Codex Born (Jim Hines)

The second book in this series lives up to the promise of the first. When Gutenberg developed the printing press, he made it possible for thousands of people to read identical copies of the same book, and their collective belief in the story made libriomancy possible. Those with the innate ability can reach into books and pull out the things inside; phasers, sonic screwdrivers, magic seeds. But there's a darker magic hiding in the books, something much older even than Gutenberg, and it is coming through and threatening the world. Isaac, Lena, Nhidi, Smudge, and a whole army of good guys have to fight not swarms of magical insects, but enemy forces that seemingly negate magic all together. Lots of fun.

Zer0es (Chuck Wendig)

The Zeroes are a motley group of hackers and trolls dragged to a prison compound by a mysterious government organization and put to work on various hacker-related tasks that don't seem to make much sense. They gradually figure out that there's a powerful and dangerous force that's taking over the Internet, causing death and mayhem, and they band together to escape and fight this power. I enjoyed the geeky references to tech and pop culture, but ultimately the story didn't really work for me. The characters never came alive, but remained cardboard stand-ins for stock people. The story also had two basic flaws that dragged my disbelief to the ground. One is that if a computer takes over the Internet then it can take direct control over any interconnected digital device, from the GPS in an airplane to your car's radio. The other, even more implausible, is that it is possible to throw someone down on a table, drill a hole in their skull, and shove in a cable that allows the computer to both download all their memories and upload a command program that turns them into a remote-controlled zombie. I'm sorry, but no.

Blood Runs in the Family (Rich Burlew)

This fifth book in Burlew's series about the adventures of the Order of the Stick maintains and builds on the strong characters and stories he has managed to create out of a set of cartoon stick figures. Although the series began long ago as throw-away comics based on the rules and foibles of Dungeons and Dragons role-playing games, it has become so much more. There are several sets of contradictions here. First, the art seems simple but manages to convey depth and personality with skill. Second, the characters are simultaneously living authentic lives within the semi-medieval setting of a typical role-playing setting and also aware of the game itself. How Burlew pulls this off, I don't know, but he does. In this book, our heroes travel to the desert on the Western Continent, searching for the third of five mystical Gates after the first two were destroyed. This gate is hidden by the illusions of a master wizard, but they find something there that shatters one of the characters almost beyond redemption. Some plot lines in the long story arc come to an end, a few threads are tied off, and there's a sense of the story arc starting to narrow in toward the final confrontations, still off in the future. I wait impatiently for the next book!

Finn Fancy Necromancy (Randy Henderson)

This rollicking fun trip of a novel involves elite necromancers, formless Fey, evil witches, brutish Sasquatches, and thuggish gnomes, set in modern-day Washington State under the blind eye of the mundane world. At the center is a mystery: who framed Finn for dark necromancy and got him exiled to the Other Realm for 25 years, and now that he's finally out, who's trying to get him sent back there again? Finn and his funky family and assorted other strange folks have just three days to solve these mysteries before he's dragged back to his non-life. As he tries to figure out what's going on people around him are dying, falling in love, discovering secrets, and speaking from the grave. I enjoyed the romp quite a bit, because although it feels very comic book I could really care about the characters (including several that are diverse in mundane ways such as race, orientation, and intellectual ability, without carrying Look At Me - I'm Diverse!! signs). The ending wasn't terribly surprising but satisfying enough and leaves open lots of directions for sequels, which makes me happy.

The Fuller Memorandum (Charles Stross)

I'm reading the Laundry Files series out of order, which is a little confusing, but I love them anyway. The mixture of humor, pop culture, computers, science geekery, Lovecraftian horror, James Bond, and soul-deadening bureaucracy really works for me. In this one, we learn a little about Angleton, Bob Howard's very scary boss, and find out why he's even scarier than we thought. Along the way Bob's wife Mo proves her badassery with the demon-killing violin and Bob has to face an army of cultists bent on sacrificing him to the ultimate dark lord, armed with nothing but his knowledge of computational demonology. Great stuff.

The Apocalypse Codex (Charles Stross)

Another in the Laundry Files series, which I love for its humor, its intelligence, and its willingness to twist genre boundaries into Moebius strips. Bob Howard is again the narrator, telling how he is threatened with promotion within the more-secret-than-secret British agency charged with protecting England and the world from Lovecraftian horrors that constantly try to breach the boundaries between the worlds and munch on our tasty human souls. In this version, the charismatic leader of a splinter faction of an evangelistic American church is demonstrating a distressingly effective ability to rally the faithful. It turns out that the Second Coming is not quite what they think it is, and Howard and a beautiful, powerful witch named Persephone have to shut them down. If you like humor and horror woven together, you'll love this one.

