karen traviss | It Doesn't Have To Be Right...

March 22, 2012
by iansales 1 Comment

30 words on 30 books

I shamelessly stole this idea from Pornokitsch, who did the same yesterday. Since I’m not doing my readings & watching posts this year, I thought thirty words on the last thirty novels I’ve read might be a good way of mentioning my recent reading. But 30 words is actually harder to do than it looks…

Final Days, Gary Gibson (2011)
Discovery on planet orbiting distant star reached by wormhole suggests future is fixed and immutable. World starts to fall apart. Nice Apollo re-enactment but otherwise not that much stands out.

The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers (1946)
Tom Sawyer-ish Frankie daydreams of brother’s wedding. A GI mistakes her age, wants to get frisky. Lovely writing, though it’s hard not to suspect Frankie is wrong in the head.

Like A Sniper Lining Up His Shot, Jacques Tardi (2010)
Graphic novel adaption of French thriller set in the UK. Assassin like father like son. With guns. And gore. Not much more to be said. Tardi is definitely worth reading.

Bodies, Jed Mercurio (2002)
Incompetent doctors get away with murder on the NHS. New houseman is horrified. He learns to work with the system. A favourite writer but it will scare you off hospitals.

City of Pearl, Karen Traviss (2004)
First human colony disappears, rescue mission discovers aliens protecting them. Mix of hard sf and space opera. Nice heroine, not so interesting aliens. Oozes competence without suggesting more. Review here.

The Bender, Paul Scott (1963)
Should have been a film with Dirk Bogarde. 1960s wastrel goes begging for cash and sparks family crisis. Great wit, great writing, and an astonishing postmodern interlude. Recommended. Review here.

Leviathan’s Deep, Jayge Carr (1979)
Freak alien resembles humans. They want to conquer her planet and fall in love with her. She scuppers their plans. Somewhat old-fashioned sf, though protagonist well-drawn. Review on SF Mistressworks.

The Bookman, Lavie Tidhar (2010)
Literary and pulp potage which stripmines steampunk tropes. Orphan adventures, starts cleverly in Victorian Lizard London but loses steam about halfway through before Bond-esque Vernian finish. The first of three.

Omega, Christopher Evans (2008)
Man recovering from terrorist bomb explosion dreams himself into alternate self in a world where WWII never ended. Very cleverly done, alternate world very real, great writing. Recommended. Review here.

Angel At Apogee, SN Lewitt (1987)
Princess pilot, a hot-shot of course, proves to be catalyst which rejoins three sundered races on three separate planets. Interesting debut, though perhaps a little over-egged. Review on SF Mistressworks.

The Fat Years, Chan Koonchung (2009)
China prospers while rest of world in financial crisis. Interesting window on Chinese society, though unsatisfactory as a novel – the plot is explained in a final chapter info-dump. Review here.

The Fall, Albert Camus (1957)
Pompous ex-lawyer monologues at stranger in Amsterdam bar and over several days tells him of his somewhat boring fall from grace. Mercifully short, though there’s some insightful writing in it.

Selected Poems, Lawrence Durrell (1956)
It’s a book of poems. And they were selected. By Lawrence Durrell. He did this several times. Except when he wasn’t collecting his poems for his Collected Poems. More here.

Betrayals, Charles Palliser (1994)
A story told through several stories – including a superb pisstake of Taggart, and a righteous skewering of Jeffrey Archer. Superbly done, though perhaps needed the stories tying together more. Recommended.

Leviathan Wakes, James SA Corey (2011)
Solar system shenanigans as alien virus wreaks havoc for corporate profit. Who needs New Space Opera? Regressive: no diversity, old school sexism, implausible villainy. Mostly right physics. Avoid. Review here.

Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin (1984)
Men repeal rights of women, so they secretly develop women’s language. Interesting linguistics, good female characters, though characterisation of men not so convincing and world-building weak. Review on SF Mistressworks.

This Island Earth, Raymond F Jones (1952)
Manly engineer saves the galaxy by demonstrating good old US engineering know-how. Womanly PhD does his ironing and cooking. Happily they don’t write them like this any more. More here.

The Lady in the Lake, Raymond Chandler (1944)
Mixed-up femme fatales don’t fool Marlowe in hunt for rich man’s missing wife. Not the cunningest murder-mystery plot and Marlowe often gets away with murder. Strong on place and time.

