Twenty-eighth parkrun

After a terrible run mid-week, I felt much stronger today and went off quickly from the start — I reached the 3K mark in 11:25. I slowed down over the rest of last couple of klicks — heat and tiredness starting to take their toll — but I still managed to finish in 20:04. Which means I'm ten seconds up on the PB I set last week, removing any lingering doubts that last Saturday's performance was a fluke...

Illuminae

Another book from the to-read pile in the form of Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff's Illuminae. Set in an obscure solar system in the 26th century, it takes the form of a report filed by the Illuminae Group on the recent attack on Kerenza IV. The story is presented through a series of found documents, including chat logs, emails, internal diagnostics from an artificial intelligence, even bits of ASCII art, which piece together something that combines 2001 with Alien and Battlestar Galactica.

The action begins on the day Kerenza IV is attacked by four BeiTech dreadnoughts. Kady Grant and her ex-boyfriend Ezra Mason escape the worst of the assault — BeiTech use an experimental bioweapon on Kerenza's illegal mining facility — to find themselves part of the evacuation fleet. Composed of the freighter Copernicus, the research ship Hypatia, and the battlecarrier Alexander, which took heavy damage to its jump drive and AI while engaging three of the dreadnoughts, the fleet is forced to run for Jump Station Heimdahl at the edge of the system, with the remaining dreadnought, the Lincoln dogging its every move.

With the situation desperate, some of the colonists are conscripted into the United Terran Authority — the military. Kady, an elite hacker, pretends to be useless; Ezra, a highschool sports star, becomes a fighter pilot. So when AIDAN, the Alexander's artificially intelligent battle computer orders an attack on the Copernicus, Ezra finds himself at the sharp end while Kady is perfectly located to dig into the conspiracy that she is convinced surrounds the attack.

It soon becomes clear that the fleet has some serious problems. The bioweapon deployed by BeiTech, apparently an experimental and non-lethal agent, may not be as non-lethal as thought, and, worryingly, may not have been left behind on Kerenza IV but may have followed the refugees up into space. Meanwhile the battle damage taken by the Alexander appears to have done something to AIDAN, changing the intelligence's personality and algorithms in a way that makes it unpredictable, leaving General Torrance and his staff with a difficult dilemma: do they keep AIDAN running, something they need to use their main engines and to run their defence grid, or do they shut it down, allowing the Lincoln to gradually catch them up and ensuring that they are helpless when it arrives.

The plot, if slightly familiar, is well done and the action proceeds forward at a relentless pace. The characters are well drawn and the chat logs, a nice touch, really give a strong sense of what each of the major protagonists is like, with journals on hand to provide insights into Kady's inner thoughts and great rambling dumps to testify to the AIDAN core's growing insanity. The layout is extremely interesting, mirroring the supposed source of each element, with one of the medical reports on the bioweapon appearing literally blood-splattered.

Illuminae is a very pretty book with a clever framing device and a solid story in between. The closing statements indicate that there is more, much more to come. I'm intrigued to see whether it measures up to the very solid standards of the first book..

Mussorgsky at the Proms

Grand opera from Mussorgsky in the form of the 1869 version of Boris Godunov. The Royal Opera House version may not have been as silky-smooth as the Kirov's — I was there in 2002 when Boris was last performed at the proms — and maybe the RoH Russian wasn't quite as authentic, but I like the piece so much, it's hard to be objective.