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December 3, 2018
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Must. Stop. Buying. Books…

Maybe I should make it a New Year’s Resolution or something. I did recently go chasing down my teen years by buying role-playing magazines and supplements from the 1980s that I remembered fondly, which at least are not books… But that’s no solution. And actually a little bit depressing, when you think about it. Anyway, the following book-shaped objects containing many thousands of words landed chez moi during the past month or so.

I’m so shallow I’ll buy anything if you make it look like a set. And get unreasonably enraged when you stop making it a set – like publishers who completely change the cover design of a trilogy when they publish the last book. Argh. I shall be forever grateful to Gollancz for not numbering their relaunched SF Masterworks series. Because if they were numbered, I would have to buy them, even the ones I already have in the old series. OTOH, Gollancz: Alastair Reynolds’s Poseidon’s Children trilogy. Argh. This is perfectly normal behaviour, of course. Anyway, NewCon Press, an excellent small press, have over the last couple of years been publishing quartets of novellas which share a single piece of cover art split across the four books. This is the fourth such quartet, subtitled “Strange Tales” – The Land of Somewhere Safe, Matryoshka, The Lake Boy and Ghost Frequencies – and I’ve enjoyed those I’ve read so far.

Some recent, and not so recent, genre fiction. Europe at Dawn is the fourth book of the excellent Fractured Europe series. I don’t know if this is the last book. I hope not. Kim Stanley Robinson is an author whose books I buy in hardback; hence, Red Moon. A desire to reread Le Guin’s Earthsea books came over me when I saw The Books of Earthsea advertised, so I got myself a copy. It’s a humongous book, and not a comfortable size to read, but the contents are definitely worth it. Yaszek’s name I already know from Galactic Suburbia, which I read as research for All That Outer Space Allows. Recently, she’s been involved in a couple of projects to signal-boost early sf by women writers, much as SF Mistressworks has done, and Sisters of Tomorrow, an anthology, is one of them. Ignore the copy of Without A Summer, which sneaked its way into the photo. I thought I’d bought it recently, but I actually purchased it about three months ago. The Quantum Magician I have to review for Interzone.

Here we have a couple of bandes dessinées. Distant Worlds Episode 1 is another, er, episode in Léo’s long-running science fiction story which began with Aldebaran (see here). I admit I’m not entirely sure on the chronology of Léo’s series, given there are half a dozen or so separate stories, and no real indication of which follows which. But this one appears to have been written by someone else, Icar, although I still think it’s set in the same universe. Inside Moebius, Part 3 is, er, the third volume of Inside Moebius, containing books 5 and 6 of the original French edition. It’s one for fans of Moebius – and who isn’t one? – and not much use without the two earlier volumes.

I’ve been a fan of Shariann Lewitt’s fiction since finding a copy of her debut novel, Angel at Apogee, in a remainder book shop in Abu Dhabi. I subsequently hunted down copies of her other novels. Initially, she was SN Lewitt (see what I did there?), but with Memento Mori, her fifth novel, she became Shariann Lewitt. I bought a paperback copy back when it was published in 1995, but always fancied upgrading it to a hardback. Sadly, her seventh novel, Rebel Sutra, published in 2000, appears to have been her last. Cherryh is another author I’ve upgraded to hardback– Actually, no, that’s not strictly true. I read a lot of Cherryh during the 1980s, back when she was pretty much ubiquitous on the sf shelves of UK high street book shops. And then in the 1990s, when I was living in the UAE, I started buying her books in hardback as soon as they appeared. But when I returned to the UK, I stopped doing that… And then I discovered eBay, and started picked up hardback copies of her back-catalogue. Some of which were published in signed limited editions by Phantasia Press, like this one: Forty Thousand in Gehenna.

