Last year my good friend Peter went on a Himalayan hiking holiday and had a copy of The New World Order in his backpack as he gazed down on Everest Base Camp.
This year, on behalf of Guildford Town Centre Chaplaincy, he ended up on top of Kilimanjaro. And this time he thought to take a picture of his holiday reading.
Well worth the £20 I sponsored him for.
He points out that I now have until summer 2012 to get another book out, which is when he’s hoping to do the Inca trail.
Orson Scott Card has written some of the best science fiction and fantasy I’ve ever read. He also wrote the Homecoming Saga.
The column he writes for his local paper usually touches on a number of bases in no particular order. SF&F: always worth reading even if you disagree with him. Commentary on other artforms (audiobooks, TV series, plays etc.): often worth a look even if you’re not familiar with the works in question. Local trivia: only really for anyone who happens to live in Greensboro, North Carolina – which is not unreasonable for a local paper.
And politics: strictly for broad-minded individuals looking for a bit of entertainment.
Card is regrettably one of those people who seem to believe that there is an organised body known as the Extreme Left which is out to destroy America – nay, western civilisation – and it begins just west of David Cameron. It’s a belief that colours far too much of his worldview. For example, of Jeffrey Archer he once wrote:
“as a conservative, there’s almost no chance of his being favorably reviewed by London’s critical establishment, since the British intelligentsia are, if anything, even more leftist than the American.”
No, Scott, Jeffrey Archer has almost no chance of his being favorably reviewed by London’s critical establishment because the man is such a repellent individual. Granted that an adverse review based on the author’s character is just as lax as an adverse review based on the author’s politics, but at least get your facts right.
In Card’s latest column, he describes his joy at discovering New Who (which is rather touching) and we learn he has read Tony Blair’s autobiography. Ha-hum …
“The way he stood firmly with President Bush when it was time to take a stand against terrorist states like Afghanistan and Iraq reminded me of the days of transatlantic solidarity during World War II — though Blair was actually more loyal and reliable as an ally to Bush than Roosevelt ever was to Churchill. “
That’s because while Roosevelt and Churchill may have made realistic assessments of the strengths of their respective positions, and acted accordingly, they regarded themselves as moral equals. Blair made the policy decision that he would be Bush’s poodle. And bitch. (Not necessarily the same as a female poodle. You know what I mean.) More precisely, Blair decided he would be the poodle/bitch of whoever happened to be President of the United States. Before being best buddies with Bush, whom Card admires, he was best buddies with Clinton, whom Card despises. Such a thing should not be physically possible, yet it happened. Card is silent on this paradox.
Blair “was eventually turned out of office the way Churchill was”, and Card finishes on a note of pure fantasy:
“Still, he was and is a good man who kept his word when he came to power, and he did a pretty good job of governing, which puts him way, way above average. I recommend the book, if only to see how a rare bird like that was ever able to get off the ground and fly!”
Ha-hum again, and again I say, ha-hum.
One book I’m guessing Card won’t be reading is Robert Harris’s The Ghost. I read this last year and saw the movie at the weekend. Even if you find the movie contaminated by association (it was the one Roman Polanski was working on when he was arrested), read the book. Robert Harris sticks it in with all the anger and bile of a disillusioned convert. An unnamed ghostwriter is sent to the US to ghostwrite the memoirs of ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair Adam Lang – Pierce Brosnan in the movie. The previous ghostwriter died in mysterious circumstances, which is just the start of the fun. Then the UK government announces that it is cooperating with the International Criminal Court with a possible view to prosecuting Blair Lang for war crimes. There is a wonderful scene where Blair Lang is told that no, he can’t go home at the moment but he can travel anywhere that doesn’t recognise the ICC. Um – Iraq, North Korea, Israel …
It’s not Harris’s best book, because the sound of the axe grinding in the background does get in the way of the enjoyment. It was also written in apparently ignorance of social networking. What do you do nowadays with a good conspiracy theory? Stick it on Facebook, watch it go viral and then let the CIA try to silence it, ha ha. (What they do to you is another matter, of course.) But it is enjoyable and thought-provoking. Y’see, a key question that arises – and the answer is beautifully unexpected, so I’m not spoiling anything here – is whether or not Blair Lang was recruited by the CIA at Oxford Cambridge. I wouldn’t dream of saying yay or nay, though I will say the book ends more convincingly than the movie did. But one character asks a question that really gets the wheels of the mind spinning: “In ten years as Prime Minister, can you name a single decision that wasn’t in the interests of the United States?”
I still incline towards the poodle/bitch interpretation myself: the simplest explanation is usually the right one. But still …
This is where I would like to come up with a nifty, pithy one-liner that ties these various strands together, but I can’t and it’s the end of my lunchbreak and the black helicopter full of CIA Mormon SF fans outside the window is being really distracting so I’ll stop now.
