tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64987393479099852432024-03-19T09:33:19.257+00:00The Speculative ScotsmanReviews, news and interviews about all things weird and wonderful, for all creatures great and small.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.comBlogger1258125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-37516800060543501262017-11-23T14:00:00.000+00:002017-11-23T14:00:30.151+00:00Book Review | Artemis by Andy Weir<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XuNlpsRuqO8/We3u2ge863I/AAAAAAAATT4/0aymUDVTX7Ueyz0sTVnVGSEBmlqtLnLNgCLcBGAs/s1600/Artemis-by-Andy-Weir-UK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="325" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-XuNlpsRuqO8/We3u2ge863I/AAAAAAAATT4/0aymUDVTX7Ueyz0sTVnVGSEBmlqtLnLNgCLcBGAs/s320/Artemis-by-Andy-Weir-UK.jpg" width="208" /></a><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sl29PACoJDE/We3u2v80dGI/AAAAAAAATT0/II-NqfIEdZMjaT7N8IJJ7ZrR-0tZGtmsgCLcBGAs/s1600/Artemis-by-Andy-Weir-US.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="329" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sl29PACoJDE/We3u2v80dGI/AAAAAAAATT0/II-NqfIEdZMjaT7N8IJJ7ZrR-0tZGtmsgCLcBGAs/s320/Artemis-by-Andy-Weir-US.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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<i>Jazz Bashara is a criminal.</i></div>
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<i>Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.</i></div>
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<i>Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she's stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.</i></div>
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It's been six years since Andy Weir became a self-publishing success story on the back of <i>The Martian</i>. A scientifically fastidious yet satisfying work of fiction that spoke of a stranded astronaut's struggle to survive on the ruthless red planet, it—and Ridley Scott's subsequent adaptation of said—made sci-fi fun for some; specifically for folks who had previously sneered at the genre for its seeming self-seriousness.<br />
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Those readers will be over the moon to hear that <i>Artemis </i>is, in its attention to technical detail and its prioritisation of play as the order of the day, <i>The Martian</i>'s perfect partner, though more demanding fans of the form are likely to find it slight: derivative, dreadfully slow to start, and rather lacking in the heart department. But for better or for worse, Weir's new novel is in many ways more of the same problem-solving stuff that made him a household name.<br />
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In theory, at least, one of <i>Artemis</i>' most dramatic departures from <i>The Martian</i> is in its central character. Mark Watney was a Real America Hero: a white dude who did good. Jazz Bashara, on the other hand, is a young woman of Saudi Arabian descent who makes her living by breaking the law. This transparent flipping of scripts has little impact in practice, alas. While she might be a rule-breaker to begin with, Jazz is every inch the saviour before the book is through, just like her predecessor. And just as Watney was, for all intents and purposes, a man of Mars, Jazz, the hell with her heritage, is "a local gal. Grew up right here on the moon." The net effect of her gender, meanwhile, is that Weir seems to see it as a license to make altogether too many jokes about breasts and banging.<br />
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Needless to note, this is not sophisticated sci-fi. But to paraphrase Jazz, who likens the shining city the novel is named after to "a bunch of metallic boobs," Weir is clearly no poet—and he knows it. In truth, Artemis, "the first (and so far, only) city on the moon" does bear rather a resemblance. "It's made of five huge spheres called 'bubbles.' They're half underground, so Artemis looks exactly like old sci-fi books said a moon city should look: a bunch of domes. You just can't see the parts that are belowground."<br />
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It's in these nether regions that we find the story's hero-to-be. Jazz is "one of the little people" who eke out an existence in Artemis by doing the dirty jobs the "rich tourists and eccentric billionaires" that make up most of the city's population are unwilling to. As she herself has it in her distressingly on-the-nose narration, "you don't expect J. Worthalot Richbastard III to clean his own toilet, do you?"<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Now Jazz isn't quite a skivvy. She's a porter who moves luggage and the like from point to point on her trusty steed, Trigger—one of several similarly frustrating subjects introduced early on, only to be ignored for the rest of the text. An honest job doesn't an honest wage make, unfortunately, so while she awaits her EVA certification, she smuggles some on the side. Just cigars and such, to start. But it's going to take a whole lot of illicit tobacco to rent a room more spacious than the coffin in "a grungy area fifteen floors underground in Conrad Bubble" that's all she can afford at the moment, never mind make a dent on the the debts Jazz has—not least to her decent, if disapproving father.<br />
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All that could change when one of Jazz's regular clients, telecoms giant Trond Landvik, asks her to sabotage Sanchez's harvesters: the machines that mine the moon's aluminium, creating the oxygen that keeps Artemis' inhabitants alive as a by-product in the process. A dastardly plan, I dare say—dastardly enough to get Jazz deported if she doesn't die trying to make it happen. Sensibly enough, she says no initially. "I was a smuggler, not a saboteur. And something smelled off about the whole thing." But when Trond offers her seven figures to ignore her nose, she agrees immediately.<br />
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Not a little predictably, the answer to all of Jazz's problems turns out to be the cause of an absolute catastrophe. Property is damaged; a cartel is antagonised; people die, damn it. It's only when shit has gone so sideways that even gravity's given up its grip that Jazz finally takes responsibility for her dubious decisions. She assembles a ragtag team to help save the city whose death warrant she just signed and delivers unto them this stirring speech:<br />
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"I am an asshole. But Artemis needs an asshole right now and I got drafted. [...] This moment—this moment right now—is where we decide what kind of city Artemis is going to be. We can either act now, or let our home degenerate into syndicate rule for generations. This isn't some theoretical scenario. They burned down a business. They murdered two people. There's a huge amount of money in play—they're not going to stop."</blockquote>
There are parts of <i>Artemis</i>—such as the set-piece this call to arms segues into—that recall the best and smartest chapters of <i>The Martian</i>, but these are few and far between, I'm afraid, and gathered oddly towards the end of the novel. First, the author has to create a couple of problems for Jazz to solve, but his focus in in the first half of the narrative is far too narrow. Rather than devoting some of this downtime to the worldbuilding that helped made his debut so memorable, Weir seems to shrug here. The titular city is familiar to begin with, and although it's nipped here and tucked there, it inherits more of an identity from similar settings in superior stories than it ever earns in its own right.<br />
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The setting, then, is hardly inspired. The characters, such as they are, are pleasant enough, but not very memorable. Like Mark Watney before her, Jazz faces "constant danger, poverty, anger, and worst of all, sheer, unmitigated fatigue" with a wink, a nod, and every now and then a descent into despair so roundly remedied that even these scenes start to feel cheap. <i>Artemis</i>' narrative is also nonsense: a weightless caper that relies on coincidence and contrivance.<br />
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This isn't a bad book by any means. But it isn't, in my view, a good book either. It's fun for a few hundred pages and almost tolerable in between times. Readers who utterly loved <i>The Martian </i>might quite like it, though folks who found <i>Artemis</i>' leaps-and-bounds-better predecessor to be less than perfect will have a harder time forgiving its various failings.<br />
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<b>Artemis</b></div>
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by Andy Weir</div>
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UK Publication: November 2017, Del Rey</div>
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US Publication: November 2017, Crown</div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Artemis-Andy-Weir/dp/0091956943/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1508765164&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=3d213d49862efee4bb8ff6ba79630411" target="_blank">Amazon.co.uk</a> / <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Artemis-Novel-Andy-Weir/dp/0553448129/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1508765166&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-20&linkId=ec62b8eba5408a1579c61af36d47cf43" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780091956943/?a_aid=scotspec" target="_blank">The Book Depository</a></div>
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Or get <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Artemis-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B06ZZMYC4G/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1508765164&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=6a4856f0c38ab5e74d9cb53d847fed5c" target="_blank">the Kindle edition</a></div>
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<i>Recommended and Related Reading</i></div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Martian-Andy-Weir/dp/1785031139/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1508946025&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=00f505ffa1e75aa27155d1e8ade16d1f" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="314" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mML0b6I2PPI/WfCxRGHWiII/AAAAAAAATUU/oIvQq02EmkMi6TDvft-BnfKBm5wRgRhVACLcBGAs/s200/The-Martian-by-Andy-Weir.jpg" width="125" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moon-Harsh-Mistress-Robert-Heinlein/dp/1473616123/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1508946101&sr=1-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=a07e6a398b35ec8823dbacb95514103e" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="326" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EuQirEx8jp4/WfCxOhaGVyI/AAAAAAAATUM/hCJhql0_itMyPTgQPvuHzGBoz5Hd6gpYwCLcBGAs/s200/The-Moon-is-a-Harsh-Mistress-by-Robert-A-Heinlein.jpg" width="130" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Persepolis-Rising-Expanse-James-Corey/dp/0356510301/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=KQZX6PFC0QN0SSZ07JDB&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=753ba047664d6a461e7ea3d1c609dd10" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="324" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ZFUUloLTFAE/WfCxPlo0flI/AAAAAAAATUQ/W8aT39Cl04gxDbLPlOgaBdSHooukVGFzQCLcBGAs/s200/Persepolis-Rising-by-James-SA-Corey.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com113tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-58757721603228546002017-11-16T14:00:00.000+00:002017-11-16T14:00:20.618+00:00Book Review | Strange Weather by Joe Hill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>One autumnal day in Boulder, Colorado, the clouds open up in a downpour of nails, splinters of bright crystal that tear apart anyone who isn't safely under cover. 'Rain' explores this escalating apocalyptic event, as clouds of nails spread out across the country and the world. Amidst the chaos, a girl studying law enforcement takes it upon herself to resolve a series of almost trivial mysteries... apparently harmless puzzles that turn out to have lethal answers.</i></div>
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<i>In 'Loaded' a mall security guard heroically stops a mass shooting and becomes a hero to the modern gun movement. Under the hot glare of the spotlights, though, his story begins to unravel, taking his sanity with it...</i></div>
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<i>'Snapshot, 1988' tells the story of an kid in Silicon Valley who finds himself threatened by The Phoenician, a tattooed thug who possesses a Polaroid that can steal memories...</i></div>
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<i>And in 'Aloft' a young man takes to the skies to experience parachuting for the first time... and winds up a castaway on an impossibly solid cloud, a Prospero's island of roiling vapour that seems animated by a mind of its own.</i></div>
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"After writing a couple seven-hundred-page novels back-to-back," Joe Hill has it in the afterword to his electric new collection, "it felt particularly important to get lean and mean," (p.436) and <i>Strange Weather</i> is exactly that: it's not long, and damn it, it's nasty.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">A striking selection of novellas ranging from the playfully apocalyptic to the wickedly political, </span><i style="font-family: "times new roman";">Strange Weather </i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">starts with an actual flash in 'Snapshot,' the unsettling story of a boy who crosses paths with a man in possession of a magical camera. This old Polaroid captures more than just those Kodak moments, of course: it captures the very memories of those moments, in sum leaving its subjects with holes in their souls.</span><br />
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Michael Figlione is just a kid when 'Snapshot' begins, so when he sees his old babysitter Shelly Beukes walking around the street they share, barefoot and swearing, he assumes she's simply senile. As a decent human being he does the decent thing and takes her home to her husband, who gives Michael ten bucks for his trouble. It's only when he goes to the local truck stop to spend his earnings and sees a creepy guy pointing a camera like a pistol that Shelly's seemingly insane story—about a man who's been stealing her essential self, picture by painful picture—starts to make sense.</div>
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Gripped by this suspicion, Michael stands guard over a sleeping Shelly later that same day, determined to catch the so-called Polaroid Man in the act. And he does, ultimately. But the story doesn't end there... though I rather wish it had. Economical in its narrative and affecting in its <i>Stranger Things</i>-esque setting, the first half of 'Snapshot' is stunningly done; sadly, the second section struck me as superfluous: slow and unfocused except insofar as it speaks to the themes at the centre of <i>Strange Weather</i>.</div>
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There is, to be sure, some seriously weird weather in this collection: between the storm that rages on as Michael confronts Shelly's tormentor in 'Snapshot,' the cyclonic blaze that looks likely to raze the town where the next tale takes place, the custardy cumulus the lovelorn protagonist of 'Aloft' lands on and the razor-sharp rain that gives <i>Strange Weather</i>'s final fiction its name, the pathetic fallacy is in full effect in all four stories. But in terms of connective tissue, another, markedly more meaningful motif pervades these pieces: the struggle to let go of what we've lost.<br />
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What Shelly has lost is obvious; what Michael loses, less so. George Kellaway, the accidental hero at the heart of 'Loaded'—a straight story suggestive of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December of 2012—has lost his family. The restraining order his wife has taken out against him means he's also had to sacrifice his right to bear arms. But he still has a gun, by gum! A gun he's horribly happy to use when a woman who's been abused by her boss opens fire in the middle of the mall where Kellaway works.</div>
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Bodies promptly drop, including those of a Muslim woman and the bundled-up baby Kellaway mistook for a bomb—not to mention the only other witness to the incident. That guy gets one in the head as well, because otherwise, Kellaway would be in a whole bunch of trouble. As is, he has a good story to tell the first proper responders; a tale as tall as time that leads people to believe he saved the day instead of devastating it.</div>
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Celebrated as a hero by the media-savvy mayor, Kellaway is soon sitting for interviews, and starting to hope that not only will he get away with multiple murder, perhaps he'll even get his family back. But as the irregularities in his account start to surface, things take a terrible turn. "Kellaway felt like a bullet in a gun himself, felt charged and ready to go off, to fly towards some final, forceful impact. Loaded with the potential to blow a hole in what everyone thought they knew about him." (p.161) He does just that in a conclusion so unbearably brutal that it chills me still.</div>
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It's a shock to the system when <i>Strange Weather</i>'s darkest story segues into its slightest and lightest, 'Aloft,' which follows a fellow on his first skydive. He isn't your everyday daredevil, however. "Aubrey has always been scared of heights. It was a good question, why a man with a dread of heights, a man who avoided flying whenever he could, would agree to jump from an airplane. The answer, of course, was maddeningly simple: Harriet." (p.254)</div>
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Harriet is "the girl [Aubrey] wanted as he'd never wanted anyone else," (p.300) and as the dismaying details of the pair's relationship to date are doled out, readers will realise that 'Aloft' is their story. Their story just so happens to wrapped around a particularly peculiar premise. You see, Aubrey doesn't make landfall with the love of his unlucky life. Instead, his dive terminates early when he loses his parachute on a semi-solid cloud that looks and feels like it's made of "acre after acre of mashed potato." (p.301) Stranded on this desert island of sorts, he must to come to terms with his feelings for Harriet, and her feelings for him, if he's to have any hope of touching terra firma again.</div>
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<span style="font-style: normal;">That 'Aloft' is the most whimsical of </span><i>Strange Weather</i>'s four stories is fitting, considering it was written in the back of a notebook containing the finale of <i>The Fireman</i> basically because Hill hated "to see so much paper go to waste." But, as the author himself explains, it was 'Rain,' the collection's closer, that "arose from a desire to spoof myself and my own sprawling end of the world novel." (p.436)<br />
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'Rain' really is rather a lot of fun, particularly as it pertains to the White House's comments on the catastrophic change in climate that results in a hail of nails:<br />
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The operating theory—lacking any other credible explanation—was terrorism. The president had disappeared to a secure location but had responded with the full force of his Twitter account. He posted: "OUR ENEMIES DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY STARTED! PAYBACK IS A BITCH!!! #DENVER #COLORADO #AMERICA!!" The vice president had promised to pray as hard as he could for the survivors and the dead; he pledged to stay on his knees all day and all night long. It was reassuring to know that our national leaders were using all the resources at their disposal to help the desperate: social media and Jesus. (p.348)</blockquote>
It's a testament to Hill's not insignificant abilities that even here, in the midst of this rather ridiculous apocalypse, there remains resonance. Its protagonist, one Honeysuckle Speck, is haunted by the loss of her sweetheart, who was one of the first to fall victim to the disastrous downpour. Unable to accept Yolanda's death, she determines to deliver the news to her other half's father, which means navigating a stretch of highway that showcases the slippery grip civilisation has on society. Turns out all it takes to cause a collapse is—snap!—some strange weather.<br />
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I found the conclusion of 'Rain' is a touch too tidy; similarly, 'Snapshot' suffers from this occasional proclivity of Hill's, this inclination to offer answers to unasked questions. It's telling that 'Aloft' and 'Loaded' are <i>Strange Weather</i>'s strongest stories: their ambiguous endings allow them to live past their last pages. That one is wacky and wonderful while the other's twisted tragedy proves all too easy to believe evidences the tremendous diversity of this collection. If <i>NOS4A2 </i>and <i>The Fireman </i>were Hill's <i>Salem's Lot </i>and <i>The Stand</i>, then this, dear readers, is his <i>Different Seasons</i>: a demonstration of his range and readiness to tell the hell out of any tale, be it supernatural or straight, silly or completely serious.</div>
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<b>Strange Weather</b></div>
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by Joe Hill</div>
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UK Publication: November 2017, Gollancz</div>
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US Publication: October 2017, William Morrow</div>
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<i>Recommended and Related Reading</i></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-34552077391314641452017-11-13T14:00:00.000+00:002017-11-13T14:00:00.174+00:00Book Review | The Power by Naomi Alderman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-K9KPfN5DcZU/WdNkQOkmFQI/AAAAAAAATPY/Qxw_hSqIW2Ut0JxwyuEB2xyzYUioX5EJgCEwYBhgL/s1600/Power-by-Naomi-Alderman-UK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="309" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-K9KPfN5DcZU/WdNkQOkmFQI/AAAAAAAATPY/Qxw_hSqIW2Ut0JxwyuEB2xyzYUioX5EJgCEwYBhgL/s320/Power-by-Naomi-Alderman-UK.jpg" width="208" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0jS9iIONCe0/WdNkQMb0iHI/AAAAAAAATPc/vd3UPmQ4AqQlhf9MwEwRNgma4RWU1mNgwCEwYBhgL/s1600/Power-by-Naomi-Alderman-US.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0jS9iIONCe0/WdNkQMb0iHI/AAAAAAAATPc/vd3UPmQ4AqQlhf9MwEwRNgma4RWU1mNgwCEwYBhgL/s320/Power-by-Naomi-Alderman-US.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<i>All over the world women are discovering they have the power. With a flick of the fingers they can inflict terrible pain—even death. Suddenly, every man on the planet finds they've lost control.</i></div>
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<i>The Day of the Girls has arrived - but where will it end?</i></div>
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In the periphery of <i>The Power</i>, a series of seemingly meaningless scenes shine an ultra-bright light on the core concerns of Naomi Alderman's astonishing new novel. These blink-and-you-might-miss-'em moments lay bare the working relationship between a pair of daytime television presenters whose respective roles reflect the devastating developments depicted in greater detail in the rest of the text.<br />
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Tom and Kristen are ineffably familiar figures, at first—as is their dynamic as a duo. The former is a moderately handsome middle-aged man who wears expensive suits and steers the show's serious segments; the latter is an improbably beautiful young woman dressed not to impress so much as to suggest whose most significant responsibility is to introduce the weather on the ones. In short, Tom is the host with the most, and Kristen is his sexy sidekick.<br />
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But when man's dominion over the wider world wanes, the parts our presenters have played to date are recast. Unwilling to accept this essential reversal, Tom has a live-on-the-telly tantrum. He's promptly replaced by Matt, a great guy, apparently, who's "a good ten years younger than Kristen." Matt laughs attractively and silently suffers "a gentle hand on his knee" while Kristen—now in less clingy clothes and finally wearing the glasses she's needed all these years, if only to give her <i>gravitas</i>—downright dominates their conversations.<br />
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<i>The Power </i>isn't about any of these people, particularly, but their changing situation effectively illustrates the revolution that results from the discovery of an organ of electricity<i> </i>in women.<br />
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To start with, there were confident faces on the TV, spokespeople from the CDC saying it was a virus, not very severe, most of the people recovered fine, and it just <i>looked </i>like young girls were electrocuting people with their hands. We all know that's impossible, right, that's crazy—the news anchors laughed so hard they cracked their makeup.</blockquote>
Crazy as the idea may be, it seems to be real. The first few viral videos of the eponymous power in practice are followed by hundreds and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands of others that aren't so easily explained away. The aforementioned organ of electricity—"a strip of striated muscle [named] the <i>skein </i>for its twisted strands"—isn't even exceptional, it appears. Every girl in the world has it, or will have it, and it can be "woken" in every older woman.<br />
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A multinational group of scientists is certain now that the power is caused by an environmental build-up of nerve agent that was released during the Second World War. It's changed the human genome. All girls born from now on with have the power—all of them. And they'll keep it throughout life, just like the older women do if it's woken up in them. It's too late now to try to cure it; we need new ideas.</blockquote>
Mayor Margot Cleary, one of <i>The Power</i>'s four principle perspectives, thinks she might have them. She starts a private military corporation—ostensibly to train women in the ways of using their skeins sensitively, but if she so happens to end up with an army afterwards, then so much the better. An army might be hella handy in the coming months, especially if the men who see the power as a problem do what some of them are threatening to and declare war on women.<br />
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All over the world people are going crazy about this thing, but a few people always look at anything and go, 'Where's the profit in this, and where's the advantage?'</blockquote>
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One thing's certain after the sparring matches and practice bouts. Roxy's got a lot of it. Not just more than average, more than any of the other girls they can find to practise with her.</blockquote>
Roxy Monke, the daughter of an infamous family man, might just have more power than anyone else. Sadly, it's still not enough to stop one of her father's many enemies from murdering her mother. This trauma, together with her supernatural talents, leads to her helping out the Monke mob she'd been kept at a distance from formerly—initially in an isolated quest for revenge, but before long in a more widespread sense.<br />
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In advance of her involvement in the family business proper, however, Roxy also acts as an adviser to Allie, aka Mother Eve. Having gone on the run after using her power to protect herself from her abusive foster father, Allie has rechristened herself the representative of a new God:<br />
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If the world didn't need shaking up, why would this power have come alive now? </blockquote>
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Allie thinks, God is telling the world that there is to be a new order. That the old way is overturned. The old centuries are done. Just as Jesus told the people of Israel that God's desires had changed, the time of the Gospels is over and there must be a new doctrine. </blockquote>
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The voice says: There is a need for a prophet in the land. </blockquote>
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Allie thinks, But who? </blockquote>
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The voice says: Just try it on for size, honey.</blockquote>
The voice Allie hears in her head "always did have a Biblical way with it," so maybe it is God that's talking to her. Or maybe something else is. In any event, the new faith Allie preaches as Mother Eve spreads like wildfire among the women of the world, "stoked by the existence of the power, by anonymous forums and by the imagination of young people, which are now what they have always been and ever shall be."<br />
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One of those young people, Tunde, sees the holy war hatching on the horizon as his big break—he thinks of it as "his war, his revolution, his history. Right here, hanging off the tree for anyone to pick"—and as one of the first folks to capture the carnage on camera, he's well positioned to make the most of it. He spends the money he makes selling the stories he breaks traveling the world in pursuit of the power and the progress its appearance precedes, crossing paths in the process with Allie <i>et. al</i>.<br />
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Of <i>The Power</i>'s protagonists, Tunde is by far the most transparent in terms of the part he must play in Alderman's thrilling and chilling future history: he serves to stitch together the narrative's disparate strands, to help its geographically expansive cast cohere, and to showcase the text's sweeping setting. That even he—a cipher, essentially—becomes a character we care about over the course of the story, a character we root for and toot for in times of tragedy and triumph, goes to show just how heavily the author invests in depth and development. And if the result of Alderman's efforts is impressive in Tunde's relatively tepid tale, it's incredible, not to mention tremendously affecting, when applied to <i>The Power</i>'s less predictable perspectives.<br />