A copy of The History of American Deep Submersible Operations popped up on eBay for kof kof £95. And even though I fancied it, that was too much. But then I discovered that all the other copies I could find were £400+ and, well, then it suddenly turned into a bargain. So I, er, bought it. Owner’s Workshop Manual: NASA Mercury is one of a range of excellent books on spacecraft by Haynes, who have branched out from cars to covering everything from the Death Star to Pies. Yes, honestly. I admire Delany a great deal. He’s probably one of the cleverest writers and critics the genre has produced, and while I probably like the idea of his fiction more than I actually like his fiction – although Dhalgren remains a favourite novel – I suspect I also like the idea of Delany more than I do reading his non-fiction. But I’m determined to give it a go. Hence, In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany Volume 1 1957 – 1969. Which had sat on my wishlist for over a year before finally shaming me into putting it into my basket. I’ve no idea when volume 2 will appear, or if indeed it ever will (Delany is not very good at producing sequels). And yes, I’ve read The Motion of Light in Water. And I have a copy Times Square Red, Times Square Blue on its way to me…

Some secondhand books. The Lung is not an easy book to find – or, at least, those few copies that can be found are not cheap, especially not for a 1970s paperback. But this one was more reasonably-priced than other copies I’ve seen. And in really good condition. A Trick of the Light, which is Faulks’s first novel, on the other hand… I’ve seen copies on eBay priced between £300 and £400, which is way more than I’d pay for a book I’m not desperate to own. So I was pretty chuffed when I found this copy for £35 from a US-based seller on abebooks.co.uk. Bargain. How to be Both and A Handful of Dust were charity shop finds. (The part of the city where I live, by the way, has around a dozen charity shops. In fact, my local high street is charity shops, discount food shops and cash converters. Welcome to Tory Britain.)

I asked my mother, who is a regular browser in charity shops, to keep an eye open for books by William Golding or Evelyn Waugh. The only Golding she could find was Lord of the Flies, which I already have. But she did find a bunch of Waugh: The Loved One, Vile Bodies, Scoop, Put Out More Flags, Work Suspended and Black Mischief. I should ask her to look for some female writers for me, like Manning, Taylor, Lehman, West, Bowen, Ertz, Frankau and so on.

On my way back from Leeds last week, I caught a black cab home from the station. The route goes along Shalesmoor, a road I’ve travelled along hundreds of times – and walked it many times too on my way from the tram stop to the Shakespeare pub. This time I noticed a new shop, the Kelham Island Bookshop. So the next day I went and checked it out. And found Decline and Fall and When the Going was Good, and The Pyramid and Pincher Martin. The shop has an excellent selection of secondhand books. And they sell vinyl too. I asked how long they’d been open. Since last July I was told. I’ve been along that road I don’t know how many times in the past five months, and never spotted the shop. Shows how observant I am. Sigh.

I nearly forgot. Three more of the Heinmann Phoenix Edition DH Lawrence Books: The Complete Short Stories Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3. I already had two of them, but these came as a set and the two I already owned aren’t in as good condition as these. That means I now have twenty-one of, I think, twenty-six books. Why collect these when I have a full set of the white Penguin paperbacks? Well, aside from the fact it’s a set, the Phoenix Edition does include some books not in the white Penguiun editions, and vice versa.

July 23, 2018
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Summer bounty 2

I couldn’t think of a fresh title for this book haul post, so I just stuck a “2” on the title of my previous book haul post. Blame the weather. Anyway, here are the additions to my ever-expanding library…

I bought and read the first quartet of NewCon novellas, and then the Martian novellas (see here), but didn’t bother with the second set as they were horror/dark fantasy, which isn’t really my bag. But then I thought, why not? And since there were copies still available… I’ve yet to read any of the above, and the only two authors I’ve read previously are Simon Clark and Sarah Lotz.

The Melissa Scott Roads of Heaven trilogy – Five-Twelfths of Heaven, Silence in Solitude and The Empress of Earth – I got for a quid on eBay (along with a fourth book, The Kindly Ones, which I already have a copy of, and which I’ve given away). They’re actually ex-library, but I don’t plan to keep them once I’ve read them. Brideshead Revisited I bought in a charity shop for twice as much – a whole 50p.

