Torque Control

Helping the Lich King

Venturing into new territory for Torque Control, I’m going to talk about a video game, and when I tell you it is World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King it probably explains my lack of posting around here over the past month.

If you’re not familiar with World of Warcraft, then you’ve probably been living under a rock for the past four years. A massively multiplayer online world with 11 million subscribers around the world, the newest expansion pack managed to sell 2.8 million copies in a single day. I’m pretty sure that makes it the most popular work of fantasy around, and there are spinoff books, comics, card games, and an annual convention with 15,000 attendees.

There are many reasons why WoW is such a ridiculously successful game, and one aspect is certainly the addictive, easy gameplay – it takes a significant time investment to reach a high level, but it doesn’t require much in the way of skill. There’s also an enormous world and backstory to explore, throwing together fantasy and science fiction and horror tropes and lovingly stealing from and referencing everything from Dune to Lovecraft to Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Another big reason for the continuing success is that having made a wildly successful game, they haven’t sat back on their laurels and churned out more of the same, they are actively trying to improve it. Nowhere is this more evident than the epic quest chain which swallowed a large chunk of my weekend, and shows off how well they’ve managed to integrate storytelling and gameplay.

The new expansion introduces a new playable character, the Death Knight. This is the first chance to play a character who is not just morally dubious, but absolute evil in the service of the villainous Lich King, Elric Arthas. (Arthas has a backstory containing pretty much every epic fantasy cliche going, but he’s now a creepy albino cursed by an evil sword.) Of course, it turns out that being evil is a whole lot of fun.

The game can be criticised for relying on too many quests of the “Go over to X and kill me a whole bunch of Y’s” formula, and there’s still a few of those, but when going to X involves sneaking onto the enemy ship by hiding in a decoy mine cart, and the Y’s are slaughtered by taking control of a cannon to effect mass slaughter before escaping on the back of a flying skeletal horse, I really don’t care. I have stolen horses, killed cowering civilians with my enormous glowing sword, corrupted the innocent with an undead plague, and bombed a town from my skeletal dragon.

Another common criticism of the original game is that the world was far too static and unchanging, and quests which led to enormous revelations had no lasting effect – even when you revealed the evil power behind the throne was a dragon in disguise, she would reset five minutes later to let the next player finish the quest. With the introduction of “phasing”, which allows the same area of the world to appear differently to players at different stages of the game, the quests you complete really do make a difference, and when you set the town on fire and murder all the inhabitants, this time they stay dead. The final quest is not only an epic phased battle with hundreds of participants, it ties up major storylines that have run through the game from the start, as well as the previous Warcraft games.

It is by no means a perfect gaming experience. It’s a much more linear story than in most parts of the game, and there’s no opportunity to run off and do something else, or to skip a quest you find boring. The introduction of new controls can be confusing, when you suddenly find all your normal controls have disappeared and you are in what appears to be a floating eye roaming around the landscape, but you get the hang of it pretty quickly. (Or you don’t, and you send me endless badly-spelled messages asking how you do this part, but your fellow players are both the best and the worst thing about this game, and could fill another post entirely.) It’s also buggy in parts – I missed part of the final quest because I was being endlessly killed by a bugged enemy, and it’s not a part of the game you can easily replay. But if there was anyone considering taking up World of Warcraft, or returning to their dormant characters, it’s worth knowing that once again Blizzard have upped their game, and it’s hard to see how anything else can dislodge them from their place at the top of the MMORPG market.

Story Notes 2

Apologies for the quietude around these parts at the moment; I’m going through another busy period at work. I actually have a fair few posts in the half-written or draft-that-needs-polishing stage, though, and hopefully I’ll get some of them up next week. In the meantime, have some more brief short fiction reviews.

