Rewritten by machine on new technology

The Bookageddon Challenge reactivated my voracious scifi geek gene. Before long I found myself in the library taking out armloads of the stuff ... the shame!

So anyway I have already polished off 3. All entertaining, all very different. The first I read was called Debatable Space by Philip Palmer, a high-energy tale of space pirates (I loves me some space pirates) who kidnap a very important personage, a woman named Lena, and use her as leverage to extort the dictator of the galaxy. Lena turns out to be one messed-up dame, and she makes life pretty crazy for her space pirate captors. Eventually, though, she develops Stockholm syndrome and joins their cause. This novel is very fast-paced, racing from rousing space battles to salty banter to gratuitous sex, with the occasional sidetrip into lurid tragedy. It was lots of fun to read.

Next I read Joe Haldeman's Old Twentieth, a more run-of-the-mill SF novel, but a very good one. The setting is maybe 100 years onto the future, and humanity has developed a treatment that seems to prevent aging. The people all happily call themselves "immortals," even though no-one knows how long the treatment will work. Also, they have all survived a catastrophic class war between those who could afford the treatment and those who could not. The title refers to an immersive virtual reality program that is popular among the characters, one that lets them experience the staid and placid twentieth century (a selection of wars, jazz clubs, epidemics and social upheaval). Yes, these people are so messed up, they have fond nostalgia for this stuff! But the twist comes when, for the first time in a century, someone dies! and they seem to have been killed by the virtual reality machine.

There were some really well-written scenes in this book. The autopsy performed by a robot was pretty freaky. Also, chasing ducks in zero-G sounds like a pile of fun. Joe Haldeman is really damn good at writing piles of good, solid SF.

Finally, I read J.G. Ballard's The Drowned World. J.G. Ballard is the Hemingway of SF ... he goes beyond mere exploration of new scientific ideas and simply writes amazingly good literature. This one was first published in 1962, but (I love it when this happens) he has created such a believable future world that you forget as you read that the book is almost 50 years old. In this book Ballard writes about an Earth where climate change has caused sea levels to rise several metres and temperatures to go up (Ballard is one of those SF geniuses who are like Nostradamus. He also predicted back in the 60s that Reagan would become president!)

We meet a scientist called Kerans in a drowned city, and he's not even sure which one. His team have come south from Greenland with some military guys to study the rate of climate change in Europe, but the landscape is unrecognizable: buildings stick up out of the water and silt, half submerged; the jungle has encroached; and oversized iguanas roam the earth. In this surreal environment, Kerans and some of his fellow scientists begin to lose their minds, perhaps because they know the temperature is still rising and maybe humanity is doomed. They begin to have dreams of returning to the primordial swamp. Their military friends are oblivious to this; they prepare to return to Greenland when their work is done, but Kerans and a few of his pals go AWOL and stay behind to watch the former human world disappear into a new triassic age.

If you liked Heart of Darkness, you should DEFINITELY read this book.

Alrighty! I'm moving on to reading The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper.