Necronomicon, The Long Utopia and Steelheart

Necronomicon is a compilation of readings of various stories by HP Lovecraft. There no particular theme to the collection, which encompasses most of the classics ('The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Colour Out of Space', 'The Shadow out of Time' et al, although not 'At the Mountains of Madness' or 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'), but the resulting collection is 21 hours of very well read Lovecraftian horror, and like many first person narratives, Lovecraftian horror benefits greatly from a good reader.

The absence of 'At the Mountains of Madness' is the greatest omission, presumably because it's chunky enough to be published on its own. Other than that, the main problem with this and other Audible short story collections is the lack of any easily accessible indexing. If I wanted to go back and relisten to 'The Horror at Red Hook', I'd have to take pot luck.

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The fourth book in the Long Earth sequence, The Long Utopia shares with its predecessors a combination of intricate world-building and faintly half-arsed plotting aimed more at making a philosophical point than servicing a conventional narrative. Each book jumps ahead five to ten years and seems to spend most of its bulk catching us up on what's happened in the interim rather than moving the story forward in any meaningful sense. The multitude of viewpoints also serves to distance the reader instead of increasing involvement, and the whole thing ends up rather dry. It feels that the series as a whole would have been better served by either abandoning conventional narrative altogether to create a pseudohistory, or more rigorously enmeshing the cosmological musings with the story of a specific set of characters.

It's rare that I have a serious complaint about Audible readings, and I have nothing but respect for Michael Fenton Stevens as an actor, but honestly the fact that so much of the book is set in America - and that Fenton Stevens range encompasses few, if any, convincing American accents - makes the choice of a British reader frankly baffling.

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The nature of its own purpose and identity is not one that Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart shares. Sanderson's superhero deconstruction, the first of a series - The Reckoners - set in a world in which superhumans have appeared and proven to be universally megalomaniacs who despise ordinary humans and lesser 'Epics' for their weakness, is unabashed dark fantasy. In the city of Newcago - formerly Chicago - the word of Steelheart is law and humanity lives as an underclass in the transformed remnants of their old world. The Reckoners are the ones who fight back, humans who hunt Epics, and newcomer David thinks that they should be setting their sights on bigger game.

Steelheart is a pacy adventure, as well as a deconstructionist musing on the nature of absolute power. It's not a breathtaking work of existential genius, but it would be surprised if anyone expected it to be, and that is to its credit.

Pines

Hello tie-in cover!

Ethan Burke, Gulf War veteran and Secret Service agent wakes on the road into the small town of Wayward Pines, Idaho, with no wallet or ID. He dimly recalls an accident, a truck hitting his car and killing his partner. He remembers that he was looking for two other missing agents. And he can not get out of Wayward Pines, a town which seems too perfect to be true.

Pines is the first book in the Wayward Pines trilogy (now adapted as a 'major television event' as the tie in cover informs me excitedly) and lays out a surprising number of its cards by the end of its relatively short length: What the deal with the town is, who is behind it; all revealed by the final page, so the following books are presumably going to be very different, and it's kind of a shame. Pines is a deliberate tribute to Twin Peaks, and although more SF at heart, has a vein of almost Lovecraftian horror running through it, with its road that leads back on itself, the eerie perfection of the town and its brutal and macabre immune response.

It's on the level of weird fiction that Pines works best, and the high concept but ultimately mundane reveal at the end was actually a slight disappointment, for me at least. That said, I think there's enough potential to look into the other books in the series, but I'm going to miss the weirdness.

The Rithmatist

Rithmatics is a magic forged in chalk. A Rithmatist can create, defend and breach barriers just by drawing in chalk, but it is not a skill that can be learned: Rithmatists are chosen.

Joel was not chosen, but he has a fascination for Rithmatics that is matched by an agile, mathematical mind and a superb geometric eye. The son of a chalkmaker, he attends a prestigious school on a scholarship, fitting in with neither the Rithmatic students, all bound for ten years military service defending the United Isles from wild chalklings, or the sons and daughters of the wealthy who attend the general school with him. Melody has position and wealth to spare, and was chosen as a Rithmatist, but can't even draw a circle. Pushed together in a summer elective class with eccentric Rithmatic theorist Professor Fitch, this odd couple are drawn into the investigation of a series of gruesome crimes involving Rithmatic students; crimes which could threaten the entire nation.

