Book Review | Artemis by Andy Weir

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she's stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.

***

It's been six years since Andy Weir became a self-publishing success story on the back of The Martian. A scientifically fastidious yet satisfying work of fiction that spoke of a stranded astronaut's struggle to survive on the ruthless red planet, it—and Ridley Scott's subsequent adaptation of said—made sci-fi fun for some; specifically for folks who had previously sneered at the genre for its seeming self-seriousness.

Those readers will be over the moon to hear that Artemis is, in its attention to technical detail and its prioritisation of play as the order of the day, The Martian's perfect partner, though more demanding fans of the form are likely to find it slight: derivative, dreadfully slow to start, and rather lacking in the heart department. But for better or for worse, Weir's new novel is in many ways more of the same problem-solving stuff that made him a household name.

In theory, at least, one of Artemis' most dramatic departures from The Martian is in its central character. Mark Watney was a Real America Hero: a white dude who did good. Jazz Bashara, on the other hand, is a young woman of Saudi Arabian descent who makes her living by breaking the law. This transparent flipping of scripts has little impact in practice, alas. While she might be a rule-breaker to begin with, Jazz is every inch the saviour before the book is through, just like her predecessor. And just as Watney was, for all intents and purposes, a man of Mars, Jazz, the hell with her heritage, is "a local gal. Grew up right here on the moon." The net effect of her gender, meanwhile, is that Weir seems to see it as a license to make altogether too many jokes about breasts and banging.

Needless to note, this is not sophisticated sci-fi. But to paraphrase Jazz, who likens the shining city the novel is named after to "a bunch of metallic boobs," Weir is clearly no poet—and he knows it. In truth, Artemis, "the first (and so far, only) city on the moon" does bear rather a resemblance. "It's made of five huge spheres called 'bubbles.' They're half underground, so Artemis looks exactly like old sci-fi books said a moon city should look: a bunch of domes. You just can't see the parts that are belowground."

It's in these nether regions that we find the story's hero-to-be. Jazz is "one of the little people" who eke out an existence in Artemis by doing the dirty jobs the "rich tourists and eccentric billionaires" that make up most of the city's population are unwilling to. As she herself has it in her distressingly on-the-nose narration, "you don't expect J. Worthalot Richbastard III to clean his own toilet, do you?"

Book Review | Release by Patrick Ness

Adam Thorn doesn’t know it yet, but today will change his life.

Between his religious family, a deeply unpleasant ultimatum from his boss, and his own unrequited love for his sort-of ex, Enzo, it seems as though Adam’s life is falling apart. At least he has two people to keep him sane: his new boyfriend (he does love Linus, doesn’t he?) and his best friend, Angela.

But all day long, old memories and new heartaches come crashing together, throwing Adam’s life into chaos. The bindings of his world are coming untied one by one; yet in spite of everything he has to let go, he may also find freedom in the release.

***

Happy as I hope we all are, on the whole, I expect each and every one of us has lived through a few bad days too.

Now I don't mean those days when we have to deal with death or ill health or anything actively awful. I'm talking about those days that just suck a bunch; those days when nothing seems to go your way. Maybe it starts with a letter from the taxman and spirals up, up and away from there. Maybe the milk is spoiled so you can't have your morning coffee. Maybe traffic makes you late for work even though you left early. Whatever the particulars, these are the days when everything that can go wrong does go wrong, and damn your plans.

These days doesn't destroy us, because we're reasonably well adjusted human beings. Tomorrow's another day, we tell ourselves. It's not like the world is ending or anything. But it is in Patrick Ness' ninth novel. Like The Rest of Us Just Live Here and More Than This before it, Release is a smart and sensitive standalone story that mixes the mundane with the magical in order to underscore the extraordinary qualities of the ordinary. It's a brief book about a bad day as bold and as beautiful as any finely-honed tome about the rise of Rome.

The bad day I've been banging on about is had herein by a young man called Adam Thorn. Adam is a pretty typical kid. He's never done drugs or caught an STD or seen a psychiatrist or displeased the police. He probably did decently at school, and he's definitely been holding down an alright job at a warehouse run by an Evil International Mega-Conglomerate in the several years since. He doesn't deserve to be miserable, but he is—in large part because of his family.

