Consider Phlebas

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
                                   A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
                                 Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

from The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot

I've been reading less than I used to over the last few years, but despite that whenever there's been a new Iain M. Banks book out I've been quick to get it. It just so happened that when I heard the news earlier this year that Banks was suffering from terminal cancer I was reading his latest Culture offering, The Hydrogen Sonata. And now he's died.

Banks has been one of my favourite authors in both his science-fiction guise and mainstream fiction. My formative sci-fi education as a teenager was pretty much all from reading my dad's Clarke and Asimov books. That was until I came across Banks' first sci-fi book Consider Phlebas. It opened up a more gritty, adult and far more richly charactered world than I'd previously enjoyed. His Culture universe was such a fantastic setting that I was quick to read his other available novels and eagerly anticipated each new release (Culture and non-Culture). Back then my book collection was limited, so I re-read some of his earlier novel several times (The Player of Games was my favourite book for many years and still remains one of my top recommendation), always getting more out of them and enjoying meeting and re-meeting the always excellent Culture Minds and Ships. Indeed the non-human(oid) (non-biological) ships and drones were always a huge draw of the books.

I have Banks to thank for opening me up to a whole new range of modern sci-fi and fiction in general (I think Complicity may have been my first non-sci-fi novel that I'd read other than books I was made to read for school work, and The Crow Road amazed me that I could be so drawn into a book about a Scottish family). I'm lucky that I haven't exhausted reading all his works and can still enjoy seeing what else he has to offer. I'd recommend anyone start reading his works and if you've never read any sci-fi before you'd do far worse than to start with some of his - try the short story collection The State of the Art for a dabble.

Hitchhiking for cash

I just read how Eoin Colfer (the author of a series of children's books about a guy called Artemis Fowl) has been commissioned to write a new Hitchhiker's book. Now like many people the Hitchhiker's series holds a special place in my heart (to varying degrees depending on the book) and I'm not really sure that it should be added to by anyone other than Adams - and since he's dead, and a very strong atheist (so if he was in an afterlife he'd probably be a bit too embarrassed to send us back a manuscript for a new book), that doesn't seem a very likely possibility. Then again even if Adams was still around I'm not sure that even he should have carried on with the writing books in that series. Colfer himself said "My first reaction was semi-outrage that anyone should be allowed to tamper with this incredible series,". My main problem is that I just don't see the point (other than a money making ploy by the publishing company, which obviously is the main point) with someone else trying to get more out of the characters and Hitchhiker's universe. I really enjoyed the Hitchhiker's books, but I didn't continue reading them because I had a special fondness for the characters and just had to find out what happened to them next! I just liked the whole bizarre concept and thought it was very funny. Maybe I'm wrong and everyone else has a real need to know what these characters are doing now, but I don't think I do. Also as an author (which I'm patently not) I'm sure I'd rather be creating my own whole new vision, without the pressure and baggage of living up to some past expectation that carrying on a pre-established series would entail.

Terror in the Arctic

Due to having being lax on the blogging front last month I'll begin with a post I meant to write a while back, but obviously didn't. It's a brief review of the last book I read called The Terror by Dan Simmons. In my opinion The Terror is a return to form for Dan Simmons after his last couple of books, Illium and Olympos, which tried to cover too much and ended up being rather convoluted and disappointing. The Terror is based on the the ill-fated Franklin expedition to find the north-west passage (a sea route through the Arctic between the Atlantic and Pacific) - the expedition consisting of two ships: The Erebus and The Terror. The fate of the ships' crews, and the ships themselves, was never discovered, making the story rife for fictionalisation. The book is presented as a horror book, with one of the main premises being of something in the Arctic night picking off the crew (you get this from the blurb of the book, so it's no spoiler), but don't let this fool you as the book a mainly a brilliantly researched and realised account of 19th Century Arctic expeditions, survival and maritime history. Simmons has done a great job in getting across the atrocious conditions that the expedition would have gone through. His characterisation of the large cast of people is also done excellently, obviously with some literary license, but also with a great deal of historical research. It's very easy to feel empathy with the characters and develop an attachment to them early on, meaning you care about their fate despite knowing that the expedition doesn't end well. The book is undeniably very, very bleak and this potentially could get too oppressive throughout a nearly 1000 page book, but it's so engrossing and interesting that you want to keep going. The end of the book does diverge substantially from the rest and I wasn't satisfied with it (except for the very end), but was obviously done to give the monster a meaningful background and again was very well researched. I would really recommend this book, but far more as a historical fictionalisation than for it's horror aspects.

The dreaming void

Last week I finished reading a new novel (of the pulp sci-fi space opera kind) called The Dreaming Void by Peter F Hamilton. The book is set in the same universe as Hamilton's last two books that formed the Commonwealth Saga and is the start of a new trilogy. To start with if you are going to read this book then you pretty much need to have read the Commonwealth Saga books beforehand. There are several of the same characters involved (despite being set 1500 years later) and many events that are referred to, so I think you'd be quite confused if you didn't have the background from the previous books. Like Hamilton's other major sagas the story has many threads that are jumped between at quite a pace, which takes a bit of getting used to as you try to absorb all the characters and events. There are a couple of threads which seem to flow better and held my focus far more than other areas, but none of it is high literature. The reason I enjoy reading Hamilton's stuff as that it's generally pure pulp fun. There's enough action and high-technology stuff going on to keep you going through the less absorbing parts of the story. One thing that does start to grate, as in previous books, is Hamilton's sex scenes. He does like his sex scenes and almost all the people in his books are outrageously attractive and randy, but largely they'll just make you cringe. It's not that I'm prudish about literary sex, it's just that he can't write it without it coming across a bit pubescent-teenage-boy-style. There's one particular scene that almost made me stop reading the book completely! If I disregard certain scenes though I did enjoy the book. It's not as good as parts of the Nights Dawn trilogy, which provided some great moments of pure space opera fun, but it seems on a level with the Commonwealth Saga. I'll keep on with it as it has left me wanting to know what happens next.

