📗 Books 2025, 26: Matrix, by Lauren Groff

A book about nuns in the 12th century? Why not? Austin Kleon rates it, which is how I came to it.

About one nun, more accurately, a real historical figure, who may or may not actually have been a nun at all: Marie de France. She was definitely a poet, though.

None of that really matters, though. The book isn’t a biography, it’s fiction. A novel based loosely on a historical figure about whom not much is known. She’s descended from a fairy, or said to be in the story. She has visions of (or from) the Virgin Mary. She saves an abbey full of nuns from starvation, and turns it into a power in the land.

It’s very good. In my ongoing, unstructured notes on how writers present speech, and such: there is no direct speech at all in this. Or there is at times, but it’s not punctuated as such. I would have expected to find that annoying, but actually I hardly noticed it.

Groff is an excellent writer, I would have to say. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more by her.

📗 Books2025, 25: Summerland, by Hannu Rajaniemi

I enjoyed this, but it hasn’t really stuck in my mind. By which I mean, I finished it a few weeks ago, and don’t really recall much of it now. I’ve read two of Hannu’s hard-SF trilogy, but never got to the third, despite what I predicted back then. They were hard work, as I recall, which is probably why I never got to the third.

This one, which was recommended by Warren Ellis is much more approachable. It’s 1938 and the afterlife has not only been discovered, living humans can communicate with the souls in it. And the intelligence services of the the Great Powers are making use of it to extend the reach of their empires.

It’s good, but thinking about it now, one idea that’s mentioned and doesn’t really get explored is this. People no longer fear death. When you know there’s an afterlife — and especially when your one of the privileged ones with a ‘Ticket’, that means your soul will persist in ‘Summerland’ and not dissipate — then there’s nothing really to fear.

But it’s a spy story, so the focus is on the plot, as it should be, and it’s a good one. Thought it maybe slightly runs out of steam at the end. Worth checking out, though.

‘[W]e might have to wait two years for the conclusion’ I wrote almost six years ago.

The conclusion of The Book of Dust arrived the other day. I haven’t started it yet, and now I’m thinking I might go back and reread the previous one first.

📗 Books 2025, 24: Under the Glacier, by Halldór Laxness, Translated by Magnus Magnusson

This is a very odd little book. Laxness won the Nobel for Literature back in the fifties, but I had never heard of him before I read Jack Deighton’s review of it earlier this year. This is often the way with Nobel laureates, or so it seems to me. The committee members know of many more writers than you or I.

In her introduction, Susan Sontag includes science fiction in the group of labels of ‘outlier status’ which apply to this novel. Only, I would say, if some characters believing they are ‘in communion with the galaxies’ makes it so. Yet it somehow has something of the feel of SF. Maybe because our unnamed narrator is exploring a landscape in which he is lost and confused.

It’s the psychological landscape of a small community who live by the titular glacier, though. And that glacier — Snæfells — is the same one Jules Verne’s characters start their Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Which gives it a tentative connection to one of our ur-texts. But nothing explicitly fantastical happens. Unless it does. Resurrection? Maybe. Somebody disappearing mysteriously? Possibly.

We, the reader, are as lost and confused by the behaviours of the characters as is the narrator, who has been sent by the bishop of Iceland to find out what has been going on in the distant parish.

It muses on a lot of ideas (SF is ‘the literature of ideas’, of course, so there’s that), but has no plot as such. It’s intriguing, though, and well worth a read.

📗 Books 2025, 23: How to Solve Your Own Murder, by Kristen Perrin

Most sites describe How to Solve Your Own Murder as ‘cosy crime’, which I suppose it is. It has a first-person protagonist, so the reader doesn’t think there’s much chance she’ll die. She does find herself in some danger, though, and hell, she might not inherit her great aunt’s fortune, if she doesn’t solve the mystery of her murder.

The great aunt’s murder, that is. Our heroine has never met the great aunt at the start, and never does, because she’s murdered right away. But we know from a prologue that the great aunt always expected to be murdered. A medium told her so — or at least implied as much — when she was 16. It became the defining fact of her life, which is quite sad.

