Mare Somniorum

So, lots of praise has been given to “Redemption Protocol”.  It’s a fast packed action-oriented science fiction thriller that makes you flip pages until the birds come home.  There are big booms, enough action to rival most movies and enough deaths to rival a plague.  It does however rock your boat when you’re reading it and the characters are surprisingly rich considering the amount of time they get — something that really does help retain your interest throughout it all.

What it isn’t though is very deep or complex.  There are certainly neat ideas and breathtaking descriptions, but it’s not an Egan-esque hard story or a universe like what Reynolds would paint.   It is what it sets out to be, and in that category it is very good.

“Too Big to Fail” is surprisingly often the book people suggest one should read with regards to the economic meltdown of 2007/2008.  This might stem from the fact that there’s much less technical jargon and a lot more a view of the people involved.  This makes a few things happen, firstly there are a lot of names being tossed around.  There doesn’t seem to be an end to them at all, it just keeps on coming.  This avalanche of names doesn’t really help explain why or how, but makes sure you know that there were a heck of a lot of who involved.

Secondly, since we get personalized views, it’s hard to pin down exactly what happened and why.  In “All the devils are here“, the authors are trying to work on the what and the why, in “Too Big to Fail”, there are just a ton of pieces that we’re trying hard to pick up.  It’s useful, but with the constant avalanche of names and the jumping around it takes to follow them all, it’s hard to get any real insight.  Well, apart from “this stuff is hard to fix” and “people often try and often fail”.

The movie is in many ways almost as informative, as the linearity makes it that much easier to at least fix down what it’s trying to tell you.  It’s a useful read, but for a view of the economic calamities, both “The Big Short” and especially “All the devils are here” are much more worthwhile.

So, the final work in the Rifters saga.  The work has grown and the results from “Maelstrom” take a few more turns before we reach the crux of the tale.  Here we’ve moved on a bit from the concept of information and its ties to life, and onwards to the defining characteristics of the characters involved.  Now, these characters certainly aren’t angles, but what are they?  And why?  And, well, how did they get to be like this?

Behemoth uses the story as a backdrop to explore these beings and pushes their buttons around a fair bit.  It doesn’t instantly feel as successful as Watts’ others works though, even if the concept is very interesting.  It feels less focused, and surprisingly, long.  There are a good number of side stories that are relevant to the story, but less relevant to the what can be seen as the point of the story.  That’s rarely a great sensation.

It is however a fascinating set of works.  Starfish, Maelstrom and Behemoth all tackle quite distinct aspects of life.  How, what and why.  If the last works would have been a bit more focused, this would have been an tour de force of storytelling.  It’s still good, make no mistake of that, but it’s not quite as good as one could hope for after reading Starfish.

The entire Rifter saga is available for free from Watts’ website, http://www.rifters.com/ in a host of formats for your reading pleasure.

So, the difficult middle book of any trilogy.  We’ve now moved on from the events of “Starfish” and the world of the protagonist, the one that used to be all about pain and suffering, has about to become the world that everyone knows.  Yeah, there are moments when it feels like “Matrix Reloaded”, but at the same time, there’s more of an edge to what’s going on.  Actually, there’s very little but edge.

Watts doesn’t change strides though.  His writing is still the same.  It’s terse, acute and direct.  Our “protagonist”, Lenie Clarke, isn’t too happy about what happened to the Beebee station in Starfish, so she’s decided to make that fact known.  She is however dragging along quite the potential for collateral damage, so quite a few people wish to stop her.

“Maelstrom”, in essence, plays on one key concept.  The interplay between information and life.  Yeah, there’s a ton of other things to look at, but the core of it is the concept that all life depends on a set of instructions to multiply, to breed and ultimately, to live.  The realm of the flesh is just one angle for information to live.

The book works its way through this concept, carried by Lenie and Watts’ unrelenting desire to tell us his story.  It’s not as honed as “Starfish”, and reads more as a cross between Egan and Reynolds — a hard core, with a large story attached to it.