BooksOfTheMoon

Reborn: Supervillain Rehabilitation Project

By H.L. Burke

Rating: 4 stars

Reborn picks up the Supervillain Rehabilitation Project story about a year after the last book finished, with Prism heavily pregnant but as busy as ever. The driving force of this book is that Aiden, Prism’s brother, is alive (following the revelation for the reader at the end of the last book). Now on the one hand, it’s an long-established trope that superheroes rarely stay dead for long, but on the other, I had thought the treatment of Prism’s grief and growing acceptance of Aiden’s death in Redeemed was very well done, and this revelation felt like it undermined it a bit.

Still, the book does deal with the consequences of finding that Aiden is alive. Prism will stop at nothing to get him back, and she finds her mental balance thrown, as it’s repeatedly pointed out to her that there might not be enough left of him to save.

It’s Fade that’s most interesting here though. He’s someone who’s never had anything to lose in the past, and now he has not only a wife, but a child as well. This leads to some… dubious decisions. We didn’t see much in the way of consequences of that this time, but I expect chickens coming home to roost at some point. It also led Fade becoming over-protective to the point of being on the edge of being controlling. It’ll be interesting to see if that goes anywhere, or if I’m just being overly sensitive.

As always, there’s not enough Keeper (and Yui) – but then I’m biased towards there being more Scots in media – nor enough Tanvi, who’s probably my favourite character at this point. We got cameo appearances from some of the teens from the last book, along with their adopted parents, which was nice to see.

As with the rest of the series, the book is extremely readable. I enjoy the superhero world writ large, and this series scratches that itch admirably. Intrigued by the hook in the epilogue and already looking forward to the next one.

Note: I received an ARC of this book from the author in exchange for an unbiased review.

Book details

Year of publication: 2020

Redeemed: Supervillain Rehabilitation Project

By H.L. Burke

Rating: 4 stars

This book picks up a few months after the events of Reformed, with the whole team still reeling over the shock of Aiden’s death in the previous book, but with Prism and Fade a strong couple. Tanvi injures a sable who she sees breaking into a house and is shocked to find that it’s a just a teenage girl. She persuades Prism to recruit the girl, Alma, as the next recruit for the Supervillian Rehabilitation Project. But Alma has secrets of her own and is running from her past.

I enjoyed this short book a lot. Prism and Fade being an established couple works much better for me than bringing them together, and the interpersonal problems of a devoted Christian and a hand-waving theist make for surprisingly real drama.

I liked that we got to see much of both Tanvi and Bob this time round, although they’re still not PoV characters, and Yui also played a much more active role in the plot. Sidenote: I really liked the idea of Bob’s wife always being around, but nobody has any idea about it. It’s a neat little idea that tickled my fancy.

The true villain of the piece, Handler, was one that made me want to shower every time he was on the page. I really hate the idea of mind control, so his powers (not to mention his ruthlessness) made him an effective villain in my eyes.

Unlike the previous book, this one definitely ends on a cliffhanger, and I look forward to reading the next two books in the series, as they come out.

Book details

Children of Ruin (Children of Time #2)

By Adrian Tchaikovsky

Rating: 4 stars

After receiving signals from another world that may be part of the diaspora of fallen Earth, the Portiids and Humans of Kern’s World launch an expedition towards the distant star. There, they find something that the terraforming team that had launched at about the same time as Avrana Kern had stirred up and which may have been best left buried.

So this book is to octopodes, octopi, octopuses, what Children of Time was to spiders. One of the terraforming team that comes to the worlds later known as Nod and Damascus is fond of the creatures and harbours hopes of uplifting them. The cephalopods have the advantage of not having to start from scratch, and are able to build on the technology that their human creators left them, creating a civilisation that expands to fill their solar system, to the wonder of the Humans and Portiids that find them.

What I loved about this book was just how alien the octopus mind was. Tchaikovsky extrapolated from modern octopuses and the way that the tentacles have almost their own sub-mind to create a very different way of thinking for his creatures. At times I struggled to comprehend such a way of thinking, where the surface, conscious, level is all emotion and reaction (the what), while the logic and maths (the how) is left to the tentacles, without the seat of consciousness necessarily being aware of what was going on.

Communicating with such creatures is necessarily difficult, but Tchaikovsky manages to both describe the difficulty and the way that the gap is bridged in a strong, and interesting, way.

One of the more unexpectedly interesting characters in the book was Avrana Kern, who is something between the operating system for all Portiid technology and grumpy old mentor. We see multiple instances of Kern, running different systems, and get somewhat inside her ant-filled head (I still love ants as computing substrate). The complexity of a thinking AI that is aware of how much it has lost in terms of ability to feel emotions is fascinating.

Spoiler
And that epilogue! A true co-operative interstellar civilisation. It raised goosebumps as I was reading it. And can we get a book about corvids next, please?

A worthy sequel to Children of Time, with lots of great ideas and characters. Also a great attempt at writing a non-human sentient species that isn’t just humans with lumpy foreheads.

