Whispers Under Ground

By Ben Aaronovitch
Honestly nothing new to say. I enjoyed it, I'll be keeping an eye out for the fourth in the series. But I've already written about the first two.

Vestige

By Chris Roper
I'm rather writing this on the assumption that hardly anyone will read it. The review that is. Perhaps people will read the book, and hopefully they'll enjoy out more than I did.
Chris is someone from work, who has taken the bold step of publishing his first fiction through Amazon. In this I applaud him. Unfortunately it's a Big Dumb Object story, and it's only in thinking about how to review this and previously Heaven's Shadow that I have come to realise how much I dislike that sub-genre of SF.
The story's about a relatively near future space mission sent to deliver a mcguffin to Triton forced to make emergency maneuvers which lead it drifting out towards the Kuiper belt with no hope of rescue before discovering a mysterious black cube that may be a conduit to another universe.
So we've got the BDO problem, coupled here with the fact that of the only three characters, two are certainly insane, and the third might be. 
It's not badly written or anything, it's just starting off with all the cards stacked against it. At least as far as I'm concerned.  Your mileage may vary.
Sorry Chris.

Heaven's Shadow

By David Goyer and Michael Cassutt
There's an awful lot of Arthur C. Clarke to this book, coupled perhaps with Steven Baxter's NASA series.
Ten years into a what might already be an alternate future, in which the US space agency has been kicked back into a space race with an Indian-Russian-Brazilian coalition and missions to the Moore once again a going concern, an asteroid is detected making a close approach to Earth and the latest moonshot is diverted to visit it.
Not the only ones mind you, since a suspiciously well prepared coalition craft is also trying to be the first men on Keanu. Two spaceships land, as the asteroid starts to behave very oddly, revealing itself not to be a passing rock, but a star craft from who knows where.
Exploring the object reveals a cavernous interior able to create alien creatures and raise the dead, much to the discomfort of astronauts confronted by their dead wives, friends or children. There is evidence to suggest the mysterious Architects, creators of this world, whatever their motives might be, strange things in the body of the object, further in, further in.
Very Rendezvous With Rama. More immediate, more now, but very similar concepts.
I half liked it. I enjoyed the bulk of the stuff on Earth, with mission control scurrying about trying to form a sensible response to what might be an attack from the stars. Rather a sense of the whole Apollo-13 scrubbers episode, very clever men suddenly out of their comfort zones. The central astronaut was a bit dull, but well formed. In fact pretty much all the characters are well presented, rounded people, even if the American called Tea left me wondering if she had a sister called Coffee. Yes. I know Te-a.
So what was it I didn't like.
It occurs to be that there is in fact an entire Big Dumb Object sub-genre of science fiction that I don't care for. I was never that excited by Rama. Of all the Known Space books, Ringworld is the one I care least for. I know people who rhapsodise about Greg Bear's Eon, but it left me very cold. This is the same.
So you get these books and in them you haver some space explorers find a thing. What kind of thing? A big thing. An alien thing. Often involving a tunnel. So they dock/land/crash their spaceship at one end of the tunnel and weird shit starts to happen. And the further in they go the weirder the shit is. And eventually the shit gets so weird that they run back to the mothership and escape, often leaving one or two people behind.
It all becomes about exploring the unknowable. Instead of being driven, as the first half of the book is, but people and their interactions and competitions it just devolves into pushing further in and seeing how much weirdness the author can come up with. Which is generally lot when not constrained by much need for it all to make sense.
Essentially you get something formulated as a mystery, but without any ability to solve it. That lovely understanding that comes when the writer's presented their clues just right, so you grasp the plot a page or two before the hero? Impossible.
Obviously some people like this style of book. They're welcome to it.
There's a sequel, indeed I think there may even be an unpublished third volume. Unless I hear lots of people praising it to the high heavens, I think I'll give them a miss.

