fevered.earth

Tag: Books

  • Books 6

    Books? Care for some books, Madam? Can I interest you in a short review of a book? Yes I can!

    Clarissa Oakes – Patrick O’Brien

    As is often the case with these later Master and Commander books, O’Brien is going back over ground already trodden – in this case the difficulties presented by having even a single woman present in the all-male environ of the Royal Navy ship at sea. In this case though it’s a well-deserved barnstormer, the titular Oakes an excuse to lay out in exacting detail how discipline and good manners aboard slowly disintegrate

    The dénouement is slightly contrived, with Oakes letting slip some essential puzzle piece in a casual conversation to Stephen ‘James Bond at sea’ Maturin, but otherwise it’s still astonishing how much O’Brien is getting from what is now a very long-in-the-tooth setting. Also he still hates Australia.

    Case Study – Graeme Macrae Burnet

    A funny one this, presented in the infamous modernist framing story where the author is provided with a bundle of papers, these ones alternating between a biography of a fictional enfant terrible psychotherapist in the 60s and the macabre diary of one of his latter-day patients. I found the slightly trashy diary sections preferable to the more literary biography, which despite being humourous and well put together was a bit much like reading an actual biography of a psychotherapist, which I wouldn’t often do.

    The Book of CP-System – Fabien Sanglard

    Despite owning both Sanglard’s Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein and Game Engine Black Book: Doom, I wasn’t going to bother with this one as I have no particular connection to or affection for arcade machines; somehow however I got sucked into reading it during lunches at work. And it’s excellent, a detailed and fascinating breakdown of one of the great pieces of custom arcade hardware and what must have been involved in putting together games for it. I’d buy a physical copy but the price of Amazon’s print-on-demands is, uh, considerably more than I remember.

    Shadows of the Empire – Steve Perry

    Look, all respect to fan favourite character Dash Rendar but this is not a good book. Partial mark for the characterising Darth Vader as a sort of long-suffering Smithers to the Emperor’s Mr Burns, but everything else is tedious at best and gratuitously sexist at worse. I posted a round-up of some of the most Marenghi-like sentences.

    He Who Whispers – John Dickson Carr

    Back on the Dickson Carr, this one’s a real firecracker with each act taking place in an outlandishly gothic setup. There’s a central London dinner club no-one has turned up for, a man murdered alone atop a great stone tower, and sneaky goings-on in a New Forest stately home. Still sexist though.

    Inversions – Iain M. Banks

    I took the dive and read the last Banks Culture book I hadn’t covered. Turns out this was a great one to leave till last, knowing all the usual Culture series tics made spotting them from the outside in this inverse telling very satisfying. But the story stands as a fantastic bit of sci-fi all by itself, the story of nations – and by extension worlds – being given gentle nudges in the direction of what you might call progress by two different (but ultimately very similar) outsiders. Only flirts with the kind of ultra-violence that Banks tones down from this point on in the series, but was very prominent in e.g. Use of Weapons. It’s a slow burn in general, without much of the kind of action denouement Banks likes to give to the Culture novels. All the more memorable for it.

    The Long Shoe – Bob Mortimer

    Picked up this Bob Mortimer book at my Mum’s and read it over a weekend. Mortimer has such a distinctive patter that it can be distracting at first to read paragraphs written in his style, though he does occasionally throw it out and fill in a chapter or two from an outside perspective just to show he can. The plot is mostly nonsense, this is entirely about hanging out with the character sketches, so it’s a shame that some of them here are a little stale – ‘South London lifestyle yoga instructor’ is very mid-2000s – but I did enjoy it.

    A Game in Yellow – Hailey Piper

    I feel like I missed a lot of references and allusions here by not having read Chambers’ The King in Yellow. Having bought it entirely from seeing the cover in a bookshop window (I don’t read much horror), it was an enjoyable read on its own merits, a story of terminal self-sabotage with a strong noir flair. The depiction of BDSM is unusually authentic, almost to a fault. Like writing sex scenes as a whole, too much attention to detail can draw out the absurdity. That said, I’ve certainly read worse.

