Book Review: Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

 Set about 120 years in the future, Autonomous presents a world split into different economic zones, where sapient robots can have equal status to humans. Supposedly, at least.

The plot follows two threads. Paladin is a combat robot, indentured (for a period of ten years, to earn his autonomy) to IPC, which regulates pharmaceuticals and patent infringement.

Jack is a pirate - literally and legally; she makes knock-off versions of expensive drugs, such as the Viva life-extension drugs, and smuggles them to people who can’t afford the real thing.

The plot revolves around a productivity drug that Jack has reverse engineered, a compound that seems to allow people to get a buzz of achievement just for doing their normal, everyday jobs and therefore increasing their focus and output. When she starts hearing reports that some people have become dangerously obsessed with menial tasks to the point of harming - and killing - themselves and others, she initially thinks she’s made a mistake with her formulation but finds out it is something bigger.

However, as with the best books, the plot isn’t really what the story is about - although we do delve into the morality of patents, and of those who can afford it getting an edge over those who can’t. No, this novel is very much about identity, about what it is to be human - as, I suppose, all robot stories are. It is about relationships and gender - particularly about the way gender is something imposed by the expectations of others - and, of course, about autonomy and all that this means.

Newitz set up invites us to draw comparisons between the indentured ‘bots and the indentured humans, how one is assumed to be enslaved as a “natural” state whilst the other naturally free - but if both are sentient and sapient, is that reasonable? There are a couple of particularly lovely moments: it is mentioned that some humans resent ‘bots because they believe that allowed them to work toward autonomy has blurred the distinction and is what allows humans to be indentured - while, of course, it is actually capitalism that enables this. In another, Med - a ‘bot who has been raised entirely free, in effect as a human - is often treated as though she has faulty or compromised “programming” if she makes a contentious comment.

For about the first half of the bookI was enjoying it and admiring the ideas, but not really loving it - but then as the backstories began to fill in more and the layers built, I did love it. I loved the characters and relationships, that each had their own depths and frailties - even the bad guys. It is also very good science fiction - in that, while the ‘bots may not be a good prediction of how machine intelligence will pan out, that isn’t the point. Paladin is a person, for all their inbuilt weapon, armour and strange senses. As Ursula le Guin puts it in her introduction to the Left Hand of Darkness:

“Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore mor honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive”

And, of course, fiction is the lie that tells us the greatest truths about ourselves.

Book review: The Heroes by Joe Abercrombie; Long Live the King

 Abercrombie is the king of this kind of thing; showing the horror and fear and blood of pre-modern battle, with a human face. Indeed, with many human faces. He draws character superbly, with very few good guys or bad guys but shades of grey, for the most part people who are making decisions for a mix of reasons selfish and altruistic, noble and venal, wise and stupid.

Here, in the continuation of stories in the same world as his First Law trilogy, we focus on a battle between the Northmen and the Union, three blood-soaked days surrounding the taking of a more-or-less strategic hill. While the set-up could be classic Generic Fantasy - the Union sees itself as civilised, some meld between the empires of Rome and Britain, and the Northmen are the classic Viking/Saxon rough-hewn hard men, a loose alliance of carls and named men seeking battle-glory - but Abercrombie gives many of his POV characters a depth and complexity that makes it far more real.

On the Union side we have Bremer dan Gorst, former royal guard who has thrown himself into constant training, haunted both by his disgrace and his infatuation with his commander's daughter.

That young woman, Finree, smart and ambitious to advance herself through the only means available: her brave, noble and slightly stupid husband.

Corporal Tunny, veteran soldier, far more interested in theft and fleecing his fellows at cards than glory in battle.

For the North, Calder is the younger son of the man who first united the North as something approaching a nation; he knows he isn't brave or strong, but is handsome, clever and ambitious.

Curnden Craw, seen by many as the most honest man in the North.

Beck, a young man fresh from his farm, seeking to match the tales of glory told by the father whose sword he carries.

Along with these POV characters are a host of others, some drawn deeply others merely sketched, but Abercrombie has the skill to make each seem fully fleshed. While there are complete sociopaths (Caul Shivers who has the ability to instil terror into anyone with his calm, cold, menace, the brothers Deep and Shallow, a psychopathic Abbot and Costello double act) most characters clearly act through a mix of motivations, a tension between self-interest and the Right Thing.

The other great skill the author has is in plotting; as shown in the first book in the series, The Blade Itself, he exults in blindsiding the reader, writing in such a way as makes it impossible to predict who will come out on top - without this feeling like a cheap conjuring trick.

The plotting of this book is lesser than the previous one, although that is understandable both in the scope of this volume being over the course of this single battle and Best Served Cold being the finest book of his I've yet read. While these volumes don't follow on directly as did the original trilogy, there is clearly a throughline (Gorst and others appeared in the previous book, while Calder along with Black Dow, Wonderful and several more are veterans of the adventures of the Bloody Nine, who is referenced not infrequently) and the ending appears to set up a return to the the Southern Border. I am very much looking forward to what comes next.

To close, I wish again to praise the reading by Steven Pacey. For his pacing and intonation and differentiation of character, he is an absolute master. For each of the myriad of characters he gives a distinct, individual and utterly believable reading - mostly various British accents, ranging from posh Union men to Yorkshire and Scotland, a couple of rough East End-types (including Deep, who he give an excellent Michael Caine impression), to Calder and his brother Scale, who have distinctly different Welch voices. The single sour point is an unfortunate confluence of Pacey's pronunciation with an authorial quirk. In putting the emphasis on the second syllable of the word "grimace" -gri-MACE, rather than how I say and think the word, GRIM-uss - this does draw attention to the fact that Abercrombie somewhat overuses it. However, the fact that this is the worst I can say should also speak volumes.

Book review: Before the Fall by Noah Hawley: a masterful slow-burn mystery

 Minor spoilers.

I'm a huge fan of Hawley's TV work - notably Fargo and the truly astonishing Legion - so when I saw he was also a novelist I jumped on this.

Starting is was a strange experience. I'd just finished [author:Emily St. John Mandel|2786093]'s [book:The Glass Hotel|45754981], and to have the second book in a row starting with someone in the ocean, then giving various character backstories one of which involved financial crimes, really did give me an odd sense of deja vu. However, the two are very different books.

Here, a private jet flying from Martha's Vineyard to New York mysteriously crashes 18 minutes into the short flight. The only survivors are Scott Thompson, a painter, and the four-year-old boy he rescues and swims to shore with, in a remarkable act of perseverance.

Each chapter gives us the back story of one of the people on the flight - the conservative media magnate who owns the jet and his family, the slightly less wealthy couple who are their friends, the crew and Scott - as well as exploring the repercussions of the event. Is the crash to do with the fraud investigation, or an attack on the mogul, or something entirely unrelated? Is if just an accident?

