The Beekeeper's Apprentice

By Laurie King

There is a deeply annoying phenomenon in modern publishing, the rise of professional fanfic. The renowned writer of detective fiction Baroness James was on the telly the other day talking about her new book, a sequel to Pride and Prejudice. She seemed to think that it was a very brave thing for her publishers to do. I disagree.
It is a murderously safe bet that anything with P.D. James' name on it will sell very comfortably, be it a murder mystery, science fiction or genre busting regency romance. The publishers have an established writer, selling towards her own established fanbase, plus the equally established devotees of Jane Austen. Even if the book is appalling, and being P.D. James, it probably isn't, it will sell comfortably. Which is nice.
James of course is hardly the only one. Eion Cooper is busy writing a Hitchhiker sequel no-one felt the burning need for, Anthony Horowitz proudly announces that he has written the first post-Doyle Holmes novel, blissfully unaware of the dozens, if not hundreds of other Holmes writers out there.
I don't, you understand, have a fundamental objection to writers treading in others' footsteps, it can be a valid way of getting published, finding a voice, attracting a readership. There does seem something basically screwed up though, when a publisher's entire publicity budget is devoted to pumping a very well known writer's dabbling with very well known characters. They've only got so much after all, and there can't be very much left for new writers, with new ideas.
So what, you might well be asking by now, has this to do with the book named above? Well, it's fanfic again, even if the writer is one I'd otherwise never came across, and I wanted to get that rant over.
It is 1915 and Mary Sue Russell is wandering across the Sussex downs when she encounters a middle aged man studying bees. Soon Sherlock Holmes, for it is he, recognises that she has the best mind he's encountered in years, starts teaching her detective skills and they have adventures.
Now the thing you can at least say about this is that it's doing something with the characters and the genre. It's not House Of Silk, just telling a story that Conan-Doyle didn't think of, nor is it Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, taking the piss (not that I've actually read either) nor worse still Thrones and Dominions, picking up again a story that Sayers had sensibly set aside (gave up about the same point as she did).
Once you get over the idea that Watson is an unreliable narrator, that Holmes is in fact much younger than ACD would have had us believe, that characters surely celibate might have wives and families, there are stories that can be told. Some of course have already been told. There are hints in this book (I understand the detail is told in flashback circa book six of the series) of daring boys own stories of Great War Palestine, which makes me wonder if the Young Indiana Jones might be in there as well. But that kind of thing aside, would Holmes have coped with the roaring Twenties, flapper feminism and the like? Not 100% convinced that it's a question the world needed answering, but it is at least a question.
Not a bad book really, read on a recommendation, not feeling an overwhelming urge to read the rest of the series.

Forty Signs of Rain

By Kim Stanley Robinson

This is apparently a science fiction book. It says so on Wikipedia, so it must be true. If true though, it's using a definition that's very broad indeed. It is certainly fiction, it involves much science, and has events in it that have not happened, but might. Does this mean every James Bond knock off or paramilitary gun fantasy is also SF?
As is often the case with a KSR book there are half a handful of viewpoint characters, who interact a bit, but for the most part carry on and do their own thing. Most of them are connected in some way with the National Science Foundation, a perfectly genuine American institution which manages research funding, and may or may not work in the manner described in the book. In the book at least, the NSF seems rather directionless, funding science, but reacting to proposals rather than driving things forward.
The whole book is set against rising ecological... troubles, none of which are more than a step away from today's news, which seeing as how the whole thing is set against the US political establishment involves quite a lot of bashing heads against brick walls.
As well as the NSF types there is a senator's policy gonk, who I assume to look pretty much like Josh Lyman, some bhuddist monks from a made up island nation which is only a fraction above the Indian Ocean on a good day and assorted scientists who might or might not be about to get a grant.
Being a Kim Stanley Robinson book there are a lot internal monologues and more than a few points where people enthusiastically tell each other things they know really. Being concerned by climate change and the American government's inability, or unwillingness, to do anything about it, there's a pretty much continual risk of being terribly preachy, not to mention riddled with trademark KSR infodumps, but KSR is one of the few writers who can pull this kind of thing off. I would probably feel differently if I wasn't pretty sympathetic to the political message, but the book works for me.

The Name of the Wind

By Patrick Rothfuss

Hmm, it's been a while since I last wrote on of these hasn't it? The problem with big bulky Fantasy epics is that they take an age to read, they need some digestion before I'm in a position to say anything worthwhile about them and unless I'm rigorous about getting something up, it's easy to slip out of the habit.
Still. Name of the Wind. Part one of a trilogy, won some awards I'm not in a position to look up right now, subject of a frankly premature re-read series on Tor.com and generally well received. Good book, even if it took me a while to really engage with it.
Our hero is the greatest magician of his age, long since retired, now an innkeeper, hiding from his enemies and his past self. Clearly a well known hero, since all the villagers tell stories about his exploits, without ever realising that he's pulling them a pint. Into this comes the greatest biographer of his age, looking for the tale that will reveal the lost truths of the mighty Kvothe, and over three days the story of his life will be told.
The first day tells of his childhood life as a travelling minstrel, until his family are killed by a demon with a particular downer on folk music, after which he survives as a street urchin, then a university student and budding hero, ultimately slaying a drug addled dragon.
Stockly formulaic as that sounds, there's a bleak depth to the world that raises it above the common herd. It's implied that the rather cozy world of student life with occasional draconic interludes has been destroyed, with waves of demons (apparently indifferent to folk music) overrunning the country. So far it is unclear how, presumably to be revealed in the unpublished third volume.
Must admit though, it fits generic lit-fic plot number one perfectly: old man remembers past loves, victories and betrayals. Hopefully the next will stretch it a bit.

