|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B0C416D56S
| 3.30
| 220
| unknown
| Sep 12, 2023
|
it was amazing
|
It takes cojones of a certain size to write this sort of book, when the template has long been transformed into a Holy Grail by Brett Easton Ellis and
It takes cojones of a certain size to write this sort of book, when the template has long been transformed into a Holy Grail by Brett Easton Ellis and Douglas Coupland. Not to mention iconic movies like ‘Elephant’ by Gus van Sant, ‘Kids’ by Larry Clark, and the entire slacker oeuvre of Kevin Smith. (Though I will rather stick toothpicks under my own nails than attempt to watch HBO’s ‘Euphoria’.) Coupland’s ‘Generation X’ (1991, the subtitle of which is ‘Tales for an Accelerated Culture’), put the official stamp on my blip on the generational timeline (I was born in 1969.) Then I saw that Mark McCrindle’s ‘Generation Alpha’ (those born 2010 to 2024) was published earlier this year. It all seems grist to the inter-generational mill, meaning that young, dark horse writers like Alex Kazemi (29) will always be writing books like this that seem to serve more as a warning to the next generation about the sociocultural toxicity seeping in from previous generation. Is it a cycle we are ever going to be able to break? We are already getting official studies like ‘Mental health and wellbeing of children and adolescents during the Covid-19 pandemic’ in BMJ (2021), which points out that half of mental health disorders (including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and others) start by age 14, and three quarters by age 24. That is a truly frightening statistic. Considering the potential scale of that looming mental health crisis for an entire generation, do we really need (yet another) book like ‘New Millennium Boyz’ (both the ‘new’ and the ‘z’ are semiotic indicators of a particular sense of ironic detachment, combined with a nostalgic yearning for commodification, that seems to have permeated the 90s.) The decade commenced with Mandela being released from prison on 11 February 1990 and was book-ended by the Columbine High School massacre on 20 April 1999. Chuck Klosterman notes in ‘The Nineties’ that Facebook was launched in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and Instagram in 2010. The (now rather quaint seeming) AOL and CompuServe ‘chatrooms’ of the 1990s were light years away from how social media has both mediated and altered the discourse around individual and collective identity and freedom in the 2000s – especially now that we’re at an unknown tipping point thanks to the Pandora’s Box opened by AI. Klosterman notes: It was possible, perhaps as late as 1995, to view the internet as only an extension of computer technology. By the end of the decade, the internet operated as its own form of mass media, with computers merely serving as the host. It was a profound change that continues to reverberate in the Western world, the full implications of which were not even dreamed of in the 1990s. It tends to colour the decade with rose-tinted nostalgia – Kazemi’s main point, I think, is to warn against the danger of such nostalgia. It not only blinkers us but puts up inter-generational fences and stymies us from nurturing empathy and enlightenment as indispensable societal traits. My favourite scene, and perhaps the most whimsical, is 18% into the ebook: Santana’s ‘Smooth’ plays outside my window. I slide the blinds to the side and look down on the backyard deck. My mom’s Tupperware group is gathered around the table, passing around a bottle of wine. The generational disconnect here is palpable. I do not want to give too much away, but Brad’s social-climbing mom is afforded significant agency at the end. It is an unexpected turn that, I suspect, is going to polarise readers. (It certainly changed my rating from 3 to 5 stars.) It is an emotionally valid and surprisingly resonant ending that casts the events of the book in a much harsher light than the romantic glow of nostalgia – again, in line with Kazemi’s argument that the biggest impact on the present is our viewpoint of the past. Change that, and you can change the future. Or at least make it that much more bearable. Of course, it might seem disingenuous or even disrespectful to suggest that a horrific event like Columbine can be perceived with any sense of nostalgia. The characters in ‘New Millennium Boyz’ certainly do, obsessing about what the killers wore, whether they went to Burger King or McDonald’s prior to the shooting, and what videos they watched. Interestingly, Kazemi refers to ‘hybristophilia’, which Bing tells me “is a paraphilia involving sexual interest in and attraction to those who commit crimes.” I think such fetishisation only became possible when social media reached a nadir in the 2000s and allowed entire swathes of people to fall down rabbit holes of their making. These people effectively live in alternate realities shaped by their paranoia and complete disassociation from what decoloniality refers to as the human Commons, “the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth.” It is the literal antithesis of the stereotyped Columbine anti-hero lurking in a basement playing video games, eating Cheerios, watching porn (if the internet connection was fast enough), and plotting the downfall of humanity. Or at least their own school. However, Kazemi warns that to label his characters as ‘anti-heroes’ is, indeed, to fall into the trap of retrospective nostalgia. Interestingly, Kazemi refers to ‘consumerism’, a buzzword of the 1990s, as opposed to our current obsession with capitalism as a system and its contribution to toxic masculinity and gender stereotyping. Selfish, self-centred behaviour is part and parcel of ‘manning up’ enough to climb the capitalist ladder to economic and patriarchal success. It is a paradigm that was already being firmly entrenched in the 1990s, which ultimately makes ‘New Millennium Boyz’ such a sad read. A lot of attention is probably going to focus on some of the more gratuitous and lurid content (the Y2K pre-apocalypse setpiece is both Dionysian and intensely grubby.) My sole caveat is that the book really needs a listing of organisations, helplines, or general resources that troubled youth can turn to if need be. We never know what intervention, no matter how small or random, is likely to save a single life or an entire community from tragedy.) This would have been far more effective than the rather lame ‘content warning’ that the publisher tags onto the beginning. But these are the times we live in, and it is certainly brave for Kazemi to have pursued this project over such a long time of his own personal blogging career (and familiarity with controversy.) I also disagree with the editorial decision to asterisk out a particular swearword. But, again, these are perilous times for free speech and authorial ownership. I just hope that the brouhaha this book will inevitably cause (I can just hear people ask: Where was the ‘sensitivity reader?’ while Kazemi was scribbling his depraved filth) does not overshadow his powerful message: The kids are not all right. They haven’t been for a long time, and still aren’t, despite our more enlightened age (more woke, right wing, and reactionary; who would have seen that curveball coming in the 1990s?) And it is our collective responsibility to help each other navigate an uncertain future to leave a legacy that, in all probability, will be flawed and marred but that will tell our children’s children: We survived. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 23, 2023
|
Sep 02, 2023
|
Aug 18, 2023
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 194372086X
| 9781943720866
| 194372086X
| 4.08
| 306
| Aug 29, 2023
| Aug 29, 2023
|
it was ok
|
They lived for those they lost. Until they could live for themselves again. Okay, this novella shows great potential. It is difficult to get an, er, fr They lived for those they lost. Until they could live for themselves again. Okay, this novella shows great potential. It is difficult to get an, er, fresh take on the zombie genre, but Warren Wagner manages to throw in some truly startling moments that combine dread, horror, and uneasy empathy in a queasy cocktail. Undead babies, anyone? I love Quinton’s backstory and the heartrending flashbacks to the death of his partner Frankie at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1990s. The symbolic link between the Afflicted, who desire only death, and AIDS victims, who only wanted more life, adds significant pathos to a book that makes for difficult reading at some points. It seems rather odd that Quinton manages to spend a couple of decades alone in an isolated cabin, scrounging for HIV meds from small-town pharmacies in the area. But no idyll lasts forever. What ensues is truly horrific and unpredictable, showing that Quinton will do anything to survive. Until he meets another living human being. While Quinton is a fully realised character, the same cannot be said of Billy. I got more mistrust than any hint of sexual attraction between the two. I wish that Wagner could have made this a bit longer to, er, flesh out the budding relationship between two damaged gay men at odds in a zombie dystopia. There are also a couple of technical issues that took me out of the narrative. When the two finally realise that there is a spark flickering there, the scene takes place just after Billy has just sewn up some nasty bite marks inflicted on Quinton. Maybe love is greater than pain. And then in the final showdown at the pharmaceutical factory and warehouse-slash-cult lodge, Quinton jumps out of a window at one point and injures his leg. He manages to crawl back into the building through another window into a laundry room and rips up a sheet to bandage his leg. Then suddenly we have him running down passageways, and no mention of the injured leg again. It is the sort of continuity error that a good editor should pick up on immediately, and it is a real pity the novella is marred by a few of these. Still, I really enjoyed this. Punchy and visceral, it literally leaves you wanting more. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 08, 2023
