I've been revisiting a number of books which I originally read in 1992 (gosh, 16 years ago!) written by one of my favourite author's, CJ Cherryh. They are Rusalka, Chernevog and a recently acquired copy of Yvgenie. I've really enjoyed them, but they've been harder work that some of the other books which I've read recently. The books are Cherryh's exploration of her Russian heritage, and quite dark in subject, full of ghosts, magic and dark forests.



The first book, Rusalka, tells the tale of Sasha, the unlucky pub stable lad, who ends up fleeing town with Pyetr, one of the local ne'er-do-wells, and getting lost in a very dark forest where they encounter a magician and a terrifying ghost. Sasha slowly comes to terms with the fact that he actually has magical abilities himself, and the truth about the ghost is established.

The second book, Chernevog, was a harder book to read, as Cherryh takes her usual approach of telling the tale from the POV of the characters, who spend a lot of the novel confused as to what is actually going on. However it came to a satisfactory conclusion.

The final book, Yvgenie, is the one I'm on now. This is a voyage of discovery, as I only found out it was published recently, and managed to get a second hand copy as it is long out of print. It's the reason that I re-read the first two books, as I wanted to remind myself what had gone on before. The story is some 16 years later than the previous book, and deals with a resurgent threat from the past which menaces Pyetr's daughter.

I love Cherryh's writing, and these books are no different. However, they are more difficult to get on with than her usual books (which normally take 50 pages to get me hooked), and have left me wanting to get a clear bit of time to dedicate to reading them. They definitely aren't novels you can just dip in and out of!

Legacies is a SF novel by Alison Sinclair. I'd been introduced to her as an author through her later novel 'Blueheart', which was a great inspiration for me with two RPGs, Traveller and Blue Planet. Recently I picked up both of her other novels, Legacies and Cavalcade. I found Legacies to be an exercise in frustration. Sinclair can write well, and the story has shades of CJ Cherryh (the isolation of the main character), Arthur C Clarke (Rendezvous with Rama) and a number of the other classics. However, it took nearly three hundred pages of a four hundred and nineteen page novel for the plot to finally kick into gear, and the whole story was made disjointed by the style deployed, ruining any flow.

The tale is a simple one – the colonists, our protagonists, have been settled for five generations on a world which is not especially hospitable. They arrived at the colony having fled Burdania, their homeworld, using an experimental stardrive because the politicians had wanted to shut down space exploration. The stardrive may – or may not – have caused devastation and widespread ecological disaster on Burdania as it did not function as planned. The colony is also home to another post-technological race with which little contact is held. The tale starts with the arrival of a mission back to Burdania to find out the fate of the homeworld. It then intermeshes chapter by chapter with the story of how the colonists finally came to decide to return to their origins. All this is seen through the eyes of Lain, an outsider in the colony who has suffered severe brain trauma in an accident in his youth which limits his ability to communicate normally.

I can't help but wonder is Burdania is a play on the word 'Burden', related to the colonists concerns about the unknown situation on their homeworld.

I did enjoy the book, but the failure to sustain any pace, and the hard work to get anywhere with it means that I would only give it a 3 out of 5 rating. I'll pass it on to my dad to try and thence to the charity shop or Bookcrossing.com as it's not a keeper.

Tags: Sci Fi

I've just finished a Terry Pratchett Diskworld book – Thud! – which I've had in the 'to-read' pile for far too long. Like many of his later books it relies on satire rather than one-liners and mirrors events in the real world as a starting point. This novel tells a tale of conflict between the Trolls and the Dwarfs of the Diskworld and how Commander Vimes of the City Watch is determined not to let it spill over into the city of Ankh-Morpork. Wrapped up in all this is the story of the Battle of Koom Valley, an event that the Dwarfs and Trolls both claim they won.

There is a hint at the sectarian violence in the Middle-East (and I guess Ireland too), with extreme deep-dwarfs who hide from the light under deep robes trying to incite the Ankh-Morpork dwarfs to rise up against the Trolls. And then there is Mr Shine ('Him Diamond!'), a mysterious Troll hero... Meanwhile the Watch tries to stand between it all and keep the peace.

