Ventus

Rating:
Summary: An Unsynchronized Mixup
Review: It would appear that Mr. Schroeder could not decide what sort of book to write: fantasy or science fiction. In the end, it is like most compromises, neither fish nor fowl. The first fifty pages were boring. Then again, so were the next 150 before I finally gave up. Ventus gives new meaning to the requirement to suspend disbelief. It is simply tedious. Save your money for a good book.

Rating:
Summary: Romantic and Philosophical
Review: Or maybe Philosophical and Romantic.

When you start dipping into Karl Schroeder's _Ventus_ you'll probably think you've seen this kind of novel times before, but it's so expertly done that you're likely to follow along with Karl Schroeder's tour of a world apparently neglected by the galactic civilization that has retrogressed to the point that the natives fight battles with swords while offworlders walk this world checking things out. (And what _are_ these "wind" things?) But then, after not all that long a wait, the author blows it apart and the novel tumbles into a long, turbulent journey told from multiple points of view.

Each of the major characters, the offworlders Calandria, Marya, and Axel, the cyborg General Armiger, and the natives--the "mad queen" Galas and her onetime lover General Lavin, and the coming-of-agers Jordan and Tamsin (playing with home field advantage)--discover part of the reasons why the terraforming, nanotechy "mechas" have become dysfunctional or perhaps even mad (instead of preparing the world for humanity they've turned against it), but it's not until the final battle royal in which it all comes together.

It's expertly written and breathtaking in its conception (Ventus may be the most interesting world since Joan D. Vinge's Tiamat), and it's sure to give you a lot to think about. It's a romantically philosophical hard-science fantasy.

Rating:
Summary: Great blend of thoughtful SF and space opera
Review: The "lost colony" story, in which a otherworldly settlement forgets its roots and becomes a sort of ersatz fantasy setting, is an old one.

_Ventus_ is a fun, thoughtful, adventuresome update of this tradition. The aristocracy of Ventus's vaguely medieval civilization are those who are able to influence the Winds, machine intelligences responsible for maintaining the world's delicately balanced ecosphere. A bit of magic is provided in the form of nanotech devices woven into the flora, fauna, and landscape.

As long as the book is, I wish a bit more time was spent looking at the society from the point of view of the inhabitants. As it happens, our viewpoint native, Jason, soon finds himself drafted by off-world mercenaries who have come to Ventus to hunt down the last remnants of a menacing superbeing. We get brief and tantalizing glimpses of a interstellar civilization, perhaps influenced by Vernor Vinge's space opera but unique enough to be interesting.

Despite these nits, I highly recommend this one, and look forward to more by Schroeder.

Rating:
Summary: Fun read
Review: The idea twist behind the story is that it takes place in a fantasy world where all the magic can be explained in SF terms. Fun read.

Rating:
Summary: A marvellous new voice in science fiction
Review: The planet Ventus is a marvel of the terraformer's art. Rather than shoving around great loads of soil, gasses and liquids to make the world hospitable, Ventus' designers deployed a mere 70 kilos of intelligent nanotechnology. When the nanos landed, they used the world's fabric to copy themselves, absorbing the world's foundations as a sponge absorbs a bucketful of water, until the very planet was intelligent -- or rather, intelligences, a collection of autonomous gods and demigods and sprites and spirits, collectively called the Winds.

Ventus sings. The ocean sings, "I am an ocean," and the waves sing, "I am a wave." The Winds sing their songs as they negotiate among themselves for the preparation of the world for the human masters to come. The clouds negotiate with the crops to provide water, the earthmovers negotiate with the sod over mineral allocation. Ventus is a Garden, a jewel of a world in a universe populated with innumerable humans and post-humans, and machine-human intelligences that embody as entire planets.

Ventus is a garden, fallen. A thousand years after the terraforming project, the Winds have forgotten their human masters. Now the Winds barely tolerate the fallen inhabitants of the garden world, capriciously manifesting as avenging angels that smash overly technological artifacts and their makers; manifesting as sinister morphs that maintain ecological balance by tearing bears apart to make gophers; manifesting as the attenuated, magnetic celestials whose Heaven hooks crush masonry and rend bone as they seek to expunge infectious humanity.

Jordan Mason, the boy-hero of the story, has been unwittingly implanted with off-world technology that turns him into a spy for Armiger, the avatar of the fallen God/world 3340. It's this very technology that makes him a target of the ruling machines, who come to perceive him a foreign technology that must be eliminated by the world's all-powerful immune system. Aided by the bounty-hunters Caladria May and Axel Chan, Jordan learns to control his technology and finds that the world itself is alive, shouting and singing in a billion variegated voices. Gradually, the boy comes to communicate with the planet itself, and to discover the internecine battles that have turned Ventus from Heaven to Hell.