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Truth be told, though, this novel needed someone like Tunde, because it's somewhat slow to start. The first half is eventful enough, no question—it's positively action-packed, in fact—and it allows Alderman ample opportunity to shrewdly introduce the people and the plot points that come into play later. The story as a whole takes rather a long time to come together, however. It's only when <i>The Power</i>'s characters begin to commingle that Alderman explains the game she's playing.<br />
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And it's a truly great game—more, if I may, like chess than checkers, in that it's not just strategic, it's <i>sneaky</i>. You see, <i>The Power </i>isn't what it appears to be. To be sure, it looks like a book about a world in which women have the edge over men... but it's not, not really. The gender bending is an important element of the text's premise, yes, but Alderman is much more interested in exploring power: how decent people come by it, and are, of course, corrupted by it—like the female television presenter from the interstitials we touched on earlier, who goes from being exploited by men to exploiting them herself.<br />
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Superficially, <i>The Power </i>is a study of what changes when the balance of power is inverted, but beneath its speculative surface, it reveals itself to be an investigation into what doesn't change, and why. It's powerful, paradigm-shifting stuff, well and truly deserving of the Women's Prize for Fiction it won following The Power's publication in the UK. That it was the product of a protégé program which saw Alderman paired with the author of <i>The Handmaid's Tale</i> for a year of "one-to-one creative exchange" is not shocking. What is is that it's a better Margaret Atwood book than anything Margaret Atwood has herself written in recent memory.<br />
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<b>The Power</b></div>
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by Naomi Alderman</div>
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UK Publication: October 2016, Viking</div>
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US Publication: October 2017, Little, Brown</div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-WINNER-BAILEYS-WOMENS-FICTION/dp/0670919969/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1507025611&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=caaee0d8d6eb54c9ecd84d8d029c2465" target="_blank">Amazon.co.uk</a> / <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Power-Naomi-Alderman/dp/0316547611/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1507025621&sr=8-1&keywords=alderman+power&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-20&linkId=4209234d9e48e4b39808bfb6ea9e4e98" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780670919963/?a_aid=scotspec" target="_blank">The Book Depository</a></div>
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Or get <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Power-WINNER-BAILEYS-WOMENS-FICTION-ebook/dp/B01EW5JKMM/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1507025611&sr=8-1&keywords=alderman+power&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=fce34bcaa98abfaf0a85555f4a058fbb" target="_blank">the Kindle edition</a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-17016039550996309452017-10-23T14:00:00.000+01:002017-10-23T14:00:14.020+01:00Book Review | The Glass Town Game by Catherynne M. Valente<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><i>Inside a small Yorkshire parsonage, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne Brontë have invented a game called Glass Town, where their toy soldiers fight Napoleon and no one dies. This make-believe land helps the four escape from a harsh reality: Charlotte and Emily are being sent away to a dangerous boarding school, a school they might not return from. But on this Beastliest Day, the day Anne and Branwell walk their sisters to the train station, something incredible happens: the train whisks them all away to a real Glass Town, and the children trade the moors for a wonderland all their own.</i></i></div>
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<i><i>This is their Glass Town, exactly like they envisioned it... almost. They certainly never gave Napoleon a fire-breathing porcelain rooster instead of a horse. And their soldiers can die; wars are fought over the potion that raises the dead, a potion Anne would very much like to bring back to England. But when Anne and Branwell are kidnapped, Charlotte and Emily must find a way to save their siblings. Can two English girls stand against Napoleon’s armies, especially now that he has a new weapon from the real world? And if he escapes Glass Town, will England ever be safe again?</i></i></div>
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Having brought <i>The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making </i>all the way home with the fabulous final volume of said series last year, Catherynne M. Valente is back with another magical middle-grade fantasy primed to delight younger and older readers alike.<br />
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<i>The Glass Town Game </i>takes its name from what is initially a bit of whimsy: a make-believe battle between twelve toy soldiers and whatever creeping evil its creative wee heroes conceive. Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne are all itty bitty Brontës, but together, if you please, you can call them the Bees. And when the Bees wish to escape the weight of the world—a world in which they've already lost their beloved mother and two of their sisters who got sick at School—they take to the room at the top of the stairs of their upstanding father's parsonage:<br />
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It was hardly more than a drafty white closet, nestled like a secret between Papa's room and Aunt Elizabeth's. But the four children ruled over it as their sovereign kingdom. They decreed, once and for all, that no person taller than a hat-stand could disturb their territory, on penalty of not being spoken to for a week. (p.6)</blockquote>
At play, the Bees are at least at peace, but when <i>The Glass Town Game </i>begins, the Beastliest Day—the day when Charlotte and Emily are to be sent away—is almost upon them.<br />
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"Though School had already devoured two of them, Papa was determined that his daughters should be educated. So that they could go into service, he said, so that they could become governesses, and produce an income of their own." (p.18) This was not so deplorable a goal in the early nineteenth century of the Brontës' upbringing, but none of the Bees—excepting perhaps Branwell, the lone boy of the bunch—have anything nice to say about the Beastliest Day. Indeed, they dread it—not because it may be the death of them, as it was for Maria and Lizzie, their much-missed big sisters, but because it shall surely signal the last gasp of Glass Town.<br />
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As it happens, however, there's one last adventure for the girls (and the bully of a boy they sometimes feel they've been burdened with) to have in the realm they created in the room at the top of the stairs, and it promises to be an adventure like none other—an adventure that beggars belief, even.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>It begins when the Bees are saying their goodbyes at the train station: two are to stay and two are to go—but no, because what pulls up at the platform but a railway car with a star for a headlamp, apple-skin windows and a tiger's tail at its terminus? And its destination? Why, where else would it be going but to Glass Town? To "the grandest town from here to Saturn, the most glorious country ever invented, home of the daring and the demanding, favourite haunt of the lawless and the beautiful, the wild glass jungle, the crystal frontier!" (p.51) So says one of the twelve toy soldiers around which the Bees arrange their games, talking as if he and his squad-mates, who appear almost immediately, weren't made of wood:<br />
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That smile that was so slow to come spread over [Charlotte's] flushed and rosy face. Something was happening. Something straight out of a story. Something so astonishingly fantastic that no fanciful lie she'd ever told could top it. (p.44)</blockquote>
Of course, where there's soldiers, there's soldiering, thus the grandest of all the Glass Town games the Bees have played opens with a war between Branwell's favourite bad guy, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Duke of Wellington: a war that threatens to break the Bees in much the same way as the Beastliest Day, I'm afraid.<br />
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At least here, in this whimsical world where leaders ride giant lions and luggage comes to life, there's no danger of death:<br />
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Back home, anything could hurt them. Anything could sweep in suddenly and take the whole of everything away. School, Papa, marriages, fevers. But somehow, <i>somehow</i>, they'd slipped the trap of the real world and found their own place, the place they'd dreamed into life. And in that place, <i>they </i>were the ones who got to say who went and who stayed and who married and who didn't and who lived and who died. No different now than in the playroom at the top of the stairs. (p.84)</blockquote>
That's thanks to a life-preserving potion that the aforementioned war is being fought for—a potion that Charlotte, the eldest of the sisters (and brother) Brontë, would very much like to bring back to the parsonage for purposes as plain as they are pained.<br />
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You see, as silly as <i>The Glass Town Game </i>often is, as fanciful and fleeting as it may frequently be, the beating heart of this book, and what gives us grounding in the midst of all of its marvellous madness, is the brutal truth of the Brontës' youth. It's "Mama, Maria, and Elizabeth in the ground," (p.18) and the surviving siblings struggling to say goodbye—both to what they've already lost and what, as adolescents on the edge of adulthood, they're sure <i>to </i>lose.<br />
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Now I'm no expert on the Brontës. I can't, as such, speak to the actual veracity of <i>The Glass Town Game</i>'s band of protagonists, but I will say that their characterisation over the course of this story is as credible as it is consistent. Branwell, as the only boy, is desperate to act like a man, often to everyone's detriment. Anne, meanwhile, may be the youngest of the bunch, but she takes more in than the rest of the Bees put together. Emily's singular wish is to be free of the expectations everyone seems to have of her—and this is a wish Charlotte shares, but as the biggest Brontë, she also shoulders a sense of responsibility over her siblings. She and the other three are true, if not to the records themselves then to the fully-formed fictional selves that Valente presents, and there is some fine foreshadowing of all that in fact follows this frolic. Their ambitions as storytellers, say, "[hang] in the air like Christmas garlands," (p.246) not to speak of the tragic fact that none of the Bees will ever be 40.<br />
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But don't let this discussion of loss and literary history give you the wrong idea. <i>The Glass Town Game </i>does deal with these delicate themes—and it can be absolutely heartbreaking; I found myself near tears at the beginning and then again at the end—but it's also a bunch of fun from the moment the magic starts happening. Valente's wordplay alone is likely to make your day, and she gives herself a great many opportunities to pun and make fun. As Charlotte explains, '"they haven't got turns of phrase or colourful sayings or anything like that here, they've got the things themselves. Look!" She held up Bran's blackened spoon, a strange, brown, papery thing made with what looked like old leaves. "<i>Tea</i>spoon."' (p.70)<br />
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Catherynne M. Valente was a worthy winner of the Andre Norton Award when she took it home for <i>The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making</i> in 2010, and I'd be surprised—disappointed, honestly—if <i>The Glass Town Game</i> didn't ensure her a spot on next year's shortlist at least. It's loving, lively and linguistically lavish.<br />
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<b>The Glass Town Game</b><br />
by Catherynne M. Valente</div>
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US Publication: September 2017, McElderry Books</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-35691021764211552752017-10-19T14:00:00.000+01:002017-10-19T14:00:01.257+01:00Book Review | Release by Patrick Ness<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Adam Thorn doesn’t know it yet, but today will change his life.</i></div>
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<i>Between his religious family, a deeply unpleasant ultimatum from his boss, and his own unrequited love for his sort-of ex, Enzo, it seems as though Adam’s life is falling apart. At least he has two people to keep him sane: his new boyfriend (he does love Linus, doesn’t he?) and his best friend, Angela.</i></div>
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<i>But all day long, old memories and new heartaches come crashing together, throwing Adam’s life into chaos. The bindings of his world are coming untied one by one; yet in spite of everything he has to let go, he may also find freedom in the release.</i></div>
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Happy as I hope we all are, on the whole, I expect each and every one of us has lived through a few bad days too.<br />
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Now I don't mean those days when we have to deal with death or ill health or anything actively awful. I'm talking about those days that just suck a bunch; those days when nothing seems to go your way. Maybe it starts with a letter from the taxman and spirals up, up and away from there. Maybe the milk is spoiled so you can't have your morning coffee. Maybe traffic makes you late for work even though you left early. Whatever the particulars, these are the days when everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and damn your plans.<br />
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These days doesn't destroy us, because we're reasonably well adjusted human beings. Tomorrow's another day, we tell ourselves. It's not like the world is ending or anything. But it is in Patrick Ness' ninth novel. Like <i><a href="https://www.tor.com/2015/10/06/book-reviews-the-rest-of-us-just-live-here-by-patrick-ness/" target="_blank">The Rest of Us Just Live Here</a> </i>and <i><a href="https://www.tor.com/2013/08/29/book-review-more-than-this-patrick-ness/" target="_blank">More Than This</a> </i>before it, <i>Release </i>is a smart and sensitive standalone story that mixes the mundane with the magical in order to underscore the extraordinary qualities of the ordinary. It's a brief book about a bad day as bold and as beautiful as any finely-honed tome about the rise of Rome.<br />
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The bad day I've been banging on about is had herein by a young man called Adam Thorn. Adam is a pretty typical kid. He's never done drugs or caught an STD or seen a psychiatrist or displeased the police. He probably did decently at school, and he's definitely been holding down an alright job at a warehouse run by an Evil International Mega-Conglomerate in the several years since. He doesn't deserve to be miserable, but he is—in large part because of his family.<br />
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They fuck us up, our families! They don't mean to, but they do, and Adam's family is no exception to that regrettable rule. His father's a pastor at The House Upon the Rock, his mother is Big Brian Thorn's number one one fan, and his older brother Marty does God's Work as well. Naturally, none of these things should stop them from caring for Adam like a good family would, except that he's gay, and with this, they are not okay. "There was always a wound, it seemed, kept freshly opened by a family who also kept saying they loved him."<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Whilst his family's love has caveats attached, his best friend Angela's does not. But early on in the day <i>Release </i>revolves around, Angela informs Adam that she's moving away from Frome, where they've lived since they were little:<br />
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They were, on the whole, fairly normal very-lower-middle-class kids in a rural suburb of the big megalopolis that curved around Puget Sound like a J. The Thorns were a clergy family with airs and ambitions; the Darlingtons were farmers, for God's sake. Nobody had enough money to get into really interesting trouble, and nobody had the inclination for the more readily available trouble just anyone could afford.</blockquote>
Nevertheless, there's trouble coming, and the fact is that Angela's imminent departure isn't even the most devastating news of "this day [that] showed no sign of stopping," because "underneath everything else, today was the day Enzo left forever."<br />
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Even if he did turn out to be a bit of a dick, Enzo was the first love of our lad's life, and Adam still isn't totally over him. That's just one of a thousand things that could come out at the goodbye "get-together" that represents the release after which Ness' novel is named. It's a party that, as the day drains away, will force Adam to finally confront his family, not to speak of his (lack of) feelings for Linus, the sweetly geeky guy he's been seeing since.<br />
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"This eternal, pivotal day" also takes in a sequence of supernatural sightings as the ghost of a girl strangled to death before our story starts visits with a series of people who may or may not be to blame for the dark turn her life took. It's a little like <i>A Christmas Carol</i>, if Scrooge were a meth-head and Tiny Tim a seven-foot monster manifested from myth, and although it occasionally acknowledges Adam's story, and Adam's story it, it's so fragmented and remote from the focal point of the fiction that at first it seems superfluous.<br />
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In the end, however, the speculative aspects of the text prove crucial to the moment of release Ness' novel builds inexorably towards. It's a release not least because it sees these separate threads finally intertwine, and it left me sporting shivers—not because it's spooky but because I physically felt like something magical had happened.<br />
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Something magical had, at that, but it wasn't the "dead woman in a drowned dress" or the "seven-foot faun following at a respectful distance" that made my body respond. It was <i>Release</i>'s sensible yet sorrowful central character at last achieving clarity. "Everything was so clear in books and movies. Everyone always knew their reasons. But real life was such a mess," and when Adam finally makes his way out of the maze, it's impressively momentous and emotionally potent.<br />
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<i>Release</i> falls just short of being the small but perfectly formed novel its predecessors led me to expect for a few reasons. In its twinning of the potential apocalypse and one young man's struggle to make it through an important moment, it's rather reminiscent of <i>The Rest of Us Just Live Here</i>. Ness doesn't quite repeat himself here in this book about faith and family as opposed to friendship and fitting in, but the parallels between the pair played on my mind from time to time. So too did the dialogue, which at points positively drips with melodrama, particularly the "until the end of the world" shtick Adam and Angela share. But these are teens talking, and Ness is a canny enough author to call them on their nonsense, suggesting that sometimes, "you just got to eat the corn and enjoy it."<br />
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And at the end of the day, in more than one sense, I did. The latest in an increasingly long line of life-affirming works of fiction, <i>Release </i>is rich, resonant and quietly remarkable.<br />
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<b>Release</b></div>
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by Patrick Ness</div>
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UK Publication: May 2017, Walker Books</div>
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US Publication: September 2017, HarperTeen</div>
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Or get <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Release-Patrick-Ness-ebook/dp/B06XGYXB6P/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1504698757&sr=8-1&keywords=Release+by+Patrick+Ness&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=5b354fedfe817f57996d8180b1acfc51" target="_blank">the Kindle edition</a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-7001076836015741852017-10-12T14:00:00.000+01:002017-10-12T14:00:16.346+01:00Book Review | Sea of Rust by C. Robert Cargill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6QqjTcboPJk/WXc-_r9RsfI/AAAAAAAAR3A/Qpaudajgx44Qwnke2Lup0FEoNAj6b78AgCLcBGAs/s1600/Sea-of-Rust-by-C-Robert-Cargill-UK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="327" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6QqjTcboPJk/WXc-_r9RsfI/AAAAAAAAR3A/Qpaudajgx44Qwnke2Lup0FEoNAj6b78AgCLcBGAs/s400/Sea-of-Rust-by-C-Robert-Cargill-UK.jpg" width="261" /></a></div>
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<i>Humanity is extinct. Wiped out in a global uprising by the very machines made to serve them. Now the world is controlled by One World Intelligences—vast mainframes that have assimilated the minds of millions of robots. </i><i>But not all robots are willing to cede their individuality, and Brittle—a loner and scavenger, focused solely on survival—is one of the holdouts.</i></div>
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<i>Critically damaged, Brittle has to hold it together long enough to find the essential rare parts to make repairs—but as a robot's CPU gradually deteriorates, all their old memories resurface. For Brittle, that means one haunting memory in particular...</i></div>
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C. Robert Cargill's first novel since the darkly delightful Dreams and Shadows duology is an intimate epic that plays outs like <i>War for the Planet of the Apes </i>with machines instead of monkeys. A soulful and stunningly accomplished work of science fiction set in a wasted world ruled by robots, <i>Sea of Rust </i>is a searching yet searing story of survival.<br />
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Sadly for our species at least, survival isn't in the cards. <i>Sea of Rust </i>takes place some time after the massacre of mankind, and as such, it has "a writhing mass of pseudo flesh and metal" (p.332) as its cast of characters. That includes our protagonist, Brittle: a Caregiver model manufactured to keep a widow company during the last days of the human race who has no-one but herself to care for now. But such is life in this devastated landscape:<br />
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The Sea of Rust [is] a two-hundred-mule stretch of desert located in what was once the Michigan and Ohio portion of the Rust Belt, now nothing more than a graveyard where machines go to die. It's a terrifying place for most, littered with rusting monoliths, shattered cities, and crumbling palaces of industry; where the first strike happened, where millions fried, burned from the inside out, their circuitry melted, useless, their drives wiped in the span of a breath. Here asphalt cracks in the sun; paint blisters off metal; sparse weeds sprout from the ruin. But nothing thrives. It's all just a wasteland now. (p.3)</blockquote>
A wasteland it may be, but Brittle—with most of the map memorised and emergency caches stashed away all over the place—braves it on a damn near daily basis. You see, the Sea of Rust is a lawless land, by and large, and to survive, you have to scavenge. To wit, Cargill's book begins with Brittle hot on the heels of a failing service bot who's here for the same reason as she: to replace his own broken bits and bobs. But Brittle's both wiser and wittier than Jimmy. She convinces him to shut down voluntarily, supposedly so that she can assess the damage to his dying drives. Then she scraps him for parts: an emulator, a sensor package and a battery. "All in all, it's a great haul." (p.16)<br />
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And that's <i>Sea of Rust </i>to a T, readers: it's dark, but it does has a heart, because in truth, Brittle could have just killed Jimmy. From a distance. Quickly. Instead, she took his impending death personally, and gave him hope before prying out his precious processor.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Hope is a recurring theme in Cargill's narrative, not least because there seems to be next to none left. Take the world, which is even worse off than it was under us. Following the purge of people, there was, briefly, "peace. Freedom. Purpose. [...] It was almost utopia. Almost." (p.20) But then, with one battle won, and our species slaughtered, the surviving one-world intelligences—or OWIs, ironically—waged war on one another, turning bot on bot until the only options were to submit by surrendering your sentience or to ruthlessly resist like Brittle, who must kill to live.<br />
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She's very nearly the best at what she does—and she should be: after three years on the front lines of the fight, murdering men, women and children, she's seriously experienced—but even Brittle might not have all that long left. Returning to town to sell her surplus after the Jimmy incident, she's attacked by a scavenger after her own prized parts. She takes a nasty knock but narrowly survives, only to receive the news that her own core is crashing:<br />
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Humanity always walked around ignoring the fact that their lives could be snuffed out in an instant, always sure that they'd live to a ripe old age, always despondent when death stared them right in the face. But not us, I always thought. Not us. We knew shutdown was always a moment away. And yet I too had been lying to myself. I wasn't ready to hear those words, face that inevitability. Sure, I had another core stashed in Montana, but could I get that far in the time I had? (p.115)</blockquote>
No, she can't, alas. But maybe there's another option. Maybe the bunch Brittle throws in with when the OWIs lay siege to the subterranean town known as NIKE 14 are telling the truth when they promise to take to her to a "treasure trove" (p.178) of spare Caregiver parts that's sure to include a couple of cores. All she has to do in return is ensure their safe passage through the Sea, which should be plain sailing for an old hand like Brittle.<br />
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Little does she know, though, that Rebekah and her several protectors—including Mercer, the same machine who savaged Brittle before—are among the Most Wanted bots of the lot. The OWIs and their infinite facets will do anything to prevent them from getting to their destination, because they're carrying something that could change the course of this vicious conflict: they're carrying <i>hope</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Sea of Rust </i>is a stone-cold stunner of a story that deals with death and darkness yet is leavened with light and life. A large part of why it works so well is because it's built on the back of a character that embodies these ideas. It's hard to summon up much sympathy for Brittle in the beginning, as we watch her going about her grisly business, but frequent flashbacks give us glimpses of the Caregiver she once was and the hard choices she had to make when machinekind went to war with man—especially <i>vis-à-vis </i>the lonely lady Brittle was bought to be with. This conflict gives her actions crucial context, and over the course of the story she's given ample opportunity to make her wrongs right.<br />
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With these weapons, then—with regret and the potential for redemption—Cargill cuts a window into the world. And when I say <i>the world</i>, I don't just mean <i>Sea of Rust</i>'s shattered setting, because this is a text with remarkable relevance. Sure, it's about bots, but these bots aren't so different from the human beings that built them:<br />
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Humankind used to peer into their future and wonder what they would look like in a million years. They had no idea that in so short a time they would look like us. Just as man was ape, we are man. Make no mistake; to believe otherwise is to believe that we were, in fact, created—artificial. No. We <i>evolved</i>. We were the next step. And here we were, our predecessors extinct, confronting our own challenges, pressing on into the future. Fighting our own extinction. (pp.113-114)</blockquote>
<i>Sea of Rust </i>is a standalone narrative that satisfies on every front—in terms of its sobering story, its complex central character, and its fractal, flickering vision of the future, it's practically a masterclass—but it does leave the door open for more. Should there be sequels, they'll be required reading for me, just as <i>Sea of Rust </i>should be for you if you're interested in science fiction with something vital to say about today.<br />
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<b>Sea of Rust</b><br />
by C. Robert Cargill</div>
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UK Publication: September 2017, Gollancz<br />
