It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

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Monthly Archives: February 2020


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Reading diary 2020, #2

Although I’m reading less books since my move, it feels like I’m reading more. Partly I suspect that’s because I do around 70% of my reading on my Kindle, and it’s difficult to judge the size of ebooks – physically, I mean. But I’m also no longer “making up the numbers” by reading short non-fiction books about aircraft or spacecraft or any other of the various “enthusiasms” I’ve had – those books are all in storage. Which I suppose means the number of books I’m reading now is closer to my actual reading figures – although, to be fair, I don’t read on my commute to work, which I used to in the UK.

Metropolis, Philip Kerr (2019, UK). This is the last Bernie Gunther from Kerr we’ll see as he died before it was published. He did finish it, however, although the novel as published includes a eulogising introduction by Ian Rankin. I’ve been a fan of Kerr’s fiction for many years, and have made no secret of it, and it’s never pleasant when a writer you admire, and whose books you like a great deal, dies. And not simply because the series must come to an abrupt end. (Without meaning to sound mercenary, others could write additions to the series – it’s been done before, with varying degrees of success and acceptance.) Metropolis, unsurprisingly, doesn’t read like the last book of a series, although it does cover the start of Bernie Gunther’s police career (which, if you know the series, isn’t as contradictory as it sounds). Unlike the other books, or at least the ones published after the original Berlin Noir trilogy, there’s no split narrative, with one narrative thread continuing Gunther’s story in the decades following WWII, while the other is set further back in time and covers a case or incident related to, or which provides a perspective on, the later narrative. In Metropolis, Gunther is a new detective in Weimar Berlin, who gets involved in two serial killer cases – the first kills sex workers (many women resorted to sex work to make ends meet), the second disabled WWI veterans who beg on the streets of Berlin – all of which is tied in with the rise of  Nazism, the excesses of the Weimar Republic, and provides plenty of back-placed hooks which tie back into the characters (most of them real) and events (most of them real) that Gunther encounters in earlier novels (which are, obviously, set later). Kerr’s Gunther novels started out good, and pretty much stayed good for the entire 14-book series. Which is quite an achievement. The title of Metropolis is a reference to Lang’s film, which the novel mentions – Gunther is even interviewed by von Harbou, who is researching what clearly becomes M – but the link is forced at best and the title is more a reference to the city of Berlin itself. Happily, it seems Bernie Gunther – and his author – ended on a high note as Metropolis is definitely one of the stronger books in an abnormally consistently good series.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 4: The Tempest, Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill (2019, UK). Whenever I mention the League of Extraordinary Gentleman I receive a blank look, and then I explain there was a movie adaptation with Sean Connery and there’s some glimmer of recognition. But, really, the film is awful and shouldn’t be considered in the same breath as the graphic novels from which it was adapted. By my count, there’ve been six previous volumes, and three spin-off volumes (the Nemo books). The last three books were actually one split into three, Century: 1910, Century: 1969 and Century: 2009, which is why The Tempest, the seventh graphic novel, is number four. For those who have never encountered this particular League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, they’re a group of fictional characters with, well, extraordinary abilities from Victorian/Edwardian literature. The original members were Mina Harker (from Dracula), Captain Nemo, Dr Jekyll, the Invisible Man and Allan Quatermain (from H Rider Haggard’s novels), but also featured Professor Cavor, Fu Manchu, Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty and HG Wells’s Martians. Subsequent volumes continued to mine and mashup proto-genre stories in many and clever ways. The Tempest, despite the ten-year gap, follows on directly from Century. As the title suggests, it centres around Prospero, and other fantastical Shakespearean characters, although it’s not unashamed to incorporate characters and institutions from other science fiction properties, such as TV21 – both Spectrum and World Aquanaut Security Patrol make an appearance. There are other dimensions to the pastiche – MI5, for example, operates a group of “J-series” secret agents, each of whom are modelled on the actors who played James Bond in the 007 movies, including Woody Allen. Some of the art is also clearly an homage to Jack Kirby’s. And it’s not all art – the book is split into six “issues” (was it published as a mini-series? I don’t know), each of which have cover art that spoofs well-known comics, and include an introduction and a letters page (written and collated by “Al and Kev”). The introductions are mini-essays on renowned British comic artists, such as Leo Baxendale and Frank Bellamy, and the letters pages are Viz-like spoofs in which it’s made clear the letter-writers are as fictional as the comic’s characters (or are they?). The story itself is told through a series of strips, echoing British comics’ anthology nature, some of which are colour, some black and white, and some 3D (glasses are included). This is a graphic novel that not only celebrates the works from which its characters were taken but also the British comics industry and its output. It is not just a graphic novel about the Blazing World – named for Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 proto-sf novel, and a sort of sanctuary for the series’s many characters – and the threat to its existence, but also a celebration of British comic history, told in a voice familiar likely only to those who have read British comics. I loved it. It wasn’t just the “spot the mashup”, or the somewhat convoluted story and its cast, but the fact it echoed my own experience of comics, British comics, although not entirely as, since I’m more than a decade younger than Alan Moore, it doesn’t quite map onto my comic-reading, which was Beano/Dandy to war comics such as  Warlord, Victor and the Commando Library, to 2000 AD and Star Lord and Tornado… to books without pictures. Ah well. The Tempest is a great piece of work, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is an excellent series from start to finish. I find Alan Moore’s work stretches from the sublime to the indulgent, but this series is definitely the former. Recommended. But start from the beginning.

