I’ve finished another book! Although to be fair I finished it on Monday morning, and since then have read yet another book, which puts me in the position to decide the next one that I’d like to read.
This book was quite excellent I thought. This is only the second John Varley book that I’ve read, although I have a few of his on the shelf. Mostly I just read somewhere online that he was a good author, so I started mooching his books from BookMooch. Mammoth was a pretty good standalone book which at the very least told me that he was talented at writing and thinking up fun SF stories.
This one really ventures more into the sci-fi realm, because it’s set in a more obvious future. The premise is that previous to when our story starts, aliens attacked the earth and anyone that wasn’t already living on Luna (the moon) perished. Since then the human race has flourished on Luna, Mars, and a few other planets in our solar system. Our main character, Hildy, is a man who is a reporter for one of the big tabloids and increasing starting to worry about his tendency to try and commit suicide.
The planet has many, many new innovations. Society has gotten to a point where people don’t really need to work at all… the Central Computer (also known as the “CC”) pretty much takes care of anything people need. They can directly interface with the computer and have information sent to their brain, it monitors the life signs of every human, regulates the air filtration, etc. You get the point.
Our character Hildy keeps getting “miraculously saved” just in time whenever he tries to commit suicide, and after each attempt he’s not exactly sure why he did try in the first place. The book follows his attempt to talk to the CC and find out why this is happening to him.
The book goes into great detail about what society is like on Luna, and it’s all incredibly interesting. People can get a sex change without batting an eye… most ailments can be fixed with a few nanobots, hence an increased lifespan of about 300yrs on the older end.
You can definitely see why John Varley is so acclaimed while reading this book… despite all of the information, background, and plot lines that are thrown at you, you don’t feel bogged down or overwhelmed by all the information. I can easy get confused when reading a book that has too many plot lines to follow, but I didn’t have much trouble at all with this one.
The character development was great and I had no trouble getting pulled into the story and making it to the end. I was quite excited to finish the book while reading it, and it was easy for me to make a connection with Hildy.
I won’t say much else about the book, other than to say that I thought it was a fun book with a nice overall theme to it, tackling some issues that I don’t often see in sci-fi. I definitely plan to read more John Varley in the future… I suggest you do too.