The Rithmatist is my first encounter with terrifyingly prolific fantasy novelist Brandon Sanderson. It's a slow-burner, paced more like a detective novel than a conventional fantasy or even school story, with the investigation and the magical theory surrounding it more important than dramatic duels or detentions. Joel and Melody are well balanced as protagonist and deuteragonist, one mathematical, the other artistic, and both qualities given weight within the setting and the magical system. Both are at times irritating - Joel in his absolute focus on Rithmatics and insistence that everything else is boring, Melody in her melodramatic self-pity - but the author is not blind to these faults and they are explored in the text rather than overlooked or excused (as in a scene where Joel is confronted with and confounded by politics and admits to failing his government class last year. "When am I going to need to know historical government theories?" he asks. "I don't know... Maybe right now," is the reply.)

Rithmatics is basically really badass
geometry.

The audiobook, read by Michael Kramer, is good, but suffers from the semi-illustrated nature of the book, and in particular the chapter-heading rithmatic diagrams which provide a great deal of visual context. Having the Kindle book as well proved a boon in this instance. The diagrams are part of a simple yet detailed magic system, although a couple of its facets felt brushed over, specifically that Rithmatists are only chosen to replace those who have died, and that one of the new rithmatic techniques which form a central plot point is so dramatically out of character for the rest of the system. I am sure that both of these facts have relevance, and even if not answered it would have been good to hear the characters ask some questions.

Rithmatics does not exist in a vacuum, however, and is clearly linked to the nature of a world in which the North American continent was shattered into a vast archipelago before any European explorer every reach its shores, and abandoned by its indigenous people in the face of wild chalkling attack. The pseudo-Anglican church with its monopoly on Rithmatists, the clockpunk aesthetic and the political landscape are broadly sketched, but clearly intrinsically linked to the history and nature of the world.

Who doesn't like a map?

If The Rithmatist has a flaw, it is that it is all setup and very little conclusion. It's not without closure, and manages a good turn of action in the closing fifth or so, but is unmistakably, and self-consciously, part of a series. It's a series I intend to follow - when the next part is published and probably recorded - but it's there.

If there is a single sentence to sum up the book's achievement, it is that it makes dual-wielding chalk seem hardcore.

The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

In a post-national world of primarily economic tribes, a young tribeless girl named Nell receives a stolen book as a gift. This book, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is in fact a dazzling work of nanotechnology which guides Nell's education as she lives through a period of upheaval in China and its artificial neighbour, the manufactured islands of New Chusan. The book was created by an engineer named John Hackworth, and as Nell's star rises so his falters, setting him on a ponderous quest to find a man called the Alchemist.

Like many of Neal Stephenson's books, The Diamond Age - which I got as an audio book, read by Jennifer Wiltsie, is less a single narrative and more a collection of stories building towards a conceptual conclusion. It is as much about the nanotechnology of their world and the potential revolution embodied in the development of a 'seed' which would permit unmonitored nanotechnological use as it is about Nell and John, and much more about the potential political ramifications of such technologies than their technical specifics. It has many more discussions of cultural and philosophical mores than of emotions, and in many places reads more like a history than a novel. Consequently, it is always more interesting than involving.

As with Snow Crash, I was struck by the 90sness of Stephenson's cultural portrayals, in particular a China more regressing into the 19th century than emerging from Communism, and a slightly piecemeal depiction of Confucianism. I don't think it can be called racism, especially given that the same regressive tendency is depicted in the Anglo-American Neo-Victorians; it is more that Stephenson appears to see a return to pre-information age social structures as a natural consequence of the collapse of the technologies which made them obsolete.

Wiltsie's reading is good. Many audiobook readings suffer from a coolness necessitated by maintaining a clear reading voice, but the nature of this book means that wild emotionality would be out of place anyway. For me, the decision to pronounce primer as 'primmer' was distracting, but that's personal.

Something Rotten

After serving two years as the head of Jurisfiction, Thursday Next feels ready to return to reality and try to have her husband reinstantiated by the treacherous Goliath Corporation. She comes back to Swindon to discover that Britain's most sinister multinational corporate behemoth is in cahoots with fictional fascist politician Yorrick Kaine, and that their bid to seize power while switching to a faith-based business model could have dire implications for the world.

On top of all that, she's got a two year old who only speaks Lorem Ipsum and a certain literary Dane to safeguard though a self-examinatory sabbatical.

