Last Sib Fric Plug Of The Year

Almost forgot the main reason I set up this blog in the first place! So, look, here I go grabbing the last chance to squeeze-in a 2014 plug for my thuswise titled collection of reviews and essays. If you got an amazon voucher for Christmas and were looking to splurge the £3.42 that this ebook costs, then I urge you to do it.

The pretext for today's post is this end-of-year notice from journalist Ray Garraty of his five best non-fiction books of 2014, Sib Fric amongst them. Which is very pleasing. On the other hand Jared Leto, sorry! Shurin I mean Shurin, reminds the world that the book is not eligible to be shortlisted for the BSFA Non-Fiction Award, which is, on the whole, less pleasing. Still, swings and roundabouts.

One last note on this collection. When I set this blog up, it made some kind of sense (I don't know what kind) to name it after the book. Now that the blog has been running for a while, I'm conscious that its name is liable to confuse. You may think that the book, Sibilant Fricative, contains material available for free upon this like-titled blog. It doesn't. The bulk of the original material in the book Sibilant Fricative appeared on this completely other blog, which I have now folded up and closed down. So the only way to get at the material in the book Sibilant Fricative is to buy it. And that's enough repetitions of the phrase 'the book, Sibilant Fricative' for one blog.

Scott K. Andrews, Time Bomb (2014)

First instalment in the forthcoming YA 'Time Bomb' trilogy, this is an OK-ish genre yarn. Various young adventurers from various time-periods are dragged into our era, and thence to the English Civil War. It's a book low on original ideas, although high-enough on incident to keep itself readable. But it bogged down for me in a couple of writerly clumsinesses. There was stylistic clumsiness of the too-many-adjectives, too-many-adverbs sort:

Dora cracked open the heavy oak kitchen door, poked her head out into the stone-flagged, wooden-panelled corridor, and listened intently. [11]

Three adjectives for a door is three too many; and the urge to replace simpler terms like 'opened' and 'looked out' with what one fondly imagines to be more vigorous, vivid ones like 'cracked open' and 'poked' is, broadly speaking, to be resisted I think. Then there are clumsinesses in the 'keeping the reader in necessary suspense' stakes:

Kaz turned his gaze to Steve. "And you?"

"I plead the fifth," said Steve, with an apologetic shrug. "It will all become clear eventually, but for now I have to remain enigmatic. Sorry. Look there'll be time for a full explanation later but basically you two can travel in time." [63]

This might bother me less if the clumsily deferred explanation, when it came, were a little less bleeeeuuuurgh ('They found an asteroid out in the Kuiper Belt. It was composed of a kind of substance that messes with time somehow' [237]). So that's: messes with time somehow. Okey-dokey.

Daryl Gregory, Afterparty (2014)

Smart near-future thriller about designer drugs is smart. Lots of lovely 'woh!' and 'mmm?' and 'aha!' moments here, and a likeably quippy alt-culture narrator. The big sell is the notion that 'the Numinous' which (Huxley, following Rudolf Otto, long since pinpointed as the salient where religious belief is concerned) might be something a pill makes neurologically manifest in people. Not a brand new notion this, in terms of SF, but it's interestingly handled here. There are various other cool speculative drugs, some nifty future tech (like miniaturised living farm animals you can keep in your bedroom), some rather gratuitous fighting and torturing and a good deal of running about.

It wouldn't be the first novel of which one could say 'it might have been better if the author just laid out his cool ideas rather than trying to realise them in novel-form via storyline, characters and all that'. But it would be, eh, a novel. Of which one could say that. If you see what I mean. The 'ideas' part are super-cool, the character interactions intermittently cool and the overall story not really very well handled. I had problems with the worldbuilding too. In our not-future-at-all present many people buy their drugs from dealers; but even now there are plenty who are happy to grow and/or mix their own. After all, Jesse Pinkman is perfectly capable of running up some passable meth; what Walter W. brings to the party is the extra quality that comes with his Respecting The Chemistry. Fast forward to a future where everybody has 3D printers and concoction machines, surely most people would be downloading recipes from shady online sources and cooking their own? But Gregory's crime-story plot needs a sub-culture of dubious dealers, fences and cooks, pursued by law enforcement of several stripes, so that's what we get.

Mind you, one thing I liked very much was the novel's emphasis on the affective rather than the logical. This, after all, is what drugs are about. People talk about 'smart drugs', but the reality is people take drugs, from alcohol to heroine, from LSD to speed, to alter their affect, not their intellect. And this is right for religion too. One of the mistakes Dawkins-gang atheists frequently make, I would say, is treating religious faith as a set of rational (to them: irrational) truth-claims about the cosmos. That kind of thing is a vanishingly small proportion of actual religious praxis, I think; and Francis Spufford is surely right that whether or not religion makes cognitive sense it does make surprising emotional sense.

I might dilate upon this for a moment, actually; because an older, eighteenth-century brand of atheism (the one that shaped Shelley's Necessity of Atheism pamphlet, for instance) starts from precisely this position ,and uses it to make points rather more compelling than Dawkins does. Because if the truth of faith is felt, not rationalised, then that by definition limits the reach of religion. People are often capable of rationalising a belief after the fact; but it's really not possible to force oneself to feel something one does not feel. The Jehovah's Witness people leaning on my doorbell are working against the insurmountable friction of that fact when they try to draw me across to their view of the cosmos. But the flip-side of this is that Dawkinistas are just as surely on a hiding to nothing in trying to convince people who feel faith to abandon it on merely rational grounds. Faith is a species of love, after all; and the more earnestly and rationally a third party strives to prove to you that the person you love is unworthy of your affection, the more you're liable to dig your heels in. When it comes to love, you feel what you feel.* Gregory understands this basic aspect of religious pretty well, I think. At one point the Vincent, a CIA expert in stress techniques, mulls over the old 'right and wrong' question. What is the difference between those two things?

'I know in my head,' the Vincent said. 'And what I've learned is that it's not knowing what's right or wrong, it's caring. Feeling the wrongness ... Your morality is not rational, or handed down to you on stone tablets by some divine cop, it's wired into your nervous system. [89]

It's possible the novel leans a little too hard on the 'just because it's imaginary doesn't mean its not real!' [340] angle. But it's good stuff. You should try a toke.

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*I don't want to derail the review by banging on about this, but the parallel interests me. It's the circumstance of the proselytising atheist that is so fascinating. Person A loves God. Person B loves Dennis. I think person B could do better: Dennis isn't actively abusive, but he isn't the kind of the person *I* think merits so profound a human emotion as love (it doesn't matter, for our purposes here, why I think this: maybe Dennis is a bit of a slob, or deadbeat; maybe his politics are 'wrong'; maybe he just strikes me as inconsequential). The point is this: what kind of individual would I have to be to try and intervene into Person B's life to persuade him/her that s/he really shouldn't love Dennis? I suppose it's possible that my strawperson Dawkinista considers Person A's 'relationship' with God to be abusive; and indeed, if Person B loved a violent, emotionally controlling or otherwise abusive person I might feel moved to intervene. But it's hard to see how a non-existent person could be abusive. What it boils down to is: I don't see that Dennis is loveable, which is an index of the fact that I don't love Dennis. That's a pretty thin reason to try and drag Person B across to my view. Similarly, what grounds do I have for meddling with Person A's love?

John Scalzi, Lock In (2014)

British philosopher retires from empiricist speculation in order to open a pub: hijinks ensue, in ... LOCKE INN.