“Greenland” by Chris Beckett (IZ 218)
A bleak story, and one which both revisits a familiar Beckett theme (identity) as well as extending into new territory, in that (as he notes in the story’s introduction) it’s one of his few tales to feature climate change as a significant background element. A solidly rendered sub-tropical Oxford is the primary location, with a dystopic background in which “Old Brits” defend the borders of their country with machine guns on the beaches. The narrator, Juan, is a refugee from a fractured Spain, and early in the story he loses his menial job at Magdalen college due to competition from newer — for which read “cheaper” — immigrants. In order to make ends meet, Juan takes up an ostensibly friendly professor’s offer of participation in an experiment for cash. But the bleakest aspect of the story is the depiction of Juan’s dysfunctional relationship with another immigrant, a French graduate called Suzanne; both have been damaged and deformed by the un-person treatment they receive from the population around them, despite the fact that immigrants now represent the majority of the population. When Juan tells Suzanne that he has a way to perhaps make enough money to get them to Greenland (a fabled refuge), her thought is not of the potential risk to him, her eyes just light up. “Here,” Juan thinks, “was the evidence of how much poverty and fear and hopelessness had coarsened and corrupted her. But I was coarsened and corrupted too.” The experiment itself turns out to be a less mundane kind of science fiction, although in Beckett’s hands it doesn’t feel incongruous, and it provides Beckett the opportunity to make some strong points about the moral value of any kind of sentence. In that, the story of Beckett’s which it most closely echoes is “Karel’s Prayer”, though it is to my mind the more effective of the two pieces; worth reading for its detail, and for the cumulative power of its voice.

“Crystal Nights” by Greg Egan (IZ 215)
Charles Stross with the lobsters filed off. This is a story about evolving AI by darwinian selection — crab-shaped AI with control of their own physiology, in fact — and the ethical pitfalls thereof. As with Beckett’s story, in fact, the deeply felt and convincingly articulated ethical concern for other forms of sentience is one of the most satisfying aspects of the story. It comes in this story from the author, not the protagonist; Daniel Cliff thinks himself not an unkind god, just one who is prepared to make some sacrifices, cause some suffering, to promote the development of the kind of intelligence he wants. The story accelerates nicely, in a “Sandkings” direction, with some welcome flashes of wit (how Daniel made his money, for instance, or what the crabs find when they reach their simulated moon), and an ending that is apt, if not completely satisfying.

“Traitor” by M. Rickert (F&SF, May)
I don’t know, you wait years for an M. Rickert science fiction story, and then … this is another near-future piece and, as with “Bread and Bombs” and “Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment” (a) it derives quite a lot of its power from revealing exactly how the world in which it is set has changed from our own time, (b) the change is dystopic in nature, and (c) the viewpoint of a child is central. Where “Traitor” goes further than either of the others is the elliptical manner in which the world is described; a scene in which a mother and daughter visit an ice-cream parlour verges on true surrealism, and a several-page digression into another story (another familiar Rickert trick, admittedly) successfully obscures precisely how the relationship between that mother and daughter is developing until the final page of the story. I have to admit that I found “Traitor” a bit less organic than the best of Rickert’s stories, but it still achieves a commendable intensity.

“Shad’s Mess” by Alex Irvine (Postscripts 15)
Irvine strikes me above all as a competent writer; everything in his stories always fits together with a pleasing clockwork deftness. This one is about a blue-collar teleport repairman who, after a somewhat grisly transporter malfunction, gets sued by some Christian missionaries and starts seeing something he refers to as the Entropy Gremlin. You might think that the satiric/fantastic elements wouldn’t mesh with the down-to-Earth grubby space life aspects, yet they do. What it lacks, perhaps, is the ability to inspire a particularly strong emotional or intellectual connection in the reader; I’m left with a sense that as well-executed as it is, it’s a story that doesn’t add up to much more than the description I’ve just given it.