Originally described as a hero, the biggest commentator on the right-wing news channel run by the plane owner, Bill <s>O'Reilly</s> Milligan decides the death of his boss - and friend - was caused by a terrorist attack that the government are obviously covering up and that this survivor must be involved.

Hawley unravels the story expertly, drawing rich characters with effortless prose. Along with the mystery of the crash he explores the power of the media and touches on the levels of extreme wealth - the fraudulent investment fund manager "rich, but not owning my own jet rich", to the media mogul, to the socialite art collector in New York who may be the seventh richest person in the world and "can buy literally anything - OK, maybe not Amazon".

This is a literary slow-burn of a mystery, not a thriller, and is utterly absorbing. Perhaps the ending is too sudden but, other than that, it's damned near perfect.

Book review: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin: Not Quite the Sum of Its Parts

It's taken me a while to get around to this review, as I've really needed to cogitate on how I felt about this book.

I really loved aspects of this novel - quite a few aspects, actually - but overall I liked rather than loved the book as a whole, and it's taken me some thought as to work out why.

First off, the things I really liked: I loved the characterisation. I loved the premise. I loved the way Jemisin played with tropes - especially the Lovecraftian aspects, a thing that is very much in the zeitgeist at the moment with Lovecraft Country and Victor LaValle and others. I loved the social commentary, even when it was far from subtle (the whiteness of the Enemy and the threat of gentrification chasing out the "real New Yorkers". The whole problem with Staten Island being part of New York, but separated - more because of White Flight and racism than a stretch of water.

But there was something that, for me, prevented the whole from coming together satisfactorily. I know it is the beginning of a series (although it follows on from the excellent short story The City Born Great) so that may be part of my issue with the structure, but it still seemed somehow lacking.

This book is very much a love-letter to New York City, to its resilience and culture and vibrancy, to its melting pot invention, its ability to absorb all comers and make them New Yorkers whilst allowing that diversity to add to its strength (not unique to NYC, of course; London is very much the modern prototype of this kind of metropolis).

I listened to the audiobook and must give a mention to the performer, Robin Miles. This is simply one of the finest readings of a book I have ever encountered, a full performance of character and subtlety and strength, aided by some superb production with the barest use of effects and music.

I may well amend this review - the book is clearly staying with me - and may well listen to or read it again before the next instalment.

Book review: Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth: Rethinking the economy

 While I say that as well as fiction I read non-fiction, really I typically only read popular science, ancient history and some travel. One area that I never expected to be reading is the wannabe science of economics - but, as with politics, you might not take an interest in economics but it will take an interest in you.

There have been a slew of popular progressive economics books in recent years - from examinations of our broken system like John Lanchester’s Whoops! and Grace Blakely’s Stolen, to those that are more focused on looking at how we build better systems (The Spirit Level and Utopia for Realists), to the more hardcore economic theory (I swear I’ll get round to reading Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis!), and Kate Raworth’s book may be the best I’ve read at both outlining the problems and offering potential solutions in clear, straight-forward language.

It is an idea she has been presenting and working on for almost a decade. While her degree is in economics she was disenchanted by the blinkered, systematised thinking that shackles the discipline (as she points out early on, and again at the end of the book, while other social sciences seek out an encourage different ways of thinking, economists are taught that certain core principles are not to be questioned - no, more than that; they are indoctrinated into the mindset that there are no other ways of thinking.)

The idea of the doughnut is simply this: the hole in the middle is the lack of human dignity - insufficient food, water, shelter, healthcare, education. Those basics that we should allow to all people as a right.

The outer circle is the limit to which we can live with the finite resources of minerals, energy, food production, clean air, clean water.

The doughnut, therefore, is the space between those, where we as a species, as a culture, can provide a decent standard of living for every individual for the long term, without threatening the environment that we rely on for our survival.

It seems like almost too simple an idea - and an even simpler diagram, however she begins by pointing out how important visual signifiers are to us - the iconic map of the London Underground, Copernicus’ illustration of the heliocentric universe - the rising curve of progress and Paul Samualson’s simplistic Circular Flow diagram, picturing the economy as a closed loop that is taught in Econ 101 to this day. Raworth references sharing the ‘doughnut’ diagram with activists who respond effusively stating “YES! That is EXACTLY what I’ve been trying to say!”

And if that was all this book was, it would be no more than an interesting idea. I am sure there are many who are happy to scoff exactly so without engaging, but Raworth both delves into the history of and problems with economic theory, and outlines ideas - both conceptual and real-world ideas actually being implemented - for how we can, and must, do things differently.

She points out how so many of the great economic theorists of the past are selectively understood - Samuelson knew his diagram was a simplification ad absurdum, of use as only the most broad idea for non-specialists; when Simon Kuznets came up with GDP as a measure of productivity, he specifically warned that it was necessarily a narrow measure that should not be used as a benchmark to gauge progress; back to John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith (I always find it remarkable that most people who quote Smith appear completely ignorant of the half of his work in which he talks about social responsibility and warns against the dangers of subverting everything to the acquisition of wealth).

She thoroughly dismantles the consensus idea of economics that growth is the Ultimate Good (quoting a respected economist whom she doesn’t name, when asked why perpetual growth is possible simply responds “Because it has to be!”) to a more thorough debunking of some of the assumptions and models that underpin a pseudoscience that has come to dominate both public policy and public consciousness to a degree that neither the public nor policy makers feel they can question it.

On top of this, the author outlines the generalities of what we need from a new economics and gives examples that work in the real world, along with concepts that should be used in general. 

But this is not a utopian exercise; Raworth makes sure to state that change will be far from easy, and requires some extremely difficult choices. Nonetheless, the tenor of the book is ultimately hopeful, pointing out possible routes out of consumption-driven catastrophe to a future that is not only survivable and sustainable but equitable and regenerative, where we are not merely ameliorating the damage we do to our life support system but actively improving it.

I mostly consumed this via the audiobook, while dipping into the ebook - hence the sparsity of notes. I feel I need to go back for a closer read, to fully embed the ideas. I should do the same for some other books - the ones mentioned at the start of the review. For all the economics is a pseudoscience, it may be the most important factor in how we cope with the coming decades, impacting on everything from our jobs to the welfare state to climate change and alleviating mass extinctions, to production of food and energy and technology.

A must read, and must act on.

Book review: Irreplaceable by Julian Hoffman: Are we the bad guys?