The Pawns of Null-A, AE van Vogt (1948, Canada). There’s a Brian Aldiss story called ‘Confluence’ which is little more than amusing dictionary definitions of phrases from an alien language. One phrase is defined as “in which everything in a book is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it”, and its converse, of course, is “in which nothing in a book is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it”. The Pawns of Null-A fails both definitions. I have no idea what van Vogt thought he was writing about and nothing in the novel makes the slightest bit of sense. It is nominally a sequel to The World of Null-A. Gilbert Gosseyn prevented the conquest of Earth by the Greatest Empire in that novel, but in this one he finds himself bouncing around the heads of various characters in the Greatest Empire in an effort to either stop it or prevent it from defeating the League of Galactic Worlds. Gosseyn finds himself caught in a trap and transported into the brain of the heir to the Greatest Empire’s leader. He surmises some other powerful player is doing this in order to hone Gosseyn as a weapon, but the reader is bounced from one unexplained situation to another, with a remarkable level of faith in the reader’s attention, certainly to a greater extent than any modern-day author would be able to get away with. Gosseyn stumbles across a planet of “Predictors”, who seem to be chiefly responsible for the Greatest Empire’s victories, but since Gosseyn – and by extension van Vogt – seem to have little idea what’s going on, there’s little point in the reader trying to figure it out. Damon Knight famously performed a hatchet job on this novel’s prequel, The World of Null-A, but later retracted it when he learnt van Vogt documented his dreams and used them as plots. That’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation, certainly, but “oh he plotted while he was asleep” does not suddenly make a book no longer open to criticism for shit plotting. I loved van Vogt’s novels as a teenager, but virtually none have survived adult rereads. And with good reason: he was a fucking shit writer. Damon Knight was right. He just wasn’t honest enough – something which has plagued the genre since its beginnings. The Pawns of Null-A is badly-written, has no real plot to speak of, and its past popularity should be considered an accurate indictment of past sf fans’ taste…

The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl, Theodora Goss (2019, USA). This is the third book in the Adventure of the Athena Club series and, I am led to believe, the final book, although nothing about all three novels struck me as “trilogy” and I would be happy for the series to continue. Like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen above, Goss has repurposed well-known fictional characters from Victorian and Edwardian literature, but to a different purpose. First and foremost, her story is female-led and female-driven. She has had to invent characters in order for this to be the case. Such as Dr Jekyll’s daughter Mary, the leader of the Athena Club; or Catherine Moreau, the puma woman from the HG Wells novel. This is not a weakness but a strength. Like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, these books are not entirely straightforward, and are framed as penny dreadfuls, explicitly written by Moreau, of the Athena Club’s adventures, in much the same way as the Sherlock Holmes stories were framed as the diary of Dr Watson. Although the books’ definition of penny dreadfuls seems to owe more to the anonymous female-authored books of Regency circulating libraries than it does actual Victorian pulp fiction. Not that the interpolations by the cast, which is all nicely meta, fit either. I’m a big fan of breaking the fourth wall, even if it’s fictionally. Having said all that… I don’t like the titles of these novels, but I love the stories they tell. This one has the Order of the Golden Dawn attempting to turn Britain into, well, pretty much what Johnson’s government has sort of been working toward. It plans to replace Queen Victoria with a compliant clone, and Queen Victoria was far more revered in the late nineteenth century than Queen Elizabeth II is now, and then turn Britain into an “England for Englishman”. Happily, this is derailed pretty quickly – not by the Athena Club, but by the female members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, who had their own plan: resurrect Tera, High Priestess of Isis, who died 5,000 years ago and was mummified, and she will take over the British Empire and remake it according to her desires. While those desires include such un-Victorian things as female emancipation and gender equality, the Athena Club oppose it on principle (no tyranny is ever benevolent, no matter how well-intentioned). The title refers to Tera’s power, which is considerably more than mere hypnotism, although the actual “mesmerizing girl” is the Athena Club’s maid, Alice, who has the same power, albeit a great deal weaker, and whose disappearance kickstarts the plot. I do like the series’s use of its characters – Van Helsing is a villain, Count Dracula is not, Ayesha is head of the Alchemist’s Society – and if there’s some occasional padding, and the plots don’t always quite fit together, never mind, they’re an interesting, and much-needed, take on the literature they pastiche.


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Movie roundup 2020, #1

This year, I’ve decided not to continue with my previous years’ practice of writing a few hundred words about half a dozen films in a post. Instead, I’ll keep it to a sentence or two per film, and post my Movie roundups less frequently. Hopefully, that’ll force me not to rely on easy content and actually write blog posts that are a little meatier, like, you know, actual criticism. I used to do it once, you know. But about science fiction, not movies. And I’d like to do it again.

Alien, Ridley Scott (1979, UK). I make no apology for it: Alien is one of my favourite films and one of the best movies, to my mind, the genre has produced. Forty years on, and the film still holds up really well, although some of the physical effects looks a bit cheap by modern CGI standards. But still a ground-breaking film.

Tag, Sion Sono (2015, Japan). Extremely weird Japanese film about a schoolgirl who finds herself in a series of violent encounters, like a high school massacre, and it’s all to do with levels in a video game – which is not spoilery as it’s pretty easy to guess. Quite gory in places, and sort of fun when it’s not being too weird.

