Reading Roundup - September 2016

Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine is a steampunky alchemical fantasy, set in a world in which the dominant global power is the Great Library of Alexandria. Popular technology is largely Victorian, while the great institutions of the world - most notably the Library itself - have access to high speed trains and sophisticated automata, much of it based on the Library's monopoly on the practice of Alchemy. The Library also seeks to assert ownership over all original works, allowing access to books through blanks, alchemical Kindles able to download any book from the Library through their pages.

Jess Brightwell is a London lad, born into a family of book smugglers who deal in rare original manuscripts. Lacking the mercenary zeal for the business, his father buys him a place on the Library's apprentice course, hoping to place a family member in a position of advantage. Along with his cohort and under the firm hand of Scholar Wolfe, he undergoes the harsh and competitive process of training and selection, but before graduation, the pupils and their teacher are all plunged into a life and death struggle, not just against those who would destroy the Library's power, but against the Library itself.

Subject of many rave reviews, Ink and Bone has a slow start, and suffers somewhat from placing its narrative focus on Jess, whose vacillation makes him perhaps understandable, but also one of the less compelling and likable of the students. In addition, one of the major twists at the end of the book is not only cruel, but predictable, and as much as I hoped it might be averted, cast something of a pall over the pacier second half of the story. I'm also not sure how I felt about the seeming assertion that burning books is better than letting the Library monopolise them. Still, I might go for the next in the sequence, and Ben Allen provides a lively narration.

Book Two of Charlie Fletcher's Oversight series, The Paradox, returns us to a London in the care of the Free Company of the London Oversight, the group who police the boundary between the mundane and the magical like Pilgrim's heavily-armed younger brothers and sisters. Despite the recent recruitment of Charlie Piefinch and Lucy Harker, the Oversight is still in a parlous state, especially with Jack Sharpe and Sara Falk still lost in the mirrors. As the two young recruits enter training, Sharpe and Falk seek for each other, avoid the sinister John Dee and the hungry wights of the mirror realms, and eventually come upon the secret behind the near-destruction of the Oversight. Meanwhile, other forces are moving, other Free Companies and freelancers are hunting. The Sluagh are looking for a way to be free of the ancient bane of iron, the Citizen schemes, and the House of Templebane is seeking its revenge.

The Paradox suffer a bit from middle volume sag, and a lot of its time is spent moving from beginning to end, rather than doing its own thing. Lucy Harker also comes off badly, her understandable reluctance to trust or be tied down unfortunately mutating into an unlikable selfish streak. The other characters are more balanced between strengths and flaws, and perhaps the most interesting theme of the book is raised by the Sluagh chieftain who tells the Smith that the Oversight is supposed to protect the border, but only ever do so in one direction, allowing the mundane to bind the old world in iron. This is never really followed up, but hopefully will be returned to in book 3.

Charlie Fletcher is not as good a reader as Simon Prebble, but neither is he as bad as many Audible reviews make out.

My final September book - I've been getting back into audio plays in a big way - is The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, one of the leading works of the modern Chinese SF scene. Set through the Cultural Revolution, it is an alien invasion story in which no aliens actually invade, instead somehow manipulating the universe in such a way as to convince scientists that physics does not work, driving several to suicide and aiming to paralyse human progress in preparation for the actual invasion in about four hundred years time.

Translator Ken Liu and narrator Luke Daniels convert the text into one redolent with familiar idiom, and while the details of the Cultural Revolution may be surprising to western readers/listeners, as they were to me, the production as a whole eschews the lure of oriental exoticism and lets the speculative fiction speak for itself. As with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet there is a section which takes the narrative viewpoint away to the alien world of Trisolaris which, for my money, is the weakest part of the book. I would have liked to have seen more of that background explored through the Three Body game, but I kind of understand the choice. It's definitely worth a read, and quite different to anything else I've read.

