Martin's Booklog

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.

Reporting War — Stuart Allan and Barbie Zelizer

Published on August 20, 2008

Cover of Reporting War

Reporting War
Stuart Allan & Barbie Zelizer (editors)
374 pages including index
published in 2004

Having kept a politically orientated weblog the past half decade or so I’ve become acutely aware of the limitations of journalism, particularly during wartime. The current war for South Ossetia provides a good example of these limitations, were we’re seeing live how difficult it is for journalists to even get to the combat zone, not to mention how dangerous, as the death of a Dutch camera man proved. Perhaps more worrying, as the conflict continued the reporting on it which started off fairly neutral has become more and more partisan, especially once the United States and the European Union got involved in its resolution, with Russia pictured as the agressor when in fact it was Georgia who started the war. Russian statements are treated with skepticism while quotes from approved official sources, like the Pentagon or NATO are quoted verbatim. In general the war is treated through an American or European lens, rarely from the point of view of the Russians or Georgians, let alone
the Ossetians…

All these problems are described in Reporting War, a collection of essays on the role of journalism in wartime, its difficulties and dillemas. Published a year after the American invasion of Iraq, a lot of attention is of course paid to the problems of that particular war. The book doesn’t just look at the role of the journalists themselves, but also how they are dealt with by armies and governments involved in war, with a specific focus on the US army’s management of journalist during the first and second Gulf War. What’s more, several essays look beyond the physical reality of reporting wars to the role the media plays in general in covering wars. Not every conflict is covered equally after all.

Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side — Clive Stafford Smith

Published on August 17, 2008

Cover of Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side

Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side
Clive Stafford Smith
307 pages including index
published in 2007

Lord knowns there have been a lot of depressing books published about America’s war on terror; not to mention a metric shitload of blogs writing about it, including my own. So what good is yet another book decrying the injustices committed at Guantanamo Bay? After all, if you don’t know about them by now, you’ll never know. But when the author is one of the lawyer volunteers defending the victims of the war on terror, who has been coming to Guantanamo for years and who also manages to inject some humour in what’s otherwise a bloody dreary subject.

Clive Stafford Smith is somebody who has a lot of experience with worthwhile but hopeless causes, as he spent years working on death penalty cases in the American Deep South. When the news about the establishment of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp became known he didn’t hesitate, but immediately got involved. Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is based on his personal experiences at Guantanamo. The title is a reference to the fact that all the lawyers have to stay on the leeward side of the bay and therefore have to take the morning ferry to get to their clients each day. Surprisingly for a book on such a dark subject matter, Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side is quite funny in places, due to the absurdity of some of the situations Clive Stafford Smith and his clients find themselves in.