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: 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.

Story review: Clover by Charlie Jane Anders: Transformation, luck & beauty

This is an utterly beautiful little story, a perfectly worked gem. A mostly black cat is gifted to a young couple with the promise it will bring luck, and things seem to go well - not miraculously well, but a steady streak of progress in their respective professions. Nine years later, to the day, another cat is delivered as a companion for the first. The first cat, Berkeley, doesn't seem to take to Clover and this disruption begins to reverse the good fortune of the previous years.



Charlie Jane Anders give this a fairy tale cadence throughout, which works perfectly. The unexpected gift of cats from strange men is odd, but within the tone this is not too strange to be accepted. Perhaps it is the cats, but there are hints of Murakami and, perhaps, Charles de Lint.



The tale itself is simple, that of a couple facing the ups and downs of life together, the one from whom we get the POV questioning himself when things go awry and paralysed with fear, unable to communicate. What makes it sparkle is that handling of tone and detail; the characters are minimally but artfully sketched with small details, and is the world. This is clearly a fantasy tale - as I say, a fairy story, with strange people delivering cats that (may) grant luck and may not be cats at all - but the brushed mise en scene suggests a world that is barely tomorrow - increased displacement of refugees, violence and intolerance. Actually, as it was published in 2016, perhaps we are in that tomorrow.



The whole is filled with compassion and flair and magic. We are left with lose threads but this is fine as they are part of the richness of the tapestry, and an acceptance that not having magical, external luck is simply normal life. If that maneki neko actually was any more than a placebo after all.



I see that the story is marked as All the Birds in the Sky 1.5. I've had that on my shelf for awhile, so I think it is due a read.




Original review at goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2673995901

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: Gnomon by Nick Harkaway: Catabasis for Democracy, with Shark

I'll admit up front that Harkaway's debut, The Gone-Away World, is one of my favourite books and his subsequent novels aren't too shabby either, but his fourth is quite remarkable. It is set partially in a near-future Britain run by the System, a data network that both organises the citizenry into an active direct democracy and keeps their lives efficient and safe. Data privacy is a thing of the past; you can query someone's identity and life by direct access to the System and Harkaway skillfully shows how this affects social mores.




This set up, of course, immediately makes the hairs of discomfort prickle on the napes of our necks; whether liberal or conservative or whatever mix, such phrases as "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", "Those who give up liberty for safety, deserve neither" and "Panopticon" cannot help but spring to mind, thought the author does an excellent job of being even-handed in his presentation of the view.




The book starts with a death of a subject in interrogation by the Witness, the security arm of the System. This is presented as a unique occurrence, and immediately taken seriously and handed to the talented and driven Inspector Mielikki Neith. The manner of the interrogation is disturbing and reinforces fears about the ubiquitously invasive arm of the state, but this is leavened over time by the seriousness with which this event is treated and, well, by the fact that the System seems to work, and seems to be benevolent and effective.




I had said the book is set partially here. We soon are introduced to narratives which seem entirely unrelated - centred around a brilliant Greek mathematician who, following personal tragedy, has turned his skills to the stock market; the former lover of the 4th/5th century Bishop Augustine of Hippo, herself a philosopher and alchemist; and a talented Ethiopian artist who (barely) escaped his country for England in the political chaos following the fall of Haile Selassie.




Each thread is superbly written, capturing the differing voices and setting and moods. The writing contains a density of allusion and meaning and texture - yet with a lightness of touch - that immediately brought to mind Umberto Eco or Neal Stephenson at his more focused, and Paul Auster. It seems clear that these stories cannot be divergent and Harkaway indeed begins to weaves threads between them, though some of the clues turn out to be fish that, at the least, seem to be scarlet in certain light.




In weaving the threads together we are treated to an exploration of liberty versus safety and convenience, public transparency and the dangers of the malicious hacking of the democratic process (I cannot possibly imagine where that last idea came from...) but, as well as the clues to the central mystery, the nested narratives also show real human stories of tragedy and love and loss and betrayal and reconciliation and hope. There are also some beautiful metaphors about books, and the power of good ideas and arguments to succeed by literally changing the person who hears them.