Starting as dusk gathers on Brighton pier and the evening strollers are transfixed by a murmuration of starlings, Julian Hoffman takes us around the world showing us how human activity is ravaging the wonders of nature that both nourish our sense of wonder and are vital to our health and wellbeing as part of a thriving ecosystem. It is not a happy book. The awe that Hoffman superbly captures at the beauty of the natural world only underlines what we are destroying by our wilful blindness and our obsession with economic growth and measuring everything with a short-term monetary value. From a previously unknown species of spider in an abandoned English quarry to the magnificent Balkan lynx and the few scraps of tallgrass prairie in the American midwest, we are pushing out irreplaceable biodiversity with roads and shopping malls and monocultured crops. 

The author makes it clear he is not merely arguing for preservation for nature for its own sake, but because it is vital to human health and survival in the short, medium and long term. In one chapter he writes about an established set of allotments in London that not only provides food for locals but an area of green growth teeming with life, and an area of abandoned "waste ground" in Glasgow that nearby residents have turned into a park and nature reserve. Both are under threat from development and he begins by telling us "Of the following two places, one will be saved, the other destroyed." 

He does show us successes, and how small groups of determined people can fight and even sometimes win against the encroachment - as well as the above, there is some success on those tallgrass prairies, a patch of ancient woodland not five miles from where I write this (which, along with mention of other Sheffield woods in which I played as a child and have visited regularly since really brought home the value, as if that personal connection were needed), the former British Army testing site that, due to the danger of left-over munitions has remained undeveloped and become a remarkably vibrant and important habitat. The rejection of a new motorway that would destroy much of the Gwent Levels on the South Wales coast. 

However, despite this, I was left feeling bleak at the prospects. Yes, I am a depressive and currently managing a particularly low patch which may feed into my pessimism, but these patches seem so fragile, so vulnerable, so at odds with the economic forces that see everything as a resource to be exploited. In his final chapter he points out how many pieces of good fortune were needed to ensure that we still have a few slivers of the Cambridgeshire Fens that are undeveloped, and when we see that a drug for cattle is approved in Europe despite evidence that it is responsible for almost eradicating vultures when used in India, or that - despite a law and specific court orders making mining small islands in Indonesia completely illegal, this is openly ignored and corporations land heavy equipment to strip the vegetation and topsoil to scour the minerals beneath, causing run-off that buries and poisons the most valuable reefs on the planet, I find it difficult to hold out hope of change. 

I have known since I was young that talk of "destroying the Earth" is pure hubris. We are a blip on this planet and, whatever we do, it will continue and repopulate itself with new organisms, new diversity. We are here now, for this moment, and have a choice of how to treat our home and the creatures we share it with, a choice for the legacy we leave our children and grand children and great grand children. 

Still, as the cartoon says, for a brief glorious moment we had great shareholder value. 

Increasingly, I think I'm on the side of the David Morse character in 12 Monkeys.

Book review: A Man Lies Dreaming by Lavie Tidhar

 Wow.

As Tidhar's novel opens it seems to be an alternative history. We are in London in November 1939, but Europe is not at war. In this timeline, the Communist part took power in Germany in the early 1930s leading to disruption and many refugees fleeing to Britain, where Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists appears on course to win the election fuelled by anti-immigrant, -communist and -Jewish rhetoric.

One of these refugees is a man calling himself Wolf, who is working as a low-rent private eye. He hates the whores who work in the alleys near his office/apartment, he hates the kindly old Jewish baker who rents him the room, he is constantly bitter about The Fall, as the collapse of Germany is referred to and, especially, about how close he himself came to power. In best noir style, events are instigated by the arrival of a beautiful (Jewish) heiress at Wolf's office.

The tale switches between Wolf's journal - where we get his observations and thoughts, often distasteful, sometimes humanising as he remembers the past events that shaped him - as well as the observations of someone who refers to himself as the Watcher, clearly a disturbed individual even before he takes action, some third person narration - and the reveal that the story of Wolf is being told inside the head of Shomer, a Jewish pulp fiction author as he endures the horrors of Auschwitz.

Tidhar masterfully weaves a fine noir detective story, made powerful by the frame and characters. The description of Wolf losing his temper and shouting and spitting in rage would be enough to tell us who he is, even were we not given other clues. In his investigations, he looks up his former associates - notably Goebbels and Hess, both having "sold out" - but we also see Ilse Koch, Klaus Barbie and Josef Kramer. Along with Mosley we meet his wife Diana and her sister, Unity, both fervent Nazis. Wolf bumps into Leni Riefenstahl, now an up-and-coming Hollywood actress (this giving us one of several surprisingly funny scenes, where Leni tells him she is filming a sequel to The Great Gatsby where Gatsby (played by Humphrey Bogart) had become a gun runner before retiring to run a bar in Tangier where she, playing Daisy Buchanan, finds him, before the scene ends with Leni, tearfully, saying "We'll always have Nuremberg, won't we, Wolf?")

Shomer, in his mind, puts Wolf through many humiliations and degradations but is unable to avoid giving his character humanity, for all the seething bigotry that drives Wolf's hatred and violence.

I don't tend to read fiction about the Holocaust; I know the details, I've read and seen much non-fiction, as well as the great Primo Levi and don't feel the need to descend into that place again, but in embedding the story in this way Lavie Tidhar casts light on those events, and on the experience the refugee and the foreigner and the other, as well as the perpetrators. (To be clear, I am not feeling in the slightest forgiving of or sympathetic to Hitler, or the others, but the character of Wolf in this novel goes through a journey that might just allow a measure of redemption). The rise of Mosley and the crowds that welcome him with anti-Semitic chants also draws a parallel with the return of the far right in our own time - although it was published in 2014, I couldn't help but see echoes of the events of Charlottesville in 2017 and those "very fine people on both sides".

A Man Lies Dreaming is a stunning novel that has left me shaken and moved, and will stay with me for a very long time indeed.

Book review: The Compelled by Adam Roberts: half-built things

 Adam Roberts is the king of High Concept Science Fiction. His novels tend to be based on a single odd concept which he uses as a jumping off point to explore society, attitudes and people; in On, a civilisation that lives in caves and on ledges on an apparently endless cliff, in The Snow a weird apocalypse caused by eternal snowfall that buries the entire surface of the Earth to hundreds of metres.

In The Compelled, the world has been gripped by "The Compulsion", where random individuals are overtaken by the irresistible urge to take seemingly arbitrary items and collect them in huge sculptures, illustrated at the beginning of each chapter with wonderfully geometric otherworldliness by Belgian graphic novelist François Schuiten.

There are as many theories as sculptures (or machines?) - that it is the work of demons or aliens or Gaia herself - but as we join the story the world has largely come to terms with the Compelled and their actions, albeit that the world economy is in recession due to the disruption caused. Police have learnt to deal with the not-theft and have procedures to differentiate from those who are simply crooks using it as an excuse, and some nations give licences to those who have demonstrated they are true victims of the Compulsion.

