Divergence
The setting: human beings have colonized other planets, and cross vast distances in their warp-drive space ships. It's been done before, you say? Well, what if I tell you that the space ships can divide in two, like molecules?
British author Tony Ballantyne takes the space-opera sub-genre and makes it wholly his own. Divergence is the third book set in a future when self-replicating machines run rampant, chewing up everything in sight to make more copies of themselves, and the humans that remain on earth live under the happy thrall of an Artificial Intelligence called the Watcher. Godlike as the Watcher is, he naturally has to have an adversary, a Satan. Curiously, this Satan, another AI, is named Chris.
This novel brings up questions of free will: is it better to be free to make the usual neurotic mess of things, as humans will, or to be under the control of an AI who labours to make your life run as smoothly as possible? What if you are permitted to choose, but software ensures that the desired end result comes about regardless? Do your choices mean anything then?
This is a novel of ideas. Read it, and your brain will fold itself into origami. And then it will thank you for it. One caveat: the ending is puzzling and unsatisfying.
As Fate Decrees
Denysé Bridger was born in Newfoundland and raised in Nova Scotia. This combination of myth-based fantasy and domination-tinged romance is an engaging read, though a flawed one.
Amarantha is captured and sold as a slave to a mysterious stranger who turns out to be Ares, Greek God of War. He trains her in combat, grooming her to be the Champion of the Gods. She is then catapulted into modern times at the turn of the millennium, when she must save the ancient religions from destruction at the hands of the fanatical followers of the One True Faith.
Bridger's flowing writing style will draw the reader in, but her heavy reliance on clichéd, unpersuasive description will repeatedly kick her back out. In moments of fear, the heroine's blood turns 'to ice in her veins.' In moments of anger, fury lights 'a trail of fire in her veins.' This is not how emotions manifest in the human body.
Fear and anger rule the day. In addition to suffering from faucet-like hot- and cold-running blood, characters grind their teeth in repressed rage. They also snarl a lot. One would wish for a cast of characters less binary in their emotional expression.
This book is most appropriate for a fan of both the fantasy and the romance genres. Readers unfamiliar with Greek mythology are likely to be confused at times.
by Tony Ballantyne
Bantam Spectra, May 2007, 389 pages, $8.99 CAN, mass-market paperback
by Denysé Bridger
EDGE, August 2007, 253 pages, $21.95 CAN, trade paperback