Thursday 24 February 2011

The Bicycle Diaries


By David Byrne
That's the David Byrne who sang in Talking Heads and now gets slightly peeved by people who think he's not done anything since the split up. He relears a new album every couple of years, and tours, as well as producing strange art shows like that musical building thing in London a couple of years ago.
I caught the last tour. Very good actually. Supporting an album I didn't much care for, but the concert and the resulting film where both top notch.
Still. As well as being a musician, David Byrne is a cyclist. Not the kind of cyclist who wears spandex and lycra, jumps red lights and yells at mere mortals who dare to walk on the pavement while the cycling god wishes to pass. Very mellow, very laid back. He is in the habit of taking a folding bike on tour, bolting it back together in his hotel room and then pootling about whatever city he's visiting, getting the feel for the place, while visiting lots of modern art galleries.
This is frankly a huge relief. While I'm fully aware that art doesn't change if you discover something unpleasant about the artist, it would be a shame to have to re-interpret their work on discovering that they're a git. Still, if Byrne is a git, he's not that kind of git.
Byrne pootles about, looking at cities, stopping and talking to people, thinking about what makes various cultures tick and at least some of the time, how much better life would be if we all listened to funky salsa music and rode bikes. It does help that this is a philosophy I have a lot of time for.
I am not quite sure if the book is a collection of blog postings. There are certainly points when it reads like one, and after a while I was rather feeling that reading the book as a book was a mistake. Each little snippet is nice and often insightful, but perhaps they would have been better read one a day over several months.
Towards the end of the book a more thorough narrative develops, with Byrne reporting on a conference he organised to discuss promoting cycling in New York City. Not really a place I'd automatically want to go for a ride, but he makes it sound inviting.
Byrne's cycling is for the most part very urban, while mine is all about getting out of towns and being able to enjoy nature. But there's a lot in the book that works. 

Saturday 19 February 2011

Wastelands


Edited by John Joseph Adams

A large collection, though reading it as an ebook means one has no real sense of size, of post apocalyptic science fiction stories.
Some very good stuff in here, though there's some pretty forgettable trash as well. Octavian Butler's "Speech Sounds," set in a world where a neurological disease has robbed people of language, stands out. A well deserved Hugo winner.
There's a splendidly bleak story about a travelling freak show in a world over-run by unstable mutations, where the audiences no longer want to see the latest freak of nature, but yearn for sight of animals that look like they did when they were young. Or children that look like normal children. I shall have to check who wrote that one and look for his other books.
The story about astronauts returning to Earth after the Rapture, unsure as to whether they could or should alert God to the fact that He didn't gather everyone is well written, but misses something.
There are a couple of tedious stories about men (generally men anyhow) travelling through deserts with battered cars and an arsenal, but they are the exception not the rule.
Overall a good set of stories. For the most part tales of quiet desperation, but not enough to make you slash your wrists. Well selected and nicely introduced.

Friday 18 February 2011

Transit


By Ben Aaronovitch

In the 1990s there was no Doctor Who. The BBC had killed the TV series off, the movie was only a twinkle in someone's eye and Russell T. Davies was then only writing fan-fic.
For a while, five years even, there were novels, Virgin's New Adventures series. Some were terrible, some quite good. I'd downloaded a couple with the aim of lending to a friend (why do people imagine that PDF is a sensible format for fiction?) and so wound up pretty much speed reading the book while reformatting it into something user friendly.
Transit was one of the first dozen published, and the first I read. In the old days Doctor Who novels had always been aimed at kids, and rather shockingly, this was not. There was a deliberate attempt to make this 'real' grown up SF, not just a TV friendly adaptation.
The Doctor of the 90s novels was the Seventh Doctor, the one from the last season, only more so. Mysterious and manipulative, you could never quite be sure that he could be trusted, that he didn't see anybody as a pawn to sacrifice in order to achieve mate.
To be perfectly honest this was a pretty bad book to start with, there was a new companion, and the story was pretty much 'throw them in at the deep end. But it delivered.

Looking over the New Adventures I'd guess that there are probably only about eight really worth re-reading nearly twenty years on. (20 years. Jeez.) I don't think it's a co-incidence that two of them were written by Ben Aaronovitch. Of whom I shall write more later.

Thursday 17 February 2011

Eternals: Manifest Destiny

I read it. You don't need to. You should thank me for that.

