Quoth the Scotsman | Nick Harkaway on The Imagery of Britishness

This year promises to be a pivotal period for the population of Scotland. In September, in case you weren't aware, the people will participate in a referendum on independence, the results of which will determine whether or not our country remains in the UK.

Now this is not, nor will it ever be, a political blog, but what it is to be British—what it means, really—has been a question asked frequently recently, and I found the following diatribe from Nick Harkaway's new book, which I'm currently reading for review, illuminating in that light:

Dealing with Brits was tricky. You had to listen to what a Brit was saying—which was invariably that he thought XYZ was a terrific idea and he hoped it went very well for you—while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you'd have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it. After six years working with the Brits in various theatres he'd come to the conclusion that they didn't do it on purpose. The thing was, Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text. To a Brit, the modern English language was vested with hundreds of years of unbroken history and cultural nuance, so that every single word had a host of implications depending on who said it to whom, when, and how. 

[...] 

Originally—when he had believe it was some sort of snobbish post-colonial joke—this all had made Kershaw dislike the Brits, but now apparently he sort of admired it. His brother Gabe was a literature professor at Brown, and when Kershaw brought this up with him Gabe had nodded and said, yeah, absolutely, but you had to read T. S. Eliot to understand. So Jed Kershaw had bought The Waste Land from Amazon dot come and read it here in Mancreu. The Waste Land was a fucking terrifying document of gasping psychological trauma, and it was plenty relevant to the island, but the important point about it was that Eliot was trying to make use of something called an 'objective correlative,' which was an external reference point everyone would understand in the same way without fear of misapprehension. Kershaw found this revealing, he said, because it was very British. [...] Only a Brit would imagine that adding a huge raft of literary imagery to the sea of human emotion and history which was English would clarify the situation in any fucking way at all. All the same, there was something glorious in that complexity, in the fact that Brit communication took place in the gaps between words and in the various different ways of agreeing which meant 'no.' (pp.95-96)

Tigerman is out in the UK in late May, and I'll say today that it's great... if not necessarily what I expected next from the author of Angelmaker.

Quoth the Scotsman | David Towsey on the Distance of Difference

I've been feeling my age of late.

Given the content of the last Quoth the Scotsman, you must've imagined as much. Continuing along those lines, then, I came across a particularly perceptive passage in David Towsey's debut, which I'll be reviewing in full on the site soon, discussing how time affects our understanding of distance.

And vice versa, because distance, I find, also influences our perception of time. But we'll leave that subject for another day, eh?

What follows is an excerpt from Councilman Cirr's lecture to the attendees of the Black Mountain Common Consensus: a punctuated prologue of sorts that has — worry not — little bearing on the book's plot. 

An appreciation of distance is always framed by an understanding of time. To a human child, tomorrow could seem a hundred miles away. A twenty-minute walk, from one side of a town to the other, is a vast and tiring expedition. But as they grow, the world around them shrinks. Over the years they shift their expectations of time, of what could and should be achieved in a single day. They begin to think of the future and the past. They lose a minute-by-minute existence, an immediacy of needs and wants. This is the transition from child to adult. 

And then, everything is reversed. The world shrinks again. It takes twice as long to walk anywhere; confined in their homes, only the most essential journeys seem worth the effort. Thoughts turn to making the most of their time. The past holds too many memories; the future, only an end. This is the transition from adult to elder. 

An example: a boy dreams of the Redlands. They are an expanse of adventure and possibility. As he grows into a man he discovers that the map of Pierre County disagrees — the Redlands are a set of lines the size of a thumb. His adult eyes realise the relative scale: big, but a space that has its limits. Then then man becomes elderly. He looks on the same map again and marvels at the sheer size of that rocky wasteland. 

There is only one disruption to this cycle. For some it is final, for others only moments. To those lucky enough to be born again, time becomes infinite and distance is reduced to nothing. 

This is the transition from human to Walkin'. (pp.99-100)

The very transition Your Brother's Blood's protagonist undergoes at the outset of what must be the most engrossing zombie novel I've read since Exit Kingdom.

Expect more on David Towsey's debut in early September, when he and I plan to put our heads together to talk about faith, before and after the fall.

Quoth the Scotsman | Charlie Human on The Illusion of Maturity

Brace yourself for the most disgusting thing I've ever uttered in the four years I've been blogging on The Speculative Scotsman.

Are you ready?

Next year, I'm turning 30.

Horror of horrors, huh? Well, it seems as much to me at least.

If teaching children has taught me one thing, it's that anyone over 18 is, and I quote, "old." Thing of it is, I don't feel a great deal different than I did a decade ago—excepting the eye strain and the back pain. I'm the same soul, but my body betrays me. The bastard!

On that note, a quote that touches on the same subject. It's from Charlie Human's debut, Apocalypse Now Now:

"You know David Copperfield the illusionist, right? He did this one trick where he walked through the Great Wall of China. They made a huge thing of it, attached heart rate monitors to him, in case he got 'stuck' inside the stone. He walked through and the wall went all stretchy, but the whole time you know it's all crap, it's just an illusion that you want to believe is real." 

At this stage I have no idea where Ronin is going with this but I decide just to go with it. I nod. 

