But I Digress | The Recommendation Engine

Some days, it's hard to be a blogger.

Some days - all your best laid plans be damned - real-life commitments rear an ugly hydra of heads to demand you attend to this thing or that thing, when all you really want to do, if the truth be told, is burble about books like a good, old-fashioned fanboy.

Alas: some days, there simply isn't an hour to set aside, and on those days - especially when there's a certain something you really want to say, or praise - the feeling of guilt, that people will be coming and going with nothing to show for it, can be... if not crippling, then certainly painfully frustrating.

But believe it or not, today's blog is about why, equally, it's awesome to be a blogger. It's about one of the reasons that arise from time to time to remind exactly you why you love doing this thing. Specifically, today's blog about a tweet I received from a reader - namely Celyn Armstrong - with a link to his Goodreads review of Kings of Morning by Paul Kearney.

You'll recall, first of all, that I really rather enjoyed Kings of Morning — indeed the entirety of The Macht Saga. Well, Celyn did too. After having read my reviews, he bought into the trilogy beginning with The Ten Thousand, and evidently didn't look back, going so far as to set down his adulation for all to see.

I only wish this sort of thing happened more often, because for a few, fine moments, it makes you feel like it's all been worthwhile. Which isn't to say it isn't otherwise... only that the rewards, and they are many and various, are rarely so naked. Maybe this is the megalomaniac in me - in all probability it is - but hearing from Celyn the other day made me feel like I'd changed the world a little baby bit. Influenced an influencer, who can help spread the good word in turn.

This, I think, is how we make our presence felt most meaningfully. This is what we leave behind, if we leave anything at all.

So please, I implore you: if you read a brilliant book or watch an awesome movie, or whatever... if you experience something superb, or perhaps something especially terrible, because a blogger has recommended you do so — and no, I don't just mean me here... then please and thank you too: take a second, and say.

You might just make someone's day. :)

E3 2012 | Who Wins When Everyone Loses?

At this very second, at the LA Convention Centre in Los Angeles, America, E3 is occurring.

Or is it?

Well, yes. Yes it is. But I think it's safe to say the best bits are behind us. There are sure to be a couple of other announcements in the days to come, but - these days, at least - the Electronic Entertainment Expo is all about the press conferences, so for me and the myriad millions whose only involvement in this annual extravaganza is which site we stream 'em from, the show's as good as over.

And what a show it was! :)

Actually, no. I'm pulling your leg again. It was rubbish. Last night I stayed up till an ungodly hour to polish off the press conferences I'd missed live, but if I'd known then what I know now... let's just say I kinda wish I'd went to bed instead.

But the show must go on! Indeed, it even had highlights.

I suppose I should know better by now, after decades of disappointment, but I had high hopes for Nintendo's presser this year. I mean, they were - and they are - the only one of the three hardware manufactures with a forthcoming console to show.

But the Wii U didn't demo very well, and the 3DS was hardly involved in Nintendo's conference at all. Speaking of: I still don't own one, but before E3 I was on the brink of buying in. Not so much now, unless they're saving a secret Legend of Zelda for some later date.

Moving onwards, if not necessarily upwards: Microsoft.

First, an admission of guilt. Most of the video games I play, I play on the Xbox 360. What can I say? I'm a sucker for achievements; Xbox Live is my go-to for online gaming; and occasionally, Xbox Live Arcade spits out something simply magnificent. If I could own only one console, it'd be my 360.

So when I sat down to watch Microsoft's conference, I was primed for awesomesauce. I got... well, a bunch of games that I'll certainly play, come the day. But that was never a question. What I wanted was a surprise, and there wasn't one.

That said, Halo 4 looks pretty impressive. I hadn't imagined that 343 Studios could possibly trump Bungie, but the Forerunner weapons alone got me all kinds of excited - more than I have been for a Halo game since I supposedly finished the fight - and I can't wait to try my hands at the neat new combat scenarios the demo delivered.

So there was that.

But if anyone won E3 this year, it was Sony, surely. I don't remember much about what happened between their first and final demo, but those two showcases alone absolutely blew me away. Further to the words we had about Kara not a week or so ago, Beyond is Quantic Dream's new project, and it looks awesome, as expected. Furthermore, it looks like it might just be more of a game than Heavy Rain, and that's got to be good.

