Tricia Sullivan

I've been enjoying Tricia Sullivan's sci-fi novels for more than twenty years. They always feature interesting ideas, weird situations, and pleasingly eccentric female main characters. Whether I love or just like her books depends upon how the interesting idea is extrapolated. My favourite remains [b:Maul|1280157|Maul|Tricia Sullivan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1182462635l/1280157._SX50_.jpg|1269161], which is fantastic. I found show more [b:Lightborn|9424256|Lightborn|Tricia Sullivan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1329001326l/9424256._SY75_.jpg|14308675], [b:Double Vision|465787|Double Vision|Tricia Sullivan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1414672338l/465787._SY75_.jpg|454187], and [b:Sound Mind|1828781|Sound Mind|Tricia Sullivan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348097911l/1828781._SY75_.jpg|1828585] less involving. [b:Occupy Me|26157017|Occupy Me|Tricia Sullivan|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1440420176l/26157017._SY75_.jpg|45969349] was great fun, though, and I liked 'Sweet Dreams' just as much. Here, the main character Charlie took part in a medical study because she was broke and ended up with narcolepsy, plus the ability to share other people's dreams. In classic late capitalist fashion, she manages her disability and pays the rent with a gig economy job doing 'dream therapy'. Basically, she goes into people's dreams and tweaks them to reduce anxiety, make them sexier, etc. Charlie is a great protagonist as she's kind, cheerful, and totally chaotic. Although the plot twists involving mysterious deaths were diverting, I'd have happily read a novel about her daily life in 2027 cyberpunk London. The little details were great: whenever Charlie goes into someone's home, she wonders how they can afford this much space in London. I was particularly amused when she went into a bleak flat with no furnishings and her first thought was how amazing that the inhabitant could afford to live alone! The virtual reality and dream technology isn't overexplained; instead the first person narrative gives a feel for it. The descriptions of dreaming didn't evoke my actual experiences of dreaming, but that didn't matter as they were still suitably strange and eerie.

I wasn't entirely surprised by the ending, as this definitely seemed like a cyberpunk novel to me. So of course the answer to whodunnit was an emergent meta-consciousness from a shared dreamspace. The uses and abuses of dream technology are quite ingenious, particularly for treating dementia. Daphne is a particularly memorable and rather tragic character, only partially aware of being a dream-assassin. I was surprised by how offhand Charlie's murder of Martin was, though. He was a complete arsehole, but I did not expect Charlie to give so little subsequent thought to taking someone's life. There was a certain lightness to the narrative, which gave the murders relatively little impact. Since I find murder mysteries dull in principle, this is not a criticism. Roman and Donato the so-called Dream Police were great, in that they weren't actual police, were awkward rather than macho, and seemed scarcely clearer than Claire on what the heck was happening. The baseline mayhem of Claire's everyday life was excellent, the characters distinctive, and the plot and world-building weirdness combined to make a very diverting rainy staycation day read. show less

I’m fond of Tricia Sullivan’s distinctive style of quasi-incomprehensible yet thrilling sci-fi strangeness. Her novels tend to have interesting female protagonists and vividly surreal parallel and/or nested realities. [b:Maul|1280157|Maul|Tricia Sullivan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1182462635s/1280157.jpg|1269161] is my favourite, as I have a particular yen for fiction set in shopping malls. I enjoyed ‘Occupy Me’ more than her other recent novels show more [b:Lightborn|9424256|Lightborn|Tricia Sullivan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1329001326s/9424256.jpg|14308675] and [b:Sound Mind|1828781|Sound Mind|Tricia Sullivan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348097911s/1828781.jpg|1828585] as it played with some interesting concepts, the protagonist Pearl is very appealing, and quite a lot of it was set in Edinburgh. More specifically, I liked Pearl’s compulsion to help, the philosophical debates about what the Resistance actually was, and the fragile citadel of bird creatures. The sudden dinosaurs were the real highlight, though. Not enough car chases are resolved by the unexpected intervention of extinct megafauna. Although I wasn’t always clear on what exactly was happening and why, ‘Occupy Me’ was a wild and fun ride. show less

