Short Fiction Corner | A Very Mieville Morning

Don't look now, but it's only new China Mieville!

And no, I don't even mean Embassytown. Though that's what I've been reading these past few night, at long goddamn last. And it is... exquisite. But no, that's not the new China Mieville I mean.

Here. This morning The Guardian posted an exclusive short story by the man, the muscle, the mind behind The City and The City: at a glance 'Covehithe' seems to be about a risen rigging platform - though don't hold me to that. I've only read the first section for the minute but of course, it's superb. Of course it is: for Pete's sake, it's new China Mieville.

Away yes go and read it, then. Catching up on the blogs can wait today. :)

Book Review | On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers

Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /

IndieBound / The Book Depository

1718: Puppeteer John Chandagnac has set sail for Jamaica to recover his stolen inheritance, when his ship is seized by pirates. Offered the choice to join the crew, or be killed where he stands, he decides that a pirate's life is better than none at all. Now known as Jack Shandy, this apprentice buccaneer soon learns to handle a mainsail and wield a cutlass - only to discover he is now a subject of a Caribbean pirate empire ruled by one Edward Thatch, better known as Blackbeard. A practitioner of voodoo, Blackbeard is building an army of the living and the dead, to voyage together to dreamlike lands where the Fountain of Youth awaits...

***

The basis for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film set to hit theatres this May, On Stranger Tides by Arthur C. Clarke Award-nominee Tim Powers is a drunken, back-stabbing, swaggering, double-dealing Saturday afternoon in the sun matinee of a novel. Depending on how closely Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio's adapted screenplay hones to it, and just how many Captain Jack Sparrows director Rob Marshall decides to composite into the thing, needless to say, in On Stranger Tides there are the makings of the best Pirates of the Carribean flick since the very first.


Nor is this the first time On Stranger Tides has been the inspiration for such estimable entertainment. Originally released in 1987, way back when Powers' novel also moved game designer and erstwhile funny man Ron Gilbert to define a generation with The Secret of Monkey Island. Their purposes might have differed somewhat - one was a boisterous book of adventure on the high seas and the other a comic point-and-click - but the veins of commonality between the game and the story which helped germinate it are easy to pick out, even to this day: there's all the voodoo hoodoo, of course, but also strains of Hatch and Shandy in LeChuck and Guybrush, and in the pirate town of Mêlée, where Threepwood determines to become a swarvy dog, there are echoes of "the outlaw republic on New Providence Island" (p.57) where Powers' protagonist Jack gets sea legs of his own.


This is after he's been pressganged, you understand. While sailing for Jamaica to right a wrong done him by an ass-kissing uncle and inherit the estate that is rightfully his, John Chandagnac's ship is boarded by pirates under the nefarious Blackbeard, who give him a no-brainer of a choice: John can either walk the plank, or join them. He signs on the dotted line forthwith - wouldn't we all? - and rechristened Jack Shandy via a few drunken sailors and a barrel of rum, he begins to realise that perhaps it's a pirate's life for him, after all... if only for as long as it takes to rescue the object of his affections.


That's Beth Hurwood, in whose body Beth's father Benjamin means to resurrect his late and oft-lamented wife. Beth is "innocence intolerably abused" (p.182) in so many words, and Jack hopes to see her free from harm's way, even if saving the girl means he has to cross Blackbeard himself, whose quest for booty takes the pirates - old and new "to a hole in the wall between life and death, and anyone standing around is liable to catch the spray from one side or the other. Don't you know any history? It what Juan Ponce de Leon was looking for - he called it the Fountain of Youth." (p.158)


Now I'm no Pirates of the Caribbean apologist. The sequels were ridiculous, self-serving things; embarrassing for all concerned, I do not doubt. But that first film... well, it took me back, reminded me of a time when pirates were in vogue, and such stories were still told. Where did they all go, anyway?