Destroyermen: Into The Storm

By Taylor Anderson

Look, I'd just finished a very big book, and was eyeing up another fairly substantial tome, and wanted something quick and mindless. And was not disappointed.
Shortly after Pearl Harbour, a pair of beat up US destroyers running from the Japanese encounter some magic weather that transports them to an alternate universe where the dominant species is evolved cannibal velociraptors, whose preferred prey is sentient ocean going lemurs.
Soon the USN-Lemur alliance is busy building cannon, oil refineries and the like in the hope of turning back the unstoppable tide of lizards, preferably before they capture the more beat up destroyer, complete with idiot mutinous captain and so work out how to build steel ships and artillery. In other news, will the square jawed captain get off with the headstrong nurse? Will the...
Oh look, I really don't care. The characterisation is minimal, the sea battles are a foregone conclusion.
As I said, I was looking for something plenty mindless, and have no cause for complaint on that score.

A Dance With Dragons

By George R.R. Martin

A large book, a late book, and paradoxically too short a book. Also, volume 5 (or if you're a British publisher, volume 6, or perhaps even 6&7) in a series, so for God's sake don't start here.
Sometimes described as a Fantasy version of the Wars of the Roses, the initial set up was of a kingdom which had deposed a (mad, bad) dynasty a generation back, and where the incoming king discovered that it was easier to seize a throne than to rule.
Much plotting, scheming and civil war follows, while the last survivor of the former royal family grows up, gains followers, and rather. To everybody's surprise a set of young dragons, which turn out not to be extinct after all.
While the previous books have all been pretty much centred in the warring Seven Kingdoms, by this point the war is pretty much spent, and most of the action here revolves about the Dragon Queen, who has stopped off somewhere in a desert to learn how to rule before she takes up her fathers throne.
So for much of the book there she is, tossing out a rather unpleasant though familiar set of rules (no slaves, no gladiators) and wondering just why no-one appreciates everything she's done for them, all the while schemers circle like sharks.
There's the prince eager to win her hand, or failing that acquire a dragon, the adventurers and dispossessed who expect her to lead them to glory, or at least to grant them honourable service, the pirates, armed with what is claimed to be a magic war horn of dragon control, the slavers and arena owners who really can't see what the fuss was about. And so on.
Meanwhile back home the action is in the frozen north, where the remnants of a knightly order guard a mighty wall from hairy barbarians and supernatural horrors, where the one royal pretender who actually put the salvation of the kingdom ahead of his immediate gain tries to regain his momentum and the thoroughly nasty Boltons scheme to prevent him.
Quite a lot going on then, all building up to two climactic battles, all very involved. And all that with about half of the core cast getting little or no face time.
Just what is Sansa, the drippy but lovely last surviving heir to House Stark up to? Still being held in reserve as a pawn presumably, but is it working out? Just what's happening with Bran, the other Stark heir, thought dead, but getting a tad mystical in the far north? At least he gets a few chapters, which is more than can be said for his younger brother, widely believed murdered, actually living safely, not seen for three books, or his mother, quite definitely murdered, apparently raised from her watery grave, and not happy about it. You know, for a family widely known to have been wiped out, the Starks are surprisingly healthy.
Several other characters get no more than a look in. Despite Martin's well known tendency to kill off key characters, there remain an awful lot of them.
Still, at least the main plots move on. There are those battles. One of which is just starting as the book ends, the other is claimed fought (and lost) but off the page, and the claimant is not the most honest character in the book.
I enjoyed it. Don't get me wrong. It's a book I've been waiting for for five years, and I desperately hope the next one comes round a bit more quickly, but it could have been better. To be honest I don't entirely care about what happens in the deserts. It's colour, it develops character, and at least one critical plot point has been reached, but dammit, an awful lot of points still dangle.
One interesting feature is the way sympathies have flowed. The Starks, who rose in romantic rebellion at the start have been pretty much wiped out (militarily, if not as a family), the scheming incestuous Lannisters remain militarily powerful, though failing a bit on the family side. The exiled young lady with the dragons was looking pretty good as a potential saviour, though having a whole book focussed on her makes me think she's a ditherer. The dull but dutiful King at the Wall was similarly seeming a good bet, but even if he survived the book, his power is surely spent. We've pretty much run out of good candidates to pull the whole thing together.
So perhaps we have two more books to come, and in them Martin has to come to the point. And I'll be there, even if this weighty tome didn't really deliver.

Star Island

By Carl Haiiasen

Carl Haiiasen writes fun, bouncy thrillers set in Florida. Each one is entertaining, each one illustrates some of the sleaze that besets the state, each one is exactly the same as all the rest.
His key character is Skink, the former Governor of Florida, who attempted to clean up the state capital, and instead was ousted from power, brutally disillusioned, and now lives a happy homeless life in the Keys, eating roadkill and saving lost souls.
Skink's particular hatred is reserved for property developers, those that bulldoze virgin wilderness in favour of high end housing, but any pretty girl roaming the everglades can pretty much count on his help. Generally creatively violent help.
Previous books have seen Skink sucked into the murky worlds of plastic surgery, strip clubs and the smuggling of endangered wildlife. It's a bit of a surprise that it's taken a dozen books to get round to paparazzi and the celebrity culture that professes to hate them and yet would be lost without the publicity they bring, but it has, and here it is.
It's hard really to say anything incisive about the book. The characters are paper thin, the plot holds next to no surprises, its just a matter of wondering exactly what mayhem Skink will get up to this time.
In this one, there's not even all that much mayhem. Someone gets (deservingly) assaulted with a sea urchin, and a suitcase is at one point set on fire, but either Haiiasen is just going through the motions or I've lost the urge. Either way the thrill is lacking.

