Author Archives: Keith West

When the Nanos Come Home

The Goliath StoneThe Goliath Stone
Larry Niven and Matthew Joseph Harrington
Tor, mmpb, 367 p., $8.99
ebook Kindle $7.25 (as of this writing) Nook $8.99

Larry Niven has long been one of my favorite writers, since like about 7th grade. Matthew Joseph Harrington is new to me. Together they’ve crafted an entertaining story about nanites sent to an asteroid 25 years prior to the story’s events coming home. While not the best thing I’ve read with Niven’s name on it, The Goliath Stone was fun and enjoyable.

The basic set up is that 25 years ago a company headed by two scientists sent the Briareus mission, which contained a package of nanites, to intercept an Earth Crossing asteroid. Shortly after launch, they lost contact with the mission. Now a larger asteroid is headed back towards Earth. Many believe that the Briareus mission is responsible.

The two men responsible for the Briareus mission, Dr. Toby Glyer and William Conners, are now being hunted by the government. But they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. After all, Conners was given the death sentence for murder and survived the execution. He’s not without his resources. Continue reading

Visiting the City Beyond Time

city_256City Beyond Time Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis
John C. Wright
Castalia House, 168 pgs.
ebook $4.99

Okay, class, wake up. Put the phones and tablets away. You can text, Facebook, and download porn on your own time. Which brings us to today’s topic: time. Yes, Simone, I realize that a great deal of time has passed since I last posted here. This isn’t my only blog, you know. Have you kept up with the reading for the others? I thought not.

As I was saying. I’ve been attempting to redeem my time in these evil days, and one of the ways I’ve been doing that is with ebook apps on my phone. Anytime I find myself cooling my jets, I take advantage of the opportunity to get some reading done.

I began reading a collection of essays by John C. Wright not too long ago and was really impressed with both what the man had to say and how he said it. I’m still reading the book. It’s one I want to savor rather that rush through. I’ll post a review at some point when I’ve finished, probably at Adventures Fantastic.

Anyway, I decided to see if Mr. Wright’s fiction was as good as his nonfiction. I’d heard positive things about his work for a number of years now. I decided to start with City Beyond Time. It was short, which is always a plus when reading on a phone. And time travel is one of my favorite subgenres of science fiction.

City Beyond Time is a combination short story collection and novel. The setting is Metachronopolis, a city at the end of time controlled by the Time Wardens. They manipulate history for their own ends. This is nothing new in science fiction. Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories are probably the high water mark for temporal police, but the concept goes back to the pulps.

Only these time cops aren’t exactly the good guys. They’re more like the cops you find in a noir novel by Raymond Chandler. Shady and on the take, with an agenda of their own.

There is one character who shows up in the first and last stories, a private eye named Jake Frontino. He’s from the 1930s. (More Chandleresque stuff; always a good thing.) The initial and final story are tied together in some subtle ways.

No, Martin, Chandler hasn’t reached his expiration date. His work has passed the test of time.

And speaking of time, in “Murder in Metachronopolis”, the lead story, Jake has to solve a murder where time travel plays a role in the murder. This was a creative an innovative story where the tale isn’t told in chronological order. Rather the sections are mixed to provide a greater depth to the narrative.

“Choosers of the Slain” concerns a defeated warrior king in some future or alternate world. He’s about to make his final stand, a stand from which he won’t emerge alive, when a young girl appears and tries to convince him to come with her to the future.

“Bride of the Time Warden” was one of the most riveting tales in the book. The potential wife of a Time Warden living sometime in the 20th century is asked to spend the night alone in the library of the family mansion. It’s a ritual that all potential brides have to pass through before they can marry into the family. During the night she meets her future self, a bitter woman who tells her not to marry this man. Then she meets her son who asks her to please marry him. This was one of my favorites.

I’m sorry, Simone, what did you say?  Yes, it did appeal to the romantic in me.

In “Father’s Monument” a son struggles to honor the dying wish of his estranged father and build a monument so visitors from the future can find the father. All the son has to do is believe the father’s story…

“Slayer of Souls” is a bit of Lovecraftian horror dressed up in time travel. It’s about a homeless man who is given a book by a book vendor. A book he shouldn’t open.

Henry Kuttner is one of all time favorite authors. His story “Happy Ending” (reviewed here) is a time travel story that is told in three sections, with the events in each section preceding the events of the prior section.  It’s a technique I’ve not seen used often.

Wright takes the concept and runs with it, scoring a touchdown with “The Plural of Helen of Troy”.  In this one Jake is working a case he already knows the outcome of, except where the Time Wardens are concerned, no outcome is certain.

Here’s a quote from that story that really stuck with me:

But how can you have hope in this city?  Hope comes when you have an unknown future waiting like a Christmas gift, shining in its pink-bowed wrapping paper, and every tomorrow is a new surprise to open.

Hope is when you can change your future.  But if the Time Wardens can step through a crystal into your tomorrow, and they can change your tomorrow, but you cannot, then all the gifts have already been opened and all the toys are theirs.