"Well, that's what becoming an adult is like," Ronin continues. "You think there's this great dividing line between child and adult, you're brought up believing that you're gonna do this trick, right, walk through the wall between the two, become an adult. But you get to the other side and you realise it's just an illusion, there was no wall, just some smoke and mirrors. There is no line between old and young, the only things that mark your passing are the things that go wrong—the car accidents, cancers and heart attacks." 

That's Ronin's idea of a motivational speech and strangely, in a way, it works. After all, if I'm going to die, it's good to know that most of what I'm going to be missing out on is mortgages, waiting in traffic and misunderstanding my wife. Sure, hopefully there'd also be threesomes in hot tubs, hoverboards and the singularity, by weighed against the absolute certainty of the mundane nature of real life it all somehow looks less attractive. (pp.252-253)

Apocalypse Now Now will be published by Century Press in the UK in early August. I'll be posting my review of it soon. In the interim, suffice it to say I'm a fan, man!

Quoth the Scotsman | Max Barry on Bias

I've been reading Lexicon lately: a blistering new literary thrilling from the mind behind Jennifer Government. I'll absolutely review the wild ride it represents closer to its release date in the UK—it's due out in June from Mulholland Books—but in advance of that, I wanted to whet your appetites a mite.

The following excerpt—one of a number of incisive interstitials foregrounded by Max Barry—purports to be a forum post... but just so you know, it's not. At the time of this writing, at least, the link leads nowhere. Just so you know.

That said, this passage captures the voice of the typical forum-goer fantastically:

From: http://mediawatch.corporateoppression.com/community/tags/fox 

I just think it's missing the point to get upset about bias in Fox News or MSNBC or whoever. I see this all the time: I mention to someone that I watch Fox and it's like I just slaughtered a baby. They ask how I can watch that, it's just propaganda, etc etc. And they know this not because they're ever sat down and spent any time with it but because their favourite news channel, i.e. a Fox competitor, sometimes plays a clip from a Fox show and it makes Fox look really stupid. 

Well, you know what, Fox does that, too. If I only watched Fox, I'd think you must be really stupid, watching that other show I see clips from on Fox sometimes. 

But I don't just watch Fox, because the way to beat biased reporting isn't to find the least biased one and put all your trust in that. First of all, they're all biased, from the language they use and the framing down to the choice they make about which stories to report. The gap between the most biased news show and the least is pretty small, all things considered. 

But more importantly, relying on a single source of information means you can't critically evaluate it. It's like you're locked in a room and every day I come in and tell you what's happening outside. It's very easy for me to make you believe whatever I want. Even if I don't lie, I can just tell you the facts that support me and leave out the one's that don't. 

That's what's happening if you're getting all your news from one place. If you stop listening to someone the second you hear a word or a phrase you've been taught belongs to the enemy, like "environment" or "job creators," that's what you're doing. You might be an intelligent person, but once you let someone else filter the world for you, you have no way to critically analyse what you're hearing. At best, absolute best case scenario, if they blatantly contradict themselves, you can spot that. But if they take basic care to maintain an internal logical consistency, which they all do, you've got nothing. You've delegated the ability to make up your mind. (p.219)

I'm going to have to start reading another newspaper—online, obviously—than The Guardian, aren't I? :P

I'm only half kidding, actually...

Look out for my full review of Lexicon to go live in late May.

Quoth the Scotsman | Joseph D'Lacey on The Dead City

On a sort of walkabout around the wasted wilds that are an integral aspect of Black Feathers, Megan and her master Mr Keeper—characters who live off the land long after the end the world has come and gone—happen upon a sight unlike anything she's ever seen.

It's simply a city, or rather the remains of one, but from Megan's perspective—a perfect POV for Joseph D'Lacey to make plain his apocalyptic point—this devastated landscape feels alien, mythical and malevolent.

Here's some of what she sees:

"A procession of skeletal towers, cages rising high up into the air, make an angled line across the land. From each tall framework, three pairs of arms stretch out to either side. These arms grip black ropes which connect every tower. Where the ropes are broken they hang earthwards like whips. A few of the towers are damaged too or buckled, leaning to the left or right. Megan thinks of giants; blind, drunken giants using ropes to guide themselves across the land. 

"Following the motionless march of the giants is a huge slate grey path with lines painted onto it. Dozens of people could walk abreast along it. In many places the path is broken or cracked, black chasms like hungry mouths wait for travellers to fall in. Along the path are things she has only seen in her visions—enclosed cars without their horse or oxen to pull them. Cars. That was what the boy had called them. 

"The path and the giants have one destination: a village. But a village so large it would hold more people than Megan knows how to count. The outlying areas of the village are made up of dwellings around mazes of smaller tracks. Hundreds and hundreds of dwellings in each area. Hundreds of tracks leading back to buildings many times the height of those nearest to Megan. Hundreds of dwellings rising high into the air, thousands of square wind-eyes, like black lifeless sockets. 

"There is more, much more, but all of it is silent and dead. She's never seen an absence of life like this in the day world. It makes her cold inside." (pp.221-2)

I'm a bit of a country mouse myself, so I see what Megan means. Urban environments are, after all, absolutely artificial, if not utterly other. They speak of the indelible mark we've made on the world, whether for good or for ill.

In any case, I hadn't thought about the city as a dead thing before Black Feathers, and it's an interesting idea, isn't it?