Ghost Rider

By Neil Peart

Nothing to do with the skull faced comic book character, not even the dodgy Nick Cage film. This Ghost Rider is the drummer and lyricist of the band Rush, a band I am rather fond of, and a man very nearly destroyed by a series of personal catastrophes.

Happily almost married for twenty years, first his daughter died in a car accident and while still realing from that, his common-law wife was diagnosed with cancer from which she died less than a year later.

Emotionally scarred, and feeling the dire need to do something, Peart set out on an epic motorcycle journey, across Canada, through Alaska, down the Rocky Mountains into Mexico and ultimately to Belize. Or Guatemala, whichever is further. I forget.

Along the journey, over 50,000 km by the end, Peart learns how to re-engage with the rest of humanity, gets his rather heavy BMW motorbike into several places it really shouldn't have gone, and how to love and create again. Sounds rather trite that, but thats biography for you.

The book is half travelogue, half tragedy porn, though porn is unfair. There's probably a better word for such works, but I can't think of it. I don't think, no matter how justified, I would have stuck with the self pity, if I hadn't already got some emotional attachment to the writer, but the travel writing is good and at times left me longing for one of those mad rambling journeys i used to do. At times the idea of motorbikes has had a small appeal, but I've never acted on it, and i suspect I'm too old to learn now. Cycling though lets me get the same kinds of travel Peart writes about, though inevitably on a rather smaller scale. No way can you get in tens of thousands of miles at fifteen miles an hour.

Perdido Street Station

By China Mieville
This is one of those books I should have read tags ago. Someone gave me a copy some years ago, and its hard to imagine that anyone at all aware of the British SF scene couldn't know about China Mieville, darling of the Clarke Awards and the socialist workers party.
But I haven't read it until now, and rather regret it.
One of the disadvantages of ebooks is that you don't really get a feel for the size of the book. Sure, you can see that this file is 200k and that one is 3 meg, but that's generally down to whether the cover art is scaled right or whether there are internal pictures. Perdido Street Station is a book with heft, even if the form I read it in was weightless.
The setting is a sprawling city, with a name I can't guarantee getting right, so won't try. Inhabited by humans and half a hundred other types of intelligent creature it's somewhat steampunk, somewhat like a D&D world that's grown up a bit.
It's a sprawling book as well, the closest thing it has to a hero is Issac, a freelance, and only slightly mad, scientist commissioned to help a crippled eagle-man return to the skies. In trying to understand all the forms of flight he unleashes a monstrous creature on the city, and, with the aid of unlikely allies, seeks to destroy it.
That's the quick summary. There's a lot else happening (and two more books in the same setting), too much to try and get into a quick commentary like this.
How to describe the writing? It's likely inevitable that big sprawling British fantasy should bring to mind Myrven Peake and Iain Banks, but a blend of the two is about as good as I can do. The sweep of Banks, the gothic scruttlings and grime of Peake.
Which is not to suggest that this is some kind of parody, it's voice is it's own. One that's well worth exploring.

Scriviner's Moon

By Philip Reeve

Another book in a series, and to be honest, a series that's gone a little bit off the boil.
The first book, Mortal Engines, has one of the best opening lines I've read in a long time. "It was a cold blustery day in April and the city of London was in pursuit of a small mining town across the dried up bed of the former North Sea."
Pretty much the whole concept's there, predatory mobile cities, environmental collapse, add in airships, killer cyborgs and heroic archeologists hunting the technology lost in the Sixty Minute War and you've got a great adventure setting. I'm vaguely surprised that there's no roleplaying game, and I've been known to storyboard the amine or perhaps comic. It really would make a stonking Studio Ghibli flick.
But that's mainly the first book, which lead off a quartet about the end of the era of mobile cities, followed now by another set at the very start. Three books in (Fever Crumb, A Web of Air, and now this) and London has just about been rebuilt as the first mobile city, as reactionary forces join in an attempt to destroy it in the cradle. There are journies into the wilderness, chases, lost civilisations, murder a betrayal.
All you'd want from a rollicking adventure story.
In the end one world dies and a new one is born, which might or might not be the end of the tale. Perhaps there's comething to say about the birth of the Anti-Traction League, but I'm not certain it's needed.
To write a script for the comic or not? I can't draw, but it might be interesting as a learning exercise. Obviously an IP violation, especially if posted here, but it's not like many people read this drivel.

The Atrocity Archives

By Charles Stross
Arthur C. Clarke is known for various things, at least some of which are true. If you wanted to make a list of science fiction writers who had a real impact on the world of today, then you pretty much have to give it to Clarke. Or at least you need to come up with something pretty damned impressive to beat geostationary communications satellites, and off the top of my head I can't.
In the SF community he's known for a set of laws, the only important one being "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". There's a reworking of this, which I think pre-dates Stross, but whatever, "sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science". Or in this case, mathematics.
The world of The Atrocity Archives is one in which Alan Turing did not simply invent computers, he came up with the maths underpinning magic, where the Final Solution was an attempt (successful in its own way) to gain the favour of the elder gods, and the process by which a basilisk's gaze can change carbon into silicon is sufficiently understood that it can be used to turn your webcam into a lethal weapon.
Magic is not regulated by a secret society of magicians, except that it is; those magicians being henpecked civil servants working for a division of the Secret Service known as The Laundry.
Its fun and yet at the same time slightly flat. Stross writes in a style emulating Len Deighton's Harry Palmer stories, which I have never read and so can't say how well he does. The only other thing I've read by Stross was Accelerando (free to download under a CC licence) and that to seemed to have a lot of characters who spoke in almost exactly the same voice. A deadpan narrator's sometimes no bad thing.
But despite this, quite fun.
TAA is made up of a titular short novel, involving an attempt to return exiled Nazi sorcerers to Earth along with the entities they made pacts with in the dying days of World War 2, and a shorter story in which a government plan to turn every CCTV camera in the country into a death ray goes a bit wrong. Well it would, wouldn't it.
Two sequels out there, will probably get round to them at some point.

