April, 2024 Reading: “April’s air stirs in/Willow-leaves…a butterfly/Floats and balances” (Bashō Matsuo)
CharlasLiterary Snobs
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1CliffBurns
Have a couple of books I'm pondering to start this month.
The weather has turned very mild in these parts, the snow melting away like a mirage.
Hard to stay inside with a book when a bright sun beckons.
The weather has turned very mild in these parts, the snow melting away like a mirage.
Hard to stay inside with a book when a bright sun beckons.
2iansales
Recent readings...
The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley - I was a big fan of Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy, but bounced hard out of the first of her fantasy trilogy, The Mirror Empire. Her later The Stars are Legion I thought good, but The Light Brigade, which was nominated for the Clarke Award, was the one I was looking forward to it. And it was worth the wait. It's a riff off both Starship Troopers and The Forever War, but is also packed with references to other sf works. In a corporatised future, Earth is at war with "aliens" based on Mars. The narrator, Dietz, joins her corporate army. The gimmick here is that troops are deployed by being "decorporealized" to light and then re-corporealized on the battlefield. But Dietz finds herself bouncing back and forth in time, fighting in missions at random times in the future. And so she learns how the war is really progressing, what it's really about, and what needs to be done to save Earth and humanity. Brutal, but there's lots of commentary on Hurley's neo-fascist future. Recommended. (It didn't win, by the way; The Old Drift, which isn't even sf, did.)
Hello America, JG Ballard - Satirising the American Dream only works if you’ve bought into the American Dream. Ballard himself admits, in a foreword written for the 1994 edition, the American Dream was plainly not real–or rather, it existed only as a construct in US media. True, from the perspective of 1970s UK, the “sick man of Europe”, everything in the US probably did seem happy and prosperous. For white people, at least. Everyone else was ignored. As was the clear happiness and prosperity present in many non-Anglophone countries. Of course, look beneath the surface and there was nothing, it was all smoke and mirrors. Hello America is set a century from now, after a dam built across the Bering Strait crashed the North American climate, turning it into inhospitable desert east of the Rockies and impenetrable jungle to the west. Everyone fled and settled in Europe (which boomed because previously frozen land could now be farmed). Obviously, no one reads Ballard for the climate science. Nor for the futurism. An expedition to abandoned New York strikes out for the west coast after a mysterious nuclear explosion in Boston. Eventually, only three members make it to Las Vegas… where they find a small population of Mexican teenagers, led by a member of a decades-earlier expedition, President Manson, who have somehow managed to restart a couple of nuclear power stations, returned several helicopters to flight, re-opened many of the hotel resorts (although they remain empty), and have even managed to get some cruise missiles working (and are keen to do the same to the ICBMs). After 100 years of neglect. It's not in the least bit credible. But you read Ballard for the commentary on on culture, and it strikes me here he's taking potshots at illusions so none of it really works. Not his best, although it was nominated for the BSFA Award (but lost out to The Shadow of the Torturer).
The Witch in the Wood, TH White - I have no idea what to make of this book. It’s the second book in The Once and Future King quartet, was extensively revised after initial publication, when it was titled The Queen of Air and Darkness. Except The Witch in the Wood is supposedly longer than The Queen of Air and Darkness, but the version I read, which had the former title, was barely 100 pages long. And, to be honest, it didn't have much of a plot. Arthur is now king, but apparently not everyone has accepted this so he has to fight to prove himself. Merlyn lectures him on how fighting for the sake of fighting is not a good idea, and while combat may be fun for knights, it isn’t for the serfs, the foot soldiers, who get killed in large numbers. Meanwhile, King Pellinore is visiting Orkney with two companions, while King Lot is off fighting Arthur. Pellinore didn’t want to be there–he was following the Questing Beast, and having great fun, and then he fell in love with the daughter of the King of Flanders, but this magic boat appeared so he climbed into it. And now he’s stuck in Orkney. His friends try to improve his mood by faking the Questing Beast, but the real Questing Beast turns up and falls in love with their fake one (think pantomime horse). Then there’s a big battle and Arthur revolutionises tactics by attacking the knights and not the serfs. So, of course, he wins. This didn’t even feel like a novel, more like an info-dump. The scenes with Sir Grummor and Sir Palomides are funny, but feel like music hall. There are several lectures on politics and authority, which reference Hitler, and are well argued. But none of it feels like a novel in a series of four. I mean, White’s prose is… idiosyncratic, but so much more appealing than Tolkien’s. White throws in anachronisms, but he makes it work. And he’s funny. The Hobbit cannot compare. Two more books to go, but it’s already clear The Once and Future King is greatly superior to The Hobbit.
