Books - February/March/April 2007
It’s been a slow few months of reading for me, but here’s what I’ve managed to get through.
Learning the World - Ken MacLeod
I’ve enjoyed all of Ken Macleod’s books, and this is one of his most immediately accessible. It’s a slightly odd setup, in that it’s a first contact novel in which almost no contact happens at all.
A colony ship carrying a terraforming race who - used to the emptiness of space - haven’t fought a war in generations, arrives at its destination planet to find it unexpectedly occupied by an industrial-age race of batlike humanoids (Say with me! It’s not as corny as it sounds!)
The interesting thing about the book is how the two races influence each other without any communication happening. The bat people are split along military and academic lines, while the colonizers are divided between their planet-born prospectors, who are there to seed the planet, move on and make some money in the process, and the ship-born settlers - genetically engineered as planet-dwelling pioneers and represented by a series of blog-style chapters (in a very Danah Boyd-like voice.)
It’s less aggressively political, and more subtle than most of his other books, but if you enjoyed any of them, then you’ll probably like this too.
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
Carrying on my long tradition of reading author’s works totally out of order, I read Foucault’s Pendulum ages ago, and have only just got around to this one, Eco’s most famous book.
As usual with any kind of famous book, there are plenty of better places to find out about it than here, so go to them for all the clever-like talk.
It’s a lot easier to read than I was expecting from a story set in a 13th-century monastery. Very playful and fun.
It’s about all sorts of things: power, learning, progress, symbolism, change, etc. but it’s all hung on the framework of a traditional whodunit murder-mystery, and operates at two totally different levels at the same time.
It’s a very important bit of reading, if only because it might help you notice the day when you yourself become the an isolated monk, screeching from your compound and desperately trying to stop the world from advancing around you.
Honestly, I have no idea what this book was about at all, but I loved it! Ostensibly about three American soldiers who went MIA during the Vietnam war and chose to stay lost in a hidden village of circus performers near Laos, but the more compelling story in the background is of their connection to four generations of women with a unique relationship to a mischievous Tanuki god.
Mostly, it’s an excuse for Robbins to enjoy himself when writing, but there’s lots of food for thought about how your world is shaped for you, and what you can do to change that shape. (It also includes the Villa Incognito song, which, you know, any book where the author writes a song for it has to be good (unless it’s Tolkien-esque high-fantasy.))
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - Cory Doctorow
Another Singularity book, but this time coming from a slightly skewed angle. The lead character, after living several eventful body-rejuvenation lives, eventually moves to Disneyland in order to reconnect with the real world(!) It sounds a bit contrived, but it’s actually a brilliant setting for the world he’s created, where people no longer rely on money as an indicator of status, but on a system of kudos (dubbed “Whuffie”) awarded by other citizens based on how much an individual enhances society.
Cory is one of the four co-editors of bOINGbOING, and if you’ve ever read that site, you’ll recognise the same sense of discovery and wonder here. It feels like he had a lot of fun writing the book and creating its non-stop stream of invention.
One of the reasons it’s so successful is that it doesn’t just rely on future-shock. There’s a good, traditional human story underpinning the whole thing, so it never seems too outlandish. It’s also the perfect length for this type of book. At 200-odd big-print pages, it’s a short, sharp rush of a story that leaves you feeling dazzled and wanting just a little bit more.
Eastern Standard Tribe - Cory Doctorow
This is Doctorow’s second novel after “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom”, and it’s a more near-future look at the globalisation of society. The premise being that as it becomes easier to communicate with people from all over the globe, finding like-minded people becomes easier but keeping up with them will eventually alienate you from your actual surroundings.
The lead character, Art, is a sleep-deprived agent for the Eastern Standard Tribe - a creative collective trying to out-innovate their peers from other time zones - who is steadily being driven mad by internal politics and by bending his life in Europe to fit the waking schedules of his peers.
