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.