books
-
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. ↩︎
- The first volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, by Anthony Powell
- Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
- Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, by Cory Doctorow
- American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
- Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami
Book Notes 20: The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones by Alan Moore and Ian Gibson
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.
Book Notes 19: Tom Strong's Terrific Tales, by Alan Moore, Steve Moore, and others
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.
[tags]book notes 2006, books, comics, Alan Moore, Tom Strong, America’s Best Comics[/tags]
Book Notes 18: Radio Free Albemuth, by Philip K Dick
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.
Book Notes 17: Vellum, by Hal Duncan
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 than 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.
Book Notes 16: The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle, by Catherine Webb
Catherine Webb is only 19; she had her first novel published at 14. It makes you sick; though it shouldn’t.
Horatio Lyle is a scientist and investigator in Victorian times. He has a dog called Tate, but there’s a lot more to this book than bad sugar-manufacturer-related jokes. The blurb describes it as “Sherlock Holmes crossed with Thomas Edison as written by Terry Pratchett”, and that’s not a bad assessment; though it’s not as funny as Pratchett. I read it with my nine-year-old son, and he thoroughly enjoyed it: though not so much the descriptive passages, and he was disappointed by the ending.
I thought the descriptive passages were very well written and incredibly evocative, but there were rather too many of them; and while I enjoyed it at the time, actually the action was on the weak side, and she didn’t make as much of the plot as she could have.
And that ending: what a letdown. See, the story is that this ancient plate of great cultural significance has been stolen from the Bank of England, and various groups are trying to get it back.
It turns out that one of the groups consists of some sort of supernatural beings. They are a bit vampirish, but they have the traditional fear of, and vulnerability to, iron, of Faerie. They believe the plate has great power.
There are investigations and plots; but not really very many of them. It’s very well written, as I say, but kind of lightweight.
I see that there’s a sequel out already, so in time we might see whether her plotting skills have got any stronger.
Book Notes 15: Appleseed, by John Clute
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, years ago, when he reviewed there regularly,1 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.
Book Notes 14: Viriconium, by M John Harrison
This is a reissue in the Fantasy Masterworks series, of all - or nearly all - of Harrison's 'Viriconium' stories. Four of the collected works are novels (though short ones) and the rest short stories. I had read only one of them before, the last-written and last presented here: 'A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium' appeared in Interzone a long time ago. I don't think I understood it then, though: it doesn't really make much sense out of context.
Though as it happens, the context of that one story is different from that of all the others. The others are all set in Viriconium, or in the lands that surround it. This final one is set in our world; it tells the tale of some people who dream of Viriconium, who believe that it is real, who believe that they might be able to reach it one day.
Whether anyone would actually want to get to Viriconium if they could is another matter. It is a sort of dream city at the end of time. It has a constant feeling that the world has run down, that time is running out. Humanity has fallen from the great technological highs of the ‘Afternoon Cultures’, and now survives on scavenged technology - machines so advanced that they are still running after millennia - and on traditional crafts.
So most of the weaponry, for example, consists of swords, but there are a few prized energy blades, or baans. People travel on horseback, or walk, to get around, especially after the last few aircars are destroyed in the War of the Two Queens, which is part of the subject matter of ‘The Pastel City’.
Did I mention that this doesn’t belong in the Fantasy Masterworks line? Just because people fight with swords, and the technology is advanced beyond their understanding into Clarke’s (Third) Law territory, doesn’t make a book sword & sorcery. This is science fiction, where the science is breaking down; or at least, the knowledge of it is.
Despite all the stories having been published before, there are copyright dates for only a few of them, and previous-publication details for none. Which to my mind detracts slightly from the collection.
Also, the first story is listed as ‘Viriconium Knights’ in the contents and on its own title page, but as Viriconium Nights" (which is the title I recall having heard of before) on the copyright page. This could, of course, be deliberate, as I have a vague recollection of having heard that this is not a simple collection and republication, but that there has also been some reworking.
It is not easy reading: it is a 500-page book, and it took me over a month to read it. Now, I’m not that fast a reader these days, but that is slow. But at no point was I thinking, “This is heavy going,” or, “I can’t be bothered with this.” Rather, it’s just that some prose styles are denser than others, and Harrison’s is dense. In a good way. Highly recommended.
Book Notes 13: Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, by JK Rowling
This, you won't be surprised to hear, was a re-reading. I started out reading it to my nine-year-old son. He, of course, soon zoomed ahead on his own, leaving me to finish more slowly. I think that makes it three times for him. Definitely just the two for me. And he's read it at least once more between me first drafting this post and finally getting round to publishing it.
So, how is it? In particular, how does it hold up to a re-reading? The short answers are “great” and “really well”.
I’m a sucker for Rowling’s work, an unashamed big fan. And obviously, I wouldn’t have been reading it again if I hadn’t liked it the first time.
So, yeah, it’s great. Probably not the best of the series (though I’m not sure I could say what that is), but not the worst, either.