The fourth book in the first Thursday Next trilogy was in many ways Jasper fforde's first foray into the dazzling light of superstar publishing. It was also something of a test, with many readers feeling that the madly conceptual The Well of Lost Plots had been a step down from Lost in a Good Book. The result is, for my money, pretty damn good, and certainly holds up to a second reading. It is particularly interesting (if you're me) to look out the changes made since book one. (For example, various chapter headings have referred to the assassination and later attempted assassination of President-for-Life George Formby, who here dies of natural causes.)

Something Rotten brings the story to a fairly natural close, sufficiently so that I was surprised to see Thursday reappear a few years later in First Among Sequels. In many ways it is the conclusion of a trilogy beginning with Lost in a Good Book than a narrative sequel to The Eyre Affair, which comes across as a slightly tentative proof of concept in retrospect, and that is a good trilogy. Once I buy the remaining books on Kindle, I'll give my thoughts on the next Next trilogy (including a first reading of The Woman Who Died A Lot, and perhaps more importantly a second reading of One of Our Thursdays is Missing.)

Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots

Thursday Next is feeling pretty good about herself. Not only has she married the love of her life with a baby on the way, but her career is going pretty well and she has successfully given the finger to the almighty Goliath Corporation. Sadly, Goliath does not take defeat well, and decide to blackmail her, with the very existence of her husband Landen as their bargaining chip. To make matters worse, her revision of the ending of Jane Eyre is coming under scrutiny from Jurisfiction, a police force which exists inside fiction, her memory is under attack, her life is continually imperiled by coincidence and, just to cap off a bad week, all life on Earth is about to be reduced to an unidentifiable goo.

So, yeah, there is a lot going on in Jasper fforde's sequel to The Eyre Affair. Coming back to the series, I'm struck by the fact that while the first book, while not bad, mostly had novelty going for it, Lost in a Good Book is a more assured work which stands better on its merits for a second reading. The eradication of Landen and the insidious threat of Aornis Hades are both genuinely disturbing devices, and despite only a couple of appearances, there is a genuine tragic nobility to the Neanderthals.

Lost in a Good Book also gives us the character of Miss Haversham. Most of the Jurisfiction agents are a delight, but Miss Havisham is the pip. Combining elements of her personality in Great Expectations with a gung ho, no nonsense attitude to policing, fforde creates something altogether wonderful, at the same time faithfully literary and more than the sum of her parts.

This was the last volume to be widely published
in the original cover style (this is not that style),
making it impossible for me to collect a matching
set without rebuying. I'm kind of glad I switched to
Kindle.

Moving swiftly on (thank you Kindle omnibus edition, even if you do make it a little more difficult to crossreference the footnoterphone conversations and scenes,) in The Well of Lost Plots Thursday is on the run from Goliath, and seeks sanctuary in the one place they can't find her: In fiction. Taking a bit part in Jasper fforde's unpublished detective novel Cavendish Heights via the Character Exchange Programme, she is hoping for a quiet life, but soon finds herself drawn into Jurisfiction politics surrounding the launch of UltraWord(TM), an entirely new reading technology. Moreover, she has a parting gift from Aornis to cope with, if she ever wants to see her still-nonexistent husband again.

The Well of Lost Plots is the most solidly bookworldian of the first three Thursday Next books, and develops the high-concept of bookjumping with concepts including the inability of fictionals to detect scent, and unpronouncable words being easily spoken in a world where all sensory input and dialogue is actually text-based. This was my favourite of the three on first reading, and remains so; I am still in love with the concepts as much as anything, and it represents the work of a writer who is both fresh and matured.

The Eyre Affair

I'm sure that car was originally described as being
painted with Escher lizards, but the Kindle version
is just stripey. I wonder if ebook technology has
finally allowed Text Grand Central to issue proper
rolling upgrades (as promised in print editions of
the Thursday Next series.)

In a world almost, but not quite entirely unlike ours, Thursday Next works for SO-27, the specialist branch of the police force that deals with crimes involving literary heritage. A veteran of the ongoing (in 1985) Crimean war, she is called upon to pursue infernal supervillain and former English Lit professor Acheron Hades when he steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and starts bumping off minor characters. When he turns his attention to Jane Eyre, Thursday knows that it is only a matter of time before England's cultural milieu is irreparably damaged. After all, everyone loves Jane Eyre (even if most of them do think it would be better if Jane and Rochester had married at the end.)

