posts interesting only to me

Another month, another list of books read. Let me know what you read this month?

Polity Agent — Neal Asher
Another fast paced Space Opera from Asher, entertaining if not that memorable.

The Weird Stone of Brisigamen — Alan Garner
A classic children’s fantasy that I’m way too old and well read in fantasy to enjoy fully the way it should. Colin and Susan are sent to their mother’s old nurse living near Alderley Edge in Cheshire when their parents have to be abroad for six months. There they get embroiled in an old legend. Comforting but it has moments with a real edge to them, best read between ages eight and twelve.

Galactic North — Alastair Reynolds
A collection of short stories set in the same universe as Revelation Space and its sequels. This could be thought at as the secret history of the Demarchist/Conjoiner universe. They do not always fit in well with the novels, as Reynolds acknowledges in his afterword.

James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon — Julie Phillips
An excellent biography of an important science fiction author, showcasing the importance of Sheldon/Tiptree beyond the boundaries of the genre.

The City & the City — China Miéville
Restraining his usual tendencies towards the baroque and fantastic, Miéville here has written a proper police procedural in the vein of an Ian Rankin. The story starts with a routine murder in a city on the edge of Europe, which quickly turns more complicated and ultimately involves the city’s much richer neighbour. The two cities exist in an uneasy and wholly unique relationship with each other and it’s this relationship that is at the heart of the book, transforming the mundane, realist experience of the police procedural into something more.

Pompeii – The Life of a Roman Town — Mary Beard
The cliche of Pompeii is that of a town where time stood still, it’s daily routine dramatically disrupted by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE and so ironically preserved for our edification. Mary Beard here shows how little this view has to do with the reality of Pompeii as excavated, how much data we have managed to extract from these excavations but how little we still know about daily life in Pompeii. At the same time it’s an excellent overview of what we do know and since it was only published last year, about as up to date as you can get.

The Kingdom of the Hittites — Trevor Bryce
Excellent and up to date overview of the history of the Hittites, a people we knew nothing about until about a hundred years ago but which for some fivehundred years were one of the Near Eastern superpowers during the Late Bronze Age.

In Search of Planet Vulcan — Richard Baum & William Sheehan
Vulcan was the hypothetical planet proposed to be the cause of why the observations of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun continued to be different from what it was calculated to be based on Newton’s laws of gravity. We know now that these laws were not the entire truth, as Einstein showed; while good enough for daily use, they break down in the presence of a massive object like the Sun. As this had not yet been realised, astronomers proposed there was something else out there influencing Mercury, just as Neptune and Uranus had been discovered because of their influence on other planets…

Armed Struggle – The History of the IRA — Richard English
A recent history of the provisional IRA examing both its active history and the way its politics and ideology evolved over the years since its founding in 1969 up to the Good Friday peace agreements and beyond. Some context is of course provided, but this is not a history of Ireland, the Irish struggle for independence or even the Troubles, just of the pIRA. I found it enlightening.

The Gone-Away World — Nick Harkaway
Wow. I understand now why this was so much talked about last year. One of the best debut novels I’ve ever read; finished it in one go.

Charge! Hurrah! Hurrah! — Donald Thomas
An entertaining biography of Lord Cardigan, (in)famous for having led the charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, which makes clear he was interesting for than that.

The Best of Murray Leinster — Murray Leinster
Read last weekend in honour of Murray Leinster Day in Virginia. Leinster was a pionering sf author, who started writing before the genre had even been established and managed to continue to do so during the Gernsback and Campbellian revolutions.

Dark Star — Alan Furst
An excellent thriller set in the years just before World War II, truly capturing the claustrophobic, threatening atmosphere of the times.

Operation Chaos — Poul Anderson
A fixup novel of three novellas, set in a world in which witchcraft and magic have taken the place of science and in which personal broomsticks are as commonplace as cars here. The first two parts are enjoyable if old fashioned adventure stories, the third is marred by Anderson’s later pessimism and hippie baiting.

The State of the Universe — Pedro G. Ferreira
A recently published book I got out of the library because I wanted to get caught up on the current state of astrophysics. This was somewhat of a disappointment as I kept stumbling over Ferreira’s explenations, which seemed to miss a step here or there. The problem is that a lot of astrophysics really only makes sense mathematically and explaining it by metaphor or analogy can be tricky.

The Cosmic Landscape — Leonard Susskind
Susskind’s attempt at doing the same thing went much smoother, though in fairness Ferreira attempted to do more than him, explaining the evolution of astrophysics as well as the current state of it. What helps is that Susskind has his own theory to sell.

Broken Angels — Richard Morgan
Takeshi Kovacs is a mercenary fighting a dirty war putting down a revolution on a planet mainly of interest due to its many Martian artifacts. He gets the chance of the lifetime when he is recruited to get one particular find located and safely sold to one of the Corporations, a find that will mean unlimited wealth and comfort for the rest of his life and a ticket out of the war, if he survives. Morgan has a reputation for being ultraviolent and having somewhat pushy leftwing politics in his stories, but while both were present here they felt right.