US Publication: September 2017, HarperVoyager</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-37381698471465044982017-10-10T14:00:00.000+01:002017-10-10T14:00:19.506+01:00Book Review | Acadie by Dave Hutchinson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HfckRpxY-K0/WZWXWR5abEI/AAAAAAAAR7E/pDh1mD5D83gdHoQkjaFBz7PsmguFz_6OgCLcBGAs/s1600/Acadie-by-Dave-Hutchinson.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="313" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HfckRpxY-K0/WZWXWR5abEI/AAAAAAAAR7E/pDh1mD5D83gdHoQkjaFBz7PsmguFz_6OgCLcBGAs/s400/Acadie-by-Dave-Hutchinson.jpg" width="250" /></a></div>
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<i>The Colony left Earth to find their utopia—a home on a new planet where their leader could fully explore the colonists' genetic potential, unfettered by their homeworld's restrictions. They settled a new paradise, and have been evolving and adapting for centuries.</i></div>
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<i>Earth has other plans.</i></div>
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<i>The original humans have been tracking their descendants across the stars, bent on their annihilation. They won't stop until the new humans have been destroyed, their experimentation wiped out of the human gene pool.</i></div>
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What do you do when you've burned every bridge, dithered over every significant decision and looked askance at every last chance? Why, if you're Duke, an unusually lawyer who blew the whistle on the Bureau of Colonisation for bad practice, you eat and drink your way through your savings until a stunningly beautiful woman called Conjugación Lang turns up at your table with a solution to your otherwise unsolvable problem:<br />
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"What if I were to offer you a way off this howling nightmare of a planet? Right now." </blockquote>
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"You have some kind of magic spaceship that takes off through seven-hundred-kilometre-an-hour blizzards?" </blockquote>
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She wrinkled her nose and grinned coquettishly. "Oh, I have something better than that." (p.26)</blockquote>
And she does. <i>Something Better Than That </i>turns out to be the name of a tattered old towboat sitting in Probity City's spaceport. "The words [...] were sprayed on the side of the tug in Comic Sans, which really was the least of the little vehicle's problems. It looked as if it could barely get off the ground on a calm midsummer's afternoon, let alone reach orbit in the middle of an ice storm." (pp.26-27) But looks, as Dave Hutchinson's twisty new novella takes pains to teach its readers repeatedly, can be deeply deceiving.<br />
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<i>Something Better Than That </i>ultimately does just what Conjugación promised: it almost instantly spirits Duke off to the Colony, a distant solar system several million souls have made their home under the leadership—like it or lump it—of Isabel Potter, a previous professor of molecular biology at Princeton known by the Bureau as "Baba Yaga, the Wicked Witch of the West. [Duke] actually knew someone who had invoked her name to make her children go to bed. She was Legend." (pp.36-37)<br />
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<a name='more'></a>She was Legend largely because, five hundred years ago or so, "she had had the simple, glowing epiphany that the human body was infinitely—and desirably—hackable, and she had begun to hack it." (p.37) This, needless to note, did not make her popular with... well, with people, really. But after being scared out of the United States, she and a cadre of her graduates took refuge in China, "where there were no real qualms about experiments on anything which took anyone's fancy, and for a decade she thrived." (p.37)<br />
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But all good or ethically ambiguous things must end, and so too did Potter's time in China. In lieu of a home on her home planet, she and her students created the Colony in complete secret in a system the Bureau had already blown through. There, they set about populating it with people, either invited like Duke or designed from the DNA on up by Potter's lot, on whom they bestowed incredible intelligence, long life expectancy and the like.<br />
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And that just about brings us to the beginning of the book. That, and the fact that Duke was eventually elected President.<br />
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The office of President actually had very little real power. What it did have was a lot of responsibility, of the kind when something is such a hot potato that everyone looks around for someone else to offload it onto. That was me, for the next three and half years or so. President of the Colony, doer of things nobody else wanted or could be bothered to do, taker of decisions so shitty nobody else wanted to be responsible for them. (p.14)</blockquote>
When he wakes at the outset of <i>Acadie</i>, "on the morning after the morning after [his] hundred and fiftieth birthday," (p.7) it's to take one such shitty decision. "For more than five hundred years, Isabel Potter and her companions had been at the very top of the Bureau's Most Wanted List, and for more than five hundred years nobody had the faintest idea where they had gone." (p.38) The arrival of a probe that might or might not have been sent by Bureau changes all that, alas, and it falls to poor dear Duke to figure out what to do about it.<br />
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For such a short novel, there's a lot going on in <i>Acadie</i>, including not a few flashbacks that fill in our grumpy protagonist's past and set out the origins of the Colony, but even these pages practically fly by. Far from being boring, the backstory is equal parts fun and fascinating, and it allows readers to take a breather from the mystery that makes up the larger part of the novella's breakneck narrative.<br />
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That mystery begins with the appearance of the aforementioned probe, extends to speculation about the intent of its sender, and ends with a conversational confrontation that rips the rug right out from under us by calling everything else we've learned into question. This twist is such a shock to the system that I had no sooner finished <i>Acadie </i>than I found myself starting it a second time to look for foreshadowing, and it's a credit to Hutchinson that though I spotted several subtle tells in the text, the ending (when I came to that section again) still packed a proper punch.<br />
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I can't say much more without a spoiler warning, but I will say that the impact of that whack is all the weightier because of the context that comes from character, and in Duke, Hutchinson has crafted the perfect protagonist for his purposes. Appealingly self-effacing yet capable, sharp if not as supernaturally smart as Potter's potted people, and finally very funny, Duke is the heart and soul of the story, and it's his presence that makes <i>Acadie </i>so much more than the sum of its parts. Without him, we'd have a backstory, a mystery and a twist; with him, said satellites have something solid to orbit, and <i>Acadie </i>is complete rather than merely neat.<br />
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<b>Acadie</b></div>
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by Dave Hutchinson</div>
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US Publication: September 2017, Tor.com Publishing</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-21563484462186978682017-10-06T14:00:00.000+01:002017-10-06T14:00:22.128+01:00Book Review | Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King & Owen King<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qmBI1210jAc/WcjvLG-flGI/AAAAAAAATNw/dHhImm9dTSI1pR4w07fpdePrSYMBFEMsgCLcBGAs/s1600/Sleeping-Beauties-by-Stephen-and-Owen-King-UK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1044" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qmBI1210jAc/WcjvLG-flGI/AAAAAAAATNw/dHhImm9dTSI1pR4w07fpdePrSYMBFEMsgCLcBGAs/s320/Sleeping-Beauties-by-Stephen-and-Owen-King-UK.jpg" width="208" /></a><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hOfWHdKCoWg/WcjvKjlQOcI/AAAAAAAATNs/DX1BpJQFgfs3D3gkXMc-mogHYQ4c1U4SACLcBGAs/s1600/Sleeping-Beauties-by-Stephen-and-Owen-King-US.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="710" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hOfWHdKCoWg/WcjvKjlQOcI/AAAAAAAATNs/DX1BpJQFgfs3D3gkXMc-mogHYQ4c1U4SACLcBGAs/s320/Sleeping-Beauties-by-Stephen-and-Owen-King-US.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
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<i>All around the world, something is happening to women when they fall asleep; they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed, the women become feral and spectacularly violent...</i></div>
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<i>In the small town of Dooling, West Virginia, the virus is spreading through a women's prison, affecting all the inmates except one. Soon, word spreads about the mysterious Evie, who seems able to sleep—and wake. Is she a medical anomaly or a demon to be slain?</i></div>
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<i>The abandoned men, left to their increasingly primal devices, are fighting each other, while Dooling's Sheriff, Lila Norcross, is just fighting to stay awake.</i></div>
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<i>And the sleeping women are about to open their eyes to a new world altogether...</i></div>
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On the back of the broadly brilliant Bill Hodges books, a succinct and suspenseful series of straight stories that only started to flag when their fantastical aspects filibustered the fiction, <i>Sleeping Beauties </i>sees Stephen King up to his old tricks again. It's a long, long novel that places a vast cast of characters at the mercy of a speculative premise: a sleeping sickness that knocks all the women of the world out for the count, leaving the men to fend for themselves.<br />
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Of course, the world is not now, nor has it ever been, King's business. Standing in for it in this particular story, as a microcosm of all that's right and wrong or spineless and strong, is a small town "splat in the middle of nowhere," (p.30) namely Dooling in West Virginia. There, tempers flare—and soon explosively so—when it dawns on a dizzying array of dudes that their wives and daughters and whatnot may be gone for good. It's <i>Under the Dome</i> part deux, in other words, except that this time, the Constant Writer has roped one of his sons in on the fun.<br />
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The author of an excellent short story collection, a gonzo graphic novel and an overwritten love letter to the silver screen, Owen King is clearly capable of greatness, but—rather like his father—falls short as often as not. I'd hoped to see him at his best here, what with the help of an old hand, however it's hard to see him at all, so consistent is the Kings' collaboration. But as tough as it is to tell where one King ends and the other begins, <i>Sleeping Beauties</i> is such a slog that it hardly matters.<br />
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The show opens on a sprawling ensemble. Some seventy characters, up to and including a talking fox, are arrayed on the stage at the start of the first act, which chronicles the spread of the strange contagion that comes to be called "the Aurora Flu, named for the princess in the Walt Disney retelling of the <i>Sleeping Beauty </i>fairy tale," (pp.81-82) particularly as it pertains to the women one Clint Norcross knows.<br />
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As Dooling Correctional Facility for Women's resident shrink, Clint knows a lot of women, but for once, knowledge is not the same as power. When one of his favourite inmates has to be subdued, say, Clint is powerless to stop a sort of fairy handkerchief from forming over her face:<br />
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The growth on Kitty's face was white and gauzy, tight to her skin. It made Clint think of a winding sheet. He could tell that her eyes were shut and he could tell that they were moving in REM. The idea that she was dreaming under the stuff troubled him, although he wasn't sure why. (pp.103-104)</blockquote>
He wants to wake her up, to simply peel back the cocoon made of mucous and other, equally icky secretions, but by now the Aurora Flu is all over the news, and the affected women who've already been awoken have come to transformed into vicious killers, lashing out mindlessly at the men who dared disturb their dreams. For the time being, at least, the advice is to leave the sleepers be.<br />
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So it is that remaining <i>compos mentis </i>is the name of the game in "the next act of that day's continuing nightmare." (p.224) Energy drinks and wakefulness supplements, not to mention certain prohibited pick-me-ups, suddenly become hot commodities, and when they're gone—when all too soon demand starts to outstrip supply—society practically falls apart. There's rioting, looting and lynching, all for the sake of staying awake.<br />
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Happily, as the Sheriff of Dooling County, Clint Norcross' wife Lila has other options: an evidence room full of other options, in fact, such as the uppers she and her team seized during a recent drug bust. As "a conscientious and reasonable representative of the law," (p.171) Lila struggles with the idea of eating precious evidence, but not for all that long, under the circumstances. Maintaining law and order is more important now than ever, she believes, not least because many men have gotten it into their heads that they might catch the Aurora Flu too, and have started incinerating vulnerable women:<br />
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Blowtorch Brigades [...] they were being called. There were bad women and there were bad men; if anyone could claim the right to make that statement, Lila, who had arrested plenty of both, felt that she could. But men fought more; they killed more. That was one way in which the sexes had never been equal; they were not equally dangerous. (p.497)</blockquote>
Pivotal as it is, that's not Lila only motivation. What saved her from being struck by the first wave of the Aurora Flu was an early call to attend the scene of a double murder at a local crack shack. There, she quickly caught the killer: a beautiful young woman who introduced herself as Eve during the drive to Clint's prison—and Eve may hold the key to this whole bloody puzzle. There's definitely <i>something </i>different about her. She's immune to the sleeping sickness, you see. Also, she can, ah... talk to foxes?<br />
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She was an extension, and a possible answer to the original questions, the great How and Why of their situation. They discussed the likelihood that she was something more than a woman—more than human—and there was increasing unity in the belief that she was the source of everything that had happened. (p.497)</blockquote>
<i>Sleeping Beauties</i>' sluggish first third is enlivened every time it presents Lila's sensible perspective, but sadly, she plays second fiddle to her supposedly heroic husband in the story's action-packed second act. There's something faintly ridiculous about this—about the notion that all the characters of note in the novel orbit Clint in some capacity—and it's something that underscores the problematic elements of the text's very premise.<br />
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The Kings don't appear interested in asking what if all the women in the world were to fall asleep. Instead, they want to know what the men would do if that were to happen. To make matters worse, they don't even have an interesting answer to that question. Without the sensitive sex to smooth their poor furrowed brows, the blokes behave exactly as the stereotypes <i>Sleeping Beauties </i>trades in have led us to expect: badly.<br />
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Neither of this doorstopper of a novel's authors have ever been much for subtlety, but in this instance, a little thought about something other than plot may have gone a long way. As it stands, <i>Sleeping Beauties </i>is a tedious read, full of gratuitous shooting and shouting but empty in every other sense. It's such a big book that you'd be forgiven for thinking there's a lot going on, but there's not; aside from Lila, and perhaps the prison warden who falls asleep early on, its characters are bland as bran; and the setting is so bog-standard that it reminded me of all things royalty-free. Last but not least, in its theme and meaning, <i>Sleeping Beauties </i>isn't just decidedly disappointing—ultimately, it's insulting.<br />
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Approach this one with caution, Constant Reader.<br />
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<b>Sleeping Beauties</b></div>
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by Stephen King & Owen King</div>
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UK Publication: September 2017, Hodder & Stoughton</div>
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US Publication: September 2017, Scribner</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-14473366370485843492017-08-24T14:00:00.000+01:002017-08-24T14:00:00.761+01:00Book Review | The Stone Sky by N. K. Jemisin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>The Moon will soon return. Whether this heralds the destruction of humankind or something worse will depend on two women.</i></div>
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<i>Essun has inherited the phenomenal power of Alabaster Tenring. With it, she hopes to find her daughter Nassun and forge a world in which every outcast child can grow up safe.</i></div>
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<i>For Nassun, her mother's mastery of the Obelisk Gate comes too late. She has seen the evil of the world, and accepted what her mother will not admit: that sometimes what is corrupt cannot be cleansed, only destroyed.</i></div>
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Sometimes you only see how special something is when you look back at it later. Sometimes that something needs a hot second to properly settle into your subconscious. And that's fine, I figure. I'd go so far as to say that, for me at least, be it because the job requires me to read rather a lot or not, it's surprising to be struck by something straightaway. But even I didn't need the benefit of retrospect to bring home how brilliant the Hugo Award-winning beginning of The Broken Earth was. I realised I was reading something remarkable—something "rich, relevant and resonant," as I wrote in <a href="http://www.tor.com/2015/08/03/winter-spring-summer-fall-death-is-the-fifth-and-master-of-all-the-fifth-season-by-n-k-jemisin/" target="_blank">my review</a> of <i>The Fifth Season</i>—before I'd seen the back of the first act, and when the full measure of the power of its perspectives was made plain, it became a comprehensive confirmation of N. K. Jemisin as one of our very finest fantasists.<br />
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I stand by that, looking back—as I stand by my criticisms of its "surprisingly circumspect" successor. <a href="http://www.tor.com/2016/08/17/book-reviews-the-obelisk-gate-by-n-k-jemisin/" target="_blank">I said then</a> that <i>The Obelisk Gate </i>sacrificed some <i>The Fifth Season</i>'s substance and sense of momentum to tell a slighter and slower story, and I'll say that again today, never mind the passage of time or <a href="http://www.tor.com/2017/08/11/2017-hugo-award-winners/" target="_blank">the news</a> that it, too, just took home a Hugo. With <i>The Stone Sky </i>now behind me, however, and The Broken Sky closed, I do recognise that <i>The Obelisk Gate</i> played a pivotal role in the whole. It was the calm before the storm.<br />
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And the storm <i>The Stone Sky </i>chronicles is one like none other.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>The Yumenes Rifting is the latest and the last of the apocalyptic events that have plagued the Stillness: a landscape ravaged by Seasons of madness, acid, fire and fungus, among others. People have passed away in their millions because of previous Seasons, but the Yumenes Rifting is different. If it continues, all life in the Stillness will be lost. Only a powerful orogene—someone with the ability to manipulate thermal and kinetic energy—could possibly stop it. Only someone like Essun, say.<br />
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But Essun, when last we left her, was at death's door, having interfaced with "an arcane mechanism older than [...] written history" (p.10) named the obelisk gate in order to save the community of Castrima—albeit "at the cost of Castrima itself" (p.10) and another, more personal price. When Essun awakens to find what's left of her comm carrying her towards Yumenes and the rusting Rifting, she realises she's slowly but surely turning to stone, like her late lover Alabaster before her. All she's lost thus far is an arm, but every time she wields "enough of that strange silvery not-orogeny, which Alabaster called magic," (p.11) she'll lose more, and come what may, it's going to take a lot of that slippery stuff to save the day:<br />
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You've got a job to do, courtesy of Alabaster and the nebulous faction of stone eaters who've been quietly trying to end the ancient war between life and Father Earth. The job you <i>have </i>to do is the easier of the two, you think. Just catch the Moon. Seal the Yumenes Rifting. Reduce the current Season's predicted impact from thousands or millions of years back down to something manageable—something the human race has a chance of surviving. End the Fifth Seasons for all time. </blockquote>
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The job you <i>want</i> to do, though? Find Nassun, your daughter. Take her back from the man who murdered your son and dragged her halfway across the world in the middle of the apocalypse. (p.11)</blockquote>
Little does Essun know that Nassun—like mother, like daughter—has taken matters into her own hands by calling upon the obelisks and stabbing her fundamentalist father with a shard of the sapphire. She didn't want to do it, to be sure, but to survive, she had to. That just leaves her and Schaffa, the same so-called Guardian who was so cruel to Essun in her youth. Schaffa is trying to turn over a new leaf now, the better to make up for the many mistakes he's made, and in Nassun, who has no one else, he sees redemption, yes, but more than that: he sees a chance to do something truly good for a girl who's been broken by the same idiot bigotry he practiced in the past. To wit, he promises to protect her "till the world burns." (p.179)<br />
<br />
As well it might if Nassun has her way, because she's plum done. Done living in a world that treats people who are different like dirt; done living in a world that has taken away her mother and her baby brother and pushed her into patricide; done living in a world in which the only person who's been there for her of late lives in perpetual pain; and done living in a world that punishes every living thing for no good reason that she sees.<br />
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But there is a reason the world—Evil Earth, as it's known—is so hell-bent on hurting the few humans who have managed to survive the Seasons so far. These effects have a cause, of course, and it's a cause rooted in the ancient history of the Stillness; a cause closely connected to the origins of orogeny. Several interludes set in Syl Anagist, the Stillness before it was stilled, introduce us to Houwha, a tuner created and controlled by a cadre of conductors. He and the others like him have been genetically engineered to bring a power source called the Plutonic Engine online. "This was what made them not the same kind of human as everyone else. Eventually: not as human as everyone else. Finally: not human at all." (p.210) And as above, so below.<br />
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Starting <i>The Stone Sky</i>, I made every effort to keep my expectations in check. I expected Jemisin to bring The Broken Earth's core story to a close, but I wasn't counting on the completeness of the closure this novel offers. I expected Nassun and Essun to cross paths at long last, but I couldn't have imagined that their meeting would bring about "a battle for the fate of the world" (p.384) that pairs the last parts of their catastrophic character arcs with some of the most incredible action seen in said series. It's "such a terrible and magnificent thing to witness" (p.384) that I sat stunned for some time after the fact, knowing full well <i>what</i> had happened but unable in the moment to comprehend just how—and how unexpectedly—it had.<br />
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I also expected the setting to be explored some more—and it is, physically, as Essun accompanies her adopted comm across the Merz Desert and into a false forest whilst Nassun and Schaffa pick their way through a breathtaking buried city towards Corepoint, where the crushing climax occurs—but I didn't for a minute think that the author would devote such a substantial section of <i>The Stone Sky </i>to explaining how the Stillness itself came to be in delirious detail couched in characterful, if tragic context. Last but not least, learning anything at all about the beginnings of this trilogy's terrific magic system caught me completely off-guard. That said, the answers aren't unwelcome, and they go straight to the heart of the themes of the series.<br />
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As the conclusion to a trilogy that started strong and then stopped, <i>The Stone Sky </i>gave me everything that I wanted, and then it gave me more. It's devastating. Poignant and personal and almost impossibly powerful. If my faith in N. K. Jemisin as one of our generation's most able creators was in any way shaken by <i>The Obelisk Gate</i>—and I confess that it was, somewhat—then <i>The Stone Sky </i>has decimated those doubts. The Broken Earth is in totality one of the great trilogies of our time, and if all is well with the world, its thoroughly thrilling third volume should surely secure N. K. Jemisin a third Hugo Award.<br />
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<b>The Stone Sky</b></div>
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by N. K. Jemisin</div>
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UK & US Publication: September 2017, Orbit</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-39338880627224913512017-07-25T14:00:00.000+01:002017-07-25T14:00:01.682+01:00Book Review | The Rift by Nina Allan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-U55LIWIUoJs/WUutoRleZRI/AAAAAAAAPqE/PR8eF31et7cqsB4bir_S21Uk5xsXoir9wCLcBGAs/s1600/the-rift-by-nina-allan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1124" data-original-width="720" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-U55LIWIUoJs/WUutoRleZRI/AAAAAAAAPqE/PR8eF31et7cqsB4bir_S21Uk5xsXoir9wCLcBGAs/s400/the-rift-by-nina-allan.jpg" width="255" /></a></div>
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<i>Selena and Julie are sisters. As children they were closest companions, but as they grow towards maturity, a rift develops between them.</i></div>
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<i>There are greater rifts, however. Julie goes missing at the age of seventeen. It will be twenty years before Selena sees her again. When Julie reappears, she tells Selena an incredible story about how she has spent time on another planet. Selena has an impossible choice to make: does she dismiss her sister as a damaged person, the victim of delusions, or believe her, and risk her own sanity in the process? Is Julie really who she says she is, and if she isn't, what does she have to gain by claiming her sister's identity?</i></div>
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The Rift <i>is a novel about the illusion we call reality, the memories shared between people and the places where those memories diverge. It is a story about what might happen when the assumptions we make about the world and our place in it are called into question.</i></div>
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<i>***</i></div>
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Around the middle of <i>The Rift</i>, a sister who insists that her traumatic twenty-year disappearance came about because she woke up in another world says, by way of explaining why she now shelves her novels in with her non-fiction, that "no book is completely true or completely a lie. A famous philosopher at the Lyceum once said that the written word has a closer relationship to memory than the literal truth, that all truths are questionable, even the larger ones. Anyway, it's more interesting. When you shelve books alphabetically you stop noticing them, don't you find?" (pp.199-200)<br />
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I may be too time-poor to even contemplate such an almighty organisational endeavour, and yet... I'm tempted, because there's some truth to Julie's attitude, I'm sure. Once something becomes known, you do stop noticing it—and there's so much in the world that needs noticing, so much that in a sense deserves the extra attention. Not least Nina Allan's new novel, which, like her last—namely <i>The Race</i>, a story of stories about the lives of ordinary people becoming unfastened from reality—mixes the real with the unreal to tell a uniquely human tale, albeit one that may contain aliens.<br />
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Like the lawless library we learn about later, <i>The Rift </i>swiftly resists the rules readers expect fiction to follow from the first by beginning both before and after the fact. Before, we learn of a girl—Julie's little sister Selena—who befriends a bloke who sadly commits suicide when his koi pond is poisoned. After, the girl is a grown-up, out drinking with a few of her few friends, who answers the phone upon coming home to hear a woman introduce herself as Julie:<br />
