My book club decided to read Hyperion by Dan Simmons for your January book in the science fiction genre. This book was first published in 1989 and won the 1990 Hugo award for best novel. I had it on my to read list, but it just didn’t call to me. I read something that described it as Canterbury Tales in space. Didn’t really appeal to me. But boy am I glad my book club selected it to read.

Though it was written in 1989, it still feels contemporary. There are references to a communication technology called the Web that’s not the same as what we have today but has a similar feel. It speaks to “time debt”, taking into account relativity and how that would affect a space-faring civilization. And the storytelling is superb.

The plot involves seven people making a pilgrimage to the planet Hyperion. The book is essentially a series of related short stories, each chapter being the story of one pilgrim’s reason for making the trip. In the background is the mysterious Shrike who lives on the planet and is the destination of their joint pilgrimage. Their reasons vary from love to religion to family. Each story by itself is worth your time, and together they make a novel that stands the test of time.

One of my fellow students in the writing workshop that I attended through work (see previous post) recommended reading Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. I had heard of this book before, but it had never appealed to me. At his suggestion, I decided to give it a go. I’m glad I did.

The Forever War takes place in the future where mankind is at war with an alien species. Soldiers travel through wormholes to find and engage the enemy. This travel is essentially time travel into the future. Due to relativity, the soldiers age much more slowly than those left back on earth. By the time they return (if they return), hundreds of years will have passed and their home will likely feel alien.

The book is about how a never-ending war affects soldiers both as they fight that war as well as what happens when they return home. The book was written during the Vietnam War. It does an excellent job of projecting the feelings from that war into the future and generalizing them. I suspect that any veteran of any war could commiserate with the soldiers in this novel on the alienation of war, bureaucratic mindlessness, and returning home to people who just don’t understand what they went through.

Despite how heavy I just made it sound, the story is a personal one. It tells the story of one person as he fights to survive this war and figure out how to live his life through it and after it, should he survive. It is at the same time personal and cosmic in its scope, perhaps even timeless.

I have read two of Blake Crouch’s previous novels–Dark Matter and Recursion. I thoroughly enjoyed those, so when Upgrade was released on July 12, I snapped up a copy. While I have to admit that I enjoyed his previous novels more, the subject matter here is closer to reality and thus more alarming.

Upgrade is about bio-engineering, or more accurately, bio-hacking. The main character has his DNA altered in a way that pushes his capabilities beyond those of any other human while making him so different that he questions his future ability to engage with the rest of humanity. In this way, the novel has a passing resemblance to Shelley’s Frankenstein. But rather than embrace this change, he fights against those who changed him against his will.

Before I started reading this novel, I also started reading Walter Isaacson’s The Code Breaker about the development of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technology. In addition to the history, that book goes into the debate around the ethics of how far the human race should go in directing its own evolution. This novel is the “what if” version of someone taking it upon themselves to actually do this.

In the future of this book, gene editing is illegal and the main character works for the agency that polices such illegal activity. His mother caused a global famine through genetic engineering that resulted in it being outlawed. He deals with guilt from that as well as other family dynamics that surface later in the story. There is also the philosophical dilemma of whether it is right to sacrifice some innocent lives to save an entire species. But mostly, the novel is a thriller of the near future.

While the book succeeds quite well as a thriller that explores contemporary themes in a world that feels very close at hand, it somehow still left me wanting more. Maybe his other books spoiled me for this one by lifting my expectations. Regardless, it is still a top notch novel of speculative fiction by one of the world’s best.

Like my previous post about The Time Traveler’s Wife, I decided to read Made for Love by Alissa Nutting after learning that it was a new series on HBO Max. Made for Love is a science fiction satire about a woman who is running away from her tech billionaire husband because he wants to test his latest product on her. The story gets weird when she ends up at her father’s house only to discover that he is sharing his home with a lifelike sex doll. And then is becomes absurd. A secondary character is a con man who suddenly finds himself no longer sexually attracted to the beautiful women he scams. His new objects of carnal passion? Dolphins.

I have to admit, I almost didn’t finish this book. Numerous times. I decided to finish it because I was interested in learning how the core story came out. It is the kind of science fiction that I like. What happens when a tech genius pushes things a bit too far and a regular citizen decides not to go along? I was mostly satisfied with that story line and the way in plays out. Unfortunately, I had to wade through the nonsense of the rest of the book to get there.

Don’t get me wrong. The book is entirely well-written. I am sure that fans of absurdist fiction as well as those who appreciate the take-down of overly serious science fiction will greatly appreciate the parts of the book that I didn’t much care for. For me they felt overly forced without adding all that much to what the book says. In the end, it felt like a book that was trying to do two very different things at the same time but only succeeded mildly at both.

I have yet to watch the HBO Max series of Made for Love. I am hoping that I like it better than the book. Since my post about The Time Traveler’s Wife I have watched all the episodes available. I really loved it! I think that book is very difficult to make into a series. They found a way to tell the story and convey the feeling in this very different medium. I highly recommend it!