Of course not. It's actually a biographical study of the immediate family of American rapper Tone Lōc, LOC KIN. Not that either. In fact Scalzi imagines the Norse god of mischief, cloned 26 times, with each separate replica identified by a letter of the alphabet: but what is the mystery behind LOKI N? Not in the least. To speak truly, this is a near-future police procedural set in a North America that is dealing with the aftermath of 'Haden's syndrome', a flu-induced paralysis in which near-enough five million Americans are 'locked-in' physically whilst retaining all liveliness of mental function. Our narrator is an FBI agent, bodily locked-in but able to operate in the world via a wirelessly tapped-in robot body known as a 'threep'. Other 'Hadens' use 'integrators', real-life human beings, as their proxies in the world. The immediate backdrop to the story is the withdrawal of what had hitherto been fairly generous governmental funds into researching the condition and providing welfare for sufferers. The new austerity means lots of people are sniffing around for necessary money, and there's a new spirit of protest in the Haden community. Scalzi hangs the story on a rather bloody murder, apparently committed by an 'integrator', and investigated by our narrator Agent Shane and his partner, the prickly Agent Vann.

Lock In is written with Scalzi's combination of The Smart and The Charming. It manages to be thought-provoking without ever sacrificing its readability (which is no small thing), and it makes some righteous if perhaps straightforward points about society's attitudes to disabled people, as well as about our modern generation's retreat into virtual worlds at the expense of the real on the other (Hadens interact through a shared virtual reality called The Agora, and some of them prefer it). When I first set up this blog, I had occasion to mention Scalzi by way of pondering one key quality he possesses as a writer: likeability. Since I myself lack that core quality, I am full of professional admiration, tinged ever-so-slightly with envy, at how well Scalzi does Scalzi.

That said, I was more under- than over-whelmed by this particular novel. Partly, I think, this has to do with the main premise. Lives lived through technologies proxies is a cool conceit, and one commonly explored in SF of course; but Scalzi's particular set up here is too intricate and specific, and relies too heavily on a set of rather arbitrary rules. We could compare the simple metaphorical force and eloquence of The Matrix set-up with the rococo and laboured set-up of Nolan's Inception: the former is something the viewer connects with intuitively, and which opens effortlessly into a series of cool and engaging possibilities. The latter requires forty-five minutes of characters painstakingly infodumping upon one another in order to bring the viewer up to speed, which in turn fatally dilutes the rhetorical power of the film's symbolic world. (Indeed, the Matrix sequels were weaker than the first film in part because they got tangled in a cat's-cradle of new conceptual grace notes and complexifications). Lock In, alas, is more like Inception than The Matrix; and the story is hobbled, especially in the first half, by a debilitating combination of flatness and conceptual over-complication. This is a novel with much to recommend it, but in the end it is somewhat LACK ING. D'you see what I did there? Eh?

Eh?

Ahh! Puns.

Adam Christopher, The Burning Dark (2014)

Hard to know how to factor in the inevitable element of subjective reaction where reviewing is concerned. Christopher has many fans, and his latest novel comes with some impressive back-cover endorsements ('a riveting sci-fi mystery reminiscent of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House' says Martha Wells; 'Creepy and Compelling' says Gareth L Powell; 'not to be missed' says James 'James' Lovegrove. Also Scott Sigler says 'Christopher puts Sci-Fi in a Metaphysical choke-hold—The Burning Dark makes reality tap-out', which may be praise. Or not. To be honest I'm really not sure what Sigler means). To say I did not find it so is to register that my organ-of-spookage was not tickled, the hairs did not raise at the back of my neck, I neither cared not was scared. Or was scarred, but then the novel probably wasn't trying to do that. Your eeek!age may vary.

The novel is, I believe, the first in a series called 'The Spider Wars', after the supersize cyborg villains against which future-humanity is fighting a galaxy-wide war. This novel, though, has relatively little to do with the Spiders, apart from one flashback by the protagonist at the beginning (in which some Spiders are literally devouring an entire planet: I didn't believe it for a minute) and some later-in-the-novel spoiler-redactedness. Most of the novel concerns Captain Abraham Idaho Cleveland, a decorated war veteran about to retire, and referred to throughout as 'Ida', in what is either a clever piece of gender-subversion or else an irritating distraction. The world of the novel is bounded by the 'Fleet', the military organisation prosecuting the war, piloting all the space ships and dismantling the space station U-Star Coast City. This Fleet is somewhere between Star Trek's Star Fleet and the army-as-fascist/utopian-model-of-society familiar from Heinlein. Christopher doesn't really capture the aura of neo-Prussian authenticity that makes Military SF so popular Stateside, and he's certainly not as ideologically moronic as Heinlein; but it's a pretty old-fashioned set-up nonetheless. Old fashioned verging on stale. That said, Christopher's focus is clearly on the haunted house story, not militarism, its ethos and praxis, so maybe this matters less. But not being able to suspend my disbelief in the military diminished my investment in the spooky story the novel wants to tell. Long story short: I was not scared by the strange noises, things going bump in the night, sudden chills etc. Accordingly the couple of hundred pages devoted to this stuff didn't ratchet up the dread and the tension, it just bored me ... too much exposition, too much faux-tough dialogue and blather. To quote the Raven: nevermore.

The Scare is subjective. What scares one person will leave another scratching his bald patch and pulling a slightly pained face. The star around which U-Star Coast City shines with a weird purple light; but instead of putting me in a Solaris frame of mind, it made me think of those fly-zappers you see in butchers. A mostly deserted space station just doesn't have the same vibe as a haunted house, because ghost stories have to be about a malign form of groundedness, a poisonous kind of belonging (fundamentally: death that is so linked to life that it can't, quite, leave it) and space stations are all, and this one a fortiori, temporary structures ... it's being dismantled as the story is being told. The tone of voice of Abraham Idaho Cleveland, hard-boiled, sweary, blue-collar American brogue, never rang true for me: not quite Go-Bakda-Joisey-Ya-Moron!, but not far away. But then again I have an imagination, and can use it to imagine a reader who is drawn into the atmosphere and tension, and for whom the novel generates real Spook. You pays yer money, you takes yer choice, you dismantles yer spacestation.

Kieran Shea, Koko Takes A Holiday (2014)

My edition of this novel came with the following cover-puff, courtesy of Stephen Blackmoore: 'a jet-powered, acid-fueled trip of pure, rocking insanity.'

This raises the key question: by 'insanity' does he mean to refer to any one of a series of distressing and socially debilitating psychopathologies? Or does he mean, you know, irritating/whimsical, of the 'you don't have to be mad to work here -- but it helps!!!' sort?

See if you can answer that question from this thumbnail. Story takes place 500 years from now; hard-drinking, hard-shagging sexy ex-mercenary Koko Martstellar is running a brothel on a ultra-Westworld-style resort called The Sixty Islands. She's enjoying life, with her boy-whore and booze and customers. But then her fellow ex-merc and onetime friend, Portia Delacompte, now high-up administrator of the depraved holiday locale, sends in some goons to have her killed. Her brothel blown to smithereens, Koko takes a 'holiday' from holidayland and goes buzzing around the galaxy, looking for revenge, shooting stuff, blowing stuff up, dyeing her hair blue (see cover) and so on.

It's a fast-moving, wisecracky, video-game-violent sort of yarn, quick to read and as quick to forget. Obviously it breaks a butterfly upon a wheel to object that the whole jaunt is built on various linked mendacities, so I'll only mention two, and briefly: one, that violence and war are fun, cathartic distractions rather than deeply psychologically damaging to those who take part; and two that the magic key to unlock millennia of systematic sexist oppression of women is epitomised in the word kickass. Koko is an egregiously kickass heroine, of course; but lurking somewhere behind the valorisation of such chicks is the conscious or unconscious sense 'there's no need to make any structural alterations to the logic of society; all that we need to do is encourage sexually alluring women to dress in tight clothes and kick some ass! PROBLEM SOLVED!' It compares poorly to (picking an example from the hat) Kameron Hurley's Bel Dame books, where the costs as well as the exhilarations of the old ultraviolence are rendered. But, hey: it's just a but of fun, no? A bit of a lark. You don't have to be mad to pilot this acid-fuelled power-jet: but it helps!