Plus, they shaved Ellen Page.

But it was the last game Sony showed that made the ordeal of E3 this year worthwhile for me. We'd seen a little of The Last of Us in advance, but the gameplay demo was absolutely amazing.

The Last of Us is the next game to come from Naughty Dog, developers of the Uncharted series, and it shows. The encounter mechanics appear to be heavily scripted, but the sheer desperation of the scuffle between our main man - and the little lady that's tagging along with him - and a floor-full of guys with guns left me breathless. The climactic brutality, too. Sure, we only saw an isolated vertical slice of the experience entire, but if The Last of Us has a few more of those in store, it could out-innovate even Bioshock: Infinite.

Which didn't feature in any of the pressers at all, alas.

Nor did Grand Theft Auto V.

And of course nobody said anything about Half-Life 3, or Half-Life 2 Episode 3, or whatever that game is called in its current incarnation.

So never mind.

That is, unless I'm missing something major. Any suggestions?

The Scotsman Abroad | Little Green Men and Big Blue Dudes

Oh, Avatar. For all your faults, I haven't forgotten you. In fact, nearly three years on, I remember you as fondly as any fanboy. Sure, you were awfully silly, but equally, you were sweet, and - no two ways about it - you were breathtaking to boot.

So when I heard sci-fi stalwart Stephen Baxter would be writing a book about the science behind your fiction, I got quite excited. I dusted off my thinking cap and steeled myself for a marathon rewatch.

But you weren't ready yet.

You weren't ready until very recently, even. You took years longer than you were supposed to... but that's alright. I was still open to your science.

I'll tell you this, though: I wasn't expecting it to be quite so sensible.

With more than $2 billion in the bank before it had even hit home video (where it shattered the stats all over again) James Cameron’s Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time. That’s the fact of the matter.

As to the fiction, well... we all remember the broad strokes. The blue people. The big ol’ tree. The incredible flora and fauna. Lest we forget the baddies who laid wanton waste to all of the aforementioned in their unabashedly allegorical quest for the mythical mineral unobtanium.

Good times, right? But obviously well outwith the realms of possibility.

Actually, as it happens, one of the most extraordinary things about Avatar - an all-round extraordinary exemplar of epic SF at the cinema in any event, be damned the backlash - is its oftentimes painstaking engagement with that very thing: possibility. Rarely is the relationship between science fact and science fiction portrayed with such determined attention to detail, especially in a blockbuster of Avatar’s caliber, and it’s easy to grasp why. It’s one thing to be honest, after all, and quite another to be entertaining, but to be both must be doubly difficult — and that, I think, is a conservative estimate.

(continue reading)

Which is to say my most recent review for Tor.com went live a little while ago. 'Twas of The Science of Avatar by Stephen Baxter, and I really rather liked it... that is, with a couple of caveats. You need only click through the link to read the rest.

Please and thank you! :)

Comic Book Review | PunisherMAX Vol. III: Castle and Vol. IV: Homeless

This is the end, my friends.

In the first half of PunisherMAX - collected in the trade paperbacks Kingpin and Bullseye, which I reviewed together here - Scalped's Jason Aaron impressed the hell out of me with his willingness to develop, on a fundamental level, a classic Marvel character that had been treading water for decades. All of a sudden there were stakes again. Heroes and villains alike, re-envisioned as if they existed in the real world rather than some impenetrable, comic-book bubble. And in the real world, narrative logic often fails to prevail. Good people suffer for nothing. Bad people get away with it, whatever it is, all the goddamned time. Shit happens, we say.

Well, shit happens on almost every page of PunisherMAX, and let me tell you this thing: very little of it is good. But bloody as it is, and unremittingly grim, it's also, equally, absolutely fucking fantastic. If I had thought - for a single, solitary second - that this lamentably limited series couldn't get any better, I'd be eating my words as we speak. Because it can. Because it does. But after Kingpin and Bullseye, I had good reason to expect the best.