Schroeder's a voracious autodidact, and he weaves his multifarious backgrounds into the storyline, burying clues to Ventus's mysteries in avant-garde linguistics, in pervasive computing theory, in cryptography, and in the theology of his apostate Mennonite forefathers. The book is as epic in scope as The Lord of the Rings, but more nuanced; it's as technologically daring as Snow Crash, but better controlled, with a narrative that makes its many pages fly past. Schroeder's created a startling, thought-provoking marvel of a book, a voice to equal any of the new guard that the Commonwealth has materialized of late: Scotsmen Ken MacLeod and Iain Banks and Aussie Greg Egan have a new contemporary.

Rating:
Summary: Ultimately doesn't work
Review: The story of Ventus is engaging but ultimately unsuccessful. Despite strenuous efforts, the author can't tie the story together with his chosen message/theme. There's always a problem when an SF writer attempts to write about beings with supposedly godlike powers and knowledge, and then tries to describe some revolutionary idea that they all missed. How can he think of it, if they can't? Schroeder does especially badly at this; apparently, all of the thinking power of various godlike AIs isn't sufficient to reveal what a relatively uneducated and not particularly insightful human can figure out just by sitting around in a room with some original information archives. Maybe there's a way to make this plausible, but it didn't make it into this book.

Still worth three stars for everything else in the book. The writing and concepts are excellent; they just needed to be directed toward a story that makes more sense.

Rating:
Summary: Epic scope, human scale
Review: Two things I'd add to the customer reviews already posted:

Although it's an epic, it's told on a human scale. Little of the narration is from a god's-eye point of view; it's mostly from the point of view of people on foot or horseback, tired, cold, hungry, lonely and lost. Schroeder made me feel, hear and smell the planet Ventus.

Also, there are deft "culture shock" touches which I enjoyed, like a nobleman laughing at (under-cover) off-worlder Axel's idiom, "I'm all ears."

Rating:
Summary: Possibly the SF book of the year
Review: Ventus could be heaven--every drop of water, grain of sand, flake of snow is created and shaped by the nanotechnology that has teraformed the planet and made it earthlike. Yet the self-replicating and fractally self-aware nanos that make up this world view humans with suspicion and bare tolerance. They may have been created to serve humans, but they have left this behind them.

Into this world comes Armiger, once a part of a God (a self-programmed artificial intelligence with superhuman powers and knowledge). If he can subvert the nanotechnology to his own ends, Ventus can become a power base stronger than anything known in the Universe.

Against Armiger stand a pair of off-planet near-humans who defeated the God he served before, and Jordon Mason, a local implanted with a portion of Armiger now turned to be a tool against him. All of their off-world powers offer little help, though, in a world where anything external is treated as a disease and eliminated.

Karl Schroeder makes this intriguing concept a powerful reality. Both characters and philosophical arguments are fully developed and convincing. The growth of Jordon, as he discovers that easy answers don't answer, the humanization of Armiger against his will, and the parallel changes in Calandria May (the off-worlder who seeks Armiger's destruction) are all sympathetic and believable.

Ventus is the best SF novel I've read this year.

Rating:
Summary: Good start, bad ending
Review: Ventus starts out very promising - good prose, good characters, good setting, great science - but halfway through it seems the author decides his characters aren't important, or not as important as the plot and science. Characters we come to enjoy fade or nearly disappear while new ones jump in and steal the stage, though they are obviously just tools to move the story-which they do poorly. The end of the novel is a jumble of characters running to collide while spewing lengthy monologues about the meaning life, man's relationship with nature, and several other deep thoughts which are hard to care about. Overall Ventus is disappointing.

Rating:
Summary: enjoyable and flawed
Review: Ventus suffers from poor editing. This is all the more disappointing because it could have been wonderful rather than merely good. The editing problems range from minor (repeated descriptors, sentences that should be rearranged, action discontinuity) to major (without giving too much away, I'll just say that the idea that Armiger has no DNA is nonsensical in the context provided by the story), but all could have been addressed easily to make this a much better piece of writing. I enjoyed Ventus from the perspective of its worldbuilding, and as in some of Brin's novels, I enjoyed learning about the civilization through offhand comments and inference rather than direct exposition.