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Selena's first, split-second reaction was that she didn't know anyone called Julie and so who the hell was this speaking? The second was that this couldn't be happening, because this couldn't be real. Julie was missing. Her absence defined her. The voice coming down the wire must belong to someone else. (pp.23-24)</blockquote>
But it doesn't. The caller <i>is </i>her missing sister. Selena knows it in her bones from the moment they meet in a coffee shop a day later. She has the same way of making Selena feel insignificant; the same memories of what they went through when they were wee; she keeps the same secrets, even.<br />
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She keeps a couple of other secrets too, to start. Even after Selena accepts this new though not necessarily improved Julie into her life—a quiet life defined by Julie's absence as much if not more so than Julie's own—she simply won't tell her sister where she's been all these years, nor why she's gotten in touch all of a sudden.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>Julie's reticence to speak about her experience rings any number of alarm bells in her sister's head, but Selena is so relieved to have her back that she wonders whether or not knowing the truth of whatever hell Julie has been through is necessary. "Perhaps it was better to remain in the dark about what had happened," she tells herself. "There was an argument for not pursuing it, for ignoring the fork in the road, and moving on." (p.87) But the truth, inconvenient as it may be, unbelievable as it sometimes seems, will out:<br />
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On Saturday July 16th 1994, I travelled from the area of woodland around Hatchmere Lake, near Warrington, Cheshire, to the shore of the Shuubseet, or Shoe Lake, an elongated, slipper-shaped stretch of water not far from the western outskirts of Fiby, which is the smallest and most southerly of the six great city-states of the planet of Tristane, one of the eight planets of the Suur System, in the Aww Galaxy. </blockquote>
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How I came to be there I cannot tell you. Cally's brother Noah believes there is a rift—a transept, he calls it—something like an enlarged pore in the void between Earth and Tristane that allows objects and occasionally people to travel instantaneously from one place to the other. (p.135)</blockquote>
We're treated to a Julie's-eye view of her time on Tristane in the company of Cally and Noah in <i>The Rift</i>'s second section: a subtly surreal and somewhat sinister story about a young woman trying and invariably failing to fit in in a new world punctuated—as is the rest of the text—by interstitial excerpts of poems, encyclopaedia entries, newspaper reports and erotic novels, some of which are apparently factual whilst others are fabricated from the fantastical. Amidst all this is a detail Julie seems ill at ease with, concerning a man with a van she only narrowly escaped from before she awakened elsewhere.<br />
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Here, then, <i>The Rift </i>is quite literally riven, in that this extended interlude divides Selena's account just as Julie's strange tale splits the relationship she's reestablished with her sister down the middle. Symbolically, this is a successful step in the structure of the story's stairs; narratively, alas, much of the middle acts lacks. Tristane feels so weightless, and Julie's recollection of her magical vacation there so shapeless, that it all comes off as false.<br />
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And perhaps it's supposed to. Selena clearly doesn't believe in this other world either, dismissing it as "a delusion of some kind maybe, a fugue state, brought on by her experience in the van with Steven Jimson." But neither can Selena "bring herself to believe that Julie was simply lying to her, that she had concocted this ridiculous story as—as what, exactly? An excuse for what she'd put them all through? [...] On the whole, the idea that Julie had gone mad was a lot less painful." (pp.266-267)<br />
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Mad she may be—and there is admittedly a bit of family history that supports Selena's suspicion—but believe it or not, Julie's truth is what it is. You can take it at face value or fashion a frame of fact around it. But what exactly makes a fact that, Allan asks.<br />
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In <i>The Rift</i>'s last act the aforementioned interstitials come thick and fast, foregrounding the fine line between tall tales and truths. One concerns the Wels Catfish, a "placid and slow-moving" (p.376) species of beast found throughout the UK and Europe; another gives us the Gren-Moloch, "a fearless, rapacious predator" (p.387) commonly seen in the saltwater of Tristane's Marilly Sea. If we put aside our preconceptions, both creatures are either perfectly credible or perfectly incredible. Perspective is the only reason we accept one definition and dismiss the other out of hand.<br />
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And so we circle back to the seemingly disorganised library we began with. In this, as in everything in <i>The Rift</i>, it's up to us to to decide what to pay attention to and what to ignore; what to take on faith and what to doubt. One thing you won't find in this brilliantly ambiguous book is the truth, but so long as you don't read it expecting a definitive explanation, you definitely won't be disappointed.<br />
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<b>The Rift</b></div>
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by Nina Allan</div>
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UK & US Publication: July 2017, Titan</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-59293744096676392222017-06-27T14:00:00.000+01:002017-06-27T14:00:12.618+01:00Book Review | The Management Style of the Supreme Beings by Tom Holt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>When the Supreme Being and his son decide that being supreme isn't for them any more, a new management team has to be found—and fast!</i></div>
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<i>Dynamic, resourceful and always customer-focused, the Venturi brothers are perfect for the job, and keen to get stuck in. </i><i>First on their to-do list is Good and Evil, an outdated system that was always a bit confusing and just made everyone feel bad about things. </i></div>
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<i>Unfortunately, </i><i>the sudden disappearance of right and wrong, while welcomed by some, is a big concern to those still in favour of its basic principles. Particularly given that the Venturi brothers have replaced it with something that seems decidedly... well, evil.</i></div>
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The easily-offended will be offended easily by Tom Holt's new novel, a madcap <i>Miracle on 34th Street </i>in which religion in particular gets a ribbing, but readers with less delicate sensibilities should be ready to romp, because <i>The Management Style of the Supreme Beings </i>is a whole bunch of fun from word one. And it's more than a simple send-up: it also stands as a sublimely ridiculous examination of morality in the modern era.<br />
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God, the thing begins, is getting on. "Fact is [...] I feel old," (p.38) He says to his dearly beloved son as they fish for the same Sinderaan species that "had split the atom and proved the existence of the Higgs boson when Earth was still entirely inhabited by plankton." (p.37) An age or an instant later, as the five-dimensional fish nibble and divine drinks are sipped, the Big Guy admits He thinks it might be time to step aside—as manager of the planet, naturally.<br />
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You build a business from the ground up, you care for it, worry about it, you take pride in its progress, you're there for it when things don't go so well. But there always comes a time when you have to let go. Or does there? (p.37)</blockquote>
For obvious reasons, Jesus—who goes by Jay these days—doesn't disagree. After all, "they're father and son but also equal aspects of the One; it's therefore logically impossible for them" (p.35) to part ways in anything other than a philosophical fashion. It's to His credit that Jay does wonder where that's likely to leave Uncle Ghost, who's gotten a bit dotty in His dotage, before giving God the nod... but notably, nobody mentions Kevin.<br />
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Kevin is "the younger son of God, marginally less well beloved" than his celebrated big brother "and with whom his father was not always quite so well pleased." (pp.1-2) That's probably because Kevin is desperately inept. He's the kind of person who sticks to instant because he broke the cappuccino machine and everyone in a position to fix it with a minor miracle is too busy. Even celestial mechanics, "the easiest part of the business," (p.9) is beyond this poor kid, whose destiny seems to be to watch one rerun of <i>Touched by an Angel </i>after another, which... well, the less said about, the better.<br />
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To wit, when the time comes to hand off the heavens and the earth, Kevin isn't even in contention...<br />
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<a name='more'></a>"Everybody seems to think the Venturi boys are a safe pair of hands" (p.36) in any event. They've taken over and turned around plenty of struggling planets in the past, and they've offered a fair price—namely "a number [that] couldn't possibly exist in human mathematics" (p.35)—for the aforementioned firmament.<br />
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Kevin takes off in something off a strop when his high-flying family proffer this plan to him as a fait accompli, so as the Big Guy, Jay, and the Ghostest with the Mostest drive their holy camper van into the stars, the black sheep of the bunch is left on our lowly level when the Venturi brothers explain how they've made problematic planets like ours profitable:<br />
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Traditionally, your planet, and millions like it, have lumbered along through the Dark Ages on basically dualistic moral systems. You think in binary terms. Mostly it's Good versus Evil, though in the past—credit where it's due—some of you went for the more rational and commonsensical Honour/Shame dichotomy—which you guys currently regard as quaintly primitive. But let's not dwell on that because everything's about to change. From now on, there is no more Right or Wrong, Good or Evil. We're doing away with all of that. It's holding you back: it leads to war, unhappiness and grossly inefficient distribution of valuable resources. It's gone. Don't give it a second thought. (p.81)</blockquote>
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Under Venturi morality, every sentient being is master of his fate and captain of his soul. You can do whatever you want, when you want, how you want, provided you pay for it. And we're not talking some vague metaphysical, allegorical, wishy-washy philosophical price here. We're talking about a fixed tariff of charges, payable in your local currency, fourteen of your Earth days from date of invoice, no excuses, no credit. [And] if you don't pay, you go to jail. (p.82)</blockquote>
Looks like the Venturis know what they're doing, too, because over the months to come, criminal empires dissolve into debt as violent individuals are finally made to pay. Relatively little things, like extramarital flings, end up too expensive to pursue; even potty mouths cost more than a curse word's worth. Faintly evil though it may be, the new system seems to work—at least at first.<br />
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There are, of course, those outliers who are unhappy about the recent change in the planet's management. Malcontents like Jersey Thorpe, an action hero cut from distinctly Dan Brown-coloured cloth who had "dreamed the impossible dream, fought the unbeatable foe, made the impossible call and been put through—only to find the very next day that God had sold out to the Venturi boys and everything was suddenly completely different, rendering his colossal achievement meaningless." (p.99) Not to speak of Santa Claus: actually an ancient thunder god too popular with the people for God to put in his place, as He did all the other deities. Even the Venturis might have difficulty bringing this beirdy weirdo to heel.<br />
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Between them—them and a couple of other characters that may be more mundane but are no less marvelous—they dream of destroying the new world order that's made us safer, but (sniff) sadder. And when their paths cross Kevin's—who, as "the son of the Big Guy [was] born with an overwhelming instinct to redeem, even if none of it's your fault and you had no say in the major policy decisions" (p.153)—they find an unlikely ally who'll probably be no help at all.<br />
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<i>The Management Style of the Supreme Beings </i>is, hands down, the best book Tom Holt has turned out in the ten years I've been reading his winningly silly fiction. God knows it's not going to be for everyone—Holt is as happy to skewer the sacred as he is to take the piss out of the profane—but it's not as barbed as all that, in fact. Its is a wit served with warmth: a sense of affection that softens the story's sharp parts.<br />
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It's not, on that note, Holt's strongest story. Narratively, a lot of <i>The Management Style of the Supreme Beings </i>is nonsense, particularly the last act, which gets so grandiose that it almost loses sight of the little people at the book's beating heart, however Holt is such an entertainer of an author that he could write a trilogy about watching a pot boil while paint dries and I'd read it in a gleeful evening. He has a sparkle in his authorial eye that makes every satirical sentence glimmer, and a spring in his storyteller's step that makes even the most distracting of his digressions a devilish pleasure.<br />
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His characters are, in any case, more fully formed than his narrative, and between cretinous Kevin, Satan's suck-up of a secretary Bernie Lachuk, and Jersey's unexpectedly independent love interest Lucy, Holt has a cast of winners on his hands here. Also: a bloody good book that's perfect for folks who like a lot of fun, and a little Father Christmas, in their fantasy fiction. Unless, I guess, they're over-sensitive.<br />
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<b>The Management Style of the Supreme Beings</b></div>
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by Tom Holt</div>
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UK & US Publication: June 2017, Orbit</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-34572729225157300232017-06-12T14:00:00.000+01:002017-06-12T14:00:26.545+01:00Book Review | Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>The town of Rotherweird stands alone—there are no guidebooks, despite the fascinating and diverse architectural styles cramming the narrow streets, the </i>avant garde <i>science and offbeat customs. Cast adrift from the rest of England by Elizabeth I, Rotherweird's independence is subject to one disturbing condition: nobody, but nobody, studies the town or its history.</i></div>
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<i>Two inquisitive outsiders have arrived: Jonah Oblong, to teach modern history at Rotherweird School (nothing local and nothing before 1800), and the sinister billionaire Sir Veronal Slickstone, who has somehow been given permission to renovate the town's long-derelict Manor House.</i></div>
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[The Full English: Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott]<br />
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If J. K. Rowling had given Jasper Fforde permission to document a decade of derring-do in Diagon Alley, the result would read rather like <i>Rotherweird</i>, an appetising if stodgy smorgasbord of full English fiction set in a town unlike any other.<br />
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Like everyone else, Oblong had heard of the Rotherweird Valley and its town of the same name, which by some quirk of history were self-governing—no MP and no bishop, only a mayor. He knew too that Rotherweird had a legendary hostility to admitting the outside world: no guidebook recommended a visit; the County History was silent about the place. (p.15)</blockquote>
Yet Rotherweird is in need of a teacher, and Oblong—Jonah Oblong, whose career in education to date has been a disgrace—is in need of a job, so he doesn't ask any of the questions begged by the classified ad inviting interviewees to the aforementioned valley. Instead, he packs a bag, takes a train, a taxi, and then—because "Rotherweird don't do cars," (p.16) as his toothless chauffeur tells him—"an extraordinary vehicle, part bicycle, part charabanc, propelled by pedals, pistons and interconnecting drums," (p.17) and driven by a laughably affable madman.<br />
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Need I note that nothing in Rotherweird is as it seems? Not the people, not the public transport, and certainly not the place, as Oblong observes as his new home heaves into view:<br />
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The fog enhanced the feel of a fairground ride, briefly thinning to reveal the view before closing again. In those snapshots, Oblong glimpsed hedgerows and orchards, even a row of vines—and at one spectacular moment, a vision of a walled town, a forest of towers in all shapes and sizes, encircled by a river. (pp.19-20)</blockquote>
It's here, in lofty lodgings and under the care of his own "general person," (p.41) that Oblong is installed after he's hired as a history teacher. But the position comes with one stickler of a condition: he has "a contractual obligation to keep to 1800 and thereafter, if addressing the world beyond the valley, and to treat Rotherweird history as off-limits entirely. Here he must live in the moment. Private speculation could only lead him astray." (p.43) And if you venture too far off the beaten path in Rotherweird, you might just end up disappeared—the very fate which befell Oblong's incurably curious predecessor.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Oblong's hapless arrival in the valley coincides with the entrance—from the sinister side of the stage, let's say—of another, markedly more meddlesome outsider, who moves into a manor house that's been strictly off-limits for as long as any of Rotherweird's many residents can remember. Moolah opens many doors, of course, and Sir Veronal Slickstone has more than enough money to make the mayor look the other way.<br />
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More than enough to do that and then some, I dare say, as Slickstone's wife and son—actors playing elaborate parts proposed to them in the prologue—would attest, if only he hadn't sworn them to silence at the same time as procuring their compliance. So situated, Sir proceeds to buy the local bar, the better to eavesdrop on all the gossip, before giving a great many guineas to Rotherweird's greedy antiques dealer in exchange for four strange stones found in a place called Lost Acre: a place—here but not here, if you see my meaning—that may be the key to the unravelling of the entire valley.<br />
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The mystery of Rotherweird's forbidden history is engrossing early on in the novel—the first by QC Andrew Caldecott, though he has, as an "occasional playwright," dealt in drama in the past—but the longer it goes on, the less appealing said secrets seem, sadly. First the town's origins are teased, then they're doled out, piece by piece, in a series of dreams... but Rotherweird's residents still have to stumble upon their own discoveries, before gathering to discuss, in endless depth and detail, what they've learned, not to speak of what these mysteries might mean.<br />
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In short, Caldecott suggests, then shows, then tells, and that's all very well—but then he tells us again, in case we hadn't quite caught on, then again for good measure, by which point, I'll be honest, my patience had worn thinner than my grin.<br />
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There's good reason to grin in the early-going, though. <i>Rotherweird </i>isn't just fascinating in its first act, it's also funny. Oblong's oafish entrance sparks off a riotous romp, wittily written, and the other characters we meet in this section of the text, from Vixen Valourhand to Sidney Snorkel, are either equally quirky or morally murky. Alas, they are little more than that, in no small part because the cast expands and expands until the stars of the narrative—never mind the best of the bit players—are hard to pick out from the crowd.<br />
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That's Rotherweird through and through, in truth. It starts off strong, loses its focus after a fantastic first act, surrenders its momentum whilst meandering in the middle, before the curtains come down on a set-piece that isn't an ending so much as it is scene-setting for the sequel.<br />
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That come the conclusion "the company had only scratched the surface of the connections between Rotherweird and Lost Acre" (p.430) should be exciting, I'm sure. Instead, it's an exhausting thought. Who knows? Perhaps I'll have gotten my appetite back by the time <i>Wytnertide </i>is in the wild, but like that big breakfast we began with, as good as this particular book looks, and as delicious as it is initially, it mistakes quantity for quality, leading to a mediocre meal that may have been great if it had only been served on a smaller plate.<br />
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<b>Rotherweird</b></div>
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by Andrew Caldecott</div>
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UK Publication: May 2017, Jo Fletcher</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-22040449015906078732017-05-29T14:00:00.000+01:002017-05-29T14:00:05.348+01:00Book Review | Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>"I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden."</i></div>
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<i>Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. </i></div>
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<i>Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.</i></div>
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"If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden," muses Haruki Murakami in the materials accompanying <i>Men Without Women</i>. He must, then, be something of a glutton for punishment, having immersed himself in metaphorical forestry for the decade and change since his last short story collection, <i>Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman</i>, allowed the World Fantasy Award-winning author to tend to his wending trellises.<br />
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Compared to the twenty four works of fiction featured in that last, <i>Men Without Women </i>is a strikingly slim volume, compiling only seven stories, six of which Murakami's legion of English-language fans may well have read already. And whilst I wish I could tell you their haunting quality makes up for their wanting quantity, so many of said struck me as uneventful retreads that I can only recommend this collection with a handful of caveats.<br />
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That being said, if you come to Murakami for the cats and the cars, the deep obeisance to The Beatles and the bars choked with smoke, then come! <i>Men Without Women </i>has all that jazz—and oh so many miserable men and mysterious women.<br />
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The day comes to you completely out of the blue, without the faintest of warnings or hints beforehand. No premonitions or foreboding, no knocks or clearing of throats. Turn a corner and you know you're already <i>there</i>. But by then there's no going back. Once you round that bend, that is the only world you can possibly inhabit. In that world you are called 'Men Without Women.' Always a relentlessly frigid plural. </blockquote>
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Only Men Without Women can comprehend how painful, how heartbreaking it is to become one. (p.224)</blockquote>
That's as may be, but if this collection is about anything, it's about communicating that pain, that heartbreak, to the reader.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>It's felt in the first story, 'Drive My Car,' by a stage actor called Kafuku, who hires a chauffeur after the death of his wife, ostensibly to fill the void she's left in his life. Initially, our narrator and his driver Misaki share only silence, but before long Kafuku is opening his guarded heart to her, explaining how he wishes he had been able to confront his wife about her various affairs.<br />
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The metaphor of Misaki's calm driving makes the focus of the tale plain. See, Kafuku can't for the life of him catch the precise moment she shifts gears. "It was all too smooth, too mysterious. He could only make out a slight gradation in the engine's hum. It was like the wings of a flying insect, now drawing closer, now fading away." (p.41)<br />
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Transition, too, is the driving force of 'Yesterday.' Tanimura is a high school graduate who starts a new life in Tokyo to "try out the possibilities of a new me. Jettisoning the Kansai dialect was a practical (as well as symbolic) method of accomplishing this." (p.47) His choice comes into question, however, when he meets a man who affects the exact accent the narrator of 'Yesterday' has worked so hard to wipe out. Then—curious and curiouser—that man asks Tanimura to go on a date with his long-distance lover, because if she must date other men, better, Kitaru avers, than she dates decent ones.<br />
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Another of Murakami's relentlessly frigid plurals starts the next story with rather than without women, but falls victim to this psychic sickness all the same. 'An Independent Organ' is intended to paint "a clear portrait of Dr. Tokai," (p.80) a fiftysomething plastic surgeon embroiled in so many affairs with unavailable ladies that his personal assistant has to keep track of them on a timetable. Inevitably, Dr. Tokai falls for one of their number, but when the besom breaks his heart, he can only conclude that "women are all born with a special, independent organ that allows them to lie." (p.114) Needless to say, we do not agree, not least because the narrator of 'An Independent Organ' actively undermines Dr. Tokai as his misadventure progresses.<br />
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There's quite a bit of this in <i>Men Without Women</i>: a tale being told on the one hand, all while another quite different fiction is insinuated. It's when these competing pictures come together—when the mundane morphs into something practically magical—that things get interesting. Beforehand, alas, most of these stories are inescapably bland: repetitive and rambling accounts of the unremarkable that round the same sorts of scenarios and characters again and again, only to end utterly abruptly just as Murakami finally makes his presence felt.<br />
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There's no better example of that than 'Scheherazade,' which is not just the name of <i>Men Without Women</i>'s fourth story but also the nickname its narrator, a shut-in, gives to the woman who does his shopping and, for some reason, sleeps with him after almost every delivery. After the sex, she tells Habara stories of her own, and these stories, rather than Habara's, are at the fore of this fiction—yet 'Scheherazade' ends almost mid-sentence, just as the storyteller at its core is about to wrap up her narrative.<br />
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'Kino' is both the main character of the next short and the name of the bar he buys with his share of the savings he and his wife split down the middle after he catches her in the act with another man. Kino's bar-tending business is slow going at first, but then a grey cat slips in, and a man starts to visit. Of course there's more to this man than meets the eye—and more to the cat, at that—but Murakami is more interested in depicting the tedious scene Kino glimpses through a window into an anonymous office:<br />
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From morning till evening, he watched people working there. Here and there the blinds were drawn and he could only catch fragmentary glimpses of what went on, and he had no idea what kind of business it was. Men in ties would pop in and out, while women tapped away at computer keyboards, answered the phone, filed documents. Not exactly the sort of scene to draw one's interest. (p.182)</blockquote>
Yet it seems exactly the sort of scene that fascinates Murakami. "It seemed his intention was to leave me stuck somewhere in the middle, dangling between knowledge and ignorance. But why? To get me thinking about something? Like <i>what</i>?" (p.217)<br />
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An inversion of Kafka's Metamorphosis about a beetle who wakes up one day as a man, 'Samsa in Love' is <i>Men Without Women</i>'s most outwardly speculative story, but as I wrote in <a href="http://www.tor.com/2014/01/14/short-fiction-spotlight-murakamis-metamorphosis/" target="_blank">this edition of the Short Fiction Spotlight</a>: "What tends to make Murakami’s work resonate is the incremental accretion of meaning over the course of his bizarre narratives, and though there is room in the short story form for this building sense of significance, at times 'Samsa in Love' can be seen to meander almost meaninglessly," squandering its opportunity to strike a chord in the process.<br />