The great aunt is a secondary first-person narrator, by way of her diaries. So we get alternating chapters of the past and present. It’s a good read.

I did something unusual for me at the end: I read the few pages fom the sequel that are included at the back. Usually I skip that kind of thing. Especially when it’s not from a sequel, but from another book entirely. Not this time, though, and I’ll be seeking out How to Seal Your Own Fate (‘Book two in The Castle Knoll Files’) at some point.

📗 Books 2025, 22: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

A Booker winner, no less. And a science-fiction novel, too. Well, of sorts. It’s set in space, but very much the non-fictional, real space of the International Space Station, and the present day. And nothing weird or fantastic (in the fantastika sense) happens.

Yet it is set slightly into the future. On the day it takes place — the whole story happens across a single day, sixteen orbits of the space station — a new mission to the moon is launched. A crew of four, scheduled to land on the moon a few days later. Is that enough to make it SF? Kind of. If it were up for SF awards, which I’m sure it must have been, few would quibble.

But none of that matters compared to how gorgeous the prose is. This is a very writerly novel. The language is lovely, almost poetic in places; yet with a lot of lists, oddly, both from the author and from at least one of her characters.

I was, however, mildly annoyed at times, in two aspects of my being. The physics graduate disagreed with some word choices. Right in the opening line, for example, a space station in orbit is described as ‘rotating’ round the Earth. While that’s not exactly wrong, it’s not how we’d usually phrase it. Orbiting or circling, we’d say. It might be rotating too, but that would be around its own axis. A tiny thing, though.

Then the writer and user of English was mildly disturbed by how the small amount of dialogue was presented: no quote marks. That’s not uncommon nowadays, but it can be distracting, and what purpose does it serve?

It’s a delightful work. There isn’t much plot, but there are fragments of all the six crew members' stories. We see them at work, performing experiments and maintaining the station; watching a typhoon building on Earth and worrying about the people in its path; and musing about and remembering their lives and families back home.

It’s incredibly skillful to conjure so much from so little text — it’s unusually short for a modern novel. A worthy winner, and very highly recommended.

📗 Books 2025, 21: The Book of Daniel, by EL Doctorow

It’s a strange thing, or so it seems to me, to deal with a political event of your own lifetime, by writing a fictional version of a life. And not of one of the protagonists, but of an imaginary version of one of their children. Yet this is what we have here, and it’s on the whole successful.

Doctorow takes the story of the Rosenbergs, who were accused of conspiracy to commit espionage against the USA, convicted, and executed in 1953. Changing their name to Isaacson, he tells the story of their son, Daniel, along with his younger sister, Susan. In reality the Rosenbergs had two boys, but their ages were similar, and some of what happened to them after their parents' arrest, according to Wikipedia, is similar to the experiences of Daniel and Susan.

As a novel it’s extremely well written, both readable and literary. It uses a number of devices — I might call them gimmicks, if that didn’t seem too dismissive, but I’m not sure I understand the reason for them. It switches frequently between Daniel’s first person and third — sometimes within the same sentence —, and also jumps around in time. One section is told from the point of view of the father and mother, which makes sense, as it’s when they are in prison and on trial, where Daniel would have no access to them.

The whole thing is presented as the thesis (or part of it) that Daniel is writing for his PhD, so there are several levels of meta involved. The main problem I had with it was the adult Daniel is at times a thoroughly objectionable character. There are a couple of early scenes where he sexually humiliates his young wife that nearly made me throw the book across the room.

Protagonists don’t have to be pleasant characters, of course, but this seemed prurient to me. I suppose we’re meant to understand he’s been damaged, if not abused. by his experiences, and goes on to abuse in turn. But I’m not sure the two sides tie up that well. The scenes of the young kids trying to make their way after their parents are gone, running away from an awful children’s home and returning to their now-empty house, are very moving.