Oh, and never has the phrase “we’re going on an adventure” been so sinister…

Book details

ISBN: 9781509865857

Giant Days: Not On the Test Edition Vol. 1

By John Allison

Rating: 4 stars

Despite hearing good things about this series, I wasn’t really sure what it was about. Recently though, I was looking for something to read, and this was recommended to me again, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’m quite glad that I did – it follows three flatmates in their first year at university and their various (mis)adventures.

I like the art styles here, which was done by Lissa Treiman for the first three quarters (chapters 1-6) and then Max Sarin for the last two. The styles are quite different and when I was flicking through it after first getting hold of it, I thought that the change would be jarring. But when it came to it, I was so absorbed in the story that it barely registered.

I like the three main characters, they’ve all got a lot of personality and are different enough that they complement each other well. It’s very believable that they would be friends, despite being so different. They have the same problems and concerns as other young adults just starting university: getting to know themselves; finding people to love; trying new experiences; making mistakes. It’s a lot of fun, and I look forward to seeing where it goes next.

My one, minor, niggle is that although it’s set in a UK university and written by a British writer, it sometimes feels very American. I’m not sure if this is just me, but it does occasionally draw me out of the story.

Book details

ISBN: 9781608869947
Publisher: BOOM! Box
Year of publication: 2017

Ingenious Pursuits: Building The Scientific Revolution

By Lisa Jardine

Rating: 3 stars

I’ve owned this book for the best part of twenty years, but at some point it ended up being moved from my “to read” pile to the main bookshelves, at which point I forgot about it. I only realised I hadn’t read it when I was browsing the shelves recently. I also have no memory of buying this book, and my edition has no hints of what it’s about on the back cover (possibly one reason I kept ignoring it all those years ago, when I couldn’t just google it), but it turns out it’s a history of the scientific revolution that went hand in hand with the Enlightenment in Britain and across Europe in the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century.

Jardine uses the Royal Society, its members and associates as her touchstone for the discoveries and inventions of this period. She talks about contributions from Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and many others, in diverse fields. She covers the creation of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich; the importance of accurate clocks; telescopes and microscopes; and several other topics, that tend to become interrelated by the people involved. Hooke, in particular, is a recurring character, turning his hand to everything from clockmaking to microscopy to blood transfusion.

One thing that the book makes very clear is the level of cross-pollination of knowledge across Europe at the time. Henry Oldenburg, in particular, seems to have acted as a clearing house for knowledge, being secretary of the Royal Society. He received and sent correspondence across the continent, passing papers between people he thought would be interested, even when the corresponding polities were at war with each other, thus ensuring that the knowledge was spread around, and enabling new connections to be made that enable further discovery and invention.

The writing is lucid and easy to follow, something that I was relieved about after reading the introduction, which was denser and, to my mind, more deliberately academic. Jardine doesn’t focus much on the personalities behind the scientists — instead concentrating on the discoveries themselves and the relationships between them, although there are some cases when the personalities overshadow everything else. There are very few women mentioned in the book, possibly inevitable due to the period under discussion, although in saying that, I think there has been much more scholarship reviewing these discoveries and the contributions of women since this book was written.

An interesting book telling a fascinating story, and one that has an important message for today: science is international, and operates best in a spirit of cooperation, where people and ideas can flow freely through borders. Something that builders of walls and those stirring xenophobia would do well to remember.

Book details

ISBN: 9780316647526

The Universe Versus Alex Woods

By Gavin Extence

Rating: 3 stars

This isn’t the sort of book I would normally read, but a friend loaned it to me, saying that she thought I’d enjoy it. Through a series of unlikely events, a teenager ends up becoming friends with an old man, and this book charts their friendship. Despite the differences, it’s hard not to compare this to A Man Called Ove. Both feature grumpy old men whose lives change when they let others in. But this book doesn’t reach the same heights for me as the other. It felt a few times like it was trying too hard to press my emotional buttons, whereas Ove did it without me noticing at all.

Our protagonist here is young Alex Woods, who survived being struck by a meteorite and developed epilepsy as a result. The book does a good job in showing the terrible unfairness of childhood, when you have no agency, any signs of being different is a reason to be bullied, and you don’t have the words to explain your inner life to those around you, especially not to adults.

We get much less of of the inner life of Mr Peterson here, the old gent that Alex befriends. He’s more of a plot device than a character. The same is probably true of most of the other characters in the book.

Spoiler
I had to skip most of the bit with the book in the bus, with the bullies. When he took the first Edition Vonnegut on to the bus I could pretty much write the rest myself. As a book lover, who’s also had some experience of being bullied, that whole sequence hurt.

Despite that, it’s a very readable book, I got through it in short order, and it kept my attention throughout.

Aside: I had to chuckle to myself at the universally horrified reaction to Alex’s (one-off) use of the “worst word in the world”. You should come to Glasgow, pal. It’s almost just punctuation up here.