It’s a great book, and well worth reading, but doesn’t hold together quite as well as Down and Out did. While the previous book suited its very short length perfectly, this one really needed a little bit more space to assert itself. The story is slightly rushed and gets obscured by the idea-flow and jabs about current-day corporate stupidity.
Still, anyone with even the slightest interest in what their future is going to look like should be reading this author obsessively.
Nextwave Volume 1 - This is What They Want - Warren Ellis
I’d love to know the exact route the pitch for this series took through Marvel’s editorial department. It’s a send up of every superhero comic ever made, with a group of stereotypical - yet memorable - superhumans going rogue from the enforcement group they belonged to and its rapidly-having-a-nervous-breakdown commander Dirk Anger.
It’s completely surreal, and has taken a lot of tricks from things like FLCL without seeming derivative at all. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed this hard while reading a book. I frequently had to pause reading to dissolve into fits of laughter and remind myself to breath every now and then.
Tragically, the series is only 12 issues long, and collected into 2 trades: this and the out-soon “I Kick Your Face.” If you read nothing else on this list, read this.
It took me a really long time to get around to reading about this. I’d been hearing about it since it came out in 2004, but it always seemed like a bit of a serious undertaking. It follows 9 different groups of people on the road to the Singularity in near-future India, but encompasses a lot of mythology and history en-route. As such, I’ve no idea how accurate or true to the spirit of the country it is, which is one of the reasons I put off reading it for so long, since following and understanding Indian religion and symbolism is more or less a job for life.
I shouldn’t have worried though. The book is really easy to read, and never bogs down at all, despite being fairly long. Even in its allocated 600 pages though, trying to fit in 9 different connected narratives was always going to be difficult, and it inevitably suffers from some characters and plotlines not getting the airtime and development they deserve. It’s still a wonderful achievement. Not many books are so ambitious and so alive, so the authors who write them should get all the encouragement in the world.
Fables Volume 1, 2 & 3 - Bill Willingham et. al.
This is another series I’d been hearing about for a while, and only just got around to starting, although for some reason I’d kind of got the wrong end of the stick of what it was actually about. The one-line synopsis is that it’s about a group of fairytale and mythological characters, and what they’re up to in the modern world.
From the previews I’d read, and the structure of the trade collection books, I’d assumed that it was a group of disconnected stories, each following different characters, but it’s actually a more traditional serialised format, where a centralised cast of characters (The Big Bad Wolf, Snow White, Rose Red, Goldilocks, Bluebeard, etc, etc) have set up a sanctuary in New York City after being driven from their fairytale homelands by the army of the mysterious “Adversary”.
It’s very well done, and isn’t anything like as twee as you might imagine from the scenario. The first 3 volumes are all very much hard-boiled detective stories, with the novelty of having recognisable characters and stories to riff off of.
I’m probably going to carry on with the rest of the series, as long as I can put up with the usual comic book aggravation of finding anywhere that actually sells every book in the series. (So far, I’ve had to buy each volume from a different place, and the hunt is getting pretty tedious. Amazon claims to have most of them, but it’s lying.)
The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penney
Ah, the joy of choosing a book randomly in a train station shop because you’ve run out of other things to read. This apparently won the Costa Coffee book of the year 2006, but I’m not sure if that’s meant to inspire confidence or dread.
A man is found murdered in a small, gossipy frontier township in 19th century Canada at the same time as a local teenage boy goes missing, forcing his adoptive mother to head out into the icy wilderness to find him and clear his name.
The book does a good job of rounding out its characters, and building an isolated, tense atmosphere, drawing on the tensions between the various settler camps, the Native Indians of the area and the monopolistic fur-trading company which forms the basis of the whole economy.
It is obviously a first novel though. The plot only barely hangs together, and relies on the most ridiculous coincidences and contrivances to move it along. Suspension of disbelief can only go so far. You can also spot the double meaning of the title from space.
I did eventually manage to get to the end of the book, but it was a close thing. There were a lot of point where I was on the brink of giving up on it, so I can’t really recommend it to anyone else.