    Thrawn – Timothy Zahn

    I wasn’t expecting much from Thrawn 2.0 but Zahn really pulled out all the stops here, having been given the chance to start again and do Thrawn ‘right’ twenty five years after first writing the character. He turns in something which is actually kind of on the pulse of genre writing, with a handful of characters – Thrawn, his provincial attache Vanto and disinherited mining magnate Pryce – who are all in some way trying to serve an Empire that is inherently hostile to them. Shades of A Memory Called Empire or The Traitor Baru Cormorant, and Pryce’s story in particular is that kind of bureaucrat power play porn, culminating in her commiting an atrocity. The trick of the book is to get you to root for these bozos. It’s not Proust, it’s still a Star Wars book and it in fact directly ties in to a season of a children’s cartoon where Thrawn is a moustache-twirling characature, but I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected.

    Anathem – Neil Stephenson

    Scurrilous monks! I’d have been happy had they never left that monastery (or ‘concent’, as the book’s alien phraseology would have it) and they were just Name of the Rose-ing it up for 900 pages. In the event this was still a very wild ride, with the constant reconfiguration of setting and mystery meaning that the high page count flew past. It occasionally becomes a bit “Boy’s Own Adventure Weekly” with the regularity with which our motley protagonist Erasmus and crew are placed at the centre of attention, to the point where there’s an extremely jarring part where Erasmus returns to his formal rank within the order he’s part of and it just feels bizarre.

    It’s possibly the most end-of-history book ever written, albeit with a kind of strange optimism to it despite the deeply, utterly cynical account of human nature it presents. The philosophical and mathematical asides were fine, it’s something of a novelty to see phenomenology represented at all in literature, let alone as a positive development, so I appreciated that.

    Previously:

  • Great lines from ‘Shadows of the Empire’

    Yes, I read the tie-in book for everyone’s favourite Star Wars midquel multimedia project, Shadows of the Empire. It is a masterpiece of prose, as soon you will learn:

