Heads, Greg Bear

This is a reread of something I must have first (and last) read 30 years ago. It's novella length, but its inventiveness and audacity have kept it memorable when other titles have long since faded away. So it was interesting to see if its legacy holds up.

Entirely Moon-set, it's narrated by Micko, a junior member of a family company (or "Binding Multiple", BM) charged with managing the affairs of his brother-in-law William's low temperature laboratory, the Ice Cave, which is teetering on the brink of an Absolute Zero breakthrough. With excess cooling capacity available, Micko's sister, and William's wife, Rho, brings a pet family history project from Earth: a mixed batch of cryogenically frozen heads from the early 21st century. While effectively dead meat, scientific advances convince Rho the heads can be "read", potentially opening a link to the great-grandparents who founded their BM. But the arrival of the heads triggers unexpected friction with other BMs, including strong pushback from the Moon's president, a member of a religiously-affiliated BM. Micko and the wider BM are caught off-guard by this hostility, until he guesses - correctly - whose head accompanies those of his great-grandparents, triggering revelations but with tragic consequences.

… And it's still excellent. Its length definitely keeps it punchy, but it's really impressive just how much Bear squeezes in. I've not even mentioned the Quantum Logic (QL) thinker - the AI controlling William's experiments - above, but its cool, alien pronouncements are a real joy. And I'm even more impressed on rereading just how vicious it is in its takedown of its thinly-veiled proxies for real-world Scientology. Bear's Logologists are transparently stand-ins for L. Ron Hubbard's cult, and he’s brutal in laying bare the reality of its formation and malevolent perpetuation.

If I had to criticise it at all, the denouement is a little raced-over compared to the preceding. But, otherwise, it stands the test of time, and is easily worth the hour or two needed to read it. It works both as a hard sci-fi yarn on Absolute Zero, and as a devastating strike on a vexatious and malign cult.

All Her Father's Guns, James Warner

An inconsistent, pleased-with-its-own-cleverness, shambling mess of a novel. Full of characters too caricatured to engage with or to like, its attempt to satirise gun culture, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the early 21st century GOP basically falls flat on its face. Physically, it's actually a thin novel, but it takes far (far) longer to wade through than you'd expect. By the end of it, I already only barely remembered its twisty, desperately flailing incoherence. And the coda, which tries to reframe one half of the novel as a reconstruction by the other half, felt like a post-modern slap in the face. Embarrassingly, I bought this one as a present - which makes it all the more annoying. One to avoid.