books and books review – Wis[s]e Words

The High Crusade – Poul Anderson

Published on September 7, 20101 Comment

Cover of The High Crusade

The High Crusade
Poul Anderson
167 pages
published in 1960

Poul Anderson has a not undeserved reputation as a deeply pessimistic, even depressing writer, largely based on his later novels which all seemed to share the assumption that human nature is unchangable, that evil will always be amongst us, progress impossible and the future will always end badly. It must have been something to do with his gloomy Danish genes. The High Crusade shows it was not always this way. Once upon a time even Poul Anderson could write a lighthearted science fantasy romp without some great clonking moral to mess it up.

Great fun it is too. It’s the year 1345 and a small town in Lincolnshire is visited by a spaceship belonging to the Wersgorix Empire, while the local baron Sir Roger de Tourneville was busy gathering men to join king Edward III in France. Thinking the landing a French trick, he and his men storm the space ship and overwhelm and kill almost all of the aliens, who have long since grown unused to hand to hand combat. Ordering the remaining alien to take them to France, Sir Roger loads the entire town into the ship, but the alien tricks them and sets course back to the planet it came from. Lots of adventures and misunderstandings follow and it ends with Sir Roger conquering the entire Wersgorix Empire…

Read more and see also the celebrations over at Tor.

Farthing – Jo Walton

Published on September 5, 20102 Comments

Cover of Farthing

Farthing
Jo Walton
319 pages
published in 2006

At first glance Farthing seems to be a classic English cozy country house mystery, if set in an alternate England. There’s the locked room murder taking place during a weekend party at the Farthing country estate. There are the clues pointing all too neatly at one of the guests. There’s the doughty detective refusing to believe them and there’s the slow deduction of the real killer’s identity and motivations. It all feels like something Agatha Christie or Josephine Tey could’ve written — the latter’s unconscious class snobbery being consciously used here — but in the end Farthing turns out to be something very different from the cozy mystery or even alternate history tale it masquerades as. This is in fact a horror story, with the horror provided not by the plot or the characters, but through the setting. As Ursula Le Guin puts it in her front cover blurb: “If Le Carré scares you, try Jo Walton”.

Farthing grabbed me by the throat from the first page and didn’t let go; one of the very few books to have ever done that. As with any other alternate WWII story, part of that is due to what you know is going on in the background that the characters themselves do not know yet or only suspect. Every such Hitler wins story depends on the tension between what the reader knows happened historically and what the characters in the story know or do not know: sometimes this is done explicit, as in Fatherland, where the whole point of the book is to get the protagonist up to speed on what we as readers already know. In Farthing‘s case though things are kept implicit. What Walton does is let the essential horror of the setting speak for itself, keeping the swastikas and Gestapo goons offstage. What she does in fact is showing that England did not need these props to become a fascist state.

Books read August

Published on September 1, 2010

Eight books read this month, which is a respectable score but not spectacular. Theme this month was war and science fiction, as you will see.

The battle of Kursk — David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House
A recentish history of the famous tank battle, making full use of the opening of Soviet state archives since the end of the Cold War.

Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory — Adrian R. Lewis
At first I thought the author had it in for the British — some American WWII historians do have a chip on their soldier about the way the UK treated the American contribution to the struggle in Europe after all — but in the end it turned out he had a much more valid case to make. What Lewis attempts to do here is to argue that the strategy and tactics developed for the Normandy landing were flawed both in conception and execution, with the methods developed in earlier landings in the Pacific and Italy ignored. I’m not sure how much I should believe him, but it’s a well made argument.

First Among Sequels — Jasper Fforde
Thursday Next is back in the first of a new series. If you like Fforde and Thursday Next, you’ll like this one as much as the earlier books in the series. Fun but slight.

Shades of Grey — Jasper Fforde
Much more ambitious is this book, in which Fforde takes his considerable inventioness and creates something more than just a cheap laugh. In a Britain of after the end everything revolves around colour, as in who can see red colours, or green colours, or yellow and how well you see a specific colour range determines your place in society. A classic sort of coming of age story in which the young hero discovers what his world is really like, it reminded me somewhat of John Christopher’s White Mountain series.

Hitler’s Empire — Mark Mazower
An indepth look at the economic realities of Nazi occupied Europe and how the nazi ideals were in conflict with the need to win the war. It’s a great book on a horrible but fascinating subject, looking at all aspects of the nazi economy, including the Holocaust.

The Dragon Never Sleeps — Glen Cook
Great space opera by an author best known for his dark fantasy, which does share some of the feeling of his fantasy works. I got this as a gift for my birthday, as well as the next book and it’s been great.

Passage at Arms — Glen Cook
Das Boot in space. ‘Nuff said. Very well done.

Spin — Robert Charles Wilson
Suddenly, without any fuzz, the stars went out, as something slid between them and the Earth. And then it turns out that while days go by down below, in the rest of the universe millions of years are passing… Apart from some slight niggles, an excellent grand scale science fiction novel.

Black Man – Richard Morgan

Published on April 4, 2010

Cover of Black Man

Black Man
Richard Morgan
630 pages
published in 2007

This was too much of a rerun for me. Black Man (published in the US as Thirteen for obvious reasons) has much the same plot as Morgan’s first novel Altered Carbon. A worldweary, cynical but ubercompetent mercenary is blackmailed into going after a murderer and in the process uncovers a far greater and more horrible truth than he suspected existed or his employers necessarily wanted him to find out. As with every Morgan novel I’ve read so far it’s an edge of your seat thriller, keeps you engaged to the bitter end, but five minutes later you’re thinking “that’s all“? I got the feeling Morgan was going through the motions, his heart not in it and it just seemed too slight to be worth a Clarke Award.

One big reason for the discomfort I felt was the silly worldbuilding. Morgan is excellent at creating a “realistic” sounding world, using infodumps, incluing and jargon to create an image in his readers’ heads, but it doesn’t work when he bases his future on the infamous Jesusland map. Remember 2006, after Bush had started his second (stolen) term and before the Congressional midterm elections, and how many of the liberal leaning blogs were despairing of their country? How it really seemed for a moment the US was split in two, with progressive coasts and an ignorant flyover country? Yeah? Remember also how fast that changed once the Democrats actually won an election? Well, it’s this that Morgan bases his future on: the Jesusland maps and books like Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas. It was already dated when he was writing it, now just feels hopelessly silly. It makes it hard to take the world Morgan created seriously.

Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan

Published on March 9, 2010

Cover of Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon
Richard Morgan
534 pages
published in 2002

Altered Carbon is Richard Morgan’s first novel. It made a strong impression, winning the Philip K. Dick Prize for best novel in 2003, as well as being optioned by Joel Silver, the sale of the movie rights enabling Morgan to become a fulltime writer. Since then Morgan has written several more novels, part of the same generation of British science fiction writers as Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I knew of him, but had not read anything of his until last year, when I read Broken Angels and was sucked in from the first page. So not for the first time I started a series in the wrong way, as that was actually the sequel to this book — not that it mattered, as all they shared was the hero, Takeshi Kovacs.

Whereas Broken Angels was a Dirty Dozen type war romp with the cynicsm turned up to eleven, Altered Carbon is more of a Chandleresque film noir story. It starts with Takeshi as amercenary on Harlan’s World being caught and killed in a police dragnet, to wake up on Earth minus one partner and forced to solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft, which everybody but the murder victim in question thinks is suicide. If Takeshi refuses to cooperate or fails in his task he’ll go back in storage for the next couple of centuries or so.