In Martin Martin's On The Other Side by Mark Wernham, it's about 40 years from now, and everything has gone dystopian disco. It's like a mash-up of 1984 and Brave New World, as if Orwell's and Huxley's dueling visions have finally merged: the government keeps everyone under ubiquitous surveillance and crushes human potential - but there's also lots of great sex and drugs. Instead of Starbucks, there's a chain of coffee shops called Starfucks, where sex and drugs are readily available along with your coffee.

If that sounds a bit idiotic, well... that's sort of the point. It's an idiotic future, and we're invited into it by an idiotic narrator, Jensen Interceptor.

Jensen is a low-level government stooge, who loves monster trucks and big-screen televisions, and Porn Disco and taking bizarre drugs of all types so he can have orgies at Starfucks. Until one day, he stumbles on a group of Martin Martinists, the followers of an obscure television psychic who died in 2008. He goes off to investigate and infiltrate this scruffy group of radicals and "lezzies," but then he starts seeing the mysterious Martin Martin himself.

As the book goes on, we start to question whether Jensen Interceptor actually is Martin Martin, who also may be a guy named Emile who died in World War II. In a kind of Scanner Darkly riff, Jensen becomes both the investigator and the subject of the investigation, and reality starts to blur with fantasy. Soon, we're not really sure what's real and whether Jensen is just a dream that Martin Martin is having as he hovers near death, or vice versa.

The other work that Martin Martin owes an obvious debt to is Terry Gilliam's Brazil - Jensen Interceptor is like a much more idiotic version of Sam Lowry, sent out to bedevil poor honest people in the name of a fumbling bureaucracy. Like Lowry, he tries to navigate and justify the ways of a state that owns him and erases people close to him, in the name of fighting mostly fictitious terrorists. And like Lowry, he winds up getting weird lectures about the nature of the state and the need to keep order in the face of encroaching craziness. He also falls in love with a beautiful seemingly-innocent woman in the course of his investigations, and has weird problems with the plumbing in his apartment, leading to a kind of sewage disaster.

If Martin Martin's On The Other Side is sounding a bit derivative... that's not entirely misleading. It does have great moments of brilliance, however. For one thing, I really like the idea that a television psychic who actually starts to demonstrate psychic powers would pose the biggest threat to a repressive government - because Martin Martin can see the truth about the world, including who's guilty and who's lying, he has the capacity to blow the lid off all of society's secrets. And it turns out the surveillance state is built as much on protecting secrets as it is on discovering what people have to hide.

Also, the other thing I really loved about Martin Martin was its narrative voice. At first blush, Jensen is just another moron speaking in future dialect, with lots of references to random drugs called things like "boris," and phrases like "spank pad." It's got that thing that a lot of first-person narrators have, where the reader is frequently way ahead of the main character - especially when he's just done a fistful of drugs and is trying to be smart. And yet, the narrator also has moments of incredible lyricism. He turns out to have a gift for empathy that rivals Martin Martin's gift for clairvoyance. He'll meet random characters and spend a page or two imagining what it must be like to be them - at one point, he's eating some eels that a homeless person has roasted, and he's picturing what it must be like to be an eel, swimming in river mud and minding your own business, until someone grabs you out and nails you to a board, then skins you alive. It's a weird trait for a government enforcer to have, this awareness of the suffering of others.

There were many moments during Martin Martin when I felt the book was reaching for true greatness, and it was going somewhere amazing. And then those moments, inexorably, slipped away. We revisit the same incidents in the life of Martin Martin over and over again, from slightly different perspectives, until his life starts to feel as redundant as his name. And the book's ending, which I won't give away, feels like a major letdown.

All in all, I liked parts of Martin Martin quite a bit - and I could see why some British critics were so enthralled with it, and why it got that nomination. But my main thought during and after reading it was: I'm quite curious to read Mark Wernham's second novel, to see how his storytelling matures.

Martin Martin's On The Other Side [Amazon.com]

Martin Martin's On The Other Side was nominated for a Clarke Award. Read more of io9's coverage of 2009's book award nominees here.

What is immediately and consistently engaging about The Quiet War is McAuley's ability to turn the hard sciences of bioengineering and synthetic ecosystems into the stuff of storytelling awesomeness. Reluctant hero Macy is a scrappy soil engineer who has been given a dream assignment on Jupiter's moon Callisto. Brilliant at putting together the perfect combination of bacteria and chemicals to create topsoils, she's been recruited by a crack team of eco-engineers who are building a new domed habitat there.

As we plunge into her geeky work with carbon captures and gene expression, we learn quickly that the novel is set in a future where Earth has suffered a catastrophic environmental collapse. As a result, its governments have become arch conservatives devoted entirely to ecosystem stability. One of the most powerful governments is that of Greater Brazil, where Macy grew up into a political world that resembles a Mafia family more than a democracy. The citizens are ruled by great families who own the people who work for them and offer special privileges to those who are "consanguinous," or connected to the families by blood.

