When I was a child, several decades ago, A.E. van Vogt was one of my favorite writers, on the same podium with Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury. Later, I was intrigued of how people never seemed to remember him, while praising loudly the others. So I got hold of whatever I could find written by him and started reminiscing.

  The Voyage of the Space Beagle is more of a short stories collection than a novel, even if it has the same characters spacing out on the same ship. It contains four stories:

• Black Destroyer - a large cat-like alien tries to get the better of the crew
• War of Nerves - an alien civilization makes contact telepathically, with unexpected results 
• Discord in Scarlet - a red alien tries to get the better of the crew
• M33 in Andromeda - a galactic sized alien tries to get the better of the crew
• there are also some connective tissue paragraphs detailing a power struggle in the crew itself

  I know why I liked him when I was a kid. The people are all science and knowledge and decisiveness. They are impressive and sure minded and solve every dire situation with their power of their cunning. They also casually discuss and sometimes enact acts of genocide "on principle alone" because some aliens are too ugly, dangerous or of a different morality. It's an all male crew, chemically castrated like in the military, with not the slightest thought women could contribute in any way. They fly between galaxies with the strong sense of their own intellectual and (if proven wrong) moral superiority. The author puts out there the idea that the universe is several million years old and it cyclically explodes to create another one. The distance between stars and galaxies, as well as their number are ridiculously underestimated. Other knowledge we now take for granted is absent completely from the book.

  So it's a strange combination of strong people and ideas that look and feel ridiculous, insensitive, uneducated and even psychotic. The main reason is that the stories were not written at time of publication, but much earlier, sometimes in the '30s and then the author was constantly fixing them and mashing them together in fix-up novels. The scientific and social change in these 100 years is shocking. Hell, I was gleefully enjoying this 40 years ago! It has the effect of making me see our modern behavior through different eyes. We are as sure now as we were then that we are in the right and that we are a pinnacle of something and everything other is weird and to be changed or avoided. What will we think of present selves a century from now? How pathetic are the five minute dramas that occupy our awareness today.

  Think of this book as a precursor of Star Trek: valiant humans exploring the universe. Only they are as far from Kirk as he was from Picard. Quite intriguing an experience which I recommend.

  Van Vogt died in 2000, but his last short story was written in 1976. He was never considered a great writer even in his own time, despite my own childish preferences, yet he made an impact. I probably am going to read something by him again, maybe not immediately. 

  At the end of Children of Ruin I was bemoaning the fact that Adrian Tchaikovsky moved things too far, too fast, and I was happy to see things go down a notch in the beginning of Children of Memory. Alas, it was all a scam, like those Star Trek episodes when nothing makes sense for the entire show only to get explained by a Deus ex Machina and a bunch of McGuffins at the end, but most of it happens in today's Earth or on some farm or Western setting.

  Where could the author have gone from a multi species confederation of faster than light travelers, capable of eternally sleeping during voyages anyway and, barring that, construct any body and transferring any kind of knowledge back and forth? Just like Stargate (most notably) which started with stranded humans at the mercy of all powerful aliens and ended up defeating gods and travelling between galaxies, the only way was back or some kind of lateral jump, like making episodic books that need not connect except through a common literary universe. I really hoped that would be the case.

  And I feel even worse because, while I hated most of the book, with its Memento-ish rehashings of the same events and with the author himself explaining obvious things over and over again, at the end of Children of Memory was a glimpse of the philosophical underpinnings of the story, and I liked those. Unfortunately those are just at the very end, making the rest of the book mostly pointless.

  Bottom line: I couldn't wait for the book to end fast enough, just to get to understand what was going on, because even if I had an inkling of that, I needed confirmation. And the ending was both philosophically satisfying and invalidating the entire beginning and middle of the the story. So to me it feels like a bad elevator episode of the series, like Tchaikovsky had one more book to write to make this a trilogy and, like me, couldn't wait to get it over with already. 

  Children of Time was split into two stories, one rich with characterization, focused on individual people, and another that felt a little bit like a nature documentary, but was pretty good, too. The science was stretched a bit, but in the end you get a subtle exploration of humanity via another species. Children of Ruin is the equivalent of explosion porn for action movies, though: more, bigger, louder, thus drowning out the parts that came close to what I liked in the first book.

