geek chocolate Archives - Tachyon Publications

geek chocolate

June 4, 2015

HANNU RAJANIEMI: COLLECTED FICTION expands the possibilities of literature and human experience

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized chris meadows, collection, elizabeth story, geek chocolate, hannu rajaniemi, hannu rajaniemi: collected fiction, lius lasahido, michael flett, review, sci-fi and fantasy reviews, science fiction, short stories

Another pair of reviews for the “largely a pleasure to read” HANNU RAJANIEMI: COLLECTED FICTION.

From SCI-FI AND FANTASY REVIEWS:

Hannu also writes good characters. Some of the stories show this off to better advantage than others, though. Probably this is a function of the story format, rather than anything else – trying to cover plot, world and character all within such compressed form. The story of a man whose family return to life one day a year is a great example of this – the character is well drawn, understated, and feels entirely human. There are other examples, and Rajaniemi managed to make me care about each of his characters, giving them room to breathe, even in such limited narrative space.

The worlds are similarly well-crafted. The reader only has a small window onto them, and typically it isn’t one blaring about the setting. Instead, there’s a quiet whisper, dropped asides by characters, worlds constructed by inference, rather than statement. The majority of the construction is left ot the imagination – and it works well.

The prose is always well done – easily readable, and lots of scientific background is made available without feeling like a technobabble infodump. Rajaniemi gives the words a more liquid, easy-flowing flavour, and they’re largely a pleasure to read. There was the odd awkward construction, but overall, the stories always had me turning pages, and the language always seemed to flow well.

<snip>

Overall, each of these works, individually, ranges from perfectly good up to excellent little gems of high-concept, high delivery prose. They make the reader think, they provide a new way to do that, and they tell great stories – I couldn’t ask for anything more.

GEEK CHOCOLATE:

Standing at the foot of the cascade of ideas, the tumbling waterfall of words and images can sweep the unwary off their feet, undercurrents sucking them downstream to an ocean of imagination and intellect where the unprepared can drown. Such it is with the first comprehensive collection of short stories by Hannu Rajaniemi, eighteen principal pieces the majority of which were written during his years as a resident of Edinburgh, his wandering now having taken him to distant shores of sunshine.

<snip>

The stories are neither arranged chronologically nor thematically, but there are emergent strands, the first of which is high technology, first in Deus Ex Homine as narrator Jukka is reunited with his girlfriend Aileen, an Angel in the Deicide Corps, on leave from the godplague war which conventional language and concepts can’t describe, yet Rajaniemi is deft in outlining all that is needed to intuit a relationship and a situation, his sparse words used with precision.

Moving into space, in Tyche and the Ants he’s able to make the surface of the Moon, likely the most explored body in science fiction, seem wild and alien again. With the rhythm and logic of a fairytale, Tyche heads out on an excursion, running free and without escort despite cautionary regulations but finds a dangerous incursion; the Brain evaluates that the best course of action is evacuation, but Tyche refuses to cooperate.

<Review goes on to discuss very story in the book>

A familiar story retold in a new way for a modern audience, the archetypes and situations are updated and subverted and told in a bold visual prose, stark colours and images and sudden changes of track to invoke a dramatic response in the brain discernible by electrodes in the original presentation; even without the added level of involvement, it remains enjoyable and relevant, a further demonstration of how science fiction is expanding the possibilities of literature and human experience.

For more info on HANNU RAJANIEMI: COLLECTED FICTION, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Lius Lasahido

Design by Elizabeth Story

April 27, 2015

SLOW BULLETS is highly recommended, both for Reynolds’ admirers and as an introduction to this author

Alec Checkerfield Uncategorized alastair reynolds, elizabeth story, geek chocolate, novella, review, science fiction, slow bullets, space and sorcery, Thomas Canty

Another pair of reviews for Alastair Reynolds’ SLOW BULLETS.

GEEK CHOCOLATE:

Told in less than two hundred pages of large print, SLOW BULLETS feels curtailed, a synopsis of a much larger story bursting to escape as Scur tries to organise a grudging peace between the different factions at the same time as organising personal revenge, believing that the man who brutalised her is hiding somewhere within the darkened chambers of the Caprice.

With so much to cover in a brief time much of the text is necessarily expositional, but when he gets going Reynolds is never afraid to dump a terrifying conceptual image on the page, a threat unlike any he has presented before: “She’s trying to describe something language isn’t made to describe, something huge and alien.”

With aspects of the story recalling the free people of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, each of them carrying something precious and unique which would otherwise be destroyed, despite being a soldier who has been captured and tortured Scur still thinks well of people, realising that the enemy is not necessarily those who represent the opposing army but those on either side for whom it is a pleasure to burn rather than to build.

Written after the publication of On the Steel Breeze but before he commenced work on the concluding volume of Poseidon’s Children, Poseidon’s Wake, and contrasting the optimistic explorations of that trilogy, SLOW BULLETS is a big story which would have required considerable further development to support a full novel; that Reynolds is happy to release it in this form indicates he already has much bigger ideas in the pipeline.

SPACE AND SORCERY:

SLOW BULLETS is slightly different from the kind of narrative I grew used to after reading Reynolds’ books like Chasm City, Revelation Space, Redemption Ark or Absolution Gap: the scope here does not concern galactic civilizations or multi-layered political plots, but rather focuses on smaller-scale events that nonetheless manage to gain intensity and depth because of that reduced focus, and not in spite of it.

<snip>

It’s a more intimate vision than what I encountered until now in Reynolds’ books, but for this very reason it felt more profound and poignant than any other I read so far, and it gave me a new level of interpretation for this author, and a key to a new way of reading his stories.

Highly recommended, both for Reynolds’ admirers and as an introduction to this author.

My Rating: 8/10

For more about SLOW BULLETS, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Thomas Canty.

Design by Elizabeth Story.