Should I expand on that? Not much. Look, if you want to read any comics about the Eternals, make sure they're by Jack Kirby. Not Roy Thomas, not Nail Gaiman, not any two bit hack who thinks that what the Eternals could really do with is an X-Men crossover.

I was taking as many books out of the library as I could, on principle, and I thought I'd see if it was as bad as it looked. It wasn't. Dear God, it was worse.


Wednesday 16 February 2011

Acacia: The war with the Mein

By David Anthony Durham.

A great big sprawling epic fantasy book, picked up in the collapse of Borders, and only just got round to. There's a lot of 'only just getting round to' coming up in this blog I think. I'd never heard of the author, but I'd seen a vaguely positive review on Tor.com a couple of days before. And it was 70% off, so when I get round to giving it to Oxfam, they'll probably get more for it than I paid.
The basic premise that that there's a great big Empire uniting the known world, with a fluffy emperor who loves his kids and his people, and imagines that they all look at him as a benign father figure, except they don't. The empire's actually built on a whole host of inequities and evils, most notably, the annual exchange of child slaves to unknown forces beyond the oceans in return for the opium that keeps the empire from rising in rebellion.
Happy complacent daddy emperor is quite keen on the opium himself, and so to no great surprise winds up with an assassin's knife in his belly, his children scattered and hiding, his murderers sat on his thrown, quite happily carrying on the opium trade.
The kids grow up, become stock fantasy characters in their own right, unite the empire against the assassins and so on. A pirate, a priestess, a master hunter, a captive princess.
All that makes things sound terribly dull. And that's a little bit unfair. It's a well written book, even if it's over long. That seems to be a very common with this kind of tome.
The first third of the book, setting up the collapse of the empire really does drag, but I suppose it is setting things up. The more interesting remainder, in which the children mature and the villains start to seem more desirable than the empire they overthrew, and at least some of those that would overthrow them does remain engaging, and does throw up at least some surprises, with at least one of the over perfect characters turning out as flawed as they come.
Still. It's taken me two years to get round to reading the book, and I'm not exactly rushing to get the sequel. At some point it will be on Amazon for shipping plus a penny, at which point I might well get it. Vaguely nice to find out what happens next, but I'll live happily enough without doing so.

Monday 14 February 2011

In the Garden of Iden

By Kage Baker.

I bought this off Amazon or Play or somewhere like that, after hearing a coupe of Baker's stort stories read on starshipsofa and enjoying them, and my first reaction was that this has to have been one of the most mis-marketed books I've ever seen. Perhaps that's got something to do with why neither the library nor any of the bookshops in town have any of Baker's further works?
The big arching meta-plot in Kage Baker's novels is that there's a 24th century company called Dr Zeus, Inc, which has developed time travel and immortal cyborgs which it has despatched to the past to acquire valuable objects and species which it can re-introduce to the future for profit. They're clearly the people responsible for coelacanths, and those weird trees that are discovered from time to time, thought extinct for millennia, surviving in just one isolated valley on the Himalayas, and would you believe it, their leaves might just contain the cure for narcolepsy!
So what did the marketing department of Hodder & Stoughton do with it? Historical Romance. Nothing at all on the cover to suggest that it's anything other than a bodice ripper, and just to reduce all possible doubt, the headline "A love story as new as tomorrow - as old as time". One rather presumes that no bookseller would have ever put it in the dingy corner of their shop where people who want stories about time travelling cyborgs would visit, and no customer who wanted a Tudor bodice ripper would have actually been happy with their purchase.
It was Baker's first book, and to be honest, it shows. She was involved in the theatre, working for at least a time as a Shakespearean language coach, and there's quite a bit of period detail I have no reason to think is not entirely accurate and a bit dull. The central cyborg, Mendoza, is posing as a minor Spanish noblewoman at the start of Mary Tudor's reign so that she can secure botanical samples from some soon to be no-longer extinct plants.
The Cyborg process involves acquiring small children from backwaters of history where they would be otherwise shortly dead and transforming them. This is Mendoza's first actual expedition since graduating from cyborg school, and she has a pretty dim view of mortals. But while taking her cuttings she falls for one of them, an earnest protestant watching Mary's religious reforms with trepidation. They bonk like bunnies, he gets very upset when he finds out what she really is, he gets burnt at the stake, she's upset for a while but gets over it. So I guess there was a Tudor romance in there, but the people who weren't expecting time travelling cyborgs would have given up by then.
There's a novella in there, sadly it's padded out to novel length.