Angry Robot Books are poised to publish Joseph D'Lacey's latest in early April in the UK, and I'll be reviewing it in full at a later date—so do stay tuned.

Quoth the Scotsman | Patrick Ness on the Printed Page

A couple of Quoth the Scotsmans ago, I featured an excerpt from The Explorer by James Smythe—a fine novel, no?—which revolved around the inimitable feeling of reading. I'd like to return to that idea today, if I may, via a passage from The Crane Wife by Patrick Ness... coming soon from Canongate in the UK.

The main character in The Crane Wife is an older gentleman called George, and in his spare time, George is a bit of an artist. But he doesn't paint or draw or sculpt... he cuts. Not himself! No, he makes cuttings from books he finds in bargain bins at charity shops.

That's really all you need to know to follow the following, which is taken from the first act of Ness' phenomenal new novel:

To take his blade and cut into the pages of a book felt like such a taboo, such a transgression against everything he held dear, George still half-expected them to bleed every time he did it. 

He loved physical books with the same avidity other people loved horses or wine or prog rock. He'd never really warmed to ebooks because they seemed to reduce a book to a computer file, and computer files were disposable things, things you never really owned. He had no email from ten years ago but still owned every book he bought that year. Besides, what was more perfect an object than a book? The different rags of paper, smooth or rough under your fingers. the edge of the page pressed into your thumbprint as you turned a new chapter. The way your bookmark—fancy, modest, scrap paper, candy wrapper—moved through the width of it, marking your progress, a little further each time you folded it shut. 

And how they looked on the walls! Lined up according to whatever whim. George's whim was simple—by author, chronological within name—but over the years he'd also done it by size, subject matter, types of binding. All of them there on the shelves, too many, not enough, their stories raging within regardless of a reader.  

[...] 

He had seen a story once about sand mandalas made by Tibetan Buddhist monks. Unbelievably gorgeous creations, sometimes just a metre across, sometimes big as a room. Different colours of sand, painstakingly blown in symmetrical patterns by monks using straw-like tubes, building layer upon layer, over the course of weeks, until it was finished. At which point, in keeping with Buddhist feelings about materialism, the mandala was destroyed, but George tended to ignore that part. 

What was interesting to him was that the mandala was meant to be—unless he'd vastly misunderstood, which was also possible—a reflection of the internal state of the monk. The monk's inner being, hopefully a peaceful one, laid out in beautiful, fragile form. The soul as a painting. 

The books on George's walls were his sand mandala. When they were all in their place, when he could run his hands over the spines, taking one off the shelf to read or re-read, they were the most serene reflection of his internal state. Or if perhaps not quite his internal state, then at least the internal state he would like to have had. Wheich was maybe all it was for the monks, too, come to think of it. 

And so when he made his very first incision into the pages of a book, when he cut into an old papterback he'd found lying near the rubbish bins behind the shop, it felt like a blundering step into his mandala. A blasphemy, a desecration of the divine. Or, perhaps, a releasing of it. (pp.60-61)

This is a sentiment near and dear to my heart indeed. I flatly refuse to even fold over the pages of a novel to mark my place... never mind taking a knife to one. The horror!

In any case, I'll be reviewing The Crane Wife in full on The Speculative Scotsman shortly, but it should come as no surprise to anyone who's read Patrick Ness in the past that it's simply stunning stuff.

Now, to stroke the spines of a few good books...

Quoth the Scotsman | G. Willow Wilson on The Good Old Days

Over the next week, we're going to be talking a bunch about Alif the Unseen here on The Speculative Scotsman. So much so that I bet you'll be sick of this pretty picture before we're through. In our innocence, then, look upon this lovely cover!

For today, I wanted to share with you a short excerpt, taken from a debate between an ancient sheikh and our young hacktivist hero. Between the old, in essence, and the new:

"I know it's common for old people to complain about the modern moment, and lament the passing of a golden age when children were polite and you could buy a kilo of meat for pennies, but in our case, my boy, I think I am not mistaken when I say that something fundamental has changed about the world in which we live. We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers. Nothing shocks one anymore. We are living in a post-fictional era. Fictional governments are accepted without comment, and we can sit in a mosque and have a debate about the fictional pork a fictional character consumes in a video game, with every gravity we would accord something quite real. [...] It is all very strange indeed."

"I don't think what you're talking about is a modern issue," said NewQuarter. "I think we're going back to the way things used to be, before a bunch of European intellectuals in tights decided to draw a line between what's rational and what's not. I don't think our ancestors through the distinction was necessary."

The sheikh considered this for a moment.

"Perhaps you're right," he said. "I suppose every innovation started out as a fantasy. Once upon a time, students of Islamic law were encouraged to give free rein to their imaginations. For example, in the medieval era there was a great discussion about the point at which one is obligated to enter a state of ritual purity while traveling on the hajj. If you were on foot, when? If you went by boat, when? If by camel, when? And then one student, having exhausted all earthly possibilities, posed this question: what if one were to fly? The proposition was taken as a serious exercise in the adaptability of the law. As a result, we had rules governing air travel during hajj five hundred years before the invention of the commercial jet." (pp.366-7)

Just a tiny taste of what's to come!

Stay tuned to the site for a grand old giveaway, followed by my full review of G. Willow Wilson's wonderful first novel, and finally, an in-depth interview with the author.