The Door, Magda Szabó (1987)
In Hungary, writer hires housekeeper, who proves to be old school peasant and a right character. Fascinating portrait of housekeeper, thoroughly enjoyed it. Soon to be major film. Review here.

The Unorthodox Engineers, Colin Kapp (1979)
Collection of sf shorts in which lateral thinking engineers solve seemingly intractable problems. Dated, problems not especially unsolvable, nor especially original. Entirely forgettable, in fact. Hard book to find, though.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne (1864)
Story not as good as Nemo’s though text is more pleasingly detailed. Science horribly dated, of course, and often wrong. Characters bizarrely emphatic – except for phlegmatic Icelandic guide. Historical document.

Arkfall, Carolyn Ives Gilman (2008)
Novella set on human-colonised Europa-like planet with interesting socialist society. Woman and male tourist find themselves on unintended journey after seaquake. Promises more than it delivers but still worth reading.

Kamikaze l’Amour, Richard Kadrey (1995)
Kadrey channels Ballard and Shepard in rock star epiphany in California overrun by Amazonian jungle. Not sure how original was 17 years ago but is not now. After Metrophage, disappointing.

Smart-Aleck Kill, Raymond Chandler (1958)
Collection of four shorts. Simple direct prose, strong on place and time, though plotting something of a direct line and characterisation sketchy. More for noir fans than normal readers, possibly.

Embassytown, China Miéville (2011)
Truthful aliens get hooked on impossible Ambassador’s speech. World falls apart. Narrator teaches aliens to lie and saves planet. Interesting ideas but old-fashioned science fiction. Likely award-winner. Sigh. Review here.

Dr No, Ian Fleming (1958)
Bond in Jamica. Again. Racial stereotype has evil plan to do evil. Bond foils, with help of trusty local. He nearly dies in the process, but he gets girl. Again.

The Incal, Alejandro Jodorowsky & Moebius (1981)
Seminal bande dessinée allegedly cobbled together from failed Dune film project. Light and dark Incal combine to save galaxy from evil Darkness. Completely bonkers. Lovely art. Everyone should own copy.

Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood (1997)
Character study of true life murderess from 1840s. Clevery done – never quite determines innocence or guilt, though very detailed on life and crime. Lovely writing. Possibly Atwood’s best novel. Recommended.

The Planet Dweller, Jane Palmer (1985)
Hot flushes and giant aliens that live inside planets. Cartoon aliens that want to conquer galaxy. Hit and miss comedy, but too fantastical for sf. Review soon on SF Mistressworks.

The Ginger Star, Leigh Brackett (1974)
By-the-numbers swords and planets. Manly hero brought up by animals battles way across barbarian planet to save mentor. Been there, done that. Yawn. Review soon on SF Mistressworks.

December 29, 2011
by iansales 1 Comment

Festive activities

Christmas is over for another year, and life can now return to what passes for normal. Once again, I was in Denmark for the festivities, but this year it was wet and windy rather than the usual deep snow. There was a lot of eating involved, and a lot of walking. The day after Boxing Day, we went to see David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at the cinema (English with Danish subtitles, fortunately). Though I’ve not read the book, I have seen the Swedish version of the film. To be honest, I’m not sure which of the two versions is the better.

The flight back from Denmark was… interesting. On the approach to Manchester Airport, the plane was thrown around by turbulence and we almost touched down… before the captain decided to abort and up we went for another go around. Fortunately, the second attempt was much smoother and we landed in one piece. I first flew in 1968 and I’ve flown at least once a year since, and that was the first time I’ve ever been in an aircraft that took more than one attempt to land. Having said that, I’ve never been a big fan of air travel – and less so these days than I used to be. All that “security theatre” is just unnecessary palaver – how many terrorists has it actually caught? We certainly know it failed to catch two bombers… And while airlines seem to want us to believe that air travel has become easier and more convenient, the reverse is actually true. Also, budget airlines appear to hold their customers in complete contempt. They ask you to queue at the boarding-gate for an hour but don’t provide anywhere to sit. Aircraft are not buses – and given all the hoops passengers are forced to jump through before boarding at present, they never will be. The entire industry needs over-hauling.

