2007s
- In googling to check that I had the right A-side (how crap is my memory?) I discovered an excellent project that Billy Bragg is involved in. Check it out ↩
The Last of the 2006 "Book Notes" Posts
Nearly halfway through the year and I haven't finished posting last year's Book Notes? Shocking. Oh well, here are the last few in one bunch.
26: The Terminal Zone, by Andrew J Wilson
My friend Andrew wrote this play back in 1993 or so, and produced it at the Edinburgh Fringe. It has now been published as a chapbook by Writers' Bloc, the spoken-word performance group that grew out of the East Coast SF Writers' group.
In it, Rod Serling, the writer and presenter of The Twilight Zone, appears; or rather, two sides of his personality appear, performed by two actors, and indulge in a dialogue. This is the story, you might say, of Rod Serling talking to himself.
27: Dicks and Deedees, by Jaime Hernandez
A collection of Love and Rockets stories by Jaime. I haven’t read any of these for years, but all our favourites are here: Maggie and Hopey, of course, and Penny Century, and HR Costigan, whose story reaches a conclusion of sorts.
His storytelling technique can make it hard sometimes, to tell where we are chronologically: he’ll tell the history of years in a character’s life in the space of half a dozen or a dozen panels, with nothing other than the pictures and dialogue to indicate that the time has changed. And yet somehow you can work out what is happening, and over what period.
The artwork is gorgeous in its simplicity, of course, and he always has moving stories to tell.
28: Tamara Drewe, by Posy Simmonds
This graphic novel was published in weekly installments in the Saturday issue of The Guardian over a year or so. Actually, most weeks there were two episodes.
I’m told that it’s based on, or at least strongly inspired by, Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy; he is one of my unfortunate missing authors, so I can’t comment on that myself. I can say, however, that it’s a great story, very moving, and a fine way of bringing graphic fiction to the mainstream reader (not that this is the first time The Guardian has done this: they published Posy’s Gemma Bovary a few years ago).
If you missed it, you can probably still read (at least some of) it on the website (though personally I find that unsatisfying because of the image quality). But I expect it’ll be out in paperback by now (in fact, I was surprised they didn’t get it out in time for Christmas).
29: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson
This is an absolute stormer of a book. A family drama, of sorts, set across thirty years and three billion years simultaneously.
The time is about now, and one night (in North America, at least), the stars go out. And the planets and the moon. But not the sun.
The Earth has been enclosed, by an entity or entities unknown (or is it a natural phenomenon?) in a membrane that closes off the outside universe, while allowing enough sunlight through for the ecosystem to function normally. Inside the membrane, time is slowed down, so that outside it the universe appears to spin on at a vastly accelerated rate.
But it’s really all about relationships. Highly recommended.
Guardian: "Straw signals rethink on ID cards"
Well, well, well. Maybe things will get better after all:
Jack Straw, widely expected to replace John Reid as the home secretary, today clearly signalled that the future of the national identity card scheme would be in the melting pot when Gordon Brown becomes prime minister next month.Mr Straw - who is Mr Brown’s leadership campaign manager and has a long record of cabinet opposition to a compulsory ID card system - indicated that the future of the £5.75bn project would be under review in the new government
The future’s bright; the future’s Brown, maybe?
New Dawn Fades
So there we have it: Tony will soon be gone. I had forgotten some of the good things: the minimum wage; civil partnerships (though why not for het couples?); the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly; the London Mayor and Assembly; Northern Ireland, of course. Even the hunting and smoking bans.
But Iraq; the dodgy dossier; detention without trial; ID cards; ASBOs; and so on and on.
“You’re a well-respected man, but bullshit! You could’ve been great,” as The Waterboys once put it. Actually I wouldn’t describe Blair as “well-respected”, so that doesn’t really work.
Should the government go to the country when the party leader steps down? Many think so, but actually, I largely don’t. In theory we live in a representative democracy. Citizens vote for a representative for their local area, and the party with the most seats forms a government. If the leader retires - or even is kicked out, though that does put a different complexion on things - that doesn’t change the position in parliament. And changing the leader does not necessarily mean a change of government.
