Originally published in Galactic Empires
More of that parallel universe nonsense that Alastair is obviously having a thing for during this period of his writing: 2006/2007. Fingers crossed it should be over soon and we can get back to some proper good sci-fi.
The next story from Alastair’s timeline will be The Fixation.
Although translated one year after The Elegance of the Hedgehog, this is actually Muriel’s first book and was published in French 6 years before. And that’s why i read it first.
I’m in two frames of mind about this book, my first one is that it’s an incredibly well written descriptive narrative that i thoroughly enjoyed, especially being a life long foody myself, to the point i found myself happily picking it up at every spare minute to read some more. However, my other frame of mind comes from my utter contempt for people who look at food as a medium for art when the best part of i billion people don’t get enough calories every day while many many more get absolutely no choice what to eat and very rarely have access to a full range of essential nutrients. At the same time, over 1 billion other people in the privileged developed world gorge themselves on highly processed foods to an obesity epidemic (creating an obscene amount of waste while doing so). A system of food preparation, presentation, advertising and marketing that caters for nothing but a ridiculous conception of what good food is. This system being pushed wholesale through advertising and television cookery programs: Master Chef being a prime example.
Good food is as it comes from the ground with the most minimal processing, just enough processing to maximise the digestion of the nutrients, and each meal should aim to be completely nutritionally balanced. Instead we have these so called master chefs, critics and their sycophants parading food on television that bears no resemblance to reality, is nutritionally corrupt in the extreme and does nothing but titillate people’s mouths and give them a spike of neurotransmitters that they fallaciously perceive as delicious while fuelling a pandemic of obesity and chronic diseases, causing years of suffering before sending them all to an early grave.
So yeah, i loved the writing and enjoyed reading it, but i really hated the main protagonist’s attitude to food, life and everything: the only thing he didn’t treat with utter contempt was his own gluttony and i was quite pleased when he died without the choux pastry he wanted so much.
Anyways, i’m certainly looking forward to reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
You’ll find this in Deep Navigation.
It seems that someone’s been leaking top secret information from a top secret facility in a different reality and a detective is sent to investigate. The only problem being that the only way to get there is to have his consciousness uploaded and sent by signal and then put into a new body at the other end: exactly like in Altered Carbon. But for some reason the detective finds himself re-sleeved into a bit cat’s body: hence the title Tiger, Burning.
Really good, Alastair at his best, as usual.
Next up in Alastair’s timeline will be Signal to Noise, from 2006.
Very much similar to The Autobiography of Kathryn Janeway that i read two books ago.
Thoroughly enjoyable look back at Jean-Luc’s early life before the Enterprise, and also some good snippets from the series and afterwards also.
Another must for Trekkies everywhere.
After the aliens invade people have their consciousnesses uploaded into giant avatar machines of Hindu gods to fight the alien invaders. What happens when ordinary humans are given the physical bodies of gods?
A good little story.
You’ll find this in the collection, Deep Navigation.
Reading this, one wonders if Alastair once had an academic paper rejected and that this is somehow a therapy session. There doesn’t seem to be much more to it.
Dyson spheres: a wonderful trope for story telling, but the idea that an actual intelligent society capable of such feats would go to all that trouble simply because they can’t control their urges to continually fuck up the front hole, producing ever expanding colonies of the results of the misguided sexual desires, just because a few seriously backward thinking Homo sapiens can’t see beyond their own retarded thinking and retarded sexual desires, is preposterous.
And the idea that we should be judging the amount — and level — of intelligent species in the galaxy on the amount of Dyson spheres we can detect is even more preposterous. Just one more example of the arrogance of Homo sapiens.
Another one of those super long 10000+ Loc point novels that Alastair seems to enjoy writing.
The story starts with an ice pusher, named Rockhopper. Rockhopper is a big space ship that finds valuable comets, etc., around the solar system, attaches big mass drivers to them and pushes them wherever they’re needed in the solar system for their materials: ergo “Pushing Ice”. It just so happens that Rockhopper ends up as the only space ship owned by the big corporations that is capable of catching up with one of Saturn’s moons that has just decided to fly away from Saturn and the rest of the solar system.
And thus begins the big chase, with mutinies, murders, aliens, and all kinds of other mayhem thrown in for good measure: did i mention there’s 10000+ Loc points of this?
It does begin fairly slow going but as you go along it all picks up speed as the stakes become higher and higher and by the last third of the book i was in couldn’t-put-it-down mode, turning pages at any brief opportunity life presented.
Super good, and it’s also left very well open for another episode should Alastair ever wish to let us have some more: please can we have some more, Alastair?
And next book on the Alastair time line will be Feeling Rejected, from 2005.
All stories copyright 2007.