I'm so excited to post all this it's silly.

Quoth the Scotsman | Steven Erikson On Deconstructive Criticism

You may or may not realise that I'm basically AFK at the moment.

I haven't made a thing of it, and there's enough content on the roster for the next few weeks that the difference is likely to be minimal - plus I'll be tweeting and talking in the comments second as much if not more than as I usually do - but I've had to resolve to stop blogging for long enough to take in a few of the tomes that have arrived in my mailbox lately.

Which is to say, I have copies of Great North Road by Peter F. Hamilton, The Twelve by Justin Cronin, and Forge of Darkness by Steven Erikson — three huge books that I'd love to read. None of which I would, if I'm honest, unless I put the brakes on for a bit.

So that's what I'm going to do. In fact I've started, and I'm already reaping the rewards. Forge of Darkness has been absolutely fantastic so far: if not easy reading - far from it, actually - then nevertheless incredibly compelling. Thoughtful and evocative, powerfully put and smartly structured, this first volume of Erikson's dark Kharkanas saga engaged me from word one, once I made the decision to slow down for a moment.

But this is a Quoth the Scotsman post, so let's get to the quote in question!

It's of a conversation - from the very early going of the novel, so not at all a spoiler - that's stuck with me in a strange way. A dialogue about the relationship between art and art appreciation that speaks, in a sense, to my own relationship as a reviewer with the books I blog about.

First, a bit of scene-setting: over supper after a sitting, Urusander, so-called saviour of the Tiste people, attempts to express his opinion on the portrait in progress by the famous artist Kadaspala. But Kadaspala doesn't want to know what his subject thinks of the piece, for these reasons:

"When stripped down to its bones, criticism is a form of oppression. Its intent is to manipulate both artist and audience, by imposing rules on aesthetic appreciation. Curiously, its first task is to belittle the views of those who appreciate a certain work but are unable or unwilling to articulate their reasons for doing so. On occasion, of course, one of those viewers rises to the bait, taking umbrage at being dismissed as being ignorant, at which point critics en masse descend to annihilate the fool. No more than defending one's own precious nest, one presumes. But on another level, it is the act of those in power protecting their interests, those interests being nothing less than absolute oppression through the control of personal taste." (p.33)

A typically provocative point from a fantastically confident author.

Riddle me this, then, readers: are critics essentially the antithesis of opinion? Or is Kadaspala's perspective tantamount to an arrogance as offensive as any suggestion or assertion about the perceived quality of an objet d'art?

Quoth the Scotsman | Lisa Tuttle on Beauty and the Book

Later this month, the fine folks behind Jo Fletcher Books are reissuing The Silver Bough by Lisa Tuttle. Originally released in the US in 2006, this lovely new edition marks the book's first publication in the UK — which is strange, because it's all about Scotland. Albeit a Scotland populated almost exclusively by Americans.

Now we have our fair share of settlers from The Other Side, sure, but the predominance of incomers in The Silver Bough struck me as oddly unsettling. Last I heard, there were still a few Scots left in the country... though you wouldn't think it from this fruit-based fairytale.

That said, the perspectives Tuttle presents in this text proffer an interesting angle on bonnie Scotland: an inversion of the unavoidable fact that when you spend any amount of time in a place, however amazing it may be, you become blasé about all it has to offer. The Silver Bough's characters, on the other hand, see Scotland for what it is: a space almost outside of time.

"The road leveled out, but then, almost immediately, it began winding downward in a long, slow descent. [Ashley] looked down at a mountainside covered in dark green pines like a pelt of thick fur, and up at a glittering, roaring cascade of water that tumbled steeply down over rocks. There were no buildings anywhere. It was all wilderness, with nothing man-made in sight but the long and winding road. 

"Except for the traffic, there was nothing to fix you to a particular era. The scene was magically timeless. Wander off across that rocky meadow, or into the shelter of that dark forest, far enough to lose the sight and sound of the road, and you might find yourself in another century, meeting some hunky, shaggy, kilted Highlander..." (p.18)

Other than the idea of wild Highlanders, Tuttle hits the nail on the head here, and later, she touches on another of my lifelong loves.

Can you tell what it is yet? :P

"She loved the look, the heft, the weight, the smell and the fact of books — all those miniature embodiments of other lives, other times. Thoughts and dreams preserved for posterity to be summoned back to life through the act of reading. The buzz these days was all about the Internet, the world of online, digital knowledge, the necessity of being connected. But even though she accepted that the Net was not merely the waves of the future but the fact of present-day life, and did miss the access to it that she'd taken for granted in her old job, on an emotional level it could not compare, for her, with the magic of an old-fashioned, printer, real book. It was that, and a childhood fantasy of being able to live in a library, which had really decided her choice of career, no matter what sensible reasons she might tell other people." (p.49)

I'll have a full review of The Silver Bough ready to post on The Speculative Scotsman shortly, but for the moment, know that it's as unassumingly lovely as it sounds... if a little slower than I might like.

Quoth the Scotsman | Tom Pollock on The City & The City

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following post are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those of the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

I'm a country mouse, I suppose.

(As opposed to a city mouse, I mean.)

