Monthly Archives: May 2018

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

Crash Override, by Zoe Quinn

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Even if you stick mainly to mainstream sites, you’ve probably seen glimpses of the internet’s underbelly in the notorious comments sections at the bottom of news articles. The article could be about a local man saving a box of kittens from a burning building, but no matter: the comments will accuse him of hating dogs, setting the building on fire in the first place, and secretly being Barack Obama’s Kenyan uncle.

This is a crucial book, a finalist for this year’s Hugo in the Best Related Work category; its author was the first victim of the appalling #Gamergate affair, in which the forces of the dark side of the Internet were unleashed upon her for supposedly securing a positive review of a game she had written by having sex with the journalist (who in fact did not write or publish any such review). Being white, male and cishet, I’ve faced very little of this myself. (There was one Brexiter who argued with me on Facebook and eventually resorted to sending me obscene messages from sockpuppet accounts and emailing cartooney threats of legal action when I gave him the silent treatment, but at least he involved only his imaginary friends rather than any real ones.) I’ve seen quite enough of it both online and offline, though; it’s very chilling indeed to read what it’s like to be at ground zero of one of the Internet’s most notorious and vicious attacks. (And I am not interested in hearing from any Gamergate supporters who do not start their contribution by admitting that Gamergate’s treatment of Zoe Quinn was inexcusably evil.)

Zoe Quinn also writes about what can be done to fix the problem. It’s clearly been a very wearing and learning political process for her and her allies. She has tried to take the issue to the US government, the UN, the titans of the private sector; she has set up her own organisation to help people mitigate similar situations when it happens to them. Good for her to take this dreadful experience and turn it into something positive.

The other point I took from it is that it doesn’t cost you to be nice. The waves of harassment diminished every time a celebrity spoke in public against Gamergate. Even on the micro-level, if we see an internet pile-on among our own social circles, it costs nothing to say “this isn’t cool” – particularly if the object of the pile-on is not white, male and cishet. Often the harassers are motivated by the low-hanging fruit of an easy target. Telling our friends to calm down can sometimes make the world a better place.

The book is only distantly related to sf literature, but games are definitely part of the genre (so far not much recognised by the Hugos) and as Gamergate fed into the Puppies, it became relevant to the wider discourse around the Hugos themselves. So I have no hesitation in finding this a suitable candidate for Best Related Work, and of the three finalists I’ve read so far, it’s getting my top vote. You can get it here.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

Spirit: The Princess of Bois Dormant by Gwyneth Jones

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

One afternoon Col Ben Phu and Drez Doyle — two private soldiers from Orange Company who’d befriended her in Cymru along with Sergeant Aswad — arrived. Bibi was glad to see them. The servants who’d been together on campaign had been dispersed. The only familiar face in Juniper was Ogul Merdov, proud possessor of a family name (although she had no actual family living), and she had no time for the ‘savage’. Col and Drez took Bibi off with them, ignoring the protests of Serenity, the Han woman who was warden of the girls’ dorm: through squares and gardens, over bridges, past many handsome buildings to a guardhouse in the perimeter wall. Sergeant Aswad looked the other way while they smuggled her up to the walkway.

I have somewhat bounced off Jones’ prose before – I really enjoyed the novalla “Bold As Love”, but then struggled with the book-length version and the first two Aleutian books. I am glad therefore to report that I got on rather well with Spirit, perhaps because it takes a few leads from The Count of Monte Cristo, familiar ground for me. Having said that, it’s not as slavish a copy as, say, Stephen Fry’s The Star’s Tennis Ballsget it here.

This was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that list is Anno Mortis, by Rebecca Levene.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

Monday reading

Posted on by

Current
Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy
Collected Works, ed. Nick Wallace
Mind Over Ship, by David Marusek
Summer in Orcus, by T. Kingfisher
A Skinful of Shadows, by Frances Hardinge

Last books finished
Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, by Zoe Quinn
Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith
The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin
The Black Tides of Heaven, by JY Yang
No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Liz Bourke

Next books
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
Gemini, by Dorothy Dunnett

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

Akata Warrior, by Nnedi Okorafor

Posted on by

Second para of third chapter:

“What is wrong with this silly girl?” he muttered as Sunny leaned against the Jeep with her arm on the warm door. She didn’t need to worry about dirt. As always, it was spotless. Sunny suspected he paid some of the younger boys in the neighborhood to wash it often. Chukwu had gotten the Jeep three weeks ago, and he would take it with him to the University of Port Harcourt in five days.