For its part, On Stranger Tides left me feeling much the same way, in a heady haze of nostalgia and satisfaction. Powers writes unfussily, with lots of hyphens and ellipses and asides, yet through every diversion his piquant prose flows smoothly. His language is intoxicating, engaging on a visual and a sensory level, and though his characters - Jack and Beth and especially Blackbeard - are archetypes every which way you look at them, they leap to life from the first. Their adventures are an undiluted joy to follow.


On Stranger Tides has it all, which is to say romance and mystery, action and intrigue, dark magic and exciting swordfights on the seven seas. It's such great fun; it rips along, keeping pace with the best best Summer books; and if I don't remember much of it in a week or a month or a year, as well I might not, why... I'll go at it again! I read this timely reissue because of the Pirates of the Caribbean connection, I admit, but the next Tim Powers I read, I'm reading because Tim Powers wrote it.


Also: arrrrrr!

***

On Stranger Tides

by Tim Powers

UK Publication: May 2011, Corvus
US Publication: April 2011, Harper


Buy this book from

Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com /
IndieBound / The Book Depository

Recommended and Related Reading

First Impressions | Game of Thrones

Winter... has come.

I'd add to that: and about bloody time, too!


Though the urge has been in overdrive since HBO began promoting the latest addition to their many-studded slate of sophisticated adult dramas, I never did get around to reading any of A Song of Ice and Fire. This despite my quite adoring Fevre Dream and those short stories I cherry-picked from the compendium of all things early George R. R. Martin that is Dreamsongs. This despite my deep-seated fondness for intelligent epic fantasy and all things grim, which I understand now - as I intuited then - the great Game of Thrones indubitably is.


So for me it's been a long road, though not half, nor even a quarter - I'd say somewhere around a sixteenth - as long a road as I'm assured it's been for all those vocal devotees who've hung on every word of every instalment of A Song of Ice and Fire so far. Well, here's hoping this series helps tide those anxious souls over some. For myself, I come to HBO's sumptuous adaptation from a perspective unaffected by any knowledge at all of what's on the horizon, but for the received wisdom that it'll be pretty awesome, probably.


On the strength of this first episode of Game of Thrones alone, then, just this one time, I might be inclined to believe the hype. Tell no-one!

Game of Thrones opens with what appears to be a Wahlberg - though appearances are in this case deceiving - riding through The Wall which divides the South of Westeros from the tortuously frosted North. He and his Night's Watch companions come upon a bleak forest clearing full of dead people, yet the dead seem to have a little life left in 'em still, for they rise up as if they'd never fallen at all and commence beheading the men. The encounter's sole survivor escapes to Winterfell, where he's declaimed as a deserter and a lunatic for his dire rantings about beings thought dead for centures, and decapitated for his trouble.


On the other end of the offending sword, we meet Ned Stark. As Sean Bean. Or perhaps it's the other way around? Let's say that. Certainly, Bean is utterly at home in the role: as the would-be hand man of the King of the Seven Kingdoms he brings grizzled gravitas and a stout-jawed resolve many will remember fondly from The Fellowship of the Ring, while as the powerful patriarch of House Stark he evinces a warmth I hadn't expected - and a coldness, too. His character seems a fascinating one, neatly encapsulated in a couple of this first episode of Game of Thrones' most memorable lines. "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword," he tells his youngest son after insisting the boy Bran witnesses the aforementioned execution; I would imagine that a fitting mantra for Ned Stark - lifted directly from the novel, perhaps? Later, upon finding a pack of Direwolf cubs huddled around the butchered remains of their mother, he allows to his spread of sons - the bastard Jon Snow and all - the following: "You will train them yourselves, you will feed them yourselves, and if they die, your will bury them yourselves."