|
Sep 15, 2023
|
Aug 18, 2023
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1804440582
| 9781804440582
| 4.25
| 103
| unknown
| Sep 05, 2023
|
it was amazing
|
I see a set of possible futures, based on where society might be heading. Imagine, if you will, a world where science and technology have solved most
I see a set of possible futures, based on where society might be heading. Imagine, if you will, a world where science and technology have solved most of our problems, and democracy is much less likely to be gamed than it currently is, leaving us in a glorious utopia where everyone has more than enough. We can all be healthy and beautiful, and nobody has to work unless they want to. All of that leisure time and luxury would make princesses out of everyone and I think the ensuing world would be excessively camp, a high-tech version of Versailles, with endless diversions, sexual fluidity, outrageous fashions and shrieks of laughter ringing out everywhere as our robot servants sassed us with their AI algorithms. I have ‘Fabulosa! The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language’ by Paul Baker on my ‘to read’ list. So I was, er, tickled pink when I managed to bag a Netgalley arc of ‘Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World’ (yes, Baker does like long book titles with exclamation marks!) Baker is a Professor of English Language at Lancaster University, so I was unsure what to expect going into this. Instead of a stuffy academic overview, this is a delightful, whimsical, informative, and quite frankly inspiring headlong rush through a swathe of gay history and culture. Yes, Baker does engage with the seminal ‘Notes on Camp’ by Susan Sontag (1964), to which this seems like a companion piece. With a liberal dash of ‘GuRu’ by Rupaul thrown into the mix. Having finished the book, I still have no idea what camp actually is (you know it when you see it, apparently.) Though any author who offers a serious discussion of ‘camp’ in the (dizzying) context of Liberace and Trump deserves extra sprinkles of glitter. Probably my favourite section is the account of the shenanigans of Louis XIV. If there is any nation who can camp it up like no tomorrow, it is the French. From Noel Coward to Judy Garland, Madonna, telenovelas and drag … it is all here, and a lot of surprising facts and titbits that I certainly did not know. There is a lot of right-wing tension globally, with the US determined to make Margaret Atwood a lived reality rather than a (literary) dystopian nightmare. What I loved about ‘Camp!’ is that it makes me proud to be gay, and proud of my culture and the shoulders of all those wonderful people we’ve stood on to get where we are, even if it is rather shitty right now. As Rupaul says, keep on shining and let love win! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 28, 2023
|
Apr 2023
|
Mar 13, 2023
|
ebook
| |||||||||||||||
| B0B3T6G46L
| 3.19
| 135
| Jul 05, 2022
| Jul 05, 2022
|
it was amazing
|
All this time, with the creature, he’d taken care hardly to ask certain questions—what it was, where it came from. They’d taken care because a certain
All this time, with the creature, he’d taken care hardly to ask certain questions—what it was, where it came from. They’d taken care because a certain part of him knew there were no answers ... I hesitate to compare books and authors in case one gives the impression you are getting something similar only in a different package, like a bag of chips. However, we all have writers we admire. Not only do we seek out reading experiences that strike the same chord, but we also become attuned to what attracts us to these writers in the works of others. Hence reading ‘The Pain Eater’ by Kyle Muntz gave me very strong Kathe Koja and Poppy Brite vibes, fringe horror writers who are absolute masters at evoking the ineffable. What I particularly liked about ‘The Pain Eater’ is that there is a lifecycle of the titular monster lurking in there somewhere, like the egg to face hugger to chest burster to rampaging xenomorph in the Alien movies. This is a clever strategy as it allows Muntz to deliver many indelible images and leftfield ideas during the course of the book. As a savvy horror reader, I thought I knew where it was going, but I was often wrongfooted. And especially at that shocking, darkly transcendent ending. Too often horror movies focus on upping the quotient of jump scares, while horror novels tend to foreground the physicality of their horror premise. What is much more difficult, yet far more effective, is evoking existential dread. ‘The Pain Eater’ achieves this by focusing on an increasingly fractured family struggling with the corrosive force of grief after the death of a father. The sibling rivalry between the two teenage brothers is evoked with empathy and precision. It contrasts strongly against the surreal presence of the creature that enters the family’s orbit like a black hole with its own inescapable gravitational pull. The monster would not work nearly as well as it does if the human characters were not so believable. There is lots going on here thematically, from dealing with mental illness to the psychological fallout of trauma, how to cope with a toxic family structure where the traditional power dynamic is upended, and the murky hormonal soup of teenage sexuality on the cusp. Muntz does not lay on the metaphors too heavily though. Part of what gives this novel its extraordinarily visceral impact is the deliberate ambiguity of the creature, which is a looming and utterly bizarre presence even when it is not the main narrative focus. I think CLASH Books is an independent press, and it certainly is one to watch for cutting-edge genre fiction. What did mar my reading experience was a slew of typos in the first half. I dutifully highlighted these in my ebook version but gave up after a while and just tried to read through them. This is a very impressive horror novel that dissects a really fraught family dynamic with genuine insight. None of the characters here are particularly likeable, but Muntz engages the reader’s empathy and curiosity throughout. He then injects an even darker Lovecraftian dynamic into the mix, without sacrificing any of the underlying psychological realism. It is a fine balance to strike, but Muntz nails it. ‘The Pain Eater’ is likely to linger at the back of my mind for a long time to come. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 12, 2022
|
Aug 27, 2022
|
Aug 12, 2022
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1473228905
| 9781473228900
| 1473228905
| 3.96
| 1,131
| 2022
| Sep 29, 2022
|
really liked it
|
Stephen Baxter has to be one of the most prolific SF authors working today. Hardly had I bought Galaxias when I heard about The Thousand Earths coming
Stephen Baxter has to be one of the most prolific SF authors working today. Hardly had I bought Galaxias when I heard about The Thousand Earths coming out later this year. And then the friendly folks at Orion happily sent me an arc from NetGalley UK on the same day I requested it. Baxter is a bit of an oddity in SF. More well-known in the UK than the US, he harks back to a different tradition of the genre where Big Ideas were everything. I’ve always thought of Baxter as the natural successor to the great Arthur C. Clarke. Apart from collaborating with Clarke himself, Baxter and fellow Brit Alastair Reynolds wrote one of my favourite hard SF novels of all time, The Medusa Chronicles (2016), based on Clarke’s own 1971 novella ‘A Meeting with Medusa’. Well, I’m glad to say Baxter is firing on all cylinders with The Thousand Earths, probably his most cohesive and tightly plotted book in a long time. And it is a standalone story! (Though Baxter has been known to pull sequels out of some very improbable hats.) Unfortunately, all the inherent weaknesses of the Big Ideas tradition are on full display here as well, namely stock characterisation and melodrama as a central plot device. Baxter is also cheerfully oblivious to gender politics, it seems, so has no qualms to describe John Hackett’s vigorous sex romps with a far future human female after he has travelled millions of light years to Andromeda and back. Oh, and it is only in a Baxter novel where such a mind-boggling feat is merely an aside to the main action. The main focus here is the eventual collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies. Although predicted to occur 4.5 billion years in the future, Baxter likens it to the current climate change crisis in that urgent action is better sooner rather than later, when we finally run out of options and there are no more roads left to be taken. Apart from his beloved deep time and future history, Baxter tackles the Fermi Paradox again with renewed vigour and startling results. Think Stapledon and Herschel – that is all I am going to say about the plot, as it is best to go into the book cold. The two-strand narrative begins with John Hackett embarking on his epic voyage, before switching to Mela and her family on a distant iteration of earth (one of a thousand) that is succumbing to some incomprehensible apocalypse. (The savvy SF reader is likely to work out what is going on pretty quickly, but Baxter does have some nifty surprises up his authorial sleeve.) I loved the evocative Mela sections, which represent some of the best writing in Baxter’s long career to date. The family dynamics are effectively portrayed, while the world-building behind this frontier-like earth is incredibly detailed, yet never gets in the way of the story. Yes, the brother is a bit of a stock villain, while John Hackett himself is yet another iteration of the Reid Malenfant trope. And the ending does hinge on one deus ex machina too many (literally, as it were). But these are quibbles, as one reads Baxter for his sense of wonder and boundless enthusiasm for the possibilities and potential posed by science and technology, and not for his literary affectations. As per usual, Baxter includes a deft Afterword that references all of his speculation in the book. No matter how left field an idea, someone somewhere has thought seriously about it. While writing this, I saw that the latest jaw-dropping photograph from the James Webb Telescope is of two galaxies colliding. Baxter must be so proud. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Aug 04, 2022
