This is a sequel of sorts to Arthur C. Clarke's short story "A Meeting with Medusa." Due to a horrific accident, astronaut Howard Falcon has become a cyborg, mostly machine with only a few remaining organic components. However, he's now effectively immortal and uniquely qualified to explore the interior of Jupiter's harsh environment. The Medusa Chronicles is about his continuing journey through time and space as Machines rise to take over the solar system and kick us off our own planet because they need the resources of Earth. Because this is written by Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, this story gets very, very wild as both authors love to probe the limits of our understanding of science and technology.

This was the first Agatha Christie novel I've read. What I find most interesting about it is that it seems to be filled with cliches. But that's because this is where the cliches began. The Agatha Christie-style mystery has been imitated and parodied in countless stories and television shows. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia even mocked this style of mystery with their classic episode "Who Pooped the Bed?"

I was surprised that the actual murder doesn't take place until halfway through the novel. Until then, Christie spends a great deal of time setting up the possible motives from each of the suspects so that the reader is not quite sure who could have done it. Naturally, Poirot sorts everything out at the end, though it really wasn't too much of a surprise to me. Total body count is about five or so by the end of the book.

This is the first book I've read where it commanded me to burn the book before reading it. That's because it's not a book at all. It's a demon that's trapped in book form. It wants to be freed from its prison and it believes that burning the book will finally kill it forever. It's a humorous dark fantasy about the demon's life that led it to be trapped in a book for all time.

Technobabble: The Novel

Seriously. This book is approximately 80% technical mumbo-jumbo and 20% plot. Stephenson spends page after page explaining what's happened to the Earth-Moon system after the Moon simply blew up for no reason. There's a loose plot about humans surviving the end of the world, but there's a massive time skip about 2/3 through the book (5000 years) where humans go from just a handful of survivors to a thriving civilization in space. No real explanation of how that happened other than the desperate plan of the final seven survivors just worked.

In the indefinite future, humans are promised immortality by the global megacorporation Forever Center. Everyone works to buy shares in Forever Center because they believe that they will emerge into their "second life" richer than ever thanks to the magic of compound interest.

As near as I can tell, Forever Center really can't deliver on their promises, only stating that they are working on the problem of immortality, the solution of which is just a few years away.

This is one of Simak's darker stories. Most of his stories are pretty optimistic in the end, but not this one. Still a pretty good read, as Simak explores issues surrounding the ideas of physical immortality vs. the spiritual immortality promised by Christianity.