Heroes of the East, Lau Kar Leung (1978, China). Not really China as this is a Shaw Brothers movie, from Hong Kong, which in 1978 was a British protectorate. It’s notable for pitting Japanese martial arts against Chinese ones, but it’s pretty clear where the film-makers’ sympathies lie (clue: it was made in Hong Kong). As a 40 year old kung fu movie, it’s not bad; as a wu xia movie, bearing in mind the current state of the genre, it leaves a lot to be desired. Still worth seeing, but with the right expectations.

Shelter, Eran Riklis (2017, Israel). Taut thriller in which a Mossad agent babysits a Lebanese informant undergoing plastic surgery in Germany. The US and UK press and governments are happy to parrot the propaganda of the Israeli regime but there are plenty of Israeli – and Palestinian – creators in cinema and literature who give much more nuanced, and accurate, views on the situation. Worth seeking out.

Terminator: Dark Fate, Tim Miller (2019, USA). In which the protagonists of a 1984 cult film – that’s 36 years ago, by the way – are dragged out of retirement, as are the actors who played them, in service to a plot that retcons the retcons of the franchise. And possibly the retcons of the retcons of the rectons too. If this were a book they would say, “trees died for this”. Arnie displays surprising gravitas but he still can’t fucking act.

Lost and Found, Melvin Frank (1979, USA). Dreadful seventies “lit fic” movie in which neurotic US academic marries forceful UK secretary after they have a series of semi-humorous encounters while holidaying in the Alps. Marriage does not go as expected. No shit. There are thousands of novels written on this same subject, one or two of them might even be worth reading. The same is likely true for movies.

Cider with Rosie, Philippa Lowthorpe (2015, UK). Surprisingly late adaptation of a 1959 book, which I studied at school. Which makes me sound older than I am. I read it in the late 1970s, okay? It’s all West Country post-WWI bucolicism, which proves to be less a celebration of a lost way of life than an elegy to it. Surprisingly effective and affective.

Hustlers, Lorene Scafaria (2019, USA). Not intended as a J.Lo vehicle, but she plays a major role and steals the film. After the 2008 financial crisis shrinks their client base, a group of lap dancers start rolling brokers. It’s basically criminal but I’ve no sympathy for the brokers, they’re the scum who impoverished everyone and still walked away with seven-figure bonuses. They belong in jail. Certainly more than the women in this film who stole from them. Smart thriller.

Horrible Histories: The Movie – Rotten Romans, Dominic Brigstocke (2019, UK). The Horrible Histories schtick – jokey versions of UK history for kids, with jokes and songs – has been going now for a while and quite successfully. This is their first try at a feature film and it’s well, more of what they do. It’s pretty much the legend of Boudicca, centred around a useless Roman teenager who upsets Nero and finds himself posted to Brittanica and the daughter of a Celtic chieftain whose father has been ripped off big-time by the Romans. The relationship is a children’s TV staple, there’s plenty of comedy through the use of anachronisms, and it all climaxes with the Battle of Watling Street. Not that much is known about Boudicca – no one knows how or when she died, for example – but the film makes a feature of its research. For all that it’s a comedy, this is smartly-told actual history.

Shoot First, Die Later, Fernando DiLeo (1974, Italy). Typical giallo police procedural from the title right through to the story’s climax. Corrupt detective discovers there’s a line he won’t cross – drugs, of course – but it’s too late, they have him by the short and curlies. Bodies start to turn up, and the detective gets increasingly desperate as he tries to hide his complicity. But his father, a tough old police sergeant, becomes suspicious… I’ve said before that gialli are an acquired taste, and some stand out more than others… but many are little more than Italian takes on US B-movies. Which, sadly, this one is.

Blue, Derek Jarman (1993, UK). I remember when this film was released and the idea of screen that displayed a single colour for 79 minutes, while voices told the story of the film… struck me as unreasonably pretentious and a waste of whatever government money was involved in the making of it. Having since, to my surprise, become an enormous fan of Jarman’s works. and having now watched Blue – several times, it must be said – I love it. I could listen to Nigel Terry’s voice all day. And the shade of blue on the screen – International Klein Blue – is weirdly relaxing. It’s a bit like listening to an audio book in bed with the lights off, but the blue is more peaceful than a darkened room. The more Jarman I see, the more I think he can do no wrong.

The Designated Victim, Maurizio Lucidi (1971, Italy). Giallo take on Strangers on a Train. Ad exec wants to sell out (and head for South America with his mistress) but wife refuses to sell their share. In Venice, he meets a louche aristocrat who proposes a deal: he will kill the wife if ad exec will murder aristocrat’s brother. And when ad exec refuses, aristocrat murders his wife anyway and frames ad exec. Very much a 1970s Italian thriller, not helped by the aristocrat’s uncanny resemblance to Russell Brand.

El Angel, Luis Ortega (2018, Argentina). Borderline accurate treatment of twenty-something serial killer Carlo Robledo Puch, active in Argetina in the early 1970s, and played with an impressive lack of affect by Lorrenzo Ferro. Puch and his fellows were petty criminals, who robbed shops and nightclubs, but Puch was clearly a psychopath and was eventually indicted for eleven murders and seventeen robberies. Plus assisted rape and attempted rape. These were not nice people, and the film is very clear about that.

