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.

The Last Changeling

There has always been a secret history, existing alongside that which everyone knows. There have always been the fairies, wreathed in mystery and hidden from sight, dark and malevolent. Now, something has changed, and the 'metahominids' of Britain are coming in from the country, flowing like foxes into the city. What has brought this on, and where will this change of habit lead? For the man known as D and his Department, a group so secret that even their own government doesn't really know what they do, this is not merely a mystery; it is a prelude to war.

The Last Changeling is a tale of fairies, the dark and terrible sort that people used to warn their children about in the days before the otherworld became cute. It is also a kind of social satire, with D9 - the government taskforce which monitors and contains fairy activity - hampered by swingeing budget cuts, and the fae themselves cast as immigrants from the dying countryside.

The novel has an interesting set-up, but feels like too much world-building and not enough narrative. The flashbacks into the secret history tie too obscurely to the main thrust and theme of the story, and the characters are barely given room to breathe. For a narrative built around a crux of betrayal, this is a serious weakness, as it is hard to feel the necessary outrage, particularly as so many of the key characters do not even find out who the traitor is until the epilogue.

This is essentially an establishing narrative given the status of self-contained novel, and suffers from a lack of development. For my money, it could have stood to be half as long again with a lot more character building; a flashback to each main character's first encounter with the fae would have gone a long way towards illuminating their personality with more show and less tell.

Also, as a personal niggle, it felt odd that the fairies were vulnerable to silver, rather than cold iron.

The Invisible Library

Irene is an agent of the Library, a literary superspy trained to work undercover in a multitude of worlds to retrieve unique books for the Library's collection. Assigned a new apprentice, Kai, and a new assignment, she is startled to find that the world she is to retrieve an 1812 Grimm manuscript from is riddled with chaos, the force which opposes the Library's philosophy; hardly the right place to break in a new Librarian. Before long, Irene has made a local ally in amateur sleuth Vale, but is faced by a rival Librarian and the Library's near-legendary renegade operative, Alberich.

The Invisible Library is the first book in a series, and the sense of worldbuilding is palpable. Lapsing occasionally into tell-not-show, overall the nature of the Library is explored organically and - deliberately - incompletely. This first volume establishes that it exists between dimensions, has apparently sole access to the fundamental Language of creation, and secures its links to the many worlds of the multiverse by means of the books in its collection. Irene states that its purpose is 'to protect books', but there are hints that there is more to it than that.

Aside from anything else, the Language - and thus the Library - is the intrinsic enemy of Chaos, a force which manifests in the form of supernatural entities and a creep from physical laws to those of narrative. This is one of the most intriguing aspects of the story, that the Library is all about books and not about stories (although clearly the Librarians themselves, all of whom take literary or folkloric pseudonyms, are as romantic as anyone.)

Overall, I enjoyed The Invisible Library, although it did seem odd that a book so hung up on text and grammar should harbour quite such a grudge against run-on sentences. Cogman rattles out the prose in a machine gun stutter of simple sentences, reminiscent of the staccato stylings of Dashiel Hammett and suggestive of some early trauma involving semicolons. Other than this, my only real criticism is that neither Kai nor Vale ever seemed significantly dangerous or untrustworthy, even when the narrative was concerned with whom, if anyone, Irene could trust.

A Darker Shade of Magic

This is a much better cover than the Kindle image,
although there's something disingenuous about
adding 'a novel' to your cover these days.

There are four Londons. Red London lies at the heart of a world filled with magic and wonder. White London is the centre of a starving world, where power-hungry sorcerers wrestle the vestiges of magic wherever they may be found. Grey London has no magic, just a mad king named George and an empire of iron and steam. And Black London went rotten with wild magic and had to be locked away for all time. Only a few people possess the power to move between the worlds. Kell is one, a servant of the Red Throne; Holland, servant of the White is another. As far as they know, they are the last. Delilah Bard is just a thief in Grey London, but when Kell is tricked into throwing the balance of the worlds out of equilibrium, she may have a key role to play in setting things right.

A Darker Shade of Magic is a crossworlds fantasy about magic, deception and crossdressing wannabe pirates. It has a neat bit of worldbuilding and some interesting ideas, but ultimately feels like an incomplete part of a larger whole (as perhaps indeed it is*,) and seems to fail to break out of some of its more conventional moulds.