183 days later

Last week, after about six months of reading, I finally finished Neal Stephenson's trilogy of books The Baroque Cycle. This consists of three rather chunky (just under 900 page each) volumes: Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World. The books are kind of a follow on from Stephenson's previous novel Crytonomicon which is a very good book itself, and highly recommended by me to be read before or after these books.

You can read the wikipedia entries for a description of the stories' main plots and characters and I can't be bothered repeating them, but very briefly it's set in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, mainly in Western Europe, and follows the lives of several people mixed up in Natural Philosophy and the politics of the time, and includes many real historical figures. From here I'll just give my opinion on the books. Firstly if you're interested in the history of how much of modern science started (like the formation of the Royal Society), of English and Western European monarchy and politics, and of modern economics, then these books are great (especially the first one Quicksilver.) All these topics are covered as integral parts of the diverse storylines and are handled excellently. I'm not sure how accurate the historical accounts are, and there's obviously a fair bit of artistic license with real historical figures characterisations, but it all appears very well researched and timelined. You feel that your learning a lot and it makes you interested in finding out much more about the period. The two main storylines of the first book, that split into several others during the later books, before converging towards the end, are both equally interesting and well written so that you generally don't get disappointed when there's a switch between the two. Stephonson is prone to giving very long descriptions of things (hence the length of the books), but for the most part this enhances your enjoyment, however in the final book The System of the World these descriptions can seem overly long.

I really enjoyed the books and would recommend them to anyone who has half a year to spare (I can be a fairly slow reader, but they're going to take a while for anyone to get through.) I'd probably say that Quicksilver was my favourite, and that I was slightly disappointed by The System of the World. Quicksilver interest entirely throughout and didn't dragged at all, but The System of the World, despite probably being the fastest paced with regards to things happening over the shortest timescale, just had moments that I felt did drag and could have been left out or got through with fewer words.

I'll be looked forward to more or Stephenson's work in the future, but I've currently got three more books to keep me occupied.

Literary surprise

I've never come across a book that suddenly turns into a musical before. That is until I read a specific chapter of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver last night. All was normal until a sleep deprivation, but mainly syphilis, induced psychosis (the character in the books, not mine!), brought about a veritable Les Miserables style song and dance, including extras galore consisting of dancing skeletons, priests, slaves and fishwives! I'll write a proper review of the book when I've finished it, but I really recommend people read it.

Reading into things

A lot of people seem to use their blogs to review books/films/tv shows/video games/restaurants/foods/drinks/whatever and I've decided to join in by reviewing (or at least briefly commenting on) the book I finished reading last night. It was Cities in Flight by James Blish. This book is actually a collection of four Blish novels following man's expansion from being bound to our solar system to having a galactic civilisation, and it spans an approximately 2000 year period of future history from around the present day to about 4104. The books weren't quite written in their internal chronologies' order, with book two being written first, followed by book one, and then three and four. I may give some spoilers here, but I'll try not to give away anything major.

Firstly I should say that I did enjoy this book, but it's definitely a book of two halves (I know I already said it's made up of four books, so in reality it's a book of four quarters). The first novel follows the development of the technology that allows humans to eventually begin flights to other stars i.e. faster-than-light (FTL in sci-fi speak) drives - called spin-dizzies - and what Blish calls antiagathics, or drugs that prolong human life almost unlimitedly. This book only covers a short time-span of a few years and holds together very well, with enough characterisation for you to appreciate the main characters and a really well developed plot that stays interesting throughout. The second novel jumps forward about a thousand years and we get to hear about the cities in flight of the title. Many worlds have been colonised in a first wave of expansion after the invention of the spin-dizzies, however things on Earth are fairly bleak. The spin-dizzies enable entire cities to lift themselves off Earth and fly about the galaxies to look for work on colony worlds. We hear of one city and a boy press-ganged onto it as it takes flight to find work. This story also takes place over a relatively short period of time and concentrates on this boy as the main character as he experiences first the harsh life aboard the city he was press-ganged onto, and then the completely different experience of being on New York - which had taken flight many years before and was well used to the wandering lifestyle. Again it all hangs together well and is a very compelling story which makes you want to hear more about the characters.

Things start to go a bit wrong in the third book. This is set a few hundred years after the previous novel and now concentrates on the travels of New York in its searches for work, with the major player being its Mayor Amalfi. The main problem with this book is that it spans several hundred years, which leads to the reader feeling that there are quite large inconsistencies in the time frame. This is because the characters don't seem to evolve as you'd expect that they would over such a period of time - this is on purpose, I expect, because the characters have such long lifespans (due to the antiagathics) that it's natural that things take such a long time to unfold. Unfortunately Blish a) doesn't really give the reader a consistent grasp of the time frame, so things seem to happen at very weird rates and b) the characters start to grate on you a bit. You just feel that you're missing something. This feeling caries on into the fourth and final novel, which mainly however grates because of the very weird physics it invokes (I know that FTL travel is weird physics, but it's a mainstay of much sci-fi)!

So basically I'd say that the first two novels are very good reads. The second two are ok, but just seem poor after what's preceded them. You basically end up wishing that Blish had carried on in the same vein, with maybe some of the characters, as the first two novels. If you've read the book and think that I'm completely wrong (or right) then let me know.

You can now look forward to my next review. I'll be reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson which is pretty thick, so it may take a while to get through. I hope it's on a par with Cryptonomicon which was very good.