The Defector, Chris Hadfield - Yes, that Chris Hadfield, astronaut, recorded a video of himself playing ‘Space Oddity’ on the ISS and it went viral. That Chris Hadfield. This is his second work of fiction, after The Apollo Murders, and also features one-eyed ex-test pilot Kaz Zemeckis in the lead role. A Soviet pilot defects with a MiG-25, landing in Israel the day before the Yom Kippur War. He and his aircraft are shipped to the US, to Groom Lake, AKA Area 51, where USAF plans to learn as much as possible about the plane. Complicating matters are the three cosmonauts assigned to the Apollo-Soyuz Project, two real historical figures and the invented female cosmonaut who was the first Russian on the Moon in The Apollo Murders. I enjoyed the first book in what is now plainly a series because of the hardware–I mean, just look at the fiction I’ve written–and this one is centred around a topic also of interest to me: Cold War supersonic military aircraft. But not, unfortunately, to the same degree. And, I must admit, Zemeckis is starting to smack a little of Dirk Pitt. I was a fan of Clive Cussler’s novels when I first read them back in the early 1980s, but the writing grew too bad to be forgivable and I eventually gave up on them over 20 years ago. Sadly, recent rereads of those early Dirk Pitt novels have shown they were always bad and I’m somewhat surprised I bothered reading past the first one. (I didn’t read them in order, so I’ve no idea which of the first half-dozen or so I read first.) Hadfield is a marginally better writer than Cussler at his best, although this is not a field in which writing chops are much on display–in fact, it’s possibly the reverse. But when Zemeckis dogfights in a F-15 after one leg has been shredded below the knee by a shotgun blast, some of Dirk Pitt’s more incredible physical exploits spring to mind. If Hadfield sticks to areas that interest me, my “enthusiasms” as I call them–deep sea exploration next?--then I’ll probably continue to pick up cheap copies of his books.
ICYMI: I posted a longer a review a couple of weeks ago of These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs, which has just won the Philip K Dick Award. Review is here: https://medium.com/@ian-93054/these-burning-stars-bethany-jacobs-c63b5472302c
The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley - I was a big fan of Hurley's Bel Dame Apocrypha trilogy, but bounced hard out of the first of her fantasy trilogy, The Mirror Empire. Her later The Stars are Legion I thought good, but The Light Brigade, which was nominated for the Clarke Award, was the one I was looking forward to it. And it was worth the wait. It's a riff off both Starship Troopers and The Forever War, but is also packed with references to other sf works. In a corporatised future, Earth is at war with "aliens" based on Mars. The narrator, Dietz, joins her corporate army. The gimmick here is that troops are deployed by being "decorporealized" to light and then re-corporealized on the battlefield. But Dietz finds herself bouncing back and forth in time, fighting in missions at random times in the future. And so she learns how the war is really progressing, what it's really about, and what needs to be done to save Earth and humanity. Brutal, but there's lots of commentary on Hurley's neo-fascist future. Recommended. (It didn't win, by the way; The Old Drift, which isn't even sf, did.)
Hello America, JG Ballard - Satirising the American Dream only works if you’ve bought into the American Dream. Ballard himself admits, in a foreword written for the 1994 edition, the American Dream was plainly not real–or rather, it existed only as a construct in US media. True, from the perspective of 1970s UK, the “sick man of Europe”, everything in the US probably did seem happy and prosperous. For white people, at least. Everyone else was ignored. As was the clear happiness and prosperity present in many non-Anglophone countries. Of course, look beneath the surface and there was nothing, it was all smoke and mirrors. Hello America is set a century from now, after a dam built across the Bering Strait crashed the North American climate, turning it into inhospitable desert east of the Rockies and impenetrable jungle to the west. Everyone fled and settled in Europe (which boomed because previously frozen land could now be farmed). Obviously, no one reads Ballard for the climate science. Nor for the futurism. An expedition to abandoned New York strikes out for the west coast after a mysterious nuclear explosion in Boston. Eventually, only three members make it to Las Vegas… where they find a small population of Mexican teenagers, led by a member of a decades-earlier expedition, President Manson, who have somehow managed to restart a couple of nuclear power stations, returned several helicopters to flight, re-opened many of the hotel resorts (although they remain empty), and have even managed to get some cruise missiles working (and are keen to do the same to the ICBMs). After 100 years of neglect. It's not in the least bit credible. But you read Ballard for the commentary on on culture, and it strikes me here he's taking potshots at illusions so none of it really works. Not his best, although it was nominated for the BSFA Award (but lost out to The Shadow of the Torturer).
