So, The Book of All Hours is finished. And fine, fine stuff it is, too. This volume seems somehow more polished than the first , but perhaps not as exciting, as startling.

The story is brought to a conclusion of sorts, but as you might expect, it’s ambiguous, open to interpretation. This is, of course, not a bad thing: in fact, I thoroughly approve.

I’m not, though, going to try to give any details of it, or to explain what it ls about; just read it: it’s great.

Technorati Tags: books, books 2007, hal duncan, ink, velum, the book of all hours, sf

A couple of articles (Times, Indy) on Banksie’s new novel refer to it being five years since his last one. Err, no: The Algebraist came out in 2004 (which is longer ago than I thought, but still less than three years).

Oh, wait, no, of course: that wasn’t a novel; that was just sci-fi.

Bah!

Technorati Tags: iain banks, books, science fiction, sf, literary snobbery

Robert Anton Wilson has died. I read the Illuminatus! trilogy while I was in university, and have re-read it several times since then, as well as reading a lot of his other books. No-one could spin a conspiracy theory like RAW, or debunk one so convincingly. Plus he told a great tale, and unravelled seven levels of meaning in a single sentence of Joyce.

The last post on his blog has many comments saying goodbye, and mainly wishing him well on his onward journey. I don’t believe there is any onward journey, but it would be nice to think there was. My favourite of the comments I read was from an anonymous commenter, and reads:

Goodbye, you magnificent bastard. You join the ranks of Bill Hicks, Frank Zappa, and Hunter S. Thompson: for decades frustrated malcontents like me will be saying, “You know who we really need now?” and thinking of you.

Can’t argue with that.

Hail Eris! And 23 skidoo.

---

^1. The title of his post, by the way, is from another of RAW’s blog posts.

Technorati Tags: Robert Anton Wilson, RAW, discordia, Illuminatus, eris, discordianism, 23

Another old Moore from the 2000 AD days. I’ve read it before, as three separate volumes, but I totally didn’t remember anything about Book 3, in which Halo joins the army. Well, the Space Marines, or whatever you want to call them.

It’s a great story about an ordinary young woman in a very un-ordinary world. Much better than the last one, and very much more than a curiosity: highly recommended.

Technorati Tags: book notes 2006, books, sf, Alan Moore, Ian Gibson, comics, graphic novels

This is a strange one. Moore (Alan) has,as I understand it, started up his own line of comics, called ‘America’s Best Comics’. A strange name, too, for a guy living in Northampton, but hey, maybe it helps them to sell in Peoria (wherever that is).

Tom Strong is a kind of Doc Savage/Tom Swift figure. The stories are kind of fifties/sixties futurist styled. They’re not that good, unfortunately. In, of course, my humble opinion. Even the ones written by Moore (there are several other writers) aren’t up to his usual high standards.

A curiosity. Though I notice that there is a range of other Tom Strong books, so maybe there’s more to it all than would seem from this.

Technorati Tags: book notes 2006, books, comics, Alan Moore, Tom Strong, America’s Best Comics

Ah, how we love the paranoid fantasies of our Phil. As does Hollywood, considering how many of his works have been made into films.

Not much chance of that ever happening to this one, mind you (though they’ve done A Scanner Darkly now, so you never can tell).

This is kind of a prequel or counterpart to Valis, which I read a good number of years ago. In a similar way, Dick himself is one of the central characters, though it is not him who believes that an alien intelligence — the Vast Active Living Intelligence System — is communicating with him.

We are in an alternative America: instead of Nixon becoming President in 1968, an even more authoritarian, fascist figure called Ferris F Freemont does. His regime quickly takes on an extreme McCarthyite nature.

Valis sends a message of hope from beyond the stars. Or is it from another dimension? Or is it God? Nicholas Brady does not know, and neither do we. A significant portion of the book consists of him and his writer friend, Phil, discussing possibilities for what it could be that contacts him in dreams, and sometimes lends him lifesaving information and even healing powers. But no real conclusion is reached.

It’s an OK read, but is largely unresolved by the end: though not without hope.

Technorati Tags: book notes 2006, books, Philip K Dick, PKD, sf, science fiction

I finally get to read Vellum, then. I’d been waiting for the paperback for a while, as I said back in Book Notes 7. I’ve pre-ordered the sequel, Ink, in hardback, though, which should be recommendation enough.