Book details

ISBN: 9781444765892
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Year of publication: 2013

Huns, Vandals, and the Fall of the Roman Empire

By Thomas Hodgkin

Rating: 3 stars

Despite being written in the 19th century, with footnotes in Latin (everyone learns Latin at school, right?), this book is actually fairly easy to read. It does sort of throw you in at the deep end, but that’s at least partially because it’s part of a larger work, so by the start of this book, the Roman Empire has already split into Eastern and Western empires, and the Western one isn’t even ruled from Rome any more.

I picked this up mostly because my knowledge of Roman history is pretty weak. The book is split into two sections: a shorter one covering the Huns, and a longer one covering the Vandals. I knew very little about Attila the Hun and the way he swaggered across Europe. Hodgkin is certainly opinionated; he doesn’t try to take a neutral tone at all. He sneers at Attila and the Huns generally, very much giving the impression that he favours the civilised Romans over the “barbarian” invaders. He doesn’t rate Attila’s abilities as a general, despite his obvious accomplishments. This is sort of refreshing, given how used we are to historians trying to remain impartial.

However, I got to the end of Attila’s life, and Hodgkin started setting the scene for the Vandals, and I found myself caring less and less. There’s so many different players, petty politics (some things never change) and armies marching around, that every time I picked it up, I would lose heart after barely a handful of pages.

So I’m admitting defeat. Maybe I’d be better off starting smaller, like with a Wikipedia page summary or something. So despite being well-written, easy to read, I just don’t care enough about the subject matter to continue.

Book details

ISBN: 9781853672422
Publisher: Greenhill Books
Year of publication: 1996

Norse Mythology

By Neil Gaiman

Rating: 4 stars

Gaiman’s retelling of the mythology in this volume perhaps doesn’t add anything new, but the stories are pared back and well-told, with little getting in the way of the story itself. I was half way through the book in one sitting, so it’s definitely easy to read.

Gaiman talks in his introduction how he was inspired by Roger Lancelyn Green. Although I read his collection of Greek mythology as a child, it appeared to make little impression, as I don’t have much memory of it, and I never read the Norse mythology book.

I appreciate that the book has to rely on what sources there are, but I’m sure there are more stories than the handful of familiar ones told here. It would have been nice to read some of the more obscure ones, but that’s about my only big complaint. Other than that, it’s a very easy book to read, the stories in it would work well told aloud, and it helps to keep an important cultural touchstone alive.

Book details

ISBN: 9781408891957

Witch Hat Atelier, Vol. 3

By Kamome Shirahama

Rating: 4 stars

The third volume of this enjoyable manga neatly resolves the cliffhanger from the end of the previous volume, and apart from some ominous grumbling at each other, nothing more is heard of from the Knights Moralis, who I assume will be back in a future volume. But we are introduced to a bunch of new mysteries, and Master Qifrey is revealed to have his own connection of some sort to the Brimmed Caps and isn’t above being devious himself.

Our window on the witching world, Coco, continues to be innocent and delightful, and she starts to make a connection with Tartah, the grandson of the quill and ink seller, who turns out to have his own problems.

There’s nice little world-building touches, like the idea that the ban on magic that affects bodies is so absolute that even healing magic is banned; and how much the idea of witches helping others in their society seems to be taken for granted by those around them, and they almost stop seeing the witches as people, and just as things that make their lives better.

It’s continues to be a fun and engaging series and I look forward to continuing the story in future volumes.

Book details

ISBN: 9781632368058

Noumenon Ultra

By Marina J. Lostetter

Rating: 3 stars

You certainly can’t accuse Noumenon Ultra of lacking ambition. Picking up where the last book left off, about a hundred thousand years in the future, it accelerates from there, going ever-further into an unknowably-distant future. We start with the AI, ICC, that has held the Noumenon convoy together for so long waking up from hibernation to find itself about a hundred thousand years in our future, and although its humans have long vacated its ships, there is life within it once more. It eventually learns to communicate with the sentient life of the terraformed world that now bears the name of its convoy and later regains contact with the descendants of its crew, and they all have to work together to solve a problem that could threaten the future of the entire universe.

There’s a lot to enjoy in this book. We pick up characters from Convoy Twelve from the second book, as well as further clones of the crew of Convoy Seven and spend time with the post-humans that most of humanity, other than the remnants of homo sapiens from Convoy Twelve, has now evolved into. We don’t spend as much time as I would have liked with the post-humans, or see more than a glimpse of the way that they interact with their ancestors, but life in the galaxy at large is only tangential to the story being told here.

I enjoyed this book, but I felt it was missing a spark that both the other two books had. While the first one jumped in time quite a lot, there was conflict and drama in each segment. The second one had the parts of the book that followed Convoy Twelve to ground it. While this book had the time jumps from the first and some of the characters from the second, there was little conflict. Everyone was working together for a larger goal, without any great deviation from that or misunderstandings or disagreements on the nature of the work.

In my review of the previous book I complained that there was no closure on the alien megastructures that the convoys had encountered. Hoo-boy is that resolved here. And in an incredibly mind-blowing payoff as well. So while it has a lot of that sensawunda that we often talk about in SF, it’s lacking in the characterisation to truly make it great.

Book details

ISBN: 9780008412852

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress