Head On by John Scalzi

Published by Tor Books on April 17, 2018

Head On is the second novel set in the “locked in” universe that John Scalzi created in Lock In. A virus called Haden’s Syndrome has caused a small percentage of the population to be “locked” inside their bodies. They can think but they can’t move or communicate in normal ways. Those people are called Hadens. Technology, in the form of a neural network, has made it possible for them to inhabit robots called threeps. The government has funded threeps as a health care benefit for Hadens but the funding is going dry.

Head On is a science fiction mystery featuring FBI agent Chris Shane, who happens to be a Haden. Shane has as much personality as soggy tofu; his edgier partner Vann is a better character. Thanks to his wealthy parents who are considering an investment in a Hilketa team, Shane (inhabiting a threep) is in a luxury box when a Hilketa player named Duane Chapman dies.

Hilketa is played on the field by threeps that are controlled by players who are off the field. The object of the game is to cut off the head of a designated opposing player and to score a goal by carrying, throwing, or punting the head over the goalposts. Threeps are usually operated by Hadens because their neural networks give them a reaction time advantage.

The players controlling the threeps aren’t supposed to be injured by their threep’s decapitation, but Chapman dies after his threep’s head is ripped off for the third time in the game. Shane is therefore front and center in a death investigation which arguably falls within the FBI’s jurisdiction because of the interstate nature of Hilketa, whose players are generally in a different state than the venue in which the game is played.

Hadens shouldn’t die from contact with their threeps, so establishing the cause of death is the first problem. Did Chapman’s use of a nutritional supplement that he didn’t endorse have anything to do with his death? Is the league covering something up?

As a science fiction murder mystery, Head On is about average. I enjoyed the science fiction setting more than the actual mystery, which has Shane watching a number of deaths pile up as he tries to piece together clues about how and why Chapman died and how the other deaths are related. The plot is reasonably complex but not wholly engaging, in part because Shane is just a dull guy. Still, Scalzi incorporates enough amusing background details (including vague suggestions about Hadens use threeps to have sex with other Hadens) to make the overall story more interesting than the mystery at its center.

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Quietus by Tristan Palmgren

Published by Angry Robot on March 6, 2018

Quietus is a novel of big ideas. Like many good books about big ideas, the story focuses on small people, the kind of people who seem insufficiently consequential to drive big ideas. In the end, Quietus reminds us, we are all consequential, even if we seem insignificant in the vastness of the multiverse.

The two central characters in Quietus are Niccoluccio, an Italian monk who is questioning his faith during the plague years, and Dr. Habidah Shen, who doesn’t understand Niccoluccio’s need “to forever be watched and judged” by a higher being. Perhaps Habidah doesn’t understand because she is not from Earth. She is from Caldera, a member plane of the Unity, one of countless planes in the multiverse.

Habidah is working for the amalgamates, who emerged from the AI wars as the most powerful minds in the multiverse (or so they believe). They assured their supremacy by developing “neutered” AIs who could not develop beyond a fixed level. Finding humans to be more useful than other sentients, the amalgamates maintain an empire of human civilizations from many universes. From their residences in core worlds and planarships, the amalgamates protect the Unity from threats, including rival transplanar empires, rogue AIs, invasive species, and nonhuman xenophobes.

Habidah is a researcher who leads a team that is studying how humans on Earth are coping with the plague. The research is important because the Unity is suffering its own plague, one that only appears to infect the demiorganics that make it possible to receive datastreams from machine entities. It also only affects transplaner civilizations — those that have the ability to move across the multiverse. Having defeated disease, the Unity no longer knows how to address it. By studying survival strategies adopted by more primitive societies, the Unity hopes to preserve its existence.

Niccolucio’s crisis of faith comes as he buries his Brothers before abandoning the Monastery and returning to his home in Florence, which for political reasons is even more disheartening than the monastery. Niccolucio and Habidah meet before Niccolucio goes to Florence and meet again after he leaves. At some point, they both discover that the amalgamates’ notion of protecting the empire will require the subjugation of a good many human planets.