And so the looming GRRM question looms. 2 months time. A Dance With Dragons. On order for the last three years. I probably could reread the first four books if I got on with it. But do I really want to read nothing else in so short a time?

Fever of the Bone

By Val McDermid

Torture porn. That's what you get from Val McDermid. You read the book knowing that it's going to involve someone doing something ghastly, probably getting a sexual high from it, while the good coppers of Bradfield (twinned no doubt with Wakeford) flail about a bit, inflicting mental scars to match the victims physical wounds. Much pain is had by all before the profiler spots the one thing he's got right about the killer, an arrest is made, and everyone goes home, unable to sleep properly.
It's very gripping, and well written torture porn you understand, but you can't shake the feeling that you're vicariously sharing in some sordid pleasure. Reading your first book, when something nasty happens, and then reading more, each time finding some bigger, more intense crime. All while the profilers look on and explain how broken humans need this kind of escalating chain of horrors. Does coming back for book after book show us that we're just as bad as the killers?
I don't come back religiously, but I do come back. Val McDermid's books are very good torture porn. I don't come back all that often - I actually bought this one over a year ago, and have only just gotten round to reading it. It's not the addictive behaviour of the killer.
But there's still something grimy about enjoying such things.

Hexwood

By Diana Wynne Jones

Are you of the age to remember Jackanory? A BBC childrens storytelling series, in which an actor would read a story, intercut with some illustrations, over the course of a week, sometimes two.
That was where I first encountered Diana Wynne Jones, who sadly died of cancer a few weeks ago.
Putting on a story a week, for most weeks of the year, Jackanory went through a lot of books. Very few stuck with me. There was Arabel's Raven, by the late, great, Joan Aiken, illustrated by the godlike, and happily still living, Quentin Blake. There were Quentin Blake's own mad stories, which would begin with him in front of a perfectly white board, and would be illustrated as he went along. There were Leon Garfield's stories about Georgian artful dodgers, whatever did happen to him? There was something about a cave boy and his tame mammoth. I keep trying to remember him as Little Plum, but he was a Red Indian from the Beano.
And there was Diana Wynne Jones, telling stories of magic and mystery. 'Dogsbody', in which Sirius, the star, is accused of murder and sent to learn humility on Earth. 'The Ogre Downstairs' in which a chemistry set (do children still have chemistry sets?) turns out to have a rather unusual set of substances, and we find out just what's in those blue and red bottles chemists used to have in their windows. There was 'Cart and Cwidder', to be honest a rather lacklustre story about political oppression in a fantasy land, the first book of a sequence that didn't really sparkle until the later books.
I was reading her books as well, the Chrestomanci books in particular shaped my ideas about what magic could and could not do. Well, that and Bewitched.
Then, I'd guess at about the age of 14-15, I stopped reading 'children's' books.
It was 5 years later that I came back, meaning that I'd missed the start of Diana's really productive phase in the eighties, which meant that I just had more available to read. Joy.
And now Diana is dead, and unless there are any final manuscripts clutched in a editor's hot little hands, there will be no more. So I thought I should re-read something.
But which? Such choice. 'Howl's Moving Castle', which works so much better as a book than as a film? 'Archer's Goon', which I say directly inspired Gaiman's Sandman, even if no one else can see it? 'Eight Days of Luke', which may have similarly influenced 'American Gods'. 'Dogsbody', 'The Power of Three', the Chrestomanci series. All had their appeals, and over the next several years, when I need light comfort reading I expect I'll come back to them all.
Instead I chose Hexwood, which is quite possibly Diana's most fiendishly complicated book.
If there was a common theme to Diana's more mature works (meaning those where she had matured as a writer, not those where she was trying to write for a more adult audience) it was that things were never what they initially seemed. Someone would be under an enchantment, indeed, if there was a McGuffin, and there generally was, it would always turn out to have been in the book from the first chapter, and moderately often would turn out to be the viewpoint character.
Hexwood does all all that and lays it on with a trowel.
There's a machine that turns dreams into reality. There's a magical wood that warps time and space, an echo of Holdstock's Mythago wood if ever I met one. A girl who has adventures with a magician who is raising the child that may overthrow the sinister bureaucrats who rule the galaxy. The bureaucrats chief assassin who dreams that he is a magician in a wood, or perhaps a dragon. The bureaucrats getting sucked one by one into the dreams. The girl is perhaps an extra-terrestrial conspirator dreaming that she's an earthly schoolgirl, or perhaps the sinister bureaucrats that she conspires against are themselves part of the fiction. The Fisher King suffers from an uncurable wound, failing to remember his past lives, there are outlaws and dragons, a robot, the Grail and hints of a one-eyed wanderer.
That's a lot to fit in. Couple that with the competing magics of the dream machine and the wood twisting time to fit their own purposes, so that characters first met wrapped up in fictions are then introduced in their (possibly) true forms. All very complicated.
It all very nearly fits together perfectly. There are a couple of characters introduced from left-field right at the end to mesh the whole thing together, but on the whole it comes as close as could be reasonably expected. It's a tribute to Diana's ability though that this is a 250 page paperback. Many writers wouldn't be able to tell this story without three plus volumes of 4-500 pages each.