On the other hand, calling an election wouldn’t be a bad thing for the country, except for one problem: we’d probably end up with a Tory government.
Though it shows how bad things have got when I find myself thinking that maybe a Tory government, if they would scrap ID cards, wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
Now that’s a worrying thought.
Ten Years in an Open-necked Shirt
He could have been great, you know.
We could be sitting here now, raising a glass to the end of the reign of Britain’s greatest Prime Minister of the (loosely-bounded) century, if not ever. It wouldn’t have been hard. Look at the two before him: after they had finished their slash-and-burn attack on the economy and the welfare state, all he’d have had to do was put it back together, and things would have got better
And they did do some good; some things did get better. I’ve spoken before about my approval of the Human Rights Act, and despite its current problems, the NHS is, on the whole, in a better state than it was. And the economy has seen a kind and duration of stability that you just don’t get under the Tories (never trust a right-winger with your economy: they’re all about “invisible hands”, and they just don’t know how to run it properly; just look at the way Bush threw away the trillions that Clinton left him).
And the Africa thing. A real attempt at ending poverty in Africa. Now that would have been a legacy worth having.
But here we are, now. He’s squandered all the goodwill he had ten years ago, taken the country into an illegal war, and taken massively Orwellian steps towards the reduction of civil liberties. In years to come, when you search the net for the phrase “power corrupts”, you’ll find a picture of Tony Blair.
Don’t bang the door on your way out, Tony, and goodbye.
[tags]politics, tony blair, legacy, irag illegal war, id cards, power corrupts, new labour, things can only get better, 1997[/tags]
Diplomacy 101, and Cash for Stories
Sometimes I write these things and don’t post them immediately, and then they seem wildly out of date. But it’s still worth putting them out there. Blogging doesn’t have to be completely reactive. Sometimes it should take the longer-term, contemplative view. So I offer this.
It seems obvious to me that, if your navy personnel are captured by the forces of a foreign power, in peacetime, and accused of being in the foreign power’s waters, then what you should do is as follows:
You say, “Oops, sorry. Didn’t mean to have them off station; didn’t think they were, actually, but if they were, we’re sorry.” Even, and let me make this quite clear, if you know perfectly well that they weren’t in the other power’s territory.
That, it seems to me, would be the diplomatic thing to do
So why did they not do that? My best guess is that they – the British government – were worried about losing face.
‘Losing face.’ It’s a strange thing for the government of what is still a fairly major world power to be worrying about, isn’t it? After all, it’s not as if making such a guarded admission and apology would actually have done Britain any harm, would it?
And it might have got the captured service people home a few days earlier – and without being humiliated on TV – you never know. Perhaps, even, the Iranian government would have apologised in their turn, and admitted that they might have made a mistake.
That last seems almost likely, given that they did appear to concede quite graciously in the end. But what do I know? I’m neither diplomat nor politician, and there might be some way in which doing what I suggested right from the start would have been political suicide. And obviously things will have been going on in the background of which we know nothing. But still…
And then they get home and tell their stories. I seem to be the only person in the country who thinks like this, but I see no reason why they shouldn’t be allowed to profit from doing so. Somebody is going to profit from the stories being told, so why shouldn’t it be the ones to whom they happened?
Sure, if it’s against the rules of the service, then that’s the deal they signed up for. But since the Ministry of Defence authorised it, then at the very least, I don’t see how you can blame the sailors.
I speak as someone who likes to write; so if I imagine myself into a situation like that, I know I would want to write my story once I had escaped. And if I could go on to sell it for professional publication, then you’re damn right I would want to do so. Why not?
The reported reactions of some of the families of service personnel who have died in Iraq is, to my mind, a red herring. There’s no direct comparison. As far as I know, there’s nothing to stop those families from writing, telling, or selling their own stories, or those of their lost ones. If they choose not to, that’s fine. But the two situations are quite different.
Book Notes 25: The Family Trade, by Charles Stross
Of course, the alternative world works on a feudal system, and weapons are mediaeval (apart from ones that have been carried over from “our” world). So it has some of the tropes of fantasy, and more may develop. But it looks like there won’t be any magic other than the world-walking ability.