They fuck us up, our families! They don't mean to, but they do, and Adam's family is no exception to that regrettable rule. His father's a pastor at The House Upon the Rock, his mother is Big Brian Thorn's number one one fan, and his older brother Marty does God's Work as well. Naturally, none of these things should stop them from caring for Adam like a good family would, except that he's gay, and with this, they are not okay. "There was always a wound, it seemed, kept freshly opened by a family who also kept saying they loved him."

Book Review | Acadie by Dave Hutchinson

The Colony left Earth to find their utopia—a home on a new planet where their leader could fully explore the colonists' genetic potential, unfettered by their homeworld's restrictions. They settled a new paradise, and have been evolving and adapting for centuries.

Earth has other plans.

The original humans have been tracking their descendants across the stars, bent on their annihilation. They won't stop until the new humans have been destroyed, their experimentation wiped out of the human gene pool.

Can't anyone let go of a grudge anymore?

***

What do you do when you've burned every bridge, dithered over every significant decision and looked askance at every last chance? Why, if you're Duke, an unusually lawyer who blew the whistle on the Bureau of Colonisation for bad practice, you eat and drink your way through your savings until a stunningly beautiful woman called Conjugación Lang turns up at your table with a solution to your otherwise unsolvable problem:

"What if I were to offer you a way off this howling nightmare of a planet? Right now." 

"You have some kind of magic spaceship that takes off through seven-hundred-kilometre-an-hour blizzards?" 

She wrinkled her nose and grinned coquettishly. "Oh, I have something better than that." (p.26)

And she does. Something Better Than That turns out to be the name of a tattered old towboat sitting in Probity City's spaceport. "The words [...] were sprayed on the side of the tug in Comic Sans, which really was the least of the little vehicle's problems. It looked as if it could barely get off the ground on a calm midsummer's afternoon, let alone reach orbit in the middle of an ice storm." (pp.26-27) But looks, as Dave Hutchinson's twisty new novella takes pains to teach its readers repeatedly, can be deeply deceiving.

Something Better Than That ultimately does just what Conjugación promised: it almost instantly spirits Duke off to the Colony, a distant solar system several million souls have made their home under the leadership—like it or lump it—of Isabel Potter, a previous professor of molecular biology at Princeton known by the Bureau as "Baba Yaga, the Wicked Witch of the West. [Duke] actually knew someone who had invoked her name to make her children go to bed. She was Legend." (pp.36-37)

Book Review | The Management Style of the Supreme Beings by Tom Holt

When the Supreme Being and his son decide that being supreme isn't for them any more, a new management team has to be found—and fast!

Dynamic, resourceful and always customer-focused, the Venturi brothers are perfect for the job, and keen to get stuck in. First on their to-do list is Good and Evil, an outdated system that was always a bit confusing and just made everyone feel bad about things. 

Unfortunately, the sudden disappearance of right and wrong, while welcomed by some, is a big concern to those still in favour of its basic principles. Particularly given that the Venturi brothers have replaced it with something that seems decidedly... well, evil.

***

The easily-offended will be offended easily by Tom Holt's new novel, a madcap Miracle on 34th Street in which religion in particular gets a ribbing, but readers with less delicate sensibilities should be ready to romp, because The Management Style of the Supreme Beings is a whole bunch of fun from word one. And it's more than a simple send-up: it also stands as a sublimely ridiculous examination of morality in the modern era.

God, the thing begins, is getting on. "Fact is [...] I feel old," (p.38) He says to his dearly beloved son as they fish for the same Sinderaan species that "had split the atom and proved the existence of the Higgs boson when Earth was still entirely inhabited by plankton." (p.37) An age or an instant later, as the five-dimensional fish nibble and divine drinks are sipped, the Big Guy admits He thinks it might be time to step aside—as manager of the planet, naturally.

You build a business from the ground up, you care for it, worry about it, you take pride in its progress, you're there for it when things don't go so well. But there always comes a time when you have to let go. Or does there? (p.37)

For obvious reasons, Jesus—who goes by Jay these days—doesn't disagree. After all, "they're father and son but also equal aspects of the One; it's therefore logically impossible for them" (p.35) to part ways in anything other than a philosophical fashion. It's to His credit that Jay does wonder where that's likely to leave Uncle Ghost, who's gotten a bit dotty in His dotage, before giving God the nod... but notably, nobody mentions Kevin.

