Crazy Time (Kate Wilhelm)

This is one of Wilhelm's earlier books, a cross between a romantic comedy and science fiction, and while it was enjoyable it didn't grab me as much as the book of hers I recently read (the mystery The Deepest Water). It was much more superficial in its emotions, relying for depth on some very iffy SF. A military experiment goes awry (because of some hacking by a fat, nerdy 14-year-old boy, the first of many stereotypes) and the adorably awkward hero gets blasted into an altered state of existence where his consciousness is dispersed around the globe. He manages to get himself back together partly because he's on the mind of the adorably awkward heroine, who was the person who happened to be looking at him when he vanished. She spends most of the book denying that he is real or that he is attracted to her, enough that I just wanted to slap her upside the head. Meanwhile, an obtuse military man is convinced that both of them, and practically everyone in the state as well, are involved in a complex spy ring. Eventually, of course, everything ends happily, though I have to say I didn't really get most of the big reveal at the end. Not a strong book, but she definitely got better.

Zero History (William Gibson)

This book shares a universe and several characters with Pattern Recognition, which I loved, but this one didn't work quite as well for me. It seemed more scattered. Pattern Recognition had one central character; this had two or three, and they didn't seem quite as well realized. Milgram, for instance, has "zero history," meaning that he has no credit, employment, or other records, but this doesn't seem to figure in the story much, and no explanation is given as to why Bigend chose this particular drug addict out of the millions in the world to rehabilitate and use as a tool. The plot seems equally scattered, with themes of military contracting, flying robot penguins, rock bands, secret fashion designers, odd hotel rooms, and stock market manipulation. The solution involved a real deus ex machina, for though the character who pulled it off had been mentioned throughout, no justification for his skill set was forthcoming. I probably shouldn't have expected it to live up to its predecessor, but I was disappointed nonetheless.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Charles Yu)

This book scores high on the cool-meter, with lots of geek references and self-consciously meta structure. The protagonist is named Charles Yu, and he is a time-machine repairman, a kind of blue-collar bloke, who spends his time outside of the time line waiting for service calls in a closet-sized time machine, equipped with a low self-esteem AI system and accompanied by a nonexistent dog. He gets trapped in a time loop after shooting himself in the stomach, and in the loop he visits a hypothetical version of his mother and simultaneously reads and writes a book called How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe as he tries to find his disappeared father, who sort of invented the time travel technology. The story is just as off-kilter as this sounds, and while I admired its originality, I never really got into it.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot)

This book is half science, half biography. The science part is about the HeLa cell line, made up of the only human cells that grow robustly and eternally in culture. They are cervical cancer cells, and they are enormously valuable to medicine.They can easily be grown to test how diseases work and find cures, how radiation and chemicals attack cell functions, and just generally how cells work. The biography part is about Henrietta Lacks, the poor uneducated black woman whose fatal tumor yielded the sample that started the whole HeLa cell line, and her family. The author describes them in brutal and tender detail, including the violence and ignorance of their lives as well as the faith and courage. She does a marvelous job of blending the two halves, so that each of them is strengthened by the other. I very much enjoyed it.

Omnitopia Dawn (Diane Duane)

This story is about MMORPGs and corporate espionage. Omnitopia, a hugely popular gaming system of a great many interconnected universes, is poised to roll out a major expansion, but lots of competitors and hackers want to make it fail. The man who runs Omnitopia is an all-around great guy (too good to be true, actually), and leads an amazing team of folks in defense of his world and the players. I was really caught up in the whole battle, especially with all the fantasy elements they use as metaphors while fighting. The ending was a little overblown, where it wasn't predictable, but it was still a fun trip.

Heir Apparent (Vivian Vande Velde)

I seem to have been on a YA book kick lately! I can't remember why this book landed on my list, but I did enjoy it for what it is--a decent example of the species. A teenage girl goes in for an hour of virtual reality game play, in a typical Medieval setting, with princes, barbarians, wizards, ghosts, and dragons. The gaming center is attacked by a citizens' group against fantasy as dangerous to the proper upbringing of children, and the equipment is damaged. They can't pull her out without injuring her; the only way she can safely exit is by winning the game. The plot reminds me of the constant problems with the holodeck on the Enterprise! Naturally, she figures out a solution to the game and emerges successfully in the nick of time. Charming and fun, at a YA level. I'm ready for something grown up now!

