Halo: Combat Evolved

Having enjoyed putting together the C&C3 review yesterday I've decided not to rest on my laurels and immediately proceed with another PC games review. At some point I will actually review truly classic games that everyone should play immediately if they have not done so previously (Freespace 2, Hostile Waters, Planescape: Torment etc etc), but frankly it's more fun to look at those games which everyone has heard of but which actually aren't all that. Hence:


Halo was first unveiled circa 1999 as a major first-person shooter from the makers of the classic Marathon series on the Apple Mac and the Myth series of strategy games on the PC. Halo promised to combine a solid SF setting (basically an Orbital from Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, althouh lazy reviewers referenced the more obvious titular construct from Larry Niven's Ringworld books) with equally-good vehicular and personal combat all set against a solid storyline. However, a bump appeared in the road during development, namely a large, misshapen, three-times-too-big bump called the Microsoft X-Box. Before you could say "Killer App!" Halo had been gagged and dragged screaming off to the land of Console Exclusive Releases, leaving PC players feeling vaguely cheesed off, but the developers immensely richer. Anyhow, Halo came out for the X-Box, made a tremendous wad of cash, got lots of people to buy the thing and was praised by all and sundry as the Best Thing Ever, with even the usually-more-difficult-to-excite-than-Al-Gore Edge magazine getting unseemingly excited and awarding it maximum points, which felt rather wrong, a bit like Barry Norman giving a five-star review to Debbie Does Dallas.

Meanwhile, the PC community had basically forgotten that their promised classic had been carted off to the land of mass appreciation, mainly because Half-Life 2 had just been announced, Doom 3 was on the way and something called Far Cry was looking a bit tasty as well. When Halo therefore arrived on PC at the end of 2003 like an overeager puppy anxious to please its new owners, it was rather cruelly ignored and reviews were less than stellar. No doubt some of this can be put down to PC owners generally believing that console games are unchallenging sacks of crud and console conversions are very disappointing (although if the game in question is developed by BioWare, this rule no longer applies), but most of it can be put down to the fact that Halo is in fact a bit (but not totally) crap.

Things get off to a solid if unoriginal approach when your spaceship detects a huge alien artefact in space and your captain decides to check it out. Your ship then gets borded by what appears to be a bunch of gibbering monkeys wearing brightly-coloured spacesuits, giggling like lunatics and running around like a bunch of five-year-olds on acid. These turn out to be the primary recurring footsoldiers of the Covenant. They are the worst enemy ever conceived for a first-person shooter. Shooting them is satisfying, but would be more so if your collection of weapons weren't entirely inspired by the Super-Soaker 5000. Things obviously go pear-shaped and you end up stuck alone on the huge alien construction, at least for about ten minutes until you meet up with some of your mates and engage in squad-based combat with the Covenant.

This takes up the first third of the game and is actually enjoyable. There's some nice non-linearity to the game, combat is generally okay and Halo's approach to grenades is, if massively overstated, nonetheless a welcome innovation in the staid FPS genre. Much respect to the vehicles. If there is one thing Halo gets right, it's the vehicles and vehicle combat, which are fun throughout the game. Also, whilst the gibbering Covenant monkey grunts remain infuriating, more challenging opponents turn up who are more interesting to fight.

You may suspect a huge "BUT" is coming and you would be correct. About a third of the way through the development of the game Bungie apparently checked in on the gametesters and realised that people were having fun fighting in outdoor environments with vehicles and alongside NPC allies and against a reasonably decent opposition. Bungie apparently decided that it would make perfect sense to therefore kill all of the NPC allies, take out the vehicles, set the second two-thirds of the game almost entirely indoors on the same map just repeated over and over and replace the Covenant with The Flood, the Flood being basically the headcrab zombies from Half-Life with the added bonus that they sometimes explode when standing right next to you and they never appear in numbers of less than four trillion. I can only assume that Bungie had a moment of rebellion against their evil corporate overlords at Microsoft and tried to sabotage their own game, but it didn't work because it came too late in the day and all the previews had enthusiastically widdled on about the great part of the game and not even mentioned the large chunk of it that sucked donkey legs.

