My Reading Year 2011

Well, all in all, 2011 wasn't quite as horrible as 2010. I have a new job and will be shortly moving house, so it's all change here. A change is as good as a holiday, as they say, although having cashed-in a week of leave at my old place before starting at my new job, I have to wonder if that's true.

At the end of the year, I self-published Panoptica as an ebook on amazon, thus surfing the breaking wave of publishing phenomenon or throwing my lot in with a passing fad, depending on which way the future goes. To be honest, it's hard to imagine the impact of ereader going away. Maybe it'll all be through more—sophisticated tablet computer things, but it's clearly here to stay and has some expansion yet to do.

It's nice, however, to have it out of my hair, buried in the torrent of slurry, so I can move on to the next project. I'm not sure if my own entry comes a little late, and publicity remains a challenge, but at least it's out there. If you're a regular reader of this blog, I urge you to buy a copy – I mean, at worst it'll sit on your hard-drive harming no one. You might even enjoy reading it, but if you do, don't forget to leave a review on amazon! (A hard copy version is coming soon!)

Okay, that's the sponsorship over with. Let's get serious. Let's talk about books!

Cutting to the chase, the best books I read in 2011 are:

Necronomicon: The Best Weird Fiction of H P Lovecraft
Supergods by Grant Morrison
The Immortalisation Commission by John Gray
The Big Knockover & Other Stories by Dashiell Hammett

The Dervish House

I remember my Dad was partial to what you might call respectable thrillers. He liked Frederick Forsyth, Len Deighton, John le Carre, that sort of thing. He'd happily tear through one of them in an afternoon over a day of test cricket and two packets of Benson & Hedges, happy as you'd ever see him. Part of what he liked about those thrillers, I think, was the way they dealt in almost real-world events, the way they seemed ripped from the headlines.

It's a kind of a sci fi, thing, almost, with a speculative edge to it as it tries to imagine possible scenarios for the shift in geopolitics. Le Carre's novels seem to take place in what would seem like a nightmarish SF dystopia if we didn't know how scarily close to the truth is is. It's not far at all into a cyberpunk thriller if you push these stories a decade or two into the future. Authors like Bruce Sterling, Jon Courtney Grimwood, Neal Stephenson and Greg Egan kind of fit that niche, and Charles Stross has acknowledged the inspiration of Len Deighton.

Like my Dad and his thrillers, I love these near-future crime and espionage capers and The Dervish House is a particularly satisfying example. 

Far North

Why don't we all just kill ourselves?

Seriously: why do we carry on, day after day in full knowledge of our own personal insignificance and the life's general pointlessness? Everyday we avoid oblivion is just one step closer to the yawning embrace of the grave, the eventual extinction of the human race and even the heat death of the universe itself.

People give themselves reasons to carry on. For some it's belief in an afterlife, for others ambition to do good, or maybe you can fetishize it in the shape of children and an imagined line of descendants who will never think of you, never know your name. How do we get up every morning and get dressed, face the thousand tiny indignities and humiliations that life and age and time heap on us, more and more with each passing year?

When it boils down to it, we are pathologically invested in our continued life. There are those that say they don't want to live forever, and yet day-by-day, they too cling to life and when, exactly, will they be able to say "enough, I'm done"?

I myself am very much in favour of immortality, but I don't have much faith in it. I'm rapidly approaching what will, in all likelihood, be the mid-point of my life. It's all down hill from here, physically, and I don't think there's much of consequence in the world that I haven't felt or seen or done, so why carry on?

I think that's the question that Marcel Theroux raises in Far North. Makepeace inhabits a world of very few comforts. The post-apocalypse landscape offers no rest or comfort, she's seen too much to hold on to the faith of her long-dead parents, and in the opening movement of the novel she's even denied the companionship of a family. Yet when she comes to end it all, she can't do it: a plane flies over head, and fills her with hope of a reborn world.

She clings to that hope to keep her going through the subsequent years of hardship and brutality of the following, and when she finds the longed-for plane, what does it reveal? Not civilization reborn, but savage remnants clinging to the remains of the dead civilization with merciless tenacity.

Makepeace sees the futulity of hanging on, but finally, life - desperate, stubborn life - blossoms in her. There's a religious quality about the final passges. As Makepeace finally finds solace in those things that keep us all going - the comfort of work, someone who needs them and, ultimately, a numinous sense of the landscape around her. Maybe it's all a delusional pass-time that distracts us from crushing purposeless of life in between the times we're following our programming and passing on our genes, but it's still better than the alternative.