Jodorowsky seems to be churning out even more stuff than ever before – new additions to the Metabarons series (not actually written by him, to be fair), new stories like Moon Face, and even a pair of autobiographic films (see here and here). The Inside Moebius trilogy – this is part two – however, is new to English, as it originally appeared in French, in six volumes, between 2000 and 2010. And Moebius, of course, died in 2012.

I am eternally grateful to Gollancz for deciding not to number their re-launched SF Masterwork series, because it means I only have to buy the ones I want. I’m not a big fan of Heinlein, although I read many of his books when I was in my teens – and those I’ve read in recent years have been pretty bad, but were ones I expected to be bad. The Door into Summer is one I’ve not read, but I seem to recall it has a mostly positive reputation – and not from the people who like the appalling Starship Troopers or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Always Coming Home is, well, it’s Le Guin. Uppsala Woods is by a writer from the Nocilla Generation, a group of writers in Spain who were inspired by Agustín Fernández Mallo’s excellent Nocilla trilogy (see here and here; the third book has yet to be published in English). Angels’ Falls is the last unpublished Frank Herbert manuscript published by Kevin J Anderson’s WordFire Press. Books are usually left unpublished for good reason, although Herbert apparently started out attempting to carve out a career as a thriller writer so perhaps he kept these back because they were incompatible with his career as a science fiction writer.

I pledged to the Mother of Invention kickstarter last year, which makes it one of the quickest kickstarter campaigns to deliver I’ve contributed to. Haynes now cover all sorts of stuff with their Owners’ Workshop Manual series. I’ts not like I’m ever going to own a North American X-15 – I think the only complete example remaining is in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum – and so will ever need to fix it… but I’ve always found the aircraft fascinating and already have several books on it.

If you like the fiction of early genre writers, such as Leigh Brackett and CL Moore, then Haffner Press publish some lovely collections of their stories – such as Lorelei of the Red Mist and Stark and the Star-Kings. (I already own Martian Quest: the Early Brackett, but I still need to get myself a copy of Shannach–the Last: Farewell to Mars.) Michael Moorcock: Death is no Obstacle is a hard-to-find critical work/book-length interview of/with Moorcock by Colin Greenland.

November 2, 2015
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Reading diary, #15

Still not reading as much as I’d like – I’m currently seven books behind on the 150 book challenge, according to goodreads.com – but it’s not a bad spread in this post… Incidentally, I’m still alternative genders in my fiction reading, and it currently stands at 37% women writers, 33% men.

Pale Fire*, Vladimir Nabokov (1962). Though I’ve seen Kubrick’s Lolita, and Nabokov is hardly a name unfamiliar to me, I’d never actually read any of his books. So I’m always on the look-out for copies of his novels in charity days. Except he doesn’t seem to be an author whose books are discarded much. But I did find Pale Fire – in Harrogate, no less – so of course I snapped it up. The back-cover copy makes quite a meal of descrbing Pale Fire as “an extraordinary, uncategorizable book”, which might well have been true in 1962 but feels a bit like over-selling in the twenty-first century. The story is told in the form of an introduction to a narrative poem, then the poem itself, and followed by copious (more than copious) notes on the poem. The author of the introduction and notes is not the author of the poem, but claims to have been the poet’s closest friend in the year leading up to his murder. Two things occurred to me as I read the book: a) the poem is actually complete doggerel, and b) the narrative voice reminded me throughout of Adam Roberts’s prose (there’s a particular line, “The crickets cricked”, which felt like it could have come from any random Roberts story). Threaded throughout the notes is the commentator’s own history, which involves some sort of Mittel-Europa principality whose monarchy was violently overthrown. The Appalachian academia and the Ruritanian adventure make for interesting bedfellows, and the prissy prose fitted the story extremely well. I liked it a lot and I plan to read more Nabokov.