  Adrian Tchaikovsky starts with another pair of obsessive scientists, but there is less focus on their actual personalities and struggles. They become the cause and catalyst of what he really wanted to write about: a civilization of octopuses and a complete new alien species - which of course also reaches sentience. Strangely enough, these take a lot of the book without - to me - providing any insight into our own species or telling me anything really interesting and new about cephalopods or making me feel a lot about any of the characters. In a sentence: this book is less careful, larger but coarser, faster but less inspiring.

  This doesn't mean I didn't like it. The story captivated me and I wanted to know where it goes and how it ends, so I read it really fast. Yet the ending left me a bit disappointed, as I understood that the pyrotechnics ended and the story stands in ruin. Children of Memory seems to go back to the roots a little from the little I've read already, I hope it stays more true to the original concept.

Saturn's Children feels like a book that started as something and turned out to be something else in the middle of it. Charles Stross writes something that seems very fashionable this days: a novel from the point of view of a robot. And not just any robot, but a humanoid female sex robot in a world devoid of humans with which to have sex with. Add some solar system travel, spy thriller mechanics, the occasional sexy comedy, philosophical musings about the meaning of life and identity, even what some people might consider light horror and you get this story.

  Even if I enjoyed it, the book is a mess. The style changes, the metaphors change from something from this decade to something that would only make sense in the far future populated exclusively by robots and back again. The mood changes, the motivation of the characters change. You can't even tell who is who anymore because of the multiple "soul chip" identity swaps. It is all written as a letter, but you can't tell who the letter is addressed to, since it also explains to us stuff that should be obvious to a robot.

  I found the premise of humanity simply fading away into extinction, no war, no plague, no asteroid, just people too distracted to have sex with other people, quite satisfying. I know that Futurama did it too, but it makes so much sense as a solution to the Fermi paradox. The basic idea of the book (once it crystalized into one) was intriguing, but you have to read half a book before it turns that way. The writing was competent, but not really engaging or inspiring. The technical aspects were the same.

  Bottom line: more of a vacation book. You get it and you may even read it to the end if the vacation lasts long enough, but not memorable or interesting enough to care about what happens next.

  I have to admit I had no idea what this book was to be about. I hoped maybe Jennifer Egan is related to Greg Egan, maybe A Visit from the Goon Squad is science fiction or at least something humorous. But it was about random characters (New Yorkers, no less) and their private lives and introspections. The writing was good, even compelling, but I really wasn't in the mood for it.

  Maybe I will retry later on.

  I grew up with cyberpunk novels and I loved them! It made me feel thrilled, scared and hopeful about the future at the same time. So when I heard that William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, published this relatively recently, I thought I was going to see how cyberpunk evolves through the ages, post '90s, but before the true Internet age.

  I rejoiced at that heavy read-a-paragraph-three-times-to-understand style and with a name like Pattern Recognition I was ready for a feast! Only... the main character is a marketing consultant for company logos. The thing is fantastical, but not set in the future. In fact, it reads more like fashion-punk than cyber anything!

  It gets worse! The antagonists are weird and ineffectual, the tension a mere nuisance for the main character rather than a driving force, the end goal finding McGuffiny McGuffinFace, the details boring and not interesting to me. At all! And when things get tough, you have a Deus ex Machina person stepping in and solving the problem. And every character is a hipster! This book, the first of a trilogy, sucks!

  I felt personally betrayed when reading something so antithetical to my interests, yet written in the familiar Gibsonesque punk style. I had planned a deep dive in Gibson's work and now I am terrified that I am going to reread the books I loved as a child and find them just as pretentious and empty, with characters that believe themselves much cooler than they actually are. Was Henry Dorset Case just another self absorbed hipster and I failed to notice it because the cyberpunk was cool and I was a kid?

  Bottom line: I did not like it.

  Children of Time spans several thousand years from the points of view of three main actors: the people on an ark ship, the ambitious scientist who wants to create new life and that of the new life. Adrian Tchaikovsky writes adequately the story of the intersection of interests of these parties while reminding me of some of my favorite books like Accelerando and Blindsight, with a pinch of Xenogenesis, but the book is not nearly as good as either of them. Pretty damn good, though!

