Media Update

I think The Algebraist is going to take me quite a while to read. Not only is it very long (more than 500 pages, each of them large and closely-typeset) and typically dense (setting up, at present, the premise of a complex "post-civilisation" based within the atmosphere of a gas-giant, which is itself the tiniest mote in a vastly more complicated galactic culture -- although not, as it happens, the Culture), it's also physically a huge object. It doesn't fit inside my motorcycle bag, so I can't take it to work and read it during my breaks there; what's more it's too heavy to hold above my head to read in bed, which leaves me pretty much no opportunity for reading it. I've had to revert to using an older pair of glasses with a less restricted field of vision at bedtime, just so I can rest it on my recumbent chest.

Ahem. The book itself is great fun so far, though -- exuberant, witty and, as ever, astonishingly clever. Justina Robson (whose Natural History is also on my wishlist) suggested in The Guardian that it was under-edited, and sadly I'd have to concur with that so far: there are a number of places where I might have expected an editor to say, "This is all very interesting Iain, but do we actually need it here?" Still, Banks firing on all cylinders is worth watching just for the pyrotechnics, and I'm hoping the book will settle down a little once all the introductory stuff is out of the way. Spotting Banks' obsessions is always part of the fun, and I have a creeping suspicion that the so-far unexplained categories of "aHuman" and "rHuman" are going to turn out to mean "atheist Human" and "religious Human" respectively, the latter having been corrupted from the human "norm" at some point in the distant past.

By contrast, I'm racing through To the Devil - a Diva!, which is also enormous fun. Hammer-style satanists and vampires are colliding with modern-day soft-porn soap-operas and gay Mancunians in a spectacularly camp romp. Paul Magrs can do serious when he wants to, but when it comes to camp romps he's difficult to beat. Marvellous stuff.

Finally, the two episodes I've seen so far of Firefly are every bit as good as people say they are. Which, given how good people say they are, is pretty damn astonishing. I love the whole spaceships-and-horses Western styling, particularly the banjo music, and the characters are fantastic. More about this when I've seen more of it.