Martin's Booklog

The Fires of Heaven – Robert Jordan

Published on February 1, 2008

Cover of The Fires of Heaven

The Fires of Heaven
Robert Jordan
989 pages
published in 1993

The Fires of Heaven is the fifth book in the Wheel of Time series, following on directly from The Shadow Rising. It’s the first book of the series not to star all three of the main protagonists, with the Perrin storyline in the Two Rivers left until the next book in the series. As such it’s another indication of how out of control the series has grown by this point, with only three out of the four (!) storylines from The Shadow Rising continued here, none of which come to a real conclusion here either.

However, this is still one of my favourite volumes in the series, as it shows Rand and Mat kicking some serious ass and while plotlines don’t conclude here, they do seem to progress, something missing in the next few volumes. Reading this only took me two days or so, which is testament to the way Jordan was able to keep your attention if you’re willing to be drawn in.

The Diversity of Life – E. O. Wilson

Published on January 30, 2008

Cover of The Diversity of Life

The Diversity of Life
E. O. Wilson
424 pages
published in 1992

The Diversity of Life is the first E. O. Wilson book I’ve ever read and I finished it impressed. Writing science books aimed at a lay audience is not an easy job to do, having to explain difficult concepts to an audience of whom you can’t assume they have the background to understand them immediately. And you need to do this without boring your audience or telling too many lies-to-children. E. O. Wilson manages to do this with a concept as big and fuzzy as biological diversity, is a tribute to his writing.

Wilson is a biologist, who first rode to a certain amount of fame and infamity in the seventies, for popularising the concept of sociobiology. As a biologist he spent a large part of his career studying social insects, especially ants, from the study of which he also derived some of his ideas about sociobiology. For his research he spent quite some time in developing countries, seeing the ongoing destruction of wild habitats up close, so it’s no wonder that he became a passionate environmentalist.

The Big Time – Fritz Leiber

Published on January 28, 2008

Cover of The Big Time

The Big Time
Fritz Leiber
127 pages
published in 1961

Rereading Asimov’s The End of Eternity remonded me of another time wars novel, a far more cynical and modern one: Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time. And since I had never read a Leiber novel during all the time I’ve kept my booklog, I thought it was time to start. I had read this novel before, first in Dutch, then in English and been impressed by it. Nor was I the only one: in its original, magazine publication in 1958 it so impressed the fans that it won a Hugo Award, which is high praise indeed.

The Big Time is a somewhat unconventional science fiction novel, in that it’s staged as a one room play, with the stage fixed while characters move on and off it. Which means that all the action that doesn’t happen in the room has to be described in dialogue between the characters, which of course has a distancing effect. For a genre which often takes pride in creating awe inspiring, inventive and strange settings and then making them believable to the reader, this is an audacious trick. Leiber takes this huge idea of a time war, in which history is in constant flux and which spans billions and billions of years throughout the universe and only shows us glimpses of it. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it did.

Rip it Up and Start Again – Simon Reynolds

Published on January 26, 2008

Cover of Rip it Up and Start Again

Rip it Up and Start Again
Simon Reynolds
416 pages including index
published in 2005

I’ve been looking for Rip it Up and Start Again in my local library ever since I got seriously interested in the whole post-punk phenomenon some two, three years ago. It had been namechecked by a lot of post-punk enthusiasts on music blogs and the like, so it was with some anticipation that I started reading. Fortunately, it didn’ disappoint me. Rip it Up and Start Again is an excellent overview of the response to punk in the half decade after the first wave of punk bands had crashed and burned.

Punk itself had gotten started around 1975, evolving out of raw rock bands like The Stooges, New York Dolls and MC5, through the New York club scene that produced the Ramones and finally landing in the UK where punk was embraced as a backlash against the dinosaur rock and prog rock indulgences of the mid-seventies. By the end of ’77, ’78 however, just as the general public became aware of it, punk had already exploded, with the Sex Pistols disbanding, The Clash selling out to Columbia and the Buzzcocks losing their lead singer. In the meantime a whole host of imitators had sprung up, with lesser and greater talent, mostly imitating what these three bands had done a year earlier, stultifying punk. But there were also other artists who took inspiration from the energy and d.i.y. approach of punk to go their own way: these were the artists that would make post-punk.

Post-punk as a label for a particular kind of music is therefore almost meaningless. For an approach to music however, it makes more sense. This of course makes it harder to define what is and isn’t post-punk. Reynolds sensibly limits himself to roughly half a decade, 1978-1984 of music, which he divides into two parts, post-punk proper and the rise of “new pop” and “new rock”. New pop and new rock being what happened when more commercially minded groups took post-punk music and adapted it for Top of the Pops. There are twentytwo chapters in total, each cataloguing a slightly different sort of rock or pop music.

Such an approach does not make for a good, chronological overview, but might be the only practical way of dealing with a field of music as ill defined as post-punk. Within its limits, Reynolds does his best to make clear how the groups and scenes related to each other and who influenced who. It helps that Reynolds is genuinely enthusiastic and knowledgeable about it all. Nevertheless, an increbible number of bands and artists are paraded in front of the reader, introduced, dissected and left behind as Reynolds moves on to the next chapter. In the end, it was all a bit much; both Reynolds and the reader start flagging.

Before that happens though, you get a good introduction to what happened in Britain and the US in the late seventies and eighties, after punk had crested but the energy it had freed was still present. The post-punk era gave us an incredible variety of good bands –to name just some of my own favourites, Gang of Four, The Pop Group, Joy Division/New Order, The Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen, etc. — and Reynolds does a good job of establishing the key points of each one. A great book to be inspired by, to seek out new bands. Recommended for anybody interested in post-punk.

The Execution Channel – Ken MacLeod

Published on January 23, 2008

Cover of The Execution Channel

The Execution Channel
Ken MacLeod
307 pages
published in 2007

The Execution Channel is MacLeod’s newest science fiction novel and a return to the sort of book he made his name with, after several more traditional sf novels: intensily political, near future novels in settings that seems to flow logically from our own times and as a reaction to contemporary political developments. In science fiction the urge to respond to current events often results in shallow, cliched tripe, but that’s never the case with Macleod, largely because he’s a better writer than that, but also because he doesn’t as much respond to a single event as to the general direction politics is taken. In his Fall Revolution novels he was partially responding to the accelerating pace of globalisation and the role of the US as a caretaker superpower, here it’s the War on Terror and the emergence of the hypersecurity state and the increasing brutalisation of our societies as a result of this, made visible by the concept of the execution channel. Which is exactly what it sounds like, a tv channel dedicated to showing state sanctioned killings.

MacLeod has been at his best so far when he’s writing near-future science fiction and The Execution Channel is about as near-future as you can get, set perhaps ten years from now, perhaps only five. It’s a future in which all the fears we’ve had and still have about the War on Terror have become true: American and British troops not just in Iraq and Afghanistan anymore, but all over the Middle East, while in Britain itself the security state has taken over, terrorism is rampant and this in turn has led to pogroms against Muslims. And then a military airfield, RAF Leuchars, is hit by what looks like a nuclear attack. From there on things get worse.