  It might have something to do with my very high expectations from people reading the book and praising the hell out of it. The book is good, but not THAT good. Then there are the technical aspects which sometimes were so wrong as to take me out of the story. These are minor points, though.

  The main issue with the story is that you have a very personal point of view for the humans and something akin to a David Attenborough documentary for the lifeforms. The contrast is jarring. The scope of the book, though, and the ideas explored are very interesting and the story is very science fictions, in the sense that it asks that essential "what if?" question and asks it well. The answer is just a little dry, that is all. Also, under that pretext, the book is actually taking a hard look at our own history, future prospects and examines the nature of humanity. Just the stuff I like.

  As proof that I did like the book, despite my usual old man grumbling, is that I have put the other two books in the series in my to read list.

  At 60% of reading The Ninth Metal, the work Miskatonic was slided into the story. Then some vague visions of interdimensional doors and huge eyes and tentacles solidified the intention to have this as a "Lovecraftian novel". And it may well be, perhaps the entire series will be more, but as it stands, simply hinting at cosmic horror is not Lovecraftian and having less than 5% of your story be anything than random hicks in Minnesota doing whatever they usually do almost doesn't make it sci-fi.

  Now, Benjamin Percy's writing isn't terrible and slow paced stories that evolve slowly to give characters room to grow are not bad. I just felt that this book was a story of hardship in a family defined by local metal exploitation that a comic book writer felt the need to make superheroey and then (why not) Lovecraftian for a better selling position.

  But there were other things that made me dislike reading the book. One of them is the endless back and forth between present and flashbacks. This sucks in movie form, in a book format it's even worse. You have to mentally switch context from whatever you were enjoying (or trying to) to something else while the author is answering questions that you never asked. Second thing is the characterization. Most people were terrible clichés, most notably Wade. Not only does he just randomly die, no one, including his loving wife, even mentions him again. The bad boy who grew a solitary and strong-silent sense of morality, the ambitious woman regretting not having children and finding one to save, the innocent requiring saving, the psychopathic villain, the angry henchman, the waiting woman (complete with a worthless and disposable male companion while doing so), the annoying story of a vague but global catastrophe but focusing solely on a small American town and so on.

  Bottom line: I kind of liked the idea of the story, but I would have seen it compacted in the first three to five chapters of a single book. While tired of the "coasty" types of stories we are inundated with from cinema and TV, I didn't really want to fall into the other terrible formula: the small American town, truckers, miners and waitresses doing cowboy politics.

  We all know Frank Herbert for his science fiction work, mainly Dune, but before he became famous by publishing that, he wrote may short stories and novels. This collection published in 2013 holds four of the pre-Dune novels he never got to publish. I found the stories very Herbert, kind of dated and, except the first one's premise, non-sci-fi. Yet they show how the ideas that went through Herbert's brain evolved in time.

  The novels in the collection are: High-Opp, Angel's Fall, A Game of Authors and A Thorn in the Bush.

  High-Opp

  It shows the irreverent cynicism that the author had towards governments and social systems, but with a yet unpolished writing style. The story shows how a brilliant man, stuck in the middle of the social hierarchy of a communist-like government is betrayed and then manipulated by various groups. As the strong '50s male archetype he manages to outsmart and outfight everybody.

  Angel's Fall

  This is an interesting story about a damaged air vehicle floating on a river while enemies are trying to catch and destroy it. It's not sci-fi, as the air vehicle in question is a floatplane and the enemies are Amazon native tribes. But if you thought I was talking about the jungle part of The Green Brain, I would understand, as it's basically the same story without the sci-fi elements!

  A Game of Authors

  A weird story about an American journalist travelling to Mexico for a story, while being manipulated and attacked by various interested parties. It felt really dated and not well thought through. The characters were a joke, particularly the female ones. It was supposed to be a "brave resourceful man" story, but it felt like a "clueless American still doesn't believe people would try to kill him" thing.

  A Thorn in the Bush

  This felt like the least Herbert story of them all, even if it did focus on the internal drive and motivation of people. It's the story of an old madame who, having moved to Mexico and become respectable, tries to boss everybody based on her own past traumas and present delusions. Strange to have a female main character in a Herbert novel. It was not bad, but it was the farthest from sci-fi you will ever read.