The second of the YA finalists for me, a rollicking tale of 13-year-old Sunny, who is an albino Nigerian and also part of the magical Leopard Society, and must confront human and inhuman enemies to save her society. I particularly loved the immersion in Nigerian contemporary detail, adapting a lot of Young Wizard tropes to a non-Western society with great efficiency. It’s still not really my sub-genre, and it loses a point or two for being second in a series where I haven’t read the first, but in general thumbs up. I bounced pretty thoroughly off both the Binti novellas, but really liked Lagoon which was also firmly set in Nigeria with a difference. You can get it here.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by

Posted in Uncategorised

Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2010

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third article (“The Next Doctor”):

The real Doctor doesn’t have time to solve this mystery though, because they are confronted by a creature that seems to be part animal, part Cyberman – a CyberShade. The Doctors try to capture it, but it’s too strong.

This is awfully thin stuff. I’m sorry to say that, because most of the New Who spinoff literature has been of decent quality, and indeed a lot of good creative effort went into the Doctor Who Storybooks at this time of the show’s history. But this is basically a series of reviews of Tenth Doctor stories, reminders of regular characters, factual pieces and puzzles, and a couple of not very memorable comic strips – a bit of an end-of-RTD-era feel about it. OK for completists like me, but I would not have found it particularly good value for a young fan. If you want, you can get it here.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

Donovan’s Brain, by Curt Siodmak

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third diary entry:

Schratt has lived in Konapah for more than thirty years. The heat has dried up his energies. He has become as superstitious as the Indians of his district. If his medical ethics permitted, he would prescribe snake charms and powdered toads for his patients.

This is another finalist for the Best Novel Retro Hugo for 1943, a short novel which was the basis of several memorable films. Our protagonist, a mildly corrupt doctor in a desert town in the Western USA, rescues the brain of evil millionaire Donovan, who is fatally injured in a plane crash, and finds a way of keeping it alive; but the brain is stronger than its human minders, and manipulates them to continue its original owner’s evil plans of various kinds (notably perverting the course of justice). It’s a basic horror plot of possession, but there’s a tremendously convincing air of despairing degeneracy about the entire story (the narrator is disgusted with himself) and nods to the latest technology as of 1942.

It’s striking that of the six finalists for the Best Novel category in this year’s Retro Hugos, three are from firmly outside genre publishing as it then was (Islandia, The Uninvited and Darkness and the Light). I think both Donovan’s Brain and The Uninvited would fit more comfortably into today’s horror shelves.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by

Posted in Uncategorised

Something Like Normal, by Trish Doller

Posted on by

Second para of third chapter:

“Is there a good reason why you're outside my house at four thirty in the morning?” he asks, resting a travel mug of coffee on the hood of an ancient Land Rover. His keys jingle as he unlocks the driver’s-side door. He surveys my T-shirt, soaked through with sweat under the arms and in the middle of my chest. It’s a long run from my house to Fort Myers Beach — and there’s a bridge involved.

Trish Doller is one of my twins, born like me on 26 April 1967. (Also my former college flatmate who now runs London Zoo, the Estonian finance minister, and the Estonian finance minister's twin brother.) When I first got to know Trish online in 2002, she described herself as a "radio personality, wife, mother and all-around awesome babe" living in her native Ohio; now she is a full-time writer of YA fiction living in Florida. This was her first novel (of four so far), published in 2012.

It's a compassionate, even occasionally funny, account of a young Marine arriving home from military service in Afghanistan to find that his girlfriend has stolen his brother (at least, I read it that way round), his parents' marriage is disintegrating, and his own PTSD is ever more difficult to ignore. It's all in the present tense, which adds to the sense of the narrator trying to make sense of his life as it develops. There are no easy answers, but the journey to find them is interesting if tough. The happy ending is fairly well signalled in advance, but I actually found that rather satisfying. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2012. Next in that pile is Maigret Loses His Temper, by Georges Simenon.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

Luminescent Threads and The Road to Middlemarch

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third article (a letter to Octavia Butler from Karen Lord) in Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, eds Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal:

I did not have the strength to read more, and so I know more about your books through synopses, reviews and commentaries than through the direct experience of reading. I can see similarities to my own work: the concerns about balance of power, the boundaries of self, the joys and demands of community, and the bliss and burden of empathy. However, it is not your work that inspires me so much as the fact of your success as an author, and the vision and determination that paved the way to that success.

