Books update: Deserts, Sheikhs, Monks and Magicians

It's probably about time I wittered on about books other people have written for a change.


Since January I've read a further seven and a bit of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman books, bringing me (in publication order) up to about quarter of the way through Flashman and the Mountain of Light. I'm enjoying them hugely, though I've found it improves them to intersperse them with other things. I'll blog about all twelve once I'm finished, I think.

I believe I'd already read Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs when I blogged that last piece, but it managed to slip my mind. It's a series of memoir-essays, rather than the handbook which the title promises for navigating masculinity, fatherhood and husbanddom in a post-feminist world (a shame, as I could really have done with one of those). It's very sweet though, and beautifully written, especially when talking about familiar elements of geekdom such as Lego and Doctor Who (Chabon is, inevitably, a fan). The only downside, and it's an equally characteristic one, is that it sometimes becomes doubly impenetrable by talking not only about sport but specifically about American sports.

Frank Herbert's Dune is... well, long, isn't it? And there's an awful lot of it that's primarily about sand. To tell the truth, I was disappointed in this, one of SF's undoubted towering classics which I'd never quite got round to reading before. The worldbuilding is astonishing -- possibly unmatched outside Tolkein, in fact -- but most of it is kept off the page, in oblique hints in the appendices and glossary or at most in the dialogue of subplots which only temporarily diverge from the grand epic scenes of trudging on and on through some more sand. In fact, one gets a much, much stronger sense of Herbert's remarkable universe through watching David Lynch's magnificent film than by reading the book.Creating the Imperium but setting your story on Arrakis makes about as much sense to me as imagining the whole of Middle-Earth, then writing a huge novel set entirely in Forodwaith.

The writing isn't particularly impressive either, often aiming for a grandeur which it never quite lives up to, and getting lost in its own abstractions. I was amused by the fleeting mention of a Fremen warrior called Geoff. I reckon he deserves his own web comic.

Another SF book failing for me to live up to its (more recent) hype was Lavie Tidhar's Osama, a poetic but ultimately rather predictable alternative-world fantasy with a Dickian twist. It gains kudos for dealing directly with the eponymous bogeyman of our age, who in a world free of terrorism has become the hero of a series of pulp thrillers whose author the protagonist, an equally Dickian private eye, must track down. The twist will not surprise anybody who's been keeping their eye on popular BBC time-travel series over the past few years, though, and ultimately I was left with the impression of a book which thinks itself cleverer and more daring than it is.

I read SJ Parris's Heresy as research for a thing I can't talk about yet, and found it distinctly under par. It's a mystery set in Elizabethan Oxford, where a serial killer's carrying out murders modelled on Foxe's Book of Martyrs, but is hugely less fun than that makes it sound. The formulaic plot relies on intelligent people being dense and making stupid decisions, and there's only the most desultory of attempts to help the reader inside the renaissance mindset. (To give you some idea, one character uses the word "paranoid" -- a solecism which this reviewer makes a valiant, but ultimately bollocks, effort to justify.)

Stonemouth, like Iain Banks' last non-genre novel, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, reads like a greatest hits collection: a family of gangsters; a young protagonist returning home; his long-lost love; violence, drugs and shagging; landscape and buildings; the merest hint of incest; a suspension bridge... Banks effortlessly gets inside the head of a generation for whom the internet and mobile phones have literally been around all their lives, in a way I'm not confident I could do at nearly 20 years younger. It's a good read -- fun, and evocative, and ultimately touching -- but don't expect any of the exuberant originality which makes Banks' truly great works great.

From Obverse Books this year I've read the latest Iris Wildthyme collection, Wildthyme in Purple, whose theme of pulp fiction leads to some surprising approaches, verging from pastiche to metafiction to massivel multitextual crossover; The Diamond Lens (Obverse Quarterly volume 1.3), which reprints some fascinating and genuinely excellent SF and fantasy short stories by the almost entirely neglected Fitz-James O'Brien; and Zenith Lives! (OQ volume 1.4), which revives the Sexton Blake villain Monsieur Zenith the Albino, in assorted tales by some familiar Obverse hands and -- in a startling coup -- Michael Moorcock.

In theory, Shada, Gareth Roberts' novelisation of Douglas Adams' unfinished Doctor Who story, combines two of my favourite things. In practice, the story is so familiar from partial releases including a scriptbook that it's rather less exciting than the combination would suggest. That said, it's not at all bad -- veteran Who novelist and latterly scriptwriter Roberts is doing his best (which can be pretty good) to do justice to something written by a genius on an off-day (which is also, mostly, good). He does a lot of work to firm up the characters and tidy the wobbly plot, explaining in an afterword that he was working with later versions of the script than have previously been published (so it's difficult to know what exactly he added, except when it's obviously novelistic). He also talks about a process of archaeologically extracting Adams' pre-deadline intentions from early drafts, abandoned plotlines and unfollowed hints, and again it's impossible to know how accurate his guesses are.