The main fault with it is that it shows its history as the first part of a much longer book which the publishers decided should be split in two. So just as it’s starting to get really interesting, it ends.
Oh well, I look forward to reading the second part, and its sequels.
Alias Doc and Martha
The new __Doctor Who__ episode was butt-kicking excellence! And Martha is a worthy successor to Rose.
Just replacing the sonic screwdriver like that was a bit of a copout, mind: given that it got destroyed, I thought that they might try to make something of him _not_ having it.
Still, that’s a very minor nitpick; it was much better than the start of the previous series (also set in a hospital, curiously).
A really strong start.
Updated to say: I’m guessing that the “Vote Saxon” poster is the first reference to whatever this season’s “Bad Wolf” may be.
Unless it’s just a reference to a dodgy heavy metal band.
[tags]Doctor Who, tv, sf[/tags]
Straight to Elgin Avenue
So I ordered the new Banksie from Amazon, and to get free delivery, of course, I had to order one or two other things, to bring the price up to the threshold. I tend to have a number of things queued up to buy when the time is right, so I selected some things from that list.
All three items I chose are things that I meant to get at the time they came out, but didn’t, for one reason or another. The book was Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, which I’ve meant to get since I read the reviews when it came out. I’m not sure why I never bought it (actually I did buy it once, but that was to give to a friend who had a particular interest in stage magic).
Anyway, my interest was recently rekindled because of the film coming out, of course. I may want to watch it one day, and I’m not going to read or not read something on the reported say-so of some film director. I can’t find a reference for that: the director is supposed to have said, “Don’t read the book before you see the film.” Though I suppose that I will, in effect, be doing exactly that – in a contrary way – by insisting on reading the book before seeing the film. Whatever: books come first.
But I didn’t bring you here to talk about books, for a change. No, this time it’s music. Because I also got two CDs from Amazon.
Regular readers might not be surprised to hear that I’m a huge fan of the late, and sadly missed,Joe Strummer. As such, I want to get a hold of anything he released that I don’t yet have. Now, during his so-called “wilderness years”, Joe did a lot of soundtrack work. I’ve got most of that on record, but I never got round to getting the soundtrack for Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell. I recall hearing a borrowed copy in ‘87 or so, and enjoying it, but not being overwhelmed by it. The one track I remembered was ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’, by The Pogues, more of which later.
In the intervening years, I mostly forgot about the album. Once in a while I might have poked around a second-hand record shop, but it was low on my list of priorities. Recently, though, I discovered that it had been reissued, revised and expanded. Into my “buy later” list it went, until the other day.
As well, I discovered it was possible to jump back to an earlier part of Joe’s career, namely his pre-Clash band, the 101ers. Elgin Avenue Breakdown was originally released back in 19-something-or-other. At the time I was mildly interested, but saw no need to rush out and buy it. I had the ‘Keys to your Heart’ single, and it was OK, but nowhere near as good as the heights of The Clash. And Joe was still around, and we could expect new music from him in the future.
We are in that future now, of course, and we don’t have Joe anymore. So buying the 101ers’ album is a way to hear him again.
And a damn fine album it is. Straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll, jam-packed with bounce, verve and excitement. What it doesn’t have is the political sensibilities of The Clash. Or actually, it does have the first vestiges of them; and indeed, the first vestiges of The Clash’s excellent ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ (the B-side of ‘Clash City Rockers1'), in the form of ‘Lonely Mothers Son’. And I’m sure that title should have an apostrophe in it, but I’m not sure where.
And the Straight to Hell soundtrack? It’s great. It’s mostly film music, of course: largely instrumentals. There are selections by Elvis Costello and Pray for Rain, as well as by The Pogues and Joe. Among the proper songs are one by Joe called ‘Evil Darling’, which is OK, and the original version of ‘If I Should Fall from Grace With God’, which The Pogues wrote during filming, apparently. Then there’s a version of ‘Danny Boy’, by the cast, led by Cait O’Riordan, and the album ends with ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’.