Kevin is "the younger son of God, marginally less well beloved" than his celebrated big brother "and with whom his father was not always quite so well pleased." (pp.1-2) That's probably because Kevin is desperately inept. He's the kind of person who sticks to instant because he broke the cappuccino machine and everyone in a position to fix it with a minor miracle is too busy. Even celestial mechanics, "the easiest part of the business," (p.9) is beyond this poor kid, whose destiny seems to be to watch one rerun of Touched by an Angel after another, which... well, the less said about, the better.

To wit, when the time comes to hand off the heavens and the earth, Kevin isn't even in contention...

Book Review | Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub-Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.

Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.

Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.

***

In Salman Rushdie's first novel for older readers in something like seven years—an onion-skinned thing at once wise, wilful and winningly whimsical—a great storm signals the end of the world as we know it.

A state of strangeness reigns in the wake of this otherworldly weather. Lightning springs from fingers; a would-be graphic novelist dreams the superhero he conceived into being; an abandoned baby bestows "blemishes and boils" on those who tell tall tales in her pint-sized presence; meanwhile, an elderly gentleman who calls himself Geronimo wakes up one day able to levitate: which all sounds quite delightful, doesn't it?

Don't be fooled, folks. Many will perish in the next two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights. Wars will be fought and an awful lot—not least lives—will be lost. But every ending has a new beginning built in, and perhaps a better world will arise from the ashes of the last. Maybe Rushdie's plea for a future "ruled by reason, tolerance, magnanimity, knowledge, and restraint" will be accepted rather than outright rejected. Stranger things have happened.

The overarching narrative of Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (hereafter just Two Years, if you please) is an encapsulation of exactly that argument—between the rational and the unreasonable. Representing these opposing perspectives are two long-dead men: the intellectual Idb Rushd and Ghazali of Tus, a sinister, fire-and-brimstone figure whose irrational rhetoric made a laughing stock of the aforementioned philosopher.

But Rushd's life was not all strife. For a little while, when he lived—a millennium or so ago, don't you know—he loved, and was loved by, a beautiful woman called Dunia who bore him many children.

Being a man of reason, he did not guess that she was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn, the jiniri: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular.

Generations later, in the present day, their disparate descendants—all one thousand and one of them—are all that stands between humanity and the dark jinn that declare war on the world at the behest of the disgusted dust that was once Ghazali.

Book Review | The Good, the Bad and the Smug by Tom Holt

New Evil.

Same as the Old Evil, but with better PR.

Mordak isn't bad, as far as goblin kings go, but when someone, or something, starts pumping gold into the human kingdoms it puts his rule into serious jeopardy. Suddenly he's locked in an arms race with a species whose arms he once considered merely part of a calorie-controlled diet.

Helped by an elf with a background in journalism and a masters degree in being really pleased with herself, Mordak sets out to discover what on earth (if indeed, that's where he is) is going on. He knows that the truth is out there. If only he could remember where he put it.

***

Evil just isn't what it was.

Used to be, you could slaughter a dwarf and gnaw his gnarly bones all the way home without attracting any undesirable attention. Now? Not so much. It's a new world, you know? And it might just be that the new world needs a new breed of evil.

In The Good, the Bad and the Smug, Tom Holt—aka K. J. Parker—proposes exactly that as the premise of a satirical and sublimely self-aware fairytale that brings together the wit and the wickedness of the author's alter ego with the wordplay and the whimsy which have made the YouSpace series such a sweet treat so far.

Readers, meet Mordak: King of the Goblins, and winner of a special award at this year's Academy of Darkness do. The prize is just the icing on the (unfortunately metaphorical) cake; he's been turning a whole lot of heads of late. Why? Well:

It wasn't just Mordak's arbitrary and bewildering social reforms—universal free healthcare at rusty spike of delivery, for crying out loud—though those were intriguing enough to baffle even the shrewdest observers, frantically speculating about the twisted motives that underlay such a bizarre agenda. It was the goblin himself who'd caught the public imagination. Mordak had it; the indefinable blend of glamour, prestige, menace and charm that go to make a genuinely world-class villain. (p.3)

It isn't all he has to offer either, for Mordak is also the face of New Evil: a "caring and compassionate" (p.281) agenda he's in the middle of forcing down folks' throats when his eternal enemies—is there anything worse than people, really?—suddenly find themselves filthy rich. So filthy rich, in fact, that they could cause a proper problem for the goblins.

