Number 59 - Homelands of the Heart - SP Somtow

 

Nearly 3 decades after the last of the Chronicles of the High Inquest, Somtow has returned to the Overcosm and the Dispersal of Man and the universe where delphinoid ships traverse the gaps between galaxies and the Inquest play games with the lives of entire civilisations.

In this new volume, we return to the childhood of one of the series' more important characters, the musician Sajit, whose music enchanted the inquestors themselves.

Although this is one of the longer entries in the series by page count, it's also a much more intimate storyline than the last 3 volumes. the action is confined to the world of Urna, which, due to the games of the Inquestors, has been "sent beyond" and is due to be merged with another world, a pleasure planet that was destroyed and relocated.

We see the impact of the Inquestor games more clearly than ever before in the series through the eyes of the young Sajit. 

There are surprises and revelations throughout. As ever with this series, the sheer scale of imagination on display is mind-blowing. There are some of Somtow's repeated themes that pop up, goddesses, twins, sexual awakenings, strange religions, just as a starter.

It's probably the best written of the four books.  Somtow's style has matured and improved over the years and there are few stylists who can touch him when he's on form as he is in this book.

It's an absolute pleasure to read. Some plot details would seem silly and overblown if written by almost anyone else, but in Somtow's gorgeous prose they seem like natural progressions of the storyline.

There's a fine villain who appears later on in the story, giving us a far more cruel and depraved version of the Child Snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. A disgusting and truly deplorable character indeed. I hope he's back for the next volume. I need to see  him get his just punishment.

There are a couple of continuity errors. The villain's record in collection is said to be flawless, yet there's a flashback to a collection that went very badly indeed.  There are also quite a few grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.  The book does need to be thoroughly proofread (although I'm not sure if this wasn't a review copy that i disgracefully didn't get around to- in which case, they might have been corrected). It's testament to how much I enjoyed the book that the errors didn't pull me out of the story like they normally would. 

A worthy return to a classic and overlooked series. It's available through Diplodicus Press or the usual online retailers. Buy it.

Number 58 - Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch

 I'm starting to think Magical London is it's own specific subgenre of fantasy fiction. there's the Smallest things book i read recently, Un-Lun-Dun and King Rat by China Mieville, Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, and the 8 books in this series to name a dozen off the top of my head.

This my first foray into this particular iteration on the theme and I have to say I'm impressed.

I was lead to believe that this was a Pratchett style high fantasy with a dozen laughs on each and every page. It's not that, but what it is is very good indeed.

Peter Grant is a young policeman just ending his two year probation and about to be posted into records rather than the excitement he wants on the streets.

He runs into an eyewitness to a recent brutal murder. The problem is that the eyewitness has been dead for 300 years.

This is the beginning of his awakening to the magic that surrounds his native city. 

He's recruited into a specialist unit instead, under Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, who heads up his own very exclusive unit. Peter finds out that the serial killer the met is looking for is not the usual run of the mill murderer. In the course of his investigation he meets several more ghosts, at least one vampire and the human forms of the eponymous rivers of London who are themselves in the middle of their own internal fights which could cause trouble for the city.

There's a great imagination on display here. While I did say it's not Pratchett style. a dozen laughs a page funny, it is still very funny.  The plot comes before the humour though, and there are some very dark elements going on. Peter's narration is suitably cynical and does lead to a few belly laughs.

Aaronovitch clearly loves the London and the historical details about the city seem entirely convincing without feeling like a history lecture. The characters are well drawn, especially Grant, Leslie, and Nightingale. 

I was lucky enough to find a box set of all 8 books in the series for only £20 online. I will certainly be reading the full series There's a definite mystery linked to Nightingale's past that feels like it will be great fun to explore in the later volumes.

Number 53 - The Smallest of Things - Ian Whates

 Continuing my theme of short fiction, I'd already decided to read this small volume I received in the last bundle I bought from PS before I started on the John Probert book.  I'd never heard of him before so I thought it was quite a coincidence that he was mentioned in the acknowledgements in that book as the head of the small press that published it.

So we know as editor in chief of a small press he has good taste.

Is he a good writer to go with it?

The answer is a definite yes.

Chris is a fixer with a strange skill set.  he can move between different iterations of London. from the regular version he (and presumably we) inhabit, to mega futuristic versions, to smog filled nightmares. he can sense the spaces where reality is weak and leap through the gaps.

Whether any place outside of London exists in these multiverses is not discussed which is a bit of a sticking point for me- but that's incidental.

