Free to read over at Clarkesworld, and also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight.

Another short from “The Universe of Xuya”.

One of the really good things about these huge sci-fi universes is that there’s always a space somewhere to tell a story about anything you want to.   Immersion is a story that very much warns humanity of its folly with modern technology and how we use it to hide the truth of our selves from others while also, at the same time, allowing it to filter out the truth of others from ourselves.   Facebook, and it’s other entities, are very much the beginning of the immersion technology discussed in this story: the way people have created their on-line personas that they window dress to impress others for a few more likes, covering up the truth about their shitty little dull lives while eagerly consuming an equally fictional illusion of the reality of other people’s lives.

It’s all lies, all bullshit, all an illusion!!!

How far down this rabbit hole do people go?   How lost in the addiction?   At what point does it end?   How many suicides?   How much depression?   How deep the anxiety?   When will people pull the plug and get back to living their real lives and is that even possible any more with the internet being so pervasive?   People are now having their fridges and other appliances hooked up to wifi and the internet, FFS — Oooh, look at all the nice food in my fridge, gloat, gloat, gloat, please hit that like button please, please, please!!!

Or maybe i’m just over-thinking everything too much while i’m under house arrest.

Ho hum.   One day we will be free.   Sadly, it will most probably be the day we die.

And thus endeth my cheerful review.

Seriously though, it’s a good story and one well worth reading for a lot of people.

Next up, On a Red Station, Drifting.

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Free to read over at Clarkesworld.   It’s also in the collections, Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight and Scattered Among Strange Worlds.

This story reminds me of Butterfly, Falling at Dawn in the way people and cultures change and shift, with those who fight to maintain things, those who fight to rid things, those who adopt the new and those who refuse to.   But unlike Butterfly, Falling at Dawn where we had an external power come to support those who wanted change within their own society, to free themselves from the tyranny of their own people; in Scattered Along the River of Heaven we have a post conflict situation where one society has freed itself violently from the slavery and tyranny imposed upon it by an external society.

Likewise, within that society there were slaves who wanted to maintain the status quo, as they had been granted privileged positions amongst the slaves: the masters deliberately creating a tier system ensuring that the privileged slaves would keep the under-privileged slaves in place by overseeing, snitching, reporting, etc..   However, once their enslavers had been overthrown these privileged slaves were either killed or exiled along with their masters, hated and despised by those of their own people that they kept downtrodden for their own comfort and importance.

It’s also another one of those books by Aliette where a second reading is a must: at least it was for me.   It’s like i just couldn’t see the overall picture until the last 10th or so of the story, where things become clear and fall into place, and then i was left hanging, needing to go back and read it all again with a much clearer idea of what it was i was reading.   I think there’s some important information that is missing from the beginning that you don’t find until the end, but, doesn’t matter.   Or maybe it’s like one of those poems that you have to keep going back to hoping to glean a little more meaning each time.

But yeah, good book, plenty to think about culturally and things.

Next up, Immersion.

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Very much in keeping with the rest of the Xuya books and i absolutely recommend reading them before diving into this deep space.

A lot longer than the previous short stories and novellas that we’ve so far been used to: as such, this one is available as a real book that you can buy over at Amazon.

For those reading my previous review on Pearl, you’ll now know how i feel about pricing and this is no different to that.   At the time of writing this the brand new paperback is £7.75 while the Kindle version is £7.34.   And Amazon will deliver the paperback for free if you buy something else from them for £2.25 to make the total £10.00.

However, i’m not going to get back into my rant on the pricing of a teeny tiny data file compared to a forest of processed trees and environmental damages of such, you can read all about that at Pearl.   Like that, it’s up to you if you are willing to pay that or not, or you can simply get a copy elsewhere, like get your local library to buy the paperback and then a thousand people can read it for free.   Or you can buy the paperback with free delivery and then sell it on ebay to make some money back, or share it with a few friends, or give it to a charity shop.   At the end of the day, it’s up to you, but ebooks aren’t going to be priced fairly for what they are if people — you the reader — keep paying silly prices for them.   It’s utterly ridiculous to be charging every Kindle user similar prices for a single use, data protected copy while the paperback can be bought once and shared and read by dozens of people for years and years.

