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Sci-Fi: mini-reviews

This Week: Lock In, The Causal Angel, The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection

Lock In by John Scalzi. Tor. 336 pages. $28.99.

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Lock In by John Scalzi. Tor. 336 pages. $28.99.

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  • The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi. Tor. 304 pages. $29.99. zoom

Lock In

By John Scalzi

Tor, $28.99, 336 pages

John Scalzi, who won the Hugo Award last year for his novel Redshirts, may be the most entertaining writer in SF today. His books are cover-to-cover fun, and Lock In shows him once again at the top of his game.

In the near future a virus dubbed Haden’s Syndrome has shut down the bodies of millions of people while leaving their minds unaffected. Luckily, technology has advanced to the point where “Hadens” can either occupy robot chassis (dubbed “threeps,” after C-3PO) or enter the consciousness of human hosts known as “Integrators.”

What happens when Chris Shane, a new FBI agent with Haden’s Syndrome, partners with Leslie Vann, a former Integrator, to investigate a murder in Washington’s Watergate building? Well, things get complicated. Luckily Agent Shane comes from big money and so can afford to replace all of the threeps he’s going to have shot out from under him.

Lock In can be read as a plea for political tolerance (the Hadens as disabled), or a satire of people who have their heads stuck too far up the web (the Hadens as super-nerds), but mainly it’s an exciting police thriller built around the traditional odd-couple buddy plot, albeit this time kitted out with lots of interesting upgrades.

However you want to approach it though, it’s one of the best SF novels of the year, and one with substantial crossover appeal for non-genre fans as well.

The Causal Angel

By Hannu Rajaniemi

Tor, $29.99, 304 pages

There’s an optimistic branch of SF that sees the future in terms of a post-human, secular rapture. Technology has advanced so far that it has annihilated not just time and space but most of what we think of as the laws of physics. “Reality” has become just another plastic construct, to be manipulated at will. Identity, memory and consciousness are compressed into so much information and then transported around the universe at the speed of light.

The Causal Angel, by Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi, is a novel very much in this tradition. It’s the final part of the Jean de Flambeur trilogy and continues the adventures of that master thief and gentleman rogue as he tries to navigate various bizarre conspiracies involving the weaving and reweaving of the cosmos.

If you haven’t read the first two parts of the trilogy then you’ll be lost — even if you have you’ll find yourself in deep water. Rajaniemi’s universe is a dense and cluttered one, whether we’re travelling through deep space or just sitting in a virtual-reality drawing room. Characters also have a disorienting habit of jumping between avatars, and the language takes a while to get used to.

If you can find your feet, however, you can expect to be taken on a ride that doesn’t let up for a second.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection

Edited by Gardner Dozois

St. Martin’s Griffin, $26.50, 705 pages

How does editor Gardner Dozois manage to read so much? For this year’s volume of the year’s best SF his list of stories making the “Honourable Mention” roll comes in at more than 400 titles.

What makes The Year’s Best Science Fiction such an essential series is both Dozois’s skill at setting the table and the sheer size of the feast. With “over 300,000 words of fantastic fiction,” the thirty-first annual collection is able to include several full novellas, including Damien Broderick’s tale of zombies enhanced by alien technology, “Quicken,” Jay Lake’s environmental techno-thriller “Rock of Ages,” and Nancy Kress’s “One,” the story of a boxer who receives a rather special gift when he goes in for brain surgery.

As always you can expect a lot of diversity, from steampunk, mystery, and neo-noir to speculative, futuristic fantasy. It all adds up to a volume that’s always a treat, and a great sampler of the state of the art.

Alex Good is the Star’s science fiction columnist.

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