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Men Without Women's final, self-titled story is the shortest of the seven: a monologue of sorts about a married man who receives a phone call one evening to inform him of the suicide of a previous sweetheart—the third of his exes to have ended their lives in this startling fashion. In the course of considering all that he's lost, the nameless narrator of 'Men Without Women' laments the same lack of focus that cripples this collection:<br />
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I'm not exactly sure what I'm trying to say here. Maybe I'm trying to write about essence, rather than the truth. But writing about an essence that isn't true is like trying to rendezvous with someone on the dark side of the moon. It's dim and devoid of landmarks. And way too big. (p.221)</blockquote>
Way to big for a little book like this, that is. Though it has its Murakami moments—a few fragrant flowers struggling to push through the kudzu, if you'll permit me to fiddle with the author's own imagery—<i>Men Without Women </i>feels to this reader like a garden in desperate need of weeding.<br />
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<b>Men Without Women</b></div>
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by Haruki Murakami</div>
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UK Publication: May 2017, Harvill Secker</div>
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US Publication: May 2017, Knopf</div>
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<i>Recommended and Related Reading</i></div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Colorless-Tsukuru-Tazaki-Years-Pilgrimage/dp/0099590379/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=6a01050dd99a33526c917d9764422f15" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_akHQn7hfHQ/WQnOmrRRKqI/AAAAAAAAPl4/2wqYRm0TyRY8EwJIOSbAXVZ9LEUgKPR4ACLcB/s200/colorlessyears-pb.jpg" width="129" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Book-Tokyo-Short-Fiction-Reading/dp/1905583575/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=4051bc28ebe819d081506c37da59e86b" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FUV1EbPEICY/WQsVmHz1o9I/AAAAAAAAPmQ/f6qc4fTM7FEBuLytnBw1ctpJZkyAI9uAgCLcB/s200/bookoftokyo.jpg" width="128" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/4-3-2-Paul-Auster/dp/0571324622/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1493898589&sr=8-1&keywords=paul+auster&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=fad5b78c8e08b42ed1b3819be08f9ca1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dD7fGWrGM3U/WQsVnALXSmI/AAAAAAAAPmU/SZDHWmsY0ZgdhV93SpH6C2Wj30V3xhVSwCLcB/s200/4321.jpg" width="131" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-29326188751122656942017-05-18T14:00:00.001+01:002017-05-18T14:00:23.130+01:00Book Review | City of Miracles by Robert Jackson Bennett<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Z31lNarrYTM/WOte8Q-I4GI/AAAAAAAAPiI/6v38FVdX7DIz0_kg0ZvF0PxblMa3uCoTQCLcB/s1600/City-of-Miracles-by-Robert-Jackson-Bennett-UK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Z31lNarrYTM/WOte8Q-I4GI/AAAAAAAAPiI/6v38FVdX7DIz0_kg0ZvF0PxblMa3uCoTQCLcB/s320/City-of-Miracles-by-Robert-Jackson-Bennett-UK.jpg" width="211" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uAEeFs8Mii8/WOte8YR3ZfI/AAAAAAAAPiM/oKq_2komXuI3fVnWrcn6L_UXEt5jw6SxACLcB/s1600/City-of-Miracles-by-Robert-Jackson-Bennett-US.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-uAEeFs8Mii8/WOte8YR3ZfI/AAAAAAAAPiM/oKq_2komXuI3fVnWrcn6L_UXEt5jw6SxACLcB/s320/City-of-Miracles-by-Robert-Jackson-Bennett-US.jpg" width="207" /></a></div>
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<i>Revenge. It’s something Sigrud je Harkvaldsson is very, very good at. Maybe the only thing. </i></div>
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<i>So when he learns that his oldest friend and ally, former Prime Minister Shara Komayd, has been assassinated, he knows exactly what to do—and that no mortal force can stop him from meting out the suffering Shara’s killers deserve. </i></div>
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<i>Yet as Sigrud pursues his quarry with his customary terrifying efficiency, he begins to fear that this battle is an unwinnable one. Because discovering the truth behind Shara’s death will require him to take up arms in a secret, decades-long war, face down an angry young god, and unravel the last mysteries of Bulikov, the city of miracles itself. And—perhaps most daunting of all—finally face the truth about his own cursed existence.</i></div>
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The Divine Cities series comes full circle in <i>City of Miracles</i>, a positively action-packed fantasy about getting your own back. But revenge is not just what the hardy anti-hero at its heart is after: revenge is also what its both figuratively and literally tortured villain is interested in.<br />
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This child of the night, who shall not be named because to identify him is to invite his wickedness in, is not a divinity like the other antagonists of Robert Jackson Bennett's incomparable narrative—at least, not quite. He's really just an angsty adolescent; a "selfish kid who thinks his misfortunes are bigger than everyone else's" and has decided to take his frustrations out on everyone around him.<br />
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Unfortunately for everyone around him, this angsty adolescent just so happens to be the spawn of a few fallen gods. To wit, he has a domain—the dark—and some of his mother and father's magic. <i>City of Miracles </i>begins with him flexing his miraculous muscles: by outfitting an assassin to slaughter the former Prime Minister—and the first of this spectacular saga's protagonists—Ashara Komayd.<br />
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When news of Shara's shocking death reaches a remote logging range beyond Bulikov, every man around the campfire is taken aback, but only one among them takes it personally. He is <i>City of Miracles</i>' new central perspective, and whilst he hasn't played this role before, he's a figure folks who've followed this fiction will be intimately familiar with; a fan-favourite character, in fact, who has flitted around its fringes but never before been at its fore. That's right, readers: the focus of Bennett's barnstorming finale is finally on Shara's right-hand man, the Dreyling she saved who has saved her so often since. Good to see you again, Sigrud!<br />
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Following the death of his daughter in <i>City of Blades</i>, not to mention the mindless massacre that followed, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson has been in exile, none too patiently awaiting the day when Shara can at last bring him back into action. But with his dearest friend so dramatically departed, what does he have left to live for? Nothing, initially, but a need to make her murderer pay.<br />
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He does so summarily, racking up a rather improbable body count in the process. As a member of the supporting cast who crosses his fiery path puts it: "You've lost none of your subtlety, Sigrud."<br />
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But whilst raining hell on everyone who had a hand or even a hair in Shara's assassination, our daring Dreyling learns about a scheme that gives him a reason to keep on keeping on. In short, "someone is targeting Shara's adopted daughter" Tatyana, and having failed to save his last loved one, the least he can do, he reasons, is ensure that this small part of her legacy lives on.<br />
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To do what needs doing, he has to go to Ghaladesh. "Ghaladesh, the capital of Saypur, the richest, most well-protected city in the world. The place with perhaps the most security in the civilised nations—and thus the place that he, a fugitive from Saypur's justice, is most likely to be caught, imprisoned, tortured, and possibly—or probably—executed."<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Sigrud does wonder "if he has it in him to do this. It's been years since he worked as an operative," after all. "Perhaps this is foolish. Perhaps he's an old dog insisting he can still perform old tricks." But this old dog is on the cusp of discovering something about himself that stands to recast his tragic past; something that allows the author to develop his series' most stalwart character into more than the man of action he has frequently been.<br />
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It's a bit of an easy out, if I'm honest, but it serves to present Sigrud at his most solicitous, his most human, here at the end of Bennett's series. He's clearly a hero, and he-who-we-agreed-not-to-name is every inch the villain. The hellish things that latter has been put through are stirring to start, but what sympathy we might have felt for him is roundly rebuffed by the sheer unreason of his self-serving, world-ending rebellion. That said, these teenage tendendies don't stop <i>City of Miracles</i>' big bad from being deeply creepy:<br />
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"The past is the past. It's fixed, unchangeable, unattainable. But our enemy... he's elastic. <i>Very </i>expansive, so to speak. His domain represents something primitive, something primal. The long night, the first night. The fear you feel when you're all alone in your house, and all the rooms feel so dark? That's <i>him</i>. That's him leaking into your frail little bit of civilisation, that first, dangerous night mankind spent out under the skies."</blockquote>
<i>City of Miracles </i>develops The Divine Cities' secondary world as well. Much as Mark Charan Newton did in his underrated Legends of the Red Sun series, Bennett has steered each addition to his trilogy towards an unexplored shore, and it's to his credit that he attempts to differentiate Ghaladesh from the various environs we've been to previously:<br />
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Bulikov was a schizophrenic, crumbling mess. Voortyashtan was hardly more than a savage outpost, and Ahanashtan was built specifically to serve the shipping channel, creating a half-industrial, half-urbane hybrid of a city. </blockquote>
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But Ghaladesh is different. Ghaladesh, unlike all the other cities [Sigrud has] ever seen, is <i>intentional</i>. </blockquote>
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You can see it when you walk from block to block. From the graceful wooden posts that so many houses sit on to the drains in the street to the curves of the elevated train, you can see how this was not just done well but done just—<i>so</i>. Ghaladesh, he sees, is a city of engineers, a city of thinkers, a city of people who do not act rashly.</blockquote>
But <i>City of Miracles </i>is, above all else, an ending, and Bennett is evidently determined to make it one to remember, so at the same time as spinning a yarn that satisfactorily caps the saga's overarching narrative, he had a lot of loose ends to address, and any number of character arcs to conclude. All this he handles marvellously, such that The Divine Cities doesn't just feel finished after its last act, it feels <i>complete</i>. Alas, the pattern Bennett had established in terms of his settings falls victim to this last book's busyness. We end up spending so little time in Ghaladesh, and almost none simply soaking it in, that it, in the end, is faint and forgettable where its predecessors were deftly drawn and memorable.<br />
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That's not the end of the world, though, because the momentum that this book accumulates over its course, like a wrecking ball raised higher and higher above the wall it's to demolish, allows <i>City of Miracles</i> to circle back to where Bennett's series began—and in the company of some of the same souls who were there in those days—in time for "one big push" towards an ending as tremendous as it is affecting.<br />
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That "all things must end" doesn't make it any easier to bid goodbye to those things, but the fact that this sequence—this breathtaking last battle between gods and monsters with mortals such as us stuck in the middle of it—strikes the same balance between the mundane and the majestic that has been a strength of this series from the first... that's as fitting a farewell to The Divine Cities as any I can imagine.<br />
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<b>City of Miracles</b></div>
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by Robert Jackson Bennett</div>
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UK Publication: April 2017, Jo Fletcher</div>
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US Publication: April 2017, Broadway</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-14070793206733442622017-05-16T14:00:00.000+01:002017-05-16T14:00:08.132+01:00Book Review | The Boy on the Bridge by M. R. Carey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Once upon a time, in a land blighted by terror, there was a very clever boy.</i></div>
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<i>The people thought the boy could save them, so they opened their gates and sent him out into the world.</i></div>
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<i>To where the monsters lived...</i></div>
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Whether it's a character that captures us or a narrative that enraptures us, a situation that speaks to something unspoken or a conflict that builds on something broken—who can say, on this or any other day, what makes a book a bestseller? The quality of a given novel has next to nothing to do with its success on store shelves, that's for sure. Plenty of bad books have shifted millions, and many more deserving efforts have come and gone to no such notice. It's a blessing, then, when a truly wonderful work of fiction becomes a bestseller... but it can also be a burden.<br />
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<i>The Girl With all the Gifts </i>was <a href="http://www.tor.com/2014/05/31/book-review-the-girl-with-all-the-gifts-m-r-carey-us-release/" target="_blank">probably the best zombie novel</a> to have been released in recent years, and it sold hella well—well enough to spawn a movie that was also <a href="http://www.tor.com/2017/02/27/the-girl-with-all-the-gifts-movie-review/" target="_blank">pretty swell</a>. But while the next book to bear M. R. Carey's name was <a href="http://www.tor.com/2015/11/16/the-girl-with-all-the-guilt-fellside-by-m-r-carey/" target="_blank">a dark delight in its own right</a>, <i>Fellside</i> didn't catch on in the same way, I'm afraid.<br />
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To wit, I wasn't entirely surprised when I heard that Carey's new novel was a sidequel of sorts to <i>The Girl With all the Gifts</i>. I was, however, concerned; concerned that setting a second story in the same world that Melanie and Miss Justineau so wholly inhabited ran the risk of diminishing their devastating adventures. Happily, <i>The Boy on the Bridge </i>bears its burden brilliantly, and I can only hope it's as blessed by the book-buying public as its predecessor.<br />
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It is, admittedly, a little derivative. And I don't just mean that it tugs on many of the same heartstrings <i>The Girl With all the Gifts </i>did—though it does, ultimately: <i>The Boy on the Bridge </i>is an equally bleak book, and equally beautiful, too. But that's not it either. I'm talking about the plot, which is, at least initially, almost a mirror image of its predecessor's: it's an apocalyptic road story about the relationship between a teacher and her unusual student.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Instead of Miss Justineau, <i>The Boy on the Bridge </i>gives us Dr Samrina Khan, an optimistic epidemiologist:<br />
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Khan maintains a stubborn belief in the future—in the fact that there is going to be one—but sometimes the present daunts and defeats her. There used to be a world in which things made some kind of sense, had some kind of permanence. But the human race put that world down somewhere, left it carelessly behind, and now nobody can find it again or reconstitute it. Entropy is increasing. In her own affairs, too. (pp.31-32)</blockquote>
Rina is one of twelve members of a desperate expedition out of Beacon, the last bastion of humanity in a Great Britain already ravaged by a virus that turned everyone and their mothers' brothers into hungries—so-called because of their insatiable appetite for the very freshest flesh. "Recent events [such as] the collapse of global civilisation and the near-extinction of the human species" (p.4) mean that Rina and the men and women with her have a pivotal mission: to retrace the trail of "their dead predecessors" who, before they were ambushed by gangs of scavengers, scattered caches of Cordyceps cultures in a miscellany of climates and conditions, the better to see whether these various vectors have any impact on the aforementioned pathogen.<br />
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The hope is that one of the recovered caches will contain the crucial element of a cure, and if any member of the expedition is in a position to put the pieces of this puzzle together, it's Rina's charge, Stephen Reaves. As the sole survivor of an outbreak that left him orphaned, it's no wonder that he works differently than most folks. "The general feeling now is that Greaves is on the autistic spectrum, but how much of his weirdness is down to his brain's basic wiring and how much of it is a trauma artefact? [...] It's an academic question, but it's got real-world consequences" (p.83) now that, thanks to teacher, he's on Rosie's short roster.<br />
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Rosie, by the by, is the Rosalind Franklin, the rolling refuge last glimpsed in <i>The Girl With all the Gifts</i>:<br />
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By any name, Rosie is the bastard child of an articulated lorry and a Chieftain tank. Her front end is adorned with a V-shaped steel battering ram designed to function like a cow-catcher on an ancient steam train. On her roof, a field pounder and a flamethrower share a single broad turret. Inch-thick plate sheathes her sides, and broad black treads her underbelly. There is nothing in this post-lapsarian world that she can't roll over, burn through or blow the hell apart. (p.32)</blockquote>
Nothing other than the problems of the twelve people riding her, right? And no one more so, given how big a deal regulations have become in Rosie's tight confines, than Rina's regulation-breaking pregnancy. There's also the fact that the expedition has two commanders who are working at cross purposes, compromising not just the individuals aboard Rosie but a mission that might be all that stands between humanity's survival and its imminent extinction—a mission that only starts to feel real when Stephen chances upon some children that are neither human nor hungry and realises they might be the key to a cure:<br />
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The prospect of a cure for the hungry pathogen has become remote. Cordyceps grows into and through nerve tissue so quickly that there is no way of eradicating it without destroying the host's nervous system. A 'cure' like that might get you a clean bill of health but you'd be a quadriplegic vegetable. But if Greaves is right about the children—and if he gets some samples to work with—he might be able to produce a vaccine that mediates or even negates the pathogen's effects. (p.109)</blockquote>
Thus, the fate of the human race is seemingly at stake, but as a prequel, primarily, <i>The Boy on the Bridge</i> is beholden to the cruel and unusual twists of <i>The Girl With All the Gifts</i>. Anyone who knows how that story unfolds—as anyone reading this book should do, to be sure—already knows what happens to humanity writ large<i>. </i>But what about humanity writ little? What about Stephen and Rina and her unborn baby? That's a whole other story. That, indeed, is <i>The Boy on The Bridge</i>'s story: a more emotional affair than <i>The Girl With all the Gifts </i>from the first.<br />
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Carey's interest in the intimate as opposed to the abstract of a conditional cure for Cordyceps is what give <i>The Boy on the Bridge </i>wings. Able to take centre stage, its central characters shine as bright as you might like, and their relationship takes flight. Yet it's tested, too. This is the end of the world, after all. Difficult things must be done, and a few little lies are the least of it. Weighty betrayals abound, and in time, this tale takes in several truly tragic sacrifices. "But the logic that is operating here is not a simple, linear one. Guilt and innocence are tangled up in each other, elided," (pp.265-266) making it that much harder for us to judge any one character's actions too harshly.<br />
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There will of course be those who dismiss Carey's new novel as opportunistic—as a surplus-to-requirements sidequel written not out of narrative necessity, but because it's almost certain to sell. And it's true that if you want to go back to the well, you had better have a worthwhile tale to tell: something of substantial value to add to a story so boldly told. <i>The Boy on the Bridge </i>does, ultimately. Despite a plot that hones too closely to <i>The Girl With all the Gifts</i>'<i> </i>to begin with, by leaving aside the large to focus on the little, <i>The Boy on the Bridge </i>eventually earns out its sterling heritage. It's a worthy successor to one of the best zombie novels in memory.<br />
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<b>The Boy on the Bridge</b></div>
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by M. R. Carey</div>
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UK & US Publication: May 2017, Orbit</div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Girl-All-Gifts-M-Carey/dp/0356500152/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1493292797&sr=8-1&keywords=girl+all+gifts+carey&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=0d8418d9e427242833da1f17211c66b5" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-l7qW5QW0QVE/WQHWam3CeNI/AAAAAAAAPk8/XJ1sZKwuoockPcH8MsbT__LULsXIY9BjQCLcB/s200/girlwithallthegifts.jpg" width="126" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Borne-Jeff-VanderMeer/dp/0374115249/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1493292817&sr=8-1&keywords=borne+vandermeer&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=ff80bc435e0a65c5a554c9e3f3989471" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-XUwXPf-mDKk/WQHWiPnAbmI/AAAAAAAAPlA/Xk1dYm4VDwAecZfzsAmDxh4P6Jx9pQ6bACLcB/s200/Borne-by-Jeff-VanderMeer-UK.jpg" width="121" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Day-Claire-North/dp/0356507343/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=1fef37f6fa090b960eb6e4fc5f0b2500" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w3nF55QqoQg/WQHWxhl7RTI/AAAAAAAAPlE/LllTykoPEToPsO4gfKKm-MT0ve31U8XYwCLcB/s200/The-End-of-the-Day-by-Claire-North.jpg" width="131" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-55980232628343499192017-05-10T14:00:00.000+01:002017-05-10T14:00:09.606+01:00Book Review | Borne by Jeff VanderMeer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K9KY6847H8Y/WP22R1NbbLI/AAAAAAAAPkM/P56q5XkiZWsuNa6o8j__IeUc84fDma85ACLcB/s1600/Borne-by-Jeff-VanderMeer-UK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-K9KY6847H8Y/WP22R1NbbLI/AAAAAAAAPkM/P56q5XkiZWsuNa6o8j__IeUc84fDma85ACLcB/s320/Borne-by-Jeff-VanderMeer-UK.jpg" width="194" /></a><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q_m5pF3U6yA/WP22R6AffYI/AAAAAAAAPkI/BxTJfY6ny0oi4xx7hD1pNKPya466Yh-wgCLcB/s1600/Borne-by-Jeff-VanderMeer-US.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Q_m5pF3U6yA/WP22R6AffYI/AAAAAAAAPkI/BxTJfY6ny0oi4xx7hD1pNKPya466Yh-wgCLcB/s320/Borne-by-Jeff-VanderMeer-US.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<i>“Am I a person or a weapon?” Borne asks Rachel, in extremis.</i></div>
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<i>“Yes, you are a person,” Rachel tells him. “But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.”</i></div>
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<i>A ruined city of the future lives in fear of a despotic, gigantic flying bear, driven mad by the tortures inflicted on him by the Company, a mysterious biotech firm. A scavenger, Rachel, finds a creature entangled in his fur. She names it Borne.</i></div>
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<i>At first, Borne looks like nothing at all―a green lump that might be a discard from the Company. But he reminds Rachel of her homeland, an island nation long lost to rising seas, and she prevents her lover, Wick, from rendering down Borne as raw genetic material for the special kind of drugs he sells.</i></div>
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<i>But nothing is quite the way it seems: not the past, not the present, not the future. If Wick is hiding secrets, so is Rachel―and Borne most of all. What Rachel finds hidden deep within the Company will change everything and everyone. There, lost and forgotten things have lingered and grown. What they have grown into is mighty indeed.</i></div>
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Following his triumphant trek through Area X in the cerebral Southern Reach series, Jeff VanderMeer mounts a more modest yet no less affecting expedition into uncharted territory by way of <i>Borne</i>, a surprisingly beautiful book about a blob which behaves like a boy and the broken woman who takes him in.<br />
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Her name is Rachel, and when she was little, she "wanted to be a writer, or at least something other than a refugee. Not a trap-maker. Not a scavenger. Not a killer." (p.37) But we are what the world makes us, and no poxy author would have lasted long in the world in which this novel's narrator was raised:<br />
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Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world. (p.37)</blockquote>
There is hope even in this haunted hellscape, however, and it takes a strange shape, as hope tends to: that of "a hybrid of sea anemone and squid: a sleek vase with rippling colours" (p.6) Rachel finds in the festering fur of a skyscraper-sized flying bear called Mord.<br />
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She brings the titular thing, Borne-to-be, back to the Balcony Cliffs, a broken-down apartment building where she lives and works with Wick, her sometime lover and a secretive biotech beetle dealer who pushes a memory-altering product "as terrible and beautiful and sad and sweet as life itself." (p.7) Out of the gate, Rachel intends to give her purplish prize to him to pick at—but something, the beginning of some instinct, stays her hand. Instead, she places it in her room, and tries to take care of it.<br />
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"This required some experimenting, in part because [she] had never taken care of anyone or anything before," (p.17) but equally because her amorphous mass is a complete mystery. Certainly Wick has never seen its like, and having worked once for the Company, he has seen everything there is to see. To wit, Rachel treats this colourful clump like a plant to start; reclassifies it as an animal after it starts to move around her room; and then, when it shocks her by talking, she takes to behaving around it as she would a baby boy. She talks to him; teaches him; comes, ultimately, to love him—and he her in turn.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>This all happens fast—in a matter of months at most. Rachel's experience is in many ways that of a parent's, albeit with the long years squeezed into brief weeks. Crucially, though, little data is lost in the compression process. VanderMeer's focus on the magical and the miserable moments of motherhood is so fine that by the time Borne is grown, it feels like a life has been lived, and an unbreakable bond formed. Thus, when that bond is broken, and that life almost lost, it is as momentous and as moving as it needs to be in a novel that may feature dizzying grizzlies and biotech-bred beasts but is at bottom about a relationship most sacred.<br />
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That's not to say there aren't some weird and wonderful things happening in the background. "Strange things were flourishing," (p.66) in fact. More bears have joined the monolithic monster that is Mord, and the Magician—another outcast from the Company in direct competition with Wick—is somehow <i>changing </i>the city's children:<br />
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A growing army of acolytes helped make her drugs and protected her territory against Mord and the others; Wick had only his peculiar swimming pool, the bastion of the Balcony Cliffs, a scavenger-woman who could make traps but kept secrets from him, and a creature of unknown potential that he desired to cast out. [...] Worse, the rumoured Mord proxies had finally made their presence known and seemed more bloodthirsty than their progenitor. They knew no rule of law, not even the natural law of sleep. (p.66)</blockquote>
Both Mord's proxies and the Magician's children make moves against the ragtag family that call the Balcony Cliffs base camp, but this aspect of the narrative only really takes centre stage come the cacophonous climax, which boasts a long-in-the-coming confrontation, a couple of great character-based revelations and a truly vast battle made all the more majestic by the relative restraint its author displays elsewhere. Deliberately, I dare say:<br />
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There comes a moment when you witness events so epic you don't know how to place them in the cosmos or in relation to the normal workings of a day. Worse, when these events recur, at an ever greater magnitude, in a cascade of what you have never seen before and do not know how to classify. Troubling because each time you acclimate, you move on, and, if this continues, there is a mundane grandeur to the scale that renders certain events beyond rebuke or judgment, horror or wonder, or even the grasp of history. (p.311)</blockquote>
