Books - July/August/September 2006 Part 3
The final part for a while, fashionably late. All of these were strangely hard to write about, partly due to a three day long headache which feels like an angry badger trying to burrow through my right eye, but mostly cuz im dum.
Glasshouse - Charles Stross
(Sorry for the U.S. link. The book isn’t out in the UK yet. I got hold of it from an import shop in London.)
This is a sequel-of-sorts to Accelerando, this time using the in-progress singularity as a backdrop for the story rather than the subject, but with plenty of room left for technological and societal extrapolation to take place.
After undergoing a voluntary mind-wipe (ostensibly to escape dangerous memories and possible recriminations from the recently ended ‘censorship’ wars) the protagonist volunteers to enter a high-security prison re-purposed as a simulation of current-era Earth. The story abruptly shifts from a far-future permissive society to modern-day suburbia seen through the eyes of advanced-enough-to-be-alien humans.
While Accelerando just kept expanding and expanding into bigger and more fanciful scenarios, this one actually becomes more constrained as the book progresses. The scenario is unusual, but the action eventually boils down to something close to a current day thriller.
Lots of interesting things to think about, and definitely worth reading, but probably best to try some of the author’s other stuff if you’re new to his work.
Looking For Jake - China Mieville
A bunch of short stories from the guy who wrote the fantastic ‘Perdido Street Station’ and ‘The Scar’ (and, I guess, King Rat and Iron Council too, but I didn’t like them as much…) In the tradition of short story collections, some of them are great (’Looking for Jake’, ‘Reports of Certain Events in London’ and ‘The Tain’ in particular,) while a lot of them are pretty forgettable and seem to be included mostly to make up the page count.
The high points are enough to make the book a good purchase, although it’s sort of a shame that any dissatisfaction I have after finishing it is down to the vagaries of the publishing industry. Tracking down the stories from their original sources would be far too much hassle, but collecting them only makes sense if the volume looks thick enough in a bookshop to justify the novel-sized price tag. Maybe I’d have had a better time if I didn’t have this weird compulsion to finish everything I start reading even if I’m not enjoying it very much.
Banner of Souls - Liz Williams
This is the first thing I’ve read by Williams, but I’ve seen a lot of good reviews of her work, which seems to dot around between fantasy, horror and sci-fi. This instance is of the sci-fi caste, set on far-future versions of Mars and Earth, where evolution has shunted human males out of usefulness leaving them as barely sentient monstrous scavengers, the remaining population is governed by a mysteriously alien matriarchy, and the fate of the human race seems to rest with a time-manipulating child.
Trying to describe the story doesn’t really do it justice, since any potted description makes it sound quite cliched, but in fact it’s very well written and incredibly engrossing. It was enough to make me pick up Darkland afterwards, so I’ll see if that can keep up the good work.
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Nifenegger
I’d avoided reading this for ages, since it was on all of the bestseller lists for yonks and had all of the annoying popular press raving about it. (Which is a pretty stupid reason for refusing to read something, but there you go. A better reason is that the front cover of the book has a blurb calling it ‘The next “The Lovely Bones”‘ and that book sent me to sleep.)
Thankfully I got over all of that and just started to read, and discovered that it’s fantastic. The story follows a man who is occasionally pulled back through time involuntarily, and his wife who has to put up with all of the good and bad which that brings. The mechanics of the time travelling are more or less left alone, but the author uses all of the possibilities that the scenario brings up perfectly. At any point where you start to think ‘Wait doesn’t that mean he could…’ that thought is addressed a few chapters further on.
At the lowest level it’s really just a love story, but it’s told in an off-kilter, non-cloying way, where even though there are moments of elation, the ending is almost unbearable to approach because the book makes never leaves you in any doubt about how it’s all going to finish up. Favourite book since ‘Anansi Boys.’