The War That Came Early

By Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove wrote at least one really good book, and increasingly I find myself thinking, only one really good book. The good book was the Guns Of the South, a time travel book in which Afrikaans supremacists, smarting at the loss of apartheid come back to 1863 and give the Confederates a whole bunch of AK47s in the hope that a victorious CSA will make a world where slavery's a going concern and so the idea of white people's 'natural' domination over the darker skinned remains acceptable into the 21st century.
It manages to present not only a rollicking adventure story, but also some fairly cogent ideas about the attitudes of the common southern soldiery, only a few of whom are fighting to keep the slaves in their place. If there's a flaw it's that pretty much everyone except the time travellers is entirely nice. It's been a while since I read it, but I seem to remember that even the founder of the Klu Klux Klan comes round to a liberal position as soon as he finds out the degree to which he's been manipulated.
Since then Turtledove's books have become increasingly long winded, formulaic and plain Alternate History, lacking any time travel elements. A twelve volume history of a (different) victorious South as it slides throught the first and second world wars is a fine example of his current style, which seems to involve less speculation that one would really like, and rather more taking real events and putting a gloss over them. So a corporal in the defeated southern army comes to lead a party devoted to getting his nation back on it's feet while ensuring that the traitors who stabbed them in the back get sent to camps. Negroes rather than Jews, artillery rather than infantry, but it's not a clever bit of parallel, it's just recasting. The whole series was full of that, be glad that I am not going to go on.
Sometimes this style can work, but generally only when things are kept snappy, which is to say, kept to a single book. I quite liked the one about the few surviving Jews in a post Hitler reich, but at the point it became clear that the big events were all glasnost/Yeltsin then it became predictable, and all the suspense was left hanging on who'd win a game of bridge, a challenge for even the best writers. And being honest, Turtledove is not one of the elite.
So here we have what looked at first like it was a snappy-ish pair of books positing a second world war starting with Chamberlain standing up for Czechoslovakia. Oh and someone other than Franco running the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. If these two events are connected then I've not grasped why.
To get the good stuff out of the way: the books bounce along at a fair old pace. They're not demanding, not trying to be. There's also a pleasing preparedness to kill off viewpoint characters. No-one is safe.
Unfortunately the bounce along just helps show up the author's weaknesses. There's a strange sense that each section is there to establish a single point. God knows it's not characterisation. All his characters talk exactly the same, all have the same annoying little tics. There really is the sense that the book starts off as a Word document plan and just gets filled in. Do all writers work that way? Most don't make it that obvious.
And then there's the dread that occurs about three quarters of the way through the book. Oh Lord, there's too much still to wrap up. There's that character who's been hanging about for two books and done bugger all. This isn't a snappy two parter, it's another bloody extended opus. More of this rubbish.
Thank God they were library books, I'd hate to have paid for them.

Hit Man/Hit List

By Lawrence Block
I can't remember the last time I discovered a new writer through a book.  Especially not a book written on bits of dead tree. Still reading,  rather faster than I'm writing them up for here,  but I'm just not picking up the odd speculative paperback like I used to.
Where I am starting with new writers it's through podcasts,  particularly Starshipsofa and its entourage.
One of these podcasts launched a few months ago with a rather fine story by Block about a hit man hired ostensibly to kill an especially annoying dog. Nice story. Enough to make me hunt down more of the same.
The first is a collection of short stories,  the second has far more narrative, but still does it's short fiction roots. Surprisingly light,  all told with an appealing deadpan sense of humour. On the list of writers to come back to.
The thing that's bugging me though,  and no answer is available,  is whether these were books my late grandfather read. He did read American crime fiction, lots of it, and while he wouldn't have been about for these books, too recent, Block's been writing for ever. Perhaps there were shelf loads of them, making him a writer I really should have been reading for decades.

Zoo City

By Laurel Beurkes
I've been dithering over this one. The book is good. Lets get that out of the way. Addressed as a mildly post-apocalyptic detective story it works, it flows, it would be well worth reading.
The heroine is seriously flawed, but remains engaging. Her long suffering sloth familiar is one of the most entertaining such creatures out there, easily the nicest beast one might be lumbered with since Pantelimon, though he is certainly less talkative. But what would you expect from a sloth?
So in short: if you're in the mood for a thriller set against a collapsing South Africa where criminals and outcasts are marked by the appearance of a mystically linked but otherwise normal animal, then this could be the book for you. Buy the book.
You might want to think about it a little longer if you're the looking out person who worries about just why people might fund themselves saddled with an animal just because they've stepped outside human norms. There's obviously something supernatural going on, but no-one knows just what. All that matters is that 15 our so years ago people stayed getting animals and with them abilities that feel like, and might even be, minor magical powers.
Like most magical realism that kind of thing kindly bothers me if done badly, and here it's not.
So why am I dithering?
It's South Africa. I don't know how to think about it these days. I don't know what degree of metaphor is here employed.
When I was a kid South Africa was simple. The nasty white people were dominating the blacks, and if only they started paying attention to the Special AKA then it would have a much nice place. And then they let Nelson Mandela out, they won the rugby and it was.
All very simple. Too simple, I know. And it's all got more complicated since then as increasingly less saintly presidents come and go and the stories about rampant criminality grow and grow and one comes to see just why the modern South Africa might feel like a post-apocalyptic wasteland. But probably line where not recent the most hardened criminals get a sloth.
But is that what the author intended? Or just my trying to second guess her motives? I don't know and that worries me. And so I dither.
Good book though. Well worth making your own decision.

Goblins

By Philip Reeve
I think I wrote about Philip Reeve before, lauding his young adult steampunk books.
Same writer, but this is aimed at a rather younger audience, his eight year old son was mentioned, and I didn't really get as much from it.
It's a nice enough book, don't get me wrong. The hero is a too clever by half goblin exiled from the half forgotten ruins of Mordor. He is supported by an amiable cast of cheese-makers turned would be heroes, abducted, and perfectly happy with it, princesses, accountants  who fancy themselves sorcerers plus assorted monsters.
Something the younger me would have enjoyed entirely, something the current me found a little too slight. Which given that I'm on the order of thirty five years older than the target audience isn't really the most surprising thing in the world.
Apparently the people that turned Coraline into a movie are planning on filming this in the next couple of years. I shall look forwards to it.
Meanwhile I shall look for someone of an appropriate age and pass the book on.