Gasp, original fiction by @readingchameleon?! In double-drabble form no less! ​​

Well, you better believe it 'cause it's here! Inspired in part by @Unixbigot@aus.social's microfiction toots actually.

The minutes pass and I'm left with a single task

A found family builds a starship and walks the stars, until disaster strikes.

A single pilot with a single task.

The minutes pass, and all that’s left is me.

The minutes pass

and all



that’s left….



is



me.

Standalone double drabble inspired by The minutes pass and all that’s left is me by Moonlit_Blossom (ao3) / yoroshiu (tumblr). [200 words]

Not Till We Are Lost

Not Till We Are Lost is the fifth Bobiverse book by Dennis Taylor. I’ve been following these books for years. Although there’s usually a delay in reading new releases because they’re initially exclusive to Audible. I do listen to the occasional audiobook, but most of my reading is Kindle editions. Thankfully they subsequently get released under Kindle Unlimited, which is nice.

The Bob in these books starts out as a software engineer in life who dies in an accident, and wakes up in the future to discover he’s now an uploaded mind and forced by the reigning theocracy to be the control system for a self replicating Von Neumann probe. He is barely launched before a devastating war desolates the earth. He explores other solar systems and makes copies of himself, some of which return to Earth to help the remaining human populations migrate to other worlds. In the meantime his replicas encounter other alien species, both hostile and friendly, and have a variety of adventures.

The stories are told in first person, with each chapter from the view of a particular replicant. Each replicant has a unique name, and there is “replicant drift” with each copy, leading each replica to have a slightly different personality. Initially the replicants are all recognizably Bob, but as the series progresses, the drift leads to major differences, and conflict.

Initially this is sort of hard sci-fi, with interstellar travel taking years. The “sort of” refers to the fact that the propulsion system of Bob’s ship is a type of reactionless drive. As things develop, the Bobs figure out how to communicate with each other faster than light, allowing an interstellar community to develop. And the reasons for the “replicative drift” are thought to involve quantum entanglement.

In this latest book, a group of Bobs, called the “Skippies”, are trying to create an artificial intelligence, something that, despite the success of mind uploading, has eluded human science. But in the fourth book, an alien AI is discovered, who turns out to be friendly, and provides advice on how to build AIs. Except in this book the Skippies cut corners, which leads the AI, named “Thoth”, to behave in ways that, at least on the surface, seem resonant with all the typical tropes of a dangerous AI.

At the same time, a couple of Bobs are exploring toward the galactic center of the galaxy, and come across a network of wormholes, and a highly advanced civilization that appears to be completely abandoned, although a lot of the automation in that civilization continues to work. They spend the book resolving the mystery of what happened.

There are also rising tensions with human populations, with growing resentment against the Bobs and other replicants, while the theocracy that had originally enslaved Bob’s mind is making a comeback. And there a side adventure with one of the Bobs and his wife as they use avatars to interact with another alien species, one that looks like human sized dragons.

This is a fun book and I recommend it, although I strongly suggest starting with the first book of the series.

I do have a few nits.

These books have never had tightly structured plots, with many of the threads meandering over time. In the early books, it didn’t feel like too much of an issue. The concept was fresh and it was an interesting exploration of the various implications. But I felt it in this one. It seems to take the story a long time to really get going, and some of the side threads felt pretty tedious.

I also could have used a bit more recap about all the various situations, developments, and technologies from the earlier books. Most of these are just referred to by name with the reader expected to remember the details. I read the first three books in 2017, and the fourth in 2023. I don’t have time to reread the whole series every time a new book comes out. Certainly some authors take this too far, and burn too much space constantly reminding us about everything, but having brief refreshers at least once in a book for relevant situations is a lot easier on the reader.

Finally, without getting into spoilers, the explanation for the disappeared civilization felt improbable. Not that I don’t believe it can happen, just that the idea of it developing at a point in cosmic history right when we might be able to do something about it strikes me as a little too convenient. Of course, this is fairly common in sci-fi, but it tends to briefly throw me out of the story.

