Kim Miller

Severian continues moving through his mad world, gradually rising in social standing if only he didn't find it so easy to make enemies.

This volume 4 of Sun Eater is such a heavy hitter. Ruocchio has a great talent as a story teller but this book takes that talent further than the first three in the series. Hadrian has been through some 'stuff' in those books, but this time Ruocchio throws him to the wall. At the 40% point Ruocchio stomps on Hadrian, and then does it again and again and again. This is not merely a crisis moment, for hundreds of pages Hadrian is pounded deeper and deeper into suffering. I found it a painful thing to keep reading, but the writing is so good and the story is so imaginative that it kept me glued to the page.

We know that Hadrian is writing this way into the future so he has to survive, but I could not fathom how Ruocchio was going to get him out of the fire this time.

There is a long denouement in this story and it's the first time for as long as I can remember that a book has brought me to tears.

I saw the Tarkovsky movie many years ago but his movies are so slow and dreamlike it was difficult getting into the story. I chased up the book but the English translation had come from the French translation and everybody bagged it out. This direct to English translation by Bill Johnston came out in 2011 and this was the one i read. Now I've got to go back to the movie, I'm sure it will make more sense.

It's a book that deals with mankind's inability to handle failure, and with no hero in sight.

This is #1 in a Steampunk series that the author started as a NaNoWriMo project - National Novel Writing Month. This is an international endeavour where people undertake to spend November writing as much as they can of a novel. When I was writing a few years ago I participated in NaNoWriMo so it has a natural attraction for me.

Nita is a general duties mechanic, a Free Wrench, in the boiler room of a power plant built into the side of a volcano. Yep, steam powers everything. In a fit of impulsiveness she finds herself trying to fit in with the crew of smugglers of a steam powered airship. And so the adventures begin.

This is a free-wheeling story that reads as a YA novel. It's a bit swashbuckling pirate, a bit "find the mole in the crew", a bit "how do these people even get along?, and a bit "I know this will all turn out OK because the author is too nice to his characters".

Rod Moss is an Alice Springs (Australia) artist and author. His work mostly features life in the red centre. In this book he travels to the coast.

Blue Moon Bay is a coastal town filled with comedic but weird characters living out their weird lives. Some of the characters are people, some are animals, some are puppets, all are grotesque. The book is a celebration of absurdist comedy with Moss's artworks peppering the text.

If this ever found its way to Florida they would ban it.

Not much needs to be said about one of the iconic works of American fiction. I first read this not too long after it came out as one of those university students who thought they were so cool for being abreast of modern literature. Or, as Vonnegut once said about his writing, "It's all just horseshit." Or something close to that.

Vonnegut gathers all his chaotic black humour into one place for this book. Billy Pilgrim's time jumps scatter his story back and forth, from childhood to the day he will die, from being abducted to another planet to watching his interplanetary lover in a porn film in a New York adult book shop, from running scared through a German forest before his capture to being a wealthy optometrist in the US.

It's an insight into Vonnegut's state of mind following his return from war and surviving the Dresden bombing, well before the term PTSD was coined or the condition even understood.

The second collection of short stories that fits between the Sun Eater novels. This is a mix of Marlowe stuff and minor characters who don't appear in the novels. The final story concerns Crispin, the follow up from The Lesser Devil novella. Getting a bit more family info bumps this book up a half star.

Book 3 of The Bromeliad.

Remember the few Nomes who set out to find a new place to live? They have come across somebody named Arnold, yep the guy from the old store. He's been given an award and is off for the presentation. It's in some place called Florida. They hide in his stuff and accompany him all the way.

Right from the first book the leader of the clan has had a black box that they've called The Thing. Nobody knows what it's for but it's an heirloom to be preserved for some reason. Once in Florida it starts flashing lights and humming. in the distance they can see a tall cylindrical tower with some flying machine attached to it. There is lots of activity and steam or smoke around the tower. The Thing wants to get closer.

As they approach the shuttle The Thing really starts to go off, as if its talking to the shuttle, or through the shuttle to something else. And as a black shadow descends over them they realise it's a communication device that has called a space ship down to itself.