Then again, there's a subplot concerning a disease called 'Vast Depressus' ('a severe, stage-classified psychosis' untreatable with pills that causes 'mass-suicide events'). So maybe the novel is really about the first kind of insanity, after all. ONLY KIDDING! The novel's all about the video-game lolz, like this

A massive rolling explosion shattered to the right of Koko's rooftop position ... [156]

and this

Entering the ship's cramped cockpit, Koko hacks a crisp half-strike into the first mate's neck and the young woman droops to the floor like a wilted flower. [257]

and this

The redhead springs deep and soars through the air. Flying like a spread-eagled amoeba, she lands and latches onto Juke's front and shatters his nose with a quick head-butt. The hammer blow to Juke's nose is a starburst of pain and a delta wash of blood squirts down his sweaty face. [139]

and ... wait, hold up. Like an amoeba? You what?

Glen Duncan, By Blood We Live (2014)

Vampires are creatures that enjoy unnatural long life, sustained by ruthless predation upon other forms of life. Vampire novels are, formally speaking, the same. On and on the genre goes, sucking the lifeblood out of everything from Bram Stoker and Anne Rice to the 'Count of Sesame Street' and that girl from Adventure Time to maintain a pale not-quite-life of its own. On and on, never seeming to die. Werewolves have a similar postmodern hoover-it-up, wolf-it-down wearying endurance quality to them. Of course, Duncan is very far from the first writer to think it might be a nifty idea to combine the two. By Blood We Live is the third in a trilogy that began with The Last Werewolf (2011) and continued with Talulla Rising (2012), and it certainly embodies its premise, formally speaking, insofar as it goes on and on and on and will not lie down and die already just wrap it up my god you've already had 900 pages to tell your story do you really need another 450?

I'm not suggesting Duncan is a bad writer. On the contrary, Duncan can clearly write, and write very well. But what he's written here wearied me a great deal, partly because the plot is too choppily structured, partly because my nonreading of Last Werewolf and Talulla Rising left me more than a little puzzled as to the meaning and/or point of it all, but mostly because it's just really tiring to read so many ripely-written sex scenes, so much goresplash and so many endlessly purpled interior monologues. That all this is pretty adolescent, really, isn't exactly a criticism, because Vampires and Werewolves are fundamentally adolescent imaginative constructions. It's just a little wrongfooting to find such stylistic effort and panache expended upon like a warmth going through him and it was like the warmth of coming home and his face had felt so full and tender with this feeling of ashamed homecoming that even then he'd known would never be free of rage and boredom and sadness and he'd never be anything except alone and what he was [232], not to mention Madeline with her snout in the girl's flank and her ass in the air, legs spread, the smell of her cunt was sly and sweet and full of tortured willingness, and me with a hard-on that could've broken a piano in half [285] (although I am compelled to confess my doubts as to whether 'tortured willingness' is actually a smell), and let's not forget my fingernails went so easily through the soft flesh of his throat ... I got a grip on the wet tubing of his throat and pulled. A lot of it came out. His eyes couldn't open wide enough to fit this surprise in. Miles away, his legs were kicking. I felt my thumbnail go through a big slippery vein. An artery I guess. Blood went through the air like a Spanish fan [385] and pretty soon you're thinking: 'as Tithonus came to regard his own eternal life, so I look now upon the endless stream of neverending vampire/werewolf novels. ἀποθανεῖν θέλω.'

And ever when the moon is low,
And the shrill winds are up and away,
In the white pages, to and fro
We see the randy werewolves play.
But when the moon was very low,
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the vampire fell
Upon his bed, across his brow.
He only said, 'This genre's dreary,
Goes on and on,' he said;
He said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that it were dead!'

Hermione Eyre, Viper Wine (2014)

This is a genuinely charming and engaging example of historical fiction, given added vim by a number of wittily handled po-mo touches. Mostly it is simply an entertaining read, although intermittently it becomes more than that and achieves palpable greatness. What it isn't is a Fantasy or time-travel SF yarn, but that's hardly a hanging offence.

The two main characters are actual people, and the core of what happens has historical sanction (Eyre is fond of quoting chunks of the Dictionary of National Biography to shore up the on-going narrative). Here is Sir Kenelm Digby, seventeenth-century aristocrat, natural philosopher, Catholic, alchemist and all-round old-fashioned English eccentric. More compellingly here is his wife, Venetia Anastasia Digby (née Stanley), one of the most acclaimed beauties of her generation. Which, if you're a fan of tiny mouths, wide-set-eyes, and a ghostly forehead fringe of hair that spells out 'dSygg666' like a captcha, she may well have been:

On a larger scale is the celebrated Van Dyck portrait of Venetia, which is used as the cover art for Eyre's novel:

Sir Kenelm's multifarious interests, and his wife's anxiety at her fading charms, are rendered by Eyre very skilfully: it's energetic, fluent and readable stuff. But it's all interleaved by the present, in ways that speak to a—strange to say—rather quaintly old-fashioned postmodern vibe ('vibus postmodernicus'). Early in the book Digby is interviewed by various gentlemen, amongst them Paxman, 'a soft Irish man called Wogan' and 'Jonathan Ross, a fool with weak "R"s' [34]. The author herself pops up ('a woman with a notebook marked "Viper Wine"', [37]). Kenelm notes ideas down under headings that include 'Cosmographie', 'Thaumaturgike' and 'Nanobiotechnology' (though when he looks again 'he could not remember what was meant' by this latter [249]). He gets weird garbled html messages from somewhere, 'response.setContentType("text/html")' and the like ('the letters seemed to [Kenelm] like a spell or symbolism more than a story: hieroglyphs' [179]), and instructs that the message 'One Small Step For Man One Giant Leap For Mankind' be painted along the wall of his long library: though the calligrapher slopes off leaving only 'One Small Step For Ma' [165]. All this is perfectly beguilingly done, threading the tricky path between hard core literary experimentation on the one hand and frou-frou whimsy on the other, only occasionally straying into either. It's scrupulously researched, too: I read with a pedant's eye for errors and found almost none (there's a 'by the by' on p.113 that should be 'by the bye'; and some Latin on p.222 that's not quite right). There is a class problem, not unusual in novels like this: we gad about with people of the caste of the Digbys and Van Dycks and other assorted posh nobs, whilst the 99% are background colour (one exception is an interleaved first-person narration by a poor Wessex lass; but it hardly counterbalances the posho bulk of this novel's 17th-Century).

It's in the nature of this kind of project, perhaps, that it's liable to go on too long, and to register a proportion (I'd gauge this, using my complicated actuarial equipment, at 22%) of misses for all the hits. More debilitating, perhaps, is the way the almost-whimsy degrades the novel's scenes of pathos: the way Eyre draws out Venetia's vanity into something more existentially eloquent; and Venetia's abrupt, early death, in which the titular 'viper wine' (another actual thing from history, a potion made from snakes supposed to keep a woman young looking) is implicated; and the profound grief of her husband. All this is good, and Eyre does interesting thematic things with Digby's interest in 'curing wounds at a distance' (he thought the trick was not to treat the wound, but to apply magic powders to the thing that caused the wound, no matter how far away it was from the wound it had caused). Overall, a notable novel. I enjoyed it very much.