The book's not entirely satisfying: it's obviously not a pure transcription of the nonexistent TV story, but it's too tied to those roots to take flight as a novel. I enjoyed it, though.

Last year I read Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, and earlier this year I finished off the Tiffany Aching sequence with Wintersmith and I Shall Wear Midnight. They're very good books, full of humanity and realism (witchcraft is a painful, thankless path of discipline and service, and if you take pleasure in it, it probably means you've turned evil). If I had to quibble, I'd say that the wonderfully-drawn character of Tiffany becomes slightly less interesting as she leaves adolescence for womanhood, although this may be because the fourth book, Pratchett's penultimate to date, lacks focus in rather the same way as his more recent and disappointing Snuff.

Another book intent on deglamorising magic -- and, much though I love Pratchett, one that seems to me to be in a different league altogether -- is The Magicians by Lev Grossman. This is one which does live up to its hype; The Magicians is a very strong novel in its own right, as well as being both a brilliantly-imagined fantasy and a clever critique of fantasy in general.

Thoroughly readable on the surface as fantasy of escapism in which (as closely as the demands of copyright law will allow) students at the US equivalent of Hogwarts graduate and find their way into Narnia, it's actually a fiercely intelligent deconstruction of the cosy comforts of this kind of conventional story. It does this partly through treating its situations with rigorous realism and logic, and partly through the character of its protagonist Quentin -- a teenager (and later a man) who's never satisfied with what he has and always suspects the universe is keeping something better from him. His addictive character could be said to typify the Western consumerist mindset to which modern fantasy is obliged to cater (although it must be said that The Magicians is also a bestseller, and that The Magician King, the second book in what looks suspiciously like a trilogy, is already sitting on my Kindle awaiting my attention).

Grossman's glittering, crystalline prose is perfectly pitched to serve the clarity of his purpose: in the end, one suspects, the only reason this is a fantasy at all is because the real world it depicts is ultimately equally unsatisfying.

If I had to recommend one of these books, this would be the one.

[Edit 26/5/12: Somehow managed to forget Shada. Have included it now. Also linked Foxe's Book of Martyrs.]

The Adventure of the Anagrammatic Algebraist

I'm beginning to suspect, if I'm to keep this blog going at all, that I need to learn the art of writing pithy but substantial posts, rather than great long screeds which lay out my every passing thought on a topic.

As a first stab at that, here are brief(ish) reviews of the most recent pair of books I've read:

* * *

Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks: The latest of Banks' loosely-linked Culture sequence, this combines enjoyably labyrinthine politics with giant space-opera battle and some serious philosophising. The necessarily murky foreign relations of a utopian society are, as ever, highlighted even while the setting itself is evoked with confidence and style.

The new element here is a corollary to an idea I've used in my own writing, of a highly technological society building its own Heaven where its citizens can survive after death. In the Culture universe, we learn, many civilisations have also built Hells in which the uploaded souls of their dead can suffer eternal torment in retribution for perceived misdeeds in life. It's an effectively nasty -- and as far as I'm aware original -- idea, and Banks is just the author to deplore it whilst still having some sadistic fun. (Indeed, a couple of passages suggest that these Hells should themselves be considered artworks in just this vein, as if Dante or Bosch -- or the Banks of Complicity and its ilk -- had worked in the arena of actual experience, rather than in depictive media.)

I suspect most sincere believers in the Christian Hell would see this as an obscene usurpation of God's prerogatives, and the novel didn't work very hard to convince me otherwise. There's also almost no indication of what most of the souls in the Hells have done to be consigned there: although a few are political prisoners, one presumes that many must be guilty of crimes which Banks and the reader would join their parent societies in decrying. Still, Surface Detail's Hells are, fairly uncomplicatedly, a metaphor for fundamentalist religion in general, and going into fictional doctrinal detail would have detracted from that.

It's a highly entertaining novel, but doesn't quite face up to the challenge it sets itself. And some of the Culture material feels very much as if it's re-exploring familiar ground -- an impression which one continuity-based revelation (in literally the last two words of the novel) does little to dispel.

* * *

Zero History by William Gibson: The conclusion to the rather startlingly named "Bigend Trilogy", in which Gibson turns essentially the same sensibility as created his science fiction works on the unadulterated contemporary world. Shockingly, I see that I never properly reviewed either Pattern Recognition or Spook Country, though I did praise them in passing here and there. Both are outstanding, and if you've enjoyed Gibson's SF I'd urge you to seek them out.