    • [Guri] had long and silky blond hair, pale and clear blue eyes, an exquisite figure. Normal human males would find her attractive.
    • [Prince Xizor] also exuded natural pheromones that made most of the human-stock species feel instantly attracted to him
    • “Chewie owes Han a life debt. That’s a big deal among Wookies.”
    • Males. Didn’t seem to matter what species they were when they wanted female company. And it didn’t seem to matter what species the female was, either.
    • “This… person has dishonoured the title of Vigo”
    • Leia liked Chewie okay, but here was another reason to find and free Han – so he could call the Wookie off.
    • Somehow, Ben had known Luke would find this book. Somehow, he had prepared it so that only he could open it safely. Amazing.
    • “You see, to contend with Xizor is to lose.”
    • [Leia] saw a small blast furnace set up on a table. Was Luke making some kind of jewelry?
    • The Emperor was capricious. He had been known to have whole cities destroyed because a local official defied him. He’d once had a wealthy and influential family banished from the core systems because one of the sons had plowed a ship into one of the Emperor’s favorite buildings, damaging it
    • Darth Vader sat naked inside his hyperbaric medical chamber.
    • The dark side was addictive, more potent than any drug.
    • “Hey, Wedge! How’s it going, buddy?” “So-so. Another day, another credit—before taxes, of course.”
    • Xizor was tempted to hire a dozen assassins, not tell them who their target was, and loose them on Vader.
    • He set his jaw. Uh-oh. She’d insulted his manhood. She knew that look.
    • “Clean up the mess,” Vader said.
    • Use the Force, Luke. Luke grinned. The first time he’d heard that, during the attack on the Death Star, he hadn’t understood. He knew what it meant now.
    • Because of [Xizor’s] hormonal makeup, his ability to produce overwhelmingly powerful pheromones, he never had any trouble attracting new companions. But because it was so easy, he quickly tired of them, no matter how beautiful, no matter how clever.
    • Lando shrugged. “[Dash Rendar] doesn’t want to owe anybody, doesn’t want anybody to owe him. He works for whoever pays the most. He’s downright magic with anything that flies, and he can pick wing nuts off a tabletop with a blaster without scorching the finish. He’s a good man to have at your back when the going gets hot—as long as your money lasts.”
    • “Chewbacca says that Master Dash must be part bird.”
    • Xizor knew that exercise was necessary, was essential for optimum health — and it helped keep underlings in line if they knew you were physically powerful.
    • Xizor never used a wrist slap when a hammer fist was called for.
    • Artoo said something that was probably derogatory. “Yeah, well, you just remember that next time you need a lube.”
    • The Emperor did like to crack the whip now and again, to show that he still held it and was not averse to using it.
    • Probably eating a fine meal or spending money on expensive entertainment. Females did love such things.
    • A Jedi Knight wouldn’t just sit around when there was vital Alliance business in the works, would he? No. He wouldn’t.
    • This was one of those times, and as usual, it was a double-edged blade. Swung with care, it would cut both ways. Just as it was supposed to cut.
    • Sitting behind a desk in front of a clear wall of transparisteel was the Bothan who’d sent the message to Leia. Well, at least Luke thought it was the same one. They all looked pretty much alike to him.
    • Well, why not? No rule said a woman couldn’t be a criminal.
    • “Don’t start again, you two.” “Very” or not, few things made a Wookiee nervous. Certainly not normal women. Something to consider.
    • When she was gone, Xizor considered what she had said, then dismissed it. He walked the cold road, and his passion was always safely leashed until he let it free.
    • “Bring one of my dueling droids,” Vader said to the air. “No. Bring two of them.”
    • “Not me! I don’t miss. I should have clipped that missile! Bothans died because I missed, you understand?”
    • He leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. Sometimes it was almost disappointing how easily he accomplished his ends.
    • The Emperor sat in his favorite throne, the one set a meter higher than the rest of the room.
    • “Rise, Lord Vader.” Vader did so. He hoped whatever the Emperor wanted was something easy and brief.
    • “Yes, we have had our share of adventures, as well. I must say I don’t like all this business the least bit. Couldn’t we find a nice quiet planet and take a vacation? Someplace warm, with a deep pool of lube?” Luke grinned.
    • Falleen pheromones were more potent than the strongest spice. Leia might want to resist him with her mind, but her body would ache for him. There was no antidote save one.
    • Vader said nothing. Solo’s ship, the Millennium Falcon, no doubt, now under Luke’s control. Perhaps he had the young princess with him and that traitorous gambler Calrissian.
    • There was an old Sithian proverb that said, “Even when fighting the great sabercat, it is best not to turn your back upon the lowly serpent.”
    • And [Xixor] wasn’t wearing a bodysuit under it. He was big under the thin cloth, hard and muscular, and if there were any visible anatomical differences between him and basic stock humans, she couldn’t see them.
    • Vader ground his teeth.
    Dash Rendar in action. Not pictured: the Bothans.
    • [Leia’s] body wanted one thing, but she was a civilized woman and her mind was what controlled her, not her hormones.
    • Ah, people would say, how devious the Dark Prince is. Beware! Beware, indeed.
    • The Luke-size lieutenant frowned as he entered the stall, Luke right behind him.
    • Luke ordered the man to strip,
    • “I anticipate that I shall return in three weeks,” the Emperor told him. “I trust you can keep the planet from falling apart while I am gone?”
    • Dash Rendar! Oh, man. Here he was saving Luke again. Luke hated this.
    • By itself a grain of sand was nothing, but with enough grains, one could cover a city. It would not do to tip his hand too early. As of now, he had enough sand to begin. A bit more and he’d be able to bury Xizor … He must be removed, once and for all, and the day was coming when it would happen. Soon. It would be soon.
    • Xizor could sit alone in a room for days staring at a wall and be as busy mentally as most men working a complex and demanding job.
    • [Xizor] would wait as long as necessary to taste Leia, and when he had done so, he would be satisfied and finished with her.
    • “I will be the judge of what is too dangerous,” he said. “And since we know it is Skywalker, this is where it ends. I will dispatch him personally!” [Xizor] would not be embarrassed in his own castle.

