Scriviner's Moon

By Philip Reeve

Another book in a series, and to be honest, a series that's gone a little bit off the boil.
The first book, Mortal Engines, has one of the best opening lines I've read in a long time. "It was a cold blustery day in April and the city of London was in pursuit of a small mining town across the dried up bed of the former North Sea."
Pretty much the whole concept's there, predatory mobile cities, environmental collapse, add in airships, killer cyborgs and heroic archeologists hunting the technology lost in the Sixty Minute War and you've got a great adventure setting. I'm vaguely surprised that there's no roleplaying game, and I've been known to storyboard the amine or perhaps comic. It really would make a stonking Studio Ghibli flick.
But that's mainly the first book, which lead off a quartet about the end of the era of mobile cities, followed now by another set at the very start. Three books in (Fever Crumb, A Web of Air, and now this) and London has just about been rebuilt as the first mobile city, as reactionary forces join in an attempt to destroy it in the cradle. There are journies into the wilderness, chases, lost civilisations, murder a betrayal.
All you'd want from a rollicking adventure story.
In the end one world dies and a new one is born, which might or might not be the end of the tale. Perhaps there's comething to say about the birth of the Anti-Traction League, but I'm not certain it's needed.
To write a script for the comic or not? I can't draw, but it might be interesting as a learning exercise. Obviously an IP violation, especially if posted here, but it's not like many people read this drivel.

The Atrocity Archives

By Charles Stross
Arthur C. Clarke is known for various things, at least some of which are true. If you wanted to make a list of science fiction writers who had a real impact on the world of today, then you pretty much have to give it to Clarke. Or at least you need to come up with something pretty damned impressive to beat geostationary communications satellites, and off the top of my head I can't.
In the SF community he's known for a set of laws, the only important one being "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". There's a reworking of this, which I think pre-dates Stross, but whatever, "sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science". Or in this case, mathematics.
The world of The Atrocity Archives is one in which Alan Turing did not simply invent computers, he came up with the maths underpinning magic, where the Final Solution was an attempt (successful in its own way) to gain the favour of the elder gods, and the process by which a basilisk's gaze can change carbon into silicon is sufficiently understood that it can be used to turn your webcam into a lethal weapon.
Magic is not regulated by a secret society of magicians, except that it is; those magicians being henpecked civil servants working for a division of the Secret Service known as The Laundry.
Its fun and yet at the same time slightly flat. Stross writes in a style emulating Len Deighton's Harry Palmer stories, which I have never read and so can't say how well he does. The only other thing I've read by Stross was Accelerando (free to download under a CC licence) and that to seemed to have a lot of characters who spoke in almost exactly the same voice. A deadpan narrator's sometimes no bad thing.
But despite this, quite fun.
TAA is made up of a titular short novel, involving an attempt to return exiled Nazi sorcerers to Earth along with the entities they made pacts with in the dying days of World War 2, and a shorter story in which a government plan to turn every CCTV camera in the country into a death ray goes a bit wrong. Well it would, wouldn't it.
Two sequels out there, will probably get round to them at some point.

And so the looming GRRM question looms. 2 months time. A Dance With Dragons. On order for the last three years. I probably could reread the first four books if I got on with it. But do I really want to read nothing else in so short a time?

Fever of the Bone

By Val McDermid

Torture porn. That's what you get from Val McDermid. You read the book knowing that it's going to involve someone doing something ghastly, probably getting a sexual high from it, while the good coppers of Bradfield (twinned no doubt with Wakeford) flail about a bit, inflicting mental scars to match the victims physical wounds. Much pain is had by all before the profiler spots the one thing he's got right about the killer, an arrest is made, and everyone goes home, unable to sleep properly.
It's very gripping, and well written torture porn you understand, but you can't shake the feeling that you're vicariously sharing in some sordid pleasure. Reading your first book, when something nasty happens, and then reading more, each time finding some bigger, more intense crime. All while the profilers look on and explain how broken humans need this kind of escalating chain of horrors. Does coming back for book after book show us that we're just as bad as the killers?
I don't come back religiously, but I do come back. Val McDermid's books are very good torture porn. I don't come back all that often - I actually bought this one over a year ago, and have only just gotten round to reading it. It's not the addictive behaviour of the killer.
But there's still something grimy about enjoying such things.