Santa brought me some books and some DVDs: William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters and Tariq Ali’s Shadows Of The Pomegranate Tree, the first book of the Islam Quintet; and Twin Peaks: Definitive Gold Box Edition, Fringe Season 3 and Caprica Season 1 Volume 2. I read the two books before returning to the UK. Of Men and Monsters was better than I expected, though I’m in two minds whether it belongs in the SF Masterwork series. Shadows Of The Pomegranate Tree is set in Moorish Spain in 1500 CE, and chronicles the Spanish Catholics’ campaign to wipe out Islam and its practitioners on the peninsula. It’s strong stuff, though Ali’s frequently inelegant prose didn’t do the book any favours. I’ll probably read the rest of the Quintet at some point, but I’m not going to dash out and buy them immediately.

I’ll also read a number of books during the holiday – in fact, I was averaging one a day. The books were Engleby, Sebastian Faulks (2007), which was a definite improvement on the longeur-packed On Green Dolphin Street. A working-class scholar at Oxford University fancies a female student from afar, but one day she disappears and is never found. It’s not difficult to work out what happened to her, though it’s hard to tell if Faulks thought the reveal was an actual plot twist. The final third of the book is a character-study of the narrator, which not only means Engleby is not a murder-mystery novel but also means it’s unsatisfactory as either murder-mystery or literary fiction.

The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry (2009), I remember seeing an approving review of in the Guardian by Michael Moorcock when the book was published. As a result, I’ve kept an eye open for a copy in charity shops ever since. It is… an odd beast. The story seems better-suited to a comic or graphic novel and, as a result, doesn’t work all that well as prose. A clerk for the Agency, a huge detective agency which seems to be the most important company in a 1950s-style city, is promoted to detective when the detective whose reports he files disappears. He soon ends up out of his depth in some weird conspiracy between the Agency and a villain based in a carnival, and it’s all to do with the way the Agency actually operates. The missing detective is called Travis S Sivart, but nothing is actually made of the fact that the name is a palindrome. It makes you wonder why the author bothered.

Black Swan Green, David Mitchell (2006), is Mitchell’s fourth novel, and is told entirely in the voice of a thirteen-year-old boy living in the eponymous Worcestershire village in 1982. He’s being bullied at school, his parents’ marriage is on the rocks, and an act of petty revenge leads to a tragedy. Everything in the book struck me as a little clichéd, but perhaps that’s because I remember the early eighties quite well. Mitchell handles his narrator’s voice with skill and it’s a very readable story, but it all felt a bit soap-opera-ish in places. It’s not as successful as Cloud Atlas, though it is better than his first two novels, Ghostwritten and number9dream.

Of course, in the weeks leading up to Christmas the postie was also busy. Since my last book haul post, the following books have landed on the mat:

These are the aforementioned Christmas goodies.

Some first editions: White Eagle Over Serbia is for the Lawrence Durrell collection. The Dragons of Springplace and Impact Parameter I bought in the recent Golden Gryphon 50% off sale.

A few sf paperbacks. I used to correspond with Mike Shupp, and I’ve always wanted to read his Destiny Makers quintet, but it’s taken me a while to find decent copies. Now that I have the first book in the series, With Fate Conspire, I can make a start, although I still need to find a copy of the third book, Soldier of Another Fortune. Eye of Terror is Barrington Bayley’s only Warhammer 40K novel, and by all accounts is especially mad – even for him. The Chessmen of Mars almost completes my set of 1970s NEL editions of the John Carter books – because, of course, I have to have a set that all looks the same, and the ones I already had were NEL paperbacks from the 1970s. City of Pearl is November’s belated read for the reading challenge. I doubt I’ll read it before the end of the year, but never mind.

My father owned quite a large collection of Penguin paperbacks. I found an invoice in one, and discovered that he’d actually ordered them direct from the publisher. This was back in the mid-1960s. Though he read and admired all the Penguin books he bought, for the past few decades his reading had mostly been thrillers. Some of his books I want to read myself so I’ve started bringing them home a few at a time, and so… Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier; Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, a short story collection by Malcolm Lowry; Clock Without Hands, The Member of the Wedding and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, all by Carson McCullers; Albert Camus’ The Plague; Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister; and The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner.

The Revenge for Love and Radon Daughters I found in charity shops. Journey to the Centre of the Earth was a swap from readitswapit.co.uk. With Luck Lasting is Bernard Spencer’s second poetry collection, and while it’s an ex-library book it’s in excellent condition and doesn’t appear to have ever been booked out.

Finally, two books for the space books collection. Falling to Earth is the autobiography of Apollo 15 astronaut Al Worden. It’s signed. The Story of Manned Space Stations was ridiculously cheap on eBay – about £3.50 compared to £18.99 on Amazon.