Zero History is as gorgeously written as ever, the information-dense prose nonetheless elegantly inventive and enthralling, the characters -- most notably the genially appalling capitalist anti-hero Hubertus Bigend -- convincingly drawn and detailed. As with Pattern Recognition and (the suspiciously similarly-named) Count Zero, one plot strand concerns a typically Gibsonian quest to track down the creator of some mysterious anonymous art -- in this case a "secret brand" of designer clothing. Although I do find discussion of fashion rather wearying, I enjoyed the branding motif in Pattern Recognition, and there's an entire thesis to be written about the parallels between these three realistic novels and the Sprawl trilogy.

Although ostensibly far more closely connected to Spook Country, with which it shares its two point-of-view characters, than to Pattern Recognition, it does a very clever thing with the structure of the trilogy, which I'd better conceal with whitespace (highlight to read): When Hollis Henry, the retired rock-musician protagonist of Spook Country, eventually meets the designer in question, she turns out to be logo-averse Cayce Pollard, whom we last saw performing a parallel quest some seven years earlier in Pattern Recognition.

Unfortunately, the anonymous-designer plot strand is rather perfunctorily resolved, and insufficiently well-integrated with the main plotline (which relates to the commercial rivalry between Bigend and a rogue operator for, erm, the contract to design clothing for the U.S. military). There's also a McGuffin which may be the nearest equivalent to a deux ex machina in a modern mainstream novel, but which equally seems to come out of nowhere. The book's a fantastic read, but ultimately I felt not quite as satisfying a novel as its two predecessors.

* * *

I've a couple of short-story anthologies to read next (both in series I've previously contributed to), but the next novel on my list is Rivers of London, a fantasy-police-procedural by the magnificently talented, and heretofore hopelessly undervalued, Ben Aaronovitch. I mention this mostly because I'm amused by the coincidence -- his two full-length Doctor Who novels draw heavily on the works of Gibson and Banks respectively -- but I'm looking forward to it enormously.

Finally, in a similar spirit of brevity, and in keeping with the mention of the police... here's one more teaser (the ninth of eleven, if I'm not mistaken) for my forthcoming short story "A Hundred Words from a Civil War" in Obverse Books's Faction Paradox anthology, A Romance in Twelve Parts:

     ‘Who was he?’ The investigator wears a greatcoat and muffler. ‘Apart from being a Remake, an academic and a closet gay, obviously. And taking his phobia of Tube travel as read.’
     ‘Remake?’ Inspector Inshaller stammers. ‘No, he was a maths lecturer. Dr Roamers-Jay.’
     ‘Oh, typical,’ he sneers. Hologlyphs in various alphabets and number-systems orbit his camelish face. ‘Someone’s leaving me a trail of dead Moriartys, and none of them are mine.’
     ‘Erm,’ Inshaller says. ‘No offence, but when we hired the Great Detective Agency, we were expecting someone a bit more...’
     ‘Heritage? Yeah,’ he sighs. ‘I get that a lot.’

The book's due out in the spring. Ordering details will appear here as soon as I have them myself.

Books Update: Woods, Banks, Burns, and Secret Horrors

My living-room's full of women and babies at the moment. And stray toys which squeak underfoot. And discarded food. If I hide up here long enough, they might go away.

I may also be able to bring you up to date on the books I've managed to finish since 10 January, because I know how much that sort of thing always interests you.

I asked for The Corner: a year in the life of an inner-city neighbourhood by David Simon and Edward Burns last birthday, as I suspect many readers have, expecting to get some insight into The Wire, the greatest and most close to platonic perfection of the 21st century's TV drama series to date. There is some of that -- mostly a good view of the scaffolding underlying the writers' creative processes, and in particular the raw materials used for creating some of their most memorable characters. But mostly this is a painstaking anatomical study of addiction, of despair, of grinding poverty and alienation, and of the occasional, heartbreakingly hard-earned, redemptive breakthrough.

It's a powerful piece of writing, and a tribute to the compassionate values which underlie liberal journalism at its best. But if you were depressed by the bleak view of human nature, and of inner-city Baltimore in particular, seen in The Wire -- where characters at least struggle against the inevitable, some of them from positions of remote nodding acquaintance with power -- well, you probably want to read something a bit cheerier and more pinkly fluffy than this. Dostoyevsky, say.