This novel is a tour-de-force, brilliant and important and a bloody fantastic read. It could be argued that, toward the end, Harkaway explains things a little too clearly and leaves less ambiguity than Eco or Auster would, but this is, I think, due to the wider audience for whom he is writing; frankly, this book already asks a great deal of the reader and such ambiguities on top of that are not to the taste of a lot of people. However, this book deserves plaudits and huge sales and awards scifi and literary alike. It will stay with me for a long time and I am sure that, when i re-read it, I will find layers I missed this time around.




A word on format. I read this on my Kindle, partly as the 700 page paperback appears to be printed in 8-point font (yes, the info page says 11.5-point, but I suspect that to be the System gaslighting me) and found this all the more useful as I could immediately check unfamiliar words and references. If you are reading a hard copy and don't have a thorough knowledge of Greek mythology, I suggest keeping close to wikipedia.



( originally published on goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2059658585?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1 )

Book Review - Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, edited by Bill Campbell

In recent years I've been making an effort to read more broadly, and my encounters with Octavia E. Butler, Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin have brought me into the sphere of Afrofuturism. I'd been yearning to delve deeper so this seemed the perfect find



I'm aware there is much debate about what exactly Afrofuturism is, and the "and Beyond" of this title should have suggested to me that editor Bill Campbell trawls his net widely; there are the kind of thing that I might have expected (although somehow I expected nothing in particular, and thought myself wide open, clearly I carry the cultural baggage of of a certain age and ethnicity and gender and geography and class and experience, so the stories that showed a standard SF future but with a Afrocentric slant, or some variant from a past less dominated by European colonialism - or simply from a point of view not rooted in that history.



That would have been plenty to both sate and whet my appetite, but there is more here. It is almost misleading to call this anthology Afrofuturism (if that is the use of a fashionable term for attention, it is forgivable); this is a collection of fictions of inclusion, of voices of groups marginalised in art and culture, their voices and viewpoints. This collection is a shining example of the joy of exploration beyond one's usual boundaries. The standard of the stories is superb (not every single one to my taste, for instance the few ultra-shorts, but I am not really a fan of flash-fiction) and there are a handful of tales that took my breath away - those by Victor LaValle, N.K. Jemisin, Ernest Hogan, S.P. Somtow, Junot Díaz - and I'm sure others I'm leaving off- were the highlights.



One of the joys of anthologies is finding writers I may not have otherwise come across, and this has certainly opened my horizons. It is a perfect illustration of two of my favourite quotes:


"Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while." Malorie Blackman

“Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” Neil Gaiman



So read widely. Read people who are not like you. Read people who have different experiences, different histories, different outlooks. Read colour, read gender, read sexuality.



Read difference.





( originally posted at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2396430194 )

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: The Rook by Daniel O'Malley

I started off rather enjoying this, but it frankly became a something of a slog. The setting is a present-day Britain where, within the government, there exists a shadowy organisation known as the Checquy. It has existed for many centuries and is made up of ‘talented’ individuals, usually recruited as infants and raised to serve and protect the British Isles. Think X-Men meets Charles Stross’ Laundry Files meets Harry Potter.


We start with Myfanwy Thomas coming to with no memory, surrounded by bodies, in a London park. At least, the letter in her pocket tells her that’s who she is - or, rather, that is the identity of the body she inhabits. This missive and the trail of information she follows are written by the ‘real’ Thomas, a highly placed administrator at the organisation, who has received several telling prophecies that she is to die and her body is to be re-inhabited by another. What’s more, it is another member of the Checquy ruling elite who is responsible.