The Witch in the Wood, TH White - I have no idea what to make of this book. It’s the second book in The Once and Future King quartet, was extensively revised after initial publication, when it was titled The Queen of Air and Darkness. Except The Witch in the Wood is supposedly longer than The Queen of Air and Darkness, but the version I read, which had the former title, was barely 100 pages long. And, to be honest, it didn't have much of a plot. Arthur is now king, but apparently not everyone has accepted this so he has to fight to prove himself. Merlyn lectures him on how fighting for the sake of fighting is not a good idea, and while combat may be fun for knights, it isn’t for the serfs, the foot soldiers, who get killed in large numbers. Meanwhile, King Pellinore is visiting Orkney with two companions, while King Lot is off fighting Arthur. Pellinore didn’t want to be there–he was following the Questing Beast, and having great fun, and then he fell in love with the daughter of the King of Flanders, but this magic boat appeared so he climbed into it. And now he’s stuck in Orkney. His friends try to improve his mood by faking the Questing Beast, but the real Questing Beast turns up and falls in love with their fake one (think pantomime horse). Then there’s a big battle and Arthur revolutionises tactics by attacking the knights and not the serfs. So, of course, he wins. This didn’t even feel like a novel, more like an info-dump. The scenes with Sir Grummor and Sir Palomides are funny, but feel like music hall. There are several lectures on politics and authority, which reference Hitler, and are well argued. But none of it feels like a novel in a series of four. I mean, White’s prose is… idiosyncratic, but so much more appealing than Tolkien’s. White throws in anachronisms, but he makes it work. And he’s funny. The Hobbit cannot compare. Two more books to go, but it’s already clear The Once and Future King is greatly superior to The Hobbit.
The Defector, Chris Hadfield - Yes, that Chris Hadfield, astronaut, recorded a video of himself playing ‘Space Oddity’ on the ISS and it went viral. That Chris Hadfield. This is his second work of fiction, after The Apollo Murders, and also features one-eyed ex-test pilot Kaz Zemeckis in the lead role. A Soviet pilot defects with a MiG-25, landing in Israel the day before the Yom Kippur War. He and his aircraft are shipped to the US, to Groom Lake, AKA Area 51, where USAF plans to learn as much as possible about the plane. Complicating matters are the three cosmonauts assigned to the Apollo-Soyuz Project, two real historical figures and the invented female cosmonaut who was the first Russian on the Moon in The Apollo Murders. I enjoyed the first book in what is now plainly a series because of the hardware–I mean, just look at the fiction I’ve written–and this one is centred around a topic also of interest to me: Cold War supersonic military aircraft. But not, unfortunately, to the same degree. And, I must admit, Zemeckis is starting to smack a little of Dirk Pitt. I was a fan of Clive Cussler’s novels when I first read them back in the early 1980s, but the writing grew too bad to be forgivable and I eventually gave up on them over 20 years ago. Sadly, recent rereads of those early Dirk Pitt novels have shown they were always bad and I’m somewhat surprised I bothered reading past the first one. (I didn’t read them in order, so I’ve no idea which of the first half-dozen or so I read first.) Hadfield is a marginally better writer than Cussler at his best, although this is not a field in which writing chops are much on display–in fact, it’s possibly the reverse. But when Zemeckis dogfights in a F-15 after one leg has been shredded below the knee by a shotgun blast, some of Dirk Pitt’s more incredible physical exploits spring to mind. If Hadfield sticks to areas that interest me, my “enthusiasms” as I call them–deep sea exploration next?--then I’ll probably continue to pick up cheap copies of his books.
ICYMI: I posted a longer a review a couple of weeks ago of These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs, which has just won the Philip K Dick Award. Review is here: https://medium.com/@ian-93054/these-burning-stars-bethany-jacobs-c63b5472302c
3mejix
March was a blur. I did finish two books:
Harsh Times by Vargas Llosa was kind of a centerless book. The different narrative lines never quite integrate well. On the other hand it is very well researched and the mastery in the writing is evident. If you are interested in mid century Caribbean and Central American history you will not be too disappointed. If you are not, you might want to consider something else.
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. I love Mariana Enriquez but her brand of atmospheric writing doesn't really translate well to this scale. A book of this length (588 pages) gives you time to notice repetitions and to ask questions about the plot. After a while the imagery looses it's shock value and some elements feel like theatrical props. The novel is well constructed and has good moments but overall it was not very satisfying.
Harsh Times by Vargas Llosa was kind of a centerless book. The different narrative lines never quite integrate well. On the other hand it is very well researched and the mastery in the writing is evident. If you are interested in mid century Caribbean and Central American history you will not be too disappointed. If you are not, you might want to consider something else.