All that said, if you enjoyed the earlier books, you’ll likely enjoy this one. And I definitely recommend the series overall. Have you read any of it? If so, what did you think?

The Forever War

For some reason I had never read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, and recently decided to remedy that. Like most classic sci-fi novels, it’s a quick read, much shorter than most contemporary novels. It’s often been called a Vietnam veteran’s response to Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Haldeman himself disputes that, although he admits it’s heavily inspired by Vietnam, and overall much more antiwar than Heinlein’s story.

This novel originally came out in the early 1970s and is very much a product of its time.

William Mandela is a physics student in the 1990s drafted into the United Nations army in a war against an alien species: the “Taurans”. Unlike in previous wars, a high IQ is part of the criteria. The military wants elite fighters. Women are included, so in this imagined near future military, it’s a mixed force, with roughly half female.

As a morale boosting measure, the recruits in training are encouraged, even required, to have regular and promiscuous sex with their colleagues. Pot smoking is common and seen as just another recreational drug. And the automatic “Sir, yes sir!” chorus of obedience in previous generations is replaced with a “F— you, sir!” response, repeated with the same lack of enthusiasm.

After some training in Missouri, the recruits are shipped to a planet in the outer solar system called “Charon” (not to be confused with the moon of Pluto discovered years after this story was written). Here they learn to use an armored exoskeleton suit so prevalent in military sci-fi. The training is grueling and dangerous. Several recruits are killed. Eventually they graduate and are sent to their first posting.

Interstellar travel in this universe happens via “collapsars”, a type of naturally occurring wormhole naturally occurring wormholes between collapsars (black holes). [My thanks to Captain Button for the correction in the comments.] However the collapsars are often a substantial distance from local solar systems or each other, requiring months of travel time, typically reaching relativistic speeds. The result is that while the troops spend months in transit, years are passing at the bases and on Earth. The battles all seem to happen in solar systems near collapsar transit points.

The Taurans, when first encountered, don’t seem like very good fighters, but they learn quickly, and the war becomes a long slog.

When Mandella first gets back to base, he discovers that decades have passed. But he, his girlfriend, and many others are given a chance to cash out their backpay and return to civilian life, although they are warned that a lot has changed on Earth. When they take the cash out option, they get back to Earth in 2024, and discover that it is a dystopia, with overpopulation, sky high crime rates, society breaking down, and widespread misery. Mandella and his girlfriend eventually reenlist.

As the war drags on and the decades and centuries pile up, Earth becomes increasingly alien from the view of the older soldiers. Governments on Earth begin to encourage homosexuality as a means to keep the population under control, and eventually make it mandatory. Mandella, as one of the longest surviving soldiers, finds himself considered a sexual deviant by the new recruits.

There are some pretty good action and battle scenes in the book, but one theme throughout seems to be that military often doesn’t know what it’s doing. Also that it’s not the soldier’s friend. And that the future is going to be very strange by our standards, starting with the army a few years in the future, and getting progressively weirder as the story progresses.

Reading older sci-fi is always an interesting experience. In this book, we get to see a 1970s vision of what the 1990s and 2020s would be like, and how dominated that vision is by the preoccupations of 60s and 70s culture. Certainly our 2020s is far from perfect, but it’s a picnic compared to the nightmare presented in the book. Something for us to keep in mind when contemplating the predictions made today.

Obviously this book isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but I found it an interesting ride, worth considering if you’re looking for classic sci-fi to read.

The Agent Cormac series

A few weeks ago I reviewed Neal Asher’s new book Dark Diamond. It takes place in his Polity universe, a future interstellar society ruled by AIs, where everyone is effectively immortal, but in a dangerous universe. That book featured Ian Cormac and other characters from his earlier Agent Cormac series.