Castle, for its part, picks up some time after Bullseye's shocking conclusion, with our bloody, broken and seemingly beaten anti-hero behind bars at last. After "punishing" a corrupt cop and being caught assaulting the Kingpin's impenetrable skyscraper, Frank finds himself locked up in a maximum security prison, surrounded by criminals on all sides... but with no way to make them pay! Instead, he turns inwards, remembering his family, and the sadistic circumstances by which he came to lose them.

Oddly, then, this third volume - of a total of four - is essentially a retelling of The Punisher's origin story, yet ye need not fear: it is not, not by any stretch, the tragic but by now over-familiar origin story fans of the franchise know to the last letter. Superficially, I suppose, the exact same things happen: after a career of killing remarkable even amidst the terrible violence in Vietnam, Frank returns home to New York City, only to find his family caught in the crossfire of a mob shoot-out in Central Park. As they bleed out in his arms one after the other after the other, to add insult to injury, The Punisher takes shape in Frank's fast-hardening heart.

However, where before Frank Castle was a victim of all this, fundamentally a family man driven to a dark place by the wickedness visited upon his nearest and dearest, PunisherMAX isn't so sure of his innocence. The continuity of Aaron's retcon is infinitely more perverse than the clear-cut conflict between the forces of good and the legions of evil that birthed The Punisher in the first. I won't give the game away, but let's say that in a very real sense, Castle implicates Frank in the deaths that have made him the murderer he is.

And Castle is just the calm before the storm, because of course Aaron isn't content to simply lock up The Punisher to rot, and throw away the keys. In Homeless, the fourth and final trade paperback collecting this stunning story arc - indeed the complete series - he breaks out of jail (with some surprising assistance, as it transpires) to wage one last on his arch-enemy: the so-called Kingpin of crime. But this time, they'll fight to the death. By the end, only one man will be left standing... and even then, no-one's truly safe in this series.

And I really do mean no-one.

If Kingpin and Bullseye were surgical strikes of a sort, these two concluding trades represent shock and awe on an epic yet still intimate scale. One senses Aaron is holding nothing back, and the rewards wrought by this no-holds-barred attitude are truly awesome, meanwhile Steve Dillion has never in recent memory been better, or ballsier. With amazing layouts and marvelous clarity, he captures the ugliness of Aaron's bastard cast of characters and the city they lay waste to like no other artist could. 

This, thus, is definitive. Never mind Garth Ennis' hallowed run on The Punisher under the Marvel Knights umbrella: PunisherMAX by Jason Aaron and Steve Dillon takes the cake, the pastry... the very dough, damn it. It's so incredibly good that I'm actually sort of bowled over that it exists to being with. After all, it ends; a real rarity in comic books — as discussed in my review of the first two trades. And though The Punisher will live on in other forms - there's already a separate ongoing series, penned by Queen and Country's Greg Rucka... which I'll probably check out eventually - it's hella hard to imagine how anything else bearing the brand at hand could live up to PunisherMAX's unforgettable finale.

I don't care if you've never given a crap about this character. PunisherMAX will make you care. Like so many of Frank Castle's unwitting targets, in fact, you'll have no choice in the matter. Unlikely as it sounds, PunisherMAX is as groundbreaking in its way as any of the medium's other high watermarks. And let's face it: Watchmen isn't half as much fun.

Meme, Myself and I | All About the Books

Timely as ever, I picked up this age-old meme from the Strange Chemistry blog, where Amanda has been having the new imprint's authors answer a couple bookish questions to give her readers a better sense of her writers.

From whence it came originally... I haven't the foggiest. Sorry!

***

1) One Book That Changed My Life

As tempted as I am to say The Scar by China Mieville, because it was the book that finally sold me on speculative fiction, or latterly Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, because it, in turn, was the on that I had to start a blog to talk about... no. These are the answers you'd expect if you've been reading The Speculative Scotsman for any length of time; they would expose nothing new about who I am or what made me me, and if memes like this have a saving grace, it's that.

So I'm going to go back a bit further. 

I'm going to go all the way back, in fact, to a book that my Mum read aloud to me, chapter by chapter, for a period of some months when I was very, very young. When she'd finished it, I went right back to the start on my lonesome. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende didn't strictly speaking teach me how to read, but I don't doubt that it helped; it was the first book I read that I didn't think was for kids. Whether in retrospect it was or was not, at the time my kiddie mind assumed length meant maturity, and The Neverending Story was certainly long.