Second paragraph of third chapter of The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot, by Rebecca Mead:

"Thornie came home. Dreadfully shocked to see him so worn," Lewes wrote in his diary the evening that Thornton arrived. "A dreadful day—Thornie rolling on the floor in agony," he wrote the following day. Thornton, usually a muscular young man of 180 pounds, had lost more than 50 pounds and was "piteously wasted," as George Eliot wrote to Blackwood. Dr. James Paget, the foremost surgeon of the day who included Queen Victoria among his patients, prescribed morphine. A prone couch was set up in the drawing room near the piano, and whenever the sedatives wore off Thornton listened to Eliot playing, and was able to speak a little about his life in Natal, where he had purchased a tract of land and had built a farm. "In the evening he got excited talking about his African experiences and singing Zulu songs," Lewes wrote in his diary on May 11. "Made anxious about him."

My reading schedules happened to throw both of these books at me simultaneously, in one of those happy coincidences that forces you to compare and contrast. Luminescent Threads, in a similar format to Letters to Tiptree and sharing an editor, brings together short pieces by almost fifty writers about the effect that Butler's writing had on them, including several who have attended the Clarion writers' workshop thanks to the scholarship established in Butler's name. Most of the pieces were written in the immediate aftermath of the Trump victory and inauguration, and many of the writers were still reeling in shock and invoking Butler, who foresaw the sort of regime that Trump would like to lead, as an inspiration in dark times.

I have to say that I was less satisfied with Luminescent Threads than I was with Letters to Tiptree. I felt that there was less internal organisation – it might have been more interesting to group the scholarly essays separately from the more personal letters. I also really missed Butler's own voice – Letters to Tiptree included a number of letters from Tiptree, whereas here we hear from Butler only in one short interview at the end. I salute the commitment of the editors and contributors, but the structure didn't quite work for me. Still, you may want to get it here. It’s up for the Hugo for Best Related Work.

The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot is similarly a long tribute to a favorite author, but with only one contributor, Rebecca Mead, now a staff writer with the New Yorker, who tracks her heroine's career across England and looks at the parallels of Eliot's life and works with her own life. Rebecca Mead is the same age as me, and we are both the same age as George Eliot was when Middlemarch was published (51). I don't go all the way with Mead in her enthusiasm; the only other Eliot novels I have read are Silas Marner, which I thought was OK, and The Mill on the Floss, which I hated.

But I do agree that Middlemarch is one of the greatest novels in the English language; it made a profound impression on me when I read it almost thirty years ago, and I still remember almost all of it. Mead teases out Eliot's portrayal of emotional complexity in the various relationships, obviously Dorothea in particular but also Lydgate/Rosamund and Fred/Mary, and explores where they were drawn from; I was fascinated to learn that Francis Pattison, later Lady Dilke, was the model for Dorothea. As I often say, it's not really my fandom, but I very much appreciated Mead's attention to historical and geographical detail, and shared her excitement in tracking down the very rooms in which Middlemarch was written, almost 150 years ago now. It's about time I read Middlemarch again. (But first, I'm going to try and revisit Proust in the second half of this year.) Meanwhile you can get Mead's book here.

The Road to Middlemarch made its way to the top of my pile of unread non-fiction books. Next on that list is The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, by Ian Mortimer.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

Torchwood: Rift War

Posted on by

Second page of part 3:

This pulls together the Rift War! comic story published originally in issues 4-13 of Torchwood Magazine in 2008, and adds at the end a single-episode story, Jetsam, published in issue 3 also in 2008.