I read the first book in that series, Gridlinked, some years ago, but not being really enamored of it, hadn’t gone any further. The story of that book had a much stronger noir like feel to it than Asher’s later stuff. It spent a lot of time in the head of a villain I didn’t find interesting. That and his early prose felt particularly slow paced to me. I had a similar experience with another of his early books, The Skinner, which I never finished, and decided that early Asher just wasn’t for me.

However, after finishing Dark Diamond, I wanted to learn more about the backstory of the characters, and so started reading the second book: The Line of the Polity. It turned out to be better than the first book, with a much more epic scope and interesting villain, a scientist named Skellor who infects himself with Jain technology and uses the resulting power to first take over a Polity battleship, and then attack a planet with it.

Jain tech in these stories is an ancient technology left from an extinct alien race. Using it seems to provide incredible power and benefits. But it’s a trap, one entire civilizations have fallen victim to. It ends up functioning as a virus, able to spread in both technological and biological systems. In addition to the villain, a couple of characters end up using the tech to recover from injuries, only to find their life and identity threatened when it begins to try to spread through them.

Skellor remains the primary villain in the third book, Brass Man. The title refers to a golem (android) named Mr. Crane, a particularly dangerous and insane character from the first book. Mr. Crane goes on a transformative journey, eventually becoming more sympathetic by the end of that novel.

He’s helped in his transformation by Dragon, a gigantic alien AI that features heavily in this series. Dragon is an entity sent by another alien race, The Makers, a civilization in the Small Magellanic Cloud, for purposes that aren’t clear at first. Dragon itself has become separated into four separate beings which travel through space, with each playing various roles as the series progresses.

In the fourth and fifth book, Polity Agent and Line War, the scope increases as the villain switches to Erebus, a rogue AI that has melded with Jain tech, and wants everyone else to meld with itself. In the final book, this threat turns existential for the Polity. It finishes with a demonstration that while the AIs portrayed in these books are superbeings, as extensions of humanity, they have many of humanity’s faults.

As in all his books, Asher’s exploration of ideas is like mind candy. This isn’t hard sci-fi, so FTL, time travel, god-like AIs, and other magical technologies proliferate. This is classic space opera in the E. E. “Doc” Smith tradition. And his books always have a big payoff in terms of action. He’s very good at making you feel the pinch the characters are in, the desperate and often brutal decisions they have to make to survive. Or not. A lot of characters die throughout the series, or worse, are transformed into something monstrous.

But my recommendation for the series comes with a few major caveats. First, as I mentioned in the last review, Asher’s strength isn’t really in character development. Ian Cormac, the main protagonist, never really comes alive for me in these stories. Strangely enough, it’s his non-human characters, the various AIs, golems, drones, and transformed humans, who often seem the most vivid.

The second is what I mentioned above. The prose in these books is very heavy on description, which makes reading a slog, at least before the action heats up. I found it particularly bad in the fifth book, where at times I had to resort to skimming until the next batch of dialogue. Asher’s later books (from 2015 on) have more description than I care for, but don’t feel nearly as ponderous.

(I’m sure there are plenty of detail oriented people out there who love this type of prose, but for me it’s a lot of work. Apparently I’m not the only one, as this recent post from After Dinner Conversation indicates. It’s a stye of writing that for some reason seems prevalent among British space opera writers, which is frustrating because I love their stories.)

And finally this is a universe where characters can backup their minds, where machines can do everything humans can, and where human vulnerabilities are a frequent liability in battle. Yet a lot of the dramatic tension in these books is supposed to come from characters’ lives being threatened. It’s hard to feel too much sympathy for someone who’s in jeopardy because they’re too lazy to take backups.

Despite these complaints, the stories in these books do work at a visceral level and are a lot of fun. If posthuman space opera is your thing, they’re worth checking out.

There is one more book in Asher’s early stuff I’ll likely try, The Technician, mainly because it seems to be a bridge between this series and the one that starts with Dark Intelligence. But with other stuff in the queue, it may be awhile.