Books

[dsrtao]

_Owner Space_, Neal Asher (short story)
_Beholder's Eye_, Julie Czerneda


Does Asher have a particular nightmare or fetish about mind control? It keeps popping up as a major theme. In this short story, apparently set in the Polity universe by drive technology, we discover that pissing off weakly godlike entities is not a good idea.

A novel with a shapeshifting protagonist and no romance, no interspecies sex, no sex at all -- is Czerneda the only recent author to do that? We also get a first contact scenario on an alien planet, a travelogue of a dozen planets and space stations, and a nasty implacable Enemy. It would have been better if (a) only the unwarned victims of the Enemy had died -- each of the others should have been able to kill it, and (b) my WSOD hadn't failed on the biology of the shapeshifting species.

Comments

[much-ado.livejournal.com]

i like Czerneda's writings; she's not as long on the science as some, it's true, for all that (IIRC) she's from a science background herself. the "Species Imperative" series is better for that, but the Shapeshifters series wasn't so bad as to trigger my own disbeliefs (quite possibly because i'm NOT a scientist :)