He's approached by an old friend in trouble.  Her boyfriend has just been apparently disintegrated by weird looking strangers in brown coats and hats. She knows Chris is the only man who can help her. This leads to a chase through many different versions of the city to an exciting denouement.

Multiverses are fairly popular in fiction at the moment and this is an interesting and entertaining addition to the sub-genre. Whates managed to keep me guessing throughout and the plot twists and turns nicely. His writing is always entertaining and Chris is a good narrator, even if he is a bit of a cliché. 

It's a fun read.  It might not be a literary classic but I'll definitely read more by this writer. 

Number 45 - Aeota - Paul Di Filippo

 And the short fiction reads continue with this little oddity from PS Publishing, normally a reliable source for quality fiction. I'd never heard of De Filippo before but the plot description sounded good.

This is a surreal science fiction story about a laconic, wise cracking, world-weary private detective, Vern Ruggles, who discovers that his latest case involves corporations that can change the nature of reality itself and sentient slime from either end of the time continuum trying to destroy history. And only Vern can stop it from happening. No pressure then...

This is fast moving, funny and somehow never confusing despite the shifting realities Ruggles finds himself thrown into. There's a whole load of WTF going on, but it's never confusing.

The supporting cast are equally good fun, his wife/ex-wife, his non-existent daughter,  the beautiful wife of the missing man he's been hired to find, and the sentient slime creatures from the ends of time.

It's a light, easy read and an inspired dose of sci-fi weirdness. I had a blast reading this and will happily seek this author out to read more of his books.

Number 14 - Titus Alone - Mervyn Peake

 

And my continuing series theme continues with the final part of the Gormenghast trilogy.

At the end of book 2, Titus left the crumbling towers and struck out for adventures new. Those adventures are detailed in this, the slimmest of the three volumes.

He finds himself in a strange city, washed up on the banks of a river and is recued by the exquisitely named Muzzlehatch. Thus begins what is probably the strangest book in the series.  

Also the least satisfactory.

Peake was dreadfully ill when writing this and this book was pieced together by his editors and it shows. It feels bitty and somehow incomplete.  It's obviously not the completed draft that Peake would have wanted.

That's not to say it's a bad book because it isn't.  But compared with its predecessors, it falls short.

Gone are nearly all the characters that made the first two books so wonderful, no Prunesquallor or Flay or Steerpike, or any of the schoolmasters. Of course some of those characters couldn't have appeared in book 3 regardless, but you get my point.

Instead we have Titus and a brand new cast of supporting characters.  However, since the book is half the length of the first two, they don't seem as fully fleshed out as those in the first books. 

This started well.  Muzzlehatch is the best of the new creations, but his motivations are not what I would call crystal clear. Indeed, none of the new characters have clear motivation except for the fact that they all develop a deep devotion/love for Titus for no particular reason. This then leads them to fight for him or plan his downfall for non-reciprocation. 

From being a fantasy series with no magical elements, this book turns into a weird science fiction tale about a third of the way into the narrative.

Most of the more potentially interesting conflicts happen off camera and we only hear about them later on. I feel that Peake would have fleshed these scenes out fully and described then for us in detail had he been fit and well. The book would have been twice as long and all the better for it. 

What was happening in the factory?  We get the briefest of glimpses and need more. Who are the helmeted figures following Titus and why?  There are so many unexplained factors in this book. Given that the levels of detail in the previous volumes could almost be argued to be excessive, this marks the tone of this book as drastically different.

The prose seems to be lacking compared with the others. He's still capable of some truly alarming turns of phrase (Chapter 102 starting with "Under a light to strangle infants by..." being a particular favourite of mine - '"But you are very poor and very ill," said another voice, with the consistency of porridge' is another favourite), but this book just doesn't have the feel of the rest of the series. It's a faster read than the others, not just because of the lesser word count, but because the writing just isn't as dense or poetic as before. 

I wanted to love this book but I don't. It's very good. But the particular weirdness in this book feels out of place with the rest of the series.  It's not the same type of weird and just feels wrong. 

And I still want to know how Titus knew what a car is when I don't recall any motorised transport in the first books.

Number 42 - The Salmon of Doubt - Douglas Adams

 

Book number 42 in the year has to be HHGTTG related. If that's not actually a law, it should be.

This year, that honour fell to this, the posthumous collection of Douglas Adams's essays, the one HHGTTG short story - Young Zaphod Plays it Safe, and the existing 11 chapters of the book Adams was working on when he died.