Bedelia, Lance Comfort (1946, UK). US novel about a woman with a succession of husbands who died suspicious deaths, by the author of the novel from which classic noir Laura was adapted, transplanted to the UK thanks to the author’s poor treatment by Hollywood over her previous novel. Those were the days. The transplant works fine, although the Yorkshire accents are suspect, and Margaret Lockwood shows she should have had a much bigger career; but it’s all a bit clichéd and the thin gloss of Englishness can’t save a standard noir plot.

1917, Sam Mendes (2016. UK). “Fake single take is remarkable achievement”. Which is sort of what all the reviews said. Which is a bit like praising Tobey Maguire for his building-swinging abilities in Spider-Man. Not a patch on Dunkirk, and everyone comes out of it a bit too, well, nice. I mean, we all know most of the officers were inbred halfwits with about as much military sense as the Empress of Blandings. That’s what most of the poetry says, that’s what most of the novels set during WWI says. 1917 feels a bit like the cinematic equivalent of a Jessie Pope poem, and given the current situation in the UK its timing, and possible motive, is somewhat suspicious.

Draug, Klas Persson & Karin Engman (2018, Sweden). Low budget horror film set in eleventh century Sweden, in which a member of the king’s guard and his adopted daughter, a shield maiden, head for the deep forest to track down a missing missionary. They suspect pagan rebels, but the culprit is far less earthly. Atmospheric, and good turns by most of the cast. The final twist isn’t much of a surprise but the trip there more than pays off. Worth seeing.


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Reading diary 2020, #1

I think I’ll continue with this format, documenting the books I’ve read half a dozen at a time. But this year, I’m going to write up each book shortly after finishing it. At least, that’s the plan…

The Man in the Darksuit, Dennis R Caro (1980, USA). I picked this up from Fantastikbokhandeln, a secondhand genre bookshop that opened recently here in Uppsala. I’m not sure what prompted me to purchase it. The cover boasts an approving quote from Philip K Dick, but I’ve never really a fan of Dick’s writing. So it can’t have been that. The title sounded intriguing, but the backcover blurb reads more like the book is a piss-take… undercover reporter saves heiress from kidnapper and so uncovers galactic conspiracy, in the sort of language that implies it’s all very funny and witty and tongue-in-cheek. And it’s not, it’s really not. It reads a bit like Ian Wallace and a bit like Ron Goulart, and neither of those are really writers to admire. The titular character is the villain of the piece and his suit bends light around him so he’s effectively invisible. But the novel is more concerned with failed reporter Bos Coggins, who seems to have had a surprisingly successful career for a “failed” reporter, and Muffie Bernstein, the heiress he “rescues” in the opening chapters and who takes a shine to him and pretty much drives the plot thereafter. I have to wonder what was going through the editor’s mind when they chose to buy and publish this book. I mentioned Ian Wallace earlier, who had a career through the 1960s and 1970s, but whose novels at least made an effort at discussing science-fictional ideas and in fact used the genre as a springboard for a discussion on all manner of subjects. The Man in the Darksuit is a an attempt at farce, and while it shows a familiarity with sf tropes, it chooses to pastiche more general tropes, which renders its presentation as sf pretty moot. It is also clearly so popular, not a single secondhand copy is for sale through Amazon. A book to avoid.

Old Man’s War, John Scalzi (2005, USA). Scalzi is something of a lightning rod for science fiction and, while I find very little to disagree with in his public persona and what he chooses to champion, he’s no poster-boy for the best of what the genre can produce, and has, in fact, built a career on resolutely commercial science fiction of a type that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s, albeit with 21st century sensibilities. Of course, science fiction is global, but Scalzi’s version of it is entirely parochial. And that’s woefully evident here. Old Man’s War is about a middle-class old man in Middle America who chooses to throw it all away – a comfortable retirement, that is, and eventual death; not that everyone, even in the US, gets the first – in order to fight for the Earth Federation in some sort of undefined war. And “undefined war” is the key to this novel. The protagonist, John Perry, knows nothing about the universe beyond Earth, or indeed what he’s signing up for by joining the Colonial Defense Force. His ignorance about the universe – imposed on Earth, incidentally, by the authorities – is the average American’s ignorance about planet Earth writ large. It turns out humanity is one of many races settling the galaxy – the science and background of which are hand-waved away quickly – but that has led to competition for habitable planets and Earth is in a war to maintain its own colonies. All of which are apparently only populated by emigrants from “developing” countries such as… Norway. Er, what? I mean, even imagining a programme in which India and Bangladesh only are allowed to send settlers offworld because, by implication, they’re failing as Earth-bound nation-states, but the US is not allowed to because… Present history, and orange buffoon in the White House, aside… even in 2005 this was a bad take. Old Man’s War is US exceptionalism writ large. And it doesn’t get any better. Characters lecture one another – the lecture on orbital elevators is dull and irrelevant – and then a love interest is – literally – manufactured, and this is used to drive the second half of the plot, despite somewhat dubious ethics. However… Old Man’s War has an engaging voice, and its story must have felt so comfortable to US sf readers of 2005 they probably wondered why they hadn’t read it a dozen times before in previous decades… Sadly, the book’s charm does not cross the Atlantic. It’s a bit like a Big Mac, a triumph of marketing over content, something that non-Americans see as an exemplar of US culture – or US sf culture, in this case – but Americans see as emblematic of culture as a whole, but of course there’s more to culture than just the US… Scalzi strikes me as a nice guy, I probably agree with 75% of his sensibilities, but that doesn’t make Old Man’s War a good book or worth recommending. It is, in fact, pretty awful. I won’t be bothering with the sequels.