I have a view on the major plot spoiler, but I won’t go into that here. Suffice to say that I’m largely convinced by the arguments of the site whose very domain name is a spoiler (though I see that it has changed its name, now).
What with Harry Potter, the Lemony Snicket books, the Artemis Fowl books and others, we are truly living through a golden age of children’s literature (or at least, publishing).
I was surprised, when I asked my son whether he was more eagerly awaiting “Seven or Thirteen,” that he said, “Thirteen.” Perhaps he sensed that Mr Snicket would be finished before Ms Rowling; and it turns out that he was right: the final adventure of the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans is coming out next month (on Friday the thirteenth, suitably enough.
Book Notes 12: The Last Temptation, by Neil Gaiman and Michael Zulli
The last of my three recent graphic borrowings from the library, and the one I expected to like most. But it's a bit lightweight for Gaiman's work, and for my taste.
It’s based on work that Gaiman did with Alice Cooper for a concept album that the latter released in 1994. I didn’t know that people still made concept albums, but there you go.
Also there is one theme in particular that Gaiman was to revisit in American Gods; namely that of the town where children disappear periodically. In American Gods the periodic disappearance (and murder, let’s face it) of the child acts a kind of spell, which protects a town from the encroachment of the rest of the world and the forces of modernity and ‘development’. In this work, there’s no suggestion that the children’s absorption into the ‘Theater of the Real’ brings advantage to anyone other than the the semi-mythical ‘Showman’. Gaiman was perhaps using this work to develop some of the ideas that he would return to later.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but as I say, the work as a whole seems shallow and perhaps incomplete, compared to, say, The Sandman.
Book Notes 11: The Originals, by Dave Gibbons
More graphical stuff from the library. Quadrophenia with hover-bikes and -scooters. It’s beautifully drawn, and well-enough told, but really, why?
There is literally no other technological change. Oh, there might be differences in the materials of the clothes, of the contents of the pills: but the look is pure 1965 – or 1965-as-remade-in-1979. I really don’t see what the point of this was.
Book Notes 10: Skizz, by Alan Moore and Jim Baikie
The local library is proving a great source of graphic fiction at the moment. Another early-early Moore, one of which I had heard, but had definitely not read.
It is Moore’s interpretation of a theme that was then very common, the alien lost on Earth. It wears its debt to ET quite openly: one of the characters even referring to the film for inspiration in how to deal with the alien.
That said, it’s entirely possible that Moore developed it without prior knowledge of the film: it wasn’t a new idea when ET used it.
Skizz is a gentle, heartwarming tale of respect between intelligent beings, regardless of difference. A human girl meets the “other”, and finds he is not so “other” at all.
And it has a genuinely nasty and scary baddie, and reconciliation between generations. Highly recommended.
Book notes 9: Redemolished, by Alfred Bester
I found this in the local library, having never heard of it before. It is a relatively recently-published (2000) collection containing some of his short fiction, some essays, and some interviews he did with people as diverse as Isaac Asimov and Woody Allen.
The title is, of course, a reference to his famous novel The Demolished Man, and appears to have been chosen mainly because the ‘deleted’ prologue to that novel is included here.
The non-fiction is interesting, not least in showing part of what Bester did for a living after he more-or-less dropped out of SF for a long time (he made most of his money by writing for TV).
The fiction, on the whole, is slightly disappointing. I enjoyed it well enough, but it hasn’t aged well: most of it reads as quite dated.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that one of the stories was the one which taught me the meaning of the word “fugue” (both musical and psychological) many years ago. I recalled that I had learned it from a story, but not what story it was: ‘The Four-Hour Fugue’. Who said SF wasn’t educational?
Book notes 8: The Complete DR and Quinch, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
I found this in the local library. I thought I hadn’t read it, but I remember reading the ‘Something something, oranges something’ episode (AKA ‘DR and Quinch go to Hollywood’) back when I was at university in the 80s. I expect they were reprinted by one of the American companies (possibly coloured in?) and I got some of them.
This is early-early Alan Moore, and of course is nowhere near the quality of his later-early work such as V for Vendetta or Watchmen, or his more recent work like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but it’s quite fun.
As a parent of young kids, though, I now see it as surprisingly violent. Not that I’d censor it, or anything: just that it’s something I’m more aware of. Or aware of in a different way. Back when I was a student I’d probably have celebrated the violence for its wild- and cartoon-ness.
Indeed, I discovered that the book used — presumably coined — the term ‘napalm dispenser’, which I borrowed for a round-robin work that I was involved in back in my university days, and which had hilarious, and nearly calamitous results. I should probably write a blog post about that one day. It involved cucumbers.
Book Notes 7: Nova Scotia, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J Wilson
(I haven’t stopped reading, nor writing these notes: I just haven’t got round to posting them, for various reasons).
I actually started reading this back in October last year, but, it being a collection of short stories, I took it slowly, over months. Since I finished it this year, it belongs in my 2006 Book Notes.