This is an intriguing idea, a nice fantastical twist on the venerable DOA motif; the crime has already been committed, and the first person narrator is trying to find the perpetrator. And it starts well enough, building the new Myfanwy’s character, with all it’s unmoored uncertainty as she struggles to fit into this life at the same time as investigating the ongoing crime - because, of course, her predecessor’s obliteration is part of a grander scheme.


This was one of the first sour notes. Once she begins to interact with the other members of the organisation, with all their strange powers and arcane knowledge, people  barely bat an eye at her sudden change of character. These are people who know there are individuals and organisations with powers exotic and powerful and multifarious, but don’t consider that this highly-placed officer might have been replaced by an imposter? However, I reinforced my willing suspension of disbelief and rejoined the ride.


Unfortunately, my perseverance wasn’t rewarded. While there are many excellent ideas embedded within the story, it needed more thought and, quite honestly, a good deal more editing. Increasingly problematic are the notes left by the original Rook Thomas for the replacement; the original purpose of these is to guide her substitute with the information she has managed to glean prior to her own ‘murder’. As this seems to be building toward something the reader can’t help but think “why not just skip ahead and find out what’s going on?” but then the author begins to pad these epistles out with stories of Thomas background which, while arguably interesting backstory, are entirely inappropriate and act as massive info dumps, a terrible example of the writer feeling the need to show their working.


I confess that I started skim reading, also encouraged by a tonal monotony and the fact that the writing just wasn’t executed well enough to carry the whole thing off. When a big action scene and reveal  left me yawning I knew I wasn’t going to continue with the series. There’s definitely potential here, but the whole needed tightening up.


Originally posted on Goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2070889433

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: 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.

Book review: When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson has long been one of my favourite authors, ever since I read her debut Behind the Scenes at the Museum. When she turned her talents to crime fiction with Case Histories she brought her wonderful skills to that genre, but it is with the third installment of the Jackson Brodie series that she’s really blown it out of the water.


The book opens with a prologue set 30 years ago, with Atkinson showcasing her complete mastery of character and the seemingly effortless way she builds a scene so real we are immersed in it. A woman takes her three young children for a walk in the Devon countryside. They are displaced from London due to her absent husband’s whim and she is at once trying to keep the children active and entertained, make the most of the situation and walk off her obvious frustration. As with the rest of the book, each piece of description and dialogue and inner monologue or realisation tells us all of this, every bit building and advancing the story (although you might not realise it for a long time) but utterly subtle and realistic. So beautifully and immersively is this scene constructed, the brutal denouement is like punch in the stomach.


The rest of the novel is in the present day and, while the first chapter features the titular main character of the series, Jackson Brodie himself is absent or, at most, on the periphery, throughout the great majority of the story. Instead, we see the tale unfold largely through the eyes of Brodie’s erstwhile colleague/sparring partner/potential love interest DCI Louise Monroe and sixteen-year-old Regina (Reggie) Chase. Reggie is a wonderful character, caught in between so many different worlds; looking younger than she is but wiser than her years, a working class girl who had received a scholarship to a posh school but had to drop out, her mother has recently - suddenly - died and Reggie lives in the unchanged flat with the ghosts of her memory and has a job as a babysitter and home help for Dr Joanna Hunter, who is posh and beautiful and capable and Reggie’s ideal mother figure.


This is a literary novel both in that it is in the literary genre and in the quality of the writing, but it is also definitely a mystery novel. The story unfolds like a puzzle-box, every part of the story intertwining (most often in entirely unexpected ways) and with clues laid out in full view that the reader only realises were clues when the subtle “TA-DA!” of revelation occurs. As well as enmeshing the stories of Louise, Reggie, Jackson and Joanna Hunter (along with Louise’s new, too-perfect husband, and her colleagues, Reggie’s millennialist classics tutor and her criminal, possibly sociopathic, brother, Joanna’s upwardly-mobile, wide-boy Glaswegian husband) she weaves them together thematically - motherhood and loss, partnership and the suitability or otherwise of our choices, the risks posed to women by strangers and those close to them.


