Another month, another list of books read. My reading pace has slacked off a bit in the last couple of months, due to all sorts of reasons. Only eleven this month, slipping behind in my goal to read 150 this year. Oh well.
Zootsuit Black — Jon George
I wasn’t sure how to take this novel, until I interpretated it as a credible attempt to create a modern psionics novel. Irritating and engrossing in equal measures, I’m not sure this was a good novel, but it was interesting.
Cold War in a Country Garden — Lindsay Gutteridge
First in a trilogy of novels, of which I bought the third ages ago in a library sale, but which is still somewhere in my parents’ attic. Matthew Dilke has been reduced from six foot to six millimeters in height and now has to survive his own garden, to prove that human beings can survive the microworld insects have ruled so long. Absurd premise, but worked out well and Gutteridge is very good at showing the scale at which Dilke now has to live.
Iron Curtain — From Stage to Cold War — Patrick Wright
Before Churcill popularised the phrase in his famous speech in Fulton in 1946, the “Iron Curtain” as a concept had had a long prehistory already, had been used as a metaphor to describe relationships between Soviet Russia and the west in roughly the same way as Churchill used it. Wright shows how this metaphor may have had its origin in the pacifist movement around the First World War, when it was used to describe what happened when Germany and England went to war.
The Stone that Never Came Down – John Brunner
So far I really had only read Brunner’s “big” novels: Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up and so on. Which is why I tried this when I saw it for 2 euros in the secondhand bookshop. It was interesting, a very 1970ties sort of English science fiction novel: economic depression, religious intolerance and moral crusades, racial tension, unconvincing slang.
Dying Planet — Robert Markley
An excellent study of the history of Mars in science and science fiction since the late nineteenth century, how our image of the planet slowly changed, not so much by new revelations as how those revelations were interpreted. A book I needed to read with my full attention to get everything Robert Markley packed into it.
McMafia — Misha Glenny
How the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the liberalisation of trade in the late eighties and nineties meant a triumph not just for capitalism, but for globalised crime. Glenny shows how traditional, controlable crime structures collapsed with the influx of new, globalised gangsters from Eastern Europe, while the shadow economy has become more and more important to the workings of capitalism itself.
The Long Run — Daniel Keys Moran
A novel the old rec.arts.sf.written crowd was always pushing. Best described as a young adult, coming of age cyberpunk adventure, a Slan for the eighties. Dated, but if you can set yourself over the “eighty megabytes of hot RAM” and other horribly wrong computer references, quite fun if not very good.
Killer Pine — Lindsay Gutteridge
The second book in the micromen trilogy, less interesting as the first, as exploring the novelty of the situation is explored less in favour of a fairly dull sabotage plot.
Renaissance Europe 1480-1520 — J. R. Hale
Another entry in the Fontana History of Europe. Written in 1971 this no doubt somewhat outdated, but it was still a fascinating look at an era I know too little about. Hale makes clear how Medieval, how different this era still was from our own, how inward looking despite the huge revolutions in exploration and science made during it.
Camp Concentration — Thomas M. Disch
A cult classic dystopian science fiction novel, which reminded me of nothing so much as of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. They share a sense of disillusionment, the same sort of dissatisfaction with American life of the fifties and sixties but being slightly too old to be truly a part of the generation that would rebel against it, too worldweary to be part of their solutions.
Real-Time World — Christopher Priest
After the Disch, I felt the need for more New Wave science fiction and this collection of early Christopher Priest stories fitted the bill perfectly. No real classics here, Priest has always been a better novelist than a short story writer, but it sustained the low-lkey, emotionally drained mood I was looking for.