The Horn of Africa — Peter Woodward
A somewhat outdated (published in 1995) history of this region and the countries in it, in the context of their international relations with each other, other regional powers and the superpowers. Academic rather than polemic.

A Computer Called LEO — Georgina Ferry
LEO was the world’s first computer specifically designed for office work. And it wasn’t American, but British and not built by one of the giants of office automation like IBM, but by Lyons, the company running the Lyons teashops! A nice little history of how this computer came to be, made bittersweet by the inevitable failure to capitalise on this innovation.

Killing Hope — William Blum
A somewhat depressing catalogue of US military and CIA interventions since WWII. Required reading for anybody still harbouring illusions about the morality of US foreign policy or the nobility of Democratic governments.

The Ancestor’s Tale — Richard Dawkins
Using The Canterbury Tales as his templates, Dawkins tells the story of evolution backwards, going on a “piligrimage” to the beginning of life on earth, with more an more evolutionary splits joining at each rendez-vous, starting with ourselves and working our way back through our entire evolutionary history until our earliest singlecelled ancestor. A great book, only slightly marred when Dawkins gets distracted into a political rant every now and again.

The Gardener’s Year — Karel Capek
I only knew Capek as the playwright who gave the world the word we now use for any kind of mechanical man: robot. That he was also a keen gardener I did not realise, until I read this delightful little book, a year’s round guide to gardening, which made me laugh out loud several times. The drawings by his brother Joseph only add to the charm and humour.

Lots of science fiction this month, because I bought a lot of it this month.

The Hacker Crackdown — Bruce Sterling
Nostalgia. During the eighties the personal computer, followed slightly later by the first computer networks came of age and with it came the hackers and crackers. Then came Operation Sundevil, the first big nationwide hacker crackdown in the States, which inspired Sterling to write about how this came about, who the players were and what was happening. Cyberpunk had become reality.

To Your Scattered Bodies Go — Philip José Farmer
Read this to honour Farmer’s death. I’ve attempted to read this before but never finished it, but this time tore through it.

AK-47 — Larry Kahaner
A slight and flawed cultural history of the Kalashnikov; parts of it were excellent.

Inventing Ruritania — Vesna Goldsworthy
A study which examines the influence popular fiction and its stereotypical images of the Balkans over the centuries have influenced our views of the region and not just our views, but our politics.

Fugue for a Darkening Island — Christopher Priest
One of Priest’s first novels. Published in 1972, it’s a very uncomfortable echo of the racial fears of white Britain of the early seventies. After a localised nuclear war that devestated most of Africa, refugee laden ships land in Britain. What follows is civil war. Well written and disturbing.

Sweet Silver Blues — Glen Cook
The first Garret P.I. novel. Garret’s a private dick in fantasyland but despite the elves his adventures are just as hardboiled of that of any thirties detective. Great stuff.

The Man Who Japed — Philip K. Dick
Typical early Dick, fun, not too outrageous and slight.

Or All the Seas with Oysters — Avram Davidson
A brilliant short storyteller who deserves a larger audience, Avram Davidson is at his best in this collection. Classic American fantasy, which takes the familiar elements and fairytales from Europe but just can’t take them too seriously anymore. The title story is the origin for that old gag of where all your paperclips disappear to.

Flandry of Terra — Poul Anderson
Three stories starring Dominic Flandry, secret agent of the Terran Empire trying to hold back the long night when inevitably the empire collapses. Despite the gloomy background these are still fun adventure stories, much better than they have to be.

The Universe Against Her — James H. Schmitz
A fixup novel introducing Telzey Amberdon, a fifteen-year-old genius and first-year law student whose psychic powers are triggered during an encounter with big cat-like telepathic aliens; now I know where David Weber got the idea for treecats from… Good fun, like Anderson Schmitz’s stories are much better than they’d need to be.

Time for the Stars — Robert A. Heinlein
Another Heinlein juvenile, about a twin, one of whom went to the stars while the others stayed home. Yes, it’s the classic time dilation thought experiment made into a story, though I still don’t think Heinlein ever really understood relativity…

The Falling Torch — Algis Budrys
Twenty years after Earth was conquered by the Invaders, the son of the president in exile returns from Centaurus to help mount the resistance. As seems to be typical of Budrys, the emphasis lies firmly with the psychological development of the protagonist rather than on the action.

Millennium — John Varley
Once upon a time Varley wrote a great short story, “Air Raid” that was turned into a mediocre movie and a much better novel. This is this novel. Far future humans are traveling back in time to snatch people doomed to die in aircrashes with no survivors. Then something goes wrong and an air crash investigator slowly learns the truth. A very seventies sort of story, even if it was written in 1983.