Plague Year by Jeff Carlson

I liked this book a lot. An intelligent novel about a nanotechnology-driven disaster needed to be written, after the neo-Luddite nonsense that was Prey.

Short version; medical nanobots run amok and render every part of Earth below 6,000 metres uninhabitable. Traumatised survivors squat on a mountaintop in the Sierra Ranges. When food runs low, they begin eating one another.

That is just the introduction, mind you. The actual tale of Plague Year begins right after this. It’s a good one.

When I’m not Reading, I’m Writing

I like to write too, but curiously I find that I cannot read and write over the same period of time. If I’m lost in a good book, I don’t have the mindspace to write, and when I’m going through the process of creating a story, picking up a book will only interrupt that.

There’s a backlog of books to cover, since blog writing doesn’t count as story writing (sorry!)

In a piece of news, my short story Salvage Rights came runner-up in a competition run through Irregular Magazine and was printed in Issue 2. Check it out!

The Watchmen by Alan Moore

Alan’s Moore’s tale of costumed heroes grown old revolutionised the comics industry when it was published in the 80s. Writers like Moore and Frank Miller made comics something people had a reason to read.

Revisiting the series, it does not disappoint. It strikes me this time round that the story is principally about what happens when life moves on and leaves you behind. Where do you go?

This is a question asked by the original heroes, now ageing and dying, and also their generational replacements. The story starts and ends with the murder of one costumed hero by another.

For me the best moment of the tale is on Mars when Laurie finally learns the truth of her parentage, a truth she has known her whole life but never consciously admitted to herself. As Jon helps her bring the truth to the surface, it’s very moving.

If you’ve never read The Watchmen before, now is the time to do so. If you’ve never read a graphic novel before, The Watchmen is an excellent place to start.

Battle for the Abyss by Ben Counter

I read pulp fiction. It’s something I do every so often. I don’t watch CSI: Miami or what have you, I do this.

In retrospect, reading pulp fiction like this straight after going through the four books of A Song of Ice and Fire was a mistake. This book was always going to look bad in comparison with what I’d just read.

Sadly, this book is the second weakest of the 8 so-far published in the Horus Heresy series. The other books, especially the first five, did a good job of re-creating an alternative Imperium, in it’s formative years, 10,000 years before the “present day”. That all falls down in Battle for the Abyss.

In previous books, it’s made clear that the Imperium has no idea of the true nature of the ‘immaterium’ that they travel through, and any thought of chaos gods is met is atheistic disbelief. Other books also managed to create organisations unknown to us, such as the Remembrancers of the early books, and the secret cabal served by John Grammaticus in Legion.

In this book the marines seem suddenly fully aware of the nature of the warp, of the existence of daemons and chaos gods. This makes some of the conversation jarring. It’s jarring already since much of the dialogue here is woeful, but the ‘out of time’ knowledge implicit among the various characters does not help.

Battle for the Abyss forms a weak link in the series. It’s not ‘bad’ like Descent of Angels, the story is actually advanced here, but this book is simply not as good as the others as it does not remain to its supposed time period.

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

When I saw the premise for this book I knew I had to read it. London is a mobile city, and other cities are its prey. It moves around the countryside, hunting.

Mortal Engines is set in the far future, where the earth’s resources are depleted, oceans and seas dried out. Mobile cities prowl the wrecked landscape, hunting one another for precious resources. The city that stops moving, dies. Municipal Darwinism is the rule of the day.

One of London’s inhabitants finds himself cast out of the city after stumbling across a dangerous secret. Left behind the city with only a would-be assassin for company, he must come to terms with the truth about the world, and his beloved city’s place in it.

Mortal Engines is a YA book, but this 35 year-old found it thoroughly enjoyable.

Halting State by Charles Stross

Set in Edinburgh in the near future, Halting State is a police procedural that will be recognisable to fans of crime fiction. The story starts with a bank robbery, which turns out to be connected to even darker criminality.

So far so crime fiction. You’ll notice that quotes on this book’s cover come from Raph Koster, creator of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and John Carmack, graphics engine writer for Id. So it’s not going to be an ordinary crime mystery.

Charles Stross is best know for sf works such as Accelerando or Singularity Sky. SF fans will be happy to know that the bank robbery takes place in an online game similar to World of Warcraft, and the company involved is one that specialising in providing space for players of such games to store their excess loot.

A company man panics and calls the police, who find themselves investigating alongside forensic accountants sent to ensure that all liability for the multi-million pound losses stays with the company and not its insurers.

It’s been over a decade since I moved to Australia from Scotland, so I enjoyed reading the Scots phrasing in Halting State. Gobshite is a word I haven’t heard for many years, as is boak.

The use of second person throughout the book is striking, and done very well. A difficult voice to write in (try it for yourself) across multiple characters involved in the story. Stross carries it off expertly.

