Dan
A fascinating insight into a life that many of us in the West only hear about in newspaper headlines, this graphic memoir about a young boy's growing up in Kashmir is illustrated in a beautiful woodblock style (fitting, given his father's profession). Malik Sajad owes a clear debt to Joe Sacco, one he acknowledges in these pages, but this work can stand on its own as one of 2015's best comics.
A lot of the hype around this SF debut has focused on how it updates cyberpunk for the 21st century. The use of a noir plot in a high tech setting certainly echoes Neuromancer (and Crashing Heaven also shares more than a few structural similarities with that classic), but there's more than just that old genre at play here. For all the Chandleresque men crashing through doors with guns and running down mean streets, there is also a real sense of the bleak emptiness of space and the beauty of glittering fragile spaceships that Alastair Reynolds would be proud of, and maybe even a nod to Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos. That's not to say Robertson is a plagiarist. The core SF concept at the heart of this novel is AI, and Robertson runs with this as well as anyone has in recent years, with a treatment I haven't seen anywhere else.
Lead character Jack is an accountant with a military AI residing in his brain, almost the last of its kind. This AI has a name, Hugo Fist, and manifests as a wooden ventriloquist's doll. Oh, and it's going to be taking over Jack's body in the near future. Fist is an amazing creation, initially a gibbering psychopathic howl of rage hellbent on destruction that goes through genuine character development over the course of the book, to the point where he becomes almost sympathetic. The other key AIs in the book are the Pantheon, a group of sentient corporations that essentially manage the remnants of humanity, who worship them as gods, and the Totality, rogue AIs with a hostile relationship to the Pantheon. It's the conflict between these two groups that ultimately drives the plot, as Jack and Fist attempt to discover exactly what Jack had got close enough to to force the Pantheon to introduce him to Fist and send him to war.
There's a lot here to chew on besides the plot. There's plenty of thought about what it means to be human. The boundaries of death are far from inviolate in this world, and the idea that our consciousness means more than our bodies is never far from the surface. It's not too much of a stretch to read the book as an allegory of modern tech-driven capitalism either - remember the vision of a disengaged populace living almost entirely in a virtual world and hoping for favours from their corporate gods next time you're on a train full of people looking at their iPhones. Robertson can handle a decent set piece as well. An encounter with one of the Pantheon in a virtual cathedral is a one of the more memorable parts of the book, and there are many action scenes that manage the trick of being both fast moving and perfectly clear.
This is a strong debut that is not only recommended, but probably essential if you want to keep up with modern SF. Good work, Mr Robertson!
A group of four young people share a flat in Tokyo. To the outside world, they have varying degrees of success, from a young film company executive to the girl who sits at home all day waiting for an inattentive boyfriend to ring, but they all seem to be rootless and drifting. One day a mysterious younger man appears in the flat, is soon accepted into the group, and becomes the catalyst of what plot there is. It's like Friends if Friends had more despair, ennui and male prostitution.
I picked this up after watching the film adaptation (which isn't referenced anywhere on the blurb, so consider this a PSA if you enjoyed the book) a few years ago. Both share the same sense of hopelessness and of lives lived waiting, but the book has the edge in providing a little more background to the characters, helping us to understand how they came to be what they are. It's a quick read, less than 250 pages, but it lingers in the mind. Well worth a read.
Well, it's King, so it's always going to be readable, but this is not one of his better books. I liked his previous crime novel, Mr. Mercedes (and I LOVED Joyland, which was published as if it was an old pulp book), but this one isn't as good. The plot is built on far too many coincidences, and the bad guy never really convinces. There's elements of his previous work in here - a little bit of Shawshank, a whole lot of Misery - which only goes to reinforce that this is less than his best.