Red London is depicted as the prime world, the best of Londons. It is hinted that there are flaws in its apparent perfection, that not all are happy in this seeming-Utopia, but the unmitigated vileness of the Dane twins, gleefully sadistic rulers of White London and its empire of bones, serves to mask the flaws. Likewise, when Holland is controlled by a bolt of magic through his soul, it papers over the fact that Kell appears to have been taken from his family as a child and 'claimed' by the royal family of Red London, an issue that is raised, but never resolved. The threat of rogue magic rears up in various places, but particularly in Grey London never really materialises into anything but a red herring.

Delilah Bard skirts a number of very irritating tropes without ever falling into them, but her story feels unfinished. It is strongly hinted that she is a third Traveler (which would place one as native to each of the realms, and suggest that maybe there is one in Black London as well,) her identity concealed by the fortuitous loss of her distinctive black eye, but that too is never resolved. It would in part explain her wanderlust, and the innate sense of responsibility that she appears to share with Kell (and to an extent, Holland.)

It's not a perfect book, but is a good start to a series, and I would certainly be interested in future installments.

* Edited for new information, although the book makes no such indication, the slightly arch 'a novel' on the cover actually suggesting away from a series.

Helen of Sparta

Once upon a time there was a girl named Helen, a princess who married a great king, ran away with a prince and so started a war the like of which the world has never seen. This is the bit of the story that a lot of people gloss over.

Amalia Carosella, in her desire to give Helen her own voice (although seriously, she's been given at least two others that I found just image searching the cover - The Memoirs of Helen of Troy and the apparently less sympathetic Memoirs of a Bitch) presents the story of her abduction by Theseus of Athens as a grand and tragic romance, in which Helen flees her abusive and resentful mother and a planned alliance-marriage to childhood friend-turned-abusive rapist dick Menelaus, but basically finds her life being continually fucked up by the anger of the gods.

Helen of Sparta is an okay book with a couple of specific flaws. Firstly, it's just... really quite rapey. As decent as Theseus is in the novel, it's hard to see how Helen can be intimate with anyone given that she's basically been dreaming about being raped in the ashes of Troy by just about every other man she knows and isn't related to since puberty. I know Greek myth is brutal, but damn. Also, turning the abduction of the prepubescent Helen into the elopement of a young woman, there is sex, and then a child, and because she has no place in the later narrative the daughter is exposed on the hillside at the will of the gods*.

Again, it's not a poor representation of the heroic age of Greek myth, but I'm not okay with little girls being sacrificed**.

Overall, however, the book manages to balance adherence to the broad structure of the mythological tale and the romantic narrative it wants to convey. It ends on a downer which hints at a part two, and in all honesty, I'd read part two if and when.

Which is a lot better than the last couple of Kindle First offerings.

* My own theory is that Athena pulled some switcheroony which will be revealed in a later book, possibly in Egypt, but it still made for upsetting reading.
** Which is not to say I am okay with little boys being sacrificed, but I can work with it as an earnestly horrible part of a narrative in a way I can't with girls, simply because I have a daughter and not a son.

Good Omens

About six months ago I posted a list of ten books that had affected me, one of which was Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens. With the recent passing of Sir Terry from this mortal coil to the etheric whisper of internet headers, I decided that I wanted to hit the canon again, and to start with one of my favourites.

At some basic level, Good Omens is a pastiche of The Omen (the original one,) complete with a Satanic conspiracy replacing the son of a US ambassador with the antichrist, filtered through a comedy of errors that is forever hovering one legs akimbo sight gag from a Carry On movie. An angel and a demon, both of whom have gone rather native, strive to save the world, while a moment of distraction leaves the antichrist to grow up as a perfectly normal boy. As the preordained moment approaches, the forces of Heaven and Hell, of England's once-proud Witchfinder Army, and of the well-informed descendants of Cromwellian prophetess Agnes Nutter, descend on the Oxfordshire village of Tadfield to do battle (because anyone who considers themselves to be a force is inevitably looking for a fight.)

Pratchett and Gaiman occasionally talked about a sequel - the title 668: The Neighbour of the Beast was touted sometimes - but in the end it never happened; partly because Gaiman moved full-time to the states, and partly because they never settled on the story. I'm rather glad of that, because Good Omens is something of a perfect storm, uniting two authors who were really just getting started in such as way that I believe it tempered both of their styles and signaled a sea-change in their individual writing, while at the same time producing something priceless.