    and finally:

    Moonglow was found only on a single satellite world, in a small section of one forest; it grew naturally nowhere else in the galaxy; in fact, it could not be grown anywhere else. Many had tried to transplant the funguslike tree, and all had failed. About the size of a man’s fist, the fruit contained in its natural state one of the most potent biological poisons known. A single unaltered slice divided into a thousand tiny pieces would be enough, if consumed, to kill a thousand people and to do it in less than a minute. There was no known antidote, but there was a way to neutralize the poison before eating the fruit. Such preparation of moonglow legally required a chef who had studied the technique for a minimum of two years under a certified Master Moonglow Chef, and the process itself consisted of some ninety-seven steps. Should any of the steps be omitted or performed incorrectly, the resulting dish might cause anything from a mild stomach upset to a painful, thrashing, hallucinatory coma, followed by death. If a would-be diner went into a restaurant that had the proper licenses to offer the dish, the price of a single serving of moonglow would be somewhere around a thousand credits. Xizor generally ate it three or four times a month and had the most respected moonglow chef in the galaxy on his payroll. Even so, a small thrill always arose when he consumed the fruit. Always the possibility, however slight, of an error.

    Previously: A Grand Admiral?!

  • Books 5

    Another plate of books served at the great banquet of reading books:

    Eight Detectives – Alex Pavesi

    Vaguely po-mo succession of detective yarns with a framing story about a reclusive writer of the stories in question. Always a risk with the high concept that the high concept part will fail to be as compelling as the low concept muck that it’s supposed to be above, and that’s the case here – the book is by far at its weakest at the end when it’s all supposed to be coming together. That said, the short stories themselves are compelling and memorable, with great atmosphere.

    A Memory Called Empire – Arkady Martine

    Curiously close in concept to The Traitor Baru Cormorant, even if all the specifics are different. Really enjoyable intrigue and fairly unique depiction of being an enthusiast for a culture that is trying to consume your own. I don’t know if the chauvinism of the Imperial subjects is ever totally convincing – everyone’s very buddy-buddy even when the heat is on. But it’s fun regardless. I haven’t picked the sequel up yet because I’m too worried it will be totally different, which is a slightly ridiculous concern.

    The Letter of Marque – Patrick O’Brien

    The Thirteen-gun Salute – Patrick O’Brien

    The Nutmeg of Consolation – Patrick O’Brien

    These really do form one continual narrative at this point, despite O’Brien paying lip service to catching new readers up at the start of each one, so I’m not going to bother trying to divvy them up for review. That said, it’s a great narrative, with Aubrey and Maturin setting off in a tacitly approved privateer after Aubrey was unfairly struck from the Naval lists. The ensuing string of missions are as good as anything else in the series, with Maturin’s visit to a sadly fictional crater ecosystem a real highlight. Also, O’Brien really hates Australia.

    The Truce at Bakura – Kathy Tyers

    Another entry in my big journal of Star Wars sequels and prequels, this is the book that infamously starts the moment Return of the Jedi ends, by having fan-favourite X-Wing pilot Wedge Antilles trip over his shoelaces and hit his head on an exploding Imperial Droid. Hijinks ensure.

    Tyers has a much looser grip on the Star Wars atmosphere than Zahn did, and the mid-nineties sci-fi pulp mood that you might also see in Doctor Who novels of that era is very much in evidence: Skywalker et al must contend with the threat of a vast empire of oddly sexy dinosaur-men. That’s not very Star Wars, but the constant diplomatic back-and-forth with the newly-minted Imperial remnant, who aren’t entirely convinced that the Emperor is dead, certainly is, and Tyers does a decent job of depicting power struggles in a very febrile situation. Takes a while to hit its stride, but an enjoyable read once it does.

    Samurai Detectives Vol 2 – Shotaro Ikenami

    More of the Samurai Detectives. Sadly less of the austere son character Akiyama Daijiro in this one, with the focus almost entirely on Akiyama Kohei and his Sherlock Holmes-esque network of spies and investigators. It’s still fun, and you can tell the author is loving being fully immersed in the Shogunate era in much the same way O’Brien is for the Napoleonic, but the always-on-top escapades of Kohei start to blur into one another a little bit. I want to see him (or his son) on the ropes a little bit here. Even Holmes has stories like Adventure of the Copper Beeches where he just fucks everything up a bit.

