Superfan: A Novel

Superfan: A Novel by Jenny Tinghui Zhang

A girl is having a rough time at her first year of college at the University of Texas. She doesn't fit in well, and has few extracurriculars other than a Zine. (But even there, she keeps putting off writing.) She finds solace in a boy band she loves. This band is an American band following the Kpop model. Even further, all but one members are Asian. The girl has her favorites and spends plenty of time online following the band. It is her solace from campus life. Then things seem to put up with an upperclassman boyfriend. Alas, they come tumbling down at a party. She learns the "boyfriend" has other girls. She gets drunk and nearly raped by the boyfriend's roommate. This makes things even worse. On a fan website, she becomes associated with a group that is super involved in the boys and "stalks" them wherever they go. She decides to write her zine article on the band. Her editor has connections that allow them to get behind the scenes. She shares a message with them from the stalker group. Later she is present when somebody injures one of the members (in an attempted assault of the manager.) This causes her to cut ties with the group. She eventually gets on with her life. A few years later, they see one of the band members as a soloist.

The story of the girl is interleaved with the experiences of the band members. They all have different reasons for joining. They work extremely hard, but they are also manipulated by management. A fake gay love affair between two members is staged to gain publicity. (This was also built up by the stalker group.) It shows the dark side of idols and fandoms.

The book had great potential as both a coming of age and fandom novel. However, it went a bit too much over the deep end towards the end.

Guardians of Dawn: Zhara

Guardians of Dawn: Zhara (Guardians of Dawn, 1) by S. Jae-Jones

Zhara is a bright, light fantasy book. There is a character that loves to read romance books. The book becomes involved in some plot twists. This society had some big war and one side is power and strives to hide books to keep from unifying others. Books hold some special secrets. Gender can be a bit confusing. He and she are used together with "they", but it may change for a character as they become gendered. There was an introductory note about it. In spoken Chinese he and she are pronounced the same. Is Korean something like that. Did some googling, and it seems that Korean doesn't often use the gendered pronouns, so that does make sense. The book felt fairly good as far as fantasy goes, but I did get a bit lost as it kept going on. It would be great if fantasy writers could write short. This one seemed to have potential.

Mal Goes to War

Mal Goes to War: A Novel by Edward Ashton

In this not-so-distant future, the US has been concerned that AI entities are gaining too much strength. They release a virus to wipe out the AIs. Mal is an AI malware that is working on the side of the AIs. He wants to protect AIs from the anti-AI humanists. He has the ability to infiltrate various technologies. Since most people have various electronic implants, he is also able to infiltrate them and perform various actions. In the end he works together with people to battle against the humanists and in the end sets some code in the Virus leader to cause occasional pain. It is an interesting dark-humor story on the risks of technological dominance and the difficulty in containing it.

Antimatter Blues

Antimatter Blues: A Mickey7 Novel, Book 2 by Edward Ashton

The Mickey7 series continues to show it's Ender's Game influence. The first book witnessed contact and "victory" over the hive-mind aliens. In this second one, the hero attempts to better befriend and understand the aliens.

Mickey had told the gruff colony leader that he had made a truce with the aliens and given them the antimatter bomb. This has bought him his freedom and the end to "death missions" as an expendable. However, he didn't mention the whole story. While he had given them the bomb, he later asked for it back and then hid it under a rock in one of the alien caves.

Two years later, the colony runs into energy problems. He is asked to get the bomb back from the aliens to use as a power source. He is conflicted. He feels he could go pick it up, but this will reduce the leverage that he has. He and his girlfriend eventually decide to get it, however it is not there. They reach out to the aliens and finds they have traded it to another group to the south. After negotiations (which go south in due to the forwardness of his girlfriend), they  get one alien to come with him to try to get it back.

Half the novel consists of the quest to get the bomb back. They get a few people from the colony to accompany them. Mickey's friend Berto has a paragliding device that comes in handy. They try negotiations and eventually use warfare to defeat the aliens and get the bomb back. Mickey is willing to be an expendable again to inject the bomb's fuel into the power reactor. However, before he can do it, the colony leader loses his life doing it.

The "fights" are fairly typical. The sentient life on the planet are two primary species. One is the friendly aliens that adapt to many different shapes using metal and other sources. The others are parasitic and have adapted to the lifestyle of the friendly aliens. They are both "hive"-type live forms that think of most of their members as ancillaries that are somewhat expendable. They also have fairly developed technology and are able to learn human language by monitoring radio transmissions. However, they do have difficulty understanding concepts that are foreign to them.

Mickey7

Mickey7: A Novel by Edward Ashton

Mickey Barnes is an expendable. His entire person was scanned and downloaded onto a computer. His experiences would be regularly backed up. Any time he died, his body would be regenerated from the downloaded version, and his most recently backed up memories would be restored. He is part of a space colonization mission. He would go on dangerous missions or scientific projects that can use a body. He may test the suitability of an environment or explore dangerous areas. Mickey7 is the seventh iteration of Mickey. He goes on a mission to explore some tunnels, and falls down into one. His commander decides to leave him as dead rather than rescue him. However, Mickey survives and makes his way back to the station - only to find that Mickey8 has been generated. This creates a number of complications - especially since the colony is resource constrained.

The novel works backwards and forwards to unravel the history of Mickey and the world. The human diaspora was started after an antimatter war had pretty much wiped out earth. Antimatter technology is still used in limited capacity for propulsion, but is generally taboo for warfare. The human duplication technology was created by an eccentric billionaire. He had eventually moved himself to a world, and made numerous clones of himself to take control of the world. He would destroy anyone that tried to come to the world. This lead to a "nativist" religion and a group of people strongly against cloning ability. (Eventually, his world was destroyed by launching a high speed projectile at it.)

The "creepers" that inhabited Mickey's colony were discovered to be sentient. They were a hive group that seemed similar to Orson Scott Card's Formics. They were willing to live on a world with humans as long as the humans did not disturb them.

The structure of the novel helps to explore numerous science fiction topics, while continuing on the narrative.