While Earth's culture curdles, its colonies bloom. New developments in synthetic biology have allowed millions of people to relocate offworld, moving outward to the moons of Saturn and Jupiter (Mars has been destroyed in a war). Led by culture hero and "gene wizard" Avernus, the Outers have created perfect biosystems within their domes, breeding vacuum crops that can leech necessary elements from the moons' soils and oceans and ice. They live in Enceladus' underground oceans, plant their crops on the shoulders of asteroid impacts, and grow gardens deep in the clouds of Saturn.

When McAuley is describing the amazing environments where the Outers live, complete with exotic flora, he's at his soaring best. He's created a world that feels scientifically plausible, and infuses it with a sense of genuine wonder. In essence, he's built the perfect setting for a quest narrative which rambles across astonishing lands that lead to something unimaginable. Unfortunately, however, McAuley isn't interested in quests. This novel is about war and espionage.

Don't get me wrong - I love war and espionage. And I think the political backdrop for The Quiet War makes good kindling for a system-wide blowup when an authoritarian Earth grows wary of the libertarian Outers. But despite intriguing characters like Macy, and a tragic bio-engineered terrorist named Dave, McAuley just isn't able to convince us that his war makes sense.

To be fair, this is partly because his message is that war is absurd. When Greater Brazil starts sending warships into orbit around key moons of Jupiter and Saturn as a kind of warning to the Outers, the Outer groups go nuts (especially a city named Paris - allegory much?). They become paranoid and issue threats. But then Brazil, which seems to want war really badly for reasons that are never truly explained beyond "those Outers just seem plumb different from us," responds with assassinations and more warships. At the bottom of the anti-Outer hatred is nothing more than ideology: People from Earth worship nature, and abhor the idea that the Outers are mutating nature and their own bodies in order to adapt to their new environments. Again, I think McAuley's point is well-taken: Many wars are begun over ideological differences even more daft than these.

When key personnel on her Callisto dome project are killed, Macy becomes a suspect amid growing tensions and has to flee from one weird moon city to another. Here, again, McAuley shows off his strengths: He offers pitch-perfect vignettes of small, isolated communities devoted to weird, Burning Man-style ideals like new age therapy or YouTube art. Everywhere Macy goes, she's startled by people who are recording her every move on video and posting it to the crazy, ubiquitous net the Outers adore (back on Earth, where the governments are more authoritarian, there is no social media - only top-down propaganda). She meets separatists who believe they are carrying out orders from their future selves, and a cute adventurer with a pink spaceship called Elephant.

No matter where she winds up, however, Macy manages to find work as a soil engineer, helping to build new habitats on the moons where humanity is evolving into something new - and yet something very familiar. Dogged by a petty Brazilian bureaucrat, and aided by the mysterious Avernus, Macy manages to survive the worst of the conflict.

It sounds odd to say this about such a long novel, but The Quiet War leaves you wishing for more. Not more story as in "give me twenty sequels," but just more of Macy's human side to the story in this war that has swept her up against her will. Intead, McAuley tries to give us the big perspective, bringing in politicians and spies and counter-spies as well as an evil foil to the gene wizard Avernus - a woman called Sri whose cruelty and motivations are never satisfactorily explained.

Though flawed, The Quiet War makes you want more precisely because there's so much promise in its primary characters and settings. McAuley makes science incredibly exciting, and you'll have his weird images and ideas in your brain for days after you put the book down. War may not have been the best plot device to get this story in motion, but the vacuum organisms and communes on Uranus make this a novel well worth your time.

If you're in the States and want to get your mitts on this book, don't fret. Pyr is bringing out a US edition later this year.

The Quiet War via Amazon

Little Brother is set five minutes into the future, when terrorists blow up San Francisco's Bay Bridge and the BART tunnel. This brings about a huge crackdown, with tons of American citizens being rounded up and imprisoned in a secret prison on Treasure Island - or shipped off to foreign countries to be tortured.

The novel's main character, Marcus, is a snarky teen hacker with authority issues. And that's before he gets locked up and abused by the Department of Homeland Security, and his friend Darryl disappears for good. That event transforms Marcus from a minor-league hacker to a major dissident and subversive element.

Marcus is a classic Doctorow protagonist: snarky and pissed off, but with an amazingly tender heart lurking just below the jagged armor. He launches a quixotic crusade to make the American government spooks pay, which starts out by "jamming" the government's attempts to profile people based on their travel and purchases, and gradually grows into far-reaching civil disobedience, and a massive network of young people communicating via hacked xBoxes.