I have had occasion to wonder how different my taste in fiction as an adult might have been had I only read something else as an innocent...

2) One Book I’ve Had to Read More Than Once

I very rarely do this. Really, very rarely. Does that make me an odd duck?

But there have been a few books I've returned to. Always after some serious time has passed since I read them last. There's The Gunslinger by Stephen King, AKA book one of The Dark Tower, and still the best in the series, for my money. There's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner. There's the first volume of The Long Price by Daniel Abraham, A Shadow in Summer, which I had to read a second time - rather recently, at that - because upon starting A Betrayal in Winter I realised I'd forgotten the detail that I'd loved about the book before it. There's The Terror by Dan Simmons. Silk by Caitlin R. Kiernan.

I'm sure there have been others, but truth be told, they're few and far between. There's always so much that I haven't yet read to read, you know?

Anyway, you only asked for one book, so count yourself lucky, master of memes.

3) One Book I’d Want on a Desert Island

I'd want something very long, obviously. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson comes to mind, or The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. Perhaps The Stand? Classic King; now that I'd read again in a heartbeat, if I only had a month to myself with no other obligations.

4) One Book That Made me Laugh 

Hmm.

Let me think about this one and get back to you in a bit.

5) One Book That Made me Cry

An easy one, this: Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay. When the identity of The Fool was revealed in the last chapter, in case you were wondering.

Nothing since has moved me to tears, but before Tigana - which is to say when I was an easier reader to manipulate emotionally - there were a fair few. Truly great stories have spoiled me in that sense.

6) One Book I Wish I’d Written

All the books? 

Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear most lately. Anything exceptionally pretty prose-wise makes my creative instincts envious.

7) One Book I Am Currently Reading

At this very second I'm in the middle of Last Days by Adam Nevill, in whose acknowledgements (which for some reason I always read) I was over the moon to see The Speculative Scotsman. Yay! It's been really creepy, incidentally. Maybe a bit bloated, but still more gripping, I think, than anything Nevill's written before. Stay tuned for the full review... soon.

Next up on my reading agenda: one of the Strange Chemistry proofs that came in the mail last week, I should think. Least I can do for stealing the meme Amanda brought back from the great graveyard in the ether. :)

8) One Book I Am Looking Forward To

What, just the one?

I'm sorry, but no. I can't. Just in the next couple of months, there's Sharps by K. J. Parker, and The Prince of Heaven - the sequel to The Shadow of the Wind, by the sounds of it - by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. And oh! It wouldn't do to forget Caliban's War by James S. A. Corey.

Beyond that, the list gets a lot longer.

4) One Book That Made me Laugh

Right. Now that I've had a think about this one, I have an answer. But on reflection, I don't think I read a great many authors who go out of their way to split sides, as it were. That sort of description puts me right off, in fact. Thus: I don't read Terry Pratchett, or Tom Holt, or Robert Rankin. The closest I can remember coming to that sort of thing are the Ben Aaronovitch books.

But one novel above all others in recent memory has made me laugh. That'd be Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde. There's one line in particular, about a typo which led to generations of children being given a smack before bed instead of a snack that cracks me up just thinking about it. Even besides its sense of humour, Shades of Grey is a truly brilliant book from start to finish - give me Painting By Numbers now, please! - and any excuse to recommend it is a good one by me.

***

By the dead, it's been ages since I did something along these lines. A meme. I forget why I stopped. Oversaturation? Boredom? Whatever the reason, it's been fun, this one... this once.

You tell me, dear readers. Going forward, would you want more of this sort of thing on The Speculative Scotsman, or even less?

Book Review | 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

The year is 2312. Scientific and technological advances have opened gateways to an extraordinary future. Earth is no longer humanity's only home; new habitats have been created throughout the solar system on moons, planets, and in between. But in this year, 2312, a sequence of events will force humanity to confront its past, its present, and its future.

The first event takes place on Mercury, on the city of Terminator, itself a miracle of engineering on an unprecedented scale. It is an unexpected death, but one that might have been foreseen. For Swan Er Hong, it is an event that will change her life. Swan was once a woman who designed worlds. Now she will be led into a plot to destroy them.

