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.