Never Let Me Go

By Kazuo Ishiguro

Another book picked up in the collapse of Borders, another taken off the shelf to try and posh up my reading list, another arguably SF novel by a mainstream writer that seems to be trying to avoid genre associations, another that it's hard to discuss without massive spoilers. Which you might want to avoid, so stop now OK?
Sometimes a work contains such a big reveal that it can never be seen in the same light for a second time. Last year I watched Sixth Sense with a then girlfriend. She hated ghost stories, but (surely by now we all know the Sixth Sense twist?) because it wasn't presented as a ghost story she enjoyed it. At least up to the reveal. I doubt she would watch it again, even though it is one of those films that does reward a second watching, as the director's craft is so clear, as clue after clue is presented only to be ignored. The first time round anyhow.
Never Let Me Go strikes me as such a work, and with the recent film it's almost impossible to avoid the big reveal, but you can still appreciate the craft behind it.
Do we all know the big secret? Kids growing up in a slightly odd private school in the country, destined to be organ donors for the rich and powerful?
Within the book the talk is of Donations. A nice fluffy word. I have made 33 (blood) donations, but the young donors of Never Let Me Go make only four, presumably the Fourth Donation is the heart.
Its an engaging and powerful book. One of those ones that you read and wonder quite why it didn't win the Booker. Was the competition especially strong that year?
So. Organ donation. Altruistic in our world, murderous exploitation in theirs. But had you such a world, in which people accepted the morality of rearing clones like cattle, how to treat them?
Here they are educated, taught to be artists, encouraged to love, while subtly being taught that they are less than human, that their duty is to offer their bodies for their metters. Is that better than to just farm such people in concentration camps? While the characters wish for a 'deferment', they barely rail against their fate. Some even relish getting on with it.
Quite a thin book, but complex and challenging. Well worth reading. I don't have answers to any but it's most obvious questions. Is that just because the concept, of young people being raised and indoctrinated with the idea that it is their duty to give up their organs for others is just too alien?

Perhaps. But we still partially cling to the old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori, at least as far as soldiers go. I can certainly believe the premise of the story that had we bumbled into a state where medical science made such things possible, we would fight tooth and nail to come up with reasons to imagine that the clones saving our lives were less than human, that our lives mattered more. God knows, otherwise respectable people said much the same thing about South Africa.
The oddity is that society is otherwise, apparently so mundane. It would be a very dull book if written about technocrats in floating skyscrapers exploiting an underclass, and probably that dull book has been written. But this isn't it, the questions are good, and I worry a bit that I don't have the answers.

After America

By John Birmingham

After several 'worthy' books, some trash thriller. Sequel to the slightly better 'Without Warning' which I read last year and needs to be explained for this to make any sense at all.
There is a rather idiotic dream possessed of some Guardian readers that the world would be a better place without the USA, or slightly less stupidly, without George W. Bush. In WW something weird and still unexplained happens, and the inhabitents of the continental USA vanish in a shimmering energy field on the eve of the Iraq invasion.
Distressingly for Guardian readers, the world does not become a better place. Israel using a fair portion of it's nuclear arsenal on it's neighbours before they can overrun it makes sense. The French banlieu riots of XXXX developing into a full scale civil war less so. And then, nine months later, the energy field vanishes. That's the first book.
Where the focus of WW is international, AA is largely concerned with the attempts to recolonise the mainland USA. There are American survivors, trying to rebuild and reassert their nations authority, a cowboy plot, a spy story, a military story which grows to consume much of the second half of the novel. It makes reasonable sense and is an OK page turner, but hardly great literature.
The disappointing thing is the degree to which nothing gets resolved. While the first book obviously set up a sequel, this is really only the first half of that sequel. Still, it's an effective page turner. I'll not be rushing to get hold of the third book, but I expect I'll pick it up sooner or later.

Oryx and Crake

By Margret Attwood

The last time I started recording and writing about my reading I did notice the way I was deciding what book to read to try and make it look like my tastes were not so very plebean. So it is again, look, nominated for the Booker! By the author of 'The Handmaid's Tale'.
Post apocalyptic science fiction again.
From what I remember this was the one that caused Attwood to start making ridiculous assertions about how a book shouldn't be considered SF if it was, oh I don't know, about a ruined world over-run by genetically engineered hybrid animals, since SF necessarily implied ray guns and super intelligent space squid.
It's a daft thing to say, and Attwood's hardly the only one to say it. Jenette Winterson popped up a couple of years back vehemently denying that a book about the colonisation of an alien world might be SF, (others?)
Crap literary fiction is about middle aged university lecturers feeling bad about fucking their students. Crap science fiction is about spaceships firing 19,728 missiles, 1,012 of which are distracted by the enemy's active fire control systems and so on.
Good fiction, be it literary or science (if we accept the premise that there is no such thing as literary science fiction) is about ideas, and how they impact people and ultimately what it means to be human.

That lost was all written a couple of weeks ago when I was a quarter of the way into the book. It's now finished.

It's a very good book, and one I would recomend to pretty much anyone. The only Attwood I'd read before was The Handmaid's Tale - this has the same deft turn of phrase but with a less oppressive atmosphere. I shall have to look out more, The Year of the Flood is a sort of sequel. Not right now though.
Attwood's claim that O&C is not really science fiction hinges on the fact that there is nothing in the book that hasn't been invented yet. This is bollocks. And it was even more bollocks when it was written, in 2003. Genetic Engineering does exist, but without the abilities of these engineers. If anyone's hoping to hybridise snakes and rats, they're still a long way off.
The strange thing is the degree to which, while the themes of the book are, ashamedly, SF, the structure is pure stereotypical lit-fic. An elderly man, living in a world he doesn't fully understand, thinks back over his life, the mistakes he has made, the failed relationships, the best friend who destroyed the world. Fortunately he wasn't an academic, and so was never had any students to regret fucking. Apart from that though, it's textbook.
But like I said. It's good. Worth reading. I suppose it does ask some questions about humanity, but they have pretty obvious answers. As lit-fic goes it's a pretty light read, well worth it.