There’s a deep undercurrent of philosophy in these stories.   They aren’t simply adventure tales or clever little time paradoxes or mish-mashes of historical figures.  While some the stories in City Beyond Time contain those things, they also transcend the tropes of time travel and deal with some pretty serious issues.  The relationship between father and son, the objectification of women, and the role of free will in a person’s life to name a few.

These stories and the overarching narrative that contains them is science fiction for people who think and feel on a deep level.  I highly recommend City Beyond Time.  It’s one of those books that’s all too rare these days, one in which the rereading is every bit as good as the reading.

And speaking once again of time, class, we’re out of time.  So for our next meeting your assignment is to write a five page paper on the significance of the private eye trope in City Beyond Time, with emphasis on how that trope is applied to 1950s movie icons.

Sailing the Ocean of Night

In the Ocean of Night 1In the Ocean of Night
Gregory Benford
ebook $9.78 Kindle $10.99 Nook
paperback $22.99

This one has been around for a while. I read it in high school, which should tell you something right there, although it had been a few years when I first read it. I didn’t really connect with the book at that time. I think I had gotten it and the sequel, Across the Sea of Suns, as a combination deal through the SFBC. I never read the sequel.

I recently decided to reread In the Ocean of Night. I’ve been in the mood for some hard science space adventure. Bowl of Heaven only scratched the itch.

So how did the book hold up when returning to it after nearly 30 years? Pretty well, on the whole. Even though time has caught up with the novel’s timeline, so that it opens in what is now the past.The novel opens in 1999 and closes in 2019.

The story concerns Nigel Walmslely, a British ex-pat in the US astronaut corps. He’s sent on a mission to destroy an asteroid that has changed course due to a sudden gas jet erupting on the surface. The new course will result in a collision with Earth. Continue reading

Murder in Utopia: A Visit to Hollow World

Hollow World Cover 1200 x 1900Hollow World
Michael J. Sullivan
Tachyon Publications
trade paper $15.95,
ebook $7.99 Kindle, Nook
audio $24.49

I’m a sucker for a time travel story. After space opera and hard science, it’s my favorite subgenre of science fiction. So when Michael J. Sullivan contacted me and asked if I’d like a review copy of his latest novel, which involves time travel, of course I said “Yes.” I’d like to thank Mr. Sullivan for providing me with an ARC of Hollow World.

This is the story of Ellis Rogers. He’s discovered the secret to time travel. There’s only one problem. It’s a one-way trip.

Rogers doesn’t have the most ideal life. His son committed suicide some years ago, and he and his wife have been estranged ever since. They share a house, but not really a life. He has a best friend he hangs out with, a buddy from high school.

Even so, he doesn’t want to take that one-way trip. Then he gets a double whammy. First, it’s a terminal diagnosis from his doctor. Shortly after that he discovers that his wife had an affair with his best friend just after his son died.

And suddenly that one-way trip doesn’t seem so bad. Rogers sets the machine for 200 years in the future and throws the switch. Only there’s a flaw in his math, and instead of traveling two hundred years, he travels two thousand.

The world he finds is one that’s mostly underground, called Hollow World. There are occasional forays to the surface to various historical sites. Rogers comes out near one and stumbles onto a murder. Continue reading

Benford and Niven’s Bowl of Heaven

bowlofheaven_NS_20pBowl of Heaven
Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Tor mass market paperback, $8.99
ebook $7.69 Kindle $8.99 Nook

You know you’re getting behind on your reading when a book you bought as soon as it appeared in hardcover is out in paperback before you get around to reading it.

I’ve been a fan of large scale, big idea science fiction almost as long as I’ve been reading science fiction.  That means I’m a fan of both of the authors of this novel, although I’ve read more Niven than I have Benford.  But I enjoy them both.

So when a collaboration between them came out, I grabbed it pretty quickly.  Not surprisingly, they’ve come up with a large scale artifact I’ve not encountered before. Continue reading

The Best Monster Story I’ve Read in Quite a While

AFFMAY2014COVER“Cryptids”
Alec Nevala-Lee
Analog Science Fiction
May 2014

I wrote earlier that I want to try to read more short fiction  and more science fiction this year. I thank God for ereader apps on phones. I’ve been doing a lot of reading of short fiction on my phone, and this story is one I read today while waiting on various things (pick up wife from physical therapy, pick up son from school, etc.)

I’ve only read a couple of the stories in the current issue of Analog, but “Cryptids” is one of the most enjoyable stories I’ve read in the magazine in a while.  I like a good monster story, especially when there a rigorous scientific rationale behind it. Continue reading

Blogging the Heinlein Juveniles: Rocket Ship Galileo

rocket ship galileoRocket Ship Galileo
Robert A. Heinlein

I’ve been intending to start this series for a while, and I planned to have this post up in January. (I read the book in January. Does that count?) However, my wife had rotator cuff surgery, so I’m a little behind in my blogging. The plan is to read the juveniles in the order they were written and blog about each one.

The first Heinlein juvenile I read was Have Spacesuit Will Travel. I was in seventh grade. The junior high library had a small selection of them, and I think I read all of them that year. Then we moved, and the selection at my new school wasn’t as extensive. I continued to read them through high school, although I never read all of them.

