I'm trying to copy a nice trend on Danish Mastodon, where we talk a bit about our reading with a language appropriate hashtag.
Lately I’ve been really good at reading instead of collapsing in front of the TV. It does something for my mental calm, even if it’s still “just” entertainment.
My #FridayBook was "Travel by Bullet" by John Scalzi, the third installment in the Dispatcher series. Scalzi is quite good at stories where he tweaks one wild detail about the world and then follows the tangent. E.g. a fundamental premise like the moon suddenly being made of cheese, or, in this case, that anyone who is murdered magically vanishes into thin air and reappears somewhere they feel safe. Naked and confused, but alive, reset to an earlier point in time and in perfect health. For example, most hospitals have a “Dispatcher” on duty if a surgery is heading in the wrong direction. Because if the patient is murdered, or "Dispatched" as the insurance term would say, by a Dispatcher, the patient is saved. It’s light entertainment, well written, and so on. Plenty of weird shenanigans, ethical questions.
In the meantime I also devoured Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. It’s been well covered in the media lately, so I’ll just say that yes, it's a light and quirky meal, but it’s also a really good, positive, and almost touching story. I’m very much looking forward to the film.
I had a bit more trouble with Halcyon Years by Alastair Reynolds. It’s about life aboard a generation ship carrying settlers to another star system, framed as a more classic noir detective story. The main character was sympathetic, but why he had to be the resurrected cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was hard for me to understand and felt like an unnecessary gimmick that dragged a trail of confusion across the whole narrative. Being Reynolds, of course something quite different was going on beneath the surface, which ultimately justified the device—and the big reveal can also be read as a biting commentary on today’s structures of power and influence in the world.
I absolutely adore everything that man writes and was well entertained, but the story felt a bit “off.” Maybe because the main characters, despite the circumstances, were uncharacteristically positive and trusting. I kept waiting for a betrayal that never came. Not sure whether I just wasn’t in the mood for that kind of unmotivated optimism, or whether it simply wasn’t Reynolds at his best.
More classic Reynolds was Sleepover. A dark little piece, maybe 60–70 pages, playing with a variation on the end of the world, the ultimate consequences of artificial intelligence (perhaps), and the nature and character of reality itself. As far as I know, the story originates from Reynolds’ notes for a novel that never came to be. Unfortunately, because there’s huge potential in the universe it sketches.
As it stands, an enormous idea told in too short a span, the story inevitably feels a bit truncated. But for $2 as an ePub? Definitely worth a couple of hours.
I also read "Time Out" by Michael Marshall Smith - a long novella of about 140 pages. The protagonist wakes up to a world where, at first, all other people have disappeared, and things only grow stranger from there. As the backstory evolves it becomes increasingly hard to see the protagonist as such, and story mainly explores his somewhat navel-gazing loneliness and the iron grip of habit.
At one point, for example, he has nothing better to do, so he works for a couple of hours. It sounds absurd, and it is.
Smith never felt obligated to write happy endings for his characters and you'll have to see for yourself how it all resolves. Smith absolutely manages to write his way out of it.
Poul-Henning Kamp