    After Hours At Dooryard Books – Cat Sebastian

    Has the unusual quality of being a story where most if not all of the major events occur off-page before the book has begun – perhaps this is what earns it the epithet ‘cozy’, though there’s rather more referencing of CIA misadventures during the Vietnam War in this one than I was anticipating given the remit. I don’t know how cozy I felt coming away from it, although the characters are very well realised, to the point where when things get a little steamy it almost seems prurient – leave these poor guys alone to it, they deserve some privacy after all that.

    The Great When – Alan Moore

    I do struggle with Moore as a prose writer, the great swamps of description that make him well-suited to comic book writing were very much an obstacle to enjoying Jerusalem a few years back. The Great When is both easier to digest and shorter than that tome, and selfishly I’m more familiar with the streets of London as a setting for psycho-geographic fantasy than I am those of Northampton. Much rueful musing on the nature of Britain’s relationship to the Second World War and the Blitz. Four sequels still to come, apparently, which will hopefully mitigate the feeling you get of seeing an extremely small slice of the larger world Moore is dreaming of here.

    Death Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather

    God, this was stunning. Crisp, simple prose belies a sketch of two muddling Priests in nascent New Mexico that is overflowing with compassion, exhilaration at the beauty of the natural world, and yet at the same time a level view of America and the construction thereof, winners and losers and all. A fascinating companion to something like Wolf Hall, historical fiction that is dreaming the characters of these real people, or Wittgenstein’s Nephew, artful and audacious meddling with minor characters of recent history. In the public domain, too.

    Previously:

  • Books 4

    The joke is on you, the reader! I have only read more books since coming off parental leave!

    The Ionian Mission – Patrick O’Brien

    The Master & Commander books are well into a single continuous, roiling narrative at this point. A couple of classic-faire, tense boat-to-boat action scenes where O’Brien excels, and plenty of opportunities for the smiling boat-men of the Royal Navy to do boat-things described at length. There’s a particularly fun sequence where a large rope is tied up so a cannon can be lifted up a hill, which you wouldn’t believe is something that could be described as ‘particularly fun’. The handling of Ottoman politics and the depiction of the Ottomans we meet can be fairly easily described as ‘orientalist’ though, I fear.

    Heir to the Empire – Timothy Zahn

    [Kirk Voice] Zahn!!!

    After my experience with Splinter of the Mind’s Eye last time I was baited into reading the ‘Thrawn Trilogy’, which seem really to be the foundational texts of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. As a one-time reader of 90s Doctor Who novels which were very much happening in the margins of this sort of thing there was a warm familiarity to the slightly askew style of 90s sci-fi writing and Thrawn – the titular Heir – is but one of several fun additions to the Star Wars cast alongside the pleasantly distinct rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold Talon Karde and his first officer Mara Jade, who manages to escape the gravity well of her ridiculous backstory.

    Treason’s Harbour – Patrick O’Brien

    “It’s treason then.” Wait, wrong series. We’re back with the boats, and despite – as the review quoted on Wikipedia says – this being a book where nothing really happens, it remains a fun read. Maturin is engaged in carting a diving bell around, after his success in the previous book Aubrey is assigned more wildly unsuited political work, and surely one of fiction’s all-time least fired Chekov’s guns takes place as the interpreter assigned to the ship by the secret French agent takes a short bath in the Red Sea.

    Dark Force Rising – Timothy Zahn

    We can’t rule anything out when this book has a Grand Admiral in it. Well, maybe we can. Zahn (who by all accounts was hammering these out at the time) totally misfires and ends up writing the same book again but worse. The parts which do distinguish this one (Leia’s adventure on the planet of honourable assassins) are tedious in the extreme. Even the title gets in on being misconceived, with the ‘Dark Force’ in question being no relation to the mystic, luminous force the setting is primarily concerned with, but instead referring to the nickname for some missing robot starships.