It's Miéville!

No great surprise to me, it's China Miéville who picked up the bookend last night. What a practical prize it is, so much better than an ugly statuette.

Sources close to the committee tell me that the final choice was a close one between this and another book. I wonder what the other contender was? It could have been any of them!

Ah well, that's that for another year. Now I can go back to randomly finding books at jumble sales and second hand shops.

Arthur C Clarke Awards - decision time!

It's the night of the Arthur C Clarke Awards, and those of us with an interest in such things now face the Ultimate Decision: what to wear?

My tweedy-jacket-and-bowtie look is very dapper but has been colonised by the eleventh Dr Who. Still good look for me, by and large, all avuncular, donnish umbers and earth-toned checks, but I don't wish to be mistaken as a cosplayer at an event like this. Not that anyone could possibly mistake my distinguished (shall we say) phiz for the young and handsome Mr Smith; that would make it worse, in many ways - not just a cosplayer, but a remarkably rubbish one.

New suit? Well, new suit also equals cheap suit. Not bad, but after a drink or two the posture slumps and the Designers At Debenhams structure doesn't have the wherewithal to provide back up.

So, good suit then, even though I appear to have had a very well-catered Christmas between when I bought it and today.

Next - shirt and tie. I mean the next thing to consider, not that I bought my shirt and tie at Next! Just what do you think I am?

The good suit's a little too structured to rock the bow tie look, and I'd ironed a couple of good shirts in preparation. I lost my nerve over the John Francombe liquorice all sort strips, and the Duffer of St George is good for job interviews but a bit business bland. Despite the cuffs beginning to show its age, I opted for my black and white Reiss shirt and black silk tie.

Combined with my silver converse, the whole ensemble has a pleasing unity of colour (grays, blacks, silver with a hint of blue) and if I keep my shoulders back and button done up, no one will even notice the alpha male belly poking out over the waist band.

Ah, well, I suppose I should say something about the books, too.

Let's start out in the territory of the unknown - I haven't read Gallileo's Dream. Only available in hardback and what with all those bills to pay... So, that one might win, might be the best of all but I can't comment.

Moving up, we come to Retribution Falls, which would not be my pick and will not, I think, be the pick of the committee. It's a fine adventure story, but I felt it was pretty thin, thematically, and I wasn't as swept away with it as I might have hoped. The bar to meet here, to my mind, is Jack Vance stuff like Big Planet and The Demon Princes, and this felt half-hearted in comparison, with a rather linear plot and no real gut punches, IMO.

Next, Yellow Blue Tibia, which is delightfully wry and has a lot of well-turned farce, but once again I felt the thematic material was a bit unsatisfying. It seemed to exist independent of the comic elements and the finale felt shoe-horned in. Aside from Konstantin, none of the other characters was especially believable or sympathetic (although the Asperger's guy was excellent comic material). I also had my doubts about the setting - particularly the way that some of the gags could only possibly work in English, that were articulated nicely in this blog post from Rules for Anchorites. I wouldn't choose this one, but my reservations appear to put me at odds with the critical consensus, so the committee may go for it, who knows? It seems kind of unlikely to me, though.

That's half the list disposed of. Next up, Spirit. I read this one about this time last year, and hadn't started blogging back then, but I discuss it in passing in my post of the year from January. This kind of big space opera isn't really my bag, and I struggled somewhat with the political machinations of the setting. With benefit of many months hindsight, however, the middle section where Bibi is imprisoned still haunts me. The scene where the little baby alien thing dies was like a kick in the guts to me (reminded me a little of the death of Grofinet in Vance's Lyonesse in that regard) and I'm thus inclined to feel that there was definitely some very strong writing here. I wouldn't pick this one, but there's big dollop of prejudice in that opinion. I suspect, though, that I'm not the only one that scratched their head of the setting, and the climax did not quite pay off, so Im don't think it's going to be Spirit.

We come now to the final two books, and this is where I really think the competition is. I have been confidently predicting a win for The City & The City, which I enjoyed a great deal both as a reader and in a more detached critical way. I vacilate on whether the split is a psychological or a supernatural effect, and have recently decided that Miéville leaves it deliberately - and deliciously - ambiguous, a move I admire and applaud. It's let down by the flaccid thriller plot, but the central metaphor is so compelling and beautifully achieved that all other considerations seem like grousing. This one seemed like a shoe in.

