Recent Reading - February 2012

Mostly I've been having a very leisurely re-read of the first three Lady Hardcastle Investigates books (I'm not planning on re-reading the fourth one as it annoyed me) before pressing on to the fifth one, which focuses on the Suffragettes, but in the meantime I've continued my completely out of order read of John Scalzi's Old Man's War series with 'The End of All Things", which supposedly wraps up the series.

As openings go "So I'm supposed to tell you how I became a brain in the box" is spectacular and unexpected. Even more unexpected was when that story ended up a quarter of the way through - if the Amazon summary mentioned it's a fix-up I completely missed it.

So you have:

The Life of the Mind

Down on his luck spaceship pilot Rafe Daquin gets a job thanks to the intervention of a friend, on a freighter doing a nice quiet three leg run through some of the safest parts of the Colonial Union. Or that was the plan, until a very senior diplomat shanghais them into taking him to an unknown location, which turns out to be because he's defecting to the Equilibrium, the guys who have been setting the Colonial Union up as the biggest troublemaker in space. By the end of the day the entire crew is dead, except for Rafe, who's now a brain in a box and wired directly into the piloting controls. He's being kept alive because the Equilibrium use brain-controlled hijacked ships as proxy weapons, implicating one side or the other in their intrigues, motivating pilots with the promise of their body back. Unfortunately for them Rafe isn't stupid, and he has an ace up his non-existent sleeve: before he was a pilot, he was a programmer, working on starship control systems, the very control system they're now using as a simulator to train him for combat.

This Hollow Union

Hafte Sorvalh is the perfect chief of staff, utterly competent, but with no desire to run things herself. Which is why people call her the second most powerful being in the Conclave, the unprecedented union of alien states opposed to the Colonial Union, after her boss General Gao. But opposition to Gao is becoming more blatant, and Hafte is worried about what happens after he inevitably dies, because all the other politicians are in it for the power and will eventually cause the Conclave to fragment, probably sooner rather than later. But events conspire to make her put that all aside, with the arrival of not one, but two, Human delegations. The delegation from Earth, which has split from the Union after finding out it was being deliberately kept low-tech as a source of bodies to turn into Colonial troops, was expected, the one from the Colonial Union not so much. To make matters worse, someone tries to shoot down the Earth delegation, leaving the Colonials as the only people in place to pull off a rescue, which bravura piece of flying turns out to be down to one Rafe Daquin, who has a story to tell. And now Hafte has even more problems.

Can Long Endure

Things aren't going well for the Colonial Union, but Lieutenant Heather Lee and her platoon haven't seen action against aliens in months, it's all been enforcing the status quo on human planets, and there's only so much playing goon-squad a woman can take

To Stand or Fall

Everything comes to a head, as the Equilibrium plan their master stroke, the destruction of Earth by 'Conclave' ships, inevitably triggering the final war between the Conclave and the Colonial Union, after which the galaxy can get back to its normal status quo antebellum with everyone hating everyone else and involved in their own petty squabbles, just the way they prefer it. Only our heroes have a plan.

And to complete the book there's also a completely different draft of The Life of the Mind that Scalzi wrote and then discarded, which frankly I haven't read.

I also still haven't read books two and three of the series either, but I feel confident in saying that despite the multiple Hugo nominations this is the weakest of the three Scalzi series I've read,. However that's not to say it's particularly weak in comparison to the rest of the market, it's just he knows how to do better now. While the series is normally talked about as MilSF, it really isn't, it's political SF told from a military perspective. Now I've realised that I'm a little happier with it, but it still has major structural issues, such as switching principal protagonist mid-stream and the fix-up nature of many of the books.