Towards the end of the game, around the time you've slaughtered your sixty quadrillionth Flood creature and passed through the same room eighty times, things do get vaguely interesting again and you experience an enjoyable jeep ride along the spine of an exploding starship. However, given that the game ends three seconds after this, this turns out not to be the return-to-form you were hoping for but rather a rather cruel way of the developers telling you they could have made the whole game as fantastic as that, but chose not to because they were too busy spending their development budget on beer and pizza.

Of course, Halo (**) wasn't a total write-off. As I said, the first third of the game is still fun, the multiplayer is okay (if nothing special by PC standards) and it did give us the superb Red vs Blue Internet comedy series, which is a Good Thing. However, it doesn't really make up for the fact that nearly two-thirds of the game is unplayable by all but the terminally stubborn and the ending is so blatantly sequel-incurring that they may as well have just demanded your credit card number before running the final cut scene.

Halo is available for the X-Box (USA, UK) and the PC (USA, UK) and has been out for ages, so should be quite cheap on both systems. There are sequels which are apparently far superior, but given that the PC port of Halo 2 was apparently a total disaster, I am not in any hurry to play them.

Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

I've been promising to add game reviews to the blog since it started, partially because I feel that modern computer games are on the cusp of becoming a valid and worthwhile artform in their own right but mainly because I play a lot of games and would like to use them as basic review fodder to pad out the blog and make it look like I'm taking the job seriously.

With this in mind I thought it would be a great idea to focus on one of the narrative-heavy, character-based SF&F games like Anachronox or Planescape: Torment and ponder their artistic merit. Then I remembered I haven't played those games in years and they both take days of non-stop playing to get through, so I thought sod that, I'd choose something more lightweight and with more explosions. Thus:


The Command and Conquer franchise is one of the biggest-selling PC game series of all time, shifting upwards of 10 million copies. The original game was published in 1995 and was one of the first real-time strategy games, a genre which contends that realism is overrated in wargames and being able to construct a tank factory in ten seconds flat and be churning dozens of tanks out directly onto the battlefield three seconds later is more fun. Ironically, the original Command and Conquer is one of the slower-paced games in the genre, with a difficulty level somewhere on the wrong side of frustrating and a unit selection that can helpfully be called 'retarded', meaning you just end up churning out fifty heavy tanks and hoping for the best. A bit embarrassed by this, the original game designers brought out an alternate-reality take on the series called Red Alert which ironically became far more popular than the original game, partially because of the chic retro-Cold War vibe and sassy unit selection but perhaps mainly because it was very self-critical and camper than a night out at Butlins in the company of Graham Norton and Frankie Howard on helium.

Of course, the analytical reader may have hit on the idea of combining Red Alert's faster-paced gameplay with C&C's more hardcore SF trappings to produce a much more interesting game, in which case well done, because you were eleven years faster than the guys at Westwood and EA. Command and Conquer's sequel, Tiberian Sun, was even more grim, po-faced and slower-paced than its progenitor (with even James Earl Jones' cameo not enough to save it), whilst Red Alert 2 took the camp overload of the original and pushed it beyond the capacity of the rational human mind to absorb. Luckily, at this point the original development team imploded and EA forced the survivors to work in their digital sweat-shops for several months churning out Lord of the Rings tie-in games of variable quality until they promised to get with the programme and actually produce a game that is decent.

Hence, Tiberium Wars, the third Command and Conquer game (not counting expansion packs). This time the story picks up in the mid-21st Century with Earth overrun by tiberium, a crystalline compound that came from outer space on a meteor and has now infested the planet, rendering most of it uninhabitable and forcing the survivors into high-tech cities defended by the Global Defence Initiative (GDI). A group of religious fanatics, the Brotherhood of Nod, have come to believe that tiberium holds the key to immortality and basically, erm, wage war on GDI so they can have access to more tiberium, even though it covers most of the planet's surface and GDI aren't really interested in stopping them outside the cities. The plot isn't exactly watertight. Anyway, after ten years of peace the Brotherhood of Nod mounts a surprise attack against GDI, overrunning many of their defences and putting them on the back foot. Oddly, because it's happened twice before, the Brotherhood are surprised when a confident new commander (i.e. you) arises amongst GDI's ranks and kicks their backsides across the planet.