Derek E Pearson, Body Holiday (2014)

The conceit here is: just as nowadays families arrange house-swaps to facilitate their holidays, in the future we might arrange body-swaps, coordinated via the 'Body Holiday Foundation'. Wealthy Pearce and his wife Alice undertake one such swap, into two bodies considerably younger and more beautiful than theirs. Then they do what people do when they go on holiday. They shag. They shag and shag, in scenes described with a rather squelchy lubriciousness combined of that peculiar mix of detailed intimate descriptions and an odd coyness of tone ('beneath her robe she wore nothing more than a tee shirt that barely covered her modesty' [210]) made popular by the Fifty Shades books. Books concerning the prodigious success of which there is nothing in our sublunary world more puzzling.

It's not all bonking, of course; there's a thriller storyline, some refried SF props and devices (space elevators and so on) and a rather over-earnest satirical thread about the general cultural imperative 'entertain me!' But most of it is porny:

Milla flushed in her first climax and put her hand to her engorged clitoris to caress it and prolong the pleasure. It was a deep warm sensation that arched her back and had her squeezing joy from her breasts. [127]

Can a lady's boobs do that? I had no idea.

Franklyn reached down to the length of flaccid meat between his legs and drew it out and up towards her, shaking the tip. "Like most ladies I'm sure you would like to sample the delights of a ride on this sturdy old crossbar." [98]

Sexy!

Pinioned on his cock, she felt its heat as it curved deeper into her, creating wells of pleasure even beyond its length. [83]

'Wells of Pleasure'. Right.

Debbie Johnson, Dark Vision (2014)

Lily McCain, Liverpuglian music journo (references in the novel include: Muse, made-up bands actually comprised of actual vampires, and Mazzy Star. Remember them?) has a magic gift/curse. When she touches someone, or they touch her, she sees their future. Yes, that's nicked from Stephen King's peerless The Dead Zone. But where King sees in his premise an opportunity to talk about isolation, loneliness and the disconnection inherent in modern life, Johnson steers the same premise in a very different direction: towards rather a gooey love story in a world that turns out to be a kind of Charlaine Harris Merseyside. I know which of the two treatments of this premise I prefer. It doesn't help that Johnson writes her debut novel in a kind of foresquare tell-it-how-it-is feisty-cum-sassy idiom, stitched out of cliché and a rather forced jollity. It also doesn't help that her own ingenuousness so often betrays her into Thoggisms ('... sipping bitter black coffee so hot my lips recoiled in protest' [16]; 'He stood tall, in fact even taller than he usually was' [31]; 'he laughed, and before I could stop him, stroked my face with the speed of light' [54]; 'Gabriel's eyes [were] sparking a bruised shade of purple. ... I felt a thud of disappointment hammer through me' [128]; 'my throat was so parched I couldn't even have swallowed my own non-existent spit' [217]; 'it was just a pillow now, and I carved out a moment to feel sad about that' [218]). There's a good deal of blushing by our streetwise but virginal narrator, especially in the first half, and a heavy dose of The Celtic, myth-and-magic-wise. Time travel of course takes us back to the Beatles playing The Cavern in late '62. Where else? A bit frantic, especially in its battle-of-gods-and-mortals conclusion. You might very well enjoy it.

Tim Lebbon, Alien: Out Of The Shadows (2014)

The cover-stress on novelty here ('an original novel'; 'official new novel'; my copy came with a little silver sticker declaring 'All New Story') bends the truth a little, without fracturing it entirely. But that's OK: we understand the drill. To put it more precisely, the sjuzhet here is new, or new-ish, though the fabula is as old as Dan O'Bannon's 1970s screenplay, and I daresay as old as Beowulf and Gilgamesh.* Indeed, come to think of it: even the sjuzhet is rather second-hand. There's a mining spaceship operated by a varied crew; Ripley joins them; they land on a planet and go underground (in this case, into a mine to get some magic fuel); uh-oh, there are Aliens™ down there! Tension; gore; hard-bitten dialogue; tension; gore. Ash, the Ian-Holm, android turns up. Ripley survives. Done. That Ripley survives is no spoiler, for the story is set between Alien and the sequel movie Aliens. So the reader does not doubt Ripley's immunity; only how it is that she didn't remember anything to do with the adventure on awakening. But Lebbon explains that, too.

Now Lebbon-the-writer is a pro, and his aliens ('Lebbalien'?) are efficiently drawn and effective. The cast of characters get deftly sketched-in at the beginning, so that we care just enough when they start getting picked off. In other words: this title does exactly what it says on the Franchise-branded tin, and does it with considerable technical competence. There are occasional head-scratching moments, mind you. One is the nature of the mine. 'Trimonite was the hardest, strongest material known to man, and when a seam as rich as this one was found, it paid to mine it out.' Mine it out with drill-bits and hammers made of a substance even harder and stronger than Trimonite, presumably. But look: nitpicking isn't the frame-of-mind in which to approach a novel like this. You already know whether it's the kind of book you'd be interested in reading.

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* Note: I was going to add a gag to the effect that 'Beowulf and Gilgamesh' sounds like a heroic crime-fighting buddy duo: 'Fighting Crime -- the Old Fashioned Way!' But, on reflection, I'm not sure they do sound like a buddy-buddy cop movie pairing. And thinking a little more about this, it occurs to me: buddy-buddy cop duos need to have a certain metrical pattern to their linked names: specifically, quartus paeon, 'short-short-short-long'. Starsky and Hutch. Tango and Cash. Turner and Hooch. Hickey and Boggs. It works in other areas too: Morecambe and Wise, Watson and Crick, Oryx and Crake. Beethoven's Fifth ... duh-duh-duh-duhhhmm! I don't know why. But this is by-the-bye, except to note that were Tim Lebbon and Ridley Scott to team up and fight crime, they could go by the joint-moniker 'Lebbon and Scott' which would work just fine.

E J Swift, Cataveiro (2014)

Very much a sequel to Swift's wonderful debut, Osiris, I nevertheless found myself wondering if this novel might face the world better marketed as a standalone. The 'Book Two of the Osiris Project' tag on the cover, there, might put readers off, and it shouldn't. New readers can start here, and get a clear sense of Swift's distinctiveness and excellence as a writer. It's a slow-burn read that earns the time it takes to develop its story. Swift has the ability to write deeply believable worlds; as far from the stomping foot of nerdism as ... well. The crown of nerdism's head, I guess. Or, eh. That might. Might not have been the best analogy, to ...

Start again.

Cataveiro opens in Patagonia. Osiris is believed lost, and has even become something of a myth to the post-disaster communities scraping a living here. Our protagonist, Romana Callejas, has a plane, a piece of Boreal (Northern Hemisphere, = the enemy) tech that she is permitted to keep so that she can map the habitable territories of South America's extremity for the authorities. Her motivation is provided by a need to get medical help to her mother, dying of 'the jinn': there are lots of well realised and suitably horrid plagues and diseases floating around, since the disaster this novel is post- was a rogue viral as well as a climate change one. The deuteragonist is a fellow called Taeo Ybanez, a citizen of the Republic of Antarctica, and his motivation is to get home to his wife and kids. In order to do this he needs to placate the government he pissed-off, and his passport to that placation is the figure of Vikram (from Osiris), washed up in Terra del Fuego. Both character motivations feel real, and Swift is too canny a writer to be tempted by artificial tension ramping-upping. Generally she does a bang-up job of avoiding overly-melodramatising her nuanced storytelling. To be picky, there are elements in the central section of this three-part novel where, via mafia-bosses and sinister cripples from the north, the Melodrama starts to creep back in. But it's not the heart of the tale; and it's not like that in the marvellous first or third sections.