It's a fascinating and well researched/compiled collection of Adams's writing outside of the novels.

His trademark humour shines through most of the essays and letters, regardless of how serious the subject matter might be. In some places, he's remarkably prescient in the ways computers would take over every aspect of life.

In others, he's not quite so accurate.  in one essay about the future of magazines, he says that unwanted advertising will be a thing of the past when magazines and newspapers start happening online... Oh how I wish that prediction had come true.

His story about traveling to Australia to try to compare a new personal submersible vehicle to raiding the backs of the local aquatic life (namely the local manta rays) is particularly funny.

The short story has been about for a long while but I'd managed to never read it before picking up this book.  It's everything you'd expect from Adams, except a lot shorter than usual. It's also dated rather badly due to the satirical ending which will probably be lost on anyone who doesn't know about 80's world (USA) politics. 

The novel extract is both brilliant and desperately sad.  Brilliant because it's so bleeding funny. desperately sad because it's unfinished.  It was a new Dirk Gently book, although apparently he was thinking of reworking the ideas into a Hitch Hiker's format. The plot was pretty much insane but certainly involved time travel.  I was really getting into the story, as hard as I was trying not to (because I knew it was only a fragment), and suddenly it just finished. We will never know what the relevance of Desmond the rhinoceros might be to estate agents battling talking kangaroos in the distant future. We'll never know why the femme fatale was missing only the back half of her cat. there's a deep seated tragedy in that.

Twenty years on, Adams is still one of the greatest geniuses to grace the world of comic literature. If the heaven he didn't believe in believes in him, I hope he's happy there and keeping the angels amused with his anecdotes about the sheer inconvenience of the afterlife. 

Number 5 - Gideon Falls Vol 6- The End - Lemire et al

 

The black barn is back, the laughing man and his hideous hordes are closing in on our heroes. 

The artwork and fantastic layouts continue to blow my mind.  There's even a section in this one where everything turns upside down and we have to turn the book over to read it.  

You could argue that it's gimmicky but I thought it was a lovely touch. 

With multiverses, time travel, monsters from the deep, cockroach infested zombies, this has been a rollicking good read.  There's no mystery as to why this won so many awards the years it was published in comic form.

This copy ends with the written script of everything that came before.

If you like your fiction wibbly wobbly timey wimey (to borrow from Matt Smith's doctor) with high concept monsters and genius layouts, this is the series for you.

Number 103 - Gideon Falls Vol 5 - Lemire et al

 

A return to the mind-bending worlds of Gideon Falls.

Now we have a grasp of what exactly is happening, this is getting more nightmarish and gripping.

The artwork continues to astound and the plot is getting twistier and twistier.  The cliffhanger ending is almost unfair.  it means i have to get the 6th and final volume much sooner rather than later...

It would be difficult to say much about what's happening without being very spoilerific for the previous 4 volumes.  Plus without a good understanding of what's gone before I'm not sure anything I say about the story here would make sense.

Suffice to say the Smiling Man is a truly scary villain and it's obvious why this series won as many awards as it did.

It takes talent to drag together as many disparate plot threads into a cohesive story in the way Lemire has done here. Sorentino's art helps build the atmosphere and general air of weirdness brilliantly as well as introducing me to narrative techniques only possible in a visual medium like comic books.

Seek these out and read them immediately.  

Number 97 - Famadihana on Fomalhaut IV - Eric brown

As titles go, that's not a good one.  It took me 4 tries to pronounce it and I still don't think I did it right. Even with the alliteration, it's clumsy.  There's no hard and fast rules about titles, but when they trip off the tongue like it's superglued in place, that's not a great sign.

Fortunately, the story does improve on the title. 

Matt Hendrick is a cop trying to find his estranged wife, who along with her surgeon lover, has kidnapped his daughter.  He's traced her to a distant planet, 4th from the sun Fomalhaut an d the book opens with him telemassing (this particular book's version of teleporting interstellar distances) to the local spaceport.

There he meets the mysterious Tiana, who's girlfriend has recently disappeared. They head off into the wilds to track down their respective loved ones, meeting up with the native inhabitants once there. 

For a story about a quest to a far off exotic planet, two thirds of this could have been set in any regular ship port on planet earth.  It's only in the final 25 pages (this is not a long book, which was the reason i chose it) that the location and storyline justify the sci-fi setting.  Prior to that it was just another regular cop tracing mis-per story.