The game's plot is communicated via fully-acted cut scenes and briefings which EA have cleverly filmed using actors who are likely to get the average SF&F film or TV fan jumping up and down and going, "Hey! That's whatshis face from, erm, that show!" As such, Grace Park and Tricia Helfer pop up from Battlestar Galactica, Billy Dee 'Lando' Williams drops in from Star Wars, Josh Holloway from Lost gets a look-in and Michael 'Needs a New Conservatory' Ironside phones it in. Long-term fans of the series are probably more excited by the return of Joseph Kucan as Kane, one of most recognisable villains in gaming history. The narrative cut-scenes are reasonably well-written and, as with previous games in the series, there does seem to be a genuine attempt to suggest that Nod have a genuine philosophical motivation behind them rather than being a bunch of lunatic religious nutcases implausibly armed with high-tech weaponry. As usual this falls flat on its face around the time Kane tells you (in the Nod campaign) to start nuking everything in sight. That said, individual elements in the GDI are painted much greyer than before and some of the orders you receive in the GDI campaign are frankly disturbing.

The gameplay is the traditional, "Build base, build army, crush enemy" format we have seen fifty times before. However, for a C&C game the pacing has been ramped up to levels that can be called 'bonkers'. You can go from building you first structure to churning out Mammoth tanks (ludicrously overpowered GDI war machines which have great anti-ground, anti-air and probably anti-dandruff weapons and frankly mean you never need to build anything else) in about three minutes, which seems indecently quick. Since the enemy AI is fairly decent and equally fast off the mark you can quickly get overrun unless you keep up with the faster style of gameplay. Mission objectives range from killing the enemy to destroying the enemy to blowing the enemy up and occasionally avoiding the enemy to do something else and then killing and destroying them by blowing them up. C&C3's narrative may have some nice twists and turns but individual missions generally resolve into different ways of churning the landscape up with high-powered weaponry. Frankly, if you've been at work for eight hours and want to relieve some tension whilst kidding yourself that you are the Patton Reborn, this is probably not too much of a problem.

There is a late-stage 'twist' in the game that would be more shocking if it wasn't spoiled on the back of the box and hadn't been built up in the previous two games as well, but there you go. More frustrating is the fact that the game doesn't so much reach a climax as simply stop, almost in mid-sentence. There are so many plotlines left unresolved at the end of the game that the player is left with a vaguely uneasy feeling in their wallet, and sure enough the news that at least one or two expansion packs and a potential full sequel are on the way is likely to leave a bitter taste in the mouth. However, this is muted by the fact that Command and Conquer 3, for all its lack of subtlety or originality, succeeds in its aim to produce a simple, easy-to-play and fast-paced wargame which eschews a lot of modern gaming developments in favour of just blowing stuff up in a satisfying manner. Given that the game has exceptional production values, good acting, a solid storyline, three well-balanced sides and is of very reasonable length, this is enough to ensure that the player gets his or her entertainment value from the title. The game is also designed to work well on older hardware, meaning that your PC doesn't need to have been engineered in God's own branch of PC World to run it.

Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars (***½) has been out for nearly a year, so I suspect you'll find it discounted in the Christmas sales. It's out now on the PC in the USA and UK, and also on the X-Box 360 in the USA and UK. The first expansion, Kane's Wrath, will be released in the Spring of 2008.

Dreamsongs, Volume I by George RR Martin

I have been reading George RR Martin's short story collection Dreamsongs for the last two weeks and it is a huge book, 1,185 pages long in hardcover and trade in the UK edition. The US edition has been split in two volumes, and as I have now reached the point in the UK edition where the US version is split, it made sense to review the first half by itself.

This book, originally published in 2003 by Subterrenean Press as GRRM: A RRetrospective, collects together GRRM's short fiction from the 1970s up until the late 1990s. Volume I covers the 1970s period of his work and includes some of his best-known stories, including Nightflyers, Sandkings, A Song for Lya, The Ice Dragon and The Way of Cross and Dragon.

Dreamsongs, Volume I is divided into five sections, each containing several short stories with a commentary by Martin at the start of each section. The sections are roughly chronological, but are also arranged by theme. GRRM's commentaries are biographical in nature, describing what in his life was driving him to write his stories at those times, and are fascinating reading in themselves. Regular readers of his work can pick up on elements and names that would later find their way into his novels or his epic fantasy series, A Song of Ice and Fire.