Sunday 13 February 2011

To Say Nothing of the Dog

By Connie Willis
It's one of those books I've been vaguely thinking I should read for years. It won the Hugo back in 1999, which is usually a reasonable indication of quality, but I was spurred into finally reading it by an interview on starshipsofa.
It's a great book. I really should have read when people first started praising it.
In the late 21st century time travel has been perfected, though rather to the disappointment of the big business types who funded it, you can't bring stuff back, and the laws of causality prevent you betting on the 1888 Grand National and investing the winnings with compound interest. At least I assume they do - I don't remember it being mentioned, but if the time machine could get you rich that way the rest of the book wouldn't make much sense.
So there's a time machine, and the only really useful thing you can do with it is send historians back to get some first hand evidence on what they're studying. As the book starts though the entire Oxford University history department is in thrall to the hugely rich Lady Schrapnell who is obsessed with rebuilding the bombed Coventry Cathedral, and demands it should be exactly as it was hen destroyed, and in particular feature a lost piece of statuary known as the Bishop's Bird Stump.
The hero, Ned, has been sent on so many trips through time that he is completely befuddled, and is despatched to the late Victorian period to undo one of his fellow's mistakes, and more importantly hide from Lady S until his nerves recover. Being befuddled, within fifteen minutes of his arrival he has put in place at least half a dozen paradoxes to further complicate the web of history. It all gets very intricate, with Ned fretting terribly as he is dragged off with two others (and a dog) on a boat trip down the Thames.
There are mad professors and murder accusations, assignations and romances, in which the wrong people insist on falling in love, and several groups of historians working at cross purposes. At one point, Jerome K. Jerome is encountered working his way up river and Ned & co drft down. All very involved and very clever. And funny.
I'll certainly be looking out for more from Willis.

Saturday 12 February 2011

I Shall Wear Midnight

Sir Terry's four hundred and zillionth Discworld book, and the fourth starring Tiffany Aching, teenage witch, who doesn't quite come from the village I grew up in, except she does.
Let's be honest. Terry Pratchett is, and despite his embuggerance, always a reliable writer, even if from time to time he becomes a bit lazy. Usually this has been manifest in a joke so funny that it gets repeated for five books in a row. Yes, Igor, I'm looking at you, standing next to that chap that said wossernames every time he appeared.
If there's a laziness in the Tiffany books, the problem is that the plots are all pretty much identical. Something becomes too aware of Tiffany, starts threatening her and more importantly all she holds dear. The more senior witches can't or won't help, mainly because the kind of witch that needs help from anyone else isn't really a proper witch. She has allie s of course, especially the Mac Nac Feegle, rumbustious scottish gnones,but in the end it's not the allies that save the day, it's Tiff's inner strength. Deep down all these preternatural bullies true power is making her doubt herself, and she's too centered for that kind of thing to last.
To a degree though none of that matters, because Sir Terry is just too good a writer. His stories have never really been about the plots, it's the characters that count, and the characters remain vibrant and engaging. I want to read about them again, even if they're all ging to have the same plot.
And to a degree, there are clear signs that the stories are evolving. In the past Tiffany was sort of not quite a hanger on to Granny Weatherwax, spun off as a Young Adult series. Shorter, less demanding books, a heroine more likely to appeal to teenage girls than Commander Vimes and the city watch. These days the books have bulked out and they're presented pretty much as normal Discworld books.
Weatherwax and Ogg do appear here, but as cameos rather than supporting characters. Tiffany is starting to form her own coven, and after several books in which she was pining after the unsuitable son of the local baron, she now has a rather more suitable young man as a romantic lead. There's growth happening. More sense that while the book's quick summary is pretty like the last one, the characters are at least going places, and so remain worth following when they do.

What I've been reading 2011

A couple of years ago I did an experiment, logging all the books I read over the course of a year.
The plan was to post them on a blog somewhere, but that was before blogging was really easy and I never got round to it.

The main thing it revealed was that I read a bloody awful load of trash.

So, trying again. Books read this year. I'm not going to talk about comics, and I'm havering a bit about graphic novels. Probably not going to talk about them as a matter of routine. Same for games or anything else that's shaped like a book.