However, I am now a third of the the way through Far North and my socks have been knocked entirely off (black, NB, to co-ordinate with the rest of the outfit). Here is a novel firing on all cylinders. The effortless prose is laded with nuggets of insight that shoot from the setting like sparks. The central voice is steady and consistent, believable, likable and wise. Already we've had heartbreak and breath-taking danger. Already we've been moved and unsettled. I'm a long way from the end, so it's a bit early to say whether it will all come together, but right now, I'm just loving this book!

So, I think it's a toss up between those two. If it was me I'd go for Far North, assuming it continues as it's begun. I feel that Méiville is a very fine writer in the SF/F context, but I'm less convinced by his chops in the wider literary scene. Theroux, on the evidence so far, seems like the real thing - intelligent, careful, wise, spurning gimmicks while unafraid of the new. It could be that the sublimity of Méiville's broken city will win through, but it could equally be Far North.

Retribution Falls

I used to think that holiday reading is a publishing market segment that is constituted almost entirely of non-readers. Books promoted as perfect for the beach and the sun tan oil are aimed at people who only read one book a year or those that only ever read shit. When I go on holiday, it's a chance to tackle something hefty, something challenging and new. I can do with the brainless stuff, when I'm semi-conscious on the DLR in the morning shambling my way to work like a Romero zombie, driven entirely by habit. At these times I want easy to understand plots, broad characters and logical sequences of action.

That's what I used to think. Then I had children.

Before I had children, days in the sun spent darting on guide book tours of temples and museums were punctuated by leisurely longueurs in cafes (street or beach-side) with a cool glass of the local lager and a plate of whatever strangely preserved morsel was the local nibble. Before I had children reading time was provided by long bus trips to remote attractions post-it noted in the guide book before we left. Before I had children, there always seemed to be time to snatch a few dozen pages, or even settle down and read a hundred at a stretch if there was nothing else to do.

Alas, those days are long passed. Today, every historical site or local attraction is a headache-inducing dredge through high school history and classics at a quarter century remove, in an attempt to answer questions that begin with “where are we?” and inevitably end somewhere like “is God real?”, “when was the first person in Europe?” and “what was there before moon appeared?” Today, every long journey requires a constant stream of patter, tricks and reassurances to get the children through without having them scream everybody's nerves into jelly.

Today's reading is restricted to the last withered hours of consciousness at the end of a day, when excited, excitable children have finally worn themselves out into sweaty somnolence, and towels and toys and piles of interesting shells and rocks and bits of wood have been cleared aside. On my most recent trip, two things helped me to get some solid reading done on my latest journey:

The first was the invention of the Nintendo DS, a boon to parents everywhere and a mind-numbing joy for children.

The second was Retribution Falls, a jolly adventure story from Chris Wooding that suited exactly the sun-struck and child-shocked days of spring holidays. It's an old fashioned story of blazing airship combat, hair-raising dogfights and a dash of criminal shennanigans. While the airships suggest steampunk, this novel is set in a secondary world fantasy realm, where steampunk engineering mixes with supernatural phenomena and daemonic magic. It's a kind of post-enlightenment heroic fantasy, where the old magic (and suggestions of forgotten and proscribed knowledge) sit side by side with a variation of ordinary science.

If you've ever played a computer adventure game called Arcanum, you'll have an idea of the sort of thing. In fact, and I mean this with utmost respect, this book reads a lot like the better sort of gaming fiction. The major skill gaming has taken from sf and fantasy is world building. I don't think it's a coincidence that mainstream heroic fantasy and pen and paper games evolved at the same time, and I think the fictional approach to world building cross-fertilised. More and more writers began creating worlds for stories to happen in rather stories around which worlds were created.

Retribution Falls has that intense level of granularity and detail. It is easy to believe in the world beyond the characters, that there's business and goings on off screen. Secondary characters all have a well thought out place in the world, they all come with a back story consistent with elements of established continuity, they all fit their little niche in a calculated milieu.

There are times when this maybe goes a little too far. Combined with the old fashioned story and broad characterisation, it sometimes feels a bit like flavour fiction in a gaming manual. This is perhaps because of the main cast's habit of over analysing things, and so piloting the Ketty Jay sometimes reads a little like a series of skill rolls, and Crake often seems to be totting up his magic points before he cooks up a little deamonism.

