Since I stayed home over the hol­i­days, I got a lot of quiet time alone to read, which was nice. I also got to spend a lot of qual­ity time with the cat, since just about no one else was in town or avail­able. Oh well. Three books over the four day week­end, and one the week before, plus some com­men­tary on Bat­tlestar Galac­tica. Or at least that was the plan before a lack of time caused me to put this off for another week. So, add four books to the total, and since I’m clean­ing the house today, I’ll inven­tory the to-​​read counts. Had I my camera, there would be pic­tures of the loom­ing piles.

In other news, I’ve fin­ished a couple of sto­ries in the last two months, and the revi­sion of said sto­ries, while slow, is con­tin­u­ing, and I expect to start send­ing them off soon. Once they’re done, I intend to start on the book that they sketch the edges of, and will post some of the more inter­est­ing por­tions of it here, most likely.

Book­shelf Update:

Unread:

• Hard­cover: 6

• Trade Paper: 22

• Mass Market: 15

• Total: 42

Par­tially Read:

• Hard­cover: 3

• Trade Paper: 16

• Mass Market: 9

• Total: 28

Grand Total: 71

Ouch. Look­ing at the books in the pile, and at the turnover, I real­ize that for the most part a lot of these are books that I thought that I should read, but that never really cap­tured my imag­i­na­tion. There has been plenty of time for me to read more of these (although not so much lately), but some of them just aren’t get­ting read because for all that they seemed inter­est­ing when I bought them, they are con­tin­u­ally sup­planted by other books that I’m more inter­ested in reading.

I find that most books that I buy are read within a week or two of get­ting them. If they are not read by then there is fairly little chance that I’ll get to them any­time soon. Or at least, that’s the over­all pat­tern, although there are notable excep­tions. Since I’m bored and won­der­ing how many I’ve read and des­per­ately avoid­ing doing the house­work, I’m going to count up the books that I have here and have read. Note that this isn’t the entirety of the books that I’ve read, since I’ve lost and sold and given some away or read it at the library, of course, nor could I bring all the books that I own out here to SF. It’s a lot of them, though, includ­ing almost all of the books that I’ve read in the last three years. The count is rough because there are a few (less than 20) books in there that I have not read and don’t really intend to read, at least not in the con­ven­tional sense. They’re mostly ref­er­ence, and a few things from school.

Read:

• Hard­cover: 62

• Trade Paper: 93

• Mass Market: 180

• Total: 335

Grand, Grand Total: 406

Read Per­cent­age: 82.3%

Short Reviews:

Nova Swing by M. John Harrison.

I think that either you love Har­ri­son or you hate him. He’s all about losers, people that you hate a lot, or at least don’t care about much, but at least they’re intrigu­ing, in some way. One day I will find the right words to describe Harrison’s prose style, but I’m not really up to the task right now. Regard­less, the writ­ing here is achingly good. I am not entirely sure that I would want to write like Har­ri­son, but I am cer­tainly glad that he is there to do it.

You should likely start with his novel Light before you read this one, or you might be totally lost. Which might be the point, or maybe not. A good deal of the novel is about uncer­tainty in any case, and there are no char­ac­ters car­ried over. If you like this one you should read Light, in any case.

The Ordi­nary by Jim Grimsley.

I am not cer­tain what I think of this book now, since I just lately fin­ished it. It’s cer­tainly well writ­ten but the prose is short of excep­tional. While the plot­ting is cer­tainly intrigu­ing, there are some deep struc­tural prob­lems that I had a hard time get­ting over. Most of the second half of the book is taken up with what might be called ‘rev­e­la­tion time, where the author spends a lot of space spelling out a lot of facts about the uni­verse that he’s con­structed and moving the plot for­ward almost not at all. This might have been a more for­giv­able flaw in a longer book, or one with more lan­guid ini­tial pacing, but unfor­tu­nately this is a short book that starts quickly and expects a good deal of fig­ur­ing out from the reader. That is pauses so long for even a quite cru­cial scene is irri­tat­ing at the least, and that he does is twice (the scene is done from two sides, but not iden­ti­cally), even more so.