Seriously; about 70% of all images resulting from a search for
'Good Omens' returns fan art of Aziraphael and Crowley, and
perhaps a quarter of that is explicitly shippy. I'm sure you
wouldn't have to look far to find one of those intertwining wing
and no clothes poses so popular with people who ship winged
humanoids and have any ounce of artistic ability.

Good Omens is a very character-driven apocalyptic narrative, and the characters are rather wonderful, from Adam's small and disorganised 'pack of ringleaders' to the bikers of the Apocalypse, and of course the fandom's favourite ship, Crowley and Aziraphael*. The authors also manage to slip in some social commentary - much of it a little dated now** - and even to get in a dig at people who wear sunglasses when it's dark, which in 1990 was only just starting to be a thing.

It is also unashamedly funny and, and this is important, doesn't pretend not to be or to have been during the big, dramatic denouement. It doesn't go all grimdark, and yet manages to have a sense of peril for characters the reader has grown to like. It may also count as one of the first truly transatlantic novels, its wry footnotes peppered with explanatory notes for the American reader which poke fun at the American and British people in more or less equal part.

In case I'm being too oblique, I love this book: always have done, still do. The only disappointment for me on this reading was the audiobook version I switched too while I was walking. It wasn't bad, but they did a Radio 4 adaptation just before Christmas*** and so I was disappointed to only get the one voice. All in all, I think I'm more of an audio play kind of guy.

* Because nothing gets shippers hot for a couple more than adversity, and what greater adversity can there be than explicitly stating that they are sexless beings? For myself I can see the sense behind the pairing, but they are more of an old married couple, rather than a white hot sexy pairing.
** Similarly, any technical references are pretty antiquated, from the wonder of a car with a phone in to printed manuals, and British fast food has come a long way since 1990.
*** Which is well worth checking out.

The Gemini Effect

A long-abandoned bioweapon is reactivated by dumb luck and apathy. Within twelve hours, Kansas City is dead, and the plague is spreading in a tide of mutated killer rat monsters. The President must act quickly, but cautiously, while his advisers pull in many directions at once. Cold war bio warfare, rats, plague, KGB sleepers, sexy sexy scientists and dear Lord does anyone in this story have eyes that aren't piercing?

The basic concepts of The Gemini Effect aren't bad, and the self-replicating death rats are creepy as hell even before they start infecting people. Grossart's writing shows signs of academic training, especially when he gives a name in full followed by the acronym in brackets (and since he's talking about GPS it has to be habit,) and as far as I can tell his bio-science is accurate, if wildly speculative. It's the people that are the real problem. Grossart struggles with the show, don't tell concept and backstory is dumped in agonising passages of internal monologue. Oh, and they're all sexy, even though only the bad ones are so unprofessional as to be intentionally sexy.

There is in fact a scene in which the two incredibly stupid ex-KGB sleeper agents who have decided that a plague of unknown origin and potential is a kick-ass time to plunge the world into international communistic revolution attempt to question the captive President. One is being a super-slutty honey trap and the other is puffing on a cigar; subtle they are not. Neither, in all honesty, are they necessary to a narrative about giant, killer plague rats.

This is how you react to the silencer.

Still; they're not alone in being stupid. The War Cabinet apparently fail to realise that when the newly appointed Chief of Staff attaches a silencer to his pistol it indicates an end to regular protocols. The same scene also flags another problem: The Chief of Staff attaches a silencer in seconds to a sidearm I'm pretty sure he ought not to be wearing in the war room (in which, as we know, you can not fight) and then shoots two people with all the disruption of a particularly prissy cat with allergies. I can not count the number of ways in which silencers don't work like that.

Okay, I can; it's two. I'll throw in scoring a perfect headshot against someone trying to push past him for free, and all in all I begin to suspect that while his biology may be wild yet sound, Grossart's weapons knowledge probably comes mostly from first person shooters. This flaw is also particularly egregious when the President moves from conventional weapons to chemical and nuclear options without recourse to the daisy cutter, the fuel-air bomb which not only is designed to deal with situations much like the ones presented, but has besides become a staple of infection thrillers since Outbreak.

Oh; did I mention that the President periodically breaks off to internally monologue about cowardly, rag-headed mullahs cowering in caves and ordering the deaths of innocent Americans just for being Americans? The clash of hyper-patriotism and apocalyptic nihilism in this book is actually kind of weird.

So I figure fuck it. I'll chalk this up to another Kindle First failure and re-read Good Omens instead.