Transition is a science-fiction book by Iain Banks, and as such has been hailed as breaking down the barriers between Banks's "M" and "non-M" writing personas. This is a cosmetic readjustment at best. The "M." tag has attempted to label one specific, narrow portion of the spectrum through which Banks's work runs: from, on the one hand, realistic novels where multi-generational dysfunctional families interact in ways which illuminate broader global issues, to, on the other, sci-fi stories about robots and aliens and spaceships crashing and SHIT BLOWING UP. The former type could be written by a slightly geekier Ian McEwan, the latter by a literate E.E. 'Doc' Smith.

The books tagged with an "M." tend to be the most unambiguously space-operatic, with the occasional oddity such as the post-cyberpunk jargonplay of Feersum Endjinn or the allusive pseudo-Mediaevalism of Inversions. The "M.-less" books, on the other hand, are a ragbag of realism (Espedair Street, Whit, Dead Air, The Steep Approach to Garbadale), detective novel (The Crow Road, Complicity) and gothic conspiracy theory (The Wasp Factory, The Business), including a couple of post-apocalyptic futures (the frankly tedious Canal Dreams and A Song of Stone) and reality-warping fantasies (Walking on Glass, The Bridge) which would have looked quite at home with an "M." on them.

So it is with Transition. The premise may be that a shadowy conspiracy known as "the Concern" has been manipulating the diverse histories of many worlds across the multiverse to unknown, but presumed benevolent, ends... but underneath it all the story's about capitalism, religious fanaticism and cultural imperialism: in short, The Way We Live Now. SF at its best does illuminate the real world, of course, and much the same agenda is at work in Banks's Culture novels. As I say, this is a spectrum of shades, not an author turning his literary credentials (or indeed his imaginative faculties) on and off with a keystroke.

The book itself is awkwardly-shaped, its actual story amounting to little more than one extended capture-escape-capture-escape cycle, with most of the interesting material told in flashback. Unfortunately, two strands of this -- illustrating respectively capitalism and fanaticism -- are imperfectly integrated with the rest of the novel, being the first-person backstories of minor characters whose contributions to the plot are tangential at most. The sheer bulk of this material means that the central storyline relating to the Concern proper, the rebellion against it and the speculation as to its true agenda, feels perfunctory. There are some authentically Banksian edifices here (literally so sometimes, as with the palace hollowed out of one universe's Mount Everest by a long-dead Emperor of the World), but they don't appear to have been subjected to much city planning. If I were feeling uncharitable I'd say Transitions was a much shorter novel and two fundamentally plotless novellas, in search of a competent editor.

This is a shame, because the story of the Concern is a fascinating one, which could have been developed at far greater length and over a wider range of excitingly architected worlds. It even feels as if the author's keeping secrets from us. Why, for instance, is the chief rebel against the Concern occasionally referred to as "the younger Mrs Mulverhill" when an older woman of that name is never mentioned? Is there an unspoken connection between Mulverhill and Madame D'Ortolan, the Wicked Queen running the Concern? Why do their surnames suggest "mother" and "daughter", and if the reason is the obvious one why are their ages the wrong way round? It feels as if Banks knows the answers to these questions, and is teasing us -- perhaps with a sequel in mind, although he's not been one for the direct follow-up in the past. Unfortunately there's not enough of substance in the book to justify it spilling over in this way.

Transition is fun, nonetheless, and works on the basic level of a fix for the many of us long since addicted to Banks's work. But it continues a recent trend towards less coherent recycling of past themes and ideas, and the cosmetic novelty of its presentation fails in the end to disguise that.

The Panda Book of Horror ed Stuart Douglas and Paul Magrs is Obverse Books's follow-up to Iris Wildthyme and the Celestial Omnibus. There's no doubt that Obverse hit the ground running with The Celestial Omnibus, which although it sold modestly was near-universally acclaimed by those who read it (and coincidentally also contains my latest published fiction to date). The Panda Book of Horror, a sly parody of the old Pan Books of Horror Stories of the '70s, consolidates and improves on that success. Having a unifying theme tightens the volume up no end, and although I've never been a big reader of the horror genre I enjoyed those stories which attempt to follow it just as much as those which parody it with a rib-nudge and a cackle.

None of the stories are less than splendid, but the opening and closing numbers are particularly good: Ian Z. Potter's "The Unholy Ghost" features clever, very funny prose and an eye-watering last-minute plot twist, while Mark Clapham's "Channel 666" turns nostalgia TV into an all-too-convincing manifestation of Hell and follows up with an equally brilliant conclusion. My favourite story, though, was Matt Kimpton's "Shadows of the Time Before", which depicts an eldritch Lovecraftian universe of creeping horror and squamous decay, whose rugose inhabitants are appalled at the cheerful irruption of a boozy, shabby party-vixen like Iris Wildthyme into their lives.