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez. I love Mariana Enriquez but her brand of atmospheric writing doesn't really translate well to this scale. A book of this length (588 pages) gives you time to notice repetitions and to ask questions about the plot. After a while the imagery looses it's shock value and some elements feel like theatrical props. The novel is well constructed and has good moments but overall it was not very satisfying.
4CliffBurns
STRAIGHT CUT, a crime novel by Madison Smartt Bell.
The protagonist is a film editor hired by a longtime (but shady) friend to cut a movie in Italy.
Thanks to said shady producer, the editor becomes embroiled in a scheme to smuggle heroin into the United States and must keep his wits if he plans on staying out of prison.
A good read, but Bell has written far better.
The protagonist is a film editor hired by a longtime (but shady) friend to cut a movie in Italy.
Thanks to said shady producer, the editor becomes embroiled in a scheme to smuggle heroin into the United States and must keep his wits if he plans on staying out of prison.
A good read, but Bell has written far better.
5CliffBurns
PROPHET SONG, the 2023 Booker Prize winner by Paul Lynch.
Exceptional novel, plausible and more than a wee bit terrifying. Set in a near future Ireland, where nationalist politicians have imposed an authoritarian regime on the populace. The scary thing is how swiftly people conform to the new reality, wearing party badges, employing jingoism, displaying the country's flag.
Solid literary effort, right to its closing scenes.
Exceptional novel, plausible and more than a wee bit terrifying. Set in a near future Ireland, where nationalist politicians have imposed an authoritarian regime on the populace. The scary thing is how swiftly people conform to the new reality, wearing party badges, employing jingoism, displaying the country's flag.
Solid literary effort, right to its closing scenes.
6iansales
A new review up on my Medium blog-type thing: https://ian-93054.medium.com/the-light-brigade-kameron-hurley-267e40c452be
7CliffBurns
PATHOGENESIS: A History of the World in Eight Plagues by Jonathan Kennedy.
Viruses have played a key role in human development for as far back as can be measured. It seems likely that our Neanderthal cousins weren't massacred out of existence but were decimated by diseases brought up from Africa by various migrations. Continent-spanning empires have been destroyed by foreign bugs introduced by trade or conflict.
PATHOGENESIS is well-framed and convincing, debunking the "Great Man" theory of history and instead positing that our civilization has been helped and hindered by microscopic entities that are portable, resilient and that have been around far longer than we have.
Recommended.
Viruses have played a key role in human development for as far back as can be measured. It seems likely that our Neanderthal cousins weren't massacred out of existence but were decimated by diseases brought up from Africa by various migrations. Continent-spanning empires have been destroyed by foreign bugs introduced by trade or conflict.
PATHOGENESIS is well-framed and convincing, debunking the "Great Man" theory of history and instead positing that our civilization has been helped and hindered by microscopic entities that are portable, resilient and that have been around far longer than we have.
Recommended.
8RobertDay
I've today finished and reviewed Chris Priest's An American Story, which at first looks like a novel exploring fact and myth about 9/11, but morphs into an exploration of the nature of consensus reality and how that might be affected by a society that cares more for what people think happened than what actually happened.
At the same time, this novel has echoes of Priest's earlier "Dream Archipelago" stories, set on and around islands in a vast world-sea which are separated not only by distance but also by time vortices - not just echoes of setting (some of the action takes place on Priest's adopted home of the Isle of Bute), but also of some hints of a different reality (there is an Easter egg for more regular readers of Priest's novels). I suspect this one will have passed a lot of people by, especially if they were expecting a 9/11 thriller or even a straight conspiracy novel. I was engrossed by it.
At the same time, this novel has echoes of Priest's earlier "Dream Archipelago" stories, set on and around islands in a vast world-sea which are separated not only by distance but also by time vortices - not just echoes of setting (some of the action takes place on Priest's adopted home of the Isle of Bute), but also of some hints of a different reality (there is an Easter egg for more regular readers of Priest's novels). I suspect this one will have passed a lot of people by, especially if they were expecting a 9/11 thriller or even a straight conspiracy novel. I was engrossed by it.
9CliffBurns
FELICITY, a 2015 collection of poems by Mary Oliver.
Usually a big fan of her work, but I found this one a bit hit and miss. Some of the poems seem forced and she breaks one of my cardinal rules but employing exclamation points.
This volume still contains some amazing verse, particularly in its second half. "Storage' and "Cobb Creek" are wonderful.