I certainly haven't lived long-term in a city, though oddly - or perhaps not - I've holidayed in a great many, across the UK, Europe and North America. Most always, I've enjoyed the experience. Sometimes, I've even wished I could stay a little longer. But I've never wanted that to be the new norm. To be able to come home, to the peace and the quiet, to the flora and the fauna, to the sizable apartment I can only afford because frankly, it's a bit out there... that means the world to me.

Maybe it's indoctrination. Maybe I'm a country mouse in my old age because that's the way and the where I was raised. Truth be told, I don't know, but it's perfectly possible. There are certain perks to a life in the cityside that I'm desperately envious of, mostly involving food: namely the nearness of vegetarian restaurants and takeaways.

But I bet you city mice feel the exact same way: that you wouldn't trade your day-to-day for anything... though perhaps there are a few things you wish you could change? A few sacrifices that must, alas, be made.

Apropos of which, last week I was reading The City's Son by Tom Pollock, and quite aside from its awesome monsters and pretty prose, a short section specifically struck me. 

The following excerpt, then, forms part of one of the most convincing arguments I've heard in favour of city living.

"Our memories are like a city: we tear some structures down, and we use rubble of the old to raise up new ones. Some memories are bright glass, blindingly beautiful when they catch the sun, but then there are the darker days, when they reflect only the crumbling walls of their derelict neighbours. Some memories are buried under years of patient construction; their echoing halls may never again be seen or walked down, but still they are the foundations for everything that stands above them.

"Glas told me once that that's what people are, mostly: memories, the memories in their own heads, and the memories of them in other people's. And if memories are like a city, and we are our memories, then we are like cities too. I've always taken comfort in that." (p.276)

Isn't that a lovely idea? And I would wager there's some real truth to it, too.

Tom Pollock's tremendous debut is still a fair ways off from its publication date, I'm afraid. You won't be able to buy it in the UK until August, or September in the States, so I'm going to hold off on posting my full review till it's rather more relevant.

But do stayed tuned. I assure you, The City's Son will be worth the wait. Plus, I'll be blogging about the book at least once more in advance of my review and its release ...

Quoth the Scotsman | Kim Stanley Robinson on Seizing the Day

This week, instead of catching up on all the reviews I've abandoned in the to-do queue, or playing Mass Effect 3, say - which we'll talk more about shortly - I've been reading 2312, the forthcoming space opera from that setter of standard, Kim Stanley Robinson of Red Mars renown.

As I said on Twitter after the first night I spent with 2312: it's been incredible, obviously.

And it's continued as awesome. I haven't been able to set aside as much time as I might like to devote to it this week - with everyone's exams either here or nearly, the tutoring has gotten all serious all of a sudden - but those moments I have had to spend with 2312 have basically, if you forgive me the hyperbole, blown me away.

I should have a full review of 2312 ready for public consumption well ahead of the book's publication in late May, but for the very moment, I wanted to share at least this little snippet with you. It's excerpted from from an early chapter, so never fear: there are no spoilers in sight. All you need know is that Wahram - one of our impetuous protagonist's co-conspirators - is considering how to keep things interesting in the midst of a long interplanetary voyage:

"Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses, bulwarks against time and despair.

"Wahram was very aware of this, having lived the process many times; so he paid attention to what he did when he traveled, on the lookout for those first repetitions that would create the pattern of that particular moment in his life. So often the first time one did things they were contingent, accidental, and not necessarily good things on which to base a set o habits. There was some searching to be done, in other words, some testing of different possibilities. That was the interregnum, in fact, the naked moment before the next exfoliation of habits, the time when one wandered doing things randomly. The time without skin, the raw data, the being-in-the-world. 

"They came a bit too often for his taste. Most of the terraria offering passenger transport around the solar system were extremely fast, but even so, trips often took weeks. This was simply too much time to be banging around aimlessly; doing that one could easily slide into a funk or some other kind of mental hibernation. In the settlements around Saturn this sort of thing had sometimes been developed into entire sciences and art forms. But any such hebephrenia was dangerous for Wahram, as he had found out long ago by painful experience. Too often in his past, meaninglessness had gnawed at the edges of things. He needed order, and a project; he needed habits. In the nakedness of the moments of exfoliation, the intensity of experience had in it a touch of terror -- terror that no new meaning would blossom to replace the old ones now lost.

"Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudoiterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a little bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise, and this was Wahram's desired state: to live in a pseudoiterative. But then also to live in a good pseudoiterative, an interesting one, the pattern constructed as a little work of art. No matter the brevity of a trip, the dullness of the terrarium or the people in it, it was important to invent a pattern and a project and pursue it with all his will and imagination. It came to this: shipboard life was still life. All days had to be seized." (pp.50-51)

I bet you can imagine why this passage spoke to me so. If not, consider the epic holiday I just had, and the soul-crushing feeling that often accompanies coming home. I only wish I'd read these words a week or so sooner.

2312 is magnificent, incidentally. Already one of the year's best in my book, and I'm still not quite finished... a situation I aim to remedy this evening.

Seize the day yourselves on May 24th!

Quoth the Scotsman | Chris Beckett on Being the Change

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following post are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those of the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

A year and a half ago, I came away from Chris Beckett's Bacigalupi-esque dystopian debut very impressed.  Curious newcomers can read my review of The Holy Machine in full here. 

Tweren't perfect, but it certainly did the trick, and at the time I said I'd be on the lookout for whatever Chris Beckett did next. Dark Eden is what.