The novel takes an unexpected turn when about three-quarters of the story has been told. At that point, the stories of Niccolucio and Habidah are joined as Niccolucio’s beliefs about the nature of the universe evolve to something that is beyond his former religious understanding, while Habidah’s beliefs evolve beyond a science-based understanding of how things work.

The story raises philosophical questions about existence while offering alternatives to traditional religious explanations for being. Just as Star Wars fans can choose to think of the Force in religious terms or not, Quietus imagines the existence of a purposeful and powerful intelligence, a “primal force of the cosmos” that might or might not be understood in a religious sense. It lives between the planes, a place that (to Habidah’s understanding) does not and cannot exist. To someone of Niccolucio’s religious background, that force might seem to be a divine power. To someone of Habidah’s scientific background, the force appears to be an entity of vast power that purports to protect the infinite diversity of the planes from undesirable interplanar contact. But if the power between the planes is the cure for the amalgamates’ ambition, the cure might be worse than the disease — at least from the standpoint of the inhabitants who populate the countless worlds that comprise the Unity.

Quietus touches on fundamental issues of individuality and free will. It asks whether death is a meaningful concept if each of us exists in infinite universes, an infinite number of whom will not die when we die, an infinite number of whom have not yet been born. It asks whether it is possible to believe in an unseen, all-powerful being without worshiping it. In some sense, Quietus asks the reader whether it is necessary to rethink the history of philosophy in light of the multiverse theory. Those are the kinds of questions that make science fiction not just fun, but meaningful.

I admire the sophistication and complexity of thought that underlies Quietus, as well as the depth of the characters. I love the message it delivers — the ultimate purpose of a civilization is not to gain power over other civilizations — yet the novel recognizes that the message is one that the powerful do not willingly accept.

On a more superficial level, I enjoyed the story. A good story is an essential component of fiction, and Quietus tells a story that makes humans from Earth and humans from elsewhere both allies and enemies, while asking whether machine intelligence will be the enemy that finally unites human intelligence or the friend that helps humans reach their full potential. Quietus is ultimately a story about manufacturing miracles — not the miracles made by supernatural powers, but the miracles we must devise for ourselves if we are to survive as a species.

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The Crooked Staircase by Dean Koontz

Published by Bantam on May 8, 2018

The Crooked Staircase is the third novel in a series that pits former FBI agent Jane Hawk against the conspirators who not only caused her husband to commit suicide, but have developed mind-control nanotechnology that lets them kill as many people as they want, which turns out to be a large number. Their goal is to shape the country in their own image by doing away with people whose more tolerant opinions might become influential. This installment, like the first two, has Hawk chasing the bad guys while they are chasing her.

One of the weaknesses in the first two novels involved the bad guys’ failure to go after Jane’s obvious vulnerability, the son she hid with friends. Given the bad guys’ all-encompassing knowledge of everything, thanks to their control of the NSA and every other federal agency’s spy network, it didn’t seem to me it would be all that hard to find her son. Dean Koontz addresses that problem in this novel.

He also throws in a bunch of collateral characters, the most interesting of whom are two young writers from India who are viewed as a threat by the bad guys (or their threat-tabulating computer) because they are writing humanist literature that might catch on and persuade people treat each other decently, thus impeding the bad guys’ cutthroat notion of a utopian society. A less interesting character, who might play a bigger role in the next novel, is a stereotypical genius whose autism makes him social-phobic.

The biggest problem with this series (assuming that readers are willing to suspend disbelief of its unconvincing premise) is that Koontz has many more than the story really needs. The words are well chosen — there is no question that Koontz is capable of crafting exquisite sentences, and reading his books is always a linguistic pleasure — but this is the kind of novel that depends on pace, and the pace slackens too much for my taste as, for example, we are lectured about the influence of the Greek Furies upon one of the writers. Koontz also tends to use Hawk and other characters to engage in philosophical discussions about the human condition, usually by lamenting the direction in which humanity is headed. That works well in a different kind of novel (it worked very well in Koontz’s The City), but it doesn’t work in a conspiracy thriller that depends on action and pace to sustain the story. I can’t say that wordiness is a big distraction, but there are too many eloquent philosophical passages in the novel that seem to have been included for the sake of showcasing eloquence or philosophy rather than advancing the plot.