We are, once again, in the territory of myths walking the Earth. This time they are angels and demons, gods and devils, and their powers extend far beyond Earth, and into the Vellum. This is a kind of multiverse, a visual metaphor for the many-worlds theory, you might say (though the book walks the fantasy line, more than science fiction, the use of nanotech notwithstanding).

It starts really well, and I loved the whole first half, but the second half loses focus somewhat. The pace slows, and it seems a tad repetitive. Though I may have picked up this last criticism from John Clute’s review of it, which I glanced at while I was reading the book.

Reading the whole of Clute’s review now, I agree with much of it, though I’m left feeling considerably more positive about the book as a whole then Clute obviously was.

In a way it feels unfinished: not just that it leaves you wanting more, which is a good thing, but I found myself thinking, on more than one occasion after it ended, that I hadn’t actually finished reading it. However, Hal himself points us at a review which captures the meaning of the ending perfectly, and makes me think I need to read things more closely and think about them more carefully. Though sometimes you just need to have something pointed out to you, to make you realise that you understood it all along.

It is a great, sparkling debut (though whether it is possible for work to be simultaneously a debut and a ‘masterpiece’, as the blurb has it, is something that caused some discussion in my house), and highly recommended.

Technorati Tags: book notes 2006, books, hal duncan, vellum

This is a very, very strange book. It’s strange in the spacefaring future it describes, but it’s probably even stranger linguistically.

I used to read John Clute’s book reviews in “Interzone“:http://www.ttapress.com/IZ.html, years ago, when he reviewed there regularly¹, so linguistic strangeness was exactly what I expected when I picked this up.

What I mean by linguistic strangeness is this: you used to have to read his reviews with a good dictionary to hand, and if you were diligent you might learn three new words in even the shortest review. His erudition was legendary, and he liked to display it. At first that used to annoy me, because it seemed that he chose willfully obscure words: he appeared to be doing no more than displaying his vocabulary for its own sake. Showing off, in other words.

But as time went on I grew to appreciate the way he made us stretch, and I moved towards the conclusion that, yes, he had an unfeasibly large vocabulary — or was unreasonably quick to reach for the thesaurus — but he did it in order to achieve precision in meaning: why use a word that is nearly right, when there is one that is exactly right? Plus, it was part of his style, his reviewer’s voice, if you will.

So to his first SF novel, then. It is strange. It is very, very strange. It’s a space opera set in our galaxy a few hundred years in the future. There are humans and a range of aliens, plus various sentient AIs. Much is made of the fact that humans smell: they have to keep away from other species, and avoid getting emotional when they do meet others, to keep their pheromone production under control. No other sentient species suffers from this problem, it seems. Furthermore, when humans meet each other, it is very unusual — extremely rude, even — to make eye contact.

I don’t know if Clute is trying to tell us something about our own society, here, but it seems to me that, with the state of technology on display, something would have been done about the smell, if it was really that much of a problem. The eye-contact thing is just bizarre. Maybe (since they exist in a state of close integrations with their computers, intelligent and not) it’s a reference to the lack of direct personal contact that we get from our present interactions on the net.

Those are relatively minor matters, though: what of the story?

Our hero is Freer, who is a free trader, with his own ship, the Tile Dance. It is staffed solely by him and run by a sentient pair of artificial Minds: KathKirt. All AIs are bipartite; they manifest through Masks, which are said to ‘face’ ‘Jack’ or ‘Flyte’. I still don’t understand what these are supposed to mean. Did I mention that it’s a strange book?

The galaxy is in danger from something called plaque, which appears to be a kind of plague causing a dementia-like effect in artificial Minds (and maybe in biological ones, too; that wasn’t clear). As things develop, it turns out that a passenger that Freer Has taken aboard knows the route to a legendary planet which is the source of ‘Lenses’, the only thing that can cure the data plague.

They have to run from the forces of the Insort Geront, who want to stop them getting the Lenses. These are spacefaring luddites, in the form of multi-bodied (or at least multi-headed) quadrupeds (possibly) who are constantly eating live prey, including the younger members of their own families.

On the way they dock at an artificial moon, which turns out to be a legendary lost world. Or something.

There’s an awful lot going on in this book, and I can’t honestly say that I understood all of it. But it’s a fascinating read in many ways, and is worth the effort. Recommended.

He may do so again: I’ve allowed my subscription to lapse in recent years, but in the latter years that I did subscribe, he had stopped reviewing there almost completely.

Technorati Tags: book notes 2006, books, john clute, clute, appleseed