It’s hard to express how good that song is. From the opening guitar riff, through Shane’s crazed-gunman-death-worshipper lyrics, to the shouldn’t-work-but-does device of the verse and chorus being exactly the same tune, it struts into your ears and rips your head apart. In a good way. I’ve hardly had it off repeat on my MP3 player since I got it.
Go and buy it. Now.
Apologise, explain?
Totally not sure about this one. Someone emails their MP and gets an accidentally-sent response (in the MP's name? Not sure) calling the constituent's mother-in-law "snotty", and saying, effectively, "don't rush to answer this, since they don't like the government."
So far, so unsurprising (though your attitude towards the government should not affect the service you get from it). But the MP has just been on the radio refusing to apologise.
She was very good on defending her staff: they’re professional, but they’re human. Fine, people make comments that shouldn’t become public, and mistakes get made. But surely an apology for the mistake would be in order?
I suspect that more will come of this.
Not Before Time to the nth power
Just heard on the radio that Wimbledon is going to pay women the same as men, at last. Though I see that some neanderthal called Tommy Haas is complaining about it. Welcome to the twenty-first century, mate.
Book Notes 24: Variable Star, by Robert A Heinlein and Spider Robinson
These are still the 2006 Book Notes. I'll finish them soon, honest.
Heinlein used to be my absolute favourite author. Indeed, he is in large part responsible for me developing a lifelong love of science fiction. And I’m also very fond of Spider Robinson. So when I found out that this existed, obviously I had to buy it.
It seems that, sometime after the death of Heinlein’s widow Virginia, his literary executor discovered an outline that Heinlein wrote in 1955, but never expanded into a novel. If remarks by Heinlein, that Spider refers to in his afterword, are true, then it was John W Campbell who talked him out of doing so. Which seems strange, and rather sad. Still, if Heinlein had written that novel, it’s possible that we wouldn’t have had one of his other ones; and of course, we wouldn’t have this one.
Would that be a good or bad thing, though? That is what we are here to decide.
I became intensely irritated by the story early on. The first-person narrator is supposed to be eighteen years old at the start, and he just doesn’t sound like an eighteen-year old. I don’t mean the narrative voice: that would not be a problem, as we can assume that the narrator is supposed to be telling his story in later years. I’m talking about his dialogue, and particularly his thought processes.
Tied to this is the fact that we are left largely in the dark about the society on Earth where the novel starts. The only thing we learn is that sexual mores have gone backwards by several hundred years, in North America, at least. Our narrator and his beloved can’t move in together, or even just spend the night together (despite living independently from any parents or guardians): they have to get married if they want to have sex. That his how Spider gets round the fifties expectations of Heinlein’s outline, of course, but it doesn’t sound like any eighteen-year olds I’ve ever heard of.
Except, perhaps, those who subscribe to one of the world’s many anti-sex religions, which these two don’t. In fact, the handling of religion in this work is quite interesting.
It is slotted into the timeline of Heinlein’s ‘Future History’ stories. In that timeline, the name of Nehemia Scudder appears, but I don’t think there is a story in which he ever appears directly as a character. Scudder is some kind of Christian fundamentalist leader, who becomes, I think, the World President. In this novel we are after the time of the Prophets – Scudder and his successors – and the world is still recovering from the restrictions that were placed on life, on scientific research, by them: “We could have had immortality by now,” one character complains.
It’s a good story, but not as good as it could be. Robinson has obviously worked hard at “channelling” RAH, but it seems to me that there are parts of the story where things just don’t quite fit together, or totally make sense. Though this may in part due to the speed with which I read it.
It is, of course, a good thing when a book makes you read it quickly: it usually means that the plot is compelling and you are keen to find out how it will play out. But if it causes you to skim, and miss – or at least, imperfectly absorb – important information, then that’s not so good. Though I don’t think that can really be considered a criticism of a book.
It’s worth a read, and I suppose I might read it again at some point, to see whether I did just miss some bits; but I’d probably prefer to re-read, say Have Space Suit, Will Travel.