The Deepest Water (Kate Wilhelm)

This beautifully written mystery novel starts quietly and gently, but builds to a tense and surprising climax. A young woman's much-beloved father was murdered at his isolated cabin in the mountains, and she is drawn into a convoluted chain of evidence and speculation leading, finally, to justice. The characters are sometimes one-sided (all good or all bad), but the plot progresses realistically and the story is compelling. I very much enjoyed this book and will read others by this author.

The Titan's Curse (Rick Riordan)

This third installment in the Olympians series is very much like the first two. Percy Jackson, half-blood son of the god Poseidon, has to face mythical monsters and rogue Titans to save his friends and, oh yes, the whole world. This time the goddess Artemis and Percy's good friend, Annabeth, have been taken hostage and have to be rescued. The author is doing a good job keeping the stories interesting and exciting, but they are for teenagers and, for me, are getting a little stale. I still like them enough to want to keep reading, but need to wait a while before reading the next one.

Mostly Harmless (Douglas Adams)

This is the fifth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, which makes about as much sense as the books do. They are zany, imaginative, mind-blowing, and funny. It's been a long time since I've read one of them, which may be why this one didn't appeal to me as much as the others did, though I still enjoyed it. The usual characters (Arthur Dent, Ford Perfect, and assorted aliens and humans) careen around the universes like pinballs on TILT, running up against corporate greed, multidimensional bison, unexpected offspring, and Elvis in the process.I was mostly disappointed in how it ended, or didn't; the major issues of the book are entirely unresolved. The ride was fun, but the destination left something to be desired.

The Red Garden (Alice Hoffman)

This quiet, moving novel is a set of linked stories set in Blackwell, MA, starting with its founding in 1750 to the present day. Each story is a focused portrait of someone in the town, and they are linked in many ways: through the first house built in the town, through bears and dogs, through eels and Eel Creek, through drowned children and runaways, and through an old garden where the dirt is the color of blood and, no matter what you plant, it comes up red. I thoroughly enjoyed it, coming to know these people and this place deeply.

Imajica (Clive Barker)

I've decided to abandon this book. After a week, I'm only 20% done, and it's becoming a real chore, so I'm moving on to other books waiting on the shelf. This is a grand vision kind of book, very convoluted, and I have never really grabbed a thread I can follow through the maze. There are these 5 dominions, which might be planets or alternate planes of existence, and 4 of them are joined so that travel between them is easy, but Earth (maybe our planet, maybe our whole universe) is a 5th dominion that's relatively isolated from the others. The rituals and processes that can allow people fro Earth to travel to the other dominions and invoke entities from there to come here are basically magic, which nearly caused some kind of cataclysm at some point in the past, so magic is systematically squelched by a secret organization. There is a character who is obviously from another dominion, who is an assassin but also a good guy, and two other characters who I think are going to prove
to be as well, but they don't know it. It's all too vague for me, and I've given it all the time I plan to give it.

Shadows Bright as Glass (Amy Ellis Nutt)

This fascinating book describes in detail the experiences of Jon Sarkin, who suffered a massive stroke that tore him loose from his former self and shattered his experience of time and space. He found peace and his way of connecting back to life through art, as he began  doodling compulsively and it expanded  into a national career as an artist. Woven into Sarkin's story is much information about the history of neuroscience and the search for the nature of consciousness and identity. This book is much more accurate and well-researched than the Taylor book I read recently, though not without its own errors. The author repeatedly conflates information seen by the left eye with information in the left visual field, for example, and reports straight-faced that "Some scientists have suggested that there are more synapses in the human brain than there are atomic particles in the universe (p. 24)." Any scientist who suggested this does not deserve to be reported in a serious work of nonfiction. Overall, though, I found the story compelling, and my only real complaint is that there are no pictures of Sarkin's art, aside from the cover.

The Sea of Monsters (Rick Riordan)

This second book in the Olympians series lives up to the standards of the first one, delivering action, humor, and relationships in about equal parts. Percy, who discovered in the first book that the ancient gods are real and he is the son of Poseidon, now must go on a dangerous, unauthorized quest to save the camp that protects other half-bloods like him and the life of his satyr friend. This series is aimed at young adults, so its story is somewhat less complex and nuanced than others, but it emphasizes the eternal truths of most fiction, at least the fiction I like: bravery, friendship, honesty, and resourcefulness will win through in the end. I quite enjoyed it and will read others in the series.