Tales from the Bitface

If there’s a record for the longest gap between volumes of a series of collections, I think we all know that there’s only one real contender. Though to win it, JMS’s The Last Dangerous Visions will have to actually be released (which, at the time of writing, is scheduled to happen next month, amazingly).

Second on the list, though, might be Nova Scotia. The first volume was published in 2005, to more-or-less coincide with the second Glasgow Worldcon. Nineteen years later all is well, as Volume 2 is published to more-or-less coincide with this year’s Glasgow Worldcon.

And it is again, very good, and very varied. I’m not going to go through the stories, but it struck me that three of them concern someone being resurrected — woken from cryogenic stasis, or reconstructed from DNA and memories — in a future that might not be quite what they had expected or hoped for. A couple of others include bringing back extinct species, or sentient life coming to entities that are not (to the best of our knowledge) sentient at present.

I doubt the stories were chosen deliberately to have those connections. Rather, perhaps this is how our current end-of-the-world fears are playing out: in fantasies of technological afterlives. Not that such stories are particularly new, but maybe they’re particularly now.

Notable contributors: Ken McLeod, of course, Scotland’s premier living SF author. James Kelman, surprisingly: as one of Scotland’s best-known literary authors, it’s pleasing that he’d lower himself into our genre murk. Grant Morrison, Scotland’s best known comics writer, I imagine. And plenty others.

I saw Tendai (as is his name) interviewed at Worldcon last month. Went along without knowing anything about him or his writing, and the interview was interesting enough that I went and bought this in the dealers' room immediately afterwards. Or maybe the next day, but you get the idea.

It’s the first of the Edinburgh Nights series, which I think is currently at three books with a fourth on the way and a fifth planned. Which means it kind of violates one of my personal guidelines to have bought it, but what the hell, you know?

Anyway, it’s set in an alternative Edinburgh where there’s magic. The time is approximately the present day, because there’s things like smartphones. But our heroine, Ropa, can talk to ghosts, which tend to hang about when they’ve got unfinished business back on the plane of the living.

And a whole lot more happens besides. It’s a pretty bleak environment that she lives in, essentially a shanty town of caravans on the edge of the city, very much hand to mouth. It feels kind of post-apocalypse, but I don’t think there’s been anything quite as disastrous as that, just a slow decline. Not sure, though, there are hints at things. It’ll be interesting to see where he takes it.

As far as the ‘Don’t start a series that the author hasn’t finished writing’ guideline goes, it’s pretty standalone, thought with plenty of setup for more.

I mentioned in the last books post that I’ve seen the Jackson Brodie TV series. Well, maybe not all of them. I enjoyed the latest book in the series so much that I thought I’d go back and read the earlier ones. This is the first, and the story was completely unfamiliar to me.

It was also surprisingly horrific. It starts by setting up three ‘case histories’, with three stories of crimes at different times in the past: a young girl disappears; a young woman is murdered; another young woman murders her husband.

Then we’re introduced to Jackson Brodie: divorced and trying to co-parent a young daughter and carry on his life, while also trying to run a private detective agency in Cambridge, a city he hates.

Somehow, all these cases are going to come together and get solved. As I said about the latest book, though, it’s clear that Atkinson’s writing about the minutiae of the human heart, far more than the minutiae of detective work. And that’s OK.

It’s an enjoyable, easy read — well, apart from the gruesomeness and tension of the first three chapters — and intriguingly it ends as if Brodie’s career is over. I don’t know if she planned to write sequels, but clearly something must change.

I’ve read several of Kate Atkinson’s books, but never one of her Jackson Brodie detective series. This despite having seen the TV adaptations. So getting this as a birthday present was great.

We’re promised a murder mystery set against the background of a country house hosting a murder-mystery party, and that’s what we get, eventually. I really enjoyed it, but if anything I’d like her to spend more time with the titular detective.¹ But we get various viewpoint characters, and really very little from Brodie’s viewpoint. Very little actual detecting, too.

Indeed, I got the impression that Atkinson doesn’t really want to be writing a detective story. Or she does, of course, but she’s so keen on multiple viewpoints and character creation — and so good at them — that those are the things she’s doing, more than writing a conventional story of a detective solving a mystery.

Nothing wrong with that, of course, you can tell any story you want, any way you want, and why be bound by conventions?

When the final chronicles were first announced, and indeed on the first two books, it was referred to as a trilogy. I assume that the third volume just became so long that the publishers, and probably Donaldson himself, decided it needed to be split in two. Each of the third and fourth volumes is about the same length, anyway.

And they bring everything to a satisfying conclusion, that’s the main thing. Of course Linden hesitates, and Covenant resists using wild magic (but not to the extent he once did). Of course Donaldson uses fifty words where fifteen would do. Of course his writerly tics come through.

But the pages keep turning, and old friends and enemies turn up, and Wild Magic, Law, and Earthpower do their things, and we all leave satisfied.

I didn’t even realise there was a third (and final?) volume in Talbot’s Luther Arkwright chronicles. Until friends mentioned it at worldcon.

I ordered it immediately. It’s really good, right up there with the earlier ones. In this there turns out to be an even more highly-evolved, more powerful human than Arkwright and co. And they do not have the best interest of anyone but themself at heart.

Not going to say much about this here, as I’m already well into the next (and final) volume, and they’re very much a single story.