Books - July/August/September 2006 Part 2
Pushing Ice - Alastair Reynolds
I’m never really sure what I’m going to get with an Alastair Reynolds story. He wrote the fantastic Revelation Space space opera series, and interspersed it with the ho-hum Chasm City and Century Rain. He also published a volume collecting the dull-as-ditchwater Turquoise Days alongside one of my favourite short stories ever: Diamond Dogs.
My natural suspicion is that he’s better at writing Big Space! Huge Ideas! novels than at touchy-feely character driven ones, but that might just be my natural subject-preference talking. In any case, this one starts out with promising Big Space! ideas but then gets mired down in plodding character development. A band of humans on a comet-mining ship are relativistically kidnapped by an alien ship, dumped in space/time and forced to try to rebuild some kind of society while finding out exactly what happened to them.
It has its moments, but just gets too involved in unconvincing personal territorial battles, and by the end I was continuing to read more just to be done with it rather than because I was really enjoying it.
Natural History - Justina Robson
I really enjoyed Justina Robson’s first two novels - Silver Screen and Mappa Mundi. They were both nature-of-identity stories from the point of view of human protagonists observing the social landscape alter into something fundamentally different. This book has aspects of that too, but from a different direction. The world has already changed out of recognition, with humans able to be forged into all sorts of physical forms either through choice or intended function.
A vaguely human intelligence in the form of a spaceship stumbles upon a pile of alien nanotech-goop which seems to allow the finder to do almost anything (instantly travel huge distances, create ludicrously deadly weapons, that kind of thing.) This causes, uh, ‘political friction.’
It took a little while for the book to get going - it didn’t really seem to flow for the first fifty pages or so - but after that it just completely devoured all of my free time. None of the characterisation is too heavy-handed, and there’s just so much enthusiasm behind all of the technological aspects of the story. Probably my favourite of her books so far.
Keeping it Real Justina Robson
Flipping the switch from heavy sci-fi to frothy fairies-elves-and-robots fantasy, Keeping It Real felt really odd. I think it’s basically just the author blowing off steam, but I’m not sure I actually enjoyed it all that much.
The setup is that a ‘quantum bomb’ has opened connections from the earth to various other aetherial versions of the planet, featuring fairies and demons and the like. The newly-cyborgised heroine of the book is assigned as a bodyguard to an outcast rockstar elf. Shenanigans and explosions and world-sundering magic ensue.
I think there’s probably mileage for future books in the world that Robson has set up, but this instance was just too unfocussed and insubstantial to be really enjoyable.
I don’t feel qualified to speak about this book at all. It’s such a huge landmark of Scottish literature, and many people smarter than me have spent much longer analysing it.
It’s laid out as four books collected into one volume, two set in post-war Glasgow book-ending the two central pieces set in Unthank: a nightmarish version of Alice in Wonderland’s mindwarping logical landscape. The Glasgow books follow the life of artist Duncan Thaw in his descent into isolation and insanity, with his ‘resurrection’ and attempted redemption as ‘Lanark’ being chronicled in the Untank volumes.
The novel is endlessly creative but also unremittingly cold and unsympathetic. It’s essentially painting several different pictures of hell, and leaves it up to the reader to decide whether it’s Thaw’s Glasgow, or Lanark’s Unthank which is the more unbearable. It’s all dazzlingly impressive, but probably not one to read if you’re feeling depressed in any way whatsoever.