Many, if not most, young-adult science fiction novels take place in a dystopian or post-apocalyptic setting, where the grown-ups have long since stopped asking questions about the evil overlords and their excessive overlording. The twisted genius of Doctorow's novel is that it starts out in our world, more or less, and then shows how easily and quickly it transforms into a dystopia.

The "Panopticon," in which observation and spying are constant companions, becomes an alarming reality in Little Brother. It turns out all of those devices that make your life easier, like transit fast passes, credit cards, and RFID-enabled tags, allow the government to track your every movement. And anyone whose movements falls outside normal patterns can be arrested - or simply made to disappear - unless you can "prove" that you're not a terrorist.

And the adult characters in Little Brother quickly become inured to this crazy surveillance regime, accepting it as a necessary evil to stop those awful terrorists from destroying our way of life. Marcus' dad, in particular, goes from being a critic of the government to an apologist for the Homeland Security fascists. And adults who do encourage dissent, such as Marcus' Social Studies teacher, tend to lose their jobs or vanish some other way.

The other thing that sticks in your mind after reading Little Brother is the alarming depiction of propaganda gone insane. Marcus' version of Dumbledore's Army becomes so successful, they start getting condemned on Fox News and in the newspapers, and in the mass media generally, and no matter how media-savvy Marcus tries to be, he only makes things worse. At one point, he does a "press conference" in a virtual world, where he tries to explain his viewpoint, and the press only twists his words around:

I'd blown it, somehow. The press had come to my press-conference and concluded that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst was the reporter on Fox News, who had apparently shown up anyway, and who devoted a ten-minute commentary to us, talking about our "criminal treason." Her killer line, repeated on every news-outlet I found, was:

"They say they don't have a name. I've got one for them. Let's call these spoiled children Cal-Quaeda. They do the terrorists' work on the home front. When — not if, but when — California gets attacked again, these brats will be as much to blame as the House of Saud."

Leaders of the anti-war movement denounced us as fringe elements. One guy went on TV to say that he believed we had been fabricated by the DHS to discredit them.

The title, Little Brother, comes from the idea that young people can become "little brothers" keeping tabs on "Big Brother," but it kept reminding me of this classic 80s song:

And meanwhile, Doctorow doesn't neglect the "love story" portion of the young-adult formula. Through his rabble-rousing, Marcus meets the defiant Ange, who's just as radical and brilliant as he is, and they bond over spicy food, loud music, hacking and civil disobedience. Compared to the Orwellian nightmares of the main storyline, the Marcus-Ange love story feels a bit less urgent, but it still has moments of genuine sweetness and gives us another reason to root for Marcus in his struggle.

You can tell Doctorow was a staffer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the techie civil liberties organization. He mentions EFF a number of times in the novel, and the book is full of helpful little asides where Marcus explains the ins and outs of surveillance, hacking and computer security.

Major spoiler: The only real problem I had with Little Brother was the happy ending, which felt a bit forced. It actually reminded me of the fake happy ending in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and for a moment I thought Doctorow was doing something similar - I thought Marcus was fantasizing this happy ending while he was being tortured by government goons. I felt a bit let down when I realized the happy ending was "real," and there's a part of me that still imagines the book's narration panning back from Marcus' comatose face, as someone says "He's gone."

But generally, Little Brother represents a great step forward in the burgeoning subgenre of dystopian young-adult SF. It brings a greater degree of political sophistication, geekiness and civil disobedience to a genre that was already serving up a milder dose of rebellion. After this, no YA novel will be able to get away with watering down its youthful revolution.

Little Brother was nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards. Read more of io9's coverage of 2009's book award nominees here.

In a sense, Making Money is Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle writ small and funny. I should reveal here that I did not finish The Baroque Cycle. This is also only the third Discworld novel I have read, but enjoyed the other two.

Clearly there has been a lot going on since I last visited the Discworld. Moist von Lipwig, also the hero of Going Postal, was a petty thief and con-man given the choice of facing the gallows, or setting Ankh-Morpork's postal system on its feet. He has now been drafted to reform the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork, although there is also a lingering feeling that he has been gently but firmly ushered into a conspiracy to nationalize Ankh-Morpork's banking system. Sound familiar? There's also a mad plutocrat and an enigmatic mystery surrounding the city's golems, who are not Jewish but are definitely indefatigable workers made of clay.

In the ensuing pages, Moist's shrewd grasp of street-level microeconomics once again stands him in good stead (viz the grasp of "sweating" gold currency - jingling it in a bag until it sheds enough gold dust to be usable). To say that he succeeds by liberating Ankh-Morpork from the gold standard sells the book a bit short. Pratchett deftly dramatizes the question "what is money?" in the context of a fantasy novel. Is it gold? Why is it gold, when gold isn't good for anything other than being gold? If it's not gold, what the hell is it? Hint: the symbol of economics is a worn black top hat - a symbol for cheap magic, just sleight of hand really; a dirty kind of psychological magic. Or as Pratchett puts it, "It was a dream, but Moist was good at selling dreams. And if you could sell the dream to enough people, no one dared to wake up."