The first story, Only Kids are Afriad of the Dark (1965), was written for a comic book fanzine when the author was just 17 and is obviously a bit rough compared to GRRM's later work. Nevertheless, it is fun and colourful, pitting superhero Dr. Weird against the demon prince Saagael with the safety of the world at stake. The Fortress (1968) is a purely historical work and shows a tremendous improvement on the earlier story, even though it was written only three years later (and never published prior to this collection, at least not in this form). The story is about the inexplicable surrender of Sveaborg to the Russians by the Swedes in 1808 and is a compelling account of a minor footnote in military history. And Death His Legacy (1968), a political piece from the same year, is rather more obvious in what the story is about and where it goes, but is nonetheless readable.

The Hero (1968, published 1971) was GRRM's first professional sale and it's easy to see why. The first story in his 'Thousand Worlds' mileu, it is a compelling little tale of war, heroism and what it means to be a soldier. The Exit to Santa Breta (1969, published 1971) is an effective story which is a hybrid of SF and horror (a popular piece of genre-bending with GRRM). The Second Kind of Loneliness (1971) is the first undisputed classic in the book, a tale of solitude and delusion set at the fringes of the Solar System. With Morning Comes Mistfall (1971) is equally good, and can be read as a critique of the need to know, rather than just accept and wonder.



The next batch of stories represents some of GRRM's SF output of the early 1970s, mostly set in his Thousand Worlds setting. A Song for Lya (1973) is one of his best-known SF stories, which starts out as a simple mystery and turns into a fascinating commentary on religion and the human need for company and comfort. It deservedly won George his first Hugo Award. The Tower of Ashes (1974) is less accomplished and perhaps even predictable in its final twists, but nevertheless the story holds the reader's attention and like Lya and the later Meathouse Man it clearly comes from a personal well of emotion that is quite intense. And Seven Times Never Kill Man (1974, published 1975) is more impressive, pitting a technologically primitive people against invaders wielding advanced technology and singularly fails to go all Ewok on us, building to an impressively subversive ending. The Stone City (1973, published 1977) is a remarkable story, taking us out on a journey into the depths of the Galaxy in a haunting way. It is one of GRRM's underrated masterpieces. Bitterblooms (1977) is a very different work that functions on several levels and builds to an eerie if somewhat traditional ending. The Way of Cross and Dragon (1979) is a truly great story, based on a killer premise (Judas is made a saint by a breakaway religious sect in defiance of the Catholic Church) with a terrific ending and one of GRRM's best-ever lines:

The truth will set us free. But freedom is cold and empty and frightening, and lies can often be warm and beautiful.

The next batch of stories shows GRRM's talent for fantasy and shows that he was active in this genre long before A Song of Ice and Fire. The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr (1976) is a great story, featuring the girl who travels between worlds and on each world faces a different threat that stops her from travelling onwards. Some of GRRM's most striking imagery is represented in this story. The Ice Dragon (1979) is even better, featuring GRRM's first real attempt at a work set in an epic fantasy world, but told from the smallest possible point-of-view. There are many future hints of A Song of Ice and Fire in this work, and GRRM is to be commended for not retrospectively shoehorning this story into Westeros (which could be done fairly easily). In the Lost Lands (1979) is a terrific, evil fairy tale which is great fun to read with a satisfying ending.