Indeed, Westeros feels every bit a world in which the dead - and I would wager there will be many dead when all is said and done - must either resolve to somehow bury their own bodies or be content to decay in the open air. From the chill and forbidding feel of Winterfell alone, where much of this first episode's action occurs, it is too a lavishly realised location: it and its sister continent, Essos across the narrow sea, which with its rugged golden coves and sun-bleached Mediterranean sensibilities appears the polar opposite of Westeros, one bleakly blue-white and the other orange, and earthy. But though in its first 30 seconds alone there is enough stunning fantasy imagery to secure the undying devotion of many a genre fan, Game of Thrones doesn't really seem to be about the sightseeing, for in Essos we're offered an opposing perspective on the struggle for the Iron Throne one imagines will own the day across the narrow sea. Silver-haired siblings Daenerys Targaryen and her banished brother Viserys are all that remains of Westeros' former royal family. Between them they mean to reclaim their rightful place by amassing a vast army, but Essos' forces are a barbarian horde, and the only way into their good graces seems to be by marriage. Thus, Viserys demands Daenerys give herself to Dothraki leader Khal Drogo like a prize pony, and though the prospect does not please her, what other option does she have?

All this and I haven't even mentioned House Lannister - composed of Peter Dinklage as Tyrion, a double-talking dwarf whose "greatest accomplishment" is to be the Queen's brother; the Queen herself, Cersei, to whom Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles' Lena Headey brings the same pained nonchalance she seems to visit upon her every role; the King, of course; and Cersei's brother and lover Jaime, a dirty great meanie by all accounts, however little seen in the first episode of Game of Thrones.


All this and all that and there's more, I gather, and much more still to come. Yet Game of Thrones is not, at the outset, nearly so unwieldy as I'd feared. Pulling double duty as showrunners and head writers, David Benioff and Dan Weiss wisely opt to offer a throughline into this desperately complex world via the Night's Watch man, who passes along the narrative torch to Ned Stark when the latter unceremoniously beheads the former. Only when this hour-long first episode veers too far from Winterfell and the trials ahead of House Stark did I find my interest beginning to slip - and even then David and Dan have the decency to keep such seeming digressions as the incestuous manoeuvring of Cersei and Jaime as brief at this point as the source material will allow.


We're being broken in gently, then. Well thank the heavens for that!


Such restraint means we've had time to align our sympathies just so - though I don't doubt they'll change a great deal in the weeks and months to come. Such focus equates to the natural establishment of certain crucial characters and relationships that could easily have overburdened the narrative's developing momentum. The showrunners clearly have a lot of love for George R. R. Martin's series, and I found that their affection shone through, glinting like a knife in the night even during the darkest moments of this terse introduction to Westeros.

Which isn't to say Game of Thrones is in any way without its share of drawbacks. Headey's lazy imitation worries me already, and though Emilia Clarke does a terrific dazed and confused as Daenerys, there seems precious little dimension to her performance. But perhaps it'll come. I hope so, for hers is a character I am fascinated by already - what with the way she wilfully scalds herself in too hot a bath. The only personage who interests me more is Michelle Fairley's Catelyn Stark, who I dearly hope has more to do in future, for she positively smoulders with tempered frustration in some of her scenes with Sean Bean, while near every other cast member is content to either smirk or sneer.


Then there's the score, which seems dreadfully overbearing during certain key scenes - a relentless racket of dramatic drums that quite ruined a few moments for me - though the theme itself is solid, I'll say that. And oh: and I could do without the contrived cliffhangers in future, thank you very much. The first such - Bran's "fall" from the walls of Winterfell - already strikes me as a cheap way to elevate stakes in no need of elevation.


But we're talking small potatoes, because assuredly Game of Thrones does a great deal with what I'm sure is very little in the grand scheme of things. I was won over in moments - not quite despite myself, for I had been looking forward to this series, but there were no guarantees of quality going in, and coming out, I find myself struggling to restrain my excitement for all that's to come. We'll be looking at a fantasy for the ages here if Game of Thrones continues anything approaching as impressive as it's begun.


Truly, Gods be good that it does.

News Flashing | The Cube Cometh!