|
Aug 08, 2022
|
Aug 04, 2022
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1250827485
| 9781250827487
| 1250827485
| 3.30
| 1,247
| Apr 28, 2020
| Jun 07, 2022
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
0
|
not set
|
not set
|
Mar 24, 2022
|
Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1646569237
| B09L7HY2W8
| 4.50
| 2
| unknown
| Nov 13, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
“I realize it’s barely daybreak, but this has been a lot to unpack,” he announced. “I need a drink.” Through some sleight-of-hand, Didi produced a ligh “I realize it’s barely daybreak, but this has been a lot to unpack,” he announced. “I need a drink.” Through some sleight-of-hand, Didi produced a lighter like a magic trick. “And I need a cigarette,” she agreed. What is it with Rodney Ross and conflagrations? First, he releases ‘Diversionary Fires’. Hot on its heels, we have ‘Smoking with Didi’, another tale where people rake through the metaphorical ashes of their lives. In this case, it is a brother and sister reluctantly drawn back into the family orbit after the paterfamilias passes away (or, rather, succumbs agonisingly to cancer.) Ross has never shied away from the messy reality of death: ”He’s been knocking at death’s door so long he was wedged in the mail slot. He had cancer everywhere but his fingernails, and I’m not so sure about those, as gray as they got. Did you know I had to cut them with tin snips?” It is a macabre detail, but a strangely endearing one that not only anchors Didi in a very particular reality, but has the reader rooting for her all the way through this all-too-brief novella. And on a side note, if you think the town Aughe (‘pronounced Oy’) rings a bell: Yes, it is the same setting as ‘Diversionary Fires’. Early on, Pete comments “that the outskirts of town had seen some resurgence due to the construction of a large senior care facility.” On Firefly Road. Ross is also the master of the plot twist that either throws events into stark relief, or forces the reader to mentally recalibrate what has happened before. Or both. ‘Smoking with Didi’, in particular, carpet-bombs the poor reader with two incendiary twists in quick succession near the end. The twists are innocently contained in short separate paragraphs at the end of two specific chapters. I, for one, did a mental ‘WTF?’ U-turn before I could carry on reading. Really? was my initial response. He expects us to believe that? But then Ross deftly fills in the blanks, and lets the reader consider the true implications of what seemed so preposterous at first glance. He also pokes fun at the very conventions he uses to such masterful effect: “This has all the call-outs of a crappy brother/sister movie on Hulu, to allow for swear words.” Pete remarks at one point that ”This trip’s already been like an O. Henry story.” The story starts out with a sister (reluctantly) phoning her estranged brother to inform him of their father’s death, and the brother (equally reluctantly) agreeing to return to their home town (where he had long ago managed to “get that cherry business out of the way”, but with unfortunate [and unforeseen] consequences.) Pete wonders at the end, in the wake of all the ensuing drama: “Am I Dorothy, returned from Oz, having learned the lesson to never venture beyond my own cow barn?” It ultimately transforms into a brother-and-sister buddy road trip as Didi is hellbent to rekindle memories of Harry Potter at Wizarding World in Florida. If that sounds crazy, fear not. Ross is in such control of his material, and has such an abiding faith in these damaged but endearing characters, that the reader can’t help be swept along in their wake of revelation and redemption. Pete is gay and down and out on his luck, both in love and work. He is also on the wrong side of being a twink, with his gym-bunny sixpack a shadow of its former self. One of the best set pieces (in a long string of standout scenes for such a short story) is when Pete bumps into a former schoolmate at his dad’s funeral. Of course, he had had the raging hots for this unattainable jock. Now, when the afterglow of youthful horniness has faded for both of them, and in the wake of the friend’s bypass surgery and a failed marriage, he invites Pete to his house for a beer and a dip in the jacuzzi. (At this point I was saying ‘no, no, no!’ quite loudly at Pete’s rashness. Actually, there are a lot of moments when the reader finds him or herself admonishing these characters for reckless behaviour, stupid decisions, or both.) I know it is terrible to compare writers without sounding like a publisher’s marketing department, but Ross has the weird eye for detail and empathic humour of John Irving (and Richard Russo, come to think of it) that results in paragraphs such as this: He came to The Blood Clot Badminton House, where the father of a childhood buddy, Marty, died of a cerebral aneurysm in front of the entire family, playing badminton. Swatting at a shuttlecock, he’d clutch his head and collapsed on their lawn. The wife, thinking it was a joke, kicked him in the ass. When he didn’t leap up and yell, “Fooled’ ya!” 911 was called. That this bawdy and riotous tale manages to end against a backdrop of fireworks at Disneyworld is no small wonder, as it is testament to Ross’s unwavering faith in humanity: Whistling projectiles soared high behind Cinderella’s illuminated castle. The expectant intake of breath was crowd-sized. “And just like that,” Pete observed, “every adult, transfixed.” ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 14, 2022
|
Jan 19, 2022
|
Jan 14, 2022
|
Kindle Edition
| |||||||||||||||
| 0374600961
| 9780374600969
| 0374600961
| 3.50
| 1,339
| Jun 07, 2022
| Jun 07, 2022
|
it was amazing
|
The Church believes in the Resurrection, and at the Resurrection the body and soul are united. What age the body is, and exactly how the two are rejoi
The Church believes in the Resurrection, and at the Resurrection the body and soul are united. What age the body is, and exactly how the two are rejoined , I don’t know; when I asked my friend, he said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that one.” You know when a book comes out of left field and reading it ends up being such an emotional wallop? I received ‘The Kingdom of Sand’ as a Netgalley arc and promptly forgot about it until I checked my bookshelf and realised I had only a week in which to finish it. Luckily for me it is under 300 pages, and also a book hard to put down once you start it. Holleran, of course, is author of the classic ‘Dancer from the Dance’ (1978), and this apparently is his first novel in nearly two decades. How on earth do you follow up such a seminal work so far down the line, especially as a shining star of The Violet Quill writers’ group in the 1980s (Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund, George Whitmore). Now aged 79, Holleran tackles what is perhaps one of the most ignored topics in contemporary gay literature: Getting old and sick, and dying alone. The situation is doubly compounded if you are gay, especially if you lost a partner to Aids or simply natural attrition, or never ever found ‘the one’. A lot of gay people are also estranged from their families, who disapprove of their ‘lifestyle choices’, while gay friends of a similar age (and outlook) are few and far between. As Holleran says, who on earth do you call when you need to go for that colonoscopy? If all of this seems depressing and offputting, fear not. You will be amazed at our unnamed narrator’s sexual appetite (and stamina) deep into his sixties, and his cruising habits in the small town in which he has chosen to settle (and eventually pass away in). The book is deeply funny, tender, humane, and surprisingly unsentimental. Holleran’s glorious writing – long, lingering sentences, even longer chapters, and a painter’s eye for detail and effect – hums with the vibrancy of life and passion. At the core of the book is the unnamed narrator’s ‘relationship’ with Earl, who at two decades older is about to begin the path of inexorable decline that we must all undertake in the end. It is a quiet story, filled with wonder and pathos, and unflinching about the terrible toll that age can exact. It is no spoiler to reveal that Earl does finally succumb to what Henry James called “the great, the distinguished thing.” He does so quietly in the middle of a paragraph, as discreetly as he had lived his entire life. There follows an incredible passage where we find the unnamed narrator sitting at home watching the teeming animal and insect life in his unkempt garden, thinking of his just departed friend, and what a precious gift life is in the end, simply due to it being bestowed upon us so arbitrarily and briefly. When the American novelist Howard Sturgis lay on his deathbed he was cared for so solicitously by his life partner that at one point Sturgis had to remind him, “A watched pot never boils” – surely one of the wittiest comments ever made while dying, unless you consider what the socialite Drue Heinz said when nearing the end – “They won’t even let you take a book” – or the emperor Vespasian, who remarked on his deathbed, “I think I am turning into a god.” ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Mar 22, 2022