Under other circumstances I might have been more impatient with the straight forward plotting, and I can't help wishing that Wooding was a little harder hearted and killed off a character or two on the way through, just to show us he meant business. Maybe things are a little easy for the crew of the Ketty Jay, but even so they make good company for frazzled evenings semi-conscious on the sandy settee with a glass of the local poison to ease the sandblasted headache.

The City & The City

This arrived as part of a much delayed shipment from amazon, and so I fell on it like a starving man. It was just what I needed,- - not so heavy or rich that it was hard to digest, but also not so light and bland that it lacked savour.

I have previously only read Miéville's Perdido Street Station, which I had a hard time with. I can think of material problems I had with this: large sections were in italics. It's a convoluted story with some bits more interesting than others. Most of the characters are pretty miserable most of the time, and spent quite a lot of pages mulling it all over. Often in italics. But despite all this, a lot of the reason I turned against it was the circumstances of when I read it.

It was a hot summer holiday in Rome, and we stayed in a cheap hotel that was close to the monuments, but down a back alley in a nasty part of town. It was built into a dark corner of an old office block, one window looking out to the gloomy street, the other into a bird shit stained lightwell. The breakfast room was in a stairwell, and we'd fill up on cheap euro breakfast of cheese and bread rolls before heading out to wander the city's ancient ruins. Rome is the closest place in the world to a real life fantasy city, where the spirit of forgotten magic rises from the ruins the randomly erupt from the streets around every corner.

My copy of Perdido Street Station was a cheap paperback that I read lying in bed, propped up on pillows during afternoon siestas in a stuffy hotel room, while Jane snored beside me. I remember hot afternoons with aching feet, frowning intently at the tiny, close set pages of type, feeling the weight of ages all around me. No matter how well imagined or well-described it was, my mind was never really in New Crobuzon.

Reading this on the DLR and in the cafeteria at work, looking over the buildings that have been written across the Docklands, Miéville's divided city had the compelling power of truth. It is only a tiny step from the divided cultures that co-exist all around us to the eerie superimposition that Miéville portrays with such effortless conviction.

The divided city had the dark surrealism of Dick/Borges/Kafka and it was combined with the spy and thriller genres, which I've been reading a lot recently.I'm pretty sure Miéville wants us to see this as a supernatural phenomenon - some kind of fold in space - but the writing is ambiguously poised between this and the idea of two populations occupying the same place, but deliberately ignoring each other due to some bizarre ancient schism. It's a brilliant idea that lets Miéville in to all sorts of interesting observations about society and politics.

It particularly resonates with the state of Eastern Europe following the break up of the Soviet Union. Tiny ethnic communities are drawn apart by the pull of East and West, with dividing line now between Islam and Christianity rather than the communism versus capitalism that fuelled the split in Berlin. The City & The City feels a bit like the Cold War, but Miéville's political concerns are right up to date.

It's let down a little by the thriller plot, which lacks drive and resolves into a bit of a damp squib. The big problem is with characterisation: we just don't care about Borlu or Mahalia enough to be pulled through the story by the mystery. The final revelations are all a little mundane, particularly Breach who have all the eerie menace they exert in the first half of the book stripped from them in the second.

The richness and consistency of the central metaphor keeps you reading, though, and the atmosphere is sustained through masterly control of the reader's attention. The cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma are real and distinct, and Miéville examines the cultural and psychological consequences of their separation with great insight.

The Arthur C Clarke Awards shortlist has been announced!

Yep, here's the rundown at Torque Control, the BSFA site.

I am not suprised to see The City & The City on there, nor am I surprised to see Yellow Blue Tibia. In retrospect, I am not surprised that Spirit made it to the shortlist, either but I'd read this last year and kinda forgotten about it.

I was expecting to see Moxyland there (I have it in my bag to read next, right after I finish The City & The City - I'll post about this one on Friday) as the outlier-designed-to-annoy-traditionalists, but it looks like that position has been taken by Far North, a novel I'd not heard of before now. The list is rounded out by Kim Stanley Robinson's Gallieo's Dream and Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding.

Out of the three I've read, I'd say The City & The City is the clear favourite in my eyes. I'm kinda foxed by Spirit, though, as being not-my-kinda-thing I'm perhaps a little blinded by its finer qualities (although the middle section where the heroine is imprisoned is as fine and moving as writing gets, I'd say).