Susan is in a mental institution at the start, and apparently dies there. Her story is the one that’s missing from this, in fact. We learn about her as a kid, certainly, and there are some interactions with Daniel when they’re older, then they’re estranged for a while. Then he visits her at the institution and she dies offstage. It feels like a gap, but again, maybe that’s how life feels sometimes.

As I say, it’s an unusual choice. Doctorow could have written a story about children torn from their parents and all that implies, without making it so closely tied to real events. Or he could have written a biography of the Rosenbergs. The latter would be a different kind of thing, though, and probably have a different readership. You’d only read such a biography if you were specifically interested in the case or the people, while you can read this as a novel without even knowing it’s inspired by real events. And maybe that’s the reason for using the events as the seed.

📗 Books 2025, 20: The Hallmarked Man, by Robert Galbraith

The mighty JK Rowling’s latest reaches us, at long last. After the bombshell ending of The Running Grave two years ago, we have the next installment in Strike and Robin’s story. (That should really be ‘Strike and Ellacott’s’, or ‘Cormoran and Robin’s’, but sometimes you’ve got to write things in the way that feels right).

The case is way complex. I’m not sure I followed all the twists, or even quite had all the characters figured out — especially actual and possible victims, even more than culprits. That’s partly because of the speed I read it at, and the late nights my reading caused.

Anyway, I’ll not say too much more because of spoilers, but I think The Ink-Black Heart is still my favourite.

📗 Books 2025, 19: In Ascension, by Martin MacInnes

It’s unusual to get a science-fiction novel that was also longlisted for the Booker, as this was. The question, though: is it science fiction?

It certainly has science: most notably marine biology. Also space travel to the edge of the solar system via a new, unexplained drive; something which might be a first contact event; possible time travel; and a kind of ascendence. In fact there’s a section near the end that had strong resonances of 2001: A Space Odyssey for me.

So yes, it’s SF. But it feels somehow incomplete. Not unfinished, except in the way you might say that about 2001 itself. It keeps the pages turning OK, but I’m not entirely sure exactly what it’s trying to achieve, and (therefore) whether it’s successful.

It tells two stories at once. And I do wonder whether MacInnes was similarly torn between his desire to write a mainstream, literary novel, and one diving deep into fantastika.

Leigh, the marine biologist who ends up on a space mission, had a physically abusive father, which not surprisingly affects much of her life. Though her sister appears not to have suffered similarly, and there are hints that Leigh is not entirely a reliable narrator. (But then again, who is?) The adult Leigh is torn between her career and her desire to visit her mother, who is showing signs of dementia.

As a marine biologist Leigh experimentally engineers algae which is intended to feed, oxygenate, and cheer up the small crew of a year- (or more) long voyage. But there’s a lot going in the background of the story, that Leigh and most of the other characters are not privy to. Secrets kept by companies and governments. We, the readers, are also kept outside the walls of secrecy.

So it’s very good at evoking the situation of someone who is a cog — albeit an essential one — in very complex machine, but who has no picture of the machine as a whole.

All of which leaves it convincing, but frustrating, especially if you’re looking for a nicely wrapped-up story.

📗 Books 2025, 18: Glory Road, by Robert A Heinlein

I had a sudden hankering to reread this old Heinlein book (even older than me, it turns out, being first published in 1963). I read it as a kid, from the library, and if I ever bought a copy it isn’t accessible now.

I searched my local library’s catalogue. No joy. But the excellent World of Books duly had an old copy or two, and one was soon here.

It is almost exactly as I remembered it, which is to say it’s a tale of derring-do, sword-and-sorcery adventure, where the sorcery is sufficiently-advanced technology. We don’t learn anything about how it works, and it doesn’t matter. It’s just a fun story, very much of its time.

The first-person male protagonist is one of those highly-capable men beloved of that era’s male American SF writers. But he is relatively lacking in self-confidence at times, which is surprisingly refreshing for the type. The female lead is mostly great, and considerably more capable than the guy, even if he doesn’t exactly realise it.

Anyway, loads of fun, and I’m glad to have read it again after all these years.