Isn't it pretty?


Inside as well as out.

As of the time of this writing, I'm only halfway through Dark Eden, but it's been quite simply stunning. It's about the rise and fall of a small colony left to its own devices on a distant world without a sun to warm it, and the main character, John Redlantern, is a sort of revolutionary, determined to break with tradition for the sake of the greater good, though everyone and everything's against him.


The following excerpt occurs immediately after John, who is all of twenty wombtimes old - a newhair, as they say (use your imagination) - has taken on a leopard with just a thorn stuck to a stick. Incredibly, he lives to tell the tale... or rather to hear his friend Gerry tell it, again and again and again. The leopard wasn't so lucky, alas, and John is disgusted by the way everyone treats him like a hero of the ages simply for outsmarting an animal:

"You're all of you hiding up in trees like Gerry did, I said in my head to all those friendly smiling people, and that's the trouble with bloody Family. You eat and you drink and you slip and you quarrel and you have a laugh, but you don't really think about where you're trying to get to or what you want to become. And when trouble comes, you just scramble up trees and wait for the leopard to go away and then afterwards giggle and prattle on for wakings and wakings about how big and scary it was and how it nearly bit off your toes, and how so-and-so chucked a bit of bark at it and whatshisname called out a rude name. Gela's tits! Just look at you!

"And the thing was, the meat was starting to run out in Circle Valley. It was no good just hiding up a tree and giggling. Something was going to have to happen or a waking would come in the end when people in Family would starve. That's assuming that there wasn't another rock fall down by Exit Falls, in which case we might all drown instead.

"Never mind drowning or starving from lack of food, though. I was going to starve inside my head long before that, or drown in boredom, if I couldn't make something happen in the world, something different, something more than just this." (pp.32-33)

Dark Eden is certainly the best book I've read this month, and if it keeps on as darkly fantastic as it's begun, I wouldn't be surprised to see it place in Top of the Scots 2012. Stay tuned to TSS for the full review, which should be ready just as soon as I get back from Bratislava.

Sadly I don't see a release date for our friends across the pond, but here in the UK, Dark Eden is out right now from the good folks at Corvus, and The Book Depository ships overseas for free.

What are you waiting for? :)

Quoth the Scotsman Abroad | Adam Roberts on Rich History

So I did my best to make it last - here's to two weeks of Halloween every year - but October, alas... October's over.

And you all know what that means, don't you? It's November now. Which is to say - there's no getting around it - the month before December is officially upon us, and in December I have to tell you all which of the year's new books were in my humble opinion the best of the bunch.

That means I've a whole heck of a lot of catching up to do, and I began, not least because I'd heard such great things about it, with the new Adam Roberts. That's the same Adam Roberts who wrote New Model Army, as challenging a novel as it was rewarding, which I read and reviewed here on TSS in early 2010. 

By Light Alone was... well, brilliant. Brilliant in such a way as to move me to think about all sorts of things differently. For instance history:

"Historians have hitherto worked from the premise that poverty is not as significant as wealth. But they don't mean that. What they mean is that poverty does not make for diverting narratives the way wealth does. They mean young people would rather watch a book with a sexy actress representing Anne Boleyn in a splendid dress, than watch a book about ill-clad peasants grubbing in the dirt. They mean poverty is dreary. And so it is! They mean that poverty is boring. And so it is! So, only understand this: historians look to history for entertainment, not for the truth. They go to be diverted and titillated, not to see how things really are. History [...] is like a study of a mighty forest of fir trees that only ever talks about some primroses growing on the extreme edge. History that talks about rich people is a lie. Taken as a whole, mankind has never been rich." (p.172)

A fascinating way of thinking about history that I'm afraid to say simply hadn't occurred to me before I began By Light Alone. Admittedly I've never been one to pay history much mind - in my experience, what is is difficult enough to pick a path through, never mind what was as well - but now that there's this whole other side to it? Now you never know.

Anyway, if ever I needed reminding, this - this right here - is why I read. To wit, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the latest to come from the great and terrible Adam Roberts figured into Top of the Scots somehow, come the reckoning.

For the time being, it just so happens that my review of By Light Alone went up yesterday as a guest post on the inimitable SF Signal. Do click on through to read the thing; I'm really rather pleased with how it turned out.

Next up on this Johnny come lately journey through some of the year's most overlooked (by me) books: I expect either The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht or The Wise Man's Fear by he of the beard. And I know which of the pair I'd rather read. On the other hand, I have a sneaking suspicion you guys would rather hear what I have (or have not) to say about the other one. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Please, do!

Quoth the Scotsman | Christopher Priest on Perception

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following article are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental... or so I'm saying.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

Here before me I have a copy of one of my single-most anticipated novels of 2011: The Islanders by the great and terrible Christopher Priest. 

It's a good feeling!

And by gum, it's a good book, too. But then, you hardly need me to tell you that. Christopher Priest has been astonishing readers in genre and the mainstream for almost forty years now; he's that rare species of author literary critics whip out the big words for, and with every reason.

Anyway, I know I'm very far from alone in my undying appreciation of Christopher Priest, so to tide you over till I've crossed all the eyes and dotted all the tees in my review of The Islanders, I thought I'd share a choice quote from the chapter (though it is not, strictly speak, a chapter at all) accounting for the isle of REEVER, or HISSING WATERS, as per the local patois.