***

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away - or so it feels, at least - I read Red Mars. I was at an age and a stage that demanded I discover those things that I'd love for the rest of my life: not the perfunctory pleasures I'd inherited from my parents, nor the playthings of my peers, but passions of my own devising. Thus, I invested in an alarming amount of classic sf and fantasy. Decades if not centuries of masterworks were mine in one fell swoop, and amongst them, the most celebrated of all Kim Stanley Robinson's novels.

I adored it, of course. Then as now. I'd never read such a meticulous and convincing future history, and Mars, though far-fetched yet, was not such an unknown quantity as to overstretch my limited imagination. By that same token, a lot of Red Mars went right over my head - not least the fact that it was book one of three - so it's been an occasional aspiration of mine to re-read it ever since, in quick succession with its acclaimed sequels, Blue Mars and Green Mars.

Alas, as is often the way with aspirations, it hasn't happened yet... though I have returned to Robinson's work in the succeeding years. Galileo's Dream was not for me, I fear, but I had a terrific time with the best of collection Night Shade Books put out in late 2010, such that I've been eagerly anticipating 2312 for, ahem, many a moon.

It does not disappoint.

"Really you have no idea. It's like nothing you've ever seen. You may think you are inured, that nothing outside the mind can really interest you anymore, as sophisticated and knowledgeable as you are. But you would be wrong. You are a creature of the sun. The beauty and terror of it seen from so close can empty any mind, thrust anyone into a trance. [...] The sight of it can strike thought clean out of your head. People seek it out precisely for that." (pp.3-4)

Three centuries on from the present day, everything has changed. Everything, that is, except Earth. Humanity has taken to the stars; spacers have radically overhauled the solar system; millions of people have been born and raised on Venus and Mars and Mercury, meanwhile countless thousands of terraformed asteroids - which is to say terraria - are now home to Earth's surviving flora and fauna. Longevity treatments have raised life expectancy amongst those who can afford the intervention into the high hundreds, and gender, in the future, is a thing of the past.

Advances along these lines are made every day - exponential progress is the name of the game - yet humanity's pitiable point of origin is in dire crisis, as ever.

"It was almost an ice-free planet now, with only Antarctica and Greenland holding on to much, and Greenland going fast. Sea level was therefore eleven meters higher than it had been before the changes. This inundation of the coastline was one of the main drivers of the human disaster on Earth. They had immensely powerful terraforming techniques off-planet, but here they usually couldn't be applied. No slamming comets into it, for instance." (p.90)

For obvious reasons.

In short, "Earth was a mess, a sad place. And yet still the center of the story. It had to be dealt with, as Alex had always said, or nothing done in space was real." (ibid) Alex, incidentally, is the self-styled Lion of Mercury, a scientist and a significant political figure whose sudden death - supposedly from natural causes - sets off 2312. In the bravura prologue - a short but stunning sunwalk that serves to set the surreal scene ideally, as well as one's expectations - Robinson introduces us to Alex's daughter, Swan Er Hong, as she navigates her planet's scorched surface in an attempt to get to grips with the unbearable grief she feels. Some distance away from the relative safety of Terminator, Mercury's sole city - an awesome industrial colony that circles the world a scant step ahead of the world's own orbit, and thus the sun, which burns hot enough here that it might melt a person (indeed a place) - Swan considers suicide, for a second, or seems to.

Her impetuousness will be the death of her, one suspects. If not now then not long from. She's a spacer, born and raised, and though she's more than a century old, as often as not she behaves like an entitled child. Swan huffs and sulks, pouts and shouts. Not unrelatedly, she's an artist. An aesthetic activist in full-fledged rebellion against the abstract of the establishment. To which end she's eaten aliens, and had bird-brains installed in her head - as you do - as well as a snarky quantum computer called Pauline whom readers of Red Mars may well recognise.