The comic results of contemporary capitalism mixed in with heroic fantasy - as old as Bilbo's contractual negotiations with a wizard and a band of dwarves - are in full play here. The arrival of a cohort of golems threatens not mayhem, but a labor shortage; an alchemical economic instrument reveals the witchy reversibility of causation between economic model and reality, courtesy a mad scientist (er simulationist-economist) and his Igor.

For all the economic theory in play here, Pratchett makes everything look easy - you get the sense that he's one of the smartest people writing fantasy out there, but he just doesn't feel like showing it off. He is always unbelievably fluid in his prose and the comic aphorisms that seem to flow out of him. Every once in a while he cues his punchlines too noticeably, with an "after all," or an "oh all right then." But it's hard to complain - he also uses the word "hopefully" correctly. Also: "charivari."

House Of Suns is one of those novels that assumes a shape after you're done reading it. All of the elements that seemed purely random fall into place, and you realize quite what an intricate design you've been looking at all this time. During the story, however, you're frequently left wondering if Reynolds was throwing darts at an idea-board. This novel has everything: artificial intelligences that become sentient, post-humans, questions of faster-than-light travel and causality, cloning, virtual worlds, a murder mystery and a group of nigh-immortal people dealing with the burden of history in a more personal way than most of us ever do.

It's probably one of those novels that's more satisfying to re-read than to read, actually. A lot of the cool elements will seem a lot more satisfying the second time around, and when you can see the whole picture, you'll appreciate the flow of the story more. The first time around, though, the novel feels like an endless succession of awesome ideas and neat moments. It probably doesn't help that it has the kind of post-human characters who are common in the new space opera: all of the main characters in the book are six million years old, and have seen galactic civilizations rise and fall, over and over.

In House of Suns, it's six million years in the future, and humans have colonized the entire galaxy. Our heroes are "shatterlings," or a set of clones of a woman named Abigail Gentian, who lived six million years ago. They create "stardams," or artificial spheres around suns that are in danger of going nova, for a living. And there are other sets of "shatterlings," other groups of clones of wealthy people who lived six million years ago. Thanks to travel at relativistic speeds, and various methods of slowing down people's bodily functions, the main characters have only lived through a fraction of those six million years. (They're called "shatterlings" because in some sense, they divide up the identity of their progenitor amongst them.)

Our two main characters are Campion and Purslane, two clones of Abigail Gentian, who are committing a "shatterling" taboo by carrying on a sexual/romantic relationship. Their forbidden love for each other is one of the two relatable things in the book, and it drives a lot of the story forward in the second half. The other major emotional strand in the book is their friendship with Hesperus, a "machine intelligence," or robot, who nearly dies to save them from a horrific massacre.

That massacre turns out to be tied to a crime that the "shatterlings" are complicit in, but have forgotten, millions of years ago. And that historical atrocity, which is both ancient and personal, turns out to be connected to a whole host of other secrets about the nature of the galaxy and our place in the universe. Meanwhile, we learn about another crime, which the clones' progenitor, Abigail Gentian, committed in her youth, inside a virtual world called Palatial. In a universe where we're reminded, over and over, that "nascent" societies rise up out of nothing, only to die off again in a scant half-million years, how much do we owe to the ghosts of the intelligences we've wronged?

In a real sense, House Of Suns is about history, and the fragility of memory. The shatterlings have lived almost as long as humans have had language, but what they've forgotten about the galaxy — and what they never knew — would fill volumes. And it turns out almost everything they believed about themselves, as dispassionate observers, aloof from the barbarism of history, is false. (I'm trying to avoid major spoilers here.)

Another major theme in the book is the prejudices of organic life forms against artificial intelligences. Early on, we meet an aquatic creature named Doctor Meninx, who is a Disavower, an organic who hates A.I.s and doesn't believe they have souls. He's quick to assume the worst of any machine intelligence, even though the main A.I. character in the story, Hesperus, turns out to be the most sympathetic and altruistic character. Of course, later on we meet machines who don't have humans' best interests at heart, but by then we've discovered there's a lot more to the picture than we'd realized.

