It's time for another reading roundup, as I quickly review the books I've read or listened to lately.
Part 2 of Tad Williams' epic 'Sorrow, Memory and Thorn' trilogy,
Stone of Farewell, was kind of jarring for me as a kid, shifting book 1's child-principals - especially Simon and Miriamele - into young adult mode with what seems almost indecent suddenness, and there's a fair degree of the sex given that my impression of Book 1 was that they were about thirteen. In retrospect, they're older, it's just that they're both kind of spoiled and childish teenagers in their own way in
The Dragonbone Chair, while here they are forced to grow up fast. There's a lot in here that is pretty stock quest fantasy, but it did a lot to at least reshape the mould at the time. I remember the third book -
To Green Angel Tower - receiving one of the first favourable newspaper reviews I'd ever seen of a work of fantasy. The greatest strength of the book is also one I think I failed to appreciate as a young reader, to whit the depiction of a mundane and reasonable feudal empire being overtaken by magic, myth and insanity. It's interesting from a more mature perspective to see the degree of genre-blindness in characters who belong in a respectable mediaeval chronicle when not being forced to deal with bloody elves.
Like
The Dragonbone Chair, this was read by Audible regular Andrew Wincott with characteristic gravitas.
China Mieville's
Perdido Street Station is a gritty, thaumpunk scientific romance and a sprawling, Gormenghastly epic of intertwining plot threads and prose that occasionally forays into sweeping and ornate forms worthy of a star or two from Stella Gibbons. In narrative scope it is somewhat akin to
Stone of Farewell, although set in a more confined geography and far, far more aggressively opposed to any sense of conventional fantasy. Mieville creates a dense and layered world of ancient mysteries, steampunk technology and rigorously analysed magic, of part-animal humanoids akin to the images of Egyptian gods and half-machine 'remades', of corrupt civil servants and exotically-armed murder-hobos hell-bent on 'gold and experience'. Into a city on the brink of either revolution or eternal tyranny comes a horrifying apex predator, capable of overwhelming the most powerful of opponents, and petty graft, scientific curiosity and dodgy associations combine to turn a city on its head and the life of one particular scientist and his friends inside out.
This audiobook is excellently read by prolific narrator Jonathan Oliver. Increasingly I find the Audible stable of readers to be a boon; not that I choose by reader, but with a few notable exceptions that I don't get on with, it does tend to mean they'll have someone good to do it.
Un Lun Dun is probably a less technically excellent example of Mieville's craft than
Perdido Street Station, and having been written with a much younger readership in mind notably lacks much of the sex, violence and sheer unpleasantness of the earlier book. It begins as a (relatively) straightforward tale of two girls, one special and the other not so special. Zanna is the Shawzy, the prophecied hero of UnLondun who will save the abcity from the depredations of the Smog. Deeba is her sidekick; possibly the clever one, or the funny one, no-one is that bothered, at least until the Shwazy spectacularly fails to save the day. Faced with corrupt officials, nefarious schemes and the single-minded faith of most UnLonduners in obvious heroes, Deeba sets out to convince a city that they are wrong before her own life forgets her.
In its way,
Un Lun Dun is as ground-breaking as
Perdido Street Station, challenging the hell out of the preconceptions of young adult quest fiction with its offbeat, technofantastical secondary world, failed prophecy and 'wrong' hero. The reading by Karen Cass is overall good, although there is just something in the performance that can't seem to close a chapter.
Childhood's End was pretty groundbreaking at the time, although it's been long enough that it no longer feels it.
I read Arthur C. Clarke's classic tale of quiet invasion and parapsychological evolution in the wake of the
recent TV adaptation, which sought to focus on fewer characters for clarity, and succeeded mostly in making the whole thing vastly more sensational by compressing the expansive timeline of the novel to about twenty years. I had previously only read the short story 'Guardian Angel', on which the first part of the novel is based.
It's hard to come at the novel these days without noticing how old-fashioned, even reactionary the future it envisions is. One of the characters is essentially polyamorous, but with no indication that his wife - whose life even in the Golden Age of mankind is as a mother and housewife - wishes for anything more than a stable marriage. The absence of mobile phones is always telling (see also
Doomsday Book below) and the horror of the anti-Overlord characters that in the 'Golden Age' there are dozens of channels and people watch up to
three hours of television per day makes me blush.
Greg Wagland's reading is good, but ultimately there is no getting away from the fact that this is a novel of its era. In many ways, the most fascinating part in this day and age is the foreword, featuring the ageing Clarke's reflections on his early work and assumptions.
Demigods and Magicians collects the three short stories which cross over between Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus and Kane Chronicles settings (which also take place in the same world as the Gods of Asgard series, because Riordan is not a man afraid to ask for the plural of pantheon.)
