Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter

 After reading a lot of articles on Reddit about Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, the consensus was that his novels are an "acquired taste" and not for everyone who doesn't feel like waddling through dozens of pages of bad prose while tries and fails to build relatable characters. The Reddit users recommended his "connected" collection of short stories "Vacuum Diagrams".

This collection consists of many short stories written over the span of decades, most of them connected to the Xeelee, at least tangentially, and brought together by the first story where the Silver Ghosts are conducting a new forbidden experiment, and the protagonist's dead wife retells him the entire human story in the current universe, starting from billions of years ago and finishing a billion years in the future when the Photino Birds finally win and extinguish all Baryonic matter in this universe.

Some of the stories are silly, and can be seen that they were written long time ago, when the author was young.  Some are pretty good, but overall it is a very enjoyable book, since each story (almost) has different characters which cannot be developed in the given length, so you don't really miss them as you would in a novel. 

Many of the stories are the beginnings of the large novels Baxter wrote.  For example, the story "Raft" is the first chapter of the novel "Raft".  If you enjoy  the Xeelee concept with its technology on a super-advanced level that is barely comprehensible today, but do not want to wade through thousands of pages of boring characters as in the novels - this book gives you an overview of the entire timeline and just the nuggets you want.

Raft by Stephen Baxter

I started this book as it is the first in the "Xeelee" sequence, which is supposed to be one of the most far-fetching SciFi ever written, helped with Baxter's background in Physics, but it is just too much of a torture.  Kindle says I'm 29% in and I am calling it quits. It is just a badly written book.  Rees is probably one of the most boring characters ever created, along with the Pilot and the Scientist.  The two women (only two) in this novel are caricatures. The science of the Nebula, the Belt and the Raft is passably interesting, but it could have been a 5-page short story (yes, I know this novel is based on an earlier short story).

Even though the Xeelee do not appear in this book, just like the Heechee, they are more interesting when read about in a Wikipedia article than a novel.  Just like the Heechee kids are wearing a metal diaper for microwave radiations, the Xeelee seem to have a penchant for black holes and baryonic (?) matter.  Baxter is just a bad writer.  His prose is bad. The few interesting ideas here and there cannot compensate for the ennui of wading through his cumbersome and uninteresting prose.

I think I am going to switch back to detective fiction for a little while. 

Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks

 This is the first book in the "Culture" series, which consists of about a dozen novels and a bunch of short stories, which Banks worked on until his death a few years ago.  Banks said that he was tired of dystopian version of the future in sci-fi literature where machines and AI rise against man, so he wanted to create a world where the machines and AI are benevolent, help the humans and protect them.  He built "The Culture" with that basic idea in mind, but also set it in a realistic universe where there are other races, civilizations and alliances which are against the ideas of the Culture and there are brutal, bloody wars. This book in particular is about the Culture-Idirian war, which had close to 900 billion casualties. 

My general idea of the style of Banks' writing is that it is somewhere between Star Wars and Hitch-hikers' guide, the second being foundational British Sci-Fi and Banks is Scottish.  Although technology is emphasized - it is definitely not at the level of Asimov, but more emphasis is placed on adventure, swash-buckling heroes (Horza) who get themselves into difficult situations and the bravely, and by the skin of their teeth, get out of them victorious.  Btw, my personal preference is for short, dynamic, explosive descriptions of fight scenes, but Banks has completely opposite idea, where single fight of 10-14 mins is described over 4-5 pages, with every minute detail described profusely. 

This first book is about a Changer, Horza, who work for the Idirians against The Culture, and Balveda, a Culture Agent from "Special Circumstances" (basically military intelligence).  The Culture has no military and uses no money since it is 'coordinated' rather than 'ruled' by "Minds" which are advanced, sentient AIs which exist in multiple dimensions, think faster than light, and have storage capacity the size of an average planet.  Changers are humanoids which can change their outer appearance (over several days) to ideally represent any other humanoid they've observed.  The lore says they are a remnant of some genetically-modified population from some forgotten war, thousands of years in the past.  They are living weapons, having venomous teeth and nails and can also spit venom. 

Idirians are tri-pedal giants with saddle-like heads and redundant organs for every function, a result of evolving on an extremely inhospitable planet, which gives them biological immortality (i.e. no aging or disease death, but definitely death from being murdered or destroyed in an accident).  They are a theocracy and religion/God is the main pillar around which their society and personal lives are organized.  This makes them natural enemies of The Culture, which is Atheist by nature, and also proselytizing their ideas across the Galaxy. 

There are many adventures throughout the book that Horza gets himself in, like with the Eaters, Game of Damage, Kraiklyn's Free Company, Balveda's infiltration and Horza's escape from Culture's transporter.  Horza is not the typical Star Wars hero, as he is at times selfish and murders to achieve his goals, but we still end up sympathizing with him.  The background onto which he exists is much more murderous and self-aggrandizing, so he comes out as a moderate by comparison.

Horza dies at the end.  His entire species of Changers is completely destroyed by the end of the Culture-Idiran war and does not figure in future books, except as a remembrance. 

High WIndow by Raymond Chandler

 This is the first novel Chandler wrote that is not based on some previous short story.  It was made into a movie called "The Brasher Doubloon" but the plot was different somewhat, and Marlowe was not played by Bogart. All move adaptations have simpler plots as Chandler's novels get really complicated at times.  In "The Big Sleep" about 1/3 of the plot was cut out and the ending is completely different from the book. 

The "High Window" is a story of a rare coin from early USA stolen from an old rich lady with an attitude adjustment problem. Her secretary is the one that hires Marlowe and her son's wife is the one who is suspected of stealing the coin.  There are some local goons involved because the son has a gambling habit and the mom is just not dying. 

Eventually, a denture maker and old coin collector are killed in the same building and the secretary comes to Marlowe to confess to a murder she didn't commit.  Marlow finds the real murderers who were making copies of the doubloon with the denture maker's casts and returns it to the old lady, but now there are several of them already. 

Marlowe finds evidence that it was the old lady who pushed her ex husband through a high window and framed her secretary for it.  The secretary is free and Marlowe escorts her to her parents in Idaho. Pretty good book.