The final batch in this first volume is based on GRRM's love of genre-bending. Ten years ago Peter F. Hamilton won great kudos for mixing SF and horror in his seminal Night's Dawn Trilogy, but GRRM was at it twenty years earlier. Meathouse Man (1974, published 1976) is a somewhat painful read for anyone who's ever felt that they didn't get relationships or how to handle them (that will be all of us at some point or another then), but for what is often described as the darkest thing GRRM ever wrote there are rays of hope shooting through the story. It is a very powerful work. Remembering Melody (1979, published 1981) is a shorter, sharper work, a piece of psychological horror that works very well. Sandkings (1979), which netted GRRM another Hugo, was probably his most well-known individual story until A Song of Ice and Fire. An SF tale, a morality play, a horror story and a psychological profile all mixed into one, it is easy to see why the story is so well-regarded, although I would argue that there are stronger stories in this collection alone. Nevertheless, it is terrific. Nightflyers (1980) is another great story, a haunted spaceship tale set in the depths of interstellar space with a crew suspicious of one another and their unseen, unknown captain. However, the ending is mildly dissatisfying and one ponders if there could have been a stronger resolution to the story. The Monkey Treatment (1981) is a much-needed dose of sunshine in an otherwise somewhat dark collection, although it is still a satisfyingly bitter and twisted thing of a tale. Nevertheless, the ending is unusually optimistic, although it will leave the reader with an insatiable desire to eat pizza. The Pear-Shaped Man (1987) won GRRM his Bram Stoker Award and is another deeply disturbing tale of psychological horror and breakdown, with a genuinely satisfying twist ending.

Dreamsongs, Volume I (*****) is an overwhelmingly impressive short story collection. With the exception of the first story, none of these tales feels old or dated, and Sandkings, Nightflyers, The Stone City, Meathouse Man, The Way of Cross and Dragon and The Ice Dragon are up there with the very best short SF fiction I have read.

Dreamsongs, Volume I is published by Bantam in the USA and is available in hardcover. Volume II will be published on 27 November.

The one-volume edition of Dreamsongs is published in Gollancz in the UK and is available in hardcover and trade paperback. The mass-market paperback version will be split in two and the first volume will be available in the spring.

The second volume features GRRM's short fiction and screenplays from the 1980s and 1990s, including his TV pilot Doorways and some of his Haviland Tuf series, along with selected stories from his contributions to the lengthy Wild Cards series and several of his other popular short fiction, including Portraits of His Children and the prequel to A Song of Ice and Fire, The Hedge Knight, which is a classic story in its own right. I will be reviewing it as soon as time allows.

Update

First off, a warm welcome back to William 'Stego' Lexner, who for personal reasons had to discontinue blogging back in May. His excellent blog, I Hope I Didn't Just Give Away the Ending, is now back online again and well worth a look.

For myself, I continue reading GRRM's Dreamsongs. It is a huge book and I'm about halfway through. I may pause at the point the American edition is broken in half and review the two halves individually for clarity. It is, however, a remarkable work.

Starting a week ago, the Writers Guild of America went on strike in the United States, bringing television and film production to a standstill once they had used up their completed scripts. Essentially the dispute boils down to the American film companies refusing to give their writers increased compensation from DVD sales (the writers are still covered by a deal brought in for VHS in 1988) or indeed any kind of compensation at all for 'new media', such as iTunes downloads or streaming video over the Internet. A number of SF&F TV shows are adversely affected:

Battlestar Galactica: Ten episodes of the fourth and final season (plus the Razor TV movie airing in a week or so in the USA) are now in the can, with another 2-3 written. Even before the strike the Sci-Fi Channel had been making noises about splitting the final season in half and showing the first ten episodes in 2008 (likely starting in April) and the second ten in 2009. This is now much more likely to be the case.

Heroes: Eleven episodes are complete. Season 2 was designed to be two 'chapters' in the Heroes storyline in any case. When and how the second eleven episodes are made or aired depends on the duration of the strike.

Lost: Eight episodes of the fourth season are complete with an unknown further number written (hopes that all sixteen had been completed were dashed when Lost writers joined the picket lines). ABC are debating about delaying the entire season (which was supposed to start airing in February 2008) so all sixteen episodes can be shown together. However, this could potentially delay the show until the autumn of 2008, given that the strike is not expected to end until the early summer at the best.

A Song of Ice and Fire: George RR Martin's epic fantasy series has been optioned by HBO. A pilot episode has been writte and HBO were investigating the option to make the show thoroughly when the strike began. It is likely this project will be on indefinite hiatus until the strike ends.

The Fade by Chris Wooding

The world of Callespa was long ago settled by humans. A rocky moon circling a much huger world (presumably a gas giant) in a binary system, the world became virtually uninhabitable when the stars' output dramatically increased. Humanity retreated underground, splintering into many tribes, leaving only those hardy people known as the SunChildren to dwell on the surface. For many years the nations of Eskara and the Gurta have been at war, a battle fought back and forth through vast subterrenean chambers with neither kingdom able to win a decisive advantage.