Usually a big fan of her work, but I found this one a bit hit and miss. Some of the poems seem forced and she breaks one of my cardinal rules but employing exclamation points.
This volume still contains some amazing verse, particularly in its second half. "Storage' and "Cobb Creek" are wonderful.
10Cecrow
I have Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie on my list as a must-buy.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/salman-rushdie-knife-1.7175940
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/salman-rushdie-knife-1.7175940
11CliffBurns
Huge fan of the British comedy series "The Mighty Boosh" and so was delighted to pick up THE MIGHTY BOOK OF BOOSH, a volume assembled by the series creators, Noel Fielding and Julian Barrett (along with a few others).
Gorgeous artwork and character sketches by Fielding and the text pieces are quite funny.
Recommended for those who loved (and miss) the series.
Gorgeous artwork and character sketches by Fielding and the text pieces are quite funny.
Recommended for those who loved (and miss) the series.
12iansales
Recent reading...
Remain Silent, Robyn Gigl - the third book in Gigl’s series about Erin McCabe, a transgender lawyer in New Jersey. The books are set some 15 years ago, and I initially wondered why… but then it occurred to me Sue Grafton started writing her Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series in the early 1980s, and kept to a strict internal chronology so that her last book (heart-breakingly), Y is for Yesterday, was published in 2017 but set in 1989. So perhaps Gigl is doing something similar and slowly approaching the present day. Because Remain Silent certainly tackles a present-day hot topic head-on: trans kids. Back in 2009, of course, the so-called “culture wars” barely existed and JK Rowling was best known as a writer of a very popular children’s fantasy series. In Remain Silent, Senator Townsend, the villain of Gigl’s first novel, By Way of Sorrow, finds himself neck-and-neck with a populist right-wing candidate in the polls for the upcoming gubernatorial (I still find it hard to take that word seriously) election. So he joins forces with a group backing a father who has been manipulated into thinking his ex-wife is committing child abuse because she supports her trans eleven-year-old. Meanwhile, Erin McCabe meets with the financial advisor to Townsend’s rival for the Republican nomination, only for the advisor to end up murdered shortly afterwards. McCabe is charged, but the evidence is thin. Townsend, however, has a fix in. Meanwhile, McCabe is also helping the trans kid’s mother. I do like these books. McCabe is a good character, and the author, a trans lawyer and trans right activist, knows what she’s writing about. True, the villains seem to think every setback can be resolved by killing someone, which is not entirely credible, even for a Republican senator. But that, I guess, is the nature of the genre. And yes, McCabe is a little too good to be true, but the trans community is never going to be short of room for heroes. On the other hand, thinking about novels such as these, which do a lot I admit to raise awareness and present the trans community’s view, and I wonder if their happy endings can be self-defeating. Of course, that’s true of all crime fiction, if not all fiction. But in Remain Silent, McCabe wins through yet again, and the trans kid’s father sees the error of his ways... and of course real life is not like that, even more so now than when the book is set. True, no one wants to read a novel that’s as depressing as real life, but...
The Sixties: A Forged Diary, John Crowley and Seventy-nine Dreams, John Crowley - another two chapbooks from last year's John Crowley Miscellany kickstarter. The titles pretty much describe the contents. In the first, Crowley confesses to having been impressed by someone's diary, although perhaps more so at their discipline at writing an entry each day, and so deciding to fake his own, some of which may be true, some misremembered, some confabulated. Interesting for what it hints at more than what it says. Seventy-nine Dreams is 79 (mostly) one-page descriptions of, well, dreams. I suppose they might be described as prose poems, but they're closer to vignettes with stories that obey dream logic. Crowley is an excellent writer, but these are for fans or completists.
