Category Archives: Books

Nation and other books

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One of the best books I read in 2008, I just managed to squeeze into the year. I finished it about five minutes before the bongs, on the same day its author’s knighthood was announced.

Nation by (Sir) Terry Pratchett could have been a Discworld novel but it wouldn’t pack half the punch it does. It’s more or less set in our world’s nineteenth century, with just enough variance for Pratchett to have fun. But the underlying premise simply isn’t funny and he doesn’t try to pretend it is: the Nation is a Pacific island (one of the Mothering Sunday islands, which are an extension of the Bank Holiday Monday group) whose population is wiped out by a tsunami following a volcanic eruption. Mau is the sole survivor. On the island he meets Daphne (née Ermintrude, but in Pratchett style she chooses a name that better reflects her personality), scion of the aristocracy and related more closely than she realises to royalty, who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck caused by the same tsunami. They both have a great deal of pain to get through. Being Pratchett heroes, of course, they manage; and then you remember the author’s own recent personal tsunami, his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s, and you realise this is Pratchett’s Book of Job.

I hadn’t realised before how well Job works for non-believers as well as believers. I remember Pratchett saying in an interview that he’s a humanist, and therefore an atheist, and either way that unfortunately means he can’t get angry with God because he doesn’t believe in him. Job, and Nation, show that you can still scream WHY? at whoever you do or don’t believe in, and either way you get the same answer: “Because. Who’s asking?”

After all that, don’t get the idea it’s heavy going, because it isn’t. Pratchettism abounds. When you hear a sentence like “it only needs 138 people to die and your father will be King!” then it’s just asking for trouble – the humour equivalent of the gun on the mantelpiece. The platonic love story – Mau and Daphne are still children – is funny and moving, and there are sideways views of science and religion and civilisation and wonderful turns of phrase left, right and centre. One of my favourites was a description of Daphne’s great-great-aunt: “apparently a young man had smiled at her on her twenty-first birthday and she’s gone straight to bed with an attack of the vapours, and stayed there, still gently vaporizing …”

It’s great fun, and it’s also one of the few books I actually feel honoured to have read.

And here’s everything else I read in 2008. In summary, with last year’s figures in brackets:

total: 53 (60)
science fiction/fantasy: 30 (30)
translated from Swedish: 4 (4)
gave up reading: 2

In full:

  • Nation, Terry Pratchett
  • Black & Blue, Ian Rankin
  • The Turing Test, Chris Beckett
  • Enigma, Robert Harris
  • The Big Over Easy, Jasper Fforde
  • Fool Moon, Jim Butcher
  • Storm Front, Jim Butcher
  • Halting State, Charles Stross
  • Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman
  • Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
  • The Locked Room, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö
  • Marooned in Real Time, Vernor Vinge
  • The Peace War, Vernor Vinge
  • Jingo, Terry Pratchett
  • Invasive Procedures, Orson Scott Card and Aaron Johnston
  • The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
  • Smoke & Mirrors, Neil Gaiman
  • His Majesty’s Dragon, Naomi Novik
  • Coyote Frontier, Allen Steele
  • Coyote Rising, Allen Steele
  • Empire, Orson Scott Card
  • Notes from a Big Country, Bill Bryson
  • The First Rumpole Omnibus, John Mortimer
  • Pied Piper, Nevil Shute
  • Imperium, Robert Harris
  • Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett
  • Saturn’s Children, Charles Stross
  • Keeper of Dreams, Orson Scott Card
  • A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge
  • Wife to Charles II, Hilda Lewis
  • Round Ireland with a Fridge, Tony Hawks
  • I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
  • Ireland: Awakening, by Edward Rutherfurd
  • The Great Siege: Malta 1565, Ernle Bradford
  • Snakehead, Anthony Horowitz
  • The Digital Plague, Jeff Somers
  • Simon and the Oaks, Marianne Fredriksson
  • Then and Now, W. Somerset Maugham
  • Leviathan Rising, Jonathan Green
  • Stardust, Neil Gaiman
  • Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist
  • Mister Monday, Garth Nix
  • Looking for Jake & Other Stories, China Miéville
  • Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge
  • Causing Chaos with Jeremy James, David Henry Wilson
  • The Queen’s Tiara, CJL Almqvist
  • The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman
  • The Subtle Knife, Philip Pullman
  • Frankenstein Unbound, Brian Aldiss
  • The Dilbert Future, Scott Adams
  • Galileo’s Daughter, Dava Sobel
  • My Booky Wook, Russell Brand
  • The Twinkling of an Eye, Brian Aldiss