Before I get much further I should declare an interest: one of the editors, Andrew, is an old university friend of mine.
So it might come as no surprise that I am more impressed by the very existence of this boook than by its content. Which is not to dismiss or belittle the content. There are some very good stories here, by some top authors and fine newcomers. But the overall sense of it is less than overwhelming.
Perhaps the most surprising letdown is a sin of omission: where is Scotland’s most famous SF author; indeed, probably its most famous living author? No doubt the good Mr Banks has other things to do — I doubt that he writes short stories at all, these days — but you’d think he could have done an introduction or something.
The introduction in fact is by David Pringle, the former editor of Interzone: I had no idea that he was even Scottish. But there you go: we get everywhere.
I’m not going to go through all the stories, just hit a few high and low points.
In a way the most disappointing story is Hal Duncan‘s ‘The Last Shift’. Not because it’s badly written or anything. Rather, because it’s not SF, fantasy, or speculative in any way. It’s a sadly-commonplace tale of the last day of a factory whose company is “outsourcing” or “offshoring” all the work. The fact that the characters all have wings and horns like the demons of our world’s mythology (and that the location doesn’t exist in our world) neither adds anything to it nor detracts from it in anyway: those factors are just irrelevant.
Which is a shame. I’m a keen reader of Hal’s blog, and look forward to reading his first novel, Vellum (I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve so far been put off buying it by the price: it’s a full-price hardback at £17:99, and that just seems a bit too much for an essentially unkown author).
The high points for me are probably ‘Sophie and the Sacred Fluids’ by Andrew C Ferguson (another disclaimer: I also had a passing acquaintance with this Andrew); ‘Deus ex Homine’, by Hannu Rajaniemi; and ‘Snowball’s Chance’, by Charles Stross.
In conclusion, I’m very glad it exists, and I’m glad I read it; but I hope the next volume, if it happens, is better.
[tags]books, book notes 2006, nova scotia, sf, scotland, science fiction, scottish fiction, scottish literature, scottish sf, scottish writing[/tags]
Stanslaw Lem
Just heard on Radio 4 that Stanslaw Lem has died. He was 84.
I’ve only read Solaris, but I recall it as being very good.
[tags]books, writers, stanislaw lem[/tags]
Book Notes 6: Saturday by Ian McEwan
This is an interesting one: another Booker nominee, if I’m not very much mistaken, and a strange and masterful work. It is a portrait of a single day in the life of its protagonist, one Henry Perowne, a successful neurosurgeon.
Reading matters
This year I’ve been blogging about the books I read. I started over on my LiveJournal, but I’ll continue here. So far, though, there have been:
No a bad wee collection, if I say so myself. I’ve also read Ian McEwan’s Saturday, which I’ll be posting about shortly, and am struggling through (while enjoying) Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital.
[tags]books, book notes 2006, reviews, this year’s reading[/tags]
Book Notes 5: Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
I read a review of this book in The Guardian years ago (this one, I think). It sounded absolutely fantastic, and I’ve wanted to read it ever since. But I only got round to buying it recently.
I was aware, of course, of the danger of approaching a work with unreasonably-raised expectations, so I tried not to. You can’t make yourself think “This won’t be very good,” when you actually think, “This should be pretty good.” The trick, therefore, is to convince yourself to have a slight seed of doubt. I’m not totally sure how well that can ever work, though.
I did enjoy the book, however: it starts with a light, easy style, and has an endearing central character in Sumire.
Book Notes 4: American Gods by Neil Gaiman
I’ve been reading Neil Gaiman’s blog since the time when he was writing this book — as, I’m sure, have most of us, what with his site being the number one hit on Google when you search for ‘neil’.
But I hadn’t actually read the book until now. I had read the first chapter online, and I had an idea roughly what it was about: real gods (maybe all gods) walking the Earth in the present day.
And it’s a stormer of a book. The pages just keep turning, the quotes are quotable (girl-Sam’s “I believe” speech is particularly fine) and myths are mashed up in glorious style.
It’s shortcomings are, perhaps, that it slows down a bit too much in the middle section; and Wednesday and Shadow make perhaps too many visits to down-at-heel gods without anything very specific happening during them. It reads like a road movie in places (which is fine), and it would probably make a good one.
There are surprises right up to the end, though, and I’m sure I’ll read it again in the future.
Technorati Tags: books, book notes, american gods, neil gaiman, 2006
Book Notes 2: Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Yes, and only a day after the last one. It took me a bit longer than that to read it, mind you.
A science-fiction book that was nominated for the Booker: amazing. And have no doubt about it: this is a science-fiction book. Just as Nineteen Eighty Four is; and Orwell’s masterpiece is perhaps the best reference point for Cloud Atlas. The appearance of O’Brien’s Goldstein‘s book within Winston Smith’s story may well have been a model for Mitchell’s multiply-embedded stories.