“Africa” by Karen Fishler (IZ 217)
I’ve enjoyed Fishler’s previous Interzone stories, and I enjoyed “Africa”; like the majority of modern Interzone‘s stories, it seems to me, it aspires to craft rather than innovation, but like Irvine’s story it is a good, solid piece, even if that means I’m damning it with faint praise. The set-up is this: at some point in the future, humanity is expelled from Earth by an alien race, probably (though I don’t think it is explicitly specified) for incompetent planetary stewardship, bound never to return or indeed to land on any other planet. A barrier was constructed around the Earth, with a station that travels on its surface to meet and interrogate any intruders; it is manned by long-lived Guardians, although their numbers have dwindled such that there are now only two of them, Tomeer and his clone-father. A ship approaches, which also appears to be carrying only two people, this time a daughter and her natural father, who is dying. The daughter, Ainkia, tells Tomeer that they are all that is left of Expelled humanity, the rest having died of age and sadness. Youthful, innocent Tomeer is touched by her request to bury her father in the Earth’s soil, but his father is less than impressed by the idea. What’s most satisfying about “Africa” is that, though hardly action-packed, it never feels as though it is treading water – indeed, as usual with Fishler the character relationships are well defined, such that when the inevitable hard choices come (and this is where it scores slightly over “Shad’s Mess”) they mean something. It is not an extraordinary story; but it is an admirable one.

The Warwick Prize for Writing

So, the first Warwick Prize for Writing longlist is out:

Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 by Lisa Appignanesi (Virago)
The Tiger That Isn’t, by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot (Profile Books)
Torques: Drafts 58-76, by Rachel Blau Duplessis (Salt Publishing)
Glister, by John Burnside (Jonathan Cape)
Planet of Slums, by Mike Davies (Verso)
The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed Bishop Gerardi?, by Francisco Goldman (Atlantic Books)
Someone Else, by John Hughes (Giramondo Publishing Company)
Reinventing the Sacred, by Stuart A Kauffman (Perseus)
The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein (Penguin)
The Burning, by Thomas Legendre (Abacus)
Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion and the Politics of Human Origins, by David Livingston (Johns Hopkins University Press)
The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane (Granta Books)
The Meaning of the 21st Century, by James Martin (Eden Project Books)
Brasyl, by Ian McDonald (Gollancz)
Netherland , by Joseph O’Neill (4th Estate)
The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross (4th Estate)
The Informers, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (translator: Anne McLean) (Bloomsbury)
Montano’s Malady, by Enrique Vila-Matas (translator: Jonathan Dunne) (New Directions)
Portrait with Keys, by Ivan Vladislavic (Portobello Books)
The Trader, the Owner, the Slave, by James Walvin (Jonathan Cape)

As you may be able to tell from the above list, it’s a bit of an oddity, this one. The process that generated it is pretty quirky, to start with: it’s a biennial award with a 30-month eligibility period; nominations come originally from university staff; the longlist can include a maximum of 15 titles, except that each of the five judges can add one directly, for the total of 20 you see above.

It’s certainly high-minded enough: the website says that “The Warwick Prize for Writing is an international cross-disciplinary award which will be given biennially for an excellent and substantial piece of writing in the English language, in any genre or form, on a theme which will change with every award”, and declares with teleological certainty that “The winning submission will represent an intellectual, scientific and/or imaginative advance and be written with an energy and clarity that makes it accessible and attractive to a wide audience”.

The prize also has a substantial fund behind it — the winner gets £50,000 — not to mention a well-qualified judging panel. On some level, it is undoubtedly a good and welcome thing. But the more I look at that list, with its seven fiction titles, twelve non-fiction titles, and one poetry title, the more sceptical I am about the meaningfulness of choosing a winner.

Bear in mind that it’s a list that includes books I have enjoyed, books I want to read, and books I’ve never heard of but which look interesting, which is about all you can ask of a longlist. My reservation is that measuring fiction, non-fiction and poetry against each other always strikes me as a bit pointless when the Whitbread/Costa does it, and it strikes me as a bit pointless here. This is not to say that such comparisons can’t be illuminating: I’m sure that reading Glister, Portrait with Keys and Planet of Slums together with an eye to how they treat the idea of the city could be fascinating, for instance. Assuming that you found all three to be good, however, I’m baffled as to how you could declare one to be better than the others in ways that rise above the simple subjective fact of enjoying one more than another. Put another way, I can’t think of any sensible evaluative way to compare, say, Brasyl and The Rest is Noise: their goals, reference points, interests, and techniques seem to be so divergent as to make such comparison meaningless.

