Monthly book reviews: 2025
Reviews of 2024: https://www.tumblr.com/theflyingpimphat/772473279372017664/december-2024-the-obelisk-gate-spiderlight-myth?source=share
To reduce my book pile of shame, I do short reviews of the books read every month, as part of the reading challenge is to finish at least two a month. The books read and reviewed are mostly sci-fi and fantasy of variable age. The synopses and reviews are put under the cut to preserve space; they also contain spoilers.
January 2025
When Harry met Chunglie: It was Murder; The Return of Nathan Brazil; Player of Games
When Harry met Chunglie: It was Murder, Jack Q. McNeil
Language: English
Synopsis: Chunglie, a cybernetically-augmented, vaguely centipede-like alien wakes up in the cargo department of a spaceship, together with a bunch of other people who turned out to be drugged and locked up there. After they manage to get out of the cargo, they discover that a bunch of people on the ship are dead, and that its course is set to crash into a planet in a few hours. Chunglie and Harry, an investigator whose father didn't want to break with a naming tradition just because he had a daughter, try to find out who was involved in the crime and how to prevent the crash.
Review: A fairly short and amusing murder mystery which I regret to have read after finishing writing the 18. A to Z episode, as it was thematically similar. A lot of the humour stemmed from Chunglie not understanding humans, like asking if they reproduce asexually when noticing there is one person more than previously counted. The clues to who did it were either laid out poorly, or I haven't noticed them properly, considering I don't usually read murder mysteries. I'm certainly excited to see what will follow.
The Return of Nathan Brazil, Jack L. Chalker
Language: German (Rückkehr auf die Sechseckwelt)
Synopsis: Around 700 years after the previous book's events, a mind-controlling microorganism begins to take over the Milky Way's population. A war between the possessed and the uninfected breaks out, brought to an end with a weapon engineered from Zinder's research, which deletes an area of sime-space and everything inside it. While it wins the war, the hole starts to grow and will comsume the entire universe at some time, unless it damages the Wellworld computer and causes its end even earlier. To stop the process, Mavra Chang and Obie have to find Nathan Brazil, the only person who is able to fix the already damaged computer and the spacetime hole. While they manage to find him with the aid of Olympian cultists, he at first refuses to do it, because it would require the computer to be rebooted and with it, the universe would cease to exist. After he is convinved that ending it now and allowing the universe start anew is better than having it end irreparably after a few millenia, the ensemble travels to the Wellworld and undergoes the usual process of being assigned to a random hexagon and being transformed into its native intelligent species. Their plan to get Brazil to the Well of Souls involves the world being flooded with the cultists, which leads to the natives defending themselves against the new arrivals, ultimately ending with Brazil's death.
Review:
The ending of the book makes it pretty obvious that the story stretches over two ooks, even more obviously than the last two books. The Wellworld was visited lately in the book, but it was nice to see how the galaxy looks like for a change.
Player of Games, Iain M. Banks
Language: English
Synopsis: Partially because of boredom, partially because of being blackmailed by a drone after having been talked into cheating by it, Jernau Gurgeh embarks on a flight to the Azad Empire to compete in the game of Azad, a highly-complex game that determines the rank of those competing in it. At first he is seen as entertaining, but since he keeps winning, there are attempts to stop him, like assassination attempts, coercing him into bets to have him castrated or offering an island complete with an estate and slaves if he drops out. Gurgeh manages to stay in the game up until playing against the emperor, who would rather kill the entire entourage including himself rather than losing; it turns out that he was told Gurgeh's win would mean the Culture would invade the Azad Empire and Gurgeh was essentially used as a gaming piece by the Culture to usher in the Empire's downfall.
Review: A massive improvement compared to Consider Phlebas. On one hand, it finally showed the Culture properly (the author was quite the visionary, predicting deepfakes and health-monitoring smartwatches), on the other hand, it avoided the previous book's shortcomings by not having any overdrawn action sequences, although some scenes did drag. It also lends itself well to analysis: the equality of Azad on paper against the reality where it's rigged in favour of the elite, how people are game pieces in the hands of the mighty, or which factors led to an outsider winning over those playing the game from birth.