Soyuz: Owners’ Workshop Manual, David Baker (2014). Sadly, this is not an owners’ workshop manual for Soyuz spacecraft in the same form as the owners’ workshop manuals Haynes has been publishing for various cars for decades. It won’t teach you how to change a leaky valve or an oxygen tank. If your Soyuz breaks down in orbit, even if you have a copy of this book with you, you’re still pretty much fucked. It is, however, a pretty comprehensive look at Russian crewed spacecraft, from Vostok through Voskhod and the various iterations of Soyuz, in pretty impressive factual detail. I found it all fascinating, but I suspect the book will also prove to be a useful reference for any future stories I might write involving Soyuz space craft. There are similar Haynes manuals for Gemini, Space Shuttle, Lunar Rover and, er, Millennium Falcon.

The Silkworm, Robert Galbraith (2014). I wasn’t that impressed with Rowling’s first pseudonymous crime novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling, nor, as far as I remember, was anyone else. The book sold modestly, and received a handful of good reviews – which is pretty much what you would expect from a debut crime novel. Strange then, that the back cover of her second Galbraith novel, The Silkworm, boasts quotes about The Cuckoo’s Calling such as “One of the most unique and compelling detectives I’ve come across in years” and “One of the best crime novels I have ever read”… Which suggests crime fiction must be in dire straits, or Rowling’s name really does affect how people – even reviewers in newspapers – judge books. I thought The Cuckoo’s Calling somewhat padded, but The Silkworm at least feels like its the right length. It’s also about the publishing industry, something you’d imagine Rowling would know about since she is, after all, a best-selling author. The actual crime investigated by Cormoran Strike, however, seems more like something from an episode of CSI. A woman hires Strike to find her missing novelist husband, Owen Quine. He’s done it before, but his agent usually tracks him down quite quickly. But this time Quine seems to have really vanished. Making matters worse is the fact his new book is libellous (shades of Burgess’s The Worm & the Ring) and more or less unpublishable. It doesn’t Strike long to find Quine – or rather, his body. And his corpse has been mutilated in a manner which links back to his manuscript. There’s nothing startlingly original here – the plot moves on well-oiled wheels, the characters teeter on the brink of caricature but Galbraith manages to rein them in, and the prose is smooth and readable without being too literary for a crime novel or too commercial for those who prefer their crime novels to have some ambition. The novelists at the centre of the plot were all literary enfants terribles, and though mostly well-respected now their novels as described don’t much read like twenty-first century British literary fiction. Oh, and the title is a reference to Quine’s unpublishable novel, Bombyx Mori, which title only seems to exist because it justifies a particularly gruesome murder.

Mortal Engines, Stanisław Lem (1977). I somehow got it into my head I needed to read more Lem, but I suspect I like the idea of Lem more than I like the fiction of Lem. Which is not to say this collection of short stories is bad. But I can’t say I agree with the person who collated the collection, Michael Kandel, who loves Lem’s “robot fables” so much he chose to bring them all together into one book. Because while they’re clever little fairy tales, with one or two clever puns, they do get a bit wearying en masse. Happily, the book is rounded off with an Ijon Tichy story, a Pilot Pirx story, and one which is completely unrelated to the others in the book but is still about robots. This is not the best sf collection in the world, and even Lem’s snide bleakness can’t hide the datedness of some of the stories. I suspect this one might end up as a raffle prize at one of the pub meets some time next year…

The Monitor, the Miners and the Shree, Lee Killough (1980). That’s a pretty awful title for a book that’s actually not that bad. Not as enjoyable as A Voice Out of Ramah (see here), but certainly not awful. A review to appear soon on SF Mistressworks.

Slade House, David Mitchell (2015). I was sent an ARC of this by Interzone to review (they also wanted to send me a copy of The Bone Clocks, but I’d already bought one – using a voucher given to me by my employer as a reward for five years of service). Overall, I don’t think Slade House is as successful as The Bone Clocks, and that’s not just a consequence of its significantly shorter length. Mitchell’s trademark ventriloquism is in fine, er, voice, but the fifth of its six sections is almost pure exposition, some of the tropes are a bit cheesy, and the whole thing doesn’t add anything of note to the mythology of The Bone Clocks. Which is not to say it’s a bad book – Mitchell is a fine writer and always worth reading – but it is a little disappointing after last year’s epic.