I first read The Eyre Affair in print... many years ago, and have since recommended it to various people, to the point of buying copies for two friends whom I thought would enjoy it. Coming back to it in a Kindle edition, I'm less wowed than I was back then. I still enjoyed it and the writing is still witty and pacy, but I suspect that novelty was a big part of its impact. Having moved on to the later books (I bought it in a three pack with Lost in a Good Book and The Well of Lost Plots,) I find it to be a good start, but ultimately not as strong on its own as it was back then. This saddens me somewhat, although I;m finding the others good enough not to write off the entire canon based on a lukewarm re-reading.

As an aside, it's fascinating to read in ebook format a series which was originally written for purely print media and which postulated the advance of book technology to allow rolling updates and DVD-style special features; in short, something akin to an ebook, but with real pages.

This has been a brief review, I know, but I will probably add some additional thoughts after I wrap up The Well of Lost Plots.

The Atopia Chronicles

Kindle Unlimited is slowing me down by offering free audiobook readings. I like audiobooks, but they go slower than reading a book myself. On the other hand, I'll probably drop Unlimited in a few days when the free trial expires, and it's been a nice interlude.

The most recent 'read' from my list is Matthew Mathers' The Atopia Chronicles, a complex novel of interweaving narratives set largely on the artificial floating island state of Atopia at the dawn of an era of synthetic reality. A fusion of AI and VR, synthetic reality is intended to save the world by giving everyone everything they could want at a fraction of the material cost of real-world equivalents. While adults struggle to adjust to the new technology - skins which overlay and filter reality, a proxxi alter ego to control your body while you explore the metaverse, and even the ability to distribute your consciousness into dozens of subjective viewpoints simultaneously - the first generation to have had access from birth are reaching maturity on Atopia.

The Atopia Chronicles begins as a series of interweaving narratives, each exploring aspects of the PSSI (poly-synthetic sensory interface) technology against the backdrop of a world on the brink of ecological collapse. An advertising executive filters out everyone who annoys her and ends up virtually isolated from humanity in a story reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode. Atopia's security chief and his wife adopt simulated children to try to save their ailing marriage; one of the pssi kids struggles with his relationship with his brothers while another misplaces his corporeal body; a millionaire fights for his life at the heart of a web of predicted future deaths; and the commercial launch of the system becomes intertwined with a plot to destroy Atopia.

The first two-thirds of the novel are the most successful, with the increased presence of the arc plot and the emergence of an almost cartoonish villain diminishing the core strengths as a speculative technological SF story. In a lot of ways, the distributed narrative is strong enough not to need the arc, and certainly not to need a villain, and there is a curious parallel with the fictional universe, with the more interesting technique ultimately being subjugated by conventional narrative devices even as Atopia's ideals are subjugated by a self-made monster.

S - A prelude

Yesterday, I slipped and bought a book I'd been eyeing up in the window of the Cambridge International Book Centre for a while. It's going to take some getting through, since I really can't read it on the train without things falling out.

S is written by Doug Dorst, based on a concept by JJ Abrams and inspired by Bookcrossing. I'm only a few pages in, so a review will have to wait, but the production of the thing is such a factor that I feel it's worth exploring first.

Held within its slipcase is a hardback novel called Ship of Thesus, by V.M. Straka. The book carries a library stamp, and its pages are defaced with columns of handwritten notes from two readers, conversing only by this medium and discussing the mysterious identity of the book's reclusive author, and also the identity and reliability of the editor and translator of the novel. Slipped between the pages are other documents relating to the mystery.

It is a thing of beauty, in a format I've only seen before in a handful of children's and YA novels and carrying the form to new heights. It's a text and a metatext, which I've only just begun to explore (I'm not even through the foreword yet; the one document I've got to is a letter, in German, with an attached translation.)

It may yet prove a triumph of style over substance, but I think I'm going to have fun finding out.

Redshirts

The Universal Union's flagship Intrepid is the most prestigious posting for the young officers of 'Dub U', and the most dangerous. Every mission seems to result in the death of at least one junior crewmember, and the old hands all duck out when the senior staff come looking for someone to add to the away team. Could a ship really be this unlucky? Could the amazingly handsome Lieutenant Karensky really survive so much punishment? And why is it that backstory seems to pop into people's heads as if it had always been there?