The style of writing was reasonably good, if a bit bland.  The sections in italics at the end of every chapter from Tiana's point of view were needless and irritating.  There were only 2 that delivered any information we hadn't been given in the preceding chapter. The rest just felt like Brown was repeating himself.

I received this book in one of the bundles that PS publishing offer on their discount site.  I also happen to have books 2 and 4 of the quartet on my shelves. because I already have them, I will pick them up and read them at some point. If they are up to this standard, they will be a decent way to kill an hour or two,  I hope book 3 arrives in the bundle I ordered the other day, then I don't need to make any effort to find book 3

Number 95 - Of Whimsies and Noubles - Matthew Hughes

 

As you might be able to guess from the title, this book is a whimsical affair.  A whimsy in this case though, is a portal through different dimensions that works as a wormhole to vastly distant corners of the universe, but can send people mad who enter them unmedicated.

An art forger in the distant future trades his latest forgeries for Noubles, a rare and highly sought after jewel. He soon finds that he's been double crossed and is stranded on a prison planet and forced into dangerous work.  Can he find a way out?

There are some nifty science fiction ideas at work in this.  Where do Noubles come from?  Who built the whimsies since they're certainly not natural occurrences?  What lives inside them?

The whole thing is engagingly written.  Hughes has a slyly sarcastic style that I like a lot.  To be completely honest he won me over with the author bio.

"Matthew Hughes writes science fantasy.  Booklist have called him "heir apparent to ack Vance," George RR Martin has called his Archonate tales "a tremendous amount of fun", and Robert J Sawyer has called him "a towering talent". Hughes calls himself "Matt". His webpage is at www.matthewhughes.org ."

Everything after that was a bonus.  

It's very short.  I read it in a couple of hours and enjoyed myself immensely in the process. i will be seeking out more of his work.

Number 94 - Gideon Falls vol 4 - The Pentoculus

 

This series gets more mind-bending by the volume.

The stakes are raised considerably in this collection of issues 19 through 24 of the original comic. 

I am so glad I'm reading them in this form instead of having to wait a month for the next issue. The drawback is that some of the double page spreads don't have the same impact. Whereas the comics open flat, there's always the crease in  the centre of a book with a solid spine. 

The art continues to impress with the highly original use of layout to advance the storytelling. 

The writing continues to impress.  The tension has really wracked up considerably in this volume.  Things are starting to make more sense but that doesn't lessen any of the impact. It's pretty obvious why this won so many awards while it was out.

It's easily on a par with my previous favourite series Locke and Key.

Number 81 - Starship and Haiku - SP Somtow

Continuing in my quest to read Somtow's entire back catalogue, here's one of his earliest novels. In fact it won the the Locus award for best first novel, so it's his first.

You can tell this is a late 80s reprint from the fact that it has his shortened name on it instead of Somtow Sucharitkul. They knew how to put together a nice looking book cover in the 80s and this one is no exception.

The story has to score several points for originality. We're in the distant future (2022) and a plague is spreading across what's left of the world after the millennial wars.  The story is split between Japan and Hawaii.  

On Hawaii we meet Josh Nakamura and his little brother Didi who was born on the night that the moon was blasted out of the sky. People think Didi is simple but he has abilities that no one could guess.   They're desperate to leave for Japan, the last vestige of civilisation on the planet.

Japan has more than its fair share of problems too. Mass suicides are in progress at the behest of a mysterious figure calling himself the death Lord.  Ryoko Ishida, daughter of on of Japan's first ministers and blessed with the ability to talk to whales,  has other plans. 

This is a world ending apocalypse unlike any I've read before, and I doubt I will again.  I think maybe if I knew more about Japanese culture I might have picked up on some details that I've missed.

Somtow's prose is lush and lyrical.  He builds this bizarre end of times in broad strokes.  Where some writers would have used 210 pages just to set up the premise, Somtow trusts his readers to follow him on this headtrip and not lose track and tells the whole story in those 210 pages. And it's a trip well worth following him on.  There are world changing revelations about the nature of humanity and life itself.  They're thrown at us as casually as most writers will have a character decide on what coat to wear.

Like everything else he's written, this is a damned good read. Highly recommended.

Number 54 - the Creatures that Time Forgot - Ray Bradbury

 I thought I had nearly everything that Bradbury had written, so when I saw a new title on Amazon that I'd never seen before, I had to buy it.