In the following excerpt the gazetteer describes the vortical distortions, or temporal gradients, which make mapping the vast Dream Archipelago such an absolute nightmare:

"If you fly in one direction, looking down at the ground - say from north to south - a certain island will look a certain way: mountains here, a river there, a town, a bay, a forest, and so on. However, if you fly over it a second time - east to west - the same island will look oddly different: the river doesn't reach the sea in quite the same part of the coast, the forest looks darked or larger, the mountains now have fewer peaks, the coast seems less jagged, or more. Has it actually changed? Or was your observation inaccurate the first time? You go round for a third look - north to south again - and the island has seemed to change its layout yet again, and is different in a new way.

"Worse, if you set off across the sea to an adjacent island, then try to return home, the island you left will now seem to be in another place or direction entirely. Sometimes it will have vanished altogether, or that is how it appears." (p.284)

In the UK, Gollancz will be publishing The Islanders in late September; mark your calendars accordingly. There's no date that I can see for a US release, alas, but worst case scenario, I'm sure The Book Depository will have your back.

Meantime, expect a full write-up of The Islanders here on The Speculative Scotsman, or on one of the other genre review resources I haunt... very probably before then.

Quoth the Scotsman | Daniel Polansky on Decisions

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following article are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental... or so I'm saying.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

There's a great deal more than a good read riding on the success, or not, of The Straight Razor Cure - that is to say Low Town, if you're in the States. If it's well received, The Straight Razor Cure will of course serve to launch the career of one Daniel Polansky: a young American author, and a rather talented fellow by my estimation.

Moreover, however, here in the UK Polansky's debut is being positioned as "the launch title of Hodder's revitalised science fiction and fantasy list," so it follows that the publishers aforementioned will be paying close attention to its reception - both by critics and by the book-buying public at large - in the months to come. Whichever way you cut the mustard, a substantial new market for genre authors and a new avenue of speculative entertainment for readers so inclined would be Very Good Thing.

So I'm hoping The Straight Razor Cure does well. Exceedingly well, even - like a good cake. Thus it was with some trepidation that I heard rumblings about the blogosphere that Polansky's novel wasn't all it could have been.

Well, truth be told, what is?

As of the time of this writing I'm about two thirds through The Straight Razor Cure, and if I'm not yet ready to champion Polansky as among the year's most exciting arrivals, that's in large part because I'm wary of making such claims without all the facts in hand. That said, I'm optimistic; it's made for pretty damn fine reading so far. Think the bastard offspring of Mark Charan Newton and Scott Lynch...

Not to give too much away, but I suppose you could say the following exchange - cod-philosophical and winningly self-aware - spoke to me. So I thought I'd do the decent thing and share:

"It's strange, the paths a man finds himself on. In the storybooks everyone's granted some critical moment, when the road forks and your options are laid out clear in front of you: heroism or villainy. But it's not like that, is it? Decisions follow decisions, each minor in and of itself, made in the heat of the moment or on the dregs of instinct. Then one day you look up and realise that you're stuck, that every muttered answer is a bar in the cage you've built, and the momentum of each choice moves you forward as inexorable as the will of the Firstborn."

"Eloquent, but untrue. I made a decision, once. If the consequences were worse than I had anticipated... that's because it was a bad decision."

"But that's my point, you see. How can you know which choices matter and which choices don't? There are decisions I have made that I regret, that were - that were not who I am. There are decisions I would unmake, were it possible to do so."

Decisions, right? Who would have 'em! :)

The Straight Razor Cure will be published by Hodder in the UK on August 18th. Doubleday, meanwhile, will have Low Town out the door a couple of days earlier in the States, albeit bearing - I think we can all agree - a rather less interesting title.

Expect a full review to hit The Speculative Scotsman well before either date.

Quoth the Scotsman | Robert McCammon on Living the Dream

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following article are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental... or so I'm saying.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

What a topsy-turvy couple of weeks it's been...

If you follow me on the Twitter, you'll know all about the latest twist of the knife in the comedy of errors my life seems to have become this last while: after the router failing, and the pitiful hand injury, on Monday my monitor gave up the ghost.

I suppose I shouldn't begrudge it. My Samsung Syncmaster served me very well for four, perhaps five years - and it even had the decency to let me know, in advance of its final failure, that its time was finally coming. Didn't make the thing any cheaper to replace, but hey, these things happen. I just wish they didn't happen all at once!


And I'll say this. Not being able to blog's left me with an almighty whack of time to spend on other things, like reading. And betwixt sessions of the tremendous L. A. Noire, read I have. I've read The Lost Fleet: Dauntless, The Thing on the Shore, Who Goes There? and Man Plus. On my shiny new tablet I've read a couple of comics: some Locke and Key, some silly Batman fluff, and the first volume of Richard Stark's Parker.

But last night I put the Transformer down to start in on a particularly appealing new arrival: the gorgeous Subterranean Press edition of The Five by the great Robert McCammon, which I hear is selling out as we speak.