In terms of her character arc through 2312, however, the single biggest obstacle opposite Swan - at least when we meet - is that she has no sense of purpose, or of place. But Alex's death gives her a glimpse of these things, tantalising if not yet terrifying: Alex's last request is that Swan personally ferry some encoded information to those who need to know it. Thus, our odd duck comes into contact with Alex's cultish cadre, who (as it happens) have been working to disrupt the dithering establishment on Earth themselves. Almost as if it were meant to be, Swan finds herself falling in with one of her dearly departed's closest confidantes: Fitz Wahram, out of Titan. He is "a very big man. Prognathous, callipygous, steatopygous, exophthalmos - toad, newt, frog - even the very words were ugly. [...] Once she had seen a toad in an amazonia, sitting at the edge of a pond, its warty wet skin all bronze and gold. She had liked the look of it." (p.15)

So it is that the scene is set for revolution, and perhaps a strange strain of romance.

Thereafter, 2312 gets quite complicated quite quickly:

"By the early twenty-fourth century there was too much going on to be either seen or understood. Assiduous attempts by contemporary historians to achieve an agreed-upon paradigm foundered, and we are no different now, looking back at them. It's hard even to assemble enough data to make a guess. There were thousands of city-states out there pinballing around, each with its presence in the data cloud or absence from same, and all of them adding up to—what? To the same mishmash history has been all along, but now elaborated, mathmaticized, effloresced—in the word of the time, balkanized." (p.78)

To paraphrase our occasional, omniscient narrator: to simplify history would be to distort Robinson's reality, and this award-winning author does not dilute. It is, therefore, a bold-type testament to his unflinching grasp of the narrative art that one understands as much of the plot, and indeed its byzantine backdrop, as one should, or is supposed to. Wisely, I think, Robinson draws a hard line between the involved scientific speculation readers have come to expect from his work and the actual unfolding of the tale he's here to tell; that of - at long last - the end of the world as we know it, if not the apocalypse proper.

To wit, Robinson builds his single sprawling setting, and gestures toward the million (give or take) meticulously researched ideas underpinning it, in excerpts, as in in the extract above. In extracts - of which there are eighteen - in addition to fifteen lengthy lists, a miscellany of individually titled segments, ten strong, on top of a prologue, an epilogue, and forty-odd actual chapters. 2312 is a big book punctuated, and so forth made manageable, by lots of itty bits. Asides, mostly: postcards from the far-distant future, or the diary entries of an unfathomable AI.

This tension in the structure of 2312, between the little and the large, reflects the relationship between the planet-cracking happenings and the seemingly insignificant events that Robinson is interested in for the bulk of the book. The reader is routinely shuttled between stunning set-pieces, like the sunwalk with which the whole thing begins, or the destruction of Terminator - Swan's sweet home if she has one - and quiet, composed, character-oriented moments, such as the prolonged underground walkabout our scattershot protagonist shares with Wahram, or the stop-overs she takes on various terraria.

You will come to look upon all these moments equally. In astonishment, in awe, at both the small, and the immense. Such is Robinson's success in terms of the sense-of-wonder 2312 evokes, like a sky full of stars exploding one after the other, over and over again.

Given all its ideas, not to speak of the myriad intricacies of each of these, I dare say 2312 is a substantially more accessible novel than it has any right to be. The author's decision to delineate his science from his fiction pays dividends in that respect, as it allows each scene to breathe, and more often than not to blossom. Furthermore, Robinson presents many of most complex concepts with a winning amount of whimsy. As recipes, among other things. For a successful revolution, for instance, Swan's qube would have us

"Take large masses of injustice, resentment, and frustration. Put them in a weak or failing hegemon. Stir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat rises. Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste. A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole. Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved, cool instantly to institutionalize the new order." (p.334)

There's fun in 2312, then. Fun, and unbelievable wonder; love, profundity and a lot of legitimately gripping drama. Also some startling ideas. I had not dared to dream that Kim Stanley Robinson could even equal Red Mars, but in time, 2312 could take the cake. That and biscuit-based relativity aside, it's a magnificent sweet treat in its own right. Robinson is as intelligent and compelling as ever he has been - at least in my experience - but herein he has tempered his the science of his fiction smartly, if not sensitively. The result, simply put, is stunning.

Never mind the usual genre divisions: 2312 is easily one of the year's best books, period.

***

2312
by Kim Stanley Robinson

UK & US Publication: May 2012, Orbit

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
IndieBound / The Book Depository

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