Besides the somewhat unrelatable characters — even Campion and Purslane, with their star-spanning love, feel a bit empty most of the time — the novel's other big problem is its structure. Reynolds chooses a structure that few novelists could pull off. The novel is divided into eight "books," and each book starts with a first-person section from the point of view of Abigail Gentian, who becomes the progenitor of most of the clones we meet in the book. (Her "shatterlings" are referred to as "Line Gentian.") And then within each book, we alternate chapters from Campion and Purslane's point of view. (This isn't explained, you just have to sort of pick it up.) So the novel has three first-person narrators, two of whom are clones of the third. For understandable reasons, all three narrators have the same narrative voice, and share the same values and attitudes. In other words, the narrative trick is just a way for Reynolds to get across more information, without dipping into third-person narration. But it's a distracting structure, confusing at times and a bit annoying at others.

And the other huge structural problem is that the novel's story actually starts on page 96 or thereabouts. Nearly the first hundred pages are just backstory, introducing us to our main characters and giving us some exposition we'll need later on. Nothing of any real consequence happens in the first 100 pages, other than that Campion and Purslane meet Hesperus.

I found the novel slow going until around page 100, and then it suddenly became a compulsive read that I found myself staying up until three A.M. reading. (In fact, as I write this, I'm a bit sleep-deprived thanks to the crackling narrative intensity of House Of Suns. It really does get amazingly good, and you're kept wondering what happens next. The murder mystery stuff is fun while it lasts, and the space battles are exciting as all get-out.) At the same time, the last chapters of the novel contain massive amounts of infodump, as characters explain the plot to each other.

The novel brims with ideas, many of which deserve their own book. There are the Priors, the mysterious ancient intelligences who left behind a few clues to their super-advanced civilization. There's the Absence, a black void that seems to have swallowed the Andromeda Galaxy. There's the Golden Hour, a kind of ring around a single sun containing a number of worlds that are never more than an hour's communication apart at sub-light speeds. There's Palatial, the virtiual-reality world where young Abigail Gentian spends her time, which seems to become sentient.

I found House Of Suns incredibly clever and sweeping and thought-provoking, and it all pays off in the final chapter with a very cosmic moment where the story's sweep opens up to take in a much larger, and stranger cosmos than we've glimpsed so far. Once you get past the slow begining, it's an exhilerating read that keeps your brain buzzing the whole time. And there's a payoff to the Campion-Purslane-Hesperus relationship that caught me by surprise and made me love those characters much more than I'd been able to during the novel. I'm not sure it's a great novel as a novel, but as an exploration of the myriad possibilities of our far-future descendants in a vast, bizarre cosmos, House Of Suns is a terrific read.

House Of Suns was nominated for a Clarke Award. Read more of io9's coverage of 2009's book award nominees here.

Tepper's work is often compared to Ursula Le Guin's because she fuses the spiritualism of epic fantasy with interstellar war stories. For these reasons her work could also be compared with the Star Wars franchise, where shamans in touch with a magical Force cross swords with space-faring fascists. But unlike Star Wars, which focuses pretty much relentlessly on male experiences and heroes, Tepper explores how women fare on many interconnected worlds facing uncertain fates.

Margaret begins her life as a little girl on a Martian space station, where her parents are scientists. Earth has become so overpopulated, polluted, and resource depleted that it can barely gain entrance to an union of alien civilizations called the Interstellar Trade Organization (sort of like an extraterrestrial WTO). Humans are viewed by most aliens as savages, unable to treat themselves and their planet wisely. Their ruthless exploitation of resources on Earth has left them with nothing to trade with the ISTO groups, and their continued population expansion puts their continued membership in the group in jeopardy. And this is membership they need, because its members protect them from dangerous, evil alien groups who want to carve up what's left of the Earth for its last remaining resources and leave the humans to die.

So the Earthian governent strikes a bargain with the ISTO. They'll shrink their population to livable levels by shipping out many humans to alien colonies or into slavery. In fact, human slaves are the one export the planet has, and the ISTO allows them in on that basis. Unfortunately, the humans keep breeding and sucking up resources. A cabal of kindly aliens sterilizes 95% of the Earth population, but that still doesn't prevent humans elsewhere from repeating the same cycle of breed and pillage.

And that's where Margaret comes in. The kindly cabal - part of a secret order within the galactic Sisterhood - keeps watch over her as she divides into many selves, magic realism style. At various points in her life, when she makes momentous decisions, she divides into multiple Margarets who have each made the decision differently. Before one such decision, Margaret is marked by the population board on Earth as an extraneous human and tagged for shipment off the Earth. One self decides at the last minute to join a colony with her boyfriend, thus avoiding servitude. Two other selves refuse the boyfriend's offer: one winds up in bondage on a world where she tends intelligent sheep; and the other is apprenticed to a shaman (yes of course there are shamans in this book).

This aspect of the novel is quite simply amazing. Each of Margaret's selves is a believable, fully-fleshed-out character, and it's intriguing to watch how slightly different decisions turn the same person into quite different people in the end. One of Margaret's selves even becomes male, again via a moment of magical realism that slowly begins to seem oddly appropriate to this scifi tale about the mysteries of identity and choice. As the Margarets' stories unfold, we focus on a few of her selves more than others and the mysterious force that shattered them is slowly revealed.