Fans of online games will find a lot of this book interesting, tracking as it does a possible evolution of that genre from MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) to ARG (augmented reality games) that take place online and offline, though those boundaries are increasingly blurred.

Mysteries within mysteries kept me turning the pages of this one late into the night. Halting State is a great read.

Moments

Many books have their moments, scenes that stay in your mind even years later, as vivid as when you first read them. This is one of the things that drives me to keep reading, the knowledge that there are more such memories waiting to be burned into my mind.

I’ve selected some of my own favourites below – I’m sure you have yours. I’ve put the book they come from after the scene.

William reading his letter from Marygay, written centuries earlier. (The Forever War by Joe Haldeman)

The cacophony of talking stones at York cathedral. (Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell by Susannah Clarke)

The French dragon falling screaming to its death after suffering a face
full of acid from an English longwing. As it plummets, its sorrowful rider puts a
pistol to the head of his faithful companion to end its agony. (Temeraire by Naomi Novik)

Ilya Volyova walking the vast and silent corridors of her ship. (Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds)

Fat Charlie Nancy’s karaoke experience – I’m smiling as I type this (Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman)

Trying to use the phones in Unlondon (Un Lun Dun by China Mieville)

The wizard Harry Potter digging the faithfuls Dobby’s grave using only a
shovel and the strength of his arms. (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by Joanne Rowling)

Reid Malenfant, at the point of death, clutches an image of his wife,
dead 6000 years ago. Her name is the last sound on his lips. (Space by Stephen Baxter)

Sansa realising it is her wolf that is to be executed. (A Game of Thrones by George RR Matin)

Science Fiction: Five of the Best

I’ve mentioned before how I have little use for genre labels. This isn’t about that. The only use such labels have is to group books into sections convenient for discussion. Like Science Fiction.

Today science fiction is a thriving genre. The ‘adventure sf’ of the 1950s has given way to a ‘hard sf’ today. Instead of space cowboys fighting space monster before heading back to the space ranch for some space food, we now have intelligent books written by authors fully cognisant of the scientific realities of space travel. Words for me. Five of my favourite such books follow.

1. Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton
This book and its sequel Judas Unchained are my favourite Hamilton books and I’ve read a few. In this series, humanity has spread to other planets through the use of stabilised wormholes, when an alien race is encountered, a race so violent that it was sealed off eons ago. Naturally curious humanity trips the lock and unleashes something terrible. This book also features investigator Paula Myo, one of my favourite characters from any book.

2. Space by Stephen Baxter
I’ve mentioned Space before, talking about the Fermi Paradox. This is not the only hard science tackled in the book. In fact the whole book revolves around a scientific and philosophical investigation, spanning thousands of years. The book is also inhabited by characters to care about, which turns it from text into classic sf.

3. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Unwilling soldiers return from their war to a society they no longer recognise, and which doesn’t sympathise with their experiences. Sound familiar? The Forever War was written in the 1970s, and is still not dated. A great achievement.

4. Ilium/Olympos by Dan Simmons
It was a close call between this and Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion by the same author. Dan Simmons writes fantastic two-part series. I tip my hat to robots who study Shakespeare, and revived Homeric scholars acting as war correspondents for Greek gods.

5. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
Nanotechnology, a retro-Victorian society, a dilemma concerning education, all these add up to a fascinating look at a near future that may never be.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

The straightforward way to discuss this book is to call it a vampire novel and move on from there. That’s one conversation.

Richard Neville is seemingly the last man. Everyone else has become a vampire. By day he walks the empty streets, by night he cowers as the vampires surround his house.

What struck me most about I Am Legend was how it comprised a study in hopelessness and despair. The internal thoughts and deteriorating mental condition of the protagonist comprise the majority of this book.

Neville’s study of vampires provides him with some relief through engaging his mind, the monotony rather than the danger being his greatest enemy. It is not bloodthirsty monsters but tedium that drag at him day after empty day. The incident with the dog is just incredible.

I Am Legend is highly recommended. If you see the word ‘vampire’ on the cover, don’t be mistaken. This is closer to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle than to Bram Stoker, or Joss Whedon for that matter.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

Reading the second Hitchhikers book leads me to a conclusion – Douglas Adams is the master of the anti-climax. Climactic events are something he goes out of his way to avoid. If they have to happen, then everyone just ignores it anyway, or orders another round of drinks.

It took, the possible answer to the ultimate question, combined with a meeting with the man who secretly runs the universe, for me to come to this conclusion, but there it is. No climax. You may draw whatever conclusion you wish from this observation, I stand by it. In fact it makes the other Douglas Adams books I have read make more sense.

Restaurant… is a direct continuation of the story from the first book, and sets up the beginning of the thirds book, at least. We also get to encounter Disaster Area, the galaxy’s greatest rock band. Who could ask for more?