Chapters alternate through a disparate section of society, all Compelled or Compelled-adjacent, such as the social worker whose job it is to determine Compelled from Chancer (someone demanding all the cash from a bank or to have sex with a certain movie star because they say they are "compelled to do so" seems eye-rollingly common).

As so often with Roberts' work, what could be silly in other hands is turned, by the depth and deftness of his insights and quality of his writing, into something quite special and moving.

Roberts doesn't always nail the dismount, occasionally leaving things feeling unfinished. In this case that is literally situation as just as it seems we might be gaining some insight into what is really going on, he hits us with

"TO BE CONTINUED..."

Personally, I hope he doesn't leave us hanging too long, as I bloody loved this book.

Book review: Recursion by Blake Crouch, in which I somehow don't use the phrase "mind fuck"

 Time travel stories are tricky beasts. So often the author can be tied up in knots by trying to be too clever in their plotting, or simply by using the idea of changing the past as an excuse to propel the story at the expense of internal or character consistency.

But when done well, it can give us a doozy of a story, and Crouch manages this magnificently.

While he's been on my radar - and my TBR pile - for some time, this is my first of his books, and grabbed me from the get go. The idea of False Memory Syndrome dangled an intriguing thread, immediately making me want to know where this would lead, and the author's prose is as cinematic, fluid and immediate as any top-drawer thriller writer, the kind of writing that mostly disappears as the reader is simply immersed in the tale - but, thankfully, with a deftness of characterisation that is so often missing from these writers.

He sets up the parallel tales of cop Barry Sutton, drawn into the suicide of a woman assailed by a double set of memories, and Helena Smith, a neuroscientist driven to find a way to recover memories as a treatment for dementia, and weaves them together in a way I honestly didn't see coming. About a third of the way through threads seem about to wound up before Crouch hits us like a truck coming out of the darkness with the real concept, sending the book spiralling off in recursive loops and increasingly extreme outcomes that could quite easily have felt too much had they not been handled so well. 

(It's around this switch where I found the only sour note in the whole book; Barry's character reactions just seem completely off, given that he has just remembered is while previous life and both losing and regaining his daughter, his actions and interactions with Helena seem unaffected by this emotional maelstrom. However, as this is just prior to the Big Reveal, I'm happy to put it down to Crouch perhaps concentrating on what is to come.)

As well as the plotting and wonderful time travel premise (which is compelling enough for me to suspend my disbelief, even though I find it no more credible than magic or faster-than-light travel), the novel is fascinating due to the way the author writes character and uses the alternative timelines. That he shows Barry's marriage didn't fail because of his daughter's death, how characters are affected by their circumstances - even though Barry and Helena fit perfectly together and cherish the lifetimes they spend together, their is no clumsy hint of their being twin souls that are meant to be and will always find each other no matter what; having found each other, they need to make the effort to ensure they do so in each subsequent timeline, and this is reinforced by the ending that leaves open that, having now found each other so much later in life than previously, there is no guarantee that the people they now are will click in the same way.

Another bit of genius is the idea of the "dead timelines", where the alternatives cease to exist except as memories. There's a debate in science fiction that the many universes idea as it pertains to time travel can both be used as a lazy get out of jail free card and can also represent a callous indifference to the fate of others, as explored brilliantly in the TV show Rick and Morty, where realities are discarded with abandon when things go awry. In Recursion, Blake Crouch explicitly foregrounds how going back in time to change things for your own advantage - saving a daughter from a speeding driver, rescuing a failed relationship, focussing on a professional project that you'd allowed yourself to be distracted from - will have repercussions for other people that you cannot even begin to comprehend and, while he could have written a story in which these repercussions remain relatively small scale and personal, I quite like the Roland Emmerich-type extremes to which he takes it.

Blake Crouch has written a high-concept scifi thriller that drags you along and leaves you both open-mouthed and thinking. Perhaps it's not In Search of Lost Time or Solaris, but it is a damned-near perfect scifi thriller.

Five well deserved stars.

Review originally published on goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3585601013

Book review: Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by KJ Parker: Grimdark with jokes

I’ve been reading Tom Holt since Expecting Someone Taller in the early 90s, and KJ Parker since stumbling across the Shadow trilogy in the 2000s, and wasn’t aware for a long time that the latter was a pseudonym for the former - or, to be more contemporaneous, that many people suspected KJ Parker was a pseudonym for a well-known writer, and there was quite heated discussion within the community as to their identity.




Not that I’d have been that interested - I’ve always been more interested in the work than the personalities behind it - but I don’t think I’d ever have linked the authors. Holt’s funny, frenetic, while learned and very English style seemed (to me) to bear very little relation to Parker’s dark, foreboding, intricately-plotted tales of individuals fighting fate and obsession to a level that changed the course of nations. Indeed, it didn’t even occur to me to compare the two until a friend mentioned the potential connection.




I mention this because this is the first KJ Parker book I’ve read that has been written since the connection has been acknowledged, and I don’t think it can be coincidental that, in many places, this seems like a blending of the two styles. Mixed in with the story of the military engineer colonel, a former slave and displaced person who has risen through the ranks of an imperial army due to his skill and knowledge but is no soldier, much of the tone is comic; Orhan ( the protagonist in question ) from the start feels out of his depth, apparently muddling through a situation where disasters seem to be multiplying exponentially. The difference in tone to the Scavenger and Engineer books, with their pace driven by the protagonists’ obsession and friction between destiny and self-determinism, could hardly be more marked.




Early on, I confess that this tone kept my opinion lower than it might have been - I’m certainly not against levity in grimdark fantasy ( the master of this is Joe Abercrombie who can take you from belly laughs to stark horror and back again in the space of a few pages ), so perhaps the fault was in my own comparing of the evident clash of styles.



Soon enough, however, I found myself entirely carried forward with the story. Orhan and his regiment of engineers find themselves at the capital city of the mighty Robur empire ( there are many references to classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Constantinople - and I’m sure others I missed ) just as things seem to be falling apart, and Orhan may be the only hope of saving it. Or at least saving the city. Or at least saving his friends. Or at least saving himself.




The tale is pure KJ Parker - overwhelming odds, intricate and surprising plotting, moral ambiguity, incredible detail on technologies of carpentry and metallurgy and siege-craft without detracting from the story - shot through with humour, almost entirely based on the fact that we see it all from the point of view of a character with both too little belief in his own brilliance and the knowledge - or arrogance - that only he can save the day.