Oh. My. God.

You do know what day tomorrow is, don't you?

Why, it's Portal 2 day! :D

Have you been doing your homework in readiness? Have you been duly replaying one of the most significant video games of the past decade? Come on: it'll only take you a couple of hours. Lay off your latest rewatch of Beyond Reanimator tonight and get reacquainted with GLaDOS and Chell!

If you're up for a few new challenges to ease your your puzzle-solvin' noggin into the mind-bending of Portal 2 proper, you can download Portal: Still Alive on XBLA for thirteen new challenge rooms in exchange for a few puny spacebucks.

If that's not enough to satisfy you, or else you're too cheap, or just can't be arsed, well. There's this, too. Portal 2: Lab Rat is a short comic book which serves to bridge the gap between the events of Portal 2 and its storied predecessor. It's by Powers co-creator Michael Avon Oeming and it's really quite good. Fascinating - and funny, that too.

Oh, and free as a bird over on IGN right now.

Wait, you want more?

Well, I guess. Here's a neat Quick Look at Portal 2 from the folks at Valve and Giant Bomb, for instance. It's a good laugh, if a little spoilery.

For myself, I've done all of the above this past week. I've replayed Portal, read the comic book, watched the Quick Look. I've even gone above and beyond. Here, for instance, is my coffee mug, as of this morning:

Let us all eat cake once more! Or else be cruelly deprived of cake by an adorable yet unabashedly evil AI whose promises us cake though in truth he means us ill! :)

So, do you think Portal 2 will live up to the huge success of the little game that could? The game that gave us companion cubes, the song "Still Alive" and the long-con of the cake?

Me? I really think it might. I have faith in these Valve folks. They tend not to release anything till it's good and cooked... golden-brown like demerara sugar... on a cake.

Cover Identity | Bow Before The Magician King

You know, back when I starting out, all I wanted to do with The Speculative Scotsman was talk about Tigana. So I talked about Tigana, at length. And yea, verily, it was good.

However, I realised within a few weeks and a handful of comments that somehow or other, word about TSS had gotten out. And I'd run out of ways to say Guy Gavriel Gay was - is - awesome.

So I bought a bunch of books. All the speculative fiction that'd been clogging up my shopping basket on Amazon - that I'd sat undecided on for weeks, months, even years in a few cases - I bought. Ostensibly so I'd have something to talk about. But mostly because it was a brilliant way of rationalising the purchase of still more fantasy and science fiction as a sort of investment.

And more books = more happy, right? :)

Anyway, among the batch of books I bought, way back when, was The Magicians, by Lev Grossman. I'd been lurking around the blogosphere for ages even then, and I remembered a few reviewers had adored it, and a few... had not, shall we say? What swung me in the end was the gorgeous cover art.

What I actually got when my rather massive delivery came through was, thanks to the wiles of some shady Marketplace seller, this:

And not even that. That in blue. Pffff.

In any event, the best laid plans and all that, because within a few weeks of launching The Speculative Scotsman the review copies had started coming in, and it was all I could do even then to keep up with them even then. So The Magicians floundered on my bookshelves. I alphabetised it and forgot it, all but: in part thanks to the dreary corridor cover art and in part because in short order I found I had so much else to talk about.

However.

There's a sequel on the way. But of course there's a sequel on the way! The Magician King will be out in September here in the UK.

I've known this for a while.

What I didn't know, before Lev Grossman posted about it on his blog yesterday, was that it'd look like this:

Which, well...

Isn't that just the loveliest cover art you've seen in years? Absolutely beautiful. So very pretty I might just have to move The Magicians from the bookshelves to the TBR tower.

So what do you all think? What are your thoughts on the new UK cover art? And in a larger sense, how about The Magicians, anyway? Will it be up my alley or what?