That he then cou­ples this with a pulled punch ending, adds the injury to it. I liked the book, but the point at which he leaves the story off is almost unfor­giv­able. A sequel has just come out, and it might be easier to rec­om­mend them as a pair. We’ll have to see. For all of its flaws, it’s an engag­ing book, and the extra time that he spends at the expense of the plot is spent in well done char­ac­ter build­ing. I’ll pick the new one up one of these days and let you know.

Also, in light of the furore over the fact that Bear’s Car­ni­val con­tained even a tiny bit of it, I feel that I must inform some of my more faint-​​hearted read­ers that this book con­tains tiny bits of ‘teh gay’ and that if you read it it might get all over you. How­ever, it pri­mar­ily con­cerns les­bians, so I’m sure that people will be much less bothered.

The Mark of Ran by Paul Kearney.

This short little fan­tasy suf­fers from some of the same prob­lems as the above, but at least you get a good sea battle at the end, some­thing that’s been seem­ingly promised from the first couple of chap­ters. There are some good things and bad things about it, but it’s mostly good. Much in the same vein as but sadly some­what infe­rior to the work of Steven Erik­son. That said, it’s a quick, light book to read, and I’m hoping that the second volume of the story picks it up a lot. As this, this first of a tril­ogy, as I under­stand it, suf­fers a but from first child syn­drome, over-​​heavy with world-​​building and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment and just finally gets into the plot right before it ends. This will be some­thing that I’ll have to revisit once I’ve read the second volume (I’m hon­estly tempted to call it the second section).

Polity Agent by Neal Asher.

I’ve just noticed that of the four books that I’m talk­ing about here, only one of them could pos­si­bly stand alone. It is not this book. Asher is essen­tially writ­ing one novel that’s about two mil­lion words long. I have no prob­lems with this, as it’s incred­i­bly enter­tain­ing, and I think that you should read them all, as much as that is pos­si­ble, since Tor skipped pub­lish­ing Line of Polity and may or may not pub­lish this one. I would rec­om­mend either going to amazon.ca or to your local spe­cialty store, assum­ing that you have one.

One thing that both­ers me these days, though, is that cer­tain lengths are con­sid­ered uncom­mer­cial. It’s no real secret that short fic­tion is a slow way to starve. Unfor­tu­nately, if you’re truly gifted at the form of the short novel, you’d better have a day job, because you’re going to starve quickly, as you’re too long for the mag­a­zines and too short for the main pub­lish­ers, unless you’re a huge, huge name and people will pub­lish any­thing that you write just because they know people would buy your spit on paper. Unfor­tu­nately this leads to a lot of weird things hap­pen­ing. The worst of it, I think, is that novels that are uncom­mer­cially short are padded out, often to great diminu­tion of their effect. But then there are the longer novels that are, at the other end of the scale, cut into smaller parts so that that they can phys­i­cally be published.

Majestrum by Matthew Hughes

Those of you who are fans of Matt Hughes’ work from F&SF no doubt will already be famil­iar with Hengis Hap­thorne, the Holmes-​​like ‘free­lance dis­crim­i­na­tor’ who fea­tures heav­ily within what is the more inter­est­ing thread of those sto­ries. In this, the first full-​​length book fea­tur­ing that char­ac­ter, we get to see that Hughes and his char­ac­ters, who can seem car­toon­ish at times, are capa­ble of hold­ing forth at greater length and still main­tain­ing the light tone and humor of the sto­ries, while infus­ing the char­ac­ters and their envi­ron­ment with addi­tional depth and inter­est. Nor, it seems, is Hughes lim­ited only to humor, for we get to see this deeply self-​​absorbed char­ac­ter con­fronted by his lim­i­ta­tions and faced by a strange form of his own mor­tal­ity. It’s well han­dled, and it’s nice to see that the char­ac­ter has more than one note.

