7th Sigma

7th Sigma is the full novel in the same world as the short excerpt "Bugs in the Arroyo" from 2009 which is still available from the publisher TOR's website as of this time.

Gould has created a story of people who survive and sometimes thrive in a localized apocalypse in the US South West. With a nod toward Clarke's third law, the apparently hyper advanced technology is not center stage. While teams of scientists almost certainly are working tirelessly to find an answer, this is not yet their story.

Kimble/Kim, the young, resourceful male protagonist who is also an aikidoka has some clearly audible echoes of Gould's prior book Helm. The actual technical aspects of Aikido are more in the background here than in Helm and the world receives more of the author's attention.

Technically, the story is broken into several slices of Kimble's life which may be months or only days in duration. The feel is almost episodic: the problem of the day front and center while the ongoing disaster the Bugs represent are the moving backdrop for everything in his world.

I will admit to being an unreasoning fan of the book Helm who owns 2 harcover copies and the kindle version. I was happily surprised by the similarities in this story. I do wish that Kimble was a bit less of a cipher in the later story slices. As the slices jump forward in time, I felt a bit left behind when the young man struggling to learn and expand the edge of his capabilities suddenly becomes the experienced campaigner.

All in all, I enjoyed the quick, entertaining story. For me, the surprising similarities previous work were less important than the large unanswered question of what the Bugs actually are. That question is only more loudly asked at the end of the story and I'm sure another installment from Kimble will be on the way to us.

I thought I was getting serious science fiction with the title's reference to a relatively obscure statistical phenomenon, but 7th Sigma is really a "young adult" book and I have no idea why it is called "7th Sigma" because as far as I can tell that phrase has absolutely nothing to do with the book.

The story is centered on an impossibly perfect child "Kim", and his life in an agrarian utopia where he becomes better than everyone else by doing lots of chores. The bugs might as well be magical beasties, there is no justification for their seemingly magical superiority to everything man-made.

Calling the 7th Sigma science fiction is like calling cycling a sport. It is technically correct, but I still wouldn't watch it on TV. There was nothing interesting or challenging in this novel for me. Maybe for a younger audience it would be more appropriate.

First off; This is a young adult book.
I don't consider it a novel as it is more a collection of short stories held together by a thread.
If I had known it was a YA I probably wouldn't have picked it up, and fortunately my copy came from the local library.
I liked the other Gould novels I had read and was expecting more from this one. Unfortunately he spends far too much time concentrating on the Aikido obsession of the protagonist and almost nothing on the bugs that are featured on the cover and lead me to pick up the book in the first place.
There are so many obscure terms and references to the immediate area where the story takes place which slowed the pace considerably. Some I am not sure of, even in the context they were used.
It is less a straight forward sf novel as it is a YA adventure novel. The bugs are tertiary at best and the whole story could have been handled in any apocalyptic setting, let alone where nano machines have taken over a corner of the US southwest.
There is obviously a sequel planned which may, or may not involve the bugs more, but I won't be reading it to find out.

I really enjoyed Gould's Jumper series, but HATED this book. It is called "7th Sigma" for reasons I still cannot fathom. The cover is misleading and the story is boring. I don't know what Gould was thinking when he wrote this book. It is just terrible. When I finished it (which I did in the hopes of a surprise, climactic ending), I said to myself, "Well, that was hours of wasted reading that I will never get back."

I can't figure out where the glowing reviews came from. It's almost like all of Gould's friends decided to pitch in and help him with a propaganda campaign. Don't waste your time on this one. If you do... don't say you weren't warned.

The latest book by Steven Gould is another in his well conceived and well executed bibliography. It is the story of Kim Creighton aka Kimble Monroe who lives in the Territory. The Territory is a large chunk of the Southwest patrolled by metal eating 'bugs'; tiny machines of unknown origin that have caused a limited apocalypse within their range. We meet Kim 10 to 20 years in our future as a young preteen who is almost feral and follow him to almost adulthood. He grows into many roles; martial arts expert, student, spy, righter of wrongs and punisher of evil-doers among others.

The book is a throwback in a couple of different ways. First, it reads as what I've seen described as a string of pearls. Each individual pearl is an almost self-contained episodic story interconnected to the other pearls on the string by common characters, a common setting and an overall connecting theme. This was the source of a number of novels from the 50's, 60's and 70's where the individual 'pearls' were sold to and published in a magazine as individuals stories. Then they were collected into a novel. This book has that sort of feel. The second throwback element is that it has the feel of a Heinlein juvenile. That is really a compliment. There were great moral themes, growth, exploration and a positive, upbeat feeling in Heinlein's juveniles. I find the same thematic elements in Gould's book. And, that is a real treat in a time when so many authors seem to delight in presenting a dark, dingy, dirty world inhabited by unlikable jerks who delight in abusing and mistreating the protagonist throughout the entire book. I don't enjoy negativism or nihilism. And, you find those who present those attitudes in this book get their just desserts quickly rather than on the last page of the book. Since there is an abundance of jerks and evil-doers in this book as there seem to be in real life, you don't need to worry about Kimble lacking the opportunity to display his advancing skills.

The bottom line is that I enjoy Gould's writing and this book is him in top form. I enjoy the themes and ideas presented in the book. And, I enjoyed the character of Kimble as I observed him grow through the course of the book. It's well done and worthy of consideration for the Hugo Award for this year. Buy it. You will enjoy it!

P.S. Mr Gould, please give us a sequel or two to this and Wildside both.

