Scifi books: Grand Cru 2018

20 Nov 2018

I read a bunch of sci-fi this year. From light short stories to larger epopea. One common thing between all those books is that they manage to dream about all the possibilities the future can offer us:

• spaceships? I want.
• Rogue AI? Amazing.
• Rejuvenation? Downloading your thoughts to your brain? That is the real killer.

Maybe the fact that most of them offer a solution to human death is what really keep me reading them. Anyway, enough of this introspective nonsense. Here is a selection of books I really liked in 2018 (I suck at describing books, so quotes are from goodreads and the comments below are mine).

The murderbot diaries

On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid — a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is.

Follows a rogue robot, who despite his acerbic comments and infinite cynicism, makes a nicer human than most.

Bobiverse

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it’s a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets.

This book is the ultimate nerd novel. Prepare to hear a lot about Dyson spheres and von Neumann probe.

Imperial Radch

On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren - a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.

Again a story about a rogue UI. The pace is a bit strange, with the second book in the series focusing on the politics of a single space station.

Homo Deus: A brief history of Tomorrow

Homo Deus explores the projects, dreams and nightmares that will shape the twenty-first century—from overcoming death to creating artificial life. It asks the fundamental questions: Where do we go from here? And how will we protect this fragile world from our own destructive powers? This is the next stage of evolution. This is Homo Deus.

Well, it is not real science fiction. The author presents what he believes will be the major problems of our society of tomorrow. It is the duty of historian and philosophers to remind people of the danger of technology he argues, because engineers focus mostly on the creation of technology and not on the consequences.

House of Suns

Six million years ago, at the very dawn of the starfaring era, Abigail Gentian fractured herself into a thousand male and female clones: the shatterlings. Sent out into the galaxy, these shatterlings have stood aloof as they document the rise and fall of countless human empires. They meet every two hundred thousand years, to exchange news and memories of their travels with their siblings. Campion and Purslane are not only late for their thirty-second reunion, but they have brought along an amnesiac golden robot for a guest. But the wayward shatterlings get more than the scolding they expect: they face the discovery that someone has a very serious grudge against the Gentian line, and there is a very real possibility of traitors in their midst. The surviving shatterlings have to dodge exotic weapons while they regroup to try to solve the mystery of who is persecuting them, and why - before their ancient line is wiped out of existence, forever.

I read The Prefect from Reynolds before, but while it was a nice read, it didn’t gave me the irresistible need to read more of his work. House of Suns however, was full of surprises and epic mysteries. A must read.