Zima Blue by Alas­tair Reynolds

Reynolds, in my opin­ion, is one of the more inter­est­ing writ­ers of short fic­tion around, and I find that, despite his claims that he doesn’t work well at shorter lengths, that his short fic­tion is more effec­tive, at least in terms of my enjoy­ment of his work, than his longer work. That holds true espe­cially here, in a col­lec­tion of much of his strongest short work that doesn’t take place in the Rev­e­la­tion Space uni­verse. High­lights include “Spirey and the Queen”, “Hide­away”, and “Beyond the Aquila Rift”. This book just gives us all the more reason to lament the fact that an author can make no more than a tiny frac­tion of their living from writ­ing short fic­tion. If it paid a little more, we might see more books like this one.

Child of For­tune by Norman Spinrad

I’m not entirely sure what to think of th this one. I’m a huge fan of Bug Jack Barron, and Spin­rad is one of the most inter­est­ing styl­ists that SF has yet pro­duced. That said, I think that this book was meant to be shock­ing, and unfor­tu­nately it fails at this today, although it may not have when the book was first released. For the most part, the book focuses on sex, almost exclu­sively het­ero­nor­ma­tive, and it does so at the expense of its set­ting. The lan­guage used is quite inter­est­ing and inven­tive, and some of the set-​​pieces are pretty mag­nif­i­cent, but the char­ac­ters and the plot suffer a bit in com­par­i­son. There’s just not all that much going on there, and the addi­tional dif­fi­culty imposed by the styl­is­tic exper­i­men­ta­tion and visu­al­iz­ing some quite strange envi­ron­ments ends up being tiring rather than fas­ci­nat­ing, because you don’t have the engine of a strong plot to propel you along.

The Man from the Dio­genes Club by Kim Newman

I have to admit, I was a little doubt­ful coming in to this one. First off, the cover is, well, more than a little bit gaudy, and I’d never read any­thing else by Newman (although I have met him, and he’s quite a nice and good humored person, from what I could tell). But it’s from Mon­key­Brain, and I trust Chris’ taste, gen­er­ally. Thank­fully, any appre­hen­sions that I might have had were entirely unfounded. This is a great book and it’s a whole lot of fun. It’s also car­ried off with a great deal more styl­is­tic panache than one would infer from the seem­ing wonky­ness of the con­ceit. A col­lec­tion of short sto­ries revolv­ing around psy­chic and disco fash­ion maven Richard Jepe­son, the whole thing could be shal­low and played for laughs, but Newman infuses the char­ac­ters with feel­ing and depth that could easily have been left out if these sto­ries had been writ­ten simply as a lark. The only issue that I had with these sto­ries was that, as an Amer­i­can reader, with no deep knowl­edge of British pop­u­lar cul­ture, I con­stantly had the nag­ging feel­ing that I was miss­ing quite a bit of the cul­tural ref­er­ences being made. I did not dis­cover until after I had fin­ished half the book that there was a gen­er­ous glos­sary and expli­ca­tion of many of these ref­er­ences at the end of the book, which I found help­ful and would rec­om­mend read­ing through first, if only so you don’t have to go to the back every time you get the feel­ing that you’re lost. Over­all, this stuff was incred­i­bly enjoy­able and I’ll cer­tainly be seek­ing out more of Newman’s work in the future.

Bat­tlestar Galac­tica Start to ep 2×08

I’ve stopped watch­ing this show. I don’t know whether it’s the Star Trek sci­ence, the hot top­cism, or the irri­tat­ingly incon­sis­tent way the char­ac­ters seem to be writ­ten, but this show just doesn’t seem to be very good. The Gaius Baltar char­ac­ter is espe­cially annoy­ing. I think that the show might have worked better with some more seri­ous con­straints, like a state­ment at the outset that said the pro­duc­ers of the show would see the char­ac­ters on Earth or dead in three sea­sons. That way you might get less of the sense of mean­der­ing that this series gives off. I don’t hate it, and there are many good moments, but I just can’t keep watch­ing a show that has me stop­ping a few times an episode to cringe at how astound­ingly bad the last couple of min­utes were. Also, I know that they’re not going to give it the ending that I want already, so… meh (I don’t say that self­ishly, as in I only want end­ings that I like or can pre­dict, but I can already see it ending like so many of the other genre shows, draw­ing it out too long and slowly losing view­ers until they have to finish the show in an unsat­is­fy­ing hurry).