A qualified thumbs up for this one from me. It's much much better than his last effort, the dire Reamde, but still doesn't regain the heights of Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash. The main issue for me is what Stephenson chooses to show. I was a bit peeved after reading fifty pages of orbital mechanics to discover that, while all these velocity changes were going on, just over there they were having revolutions and space cannibalism and all sorts that gets glossed over in a paragraph or two. The structure of the book is a bit frustrating as well - there's nothing wrong with the first two thirds, but the final section is begging for more exploration. It throws up all sorts of interesting ideas and developments that don't have time to go anywhere.
That said, it's still a good read. If a giant rock does ever hit the moon, this is probably how it'll go down.
This account of the staging of Aristophanes' play Peace c421 BC may not be exactly how it went down, but it's an engaging comic novel. Aristophanes is having trouble putting on a play about peace in a warlike climate, eternally hopeful lyric poet Luxos is trying to get a break, shady generals and weapons manufacturers want the upcoming peace talks to fail, a deity is sowing discord throughout Athens, and into the middle of all this walk am Amazon and a wood nymph whose powers are not quite as advertised....
Millar writes simply and clearly, and there is a fairytale quality to his writing which makes the next thing to happen seem like the only thing that could have. This is a good read, and a decent depiction of ancient Athens and her dramatic festivals. Long time fans of his work will also be glad to know that this one has two happy endings - it's just that one of them is only halfway through and for a different book that's twenty odd years old and set thousands of years later.
A long time ago, Clive Barker wrote and directed (from his own novella The Hellhound Heart), the classic horror movie Hellraiser, a dark tale of deceit, sexual jealousy and betrayal that introduced us to the Cenobites – otherworldly creatures that relish pain, torment and despair. Their leader, Pinhead, became a horror icon but like Freddy and Jason before him, his original impact has been leached away by a parade of increasingly shoddy sequels. This book is Barker's attempt to reclaim Pinhead, but there's more riding on it. Much like Pinhead himself, after a spectacular start with the Books of Blood and the fantasy epic Weaveworld, both of which marked him out as a writer of prodigious talent and imagination, Barker's work has tailed off into a long nose dive of mediocrity. These Gospels have been promised for years, and there were high hopes attached to them, especially with the news that Pinhead's foil would be another of Barker's long running characters, the occult detective Harry D'Amour. Supposedly, the original manuscript ran to around a thousand pages, before being cut down to this 350 page book. Which begs the question: considering what has been left in, how bad were the two thirds that have been cut? This isn't going to be a glowing review, I'm afraid.
The book starts strongly, with an excellent scene of a magician murdered by Pinhead being resurrected by colleagues, only for them all to be slaughtered anew by the Cenobite. It's a dramatic and cinematic episode with a real sense of building menace. It's all downhill from there, though. D'Amour's sections read like a parody of a hardboiled PI novel, while Pinhead has none of the melancholic grandeur we saw in Hellraiser. The paper thin story is to do with Pinhead attempting to wrest the rule of Hell to himself, while D'Amour does little but watch things happen around him. Ultimately, it's just all so wearyingly adolescent. The first two thirds of the book are a parade of erections and gore, leavened with supposedly tough guy dialogue that just embarrasses. While things pick up a bit when we finally start exploring Hell, it's still no more transgressive or imaginative than a Vertigo comic from twenty five years ago. The story is rushed, the characters are banal, their dialogue worse, and it's just not very good. Pinhead deserved a better send off than this
A lot of the other negative reviews have covered what I didn't like about this book - the lack of incident, the multiple POVs leading to a lot of padding and redundancy, the terribly cliched depiction of religious Americans - but it is also worth highlighting that this is one of the worst evocations of contemporary Japan I have come across. It doesn't appear that the author has done anything more than speed read a few articles on the Internet and picked up on a few buzzwords like freeter. Very disappointing.
Music and magic? I'm there. It's the late 80s and a trio of Mexican teenagers discover that certain records have magical qualities, qualities they can use to improve their standing at school, to improve their romantic lives, to just make things better. When things go too far, the three seperate, but decades later chance brings them back together in Mexico City...