It turns out that this is a version of his story Frost and Fire from the R is For Rocket collection.  Somehow this slipped through when copyright was supposed to be renewed in the 70s and this particular text of the story is open for anyone to publish if they want to.

(Thanks to the Bradbury fans in the Ray Bradbury Fan Club facebook page for clueing me into that.  I would have spent forever trying to work out where I'd read it before)

The people who've put this edition out have done a decent job.  That's pretty good artwork that goes well with the story.

The story is one of Bradbury's more fantastic ones. On a world where spaceships crash landed an unknown time in the past, the radiation from the atmosphere means that people age from birth to death in just 8 days. During those 8 days, they can only leave their caves for about 2 hours a day.  The rest of the time, they will either freeze in the sub zero temperatures at night, or literally fry on the rocks in the sun in the afternoon. Only the couple of hours just before noon are habitable. 

There is an old spaceship at the top of a hill, just too far away to get to in the scant time available. Can Sim and his potential lover Lyte work out a way to get there without dying, and save themselves?

As usual with Bradbury, the prose is poetic and freewheeling, never using one metaphor where he can squeeze in ten. But as usual, it works and it works brilliantly. If you think about the science of the story, it's not going to work.  But Bradbury didn't write science fiction (except for F451), he wrote fantasy and this is a brilliant short fantasy tale.

This was a good cheat read but unusually, I'm recommending that you don't buy this particular edition. Bradbury isn't even named on the Copyright page. This smells of someone taking advantage of an out of copyright story and making easy money out of it.  Even that rather nice cover art is from a stock photo website.

If you want the Bradbury estate to get the money from your purchase, you might want to buy a new copy of The Stories of Ray Bradbury. You'll get a lot more stories for your money too.

Number 42 - The Restaurant at the end of The Universe - Douglas Adams

 “The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

 With an opening line like that, how can a book go wrong?  In this case it certainly can’t.

The Hitchhikers trilogy (all 5 books) have been a staple part of my existence since I was about 12.  Whenever I hit book 42 in a year, it has to be a HHGTTG related tome – if that isn’t the law it should be, and this year I decided on a long delayed reread of book 2.

Accidentally, I’ve chosen a very appropriate time to post this review as it’s the 20^th anniversary of Adams’ sad death.

This second part of the 5 part trilogy is a very loose adaptation of the last two episodes of the first radio series, and the first 3 episodes of the second. The first book finished with our favourite space travellers boarding the Heart of Gold on the planet Magrathea.

The second starts straight after the events of HHGTTG when Eddie the onboard computer on the Heart of Gold spaceship shutting down to help the drinks machine work out how to make a good cup of tea, just at the moment that a Vogon ship is about to launch an attack.

We're then launched into the events from the first couple of episodes of the second series, where Zaphod finds he's set himself a mission and wiped his memory of it. He soon finds himself at the headquarters of the Guide's publishers where the psychic lifts don't want to take him to the 15th floor.  They know what's about to happen.

After various misadventures involving a sense of perspective, fairy cake, and missing lemon scented napkins, he is reunited with the rest of the cast and they make their way to Milliways.  From then on the book pretty much follows the end of series 1 of the radio show, with a brief diversion to episode 3 of series 2. 

There's not a single page of this book that doesn't contain laugh out loud funny jokes, and/or seriously groan inducing puns.  The wordplay is genius throughout and Adams' natural cynicism shines through all of it.  I always wondered who was to blame for my sarcastic sense of humour.  rereading these points to a very likely suspect.

All 5 books in the trilogy are comic masterpieces.  Please note I don't count book 6 as part of the trilogy.  The end of Mostly Harmless makes it clear that Adams wanted it all to stop so he could write something else for a change. So book 6 was a cash cow and nothing else. 

Not much else to say.  Adams was a comedy god and is sadly missed. 

If you've not read the books, read them now and that's an order.

Number 32 - The Brain from Beyond - Ian Watson

 When I picked this out of my TBR pile I thought it looked like a fun piece of nonsense. I was half right.

This is the closest thing to a DNF (Did Not Finish) I've had since I started writing this blog. If it had been even 10 pages longer I don't think i would have bothered. Considering that it's only 112 pages, that's quite remarkable.

The problem is the prose style.  it's just irritating.  I'm normally a fan of present tense narrative for the sense of immediacy it brings to the story.  But this book uses it so badly.  Although I don't think there's much that could have salvaged this short of a total rewrite by someone who can write. Just switching tense would probably not have fixed anything.