World Book Night: Cloud Atlas

By this point I figure that you're a reader. Sure there will probably be people you've hit the 'next blog' link and arrived here by chance, and there are doubtless some Facebook friends glancing at the first paragraph and stopping, but if you get much further you read books.
That means you probably know what World Book Night is, but for anyone who's missed it, it's a reading promotion based about the idea that 20,000 people will be giving books away to friends, family, perfect strangers.
Sounded cool. So I signed up for it. Then I realised that it was the same night as Chris and Sandra's delightful wedding. So I've basically fluffed the whole concept.
The idea was that everything would be happening on the same night. You'd have bashes in libraries, people holding parties at home to explain their love of a book, people wandeing round pubs pushing books at God knows who.
Except I am at a wedding party, watching couples dance, and fighting the urge to drink so much subsidised Landlord that I won't be able to drive home tomorrow. I have given a copy of the book to the groom, and may give some out at breakfast tomorrow, but as far as the book frenzy goes, I'm not getting it right.
The book I chose to give away was Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. Not the one from Mitchell & Webb. And for what it's worth, if you're remotely interested in the book, you might want to stop reading real soon. It's one of those books where the structure is as important, perhaps more important, than the plot, and while there are reviewers clever enough to write about such works without blowing the big reveals, I have no such pretentions.
So where was I? Instead of holding on to all the books so that icoyld give them to people at a party where modern literary novels were the last thing on their mind, I've been naughtlily handing them out for several days now. I guess I have about 20 left as I write. So if you want one let me know. Except that I already advised you to stop reading.
Potential readers gone now? Or at least anyone still here fully aware of the likelihood of spoilers? OK.
Cloud Atlas is one of those strange books that isn't quite a novel. It's not a collection of short stories either, but something between the two, that I don't quite have the language to explain.
The conciet is that there are a series of separate narratives, in very different styles embedded one within the other. There's a story about an anguished American in the South Seas in the 1800s, only to have his story cut off in the middle of a sentence, to be replaced by the story of a dissolute composer in the 1920s, who at one point finds a particular story about the South Seas in a library, and is inspired to write the mcguffin of the LA detective story. Eventually the narratives reverse their flow and each unpacks into the next, before all six reach their own conclusions.
Normally I find books like this annoying. I like characters, plots, that kind of thing. When the structure becomes clever-clever it's often a sign that the writer is just showing off, and who wants that?
Cloud Atlas manages to overcome me. At least in part this is because the writing is so damn good. I would read almost any of the stories if they were blown up into novels in their own right. Well perhaps not the first, which suffered from a well written, but whiney, protagonist, but on the whole the stories would stand up perfectly well if they were presented as distinct novellas. But that would pretty much miss the whole point. The strength of Cloud Atlas is the way that each story sets up it's sucessor, and only really makes sense when completed in the light of the revelations of the sucessor become predecessor as the book unfolds.
It's a masterful work, nominated for the Booker, and, given that I have no memory of what won that year, one that I think should have scooped the prize.
I can't help but wonder if the science fiction elements in the middle stories deterred the judges. This may become a bit of a theme.

The Rivers of London

By Ben Aaronovitch






So here we are with Mr Aaronovitch again, described in a review of his blog as his first novel. Obviously genre spinoffery doesn't count, or didn't reach the Americas.
It's a police procedural with magic. Peter Grant, a wet behind the ears copper turns out to have an aptitude for magic, and is apprenticed to the dapper (and perhaps immortal) Chief Inspector Nightingale, apparently the only wizard in London, certainly the only one working for the Met.
It's a nice book. Apparently sold, with sequels, for a prodigious sum, and rather crying out to be televised. Nightingale is somewhere between Morse and Chretomanci, Grant is pleasently stroppy and charasmatic. If there's not an adaptation sometime in the next few years I shall be surprised. Hopefully not brought to us by the sale people that made Demons.
I started reading this thinking it was an attempt to be an English version of Jim Butcher's Dresden series. And perhaps that came into the pitch, but it lacks the grime of Dresden. It's far more gentlemanly and... British.
It's not the most demanding of books, but entirely readable.

The Bicycle Diaries

By David Byrne
That's the David Byrne who sang in Talking Heads and now gets slightly peeved by people who think he's not done anything since the split up. He relears a new album every couple of years, and tours, as well as producing strange art shows like that musical building thing in London a couple of years ago.
I caught the last tour. Very good actually. Supporting an album I didn't much care for, but the concert and the resulting film where both top notch.
Still. As well as being a musician, David Byrne is a cyclist. Not the kind of cyclist who wears spandex and lycra, jumps red lights and yells at mere mortals who dare to walk on the pavement while the cycling god wishes to pass. Very mellow, very laid back. He is in the habit of taking a folding bike on tour, bolting it back together in his hotel room and then pootling about whatever city he's visiting, getting the feel for the place, while visiting lots of modern art galleries.
This is frankly a huge relief. While I'm fully aware that art doesn't change if you discover something unpleasant about the artist, it would be a shame to have to re-interpret their work on discovering that they're a git. Still, if Byrne is a git, he's not that kind of git.
Byrne pootles about, looking at cities, stopping and talking to people, thinking about what makes various cultures tick and at least some of the time, how much better life would be if we all listened to funky salsa music and rode bikes. It does help that this is a philosophy I have a lot of time for.
I am not quite sure if the book is a collection of blog postings. There are certainly points when it reads like one, and after a while I was rather feeling that reading the book as a book was a mistake. Each little snippet is nice and often insightful, but perhaps they would have been better read one a day over several months.
Towards the end of the book a more thorough narrative develops, with Byrne reporting on a conference he organised to discuss promoting cycling in New York City. Not really a place I'd automatically want to go for a ride, but he makes it sound inviting.
Byrne's cycling is for the most part very urban, while mine is all about getting out of towns and being able to enjoy nature. But there's a lot in the book that works. 