This wasn't the best Pratchett I've read recently – Going Postal fills that niche – but I enjoyed it and wouldn't mind reading it again. The satire wasn't as sharp as usual but it was a fun tale. In summary, it was a humourous fantasy thriller that whiled some hours away...

Tags: Fantasy

'The Children of Húrin' sees me return to one of my favourite authors, JRR Tolkien, whom I haven't read since I last visited the Maldives on holiday (2004). Like 'The Silmarillion', this is another of the post-humous tales that Tolkien's son Christopher has pieced together. The story is set in the First Age of Middle Earth, well before the events of 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings'. It's an expansion of a story within 'The Silmarillion', a tale of men within the story of the Elven war of the Silmarils.

Just like Ronseal, it does what it says on the tin; the story tells of the human hero Húrin, and his children, especially his son Túrin. It has fantastic imagery (Túrin predates Moorcock's Elric, but has a black sword and a similar feel of doom), dragons, battles and an all powerful dark lord. The tale is very black and bleak, and reads like a saga. Stylistically, it's very similar to 'the Silmarillion' in form rather than 'The Lord of the Rings'.

This was a welcome return to Middle Earth for me, and I think that I shall read some more there soon. I'd love to find an RPG engine that does the setting justice so I could play some games there; I may find one in October when Graham Spearing runs a First Age game with Heroquest based around these events.

Tags: Fantasy

I came very late to MR James, especially considering that I read Lovecraft and Poe back in my early teens. Somehow I missed one of the best English writers of ghost stories, but it's made finding James' work so much more enjoyable now. I became aware of his work from a review in a UK roleplaying magazine called 'The Black Seal', which is dedicated to modern-day Lovecraftian material for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. The review was of the BBC TV adaptation of 'Whistle and I'll come for you my Lad', and peaked my interest.

I bought the DVD (which the BFI had issued as part of its classic British Television series) and both Jill and I enjoyed it. This last Christmas, as we were waiting for the baby to arrive, I was fortunate enough to see another more modern adaptation on BBC 4, 'Number 13'. Both stories were extremely good at building a feeling of menace without the gore that you usually see in modern horror material. This made me decide that I had to read more of James' work, so I went into Wetherby and ordered the collection for the princely sum of £1.99! An absolute bargain.

All the stories are well written – although stylistically they are better if you read them out loud in your head as if you were telling them to an audience – and the plots of most are good at building tension and giving a subtle sense of horror. I think I may well recycle one or two into an RPG scenario in the future. The only issue I have with the collection is that the stories are best read (or should that be devoured?) in a single sitting, so it can take a while to work through the book if you're reading it late at night around a small child.

Since I read this, I've also been fortunate enough to watch 'A Warning to the Curious', another BBC adaptation of an MR James story. I whole-heartedly recommend that as well!

Tags: Horror

A few weeks ago, Jill asked me if I was on some kind of spy obsession based on what I'd been watching. I guess I have been, in the main due to a slow burning fuse lit by reading John le Carré's novel Absolute Friends last May. Le Carré was one of the authors who really made an impression on me at a young age at the start of secondary school. Along with Tolkien, Cherryh and a few others he was a favourite for a long time, but somewhere along the way I lost the passion for his writing. I think it was around the time of 'the Night Manager' or 'Our Game' which really left me cold.

Anyway, I picked up a few of his books at the local Oxfam, when I had gained further enthusiasm from seeing 'The Constant Gardener' on DVD. 'The Secret Pilgrim' is the first of these books. It's fair to say that it has sat around for a while, but that is more due to Nathan's arrival more than anything else. I also had a slight detour in the BBC TV adaptation of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' and 'Smiley's People' and have the somewhat enticing 'A Perfect Spy' to watch sometime in the future.

Anyway, 'The Secret Pilgrim' is a novel, but in a very different style to the norm. It reads more like a selection of short stories than a full novel, but there is an over-arching plot in the form of the reminiscences of the main character, Ned. Ned will be familiar to readers of 'The Russia House', but I have to confess that I haven't read that book in perhaps 20 years. Ned works in the Circus (British Intelligence) and is approaching retirement. The cold war has ended and the winds of change are blowing through the intelligence community. Ned has been sidelined into running the Circus' training facility for new recruits. The story begins, and ends, at a special meal held at the end of an intake's course. Ned has asked George Smiley to come out of his reclusive retirement and give the after dinner speech. As he does, memories of triggered of Ned's life in the Circus from his first assignments to his last ever before retirement. We see the changes that years of duplicity and moral ambiguity impart to Ned, punctuated with gems of wisdom from Smiley. Along the way there are a number of what would best be described as rants, putting forward Smiley's and Ned's world view. The crux seems to be that the world has changed, but it doesn't diminish the need for spies. However, it does change how they need to operate, and who the friends and enemies are.