Romana and Taeo make a deal, although each is lying to the other. They head off in different directions. Romana soars off in her microlight plane, Taeo picks up Vikram and proceeds on foot. Both pass through Cataveiro, a city on the East Coast, possibly on the location of old Santa Cruz (I'm not sure). Romana eventually travels much further north. The narrative is deeply absorbing and effective, cleanly and evocatively written and with an immaculate sense of what telling details will bring a scene to life without overloading the reader. The mood of the opening section reminded me a little Christopher Priest's first novel, Indoctrinaire, also set in a future South America (Priest is thanked in the acknowledgements). That I thought this may be an index of nothing more than how big an impact that novel had on younger-me; and indeed, where Priest went Kafkaesque and deliciously baffling, Swift goes for a mellower, more carefully rendered quest narrative. The landscapes are beautifully rendered, the deserts in particular, the proper Lawrence of Arabia glamour of emptiness, not to mention a tastily written English Patient airplane crash. Not that I want to give the impression this fine novel is in any way derivative. It's not. Like Swift's first novel, it is stylish, memorable, beautifully written and utterly distinctive. Proper grown-up SF.

Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart (2014)

Bob Howard works a 1970s-sitcom version of 'bureaucracy' in the 20teens government department tasked with handling the various occult irruptions that plague Stross's Britain. That is to say, this is volume seventy-or-so in Stross's ongoing Laundry Files sequence, and it's much like the others, save only that with each vol the amount of backstory exposition grows. It's an arithmetic rather than a geometric progression, this acreting, but it leads to quite a lot of padding nonetheless. And it's true that this instalment is rather oddly shaped, with a great long spool of elaborate prologue (theme: there are loads of supernatural monsters and Lovecraftian horrors in the world but there's no such thing as vampires!) before the main chunk of the story arrives to pay out the reader's investment of attention (there are vampires! they're bankers! DO YOU SEE WHAT HE DID THERE?). But it's within normal tolerances for a structure such as this: close enough as the phrase goes for government work. Now, as is typical with Stross, what the reader gets is a chunk of clever ideas and a shedload of geeky references and in-jokes; and meanwhile characters swap dialogue of the sort that would never emerge from the actual lips of living, breathing human beings in the real world. If you like this sort of thing then this is very much the sort of thing that you will ... eh ... I forget how the rest of that goes.

My personal mileage, from which yours may vary, is that Laundry Files flavour Stross is my least favourite Strosstyle. His other books are better, because here he is essaying humour, and he does not have funny bones. He has many talents and skills, but funny bones are not amongst them. So there's a scad of rather brittle in-joking, loads of meme references, and milquetoast disparagement of topics pre-selected to avoid giving offence to anybody very much ('Wolverhampton's an ugly town' and the like). Beyond that, the humour of these books is the sort that occasions a particular reaction in me: first, recognising that humour has been attempted and then, following almost immediately upon this recognition, a kind of nihilist abreaction in which I grasp that no, life ends and no, there is nothing elsewhere, and no question now of ever finding again that white speck lost in whiteness, to see if they still lie still in the stress of that storm, or of a worse storm, or in the black dark for good, or the great whiteness unchanging, and if not what they are doing sudden all far. And to decide not to smile after all, sitting in the shade, hearing the cicadas, wishing it were night, wishing it were morning, saying, No, it is not the heart, no, it is not the liver, no, it is not the prostate, no, it is not the ovaries, no, it is muscular, it is nervous. No move and sudden all far. All least, three pins, one pinhole, in dimmost dim, vasts apart, at bounds of boundless void, whence no farther, west worse no farther. Nohow less. Nohow worse. Nohow naught. Nohow on.

Apart from that, it's fine.

M R Carey, The Girl With All The Gifts (2014)

On the upside, this is a sharply written, well-plotted, grippy-read-y thriller. It builds a workable post-apocalyptic world, keeps its momentum going and pays off nicely. The central character, the titular young girl, little Melanie, is an especially noteworthy creation: a highly intelligent child kept in a cell, who is strapped into a chair and muzzled in order to be wheeled through to her schoolroom with her peers. Why is she treated this way? Ah, that's the hook. Her perspective on the classroom experience (something there's not enough of in contemporary culture: it's a shame it only occupies the early sections, here), on adult attitudes to childhood, and on the arbitrary and often cruel way she and her kind are treated, all this is brilliantly done.

On the downside, it's yet another zombie story.

To return to the upside, the rationale for zombification (a toxoplasma gondii-like neural fungus) is kind-of new, and people never use the 'z'-word, because, you know: the one thing you don't want to do when zombie apocalypse has destroyed almost all humanity is to trip-yourself into using worn-out terminology like a square. So it's 'hungries', not zombies. There's a creditable primary focus on female characters and female interactions here, that doesn't exclude or merely demonise the men in the story; and there's nicely-handled light dusting of mythic resonance: Pandora's box, Iphigenia at Aulis.

On the downside, though: it's yet another zombie story.

I don't want to underplay the upside. This is a smart, readable book. It plays cleverly with our point-of-view assumptions when it comes to this mode of story; it has some interesting things about humanisation and dehumanisation, about parents and children. True, the middle section was a bit wandering-about-y, and I kept getting flashes of Cronin's The Passage, which though it also has its problems is a heftier, richer version of the same thing. Still, this isn't aiming at epic sweep; it's trying for something more emotionally engaging.

On the downside, though: it's yet one more example of that egregiously over-supplied contemporary sub-genre known as 'the zombie story'.

So upside: readable, engaging.

Downside: another another another fucking zombie story.

That's the thing about zombie stories. It never BRRAAAAAINS but it pours.

Charles Burns, Sugar Skull (2014)

What an odd standalone Sugar Skull would make. Imagine reading it without knowing that it was the third in a trilogy of graphic novels: first X'ed Out (2010), then The Hive (2012), now this. Or then again, maybe it wouldn't make much difference. It's oblique and puzzling and suggestive, but then the whole trilogy is that. Doug is a performance artist, given to wearing masks and hanging out at countercultural events. He met his girlfriend Sarah on this scene, but her psychotic ex-boyfriend is also lurking about. Parallel to this vie more-or-less quotidienne, and intercut with it, is a Burroughsian alternate reality in which Doug's alter-ego, Nitnit, has a series of discombobulating adventures in an run-down city populated with mutants and freaks, and also in an underground breeding hive, where lizard-like humanoids patrol the corridors and seemingly human women give birth to gigantic slimy eggs. Nitnit is the reverse of Tintin (black quiff instead of blond, creepy-gross adventures in a deformed and baffling land rather than uplifting action shenanigans in the exotic hotspots of the world), and much of the beauty of this book inheres in the clever distortions and exaggerations Burns inflicts upon Hergé's ligne claire style. Sugar Skulls are the name of the skull-shaped sweets Nitnit is compelled to buy in The Hive's very last frame; and there are plenty of skulls in this volume too.

The protocols governing 'spoilers' perhaps don't apply as they normally might in a work as oblique and deliberately puzzling as this. Accordingly, though still proceeding in a caveat lector spoilerōrum fashion, we might note that the skull in question is Doug's, sugared in the vividness and high-calorie, low-nutrition buzz of its imagined universe, and sugary also in its fragility. He gets mugged by Sarah's ex and suffers a head wound bad enough to hospitalise him (hence the plaster Nitnit is always pictured as wearing). His visions are a direct reaction to this trauma. We can also trace the various hideousness connected with childbirth, dwarfs, miniature monsters, piglets and so on to the fact that Doug got Sarah pregnant and then ran out on her, leaving her to raise the kid alone The male guilt, squeezed between unhappy memories of his unhappy Dad on the one hand, and his own complete delinquency as a father on the other, inform the queasily ghastly mood of the whole trilogy, I think.