A very strong book, almost a Central American version of Kieron Gillen's excellent Phonogram comics. Recommended.
I am a sucker for underwater horror, so I was hoping this would be right up my street. Not to be, I'm afraid. I didn't like the scratchy art at all, and a promising storyline falls apart at the end into a mess of cliched characters, over exposition, confused page layouts and a load of terrible sub-Von Daniken guff.
Really disappointing.
You don't need me to tell you that Ursula Le Guin is a very special writer. This isn't quite her best, but it's still top notch stuff. It's an explicit Vietnam allegory, where the natives of a undeveloped forest world turn against their human occupiers. Le Guin's typically careful building of a believable alien society is the highlight of the book, but it is a little let down by having the main villain be such a stereotypical bad guy. If you haven't read The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed, you should go for those masterpieces ahead of this one, but it's a good next stop.
This is an eye opener, a collection of linked short stories about tribal life in the debated lands between Afghanistan and Pakistan, which is a world that I imagine very few people reading this will ever experience. The common ground in each story is Tor Baz (the Black Falcon), but he is often a minor or background character in a snapshot of an aspect of tribal life. The writing is simple and clear, giving it an almost fairy tale air, but but there is no flinching from gritty reality in the content. At the beginning I was thinking it was intended as an elegy for a way of life that was dying. By the time I finished, I'd decided it was probably a good thing said way of life was on the way out.
James Smythe is a very up and down writer for me. I loved The Testimony, but thought No Harm Can Come To A Good Man was a terribly thought out mess. His other books are somewhere between these two poles, and The Echo fits right in the middle. It's a follow up to The Explorer, and is about a second mission sent to the mysterious anomaly in deep space. It's a decent read, with some properly horrific sequences, and the mental disintegration of the main character is effectively communicated, but ultimately the rebranding of these novels as The Anomaly Quartet makes you know you're only partway through the story. The finished thing is some years off I suspect, and ultimate judgement has to wait for that.
I picked this up after reading the blurb in the library. I wanted it to be really good, but it turned out only okay. At 700 pages, it's probably about 200 pages too long, and some of the middle sections are a bit flabby. There are also characters whose storyline appears to just peter out, almost as if they were forgotten about, but an afterword does suggest that there's a second book on the way, so I will reserve judgement on that. I was alsodisappointed that a book set for two thirds in mid to late 70s Jamaica and then early 80s New York had so little focus on with music. It's not all bad though. The depiction of the Jamaican ghetto is very evocative, and the different narrative voices are really well handled. There are also some great set pieces - the crack house scene is a fantastic piece of writing.
I'm glad I read it, but it won't be the best book I read this year.
Jane Austen gets drafted.
Not really, but it's a good tagline for this long single volume fantasy set in an analogue of British Regency history. The Marshwic family has already given much to the war against Denland, but still it comes for the middle daughter of the house and sends her to the frontline, a world away from the sea of polite society she has swum in all her life. It's a bumpy ride from country house living to fighting a guerrilla war in swamps, but Emily adapts and develops skills she, and we, never suspected she had at the beginning of the novel.
By using this skewed version of real world history, Tchaikovsky is on the same kind of ground as Guy Gavriel Kay, and it's a testament to the strength of this book that isn't ridiculous to compare him to such a master. He's not interested in the mythic echoes that Kay loves, preferring something grounded in grittier reality, with a fine supporting cast adding emotional heft to Emily's journey. This is a really good book.
The London 70s punk story has been told many times, but not like this. Viv Albertine was involved with many of the names you'd know, and also in her own band, the fabulous and unconventional Slits. This is the meat of the first part of the book, but the second, less glamorous, half is just as compelling, as Albertine opts for a life of domesticity and encounters some awful traumas before a hard fought artistic rebirth. A good book from an unashamedly strong female perspective. I'll give this to my daughter to read (but not for a few years yet).