And the plot really does need advancing. My understanding is that Koontz intends to tell this story over at least five books. A standard conspiracy thriller doesn’t merit five books. I don’t know what more is to come, but my suspicion is that the story could easily be compacted into a trilogy. Parts of this novel seems like filler, with extended chase scenes and some collateral stories involving characters who are introduced and thrown away. Some of that content could have been excised with no loss of value.

I give Koontz credit for not contriving a happy ending for every character. And I give him credit for working in several peaks of suspense as the story moves along. Koontz occasionally indulges in a bit of pop psychology of the sort that appeals to thriller writers — a sociopath is trying to punish his mother by serially punishing and killing women who look like his mother — and that I expect to encounter in bad novels about profilers. The evil mother who shaped the key villain in this volume is completely over the top. Other characters are more credible, but again, none of the characters match Koontz’ best work.

The ending isn’t exactly a cliffhanger, but it’s close, as one would expect of each novel in a five novel series. I’ll keep reading because Koontz is a gifted wordsmith and the story isn’t dull. So far, however, the story isn’t particularly original or thrilling, and I fear it’s losing steam.

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The Price of the Haircut by Brock Clarke

Published by Algonquin Books on March 13, 2018

The Price of the Haircut is a collection of tragicomic (or in a few cases, twistedly comic) stories that blend humor with perception. After the mayor in “The Price of the Haircut” tells the city that a race riot wasn’t caused by yet another shooting of an unarmed black man by a white cop, but by a quarrel over a barber’s racist remark after he gave an $8 haircut, the white narrator and his friends lament all the bad but expensive haircuts they’ve had. They want to save money and get a bad haircut for only $8, but can they patronize a barber who makes racist remarks? The frivolous logic they employ to wrestle with their moral dilemma is hilarious, but the story’s larger point concerns the willingness of white people to pretend that racism doesn’t exist while agreeing that if it did exist, it would be awful, a point they would happily make in a patronizing and self-congratulatory way to their black friends if they had any.

In the volume’s most bizarre story, “Our Pointy Boots,” young men and women ask the question: “How does the thing that promises to be different, the thing that promises to make you feel good, end up making you feel as bad as everything else?” After they return from war (except for the one who died), the same young men and women just want to march around the Public Square in the pointy boots they thought would make them feel good. This is a tragically funny story that lampoons all the clichés about returning veterans and reminds us that people are individuals, not clichés. Ultimately the story is about the importance of holding onto something that makes us feel good during all those times when feeling good seems very far away. And it’s about the importance of holding onto ourselves if all else fails.

In “The Pity Palace,” a man in Italy is too sad to venture outside of his home because his wife left him for Mario Puzo. After jettisoning the friends who warned him that he needs to go outside if he wants to keep his friends, he has no one to take care of him, compounding his desperate loneliness. His former friends have circulated flyers inviting people to visit the man’s home, which they have dubbed “The Pity Palace,” in order to pity him. Feeling pity for the man makes visitors feel better about their own lives (except for those who complain that he isn’t pitiful enough), which says something sad but honest about human nature. The story’s kicker lies in the growing realization that the man is even more pitiful than he appears to be.

“What Is the Cure for Meanness?” should be a sad story told by a young boy about his mean father and emotionally wrecked mother, and while it is a sad story, it’s also very funny. The son is trying to avoid his father’s meanness and is only partially successful, although he’s more insensitive than mean to his mom. But their life is filled with misfortune — everything the mother cares about dies or leaves — and maybe meanness is the natural response. Still, as the title suggests, meanness might not be inevitable.

The narrator of “Concerning Lizzie Borden, Her Axe, My Wife” is a research-obsessed husband who is afraid to lose his wife to her congenital heart defect and is instead losing her to his inability to give her the space she needs. That doesn’t sound funny, and it’s not, but the tour of Lizzie Borden’s house (which frat boys have mistaken for porn star Lezzie Borden’s house) is hysterical.

