One of the nice things about my industry's holiday break is that I get to catch up on my SF reading. Got through a number of books in the pile, some of which are either advance review copies or British versions out ahead of US publication. In no particular order, then:
In a new turn for Reynolds, this stand-alone novel tells the story of a crew of near-future asteroid miners who are sent to rendezvous with an alien artifact as it rapidly leaves the solar system. Like most of Reynold's work, it plays heavily on interpersonal and group politics in pressure situations, and does so very well. Strong central characters and an interesting story. I liked it, but (without giving away the plot) it seemed like there was such opportunity for a wider story and he missed it. Then again, maybe I just don't like stories this melancholy. I'm pretty sure many will like it more.
Damien Broderick is one of the new breed of non-US Anglosphere writers that is challenging for preeminence in SF. This book, which could be summed up as "Roger Zelazny meets Stephen Hawking", tells the story of a young man who finds he can walk among worlds, and he'd better do so pretty quick because the bad guys can too, and they want to kill him and his little dog, too. I'd have liked it better if it didn't seem quite so much an updated Amber.
Set in the same future as last year's Old Man's War, this tells the story of the Colonial Defence Force's Special Forces. They're called ghosts because they are artificial humans with tailored DNA based on dead people, who are born into adult bodies and taught only war. The central character has a bit more going on, as someone dumped the mind of a traitor into his head before he woke up; they wanted to see if he could tell them what the traitor was up to. It apparently didn't take. Or did it? A good airplane book.
The eighth entry in Cherryh's Foreigner series. Note: you pretty much have to read the other seven first. Unlike the last entry, which was mostly set-up for this and the next book, Pretender is pretty much full-tilt story. Bren Cameron has come a long way as the ambassador from the shipwrecked human colony to the native Atevi. Matter of fact, his influence is so strong he's pretty much become an essential part of the Atevi government and a close adviser to their ruler. This pisses a lot of atevi off, and they want him dead. Not hard to arrange, either in atevi society as their "lawyers" are the Guild of Assassins. Now that the ruler has been deposed (largely because of Bren's influence), his only chance to stay alive is for the counter-revolution to succeed. Unless of course, his old friends allies (atevi don't have "friends") find it more expedient to throw him under the wheels as the price of regaining power....
This is one of the better Foreigner books. Five stars, but you need to start at book one.
Another new writer taking on the Singularity, this time a twenty-second century story of a fight to see who will get to update Disney World's Haunted Mansion. Given the death of scarcity and the death of death, no one has to work in the Bitchun Society. There is no property when everything is free, and resources are allocated by a network mediation of popular choice. So, to keep control of the Haunted Mansion, Julius and his ad-hoc group of Imagineers have to continuously keep the customers happy. Otherwise they'll let someone else walk in and take over. And there's another group that's just revamped the Hall of Presidents in a really Bitchun way...
And just as this new group starts to close in, Julius is murdered. This makes him very angry indeed....
I've been waiting for SF to start dealing with the social changes that will happen when death and scarcity are conquered. Plenty of dystopian visions, and it's nice to see a positive spin on it. What do you do when there's little point to money, except for one-of-a-kind things? Is there a better way to allocate when the poorest human can pretty much live forever in fair luxury?
The extremely satisfying conclusion to Pandora's Star. The human Commonwealth of thousands of worlds, hooked together by wormhole transport, has come under attack from without by a hive-mind intelligence that is bent on being the only living thing in the universe. Mankind is its first stop and it's rolling the humans up pretty quickly, mainly because they're more concerned about intrahuman rivalries.
Only a few people believe in the other, more serious threat -- an alien is hiding within the Commonwealth and doing its damnedest to undercut the human defence. An underground has been warning the Commonwealth for decades, but is treated as little more than a wingnut terrorist band and is hunted down mercilessly. Even if they defeat the external threat, the internal threat may destroy them anyway. Add to all this about 20 sub-plots all coming together in the climax. Grand space opera at its best.