Crimson Darkness, William Barton (2014, USA). I’ve been a fan of Barton’s fiction for many years – he’s American, by the way – ever since reading the collaborations he wrote with Michael Capobianco back in the 1990s. At one point, we were even corresponding. His last traditionally-published novel was 1999’s When We Were Real, and he has self-published ever since. On the one hand, this is almost a crime as he’s one of the best sf novelists the US has produced; on the other, Crimson Darkness is pretty much unpublishable in its current form… I’m describing it badly. Crimson Darkness is an excellent sf novel. It’s also a much harder read than most sf readers will accept. It’s a bravura piece of world-building, it takes no prisoners, and so creates a narrative that bounces from obtuse to obscure. No traditional publisher would touch it in its current form, but by self-publishing Barton allows us to decide for ourselves. This is complicated by a number of issues: one, it’s a big novel, 200,000 words; two, it’s the first in a series of, to date, three novels, with possibly more to come; and three, it’s supposed to be backed up by an online reference, particularly for the conlangs used in the novel, but that online reference is still “under construction”. I can’t fault Barton for his ambition, or indeed for failing to meet those ambitions. Been there done that, myself. Crimson Darkness is part Bildungsroman and part Secret-of-the-World story. A prince of a defunct kingdom bounces around various nations, gets embroiled in revolutions, witnesses great social and industrial change, but is also puzzled by the nature of his world. There’s a lot of discussion of the conlangs Barton has invented for the series, a lot of descriptive prose, which Barton does well (despite a tendency to use “it’s” when he means “its”), and an astonishing amount of detail in the worldbuilding. This is what Neal Stephenson should be like. As I said earlier, a bravura piece of worldbuilding. But also an engaging narrative. I’ve been aware of Barton’s self-published novels for a number of years, but they were only available on Kindle and until last year I didn’t have one. I now have access to a whole bunch of stuff he’s published since When We Were Real (since re-published by Barton himself in a preferred form), including preferred versions of earlier traditionally-published novels. His works are not easy reads, not the simplistic deathless prose and well-worn tropes of the more successful self-published sf authors. Obviously. I wouldn’t be reading them if they were. But for those who like intelligent sf, this is the real stuff.

Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik (2018, USA). I received a copy of this as part of the Hugo Voters Pack as it was shortlisted for the award in 2019. (I didn’t read it in time to vote, but I don’t vote anyway – why should I vote for the least worst of half a dozen books I don’t think are any good?). I’ve not read anything by Novik before – she was the GoH at IceCon 2 in 2018 in Reykjavik, which I attended, but her best-known series, the Napoleonic wars and dragons one, is not the sort of thing that appeals to me. Spinning Silver, and the earlier Uprooted, which was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2016, were, I understood, retellings of fairytales, and while that does appeal to me a great deal more, it’s a genre that’s very much in the shadow of Angela Carter, a writer I greatly admire. Having said that, it’s a genre open to many different approaches, and one that’s good at reflecting the concerns of the time, and place, it was written. And so it proves with Spinning Silver, which actually bears little resemblance to the Rumpelstiltskin story on which it is supposedly based. The story is told – chiefly – from the viewpoints of three young women – and, to be fair, on the occasions when it uses other viewpoints, it weakens the story, if they’re necessary it’s because plot. Anyway, one is the daughter of a moneylender, who takes over her ineffectual father’s business, and proves very effective at it, and is only identified as Jewish a quarter of the way into the novel. Another is the plain daughter of a local earl who is unlikely to marry well. And the third is the abused daughter of a farmer who becomes the servant of the moneylender’s daughter… And the moneylender’s daughter – although she’s pretty much the moneylender by this point – attracts the interest of the Staryk , who are sort of winter elves, and Novik builds her story, which isn’t much of a retelling out of these three young women, and it works really well. If there’s a flaw to the novel, it’s that it feels like its story should be an allegory – but the Jewish experience, although it takes a while to be revealed, is explicit in the narrative – and so you have to wonder what point Novik is trying to make if it’s not about the treatment of Jews in Slavic Europe (which the book’s world is a thinly-veiled version of), or indeed Europe entire. Which is not to say the book has to be about that, or that there’s an expectation it is… it’s just that retellings of fairytales generally carry a different payload to the original fairytale, and in Spinning Silver that’s not actually apparent. Nonetheless, worth reading.