'The Secret Pigrim' is a quietly compelling book. It isn't le Carré's best, but it's a worthwhile read, and a telling assessment of how the world changes.

Tags: Spy

I've finally worked my way through the book that I was reading when Nathan was born, 'At the Edge of Space' by CJ Cherryh.

Cherryh has long been one of my favourite authors and this compilation was an opportunity to discover two of her earlier works which I'm not familiar with. She has never been an easy author to read, often taking up to fifty pages for the story to really take a grip. This is partly a result of the way that she tends to write novels from a very narrow viewpoint. They are written from the perspective of the principle character, and the read discovers what is happening as the character does. There is virtually no narrative exposition of the plot-line to expand and fill in; you get to live it as the person who you are reading about does. Both of the novels within the book explore a theme that Cherryh has returned to time and time again; the experience of being a stranger in a different culture.

In the first book, Brothers of Earth, two human survivors from opposing warring factions need to integrate into an alien culture more backward than their own to survive. In the second book, Hunter of Worlds, the principle character is an alien who has been kidnapped by the extremely powerful race which used to rule his world. He has to make sure a human in a similar position also integrates, because failure could result in the death of a human world. This is a clever set up with nested levels of isolation and difference from the dominant culture.

Both novels in the books are a very satisfying and enjoyable read, but demand that the reader becomes absorbed with the character's plight. Fortunately, that isn't too difficult. Lightweight, it isn't. This is hard SF with good characterisation and plotlines.

The next book I've read is very different to At the Edge of Space; I've had it for far too long and feel relieved that I've finally read it, if only so I can stop being sheepish about it every time I see my mother, who bought it for me perhaps 2 years ago.


It is, of course, Eragon by Christopher Paolini. The first thing to say about this is that it isn't literature! It's much more in the tradition of a pulp fantasy novel of the type that seems to fill thousands of turgid trilogies. However, it was a surprisingly fun, if lightweight read. The writing does – at some points – feel like it is an English Language writing assignment as there is a lack of a natural rhythm to it, but it is very fresh and energetic. However, as Paolini wrote this when he was 15, and has been successfully published (albeit initially by his parent's publishing house), I don't feel I can criticise this too heavily.

It held my interest, which is a big plus, and in parts it reminded me of David Eddings' early books in the Belgariad before his writing became bloated and repetitive. That is a compliment in my mind, as there are few people who have written as approachable fantasy as Eddings. However, it doesn't quite hit the same levels as the Belgariad, and it does feel very deriative in other parts. This isn't to the point of plaigarism, but rather to the point of feeling like it's a teenage Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master's first home-built game world made up of all his favourite fantasy stories stuck in a blender. The other authors that particularly called out to me in the text were Tolkien (with a resemblance to the city of Gondolin in The Silmarillion) and Anne McCaffrey (with her Pern books). For all the comments I make here, I would like to read the sequel to this – Eldest – sometime, if only to see if the plot signposts are as obvious as I think they are!

Dom 22/4/2007

Tags: Fantasy, Sci Fi

I recent read a refreshingly different fantasy novel. It was 'The Year of Our War' by Steph Swainston. This could – very easily – have been traditional fantasy fodder. A multi-racial empire with an eternal emperor supported by 50 immortals of 'the circle', who are the best of the best, is threatened by the Insects. These are large, ant-like hive creatures that have appeared in the north and are trying to turn the world into a large paper hive. There is no communication, and no hope of a peace.

The story is written from the perspective of 'Comet, the Messenger', one of the Immortals who is also hooked on drugs. Something changes, that shifts the balance between the Insects and the Empire, and all hell breaks loose, compounded by politicking between the Immortals. There is also a hint of Lovecraft's 'Dreamlands'. Very different, very nice and I'l be looking for some more books by Swainston in the future.