On top of which, because Parker/Holt is a very good writer, we have multiple themes of privilege - sexism and racism, especially based around the fact that Orhan is a “milk-face” northerner, facing prejudice and legal restrictions amongst the dark-skinned Robur ( especially due to a scene at a drinking fountain, I’m confident that this is purely an artistic choice and definitely not some “whites are the real oppressed people!” shtick. This shouldn’t even need saying, but have you seen the world? ) and, especially, the meaning of loyalty and friendship and belonging.




Perhaps secondary characters are well-sketched rather than fully formed, although this can be excused as the whole book is from Orhan’s first-person viewpoint - and the author cleverly plays with our expectations when we find he has, indeed, been dictating the story to a scribe - but this is a fine example of modern fantasy, exciting and referential and thought-provoking. I reckon any expectation of style is entirely on me and, frankly, it must be pretty bloody difficult to keep up the level of grimness from the earlier KJ Parker trilogies.

Book review: The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane: poetry of the outer and inner landscape

In The Wild Places, Robert MacFarlane sets out to find if there are any such environments left within the British Isles. The book begins contemplatively, with the author journeying to one of his favourite local places, a beech wood outside the city of Cambridge where he lives, climbing a tree as is his wont, so he can sit and observe, and be part of, this sylvan idyll.



This sets the tone wonderfully. From the very first sentence, you realise that you are in for a special experience; the quality of MacFarlane’s prose is quietly spectacular, largely understated but with the rhythms of good poetry and this, combined with his eye for detail and a mind that connects the landscape and the animals and our inhabitation along with more personal experiences, make the book extraordinary.



Over fifteen chapters MacFarlane travels across Britain, and to Ireland, to experience the places he considers most “wild” and natural, initially using as a guide the travels of the legendary Irish King Sweeney, who was made to wander the wild places as a beast following an act of betrayal.



From the island of Ynys Enlii, off the Lleyn Peninsula, where Wales reaches it most Western point toward Ireland, on to Scotland - to Coriusk on Skye, Rannoch Moor, Coille Dubh ( The Black Wood ), Strathnaver and Ben Klibreck, Cape Wrath and Ben Hope before crossing the Irish Sea to the desolation of the Burren. MacFarlane finds even more poetry in these places than their evocative names suggest - along with the rest of his journey, to the high ridges of the Lakeland fells, the Kentish Holloways, the storm-lashed beaches of Norfolk, Essex saltmarshes and, finally, my own back yard, the moors above Hope Valley in the High Peak. His writing conjures the landscape like nobody I’ve read, the individual feel and sense and rhythm of each place, drawing the reader to it - even when, as in attempting to spend the night on the frozen Ben Hope in Northern Scotland, for the first time he feels how truly hostile a place can be and is genuinely afraid.



Each section of travelogue is also woven through with skeins of history - both of the regions, and more personal history. This becomes more pointed when MacFarlane’s friend Roger, with whom he has discussed many of his trips, have shared ideas and thoughts like the oldest of friends, who has accompanied him on several excursions, falls suddenly ill.



The final trip to the Peak District brings the book full circle, as he is shown where to find snow hares by John, who had piloted the boat out to Ynys Enlii, and then a final coda where MacFarlane returns once more to the beech wood. He may have found that there is, perhaps, no true wilderness in the British Isles, in that there is no land that has not been shaped by humanity and our works, but that the wild is still there to be appreciated and respected, should we wish to look for it, that we need to protect it for our own health and benefit, but it the wild places will be there long after we have gone.




5/5, and an instant addition to the Favourites shelf

Book Review: Darkness, Take My Hand by Dennis Lehane

For me, Dennis Lehane is one of the top-tier thriller writers. This second instalment in his Kenzie & Gennaro series builds slowly, relying entirely on character and mood - built from the first-person observations of Boston PI Patrick Kenzie as he describes the crazily changeable weather of a Massachusetts autumn, violence in the news, and hints at the events of the past season that have left him untethered.



This prologue sets a dark, foreboding mood, before the story starts in classic detective story style with a friend calling to recommend a prospective client, and setting up the meeting, all set against the easy back and forth banter between Kenzie and his partner in investigation and friend since childhood, Angie Gennaro. Although we are a hundred pages in before the first crime occurs, the book is never less than gripping as Lehane builds the characters, their world and relationships and history. The investigation lead the pair into situations smouldering with the threats of sudden and fatal violence. Once the first body turns up, the author begins the steadily crank the already building tension, and this doesn't let up for the rest of the book.




This first body seems separate to the pair's investigation but, of course, it is no spoiler to say that everything is connected, or ( if you've read the cover blurb, or the signs in the writing ) that this is a serial killer book. And, fair warning, steer clear if you don't like graphic violence. I'd forgotten how disturbing Lehane can get in his writing, but the most uncomfortable scenes are not those of actual violence but those where some of the worst characters in the book talk. One conversation in particular, with Kevin Hurlihy - a contemporary of the leads who is now a mob enforcer - still stains my thoughts.




Kenzie seems to surround himself with damaged, dangerous people - as well as Kevin, the mobsters, and the killers he investigates, there is Bubba, another childhood friend of himself and Gennaro who is a "good guy" only inasmuch as he deeply loves them both and will do anythings for them - however, Kenzie points out that the two are literally the only things in the universe he cares about and anything, or any body, else is utterly disposable.




The serial killer story has shades of The Silence of the Lambs ( and, Darkness was published in 1996, probably a deliberate nod to it ), but a huge difference with many other serial killer books is not only a complete refusal to lionise the killers - they are not geniuses, they are not extraordinary, they are not even inhuman ( they are, as he point out, very human even though they are the worst of us; they are Auschwitz and Belsen and Bosnia ) - they are, to quote Michael Marshall at the end of a page-long rant on this very subject "just fucking monsters that destroy" - but Lehane is a master at showing the effects: the utter devastation of loss and violence and cruelty visited upon the innocent without logic or reason or cause. The effects of just moving in that world, with Patrick Kenzie as the prime example.




Darkness, Take My Hand is not a flawless book; there are some moments when hints are dropped a little heavily, others where equally weighty red herrings proffered, and a couple of character moments that raise eyebrows but this can easily be forgiven in this superbly written, completely gripping, and hugely effective and affecting thriller.




I'll definitely be continuing with the series however, as I think I may have said after reading A Drink Before the War, I feel I will have to walk around in the sunlight for some time before I feel strong enough to re-enter the Boston of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.

Book Review: The Mongols by John Man

Author John Man takes us from the youth of Temujin, and how he became Genghis Khan and built an empire that crossed Asia into Europe, to his descendants - not just Ogedai and Kublai, but all the branches of his family, taking us into the internecine feuds and jostling for power while the empire Genghis has founded doubled in size, and then caused it to fracture and split.




