April, 2023: Reading "Sweet April's tears, Dead on the hem of May." Alexander Smith

Starting April with two books on the go, fiction and non-fiction.

TELLURIA by the demonstrably insane Vladimir Sorokin
WARRIORS OF GOD: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade by James Reston

TELLURIA shows what a writer cursed with individuality and talent can accomplish even with a moribund genre like SF.

The latter is a solid, unpretentious look at history.

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is a collection of stories by Mariana Enriquez that was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021. The stories are from early in her career. There are some interesting things here and there but these are for the most part exploratory works. It does include a little gem ("Back When We Talked to the Dead") at the very end.

I also tried her more recent Our Share of Night but I couldn't get into it. Maybe I'll try it again later in the year.

Her collection Things We Lost in the Fire was one of my favorite books last year.

A catch-up on the last few weeks' reading...

The Green Man’s Gift, Juliet E McKenna - have been enjoying this loose series about Daniel Mackmain, son of a dryad, and his various run-ins with other English folkoric creatures. This is the fifth in the series. A missing teenager is found in Snowdonia and Mackmain is called in when it transpires he had been enchanted and kept by faery under the mountains. Another boy goes missing and Mackmain, with the help of others with the blood of folklore creatures, set out to rescue the boy and kill the faery queen. Like the other books, this one has a great sense of place and makes excellent use of local folklore. Add in a well-drawn and likeable cast and you've got some of the best British urban fantasy of recent years. Recommended.

The Looking-Glass War, John le Carré - the fourth George Smiley novel, and like the one preceding it, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Smiley only appears briefly. A British intelligence service, rivel to Smiley's employers, the Circus, and the bureaucratic remains of a WWII military intelligence service, gets wind of strange military manoeuvres in East Germany. They suspect a forward missile base, much like the one that caused the Cuban Missile Crisis. But they've no field agents, and no real experience at putting agents in the field. So they do their best, and fail miserably - mostly thanks to Circus sabotage, who would sooner see people die and a rival service fail than actually do anything that might, you know, prevent nuclear war. Dispiriting, but all too plausible. The British really are like that.

HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Michel Houellebecq - an early essay on Lovecraft by Houellebecq, padded out by the inclusion of two of Lovecraft's stories, 'The Call of Cthulhu' and 'The Whisperer in Darkness'. Not sure I agree entirely with Houellebecq's argument - much as I don't agree entirely with the premises of his novels - but while I'd always known Lovecraft was racist, I was surprised to discover how pathological his racism was. Initially just a bit more racist than other people in his situation at that time, after marrying and moving to New York, his racism turned into a psychopathy. He died young and penniless, and left behind a singular body of work - readers of which are all too quick, or too happy, to excuse his racism, even though it's so central to so many of them... But at least he's not profiting from his racism. And the stories are worth reading.

The Modern World, Steph Swainston - the final book of the initial Four Lands trilogy, which was not added to until nine years later, despite ending at what was clearly not an ending. I'd heard rumours the books had suffered declining sales, as had pretty much everything labelled as New Weird, but perhaps the delay was due to the writer and not the publisher. These books are a very distinctive form of fantasy, clearly heavily inspired by Miéville, but I'm still not 100% convinced the anachronisms improve the mix. But Swainston draws good characters and her world is sufficiently strange to keep interest high. I plan to read the next book... although seven years since that came out, so when will we see the one after that?

Maestro and Other Stories, Phillip Mann - short ebook-only collection of short fiction by Mann, who was chiefly known as novel writer. I like his novels, I think they're very good. Sadly, the same can't be said for his short fiction. They were either too old-fashioned, too mannered, or too derivative. One for fans, I think.

Murder Most Vile, Eric Brown - more about the novel, and a bit about the author, who was a friend and passed away recently, here: https://medium.com/p/murder-most-vile-eric-brown-f66171a663c1

>3 iansales: Never under-estimate the ability of rival organisations to work against the achievement of a common goal. A little while back, I read George Dyson's Project Orion; The Atomic Spaceship, 1957 – 1965, and was amused to see that amongst the various rival services vying for control of Project Orion - the plan to propel giant spaceships by detonating atomic weapons underneath them - the US Army wanted control, on the grounds that atomic weapons counted as "munitions" and therefore came under their jurisdiction. Part of their motivation, said Dyson, was that the Army lived in fear of reaching the Moon, only to find that they'd been beaten, not by the Soviets, but by the US Air Force.