It turns out that Margaret - all the Margarets - are required to exist so that they can help the Sisterhood discover a way for humanity to survive without constantly destroying its environment. The key lies in memory. Most intelligent species, it turns out, have ancestral memories that allow them to remember first-hand what it's like to be in war, to starve, and to know fear as a slave. Because humans don't have that kind of memory, they make the mistakes of war and slavery over and over again. They simply can't learn as a species quickly enough, though their written history helps prevent them from becoming completely evil.

To save humans, Margaret also has to discover why alien creatures called ghyrm are appearing all over human worlds, sucking the life out of people who discover them. A conspiracy that is half-political, half-spiritual ultimately ties the human and ghyrm problems together - and leads to their solution. In the meantime, the Margarets go on an adventure that spans wormholes, the realm of the gods, a planet of female slaves, a land full of dragons and green elfish creatures, and even leads her into deep friendship with a talking cat. All of this sounds a little cheesy, and believe me, it is. There are some cutsey moments in the novel that verge on atrocious. But ultimately The Margarets is saved by the non-cutsey, gritty intensity of the main chracters. All roads lead back to a meditation on the true nature of human selfhood, always divided but also with the capacity to become whole.

If you're looking for a hard science fiction novel with realistic political intrigues, The Margarets probably won't work for you. But if you're willing to suspend disbelief and enter the echoing realms of the psyche along with spaceships to distant planets, you'll find this novel supremely satisfying. As ever Tepper is unafraid to ask the hard questions about human nature, and to propose radical solutions to it. And she manages to bring magic into a story whose human characters feel as real as people you meet every day on this insane planet whose future is anything but certain.

The Margarets was nominated for a Clarke Award. Read more of io9's coverage of 2009's book award nominees here.

On the 19th of May, 2001 Charlie and Jack, Juniors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, invite the three girls from downstairs to hang out and try Jack's first successful attempt at home-brewed beer. The beer's pretty good - but in the morning something more extraordinary has occurred than Charlie's fumbling make-out session with his dream girl, Caroline. All five of them awake with a bit of a hangover and new abilities, right out of a comic book.

Each of them has gained one of the more typical powers from our dreams of wish-fulfillment. Caroline, who feels ignored by her globe-trotting cougar mom, can fly. Jack gets mistaken for a big clumsy lunkhead, but now the local farmboy and Chem major is the fastest man alive. Short, bookish study-grind Mary Beth can toss cars around like nerf balls. Charlie, a good-natured but vague and unfocused slob becomes a mind-reader. Harriet is the daughter of a Madison P.D. detective and is haunted by a horrible incident in her past, so she gets the relatively lame power of invisibility. Almost immediately they all decide to band together as a superhero team.

Mary Beth purchases a stack of essential research from an amazingly helpful and informative woman at the local comic book store. Caroline whips up some Lycra costumes in primary colors. Everybody goes to Jack's family farm to practice a few martial-arts moves Harriet picked up. Now properly prepared, they go off to fight crime, foiling an armored car heist on their very first day. At first this has all the makings of a comedy, and I immediately thought of the comic book Freshman by Seth Green and Hugh Sterbakov. Although there are several very funny moments, Schwartz wants us to take his story seriously. This is meant to be a sober, realistic examination of normal confused, insecure kids thrust into fantastic circumstances. The characters are realistically portrayed and believable, but their powers are pure fantasy. The new heroes make no attempt to find out how any of this could possibly be happening. "Hey, I can fly! Well that's weird. Better get me a costume." Magic beer, really?

The powers are also utterly inconsistent with physics. A 5'2" girl stops a speeding car as if it had smashed into a wall. Her outfit gets torn but she hasn't budged an inch. Does she have some sort of force field like Alan Moore used with Miracleman? Apparently that's none of our business, because no explanation is ever given for any of these miraculous feats. Forgive a nerd for nit-picking, but David Schwartz is an avowed comic book fan and should really have known better. I wouldn't want to wade through pages of Character Stats and technobabble, but if he wants to play in a realistic world, he should observe the rules.

Schwartz's characters are well-written with actual depth and personal backgrounds that live and breathe. The passages about Jack and his family coming to grips with his father's losing battle with cancer are especially moving. Like young people anywhere, they also struggle with demanding classes, crummy jobs, and disastrous romances. Most of the cast is very believable, maybe too much so. They are likable, normal - and ultimately, not very interesting.

The third-person omniscient narrative is occasionally interrupted by "Editor's Notes" written in the first person by a supporting character who supposedly wrote the book Superpowers. Marcus Hatch, independent journalist and conspiracy nut, breaks in repeatedly to remind us this is all a True Story, that He Was There, and that Terrible Things will happen before the story is over. He also tosses around some vague ruminations on the nature of heroism. This is all mind-bogglingly annoying. And one of these Terrible Things, hmm... will it happen in the first half of September, 2001?