That same Mark Clapham edited Secret Histories, the other book of short stories I've read this year. The unifying conceit of this one is that all the stories are told by the heroine -- Bernice Summerfield, of whom you'll certainly have heard me speak (and very likely seen me write). This collection's more of a piecemeal affair, although there's a rather notional through-plot and a few of the stories have closer links. Nonetheless, there's some fine writing here from Lance Parkin, Jim Smith (a sterling story featuring Bernice's old friend Mycroft Holmes), Jon Dennis and the increasingly inimitable Cody Schell. I think my favourite here was Mark Michalowski's elegantly evocative "The Illuminated Man", an everyday story of Edwardian circus folk.

(And yes... for the sake of full disclosure all the authors and editors I've mentioned with respect to these anthologies are friends of mine. Except Matt Kimpton, who I don't believe I know from Y-chromosomal Adam.)

Most recently, I've reread Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock, who reminded me of its existence by dying last November. I remember reading it as a teenager and being wholly enthralled by the central conceit -- a stand of ancient woodland whose near-impenetrable interior opens tardistically into the vast forested landscape of the human collective unconscious, replete with unreconstructed archetypes. The central story is itself deliberately mythic, with two brothers in the 1940s falling out over a woman (albeit the archetypal form of a Brythonic folk-heroine) after the death of their father (who lives on in Freudian form in the forest as an ancient, murderous beast-god). I enjoyed revisiting it, and was reminded of one possible source of my fascination with stories where different periods of history and prehistory rub shoulders. The "mythago" characters we meet in this book range from World War I back to the last Ice Age.

I seem to remember I tried the sequel, Lavondyss, and didn't get on with it. Well, I'd only have been 16 or so. I might well try it again, although I'm slightly daunted by the fact that Holdstock seems to have squeezed out five more books in the series, the most recent being published last July. Still, in the "interminable series by authors I actually quite like" stakes, it can't possibly rival the Mars trilogy.

Undermining Banks

There's a lovely (although perhaps inadvertently) double-edged compliment in the Wikipedia entry on Iain Banks's Raw Spirit:

Banks has said he felt more relaxed when writing this book; critics have said that this comes across on reading it.

I did enjoy Raw Spirit, but it reads more like a bunch of rather rambling letters to one of Banks's friends than something he's actually put effort into writing, let alone been given money for.

66 out of 149 out of 1000

I missed blogging about it at the time, but a few weeks ago The Guardian, ever hungry to add value to their news coverage, started publishing a series of supplements which between them make up a list of recommendations for 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read.

Inevitably the category of this list which most interests me is the rather impressive Science Fiction and Fantasy section. The whole thing's online:

Introduction
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Sidebar: The Best Dystopias
Sidebar: Radical Reading
Sidebar: Imagined Worlds
Sidebar: The Best Gothic Novels
Sidebar: The Best of JG Ballard
Sidebar: Novels that Predicted the Future
The Full List of 1000

As those sidebar headings make clear, the net's cast fairly wide here, which I approve of -- it's far better that the Guardian's readership be educated to see the continuity between Asimov and Heinlein on the one hand and Rushdie and Self on the other, than that they be encouraged to believe in S.F. as a ghetto literature. It's lovely to see the fantastical and science-fictional elements in such non-genre novels as Cloud Atlas, Ada or Ardor and The Handmaid's Tale embraced in the mainstream press rather than explained away.

Admittedly there are one or two occasions when I think they've been too inclusive -- the authors' other work notwithstanding, it's difficult to see The Wasp Factory or Kavalier and Clay, for example, as fantasy or S.F. -- but I'd far rather that than the alternative. Similarly, I don't agree with all the choices -- in Banks's case again, Consider Phlebas is probably his least good S.F. I'd have preferred a Philip K. Dick Top 3 to a Ballard one and in particular I don't think Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is Dick's best, rather than his best-known, work. (The Man in the High Castle's an excellent choice, mind you.)

Nevertheless, many of the right books and nearly all the right authors are listed, and the selection as a whole gives an excellent overview of the history of the novel in these genres -- in English, at least -- from their origins to the present day. The people who put the list together are literate, knowledgeable, intensely well-read and deeply respectful towards the genres they're writing on. Which of course is entirely as it should be, but still, it isn't altogether the sort of thing we S.F. readers have come to expect.

However, this is the internet, so let's skip over the detailed analytical discussion and dive straight for the tickable booklist. (I presume there are people on the web memeing up the entire list of 1000, but frankly I have too much lust for life.)

I've separated out the sidebar entries and stuck them on at the end (except for the "Novels that Predicted the Future" list, which doesn't seem to count). Books I've read are in bold, books I own are underlined, books I want to get around to reading are italicised and books I have no interest in whatsoever are struckthrough. Is that reductionist enough?

1. Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
2. Brian W. Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)
3. Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)
4. Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)
5. Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)
6. Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)
7. Iain M. Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)
8. Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)
9. Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)
10. Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)
11. Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)
12. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)
13. Poppy Z. Brite: Lost Souls (1992)
14. Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)
15. Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)
16. Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)
17. Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)
18. Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)
19. Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)
20. William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)
21. Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)
22. Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)
23. Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)
24. Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)
25. Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
26. Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)
27. Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)
28. Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)
29. G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
30. Arthur C. Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)
31. Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)
32. Michael G. Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)
33. Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)
34. Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)
35. Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)
36. Samuel R. Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)
37. Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)
38. Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
39. Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)
40. Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)
41. John Fowles: The Magus (1966)
42. Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)
43. Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)
44. William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)
45. Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)
46. William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
47. Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)
48. M. John Harrison: Light (2002)
49. Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
50. Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)
51. Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)
52. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)
53. James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)
54. Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)
55. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
56. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)
57. Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)
58. Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)
59. P.D. James: The Children of Men (1992)
60. Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)
61. Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)
62. Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)
63. Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966) [I own and have read the short story, but this is a list of novels.]
64. Stephen King: The Shining (1977)
65. Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-Longue (1953)
66. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)
67. Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)
68. Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)
69. David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
70. Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)
71. Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)
72. Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)
73. Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)
74. Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
75. Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)
76. Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)
77. Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)
78. China Miéville: The Scar (2002)
79. Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)
80. Walter M. Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)
81. David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)
82. Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)
83. William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)
84. Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)
85. Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)
86. Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)
87. Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)
88. Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970) [Not entirely sure I own this one -- if I do, it's in the loft.]
89. Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)
90. Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)
91. Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)
92. Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)
93. Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)
94. Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)
95. John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932) [I sincerely tried -- it's just so huge...]
96. Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)
97. François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)
98. Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
99. Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)
100. Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)
101. JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) [My wife owns this one, but I disown it.]
102. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)
103. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)
104. José Saramago: Blindness (1995)
105. Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)
106. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)
107. Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)
108. Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)
109. Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)
110. Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
111. Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)
112. Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)
113. Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)
114. Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)
115. Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)
116. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)
117. Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)
118. H.G. Wells: The Time Machine (1895)
119. H.G. Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)
120. T.H. White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)
121. Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
122. John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)
123. John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
124. Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

125. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) [Yes, they did get the title right.]
126. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
127. Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)
128. Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)
129. Thomas M. Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)
130. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)
131. Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)

132. Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)
133. Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)
134. Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
135. Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)

136. C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56)
137. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)
138. J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
139. Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)
140. Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- ) [Well, nearly all of them.]
141. Ursula K. Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990) [Edit to add: I've just realised that I've only read the first trilogy, not the more recent supplemental volumes, so this one might strictly be a "no".]

142. Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)
143. William Beckford: Vathek (1786)
144. M.G. Lewis: The Monk (1796)
145. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)
146. Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)

147. J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)
148. J.G. Ballard: Crash (1973)
149. J.G. Ballard: Millennium People (2003)

Why they stop at 149, I've no idea. (Or maybe I've left one off -- do feel freel to check.) Never mind.

By my count I've read 66, which comes to a moderately respectable 45%. What about you?

Life, Death, Space, Time, Matter, Gods, Aliens...

...you know the drill.

And now so do I. A BLOODY GREAT BIG DRILL, in fact, positioned a few inches from my head as the next-door house is disassembled down to its very foundations (warning: slight risk of hyperbole). I guess that writing I mentioned won't be happening today.

(Disturbingly, the van at the front of the house belongs to a pest control company, suggesting that they've been called in to deal with something living in the walls.)

So -- books. And beer as well, but probably in a separate post.

I think I've said what I wanted to about Arthur C. Clarke in my piece for Surefish. I'll update here when that's available online -- I'm hoping it might be today [ETA: Yes -- see above], but it may have to wait till Tuesday[ETA: No, I told you, the link's just up there.]. Suffice it to say that Clarke's been an inspirational figure since my childhood, has had a pervading influence on my thinking in all kinds of ways -- most of them too deeply ingrained to identify -- and that his death, whatever age he reached, was always going to be a loss to the world.

(One thing I hadn't room to mention in the article was that his 62-year professional writing career was one of the few to threaten the 65-year record of George Bernard Shaw. If Clarke had lived another four years, as Shaw did, I'm sure he'd have overtaken him.)

One thing that some of you might be able to tell me, though... the most recent book of Clarke's I read was 3001: The Final Odyssey, one of a cluster of utopian novels by senior SF writers which popped up unexpectedly around the turn of the millennium. I've not read any of his co-written stuff, not being a big fan of Stephen Baxter's work and suspecting that Beyond the Fall of Night and the Rama sequels in particular were blatant cash-ins.