It makes compelling reading, certainly. Maybe one or two of the grotesquenesses are a little too, I don't know, obvious; and certainly they depend too strongly (I'd say) on a buried revulsion at female physicality as such, female flesh in its obstetric mode but also female sexual allure in a broader sense. And there's a slightness to the overall telling, although this may be more feature than (ugh! squash it squash it!) bug. The imagined world is pretty nightmarish, but the nightmare is different in details not in kind to the actual lived life; and Burns is good on illustrating that old saw of psychiatric medicine ... that though madness is a particular problem for a patient's family and for society as a whole, it is a particular solution for the patient him/herself. If the solution looks extreme, then think how severe the underlying pathology must be ...

Marie Brennan, A Natural History of Dragons (2014)

There's a certain odour of How To Train Your Dragon about this, with the cod-Viking milieu replaced with a Fantasyland version of Edwardian England, and the cartoonish humour swapped over for a detailed (frankly, rather too detailed) evocation of the curiosity of the natural historian. The result is a gentle and, to some extent, beguiling yarn; although one that lacks any properly draconic fire or force. The narrator, Lady Trent, nurses a by-the-standards-of-her-sexist-time unladylike interest in dragons from an early age. She learns from the cook how to preserve a dead 'sparkling' in vinegar (a dragon so small some categorise it as an insect). She grows up the copy of the De draconum varietatibus in her father's library -- I can't say I trust the Latin here, since Lewis and Scott insist the genitive of draco is dracontis. Or perhaps Latin works differently in Brennan's imaginary locale. After all, Lady Trent grows-up in Edwardian luxury in 'Scirland' not Britain, and she travels from this large set of islands off the shoulder of the mainland continent not to Albania/Transylvania/somewherelikethat-ania but rather to 'Vystrana'. What Brennan gains by setting her tale in this arbitrarily constructed Fantasy realm isn't clear to me.

Anyway, not to get ahead of myself: Lady Trent grows to maturity and gets married the kindly Jacob, a less oppressively patriarchal husband than Isabella might have been lumbered with. Jacob risks social ostracism by permitting his wife to attend him on a scientific expedition to the valleys surrounding Drustanev in assuredly-not-Albania/Transylvania/somewherelikethat-ania in search of dragons. There are a couple of rather slackly told adventures: our heroine kidnapped by colourful bandits, who despite her fears that they might 'outrage her honour' in fact swiftly return her to the expedition. She goes on to encounter ancient tombs, statues, legends of the mythical half-human-half-dragon king Zhagrit Mat, and a variety of actual big-as-a-bus dragons, which Isbaella sketches. The illustrations, notionally hers, are one of the high-points of this otherwise rather underinflated story. Nothing very much happens; the cod-Edwardian tone is too broadly pastiche-y and Down-Abbeyesque properly to work and the whole flavour is, well, cosy. Though Isabella carries on her shoulder the scar of a childhood encounter with a Wolf-Drake (half wolf, half duck! Or, no, wait a minute: actually a kind of large dragon ...), and though she's always tumbling through into subterranean caves, being stalked by wild beasts etc etc it never generates any tension or terror. On the plus side, the dragons are treated as examples of naturally occurring wildlife, rather than as feeble McAffreyish ciphers for housecats or horses. But on the down side, the dragons are treated as examples of naturally occurring wildlife, and the minute itemisation of their anatomy and behaviour is a little ... well, dull.

Philip Reeve and Sarah McIntyre, Cakes in Space (2014)

The previous review, here, talked a bit about charm: and this collaboration between storyman Reeve and picturewoman McIntyre has that quality in spades. In space-spades. Astra's family are part of a generation starship to 'Nova Mundi' (not good Latin, I fear: shouldn't it be 'novus mundus'? But then again, who's counting?). Her family slumber in their hibernation pods, but Astra and her robofriend Pilbeam are 'WIDE AWAKE'. They discover that the ship is off course, and come across some intruders called 'Poglites', with a thing about collecting spoons. But these are as nothing compared to the titular Cakes, very alarming aliens. There's a sweetened Vermicious Knid vibe to these latter, and lots of Douglas-Adams-rewrites-Dahl fun to be had. The worst you could say is that occasionally the charm degenerates into whimsy. But that's not so bad.

Ken MacLeod, Descent (2014)

Ryan is a regular lad growing up in a near-future Scotland struggling under yet another severe economic recession. He and his friend Calum have an encounter with a UFO. Ryan later 'remembers' an abduction experience, rather too fruitily supplied with all the clichés of that mode. Calum, though, has no such memories. After this vividly realised opening the novel in leisurely but absorbing style follows Ryan and his generation as they grow to adulthood. Nothing much comes of the UFO encounter, except that it primes Ryan to develop a series of complex, interlocking conspiracy theories: about advanced military tech disguising itself as alien saucers, about a new speciation event by which a secret homo neanderthalis bloodline is about to emerge and separate from homo sapiens; about the truth behind 'religious' epiphanies and of course (it being MacLeod) about politics, establishment agents pretending to be revolutionaries and vice versa, the complicity of the secret services and so on. This, it dawns on the reader, is the real theme of the book. Descent is, consciously or otherwise, a Jamesonian riff on the enduring appeal of 'the conspiracy theory' as such—Jameson, as I'm sure you know, thinks that our appetite for these sorts of things indexes our attempt to see our social, cultural and ideological milieu for what it is, a global interlocking system called 'Late Capitalism'. Meanwhile the economy gets sorted out via a quick nationalisation of the banking system and an acceptance of the trading dominance of China (or something); Ryan gets a job as a an online journalist. MacLeod has fun with some near-future tech: a world so saturated in surveillance its possible to assemble a real-time Google Earth rolling map just by sampling all the feeds. There are advances in fabric technology, a ramscoop jet that could cut access-to-space costs and the like. A dubiously sleekit fellow called Baxter stalks Ryan down the years in various guises: a priest, a man-in-black and so on. Baxter eventually becomes a political Big Cheese in the Scottish Parliament (I found this plot strand all rather hard to swallow, actually: not so much the conspiracy side to it, but the way he seems to have endless time for Ryan; the narrator phones him for a meeting and he immediately says 'I can give you an hour and a half, face-to-face' and so on). The book is dedicated to 'the memory of Iain M. Banks', and there's a decidedly Crow-Road-ish flavour to the storytelling. I enjoyed reading it very much.

What it lacks, despite all its excellencies, is menace. Even when the heavies turn up, late in the story, and rough-up our narrator the mood doesn't shift from its tenor of expansive, rather leisurely charm. Now this is not to be sniffed at, this latter quality: it is valuable, and very hard for a writer to do -- it is, for instance, quite beyond my technical capacity as a writer (I can do lots of things, but I don't seem to be able to do that). And it carries Descent a long way; the growing-up-in-Scotland milieu, the characters, the prose. It just doesn't quite carry through the thing that gives real conspiracy theories their tang, the curry-paste hotness that keep adherents coming back for more: the sense that it matters, the self-preening I'm taking a courageous risk by pursuing it. It's almost never true, the 'risk' thing. Actual conspiracy theorists risk only their sanity, and that sort of risk-taking is the opposite of courageous. But it's addictive nonetheless.

Sibilant Fricaplug

It's been a while here since I've had a bookplug post for the Sibilant Fricative: Essays and Reviews book (available as an ebook for the low-low price of £3.42), and I'd hate to leave you missing that sort of naked marketing. So here is a link to The OF Blog's review of the collection. And here is that review!

Confession: I have a difficult time pronouncing "sibilant." I frequently confound it somehow with silibant, which would make for an odd pun if one were pondering the merits of (unintentionally) comic novels. Puns of course being something with which followers of Roberts' Twitter account would be familiar. That weakness being confessed, here's another: Roberts is one of the best lit critics writing today, especially for those who deign to treat topics as varied as Robert Browning, Gene Wolfe, Christopher Priest, Maurice Sendak and Robert Jordan. Yes, Roberts' essays run the gamut from breaking down complex fictions into interesting, illuminating reviews to bringing to the fore Jordan's unfortunate penchant for writing quasi-clothing and tea porn. There are times where I disagreed with his conclusions but admired the way he argued his points. Then there were the times that I wanted to laugh aloud at how adroitly he could skewer a plot that deserved to die the death of a thousand pinpricks. If this isn't a testimony to how good Roberts is as a reviewer, then perhaps I should just say go forth and buy a copy and find out for yourself.