Wastelands

Edited by John Joseph Adams

A large collection, though reading it as an ebook means one has no real sense of size, of post apocalyptic science fiction stories.
Some very good stuff in here, though there's some pretty forgettable trash as well. Octavian Butler's "Speech Sounds," set in a world where a neurological disease has robbed people of language, stands out. A well deserved Hugo winner.
There's a splendidly bleak story about a travelling freak show in a world over-run by unstable mutations, where the audiences no longer want to see the latest freak of nature, but yearn for sight of animals that look like they did when they were young. Or children that look like normal children. I shall have to check who wrote that one and look for his other books.
The story about astronauts returning to Earth after the Rapture, unsure as to whether they could or should alert God to the fact that He didn't gather everyone is well written, but misses something.
There are a couple of tedious stories about men (generally men anyhow) travelling through deserts with battered cars and an arsenal, but they are the exception not the rule.
Overall a good set of stories. For the most part tales of quiet desperation, but not enough to make you slash your wrists. Well selected and nicely introduced.

Transit

By Ben Aaronovitch

In the 1990s there was no Doctor Who. The BBC had killed the TV series off, the movie was only a twinkle in someone's eye and Russell T. Davies was then only writing fan-fic.
For a while, five years even, there were novels, Virgin's New Adventures series. Some were terrible, some quite good. I'd downloaded a couple with the aim of lending to a friend (why do people imagine that PDF is a sensible format for fiction?) and so wound up pretty much speed reading the book while reformatting it into something user friendly.
Transit was one of the first dozen published, and the first I read. In the old days Doctor Who novels had always been aimed at kids, and rather shockingly, this was not. There was a deliberate attempt to make this 'real' grown up SF, not just a TV friendly adaptation.
The Doctor of the 90s novels was the Seventh Doctor, the one from the last season, only more so. Mysterious and manipulative, you could never quite be sure that he could be trusted, that he didn't see anybody as a pawn to sacrifice in order to achieve mate.
To be perfectly honest this was a pretty bad book to start with, there was a new companion, and the story was pretty much 'throw them in at the deep end. But it delivered.

Looking over the New Adventures I'd guess that there are probably only about eight really worth re-reading nearly twenty years on. (20 years. Jeez.) I don't think it's a co-incidence that two of them were written by Ben Aaronovitch. Of whom I shall write more later.

Eternals: Manifest Destiny

I read it. You don't need to. You should thank me for that.

Should I expand on that? Not much. Look, if you want to read any comics about the Eternals, make sure they're by Jack Kirby. Not Roy Thomas, not Nail Gaiman, not any two bit hack who thinks that what the Eternals could really do with is an X-Men crossover.

I was taking as many books out of the library as I could, on principle, and I thought I'd see if it was as bad as it looked. It wasn't. Dear God, it was worse.

Acacia: The war with the Mein

By David Anthony Durham.

A great big sprawling epic fantasy book, picked up in the collapse of Borders, and only just got round to. There's a lot of 'only just getting round to' coming up in this blog I think. I'd never heard of the author, but I'd seen a vaguely positive review on Tor.com a couple of days before. And it was 70% off, so when I get round to giving it to Oxfam, they'll probably get more for it than I paid.
The basic premise that that there's a great big Empire uniting the known world, with a fluffy emperor who loves his kids and his people, and imagines that they all look at him as a benign father figure, except they don't. The empire's actually built on a whole host of inequities and evils, most notably, the annual exchange of child slaves to unknown forces beyond the oceans in return for the opium that keeps the empire from rising in rebellion.
Happy complacent daddy emperor is quite keen on the opium himself, and so to no great surprise winds up with an assassin's knife in his belly, his children scattered and hiding, his murderers sat on his thrown, quite happily carrying on the opium trade.
The kids grow up, become stock fantasy characters in their own right, unite the empire against the assassins and so on. A pirate, a priestess, a master hunter, a captive princess.
All that makes things sound terribly dull. And that's a little bit unfair. It's a well written book, even if it's over long. That seems to be a very common with this kind of tome.
The first third of the book, setting up the collapse of the empire really does drag, but I suppose it is setting things up. The more interesting remainder, in which the children mature and the villains start to seem more desirable than the empire they overthrew, and at least some of those that would overthrow them does remain engaging, and does throw up at least some surprises, with at least one of the over perfect characters turning out as flawed as they come.
Still. It's taken me two years to get round to reading the book, and I'm not exactly rushing to get the sequel. At some point it will be on Amazon for shipping plus a penny, at which point I might well get it. Vaguely nice to find out what happens next, but I'll live happily enough without doing so.

In the Garden of Iden

By Kage Baker.