So, onto the content: great story, this time we’re going into the deep spaces within the deep spaces.   Yeah, deep spaces squared get seriously bizarre.   Lots of court intrigue and military invasion matters and the normal everyday life things as well.

Once again, super great writing from Aliette that keeps your attention from beginning to end.   Shame about the ebook pricing.

And now let’s go get Scattered Along the River of Heaven.

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Well this is a new one on me: genocide by nebula.

It does make one wonder what depths of fucked-up-ness humans will descend to as we get ever more dangerous technology to play with.   Like what will happen when we eventually develop the ability to destroy whole suns, allowing one group of Homo sapiens to eradicate another, purely out of fear and mistrust, or just plain and simple, old fashioned, nastiness.

I like to think that future species of Hominids will be a lot nicer than this current bunchacunts, the arrogantly self titled Homo sapiens.   Heaven help the universe if Homo sapiens ever escapes this solar system.

Anyway, it’s free to read over at Uncanny and also in the collection The Dragon that Flew Out of the Sun and Other Stories, so have at it.

Next up: The Citadel of Weeping Pearls.

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Ok, people, today i’m going to begin with a good little rant.   Are you sitting comfortably?   Then i’ll begin.

Ones day started off well enough in that trying to find a copy of this story to read was fairly easy: as with all the Xuya stories, you just go to Aliette’s website and you’ll find a comprehensive list.

So you look down the list to find Pearl, click on the link and go to the page about it.

Follow the link on that page and you can find a way to Amazon where you get to see that Pearl is included in an anthology and that the cost for the Kindle edition is an utterly ridiculous £11.99, which is bad enough in itself, but then consider that the brand new paperback is only £8.44 — at the time of writing — with new hardcovers from £10.00 and that £11.99 becomes more than utterly ridiculous …

… like, seriously, WTF!!!

All i can think of to explain this appalling discrepancy is that this is done by someone who is clearly a Luddite hell-bent on making some kind of statement that they hate Kindles and the people who use Kindles: at £11.99 they obviously have no intention of ever wishing to sell this to anyone with a Kindle.   If, by strange chance, the person setting this price gets to read this and wishes to let me know that they had another reason to insult and abuse Kindle owners in this manner, then please let me know and i’ll be more than willing to update this page adding your excuses — and please do make it entertaining for posterity, if nothing else, we could all do with a laugh.

The reality is this: the Kindle version is a very simple, teeny, tiny, data file — FFS — we’re not buying shares in the AI program that lands and manages a rover on Mars, no land has to be cleared and farmed for decades to grow the trees, no trees had to be harvested and killed, no dead trees had to be processed and shipped to mills, no logs had to be turned into wood and pulped, no pulp had to be bleached and made into paper, no ink had to be made and printed onto the paper, no glues and binders and card covers and more inks and shit, no boxes and packing materials, no shipping from publishers to reseller, no warehousing, no trucks and vans and transport hubs, no MOT’s and fuel and repair bills, no insurance and driver, no ferries and ships, no adding to road congestion, no shit loads of environmental damage, polution, CO2 and carbon footprint, etc., etc., etc., and that’s just getting the paperback made and delivered to Amazon’s warehouse.   So why the fuck is the Kindle book £3.55 more than the paperback?

And i can’t even resell the Kindle version.   Yes folks, Amazon made it so a Kindle e-book cannot be lent or resold, while your far, far cheaper paperback can passed on, re-sold, put in the library, and read by several dozen different people all for the much cheaper price of £8.44 which you can share with 10 of your friends so you only have to pay 84p each, while i still have to pay £11.99 for my single user read.

And then, at the end of it, how many of these paperback and hardback books are left unsold, needing to be dumped, pulped or burned by the publishers, otherwise thrown in rubbish bins by the end users up and down the land and sent to landfill the world over when people are fed up with them — the environmental damage of real books is never paid for by those that use them.   Give yerselves a big round of applause!

When more than half the books sold in the world now are ebooks, one can almost feel a little twinge of sympathy for the loss of sales experienced by those writers who ended up giving their work to publishers like this who think that charging £3.55 more for the e-book than a brand new paper back is acceptable.   But, at the end of the day, its incumbent upon the writers to insist in their contracts that any publisher of their work ensures that the ebook version will always be significantly cheaper than the paper version.   Because, after all is said and done, if you’re getting paid by royalties on books sold, this publisher is totally shitting on you because they won’t be selling any of your stories to Kindle users because we’re not stupid enough to be thoroughly taken the piss out of in this fashion.   And whether you like ebooks or not, they’re here to stay and more and more people are using them.   When the world is now buying more ebooks than real books you have to be out of your mind to be shitting on such a large demographic with draconian pricing tactics simply to further some retarded, Luddite mission.