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With this I have ended reading everything Herbert wrote and I could find. From them all, Dune is of course on top of it all, but also Destination: Void (not the series, but the original book), Hellstrom's Hive, The White Plague and perhaps surprisingly Soul Catcher. There are lot of other good stories, but I loved these ones. Phew! It's over! :) It was nice, but a little tiring.

  I read The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert on and off for two months. Some of the stories are brilliant, some of them are seeds to future books, while some are just mediocre. But the series is very revealing of Frank Herbert's mind and filled with intriguing and unique ideas. I liked it!

  There are thirty eight short stories in this huge book. Some of them made me think days after I've read them. Perhaps that's the best way to read this: story by story with pauses in between. Or other books.

  Honestly, I didn't feel like reading much these two months, either. From the great endeavor of reading everything Herbert, I only have one collection of four unpublished novels. Then I am free to read other stuff. Unfortunately it does feel that way, like something that needed effort to finish. Most of it was pleasant, but damn it took too long!

  Bottom line: I think if you liked Dune, for example, you might want to try a few of the other great novels he wrote, but before that try reading this collection, get a feel for the man and, of course, don't let the average experimental things be the last thing you read of Herbert.

  Man of Two Worlds may be the worst book signed by Frank Herbert that I've ever read. It features that nasty '50s newsroom trope, where single minded egotistical people (sometimes to the point of cruelty) get a pass because they are brilliant and they talk fast (and they own the newspaper). The characters are unsympathetic and rather not interesting, while the ideas in the book are dull and going nowhere. The plot itself is often inconsistent. I do suspect that this is more of a Brian than a Frank book, because none of the themes found in previous Frank Herbert books are found here (if one discounts the awkward depiction of women). Also the tiny Wikipedia page dedicated to the book lists Brian as the main author.

  In short, the story is about a human and an alien merging accidentally and having to work together to get things done. Kind of like the authors were trying to do, huh? The setting is classic '50s sci-fi, with people living on Mars and Venus and going from planet to planet using vehicles that function like normal airlines, only in space. Meanwhile, the aliens are trying to destroy Earth because they fear humans - not sure how that would work since they already live on other planets, and the humans have their own familial issues to resolve - including an uncle with god-like powers but no apparent care about the outcome of anything he does.

  There are many issues with the book that I am not going to go into. I almost did not finish it. However, someone else might enjoy it, so no need to rant in this review. Suffice to say that the book feels insulting when it is not boring, which is most of the time. I don't recommend it.

  Imagine reading a novel about a global pandemic with the background of Irish violence right about when Covid struck and people didn't know how Brexit was going to turn out and what it would do to Irish tensions. That was the best moment to read it. A bit anachronistic, with some pacing issues, The White Plague is still one of Frank Herbert's best.

  After reading the book synopsis, one expects to get a book about a violent global pandemic, but in fact that's just the first quarter of the book. The rest is psychological explorations of people motivations and characters, the ubiquitous Herbert attempts to find a solution to the toxic human organizational structures, analysis of history, violence, religion and philosophy. I mean, it's Herbert!

  A violent "Provo" bombing kills the wife and daughters of a molecular biologist that was in Ireland on vacation. He goes mad and creates a plague to destroy the people who wronged him by killing their women. I can't but smile at the implications, that if a smart educated scientist gets pissed off they could easily cause more damage than the toys and sticks of military people. The theme reminds me of his short story Public Hearing, which explores what happens when immense destructive power can be achieved with little effort by individuals, and how that makes governments - the keepers of peace - obsolete.

  But then there is the larger part of the book that is just the guy walking in the Irish countryside with a priest, a mute child and an IRA member that was actually the one who ordered the bomb that killed his wife. And to tell you the truth, the scientist is not very sympathetic, the IRA soldier is annoying and the priest and the child are unbearable. The ideas that the author is analyzing are interesting, but the pacing is slow, methodical, and perhaps the reason why more people haven't heard of this book.

  And there is the usual strangeness of Herbert's approach to female characters. There is just one, really, in this book, and she comes across as stupid, vain but also calculatingly self serving, while still having men fawning over her. That in a story which covers the death of most women on Earth. The guy didn't like women much.

  Anyway, if you take anything from this review, is that together with Hellstrom's Hive and of course the Dune series, this is one of the books that impacted me most. 