I've already read (and reviewed) 'The Son of Sobek' and 'The Staff of Serapis'. 'The Crown of Ptolemy' wraps up the crossover with the insane, less-dead-than-he-ought-to-be magician Setne attempting to consume the power of
all gods and become himself a singular, all-powerful deity. With his mix of Egyptian and Greek magic granting him the ability to consume any power thrown at him from either pantheon, it is up to our heroes - Percy and Annabeth, and Sadie and Carter Kane - to find a way to cross the streams of their respective powers and thwart him.
I read this one the old fashioned way, and from the library no less. Kicking it old school.
'The Crown of Ptolemy' feeds naturally into the beginning of Riordan's new series, 'The Trials of Apollo'. In
The Hidden Oracle the Sun God falls, powerless and mortal, into the heart of New York and becomes the slave of feral demigod Meg. As he struggles to reach the relative safety of Camp Half-Blood and to understand why his father has opted to take away not only his divine powers, but his strength, looks, clear-skin and washboard abs, he becomes caught up the attempt of another group of mortals to gain divinity, this time by controlling all of the world's Oracles and thus fate itself. While seemingly less threatening than Titans or Giants, these new enemies have a power and menace all their own, and may in fact have manipulated all of the preceding events in order to facilitate their own selfish designs.
Robbie Daymond is another good reader, and as with previous Riordan novels helps me to get into the correct American milieu for the writing.
While I've been on my current Riordan kick, I also looked to the library for
Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods and
Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes. These are secondary works in which Percy narrates the stories of classical mythology in all their gruesome glory and his characteristic irreverent manner. More than just a money-making spinoff, they form a useful pair of companion volumes for a series which gets pretty damned into it sometimes on its mythology, and a decent primer on the canon for anyone old enough to recognise Percy's anachronistic insertions for what they are. Importantly, they don't romanticise the material in the way that a lot of authors do when recounting these much loved tales of bloodshed, parricide, infanticide, patriarchal attitudes, questionably consensual relations and gruesome mutilation.
A modern time travel classic, Connie Willis' Doomsday Book is set in a near-future Oxford where the Faculty of History operates an extensive time travel programme, sending historians to periods considered 'safe' in order to conduct field research. Taking advantage of the absence of the Head of History, Mediaeval plan to send a researcher to the middle ages for the first time, a period previously rated unsafe. Unfortunately, the question of whether or not she is safe in the fourteenth century soon pales as a terrible influenza epidemic sweeps the city, starting with the technician who operated the 'drop'.
Doomsday Book is notable for featuring a female time traveler, and is widely hailed as a classic of the genre. This historical sections are extremely well done, and the theory of time travel is well-developed enough for in-universe discussion, without being precise enough for strict debunking. On the other hand, the near-futurism is damned strange. Despite time travel and the near-elimination of disease, it's very much the 1990s still, with most if not all of the problems in the modern parts of the plot down to the absence of mobile phones, email and virtual networking. It is also quite noticeably an outsider's - specifically an American's - Oxford, with colleges operating their own academic facilities and staff, and archaeological research conflated with history (rather than operating in a separate academic division.)
While dramatically apt, Jenny Sterlin's narration is perhaps a little too dry for the book's humour, mostly coming into its own in the more somber late sections of the novel.
Finally for this roundup, The Ables is a novel about preteen disabled superheroes learning to overcome their disabilities through cooperation and taking on a messianic cult. It is also, and this has not hurt the sales figures at all, written by Jeremy Scott, the voice of the popular Cinema Sins YouTube videos. The audiobook is also read by Scott, and that was a fascinating experience, as you can almost hear him learning to narrate as the book goes on. It's subdivided into - I think from memory - four books, and continuity references make me suspect it was written with some intent to be released serially as four separate parts. Throughout part one the reading is in the same quickfire delivery as Cinema Sins; so much so that I expected a ding at the end of every sentence. Further on, however, Scott's storytelling style became more relaxed and naturalistic, bending more to the dramatic needs of the story.
The Ables is a great idea, and a good novel. It's not perfect, in part because Scott is not able to get entirely into the perspective of a blind boy (I think; hell if I know what a blind boy's actual perspective is.) It also fails the Bechdel test hard, and I'm in two minds about that. On the one hand, d'uh; on the other, it's a book about a twelve year old boy, and twelve is often a very gender divided time. On the gripping hand, it's a book about a twelve year old boy with superpowers, and if we can get behind supergeniuses and telekinetics, we can surely manage to imagine a world in which one or more girls can be part of the gang without fear of an uncontrollable cootie epidemic.
Still, all in all it's not a bad book, and an impressive first effort for someone whose comfort zone is pure snark.
