Saturday 30 June 2012

Goblins

By Philip Reeve
I think I wrote about Philip Reeve before, lauding his young adult steampunk books.
Same writer, but this is aimed at a rather younger audience, his eight year old son was mentioned, and I didn't really get as much from it.
It's a nice enough book, don't get me wrong. The hero is a too clever by half goblin exiled from the half forgotten ruins of Mordor. He is supported by an amiable cast of cheese-makers turned would be heroes, abducted, and perfectly happy with it, princesses, accountants  who fancy themselves sorcerers plus assorted monsters.
Something the younger me would have enjoyed entirely, something the current me found a little too slight. Which given that I'm on the order of thirty five years older than the target audience isn't really the most surprising thing in the world.
Apparently the people that turned Coraline into a movie are planning on filming this in the next couple of years. I shall look forwards to it.
Meanwhile I shall look for someone of an appropriate age and pass the book on.


Geek Tragedy

By Nev Fountain.
So there I am, contemplating going to an SF convention for the first time in my life and I read this. Enough to make one steer well clear, though it is possible that this is not entirely representative.
Not actually science fiction, though rooted in SF culture, this is the story of a retired script editor attending a convention for the first time in years, and is written by a script editor who may or may not be retired. The hero is a reluctant detective who punches well above his weight with the ladies, in particular the somewhat ghastly female lead of his dreadful show. The author is apparently in a relationship with an eighties Doctor Who companion, whether he is also prone to occasional bits of detective work is not known, but I can't shake the suspicion that incidents are drawn from life.
Nev Fountain is a writer I have issues with. He was associated with two of my all time least favourite Doctor Who stories, as script editor on the dreadful Death Comes To Time, and writer of a Big Finish story involving little old lady Time Lords that just rubbed me up the wrong way. I went into the book very happy to hate it.
And it surprised me.
It's actually a pretty good book.
It might even be a very good book.
It's not high art, but it makes no attempt to be so. It's a romp, and pretty much every romp target is hit. It helps of course to be reasonably sympathetic towards somewhat cringeworthy Eighties TV, but deep down the geek stuff wouldn't be worth a damn if the detective story wasn't well told.
And it was.
I don't normally go into any depth about where to buy books, but it's worth noting that Amazon would like one to pay £7.50 or thereabouts, while BooksOnBoard are happy to sell it for half that. Just hoping that they're legit and the author will actually get their deserved royalties.

Friday 22 June 2012

Full Dark House

By Christopher Fowler
The adventures of Bryant & May, detectives with the Metropolitan Police's Peculiar Crimes Unit, sounds like it should be in the same kind of supernatural cop space occupied by Ben Aaronovitch, or, given that Arthur Bryant apparently dies in an explosion shortly before the start of the first book in the series, Randal and Hopkirk (deceased).
Alas it's not.
We have here a rather cleverly constructed novel set in two periods, the unit's first case in 1940, the surviving detective's investigations in... not entirely clear, but they have mobile phones and aren't surprised by them, do lets assume it's about 2003 when the book was published.
It is not clear quite how a pair of detectives might still be working in their eighties, though it is remarked upon. Perhaps there it's more explanation in later books.
The central characters are likable enough in a kind of repressed English manner. All jolly enough. So why didn't out really grab me?
Perhaps out was just first book (in that series anyway) not quite finding its voice, but there was a sense that the crimes involved weren't peculiar enough.
What we have instead is a story about detectives investigating a theatre where someone is murdering their way through the cast and crew of a new production, in that way that never really happens, but turns up a lot in fiction. We have a detective who has studied in the Elijah Bailey school of deduction, accusing everybody in sight until it ultimately turns out to be the character that he and you had no real reason to think existed, let alone was in the theatre all that time. Very much the sort of thing you expect in a book, even one that doesn't bill itself as peculiar.