I bought this off Amazon or Play or somewhere like that, after hearing a coupe of Baker's stort stories read on starshipsofa and enjoying them, and my first reaction was that this has to have been one of the most mis-marketed books I've ever seen. Perhaps that's got something to do with why neither the library nor any of the bookshops in town have any of Baker's further works?
The big arching meta-plot in Kage Baker's novels is that there's a 24th century company called Dr Zeus, Inc, which has developed time travel and immortal cyborgs which it has despatched to the past to acquire valuable objects and species which it can re-introduce to the future for profit. They're clearly the people responsible for coelacanths, and those weird trees that are discovered from time to time, thought extinct for millennia, surviving in just one isolated valley on the Himalayas, and would you believe it, their leaves might just contain the cure for narcolepsy!
So what did the marketing department of Hodder & Stoughton do with it? Historical Romance. Nothing at all on the cover to suggest that it's anything other than a bodice ripper, and just to reduce all possible doubt, the headline "A love story as new as tomorrow - as old as time". One rather presumes that no bookseller would have ever put it in the dingy corner of their shop where people who want stories about time travelling cyborgs would visit, and no customer who wanted a Tudor bodice ripper would have actually been happy with their purchase.
It was Baker's first book, and to be honest, it shows. She was involved in the theatre, working for at least a time as a Shakespearean language coach, and there's quite a bit of period detail I have no reason to think is not entirely accurate and a bit dull. The central cyborg, Mendoza, is posing as a minor Spanish noblewoman at the start of Mary Tudor's reign so that she can secure botanical samples from some soon to be no-longer extinct plants.
The Cyborg process involves acquiring small children from backwaters of history where they would be otherwise shortly dead and transforming them. This is Mendoza's first actual expedition since graduating from cyborg school, and she has a pretty dim view of mortals. But while taking her cuttings she falls for one of them, an earnest protestant watching Mary's religious reforms with trepidation. They bonk like bunnies, he gets very upset when he finds out what she really is, he gets burnt at the stake, she's upset for a while but gets over it. So I guess there was a Tudor romance in there, but the people who weren't expecting time travelling cyborgs would have given up by then.
There's a novella in there, sadly it's padded out to novel length.

To Say Nothing of the Dog

By Connie Willis
It's one of those books I've been vaguely thinking I should read for years. It won the Hugo back in 1999, which is usually a reasonable indication of quality, but I was spurred into finally reading it by an interview on starshipsofa.
It's a great book. I really should have read when people first started praising it.
In the late 21st century time travel has been perfected, though rather to the disappointment of the big business types who funded it, you can't bring stuff back, and the laws of causality prevent you betting on the 1888 Grand National and investing the winnings with compound interest. At least I assume they do - I don't remember it being mentioned, but if the time machine could get you rich that way the rest of the book wouldn't make much sense.
So there's a time machine, and the only really useful thing you can do with it is send historians back to get some first hand evidence on what they're studying. As the book starts though the entire Oxford University history department is in thrall to the hugely rich Lady Schrapnell who is obsessed with rebuilding the bombed Coventry Cathedral, and demands it should be exactly as it was hen destroyed, and in particular feature a lost piece of statuary known as the Bishop's Bird Stump.
The hero, Ned, has been sent on so many trips through time that he is completely befuddled, and is despatched to the late Victorian period to undo one of his fellow's mistakes, and more importantly hide from Lady S until his nerves recover. Being befuddled, within fifteen minutes of his arrival he has put in place at least half a dozen paradoxes to further complicate the web of history. It all gets very intricate, with Ned fretting terribly as he is dragged off with two others (and a dog) on a boat trip down the Thames.
There are mad professors and murder accusations, assignations and romances, in which the wrong people insist on falling in love, and several groups of historians working at cross purposes. At one point, Jerome K. Jerome is encountered working his way up river and Ned & co drft down. All very involved and very clever. And funny.
I'll certainly be looking out for more from Willis.

I Shall Wear Midnight

Sir Terry's four hundred and zillionth Discworld book, and the fourth starring Tiffany Aching, teenage witch, who doesn't quite come from the village I grew up in, except she does.
Let's be honest. Terry Pratchett is, and despite his embuggerance, always a reliable writer, even if from time to time he becomes a bit lazy. Usually this has been manifest in a joke so funny that it gets repeated for five books in a row. Yes, Igor, I'm looking at you, standing next to that chap that said wossernames every time he appeared.
If there's a laziness in the Tiffany books, the problem is that the plots are all pretty much identical. Something becomes too aware of Tiffany, starts threatening her and more importantly all she holds dear. The more senior witches can't or won't help, mainly because the kind of witch that needs help from anyone else isn't really a proper witch. She has allie s of course, especially the Mac Nac Feegle, rumbustious scottish gnones,but in the end it's not the allies that save the day, it's Tiff's inner strength. Deep down all these preternatural bullies true power is making her doubt herself, and she's too centered for that kind of thing to last.
To a degree though none of that matters, because Sir Terry is just too good a writer. His stories have never really been about the plots, it's the characters that count, and the characters remain vibrant and engaging. I want to read about them again, even if they're all ging to have the same plot.
And to a degree, there are clear signs that the stories are evolving. In the past Tiffany was sort of not quite a hanger on to Granny Weatherwax, spun off as a Young Adult series. Shorter, less demanding books, a heroine more likely to appeal to teenage girls than Commander Vimes and the city watch. These days the books have bulked out and they're presented pretty much as normal Discworld books.
Weatherwax and Ogg do appear here, but as cameos rather than supporting characters. Tiffany is starting to form her own coven, and after several books in which she was pining after the unsuitable son of the local baron, she now has a rather more suitable young man as a romantic lead. There's growth happening. More sense that while the book's quick summary is pretty like the last one, the characters are at least going places, and so remain worth following when they do.

What I've been reading 2011

A couple of years ago I did an experiment, logging all the books I read over the course of a year.
The plan was to post them on a blog somewhere, but that was before blogging was really easy and I never got round to it.

The main thing it revealed was that I read a bloody awful load of trash.

So, trying again. Books read this year. I'm not going to talk about comics, and I'm havering a bit about graphic novels. Probably not going to talk about them as a matter of routine. Same for games or anything else that's shaped like a book.