Ten glorious years

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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, humans and other, on behalf of Captain Michael Gilmore RSF and the crew of HMSS Ark Royal may I wish you all a happy tenth anniversary of the publication of His Majesty’s Starship.
Or, more succinctly, YAY!
Its star sign was Sagittarius, its birthstone was Blue Topaz or Turquoise and it was born in the Chinese year of the Tiger. The no. 1 song in the charts was Cher with “Believe”.
Yes, it was 11 December 1998 that His Majesty’s Starship hit the bookshelves with the force of a reticent snowflake. And what a ten years it’s been. Three more novels have followed it, and that’s just under my own name, and don’t get me started on other projects started and sometimes finished. The little boys to whom it was dedicated, aged 3 and 1, are now 13 and 11 respectively. Who’d have thought it? I’ve been fired, set up my own company, gone broke, been gainfully re-employed, got married and acquired a teenage stepson. All once, though not all at once.
Back then we had no Weakest Link or Big Brother or I’m An Idiot, Get Me On TV. I had a personal website but had never heard of blogs. All HTML coding was manual.
I still have and even occasionally use the laptop I bought with the proceeds. It were an IBM Thinkpad, it were.
I used to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, type out an entire trilogy on a typewriter with no keys that were always sticking, eat the paper for breakfast and pay an editor to reject it. And I was lucky.
I continue to believe that publication constituted 50% fulfilment of a prophecy.
It would have been interesting to have written down a list of hopes for the next ten years back then so that I could compare and contrast. Obviously, I hoped the book would take the world by storm and herald the arrival of a new hard SF writer on the scene. It didn’t, which is really just as well because in the intervening decade I’ve managed to go quite off hard SF. I don’t even especially consider myself a science fiction writer anymore, just a writer whose oeuvre can most accurately be described – for the time being – as science fiction. That may seem a very picky difference but it’s an important one, to me at least. What it means is that I enjoy writing stuff that is mostly science fiction, and I make no bones about it, but am quietly resigned to being officially a young adult writer virtually unheard of within the science fiction field. I don’t complain because that gives me much more room to manoeuvre than if I was best known for one kind of thing. If I felt inclined to write it then I could probably turn in a novel about fluffy bunnies and elves to my usual editor and still have a chance at publication. Charlie Stross or Alastair Reynolds probably couldn’t.
Back to HMSS. I got a very short-lived thrill when Blackwells got in touch to say it was selling like hot cakes, they’d ordered in a couple of boxfuls and did I want to come in and sign them? Well, I could make a window in my busy schedule … Turned out to be my housegroup leader buying up a single load as Christmas presents for friends and family. But I still went and signed the couple of boxfuls and I presume they sold too. I certainly hope so, because Blackwells couldn’t have returned them after some idiot went and scribbled in them.
My author copies didn’t arrive until just before Christmas; I wasn’t in, the couriers left a card, and to make sure I got the copies before Christmas I had to drive to the depot to collect them. On the way back home Classic FM played the third movement of Vaughan Williams’ English Folk Song Suite, which includes a triumphant trumpet fanfare (around 1m26s on the video below), and then the news announced that Peter Mandelson had resigned (only for the first time but we weren’t to know that then). And it was Christmas and I was officially on holiday. That was a good day.

Not quick enough

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With a heavy heart I must consign another book to the “Life’s too short” category. And I so wanted to like it.

The last, and first, to suffer this fate was The Dice Man back in January. That one went with much rejoicing and lightness of heart because it was truly quite pants. The latest, tragically, is Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver.

Neal Stephenson wrote two of the greatest SF novels of the nineties. Snow Crash made cyberpunk hip and enjoyable and compulsive reading – something William Gibson, who only invented the genre, could never quite manage – and The Diamond Age is the perfect primer for life in a future, post-national, post-scarcity society. And then the new century was ushered in with Cryptonomicon, which defies categorisation and tragically sows the seeds for The Baroque Cycle, of which Quicksilver is the first volume.

Y’see, each of the above books was getting longer. It wasn’t hard to plot ahead of the curve and see that sooner or later Stephenson was bound to turn in a 380,000 word opus and that his editor would let him get away with it. Sadly said editor didn’t bother editing.

Quicksilver, which is set around the dawn of the modern scientific age and the Restoration in the late seventeenth century, could have been such fun and is so boring. Pages and pages (and pages and pages) of people talking to one another for no reason than to convey all the research Stephenson has done. I knew the book consisted of three smaller (for a given value of “smaller”) books and vowed I would at least get through the first one; then I’d see how the second was going. And it started well … until two characters spend six (six!) pages riding across Europe to a destination they could have reached in a paragraph if they weren’t so intent on telling each other what they already know, or didn’t but have no reason to either, for no reason than to give us more of the author’s Research.

Life is too short.

Stephenson has a lovely dry way of writing that makes the fun bits a real pleasure to read. Here is lapsed Puritan Daniel unable to shake off his upbringing as he finally has sexual intercourse for the first time with the crucial aid of a sheepgut condom:

“Does this mean it is not actually coitus?” Daniel asked hopefully. “Since I am not really touching you?” Actually he was touching her in a lot of places, and vice versa. But where it counted he was touching nothing but sheepgut.

“It is very common for men of your religion to say so,” Tess said. “Almost as common as this irksome habit of talking while you are doing it.”

“And what do you say?”

“I say that we are not touching, and not having sex*, if it makes you feel better,” Tess said. “Though, when it is all finished, you shall have to explain to your Maker why you are at this moment buggering a dead sheep.”

(*an irritating and deliberate stylistic touch is to combine seventeenth century spellings and styles with slap bang modern idioms.)

Or this, about life on the Isle of Dogs in 1665:

“The Irish worked as porters and dockers and coal-haulers during the winter, and trudged off to the countryside in hay-making months. They went to their Papist churches every chance they got and frittered away their silver paying for the services of scribes, who would transform their sentiments into the magical code that could be sent across countries and seas to be read, by a priest, or another scrivener, to dear old Ma in Limerick.

In Mother Shaftoe’s part of town, that kind of willingness to do a day’s hard work for bread and money was taken as proof that the Irish race lacked dignity and shrewdness. And this did not even take into account their religious practices and all that flowed from them, e.g. the obstinate chastity of their women, and the willingness of the males to tolerate it.”

More of that, and less drop-of-the-hat extemporising about the sociopolitical state of Europe and inter-relationships of the various royal families, and Quicksilver would really be quite readable. It is one of the few books where a Readers’ Digest condensed version would actually be a good idea, and I don’t often say that.