Do what the man says, why don't you.

Tobias S, Buckell, Hurricane Fever (2014)

This is a sort-of sequel to Buckell's previous spy-malarkey thriller Arctic Roll sorry, Rising (2012), which I haven't read. So, you know: I may be missing some nuances. I'm just not convinced that 'nuance' is really the name of the game, here. It's bang-bang-bang, thrills and tension, fight and flight and more fight. They call this sort of book a 'thriller' for a reason. And that reason is: Marketing. Not there there aren't some nice touches. There are. I liked the near-future globally-risen sea levels, flooded streets and hurricane afflicted Caribbean. Or CaRIB-bean, as I believe the Americans like to say. It was nice to see that part of the world treated as a proper setting, rather than just an exotic locale for incidental adventures. The story is efficiently plotted, and written with the sort of unembellished directness its genre mandates. That story concerns ex superspy 'Roo' Jones, dragged back into the 'game' after a former colleague is killed, a secret package turns up, and he's on his boat (having to babysit his teenage nephew) whilst a wonder weapon that could Destroy The World is somewhere in the offing. It's a good job Roo is on the case. All the time steering his boat to avoid the titular hurricanes. Truly, he Roo, Roo, Roos his boat.

I'm going to pause for a moment, to let the odour of that dissipate.

Right.

So, there's a lot of rapid-fire action, and some rather too neatly disposed global conspiring too. It's a spy-thriller with a strong maritime component and a dusting of near-future imaginary tech. In other words it's yet another example of the Oft-Discovered Bond Spree, from whose Bourne/No trad Le Car-Returns, and Catcher in Jack Ry-/An makes Missions quite Impossible. Not to, you know. To get carried away. *clears throat* Thus Copying doth make Cowards of us all.

My problem is generic, not specific to this novel. That problem is that certain readers, and the writers who supply them, believe that fighting is more interesting than talking, that shooting is more interesting than being, that violence is more interesting manifested physically in the outside world than internally in the psyche (indeed, who believe that the former doesn't really entail the latter at all, though the latter is where all violence actually comes to rest), that explosions are fireworks rather than massively accelerated entropy, that Bond, James Bond is better than Henry James (Henry), and in sum that characters in action are more fun than action in character. Whereas I tend to believe the exact opposite. But that only means I'm probably not the idea reviewer for this title. Which is fair enough.

Gregory Benford and Larry Niven, Bowl of Heaven (2014)

Two big names in SF collaborate on a Big Dumb Object novel. The titular 'bowl' is a titanic construction built around a red star and travelling through the galaxy collecting life-forms. It is, in effect, half a Dyson sphere. Appropriate to this conceit, Benford and Niven have here written a half-arsed novel. Less BDO, more BOOO!

The thing is, I've a soft spot for these kinds of rude Rama retreads ('Re-rendezvous With Rama'?), and even Niven's hilariously cack-handed writing and plotting can't spoil the original Ringworld novel for me, where traces of grandeur still manage to cling, like wisps of morning fog, around the main idea (I say nothing of the myriad sequels, which are all terrible). BDOs are cool; scale and sublimity and the chance to let yourself wander, imaginatively speaking, around a varied and beguiling environment. Bowl of Heaven, though, is lamentably bad. There are two different levels on which it is simply not yet ready to be published. One is the level of story. We start with a sub-light interstellar spaceship SunSeeker, on its way from Earth to a planet called Glory. Key crewmembers are woken from hibernation because the ship's trajectory, in a co-incidence the scale of the cosmos licenses us to call 'bollocks', has crossed paths with the Bowl of Heaven. Since there's some question as to whether supplies will last the rest of the SunSeeker's voyage, on account of whoever supplied said supplies Earthside being obviously an idiot, the crew decide to fly their starship, complete with its sleeping cargo of thousands of human settlers, into the Bowl. This they do by nipping up the superheated plasma stream of the BDO's exhaust. You see, the 'bowl' has a big hole in its base, and mirrors in its concave inner surface focussing the starlight back on a spot on the star, which in turn shoots out the colossal plasma jet that moves the whole thing through space. The motion forward exactly counteracts the tendency of the bowl to fall into the gravitational well of the star, keeping the system in equilibrium. Except that late in the book some of the earthers see a sort of home movie of the Bowl being built, and there's no explanation of how the structure is kept in its orbit during the eons-long construction. No matter. Surely we can agree that flying up the stellar exhaust pipe is a stupid thing to do.

Of course, we know that Benford and Niven (I like to think of them as 'Nivbenford', the result of a tragic matter-transporter malfunction) need to get their human characters aboard Rama, Ringworld, Orbitsville, the Bowl of Heaven as soon as possible, so they can have Adventures. Let's give them a bye for that. The problem is once the characters are there, the story gets flushed down the cosmic toilet-bowl of heaven in short order. Nothing very much happens. The characters are so flat and interchangeable that not even the authors are able to keep them distinct. The landing party is a group of ten people [87] that immediately splits up, main character Cliff Kammash taking four with him, and Beth Marble taking, er, five with her. What? Sometimes the authors forget that Cliff is called Cliff and call him Carl [for instance on p.327]. Individuals specified as being in one group are casually referred to as being in the other group. One character is killed by native life forms, watched helplessly by other characters from the far side of a towering transparent wall. Those same characters later refer back to the event as if there had been no wall. Several events happen twice in quick succession, with slightly different characters, as if Nivbenford was trying out alternate possibilities only to forget to delete the less favoured one. The captain leaves the bridge, and a few pages later leaves the bridge. No sooner have the landing party arrived than they spend literally days trying to open a closed hatch (to, unless I misread, outer space) by burning it with seemingly inexhaustible lasers. It turns out they can't; but I don't know why they were even trying. There's little overall shape to the story, and only at the end do we discover (hah! ahaha!) that there is no end to the story either, for it is to be continued in an indeterminate number of sequels.

I mentioned two things; and the second is the worldbuilding. This is more deplorable, in a way, since the novel really only exists to display the cool BDO. But Nivbenford seem to have run out of space on the back of the envelope they used to plan this structure. It's big: 'bigger than the orbit of Mercury' [34]. To be precise 'it covered a perimeter about the size of Earth's orbit' [247]. Which is certainly bigger than the orbit of Mercury, I suppose. It rotates in nine days [247] except on p 315 where it rotates 'in about ten days'. How is the implausibly earth-like atmosphere kept inside? A barrier is stretched across the inside of the bowl, like clingfilm. Imagine the size of the roll they must have used! Ah, but how does the bowl steer itself, slow down to pick up new life forms, stop etc? We're not told, presumably because it can't. Out of what improbably rigid material is the bowl made, to prevent it breaking-up? Again we're not told, though we are vouchsafed that the construction of the Bowl entailed 'girders ... scaffolds ... crossbars ... joists and brackets the size of planets' [242]. Pull the other one. Nivbenford's imaginations have failed them, and they've reverted to an Empire State Building Sized construction rather than a solar-system sized one. This novel puts the 'ow!' in 'bowl' and the 'heave' in 'heaven'. If I were you I wouldn't touch this Bowl of Heaven with a barge-pole. Of heaven.

Susan Gray, Sum (2014)

I saw Susan Gray's excellent science fiction play Sum at the Bread and Roses, in Clapham, last Saturday night. There are still a few tickets available for the final three performances, at the end of this week (Thu Dec 4th - Sat Dec 6th, 7:30pm - 9:00pm) and I urge you to snap then up.