He does a wonderful job of following the often tortuous paths of history with clarity, but also setting them in the context and feel of time and place; the attitudes of the lands and nations who faced the Mongols, well-argued reasons for why they fell or resisted. The canvas is vast, and he introduced me to many aspects of this history of which I was entirely unaware: the facts that the Turks were a earlier wave of settlers from the same part of the world, the Mongol conquest of the entirety of Asian Islam, the fact that European Christian crusaders allied with the Mongols on more than one occasion ( from a belief that they represented the mythical Eastern Christian emperor Prester John to simple practicality of fighting the same opponent ), the failed invasions of Vietnam and Japan, the off-hand remark that modern Pakistan was part of the empire. Each of these and more could fill volumes in their own right, and I hope I can find accounts written as well as this.




Not that this book is simply a brief overview, Man goes into detail that is substantial and in depth, but not overwhelming. Early on I had been perhaps a little disparaging of his narrative style, but that was entirely unfair; while quite different from the style of, say, Tom Holland, one of my personal favourites and a consummate writer of narrative histories. While initially it seems that Man is rushing through events and piling up detail, he circles back and suddenly he is building a narrative picture that has drawn the reader right into the heart of the story. His main achievement, though, is the way he connects the events to modern history, not only the China ( including how the Chinese claim Genghis for their own ) but Russia, the 'Stans, the Middle East and even how it moulded medieval Japan.




I do have to say that one problem with the book is the way he deals - or doesn't deal - with rape. This becomes especially apparent in a later section when he revisits the fact that one of Genghis' sons was viewed ( possibly correctly ) as illegitimate as his mother had been held captive by an enemy tribe for several months, as well as the fact of Y-chromosomes originating in Mongolia being widespread throughout Asia and Europe. He states these matters as simply that, without acknowledging the sexual violence implicit in both. I'm sure the author would say something along the lines of "it was a simple fact of how the world was then", but he doesn't say anything in the text and this omission, whether he feels it irrelevant, or is uncomfortable with the subject, leaves for me a troublesome gap that should at least have been recognised.

Book Review: The Book of the Unnamed Midwife by Meg Elison: Marginally less bleak than The Road

Perhaps it's not surprising that a book set during and after an apocalypse is bleak, and this is less bleak than Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but in many ways it's still a book that I'm not sure the word 'enjoy' attaches to.




A sudden, rampant plague starts to kill people in massive numbers. Women seem even more effected than men, perhaps only a tenth as many surviving, and not a single child survives birth.




A maternity nurse recovers from the fever, waking in her apartment to witness that the ravages she had been trying to treat - or ameliorate - have left devastation. Her first encounter with another human being is an attempted rape, and she quickly decides to disguise herself as a man for safety.




Her travels to eventual safety are fraught and disturbing. ( This is not a spoiler, by the way; the novel is prefaced with a future monastery-like scene where a woman leads some boys in making copies of the Book of the Unnamed Midwife, so we know there is some sort of continuation ).




One thing that gave me pause - not while I was reading it, as the writing is of such a high quality that it wasn't until I paused that questions came - is that in the first part of the book her encounters with men portray them almost exclusively as wanting to rape and and own and control the few remaining women in the most horrific ways. I don't think the evidence of how the vast majority of people behave after disasters maps onto this (although this is of a scale unseen; I know complete devastation has happened more locally and would be interested to see if there is a difference) but then I began to see this as much of a metaphor for toxic masculinity as anything else. If this were written by a man it would probably come across as some awful rape fantasy like those appalling Gor books.




As the story progresses we get asides, mentioning what happens to some of the people the wanderer ( she chooses different names constantly, and I do like how Elison then sticks to that name while it is in use ) or just to mention what is happening in other parts of the world - all of which tend to be at least as bleak as the main narrative.




Well worth reading - but, of course, bear in mind the sexual violence warning, and general timbre - but I think I'm genuinely looking to the next volume. I'm hoping this will be less bleak.




original review on goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2485957571?

Book Review: Voices (Annals of the Western Shore 2) by Ursula K le Guin

Le Guin is rightly famed for her novels of the late 1960s and the 1970s such as the Earthsea books, The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, but she has never let up and has been a force in science fiction, fantasy and indeed literature for almost 60 years now. This, the middle volume of the Annals of the Western Shore, shows just why; she writes prose as lucid and powerful as almost any writer I can think of, characters that walk the line between tale-tellers archetype and fully three dimensional human beings, and infuses the whole with a humanity and relevance that is breathtaking. She writes great stories that are made epic by the inclusion of a meaning that is apparent but never heavy handed, that never overwhelms the tale but lifts it.



Voices finds a great, ancient city of learning that has been subjugated for seventeen years by a foreign power whose singular god considers any other deities to be demons and any books or writing blasphemy, and a girl - child of a violation during the invasion - who has grown up tending the remains of a secret library and is witness to, and instrumental in, a great change.



As wonderful as the first volume, Gifts, leaving me a little sad that there is only one book remaining.

Book Review: Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This novel starts in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and advances to the present day - or, more probably, to the very near future, although this isn’t completely clear. Along with this interesting and - for me - unfamiliar setting, it is a novel of big ideas, science, culture and society (all the things science fiction does best), so I should have loved it.


And it isn’t that is is badly written. There are, indeed, moments of sheer beauty, and I would call the novel a success, but it does fall short. In some ways the book feels like a patchwork from different eras of SF; there are parts reminiscent of ‘Doc’ Smith, Asimov, Silverberg, Stephenson. I particularly thought of this last a few times with Liu’s tendency to elaborate on a scientific idea (such as the titular Three Body Problem) or a technology, and also to expostulate at length.


Much of the novel centres around one of the characters investigating a virtual reality game called Three Body, wherein the players are attempting to define a scientific model for a reality where the days and seasons seem utterly chaotic (although it might seem that the name of the game is a rather obvious clue, given the scientific background of so many of the players). It transpires that this game is actually a recruiting tool by a group of people who are preparing to welcome to Earth an alien civilisation from just such a world. And this is where the book really falls apart; the aliens just aren’t believable. While many of the other shortcomings of the book can be excused - there is a lack of good characterisation, the scientific ideas may break the flow of the story on occasion but are interesting in themselves, the idea that intelligent life could evolve on such a chaotic world are far fetched but no more so than, say, Dragon’s Egg, The aliens themselves entirely lack personality. Worse, their communications are often nothing but the worst sort of exposition and full of metaphors that are so human and 20th century it is entirely jarring.


This is a great shame, as there is so much about the book to admire and enjoy. The details of the Cultural Revolution, and the inviting of the potentially destructive outside force to solve the problems of a humanity that may be considered to be beyond redemption as a mirror for that terrible era. I am very much undecided whether to pick up the next volume.