So, um... are any of the collaborations any good? I'm thinking here particularly of the Clarke-Lee Rama books and the Clarke-Baxter Time Odyssey series, all of which I really ought to have read at some point.

In other S.F. news... I enjoyed Iain Banks' Matter, but like The Steep Approach to Garbadale and to some extent The Algebraist, it had the feel of Banks working to a reliable formula without much interest in stretching himself. (Dead Air didn't feel like that to me, and nor did Look to Windward, so I hope this is an extended lapse rather than a long-term slide into senescence.)

The complex and massive detail of an insanely long-lived galactic metacivilisation (and a completely different one from the one in The Algebraist, at that) was well done, but other elements felt fairly familiar. This is particularly true of the absurdly advanced and enlightened Culture's covert intervention in the affairs of the rather boring feudal society who form the focus of the novel, since this was also the plot of Inversions nearly ten years ago. Admittedly this feudal culture occupies a portion of a world-sized artifact left behind my mysterious long-vanished aliens, but -- as one of the characters even points out during the novel -- that's the only interesting thing about them.

Admittedly there's a cleverish twist in that the Culture's agent is herself a native of the feudal society in question -- a princess no less, donated by the king as payment for services rendered some time previously, and immediately emancipated as a fully entitled (and enabled) Culture citizen. (Her name, Djan Seriy, recalls "Janissary", whether deliberately or otherwise.) In other respects, the book rehashes elements of Excession, Use of Weapons and The Player of Games, to no particularly worthwhile effect. It's a fun read and I was never bored, but I do feel Banks has been treading water for the past half-decade or so.

Since finishing Matter I've started River of Gods by Ian McDonald. I'm not very far in, and so far it's a little baffling -- I'm ashamed to say the panoply of Indian names, not all of them readily distinguishable to my angloglot eyes, isn't helping with that. I've just reached the part where the synthetic Bollywood-soap star explains that he was created as an A.I. actor rather than an A.I. character because everyone likes to know what stars get up to behind the scenes, only for it to be revealed that this part of his life is just as scripted as his soap appearances. That's fairly promising.

I'm also most of the way through Bryan Appleyard's Aliens: Why They Are Here, an examination of fictional and supposedly-real aliens which blends pop-culture and philosophy with immense readability. It's fascinating.

Oh, and this isn't a book, but it did appear in the Guardian Books supplement, and is written by the author of a book I want to read. Well, I guess that about wraps it up for Dawkins.

Books Update: Expectations, Given Form

It's been a while since I last wrote a bit about what I've been reading, with the result that I'm now four books in deficit. All of them I came to with certain expectations, having read books by their respective authors before.

And here they are:

The Steep Approach to Garbadale is, shockingly, the twenty-first novel I've read by Iain Banks (along with a volume of shorts and a book about whisky), and there was much about it that was comfortingly familiar. Rather too much, I found in fact, as the narrative presented me with a hero emotionally crippled by his childhood love (as in The Crow Road and Walking on Glass), avoiding his sprawling, matriarchal family (The Crow Road again, and also Whit) who run a venerable, highly successful business (The Business) making a game which forms a metaphor for politics (The Player of Games) and taking lots of drugs (passim). What's more, this family has been guarding a terrible secret for a generation (The Wasp Factory and -- oh look -- The Crow Road) whose nature (which I won't reveal here) will also be familiar to long-term appreciators of Banks' oeuvre.

Banks' writing is always competent, and Steep Approach is less flabby and in need of editorial trimming than his last S.F. novel, The Algebraist. There are some lovely bits of writing relating to the hero, Alban's, youthful affair with his cousin, and to his long-dead mother's suicide. But overall it says very little of weight, has none of Banks's usual exuberant creativity, and feels much as if he's writing by the numbers. I've never met a Banks novel I've actively disliked (A Song of Stone and Canal Dreams come closest), but this one's something of a disappointment.

The Penelopiad, on the other hand, is classic Margaret Atwood without, as far as I know, being a retread of anything she's written before. Looking at The Odyssey through the eyes of Odysseus' long-suffering wife Penelope follows a standard feminist-revisionist approach (though it's one James Joyce, for instance, had flirted with before), but it's very productive. Penelope lends the novella a lively, sympathetic voice, sidestepping the victim status she might otherwise invite by tempering her complaints with hard-edged ruthlessness. Atwood gives the novella a second thread in the choric voices of the maids unjustly hanged by Ulysses for fraternising with Penelope's suitors, showing how Penelope herself is compromised by her privileged background as an aristocrat. It's a clever, erudite, witty and highly readable book, and reminded me of why I enjoy Atwood's writing so much.

The only previous work I'd read of Stephen Marley's was his 1995 Doctor Who novel, Managra, which was one of the very best published in Virgin's Missing Adventures range, and a major source of inspiration for Of the City of the Saved.... His Spirit Mirror is an earlier and sadly less deft novel.

The first in Marley's notorious (among Missing Adventures readers, anyway) yet little-read (ditto) "Chinese lesbian vampires" trilogy -- his first novel, bizarrely, being a life of the Virgin Mary -- Spirit Mirror has a lot to recommend it, including inventive ideas, strong characters and vivid descriptions both beautiful and horrific. Unfortunately it's all very po-faced, lacking the streak of wicked humour and deliberately outrageous invention which raises Managra to greatness. The second-century Chinese setting lends local colour -- though less than you might expect -- but ultimately the book is rather flat genre fantasy with some interesting moments.

(Oh, and although the novel contains both Chinese lesbians and vampires, there is no overlap between the two.)

Martin Day's one contribution to Virgin's Missing Adventures line was The Menagerie, a sadly lesser work than Managra, but he has since redeemed himself with contributions to the BBC's Doctor Who book ranges, notably Bunker Soldiers and The Sleep of Reason. I had hoped that Wooden Heart, like Gareth Roberts' Only Human, might be an exception to the dismal tendency of Who books since the new series to be shallow, vapid froth.

Sadly, it isn't quite. Day's work has always had a slight tendency to verbosity, which sadly comes out here in a book I can't imagine its target audience of 8-year-olds enjoying very much. There are some interesting themes relating to ethics and the nature of good and evil, which it's certainly surprising to see tackled by David Tennant's Doctor, but they never develop into anything truly worthwhile.

In the early days of the new series, we long-term Who book readers bemoaned the fact that none of the new Ninth Doctor tie-in books could match such TV episodes as Dalek and Father's Day for subtlety and complexity. Day's book isn't actually a great deal deeper or more complex than those, and yet it easily outdoes the current TV series for thematic sophistication. I find this disappointing.

After all that, then, the list of books I've read so far this year runs thusly:

• Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad.
  
• Iain Banks, The Steep Approach to Garbadale.
  
• Thomas Bertonneau and Kim Paffenroth, The Truth Is Out There: Christian Faith and the Classics of TV Science Fiction.
  
• Frederick Crews, The Pooh Perplex.
  
• Frederick Crews, Postmodern Pooh.
  
• Martin Day, Doctor Who: Wooden Heart.
  
• Roger Fairclough (ed), The Prisoner: the Original Scripts Volume 2.
  
• Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Pashazade: the First Arabesk.
  
• Kelly Hale, Faction Paradox: Erasing Sherlock.
  
• Andy Lane, Torchwood: Slow Decay.
  
• Ken Macleod, The Star Fraction.
  
• Stephen Marley, Spirit Mirror.
  
• China Miéville, King Rat.
  
• Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood, About Time 2.
  
• Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls.
  
• Kate Orman, Doctor Who: Return of the Living Dad.
  
• J-P Stacey, A Pocketful of Lies.
  
• Charles Stross, Accelerando.

That's eighteen of the buggers. It's also the eighteenth week of the year, and while I started some of the above before the end of 2006, I'm also part of the way into Collapse and Iron Council already, which means I'm very slightly ahead of the game. Assuming that the name of the game is "reading a book a week".

And that's not counting humorous books read on the lavatory.

Still on my to-read list since last time are the following (new arrivals in bold, "less urgent" stuff in square brackets):

Non-Fiction:

• [Brian Bates, The Real Middle Earth.]
  
• Michael Frayn, The Human Touch.
  
• Tom Holland, Persian Fire.
  
• Robert Markley, Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination.
  
• Terry Pratchett, Ian Cohen and Jack Stewart, The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch.
  
• David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster: Essays and Arguments.
  

Fiction:

• Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake.
  
• Max Barry, Jennifer Government.
  
• Mark Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
  
• [Mark Chadbourn, World's End.]
  
• Samuel Delany, Dhalgren.
  
• [Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum.]
  
• Frank Herbert, Dune.
  
• [Gwynneth Jones, Bold as Love.]
  
• Ian McDonald, River of Gods.
• Christopher Priest, The Space Machine.
  
• Kim Stanley Robinson, the Mars trilogy.
  
• Justina Robson, Mappa Mundi.
• Justina Robson, Living Next-Door to the God of Love.
  
• Philip Roth, The Plot Against America.
  
• Norman Spinrad, The Iron Dream.

From all of the above we can deduce that:

a) I don't read nearly as many non-fiction books as I intend to.
b) An embarrassing amount of my reading is Doctor Who related.
c) Only women writers are fulfilling my expectations at present.

Perhaps I'd better start one of those Justina Robsons.