Schismatrix Plus, Bruce Sterling - I’m pretty sure I read Schismatrix back in the very early 1990s… but I also have a vague memory of borrowing the novel when staying with a friend on a trip to the UK a couple of years after I’d moved to the Middle East in the mid-1990s. Schismatrix Plus, published a decade after the original novel, includes it and five short stories set in the same universe. I suspect I’d read a couple of the short stories first, and then read the novel when staying with that friend. Whatever the truth of the matter, I’d pretty much no memory of the novel’s actual story when coming to this recent reread. Certainly, the one big thing I’d forgotten about Schismatrix was that it featured aliens. In the future of the novel, a couple of centuries hence, humanity has colonised the Solar system and those based off Earth have split into two factions - the Shapers, who improve themselves through genetic engineering, and the Mechanists, who use technology and cybernetics. The two factions are in an almost constant state of political and commercial rivalry slash war. Lindsay is born in an O’Neill cylinder orbiting the moon. Despite being a Mechanist, he’s sent to the Shapers for diplomatic training (and some genetic engineering). Later, he’s exiled from his cislunar republic, and embarks on a career bouncing around the outer Solar system, growing more and more politically powerful, although typically as an eminence grise. He has a rival, Constantine, and the two are at constant, if often hidden, loggerheads. Aliens, the Investors, large dinosaur-like interstellar merchants, arrive, and there is a peace of sorts between Shapers and Mechanists. But it doesn’t last. Sterling’s future solar system is pretty neat, if a little dated in places, such as the frequent mentions of “tape”, but Lindsay’s and Constantine’s political genius, even the reasons they’re so admired, is never explained and never really convinces. They are what they are because Sterling tells us so. The most interesting character in the book, Kitsune, who later becomes an actual space station, doesn’t appear often enough. The aliens are dull, and not very original. Although the Swarm in the story titled, er, ‘Swarm’, is based around a neat idea, later used by Paul McAuley in his 1989 novel, Secret Harmonies. Sterling went on to write much better novels than Schismatrix, although it remains popular to this day. It was ahead of its time back in 1985, but sf has moved on a great deal since then. Schismatrix Plus is worth a read, the original novel on its own not so much.
The Simulacra, Philip K Dick - I am not, I will happily admit, a fan of Dick’s books, and the only reason I read this one is because it’s in the SF Masterworks series (and the series has way too many books by Dick in it, as well). I find his novels slapdash, the good ideas wasted on haphazard plots and inconsistent settings. In this one, the US and Germany have formed the USEA, the president is a simulacrum (although only those in the know, er, know it), and the country is effectively ruled by the First Lady. There are also colonists on Mars, and roadside spaceship dealers who sell craft capable of reaching the Red Planet to those wishing to emigrate. The dealers are apparently mobile and unregulated. The novel opens with all psychotherapists, except one, being banned from practising. And that one is needed to treat a psychokinetic pianist who is a favourite of the First Lady. Meanwhile, the current president, or the der Alte (“the” and “der” are tautologous), is about the be retired and a new one built–but this time by a small firm and not a large German cartel. There’s also the Sons of Job, which seems to be a weirdly inoffensive neo-nazi popular movement, whose leader has access to a time-travel device. As indeed do the upper echelons of the USEA. A handful of ordinary people sort of bounce around the US–well, California and Washington, DC–stumbling into various plots and conspiracies, and so bringing everything crashing down to a somewhat abrupt end. And that’s it. A pretty fast read, and mildly amusing, but certainly not a Masterwork and not even one of Dick’s better books.
Also, The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley - see my review here: https://ian-93054.medium.com/the-light-brigade-kameron-hurley-267e40c452be
Remain Silent, Robyn Gigl - the third book in Gigl’s series about Erin McCabe, a transgender lawyer in New Jersey. The books are set some 15 years ago, and I initially wondered why… but then it occurred to me Sue Grafton started writing her Kinsey Millhone Alphabet series in the early 1980s, and kept to a strict internal chronology so that her last book (heart-breakingly), Y is for Yesterday, was published in 2017 but set in 1989. So perhaps Gigl is doing something similar and slowly approaching the present day. Because Remain Silent certainly tackles a present-day hot topic head-on: trans kids. Back in 2009, of course, the so-called “culture wars” barely existed and JK Rowling was best known as a writer of a very popular children’s fantasy series. In Remain Silent, Senator Townsend, the villain of Gigl’s first novel, By Way of Sorrow, finds himself neck-and-neck with a populist right-wing candidate in the polls for the upcoming gubernatorial (I still find it hard to take that word seriously) election. So he joins forces with a group backing a father who has been manipulated into thinking his ex-wife is committing child abuse because she supports her trans eleven-year-old. Meanwhile, Erin McCabe meets with the financial advisor to Townsend’s rival for the Republican nomination, only for the advisor to end up murdered shortly afterwards. McCabe is charged, but the evidence is thin. Townsend, however, has a fix in. Meanwhile, McCabe is also helping the trans kid’s mother. I do like these books. McCabe is a good character, and the author, a trans lawyer and trans right activist, knows what she’s writing about. True, the villains seem to think every setback can be resolved by killing someone, which is not entirely credible, even for a Republican senator. But that, I guess, is the nature of the genre. And yes, McCabe is a little too good to be true, but the trans community is never going to be short of room for heroes. On the other hand, thinking about novels such as these, which do a lot I admit to raise awareness and present the trans community’s view, and I wonder if their happy endings can be self-defeating. Of course, that’s true of all crime fiction, if not all fiction. But in Remain Silent, McCabe wins through yet again, and the trans kid’s father sees the error of his ways... and of course real life is not like that, even more so now than when the book is set. True, no one wants to read a novel that’s as depressing as real life, but...