Reading Roundup - August 2016

The Scar is the second of China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels, named on my copy as the New Crobuzon series, and although the action of The Scar leaves the outskirts of the city itself in the prologue and never goes back, it does loom large in the thoughts of our protagonist throughout. Belis Coldwyn is an author and linguist, and as an ex-lover of Perdido Street Station's Isaac, unreasonably high on the government's to do list. She jumps on a ship to the colonies, but when that ship is intercepted by the forces of the floating city of Armada she is caught up in something vaster than she could have imagined. Some in the floating city have an audacious plan to tether an extradimensional leviathan and so make their way to the ruins of an ancient Empire and plunder their unimaginable power.

As with Perdido Street Station, the scope of The Scar is colossal. Geographically it far exceeds its predecessor, although the bulk of the action is restricted to Armada itself. The rough and gritty thaumpunk dystopia of Bas-Lag opens out from the claustrophobic glory of New Crobuzon through the eyes of Belis and a handful of other viewpoint characters, all of whom play key roles in the plot without any of them being major players, even when they think that they might be, as it rambles towards what is more of an end than a conclusion. The Scar is very much about the journey, rather than the destination.

Damian Lynch provides a radically different voice to Jonathon Oliver, and at first I did find this a bit distracting. Ultimately, however, he brings his own energy to the reading.

Sleeping Giants is the debut novel from author Sylvain Neuvel, and takes the form of a series of statements and interviews with the personnel of a highly secret project, recorded by the programme's enigmatic and ludicrously well-connected backer. The statements reveal the discovery of the pieces of a giant, alien mech functioning on an utterly unknown level of science, the underhanded and even illegal steps taken to secure it in US control and the intricate web of contingency plans and conspiracy used to bring it into the open.

While only touched on briefly, the mech's origins hint at future conflict with an ancient empire long-since withdrawn from Earth along with the planet's eleven other protectors, and the novel is pitched as Volume 1 of The Themis Files. I confess, I'm not rushing for the next one. While the multi-voice recording was excellent - I am hugely in favour of multi-voice recordings in general and this one had a talented cast on its side - I was not quite taken enough with the characters to truly get into the story, and given the archival approach I felt that it might have benefited from taking a broader view and including outside perspectives on the programme and the appearance of the robot on the world stage.

Not remotely a debut novel for prolific military scifi writer Jack Campbell, The Dragons of Dorcastle is the first in a series set in a world in which the ordinary people are caught between the mutually antagonistic influences of the two Great Guilds, the Mechanics and the Mages. The Mechanics create the devices on which society runs and insist on their exclusive right, indeed ability, to provide and maintain them, while the Mages manipulate reality by embracing a philosophy which insists that nothing is actually real. Neither have much time for the Commons.

When Mari and Alain, prodigies of the Mechanics and the Mages respectively, are thrown together by circumstances it at first seems to be nothing more than your average star-crossed love affair, but even as their feelings challenge their Guild teachings and their experiences reveal the internal corruption and contradictions of their masters, Alain becomes aware that Mari is a figure of prophecy fated to stand against a great Storm that threatens to tear the world apart. To defeat it, however, she needs to overthrow the established order of both Guilds and rally them in common cause with the ordinary people of Dematr, a level of change that neither Guild will allow, even if the alternative is destruction.

Also dragons.

MacLeod Andrews provides a good reading, although I did hear 'Alain' as 'Elaine' to start with. Overall, The Dragons of Dorcastle has an involving story and an interesting set-up, but personally I could have done with less romance. It doesn't feel like Campbell's strong suit, and narratively it primarily serves to provide a reason for the two leads not to discuss the vital prophecy in a timely and useful fashion.

Finally this month - this feels thin. I'm sure there must be something else I'm missing, although in my defence, The Scar is fucking immense - is Hamlet's Hit Points. One of my rare non-fiction reads, in this book rock star games designer Robin D. Laws uses a system of beat analysis to break down the fluctuation of hope and fear in the dramatic and procedural plots of three famous narratives, in order to provide exemplars for games masters to consider when pacing their own offerings. In addition to providing an interesting and innovative reading on three well-worn texts - Shakespeare's Hamlet, Dr No and Casablanca - and providing some interesting examples of technique for the storyteller or game writer, Laws discerns some under-discussed elements of the works involved, such as a eakness in Hamlet's supposed tragic flaws or the Freudian subtext of No. It's a genuinely fascinating approach and one I shall likely be applying to my future storytelling.