Sum is a play about the early days of a hivemind, set in a blasted near-future and tracing, through a sinuously threaded string of intense set-piece scenes, the tension between assimilation and individuality. The direction, by Chris Callow Jr, very effectively focuses attention where it needs to be: on the performances and the words; and the acting of the all-female cast is uniformly excellent. Where so much of the dramatic force depends on the integrated work of the whole company it would be invidious to single performances; but, that said, Lydia Kay as Carrie/Lan does extraordinarily well with the technically tricky business of acting two rather different characters at once; Melanie Crossey brings real electricity to Syne's hopes of becoming the 'head' of this new acephalic entity. Gray's play is at once an imagintive new intervention into a venerable SF trope, and a meditation upon theatre itself. Callow, who trained at the Athenian Stage in Greece, knows very well how the interaction between individuated 'characters' and a group-mind 'chorus' determined the very shape of drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; and Sum feels in one sense like a modern re-evaluation of the core structures of theatre itself.  Highly recommended.

Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book (Graphic Adaptation by P Craig Russell; 2014)

Today's third, and last, 'Illustrated Title' for review is this graphic novelisation of Gaiman's Graveyard Book: orchestrated by P Craig Russell and featuring the penmanship of Kevin Nowlan, P. Craig Russell, Tony Harris, Scott Hampton, Galen Showman, Jill Thompson, and Stephen B. Scott. It's all very professionally accomplished: a thoroughly realised bande dessinée. It's so well done, indeed, that it feels petty to carp. Nonetheless there was a small still voice, at the back of my head, that wondered at the point of the exercise. It's not as though Gaiman's prose (never less than plainly efficient at communicating its story) doesn't work in the original at getting the whole over to its YA readership. The rather wordy, explanation-heavy original has been scripted, here, into some text-dense panels, lots of fat speech balloons lousy with words, and a slightly sluggish pace. It's by no means bad though. By no means.

Emily Carroll, Through the Woods (2014)

An 'illustrated' theme today; this graphic novel by Emily Carroll collects together five deliciously chilling and haunting stories, all set in a Gothic-y, Grimms-y forest world somewhere between about 1800 and about 1920. These tales work through fascinations with murder, guilt, the disinclination of the dead to rest calmly in their graves. It's beautifully done. The worst I might say is that the illustrations, and the choices Carroll has made about individual or multiple panels, occasionally force or compress the pacing in ways that seemed to me disadvantageous to the larger mood;

More, at the end of the day Through the Woods is only five, fairly short stories, which perhaps makes the book seem, overall, a touch slight. But they are all very cleverly constructed, readable and every one of them stays with you after you've finished. That's the true test of this sort of tale.

The visual style is clear-line and moderately exaggerated cartoon-y figures rendered in a more atmospherically realised world of bold primary colours, blocks of composition and filigree detail. The latter are better than the former, and the art is (I thought) better as establishing an initial mood of unease and dread...

...than at cashing-in shock moments, or startling us with visualised horror:

You may disagree, of course: these things are not measured against absolute aesthetic tables, but upon the pulse of the individual reader. And it's possible I'm only registering the old truth of horror: what's not shown but intimated is much, much more terrifying than what's shown. It's not in the thing that terror resides, you see: it's in our own minds.

A. F. Harrold, The Imaginary (2014)

Lovely older child/YA fable by the impressively bearded A F Harrold, beautifully illustrated by Emily Gravett, concerning the state of whose facial hair I have no information at present. It's about imaginary friends, but from the point of view of those imaginary friends, troped here as real but supernatural entities. Amanda, the heroine, discovers Rudger (not Roger!) in her cupboard.

They have splendid play-adventures together. Some delicious chills are provided by the alarming Mr Bunting, who has unnaturally extended his lifespan by devouring imaginary friends, and now has got a whiff of Rudger. Amanda is well realised; Rudger's adventures, pursued by Mr Bunting, and properly tense and thrilling; but the most moving part of the whole novel, perhaps surprisingly, is the secondary story of Amanda's mum, who has forgotten about her own childhood imaginary friend, a dog called Fridge; who recalls him, and then forgets him again. Heartbreakingly written! All in all: a very lovely novel indeed.

Nick Harkaway, Tigerman (2014)

The Harkaway thing about Tiger(man)
(For Tiger(man)'s a Harkaway thing):
Its tops are made out of Batman;
Its bottom is made out of Greene.
Its bouncy, flouncy, lit'ry, bit twee, fun fun fun fun fun,
But by far the most Harkaway thing about Tiger(man)
Is its tangled-yet-self-aware-complicity-with-upper-middle-class-White-English-masculine-codes-of-right-behaviour-in-a-postcolonial-context:
Po-o-o-ost
colonialcontext.

John Darnielle, Wolf In White Van (2014)

I might say 'I enjoyed this', except that 'enjoy' doesn't seem the right word, exactly. For a first novel it's a very accomplished piece of work indeed: sensitively, evocatively and occasionally alarmingly written. It is eerie and weird and sticks in the mind after reading, like a piece of pungently delicious food sticks in the teeth. Quite apart from anything else, it offers a portrait of the inward oddness of the SF fan (the crossover between SF and gaming especially) a healthy distance away from the rather self-congratulatory cosiness of Jo Walton's Hugo-winning Amongst Others. There's little to love and much to recognise in this portrait of what it means to be a geek. Wolf In White Van shares with Walton's book a deliberately aimless structure, and little actually happens in it. A better book, though, I think.

Story: our narrator, Sean, lives alone in Californian suburbia, coping with the consequences of some terrible incident in his youth that left his face hideously disfigured. A nurse calls four times a day to check on him and top up his treatment. The rest of the time he runs a retro-style, postal-only role-playing game called 'Trace Italian': people write to Sean detailing their next move in the post-nuclear-disaster dystopia of his game-space, and he writes back with personalised details as to how their game is going. The novel is written, in a sinuous sort of way, backwards: so we start at the end, rewind through the story of two teenage players of Trace Italian who confused the game and reality and suffered (one died, one badly hurt) as a result, and end up with the initial trauma that wrecked Sean's face. Along the way are some beautifully written excursi on solitude, imagination, science fiction and games -- the stuff on the porousness of game-players' sense of game and world struck me, post-Gamergate, as prescient (Sean has a thing for Conan, and also for John Norman's Gor novels, although not to read, just to stare at their 'shamesful and garish' covers, 'pornographic, but in an almost dishonest way': 'I didn't need to hear the stories the books were trying to tell me: their skins haunted me enough' [49]). Sometimes these excursi drag a little, but often they are marvellous embedded essays on the side of being a genre Fan upon which Amongst Others prefers not to dwell. Sean is keen not to be thought a creep and a freak, and works hard not to be; but there is something creepy about him nonetheless, and as you read through the novel it starts to dawn upon you that this freakishness is nothing to do with his ruined face or hermit existence. It's the freakishness he shares with you: the combination of desire to escape and desire to control, the passion, passivity and hatred of being passive, the strange potage of imagination, generosity, anger and perversity that is mixed in the head of the true science fiction geek. I know whereof I speak.

It's a novel about SF rather than a SF novel, without even the set-dressing of magic that made Amongst Others Hugo-acceptable. But it's a very, very good novel for all that.

Downsides: Darnielle is, perhaps, a little too obviously coy about withholding the precise details of the 'event' that led to young Sean Phillips's disfigurement. Sometimes the prose strays into mere whimsy (though this is rare). And, though the blame for this can't be laid at Darnielle's door, that cover is rather too EEEEEK! for my taste. In fact, if you stare at it, and rotate it slowly through 35° you find yourself feeling physically nauseous.