This is definitely one of the best fantasy novels I've read in a while.


"Pushing Ice" is excellent - it was harder to put down than Alastair Reynold's previous book, "Century Rain", as the plot kept on jumping forward in time. It's a good read – I'm not sure if it is as good as "Chasm City" or "Revelation Space" but very enjoyable. It's also the third different world that he's set novels in.

The basic premise is that a corporate ice-comet mining ship (in 2057) is directed to enter a first contact situation when one of Saturn's moons (Janus) suddenly starts accelerating out, revealing that it is really an artifact. The ship (Rockhopper) pursues to try and find out more, co-opted as an agent of the equivalent to the UN. Trouble ensues!

It's good, hard SF space opera.

Tags: Fantasy, Sci Fi

Richard Morgan's Woken Furies is his fourth novel, and the third in the sequence with Takeshi Kovacs in. It's not a trilogy, so you could pick up any of them as a starting point.

It's very enjoyable and tautly paced with some interesting ideas. The ending is kind of a deux-ex-machina, but – unlike Peter 'I can't finish a full length novel well' Hamilton – there are sufficient hints and pointers along the way to make it a plausible surprise.

The big difference in technology from most modern cyberpunk is the use of 'stacks'. These are implants at the back of the skull that most people have which download their personality. So if you are killed, you can always be downloaded into a new body aka sleeve. And interstellar travel is mainly by needlecast - people are beamed and downloaded into new bodies. You don't die unless your stack is destroyed.

Kovacs is an ex-UN Envoy. Which means that he's a very nasty warrior who is now freelancing, as the Envoys are the UN Protectorate's enforcement arm. The UN is effectively the world government. In the novel, Kovacs has returned to the world of his birth (Harlan's World) which is a water world run by an oppressive regime. When the story starts he's carrying out a one man vendetta against a sect on the planet. Complications ensue, including the return of a 300 year dead terrorist... And then there are the orbitals that cordon of the skies of the world, built by the 'Martians', destroying any aircraft moving too high or fast with 'angelfire'...

Recommended.

Another review salvaged from my posts at The Tavern.

Tags: Sci Fi

I've just had a fantastic trip down memory lane, and re-read the whole Dark is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper. I enjoyed it a lot the first time around (when I was eleven, just starting secondary school) and it was quite scary.

Reading it some 23 (!!) years later, it's not as scary, and but it's still very well written. The strongest two books of the five (which are now also available as a single volume) are the second – The Dark is Rising – and fourth – The Grey King. These have a harder, darker edge, probably because they are about a character (Will Stanton) who is far more initimately involved in the struggle between 'the Dark and the Light' than the characters in the first and third books. These two – Over Sea, Under Stone and the Greenwitch – deal with three other children who are also involved in opposing the Dark. I suspect the fact that there are three children – and the two books are set in Cornwall – triggers some memories of the Famous Five.

They are childrens books, with the characters initially around the same age as I was when I read them. I guess this sets them directly against Harry Potter, but to me they are far better.

Originally posted to The Tavern

Tags: Fantasy, Kids

Absolute Friends (by John Le Carre) was excellent. This was the first Le Carre novel that I'd read in a while, and I can see why certain establishment figures objected to it, claiming that it was a rant against the conflict in the Middle East. However, it is probably the closest that Le Carre has got to the style of his Cold War novels in a long while; like those books, it is a story of betrayals and relationships, a study of human frailty against a bigger backdrop. I think that it is worrying that the current geopolitical situation lends itself to one of the old masters of dark spy fiction returning to form!



I followed this with The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. This is an interesting book on how ideas become epidemic. It tries to identify the factors that will make something – an idea, a product – wildly popular. It's certainly worth a read, although not necessarily applicable in any easy way. It was an impulse buy at the airport on the way to France.



I followed this with a book which I have meant to read for a long time, but never got around to: Diaries - Alan Clark. This charts the former Tory minister's rise in the party. He always entertained me by his refusal to be politically correct. Well worth a read. I'll be looking up the rest at some point.