This is a terrific book, up there with Behind the Scenes and her more recent, much- and rightly-lauded Life After Life. Every character is built with depth and breadth (even Sadie, Dr Hunter’s German Shepherd) and the way every aspect interweaves - plot and character, motivation and theme, even location - is breathtaking, but done so well and so subtly that it is only breathtaking in retrospect. The resolution of the mystery is truly shocking at the same time as being utterly right and the bow on top is the final paragraph of the penultimate chapter which brings everything full circle and where you realise that Jackson Brodie is the central thread in the tapestry, after all.

You should read this, it is wonderful.


Sweartogod.

( first published on goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/617392594 )

Book review: The Secret Books of Paradys volume 3, The book of the Dead by Tanith Lee: Book of the Meh

I will argue that, at her best, Tanith Lee is in the same league of Gothic writing as Angela Carter; multilayered fictions about sexuality and possession and identity, built of startling imagery and metaphor. Unfortunately, The Book of the Dead, the third quarter of the Paradys cycle, is a long, long way from her best.


There are many problems with this book. Paradys, that shadow Paris where vampires and shapeshifters and magic roil beneath the surface, a main character throughout the previous stories, is barely present. Most of the tales here are barely connected to it and, even in those that are, it is the flimsiest of painted backdrops. The stories themselves are generally weak, feeling throwaway and somehow unready, and not even saved by forming together into any sort of thread as had the tales in the previous volumes. The protagonists seem to be involved for no good reason - these are not tragedies where a character brings doom upon themselves by their own greed or recklessness or malice or hubris, more they feel like failed attempts to try for a kind of Lovecraftian random universe - and often the stakes are so low and the motivations so pointless that it is to no effect.


For example, in the story Morcara’s Room we start with an interesting set up. A young woman grows up unusually strong and sure of herself for the time period, self-assured and dominant and, being an only child, inherits the estate. She dresses how she chooses and selects her lovers with impunity. Her downfall occurs the first time a man spurns her, although we are simply told this, not shown it, and in such passing detail that her reaction - to shut herself in a tower chamber and commit suicide - is so melodramatically over the top as to be absurd, even in context of a gothic tale. To compound matters, this is merely the backstory; in the present a traveller comes to the estate to find an elderly brother and sister living in the house, who tell him this story - of their ancestor, her death, that there was a warning on the door “all who enter will die” and the servant who broke down the door fell down the stairs and broke his neck. The cursed tower has been sealed for many years (after a subsequent death for which the siblings bear some guilt) and the denouement is this rather arrogant interloper stating that this was not a curse but a simple statement of fact: all who enter the tower room will die, because everyone dies in the end. The whole thing reads like some very early gothic story you’d study in a literature class and you’d have to give a pass because the once-original ideas had become cliche.


Indeed, each of the stories feels as though Lee is trying her hand at a different era of horror writing, without really committing to it. The segment Lost in the World finds a man obsessed with obscure travel writings of a previous century journeying to Africa to try and locate the hidden valley they mention, finding it, being trapped, and (spoiler) being killed by one of the pterosaurs that inhabit it - although the final image here of his aerial view of what he had taken as a huge, ruined temple is a nice idea, the story as a whole is disjointed and messy, and reads like bad Lovecraft, complete with period casual racism.


Definitely a highly disappointing effort, and I’d probably have chucked this part way through had it not been multiple tales. I hope the final part of the Secret Book of Paradys, The Book of the Mad, finishes on a higher note.

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Review originally posted at goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/261183065

Reflection

I sit at my desk. I’ve been inactive so long my monitor has gone into standby mode so I am no longer reflected in the window. I can see across the valley, patches of orange sodium streetlight and the white lights of buildings, houses and a few high-rise buildings, but far less than you’d expect; this is a green city, so many of the streets lined with trees that they block the lights and make it look like a series of hamlets, at least at this part of town, the posh one I now live in. The hilliness adds to it as well. I can see the opposite side of the valley and the one behind that - appearing to be one continuous rise in the darkness and, in the daytime, the green canopy disguises the crest of the first hill distorting perspective. Seeing the lights twinkle, interrupted by the swaying of limbs or, perhaps, just the distortion of heat haze as the earth gives up the day’s accumulated radiation back to the cooling night, I think of a line of poetry. “Each star a light, each light a soul”. Where is that from? I can’t place it. Where did I read that? Wait; is it something I wrote, a piece of infantile doggerel I once thought profound?