I've got to go to the bookshop at lunch time anyway (to search out a copy of Sticker Dressing Dolly Popstars, which is inelligible for the award as it was published in 2008), so I'll pick one of the three I haven't read to read on holiday. My wife's gonna start thinking of sectioning me as my bibliomania spirals out of control. And the pile - she is growing, with Moxyland now joining The Still Point and Beyond Black on my bedside table. Don't hassle me man!

The Red Men by Matthew De Abaitua

This novel was short-listed for the Clarke awards in the same year as Richard Morgan's Black Man, a novel I really disliked and that eventually won the prize. By contrast, I enjoyed The Red Men a lot – it's well written, by and large and played close to a lot of my own preferences and interests – but there are few points that prevent it from being a great novel and I guess these are why it didn't win.

In the inevitable review style, I'm going to write more about them than why I liked it, but don't get the wrong impression - this is a very cool and funny book. That out of the way...

I think it shows a few first-timer mistakes. It's frequently over-written, with a lot of fancy word work of the sort that writers often think sounds good but is in fact empty word play. In one place (by way of example) we get “Florence inspected her wet hair, found a split end and plucked it out, as unfeeling as a one of The Fates cutting a thread.” This doesn't throw any light on the conversation being had and just seems to be there to nudge us in the ribs with a classical allusion. Where there is a closer relationship to matter of the text, they often over-explicate something that's already been said it seems to me that he had a few ways of describing some action or emotion and rather than choosing one he leaves them all in there. I feel, by and large, you're better off choosing one, and the simplest one at that in these situations.

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that there's a lot of embroidered autobiography here, too, another first-timer characteristic (I hesitate to say “mistake” here). The Nelson character doesn't seem a million miles from De Abaitua's own biography, although of course I don't know all that much about him. A lot of the writing about Hackney clearly comes from personal experience, and there are a few places that reek of real characters used without much fictional dressing. The latter half of the novel set around Liverpool also has an autobiographical air to it as the narrator deconstructs the place he grew up.

De Abaitua writes particularly well about the domestic reality of a young family. I really like this description of domesticity: “no task was ever finished: there were clean clothes drying in the hallway; half-completed application forms on the desk; party decorations from the previous year still hanging around,; this was the half-done, in-betweeness of domesticity, neither victory nor defeat, just an ongoing obligation”. I also liked his characterisation of the tension between work and life (“The corporation and the family are rivals.”)

The best part of this novel, IMO, is the first section dealing primarily with the poet Raymond and his experiences at Monad. This seemed to me to be the most fully realised fiction in the novel, where De Abaitua wasn't just writing about himself, but imagining a new person in a new situation and describing and discovering them.

I do agree with the notion that authors, by and large, write about versions of themselves, but I think better novels come from burying these elements more deeply than they're buried in the Nelson character. I wondered if a better novel might have focused on Raymond, ditching the Nelson character altogether.

The Red Men is a bit messy, as well, as if De Abaitua was trying to get everything in at once. The strange point of view gymnastics that were required to fit Raymond's narrative into Nelson's first person voice were nicely done in a dream like way, but it was rather distracting. I realise that i am overfond of focus and efficiency in fiction (I find it paralysing, sometimes) but I think this would have been a smoother and better novel with a bit more focus.

I'm probably too over-familiar with the kind of drugged out gonsticism this novel is based on to give a decent commentary. I have to say I'm heartily sick of all that Alan Moore-ish, Throbbing Gristly New Age occulty hoohah, having been heavily into it in my time and then woken up one morning and thought “wait a second! It's all bollocks!” This sort of stuff seems like a young man's game. It's a kind of adolescent view of the universe as a spooky place you can change to your will, as if a toddler stamping their foot can get what they want.

I think this novel is expressing a drift away from that kind of thinking on De Abaitua's part, but he kind of wants it both ways here – clearly the powers behind Monad are nutters, but on the other hand it seems to be true, and at the end Nelson expresses a final acceptance of these ideas. It's a credit to De Abaitua, though, that I enjoyed this novel despite my over-familiarity and (dyspeptic middle aged) hostility to these concepts. Maybe the drift away from the drugs and occultism chimed with my own experiences over the last decade or so.

So, I can see why it missed out the The Black Man, which is a more coherent work and plays a lot closer to mainstream SF concerns (and stupid populist machismo, which is what really turned me off). I don't know if The Red Men deserved that award – I haven't read the other nominees – but I definitely enjoyed it more than Black Man. I doubt I'll read another Morgan novel, but I'd be inclined to give De Abaitua another whirl.