This is an obstacle Mordak simply must overcome if he's to have a chance of realising his reforms. To wit, together with Efluviel, an elf who'd do almost anything to get her job as a journalist back—a job Mordak can give her as easily as he took it away in the first place—the King strikes out on an unexpected journey in order to expose the source of all the goddamn gold the humans have gotten their grubby paws on.

Book Review | Armada by Ernest Cline

Zack Lightman has spent his life dreaming. Dreaming that the real world could be a little more like the countless science-fiction books, movies, and videogames he’s spent his life consuming. Dreaming that one day, some fantastic, world-altering event will shatter the monotony of his humdrum existence and whisk him off on some grand space-faring adventure.

But hey, there’s nothing wrong with a little escapism, right? After all, Zack tells himself, he knows the difference between fantasy and reality. He knows that here in the real world, aimless teenage gamers with anger issues don’t get chosen to save the universe.

And then he sees the flying saucer.

Even stranger, the alien ship he’s staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every night, a hugely popular online flight simulator called Armada—in which gamers just happen to be protecting the earth from alien invaders.

No, Zack hasn’t lost his mind. As impossible as it seems, what he’s seeing is all too real. And his skills—as well as those of millions of gamers across the world—are going to be needed to save the earth from what’s about to befall it.

It’s Zack’s chance, at last, to play the hero. But even through the terror and exhilaration, he can’t help thinking back to all those science-fiction stories he grew up with, and wondering: doesn't something about this scenario seem a little... familiar?

***

Isn't the world weird?

After decades of dismissal, what was once the preserve of known nerds is now everyone's favourite field. Video games are a cornerstone of contemporary culture. There are characters from comic books wherever you look. The fundamental stuff of science fiction and fantasy has been embraced in a big way by the mainstream, and though there are those who still question the merits of the speculative, even these outliers have had a hard time denying the cultural cache it has accrued in recent years.

Fair to say, then, that geek has never been more chic—a zeroing of the zeitgeist Ernest Cline capitalised on to heartfelt effect in his first novel following the cult film Fanboys. A celebration of all things 80s bolstered by a cannily-characterised protagonist who came of age over its uproarious course, Ready Player One was smart, but it also had a heart.

Armada starts strong, by scratching a great many of the same itches Cline's debut did. It too worships at the altar of this new, nerd-friendly nostalgia. It combines space-based spectacle with a series of intimate interruptions. It's frequently funny and remarkably referential. But there's a but.

Book Review | Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory

Harrison Harrison—H2 to his mom—is a lonely teenager who's been terrified of the water ever since he was a toddler in California, when a huge sea creature capsized their boat, and his father vanished. One of the "sensitives" who are attuned to the supernatural world, Harrison and his mother have just moved to the worst possible place for a boy like him: Dunnsmouth, a Lovecraftian town perched on rocks above the Atlantic, where strange things go on by night, monsters lurk under the waves, and creepy teachers run the local high school.

On Harrison's first day at school, his mother, a marine biologist, disappears at sea. Harrison must attempt to solve the mystery of her accident, which puts him in conflict with a strange church, a knife-wielding killer, and the Deep Ones, fish-human hybrids that live in the bay. It will take all his resources—and an unusual host of allies—to defeat the danger and find his mother.

***

Not an author to dare wearing out his welcome in any one genre, Afterparty's Daryl Gregory turns his attention to tentacles in Harrison Squared, a light-hearted Lovecraft lark featuring a friendly fishboy and a ghastly artist which straddles the line between the silly and the sinister superbly.

It's a novel named after its narrator, Harrison Harrison—to the power of five, in fact, but around his mom and his mates, just H2 will do. Whatever you want to call him—and you wouldn't be the first to go with weirdo—Harrison has a paralysing fear of the sea. A hatred, even, and for good reason, because when our boy was a baby, his father—Harrison Harrison the fourth, of course—was swallowed by the waves, one dark day; a day Harrison has forgotten almost completely:

Some images, however, are so clear to me that they feel more true than my memory of yesterday's breakfast. I can see my father's face as he picks me up by my life vest. I can feel the wind as he tosses me up and over the next wave, toward that capsized boat. And I can see, as clearly as I can see my own arm, a huge limb that's risen out of the water.

