Originally published in Godlike Machines, and also available in the collection, Beyond the Aquila Rift.
The story starts with an escapee from a mental hospital in Siberia desperately trying to reach the local town.
The escapee was one of three cosmonauts sent to investigate an alien vessel that had appeared in the solar system years before.
The story bounces back and forth between the escapee trying to reach someone in town and when he was a cosmonaut at the alien vessel.
Quite a good twist in the tail of this one as well.
Another good novella from Alastair, a master of short fiction as well as the super long stuff too.
Next up on Alastair’s timeline will be Sleepover.
A rather strange mix of steampunk and sci-fi with a hint of fantasy thrown in. All in all, a rather good mix.
This is another one of Alastair’s trilogy in a single novel book, so if you aren’t in for a long haul then don’t bother. But if you don’t mind a thousand Kindle Loc points of reading to get through this’ll keep you going.
While i didn’t find it anything like the normal page turners that Alastair generally puts out, i did keep coming back to it twice a day for a little read and soon got through it.
So, while not the greatest thing that Alastair has ever written, and personally wishing he’d just stick to the sci-fi that he’s so brilliant at, it’s still a fairly good read.
Next book in Alastair’s timeline is Troika.
It had been a bit of a wait since Galactic North but now that Inhibitor Phase has arrived, was it worth the wait?
Well, ok, i’m gonna get my rant out of the way before i go any further.
To begin, we find ourselves on one of the few remaining human colonies that the Inhibitors haven’t got to, that of Sun Hollow. We’re lead to believe that the people of Sun Hollow live inside a star scoured planet where resources are incredibly tight and the struggle to survive is always right on the edge.
Ok, that’s fair enough.
So why, oh why, oh why the fuck, does Alastair have to put sheep farming into this already over-stretched and under-resourced ecosystem? This is the most imbecilic thing that is possible to write into this situation. Where, for a start, do the sheep get their feed from? Surely, if there are resources enough to keep a viable gene pool of sheep going just so these idiots can taste mutton every day then Sun Hollow must be a paradise to live with resources and space aplenty.
I put the question to anyone who disagrees with me: how many calories of plant foods does it take to make a calorie of mutton?
And as there is absolutely no nutritional need for Homo sapiens, or any other monkey/ape to eat dead animals, why would the people of Sun Hollow be throwing good plant food (that humans do need to eat) away like this?
Yes, Alastair, you screwed up royally on this one.
Anyway, rant over.
The rest of the book is good though, picking up after the events upon Hela that we left off in Absolution Gap, we get to meet Scorpio and Aura again with a new bunch of interesting characters thrown into the mix.
And best of all is that the ending certainly leaves things well and truly open for further books in the series: which i do look forward to as long as Alastair realises that there is no place for animal agriculture in the future of humanity because Homo sapiens have no nutritional needs that can be met by eating dead animals, and animal agriculture is the biggest contributor to environmental destruction on the planet Earth so it certainly won’t be part of any future space colonies that we set up, unless we want them to fail miserably.
I’ve rearranged the stories into date order, rather than the order they are in the collection: coz that’s juse how i roll, darlings. Obviously, you can read them in any order you chose as well.
Basically, it’s just the film in writing. Which, if you’re just wanting to read what happens in the film, then great, but personally i feel that this is just totally lazy on the part of the writer: or maybe this is all they were told to do by the rights holder???
The great thing about books, as opposed to film, is that you don’t have to pay for the sets, the extra cameras, the costumes, etc.. In a book the writer is simply limited by their own imagination and language skills, whereas in a film the director/writers are totally and absolutely constrained by finite resources such as finances, but also logistics, cgi limitations, the human elements of everyone involved (remember the pandemic and the disruption that caused to films and tv shows?) and many other things besides. So to sit down and write a novel based upon a film, one would think a really good writer would have a fucking field day with it, but, with Ghost in the Shell, they didn’t.
Like is say, maybe this was the brief, and when someone throws a bag of money in the direction of writers and tells them what they want writing i would imagine they’ll get plenty of writers clamouring to take on such an easy task as this “novelisation” must have been.
At less than 2300 Kindle Loc points you’re pushing it to label this as a novel anyway. At this length you’re seriously riding the boundaries between novella and novel.
I suppose they didn’t want to upset the film fans who only have attention spans of two hours.
So yeah, sadly, a total let down. There could have been so much more background and detail that could have really added to the story. A seriously wasted opportunity.