|
Mar 26, 2022
|
Jan 14, 2022
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| B09C4FGVGQ
| 3.30
| 1,247
| Apr 28, 2020
| Jun 07, 2022
|
it was amazing
|
The impact of Tordotcom on promoting transnational SF cannot be underestimated. When I received an arc of ‘The City Inside’, I had no idea who Samit B
The impact of Tordotcom on promoting transnational SF cannot be underestimated. When I received an arc of ‘The City Inside’, I had no idea who Samit Basu was or what the book was about. Going into it blind was a good thing, as I emerged a couple of days later completely bowled over by Basu’s dense world-building and evocative characters. I like to think of this type of near-future SF as ‘bleeding edge’ fiction. On the surface of it, ‘The City Inside’ seems to be a rather outlandish and lurid dystopia extrapolated from current trends such as neofascism: “the repeated pandemic-wave collapses … the blasphemy laws in several states … the mass de-citizenings, the vote list erasures, the reeducation camps, the internet shutdowns, the news censors, the curfews … even the scary stories of data-driven home invasions …” But there is nothing here that could not conceivably happen in our current world, or that is not already poking its nasty head out somewhere. At the same time there is an element of timelessness, in the sense of being frozen in a never-ending nightmare, about this book that sucks the reader into its dark maw. Remarkably, given how quickly global events have progressed recently, this was originally published by Simon & Schuster India as ‘Chosen Spirits’ in 2020. That version had an ending that a lot of people found to be quite abrupt, but which I quite liked. The American version, however, adds a final chapter called ‘Deleted Scenes’, which rather sneakily makes that abrupt ending even more tenuous and ambiguous. In his 27 July review for Locus, Gary K. Wolfe remarks that ‘The City Inside’ “is yet the latest example of what seems to be a remarkable period in Indian and South Asian SFF.” This did remind me somewhat of ‘River of Gods’ (2004), but Ian McDonald’s procedural-cum-singularity opus is more concerned about an idealised version of India (maybe in a similar way that William Gibson is attracted to China because of its exotic grit and texture.) A particular achievement of Basu’s writing here is that he never resorts to warts-and-all polemic, but instead puts his characters through the wringer of an increasingly distorted world ravaged by both climate change and the death throes of neoliberal capitalism. Throw in the diabolical evil of social media as the ‘new’ reality, and you have a recipe for an extraordinarily evocative read. This is a bit of a slow burn, and the reader is allowed ample time to become immersed in Basu’s world before the story gains legs. This may be frustrating to readers used to more conventional plot-driven narratives, but hang in there. That ending is really worth it. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jul 30, 2022
|
Jul 31, 2022
|
Jan 10, 2022
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| B09B5JY1HC
| 4.38
| 63,853
| Apr 05, 2022
| Apr 05, 2022
|
it was amazing
|
Since finishing this novel, I have been debating how, and when, to review it. Should I wait until my thoughts have percolated a bit more? And what abo
Since finishing this novel, I have been debating how, and when, to review it. Should I wait until my thoughts have percolated a bit more? And what about the issue of trigger warnings, because if there is one book that needs a lurid ‘hazardous to your emotional state’ sticker, this is it. But then any mention of potential triggers to alert sensitive readers will spoil the plot for savvy readers, especially as this is a book that pivots on certain key events. One elephant in the room I want to get out of the way first: This is not ‘Shuggie Bain 2.0’, even though it features a similar setting and milieu. And an alcoholic mother called Mo-Maw. When Jodie asks her brother Mungo: “What on earth would you know about the ways of men, eh?”, what she should be warning him about are the ways (and wiles) of women. There is none of the sentiment or accidental empathy here that accrued to the mother figure in ‘Shuggie Bain’, by dint of the reader spending so much time in her sozzled company (hogging the limelight from her son, whose name after all does adorn the cover). Mo-Maw makes a brief appearance at the beginning when she waves Mungo on his way to a fateful fishing weekend with two complete strangers, and then only reappears again round about 100 pages in. Crucially, she is a truly monstrous figure with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, so the less time we spend in her company, the better. Critics, armchair and otherwise, have not only been decrying ‘Young Mungo’ as ‘Shuggie Bain’ in a different cagoule, but are already lamenting the poor departed muse of author Douglas Stuart, who seems perpetually fixated on Glasgow. Bear in mind that this is called ‘Young Mungo’, which clearly signposts the boundaries of the novel’s scope. Equally clear is that the ending is likely to irritate those same readers who were annoyed at how ‘Shuggie Bain’ ended. Or, rather, petered out (me included, though I am more ambivalent about the ending of this book). I for one would love for Stuart to complete a trilogy of Glasgow novels. ‘Old Mungo’ would be as satisfying a title as any for the third, because one thing that fascinates me about the world of extreme poverty, deprivation, and violence depicted so powerfully here is what modern Glasgow looks like beneath the scars of her brutal past. What is this city and its people like today? What remains of the tenements? Is it haunted by the blood and violence that stalked its streets and took place behind closed doors? In a 2015 BBC News article, Andrew Kerr wrote: Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who was her Scottish secretary from 1986-1990, famously said in one interview about the Scottish view of Thatcher: "She was a woman, she was an English woman and she was a bossy English woman and they could probably put up with one of these but three simultaneously was a bit too much." There is an underlying political current throughout the book that turns into quite a live wire whenever Thatcher is mentioned. One of the most devastating scenes in the book (and there are a lot of those) is when Mrs Campbell gets beaten up by her husband, an event that reverberates through the very floorboards of the tenement building. When Mungo and Jodie go to her rescue by fabricating an excuse as to why she is needed in their flat, and Mungo innocently asks as to why she stays with the bastard, Mrs Campbell launches into a long diatribe justifying her husband’s appalling behaviour: “Ye’re too wee to know anything about men and their anger.” Another ‘wee elephant’ in the room, to adopt Stuart’s phrasing, is the jacket copy describing this as “the deeply moving story of the dangerous first love of two young men.” A quotation from The Observer review declares this as “a gay Romeo and Juliet set in the brutal world of Glasgow’s housing estates”, a description that made me blanch. I think this marketing angle skews the reader’s expectations, because Mungo and James’s affair or dalliance or whatever is exceedingly slow burn. It begins with platonic innocence, and only becomes a focal point in the narrative after about 200 pages. That is halfway through a 400-page novel. Having said that, the ‘two boys kissing’ cover does reflect two key kissing scenes that occur one after the other that are effectively mirror events. Still, I don’t think this cover is quite accurate in reflecting the tone of the novel. The ‘Mungo submerged’ cover is rather ambiguous and ominous, and it brilliantly reflects two key events involving water. This is the best cover of the two, in my opinion. What really surprised me about the novel – and puts it in a different class than ‘Shuggie Bain’ altogether – is how bleak it is. If you thought the author’s Booker-winning debut was dark, you ain’t experienced nothing yet. I honestly think no publisher would have touched this with a barge pole if it had not been for Stuart’s commercial and critical success to date. Apart from those trigger points, there is also the ‘wee matter’ of the Glaswegian dialect. Admittedly I had to carefully reread many sentences to make sure I got the gist of what was being said or inferred, not to mention having to Google quite a few words that I did not understand at all (here I think a brief glossary would have been helpful for international readers). I cannot even begin to imagine what listening to the audiobook must be like. For my two cents, this is a much stronger and more nuanced novel. It interweaves two timelines: Mungo’s fishing trip, which has a palpable sense of dread hanging on every word, and then his life in Glasgow itself. Stuart’s characters are vivid and heart-breaking, from delicate cameos like Poor Wee Chickie to Ha-Ha, Jodie and, of course, Mungo and James. Their brief three-day interlude of mutual self-discovery is wrought with great delicacy and feeling, which makes the violence and horror this bubble of love and trust is embedded in all the more terrible as it unfolds so inexorably. I had to put the novel down halfway at a particularly grim point, which made me wonder what had happened to the love angle. Stuart is an intuitive storyteller though. Just when I became overwhelmed and was about to give up any sense of hope in the humanity of the story, he quietly and effortlessly switched to tracing the growing attraction between Mungo and James, two damaged children from torn families in a broken world, and on the wrong side of a religious and cultural divide to boot. It is a wondrous light that glows all too briefly in the final darkness that descends so quickly. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 21, 2022