The arm is fat, and gray, the underside covered in pale suckers. It whips across my father's chest, grasping him—and then it pulls him away from me. The tentacle is attached to a huge body, a shape under the water that's bigger than anything I've ever seen. (p.12)

In the lifetime since that nightmarish sight, Harrison has reasoned his strange recollections away. He knows, now, that he imagined the monster:

Yes, we were out on the ocean, and the boat did flip over, but no creature bit through my leg to the bone—it was a piece of metal from the ship that sliced into me. My mother swam me to shore, and kept me from bleeding to death. My father drowned like an ordinary man. (p.12)

Little wonder, really, that Harrison isn't keen on the sea. His marine biologist mother, on the other hand, is obsessed with it—as his father was before her—which is why she and her son have arranged to spend a couple of months in Dunnsmouth: a creepy coastal village where Harrison's mother means to meet Mr. Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni.

(That's a forty-five foot long squid "whose suckers are ringed not only by teeth but sharp, swivelling hooks," (p.22) for those of you who haven't been practising your Latin of late.)

Book Review | J by Howard Jacobson

Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. Kevern doesn't know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a world starting with a J. It wasn't then, and isn't now, the time or place to be asking questions.

Ailinn too has grown up in the dark about who she was or where she came from. On their first date Kevern kisses the bruises under her eyes. He doesn't ask who hurt her. Brutality has grown commonplace. They aren't sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they've been pushed into each other's arms. But who would have pushed them, and why?

Hanging over the lives of all the characters in this novel is a momentous catastrophe—a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial and apology, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened.

J is a novel to be talked about in the same breath as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, thought-provoking and life-changing. It is like no other novel that Howard Jacobson has written.

***

Alongside Us, The Bone Clocks, and How To Be Both, J by Howard Jacobson was one of a number of novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in advance of its publication date. A source of frustration for some, I'm sure—though this has ever been the panel's habit—but for others it represents a reason to update reading radars.

This year, I found myself amongst the others above, because if not for the nod, I doubt I'd have looked twice at this book. When I did, additionally, it was with some scepticism; after all, Jacobson has won the Booker before, for The Finkler Question in 2010—the first comic novel to take the trophy home in 25 years—and pointedly acknowledging former nominees is another of the panel's practices.

Not today. J, I'm pleased to say, is in every sense deserving of its spot on the longlist. It's a literary revelation wrapped in understated dystopian clothing; a wonder of wit and whimsy that takes in the chilling and the ridiculous—the hilarious and the horrific. That said, it's a novel that requires rereading to appreciate completely.

Book Review | Kill Baxter by Charlie Human

The world has been massively unappreciative of sixteen-year-old Baxter Zevcenko. His bloodline may be a combination of ancient Boer mystic and giant shape-shifting crow, and he may have won an inter-dimensional battle and saved the world, but does anyone care? No.

Instead he's packed off to Hexpoort, a magical training school that's part reformatory, part military school, and just like Hogwarts (except with sex, drugs, and better internet access). The problem is that Baxter sucks at magic. He's also desperately attempting to control his new ability to dreamwalk, all the while being singled out by the school's resident bully, who just so happens to be the Chosen One.

But when the school comes under attack, Baxter needs to forget all that and step into action. The only way is joining forces with his favourite recovering alcoholic of a supernatural bounty hunter, Ronin, to try and save the world from the apocalypse. Again.

***

The antidote to Harry Potter is back in Charlie Human's bawdy new novel: a lively elaboration of the mad as pants brand of South African urban fantasy advanced in Apocalypse Now Now which, whilst thrilling, makes some of the same mistakes its predecessor did.

Kill Baxter kicks off a matter of months on from the apocalyptic conclusion of Human's debut. Our sixteen year old protagonist may have saved the world, however his heroics haven't made a lick of a difference to his unlikely life.

