Weird & Wonderful- Altered Carbon

For the June meeting of City Lit's Weird & Wonderful club, we discussed Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan.

A sex-and-violence-filled cyberpunk noir-ish tale, Altered Carbon is the first of Morgan's books featuring Takeshi Kovacs, P.I.-slash-cybercommando-ninja...guy. In a world where people are outfitted with devices that record their memories, allowing them to be re-implanted in another body, Kovacs is hired to solve a convuluted case involving shady politics, body-swapping, and powerful gerontocrat.

Super-brief notes after the jump:

Chicago Nerds- Agents of Dreamland

For the April meeting of the Chicago Nerd Social Club, we discussed Agents of Dreamland (2017) by Caitlin R. Kiernan.

The agents in question are members of two different shadowy organizations who seem to be combating (or at least monitoring) incursions by some kind of Lovecraftian Elder-God-Type scenario; the novella alternates viewpoints between these two agents and Chloe, a young woman swept up in a sinister cult.

We gave this extremely favorable reviews! Brief notes and possible spoilers below:

Chicago Nerds- Leviathan Wakes

For the last 2016 meeting of the Chicago Nerd book club, we discussed Leviathan Wakes (2011) by James S.A. Corey, the first book in "The Expanse", an on-going series that is also going into its second season as a SyFy television show.

Leviathan Wakes is set in a fairly-near future where humans have colonized chunks of the solar system using an extremely efficient new impulse engine, but have not yet moved on to interstellar exploration. At the book's start, there's a bit of three-way political tension between Earth, a partially-terraformed (and militarily well-equipped) Mars, and the inhabitants of the outer asteroid belts, moons, and dwarf planets. The novel alternates viewpoints between James Holden, who becomes captain and unwitting political player after his original civilian ship is destroyed, and Joe Miller, a detective on Ceres whose hunt for a missing young woman leads him to a plot that killed Holden's ship and threatens the solar system.

Notes & possible spoilers below!

Weird & Wonderful- Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

"Weird" and "wonderful" apply to most of Haruki Murakami's work, making his 1985 novel "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" a fitting selection for City Lit Books' book club of the strange & amazing.

The novel follows two very different threads in alternating chapters: in one, our narrator is a kind of cryptographer caught up in strange experiments and violent information wars. In the other, our narrator is the recently-arrived Dreamreader of a strange fantasy city, surreal and mythic. The two halves have very different styles and tones: Hard-Boiled, true to its name, has some similarities to a certain kind of crime fiction (somewhat akin to noir), while End of the World is written in a more spare, poetic style. To indicate differences in pronoun use and intimate voice not easily conveyed in English, translator Alfred Birnbaum also has the End of the World written in present tense.

We had an interesting discussion, particularly because we had a real mix of Murakami familiarity--one or two of us who'd read a good chunk of his work, a few of us having read one or two others, while this was the first Murakami novel for about half the group. Probable spoilers below!

Think Galactic- Stations of the Tide

For January's Think Galactic, we discussed Michael Swanwick's 1991 novel "Stations of the Tide".

The novel is set an indeterminate but considerable time in the future. Humans have colonized other solar systems, and our action mostly takes place in the Tidewater region of the planet Miranda, which is periodically flooded. Our protagonist, a nameless bureaucrat, has been sent from the advanced space-borne societies to track down Gregorian, a Mirandan who may have stolen some dangerous replicating technology.

On one level, it's a straightforward science-fictional riff on the noirish detective tale, flavored with some bureaucratic spook business. Despite its relative brevity, though (250ish pages), there's a surprising number of levels here, threads and allusions and alternate plot interpretations constantly seeping in.

So, as you can imagine, a nice discussion. Spoilers below!

Sulzer SF/F: The City & The City

The Sulzer SF/F club recently discussed China Miéville's "The City & The City" (2009).

My goodness, what a fine book: everyone should read it.

I should probably gush on Miéville just to get that out of the way: he's amazing; he's close to a genre unto himself. He's credited with starting (or at least being the center of) the "New Weird" movement, much as Gibson was/is for Cyberpunk. But Miéville jumps around too much to worry over-much about finding a genre for him--a few science fictional works, more in a kind of complicated fantasy/horror setting that inspired the "New Weird" moniker. What unites his work is brilliant language, a diverse array of influences, and keen (though rarely axe-grindy) political/social critique.

Chicago Nerds: Hyperion

After many nominations and near-selections, Dan Simmons' Hugo-winning "Hyperion" (1989) finally made it to the top of the Chicago Nerds' book-club list.

Structurally, "Hyperion" draws on "The Canterbury Tales" (1390ish), being composed of a frame story of a group of pilgrims travelling together, with the bulk of the novel made up of the individual stories that six of the pilgrims relate; each individual's story is told in a different style, and has a different thematic focus.

I found Hyperion a delight to re-read, as did many others at group; I think we were about evenly split between first-time readers and re-readers. It's one of those books that is a real pleasure to share and talk about. Possible spoilers below!