Half Way Home
By Hugh Howey
Half Way Home is a 2010 book by Hugh Howey that was, for some reason, re-released in 2019. I don’t think it holds up that well against his more recent work but it does give some early indication of where he was going.
What we have here is basically a retelling of The Lord of the Flies, with a colony of teenagers finding themselves on another planet after their ship’s AI fails to fully abort their mission. Once again the reset button has been pressed on civilization, a frequently recurring theme in today’s SF. But where Golding’s classic novel is pessimistic in its depiction of tribal human nature taking over Howey is more hopeful about our ability to triumph over adversity, in the form of the devil in the machine and a few bad apples.
I found Half Way Home to be readable but light, and not just for being aimed at a YA audience. There is a tendency in our more optimistic SF writers to see human evil as not inherent but something artificial and thus capable of being corrected or overcome. It’s not a point of view I share, and I find the politics of these books can sometimes get preachy, but as an antidote to the more misanthropic turns our dystopian fiction has been taking it’s worth considering.
Time travel is a venerable science fiction trope, so much so that various sub-genres of time travel story can be identified. Permafrost may remind us of of 12 Monkeys in its basic premise, which has it that in the year 2080 the world as we know it has gone to hell, the result of a total environmental collapse known as the Scouring. A group of scientists in Russia, however, have come up with a way to inject the consciousness of selected “pilots” into the minds of people living fifty years earlier by way of MRI machines. In this way they hope to avert catastrophe.
The Rosewater Insurrection is the second part of Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy. The first book in the series, 
Frankenstein is, I think by broad consensus, the first science fiction novel. Yes, the science is only glanced at, and in the 1831 edition is actually played down to the point where it’s unclear even in the most general terms how Victor Frankenstein gives life to his creation. But it’s clear that Victor isn’t using black magic to raise the dead, and as a type of the mad scientist he would go on to have a long life within the genre. Such figures aren’t punished by God or the gods (indeed we can’t even be sure if either Victor or his creation has read the Bible) but instead must be judged by the results of their experiments. After all, Victor can’t really help himself when it comes to pursuing his passions. Elizabeth is such a cold figure — more sister than lover — and he’s so lonely. The Creature is his true love, albeit of the type one regrets in the morning.
The Last Iota is the action-packed sequel to Robert Kroese’s hit neo-noir mystery The Big Sheep, returning us to a mid-twenty-first-century, post-Collapse Los Angeles and the team of brainy private investigator Erasmus Keane and his brawny partner Blake Fowler.
Is it science fiction? Well, it’s prophetic. It describes itself, paradoxically, as a vision of “a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.” Shouldn’t that mean that its particular dystopic vision is now passé?
The post- but still part-human cyborg has proven to be one of the most enduring figures in SF. And as our tools and technology lead to further extensions and augmentations in the best McLuhanesque fashion, it keeps getting easier to identify with these evolving human-machine hybrids.