John Scalzi's Redshirts kicks off as a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for Star Trek, with a clear division between the scenes which are just the junior crew chatting and those where the senior crew drag the focus back onto them (mostly in the form of a change in the occurence of swearing and sexual references from 'lots' to 'none'). It then pushes into its own territory as Ensign Andy Dahl tries to escape the predestined fate of all short-arc supporting characters via a rogue mission to exploit the bad time travel mechanics of the Narrative and stop the deaths at their source: the basic cable show The Chronicles of the Intrepid.

Redshirts is not a new idea - within the text itself Scalzi openly refers to half a dozen implementations of the 'characters talk to their creator' concept, and people have been making jokes about red shirts for as long as I've been alive - but the central characters are lively and entertaining, and the bafflement of the various officers as the Narrative spotlight comes and goes is entertaining, as well as really rather creepy.

Once the main narrative is exhausted, Scalzi does go off the boil a little, however, and apparently needing some extra pages to make contract adds three codas, each one following one of the 'real world' characters. They're not bad in themselves, but they feel extraneous (which is, I suppose, why they're codas), and more like the author playing around with alternative approaches to his concept than like they are truly related to the main story.

Ancillary Justice

Breq has a mission. Once she was a soldier, she was many soldiers, and the ship that carried them; now she is but a single body, a single killer with a singular grudge. She is seeking a weapon, and a way to reach its target, but she may not be as single-minded as she believes.

Ancillary Justice is the debut novel by author Ann Leckie, and the first volume in a space opera trilogy set in the galactic empire of the the Radch. The Radch is a super-culture, which is reaching the end of several thousand years of continual expansion across occupied human space. Their military forces are unparalleled, both their AI-driven warships and their ancillary armies, the bodies of conquered peoples slaved to the control of the same AIs. Breq was once an ancillary of the AI Justice of Toren, but is now the only remaining part of the distributed consciousness, following the betrayal and destruction of the ship herself.

The first high-concept challenge for Leckie to get past is therefore that of convincingly representing the memories of the Justice of Toren as those of a multifaceted being, and this she manages quite well. Where she is slightly less successful is in establishing the distinctions between the facets of her personality, but although there is a little more tell than show in this area, it is not actually a failure. All of this - together with a distinctive SF universe - would be impressive on its own, but this is not the book's only conceit.

The language of the Radchaai is ungendered, and as a result Breq, as first person narrator, simply refers to everyone as she, whether they are male or female (in fact, many characters, including Breq herself, are never clearly established as either sex). The ungendered language itself is not extraordinary, but simply by referring to every character in the book as she (save when a few supporting characters are speaking some other language), Leckie challenges conventional assumptions and forces the reader to look at the characters without one of the standard props.

The story is both a good story, and makes use of the high-concept aspects of the story. The multiple nature, not only of the Justice of Toren and of the Emperor of the Radch, is at the core of the narrative. The nature of war and humanity are also explored, along with some - fairly broad - commentary on prejudice and privilege, although the latter is not the most effective part of the book.

Ancillary Justice is well worth a read, and I will be keeping an eye out for part two.

The City and the City

China Mieville is an author whose work I should have devoured. He writes the sort of stuff that I like, I've even met him, but I've read very little of his stuff. I think in part it's just that his books are to big to read on a bus.

Enter the kindle, and The City and the City, as I decided to kick off with something stand alone. Previously, I've only read his children's book, UnLunDun, which is also a book about the nature of cities, so I think he may have a bit of a theme there.

The City and the City is the story of Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Besel, investigating a murder. The complication is that Besel is not alone. It is part of a divided city, sharing its geographical identity with Ul Qoma, not along a single divide, but with the two cities sharing space, overlapping, with some areas belonging to one or the other and some being part of both, separate not by space or walls, but by a state of mind. As the case crosses the boundary of perception, Borlu must cope with the law of two cities, and the Breach between them.

This is a book that demands the reader buy into a pretty odd conceptual device, and one that could only really work in literature. To try to convey the separation between Besel and Ul Qoma visually would be at best problematic, at worst silly. In writing, however, out works, and the book approaches the question mostly in terms of the mindset of the residents of the city and the city. If nothing else, I can say without fear of contradiction that it is a book with a very new idea.

The concepts of identity are explored, without taking the easy course of making it strongly about racial prejudice. While racism exists in the setting, the focus is on the social construction of reality and the nature of cultural constraint.

Borlu is a bit of a cipher, but no more so than most detectives, and his emotions are convincing, which makes him thing true. His partners, in the two cities, provide a good link to either side, and the strangeness of Breach is effective at representing something both human and alien.

I am considering investing in the kindle edition of Perdido Street Station.