A Deadline Crash, and a Reading
Over the last few weeks I've been trying to write a Doctor Who short story. It was for a competition that Big Finish, publisher of DW books and CDs, were running. Alas, the closing date was the 31st of January, which is now past, and I didn't finish it (does that make it a Small Finish?)
Still, I’m enjoying writing it, and intend to finish it anyway, just on general principles. It doesn’t do to go around having lots of unfinished pieces (and I speak as someone who has a great many unfinished things lying around, of one variety or another).
When I do finish it, I’ll probably put it online. Now my question is, does such a work now count as fanfic I suppose it does, on some level. Curious, because the winner of the competition gets professionally published, and that obviously isn’t fan fiction.
Still on a literary note, my friend Andrew was in town the other night, because he was one of the authors who was doing a reading that was organised by Farthing magazine. Until Andrew told me about the event, I didn’t even know that the publication existed.
It was a good night. I missed the first reading, by Anna Feruglio Dal Dan, but heard various drabbles, Andrew’s story, and two other fine stories.
During the interval I picked up the back issues of the magazine and took out a subscription. Then at the end we helped the Editor, Wendy Bradley, to carry some boxes back to her flat, and drank her whisky.
All in all, it was a fine night.
Homophobic Christians
I started writing this post while watching This Week again. This time they were talking, inevitably, about the new equal rights legislation (good legislation; from this government? Amazing.) The Catholic church is trying to have itself made exempt from the new law; and the Church of England has come out alongside it. Or at least John Sentamu has.
It looks like they’re going to be smacked down for now, which is good.
I was brought up as a Catholic, but I grew out of it, and am, like any sensible person, profoundly anti-religious now. And what I say to the Catholics who would try to destroy one of the few good, well-intentioned pieces of legislation that this government has brought in, is this:
We here in Britain are trying to build a tolerant, inclusive, multicultural society. If you can’t work within that, within the laws and regulations that govern adoption, then you shouldn’t be in the adoption business. And if you don’t like the way our society is developing, maybe you’d be happier elsewhere. I hear they’ve got quite a theocracy going in Iran.
Of course, there’s nothing to stop people saying the same to me, when I speak out against ID cards, for example. But that’s democracy for ya: full of contradictions.
And anyway, it could come to that yet.
One Device to Do It All?
So, my new phone arrived today. It’s a Sony-Ericsson M600i smartphone. Most excitingly, with T-Mobile’s Web ‘n’ Walk service, I get unlimited (though capped) mobile internet.
All that remains (apart from ugrading the firmware, sorting out backups and synchronisation, and generally finding my way around the thing) is to get Orange to send my PAC code (actually I suspect the ‘C’ stands for ‘code’, but never mind), so that I can get my number transferred. Which they’ve said they’ll do, but I’ve heard it can be difficult.
Anyway, I’m typing this on it, and will try posting from it next.
Book Notes 23: Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson
So I finally start The Baroque Cycle; or you might say, I finally finish the first volume. I started reading this at a campsite in France while on holiday: that was back at the end of August. I finished it on the 9th of November. As I said not so long ago, I don't read that quickly these days (compared, say, to back when I was a student); but this has taken me ages. Which is not surprising, since it's 900 pages long.
While I’ve been reading it I’ve also read 19, 20, 21 and 22, but they are all graphic novels, and quite short. As well as that I generally read parts of the Saturday Guardian; a few magazines (London Cyclist, Matrix and Vector, occasionally The New Statesman, or one of the Linux magazines); and of course, a rake of blogs. But apart from those, it’s just been this one steadily for about two and a half months. And there are two more volumes to go: each, I believe, of a similar length.
None of which tells us anything about the content of the book, of course. It is an interesting exercise, apart from anything else: Stephenson cleverly educates us science geeks about history, by linking the doings of kings and lords with those of Isaac Newton and other luminaries of the Royal Society. Or so I first thought. But then I realised that simultaneously, or alternatively, it does the opposite: it teaches humanities geeks (who presumably can be expected to know about the history) something about the science of the time.
More importantly, though, it’s a damn good story. The first third tells the first part of the story of Daniel Waterhouse, who is the son of a Puritan family that is expecting the apocalypse to come in 1666. Of course, with the Plague and the Great Fire, it seems like it is.