The Jennifer Morgue (Charles Stross)

Another Laundry Files novel from Charles Stross. These stories are always a mind-twisting blend of horror (many-tentacled creatures from the murky deeps), police procedure (griping about pencil-neck desk-jockeys who don't know what it's really like out here in the field), and geekery (what else from someone who writes sidekicks named Pinky and Brains?). Bob Howard works for a top-secret British intelligence agency but he's no James Bond. As a computational demonologist, his specialty is understanding how mathematical formulae and computer programs breach the walls between worlds and let those horrors through, forcing the good guys to stop them and clean up the mess according to the proper bureaucratic rules, in triplicate. In this story, Howard starts out attending an international meeting of similar organizations, expecting a boring weekend of conference rooms and PowerPoint, but winds up soul-linked with a demon assassin and dragged to a Caribbean island to stop a megalomaniacal billionaire from stealing a deep-sea artifact that can destroy the world. Of course.  Stross scatters every page with gems that are as smart as they are funny. I have to love an author whose narrator describes the experience of driving a rented Smart Car on the German autobahn "while a jerk is shooting at me from behind with a cannon loaded with Porches and Mercedes."

The Rhesus Chart (Charles Stross)

Stross writes intelligent, funny, surprising science fiction, and his Laundry series is all of the above. This recent example lives up to the others. Bob Howard works for a top-secret British intelligence service, defending Queen, country, and universe against many-tentacled horrors from beyond the veil, through diligent application of the principles of government bureaucracies everywhere: paperwork, committee meetings, organizational hierarchies, and very bad coffee. The current crisis begins with a group of math whizzes working on algorithms that will allow their investment bank to anticipate market trends more effectively than their competition, and unwittingly trigger an outbreak of V-syndrome (you know, the one where you burst into flame in direct sunlight, develop a craving for human blood, are stronger than normal humans, and can exercise control over other people's minds). What is behind this new nest? Is there an enemy planted within the Laundry itself? And what does Bob's malevolent, unstable ex have to do with things? It's a fun ride from start to finish.

Of Dice and Men (David Ewalt)

The author is a journalist and also a dedicated gamer in the Dungeons & Dragons tradition (under his name it says, "Level 15 cleric"). He writes a history of the development of the pastime, from its roots in prehistoric games up through D&D Next (otherwise known as D&D 5). We get to learn of the collaboration between Gygax and Arneson and about its falling out, of the various companies that owned, developed, and sold various D&D games, and their successes and failures. He talks about the hysteria that equated the game with satanism and about its value for its players. Along with the history, though, Ewalt gives us an inside look at what the game is like to play and why it is so popular. As a player myself (D&D and some of its competitors, such as World of Darkness), I found his story appealing and accurate, and can recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about this game. No previous gaming knowledge or experience is needed.

Among Others (Jo Walton)

This is a lovely and touching story about a troubled teen girl finding her way in an uncomfortable world. She has escaped from her mad, magical mother in Wales to live with a father she never met in England and is sent to a posh boarding school, where she has trouble fitting in. Her lifeline is books, particularly SF and fantasy books, and they help her keep herself grounded and find others she can belong with. The magic and the fairies in the story are unusual and entirely convincing, as is her struggles with friendships, boys, teachers, and the health issues she's been left with due to her battle with her mother. I especially enjoyed it because I've read most, though not nearly all, of the books she refers to on practically every page, and could compare my opinions with hers. Recommended.

Redshirts (John Scalzi)

This delightful book is hilarious, geeky, and still emotionally moving. Scalzi asks what it would be like to be living in a badly-written ripoff of Star Trek. Why are away missions so deadly for lower-deck folks while the main officers are rarely hurt and never killed? Why do bridge consoles keep exploding, no matter how often the circuits are checked? Why is it that decks 6-12 take damage in every attack, but never any of the other decks? How do they keep finding scientifically impossible solutions to problems, and always just moments before they are needed? The heroes find their own scientifically impossible solution to their dilemma, one that is mind-bending and convoluted and just crazy enough (and funny enough) to work. Then there are several codas and other appropriately off-kilter bits of things that bring it all to a satisfying conclusion. (I think I know who Jimmy Hanson really is. As one of the character says, "that would be recursive and meta.")

The Rapture of the Nerds (Cory Doctorow & Charles Stross)

It is years after the singularity, and most of humanity has abandoned Earth and meatspace and uploaded itself to the cloud, living a virtual life. Huw is one of those who remained behind, rejecting not only a cybernetic existence but even electricity and telecommunication. So at first he is happy to have been selected to serve on a jury that evaluates new technologies thrown up by the post-humans in the cloud, but it turns out that he has been infected by something that is using his body for its own purposes. He winds up on a grand tour of the many different ways of being human, from violently fundamentalist to the expanded consciousness of the cloud, and in the end the fate of the entire solar system rests on him. I have enjoyed the smart, geeky works by Stross before, but not Cory Doctorow so much, and this one didn't really work for me. Although Huw is central to resolving some major crises, the primary tool he (or sometimes she) uses is avoidance. I like my protagonists to be more actively involved in solving problems, not throwing temper tantrums. I also tended to lose the convoluted threads of the plot sometimes. I suppose I am not uplifted enough for this novel.

Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)

This is a story for young adults, focusing on a massively multiplayer online game, that I really enjoyed. The protagonist is a young man in a bleak future world where the environment, the economy, and the nation are all falling apart, but at least there is this really wonderful online world you can go to where things are much better. The creator of this world has just died, and left all his billions to whoever can solve a series of puzzles using clues he buried inside the world. Because the popular culture of the 1980s was his passion, all the games and clues are based on comic books, video games, TV shows, and movies of that era, so it's a lot of fun for those of us who remember that decade! The antagonist in the story is pretty cardboard: an evil multinational corporation bent on stifling all individuality and turning the game world into a cash cow, and not above torture and murder to get the prize. On the other hand, the protagonist and his friends are rather amazingly good. Still, I enjoyed the action and the rapid-fire cultural references. Fun!

Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)

This is the biography of a man who was brilliant, arrogant, sensitive, brutal, charismatic, delusional...a man of contradictions. There is little doubt that Apple is successful because of Steve Jobs. It is also true that he hurt the people around him, mostly deliberately, often with no real reason. He saw the world, including people, in absolute black and white terms: everything, and everyone, was either intolerably awful or amazingly wonderful, often alternately within hours. He had an overarching vision of technology, believing throughout his career in the importance of controlling the user's experience from end to end. He also meddled in every tiny detail of his products, from the precise shade of blue for the shell of the iMac to the finish on the screws inside the unit. Love him or hate him (or both), it is hard to read this story without sheer fascination.

Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)

This is a big book with an amazing number of threads: math, computers, cryptography, World War II, treasure hunting, data security, hacking, and more. At first, the two halves of the story (WWII and present day) seem connected only by the last names of some of the characters and the general theme of cryptography, but by the end everything has come together. I enjoyed all the science geekery, presented in a way that is accessible but also accurate, and was completely caught up in the personal stories of loyalty, trust, and love. Highly recommended.

Rule 34 (Charles Stross)

I've liked Charles Stross's  work, but I would have picked this one up for the title alone! Rule 34 is one of the supposed rules of the Internet: If it exists, there is pornography of it. In the Scotland of the future, there is a special police unit that monitors the Internet to try to separate people's fantasies from actual crimes. An unusual attracts attention, and proves to be just the tip of a very strange iceberg. I enjoyed the story, with its exotic twists and turns and Stross's usual dropping of pop-culture references at every opportunity. The writing was odd, though. It was in present tense, which is fine, but I didn't love the fact that it was written in second person. If immediacy is what you're after, why not use first person? Still, it was a fun ride.

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 Atrocity Archives (Charles Stross)

This is Stross's first published novel, and it's a delightful geekfest, encompassing everything from Pinky and the Brain to the Church-Turing conjecture and Knuth's fourth book, which was written but classified. The basic idea is that some advanced forms of computation destroy entropy rapidly (tying in with the Gleick book I read recently), which tunnels through to another universe and, depending on the details, summons anything from a demon you can control to a universe-destroying monster. Shannon meets Lovecraft! The narrator is part of a super-secret British agency, part James Bond and part ISO 9000, triplicate form bureaucracy, trying to protect reality from this kind of thing. How can a geek like me not love a book where the hero works in an office of twisty little cubicles, all alike? (If that means nothing to you, you'll miss half of what the author tosses out in this novel.) I enjoyed it quite a lot.

The Information (James Gleick)

A fascinating examination of what information is (knowledge, uncertainty, meaning, and bits) and how our understanding of and relationship to information has changed over time. It starts with the pre-literate communication of word and talking drums and works its way up, through writing, printing, telegraphy, radio, computers, and the Internet, to Google and Wikipedia. There is much to enjoy here. I loved learning about how talking drums actually talk, about the Analytical Engines of Babbage (never quite realized) and MIT (which took up a room and actually worked to solve differential equations). The controversies over whether information has a thermodynamic cost or whether Wikipedia should include a page on one screw in one particular bicycle were a delight to behold. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this sort of history and philosophy of ideas.

Daemon (Daniel Suarez)

Matthew Sobol, a brilliant computer genius and online game designer, dies and unleashes the Daemon - an autonomous, web-based system that resides in bazillions of fragments distributed around the world, reading newsfeeds and responding to events in ways that he had pre-programmed, to make the world into what Sobol wanted. For example, he doesn't like spammers, so they are murdered in their thousands, and while I approve of the goal, I strongly disapprove of his methods. The Daemon is untraceable and unstoppable, because it is everywhere and nowhere and none of its many minions know its plans or what their part in those plans are. They get messages that, for instance, they are to go to X location, pick up an object from Y person, attach it to another object they already had, and deliver to Z person, and they never know why. I found the book frustrating, since the characters who were sympathetic and positive stand against the Daemon, but the overall message seemed to be that the Daemon is not only inevitable but is in fact a force for good overall. There's a cold calculus we are expected to accept, that the horrific murder of thousands (and the collateral deaths of more thousands who are in the wrong place at the wrong time) is OK because if the Daemon doesn't take over there will be a worse calamity in some abstract future. I also had trouble with the idea that one man's genius could really be that awesomely perfect, to have anticipated so much and planned in such detail as to be completely unstoppable. While the details of the technology are no doubt accurate and could really happen, no system is that perfect and free of bugs and glitches! So while I am glad I read this, and it gave me some interesting ideas to talk about, I didn't really enjoy it or buy it completely..