So do the superheros get involved with the tragic events of 9/11 and their aftermath? Not really. Other than losing people they knew and being horrified and furious, the heroes of this story have no more connection to 9/11 than most of us. Schwartz is telling us that even with superpowers, life is still filled with problems. While that is a bit depressing, his message is neither bleak, nor even particularly original. They keep the streets of Madison safe, but face no supervillain or any major threat other than lawsuits and keeping up their GPAs. There is also some attempt at political allegory, observations of the media and law, even a tantalizing hint of other superheroes in the world. Alas, none of it really goes anywhere. I cannot recommend this lightweight, bland tale of nice kids with superpowers and personal tragedies. It might make a perfect show for the CW, but I doubt I would ever watch it.

Superpowers via Amazon

This month, io9 reviews all the nominees for the Nebula, Hugo and Clarke awards. You can read them all here.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the Justice League of Dawson's Creek as Christopher Hsiang. Next book, please.

For those of you unfamiliar with Scalzi's previous novels in this series, a quick recap. Humanity has reached the stars to find the neighborhood teeming with other races all vying for the same planets to colonize. The Colonial Union governing all the human worlds except Earth has a tight monopoly on all travel, commerce, and information between the colonies. The home world is kept ignorant technologically and politically. Mother Earth is just the CU's breeding ground for more colonists, mostly from the Third World, and cannon fodder for their endless wars. The Colonial Defense Force doesn't draft witless eighteen-year-olds to do their dirty work. They want educated volunteers with life-experience who no longer fill useful roles in dirtside society.

On his seventy-fifth birthday John Perry leaves Earth to fulfill his contract with the CDF expecting never to return. He and his fellow septuagenarian are shortly amazed to find themselves in young healthy bodies. CDF soldiers wear cloned flesh with augmented abilities covered in chloroplast imbued skin. These old fogies are now mean green fightin' machines armed to the teeth facing alien armies over hotly contested planets, "Get off my lawn, you tentacled scum!"

This series has often been compared favorably with Starship Troopers, although Scalzi treads a bit lighter on the soapbox than Grand Master Heinlein and has a superior sense of humor. If you haven't read Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony you are in for a treat. Zoë's Tale is more of a companion novel than a sequel and works fine as a stand alone story. It recounts the events from The Last Colony but from the viewpoint of John Perry's seventeen-year-old adopted daughter Zoë and is the stronger novel for it.

The story opens as John and his wife, Jane Sagan a former Special Forces officer, have retired from the CDF in new demilitarized bodies living as rural colonists with their daughter. Zoë's biological father was Charles Boutin, a scientist who schemed with an advanced race called the Obin against humanity. The Obin were uplifted to sentience by the Consu, a godlike and enigmatic species who gave the Obin intelligence without consciousness, then kicked them to the galactic curb without explanation. Boutin offered the Obin a technology that would give them all individual consciousness and emotion in exchange for wiping out the CU whom he believed responsible for Zoë's death.

Of course Zoë wasn't dead, the plot failed, Boutin was killed, but the technology worked. To honor Boutin for his miraculous gift the Obin made a truce with the Humans and sent two of their kind to protect and serve Zoë, whom they revere with something akin to worship. Her two bodyguards, Hickory and Dickory – she named them when she was very young – vaguely resemble a cross between a giraffe and a tarantula, carry huge knives and scare the bejeesus out of everybody. They treat her like a beloved magic princess but she still has to do homework and chores and junk, bummer. Clearly the girl has issues.

Naturally, a quiet pastoral life is not in the cards for this odd but loving little family. The growing populations of the older established colonies pressure the CU to continue spreading out into an increasingly dangerous galaxy. Because of their leadership skills and military record John and Jane are asked to lead a brand new colony called Roanoke. I know, why not just call it Certain Doomsylvania? At least their ship isn't named the Titanic. Immediately things go terribly wrong. The tiny colony is cut off from the rest of the CU deprived of advanced technology on a world with an incompatible biology and a savage native species. A Conclave of a hundred hostile races patrols space sworn to destroy any further human colonization. And oh yeah, the whole planet smells like a stinky locker room.

As young people do, Zoë adapts quickly to this difficult new life. She, her wise-cracking pals, and her absolutely dreamy boyfriend, Enzo, manage to have fun when they can while working alongside the adults for Roanoke's survival. Zoë inherited Boutin's brilliance as well as her adopted father's relentless,sarcastic wit and Jane's fierce determination and resourcefulness. Good thing too, because she's going to need all that and more to save herself and the new colony.