Massima Leithka Orna is a Bondswoman, an indentured servant of Clan Caracassa. She is also a member of her clan's Cadre, a collection of warriors and magic-wielders (known as chthonomancers) beyond compare, elite fighters at the front of every major push but also adept at assassination and espionage. During a brutal battle her forces are betrayed and her husband is killed. Taken prisoner to a Gurta fortress, Orna lives only to escape and find her son, now serving on the front lines.



The Fade is a terrific novel. Relatively short (just over 300 pages in hardcover) it is nonetheless superbly-written with vivid characters. The first-person narrative works well, as does the unusual structure (the present-day storyline alternates with flashbacks - in reverse order - showing Orna's history up until the point of her capture). Whilst the epic story of conflict between two civilisations forms the backdrop, the novel is much more concerned with Orna's emotional journey and her relationship with her late husband and her son, which is handled well with all the depth and complexity of real-life relationships. The underground steampunk-esque setting is extremely well-realised and atmospheric, as are the short sections set on the surface.

The Fade (****½) is a complete story in itself but a fair number of loose ends are left dangling for possible future sequels. The novel is published by Gollancz in the UK in hardcover and trade paperback.

The book is also available via Amazon.com for American readers.

The author has a website here.

The Long Price: Shadow and Betrayal by Daniel Abraham

A brief moment of explanation here. The Long Price Quartet is a fantasy series by Daniel Abraham published in four volumes in the United States: A Shadow in Summer (2006), A Betrayal in Winter (2007) and the forthcoming The Autumn War and The Price of Spring (both already completed and handed into the publisher). However, for the UK edition Orbit seems to be publishing them in two-volume editions, so Shadow and Betrayal combines the first two novels in one volume. Many thanks to Pat from Pat's Fantasy Hotlist (link in the list to the right), through whom I won a copy of this book.

The world is in a state of flux. The old Empire has fallen and the new upstart nation of Galt is flexing its muscles, making inroads on three continents. Yet the city-states of the Khaiem are not concerned. They wield the power of the andat, concepts and ideas that through the magic of those known as poets are given humanoid form and carry tremendous power, enough to give the rulers of Galt pause. To be a poet is one of the most prestigious jobs it is possible to achieve, but for every one who makes it many drop out in their training. A very promising young poet-to-be named Otah learns some unpalatable truths about his destiny and disappears during training, but leaves a vivid impression on another student, Maati. Many years later their paths cross in the fabled city of Saraykeht as they confront a dark conspiracy that could shatter the power of the Khaiem and cost one man his soul and self-respect.



Daniel Abraham's debut two novels are a tremendous breath of fresh air in the fantasy genre. Abraham hasn't gained as much attention as some other high-profile recent debuts (Abercrombie, Lynch and Rothfuss in particular), possibly as his European debut has some some time after his American, but hopefully this will be rectified. These two books are inventive, clever and possess a strong moral core. That Abraham attended writing courses led by George R.R. Martin should come as no surprise, but echoes of other fantasists (particularly the emotional resonance of Guy Gavriel Kay) can be detected as well in his work. His characters are deeply flawed and human, but also utterly convincing in motivation and deed. His fantasy landscape is well-realised, with summer-blessed Saraykeht and cold, distant Machi becoming as much characters as any of the humans (or magical andat) in the tales.

An area where Abraham wins out is his description of hierarchy. A lot of fantasy writers decide to have their heroes in a feudal society come to some pretty radical ideas (equal rights between the sexes, universal sufferage, even republicanism) very quickly, possibly out of fear that they'll be seen as endorsing feudalism or serfdom if they don't. Abraham doesn't do this. His is a world of rigid hierarchal layers with each person fitting into their allotted place, underlined by an alternate method of communication which relies on poses and hand-signals. When one character does start to question how his world does things, it is as logical development of his background and his upbringing.