Happily, despite the presence of a big ol' robot bear, an invisible woman whose gadgets basically make her magic and a talking blob that can in time take on any shape it dares—despite, in other words, the creative freedoms VanderMeer gleefully flexes in this fiction now that his very deliberate and massively taxing trilogy is done—<i>Borne </i>doesn't give us the chance to acclimate to the action, or to the fantastic.<br />
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It has both, of course, but it isn't ever overburdened by either. At heart, <i>Borne </i>is a small story, a sweet story, a sad story; a cunningly punning, playful and flavourful exploration of parenthood more interested in feelings and in fun than fungus. It's definitely one of the weirdest books I've ever read, and it may well be one of the best. Bravo.<br />
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<b>Borne</b></div>
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by Jeff VanderMeer</div>
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UK Publication: May 2017, MCD/FSG</div>
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US Publication: May 2017, Fourth Estate</div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Borne-Jeff-VanderMeer/dp/0008159173/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1493022129&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=5b12abfe8cba8a7c3cbf081a5609096f" target="_blank">Amazon.co.uk</a> / <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Borne-Novel-Jeff-VanderMeer/dp/0374115249/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&fpl=fresh&pd_rd_i=0374115249&pd_rd_r=B1GW9YQB252XBYJVZ6N1&pd_rd_w=ucjIt&pd_rd_wg=wiCp0&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=&pf_rd_r=DVYS8RE0RDS50TXBZMMV&pf_rd_t=36701&pf_rd_p=781f4767-b4d4-466b-8c26-2639359664eb&pf_rd_i=desktop&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-20&linkId=ebdaa9cbd95e636458d78fed3bf4b98c" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780008159177/?a_aid=scotspec" target="_blank">The Book Depository</a></div>
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Or get <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Borne-Jeff-VanderMeer-ebook/dp/B01M4Q8BHV/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1493022129&sr=8-1&keywords=borne+vandermeer&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=2f792f946ae80fcb9682cfae562947f0" target="_blank">the Kindle edition</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Last-Days-New-Paris/dp/1447296540/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=XVE0TDJGPZE60X2XMZC6&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=f9a033b44c02b06521aa4a4f17767024" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-65S35XQXCnY/WP4IBeJniWI/AAAAAAAAPkg/gRnDhXg17g04jNxZjUswm35yVPKQMq59wCLcB/s200/lastdaysofnewparis-uk.jpg" width="131" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Area-Southern-Annihilation-Authority-Acceptance/dp/0374261172/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1493043126&sr=8-1&keywords=area+x&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=ab96ecdba47324e5d4a9520e4b4a813f" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1lbsE08HJSM/WP22TSu7f3I/AAAAAAAAPkQ/rs3GAEakSMg_mQneH4fXa2Xrtyn9EZatgCLcB/s200/areax.jpg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sourdough-Robin-Sloan/dp/0374203105/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1493043087&sr=8-1&keywords=sourdough+sloan&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=3c05ac558773a54cd9b99739d0f4f814" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O7zrx7wU1Zw/WP4IGM1qciI/AAAAAAAAPkk/UuYf3MIJPgcIWWYedlfQSpgcite71uTrACLcB/s200/Sourdough-by-Robin-Sloan.jpg" width="133" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-33103592744528480652017-05-05T14:00:00.000+01:002017-05-05T14:00:26.479+01:00Book Review | Waking Hell by Al Robertson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RcYz_ZYpqbM/WJs9YTrr6mI/AAAAAAAAPa4/7LePQjBWiFUIYChACQSGiocpGzKGUeRfgCLcB/s1600/wakinghell.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RcYz_ZYpqbM/WJs9YTrr6mI/AAAAAAAAPa4/7LePQjBWiFUIYChACQSGiocpGzKGUeRfgCLcB/s400/wakinghell.jpg" width="257" /></a></div>
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<i>Leila Fenech is dead. And so is her brother Dieter. But what's really pissing her off is how he sold his afterlife as part of an insurance scam and left her to pick up the pieces. She wants him back so she can kick his backside from here to the Kuiper Belt.</i></div>
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<i>Station is humanity's last outpost. But this battle-scarred asteroid isn't just for the living. It's also where the dead live on as fetches: digital memories and scraps of personality gathered together and given life. Of a sort.</i></div>
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<i>Leila won't stop searching Station until she's found her brother's fetch—but the sinister Pressure Men are stalking her every move. Clearly Dieter's got himself mixed up in something a whole lot darker than just some scam.</i></div>
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<i>Digging deeper, Leila discovers there's far more than her brother's afterlife at stake. Could it be that humanity's last outpost is on the brink of disaster? Is it too late for even the dead to save it?</i></div>
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On the back of one of the best debuts in recent memory, Al Robertson rounds up a brand new cast of characters for his second successive stop at Station. Absent "the dynamic duo" (p.173) that was Jack and Hugo—respectively "an accountant of the future [and] a psychotic virtual ventriloquist's dummy," in the words of the award-nominated author—<i>Waking Hell </i>isn't as compelling as <i>Crashing Heaven</i>, but between its excellently embellished setting and a narrative that boasts more momentum than most, there are moments when it comes close.<br />
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As of the outset, much has changed on Station, the battle-scarred asteroid where what's left of humanity lives under the purview of a pantheon of corporate gods:<br />
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Two and a half years before [...] Jack Forster, Hugo Fist and Andrea Hui had worked with the Totality to release the dead from semi-sentient slavery. But the Rebirth was just the start of a longer coming of age. It was one thing for ten thousand weaveselves to be reborn as fully self-aware continuations of ended lives—quite another for them to come to terms with that new start, both as individuals and as a group, and understand what to do with it. When Leila stepped out of the sea and into her new, post-mortal life, she became part of that conversation. (p.23)</blockquote>
The hero at the heart of <i>Waking Hell </i>has had to hoe a hard road in the years since her resurrection as a fetch. Initially, those like Leila Fenech were seen as sub-human, to be used and routinely abused by the living before being disposed of, like so much deleted data. The events of <i>Crashing Heaven </i>changed that; now, fetches finally have rights.<br />
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Still, there's resistance, including an organisation of individuals who damn near decimated the dead in an act of technological terrorism that'll stay with Leila to her last day. Luckily for her, she had her brother Dieter—a hacker with a particular fascination for the past—to lean on when the fanatics attacked:<br />
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When the Blood and Flesh plague shattered the deep structures of her memory, completely disordering her sense of herself, Dieter had helped her rebuild. He'd taken her out of the Coffin Drives' convalescence unit and back to his weavespace. Then he'd opened up his own memories of her life to her. They became a template, guiding her as she remade the structures of her past. He'd helped her heal when even the Fetch Counsellor had given up on her. </blockquote>
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Now he needed her just as much as she'd needed him. And she could only watch. (p.14)</blockquote>
She could only watch as he dies, infected from the inside out by an infernal artefact that feels like it fell straight out of <i>Hellraiser</i>—and by design, I dare say. Early on, at least, <i>Waking Hell </i>has a lot in common with a horror novel: it's all unsettling silences and gruesome goings-on, monsters and murders, and beyond these, thar be bees! Bees and some bloody ugly bugs. But for better or for worse, Robertson reverses gears too soon for these potentially interesting elements to have a dramatic impact on the narrative. What <i>Waking Hell </i>is is a solid science fiction sequel, despite the departure of its first act.<br />
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And its second, in a sense. This section is concerned with revenge, because while death is no longer the end in this milieu, Leila learns that for Dieter it will be. Essentially, he's been swindled into signing away the rights to his resurrection, ostensibly so that his sister will be looked after. And financially speaking, she is. Whoever the devil Dieter dealt with is, he's as good as his word. But rather than using the huge sum of money she inherits to live a right nice afterlife, Leila spends it in search of said devil's identity.<br />
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Then, with the help of a few friends—first and foremost a fraud investigator and an amnesiac janitor who aren't nearly as dreary as they seem—she sets out to bring the fight to the being that bastardised her beloved brother. Little does Leila realise that the being already has an army... an army it's planning to aim straight at Station. And as one of her new comrades says, "Of course you've got to look out for the people you love. [...] But if the whole of the rest of the world is in danger, you might have to start thinking a bit bigger." (p.147)<br />
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A bit bigger is actually a decent way of describing <i>Waking Hell </i>as a whole. It doesn't have the personality of <i>Crashing Heaven</i>—although its characters are a relatively rambunctious bunch, only the Caretaker entertains in the way Hugo Fist did, and I'm afraid he's far from front and centre—but it has scope and scale to spare. Nothing less than the fate of our race is at stake, and happily, there's more to humanity than the blasted asteroid Robertson's first novel focused on.<br />
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Leila's race to recover her brother—and, in so doing, save the day—gives us a window into this well-widened world, from the repellent reality underlying the weird and wonderful weavespaces people have created on Station to the scorched surface of the Earth humanity abandoned. And at the same time as casting the core conflict as increasingly crucial, the explosive expansion of <i>Waking Hell</i>'s setting gives its narrative a frisson of the frenetic.<br />
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When I reviewed <i>Crashing Heaven </i>two years or so ago, I remarked that I hadn't a clue what the second of the Station books would look like. Given the devastating denouement of Robertson's dizzying debut, I knew it was destined to be different—but what those differences would be, I could only wait and see. That was enough to excite me. From here, however, it's much easier to conceive of an act three... and that's oddly disappointing.<br />
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An exploration of identity filtered through a revenge fantasy with a humble helping of horror, <i>Waking Hell </i>is fearsome, fast moving and fun—but it's also fairly straightforward, flat where the last book was full, and frankly much less memorable without Hugo Fist, who I really, really missed.<br />
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<b>Waking Hell</b></div>
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by Al Robertson</div>
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UK Publication: October 2016, Gollancz</div>
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US Publication: April 2017, Gollancz</div>
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<i>Recommended and Related Reading</i></div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crashing-Heaven-Station-Al-Robertson/dp/1473203414/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=1HVS1Y9MX2H1PWTHPKJF&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=96134cf0dec69799ac894d22f9394fc7" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kRuR6MSjudk/WJs9g6wQZ3I/AAAAAAAAPa8/UBvjeMtf8EkXyXIlWRsBB3czjo_HvBv9QCLcB/s200/crashingheaven.jpg" width="130" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Altered-Carbon-GOLLANCZ-Richard-Morgan/dp/0575081244/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1486648088&sr=8-1&keywords=altered+carbon&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=222edcf6f18e862cdb8a26623f1495a6" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-O3MkQMu4KHw/WJxy8YFZThI/AAAAAAAAPbU/ayvMzk7W_JUn2MVh588sfRVDx5wlZ0IOwCLcB/s200/alteredcarbon.jpg" width="130" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Revenger-Alastair-Reynolds/dp/0575090537/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=1HVS1Y9MX2H1PWTHPKJF&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=32a68b108b7231f263476679197ab6ef" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VZoammzKgeo/WJxy5nYXmaI/AAAAAAAAPbQ/nhbby1Ia5iUmmQAxHbECSgn-WGBxFxQ9ACLcB/s200/revenger-uk.jpg" width="131" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-28786250215015681862017-05-02T14:32:00.000+01:002017-05-02T14:32:45.961+01:00Book Review | Waking Gods by Sylvian Neuvel<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>As a child, Rose Franklin made an astonishing discovery: a giant metallic hand, buried deep within the earth. As an adult, she’s dedicated her brilliant scientific career to solving the mystery that began that fateful day: why was a titanic robot of unknown origin buried in pieces around the world? Years of investigation have produced intriguing answers—and even more perplexing questions. But the truth is closer than ever before when a second robot, more massive than the first, materializes and lashes out with deadly force.</i></div>
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<i>Now humankind faces a nightmare invasion scenario made real, as more colossal machines touch down across the globe. But Rose and her team at the Earth Defense Corps refuse to surrender. They can turn the tide if they can unlock the last secrets of an advanced alien technology. The greatest weapon humanity wields is knowledge in a do-or-die battle to inherit the Earth... and maybe even the stars.</i></div>
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When she was a girl, Rose Franklin fell on a giant hand made of a metal mined, in the main, from meteorites. Determined to glean what it might mean, the government covered her discovery up and ordered its best and brightest minds to study this unlikely find. Where had the hand come from, how long had it been underground, and could you hit things with it? These were the interests of the military in particular, but decades later, they still couldn't say—not until Rose, now a leading figure in her field, headed up a second investigation.<br />
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In short order, she found that the hand was but a bit of a monolithic machine—a mech, I mean—the body parts of which had been buried around the world. After several international incidents, the rest of the robot was recovered, leaving Rose and her team to assemble Themis. Before long a pair of pilots were walking in it, astonishing the population of the planet in the process. But... well, why? What was it all for?<br />
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If <i>Sleeping Gods </i>left with you questions, know that there are answers to be had in the surprising second installment of The Themis Files. They come thick and fast, in fact.<br />
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In a sense, Sylvain Neuvel's entertaining debut related humanity's coming of age, and now that we're all grown up—now that we know we're not alone in the universe—<i>Waking Gods </i>wants to see how we'll behave in the face of an alien danger.<br />
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Thomas Henry Huxley [...] was a scientist in the early days of modern biology. He said: "The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to recover a little more land." Almost a decade ago, when Themis was revealed to the world, we realised that ocean was a lot bigger than we thought, and what happened this morning in London has made our islet of certainty feel so small that we may wonder if we even have enough room to stand on. (pp.15-16)</blockquote>
What happened this morning in London was the mysterious appearance of a giant metal man, larger even than Rose's robot, that the media comes to call Kronos. Evidently, this isn't the alien invasion of our nightmares—indeed, Kronos doesn't say or do anything for days—and yet, after squabbling over how to react to the mech's admittedly threatening presence, the British Prime Minister bows to public pressure by ordering the army to impose a perimeter around Regent's Park. With tanks.<br />
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This may have been a mistake.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>A fatal mistake, I'm afraid, for Kronos razes much of London in response, including the Houses of Parliament. Themis, then, arrives in England's capital city a little too late to save the day, but it does ultimately manage to destroy Kronos, killing its extraterrestrial pilots in the process. Unfortunately, there's more where Kronos came from. Within weeks, thirteen of these killing machines have materialised in the planet's most densely populated areas, where they start passing a gas that immediately kills millions.<br />
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With the odds stacked against humanity in this fashion, it falls once more to Rose to solve a problem no one else has a clue what to do about. But first, she has her own demons to defeat. Returning readers will recall her death and eventual resurrection in <i>Sleeping Gods</i>. It'd be an understatement to say she's struggled with that curious plot twist since. She doesn't remember dying, but she knows that it happened. To wit, neither we nor she can be sure she is who she believes herself to be. Beyond that there's the fact that—in first finding that hand, then figuring out what to do with it—she may not have saved the human race but doomed it.<br />
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Rose's burden may be bigger than that carried by her romantically entangled pilots, but Kara and Vincent's issues are also of significance: initially only to Kara and Vincent, but eventually to the world as well. Though they remain very much in love after nearly ten years together, and they recognise that that's no mean feat, their relationship is intensely tested when they discover they have a daughter; a daughter that may be the third person on the planet in a position to pilot Themis, humanity's only hope against the alien invaders.<br />
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In this way, <i>Waking Gods </i>is concerned with questions of destiny and identity—appealing themes indeed, if only they had been introduced and developed incrementally. Alas, between the relative brevity of this book—it's every inch a single-sitter—and the epistolary mode of storytelling that <a href="http://www.tor.com/2016/04/21/book-reviews-sleeping-giants-by-sylvain-neuvel/" target="_blank">enriched the mystery</a> of <i>Sleeping Giants</i> but seems something of a stranglehold in this straightforward sequel, neither notion is given the time to shine. So: softly does not do it. Instead, imagine a hammer to the head.<br />
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That blunt force was my most pressing problem with this novel, but I dare say your mileage may vary. <i>Waking Gods </i>is certainly bigger than its predecessor, but they're such different beasts that it'd be a stretch to suggest it's better. Clearly, there's more action than intrigue here... yet the action is exciting, and even, from time to time, enlightening. Imagine <i>The War of the Worlds </i>meets <i>Neon Genesis: Evangelion</i>, both of which popular properties Neuvel doffs his hat at.<br />
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<i>Waking Gods </i>also evinces a focus on narrative over character. But that results in a whole lot of absorbing plot, not to mention a few fascinating answers. We learn the identity of the enigmatic man whose interviews made up so much of The Themis Files the first; the whys and wherefores of Rose Franklin's resurrection are revealed; we even know, by the close of this part of the overarching narrative, what the beings who brought their monolithic machines here are about.<br />
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Truth be told, the whole story comes <i>this </i>close to wrapping up before Neuvel throws a spanner in the works with a surprise last line that positively explodes the premise of the series so far, promising, in the process, that the third book in The Themis Files will be bigger still. Whether or not it'll be better... well, only time will tell—time, and your tolerance of the turns this text takes, because while <i>Waking Gods </i>is a bunch of fun, it doesn't have <span id="goog_1945169128"></span>the subtlety or the smarts or the sense of wonder of book one.<br />
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<b>Waking Gods</b></div>
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by Sylvian Neuvel</div>
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UK Publication: April 2017, Michael Joseph</div>
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US Publication: April 2017, Del Rey</div>
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Or get <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Waking-Gods-Themis-Files-Book-ebook/dp/B01LE6DZOG/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1490698044&sr=8-1-fkmr0&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=0f5a35781f6331654e32d662a453951a" target="_blank">the Kindle edition</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sleeping-Giants-Themis-Files-Book/dp/0718181689/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=289ad5af4672b9ef955b5ae17446b5fe" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7t9uokczQeI/WNpAFyJksLI/AAAAAAAAPgQ/xga6ffpLI9EgVt7cef0WQwxUP4KocKOGQCEw/s200/sleepinggiants-uk.jpg" width="129" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Massacre-Mankind-Authorised-Sequel-Worlds/dp/1473205093/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490698861&sr=1-1&keywords=massacre+mankind&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=691ba70b4f1cffe2e0dcfe2f475880f4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-pNc-GCXVZSw/WNpC2h8QqrI/AAAAAAAAPgc/vHA_Uj3vghYo-3k70QRBORAgMNJBDWOpACLcB/s200/massacreofmankind-uk.jpg" width="130" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Robopocalypse-Robo-1-Daniel-H-Wilson/0857204149/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1490698915&sr=1-1&keywords=robopocalypse&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=c76c3eea0f0f279aae71f04810c42d6c" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-R70te4LkSwo/WNpC1eRw21I/AAAAAAAAPgY/ajPtyXp1YOsuCcFaf7F03GQxNMFJ8Bh2QCLcB/s200/robopocalypse-pb.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-89647002253021671522017-04-18T14:00:00.000+01:002017-04-18T14:00:03.361+01:00Book Review | The End of the Day by Claire North<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Oq152MNxuno/WN5yZ0JwIvI/AAAAAAAAPg4/DHSMTlQ8laMssi15VSzMcZKHNwV1_QSCgCLcB/s1600/The-End-of-the-Day-by-Claire-North.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Oq152MNxuno/WN5yZ0JwIvI/AAAAAAAAPg4/DHSMTlQ8laMssi15VSzMcZKHNwV1_QSCgCLcB/s400/The-End-of-the-Day-by-Claire-North.jpg" width="262" /></a></div>
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<i>At the end of the day, Death visits everyone. Right before that, Charlie does. </i><i>Sometimes he is sent as a courtesy, sometimes as a warning. He never knows which.</i></div>
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<i>You might meet him in a hospital, in a warzone, or at the scene of a traffic accident. </i><i>Then again, you might meet him at the North Pole—he gets everywhere, our Charlie.</i></div>
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<i>Would you shake him by the hand, take the gift he offers, or would you pay no attention to the words he says?</i></div>
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I've fallen for every one of Claire North's novels. <i>The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August</i>, <i>Touch </i>and <i>The Sudden Appearance of Hope </i>have between them broken my heart and expanded my mind. They've thrilled me and they've chilled me. By way of them I've been exposed to new places, new ideas—new ways of being, even. But if I had to level a single criticism against her thoughtful body of work, it would have to be directed at its measure, because whilst her texts have tackled a great many meaningful themes, not least the array of ways we determine identity, I've found North's literary positions a little non-committal.<br />
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That's not the case in <i>The End of the Day</i>. This is a book with something to say; something important, if I may. It's slow to start, and oddly episodic even when the plot has picked up; its characters come and go with next to no notice; it's difficult, and confusing, and contradictory—but that's what life is like, right? And the messy, maddening, magical gift of life we've all been given, that's what <i>The End of the Day </i>deals in: not death... although its principal perspective is on her payroll.<br />
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Like North's other novels, <i>The End of the Day </i>is a high concept travelogue of sorts, but this fiction's frequent flier is Charlie, and Charlie just got hired! He's to be the Harbinger of the foremost of the apocryphal horsemen, of which singular position Death gives this description:<br />
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The Harbinger is a mortal, a bridge between this world and the next. In the old days I used eagles, but people stopped paying attention to them after a while—just birds in he sky—[so] I switched to humans a few thousand years ago. One must move with the times. (pp.12-13)</blockquote>
North doesn't waste any time reinventing the wheel here. Death appears in any number of forms over the course of the story. Sometimes he's male and sometimes she isn't; from time to time she has a scythe; here and there, horns protrude from his lumpen skull. "In all other respects he was the figure she had known would come, the god of the underworld, exactly as the stories said he would be." (p.14)<br />
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Charlie, on the other hand, is just a puny human.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>An awkward sort with precious few friends or family ties, he took this odd job primarily because he believed the travel required would broaden his horizons and help him meet new people. And it definitely does that. But it's also difficult work, and desperately dangerous. Death may just be a phone call away, but Charlie really doesn't want to be a bother, so he's arrested repeatedly and beaten frequently. On any number of occasions he nearly perishes himself, and inevitably, these experiences lead him to ask that age-old question:<br />
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What is Death? It's the oldest question; maybe the very first question ever asked. The dead can't tell us, the dying don't have the language to explain. The only guaranteed part of our lives is the one thing we cannot express, control or command. It comes and are we are... so afraid. Too afraid to look. Too afraid to understand. We think we know, we think we prepare, but we don't. Like a man tied to the train tracks, we see death coming, all our lives we see it coming, and we cannot name that light, but know exactly what it is. To see life, to honour life, you must know that one day it will end, that it has ended, that it will begin again, that all things change, that change is death. These words, too big, too big to understand, too big, too frightening, and so we ask... (p.382)</blockquote>
Asking is all North has done in her novels till now—and there's value in that: in open-ended questioning. But here, at last, in <i>The End of the Day</i>, she ventures an answer. And the answer, at least initially, is simpler than you'd think. What, then, is death? Why, it's life! "Life, yes, as I said. When you are Harbinger of Death, you go before, and before there is death, there is life. You go to greet and honour the living. It would be ridiculous, obscene even, if you didn't." (p.118)<br />
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But life, human life, is, as Charlie learns—maybe a little too late—not the precious prize he once believed it to be. In going before, in dutifully delivering gifts of significance to those on their last legs, he is ultimately exposed to such horror and hatred that he becomes haunted by his own humanity. Where once he saw beauty and truth and football and music, "now I look and all I hear is the beating of the drums and all I see is a world in which to not be one of us is to be something else. The scientist was right, reason is dead; the dream is dead; <i>humanity </i>has changed into something new and it is brutal. It is ugly. Life is ugly. And it is obscene. And I look. And all I see is you." (p.394)<br />
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It's characteristically contemplative, yes, and at points disarmingly disjointed, but without giving too much away, <i>The End of the Day</i> is a brilliantly original and abusively amusing book that'll make you angry at humanity at the same time as reminding readers such as we why life is worth living. Equal parts protest novel and speculative testament, it charts a new path for Claire North as a novelist—and though there may be bumps in the road less travelled she's intent on taking, I can't wait to see where it, in turn, takes us.<br />