Book Review - In the Shadow of the Sword - Yes It's F*cking Political, Everything's Political

Tom Holland has made quite the name for himself with his narrative histories. His first, Rubicon, is about the rise of Julius Caesar and the transformation of Rome from the Republic it had been to the Empire usually envisioned by those of us raised on Hollywood sword and sandal epics and the UK history syllabus.




Here, Holland covers a far more complex and controversial era of history, the world of late antiquity centred on what we now refer to as the Middle East. This fits in nicely with my current undertaking of patching the massive holes left in my knowledge of world history by the aforementioned UK school syllabus. It particularly snuggles like a jigsaw piece against Judith Herrin’s superlative history of Byzantium which, naturally, focused on that great city itself and the world beyond only inasmuch as it bore directly upon it.




The setting here is the Eastern edge of the late Roman Empire where it abuts the most Westerly of the great Asian empires - initially the Parthians, then succeeded by the Sassanians. Each, much to the surprise of most people with a Western Classical education, was easily a match for mighty Rome and inflicted at least as many defeats and humiliations upon it as it upon them (the most striking of which is the fate of Emperor Valerian who, after being captured by the Parthians, spent the rest of his life being used by King Shapur I as a stool to mount his house and, on his death, having his skin flayed and gilded as a throneroom trophy).




Holland throws in vignettes like this to wonderful effect - such as the introductory account of the bloodthirsty religions zeal of Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar, before ending with the startling line “So perished… the last Jewish king to rule in Arabia.”




The author spends most of the book with background of how the two great empires grew and changed through the first 600 years or so of the Common Era - more detail on the Sassanids as Rome is more familiar to his audience, although he sketches in such things as the Gothic conquest of Italy and Spain and refers to a few things with which we are more likely to be familiar to ground the narrative. He takes us through the difficulties that Parthia has with the ‘barbarians’ on its Northern and Eastern frontiers that it massively underestimates and leads to its collapse (if I’ve learnt one thing from reading history, it is NEVER pursue bands of mobile mounted archers however much the taunt you), along with an overview of their culture and religion.




Along with this, as part of the timeline of Constantinople, we are shown the rise of Christianity in Palestine - the response of Rome to the various Hebrew insurrections, leading ultimately to expulsion from Jerusalem, the foundation of the Holy Land as a place of pilgrimage from Europe following Constantine’s conversion, the ascetic monks such as Simeon on his pillar. We also get a potted history of the schisms of Christianity, Nicea and Chalcedon, the Arians and the Copts.


Then, in the third part of the book, we are introduced again to that fragment of the region under the control of neither superpower. To the south of the fractious border is Arabia, a land considered barbarous by both Romans and Sassanians, although they are both also quite happy to pay the tribes as mercenaries. This disregard despite the fact that this area has housed the kingdom of Sheba, made wealthy beyond imagining by being the major supplier of Frankincense but fallen on hard times by the rise of Christianity and their dislike of such pagan practices as the burning of incense. From this area comes a third force, one which gives some editions of this book its alternative (and rather inflammatory) subtitle, “The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire”.




And this is where the controversy comes in. Holland shows how Islam rose not only as a political force as much as a religious one, but that it was a melange of the Hebraic history of the Arabian peninsula (as foreshadowed by that introduction with King Yusuf), the Manichaeism of late Iranshahr (Sassania), along with influences from others in the area such as the Biblically maligned Samaritans, the philosophy generated by the Christian schisms and the close textual analysis and argumentation of the Jewish yeshivas. Most controversial of all, the author points out the signal lack of contemporary accounts of the Qu’ran, Mecca and Mohammed’s direct influence. He shows Islam (or the Mohammedan faith, which came to be called Islam almost a century later) as a political construct, as riven with dissent and infighting as any other human political process. Perhaps most shockingly of all, he suggests that the hadiths, the sayings of Mohammed used as an adjunct to and expansion of the Qu’ran, are made up out of whole cloth the best part of a century after his death to justify interpretations of the extremely vague Qu’ran - or, indeed, to entirely re-write it, such as to upgrade the punishment for adultery from lashes to the traditional Jewish death by stoning. Mixed in with the jockeying for position as the power behind this new and vast empire, this shows that Islam and its holy texts are no more trustworthy and god-given than those of Christianity or Judaism, Zoroastrianism or Hinduism. They are products of human societies, of political power struggles that have a background and a frame, that both use belief and are a vector for it.




While Tom Holland’s fourth history book (he also write fiction - I really should investigate that!) is not without flaws, it is remarkably well written, well argued, as well as well researched and referenced. I have yet to read a narrative history as good as his debut, Rubicon (although that is on a par with saying that I have yet to hear a symphony on par with Beethoven’s ninth or Mahler’s fifth. Okay, anything by Mahler) but I think that is because the relatively narrow focus of the internecine power plays of Roma perhaps lend themselves more easily to the narrative history style without oversimplification. Holland obviously must simplify somewhat, but he really does seem to try to include as much relevant information as is humanly possible. As with his book Persian Fire about the Greco-Persian wars (Thermopylae and all that) this can lead to a temporary overload of information, that I dealt with by putting aside the book for a few days on occasion to allow my brain to process it. I do also feel that he sometimes gives myths of Christianity an easier ride that those of other religions, putting them down with argumentative foot- or endnotes. While this may be purely as he expects the audience to be already more familiar with these, it does mean these appear to be accepted more uncritically.




In all, an utterly superb addition to my knowledge of the history that has formed our world, told in an utterly compelling, absorbing and informative manner.

Book Review: Yellow King Tales volume 1: solid pallor and a tattered robe

After finding the recent Pulver edited anthology A Season in Carcosa a very mixed bag, I thought Id try this collection by the man himself. It starts very, very strongly; the first five stories are gloriously creepy and scary, modern-set noir-tinged Yellow King tales fraught with menace and madness, utilising many of the tropes of Chambers' original stories to stunning effect. Publication dates aren't listed for individual stories, but I can well imagine these were an influence on the original True Detective TV show.


Unfortunately, nothing else in the book hits that level of quality. There are many good stories but, for me, nothing great and frankly too much filler. Part of the problem was, perhaps, reading it as a block rather than dipping in, as Pulver's reliance on Cassilda and other fragments from the Yellow King play becomes somewhat repetitive.


In many of the stories the author also writes in a style that is neither prose nor poetry (or possibly both), going from normal block paragraphs to

setting out
the words

in

poem-like


forms/that/use

white                                                  space


and make use
of

punctuation{in}odd[and]
experimental ways.