|
Jan 30, 2022
|
Dec 02, 2021
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| B0971NXZGM
| 4.75
| 8
| Jun 25, 2021
| Jun 25, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
“Can you help keep him focused?” Noah asked Tara. I can do that. I can teach him what a diversionary fire is. There is a well-known writing principle k “Can you help keep him focused?” Noah asked Tara. I can do that. I can teach him what a diversionary fire is. There is a well-known writing principle known as Chekhov’s Gun, whereby the Master advised: “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.” Rodney Ross’s ‘poopknife’ is an excellent example of this application, albeit one that probably would have resulted in Chekhov arching an eyebrow. Dare and his mother Tara stay in an, er, real dump of a house alongside some shit-stain of a town in Ohio. The house they are renting is disintegrating inexorably (as is Tara’s own life), to the point where the plumbing cannot cope with a growing teenager’s prodigious turds. Hence the eponymous ‘poopknife’, which is a steak knife commandeered by Dare to cut his stools down to a flushable size. Said ‘poopknife’ is transformed into Chekhov’s Gun when, as we learn from the jacket copy, Dare stabs Tara’s deadbeat boyfriend when he threatens to become violent. We also learn that Dobby was in possession of a winning lottery ticket that sets the stage for an undreamt-of transformation of her and her son’s life, and indeed that of the entire town. I was puzzled that the publisher would give away such crucial plot details on the cover, and indeed this does unfortunately foreshadow the reader’s (thankfully) brief time spent with Dobby and his alpha inferiority complex. On the other hand, the death-by-poopknife scene is only about a third of the way into a sprawling 400-page novel. So, a lot of water promises to still flow under this proverbial bridge. While holding down a laundry job in town, which presages her stint at the Willamette old-age home, Tara meets Percy for the first time. We soon learn that Percy thinks Tara comes across as a bit of a tomboy, with possible lesbian inclinations, while her friend Mill informs her that Percy is resolutely queer: “I like it when Percy comes by. He’s always funny,” Tara said one day as the Willamette van pulled away. “Queers usually are,” Mill chirped casually. Tara had known a high school homo, an oddball who wore a Mary Harman, Mary Hartman tee, but she didn’t know much about adult homos… It is a curiously endearing and liberating observation on the part of Tara, who would later carry out such selfless acts of kindness as jerking off the no-longer-ambulatory-but-still-capable-of-popping-a-stiffy Mr. Tomlinson at Willamette. What neither Percy nor Tara realises is that their initial contact with each other is the beginning of a lifelong journey. Armistead Maupin once famously wrote that “Sooner or later, though, no matter where in the world we live, we must join the diaspora, venturing beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us.” I think that there is also such a thing as a ‘logical relationship’, and Percy and Tara’s lifelong friendship definitely falls into this category. There is no sexual attraction (well, more a sense of curiosity in each other than anything else), plus the fact that they are chalk and cheese. And yet they fit perfectly together, like a lock and key, and in fact end up being far more stable (and outrageous) than many a long-term relationship. While the lottery ticket changes all of their lives dramatically, it is these initial bonds of friendship, family and fellowship that carries our brave trio through the tumultuous times that lie ahead, taking in a huge swathe of history along the way. By the time we reach some of these historic milestones, the reader is so invested in these characters that we feel every ounce of joy and pain that Ross wrings from his rags-to-riches saga. Despite the basic plot outline, Ross is savvy enough of a writer to wrongfoot the reader at nearly every turn of his narrative. He also manages to avoid melodrama or predictability, and imbues his characters with a deep sense of quirkiness and sangfroid that reminded me of John Irving at his best. In these woeful pandemic times, such a wonderful story of winning against all odds, being changed by the experience, and then coming out the other end with the realisation that you will always be who you are, no matter if you use a ‘poopknife’ or not, makes for a truly uplifting reading experience. It is kind of staggering that ‘Diversionary Fires’ is only Ross’s second novel. I once stumbled across ‘The Cool Part of His Pillow’, also a quirky tale of ordinary people blindsided by the sheer arbitrariness of life and fate, and loved it. If that book can be described as a concerto, then this is a full-on symphony with a big-ass choir thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, this is one of those books where a lot of tears are shed – I also think this is due to Covid-19, especially this year when the pandemic crept into so many homes to snatch away friends and loved ones, so that even a once-ordinary experience like reading a book can become such an emotionally-charged one. But these are as much tears of laughter as they are of sadness or grief, and often both. And that, as Ross ultimately tells us, is life. Just make sure you always keep a ‘poopknife’ handy so you can cut all of the shit down to size. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Sep 11, 2021
|
Sep 22, 2021
|
Sep 11, 2021
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 9781789094299
| 1789094291
| 3.66
| 1,915
| Mar 01, 2022
| Feb 15, 2022
|
liked it
|
Because guardian angel or not, sometimes a girl just needs a huge flamethrower to burn the shit out of anything that messes with her. There is a surfei Because guardian angel or not, sometimes a girl just needs a huge flamethrower to burn the shit out of anything that messes with her. There is a surfeit of brilliant space opera at present: The ‘Salvation’ trilogy by Peter Hamilton, ‘Galaxias’ by Stephen Baxter (not to mention his ‘World Engines’ duology), ‘Inhibitor Phase’ by Alastair Reynold (which marks a triumphant return to the ‘Revelation Space’ saga), ‘Shards of Earth’ by Adrian Tchaikovsky (who also wrote the enthralling ‘Children of Time’ and its sequel) and the recently concluded ‘Expanse’ series by James S.A. Corey. What this means is that the bar has been set very high of late, so a book like ‘Stars and Bones’ by Gareth Powell has to be judged against some very high achievers. Sadly, for me, it falls short. This is not to say it is a bad book. There is a lot I liked about it, and I think it is a very good entry point into the hard SF space opera sub-genre for those readers who don’t normally read SF. Speaking of hard SF, my main problem with ‘Stars and Bones’ is that it is a bit hazy on the details and the science. Yes, a Dyson Sphere does play an, er pivotal role, but the concept of the ‘substrate’ (what Star Wars termed ‘hyperspace’), for example, and its role in allowing for near-instantaneous interstellar travel is a McGuffin that is all too common in SF these days to avoid the implications of Einsteinian reality. The main plot is not that original either: Humanity is on the verge of destroying itself when an alien called an Angel of Benevolence swoops in to save the day. It handily obliterates the rings of Saturn to build a fleet of arkships and sends the species on its merry way to explore for a new home. (There are billions of humans and only a few thousand arkships, each of which is a unique environment or conglomeration of cultures – Powell’s tantalising peak into this setup of the co-called Continuance was the best part of the book for me). Unfortunately, a pitstop on a (seemingly) uninhabited planet when an arkship goes missing unleashes a (seemingly) unstoppable force that quickly infiltrates the fleet like a combination of the protomolecule from ‘The Expanse’ and the icky stuff from ‘Night’s Dawn’. Genre readers just know that the proverbial is going to hit the fan when a strange planet is only designated by a number, with LV-426 being a classic example. There are some nice touches here, like technology allowing the cat Sam to mind-meld with both humans and arkships (leading to much acerbic commentary in the background about the general stupidity of humanity). I thought Powell has too heavy a hand in anthropomorphising the ultimate (and inevitable) showdown, but he does a pretty good job of setting up the next novel. I’m certainly curious enough to see what direction he takes his story in next. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jan 21, 2022
|
Jan 29, 2022
|
Aug 26, 2021
|
ebook
| |||||||||||||||
| 9780356514314
| 3.51
| 4,593
| Oct 26, 2021
| Oct 26, 2021
|
really liked it
|
None
|
Notes are private!