By resolving to be a better person, Baxter tries to take matters into his own hands, but it isn't easy to be decent when you're rolling with Ronin:

"You cured yet? I could wait while you knock one out in the bushes."
"Thanks, but I'm OK," I say with a sarcastic smile. "Besides, nobody is apparently ever cured of addiction. Only in remission."
The bounty hunter has become a closer friend than I could ever have anticipated. Thanks largely to the fact that he helped me rescue Esme. He's the only one that I can really talk to about all the strange creeping, crawling, screeching, roaring things that cling to Cape Town's underbelly. Plus he always has drugs and alcohol. (p.11)

Luckily, drugs and alcohol aren't Baxter's major malfunction. Instead, he's hoping to be rid of his reliance on lies and the like. Fat chance of that, though.

Book Review | The Outsorcerer's Apprentice by Tom Holt

A happy workforce, it is said, is a productive workforce.

Try telling that to an army of belligerent goblins. Or the Big Bad Wolf. Or a professional dragons layer. Who is looking after their well-being? Who gives a damn about their intolerable working conditions, lack of adequate health insurance, and terrible coffee in the canteen?

Thankfully, with access to an astonishingly diverse workforce and limitless natural resources, maximizing revenue and improving operating profit has never really been an issue for the one they call "the Wizard." Until now.

Because now a perfectly good business model—based on sound fiscal planning, entrepreneurial flair, and only one or two of the infinite parallel worlds that make up our universe—is about to be disrupted by a young man not entirely aware of what's going on.

There's also a slight risk that the fabric of reality will be torn to shreds. You really do have to be awfully careful with these things.

***

An affectionate send-up of the fairytale from the author of such sarcastic tracts as Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages and May Contain Traces of Magic, The Outsorcerer's Apprentice features overlords and underlings, self-aware wolves and woodcutters, plus a prince from another world: ours.

Benny isn't a prince of anything hereabouts, however. Point of fact, he's in a bit of a pickle when the book begins. He has his final exams at Uni in a few weeks, and with his whole future before him, all of a sudden he doesn't have a clue what he's been doing. Studying to be a mathematician, maybe? In a moment of inspiration that some might mistake for laziness, he realises what he really needs is a good, long break to take stock of his situation. To that end, he borrows his Uncle's "omniphasic Multiverse portal" (p.137) and travels to a parallel reality where he can pretend to be a powerful person, because of course. Wouldn't you if you could?

The YouSpace XP3000, designed by Professor Pieter van Goyen of Leiden [is] capable of transporting you to any or all of the alternate realities that make up the Multiverse. Intuitive targeting software and state-of-the-art Heisenberg compensators mean that all you have to do is think of where you'd like to go, and you're instantly there. It's as simple as that. 

All you'll need to operate your YouSpace XP3000 personal multiverse interface is a dream—and a doughnut. (pp.136-137)

What Benny—pardon me, Prince Florizel—doesn't yet get, and won't for quite a while, is that his very presence in this innocent kingdom is destined to affect its host of fantastic inhabitants, including, but not limited to, dwarves, dragons, goblins, elves, etc.

Readers come to this conclusion somewhat sooner than fair Florizel; by way of Buttercup, a wily woodcutter's daughter waylaid with increasing frequency by wolves wearing old ladies' clothes. She grows so sick and tired of their charade that she starts worrying she may be single-handedly endangering the population—because of course Buttercup kills all the animals that attack her. She's had a lot of practice, and they'd eat her otherwise.

Book Review | Tigerman by Nick Harkaway

Lester Ferris, sergeant of the British Army, is a good man in need of a rest. He's spent a lot of his life being shot at, and Afghanistan was the last stop on his road to exhaustion. He has no family, he's nearly forty and burned out and about to be retired.

The island of Mancreu is the ideal place for Lester to serve out his time. It's a former British colony in legal limbo, soon to be destroyed because of its very special version of toxic pollution—a down-at-heel, mildly larcenous backwater. Of course, that also makes Mancreu perfect for shady business, hence the Black Fleet of illicit ships lurking in the bay: listening stations, offshore hospitals, money laundering operations, drug factories and deniable torture centres. None of which should be a problem, because Lester's brief is to sit tight and turn a blind eye.