  McKie again saves the world, while at the same time getting some intense nookie. He is Frank Herbert's James Bond, the guy who can outthink everybody, adapt to any situation and still look cool and positive while doing it. To be fair, I enjoyed The Dosadi Experiment quite a lot, perhaps because and not despite the air of interplanetary secret agent idea. I liked it more than Whipping Star, the first book in this universe, which had the handicap of having to establish it first. Also, because most of that was a human trying to understand a Caleban, which was not terribly exciting. This book explores a planet used as a (unlawful) social experiment and what the result of that experiment was.

  There is something I both like and despise in Herbert's writing. He weaves different captivating stories and worlds from the same pieces. So you get the stagnating civilization, malignant government and various explorations of solutions to solve the problem, you get the very rational yet emotionally immature male heroes and the amazing and terrifying women that they stumble upon, the idea of terrible pressure shaping civilizations and individuals alike into extraordinary form, the people reaching higher levels of awareness and saying or understanding the precise best things that could have been said or understood. There is even a Gom Jabbar in this.

  In fact, some of his books remind me of chess games. And one might enjoy chess games immensely, but after a certain level you just don't get if they are brilliant or complete shit. It's the same with The Dosadi Experiment, where everybody begins seeing the world in the Dosadi way, speak in the Dosadi way, think in the Dosadi way, but you never understand what that is, other than a form of psychopathic focus on power games.

  I believe that, given more time, Herbert could have shaped the ConSentiency Universe into something really unique, not as dry (pardon the pun) as Dune, not as depressing as Pandora, something that would combine the mind games and social analysis that he loved with good fun and great creative ideas. Alas, other than a couple of short stories, that's all we get for this intriguing world building.

  Bottom line: a little more lighthearted than most Herbert books, featuring more action, but still having the distinctive attributes one would expect from the author. I liked it, but it wasn't as memorable as the books I really like from him.

  One of my favorite Frank Herbert books and one that is not part of a series, Hellstrom's Hive is horrifying and inspiring in equal measure. I don't know why so few people mention reading it, probably because the ending is a bit weak, or maybe because of the touchy subject, but I loved it.

  The idea is quite simple, although as usual with Herbert, the underlying motifs are subtle and powerful. An unnamed and probably illegal secret organization, possibly an arm of the corporate world rather than government, discovers by accident something suspicious about a farm, owned by a guy named Hellstrom. There, they discover an unnamed and probably illegal secret organization, a group of people who hide from the world their own brand of civilization, inspired by insects.

  You can immediately see that the two organizations are juxtaposed for effect. Which one, if any, is the good one and which one is not? Are the relatively moral agents of the first group better than the mindless drones of the second? What about if they execute their orders without thought of consequences? Are the ecosystem aware, science and reason oriented, efficiency focused godless denizens of the hive abominations or are they the way of the future, the solution to humanity's rapaciousness? Could people accept such a radically different way to live, even if it doesn't affect them?

  As many of Herbert's creations, the book touches some recurring themes: the inevitable evil of government, the importance of focusing with mind and soul towards the betterment of individuals and the human species in general, the chemical, sexual and instinctual drives at the root of behavior, the power of ritualistic fanaticism, the danger in wanting too much or getting complacent and so on. In a way, this is a revisiting of the ideas from The Santaroga Barrier, only better.

  I was dreading reading this book, I have to admit, because I was remembering the big impact it had on me when I read it in my childhood and I was afraid that it would be anachronistic, that it would feel stupid and unrealistic. I am happy to report that it did not. I mean, yeah, it does portray a story happening in the 70's, but it is realistic for those times and it could be adapted to the present with minimal changes. I don't know why no one attempted to put it on a screen. It's a captivating story.

  The Godmakers is one of Frank Herbert's weaker books. It was cobbled together from four previous short stories and it shows, as the various parts of the book go into wildly different directions. The first part was interesting, the idea of an organization dedicated to uncovering (and totally destroying) any tendency of a civilization to go to war; it feels like a police procedural of sorts. But then the book loses focus, goes into an incoherent and incomplete "god making" plot, then veers into Herbert's latent fear of women and some weird conspiracies that make little sense.

  The book is short, so one can get through it really fast, but I won't recommend it. It does have bits of Herbert brilliant insights, but they are more like a few diamonds in a lot of rough.