“The Misunderstandings” is narrated by an unemployed man whose takes his unhappy family to dinners at local restaurants, each leading to misunderstandings that lead to more family dinners at other restaurants, all paid for by restaurant owners in sort of a “pay it forward” spirit. Speaking of family dinners, one of my favorite stories in the volume is “That Which We Will Not Give,” a celebration of family stories that are repeated every year at Thanksgiving dinners and other barbaric family rituals.

“The Grand Canyon” is a five-page run-on sentence that describes a moment in a woman’s honeymoon when she considers how to paint the Grand Canyon and whether the painting should include her husband masturbating into it. “Children Who Divorce,” a story about jealousy, imagines that child actors reunite to act in updated, dinner theater versions of their original productions, minded by a doctor who tends to the actors with daily group therapy sessions (the current group suffers from Gene Wilder withdrawal).

Brock Clarke has a knack for creating strange — sometimes bizarre — situations or characters, and finding within them those things that are common to us all. The stories encourage readers not just to laugh, but to understand people and their lives in new ways, to understand how other people are, in fundamental ways, just like us, not matter how unlike us they might be.

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Semiosis by Sue Burke

Published by Tor Books on February 6, 2018

In its infancy (both in its Golden Age and for years thereafter), science fiction took human supremacy as a given. Humans were viewed as superior to aliens and were destined to prevail in conflicts. A few writers (Clifford D. Simak among them) took a contrary approach, writing stories in which aliens had a lot to teach stupidly aggressive humans, but even today, the notion of human supremacy is alive and well in science fiction.

The best science fiction asks us to question our assumptions. Semiosis questions the assumption of human supremacy without denigrating human nature. Two forms of alien life come into contact with a human colony. One faction of humans condemns both alien species because, well, they aren’t human. A competing faction argues in favor of mutualism. Neither perspective is presented in a simplistic way, giving rise to the kind of debate that invites the reader to decide how humans might best interact with intelligent nonhuman aliens, if and when we meet them.

The first alien life form is a sentient plant, or more broadly, the most intelligent plant in an ecosystem. Different kinds of self-aware plants with varying degrees of intelligence communicate with each other chemically. Other life forms on the planet (flippokats are fun, flippolions less so, and bats have rudimentary language) interact with humans, but only the plants manipulate them.

Fifty human colonists on a distant world called Pax want to create a place that exists in harmony with nature. Global warming is ravaging Earth, so the colonists are looking to do better than the humans they left behind. They have a fine constitution dedicated to peace, freedom, and equality. Of course, by the time the second generation matures, the first generation has become repressive, outlawing time-wasting notions like art and forcing women to breed. Such is the nature of humanity; fine ideas give way to our worst instincts when things aren’t going well.

The novel follows the human colonists through seven generations. Each generational chapter is narrated by a human from that generation. The question for each generation of colonists is whether the plants can be trusted. Plants can synthesize chemicals, but chemicals can be beneficial or toxic. Will humans control the plants, will plants control the humans, or will plants and people work together to attain their mutual goals? The reader is likely to revise tentative answers to those questions repeatedly as the story moves forward.

The second generation comes upon a city in which glass has clearly been shaped as art and for utilitarian uses. The colonists dub the city’s original inhabitants “the Glassmakers,” but humans do not encounter an actual Glassmaker until later in the story, after the first few generations have become part of colonial history. The Glassmakers are the second alien race to interact with the human colony, but they seem to be more primitive and confrontational than the beautiful city they left behind would suggest.

Whether the Glassmakers are good or evil is no more easy to answer than whether humans are good or evil. Forgiveness is, for some, a human virtue, but we sometimes find it easier to forgive ourselves and our friends than people who are not in our own circle. Can we learn to forgive aliens for their harmful behavior, even if their behavior was based on a misunderstanding of humans? Will they forgive us for misunderstanding them?

Understanding another human is difficult enough for humans; understanding an alien might be an impossible task. Semiosis suggests that it is a task that, at best, will require multiple generations of effort on the part of both humans and aliens. But in the end, understanding the universe and all of its inhabitants is worthwhile, and the need to pursue understanding rather than conflict is at the heart of the best science fiction. Semiosis easily falls into the category of “the best” science fiction. In the depth of its story and of its characters, Semiosis is award-worthy.

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