In 1947, Heinlein began writing an annual novel for Scribner’s, aimed at what would now be called the YA market. The first of these was Rocket Ship Galileo. Continue reading

Going Beyond the Rift

Beyond_The_Rift_BOMBeyond the Rift
Peter Watts
Tachyon Publications
trade paperback $14.95
ebook $9.95

I really enjoy well done science fiction, full of unusual ideas and fascinating characters, especially at short lengths. Unlike my taste in noir and fantasy, I generally prefer my science fiction to end on a fairly upbeat note. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy some of the darker stuff.

Case in point, Peter Watts’ latest collection from Tachyon Publications. This collection, consisting of a baker’s dozen short stories and an essay, is one of the best (and in many ways darkest) I’ve read in quite a while.

Some of the standouts for me were “The Things”. This is a retelling of the classic John W. Campbell story that was filmed more than once as The Thing. Watts tackles the tale from the point of view of the alien.

“The Island” is about a woman on a ship whose mission is to leave what are essentially stargates who is awaken to discover a son she never knew she had and a life form that completely surrounds a star. She and the AI guiding the ship, already enemies, gain new reason to hate each other as completing their mission in the system will result in the death of the organism.

“The Eyes of God” concerns a soldier of God whose zeal may hide a darker motivation. “Mayfly”, co-written with Derryl Murphy, tells what happens when a family uses an AI to try and recapture a daughter taken from them by death.

“A Niche” is a disturbing tale of two people in an underwater station, where one of them adpats to the environment and one doesn’t. The scary thing about this one is I can see it happening.

Watts concludes the volume with an essay on how his world view colors his fiction. He argues he’s really an optimist. He also spends a good deal of time telling his side of his encounter with Homeland Security a few years ago. I hadn’t heard his side of the events, so I found this informative.

My worldview doesn’t overlap much with that of Mr. Watts. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy his work. I do. He’s able to get into the heads of his characters in a way few other authors can.  His protagonists are sympathetic even when they’re extremely flawed and not always pleasant people.

I’d only read “The Things” before I read Beyond the Rift. I’ll be reading more of his work, although I probably won’t read quite so much in such a short time period.

I read the epub version of the ebook. The formatting was professional, the text had been copy edited, and the interactive ToC worked perfectly, as did the footnotes in the essay.

I’d like to thank Tachyon Publications for the review copy. Tachycon has been producing quality books for quite some time now. They don’t produce a large number of titles in any given year, but I always take note of the ones they do. Tachyon Publications is one of the premiere small presses in the US at the moment.

Asimov and the Editorial Hand of John W. Campbell

The Winds of ChangeI said in my post on Asimov’s birthday a few days ago that I was going to read some stories from The Winds of Change.  I did, getting through the first four stories before my eyelids grew heavy.  The third story is the oldest in the book, “Belief” from 1953.  Asimov notes in his introduction to the story that this was its first appearance in one of his American collections.  (The reasons are beyond the scope of this post.)

I thought I had read it somewhere, perhaps in The Great SF Stories, but the ISFDB said otherwise.  It did, however, show that the story had been published in a later collection, The Alternate Asimov’s.  I had a copy I had picked up years ago that I’d never read, primarily because I didn’t have time to read the original and final versions of the novels The End of Eternity and Pebble in the SkyThe Alternate Asimovs contains the original versions of those novels.  It also contains both version of the novelette “Belief”.

It seems the version of the story John W. Campbell, Jr. published in Astounding wasn’t Asimov’s preferred version.   Campbell required Asimov to rewrite the ending significantly.  I read the original version, and found the experience quite enlightening. Continue reading

Happy Birthday, Isaac Asimov

Isaac_AsimovIf he were alive, Isaac Asimov would have celebrated his 94th birthday today.  I never had the privilege of meeting Dr. Asimov, but I grew up reading his works.  I’ve not read everything he wrote, but I’ve read quite a bit.  I’m speaking of his science fiction here, not his total output.  Wikipedia says he wrote over 500 books.

It’s also National Science Fiction Day, which I think is quite appropriate.

Asimov was one of the first science fiction authors I read when I graduated to adult science fiction.  This would have been in junior high.  (I’ve always been ahead of my time.)  I think I came across one of his robot stories in an anthology edited by Robert Silverberg that was in the school library.  It wasn’t long before I was hunting down his short fiction (in addition to his robot stories), the Foundation series, and some of his other novels.  His later Foundation novels were among the first science fiction I purchased new in hardcover that wasn’t a book club edition.

The Winds of ChangeIt’s been quite a while since I read any of Asimov’s work.  As I stated in my reading goals post, I want to get back to basics  this year and reread some of the works and authors that first attracted me to science fiction.  I picked up a paperback copy of The Winds of Change a few months ago in a second hand shop.  It’s a later collection, and I haven’t read it.  I’ve loved the colors on the cover for years and finally gave in to temptation and bought it.  I think I’ll spend some time this evening reading it and raising a glass to the legacy of Isaac Asimov.