I’ve had boys on the mind in the last week or so, but only in a good way. I’ve been reading the adventures of young James Bond (Silverfin by Charlie Higson), young Sherlock Holmes (Death Cloud by Andrew Lane) and young Alex Rider (Crocodile Tears by Anthony Horowitz). Young Alex of course has never been anything but: the series started when he was 14 ten years ago and a decade later his fifteenth birthday is scheduled to happen shortly after the end of the book (“next Thursday”). The other two are prequels to the adult adventures, authorised by the respective estates and drawing on what we know of the protagonists’ early lives to give pointers as to how the boy became the man. Horowitz however can do what he likes with Alex – and frequently does – without having to worry about staying canon: we’ve never seen the man Alex and don’t know what he will turn out like.
The secret of a good boy’s tale is get rid of the adults as soon as you reasonably can and have them drawn into good, wholesome, sex-free adventures without too much wild coincidence or suspension of disbelief. That is an inevitable weak point of both young Bond and young Holmes. As adults, they always have the advantage of being given a case or assignment to solve, though in Bond’s case coincidence also played a part a bit to often – in both Goldfinger and Thunderball he has a chance encounter with the bad guys before it becomes official. That is the genius of Alex – he is a kid recruited by MI6, so he too gets given the assignment, though again not without some helpful coincidence first to pave the way.
In order of enjoyment:
3rd place, Silverfin. It’s not bad, you understand. Charlie Higson knows his Bond. Ian Fleming could never quite decide how old Bond was: in the early books there’s a reference to work he did “before the war”, whereas by the later books he was obviously too young for that; Higson seems to have fixed on a 1920 date of birth, meaning that he could have been in naval intelligence by 1945, if not 1939. The original books provide a good deal of information about young Bond in the form of an obituary published in You Only Live Twice (don’t worry, it’s premature). That’s how we know his father is Scottish and his mother Swiss; he was raised by his aunt after the death of his parents; and educated in reverse order at Cambridge, Fettes and Eton, having to leave the latter after only a couple of terms because of an “indiscretion” with one of the maids. Apparently a later Higson book tells the truth of that “indiscretion” and it isn’t what you might think. However I will be very surprised if he also covers the trip to Paris aged 16 on which Bond lost his virginity – also canon in the original books and a little less susceptible to reinterpretation for a young audience.
And that is the problem with Silverfin, really. Higson’s young Bond is a nice lad. Adult Bond is anything but. He is arrogant, sexist and minimally moral – they don’t hand out Double-O licences to boy scouts, you know. Young Bond does not have to become old Bond: these could be the adventures of any 1930s boy hero.
Also, the coincidence level that gets him into the adventures is just a bit too high for my liking.
2nd place: Crocodile Tears. This series has ranged from middling to superb and this is at the upper end. A few years ago there was the feeling that Horowitz was just turning them out and quality declined accordingly, as it always must – but this comes after a couple of years’ reflection and recharging. Still not quite up to my favourite, Scorpia (the eponymous organisation is quite obviously SPECTRE by another name), and the baddy isn’t up to Damian Cray of Eagle Strike, who was quite obviously an evil Elton John. But fun.
Alex of course is young James Bond, essentially: he has similar adventures with similar suffering, similar gadgets, similar villains and even a similar on-off girlfriend, Sabina Pleasure (think about it). But what sets him apart is that he emphatically isn’t Bond: he hates the things he has to do and he is aware of how each adventure damages him. In almost every case his motivation is to prevent the widespread suffering that will ensue if the bad guy has his way. Alex is a likeable, moral lad and there is a good chance that the adult will turn out the same way.
1st place: Death Cloud, and I’m not just saying this because I happen to get a mention in the dedication. Young Holmes is well drawn as a sympathetic, slightly insecure, very intelligent, socially awkward boy and here you can actually see the seeds of the man being planted. He already has a querying, analytical mind and during the novel it is taken and moulded by a tutor who teaches him to use it, as well as have adventures.
There is very little early Holmes biographical material in the original stories, other than the existence of Mycroft, so Andrew Lane fills in the gaps with his own invention and by plundering the canonical, off-the-cuff references to earlier adventures. The villain of this one is Baron Maupertuis; the next will reveal the truth about the Red Leech. Andy knows his Holmes and he knows his Victoriana, which gives the book a good period setting. Young Holmes is much easier to get on with than the adult but you can still see how the one will lead to the other; and even at his most insufferable, adult Holmes has redeeming qualities: a deep unspoken love for the people closest to him, a thirst for justice and the plain enjoyment of the intellectual challenges of each case. But he too is a damaged man and without pulling many punches we see the first signs of the damage being inflicted.
And absolutely no Watson or Moriarty. That would not be canon.
I wasn’t planning on doing any further plugging, but random web searching led to Andy’s original proposal and thus the official web site. The proposal itself is worth the price of admission: this is how these things should be done.