The story follows some characters on a time machine, going through their history salving from failed time machines. It starts with 25 solid pages of incomprehensible infodump in the form of the worst expositional dialogue I think I've ever experienced. That's nearly a quarter of the book!

Once the actual story gets up and running it doesn't get much better.  Compared to this book, the technobabble in The Unreasoning Mask made perfect sense. And there was less of it.  If I'd had to read the word Multiyottaflop one more time I think I would have binned this book. 

I think it's supposed to be funny. However, writing arch overegged prose with stupid made up words is not a recipe for humour that particularly whets my palette. I don't know what Watson was aiming at with the writing style in this, but he missed it completely.

From the usually reliable PS Publishing this is a real disappointment. At least I know I can clear a couple of books from my TBR pile.  The other Ian Watson book I received in a PS Bundle of books will be heading straight for the charity shop along with this one. 

Number 31 - The Unreasoning Mask - Philip Jose Farmer

 I'm not sure where to begin on this one.

Farmer is a writer I obsessed on in my teens and early 20s and managed to collect more than 40 of his books.  This is one I didn't get around to reading all those years ago, and it has to be said that it has an amazing cover. 

Sadly however, the cover is the best thing about this book by a considerable distance. Other than the  opening line - "The Bolg kills all but one!" 

That does at least grab the interest quite effectively.

There's a lot of imagination on show in the book, as per usual for Farmer.  However it doesn't translate into a hugely enjoyable read.

The situation we're in at the beginning is extremely alien and requires a lot of infodump to bring about any clarity. The central character isn't particularly sympathetic or interesting. 

We know he has been compelled to steal an icon from a temple on an alien world.  The icon is the egg shaped item on that gorgeous cover. It's called the Glyfa (the easiest of the alien names to pronounce in the book) and is sentient and arranged for Ramstan (our hero) to kidnap it. And who is the green robed figure Ramstan keeps seeing? 

What follows next is an exciting chase through assorted layers of technobabble and extreme philosophising on religion and the nature of the pluriverse as they try to avoid the aliens whose god they've stolen.  They also encounter the Bolg from the opening line - a supergiant thing/being that burns and destroys any planet with sentient life.

There are occasional flashes of greatness that reminded me of why I used to love his books. One chapter in particular where Ramstan does nothing but descend in a launch past layers of a 2km tall tree and witnesses all the different species is described so well you can almost see it.  The atmosphere he creates in that chapter is how the whole book should have felt. 

Sadly, he fails to do that.  We spend the first few chapters entirely confused about what's happening. It settles down to something we can follow, but then we get a full 3 chapters of infodump near the end to explain what the Bolg actually is, and soon after we get the worst ending on any book I've read since I started this blog.  

I wanted to love it. Farmer was an old literary obsession after all, and that cover... but he was always in all honesty a little bit hit and miss.  This is a definite miss.  

Number 88 - Project Clio - Stephen Baxter

 A quick cheat read from my growing selection of novellas from PS Publishing. I only know Stephen Baxter's name from his collaberations with Terry Pratchett (which I shamefully haven't read, or indeed bought, yet). Still if Pratchett was willing to team up with him for three books, he must have something going for him.

And on the strength of this he probably does.  This is a fun little romp through a very fictionalised late 60's where the John Steed and Emma Peel Avengers series was based on a real agency who were using it to hide in plain sight. 

A mysterious company, known as the company, is producing advanced technology and, through a magazone known as Magazine, is making the nation's children produce strange toys from kits known as kits whilst they listen to endless guitar solos broadcast from the Company's own pirate radio station known as... the station.

There's a lot of ground covered in this book in a very short number of pages.  We have assassins attempting to kill ex-soldiers to stop them killing an ex-nazi scientist who  holds vital information about the company. We have a pair of agents trying to take down the evil version of Radio Caroline.  We have a good cop trying to reconnect with her stepson who is under The Company's control. Oh, and a potential alien invasion from within, setting the groundwork for invaders from beyond the Solar system to swoop in and destroy humanity.

The characters are as developed as you can get in such a short book.  The prose is witty and to the point. It's not laugh out loud funny but I did have either a broad smile or an ironic grin on my face for most of the time I was reading this.

 It's still available from PS Publishing. If short and witty take-downs of 60's tv sci fi are your thing, go ahead and buy it.  You won't regret it.

Number 60 - It Came from Outer Space - Ray Bradbury

 

I've set the picture to Extra Large because it's a bloody enormous book.  This is a proper coffee table book if I ever owned one (and I own a few).

