My reading slowed badly during March and April, so much so I’m ten books behind on my Goodreads reading challenge, and I picked a total ten less than the year before (which I just managed to reach). Partly it’s because I’ve been so busy at work, I’ve been eating my lunch at my desk, and so not reading during that break. But I’ve also found it harder to continue with the book I’m reading on the weekend. I really do need to pick up my reading pace.

The American Lover, Rose Tremain (2014, UK). Back when I lived in Abu Dhabi, I read several books by Tremain, both novels and collections, and enjoyed them. Since returning to the UK, I’ve not read anything by her, so I thought it time I rectified that and bought her latest collection. And… it was a good move. She’s worth reading. These stories are slight, it has to be said, but good, of a type I like and enjoy, but not exactly memorable. I find Helen Simpson’s short stories have more bite. The stand-out is probably ‘The Jester of Astapovo’, in which a dying Leo Tolstoy, fleeing from his wife, ends up at a nowhere railway stop “120 miles south-east of Moscow, on the Smolensk-Dankovo section of the Ural railroad line”, and spends his last few days there in the house of the station-master (aside, this is, from the use of the horrible Americanism “railroad”). I enjoyed The American Lover enough to decide to carry on working my way through Tremain’s oeuvre.

The Corporation Wars 1: Dissonance, Ken MacLeod (2016, UK). I’ve been buying and reading Ken’s novels since stumbling across a copy of his first novel, The Star Fraction, in Spinneys in Abu Dhabi back in the 1990s. Throughout the years since, he’s published a variety of sf novels, and some I’ve liked a great deal more than others. Some have even been excellent – I still think his Intrusion is one of the best near-future sf novels of the past ten years. The Corporation Wars 1: Dissonance, on the other hand, has a title that really doesn’t appeal – it sounds like “Neoliberals in Spaaaace!” – and if it had been written by anyone other than Ken I’d have given it a wide berth. As it is… I’m unlikely to put it in my top five MacLeod novels. It’s a realistic treatment of robot sentience accidentally being created at a corporate mining site on a moon of Jupiter, and the team of avatars – virtual representations of dead human beings – who fight them. There’s a lot about simulated environments, a familiar topic to readers of Ken’s novels, and some intelligent treatment of the vast distances within the Solar System. But. Well, it never quite caught fire for me. The self-aware robots felt a bit clichéd, and the avatars were no better drawn. This is solid twenty-first century space opera, a bit more to the hard sf end of the spectrum than is usually the case, but I found it a little disappointing.

The Language of Power, Rosemary Kirstein (2004, USA). I forget who recommended the first book in this series, The Steerswoman, but when I came across a copy in a local charity shop, I bought it, later read it… and liked it so much I went and tracked down the remaining Steerswoman books (only the first was ever published in the UK, so I had to buy US editions… and there was such a long gap between books two and three that the first two were re-issued in an omnibus edition.) The Language of Power follows directly on from The Lost Steersman, but none of the books really make much sense unless read in order from The Steerswoman. Rowan is back in the seaport of Donner, trying to make sense of the events recounted in previous book. But her efforts to track down the records of a previous Steerswoman draw unwanted attention from the wizards… but then she stumbles upon Will, the boy genius who was taken on as apprentice by a friendly wizard, and it seems they’re trying to figure out the same things. These books are hugely likeable, and the presentation of science fiction as fantasy is perfectly pitched. It’s not a new idea, by any means – even Robert Jordan used it, for example – but Kirstein’s talent is in presenting understandable science fiction to the reader, not a handful of sf buzzwords or well-worn tropes, in such a way that it’s obvious this is sf to everyone except the characters. Sadly, the story is not yet complete and the recent installments have taken a while to appear. But it’s worth hanging in there, because these books are lots of fun.

Valerian and Laureline 15: The Circles of Power, Jean-Claude Mézières & Pierre Christin (1994, France). Annoyingly, Cinebook have been prompted by the imminent release of Luc Besson’s Valerian film – which looks a bit dodgy as an adaptation, to be honest – to rerelease the Valerian and Laureline books in hardback omnibus editions. Argh. I’ve been buying the paperbacks as they’ve been published in English. And, as is evident in this blog post, I’m currently at volume 15. (Volume 16 will be published in April, but there are, to date, 22 volumes in French, the last published in 2013.) In The Circles of Power, the titular two find themselves on a world in which the city and society are organised into circles with increasing levels of authority and regulation. But something weird is going on in the highest circle, and since they need money to get their ship fixed, they’re forced to investigate. The solution to the mystery comes as no real surprise, but along the way – and this is where, on the strength of the trailer alone, I admit, I think Besson’s adaptation might fail – there is ample opportunity for Christin to display his mordant view of real world society and politics. And I saw nothing of that dry banter in the trailer for Besson’s film. Which is a shame – one of the joys of the Valerian and Laureline bande dessinée series is how it maps onto the its time of writing.

popCult!, David Barnett (2011, UK). I bought this at the Fantasycon before last, so it’s taken me about 18 months to get around to reading it. Which is actually pretty good – I have some books I bought over a decade ago I’ve yet to read. I can’t remember why I bought it, possibly because I know the author, but perhaps also because the blurb mentions a lost Carry On film as central to the plot… and for all their myriad faults I’m a reluctant fan of the Carry On series.  In the event, Carry On, You Old Devil!, the so-called missing film, turned out to be a maguffin. The actual novel is about the writer of the titular work – a non-fiction work on popular culture in the novel – and how he is recruited by the, er, titular underground organisation, which is dedicated to safeguarding popular expressions of mass culture – talent shows, reality television, anything which makes celebrities of nobodies, basically – against a mysterious and semi-immortal enemy. Unfortunately, the protagonist is thoroughly unlikeable, and his allies somewhat too perfect to be true, but there’s some excellent commentary on popular culture buried among the implausible goings-on. It’s a fun novel, but it’s one where the writer was clearly capable of better – and has subsequently proven so. One or two aspects proved uncannily prescience when I was reading it – especially the section where popCult! break into the Palace of Westminster… Worth reading, if you can find a copy.

Darkchild, Sydney J Van Scoyc (1982, USA). Many years ago, I decided I liked Van Scyoc’s novels – I forget which of her novels prompted it – and over a number of years I’ve picked up copies of all her books… and I’ve been very slowly reading them. Darkchild I actually read as the first part of SFBC omnibus edition, Daughters of the Sunstone, which also includes Bluesong and Starsilk. I was afraid I might have gone off Van Scyoc’s writing, but I was happy to find I still like it a lot. There’ll be a review of Darkchild on SF Mistressworks soon.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die count: 129