Are there flaws? Some. The underlying 'threat' in both books is pretty similar and it could be argued that Betrayal is somewhat of a rewrite of Shadow but in a different season and setting. However, the emotional cost to the characters is much greater in the second volume and its ending propels the series onto a different tack altogether. Another potential problem for readers is that Abraham adopts a Columbo-like approach to the story, giving us both the protagonist and antagonists' point-of-view so that the reader is (mostly) in full knowledge of all aspects of the plot. This is an idea I haven't seen pursued in SF&F much and I found it quite intriguing, but I can see some complaining that it reduces tension. Another problem is a fault of the publisher, not the author, and that is that the sudden twelve-odd year leap forward between the two books is a bit jarring.

The Long Price: Shadow and Betrayal (****) is a superb, resonant story that catches the attention and engages both the intellect and heart. It is published by Orbit in the UK.

A Shadow in Summer is available from Tor as a mass-market paperback in the United States.

A Betrayal in Winter is available from Tor in hardcover in the United States.

Daniel Abraham is also the co-author of the recently-published Hunter's Run (with Gardner Dozois and George R.R. Martin) and has a website here.

Wertzone Classics: Blood Music by Greg Bear

Back in the 1980s Greg Bear became one of the biggest names in American SF through his exploration of big concepts such as biological technology and vast space constructions, although he also gained a reputation for blowing lots of really huge things up a lot (spaceships, infinite corridors through the space/time continuum, the planet Earth). Along with Gregory Benford and David Brin, Bear was one of the 'Killer Bs' and penned several notable novels throughout the decade. In the 1990s his work tailed off somewhat and today he seems to mainly work on SF thrillers. Hopefully one day he will return to his former mileu and again dazzle readers with large-scale epics intent on putting the sense of wonder back into SF.

Bear is perhaps best known for Eon (his quantum rewrite of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama), but for me his strongest novel remains Blood Music. Originally published as a short story in 1983 and winning the 1983 Nebula Award for Best Novelette and the 1984 Hugo Award for the same category, it was expanded to novel-length in 1985 and was nominated for both the Nebula and Hugo Best Novel awards.



Vergil Ulam is a biotech researcher working at the cutting edge of genetic engineering, helping in the creation of organic computer systems. Ulam becomes obsessed with his own brand of research, believing he can create sentient cells within the human body. Eventually he is fired, but carries on his research at home. This leads to a series of catastrophic events, culminating in the quarantining of the North American continent and resulting in the transformation of humanity as we know it.

Blood Music is a rather brief book (less than 300 pages) but is all the more powerful for its focused brevity. Bear describes the motivations of Ulam and his other key characters succintly and constantly poses moral questions to the reader. If this is the way forward for the human race, should base fear prevent it from taking that step? The fear of the unknown plays a key factor in various characters' reaction to the crisis and is a key theme of the novel.

If there are any major flaws in the book it is that the ending is somewhat over-ambiguous and one plot development (the biological Singularity) comes out of nowhere in the last few chapters, whilst cynics may point out that just as Bear would revamp Rendezvous with Rama as Eon, so Blood Music comes off as a retooled version of Childhood's End with the biological infestation replacing the Overmind of Clarke's novel. However, the differences are sufficiently great that this does not impair enjoyment of the novel.

Blood Music (****½) is available in several editions in the UK, where it is published by Gollancz. It is part of the Future Classics range and is also part of the SF Masterworks Series.

Oddly the only current US edition I can find on Amazon.com is the iBooks edition.

Update and News

Apologies for the lack of blog activity of late. Just started my new job and sorting out a mountain of paperwork and debt from the house move has left me with little time to read. However, reviews of Greg Bear's Blood Music and Daniel Abraham's The Long Price: Shadow and Betrayal should be up in the next few days.

I'm also hoping to finally get those SF&F computer game reviews underway, but I've said this before and not been able to follow up on it. Those looking for some good spec fic on their PC should check out the imminently-released The Witcher (based on Andrzej Sapkowski's novels) and the opposition-crushing Crysis (from the makers of the classic Far Cry).

In other news, Battlestar Galactica's fourth season has been confirmed for April 2008 in the USA (and shortly afterwards on Sky One in the UK). Razor will still air as planned at the end of November though.

R. Scott Bakker's much-awaited The Great Ordeal has been pushed back to January 2009, which is most disappointing news, as this was formerly my most-awaited book of the year (following A Dance with Dragons, obviously).

