Athenæum

By Dan Simmons.
Begun 04 July 2009; finished 12 July.
Review written 14 July 2009.

Ilium, Dan Simmons’ science fiction adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, ended with the scholic Hockenberry’s successful turning of the Greeks and Trojans against the gods on Mount Olympus, and Earth’s posthumans’ epiphany of their collective history and existence. Nevertheless, Ilium had only started to uncover the greater truths, and there were still many puzzles that have not been resolved yet. Olympos is the novel that promises to bring all the storylines together and reveal all the mysteries — and it does, albeit in a byzantine and flawed manner.

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Being, Majestrum and The Spiral Labyrinth.
By Matthew Hughes.
Begun 29 May 2009; finished 13 June.
For ‘10 Books From My Library’ reading challenge.
Review written 14 July 2009.

If you like the wit and humour of Charles Dickens or Terry Pratchett, an anachronistic “gaslight romance”-esque setting where technology and magic clash and meld together, and light-hearted, optimistic detective stories, Matthew Hughes’ tales of Henghis Hapthorn will surely appeal to you. These stories are set in a very distant future that could well be fantastical, in an age where Reason, or “linear rationalism”, and its attendant technologies prevail. But the forces of Magic, or “sympathetic association”, are on the rise in this universe, and they intrude prematurely into the life of Henghis Hapthorn, Old Earth’s foremost freelance detective. Hapthorn’s sensible, orderly and logical life is thrown out of kilter when his integrator (an A.I. or computer) transforms into a small fruit-eating mammal, and the intuitive part of his psyche takes on a persona of its own, essentially becoming a separate person but sharing the same body. The two novels of Majestrum and The Spiral Labyrinth follow Hapthorn as he struggles to cope with this (to him) infuriating situation, all the while tackling two mysterious cases which ultimately bring him to the chaotic interface of Reason and Intuition/Magic.

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By John Scalzi.
Begun 16 May 2009; finished 21 May.

Zoe’s Tale complements The Last Colony (complete Scalzi review), as a retelling of the same events of the earlier novel from the point of view of Zoë Boutin-Perry, the adopted daughter of John and Jane Perry. Whilst it is essentially the same story of the human colony colonizing the new planet of Roanoke amidst astro-political upheaval and warring between the human Colonial Union and the alien Conclave, it is narrated in Zoë’s distinct voice, provides a new perspective on the same events, and fills in some gaps that weren’t dealt with in The Last Colony.

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