Bear in mind I kept my grammar Nazi at bay long enough to adore the Harry Potter books quite despite myself, took a real shine to Spellwright, though the last Orson Scott Card - The Lost Gate - left me cold, I confess. Am I even thinking along the write lines? Where if I might ask does The Magicians stand in the scheme of things?

Books Received | The BoSS for 17/04/11

Met the old BoSS? Well, let me introduce you to the new BoSS - same as the old BoSS, more or less... except less is more. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

All caught up? Good. Let's get on with it, then.


NEW DANIEL ABRAHAM!


Need I say more?

***

The Dragon's Path

by Daniel Abraham

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 21/04/11

by Orbit

Review Priority

5 (A Sure Thing)

The Blurb: The dragons are gone, the powerful magics that broke the world diluted to little more than parlour tricks, but the kingdoms of men remain and the great game of thrones goes on. Lords deploy armies and merchant caravans as their weapons, manoeuvring for wealth and influence. But a darker power is rising - an unlikely leader with an ancient ally threatens to unleash again the madness that destroyed the world once already. Only one man knows the truth and, from the shadows, must champion humanity. The world's fate stands on the edge of a Dagger, its future on the toss of a Coin ...

A Scotsman's Thoughts: Slowly but surely, I've been working my way through The Long Price Quartet. I don't know that I've said word one about it on the blog before now - the timing wasn't quite right - but now that the timing is right, you'll be seeing a pair of long reviews of the omnibus editions Orbit put out last yet... not too long from now.


Suffice it to say Daniel Abraham is in my book right up there on a pedestal alongside my other favourite writers: at long last, some competition for Guy Gavriel Kay and Catherynne M. Valente!


Since the winter I've been looking forward to The Dragon's Path, the first book of The Dagger and the Coin, as well as Abraham's other new series: Leviathan Wakes. And while The Dragon's Path looks to be a more traditional variety of fantasy than that which astounded me in The Long Price, it comes from an author who's well and truly earned the benefit of the doubt. So.

Who Goes There?

by John W. Campbell

Vital Statistics

Published in the US

on 01/04/09

by Rocket Ride Books

Review Priority

3 (We'll See)

The Blurb: Who Goes There? is best known to science fiction and horror film fans as The Thing because it is the story that formed the basis of Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World (1951) and John Carpenter's famed 80s adaptation. But to ardent readers of SF literature, it is the legendary SF-suspense classic penned by none other than John W. Campbell. With its vivid ensemble of characters, forbidding antarctic setting, and an unforgettably original creature at the center of all the action, the story well deserves its legendary status; it was voted "one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written" by the Science Fiction Writers of America.


This all-new edition features an introduction by William F. Nolan (Logan's Run, Burnt Offerings), and includes his never-before-published Screen Treatment of the story.

A Scotsman's Thoughts: As an addendum to the arrival of Kincaid last week, the care package Rocket Ride sent along also included a copy of Who Goes There?, the very novella which inspired one of my favourite films of, you know, ever: The Thing.


I spent uncountable hours in my youth wondering about the last scene of that movie. Who was the thing in the end? It couldn't have been Kurt Russell's character... he was the good guy after all. Or was he?


Perhaps Who Goes There? will answer some of the questions which used to keep me up nights. Though I don't know that I want it to, particularly...

Home Fires

by Gene Wolfe

Vital Statistics

Published in the US

on 18/01/11

by Tor

Review Priority

4 (Pretty Bloody Likely)

The Blurb: Gene Wolfe takes us to a future North America at once familiar and utterly strange. A young man and woman, Skip and Chelle, fall in love in college and marry, but she is enlisted in the military, there is a war on, and she must serve her tour of duty before they can settle down. But the military is fighting a war with aliens in distant solar systems, and her months in the service will be years in relative time on Earth. Chelle returns to recuperate from severe injuries, after months of service, still a young woman but not necessarily the same person -- while Skip is in his forties and a wealthy businessman, but eager for her return.