    Samurai Detectives Volume 1 – Shotaro Ikenami

    Bought this primarily on the strength of the cover, as with most books I buy. That’s my motto: strength of the cover. Despite being referred to as a ‘volume’ and being made up of nominal short stories there’s one continuous narrative that shifts back and forth between retired Samurai master Akiyama Kohei and his voluntarily celibate son Akiyama Daijiro. Set in the Edo period, there’s a fantastic realisation of what it would mean to travel and investigate in such a place. If only so much emphasis were not placed on Kohei’s, uh, passionate relationship with a woman forty years his younger.

    The Last Command – Timothy Zahn

    Zahn just about brings it home – not at all sure about the late-in-the-game decision to rework insane clone Jedi Master C’Boath into an Emperor-type (an heir… to the empire?!) just so the climax can be the throne room scene from Return of the Jedi, again, but this time Lando is also there for some reason. One of the problems Zahn has writing these is that his original characters end up being breaths of fresh air in the narrative because they’re not constantly thinking about or referring to the events of the movie trilogy. This means that Mara Jade’s bits are generally the best parts of the books and it’s annoying to have to go back to Luke fondly reminiscing about-

    Hey, nothing ever happened with that remote control Luke found on Dagobah!

    The Far Side of the World – Patrick O’Brien

    Hey, that’s the name of the film! A bit of a patchwork effort, this one, which concludes with the real whiplash of going from the intolerable sequence where Jack and Stephen are taken aboard a Pacific Islander boat which hates the penis to a 10/10 do-over of the climax of Desolation Island, wherein an outnumbered but technologically superior group of stranded Englishmen have to maintain a precarious peace on a desert island they share with a large group of nominally defeated American sailors.

    The Hollow Man – John Dickson Carr

    Bought this based on Daniel Craig flapping the book about on-screen in Wake Up Dead Man. It’s good fun, and Carr’s penchant for having a gaggle of detectives hang around operating in various different styles is distinctive, even if Chesterton-esque author insert Prof. Gideon Fell always takes primacy. Carr also has a strong line in making his witnesses useless or needlessly antagonistic, it’s something of a revelation the contrast to the usually pliable and cooperative characters you wind in murder mysteries – e.g. the killer in The Red Room would always answer questions even if he didn’t like to hear them.

    The Black Spectacles – John Dickson Carr

    I felt this was slightly less effective than The Hollow Man just because it increases the contrivances – in that book the mystery boils down to two bullets and two dead men, where here there’s two dead man, a poison pill, a movie camera, and that’s basically before things have got going. Slightly less enamoured with Fell’s theatrics here too. We get it Mr Fell, you think the killer is eeeeeevil. We know. Despite this, it is a meticulously constructed mystery and I was constantly kept guessing.

    The Reverse of the Medal – Patrick O’Brien

    “And then everyone stood up and clapped [for Jack Aubrey, unfairly placed in the pillory just for trying to do some insider trading].” I will note the bizarre manner in which O’Brien reminds the reader that Wray is a French trader, taking care to do it at the beginning of every book he features in after the decision to rework him from land-based duelling threat to craven Admiralty man. Feels like it would work just fine to have it be a surprise within each book where it’s relevant. Alas.
    I’m going to take a break from Master & Commander books after this one; not because I’m sick of them, but because the ones after this are an eye-watering £6.49 on Kindle. Outrageous.

    Death-watch – John Dickson Carr

    I was wondering why Dickson Carr isn’t more fondly remembered as a writer of murder mysteries; there’s a potential answer in Death-watch, which not only has the proclivity for complexity that was present in Hollow Man and Black Spectacles, but is also staggeringly misogynistic. At one point Fell, in full-on bloviating author stand-in mode, has a digression on why woman can’t be good barristers however intelligent they seem at university. Similar to Black Spectacles, there’s no final collapse of the contrivances here either, so while it’s satisfying how it all unfolds it’s difficult to hold the whole thing in your head to assess it.

    Previously: