- I've reinvigorated @trapphic on Twitter: if you're not a subscriber, you can consult the feed here for the latest 140-character microfictions spattered from my disintegrating brain.
- I realise I'm... erm, 56 years late to the party, but the two surviving episodes of The Quatermass Experiment are shockingly awesome.
- I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but it's bloody cold out.
Showing posts with label not writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label not writing. Show all posts
10 January 2010
In Other News...
30 January 2009
Holland Takes On Norway
I've had a frustratingly unproductive week -- I've only produced only about 700 words of a sample chapter. The rest of the time I've been waiting in for building contractors, journeying fruitlessly into town and arsing around on the internet. Not a good set of outcomes, although the 700-odd words do seem to me to be rather good ones.
Meanwhile, I've finished two books written (presumably rather faster) by other people, both of which I've been meaning to blog upon. I've probably only got time for one now, so I'll pick Millennium: the End of the World and the Forging of Christendom by Tom Holland.
Like its predecessors, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic and Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (both of which I wrote a little about here), it's a chatty, pacy, well-written narrative of a turning-point in western history. If you want a clear sense of the turmoil in European thought of the 9th to 11th centuries which led to the eventual revolutionary idea of the separation of Church and State, this would be the book to read.
Unfortunately, that wasn't really what I was after. What I most admire in Holland's work is the way he makes cultures which are radically foreign to any modern worldview seem familiar and sympathetic, and in this book the distance wasn't really there to start off with. Our western Anglophone culture is of course post-Hellenic and post-Roman in the same way as it's post-Christian... but it was christian an awful lot more recently than it was either of those other things. The machinations of kings, popes, knights and even emperors (of the "Holy Roman" variety, at least) seem rather banal and mundane, in a way which even republican Rome, despite its familiarity, never does.
Inevitably perhaps, my favourite parts of the book are those which deal with the borders of christendom -- the Islamic Caliphates (whose appearances are sadly brief) and heathen-turning-christian Viking nations. Somehow the Vikings -- who are almost certainly prominent among my actual ancestors -- seem "alien" in that ancient-history way, whereas their contemporaries of the Romance and Saxon cultures simply don't. This despite the fact that the contemporary history of Britain at the time (which Holland fortunately covers extensively) is largely a power-struggle between different Viking factions for control of these islands.
As Holland points out, the Normans (who were of course of Viking descent, "Norman" being a rather unconvincing romanisation of "Norseman") didn't conquer an England that was still ruled over by Saxons: both Harold Godwinson and Edward the Confessor had Viking mothers, and had in any case inherited the throne from a bunch of Norwegians. The last King of England of pure Anglo-Saxon heritage (which is to say, of course, that he was descended from an ethnically slightly different bunch of Odin-worshippers) was the ill-remembered Edmund Ironside, who died a full 50 years before the Conquest.
The Viking stuff was fascinating, and brought home to me the extent of their cultural influence -- which extended from Vinland to Kiev, and as far south as Byzantium itself -- in a way I'd never realised before (despite reading Henry Treece's splendid Viking Saga trilogy as a lad). If only someone had been able to unite them so that they stopped spending most of their history chopping one another up with axes, the Vikings could have built an empire spanning the Northern hemisphere from America to Russia -- something which has never been achieved in our history.
(I suspect this may in fact be what Harry Harrison and John Holm were writing about in their own trilogy, beginning with The Hammer and the Cross, none of which I've never read. Certainly it's an occupational hazard of being an S.F. writer that reading actual history always diverts one into alternatives.)
Unfortunately, the Viking material accounts for barely a third of the book, the rest being taken up by the aforementioned pope-jockeying. There's a certain amount of entertainment to be had from the shocking corruption, quick succession and occasional startling simultaneity of the contemporary popes, but it palls quickly.
Holland has also developed an irritating verbal tic which I didn't notice in either of his previous books: the construction "[X amount of time] later, and [Y event happened]" is repeated on average once a page, and the repetition of all those needless "and"s quickly becomes tiresome. A canny editor could have cut nearly half a thousand words just by excising them. If I'd been more involved in the narrative I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed it -- indeed, it's entirely possible that this is what happened with Rubicon and Persian Fire. Ah well.
I did at least learn that the Olympic year of 2012 will be the 1100th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's great-to-the-32nd-grandfather converting to christianity from the worship of Odin One-Eye, All-Father, Victory-Bringer, Master of Ravens and Wolf of Battle, the Hanged God. Which is nice.
Vikings are cool. Fact.
Meanwhile, I've finished two books written (presumably rather faster) by other people, both of which I've been meaning to blog upon. I've probably only got time for one now, so I'll pick Millennium: the End of the World and the Forging of Christendom by Tom Holland.
Like its predecessors, Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic and Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West (both of which I wrote a little about here), it's a chatty, pacy, well-written narrative of a turning-point in western history. If you want a clear sense of the turmoil in European thought of the 9th to 11th centuries which led to the eventual revolutionary idea of the separation of Church and State, this would be the book to read.
Unfortunately, that wasn't really what I was after. What I most admire in Holland's work is the way he makes cultures which are radically foreign to any modern worldview seem familiar and sympathetic, and in this book the distance wasn't really there to start off with. Our western Anglophone culture is of course post-Hellenic and post-Roman in the same way as it's post-Christian... but it was christian an awful lot more recently than it was either of those other things. The machinations of kings, popes, knights and even emperors (of the "Holy Roman" variety, at least) seem rather banal and mundane, in a way which even republican Rome, despite its familiarity, never does.
Inevitably perhaps, my favourite parts of the book are those which deal with the borders of christendom -- the Islamic Caliphates (whose appearances are sadly brief) and heathen-turning-christian Viking nations. Somehow the Vikings -- who are almost certainly prominent among my actual ancestors -- seem "alien" in that ancient-history way, whereas their contemporaries of the Romance and Saxon cultures simply don't. This despite the fact that the contemporary history of Britain at the time (which Holland fortunately covers extensively) is largely a power-struggle between different Viking factions for control of these islands.
As Holland points out, the Normans (who were of course of Viking descent, "Norman" being a rather unconvincing romanisation of "Norseman") didn't conquer an England that was still ruled over by Saxons: both Harold Godwinson and Edward the Confessor had Viking mothers, and had in any case inherited the throne from a bunch of Norwegians. The last King of England of pure Anglo-Saxon heritage (which is to say, of course, that he was descended from an ethnically slightly different bunch of Odin-worshippers) was the ill-remembered Edmund Ironside, who died a full 50 years before the Conquest.
The Viking stuff was fascinating, and brought home to me the extent of their cultural influence -- which extended from Vinland to Kiev, and as far south as Byzantium itself -- in a way I'd never realised before (despite reading Henry Treece's splendid Viking Saga trilogy as a lad). If only someone had been able to unite them so that they stopped spending most of their history chopping one another up with axes, the Vikings could have built an empire spanning the Northern hemisphere from America to Russia -- something which has never been achieved in our history.
(I suspect this may in fact be what Harry Harrison and John Holm were writing about in their own trilogy, beginning with The Hammer and the Cross, none of which I've never read. Certainly it's an occupational hazard of being an S.F. writer that reading actual history always diverts one into alternatives.)
Unfortunately, the Viking material accounts for barely a third of the book, the rest being taken up by the aforementioned pope-jockeying. There's a certain amount of entertainment to be had from the shocking corruption, quick succession and occasional startling simultaneity of the contemporary popes, but it palls quickly.
Holland has also developed an irritating verbal tic which I didn't notice in either of his previous books: the construction "[X amount of time] later, and [Y event happened]" is repeated on average once a page, and the repetition of all those needless "and"s quickly becomes tiresome. A canny editor could have cut nearly half a thousand words just by excising them. If I'd been more involved in the narrative I'm sure I wouldn't have noticed it -- indeed, it's entirely possible that this is what happened with Rubicon and Persian Fire. Ah well.
I did at least learn that the Olympic year of 2012 will be the 1100th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's great-to-the-32nd-grandfather converting to christianity from the worship of Odin One-Eye, All-Father, Victory-Bringer, Master of Ravens and Wolf of Battle, the Hanged God. Which is nice.
Vikings are cool. Fact.
20 March 2008
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.
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.
19 March 2008
I Know, I Know...
...I really need to update this blog more often.
I was expecting to be writing a report on Saturday's Bristol Beer Festival today -- I've got my tasting notes and everything, and I really need to use them before everything I drank falls out of my head.
(Er, metaphorically. It didn't do that in literal terms, thank heavens.)
But then Arthur C. Clarke died, and I spent this morning expecting that I'd be blogging instead about his books, their influence on my life -- which has been substantial -- and on the world.
Which I would have done. Only when I got home from work I got an email offering to pay me for writing something along these lines... only obviously not here. So what I've actually been doing this afternoon is writing the wittily-entitled "2008: A Space Obituary", which should be appearing at an internet near you after the Bank Holiday weekend.
I'll try to catch up here tomorrow. But -- and this is also somewhat crucial -- I actually succeeded in doing some proper creative writing late last week, with characters and descriptions and stuff. Given how rare that's been recently, if I can manage to carry on with that tomorrow, it may have to take precedence over telling you all about my exciting adventures with beer. Fun though those were.
I was expecting to be writing a report on Saturday's Bristol Beer Festival today -- I've got my tasting notes and everything, and I really need to use them before everything I drank falls out of my head.
(Er, metaphorically. It didn't do that in literal terms, thank heavens.)
But then Arthur C. Clarke died, and I spent this morning expecting that I'd be blogging instead about his books, their influence on my life -- which has been substantial -- and on the world.
Which I would have done. Only when I got home from work I got an email offering to pay me for writing something along these lines... only obviously not here. So what I've actually been doing this afternoon is writing the wittily-entitled "2008: A Space Obituary", which should be appearing at an internet near you after the Bank Holiday weekend.
I'll try to catch up here tomorrow. But -- and this is also somewhat crucial -- I actually succeeded in doing some proper creative writing late last week, with characters and descriptions and stuff. Given how rare that's been recently, if I can manage to carry on with that tomorrow, it may have to take precedence over telling you all about my exciting adventures with beer. Fun though those were.
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