Martin's Booklog

In the mail (always wanted to do one of those)

Published on September 30, 2008

cover of CauseWired

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed the blog has changed somewhat, having been upgraded from a homebrew of handcoded HTML and an obsolete PHP version of Blosxom to WordPress. All the old links to individual book reviews still work and will keep on working, but this way I can make this into slightly more of a blog and less of just a placeholder.

Meanwhile, in the mail yesterday I reviewed an advance copy of CauseWired, a book version of Tom Watson‘s blog. Watson is an American journalist (not a British member of parliament) who has long been involved in various community and charity orientated web 2.0 and 1.0 ventures. His book is intended as a testimonial to show others how to organise their own causes in a always on, 24/7 internet world with people who’ve never know the world to be anything else.

It was offered through the generosity of Andrew Wheeler, ex-Science Fiction BookClub editor and now some Wiley Publishing bigwig, who earlier this month offered review copies to anybody who “want to read this book before it’s published, and […] have somewhere (preferably online) to talk to people about it afterwards”. I’m in the process of reading it; expect a review this weekend or possibly earlier.

A Plague of Demons — Keith Laumer

Published on September 15, 2008

Cover of A Plague of Demons

A Plague of Demons
Keith Laumer
159 pages
published in 1965

The advantage of reading a Keith Laumer novel is that they’re so short you can read two of them in the time it takes to get through even half a modern novel. So after Worlds of the Imperium I decided I would indulge myself with another Laumer novel I hadn’t read in over a decade. Reading them back to back it was interesting to see the simularities between the two novels. Both are partially set in Northern Africa, both star tough, grizzled loners whose name start with a B, and in both the hero gets involved in an operation way over his head and discovers the true reality of his world. Though really, that last bit is true of almost every straight science fiction novel Laumer ever wrote.

Not that Laumer wrote to a formula, but he knew what his strenghts were, what he liked to write about and what his readers liked to read. Certainly he always manages to hit my buttons. A Plague of Demons is no exception. It’s as fast-paced as the best of his work, with a nice dash of understated humour, in a writing style that owes a lot to the great American hardboiled tradition, as well as some of Ian Fleming’s work.

Tales of H. P. Lovecraft — H. P. Lovecraft

Published on September 15, 2008

Cover of Well of Lost Plots

Tales of H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Joyce Carol Oates, editor
328 pages
published in 1997

It’s almost embarassing to say this, but apart from the occasional short story in an anthology here or there, this is the first I’ve read of H. P. Lovecraft. Just as well then that this is an excellent introduction to Lovecraft, featuring many of his most famous works. The stories have been selected by Joyce Carol Oates, an not entirely unknown writer herself. What I like about Tales of H. P. Lovecraft is that she has managed to create a well balanced collection without any weak stories. It starts off slow, with several more conventional horror stories, the stories increasing both in length and sophistication, slowly immersing you in Lovecraft’s world.

Despite having only sampled Lovecraft in the past, I pretty much knew what to expect, since his influence is so pervasive in science fiction and fantasy literature. Even if you’ve never read any of his stories, you’ll probably have encountered some pastiche, homage or reference to him in other writers’ work, even discounting those authors like Derleth who imitated him outright.

The Mercenary — Jerry Pournelle

Published on September 13, 20081 Comment

Cover of The Mercenary

The Mercenary
Jerry Pournelle
223 pages
published in 1977

The Mercenary is one of those books in my collection I’m a bit ashamed of. Not because it’s so badly written, but because its politicsare so embarrassing. Having it on my bookshelves is a bit like owning a collection of books about the nazis and the Second World War; you can be genuinely interested but it still looks bad to see a row of red and black bookspines with swastikas plastered all over them. Yet it’s precisely because of its politics that I kept it when I was purging my collection a few years back and why I reread it now. The Mercenary is a book that stands at the root of one of the more succesful –and distasteful– science fiction subgenres: mil-sf and in it can be found a lot of what makes the genre so awful so often.

Science fiction has always had a large conservative, rightwing streak running through it and Pournelle falls squarely in this tradition. This in itself is not a problem; some of science fiction’s best writers, like Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper or Robert Heinlein were conservatives or had rightwing sympathies and you can still enjoy (most of) their stories without necessarily agreeing with their politics, even when they’ve made them explicit. What makes Pournelle different is that he goes beyond this. He’s not just a conservative, but a reactionary. His politics as shown in The Mercenary have fascist overtones, though I don’t believe he’s a fascist himself. No doubt if you asked him he would describe himself as an American conservative and believer in a strong democracy, though weary of the wisdom of the average voter, but what comes across here is his deep pessimism and mistrust of democracy and his yearning for a saviour to safe democracy from itself.

The Voyage of the Sable Keech — Neal Asher

Published on September 6, 2008

Cover of The Voyage of the Sable Keech

The Voyage of the Sable Keech
Neal Asher
506 pages
published in 2006

On second thought, this might have been the wrong Neal Asher book to start with, being a sequel to an earlier novel set in an universe that itself has been worked out over the course of a half dozen or so novels. But it was the only book I had with me, so I persevered. Fortunately The Voyage of the Sable Keech was standalone enough not to be completely opaque. The reason I wanted to try out Neal Asher’s work was because he kept being compared to people like Ken MacLeod, John Meaney, Alistair Reynolds and Liz Williams, part of that whole generation of late nineties British science fiction authors I like so much. Happily he didn’t disappoint, even if this was a bad book to start with.

What I liked about The Voyage of the Sable Keech wasn’t so much the plot, as that was fairly confusing since I had not read The Skinner, which this was a sequel to. What got me was both the inventiveness of the world Asher created as well as the matter of fact way in which he presents his world. In some ways it’s easily as baroque as some of China Miéville’s novels, but Asher’s writing style doesn’t draw attention to it the way Miéville’s does.In some ways The Voyage of the Sable Keech reminded me of Steven Erikson’s Gardens of the Moon, as it has a simular outrageous mix of technologies and powers, just in a science fiction setting rather than a fantasy one.