I wondered if it was very realistic to have a heroine that young be so clever and observant while spouting off with Scalzi's trademark sarcasm. Some readers might think that a brilliant and resourceful young Messiah of an alien race who Saves the Day with blatant Deus ex Machina has it a bit too easy. But Zoë's Tale isn't really about the clash of mighty empires or rescuing loved ones from monsters, exciting as those parts are — it's about Zoë. It's about that time in our lives after we've come to grips with how the world sees us but we are still not sure how we see ourselves. It's not about what you are, but finding out who you are. This whip-smart, often funny, and deeply moving novel portrays that journey of self-discovery to the satisfaction of adults young or otherwise.

Zoë's Tale via Amazon

This month, io9 reviews all the nominees for the Nebula, Hugo and Clarke awards. You can read them all here.

Commenter Grey_Area is known among the space-cruising whipper-snappers as Christopher Hsiang. Why can't you young punks let an old man read in peace?!

Like Stross' 2005 novel Glasshouse, about humans who are randomly assigned genders to participate in an experiment with recreating the twentieth century, Saturn's Children is filled with interesting ideas about what it means to live in a body that you can discard or reshape pretty much at will. After humans die out, most bots model themselves on non-human forms or take on the visages of anime characters. Upper class bots remain fashionable by stretching their eyes to enormous anime sizes, and turning their hair into stiff, blue feathers. Their bot slaves are modeled on the "super deformed" style of anime character, short and squat, perfect for space travel that costs so much per pound that many bots prefer to amputate their limbs and buy new ones when they dock to save money.

One of the central conceits of Saturn's Children is that the bots' neurology is copied wholesale from humans' because the humans never figured out a way to create A.I. from scratch. That means bot brains are basically human — with all the attendant emotions and contradictions — except for one thing. They've all been hardwired to obey humans. As a result, as Freya observes repeatedly, the bot society that humans leave behind is about 70 percent slaves. A few lucky bots who have earned enough money own most of the other bots, controlling them via slave chips.

Freya and her sisters in the Rhea line are some of the lucky free agents who have established their freedom by creating shell corporations that "own" them (since robots use human law, and under human law no robot can be free, the bots have used weird legal loopholes like this to establish personal sovereignty). Over the hundreds of years they've been alive, the Rhea sisters have traded their memory chips back and forth, sharing memories and often merging their personalities partially as a result. Bereft of their "one true love," the humans, many of Freya's line have chosen to kill themselves. But others have found purpose in life by getting involved in an elaborate conspiracy to recreate humans out of the forbidden "pink goo" — and possibly liberate all the slave bots in the process.

As the plot thickens, and Freya gets involved (in all sorts of ways) with the line of humanoid Jeeves robots, Stross is able to give us a first-person sense of what it would feel like to be an individual who also has a limited collective consciousness. As I mentioned earlier, this novel felt to me like it was partly an effort to explore the minds of the sexbot-esque cylons on BSG. Freya hears the voices of her sisters in her mind, and experiences proxy feelings for the people they love (or hate), which is both confusing and ultimately life-saving for her. It also means she has the erotic dreams of her sisters, too, which comes in handy during those 4-year journeys across the solar system in nuke-powered ships with nothing to do but jack off.

There is a lot of jacking off in this book. And tentacle sex, and bondage, and lesbian sex, and sex with sentient hotel furniture, and sex with spaceships, and sex in space elevators, and sex with multiple siblings, and sex under the influence of slave chip mind control, and there is almost a scene of sex in front of a huge room full of people who have come to an auction. But here's the weird thing: None of it is particularly arousing, and when it happens it really is just so naturally part of the plot that you barely notice (after all, Freya is a sexbot so of course she has sex with everything). I have to admit, I was disappointed when Stross relentlessly kept the tone silly ("I feel him ventilating," Freya says of one lover) instead of erotic. However, I think his point is well-taken: For Freya, sex is just a body function she's been programmed for. It's not so much erotic as autonomic.

He may go goofy when it comes to sex, but one thing Stross is serious about is trying to represent space travel accurately. Anybody who has read his rant about how stupid it is to imagine that humans could travel in space knows that he's got a bone to pick, and pick it he does. There is no FTL here, and the only reason why anybody gets anywhere in the solar system in less than a decade is because they're robots whose bodies can withstand strains no human could.

So you'll want to come to this space thriller for hard science fun, and a little sexytime, but you'll stay because Stross always raises interesting philosophical questions that stick around in your brain. For example, what does it mean to be you if you are also partly your siblings? And how can you have freedom when your brain is programmed to serve, even if it's only to serve an absent master? The answers are always more complicated than you think.

Saturn's Children [via Amazon]

Saturn's Children has been nominated for a 2009 Hugo. Read about all the 2009 book award nominees here.