I felt that the Rift War! epsiodes did not hang together very well – there was rather a feeling of three different writers (Simon Furman, Paul Grist and Ian Edgington) handing off the storyline between each other without much of a unifying concept. Also I was not attracted by Paul Grist’s depictions of the regular characters in six of the ten episodes that he illustrated, though I liked his writing for four of them a bit more. (The artist above is SL Gallant, who I found more to my taste.)

On the other hand, Jetsam was a real gem, written and drawn by Brian Williamson (who has done a lot of Doctor Who art, but this appears to be the only Whoniverse story he has actually written). It's a fairly standard Season 2 alien artefact story, but done with a real sense of warmth and engagement. I hope Williamson can be tempted to do a bt more. Worth getting the book for.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

Monday reading

Posted on by

Current
Ammonite, by Nicola Griffith
Looking For JJ, by Anne Cassidy
The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin
Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, by Zoe Quinn

Last books finished
River of Teeth, by Sarah Gailey
Luminescent Threads, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal
The Road to Middlemarch, by Rebecca Mead
Darkness and the Light, by Olaf Stapledon
The Day of the Doctor, by Steven Moffat
Donovan’s Brain, by Curt Siodmak
Akata Warrior, by Nnedi Okorafor
Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire
Twice Upon a Time, by Paul Cornell

Next books
Contes Fantastiques Complets, by Guy de Maupassant
Dark Matter, by Blake Crouch
Gemini, by Dorothy Dunnett

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by

Posted in Uncategorised

Darkness and the Light, by Olaf Stapledon

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

This Euro-American war was certainly not the war which is being waged while I write this book, in spite of obvious similarities. At this time the Germans had recovered from that extravagant hooliganism which had turned the world against them in an earlier period. They had in a manner reverted from Nazism to the more respectable Prussianism. Other facts also show that this was not our present war. Both India and South Africa had left the British Empire and were already well-established independent states. Moreover, weapons were now of a much more lethal kind, and the American coast was frequently and extensively bombarded by fleets of European planes. In this war Scotland had evidently become the economic centre of gravity of Britain. The Lowlands were completely industrialized, and huge tidal electric generators crowded the western sounds. Tidal electricity had become the basis of Britain’s power. But the British, under their effete financial oligarchy, had not developed this new asset efficiently before the German attack began.

This is another of the Retro Hugo finalists for Best Novel. I’d read Star Maker and Last and First Men by the same author; Darkness and the Light is on the same lines, but not as good. It’s a story of two parallel future histories of humanity, which bifurcate at a decision point where a movement of spiritual and political awakening in Tibet either is crushed, in the timeline that leads to the human race being defeated by rats, or leads the world to new levels of civilisation, in the timeline that ends with humanity’s transcendence. You can’t accuse Stapledon of having small ideas; however, this is not really a novel, in that I don’t think there is a single named character or a line of actual dialogue. There are six better-known Stapledon books (the two above-named, also Odd John, Sirius, Last Men in London and Nebula Maker) and there are good reasons why this is not in the top half dozen. It won’t get a high vote from me, but you can get it and decide for yourself.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by

Posted in Uncategorised

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by H.P. Lovecraft and Ian Culbard

Posted on by

Third page:

I got this having hugely enjoyed Culbard's graphic novel version of At the Mountains of Madness a few years ago. I'm sorry to say that this didn't work for me so well; it's not as visual a story, and the central characters (Charles Dexter Ward, the narrator Willett and the ancient necromancer Curwen) are not especially interesting characters. It's interesting that Lovecraft himself thought this was not one of his best efforts, and the original story remained unpublished until 1941, several years after he had died. Still, if you want to, you can get it here.

This was the top unread graphic story on my shelves. Next is Weapons of Mass Diplomacy, by Abel Lanzac.

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by
Posted in Uncategorised

Islandia, by Austen Tappan Wright

Posted on by

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Breakfast was not a meal to linger over. There was too much to be seen, and in two hours the anchor would be dropped. Because I needed advice and also liked and trusted him, when M. Perier appeared on deck, I confided my feelings about Dorn to him; and he, like Islata Soma, advised me to write at once and not to worry about our different views. There was something very friendly in his manner, and my cup of gratitude was full when he offered to take me in hand when we went ashore, suggesting that I present my credentials in his company that afternoon and then come home with him for dinner.