So yeah, sorry to all the writers who gave this publisher a story to go in this anthology, but next time you do anything like this make sure it’s in the contract that the Kindle version will be significantly lower than the price of a brand new paper back: the keyword being significantly.   You’ll find that most Kindle users will happily pay for an ebook if it’s significantly cheaper than the paperback, if not we will happily take our hard earned money else where and eagerly hand it all over to writers who do recognise that an e-book should be significantly cheaper than a paperback.

And worse of all — yes there is actually something worse than all the above — is that i only wanted to read this one single story from this pathetic, retarded, Luddite’s campaign against the 21st century masquerading as an anthology.   Yeah, £11.99 for one fucking short story’s data file.   You couldn’t write this shit …

… anyway, rant over, just don’t pay that, don’t be ripped off, boycott the Luddites, go to Google and read it for free.

I would definitely suggest reading the original version of Dã Tràng and the Pearl before undertaking this story.   Not totally necessary but you’ll enjoy Pearl much more if you experience the original writing upon which it is based.

And all that said, yeah, it’s a good little story about little AI things who start making their own improvements and evolving, but it most certainly ain’t ever gonna be worth £11.99.

Next up: The Dragon that Flew out of the Sun.

PS. Me thinks Aliette took notice, because i know she read this, and since me giving all the above rant it’s since become available in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight, which is much, much cheaper, especially when you consider that you get a whole bunch of Xuya books included, which makes it quite a bargain really.

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Currently available to read at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight.

And so we’re back to the endings of mindships, this story being about those that are lost when things go wrong, broken apart in the deep spaces.   We’re told about this through the adventures of the scavengers, the divers who throw themselves out of other mindships to collect the gems that the bodies of the passengers become in the unreality of the deep spaces when they no longer have the protection of the mindships.

Mmmm, so yeah, this one’s a bit weird: like a bunch of odd-ball poets who like dropping too much lsd while base jumping and free diving — all at the same time — just to pick up their next fix as cannibal junkies.   I’ve often wondered what mind altering substances future hominids will encounter when we spread out across the galaxy and it seems like Aliette’s been thinking along the same lines, but i got to say, Aliette’s imagination is way beyond mine in this matter.

So yeah, the future, dude!

My only thing is that while this is a fun read in and of itself, i’m not sure how this is fitting with what we’ve been reading.   We just had several books telling us how rare and unbelievable it is for a mindship to be lost and/or die — that, by human standards, they seemingly live forever — yet now we have a story where it seems like broken mindships are scattered all over the deep spaces with scavenger junkies being able to find enough of them to pick clean enough of the dead passengers’ gems for their own addictions but also enough to sell to cover the costs of their own mindships and living expenses.   One can only presume that this story is about a different culture/people than the recent stories dealt with and that this new lot aren’t very good at making mindships.

So yeah, bit of a weird one.

Coming soon: Pearl.

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You can read this at Lightspeed.

Looking at the BBC news before i wrote this, the current discussion concerning our real-world plague of Covid-19 is how we get out this quarantined, house-arrested mess that we’re currently stuck in: specifically, what is the UK government’s lock-down exit strategy.

Of course, in times like this, there are those who bang on and on about vaccines, like, if only we could have a vaccine tomorrow then we could all go out to play again and everyone would live happily ever after: yeah, right!

Crossing the Midday Gate is a story that looks back at the scientists who developed the vaccine for our in-story plague, Blue Lily, and what can go wrong if we aren’t careful.   I think this book should be essential reading for everyone at the moment.

So what we have is a scientist who develops a viable vaccine to Blue Lily, but the manufacturing process simply cannot be made to a scale that can produce enough vaccine, fast enough, without allowing billions to die.   Not to be outdone, another scientist comes up with a method that can scale up the production, albeit, reducing the efficacy of the vaccine.

It was decided that it was better to have a vaccine for everyone, albeit at a reduced efficacy, than it was to have a much more efficacious vaccine for the few.

This new method of producing the vaccine was then rushed through, without proper testing, and a vaccination program began: many subsequently died because the new method of production was fundamentally flawed.

And this is where we very much are with Covid-19 at the moment: too many people, including governments, screaming for a vaccine, or cure, will happily encourage Big Pharma to rush through yet another product that will destroy lives.

Remember, history is already littered with the failures of Big Pharma: the horrendous side effects that have ruined, and continue to ruin, so many people’s lives; not to mention the countless deaths caused by the addictive poisons that Big Pharma rushes to market with bogus, corrupt studies purely for the profits of its shareholders.

So yeah, Crossing the Midday Gate is about this very thing, and also how governments — who are more than happy to be the cheer leaders, stirring up the masses’ clamour for the scientists to take these short cuts — will soon wash their own hands of blame when it all goes wrong and will always find a suitable scape goat amongst the scientific community to throw to the wolves.

Coming soon to a world near you!

You’ve been warned!

Next up: A Salvaging of Ghosts.

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You can read this for free over at Uncanny.

Once again, we return to the death of a mindship; this time the cause of death is a plague known as Blue Lily.   I’ve often picked up a book and found, completely by chance, that it reflected what was going on in the real world in quite an uncanny way — this story being found in Uncanny magazine in this time of a plague known as Covid-19.

I think we could also do so much better if we could just give our diseases much nicer names — like Aliette has with Blue Lily — because Black Death, AIDS, SARS, MERS, EBOLA and now Covid-19 doesn’t really help with people’s mental health during these difficult, anxious and depressing times.   The last thing people need is a disease that sounds like a violent street gang, MS-13, just got more nasty and is coming to get you, yes you, just you!!!

Anyway, this was another story, like Starsong, in that as soon as i got to the end i went all the way back to the beginning and read it all again.   I really didn’t understand what had actually happened after the first time through.   I’m not sure how much of this is Aliette portraying the effects of Blue Lily so well in her writing that i was as confused as someone coming into contact with a victim of this plague, or how much my mind kept on being taken away from this story and drawing certain parallels with Homo sapiens’ current plague of Covid-19.   Suffice it to say that a second reading in which i paid a lot more attention to what i was reading was much better.

If you need your stories spoon fed to you then this most probably isn’t for you as there’s all kinds of temporal, spacial and virtual shifts going on and you really have to pay attention.   However, pay attention and you’ll be rewarded with a rather good sci-fi, plague story.

And next up, we’re going to be Crossing the Midday Gate.

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You can now read this for free over at Clarkesworld, and it’s also in the collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight.

As with our last book, Two Sisters in Exile, we’re once again visiting death.   This time it’s not the death of a mindship but the deaths of the humans in a long-lived mindship’s life.   Imagine that you knew you would live for centuries while all the people you know and care for would only have decades.

We’re also introduced to the idea of having a person’s memories condensed and inherited by their next of kin who then has them implanted, and how the powers that be will, when it suits them, take and use those memories as they see fit.   Consider also that the person whose memories you just inherited may have also inherited memories of their forebears who have also inherited memories or their forebears.

To be honest, i can’t imagine anything much worse than having your ancestor’s floating around in your head, pestering and badgering your every decision.   I could have a big long rant about this but i won’t.   Read it yourself and draw your own conclusions.   Suffice it to say, i’m with The Tiger in the Banyan in that i wouldn’t want them even if you offered.

And so…

…coming soon: In Blue Lily’s Wake.

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Originally published in Solaris Rising 1.5, but you can now read for free over at Clarkesworld.

And so we leave the birth of mindships behind us and move to the other end, to their deaths.

Once upon a time there was the Dai Viet Empire, now that has become divided between the Northerners and the Nam, the Nam are a warring bunch whose mindships don’t last for very long, while the Northerners are a peaceful, creative, trading people whose mindships simply never die: that is, until Nam kills one by accident.

I’ve enjoyed every book from this universe i’ve read already, they’ve all been really good, but this one felt like it all just got even better as we learn ever more about these living space ships and each culture’s attitude towards them.

Once again, Aliette writes perfectly, continuing to build this universe story by story, while at the same time setting a stage and giving us delightful little teasers of what i hope is going to be played out in future stories.

Next up: Three Cups of Grief, by Starlight.

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