I shake my head. Stop daydreaming and get to work. Okay; It’s (glances at the heavy, expensive watch on my desk that I remove whenever possible) after 11:45 at night. I’ve been staring at a blank screen all day. I hit the ‘Ctrl’ key and, after a moment, the monitor comes back to life and I glance toward the window, avoiding looking at the blank white page I have spent the day filling with a dozen words, a score, a hundred at most, and deleting. In place of the scattered patches of light is only my reflection, etched by the cold, sickly light of the screen. At least, I assume it’s me. I try to meet the gaze directly but the cowardly bastard always seems to avoid my eyes. I shake my head and look away, keeping him in my peripheral vision. I swear he’s looking at me, so I snap my head up the the pale reflection through which I can just make out a few shimmering points of white and orange, but his face is askew, as though looking at something behind me.

Review: The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross: Squamous Horros and paper clips

The third novel in Stross' Laundry series, The Fuller Memorandum continues the adventures of computer geek Bob Howard working for the eponymous Laundry, a shadowy department of the British secret service tasked with protecting the UK from threats occult and other-dimensional – in practice, HP Lovecraft's Old Gods, which turn out to be all too real. Of course, as the Horrors from Beyond Space and Time rarely recognise national boundaries, this usually comes down to saving the world as a side effect of protecting Her Britannic Majesty's domains. As other countries also possess ultra-top secret agencies with a similar remit but differing national objectives – The Black Chamber in the US, for example – Bob and his colleagues as often find themselves fighting against fellow humans as slimy, squamous terrors.

Each of the novels has been modelled after a different example of the spy genre. The Atrocity Archives was in the mould of Len Deighton (described by Stross in the afterword as the best horror writer of the twentieth century, who just happened to write spy stories) full of paranoia and with the overhanging threat of nuclear annihilation replaced by the menace of unstoppable monsters from another dimension. The Jennifer Morgue was a Bond pastiche, a rich mogul trying to advance his own ends and in the process threatening world security – in this case threatening to wake the things that lurk in the deeps. In The Fuller Memorandum, we move into classier territory with a le Carre inspired post-Cold War tale. Bob is now married to another Laundry operative, is enjoying his work (there has been far more of the fixing computer networks in the office and less of the facing unspeakable horrors, which makes him happy). Inevitably, things begin to go wrong and when Bob's boss goes missing, it might just be the end of the world.

Stross has a deft hand with the horror, which is perhaps starker in this book than previously. There is some excellent characterisation, although in this case the author concentrates on Bob and his wife leaving the supporting characters more in the periphery than previously, which allows him to realistic reactions to the unreal situations; not heroically setting the jaw to face things, or shlock-horror movie running around screaming. This is also leavened by a low key dry humour, often geek-culture references (the main character is a computer nerd who fights Cthuloid monstrosities, for crissakes) and some Dilbert-esque office jokes. Pointedly, while the horrors from other dimonsions are always in the background as the great threat, the evil acts in the books are always perpetrated by human beings of their own free will. By the nature of the background, secret societies proliferate and conspiracy theories abound, but the reality is close enough to ours that things are far too complex for any over-arching hand to be in control and cock-up rules more than conspiracy, individual passions vices and morality make fate redundant.

In The Laundry books, Charles Stross has used some well established tropes to create fun reads that are also thought-provoking and, at times, horrific. The next is due for publication late this year or early next, and I can't wait to see what terrors Bob Howard will be protecting the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and associated Dominions (and the rest of the world) from next.