There'll be more on The Speculative Scotsman about The Five in due course - not least in The BoSS when it returns this weekend. But today, I wanted to pull out a quote from this monster of a novel about the last tour of a nothing band that struck a chord in me... a quote which I think speaks to the eternal dilemma facing aspiring artistes the world over:

"Before he said what had to be spoken, before he opened his mouth and let the future tumble out of it, for better or for worse, he had an instant of feeling lost. Of wondering if he was advancing toward a goal or retreating from one, because in this business - in any of the arts, really - success was always a lightning strike away. Yeah, he would do fine as the rep selling audio units on the road. He would get to know the products so well he would know what the client needed before he eyeballed the venue. But was that going to be enough? Was he going to wake up one night when he was forty years old, listening to a clock tick and thinking If only I had stuck it out... 

"Because that was the sharpest thorn in this tangled bush where the roses always seemed so close and yet so hard to reach, and everybody in the Scumbucket knew it. How long did you give your life to the dream, before it took your life? 

"'I have nothing,' he said, which he had not meant to say and wished he could reel back in, but it was gone." (p.23)

I'm only 50-odd pages into The Five at the time of this writing, and I'm rooting for these guys already. Not least because they're so down-on-their-luck - as I suppose you could say I've been on mine, this last little while.

Though I'll admit I was expecting more in the way of the supernatural from a Robert McCammon novel than there's been thus far... which is to say not even a whiff. Not that I'm complaining. And perhaps the weird and wonderful is still to come - or else I've quite misunderstood the modus operandi of this particular author. An entirely too plausible scenario, in truth; it's just incredible how little exposure this author has in the UK given his profile overseas.

Now all y'all feel free to set me straight on this, but Robert McCammon is a speculative fiction author, right? Swan Song wasn't just a dalliance with the disturbing, was it? 

Quoth the Scotsman | Jon Courtenay Grimwood on Reinventing the Wheel

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following article are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental... or so I'm saying.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

It's not often I go from loathing to loving or loving to loathing, and in truth, though it did in the early going rather try my patience, I was never less than admiring of The Fallen Blade. There was, however, a moment in John Courtenay Grimwood's spectactularly dark first fantasy which served to turn my opinion completely on its head.

This isn't it.


What this is, in lieu of that, is an addendum of sorts to the glowing review I put up yesterday; a non-spoilery quote from the The Fallen Blade which speaks to so much of what I came to admire - indeed adore - about this inspired, and thickly political riff on Assassin's Creed.


For those of you who remain on the fence, then:

There were two tides a day. A low and a high. The first matter neither here nor there to those in the pit, who were removed from the festering mud banks of Venice's edges, and the stink of sour water, as backstreet canals revealed rubbish, puddles and the occasional corpse with every ebbing tide.

The second tide did concern them.

At high tide, lagoon water flowed along ditches, for a few minutes to as much as an hour, and splashed into the oubliette below. One day's tide left half the central island still exposed. Two days' drowned it, but left prisoners able to stand. Three days' killed those unable to swim. Only by constantly working the pump could everyone stay alive. Exquisite cruelty. Hard work for the sake of it. More than this, it stopped prisoners trying to escape. You worked the wheel; slept, woke and worked again. No one was allowed to slack. The oubliette was self-controlling, self-containing. 

In it, Tycho saw Serenissima. 

The varied councils, the courts within courts, the Arsenalotti at war with the Nicoletti, the cittadini jealous of the patricians, the patricians divided into old house and new, rich and poor. no one in Venice got off the wheel. 

Beyond the city, Serenissima's colonies fed the capital, the Venetian navy fought the Mamluk pirates; the Moors allied themselves with whoever the Mamluks opposed. The Germans offered support, claiming Byzantium was Serenissima's greatest threat. The Byzanties claimed the German emperor's ambition was a greater threat and offered support in turn. Timur's Mongols conquered ever larger slices of the world, threatening to recreate the sprawling empire of his hero Genghis Khan. 

And the wheel went round and round and round...

Oh, yes. Ye gods yes...

So who's going to give The Fallen Blade a shot? And who's read it already?

Quoth the Scotsman: Charles Yu on Memes

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following article are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental... or so I'm saying.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

 

How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe came out to much ado a few months ago, and not for nothing. I've finally gotten to it - take that, timeliness! - and however much of Yu's novel I fear has gone cleanly over my head, it's been a delight. Funny, sad and smart; smart as a new school uniform (and just as totty, at that).

The following quote resonated with me because it's both telling of Yu's frenetic prose style and because I think it speaks to a couple of things that have come up of late as regards the blogosphere; come to that, I'm of the mind that you can read this brief excerpt as an indictment of the internet entire.

Over to you, Yu:

From How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

Published in October by Corvus

"My thoughts, normally bunched together, wrapped in guaze, insistent, urgent, patient, one moment to the next, living in what I now realize is, in essence, a constate state of emergency (as if my evolutionary instincts of fight or flight have gone haywire, leading me to spend each morning, noon, and evening in a low-grade but absolutely never-ceasing muted form of panic), those rushed and ragged thoughts are now falling away, one by one, revealing themselves for what they are: the same thought over and over again. And once revealed for what they are, these hollow thoughts, these impostors, non-thoughts masquerading as thoughts, memes, viruses, signals fired off, white noise generated by my brain, they are gone.

"And it is quiet. Quiet in a way I have never experienced before. As if quiet were a substance, and it were thick, as if that substance were now in my head, filling it like a viscous fluid..." (p.122)