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (2019, USA). I will not be surprised if this appears on a few shortlists later this year. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good book, merely that’s it’s being pushed a lot… and being talked about a lot. However. Plot first. The Teixcalaani Empire asks Lsel Station, a small space-based polity on the edges of the empire, for a new ambassador. It seems the old one has died – murdered, the new ambassador, Mahit Dzmare, discovers shortly after arrival on the Teixcalaani capital world (which is one giant city). It turns out there’s a bit politicking going on, both on the capital world and on Lsel Station, none of which Dzmare is aware of, even though she should be carrying an “imago” of her predecessor, ie his memories and a copy of his personality, in her own head. First, a popular general is trying to seize the throne. Second, Lsel Station is trying to prevent impending annexation. Third, the Teixcalaani emperor is trying to safeguard his succession, using Lsel imago technology. And, on top of all that, it turns out there are powerful aliens lurking out past Lsel Station and Lsel wants the empire to keep it safe from them. With all that going on, it comes as something of a surprise to find that A Memory Called Empire spends more time on interiority than it does on plot or action. Or on worldbuilding – and there is a lot of worldbuilding. And it is, in the main, done quite well – except all the Teixcalaani words in the prose are italicised. Who still does that? Italicising non-English words in an English text is so twentieth-century. The end result reads a lot like Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, albeit without the advantage of being first or using Leckie’s default gender trick – but fans of that trilogy will no doubt love this novel. The publisher seems to think fans of Le Carré and Banks will love it too, but comparisons to their oeuvres is one hell of a stretch (Dzmare could be a character name from a Culture novel, but that’s about it). In A Memory Called Empire‘s favour, it has a remarkably low bodycount for a space opera, in the high three figures. Space opera as a subgenre relies heavily on well-used tropes and worldbuilding-blocks (to coin a phrase), but there is also one type of space opera that makes a feature of its worldbuilding. A Memory Called Empire falls into the latter category. That makes it interesting, and a better read, than the majority of space operas, but it’s also plain most of the book’s energy has been invested in the worldbuilding… and the romance which forms the emotional core of the novel. As a result the science-fictional elements feel paper-thin – the infrastructure of the capital city, for example, is supposedly controlled by an AI, but the book presents this as little more a big computer, and the controlling “algorithm” for the AI even forms a minor unconvincing subplot. The central murder-mystery isn’t actually much of a mystery – the murderer confesses freely to Dzmare, knowing he won’t be prosecuted – and the offstage threat is so far offstage it only seems to impinge on the plot when the writer remembers it. This is a novel that is essentially all about the worldbuilding. The writer clearly revelled in it, and hopes the reader will too. And, in general, they’ve done an excellent job. A Memory Called Empire is not a great novel, or arguably a good novel, but it is the first novel – long overdue – in a form of space opera which needs to be more prevalent. It is an example of a model of space opera which could have appeared in the late 1990s or early 2000s, and would have made space opera a better subgenre, but which was pretty much squashed at the time. Instead of The Risen Empire or Spirit: the Princess of Bois Dormant, we’ve ended up with the Expanse and assorted clones. Sigh. A Memory Called Empire won’t make any of my award shortlists, but I’d sooner it was a typical example of 21st century space opera rather than something worth remarking on…

Unholy Land, Lavie Tidhar (2018, Israel). I had wanted to buy a copy of this at the Worldcon in Dublin last August, but the handful of copies available in the dealers’ room had gone by the time I went to buy one. Fortunately, I recently found a copy in The English Bookshop here in Uppsala (albeit for somewhat more money). I’ve read most of Tidhar’s fiction – perhaps not all of the short stories, but there are so many of them, but certainly the longer works, especially the novels. So the self-referential elements of Unholy Land came as no real surprise, although the extent of them does feel greater than usual. So much so, in fact, that one important plot point, I think, is based on the first Tidhar story I ever read, some fifteen years ago, and whose title escapes me, but it was about a person browsing Hebrew pulp novels and stumbling across a novel which should not exist, or something. Which is, sort of, a fair description of Unholy Land itself. The starting premise is that Europe’s Jews accepted the British government’s offer of a homeland in east Africa (an actual historical suggestion, but the Zionist Congress rejected it in favour of historical Israel, although the first Aliyah to Palestine took place forty years prior to the Balfour Declaration). The novel is set in the 1980s, and the Jewish homeland, Palestina, is under constant attack by the African tribes who once lived in the territory it now occupies. The irony is thick here. A Jewish writer of pulp detective novels, resident in Berlin, returns to his home in Palestina on a visit. Except he has not been living in the Berlin of the same history as Palestina, and there is in fact a multiverse of alternate realities which can be accessed by certain people – in the writer’s case, unconsciously – and something is happening which jeopardises Palestina’s alternate reality… Not only does Unholy Land offer some seriously good worldbuilding and alternate history, but it also goes all meta and begins to deconstruct its own story from within its narrative. That’s so cool I’ve even done it myself. Tidhar has said he considers Unholy Land one of the best piece of work he has produced – so far – and though I take everything he says with a pinch of salt, having known him for several years, he may well be right in this case. It’s surprising how few awards picked up on Unholy Land. Well, no, it’s not really surprising – popular vote genre awards these days are entirely tribal and no longer fit for purpose, and Unholy Land is a genuinely good book.


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Looking backwards from the year 2020

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, I moved from the United Arab Emirates to the United Kingdom; in the second decade, I moved from the UK to Sweden.

As the second decade of the century opened, I was living in Sheffield, and once again employed by the company I had originally moved to Sheffield to work for. I had started writing short fiction again, after a hiatus of a decade or so. I widened my reading, continued to buy too many books, regularly saw bands perform live in Sheffield venues, and watched films from two DVD rentals services, my own DVD purchases, and terrestrial and cable television.