But Lester Ferris has made a friend: a brilliant, internet-addled street kid with a comicbook fixation who will need a home when the island dies—who might, Lester hopes, become an adopted son. Now, as Mancreu's small society tumbles into violence, the boy needs Lester to be more than just an observer.

In the name of paternal love, Lester Ferris will do almost anything. And he's a soldier with a knack for bad places: "almost anything" could be a very great deal—even becoming some sort of hero. But this is Mancreu, and everything here is upside down. Just exactly what sort of hero will the boy need?

***

I don't doubt that it's difficult to be different, but Nick Harkaway makes it look obscenely easy. In just two books, he's made such a mark on the landscape of imagination that his legions of readers will come to Tigerman bearing certain expectations: of an endlessly energetic narrative that streaks about like something stung, complete with a cacophony of lively characters and replete with ideas which bleed bananas.

This isn't exactly that... but it is undeniably of the award-winning author's oeuvre.

Whereas The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker were noisy novels, with ninjas and ass-kicking grannies, mad monks and clockwork killers, Tigerman, by comparison, is quiet. Being the origin story of a superhero and his sidekick, it's not silent, not entirely, but it is... stealthy, yes. Sneaky, even. All in all a much softer, sweeter and more surprising something than I had imagined.

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.

Book Review | The Eye of Zoltar by Jasper Fforde

The Mighty Shandar, the most powerful wizard the world has ever seen, returns to the unUnited Kingdoms. Clearly, he didn't solve the Dragon Problem, and must hand over his fee: eighteen dray-weights of gold.

But the Mighty Shandar doesn't do refunds, and vows to eliminate the dragons once and for all—unless sixteen year old Jennifer Strange and her sidekicks from the Kazam house of enchantment can bring him the legendary jewel, the Eye of Zoltar.

The only thing that stands in their way is a perilous journey with a 50% Fatality Index—through the Cambrian Empire to the Leviathan Graveyard, at the top of the deadly Cadir Idris mountain. It's a quest like never before, and Jennifer soon finds herself fighting not just for her life, but for everything she knows and loves...

***

Over the years, the Troll Wars have taken a terrible toll on the Kingdoms of Britain. All but a few of these fights have been finished in a matter of minutes—trolls, it transpires, are hardy targets—nevertheless countless lives have been lost to this pointless conflict... leading, among other things, to an overabundance of orphans. And what are orphans for if not enslaving, eh?

Jennifer Strange, the narrator of Jasper Fforde's fun-filled fantasy fable, was one of the lucky ones:

Instead of being sold into the garment, fast-food or hotel industries, I got to spend my six years of indentured servitude with a company named Kazam, a registered House of Enchantment run by the Great Zambini. Kazam did what all Houses of Enchantment used to do: hire out wizards to perform magical feats. The problem was that in the past half-century magic had faded, so we were really down to finding lost shoes, rewiring houses, unblocking drains and getting cats out of trees. (p.2)

To make matters worse, the Great Zambini immediately disappeared, leaving Jennifer to save Kazam from a fate worse than death... dreaded irrelevance! In The Last Dragonslayer, she did exactly that—then, in The Song of the Quarkbeast, she got mixed up in the machinations of an idiot king. Now, having "saved dragons from extinction, averted war between the nations of Snodd and Brecon and helped the power of magic begin to re-establish itself," (p.3) our ever so patient protagonist—sweet sixteen this year—finds herself in a bit of a pickle.

Actually, the problem might be more of a ghost pepper than your typical pickle, because Kazam's actions have attracted the wrath of the Mighty Shandar. One unintended consequence of Jennifer's aforementioned intervention was to make a mockery of the professional pride of the most powerful wizard in the world, who'd been hired, as it happens, to destroy all dragons. Kazam can either sacrifice Feldspar Axiom Firebreath IV and, um, Colin, or do as Shandar demands, and seek out the massively powerful magical artifact known only as the Eye of Zoltar.

If it exists.

Which is at least as unlikely as Jennifer's chances of surviving for long enough in the dangerous Cambrian Empire to get to the Leviathan Graveyard (about which no tales are told, because no one's survived to tell them) at the top of Cadir Idris (a mountain so monolithic that its peak has never been seen) where the Eye of Zoltar is said to be stashed. Assuming it isn't a tall tale in the first place.