The Sixties: A Forged Diary, John Crowley and Seventy-nine Dreams, John Crowley - another two chapbooks from last year's John Crowley Miscellany kickstarter. The titles pretty much describe the contents. In the first, Crowley confesses to having been impressed by someone's diary, although perhaps more so at their discipline at writing an entry each day, and so deciding to fake his own, some of which may be true, some misremembered, some confabulated. Interesting for what it hints at more than what it says. Seventy-nine Dreams is 79 (mostly) one-page descriptions of, well, dreams. I suppose they might be described as prose poems, but they're closer to vignettes with stories that obey dream logic. Crowley is an excellent writer, but these are for fans or completists.
Schismatrix Plus, Bruce Sterling - I’m pretty sure I read Schismatrix back in the very early 1990s… but I also have a vague memory of borrowing the novel when staying with a friend on a trip to the UK a couple of years after I’d moved to the Middle East in the mid-1990s. Schismatrix Plus, published a decade after the original novel, includes it and five short stories set in the same universe. I suspect I’d read a couple of the short stories first, and then read the novel when staying with that friend. Whatever the truth of the matter, I’d pretty much no memory of the novel’s actual story when coming to this recent reread. Certainly, the one big thing I’d forgotten about Schismatrix was that it featured aliens. In the future of the novel, a couple of centuries hence, humanity has colonised the Solar system and those based off Earth have split into two factions - the Shapers, who improve themselves through genetic engineering, and the Mechanists, who use technology and cybernetics. The two factions are in an almost constant state of political and commercial rivalry slash war. Lindsay is born in an O’Neill cylinder orbiting the moon. Despite being a Mechanist, he’s sent to the Shapers for diplomatic training (and some genetic engineering). Later, he’s exiled from his cislunar republic, and embarks on a career bouncing around the outer Solar system, growing more and more politically powerful, although typically as an eminence grise. He has a rival, Constantine, and the two are at constant, if often hidden, loggerheads. Aliens, the Investors, large dinosaur-like interstellar merchants, arrive, and there is a peace of sorts between Shapers and Mechanists. But it doesn’t last. Sterling’s future solar system is pretty neat, if a little dated in places, such as the frequent mentions of “tape”, but Lindsay’s and Constantine’s political genius, even the reasons they’re so admired, is never explained and never really convinces. They are what they are because Sterling tells us so. The most interesting character in the book, Kitsune, who later becomes an actual space station, doesn’t appear often enough. The aliens are dull, and not very original. Although the Swarm in the story titled, er, ‘Swarm’, is based around a neat idea, later used by Paul McAuley in his 1989 novel, Secret Harmonies. Sterling went on to write much better novels than Schismatrix, although it remains popular to this day. It was ahead of its time back in 1985, but sf has moved on a great deal since then. Schismatrix Plus is worth a read, the original novel on its own not so much.
The Simulacra, Philip K Dick - I am not, I will happily admit, a fan of Dick’s books, and the only reason I read this one is because it’s in the SF Masterworks series (and the series has way too many books by Dick in it, as well). I find his novels slapdash, the good ideas wasted on haphazard plots and inconsistent settings. In this one, the US and Germany have formed the USEA, the president is a simulacrum (although only those in the know, er, know it), and the country is effectively ruled by the First Lady. There are also colonists on Mars, and roadside spaceship dealers who sell craft capable of reaching the Red Planet to those wishing to emigrate. The dealers are apparently mobile and unregulated. The novel opens with all psychotherapists, except one, being banned from practising. And that one is needed to treat a psychokinetic pianist who is a favourite of the First Lady. Meanwhile, the current president, or the der Alte (“the” and “der” are tautologous), is about the be retired and a new one built–but this time by a small firm and not a large German cartel. There’s also the Sons of Job, which seems to be a weirdly inoffensive neo-nazi popular movement, whose leader has access to a time-travel device. As indeed do the upper echelons of the USEA. A handful of ordinary people sort of bounce around the US–well, California and Washington, DC–stumbling into various plots and conspiracies, and so bringing everything crashing down to a somewhat abrupt end. And that’s it. A pretty fast read, and mildly amusing, but certainly not a Masterwork and not even one of Dick’s better books.
Also, The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley - see my review here: https://ian-93054.medium.com/the-light-brigade-kameron-hurley-267e40c452be
13CliffBurns
LIGHT by M John Harrison.