Waterhouse is a Natural Philosopher, though (or scientist, as we would say). He goes to Cambridge, where he becomes the room-mate and friend of a hick from the country, one Isaac Newton.
I was reading it at a roaring pace all through the first part, but for me it lagged suddenly when the second part started, and we are introduced to a new set of characters, principally a vagabond called Jack Shaftoe (he has a brother called Bob, but I don’t know whether he is meant to be anything to do with the song) and a young woman called Eliza who was a harem slave to the Turks, and whom Jack frees.
The pace picks up again as we get to know these characters, and their peregrinations round the courts and battlefields of Europe mean that their paths eventually cross with Daniel and the other Royal Society members from part one. Which takes us to part three.
Far too much happens to give even a summary here. There are the births of princes and the deaths of kings, war, conquest and betrayal. Almost most importantly of all, the early scientists are probing and extending their understanding of the workings of the universe (of ‘creation’ as they would term it).
Most importantly of all, there are the lives of ordinary people going on against this backdrop
It’s a fantastic work, and as the first part of a trilogy, it isn’t marred by Stephenson’s noted difficulty with endings. I look forward eagerly to reading the second and third volumes.
I don’t know why it won SF awards, though: just being written by an SF author really isn’t enough to make a book SF.
Dead Zen Master
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.
Book Notes 22: The Sandman: The Dream Hunters, by Neil Gaiman and Yoshika Amano
A retelling of a Japanese folk tale, this. A monk lives alone in a very minor and secluded temple. He falls in love with a fox, who has taken the form of a woman at the time. and who tries to get him to leave the temple with her. When he is attacked via his dreams, she tries to protect him.
Although presented in the physical form of a modern graphic novel, this is actually a prose short story with full-page (and two-page) illustrations.
It’s very fine, but at the same time, a long way from essential, in my humble opinion.
[tags]book notes 2006, books, Gaiman, sandman, comics, graphic novels[/tags]
Book Notes 21: The Sandman Midnight Theatre, by Neil Gaiman and others
A collection of some of Neil's shorter comics work. All fine and dandy, but far from essential. The most interesting one for me was a Swamp Thing story for which they had reunited the old art team ('old' in the sense of, from the days when Alan Moore was writing it) of Steve Bissette and John Totleben. So that it looked 'right', even for me, who has always paid much more attention to story than artwork. I've never bought a comic because of its artists, but often have because of its writer. That's why it was mainly Alan Moore who brought me back to comics as an adult: he's a great storyteller.
Indeed, I fairly often find myself annoyed or frustrated with sections of comics where the story is told entirely or mainly visually, and for reasons of poor reproduction, or just the artist(s) not being as good as they think they are, it’s hard to work out what’s supposed to be going on.
That happened to a small extent in one of the stories here, in which Gaiman uses the ‘old’ Sandman character, who was published by DC long ago, and was in abeyance when he reimagined the character as the Lord of Dreams that we know today. The old Sandman is a masked adventurer in the intra-war years. His mask is a gas mask, and his weapon is a gun that fires sleeping gas.
This story is a kind of crossover between the two versions of The Sandman. The old one has cause to visit the house in England where an old wizard has the Lord of Dreams captured - as at the very start of Gaiman’s Sandman, in other words.
All in all, reading this was not time wasted, but it wasn’t that great.
... And a Happy New Year to All My Reader
Well, clearly no blogging happens over the Christmas and New Year period in the Devilgate household. In fact I didn't even switch the computer on.
So we start the year without having done a review of the last one, and without even having posted all of last year’s Book Notes. I have nine (nine!) written or partially written, but unposted, mini book reviews, that I’ll try to put up over the next few days. Perhaps I should slap them all together into one, but that would really be too big, and would make it harder to find things in future. So Book Notes 2006 entries will keep on appearing for a while yet.
And since I’ve made myself a New Year’s resolution to write every day, I hope to be making considerably more posts in general than last year. We’ll see.
I hope everyone had a fine Christmas or other winter festival, and an equally good start to the New Year.