JV Jones' A Sword From Red Ice was finally published in both the UK and USA this week. I'm hoping to get a copy for review in the near future.

Update

Reading

Forming the Tower of Reading over the next few weeks:

Fairyland by Paul J. McAuley
Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott
The Fade by Chris Wooding
The Long Price: Shadow and Betrayal by Daniel Abraham
The Confusion by Neal Stephenson
Dreamsongs: A RRetrospective by George RR Martin

Plus the concluding volume to highly-acclaimed debut trilogy by British fantasy author, which I'm hoping to get in the next few weeks.


Watching

The Bionic Woman

After watching the first episode I have to say this holds a lot of promise, but has some clunky dialogue and huge chunks of exposition. Half the cast of Battlestar Galactica turning up on it is fairly distracting as well. I'll give it a few weeks to see where it's going.

Heroes: Season 2

A slower start to the season than last year, which came out of the stables blazing in all directions, but definitely some interesting writing choices being made here.

Battlestar Galactica: The First Cylon War

It's a bit hard to write a meaningful review of something you can watch in less time than it takes to read the review. I'll wait until all eight parts are up. The only thing I'd say so far is that the guy they have playing young Adama really does look like a younger version of Edward James Olmos, which is interesting. Future eps feature massive space battles featuring the old Cylon Raiders and Basestars from the original series, which is pretty cool as well (in a kind of nerdy flashing-back to late 1980s BBC-2 after school kind of way).

Black Sun Rising by Celia Friedman

Twelve hundred years ago, a sleeper ship from Earth deposited several thousand colonists on the wild, untamed world of Erna. Seismically active Erna is a harsh planet to survive on, made worse by the presence of the Fae, a source of energy that permeates the elements and can be harnessed by certain humans to further their own ends. Unfortunately, the Fae can also be manipulated subconciously, resulting in the people's fears and nightmares taking on solid form.

With all high technology lost in the birth of a new religion, the colonists of Erna have descended to a Renaissance level of technology, although retaining certain advanced medical, astronomical and scientific knowledge. Damien Kilcannon Vryce, a warrior-priest of the Church and one of the few churchmen able to wield the Fae, arrives in the city of Jaggonath to adopt a new and difficult role in the Church hierarchy. However, when a local Fae-wielder is brutally attacked and her ability to wield the Fae is neutralised, Damien is drawn into a lengthy quest that will lead into the dangerous rakhlands to confront a powerful sorcerer. Along the way Damien is forced into a most uneasy alliance with the cold and arrogant Gerald Tarrant, a powerful wielder of the Fae who has secrets of his own...

Black Sun Rising (1991) is the first novel in Celia Friedman's Coldfire Trilogy. This SF-epic fantasy hybrid was very highly regarded upon its initial release in the United States, but oddly it wasn't until a year or so ago that Orbit finally published the first UK edition.

The novel is a mixture of the familiar and the use of more original tropes, although the familiar does win out in the end. This is a quest story, with an interesting band of 'heroes' setting out to right a great wrong and travel across a vast chunk of countryside in the process. The world of Erna has some interesting facets to it but the travelling makes for the more tedious part of the book, especially the endless mucking around in caves. Page after page of description of rocks and tunnels does not make for entertaining reading.

Fortunately, Friedman's characters are an interesting, if largely unlikeable bunch. She isn't afraid to kill off major characters and paints them in convincing detail. Less impressive is that secondary characters are not very well developed at all. The rakhs' motivations in particular could have been fleshed out more and one key character who hangs around for a good 150-200 or so pages doesn't even get a name.

The plotline is intriguing and there's no denying that the worldbuilding is quite well-thought-out. The cliffhanger ending comes out of nowhere and the enforced humour at the end of the book doesn't really work as well as intended. That said, the book was enjoyable enough to make me look forward to picking up the second volume, When True Night Falls.

Black Sun Rising (***) was surprisingly disappointing for such a widely-acclaimed novel. The author is a good writer but needs to lighten up a bit. The world is unrelentingly grim but Friedman isn't in the same calibre as Scott Bakker, who can make such a world come alive and become compelling.

Black Sun Rising is available from DAW in the United States and Orbit in the United Kingdom.