Wow. There's thinking outside the box and there's 'What's a box and why would I need one?' Tricia Sullivan's imagination is delightfully unbridled. If you can jump in and not worry about falling and just trust that everything will work out, you're in for a great time with 'Occupy Me'

You know those science fiction books that are about inter-planetary wars with human colonies spread out through space, travelling through the endless void in thin vulnerable metal boxes that they still insist on show more using to try to kill one another? Well, this isn't one of those books. 'Occupy Me' makes those books seem like they're a lazy translation of late seventeenth century pirates dressed in space suits and armed with mythical 'energy weapons', taking no account of how big the universe is or how it really works.

'Occupy Me' takes a different, more numbers-based view of life, the universe and the nature of causality. No, it's not one of those 'Look! Physics can be fun' nerdy books or one of those 'Let's science the shit out of this' uber-competent male scientist books. 'Occupy Me' does something unique, in my experience. It gets across the vastness of space and time, our limited, overly-linear view of causality and our inability truly to think in geological timeframes while building a compelling action-packed thriller filled with relatable people.

What made the book work for me was that although the core of the plot involved concepts that stretched my imagination - chains of events that are aeons long, a view of reality as essentially malleable if you can only read the code it's written in, and the difficulty of sustaining a sense of purpose and identity in the face of entropy - it was made accessible and engaging by the nature of Pearl, the main protagonist in the story.

Pearl doesn't know who she is, what she is or why she's here. She does know that she has an instinct-deep need to fix broken things, including people, and that part of her, an important part, is not just missing but has been stolen from her. Pearl is a delight. Her curiosity-driven journey from ignorance to mind-blowing comprehension as she tries to get her component back and go home powers the book. Pearl works her way from squatting in a junkyard where she throws cars around to keep in shape, to working as an agent of the Resistance (although she's not clear what they are resisting) to falling in love with her Resistance handler, destroying a passenger jet in mid-flight while working as a flight attendant, to becoming a wanted terrorist engaged in a covert struggle with a ruthless billionaire and the equally ruthless oil company that he used to work for and which is now trying to track him down. Did I mention that she also has wings (although they're not always physically present), an affinity with Doberman guard dogs that makes them behave like puppies and the ability to alter people's thoughts and moods?

Yeah, well, this isn't an easy book to summarise. And I haven't even talked about the guy who stole the component that Pearl is searching for or why he stole it or how there seems to be more than one of him using the same body or that the component is in a briefcase that isn't a briefcase but some kind of portal which, amongst other things, occasionally releases a not very happy dinosaur upon his enemies.

I had a wonderful time with this book. I liked Pearl. The ideas, especially the scale of the ideas, were intoxicating. The story was exciting.

But - like anything really original - to get the most out of it, you have to put your assumptions and preconceptions to one side and give yourself up to the experience.

I think that's easier to do if you listen to the audiobook version of 'Occupy Me'. It has two narrators, one for Pearl and one for the man who stole from her. Penelope Rawlins gives an outstanding performance as Pearl who, for reasons I never really understood, has a strong Long Island accent. Dugald Bruce-Lockhart counterbalances Pearl's extravagance with a more sober performance for his character show less

Jade, a young MMA fighter with a temper problem, decks a film star and ends up packed off to a training camp in Thailand to keep her out of harm's way. She discovers that her trainer and her gym may be involved in awful crimes, testing her loyalties and her grip on reality. Mya, a young girl working for an English Doctor in Thailand, makes journeys from or world into a mystical forest full of ghosts and gods. The doctor has terrible plans for Mya, but can she escape and keep her family safe? show more The two stories, one of the hard, bruising, physical world of training and fighting, and the other of disembodied souls and fickle deities, become intertwined, and one world leaks into another with dangerous consequences.

Snappy, pacy writing and the endearingly larger-than-life Jade, with her mixture of pure toughness and hidden vulnerability, make this a quick, smooth, action-packed supernatural thriller. The fighting, and the fighting culture, have an authentic feel to them, and the bone-crunching bouts are a highlight. show less