>4 RobertDay: well, yes, but when the consequence is a possible nuclear war or Soviet invasion of Europe? Sadly, it sounds all too plausible, because there's nothing the English hate more than success. (Oh, and foreigners, of course.)

>5 iansales: There were a lot of people in Project Orion who saw it as beating swords into ploughshares. George Dyson wrote the book on the project because of his access to his father, Freeman Dyson (yes, that Freeman Dyson), who was involved with it. Many of the physicists involved with Orion had worked on the Manhattan Project and held similar views to Oppenheimer - fascinated by the theoretical challenge of making the atomic bomb but appalled by the outcome. And don't forget that Edward Teller was a huge advocate of using atomic weapons as a means of kick-starting big civil engineering projects. There were serious proposals to bring the Soviets on-board Orion, at least as crew participants. It's tempting to think that Gene Roddenberry's vision of starships with multi-national crews was an echo of this.

>6 RobertDay: The spaceship in Stephenson's Anathem is obviously based on Orion.

More recent reads. Been doing a lot of it recently...

Love & Other Crimes, Sara Paretsky . a collection of short stories, not all of which feature VI Warshawski. Those that do are basically like the novels but, er, much shorter. The others... there's a good one set at the World's Fair in 1933, featuring early US detective Race Williams and an English old lady modelled on Miss Marple. Some interesting historical detail. There's also a Sherlock Holmes story, although he's upstaged by a female US detective - apparently, Katharine Ann Green was writing a female detective not unlike Holmes long before Arthur Conan Doyle did, in fact Doyle arranged a meeting with Green on a visit to the US. I enjoyed the collection, but it's one for fans. Readers unfamiliar with Paretsky's work are not going to get as much from the book.

Postmortem, Patricia Cornwell - the first of Cornwell's Scarpetta series, about Commonwealth of Virginia Chief Medical Examiner (ie, coroner) Kay Scarpetta. I originally read this back in the mid-1990s, and then went on to read half a dozen or so of them. I remember them becoming somewhat formulaic - Scarpetta gathers plenty of clues but not enough to identify the serial killer, so she sets herself up as bait and blows away the killer when he tries to kill her. I also remember the books being bizarrely accurate about Oracle databases, and rereading it took me back to the early days of my career. I picked up Postmortem, and the next five books in the series, for 99p each on offer. We'll see how it goes.

Selkie Summer, Ken MacLeod - a rare novella from MacLeod. It's a good one, too. In an alternate present, some folkloric creatures are real. A Young woman travels to Skye for a summer job, falls in love with a selkie (who's working as crew on the ferry across), and gets dragged into a dispute between the selkies and the Royal Navy. The way the selkies, and others, are integrated into history is cleverly done, and yet everything still feels very much like the UK of the 21st century. The resolution seems like it comes too soon, but this is good stuff and I'm surprised it didn't appear on any shortlists.

The Starry Rift, James Tiptree Jr - a collection of three novellas set in the same universe as Tiptree's novel, Brightness Falls from the Air. Space travel seems to be FTL but still extremely slow, with journeys taking years.'The Only Neat Thing to Do' has its moments - an enthusiastic but naive narrator, something Tiptree did well, and a poignant ending. But the worldbuilding here is not wholly convincing. The idea of a luxury statiuon on the frontier is good, but the aliens who are burned by water is a little hard to swallow. That's in 'Collision', in which the Federation meets the aliens on the other side of the Rift, but it doesn't go so well. Probably the weakest of the three novellas. 'Good Night, Sweethearts' is a bizarrely romantic and old-fashioned sf story which suffers chiefly from being shoe-horned into the universe of the book. A mixed bag. When Tiptree was good, she was amazing; but these are not her best by a long shot.

For Love of Mother-Not, Alan Dean Foster - Foster's debut, The Tar-Aiym Krang, was the first to feature Flinx and Pip, an empathic street kid and his pet minidrag. This ia a prequel, detailing how Flinx ended up on the streets, and how he was "adopted" by Pip. It turns out Flinx is the product of a genetic engineering experiment by a now-outlawed organisation of scientists - and one of their few surviving subjects. And they want him back. By this time, Flinx is in his late teens. The evil scientists kidnap Flinx's adoptive mother, Mother Mastiff, to try and get control of Flinx, but he proves more resourceful than they expected. Flinx's potential talents are left vague, and the evil scientists aren't especially convincing, but then it's clear Foster only really cares about his protagonist and this novel is just rounding out his background. Not a particuarly good novel and not even good science fiction. Foster's Humanx Commonwealth was one of 1970s US sf's more memorable universes, but novels set in it were variable. This was not one of the good ones.