|
2
|
Jul 14, 2024
Aug 05, 2021
|
Jul 21, 2024
Aug 08, 2021
|
Aug 05, 2021
|
ebook
| ||||||||||||||||
| 1473580951
| 9781473580954
| 1473580951
| 4.25
| 729
| Jun 03, 2021
| Jun 03, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
Every new generation that grows up can’t necessarily understand how it was before – how the current normal was achieved. It is normal for each person
Every new generation that grows up can’t necessarily understand how it was before – how the current normal was achieved. It is normal for each person to assume that where they’re at has always been that way. We just want to be able to love the way we love and be left alone, be left in peace. At the same time, the way we are poses a huge challenge perceived as a provocation to society. I must admit to being a bit ambivalent to read this book. Yes, we all know how terrible it is to be gay and living in Nigeria or Saudi Arabia, for example. “At the time of writing, homosexuality is still illegal in 69 countries and punishable by death in 6, while being trans is still criminalised in 13 UN member states.” But do we need yet another book to remind us of these dreadful statistics? Preaching to the choir, as it were. I was immediately reminded of another recent and similar book, the superlative ‘The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World's Queer Frontiers’ by Mark Gevisser, which overcomes this problem by placing the author at the beating heart of the stories he tells. Thankfully, I am very glad to report that editor Amelia Abraham also overcomes this problem in ‘We Can Do Better Than This’. The key is in the subtitle, ‘35 Voices on the Future of LGBTQ+ Rights’. Abraham brings together a commendably broad and eclectic range of voices, from celebrities to activists, artists, actors, drag queens and academics, et al. Each essay or contribution – the majority are not that long, which also helps the reader to digest the book more easily – is in the form of a manifesto: Outlining a specific problem or issue, and then proposing tangible and practical actions or solutions, and also how to go about implementing these from a grass-roots level. Of course, a lot of these problems and issues relate to trans people in particular, and the permutations of modern gender specifically, from asexual to intersex and non-binary. The post-Stonewall gay world has become incredibly complex and fraught with all kinds of intersections of race and gender politics. Abraham points out that far too little research has been conducted in this regard. What is also striking is how many of these problems and issues cross the narrow divide of being solely ‘gay’ issues, and instead permeate society in general. Interestingly, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated intersectionality as a key driver of social change. Adam Eli writes in ‘Doing Better’: In September 2019, the Queer Liberation March team began planning for Pride 2020. Those plans, along with much more, were instantly shoved aside in March 2020 when – BOOM – the entire world shut down due to Covid-19. Then, on 25 May, George Floyd was killed by the police. Like many others, I watched as protests against systemic racism and police brutality erupted in every state of America, and as thousands of people in Paris, London, Berlin and across the world. With official NYC Pride events cancelled, queer people took to the streets to support Black lives and Black queer lives, and there were at least four big rallies at the Stonewall Inn itself. What comes across strongly in this book is the role of activism from both an individual and a community level. “Knowing we need to do better and actually doing better are two very different things,” points out Eli. Not everyone’s stories and struggles are the same. However, a queer person can always relate to another queer person on at least a basic level because all queer people were born into a predominantly straight world. … I believe that because queer people are able to identify with each other in this way, we have an obligation to stand up for each other. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 02, 2021
|
Jun 05, 2021
|
May 28, 2021
|
ebook
| ||||||||||||||
| B08B3N49CT
| 3.69
| 2,266
| Jun 01, 2021
| Jun 01, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
Okay, now that was an unexpectedly pleasant reading surprise: A popcorn novel that combines Western, SF, horror and thriller elements in an old-fashio
Okay, now that was an unexpectedly pleasant reading surprise: A popcorn novel that combines Western, SF, horror and thriller elements in an old-fashioned, yet surprisingly effective, manner. Think ‘Stranger Things’ combined with some of the darker and crazier ‘The X-Files’ episodes, and you’ll get a sense of what a fantastic read this is. Also, if you enjoyed ‘The Institute’ by Stephen King, where a dastardly top-secret government organisation experiments on inculcating latent superpowers in vulnerable children, you will love this. Yet Percy’s take on the trope is a tad more ‘X-Men’ than King’s, with a good dollop of tentacular Lovecraftian cosmic menace thrown in for good measure. Described like this, ‘The Ninth Metal’ should by all rights be a complete hodgepodge, not to mention a hot mess, but Percy’s deft characterisation and expert control of the narrative tension simply sucks the reader in. There is a lot of fun to be had in the details as well, and a vein of humour running throughout the story like the extra-solar omnimetal that is omnipresent in Minnesota itself. I have no idea if Percy’s ‘ninth metal’ is a deliberate reference to the ‘Nth Metal’ of the DC Universe, described as “a special metal with gravity negating effects.” Of course, omnimetal does a lot more than that, and is therefore an expert nod at the many McGuffin Magic Materials that prop up so many SF novels. Surprisingly, omnimetal is not the main focus though. We learn about the catastrophic meteor shower that deposits it on earth in brief flashback chapters, while speculation about its function and composition is just detailed enough to be convincing without derailing the propulsive main narrative with too much info-dumping. That is a common problem of SF novels of this ilk: Never let the science take the place of the story or the characters; Andy Weir and Liu Cixin, take note. And in terms of the main narrative, it is a real corker: Two diehard and equally weird Minnesota conglomerate families (the cult is actually the normal one) go head-to-head (as well lots of other body parts) to claim exclusive rights to the miracle of omnimetal and its potential to totally transform life on Earth as we know it. And probably literally, as we suspect from the get-go. But, as in all good Pandora Box tales, getting your heart’s desire is only the beginning of a long road of unintended consequences. Unusually for a multi-volume series, this opener ends on a real cliffhanger, yet is still complete enough for the ending to be a perfect conclusion to the overarching story. However, Percy really sets a high bar for himself at the end, so it will be intriguing to see where he takes his motley crew next when the ‘The Unfamiliar Garden’ is released early next year. Metal is! ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
May 15, 2021
|
May 17, 2021
|
May 15, 2021
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| B0879GLMQ9
| 3.66
| 5,011
| Feb 02, 2021
| Feb 02, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
One of the best reading experiences – and one that is increasingly rare in our oversaturated media age – is where you go into a book cold and it takes
One of the best reading experiences – and one that is increasingly rare in our oversaturated media age – is where you go into a book cold and it takes you so completely by surprise that, for a couple of days, it consumes you totally. Prior to this I had no idea who Sylvain Neuvel was. ‘A History of What Comes Next’ was one of those books I requested in a fit of pique from NetGalley, annoyed at being constantly ignored by publishers. You know what happens next, of course. Suddenly you get a spate of ‘accepted’ requests from NetGalley that pushes down your reader rating and leaves you with a lurking pile of arcs to get to that you barely remember enquiring after in the first place, let alone what they are about. A caveat is that I have yet to read ‘The Lady Astronaut’ sequence by Mary Robinette Kowal, which I am now curious enough about to at least pick up the first book just to see how it stacks up against Sylvain Neuvel. Then I also have ‘V2’ by Robert Harris on my list, who is no stranger to that SF sub-genre of ‘alternative history’ with his superlative ‘Fatherland’. What really intrigued me about ‘A History of What Comes Next’ is that the actual Kindle text ends at 88%, leaving a goodly chunk of ‘Further Reading’. The first line of this section is: ‘(Not as boring as it sounds, I swear)’. And it really isn’t. Not to mention one of the best parts of the book for me, particularly as it is intricately connected with the narrative itself. Neuvel explains: I learned a ton writing this book. I knew little of the space race when I began, nothing of rocket science. Writing in the past was the biggest challenge. Basically, nothing exists and women can’t do anything. Neuvel proceeds to give his highly readable (and often very funny and irreverent) take on many of the major elements in the book. These range from the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, which Indiana Jones worked for, according to ‘The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’), the famous Operation Paperclip, and actual personages such as Wernher von Braun, Sergei Korolev and the particularly odious Lavrentiy Beria, who cosied up with Stalin in 1926. We also learn about Hsue-Shen Tsien, the genius behind the Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was sent to debrief von Braun and his team after they had surrendered to the Americans. And who was eventually labelled a Communist under the Red Scare and spent five years under house arrest. Go, America! Neuvel notes further: There’s been so much written on the [American space program], lots of movies seen, that I chose to focus on smaller, lesser-known events. It’s also why the book ends in 1961, before Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. This means that Act IV, for example, focuses on Mia going to Kasputin Yar, established in 1946 to test captured German V2s, and often referred to by conspiracy theorists as the ‘Russian Roswell’. There’s a lovely section on Russian space dogs, as part of the story is Mia trying to rescue Dezik and Tsygan. (We learn that between 1951 and 1960 at least 20 dogs made suborbital flights). I could go on and on … This kind of factual background is manna for SF fans, and I must say it is a section that endeared me most to Neuvel. He understands intimately what makes the average SF nerd’s brain tick. And the brilliance of this section is the