And that's enough spoilers.

Book 2 of The Bromeliad. The Nomes have driven the truck until they crash it and are forced to run into the wilderness again. They come across an abandoned quarry and take refuge in the manager's hut. Once again, disaster as the quarry is about to reopen.

Some of them take off to explore and find a permanent place for the community to live.

The men arrive to get the quarry into action again and the Nome need a quick escape plan. Having once driven a truck they decide to take a digger from the quarry and to an old barn up the hill behind the quarry. Everyone gets loaded into the front scoop and the 'drivers' get coordinated again and they drive the digger out of the yard with the workers running after them in the muddy field.

This is book #1 of The Bromeliad Trilogy. It's really a kid's series but worth it as a lighthearted adult read. The story is about a group of Nomes (no G) who live in a hedgerow outside an English city. They face being trodden on by humans or eaten by foxes, In a severe winter and with too many of them eaten they sneak on board a truck at the motorway service centre. It takes them to a department store in the city.

And there they find other Nomes living in the store. Neither community knew the other existed. City Nomes and Country Nomes have to find some way to get along.

Disaster strikes when they find out the store is to be shut down and they all have to find somewhere else to live. So they engineer some planks and ropes and teach themselves how to drive the truck and escape the store, which they accidentally set alight as they leave.

It was an extra delight for me when the truck dropped the Nomes at Arnold Bros department store. Pratchett names a street alongside the store. Arnold's department store in Great Yarmouth was started by my ancestors and that same street runs past it. So the Nomes were sheltering in my families old business. Arnolds was later bought and renamed by Debenhams.

Remember The Artful Dodger from Dickens' Oliver Twist? Here he is in Pratchett's delightful story of a teenage boy living in the back streets and underground sewer tunnels of Elizabethan London. After an eventful day where be becomes a hero he meets a journalist named Charles Dickens. And the plot thickens.

This book has Pratchett's characteristic sense of fun and the absurd but far from Discworld.

Imagine a man living a lonely life on the family farm. Nobody knows how old he is, it's as if he's always been there. In reality, he's been there since the American Civil War.

When he got back from the war and became the last one of his family an alien visitor arrived. The alien asked if he'd like to host a way station for interplanetary travelers. As long as the way station was underneath his house he would hardly age, but they didn't want the surrounding people to know about it.

One day something happened that brought people to his door.

The story maintains a sense of the deep humanity of Enoch, the farmer. When everything might easily collapse around him he manages to hold fast to some quality that his neighbours lack.

Arguable PKD's most iconic work, and definitely one of his strangest. In a far future humans are colonising the Moon and developing strong psychic abilities. Companies are employing psychics to sit in a room and do industrial espionage from a distance. One company sends a team of them to the Moon for such purpose but there is an explosion and not everyone survives.

Second story strand: People who are almost dead can be put into cryo-sleep and kept alive. They can be temporarily brought out of sleep for conversations through a psychic medium. But these sessions shorten the ultimate storage time possible for the person.

Put these two strands together. Some of those sent to the moon have died and are in cryo-sleep.

Everyone tries to get on with their lives, but strange things keep happening. It seems time is running backwards and everything is inexplicably old. And then Ubik appears in advertising. It's the universal fixit. One spray and everything is good again. But what is in the can and where do you get it?

PKD puts together a narrative that has the reader questioning 'who is alive and who is in cryo-sleep?' And does it even matter? After all, PKD's ability to blend the reality of human consciousness with weird alternatives is never ending.

This is the final book in Baxter's Zelee Sequence but was recommended to me as a worthwhile stand alone book.

As the sun approaches heat death Earth's scientists work out that it's happening much to soon and something must be happening to it. The Zelee series deals with alien wars etc and space travelers also work out that other starts are degenerating too quickly.

By sending a probe into the sun they find the problem and realise that it's non-repairable and it looks like the whole galaxy is threatened by the same thing.

As the book approaches the end they work out that the aliens with whom they were at war for so long are really the solution to a galaxy wide problem.