The Faded Sun Trilogy, CJ Cherryh - an early work by Cherryh and one which, unusually, features aliens. Humanity has been at war with the regul - think Jabba the Hutt - for forty years, but the regul had hired the mri - think Fremen - to fight for them. Humanity won, but then the regul tried to kill all the mri, for reasons the humans didn't understand. Two escaped and, with an ex-Special Forces human soldier, are given a ship by the humans to return to the far distant homeworld they left thousands of years before. They journey there and find a dying world, with the mri lviving nomadic lives in the deserts and empty ancient cities contrlled by AIs, which reminded me of the a Star Trek TOS episode more than anything - 'The City of the Edge of Forever'? There's lots of politicking between humans and regul in orbit about the mri home world, and the fate of the mri seems often closer to genocide than anything else. For an early novel, it's surprisingly cleverly done, with the plot dictated by the psychology of the various aliens. It feels weird because it doesn't quite fit into Cherryh's Union-Alliance universe, but it's an excellent piece of sf, even if its inspirations like somewhat close to the surface. I remember loving the trilogy when I originally read it back in the 1980s. I remained just as impressed on this reread.

Due to my podcast, which has devoured nearly every waking hour since January, I have been reading very little (boo! hiss!).

Just finished I LOST IT AT THE VIDEO STORE by Tom Roston, who asked a number of film-makers to detail the importance video stores played in their development.

Only mildly entertaining--I care little for the opinions of the likes of Kevin Smith. He may be big at Comic-Con, but he don't mean shit to me.

Also about 5/6 done with John Sayles' latest, JAMIE MACGILLIVRAY, a big historical novel which follows the adventures of various people after the savage Battle of Culloden.

Like most of Sayles work, it's brilliant.

>9 CliffBurns: I'm eager to hear your podcast! Having done a few myself, and now trying to pull a colleague in for another, I want to keep up the fellow podcaster connections!

I've recently started a re-read of one of my favourite books, an obscure work on European minor railways entitled The End of the Line by a (now) obscure British novelist, Bryan Morgan. He wrote a number of novels in the late 1940s/early 1950s which are now pretty much forgotten. He wrote this book in 1955, describing his journeys around Western Europe, looking at obscure minor railways, many of which most likely closed before the book got into print (especially in France).

However, a lot of what he saw in Germany and Austria did survive rather longer, and certainly the first time I read it, a lot of what he wrote chimed with me. Moreover, I'd been able to access Eastern Europe and saw the sort of railways he wrote about, before they got privatised or gentrified out of recognition. So I'd long had the idea of writing a sort of partial sequel, bringing some of the book up to date and highlighting Morgan's work for a new generation. But I've had difficulty interesting a publisher - even those who knew of the original - and so I've decided to write the book anyway and, if necessary, publish it myself.

Just to make it clear, Morgan wasn't writing a technical treatise; he was more likely to talk about the décor of the stations, the behaviour of the passengers, the decrepitude of the rolling stock and the shape of the conductor's moustache than he was to give nuts and bolts details of the engines or describe the minutiae of the timetable. Perhaps I may give a quote:

"For Égreville, now a terminus, was formerly a junction. The Chemins de Fer Departmentaux worked from it back to Souppes and Château-Landon, over a line so recently abandoned that the timetables showing the Paris connections still hang yellowing in the station-houses; whilst the old Chemins de Fer d'Intérêt Local de l'Yonne went on from an embrancement now marked by a derelict signal just east of the station. This line today is used for a few hundred yards as a siding, but beyond that its rails vanish under grass. And by 'grass' I do not mean a six-inch growth such as covers the active Montereau route, but a jungle of yard-high pasture from which the tracks hardly reappear until Sens, twenty-five miles away.

But they are there; and the thrifty French rarely leave steel to rust quite purposeless; and in fact this buried line is still used for carrying - beetroot. This is not the beet you eat, of course, but that bloodless root which they turn into sugar and which has to be gathered in tens of thousands of tons over a wide area and shipped to a refinery during some two months of the year. This is a job for a railway; and so it is not surprising that all over the langue d'oïl, from Flanders to the Loire, you stumble across such lignes betteravières. Some carry passengers on the side, but most sleep their deep sleep under long grass for ten months out of twelve. They lie down, but they are not dead."