Should really have been called, “An Abbreviated History of Western Scientific Thinking, from 1600 to Modern Times”, but that wouldn’t have been nearly so catchy. Nor is the book much more interesting than the expanded title would suggest. If you have any kind of interest in popular science, this book is going to seem like an extensive re-hash of what you already know. Bryson spends a lot of time relating anecdotes involving both key and lesser-known scientific figures from the last few hundred years, but the scope of the book inevitably forces him to omit lots of detail. If you have watched the BBC series Local Heroes with Adam Hart Davies, you’ll be very disappointed. Bryson doesn’t have the same energy or love for the subject matter as Hart Davies. Although his foreword proclaims a burning desire to understand the questions science has answered (or tried to answer), by the end of the book his wit feels forced, and any impression of real enthusiasm has fallen by the wayside. Pity.

Cayce Pollard is a cool hunter, a woman with an instinct for the next big thing, and an allergy to excessive branding. She is also a dedicated follower of something called “the footage,” a mysterious series of film fragments that someone, somewhere, is posting on the web. No-one knows who they are, what they mean, or even if the clips are from a finished film or a work in progress. While working on a big job involving a major corporate rebranding, Cayce gets persuaded to find out where the footage is coming from.

Although the hunt for the footage makes for a fine plot, driving the action from London to Tokyo to Moscow, it’s really Cayce herself, and the people she meets that make the book more than a simple mystery thriller. (Which is just as well, because the ending suffers from Sidelined Protagonist Syndrome, although not as much as, say, Greg Bear’s Vitals.) Hubertus Bigend, the charming entrepreneur; Parkaboy, the enthusiastic footagehead she interacts with via forum and email; Voytek, the artist who collects old ZX-81 computers; Dorotea, the über-bitch designer and former industrial éspion; and so many more.

Gibson’s prose is smooth like Belgian chocolate, and cool like an Armani glacier. The last third of the book is more plot-driven than character-driven, but Pattern Recognition is never less than a delight to read. Each page is an adventure, each sentence a treat. Exceedingly worthwhile.

Broken Angels is Richard Morgan’s second book, a follow-up to the excellent Altered Carbon. Although they both feature the hard-bitten Takeshi Kovacs as the hero, they take very different tracks. Altered Carbon was a dark, SF detective thriller; Broken Angels is a fast-moving treasure hunt adventure with mercenaries, greedy corporations, mysterious alien artefacts, sex, and guns. Lots of guns. Morgan’s writing is graphic and assured, and the plot rips along at a roaring pace. There are a lot of twists and betrayals–perhaps too many for an action-based book like this. Not all of them can be resolved during the climax, and so there is a long cool-down chapter afterwards, in which the characters have to explain everything that couldn’t be worked into the main plot. Nevertheless, it’s a cracking read–classic space adventure for the modern eye.

This book is quite clearly pitched at the intersection of people who love movies, and people who love writing, i.e., aspiring screenwriters. (It suited me down to the ground.) The first part of the book consists of fascinating and funny anecdotes about his long and successful career as a screenwriter, mixed with snippets of advice about writing for the movies. In the next two sections, he goes into more depth about screenplays and how they work. In the last part, he presents a rough draft of a new screenplay–written for this book–and critiques of it by other famous writers. I love reading and listening to people talk passionately about their craft, whether it’s joinery, cooking, or writing. Goldman has a witty, self-deprecating yet simultaneously confident tone, and he is a joy to read. Which Lie Did I Tell? is an informative, and highly entertaining book.

Argh–this book had the potential to be really great, but it falls apart about two-thirds of the way through. It starts out as a fast-paced science-fiction detective story. We’re not quite a century into the future, and the technology of has enabled people to make temporary copies of themselves. These copies are called golems, or dittos. They’re made of specially engineered, recyclable clay, and they only last a day. At the end of a day, they have to inload their memories into their original, or they will run out of stored energy and die. But they are true copies, with all the intellect and emotions of the real people they are copies of.

Albert Morris is a “ditective”, a detective specialising in ditto copyright violations and other property crimes. Dittos are considered as property. They are expendable, and have virtually no rights. The story starts by following a green copy of Morris (all dittos are colour-coded) as it tries to escape from a band of thugs, so that it can return to the real Morris, and inload a set of memories that are crucial to the case he is working on. Brin proceeds to use the structure and voice of a detective novel to elaborate on the society that this ditto technology has created, on the benefits, problems, and practicallities inherent in having copies of yourself running around, and on the philosophical consequences of self-multiplication. It’s a beautiful blend of SF and crime fiction, and Brin’s light narrative touch makes it a sheer joy to read.

The problem comes when Brin deviates from the detective thread, and turns the novel into “pure” science fiction. SF relishes taking a world in flux, or a society on the brink of enormous change, and cutting to the heart of the issue. It finds the people directly involved with the technology/conflict/disaster, and puts them under a microscope in order to tell the larger story through these characters. This means that ultimately the story is not about the characters themselves: they are secondary to the “Big Idea” the author wants to write about.

This is where Kil’n People goes wrong. It starts off being about the characters, and then switches to being about the Idea. The Idea happens to be really good and interesting, but it’s the characters that drew me into the book, and I was disappointed when it wandered off into metaphysics rather than staying with the murder mystery. The pace, and the whole feel of the book changed, and not for the better. Had Brin stayed with the mystery, and resolved it without trying to explain the whole nature of his fictional universe, it would probably have been the best SF detective story I had ever read. He could have carried it on as a series, and he would have had me hooked for life. But he didn’t, and so it has to go down as a just another good SF story, full of ideas, with interesting characters and a satisfying plot. Good, but not great. Damn.