To celebrate the centenary of the man himself, I had to read one of his books, and this is one I hadn't read yet.  Back in the early 50s, Bradbury wrote a screenplay for the first science fiction film made in 3D - which was of course It Came from Outer Space - if it wasn't, there would be a different film poster on the cover of the book...

This is a fascinating slice of history.  It was compiled by Don Albright (Ray Bradburys friend and agent for many years) for Gauntlet press. It was a limited run and signed by Bradbury so if you can get a copy online you're lucky.  This is an ex-library copy so is probably not as valuable as it could be (although it does tell me that the American library system must have its good points if it stocks oddities like this).

Basically, this starts with a couple of fairly dry academic essays about the impact of the film.  That's followed by the original short story that inspired the film, and then several different treatments of the screenplay in various stages of its evolution.

The progression from one to the next  is an insight into how the creative brain works.  We start with the story about human's landing on a planet inhabited by intelligent spiders - this was the original short story.  We then see the rejection letter that Bradbury recieved for both this story and A Sound of Thunder.  That anyone rejected A Sound of Thunder is a great consolation to a sometime writer like myself.  It confirms that some editors just don't know what they're doing and there's still hope for me.

Next up is a typewritten first draft of Bradbury's treatment for the film.  This still has the title "The Atomic Monster" on the front of it, and several corrections in pen.  Also the central character's (Putnam's) profession changes almost randomly throughout this first version.  Often this is the cause of the corrections, but there are still places where he's described as a reporter and not as an astronomer.  The ending is very different to the film we know.

The second version of the story seems to be a cleaned up version of this, with the crossings out and the corrections no longer visible.  

The next version is typed more cleanly again and has inserts with extra material.

The final version has a lot more of the material we recognise from the finished film, and is nearly twice as long as the other versions.  It also contains a monologue by the sheriff which is used as the centrepoint for Bradbury's story Touched with Fire.  I have no idea which came first, this screenplay or that short story.  I know the story was in a 1954 collection, but where was it before that?  

We're then treated to a whole slew of promotional material from the film, including two short story adaptations of the film script.  I might be mistaken but this may well be the first film where the aliens are described as Xenomorphs.  

All this and an extra little short story called Troll Charge that Bradbury co-wrote whilst working for the studio, this is a beautiful insight into the creative process.

If you can get hold of a copy,. it's well worth it.

Number 35 - The Darkling Wind - Somtow Sucharitkul

Somtow Sucharitkul - aka SP Somtow is another of those authors I've been reading and collecting since my mid teens. From the first few chapters of Vampire Junction when I was 15 years old, I have loved his writing.

In recent years I've been scouring the interwebzes for his back catalogue which includes the Chronicles of the High Inquest series of novels. This is number 4 in the series and, until this year, was the final book.  However, Somtow has just published book 5 this year, so I decided to finish this one so I can read the new one sooner rather than later.

Unusually, for a book I really enjoyed, I'm not going to encourage anyone to go out and read this.  Only do that if you've read the first three in the series.

Things have become complex by this stage in the story and I can't imagine much of it would make sense without reading books 1 to 3 first.  If you've read books 1 to 3 already, what are you waiting for.

This is a mind bending series of books.  Somtow isn't telling  a story on an epic scale.  This is cosmic scale storytelling.  Book 1 - The Light on the Sound is a nice gentle introduction to the universe of Inquestors and their control over the Dispersal of Man, their games of Makrugh, and travelling through vast star systems using delphinoid starships to cruise theough the overcosm.

The Inquestors have ruled over the Dispersal of Man for twenty thousand years.  They're god-like beings, although they all started as human. Their games of tactical one-upmanship can destroy entire worlds. By the time book 4 begins, the revolution is well under way.  Allegiances shift and warp in the course of this book and it's well-nigh impossible to summarise the plot effectively, other that, in this one, as advertised on that rather gorgeous cover, their empire will finally crumble.

Somtow's prose in this book is the best it's been for the series.  Even in the first book it was good and these are some of Somtow's earliest works.  There are images that will truly stick with me - for example, a character whose madness has split his personality into a million pieces physically as well as mentally at one point is seen with all his separate beings superimposed one on top of the other, all sharing the same green eyes.  The last few chapters of this book contain some of the best of his writing that I've seen.

There are sequences that, despite being abstract in the extreme, still manage to create genuine tension.  That takes huge skill to accomplish.