I've always been impressed by Harrison's writing (read THE ICE MONKEY three decades ago) but LIGHT left me cold. The characters didn't appeal to me and the book seemed needlessly convoluted and confusing.
I ended up admiring it more than liking it and quickly admit at least part of the problem could be that I'm not smart enough to "get" it.
I've always been impressed by Harrison's writing (read THE ICE MONKEY three decades ago) but LIGHT left me cold. The characters didn't appeal to me and the book seemed needlessly convoluted and confusing.
I ended up admiring it more than liking it and quickly admit at least part of the problem could be that I'm not smart enough to "get" it.
14CliffBurns
MEDITATIONS FROM A MOVABLE CHAIR by Andre Dubus.
A collection of VERY personal essays, the author telling about how his life was changed and reshaped by a catastrophic motor vehicle accident which left him wheelchair bound.
Rage and helplessness are intermingled as he shares the worldview of a disabled person trying to function in a two-legged world. He also reflects on the comforts of his Roman Catholic faith and a number of his literary colleagues, living and dead.
Recommended.
A collection of VERY personal essays, the author telling about how his life was changed and reshaped by a catastrophic motor vehicle accident which left him wheelchair bound.
Rage and helplessness are intermingled as he shares the worldview of a disabled person trying to function in a two-legged world. He also reflects on the comforts of his Roman Catholic faith and a number of his literary colleagues, living and dead.
Recommended.
15iansales
Read: The Black Locomotive, Rian Hughes
I read and enjoyed Hughes’s XX: A Novel, Graphic back in 2021. I knew his name from the excellent Dare graphic novel he did with Grant Morrison back in 1991. Central to XX was a pastiche of a Golden Age sf novella, presented as if in the pages of a magazine - a trick I’ve used myself. There’s nothing like that in The Black Locomotive, although there’s plenty of fancy typography, photos and line drawings. But these are more enhancements to the story, rather than part of it. A secret Crossrail link to Buckingham Palace comes to an abrupt halt when the tunnel boring machine hits some sort of artefact. It’s a vast doughnut-shaped chamber, made of an unknown substance. Researchers find a hatch in its floor, which they open. One man, a poet shadowing the Crossrail project, sneaks back and enters the hatch. Which then closes, and some sort of field triggers and stops all electric and electronic devices and machinery in London working. Riots follow. Meanwhile, the research team can’t re-open the hatch. Since he was a kid, the head Crossrail engineer was in a steam locomotive fan club called the Smokebox Club. It turns out they were more than just gricers, but a secret society with members in all levels of UK society. And hidden under Box Hill, in an old Cold War bunker, is a fleet of steam locomotives, kept against the day they might be needed. A dash across country to London, and into London, by rail follows, to use the steam engine to smash open the sealed hatch. Meanwhile, the poet has discovered the vast labyrinth beneath the chamber is an ancient spaceship, and it has activated, encasing London in a spherical field and taking it into orbit. At which point, the novel abruptly finishes. I’m hoping there’ll be a sequel. A fun novel, and the illustrations and design of the book definitely added to it.
I read and enjoyed Hughes’s XX: A Novel, Graphic back in 2021. I knew his name from the excellent Dare graphic novel he did with Grant Morrison back in 1991. Central to XX was a pastiche of a Golden Age sf novella, presented as if in the pages of a magazine - a trick I’ve used myself. There’s nothing like that in The Black Locomotive, although there’s plenty of fancy typography, photos and line drawings. But these are more enhancements to the story, rather than part of it. A secret Crossrail link to Buckingham Palace comes to an abrupt halt when the tunnel boring machine hits some sort of artefact. It’s a vast doughnut-shaped chamber, made of an unknown substance. Researchers find a hatch in its floor, which they open. One man, a poet shadowing the Crossrail project, sneaks back and enters the hatch. Which then closes, and some sort of field triggers and stops all electric and electronic devices and machinery in London working. Riots follow. Meanwhile, the research team can’t re-open the hatch. Since he was a kid, the head Crossrail engineer was in a steam locomotive fan club called the Smokebox Club. It turns out they were more than just gricers, but a secret society with members in all levels of UK society. And hidden under Box Hill, in an old Cold War bunker, is a fleet of steam locomotives, kept against the day they might be needed. A dash across country to London, and into London, by rail follows, to use the steam engine to smash open the sealed hatch. Meanwhile, the poet has discovered the vast labyrinth beneath the chamber is an ancient spaceship, and it has activated, encasing London in a spherical field and taking it into orbit. At which point, the novel abruptly finishes. I’m hoping there’ll be a sequel. A fun novel, and the illustrations and design of the book definitely added to it.
