The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Italo Calvino

I don’t know why I keep trying; it’s quite obvious that while there are aspects of Calvino’s writing that I love, even coming blurred through the translations, his structures, styles, plots, characters (or lack thereof) really get on my nerves. The idea is fine, but then telling a whole series of stories via someone guessing at what other people mean by laying out certain patterns of tarot cards… gets wearing.

It’s nice at first to keep your mind on the cards, the symbolism, the way the story happens… And then, for me, it loses its novelty. Maybe it’d have worked as a short story, but the more tortuous it got, the more irritated I got.

Rating 2/5

Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan

You’d think this book would be one about sheer love of books, being set in a bookstore. Like, say, The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry, which has a similar setting (persnickety little bookshop) but a vastly more personal plot. Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookshop is much more of a paean to technology: the wonders of ereaders, ebooks, writing code, visualising stuff using simulations, and most of all, Google. You can kinda tell why people accuse this book of being a shill for Google: almost every chapter mentions it; the Google characters are so cool and quirky; Google is run in such an interesting way, is in such a cool building, etc, etc.

Then again, the characterisation of the main Google character isn’t exactly appealing. She’s a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and when things don’t go her way, she blames the main character for it. You’re half the reason he even went through with trying to decode this massive conspiracy, girl; it’s you that decided to commit resources, you that insisted the end would be worth it. I really wasn’t impressed with her. A lot of it seemed to be trying too hard: Mr Penumbra, for example, is too much of a twinkly old man.

It’s fun enough, but I didn’t take it very seriously or get very absorbed in it. I’ve read plenty of conspiracy stories of this sort, and though in a way it doesn’t take itself too seriously on that front, I just wasn’t caught up by it. I did sort of anticipate the ultimate solution, if not how to come to that solution.

I found it particularly funny that I was reading this book on a Kobo when I got to the bit where it disses Kobos.

Rating: 3/5

Remnant Population, Elizabeth Moon

Remnant Population is a quiet sort of SF book. It’s more along the lines of, say, Ursula Le Guin than Lois McMaster Bujold or David Weber: at least, there’s very little by the way of epic space fights, and much more about people. Mostly just one person, alone. I loved that the protagonist is an old woman; the ending, with the recruitment of old ladies, seemed like a bit of a joke even so, but I liked that this is very much a defence of the worth and importance of the elderly, and particularly elderly women.

I liked that the aliens really are weird and nothing like us — that all our exo-scientists’ assumptions were just way out. I think if we do find other life out there, it might be like this: we might not even know what we’re looking at. They might learn in radically different ways (sorry, Pinker, Chomsky); they might mature at different speeds. We base our assumptions on carbon based mammals…

Perhaps the unrealistic thing is how easily it’s settled. You require a set up like Le Guin’s Ekumen for that, and this seemed more like a society run primarily by corporations. It didn’t seem like cooperation would be so easy… But even then, there’s a hint at how that can be done; the People join in the commercial enterprises of the rest of the universe.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one; it’s not going to be a new favourite, but it was a good read.

Rating: 4/5