I didn't find this very effective - although, full disclosure, I have never been a fan of shape poems and find stream-of-consciousness writing generally insufferable, so perhaps I'm the wrong audience. The longer of these pieces I found myself scanning through as there didn't really seem to be a great deal of content within the form. There are also a couple of stories that are fine, but then have sudden Yellow King references shoehorned in at the end for no apparent reason, and much to the detriment of the tale.


I will definitely return to Pulver, perhaps trying some of his longer work or something not so narrowly focused as he can undoubtedly be a great writer.

Book review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

In many ways, this is a straight-forward, old-fashioned space adventure. A deep space vessel - in this case, a tunneling ship, used to cut stable wormholes for interstellar travel - takes a job that turns out to be less straightforward than anticipated, and we see how the crew deal with that, and how it affects their relationships. (And I'm not trying to belittle the story or the genre; I know any story, when broken down into its basic elements, seems simplistic).



The difference here from the vast majority of these sorts of stories is the focus. While they usually put the adventure itself in the spotlight and character tension rises from that, Becky Chambers concentrate on the characters and their relationships from the start. We begin by being introduced with a new crew member - Rosemary, who seems very much a surrogate for both the reader and Chambers herself - although the third-person viewpoint quickly diversifies among the multi-species crew so we see events from different perspectives. There is a great deal of introduction to this universe, the GC (Galactic Community? Galactic Council? Something like that) to which humanity is a a fairly recent entrant after leaving a polluted Earth to repair itself and splitting into two factions - those settled on Mars and the Exodans, who live almost entirely in their ships and space stations.



The relationship-focus and the grimy, real-feeling level of the tech - along with a sharpness of wit and dialogue in the writing - are certainly why this book has attracted so many comparisons to Joss Whedon's Firefly although, if anything, here the story takes even more of a back seat to the personalities. The events are largely low-key (about which I am not complaining as I am thoroughly sick of save-the-universe stories) and the 'small, angry planet' of the title, and the main mission, does not even figure until the last fifth of the book - although, I guess, it is a long way there. It is, however, these relationships and the characters that carry the story and set it apart. The characters are fairly well realised and it is these relationships - both with each other, and outside of the family of the crew - that give us the bulk of the interest and peril. And they are very much a family, something to which focus is brought by the mention of the family structure of the reptilian Aandrisk, of whom Sissix, the ship's pilot, is a member. They are born into and raised by a hatch family (of probably unrelated individuals to their parents), choose a feather family - or, rather, a succession of feather families - of like-minded individuals throughout their adult lives, before settling into a more (but not entirely) stable house family to raise young given into their care when they are older. As well as an intriguing social structure that holds echoes of many ancient human tribes, it is a clear metaphor for the friendship groups we build and which are - often and for many people - more important than the families into which we are born.



Along with the very 'liberal' political (both small 'L' and small 'P') - there is no distinction made between binary or same-sex relationships, indeed interspecies relationships are touched upon, and gender issues are foregrounded - I imagine this is the sort of SF that makes the Sad Puppies rabid. So, kudos to chambers for that.



However, this is 'just' about gender politics (in fact, i'd say it isn't about gender politics at all, but I guess, unfortunately, taking the position that who you love is no big thing is a political stand). The theme of the book is about identity - those relationship identities, yes, but also about what it is to be a person. As well as the personhood of each of the alien races, the status of AIs is one of the big questions that this society has yet to address.



Even if you are perfectly happy with the type of SF that this - which I absolutely am - there are problems with the book itself, on its own terms. The crew of the Wayfarer are a bit too nice to each other - with the exception of Corbin, the stand-offish, persnickety algae tech (one of the power sources for the ship) who nobody else really likes, they all get on far too well with none of the annoyances that you would expect of people living in close confines for long stretches of time. I would have liked to see more interpersonal tension, if only in small ways.



However, Chambers does generally write the characters and relationships well, but this can't be said for some of the physical threats. There is a big action scene near the end that you can almost miss if you're not paying attention - yes, partly there is confusion as it is from the view of the crew who aren't expecting it, but even so the whole thing needed rewriting. But, hey, it's her first novel.



There is a far more important flaw, though. In showing us that all the five species who make up the crew are people, with the possible exception of the wonderful Dr Chef, we lose any sense of their alien-ness, except when it's explicitly stated as with the Aandrisk family structure. Okay, the fact of their personhood, that "we're all the same under the skin", is kind of the point but, for all the diversity in the liberal outlook, this has a homogenising effect that slightly undermines the message. The only species that did seem at all alien were those that were threatening - the Toremi, the civilisation to whom the Wayfarer is travelling, and the militaristic Quelin, who seem to have it humans generally (and who I pictured as the being like the Vogon guard tasked with throwing Arthur and Ford out of the airlock in the TV version of Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy...) This does seem to leave us with the lazy idea that explicable and similar means friendly whilst different and confusing means an enemy, which I doubt very much is what Chambers intended and, I'm sure, something she'll address in the further volumes. And, again, it's a very hard thing to write, but here it is very, very important.



Oh, and just one more thing. This isn't a complaint about the book at all, but about many of the reviews. Stop calling it space opera, it isn't. Space opera is the grand guignol of the spaceways - it is big storylines, overblown, huge events painted on a massive canvas in broad strokes. Often with fat ladies singing. It is Peter Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds and the sorely missed Iain M. Banks.

Book Review: Lexicon by Max Barry - the Power of the Word

Words have power. We all know this, especially as readers we are aware of the magic of words. And if we have seen any applied neurolinguistics - the magician Derren Brown, for instance, using his training and the force of his personality to either guide people’s choices or, more disturbingly, seemingly bend them to his will, both with the careful hidden placement of trigger words - we see the shared route of the two meanings of the word ‘spell’.



Max Barry posits that something even more powerful and immediate can be achieved than that which we see in the edited Derren Brown TV shows, that there are words and phrases that can control us all, different ones depending on our ‘personality segment’, and that an organisation exists of people who train in and wield this power.



Emily Ruff, a vagrant getting by on small con-jobs and sleight-of-hand tricks is recruited for training and becomes embroiled in a something even darker, their idea that there are ‘barewords’, ur-words in some primal proto-language that bypass the cortex and can control anybody, instantly and completely.



Barry presents what is both a superb, engaging, white-knuckle thriller and also an exploration of language and control. Through fragments from media stories and message board discussions between chapters he draws parallels between the blunt-force over-riding control of these ‘magic’ words and the more subtle and pervasive and more real - and hence more frightening - power of media manipulation. The book also touches on the philosophical idea of how much language creates reality by affecting our perception of it, as well as motifs of trust and loyalty and power.



This is a dark book - I haven’t given it the horror tag for nothing - but, as always with Max Barry, it is also deeply humanistic and is threaded through with real humour. Read it and, if you haven’t already, read Jennifer government too, for good measure.