In 2010, my favourite books of the year were mostly literary, or new books by favourite genre authors, such as Gwyneth Jones and Bruce Sterling. I also discovered my all-time favourite film, All That Heaven Allows. Five of my short stories saw print, and I continued reviewing books for Interzone – and also interviewing authors: my interview with Bruce Sterling in Interzone #221 I still considered the best interview I’ve done.

I began writing Adrift on the Sea of Rains, the first book of the Apollo Quartet, in 2011 and also edited my first anthology, Rocket Science. I had made an effort the previous year to read more books by women writers – successfully – but in 2011 I took it one step further and created the SF Mistressworks blog, which reviewed science fiction books by women writers published before 2000.

Rocket Science was launched at the Eastercon in 2012. I decided to launch Adrift on the Sea of Rains at the same time… which meant I had to publish it myself in order to have it available in time. So I started up my own small press, Whippleshield Books. I published Adrift on the Sea of Rains in signed limited hardback, paperback and ebook editions. Reading-wise, I raved about Katie Ward’s Girl Reading. Sadly, she has yet to publish anything else. In films, I continued to explore the cinemas of other countries.

My interest in space had been rekindled in the first decade of the century, and eventually led to Rocket Science and the Apollo Quartet, but in 2013 I discovered a new interest – I call them “enthusiasms” – which was… deep sea exploration, undersea habitats and saturation diving. This fed into both my reading and my writing. The second book of the Apollo Quartet, The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself, published in early 2013, was very much an exploration of Apollo-era space technology, as the first novella had been. But the third book, Then Will the Great Ocean Wash Deep Above, published in late 2013, included a narrative strand featuring the bathyscaphe Trieste, directly from my latest enthusiasm. Neither novella proved as successful as Adrift on the Sea of Rains, which in 2013 won the BSFA Award and was nominated for the Sidewise Award. 2013 was also the year I “discovered” Malcolm Lowry, who became a favourite writer. It was also the first year I began attending Nordic conventions.

I don’t remember 2014 being a particularly memorable year. I had signed up to attend Loncon 3, the Worldcon taking place in the UK, but ended up so pissed off with sf fandom I sold my membership and didn’t attend. I’m not even sure I can remember what prompted my change of heart. I made a serious attempt to read some well-regarded genre fiction so I could vote for the Hugo, but nothing I liked made it to the shortlists. This was not entirely surprising – my tastes have never aligned with those of the Hugo voters and I adamantly refuse to be tribal about the writers whose books I like. I worked on the fourth book of the Apollo Quartet, this one intended to be novel-length, All That Outer Space Allows. I also had a story published in a literary magazine, and one of my stories was the cover story for a Postscripts anthology.

I can’t remember how I got involved with Tickety Boo Press, a small press based in Northumberland. I was asked to edit a self-published sf novel its owner had bought. For a fee. I did so – but the writer rejected most of my structural suggestions. Somehow I managed to accidentally sell a space opera trilogy to Tickety Boo Press. I’d written the first book, A Prospect of War, in the late 1990s, spent much of the early 2000s rewriting and polishing it… and it came very close to being picked up by a major sf imprint. (I note that A Prospect of War’s flavour of space opera is currently very popular.) I sold A Prospect of War and its sequel, A Conflict of Orders, to Tickety Boo Press, who published them in May and October of 2015. I would deliver the third book, A Want of Reason, in 2016. The books were published in signed limited hardback, paperback and ebook. At least they were supposed to be. The ebook sold really well and was well-received. I signed about forty hardback copies of A Prospect of War. No paperback ever appeared. Nor did any of the editions have ISBNs. Although a hardback edition of A Conflict of Orders was available for sale on Tickety Boo’s website – and I know several people who ordered one – it never actually existed. So I stopped working on A Want of Reason. One day I may get around to finishing it. I’d like to. In 2015, I published the final book of my Apollo Quartet, All That Outer Space Allows, which was subsequently honour listed by the Tiptree Award (now the Otherwise Award). I also attended my second Nordic con, Archipelacon, in the Åland Islands.

Oh, and Adrift on the Sea of Rains was published in Spanish, A la deriva en el Mar de las Lluvias, in 2015 and was shortlisted for the Ignotus Award the following year.

In 2015, I also published my second anthology, Aphrodite Terra. I’d originally planned to launch it at Loncon 3, but, of course, I didn’t attend the convention. And I was, I admit, disappointed by the apathy shown by the genre community to the book when I put out a call for submissions. However, I wanted to submit All That Outer Space Allows to the Arthur C Clarke Award but it wasn’t eligible as it was self-published. The award agreed that if Whippleshield Books published someone else’s fiction, as well as my own, then it wasn’t a self-publishing press. So I pushed out Aphrodite Terra, and All That Outer Space Allows was accepted for the Clarke. It wasn’t shortlisted, of course. Annoyingly – and insultingly – when the Clarke Award opened itself to self-published books a year or two later, the only example of a “self-published” book it used as justification was Becky Chamber’s The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which had been published by a major sf imprint anyway.

A year or two earlier, I’d submitted a story to a Tickety Boo anthology of hard sf – on invitation, I seem to recall. But the book kept on getting delayed. I gave them a reprint story when they complained of a lack of submissions. A new editor took over the anthology – and promptly sent my reprint back. I decided in 2016 to publish a selection of my hard sf space-based stories in a collection, Dreams of the Space Age. I asked Tickety Boo if I could include the story I’d submitted to them. They said fine, the anthology was sure to be out before my collection. The anthology has never appeared. My collection did. And on its acknowledgements page it lists the story ‘Red Desert’ as having been previously published in a non-existent anthology. Ah well.