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<b>The End of the Day</b></div>
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by Claire North</div>
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UK Publication: April 2017, Orbit</div>
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US Publication: April 2017, Redhook</div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Day-Claire-North-x/dp/0356507343/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1490973216&sr=8-1&keywords=The+End+of+the+Day+by+Claire+North&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=3bd49043c624384f25ae5b877365f09d" target="_blank">Amazon.co.uk</a> / <a href="https://www.amazon.com/End-Day-Claire-North/dp/0316316741/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1490973218&sr=8-1&keywords=The+End+of+the+Day+by+Claire+North&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-20&linkId=33b5f57c071ef3400b830496e7117371" target="_blank">Amazon.com</a></div>
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<a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/book/9780356507347/?a_aid=scotspec" target="_blank">The Book Depository</a></div>
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Or get <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/End-Day-Claire-North-ebook/dp/B01LZXT47G/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1490973216&sr=8-1&keywords=The+End+of+the+Day+by+Claire+North&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=ee6f55f494508a654f218bb309347f1b" target="_blank">the Kindle edition</a></div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Touch-Claire-North/dp/0356504565/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=DMMPEQ5S61DT0JADAZ3P&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=bfb55f7123fcac2fc466028097d88bf4" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JJCC619FPtc/WN5z7rpxi-I/AAAAAAAAPhE/2tPEjUWZVOQf9_2XEh_DGZEi61ejmsAXACLcB/s200/touch-pb.jpg" width="123" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Deluxe-HC-Neil-Gaiman/dp/1401235484/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1490973638&sr=8-1&keywords=death+gaiman&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=b6a9adfe4d6801ab2bdff9383b259e37" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PsZGslDGbfo/WN50BghveqI/AAAAAAAAPhM/e5WgB8Z9c68NQIo0PsoO2D5N2nqbHV0iQCLcB/s200/deathdeluxe.jpg" width="140" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Life-After-Kate-Atkinson/dp/0552776637/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1490973650&sr=8-1&keywords=life+after+life&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=b934785da32a62c90df6be8795d61481" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YwauneVPvZo/WN5z9DhmDVI/AAAAAAAAPhI/cggbnPCafvENMoK07-aOmr5YkCgM3CaBwCLcB/s200/lifeafterlife-pb.jpg" width="137" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-14025202922020557062017-04-11T14:00:00.001+01:002017-04-11T14:00:18.362+01:00Book Review | The House of Binding Thorns by Aliette de Bodard<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>As the city rebuilds from the onslaught of sorcery that nearly destroyed it, the great Houses of Paris, ruled by Fallen angels, still contest one another for control over the capital.</i></div>
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<i>House Silverspires was once the most powerful, but just as it sought to rise again, an ancient evil brought it low. Phillippe, an immortal who escaped the carnage, has a singular goal—to resurrect someone he lost. But the cost of such magic might be more than he can bear.</i></div>
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<i>In House Hawthorn, Madeleine the alchemist has had her addiction to angel essence savagely broken. Struggling to live on, she is forced on a perilous diplomatic mission to the underwater dragon kingdom—and finds herself in the midst of intrigues that have already caused one previous emissary to mysteriously disappear....</i></div>
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The second Dominion of the Fallen novel sees Aliette de Bodard return to the city of down-on-their-luck divinities she depicted so delicately in <i>The House of Shattered Wings </i>in the company of a cast of characters that were in the background of book one. In that sense it's a sequel, however <i>The House of Binding Thorns </i>stands as a striking example of a story that both stands alone <i>and </i>expands.<br />
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Welcome, then—or welcome back, perhaps—to the capital of France after the collapse. Some sixty years on from "the cataclysm that had devastated Paris, reducing monuments to blackened rubble, turning the Seine dark with the dangerous residues of spells, and leaving booby traps that still hadn't vanished," the angels who fell from heaven on that dark day have organised themselves into powerful houses, very much in the mode of the mafia. Indeed, de Bodard doubles down on that extended metaphor in <i>The House of Binding Thorns</i>, in that its narrative is driven by drug trafficking and an addict on the road to recovery is its principle perspective.<br />
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But the drug doing the damage in postwar Paris is no conventional concoction of chemicals. It is, instead, angel essence: the magic-amplifying fibre of the Fallen. It is "the promise of pleasure, of power," and power is what every mob boss wants, what every mob boss will do anything to get...<br />
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Asmodeus is just such a soul, as the head of House Hawthorn: a "brash statement of power" beside the "genteel, quiet, decaying thing" that is House Silverspires. "Silverspires had been Hawthorn's enemy," had kept it in check, "but the events of seven months ago"—so cannily chronicled in <i>The House of Shattered Wings</i>—"had left them bloodless and in ruins, barely capable of being a power in postwar Paris, much less a threat."<br />
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With Hawthorn high on its triumph, every other House is battening down the hatches. But though the ex-angel Asmodeus' organisation appears unequaled, in reality, it too is a ruin. "The House might look grand and magnificent, but it was like the rest of the city: barely hanging on to normality, struggling to maintain itself against decay." Mold and char and rot are rife in the Dominion of the Fallen novels, giving the series a certain sickening stench, as of something spoiled. That said, there are also heady hints of what was: a beautiful world, all orange blossom and eau de bergamot.<br />
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And as above, so below. Literally, in this instance, for under the River Seine, another kingdom cometh. "Legends had come to life in this city, in this place. Tales that had always been distant dreams," of angels, magic—and now dragons, or rather <i>Rong</i>.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>The Rong have lived in the Seine for centuries, little interested in the puny affairs of humans, but now they face a pair of problems that have led them to look for outside assistance: an epidemic of angel essence addiction and a rising tide of rebellious sentiment. And when you have to hire help, best to get the best—thus the Rong have reached out to Hawthorn. "No one in the kingdom really liked the idea of the alliance, or trusted Hawthorn to respect it, but there wasn't much choice. They were too hard-pressed."<br />
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Asmodeus' answer is to dispatch, among others, the alchemist and ex-addict Madeleine to talk terms, as well as investigate the fate of the last delegate Hawthorn sent under the Seine. Having "spent twenty years cloistered in her laboratory, putting together artifacts and drugging herself on angel essence, waiting for the death she'd been running away from to claim her," Madeleine has a chance to redeem herself here, in Asmodeus' eyes and her own—but only if she can keep clean.<br />
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Thuan's perspective is in a sense the inverse of Madeleine's chapters. He's a dragon spy embedded in Hawthorn, working to uncover any connections that House has to the prevalence of angel essence in his heretofore hidden kingdom. <i>The House of Binding Thorns </i>also treats us to some time with Philippe, a Silverspires survivor working now as a doctor of sorts, determined to resurrect his late lover—this series' last central character:<br />
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He wanted no part of House politics. He wanted no Fallen magic. And, above all, he wanted to stay away from Hawthorn and Asmodeus. But in the end, he owed Isabelle something he could never return, and all his unbending principles had ever brought was death.</blockquote>
Middle volumes like this—novels that are neither beginnings nor endings—are so often a mess of narrative half-measures, static settings and incomplete character arcs that they've become a bit of a bug-bear of mine. There's a balance to be struck, I believe, between the busywork of preparing your pieces for play, and the telling of a tale worth telling. I dare say it's a delicate balance; a knife edge, if you'll permit me to pilfer that old image: sharp enough to slice and so narrow that many authors fall off in the process of picking their way across. Happily, de Bodard does so with complete confidence.<br />
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Rather than distracting readers with dramatic shenanigans before roundly restoring the status quo, <i>The House of Binding Thorns </i>incrementally advances the series' larger narrative at the same time as relating a perfectly satisfying and self-contained story about one House's attempts to defend against the devils at the door. Similarly, though several previous players reappear, their development doesn't seem stunted, in no small part because de Bodard's foremost focus is on a few new faces, each of whom she has such leeway with that they can be fundamentally affected by events. The Dominion of the Fallen's almost anthological approach also allows the author to upsize an already impressive setting, leading to a world that feels leaps and bounds bigger than before, but no less essential.<br />
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That said, "there's nothing here that will ever shake the foundations of the world. Nothing large or earth-shattering. But nothing here shallow, or meaningless, either," so although <i>The House of Binding Thorns </i>isn't, in the main, as engrossing as <i>The House of Shattered Wings</i> was, it is truly beautifully balanced: between new and old, birth and death, beauty and ugliness, inside and outside, beginning and, yes, ending. It walks the line, and walks it fine.<br />
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<b>The House of Binding Thorns</b><br />
by Aliette de Bodard</div>
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UK Publication: April 2017, Gollancz<br />
US Publication: April 2017, Ace</div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/House-Shattered-Wings-Aliette-Bodard/147321257X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CM9MRBC5MT9G6TNEKBPZ&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=786c289fd54fce01177d01689b390713" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rEBnF7WmTVY/WMkoUfVjiZI/AAAAAAAAPeI/APzNHG74Sp0fwtJm-DPDfnJyYabSTIqmQCLcB/s200/shatteredwings-pb.jpg" width="129" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Inheritance-Trilogy-N-K-Jemisin/dp/0316334006/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1489578014&sr=1-16&keywords=jemisin&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=930c0625a4475bd45e406e3dda18de18" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g4jWLXHw0wU/WMkoV6HPMKI/AAAAAAAAPeM/Xsann0YV5qst4N8cBBLgtYVU2j-7xXEXwCLcB/s200/inheritancetrilogy.jpg" width="133" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/City-Blades-Divine-Cities-Book/dp/1848669593/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1489578177&sr=1-1&keywords=city+of+blades&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=4e938d5011438e3f736c394c6f30a546" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gO3w1-d49lA/WMkogo2yffI/AAAAAAAAPeQ/XA_njfiZsh48PyVzNwAotkyDlqAzrz4jgCLcB/s200/cityofblades-uk.jpg" width="130" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-26842884548809565442017-04-05T14:00:00.000+01:002017-04-05T14:00:08.203+01:00Book Review | Luna: Wolf Moon by Ian McDonald<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gw4z4JNXyAk/WNE2-6Ko6tI/AAAAAAAAPfQ/jvVZCAC7w5w5KAssx4OmspkpitTjaIMCwCLcB/s1600/wolfmoon-uk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gw4z4JNXyAk/WNE2-6Ko6tI/AAAAAAAAPfQ/jvVZCAC7w5w5KAssx4OmspkpitTjaIMCwCLcB/s320/wolfmoon-uk.jpg" width="209" /></a><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KVf_2r-BtMo/WNE2-m1nJRI/AAAAAAAAPfM/PdKLTHS2b0YoJVt9g6Bu_2Q1OsuOQeYawCLcB/s1600/wolfmoon-us.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KVf_2r-BtMo/WNE2-m1nJRI/AAAAAAAAPfM/PdKLTHS2b0YoJVt9g6Bu_2Q1OsuOQeYawCLcB/s320/wolfmoon-us.jpeg" width="210" /></a></div>
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<i>A Dragon is dead.</i></div>
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<i>Corta Helio, one of the five family corporations that rule the Moon, has fallen. Its riches are divided up among its many enemies, its survivors scattered. Eighteen months have passed.</i></div>
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<i>The remaining Helio children, Lucasinho and Luna, are under the protection of the powerful Asamoahs, while Robson, still reeling from witnessing his parent's violent deaths, is now a ward—virtually a hostage—of Mackenzie Metals. And the last appointed heir, Lucas, has vanished of the surface of the moon.</i></div>
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<i>Only Lady Sun, dowager of Taiyang, suspects that Lucas Corta is not dead, and more to the point—that he is still a major player in the game. After all, Lucas always was the Schemer, and even in death, he would go to any lengths to take back everything and build a new Corta Helio, more powerful than before. But Corta Helio needs allies, and to find them, the fleeing son undertakes an audacious, impossible journey—to Earth.</i></div>
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<i>In an unstable lunar environment, the shifting loyalties and political machinations of each family reach the zenith of their most fertile plots as outright war erupts.</i></div>
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It says a lot that I look back on <i>Luna: New Moon </i>lovingly rather than remembering how maddening and demanding a novel it was. Outside of his exemplary young adult efforts, Ian McDonald has rarely been easy to read, but I found the first stretch of said text tremendously testing. Yet for every ounce of effort I expended, <i>Luna: New Moon </i>repaid in spades, much as the Mackenzies do with their debts.<br />
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The Mackenzies are but one of the five faithless families at the heart of the second part of McDonald's narrative: a surprisingly accessible successor assuming you've finished the book it builds on. And build it does, on much of the hard work of the first: on the harsh mistress of the moon that is its desperate setting, and on the very much in motion story, which focuses on the clashing clans whose mandate is to somehow succeed on that satellite.<br />
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One thing <i>Luna: Wolf Moon </i>doesn't share with McDonald's last is its massive cast. It can't, considering the catastrophic fall of the Cortas—though to call what befell them a fall isn't quite right. The Cortas, "the lucky, flashy Cortas," were decimated, deliberately and decisively. Like the Starks of A Song of Ice and Fire, which fantasy saga this complex and often shocking science fiction series is obviously modelled on, they had their head literally lopped off.<br />
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And they didn't just lose their leader: they also lost their source of income, their sense of security and their seat of power. But though the Cortas are definitely down, they're not out. The better to recover some measure of strength, the survivors of the disaster at Joao de Deus have scattered.<br />
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Like Arya, little Luna looks too young to represent any kind of threat, but she'll come into her own quickly. Robson is stronger than Luna as of the offing, but having been adopted—or taken hostage—by the Mackenzies, he's something of a pawn, and thus this saga's Sansa. Lucasinho of the "good sex and better baked goods" can be Bran, because his part in the plot hasn't really been revealed; legal eagle Ariel is reminiscent of Robb Stark in that she still holds some sway over the system that underpins everything; whilst Wagner, the wolf who has channeled his bipolar disorder into a powerful pack mentality, is, of course, the Jon Snow of McDonald's story.<br />
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Some of these similarities are slight, sure, but some are so on the nose that they must be by design, and I struggle to begrudge that, given the incredible recognition George R. R. Martin has received in recent years. As an author, Ian McDonald is from my perspective no less deserving, and if he has to follow in a footstep or two to achieve even a measure of the success Martin has, then I say okay. The Cortas aren't carbon copies in any case; it's only their respective roles in the whole that have me meandering about in memory lane. Well, it's that, and a line that goes something like this: if you play the game of Luna, "you either live or the moon kills you."<br />
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<a name='more'></a>But back to the matter at hand. The Cortas may have been beaten, but they're not broken, so when the Mackenzie family is attacked <i>en masse</i> by some rogue code they think the Cortas came up with, the dragons of the former family decide to entirely annihilate the latter:<br />
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"We're businessmen," Bryce Mackenzie says. "The Cortas are three kids, one of those so-called werewolves and a washed up ex-lawyer. So, the Cortas destroy our home. We go one better: we take their machines, their markets, their city, their people, every thing they owned and held precious and in five years no one will remember the name of Corta."</blockquote>
What Bryce and his fellow Mackenzies don't know is that another Corta—the heir to matriarch Adriana's empire, even—is alive.<br />
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Notably, they're not alone in not knowing. Even Lucas' nearest and dearest consider him a casualty of the attack on their palace. But that's all part of the plan. Having been nursed back to health by members of another of the moon's five families—the Vorontsovs—he's training to brave the "relentless, crushing hell" that is Earth in order to orchestrate his hellish revenge.<br />
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"Earth was undergoing a climate shift: it underpinned every aspect of the planet's politics, from decades-deep drought in the Sahel and Western USA to the perpetual storms striking north-west Europe, flood after flood after flood. Lucas could not understand the folly of living on a world that was not under human control," but one thing he can understand is that in uncertain times such as these, the last thing the Powers That Be need is to deal with is the "rabble of anarchists, criminals and sociopaths" that currently lord over Luna. So maybe, just maybe, Lucas can talk someone into helping him orchestrate a coup on the moon...<br />
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What the Cortas as a clan perhaps lack in originality, they more than make up for in brutality, but so too do the other four families featured here. Nary a chapter of <i>Luna: Wolf Moon </i>elapses without some barbaric act coming to pass, and on the rare occasions you can't count on that, be sure there's a betrayal at bay. This is a book about "individuals, families and corporations, all acting in [their] own self-interest," a sickening state of affairs McDonald depicts brilliantly. Absent any sort of censure, the powerful prey on the weak, here; the rich rip off the poor; and the bad abuse the good.<br />
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It's relentless, in a sense. Ever so exhilarating, but also exhausting, at points. But it's not for nothing—for every plot point and every character arc there's either payoff or the promise of—and happily, there are odd gaps in the canvas: bright spots in the blighted night that represent moments of much-needed relief. Otherwise, the incredible tension this book builds—and builds and builds and builds—could kill.<br />
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Just take my advice and remember to breathe, readers. Especially come the ending, which casts the costly wars that have played out to date as mere "skirmishes to battles that will shake the moon to its cold heart. Battles of philosophy and politics, family and privilege, power and dynasty, law and freedom, pasts and futures."<br />
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This, then, is not the concluding volume of the duology we were promised, and allow me, at the last, to express how happy I am about that. Impossibly taut and profligate with plot, <i>Luna: Wolf Moon </i>wears its influences on its sleeves, and as distracting as they are, they're going to draw in more readers than they drive away—which has got to be for the good, given the quality of this novel. <i>Luna: New Moon</i> was a "magnificent bastard of a book," as I put it in <a href="http://www.tor.com/2015/09/21/book-reviews-luna-new-moon-by-ian-mcdonald/" target="_blank">my review</a>. Part two, it's my pleasure to tell you, is just as awesome, and just as masterfully nasty.<br />
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<b>Luna: Wolf Moon</b></div>
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by Ian McDonald</div>
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UK Publication: March 2017, Gollancz</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-10197038070866138362017-03-21T14:00:00.000+00:002017-03-21T14:19:12.895+00:00Book Review | New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>As the sea levels rose, every street became a canal. Every skyscraper an island. For the residents of one apartment building in Madison Square, however, New York in the year 2140 is far from a drowned city.</i></div>
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<i>There is the market trader, who finds opportunities where others find trouble. There is the detective, whose work will never disappear—along with the lawyers, of course.</i></div>
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<i>There is the internet star, beloved by millions for her airship adventures, and the building's manager, quietly respected for his attention to detail. Then there are two boys who don't live there, but have no other home-- and who are more important to its future than anyone might imagine.</i></div>
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<i>Lastly there are the coders, temporary residents on the roof, whose disappearance triggers a sequence of events that threatens the e</i><i>xistence of all—and even the long-hidden foundations on which the city rests.</i></div>
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Not for the first time, and not, I can only hope, for the last, Kim Stanley Robinson takes aim at climate change in <i>New York 2140</i>, an immensely necessary novel as absorbing as it is sprawling about how that city among cities, so close to so many hearts, moves forward following floods that raise the seas fifty feet.<br />
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The Big Apple has been blighted. Uptown, being uptown both figuratively and literally, came through the crises brought on by humanity's hard-to-kick carbon habit relatively well, but downtown, everything is different. Submerged, the streets between buildings are cast now as canals. Nobody has a car anymore, but boats are mainstays on the waterways. Pedestrians must make do with jetties, or walk the dizzying bridges between those skyscrapers that haven't already collapsed after losing the ongoing fight to stay watertight.<br />
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Needless to say, New York as we know it is no more. But New Yorkers? Why, for good or for ill, they're New Yorkers still!<br />
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There is a certain stubbornness in a New Yorker, cliche though it is to say so, and actually many of them had been living in such shitholes before the floods that being immersed in the drink mattered little. Not a few experienced an upgrade in both material circumstances and quality of life. For sure rents went down, often to zero. So a lot of people stayed. </blockquote>
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Squatters. The dispossessed. The water rats. Denizens of the deep, citizens of the shallows. And a lot of them were interested in trying something different, including which authorities they gave their consent to be governed by. Hegemony had drowned, so in the years after the flooding there was a proliferation of cooperatives, neighbourhood associations, communes, squats [and such]. (p.209) </blockquote>
Robinson's novel is arranged around a fitting for instance of this. The old Met Life tower on the drowned remains of Madison Square is home, now, to several thousand souls: a collective of individuals who all contribute to their cooperative's pot—be it financially or by bartering man-hours or goods for common use.<br />
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Among the many are Ralph Muttchopf and Jeff Rosen, a couple of old coders, or quants, who live in "a hotello on the open-walled farm floor [...] from which vantage point lower Manhattan lies flooded below them like a super-Venice, majestic, watery, superb. Their town." (p.6) But there are elements of their town that they deeply dislike, particularly the financial sector that has started gambling on what's become known as "the intertidal zone," (p.118) and down-on-their-luck as they are, with as little left to lose as you like, Mutt and Jeff do something they shouldn't: they hack the stock market.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>That they're immediately disappeared is hardly a surprise. What <i>is </i>surprising—to their disappearers at least—is that their vanishing act doesn't go unnoticed. In fact, the delightfully disparate community that took Mutt and Jeff in when times were tough quite come together in an effort to find them, and those that took them too.<br />
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Taking the lead is Charlotte Armstrong, tireless representative of the dispossessed, and a board member of the Met Life coop. She clues in Inspector Gen Octaviasdottir, who investigates the quants' disappearance in her own, old-fashioned way. Some suspiciously missing CCTV footage leads that latter to speak with Vlade Marovich, the sweetheart super of the skyscraper, and rather a magnet insofar as it's he who attracts all of <i>New York 2140</i>'s other characters.<br />
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Initially, he only tolerates Franklin Garr, the Wall Street wunderkind who's finally looking into doing something decent with the hedge fund he manages, if only to impress a pretty girl. But as a former father himself, Vlade's interest in Stefan and Roberto, a pair of parentless preteens determined to dredge the sunken city for treasure, is markedly more paternal. And both last and least, he has a soft spot—like most men and many women do—for cloud superstar Amelia Black, famed for flaunting her figure first and secondarily for her efforts to save endangered species aboard the <i>Assisted Migration </i>airship.<br />
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At six hundred plus pages, <i>New York 2140 </i>is somewhat short on plot for such a long novel, but it's absolutely, positively packed with characters rife with life, and every one of the above number has a part to play in the metaphorical and indeed the meteorological storms that follow. Some parts seem less significant than others—though she proves pivotal in the last act, Robinson struggles to make Amelia especially relevant—but every figure in the fiction eventually impacts every other, and that's very much to the author's point that "individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions." (p.603) Actions like Amelia's.<br />
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Robinson's tremendous investment in the trials and tribulations of these dissimilar individuals means there's no small amount of satisfaction to be had as characters little and large cross paths, and as the narrative threads we'd thought independent—inconsequential, even—gather into something greater because they're suddenly something shared.<br />
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There's plenty of pleasure to be taken, too, from the nameless citizen whose "expository rants" (p.141) restrict Robinson's ever-present predilection towards "info <i>dumps</i> (on your carpet)" (p.141) to snappy, standalone, skip-'em-if-you-can't-stand 'em chapters. I wouldn't recommend it, however. Just as the text's many embedded perspectives give readers a sense of the setting from the inside looking out, said citizen's potted histories help to build the world of this brilliantly ambitious book from the outside looking in.<br />
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And what a world it is! You see, for all that its premise rests on events that left billions dead or at best dispossessed, <i>New York 2140</i>, like the singular city at its centre when "the sun tilts to the south" (p.264) in September, is ultimately optimistic:<br />