Take the American Southwest back to the Stone Age courtesy of the bugs - solar-powered, self-replicating robots whose metal-chomping ways not only endanger humans too close but also eliminate all electronic technology and all metal in the area. Add a land settled by hardy pioneers or those too stubborn too leave. Throw in a Captain of the local constabulary who is interested in bringing in the scum bothering those pioneers - the highwaymen, the meth dealers, the murders and religious cults and secessionists. Then take a runaway thirteen year old boy found and trained by a homesteading akaido master, and lay it all out along the lines of another young boy employed as a spy in a dicey frontier zone, Rudyard Kipling's Kim, and you have Gould's quite satisfying novel.

There's the martial arts story, there's the very Kiplingesque young-man-learning-lessons plot, there's a post-apocalypse feel as we see the ruins of old towns and cities, and there's the fascination of surviving in this frontier through a combination of imported technology like ceramic arrowheads and old ways like building adobes and weaving baskets. Of course, in a story where people move by animal power or their own legs, there's also a very definite western feel to it. But Gould doesn't scrimp on the science fiction weirdness either as our young spy Kimble (not the only name here that is playfully allusive) meets new forms of "bugs", and Gould gives us a sort of answer to their mystery.

He also gives us some expected plot developments in the lives of the Captain, the sensei, and Kimble, but that part of the story is told unsentimentally, obliquely, and with wit. Gould is also quite effective at pacing a story covering five years in Kimble's life.

The bugs may be rather novel, but Gould has given us some nice presents from the past in the elements of this story, one told in a concise manner too seldom seen these days.

Steven Gould has been a consistently solid SF writer since Jumper was published. His protagonists usually challenge the status quo, not because they are mere rebels, with or without a cause, but because they grow beyond the bounds which previous generations, and even genetics, have established.
In 7th Sigma, Kimble Monroe starts out as a young boy who lives on his own in the Territory, avoiding good-intentioned authorities who might try to place him in an orphanage, or worse, return him to his abusive father. The Territory is a sizeable chunk of land mass in the southwestern United States that has suffered a mysterious infestation of robotic insects that aggressively consume metal. These bugs may or may not be the result of an experiment in nanotech that went awry; either way, it is painful, often fatal, to be accidentally between these bugs and any object containing metal. All metal-based communications, technologies, and tools are non-existent now in the Territory; the men and women who live there have adapted stone-age materials to modern purposes.
Kimble befriends Ruth, a martial arts instructor who has moved to the Territory to start a school. He becomes her first student, and while she protects him from inquisitive social workers and gives him a home, Kimble in turn protects her, their homestead, and the school from thieves and bandits. Eventually his adroitness is noticed by Captain Bentham, an officer who patrols the Territory. Initially Bentham is impressed by Kim's applied intelligence and level-headedness in a crisis, but when he discovers that Kimble does not talk about what he sees or does with anybody, not even Ruth, Bentham recruits young Kim to be a covert agent.
For the next ten years, Kim's picaresque adventures take him the length and breadth of the Territory, not just in distances of miles and altitudes, but societally, encountering political corruption, smuggling, drug trafficking, religion used to establish slavery, and increasingly strange manifestations of bug behavior. He does not travel unscathed. By the book's end he is beginning a new phase of life, leaving the Territory to study at Stanford. But he promises Ruth he'll return.
Enough questions are left that I dare to hope Gould plans a sequel.
If you noticed the similarity to a certain young adult classic novel by Rudyard Kipling, you can enjoy this re-imagining of Kim all the more. Gould included plenty of quotations as chapter headings to direct his readers to Kipling, in case they do not recognize the source from the clues of names and parallel plot threads. What is so impressive is how completely original Gould's variation is.
The title is explained in the set of initial quotations: "A 7th Sigma is equivalent to 1.9 occurrences in a hundred million (19 in a billion): 99.999981% against." Kimble himself is an example of a 7th Sigma concatenation of abilities; perhaps other aspects of the title's significance with be revealed in that sequel.

Like Robert Heinlein, Gould has taken the opportunity to take an update of Kipling's KIM, and sit it in his own fantastic universe.

This time, instead of the training at the jeweler's, we get the training at the Akido dojo, but nevermind, same outcome, same young man engaged in a similar version of the Great Game in a part of the world which is at a distance from the core of their civilization.

Heinlein's take in [[ASIN:B0030VAT4I Citizen of the Galaxy]] was influenced by his Navy service. Gould's was influence by late 20th century culture.

Both are worthy reads, but after you enjoy them, go read the original: [[ASIN:B000JQU7BM Kim]]. Kipling still has a lot to say to us.

The book certainly was entertaining, but still a disappointment. The SF aspects of the book seemed like they were added to a a group of stories about a young teenager winning against obstacles. It is clearly geared towards the juvenile SF reader audience. "Jumper" was a much better book.

This was a very tough book to give a rating to. I loved certain aspects of this book, but it also had one large failing in my opinion.

What I liked:

1. The world-building was great. I loved the concept of metal-eating insects that would go through *anything* to get to their "food". The origin of the bugs was described, and their presence truly affected the way the characters were forced to live. Yet the bugs themselves weren't the story; it was still about the humans inhabiting this area.

2. The characters were interesting and well-drawn. The book is told from the POV of Kim, who is a likeable and engaging character. The reader roots for him to succeed.

3. The prose was lovely. It was very clean, and yet it struck me as almost literary at times.

The big failing? There was no overarching plot, no story arc with a climax. The book felt very episodic; the reader simply follows Kim along in his daily life as he grows up, learns a few things, and has a few adventures. After a certain amount of time, the book just...stops. I really wish that everything that had happened to Kim led...somewhere.

I would definitely read other books by this author, but this one just didn't quite do it for me. 3.5 stars.