As well as Dreams of the Space Age, which includes a previously unpublished story (the Yuri Gagarin Robinson Crusoe on Mars mashup), 2016 was bracketed by two pieces of published fiction. The first was a story in Interzone, to date my only story published in the magazine, although I’d been reviewing books for it since 2008. The story was titled ‘Geologic’ and was inspired by my deep sea exploration enthusiasm. At the end of the year, I added a pendant to the Apollo Quartet, Coda: A Visit to the National Air and Space Museum, which makes it a quartet of five parts. It was partly in service to a joke: the Worldcon had announced the best series Hugo Award, and any series which had an instalment published in the previous year was eligible. So I wrote something to make the Apollo Quartet eligible. Except the total word count had to be over 250,000 and the Apollo Quartet didn’t come anywhere close to that, so it was a meaningless gesture. But Coda: A Visit to the National Air and Space Museum did allow me to throw several more references into the quartet.

I also attended IceCon in 2016, the first ever sf con held in Iceland, in Reykjavik. I felt somewhat obligated to do so given I’d instigated it – at a Swecon I’d jokingly told an Icelandic fan he should organise a con in Iceland. Several other people have since claimed credit for the suggestion – all credit to the organisers, of course – but it was definitely me. (I also attended IceCon 2 in 2018, and plan to attend IceCon 3 in 2020.)

In early 2016, a team-mate at work left and the major project he had been working on was dumped on my desk. That pretty much defined my 2017 and 2018. It was an important project, and a lot of people were involved. When I got home each evening, I didn’t have the energy to do more than watch films or read books. Likewise on the weekends too. My blogging sort of dropped off, devolving to a series of Reading diary and Moving pictures posts. I did regularly visit Scandinavia for conventions, however – mostly Sweden and Denmark – and made many friends in Nordic fandom.

It didn’t take long for me to realise I’d got myself stuck in a rut. I mean, I had a good job and I worked only four days a week… But I seemed to be spending most of my time just buying stuff on eBay and Amazon, and by “stuff” I mean books, films and games, not all of which I really wanted. It got sort of ridiculous. I’m a big fan of the Traveller RPG and have been for many years. Collecting items published for the game is more or less understandable. Collecting back issues of role-playing games magazines that contained articles for Traveller is perhaps a bit excessive. Collecting 1970s and 1980s science fiction boardgames by GDW, SPI and Avalon Hill is definitely excessive. Especially since I never bothered playing them. I have, for example, among a couple of dozen other games, John Carter: Warlord of Mars, a sf boardgame by SPI from 1979. I remember seeing the game when I was a teenager. I’ve never played it.

Anyway, the big work project completed in September 2018, and I decided it was time for a change. I’d been joking since the Brexit Referendum in 2016 that my Brexit Plan A was “move to Sweden”, and I had in the years since my first visit to the country in 2013 had a look at job opportunities there in my field. Most were contract work, and I didn’t fancy making the move for 6 months of work, and then flailing about looking for my next job. But shortly after the big project at work finished, I found an advert for a job online in Sweden, applied for it… and they offered it to me. In Uppsala. In Sweden. Of course, I said yes. Brexit Plan A unlocked. (I’d visited Uppsala in 2017 for Swecon and really liked the city… but had never expected to end up there.)

I was one of a team of three at my job in Sheffield. All three of us handed in our notices within a week. One team member moved to the multinational which owned the company we worked for (I later heard he moved back), another moved to Germany, and I moved to Sweden. Our manager was not very happy…

In March 2019, I left the UK with a cabin bag and a 26 kg suitcase and flew to Sweden. I left behind 85 boxes in storage, most containing books. The move itself was… an adventure. Never resign your job and move to another country just before Christmas. You effectively lose a month of your three-month notice period. I still managed to sell enough stuff – books, mostly – to finance my move to Sweden: to dealers, to a local secondhand bookshop, on eBay… DVDs I didn’t want, or could easily replace, I gave away to friends through Facebook. I sold enough to pay for: Pickfords collecting everything that was going into storage, a month of storage, house clearance, taxi to the airport, overnight stay at airport hotel, flight to Sweden, train to Uppsala… The only thing it didn’t cover was my first month in an apartment hotel in Uppsala, which is where I stayed while I was looking for somewhere to live. (Sweden has no landlord culture, which is good, but makes it difficult to find somewhere to rent.) 5 March 2019 was my last day at work. 6 March, I travelled to Leeds to meet my mother and say goodbye. 7 March, the house clearance guys did their stuff. 8 March, I flew to Sweden. 11 March, I started my new job.

In hindsight, I’m surprised it all went so smoothly. Planning your move to another country Just-in-Time is probably not smart. It certainly impressed the guy I’d hired to clear my house. After he’d accepted the job, and also after he’d cleared my house, I received a series of rambling drunken SMS messages from him, in which he admitted to admiring me for planning my move so well but then segued into some holiday he’d had in Manila and all the prostitutes he’d had sex with. Or something. It was very weird.

Anyway, in March 2019, I moved to Sweden and started a new job. And a new life. So to speak.

Welcome to the 2020s.