Book Review | Cat Out Of Hell by Lynne Truss

The scene: a cottage on the coast on a windy evening. Inside, a room with curtains drawn. Tea has just been made. A kettle still steams.

Under a pool of yellow light, two figures face each other across a kitchen table. A man and a cat.

The story about to be related is so unusual—yet so terrifyingly plausible—that it demands to be told in a single sitting.

The man clears his throat, and leans forward, expectant.

"Shall we begin?" asks the cat.

***

Fun fact: I do most of my reading with a cat on my lap.

She came into her name, Page, by interposing herself between book and user from birth, basically; by sleeping in, on and under the many novels lying around in the library; and by chewing her way through on a fair few too. This latter habit hardly made me happy, but she's been treated like a Queen in any event. Despite resolutions arrived at when she was a bitty little kitty that I wouldn't make the mistake of spoiling her... well, I have, haven't I? She's irresistible, really.

But with rather alarming regularity, she appears in the periphery of my vision—paws primed to pounce; frenzied eyes fixed on mine; tail wagging to say she's acquired a target; ready, by all accounts, to eat me, or at the very least mistreat me. So I have had call to wonder why even the cutest cats seem to harbour such hatred. In her first full-length fiction for in excess of a decade, Lynne Truss offers a potential explanation:

They get all the best seats in the house, they have food and warmth and affection. Everything is on their terms, not ours. They come and go as they please. Why aren't they permanently ecstatic? Well, now it's explained. It's because they're conscious of having lost their ability to do serious evil, and they feel bloody humiliated. (p.173)

Imagine the following in Vincent Price's voice, for so, it is said, Roger's repartee resembles:

Up until, say, two thousand years ago, all cats had powers unimaginable to the average cat today. The species had been vastly diminished by time and domestication. In the modern world only one cat in a million has the character, the spirit, the sheer indomitable life force to fulfil that universal feline destiny of nine lives as part of a conscious programme of self-completion. I am that one in a million. And if I seem quite pleased with myself—well, so would you if you'd survived the shit I had to go through. (pp.34-35)

Roger is a cat, in case there's any confusion. "The feline equivalent of Stephen Fry," (p.44) at that... which is to say smart, charming, warm and—from time to time—quite, quite wild. Having "travelled romantically in the footsteps of Lord Byron in the 1930s [he] now solves cryptic crosswords torn out daily from The Telegraph" (p.86) when he's not otherwise occupied killing or merely maiming his keepers. So it seems, at least.

Book Review | Channel Blue by Jay Martel

Earth used to be Galaxy Entertainment's most lucrative show. The inhabitants of the Western Galaxy — the savviest, richest demographic in the Milky Way — just couldn't get enough of the day-to-day details of the average Earthling's life.

But Channel Blue's ratings are flagging and its producers are planning a spectacular finale. In just three weeks, their TV show will go out with a bang. The trouble is, so will Earth.

Only one man can save our planet from total destruction. And he's hardly a hero...

***

Guys, meet Galaxy Entertainment super-producer Gerald O. Davidoff — God for short — whose work on planet Earth everyone is of course intimately familiar with. God, say hi to the guys.

*pause for cacophonous applause*

What an immense pleasure it is to have you here, back where it all began! But I understand that you're a very busy man — and your visits, I'm aware, are getting rarer by the day — so I'll keep this quick, the better to let you get right back to business. I just have to ask: what's the plan, man? I'm no great creator, of course, but all this anger and violence and hunger and hatred is getting to be a bit much. The long and short of what we all want to know, I suppose, is... what gives, God?

As you all know, I have a strong attachment to this particular world. It was my very first planet and without it I would never have become part of the Galaxy Entertainment family. But no-one can deny that its programming has fallen off quite a bit in the last few seasons, and while I, more than anyone, appreciate the quality shows that have been produced there in the past, I also need to recognise that the storylines have become too bizarre, the cast to unlikeable to sustain the ratings we have come to expect. I think we can all agree that this planet 'jumped the shark' a long time ago. Plus, the resources spent on this single world could be used to develop several planetainments in less expensive solar systems. 

As a result of these considerations, I regrettably feel that the time has come to cancel Earth. (p.2)

Wait, you what?