Some writers build worlds in their books.  In this series, Somtow has created an entire universe with all it's own physical laws and limitations.  We have starships powered by huge whale like creatures - Remembering when this was written, this may be the first example in science fiction of this type of transport. We have living suns that bathe their humans in ecstacy, planets with think-hives that suplly the Inquestors with their knowledge.  The imagination on display is immense.

Don't go looking for hard science fiction.  You won't find complex descriptions of how things work.  We're told what they are, and that they work,and that's sufficient.  It worked for Bradbury's science fiction, and it works here.  I'm glad of it too.  If the best thing an author has to tell you about is pages of complex mechanics, it's not something I personally want to read. It's a spaceship, it goes to the stars.  That's what it's supposed to do.

It's impossible to predict where this series is going because of the sheer cosmic scale of the events. As a grand finale, this book works brilliantly (Of course now we have book 5 just released, but I've had a sneak peak at the opening and there's no cheating going on to reopen the story).  This could well be my favourite multi-volume sci-fi epic.

My only regret is leaving as long as I did between reading books three and four. One of the only disadvantages of owning as many books as I do, sometimes getting back to a series is interrupted.
The books in sequence are The Light on The Sound, The Throne of Madness, Utopia Hunters and this one. I have original 80s copies with the fabulously gaudy covers. Somtow has recently republished all 4 with new covers.

Links to buy thems are here.

Book 5 is called The Homeworld of the Heart



https://www.amazon.com/Light-Sound.../dp/B087YTPKH9/

https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-High.../dp/1940999464/

https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-High.../dp/0980014921/ 


https://www.amazon.com/Chronicles-High.../dp/B07B2L3SJB

Number 5 - Their Heads are Anonymous - Alistair Gentry

As you may have noticed, I occasionally choose books based on the covers alone. For reasons lost in the mists of time, that's why I bought this one.

Can it possibly live up to that cover?  If it lives up that cover is that a good thing? No i's not.  A book with a cover like this needs to exceed the promises the cover makes by a huge huge distance.

This sadly, doesn't even live up to that godawful picture.
This should be filed under "when will I ever learn".

It doesn't know what it's meant to be.  Is it a comedy?  A couple of wry smiles here and there doth not a comedy make.  Is it a horror novel?  It's never scary. it's never shocking. It tries too hard to go OTT in a couple of places that it fails entirely to shock.  Is it science fiction?  It has some sci-fi elements, but badly written, ill-explained and tedious.  And mostly nonsensical.

It starts in an ok fashion and deteriorates. I struggled to get to the end of this.  When you have 10 pages to go and you're wondering if you should bother, that's not a good sign.

Basic story - a huge amusement park (supposedly a satirical take on Disneyland) - our hero works as a giant bunny, his girlfriend plays a gnu. He's been hallucinating recently and seeing flying saucers. The boss of the camp is a snuff pornographer with a private army who decides to lock the park up tight and start playing his games with the guests, as you do. Of course, no outside agency intervenes at any point, except for a news helicopter which gets shot down.  At the time of the park's takeover, Parry, the guy in the bunny suit, has fallen down a shaft of some sort after passing out through an illness which is never mentioned again, and his girlfriend is locked in a tower somewhere after being sexually assaulted by her boss. There's also a "mystery guest" who comes in as a recurring character but who adds zero to the narrative. Lots of people are killed, no one from outside comes to help, it's up to Parry and Priscilla (the Gnu) with the help of the aliens to save the day.  Or should I say it's up to the omniscient aliens who can raise characters from the dead to save the day.

This should have been just my kind of thing.  It strives to be quirky, it tries to be shocking, it aims at some metafictional sci fi plot twists.  But the execution is bloody awful.  The writing style varies from bland to what-the-hell-am-I-reading-and-is-there-any-point-in-me-carrying-on. The characters are not even complex enough to warrant saying they're one dimensional.

The good guys do nothing of note for themselves.  Only the metaphysical creatures from the flying saucers allow them to actually participate in the story in an active way. The bad guy is just that.  He does bad things because he wants to because he's bad.  A good villain is still the hero of his own story.  Charles Bigger, the villain, is just evil and knows it. He knows he's the bad guy and doesn't care.  In the hands of a skilful writer, that can just about work...

In this guy's hands... nope

Remember I read this so you don't have to.

It's on amazon if you really want to.  But don't.  This is the literary equivalent of unblocking drains.