Tag archives for Science fiction - Page 9
Notice: Trying to access array offset on value of type bool in /var/www/html/themself/wp-content/themes/mesocolumn/lib/functions/theme-functions.php on line 502
Book Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie My rating: 5 of 5 stars A refreshing take on space opera, and a fascinating main character (a self-aware spaceship AI that inhabits multiple bodies simultaneously). We are introduced to the main character, who is a spaceship AI in multiple bodies, through the events of an annexation of a world. We see things from multiple points of view which all represent the same character. Through this story, told as flashbacks from another sequence, we find out about how the Radch works, and the values that empire has. The scenes are well written and avoid grand expositions, instead there is a gradual burn towards the climax. One of the interesting features, which I liked, was that in the Radch language there is no gender pronoun, everyone is 'her/she'. This is used to indicate when the speech…
Imperfect: Scene 10 – Followed
Imperfect Followed I woke up just after nine in the morning, feeling a little refreshed, but hungover from my extended stay with Special Branch. It was going to take some time to work out how to play this out, because although I wasn’t in a cell, there was no reason to believe that I was out scot free. As I lay pondering this I suddenly remembered that it was Sunday. I jumped out of bed and made for the shower room, I needed Huw to be looking his best for his habitual trip to Church. I had a quick shower, shave and briefly polished a pair of brogues. Then I dressed in Huw’s finest tweed suit, and a freshly ironed shirt from the wardrobe. I always took these to a cleaner round the corner so there was a fresh supply.…
Imperfect: Scene 08 – Plans
Imperfect Plans With breakfast out of the way we got down to planning how we were going to get Mark, Geoff and Charlie out of police custody. The first step was to find out on what basis they were being held. Once we knew that we could get some lawyers to work on getting them out. The cell had plenty of money for that sort of thing, and while we needed to co-ordinate it, it was by far the easiest way of getting someone out of a police cell. That said we had some pretty wild back-up plans just in case bail was refused. We’d heard some pretty unsavoury things about where people like us went when we were detained indefinitely on public safety grounds. Those were all just rumours, because no-one had returned to deny them. That in itself…
Imperfect – Scene 06 – Get Away Car
Imperfect Get Away Car Rosie, Cat and I were holed up in the George & Dragon about twenty miles outside Cambridge. We’d arrived there on foot after dark, coming in by the back door at three in the morning after the cleaning staff had long gone. We’d done our anti-surveillance drills as a team through Cambridge until we got to a lock-up garage in a quiet suburban street. It was one of a row of six in a housing development that looked at least one hundred years old. Some of the houses certainly looked more than a bit shabby. When Rosie opened the garage it contained a car with a dust sheet over it. “Here are our wheels!” she said, pulling the dust sheet off with a bit of a flourish. Underneath was a silver coloured car, of a type I…
Imperfect – Scene 05 – Questions
Imperfect Questions I stuck to the script when they interrogated me, and it seemed to be working. However they weren’t just going to let me go, they needed to verify it. My legend was quite detailed, but then I’d had three years to put it into place, and I’d also invested several hours a week during term time in putting it into practice, not to mention the reading time and writing the essays to maintain it. I had always felt that it would be worth it someday, and now that was looking like the proverbial rainy day that I had been saving it all up for. DC Fletcher came back into the room, she’d been away for three hours and 17 minutes. Having the terminal let me keep track of time, even if it couldn’t make it to the outside…