level of detail it adds to the main narrative, without being superfluous at all. If you’re thinking that a book which needs an explanatory appendix is fundamentally flawed, you’re missing the point entirely. Just read the damn thing, and you’ll be entranced as I was. As for the plot? Neuvel himself describes his book as “my weird slightly-homicidal-alien-clone-space-race-story”, which is as good a summary as any. For me, the smartest kind of genre fiction is where the speculative component or the world-building is so deftly intertwined with the actual narrative that you cannot even see the seams. Clearly, a huge amount of research went into this. It is equally clear that, despite the fantastic elements of the Tracker and the Kibsu, a lot of this is depressingly true. There is a popular, romanticised idea of the birth of the US Space Race effectively turning swords into ploughshares by recruiting the best of Nazi Germany’s scientists. The truth, as always, is much darker (if not greyer), as this included a lot of very morally dubious people, despite their supposed scientific credentials. And a lot of the less savoury Nazi R&D was simply taken over, and refined, by the Americans. A note on the text: Neuvel takes the interesting step of blocking out all of the spoken dialogue as if it were speech in a play. At first this takes some getting used to, as it seems a bit jumpy and jarring, but the cumulative effect is that it makes for a much faster and more immersive read, which I also have to add contains a surprisingly vigorous quantity of violence, bloodshed and assorted mayhem. If you think the idea of the Kibsu sounds familiar, like me you are probably reminded of the ‘Destiny’s Children’ series by Stephen Baxter. This is simply one of the best SF thrillers I have read in a long time. Yes, the plot elements have been recycled countless times before, and history is history. But it is what Neuvel does with all of this, and the story he tells of what happens next, that makes this such an extraordinary book. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 13, 2021
|
Apr 15, 2021
|
Apr 13, 2021
|
Kindle Edition
| ||||||||||||||||
| 0316705853
| 9780316705851
| 0316705853
| 4.19
| 25,043
| Aug 03, 2021
| Aug 03, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
This is hands-down one of the best SF space operas I have read in a long, long time. I recently finished ‘To Sleep in a Sea of Stars’ by Christopher P
This is hands-down one of the best SF space operas I have read in a long, long time. I recently finished ‘To Sleep in a Sea of Stars’ by Christopher Paolini, which makes for an interesting comparison, as both recycle a lot of the well-known tropes of this particular sub-genre. The one in the Tchaikovsky book I really do not have any fondness for is the concept of ‘unspace’, a kind of Lovecraftian hyperspeed realm inhabited by weird looming entities barely aware of our existence, but that are likely to induce instant madness if they ever turn their cosmic gaze on us poor human spacefarers. The difference between Paolini and Tchaikovsky as writers is how the latter tackles this particular trope: It becomes an integral part of the nature and reality of the alien Architects, described in the Glossary as “moon-sized entities that can reshape populated planets and ships”. Yes, I am sure the Death Star reference is deliberate, while the Psychic Intermediaries (Ints) is an equally deliberate nod to the Guild Navigators of Dune. Paolini simply has a tick-list of genre tropes that he dutifully runs through in ‘To Sleep in a Sea of Stars’, which really does not justify its length and rambles on for just one space battle too many. Yes, ‘Shards of Earth’ is also a monster of a book (in various meanings of that phrase), but I was never bored once or even found my attention wandering. And despite this being the opener in a series, the ending is truly delightful and quite self-contained (as opposed to wanting to hurl your reading device at a wall in frustration, as is so often the case with SF series that end inconclusively as a kind of hook to get you to read the next, and the next…) Tchaikovsky is one of the best writers of alien species and cultures out there, and ‘Shards of Earth’ is chockablock with some of the weirdest creatures I have ever encountered in SF. These are not the cutesy ugly-but-lovable ones that tend to crowd the Star Wars universe, or the endlessly humanoid variants of Star Trek, bar a few extra bumps on the forehead, nose or a different skin colour … Tchaikovsky’s aliens have a kind of baroque weirdness and gothic grandeur that renders them both inscrutable and utterly fascinating. What I also respect about Tchaikovsky is that he does not spoon feed the reader. You really have to work at the beginning of this book to ‘get it’. But once you have a basic grasp of the intricacies of the narrative set-up, the reader is in for a truly wild ride that consistently surprises and amazes. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 27, 2021
|
May 15, 2021
|
Mar 03, 2021
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1916366945
| 9781916366947
| 4.00
| 65,178
| Jan 31, 2021
| Jan 31, 2021
|
liked it
|
I was tired of the circumference of the whole universe living in your circled arms, of the spark of life hiding in your kiss, of the power of death ly
I was tired of the circumference of the whole universe living in your circled arms, of the spark of life hiding in your kiss, of the power of death lying in wait in your teeth. Writing about vampire sex is tricky. A Dracula figure that can fuck and kill is definitely a case of having your cake and eating it. Giving the Count a functional penis flies in the face of the sublimated sexuality that Stoker embodied so successfully in his iconic figure. Perversely, it also hetero-normalises the vampire archetype, transforming it into a kind of weaponised male privilege. S.T. Gibson tries to get around this problem by having her characters enter their vampiric state by degrees, meaning they do not abandon their bodily appetites and functionality right at the point of conversion. Instead, there is a kind of lingering dissolution that, in the case of Magdalena, also ends in melancholy (and, as it turns out, eventual madness for many other consorts.) The book begins with Constanta (presumably) killing “my lord, your hot blood splashing hot flecks onto my nightgown and pouring in rivulets onto our bedchamber floor.” This baroque writing style, part gothic and part horror-noir, is a deliberate affectation on the part of Gibson that, unfortunately, draws too much attention to its own aesthetic and distances the reader from the emotional sub-text. This beginning is preceded by a dedication: ‘To those who escaped a love like death, and to those still caught in its grasp: you are the heroes of this story’. Clearly we are in media res in terms of the plot, and also at a defining moment when Constanta assumes control of her own agency. What could the ‘lord’ she refers to have possibly done to invoke such an extreme reaction from her, in defense not only of her personal freedom, it seems, but the very essence of her individuality and femininity? This is the main, er, thrust of ‘A Dowry of Blood’, which follows the arc of a traditional abusive relationship narrative. While Stoker’s Dracula did have three seductive female vampires shacking up with him, these women are only ever referred to as the ‘weird sisters’ and are not individually named. Despite the name ‘Dracula’ not being mentioned once in Gibson’s text, the cover copy explicitly names the central vampire protagonist as such, describing the book as ‘a lyrical and dreamy reimagining of Dracula’s brides’. I am unconvinced it is Dracula, despite the main vampire never being given any actual name. I also think the cover copy does the book a bit of a disservice, for rather than ‘lyrical and dreamy’, it is instead a blood-soaked tale of a serial abuser having the tables turned quite spectacularly on his own manipulation and violence. When Constanta is turned, she assumes she is the be-all and end-all of her lord’s existence … only to be introduced to the even more radiant and enigmatic Magdalena, with whom she forms a strong sexual and emotional bond. Much has been made in the marketing about this being a ‘polyamorous’ retelling of the Dracula story, but the sex scenes are pretty tame and lack conviction. The most problematic part of the narrative for me was the introduction of Alexi, a nineteen-year-old youth they encounter in Petrograd in 1919, whom Constanta describes as “our sunlight, our destroyer. My prince cast in marble and gold.” Alexi behaves like a typical teenager, if a tad more dissolute than most, and his lord’s parenting skills are certainly not up to the task of curtailing his mercurial temperament and innate restlessness. The result is that the vampire lord in question attempts to do to Alexi what he achieved so successfully with Constanta (and to a lesser degree with Magdalena): Place him under a psychological yoke of his own devising, with a bit of male rape on the side. This brings out a fierce and protective mothering instinct in Constanta (not to mention a soupçon of sexual titillation one feels was simply thrown into the mix to give the book a rather brittle patina of perversity.) Since the book cannot help but be focused on, and thereby uphold, the patriarchal point of view, not to mention the male gaze itself in terms of all the blood-letting and sexual shenanigans, it is inevitable that the most interesting and sympathetic character is the chief abuser himself. Gibson tries to do something interesting by framing him as a scientist and researcher, who spends his long life and fortune in attempting to understand his vampiric nature. Well, that certainly does not have the desired end result, I suspect. Though there is a hint that what happens at the end, despite opening up the book to a possibility of a much broader follow-up, was part of his grand plan all along to forcefully spread the seeds of both his ideas, and by implication his blood and semen, throughout the body politic. Yes, writing about vampires is tricky. While Gibson’s book is often pretty enough to the point of being poetic, what it lacks is a true undercurrent of darkness, such as that vile ichor which pumps thick and black through the heart of Constanta’s beloved. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Apr 06, 2021
|
Apr 11, 2021
|
Feb 04, 2021
|
ebook
| |||||||||||||||
| 0575090715
| 9780575090712
| 0575090715
| 4.11
| 5,825
| Oct 12, 2021
| Aug 26, 2021
|
it was amazing
|
'All civilisations move to an accommodation of their past atrocities.' It is incredible to think that Revelation Space was published originally in 2000 'All civilisations move to an accommodation of their past atrocities.' It is incredible to think that Revelation Space was published originally in 2000. Setting a new benchmark in noir space opera, it was shortlisted for the BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke Awards. The subsequent trilogy also got a mention in Damien Broderick’s Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010. If, like me, you have been reading Alastair Reynolds since then, you will appreciate what an incredible journey it has been, from Revelation Space to Poseidon Children’s to Prefect Dreyfus and Revenger (which I have yet to read), not to mention singular novels like Century Rain, House of Suns and Terminal World. Reynolds also collaborated with Stephen Baxter on the superlative The Medusa Chronicles (2016), an extrapolation of a 1971 Clarke novella that for me is still one the finest New Space Operas written to date. Hence it was with a bit of trepidation that I first read about Reynolds’ return to the Revelation Space universe with Inhibitor Phase. Being decades since the titular novel and Chasm City (2001), Redemption Ark (2002) and Absolution Gap (2003), my grasp of the details was understandably a bit fuzzy. Reynolds does include a detailed timeline right at the end, but advises readers not to dip into this before the novel itself, as the supplementary material contains spoilers. What the heck, so I took the plunge and trusted Reynolds to drip-feed me just enough background to keep me going by the seat of my pants. And boy, does he deliver. The book not only brought back many wonderful memories of those earlier books, but contains quite a few surprises along the way as well. This is probably one of Reynolds’ most tightly written novels to date, despite the sprawling narrative, numerous setpieces and diverse locations. Miraculously, it also concludes within a single volume. Granted, there is room for more, but the ending as it stands is utterly perfect (and one that would make Arthur C. Clarke himself proud.) Reynolds clearly had huge fun writing this. Writers tend to follow a developmental path, making a splash with one or a series of novels, and thereafter often experimenting or branching out into other directions as their talent and inspiration multiplies. Returning to one’s roots, as it were, can be equally rewarding. At this point the established author has proven his or her chops and can just let rip. The Reynolds of Inhibitor Phase is not the brash newcomer storming the genre ramparts with his original trilogy. This is the veteran writer who has honed his craft and his audience, taking them expertly on one of his wildest rides ever, in the company of a unique ragtag bunch of characters that the reader comes to know and care for deeply. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Jun 13, 2021
|
Jul 02, 2021
|
Dec 26, 2020
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1916287832
| B08G8CRM58
| 4.09
| 47
| unknown
| Jan 18, 2021
|
liked it
|
Towards the end of this book about the establishment of the first permanent Martian colony, we have the eyebrow-raising revelation that “In the early
Towards the end of this book about the establishment of the first permanent Martian colony, we have the eyebrow-raising revelation that “In the early days of planning, we had proposed bringing no men at all”. Well, that would have been a sure-fire narrative dampener, especially giving the fact that so much of the granular detail is about upholding the heteronormative ideals of marriage, domestic violence and having babies and dogs. (I would be surprised if someone didn’t print out a white picket fence somewhere). At the beginning we have what I assume is a kind of manifesto for the colony: We can have fully automated luxury gay space communism when we find a supply of unlimited resources – until then, we’ll have to make do with partly automated queer social liberalism. This sounds pretty impressive, but when you attempt to unpack it, what does it even mean? What exactly is ‘gay space communism’, and why is it differentiated from ‘queer social liberalism’, for example? We have an external perspective on the colony (no spoilers as to how this context comes about) when it is described as “not a military outpost but consider themselves an independent nation”. And then also: “(T)hey are a self-sufficient colony. They operate as a democratic state with a mixed economy.” Hardly utopian. Plus the name ‘Devon Island’ itself is problematic, as it makes the colony sound like a housing estate in London. Why would you want to reference an Imperial power that is not only a shadow of its former self, but accelerating its inward collapse post-Brexit? On the subject of nostalgia, I really do not know what to make of the cosy pub the ‘White Hart’. Indeed, one could make an argument that the Mars setting is entirely irrelevant. There is not a single mention of a Martian landscape feature, or any attempt by the author to locate the colony on what is by now a quite well-known planetary surface in SF literature. Granted, Si Clarke could have been going for the tabula rasa effect of ‘The Martian Chronicles’ by Ray Bradbury, but the problem is that this colony could have been located in a post-apocalyptic wilderness on earth for all we are told about the external environment. In fact, that scenario would have made far more sense from a science-realism point of view. As Kim Stanley Robinson points out in his benchmark Mars trilogy, any attempt to settle on another planet (or moon) has to contend with the impact of humanity on what is essentially a pristine wilderness. The crude approximation of such an approach is ‘colonialism in space’. It is a rich field of extrapolation that committed writers like Robinson have mined to great effect, and with a lasting impact on the ideological conscience of the genre, I would add. The main ‘selling point’ of ‘Livid Skies’ is the diverse cast (including characters with neurological disabilities), and not terraforming itself as an act of social engineering. Here I felt that some of Clarke’s technical writing decisions worked against her agenda. The novel is divided into three acts, with each chapter a first-person account of a particular character. There is a cast at the beginning with brief descriptions. Not everyone has their own viewpoint chapters, and some only appear as walk-on characters. The first-person narration tends to blur the differences between the cast, meaning that the reader has to work double-time in figuring out the social dynamics. It is one thing to tell me that Katya is Ukrainian-British, Gurdeep is British-Indian and Desmond is South African. But there are zero cultural differentiators in the novel, with Clarke simply relying on the reader to apply the appropriate (and probably highly stereotypical) cultural identifiers, which I found kind of lazy. For example, there is absolutely nothing to identify Desmond as a Saffer, apart from this description in the cast of characters. And then Devon comments at one point: “It occurred to me Desmond had to be about eight months pregnant”. The political set-up is also very conservative, centred on a prime minister (and even lawyers). At one point the ‘Dowager-President’ of the US is mentioned, but nothing is made of this intriguing reference. Science Fiction allows for great social experiments that not only reflect on our current world, but also point the way towards future improvements or even evolutionary developments. Is the system that Clarke elaborates on here in keeping with the intent and spirit of her manifesto? (We do have a description of a ‘polyam’ relationship near the end, but does this go further say than ‘Heavenly Breakfast’ by Samuel R. Delany?) ‘Livid Skies’ is very much part of the Becky Chambers tradition of SF, where diversity and fluidity are a given, and where the world itself is messy and has a lot of sharp edges to catch us all, but where people still manage to just cope and get along and get the job done, despite their differences or how stacked the system is against them. It is probably my best kind of SF due to its vibrancy and sheer exuberance at the myriad possibilities that confront us on a daily basis: “What I like most about Devon Island is that I can stick to my routines, apply order to my daily life – but I have the freedom to do so in ways that work for me. You can do the same – the only thing you can’t do is demand others conform to your structure.” Clarke’s reference in her manifesto to ‘unlimited natural resources’ as being the Holy Grail for any self-sustaining social experiment is a sober capstone to the novel and the future of the colony, which has to contend with the fact that the ‘RTG batteries’ it uses as its main power source have a finite lifespan. In addition, the colony’s dream of expansion is limited by the bar on human (and animal) occupation that it quickly reaches. Clarke uses a bit of a hefty deus ex machina to resolve this situation, while at the same time neatly commenting on the Manifest Destiny of the US itself. As she concludes, Either way, the future looked bright. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 24, 2020
|
Jan 13, 2021
|
Dec 24, 2020
|
Kindle Edition
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
my rating |
|
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
| 3.30
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 02, 2023
|
Aug 18, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.08
|
it was ok
|
Sep 15, 2023
|
Aug 18, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 4.25
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 2023
|
Mar 13, 2023
|
|||||
|
| 3.19
|
it was amazing
|
Aug 27, 2022
|
Aug 12, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.96
|
really liked it
|
Aug 08, 2022
|
Aug 04, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.30
|
not set
|
Mar 24, 2022
|
||||||
|
| 4.50
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 19, 2022
|
Jan 14, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.50
|
it was amazing
|
Mar 26, 2022
|
Jan 14, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 3.30
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 31, 2022
|
Jan 10, 2022
|
|||||
|
| 4.38
|
it was amazing
|
Jan 30, 2022
|
Dec 02, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.75
|
it was amazing
|
Sep 22, 2021
|
Sep 11, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.66
|
liked it
|
Jan 29, 2022
|
Aug 26, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.51
|
really liked it
|
Jul 21, 2024
Aug 08, 2021
|
Aug 05, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.25
|
it was amazing
|
Jun 05, 2021
|
May 28, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.69
|
it was amazing
|
May 17, 2021
|
May 15, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 3.66
|
it was amazing
|
Apr 15, 2021
|
Apr 13, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.19
|
it was amazing
|
May 15, 2021
|
Mar 03, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.00
|
liked it
|
Apr 11, 2021
|
Feb 04, 2021
|
|||||
|
| 4.11
|
it was amazing
|
Jul 02, 2021
|
Dec 26, 2020
|
|||||
|
| 4.09
|
liked it
|
Jan 13, 2021
|
Dec 24, 2020
|
Loading...