I then read a splash of Horror - Chaosium's Lovecraftian compilation The Antarkos Cycle which has lingered on my shelf for the last two years. I bought it shortly after I got 'Beyond the Mountains of Madness' (a huge and detailed RPG adventure for Call of Cthulhu) and it certainly gives a good feel for setting games in the southern-most continent. The last true Antarctic part of the book is the original novel that inspired 'The Thing'. The final two stories are of lost cyclopean cities elsewhere in the world.



Cobweb by Neal Stephenson was one I missed when it came out originally. Indeed, it didn't even appear as one for me to buy until I saw it at the airport. It claims to be a wicked satire on US politics and conspiracies around the time of the first Gulf War. It has conspiracies, murders and shenanigins galore. I'm not certain it is a satire... It is co-written with the same gent who wrote 'Interface' with Stephenson. Good fun!

The final book was Star Hunter / Voodoo Planet by Andre Norton. The book has two short stories set in the SF universe that is very reminiscent of the game, Traveller. The second story is a Solar Queen one (read the others on the Solar Queen to understand Traveller Merchants)! Excellent fun. The problem is that it gets me itching to play the Traveller RPG again!

(I originally posted this at the Tavern. )

Tags: Contemporary, Horror, Autobiography, Sci Fi, Thriller

I recently read Margaret Atwood's 'Oryx and Crake'. Now, if you all remember the buzz at the time of its release, this was literature, not science-fiction, according to the critics.

And that's probably a good thing... The first two hundred pages, I was wondering 'why?' I was reading the book. It didn't give the brief promise that Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell did. Fortunately, around two hundred to two fifty pages in it started to go somewhere, and the story of the world begins to be revealed by the protagonist's – Snowman – flashbacks and memories. It is a tale of how the world died. The ending is an attempt to leave it open in the mind of the reader as to how things will work out. I normally like these, but didn't really get on with the execution here.

It is well written, but it isn't compelling. I wasn't expecting taughtly plotted character driven narrative, but I did expect more than I got. The plot was, to say the least, feeble.

There are some interesting genetic engineering ideas and takes on the world, but off the top of my head, Greg Bear's Blood Music and Richard Morgan's Market Forces have each covered some of the ideas better.

(I originally posted this at the Tavern. )

Tags: Sci Fi

Susanna Clarke's "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell"... how best to describe it?



I think that the best analogy would be a pedal-cycle ride. You start off in this pretty, but old fashioned, valley, and then start the hard work pedalling up hill. Steadily, but with some effort you slowly rise, wondering why people recommended the route until you reach this final rise, 300-400 pages up. All of a sudden, you crest the hill, Jonathan Strange has been overseas and you can suddenly see wider vistas. Hurtling over the edge, on the road down you can freewheel as you rapidly plunge into a fantastic, impressive but altogether darker valley below. You hit your top speed at the bottom, and gently begin to slow down...

Reading JS&MN was pretty much like that. I was nearly getting bored for the first 400 pages, and then it exploded into life. I wholeheartedly recommend this book! All 1000+ pages of it.

(I originally posted this at the Tavern. )

Tags: Fantasy

Well, I've finally worked out what I read in 2005; just the basic info at the moment - 22,754 pages and 85 books in 2005. That's down on 2004 which had 30,428 pages and 100 books. I guess the main reasons are the fact that I changed job, and also I tried to clear the RPG backlog, and our main holiday in 2005 was a far more 'doing' event than the year before. However, you can see a big spike in March when we were away on holiday.

The flat-line in September/October is the big Fritz Lieber omnibus, which seemed to take a long time to read for some reason, even though I enjoyed it immensely. I think I read more slowly because of the short story format giving definite break-points to switch off the light when reading in bed! I read a similar sized tome which wasn't a shorts collection (Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell) last month, and went through it a lot faster.

I think one of the other contributing factors was my attempt to read all the RPGs that I had sitting on the shelf, and they seem to take longer than other books. Perhaps it is because of the rules and lack of a natural flow in a lot of the books?

Anyway, it's going to be interesting to see what 2006 brings.

For the last two years I've been keeping a log of everything I read. it's been part of an attempt to see if the three foot high pile of novels 'to read' is too optimistic. On reflection, it probably is. I'll post mini-reviews and comments on both books and films on the sub-pages in this section. Totally biased ones.

I read reasonably widely, although SF and Fantasy tend to dominate. Posts following will describe what I have been reading, and whether I'd recommend it to you!