This is one of the Retro Hugo finalists for 1943 this year, having been published in 1942; it is as long as the other five combined, and was published years after the author’s death from his assembled notes by his daughter (who probably should get cover creds, but of course doesn’t).

It’s set in the first decade of the last century. Our protagonist has a bromance at Harvard with a scion of the ruling elite of Islandia, a mysterious country on a mysterious continent in the southern hemisphere (more likely the Atlantic than the Pacific, from the hints we are given). After graduation, he pulls some family political strings and gets sent there as the American Consul. And he falls in love, with several of the young women of Islandia, but most of all with the country itself, whose relaxed social and sexual attitudes are a stark contrast with the rather repressed American culture of the Gilded Age. It’s a great work of world-building, with a series of romantic plots overlaid (and some politics, but really not all that much). The pace is fairly gentle, but I did find myself caught up in the story, especially the awkwardness of the narrator’s relationships with the women of both Islandia and the USA. It’s a long read, but worth it. You can get it here (paper only, not electronic).

Posted in Uncategorised

My tweets

Posted on by

Posted in Uncategorised

The Missy Chronicles and The Legends of River Song

Posted on by

A couple of spinoff short story collections published recently, featuring two of the strong female characters of the Moffat era.

The Missy Chronicles, by James Goss, Cavan Scott, Paul Magrs, Peter Anghelides, Jacqueline Rayner and Richard Dinnick

Second para of third story (“Teddy Sparkles Must Die”, by Paul Magrs):

Jack spared his younger sister a scornful glance. ‘I’m not scared of her. She’s only a servant.’

Six stories here, and reading through other people’s reviews I am struck by how different everyone’s take is. However, most people single out “Girl Power!” by Jacqueline Rayner as a favourite, and I agree – it’s set during Missy’s years of imprisonment in the Vault, in the style of internet chat between her and famous women of history as she tries to develop a cunning plan for escape and domination but ends up getting changed herself.

The opening story, “Dismemberment” by James Goss, was a (very) rare miss for me from this writer; I simply found it too violent. However I go against fannish consensus in rather enjoying “The Liar, the Glitch and the War Zone” by Peter Anghelides, which features the first appearance of the Thirteenth Doctor in written fiction. I am more with the mainstream in having enjoyed Richard Dinnick’s “Alit in Underland”, set between the TV episodes “World Enough and Time” and “The Doctor Falls”, and exploring what Missy and the John Simm Master got up to on the Mondasian colony ship. Well worth getting.

The Legends of River Song, by Jenny T. Colgan, Jacqueline Rayner, Steve Lyons, Guy Adams and Andrew Lane

Second para of third story (“A Gamble With Time”, by Steve Lyons):

That’s on Earth, in case I haven’t mentioned it before.

Again I think Jacqueline Rayner has the best story here, “Suspicious Minds” featuring an Auton version of Elvis and a bunch of hints at River’s own past. I also liked Jenny Colgan’s “Picnic at Asgard”, which fills in that particular gap in continuity, and “River of Time” by Andrew Lane which actually has River functioning as an archaeologist.

I think this collection works better than The Missy Chronicles, basically because River Song is a more interesting and more complex character. You can get it here.

My tweets

Posted on by

Posted in Uncategorised

The Clarke shortlist: Goodreads/LibraryThing stats

Posted on by

Following on from my post on the long list, here are the Goodreads and LibraryThing ownership and ratings stats for the shortlist.

Goodreads LibraryThing
owners av rating owners av rating
American War — Omar El Akkad 70396 3.83 632 3.86
Borne — Jeff VanderMeer 50713 3.91 565 3.9
Gather the Daughters — Jennie Melamed 16643 3.66 130 3.48
Spaceman of Bohemia — Jaroslav Kalfař 9580 3.87 122 4.1
Sea of Rust — C. Robert Cargill 8563 4.14 113 4.14
Dreams Before the Start of Time — Anne Charnock 816 3.51 24 3.3

The one that I really didn't see coming was Dreams Before the Start of Time, which I really liked (though I liked the other three BSFA finalists more).

Note the high reader ratings for Sea of Rust, though it's also worth saying that it's tough to maintain high average ratings as the number of readers goes up, so Borne is doing well too.


Posted in Uncategorised