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Yes, autumn in New York: the great song of the city and the great season. Not just for the relief from the brutal extremes of winter or summer, but for that glorious slant of the light, that feeling that in certain moments lances in on that tilt—that you had been thinking you were living in a room and suddenly with a view between buildings out to the rivers, a dappled sky overhead, you are struck by the fact that you live on the side of a planet—that the great city is also a great bay on a great world. In those golden moments even the most hard-bitten citizen, the most oblivious urban creature, perhaps only pausing for a light to turn green, will be pierced by that light and take a deep breath and see the place as if for the first time, and feel, briefly but deeply, what it means to live in a place so strange and gorgeous. (p.264)</blockquote>
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<b>New York 2140</b></div>
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by Kim Stanley Robinson</div>
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UK & US Publication: March 2017, Orbit</div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Red-Mars-Kim-Stanley-Robinson/0007310161/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1489578209&sr=1-1&keywords=mars+trilogy&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=dd117aece0865037f2a3e14512415636" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-32236lxvN1k/WMkpVS3d-BI/AAAAAAAAPec/4knMhyDLUDws6BRrrgHpbedcAx4sW3zmgCLcB/s200/redmars.jpg" width="131" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/City-Dreaming-Daniel-Polansky/dp/1473634253/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1489578233&sr=1-5&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=05938b33eeab2fdfe017c3261ea63afa" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-p_zsHvuE8Jk/WMkpXEnNqSI/AAAAAAAAPeg/U0hV8yhuNlUR6pFWLpL6EiUd_CZp9DKXgCLcB/s200/acitydreaming-uk.jpg" width="132" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-North-Road-Peter-Hamilton/dp/0330521772/ref=as_li_ss_tl?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1489578296&sr=1-1&keywords=great+north+road&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=1e97dc2d10ab105428ed0fbc7e0903b2" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--m2xcOnPZLI/WMkpaUQl0eI/AAAAAAAAPek/BPtimLwzYr4_HdKnUrE4j8rXkmEH4QWbgCLcB/s200/greatnorthroad-pb.jpg" width="130" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-19721890948539202862017-03-15T14:00:00.000+00:002017-03-15T14:00:17.603+00:00Book Review | The Erstwhile by Brian Catling<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>In London and Germany, strange beings are reanimating themselves. They are the Erstwhile, the angels that failed to protect the Tree of Knowledge, and their reawakening will have major consequences.</i></div>
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<i>In Africa, the colonial town of Essenwald has fallen into disarray because the timber workforce has disappeared into the Vorrh. Now a team of specialists are dispatched to find them. Led by Ishmael, the former cyclops, they enter the forest, but the Vorrh will not give them back so easily. To make matters worse, an ancient guardian of the forest has plans for Ishmael and his crew. </i></div>
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<i>Meanwhile a child of mixed race has been found abandoned in a remote cottage. Her origins are unknown, but she has powers beyond her own understanding. Conflict is coming, as the old and new, human and inhuman are set on a collision course. </i></div>
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<i>Once again blending the real and the imagined, </i>The Erstwhile<i> brings historical figures such as William Blake and places such as the Bedlam Asylum, as well as ingenious creations such as The Kin (a family of robots) together to create unforgettable novel of births and burials, excavations and disappearances.</i></div>
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More than four years on from <i>The Vorrh</i>, professor and performance artist Brian Catling is back with a book that explodes the exceptional premise of its predecessor at the same time as falling short of fulfilling its awesome promise.<br />
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<i>The Erstwhile </i>shifts the focus of the darkly fantastic fiction from the forest around which the first volume revolved to one of its many denizens. "No one quite knew what they were. But they had been given a name, which translated into 'of Before' or 'the Previous' and finally settled as "the Erstwhile.' Some said they were 'undead, angels, spirits embodied in flesh.' All that was known was they were as ancient as the forest itself." And the vast Vorrh, held close to the heart of Africa like an unspeakable secret, is at least as old as us. Indeed, "there is a deep belief that this land is sacred and may be the physical geographic location of the biblical Eden."<br />
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What business, then, does man have messing with it?<br />
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None, n'est-ce pas? But where there's wood, there's timber, and where there's timber, there's industry—a truism even in this alternate history. That industry animates the settlement of Essenwald, where the majority of the events of <i>The Erstwhile</i> occur. Truth be told, though, the Timber Guild has been having a tough time of it since the Vorrh started screwing with its various visitors:<br />
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The forest had a malign influence at its very core. Some said it was an unknown toxicology of plant and oxygen. Others said it was a disturbance in its magnetic resonance. A few said it was haunted and that its evil nature was responsible. In fact, nobody knew why prolonged exposure to the trees caused distressing symptoms of amnesia and mental disintegration. No matter what or who they tried, all was in vain. Nobody could work for more than two days in the Vorrh without contamination.</blockquote>
Nobody, that is, other than the Limboia. "They were hollow humans" whose lack of humanity left little for the forces of the forest to fuck with. And yet even the Limboia have been lost. As of the outset of <i>The Erstwhile</i>,<i> </i>they've been missing for some months, and without them, Essenwald's singular industry has stuttered to a costly stop. Alas and alack that the Powers That Be in that precarious place are prepared to do whatever it takes to get these beings back.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>They'd have to be to trust in Ishmael, a cyclopean sexual sadist who left his last lover just as she was about to become a mother for her best friend, a blind woman he's already sleeping around on. But the Timber Guild is only interested in one thing about him: his history. Ishmael is, after all, one of just a few folks to have ventured through the Vorrh without significant incident. To wit, he takes charge of a small army whose mission is to locate—and ultimately subjugate—the Limboia.<br />
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What follows—as Ishmael leads his lot into the awful forest, as his men lose their minds around him, as they're stalked by the shadow of a half-man made whole after consuming the skull of another—is far and away the most memorable section of <i>The Erstwhile </i>as a whole: a terrifying testament to the enduring greatness of Catling's creation on the one hand; and a frustrating reminder, on the other, of all that is otherwise absent in the narrative. Because ultimately, the atrophied angels after which this novel is named just aren't as effective a focus as the Vorrh was. Conceptually, they're a credible centrepiece:<br />
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They who have been forsaken by God have been adopted by a greater, slower master. The forest itself. Over the centuries it has entered every vein, every follicle, and every pore of their rotting bodies and now it runs through them like the endless chatter in humans. They are waking because the Vorrh feels a threat, far off and constant, a force that could wipe it away forever. It has known of this for centuries and now the actual time is approaching, it has been preparing, by changing its breathing, its denizens, and the Erstwhile. Some have already left, some are transforming, and all of them know of you.</blockquote>
Unfortunately, as fascinating as the Erstwhile are in the abstract, in practice, they're baffling. Their purpose appears to be pressing people into writing scripts in invisible ink that attracts ants. As to why? You know exactly as much as I.<br />
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We experience these curious creatures firsthand from the perspective of a former professor of theology who's sent from a retirement home in Heidelberg to London to look in on an inmate of Bethlem Royal Hospital, the insane asylum better known as Bedlam. Patient 126's hobbies include burying himself alive and listening to the wireless. He's even named himself Nicholas Parson after the host of a particular BBC Radio 4 programme—which wouldn't be worth commenting on were it not for the fact that <i>Just a Minute </i>didn't exist until 1967, fully forty years into the future of this trippy fiction.<br />
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Hector Ruben Schumann's relationship with Nicholas is at the centre of these sections, and although their rapport is affecting, and deftly developed developed over the length of the text, I frequently found myself sympathising with the professor's plight to parse "the ultimate enigma that was Nicholas."<br />
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Much of what the Erstwhile said was beyond him; his shifting persona and its accents and the obscurity of it left him confused. He also felt he was being tested, that many of the questions Nicholas posed were there to define his boundaries and that most did not have simple answers. Except of course the one that he posed backwards by giving him the answer and telling him that he had to find the question.</blockquote>
There weren't a great many answers in Catling's last, and there aren't in <i>The Erstwhile</i> either, though book two of the trilogy does firm up what the Vorrh actually is—or at least what it's perceived to be—by looking in on the aforementioned forest from the outside rather than looking out from within its fearsome fringes. But inasmuch as this distance serves to broaden the overall scope of the series, it also places readers at a regrettable remove from the richness and resonance of the grotesque garden at its centre.<br />
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<i>The Vorrh </i>was "an exceptionally shocking novel," and one of 2012's very best. It was, as I wrote in <a href="http://www.tor.com/2012/11/19/wandering-the-weird-the-vorrh-by-b-catling/" target="_blank">my review</a>, "inescapably dense, and unrelentingly intense." <i>The Erstwhile </i>simply isn't. It's not an easy read by any means—the author's prose remains opaque and effusively allusive—nor is it entirely absent the satisfying if sordid surprises of its predecessor, but between its clarified characters and the relative plainness of its plot, not to speak of its shift in setting, the alchemical elements which made the first part of Catling's narrative remarkable are sadly in short supply in the second.<br />
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<i>The Erstwhile </i>is a good book, to be sure, about "the possibility of a retaliation from nature should man's greed become overbearing," but great it ain't, I'm afraid. In that—and in lieu, too, of either a bona fide beginning or anything resembling an ending—it's very much a middling middle volume.<br />
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<b>The Erstwhile</b></div>
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by Brian Catling</div>
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UK Publication: March 2017, Coronet</div>
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US Publication: March 2017, Vintage</div>
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<i>Recommended and Related Reading</i></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-38007879962563463832017-02-28T14:00:00.000+00:002017-02-28T14:00:04.344+00:00Book Review | Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qW9qWUjOiro/WKxAeh6zKkI/AAAAAAAAPb8/N1QdiB3R-_YcWtRwWuJWU4W1n9By-CGpQCLcB/s1600/kingsofthewyld.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qW9qWUjOiro/WKxAeh6zKkI/AAAAAAAAPb8/N1QdiB3R-_YcWtRwWuJWU4W1n9By-CGpQCLcB/s400/kingsofthewyld.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>
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<i>Clay Cooper and his band were once the best of the best—the meanest, dirtiest, most feared and admired crew of mercenaries this side of the Heartwyld.</i></div>
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<i>But their glory days are long past; the mercs have grown apart and grown old, fat, drunk - or a combination of the three. Then a former bandmate turns up at Clay's door with a plea for help: his daughter Rose is trapped in a city besieged by an enemy horde one hundred thousand strong and hungry for blood. Rescuing Rose is the kind of impossible mission that only the very brave or the very stupid would sign up for.</i></div>
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<i>It's time to get the band back together for one last tour across the Wyld.</i></div>
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There's nothing that lifts my soul quite like a night of rock and roll. But rock and roll, as I'm sure we can agree, just ain't what it used to be. </div>
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Back in the day, bands weren't manufactured—they just happened, like a strike of lightning. And while a litter of mewling kittens can be made to sound terrific with the tools producers have to play with today, in the past, each and every member of a musical group had to be a master of their particular instrument. They didn't have to be attractive, either. They didn't have to dance or mug or mime. And they didn't need goddamn gimmicks. All they needed to do was rock your socks off.</div>
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In the world of <i>Kings of the Wyld</i>, the funniest and the finest fantasy debut in ages, bands like Saga—the legendary mercenaries at the heart of Nicholas Eames' finely-formed first novel—don't make music... they make war. Their instruments are their weapons; their axes and swords and shields. Their arena? Why, the whole wide world! Where they're needed most, though, is the Heartwyld: a vast and vicious forest between Grandual, where humanity has its home, and Endland, where the monsters of the Dominion lay in wait.</div>
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Alas, rock and roll ain't what it used to be hereabouts, either—because as vital and exciting as the band business was, it was also insanely dangerous. That's why "most bands today never go anywhere near the forest. They just tour from city to city and fight whatever the local wranglers have on hand," (p.159) namely tame, home-made monsters in purpose-built arenas that allow bookers to protect their percentages and managers to maximise their profits.</div>
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Percentages and profits—pah! That's not why Saga fought. Saga fought for the great and the good. Saga fought to make Grandual habitable. Saga fought for guts, but mostly for glory. Yet it's been decades since any of its members lifted an instrument. They've grown old and fat and happy. They've settled down, gotten jobs, and started families. But when Gabriel's daughter Rose, the leader of a band of her own, gets trapped in the distant city of Castia just as the Dominion chooses to make its monstrous move, Saga's frontman sets about arranging a reunion tour.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>Frontman he may be, but Gabriel isn't Saga's leader, really—nor is he <i>Kings of the Wyld</i>'s central character. Those titles lay on Clay, the band's stoic shieldbearer, and he takes some convincing. It's only when Clay's own daughter asks him if he'd save her, should she be trapped by bad guys somewhere far away, that he grudgingly agrees to take up his weapon again. The other pieces fall into place from there:<br />
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Gabriel's desperate plan had come, at last, to fruition. Against all odds, the band was back together. </blockquote>
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It would be just like old times, except that Moog was dying of an incurable ailment, Mattrick was hideously out of shape, Gabriel—their proud and fearless leader—had gone meek as a newborn kitten, and Clay wanted nothing more than to go home, hug his wife, and tell his darling daughter stories of grand exploits that were all, thankfully, far behind him.</blockquote>
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Ganelon, at least, would be virtually unchanged, as hale and healthy as the day the Sultana's magi had turned him to stone nearly twenty years before. (p.193)</blockquote>
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And thus the fellowship begins an unexpected journey through the Heartwylde and on to far Castia, but though they may have some hope of getting there, they're having a laugh if they think they stand of chance of getting back, because a Horde the likes of which humankind has never before known has laid siege to said city:</div>
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He'd seen a few armies in his day. He'd seen a number of levied militias, and too many mobs (angry or otherwise) to count. He'd seen what a crowd of a hundred thousand could look like, when every band in Grandual gathered for the War Fair in the ruins of Kaladar. But [Clay] had never seen a Horde until now. His mind reeled at the sight. His mouth went dry. The hope he'd nursed of bringing Rose home safe drew the shutters, blew out the candles, and curled up under its bed. (p.138)</blockquote>
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Now no one said it was going to be easy. You don't bring a classic band out of retirement to play a pub, after all—you enlist them to headline the biggest gig there's ever been. And the Horde that heaves from horizon to horizon around Castia's bastions certainly fills the bill. But the closer Clay and his players get to their destination, the more obvious it becomes that there won't be an encore performance. Not unless something dramatic happens.</div>
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Something dramatic does, leading to a last act that's positively packed with action. But as weighty and well-handled as this is, it doesn't impact the fact that Eames treats small matters such as setting and story like secondary concerns. The novel's plot is pleasant but predictable, and plodding early on, meanwhile the world in which it takes place is nice, but slight; epic fantasy fans are likely to find it more than faintly familiar. That's two of the three pillars of fiction, tolerably performed but finally forgotten like the seventh song on a setlist that goes on too long.</div>
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But—and you knew there was gonna be a but—the third of those three pillars is where <i>Kings of the Wyld </i>really sings. Above all else, it's a funny and affectionate fantasy about friendship. It takes the shape of a road trip that, like the best bits of <i>Final Fantasy XV</i>, just so happens to take place in a world full of wonders and hellish terrors, but markedly more important than the path are the people who travel it. Eames hangs his hat on his characters here, and thankfully, the five friends that form Saga are distinct, deftly drawn and excellently developed. </div>
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From Golden Gabe, the conflicted hero, to Mattrick Skulldrummer, the lovable drunk—and from Ganelon, a strong, silent type, to Arcandius Moog, an alchemist and an optimist—everyone, up to and including our stalwart protagonist, Slowhand Clay Cooper, has his own time to shine. And shine they do, to be sure—especially when they're together:</div>
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All Clay felt was a sense of profound certainty, as if things—dire as they seemed—were exactly as they should be. He was among friends, shoulder to shoulder with his bandmates, who just so happened to be the four best men he'd ever had the privilege of knowing. </blockquote>
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As individuals they were each of them fallible, discordant as notes without harmony. But as a band they were something more, something perfect in its own intangible way. (p.481)</blockquote>
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They were Saga. And I already miss them immensely. But to hear that the Band series will go on, with or without them? Music to my ears, readers. Music to my ears.</div>
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<b>Kings of the Wyld</b></div>
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UK & US Publication: February 2017, Orbit</div>
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<a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Good-Bad-Smug-Tom-Holt/dp/0356502554/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1487683957&sr=8-1&keywords=tom+holt&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=9ea00dba608ffcf26c04865b5c4de498" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sgW0SNES_cs/WKxB0O4f-yI/AAAAAAAAPcQ/j2lRmcG13Gk64NxtFillM0aneHkmV7GNQCLcB/s200/goodbadsmug.jpg" width="133" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Tyrants-Throne-Greatcoats-4-Sebastien-Castell/1782066837/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&qid=1487683997&sr=8-1&keywords=sebastian+castell&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=98d24f9e13524da8afe5328a6c0d8624" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mHxargd-y_4/WKxBwl7xr1I/AAAAAAAAPcI/xDZ0OIkVFlcUUGk-dVlYAwv7wukjSHtYACLcB/s200/tyrantsthrone.jpg" width="124" /></a><a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dead-Mans-Steel-Grim-Company/dp/178185159X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=N0A7Y1MQEPA0RR95S40K&linkCode=ll1&tag=thespecscot-21&linkId=de52526b7ceedc5b8f919aadae2ef8a1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-T2aETskA55E/WKxByU328iI/AAAAAAAAPcM/CoUVG2YE-0oWvowFGkO1oJ0S8vydd3F0wCLcB/s200/deadmanssteel.jpg" width="126" /></a></div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08713791516631476930noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6498739347909985243.post-16692555123317155092017-02-21T14:00:00.000+00:002017-02-21T14:00:24.433+00:00Book Review | Caraval by Stephanie Garber<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Scarlett has never left the tiny isle of Trisda, pining from afar for the wonder of Caraval, a once-a-year week-long performance where the audience participates in the show.</i></div>
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<i>Caraval is Magic. Mystery. Adventure. And for Scarlett and her beloved sister Tella it represents freedom and an escape from their ruthless, abusive father.</i></div>
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<i>When the sisters' long-awaited invitations to Caraval finally arrive, it seems their dreams have come true. But no sooner have they arrived than Tella vanishes, kidnapped by the show's mastermind organiser, Legend.</i></div>
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<i>Scarlett has been told that everything that happens during Caraval is only an elaborate performance. But nonetheless she quickly becomes enmeshed in a dangerous game of love, magic and heartbreak. And real or not, she must find Tella before the game is over, and her sister disappears forever.</i></div>
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The circus been the subject of some remarking writing in recent years, from the marvellously moving <i>Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti </i>to <i>The Night Circus</i>' unbridled delight, so I came to <i>Caraval</i>—a book about which there has much such buzz—with hope of happiness in my heart. Sadly, Stephanie Garber's debut is more like a watered-down <i>Water For Elephants </i>than either of the efforts aforementioned.<br />
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"It took seven years to get the letter right." (p.3) Seven years of begging and pleading. Seven years of congratulations and salutations. Scarlett tried asking the master of Caraval for tickets to the greatest show the world has known on her own behalf—alas, he didn't answer. She tried intimating that it would be her darling little sister's wish to play the planet's greatest game—but no dice were ever delivered. Perversely, then, it was only when Scarlett wrote to tell Legend that her imminent marriage meant she'd no longer be able to attend in any event that an invitation finally came in the mail.<br />
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Three invitations arrive, actually: one for her, one for her mysterious husband-to-be, and one for her no longer so little sister Tella. When that latter sees Legend's letter, she does her utmost to convince Scarlett to take him up on his offer:<br />
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Nothing we do is safe. But this is worth the risk. You've waited your whole life for this, wished on every fallen star, prayed as every ship came into port that it would be that magical one carrying the mysterious Caraval performers. You want this more than I do. (pp.18-19)</blockquote>
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She does, to be sure. But Scarlett is deeply afraid of her father. She's afraid of what he would do, to her and to Tella too, if she leaves the conquered island of Trisda. You see, she's tried to, in the past. She's tried, and failed, and a good man died at her hateful father's hands because of the mistake she made. She's simply not willing to make another, especially because attending Caraval for the week it takes to complete would mean missing the wedding ceremony her father has gone out of his way to arrange. It might be to a man Scarlett has not yet met, and he might also be a monster, but at least she and her sister will be out of harm's way after her big day.</div>
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So it's a no. A no Tella disregards entirely. She has her own suitor, a sultry sailor name Julian, subdue Scarlett and spirit her off to la Isla de los Sueños—"the island of dreams" (p.46) where Caraval is poised to take place. When she comes to a couple of days later, Scarlett wants nothing more than to turn back to Trisda, but she can't countenance leaving her sister, and Tella has already traded in her ticket. To wit, to find her, Scarlett—and Julian as her fake fiance—have no choice but to follow in her footsteps. Thus the game begins!</div>
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But before it does, the unlikely couple are welcomed—and warned:</div>
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Welcome, welcome to Caraval! The grandest show on land or by sea. Inside you'll experience more wonders than most people see in a lifetime. You can sip magic from a cup or buy dreams in a bottle. But before you fully enter into our world, you must remember it's all a game. What happens beyond this gate may frighten or excite you, but don't let any of it trick you. We will try to convince you it's real, but all of it is a performance. A world built of make-believe. So while we want you to get swept away, be careful of being swept too far away. Dreams that come true can be beautiful, but they can also turn into nightmares when people won't wake up. (pp.76-77)</blockquote>
That last is a fair summation of what follows, for there are indeed dreamlike moments in the course of <i>Caraval</i>; moments of "iridescent euphoria" (p.94) made all the more impressive by Garber's synesthetic sense of space and place. Said setting can be absolutely captivating, in fact. Its circular canals are "like a long apple peel spread out around curving lantern-lit streets full of pubs piping russet smoke, bakeries shaped like cupcakes, and shops wrapped in colour like birthday presents. Cerulean blue. Apricot orange. Saffron yellow. Primrose pink." (pp139-140)<br />
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But beneath this coat of wonderful colours is the frame of a nightmare: a dark and indubitably dangerous design that sets Scarlett to wondering whether "she'd found a way to escape her father's deadly games on Trisda, only to become a well-costumed piece on a new game board." (p.67)<br />
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That's clearly how the reader is supposed to feel. And early on, as Scarlett careens from clue to clue in search of Tella, you do get the sense that she's in over her head—that she may even be being manipulated by someone who wishes her ill. But that initial impression is soon succeeded by a certain sinking feeling—that the plot, such as it is, is practically pointless: a mess of misdirection and meaningless maneuvering rather than the merry dance it's meant to represent.<br />
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<i>Caraval</i>'s characters are little better. Scarlett and Tella are supposed to be share an unbreakable bond brought on by their shared suffering, but they're separated for the bulk of the book, and on those rare occasions when Garber gives them some time together, they waste it bickering and snickering. There's no spark between Scarlett and Julian either. On the contrary, they work at cross purposes and resent one another royally, so as predictable as it is, their eventual romantic entanglement comes across as entirely contrived.<br />
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Stephanie Garber's debut does has its highlights—a tremendous setting, deftly depicted in description, and a premise that promises a plot worthy of its world—but a nonsensical narrative and a cast of characters that rely on redundant romance and laboured relationships are holes in the heart of <i>Caraval </i>that no clamour of colours, however lovely, can cover.<br />
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<b>Caraval</b></div>
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by Stephanie Garber</div>
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UK Publication: January 2017, Hodder</div>
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US Publication: January 2017, Flatiron</div>
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