Still in love (somewhat to his surprise and delight), they go on a Caribbean cruise to resume their marriage. Their vacation rapidly becomes a complex series of challenges, not the least of which are spies, aliens, and battles with pirates who capture the ship for ransom.

A Scotsman's Thoughts: "There is no writer in SF like Gene Wolfe and no SF novel like Home Fires," concludes the bit of the blurb I usually cut out; a sentiment I find myself in this instance in utter agreement with. In fact I'd go further, and say there is no novel in Gene Wolfe's entire back-catalogue quite like any other. The man's a literary wizard. A bona fide genius whose work, though I hate to say it, tends to go right over my head.

But year in and year out, I try. My feelings as regards his last book, The Sorcerer's House, were predictably somewhat mixed... and going from the write-ups that have come and gone since its release this past January, I expect I'll emerge from Home Fires feeling much the same way: dazed and confused. But it's always a good sort of bafflement, with Gene Wolfe. In any case I'm a glutton for punishment.

And hey, there's always the chance I finally get it. It could happen. It could!

The Land of Painted Caves

by Jean M. Auel

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 29/03/11

by Hodder & Stoughton

Review Priority

2 (It Could Happen)

The Blurb: All things must end, and so concludes the story of Ayla, her mate Jondalar, and their little daughter, Jonayla. The Land of Painted Caves will take readers on a journey of discovery and adventure as Ayla struggles to find a balance between her duties as a new mother and her training to become a Zelandoni – one of the Ninth Cave community's spiritual leaders and healers. Once again, Jean Auel combines her brilliant narrative skills and appealing characters with a remarkable re-creation of the way life was lived thousands of years ago, rendering the terrain, dwelling places, longings, beliefs, creativity and daily lives of Ice Age Europeans as real to the reader as today's news.

A Scotsman's Thoughts: My mum's not much of a reader, but when she does read - or when she used to, I should say - she reads The Clan of the Cave Bears. She loves that book. Like no other, except perhaps Dune. But the sequels, as indeed she's informed me on several occasions... not so much.


Now my mum's taste in fantasy is questionable at best. I mean, she might be the only living person who's kept up with the dreadful extended Dune canon and not seen fit to bitch about it whenever the opportunity arises. But I would like to give Earth's Children a chance; it means so much to her, I'd be an ass not to, at some point.


However methinks the final volume of the long-running series, The Land of Painted Caves - utterly lovely though it looks, and impressive as all the embedded AR and QR stuff is - will not in all likelihood be the book with which I begin that endeavour.

The Black Chalice

by Steven Savile

Vital Statistics

Published in the UK

on 17/03/10

by Abaddon Books

Review Priority

3 (We'll See)

The Blurb: Son of a knight an aspirant to the Round Table, Alymere yearns to take his place in the world, and for a quest to prove his worth. He comes across the foul Devil's Bible - said to have been written in one night by an insane hermit - which leads and drives him, by turns, to seek the unholy Black Chalice. On his quest he will face, and overcome, dire obstacles and cunning enemies, becoming a knight of renown; but the ultimate threat is to his very soul.

A Scotsman's Thoughts: Purporting to be author Steven Savile's translation of "The Tayle of Sir Alymer and hys Queste for the False Grayle," which is to say the first of a series of books recounting the events chronicled in a recently rediscovered manuscript: The Second Book of King Arthur and his Noble Knights.

Nudge nudge, wink wink, in case you were wondering.

Now it's not come up on TSS as far as I recall, but I've always had a soft spot for Arthurian mythology. Add to that the fact that I like to give every new series a shot (presuming I'm able to jump in from the beginning) and the odds on me giving The Black Chalice the old once-over at some point only increase. So sure.

***

That's it for this week. But never fear: the nearly-new and probably only moderately improved BoSS will be back at the same bat-time next week, in the same bat-place. See you then!

In the meantime, I'll be reading The Dragon's Path, of course. How about yourselves? Anything particularly exciting propping up the TBR tower?