The publicity for the Warwick prize states that it “is set to redefine traditional forms of writing”; I take this to be a reference to the fact that there are obviously books which blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction, and that it makes more sense — is more honest? — to treat types of writing as a continuum rather than a series of categories. This is true as far as it goes, but the problem is that, as with Larus Gulls, the existence of border cases doesn’t mean that distinct, incompatible categories don’t exist.

Perhaps the stated theme for this iteration of the award — “complexity“, although to be honest I’m pretty sure I could argue for just about anything under that definition of the term — is intended to help. But certainly for the ones I’ve sampled, the most useful answer to the question, “how do these books tackle or embody complexity?” is “very differently”; better and worse don’t really come into it. But it’s a prize, so better and worse have to come into it, and there has to be a winner. Part of me thinks that to be truly radical, they should forego picking a winner entirely, and just divide up the prize money between the works they’ve considered worthy of a longlisting.

BSFA News: Awards and Party

Or, in chronological order, Tony Keen has news about a party:

On Wednesday 26th November 2008, from around 7pm

in

The Melton Mowbray (18, Holborn, London, ec1n 2le)

BSFA 50th anniversary party

Including the announcement of the winner of the BSFA Short Story competition

ALL WELCOME

(No entry fee or tickets. Non-members welcome. There will be a raffle.)

(Note one-time only change of venue.)

And Donna Scott wants nominations for the awards:

BSFA Awards 2008 – Nominations

The rules
You may nominate a work if YOU:
— Are a member of the BSFA
— Send or give your nominations to the Awards Administrator to arrive by January 16th 2009.

Best Novel
The Best Novel award is open to any novel-length work of science fiction or fantasy that has been published in the UK for the first time in 2008. (Serialised novels are eligible, provided that the publication date of the concluding part is in 2008). If a novel has been previously published elsewhere, but it hasn’t been published in the UK until 2008, it is eligible.

Best Short Fiction
The Best Short Fiction award is open to any shorter work of science fiction or fantasy, up to and including novellas, first published in 2008 (in a magazine, in a book, or online). This includes books and magazines published outside the UK.

Best Artwork
The Best Artwork award is open to any single science fictional or fantastic image that first appeared in 2008. Again, provided the artwork hasn’t been published before 2008 it doesn’t matter where it appears.

Best Non-Fiction
The Best Non-Fiction award is open to any written work about science fiction and/or fantasy which appeared in its current form in 2008, in print or online. Whole collections comprised of work that has been published elsewhere previous to 2008 are ineligible.

Notes
Subject to these other rules, you may nominate as many pieces as you like in any category, but you may only submit one nomination for any particular piece.

The shortlists for these four awards will be comprised from the five works in each category that receive the most individual nominations by the deadline. Works published by the BSFA, or in association with the BSFA, are ineligible for a BSFA award. The deadline for me to receive nominations will be midnight, Friday January 16th 2009.

Your nominations can reach me in several ways. Perhaps the easiest is by email – I can be reached at awards@bsfa.co.uk. It would be helpful if you can write the award category, author or artist, title, and the source (i.e. the publisher or magazine). There are columns for this information on the form that should have gone out with this mailing for those who would prefer to use snail mail. All nominations must be received in writing, and must include your name to be accepted.

As Tom Shippey Sees Us

In the TLS, reviewing Anathem. It is not, in my view, a particularly good review; in the first paragraph, he seems to imply that Cryptonomicon is Stephenson’s fourth novel, and refers to the Baroque Cycle as the “Baroque Trilogy”; in the second he asserts that Anathem starts out looking like “high fantasy”, which really isn’t the description I’d choose; and he gives away what’s really going on in the book (a revelation withheld until about two-thirds of the way through which, though it’s not an easy call, I’d say puts it beyond the bounds of discussion in a first-look review) without, in my view, adding any striking insight. It almost seems as though the review is an excuse for him to say this:

One of the great things about (much) science fiction is that its authors really mean it. They do think, for instance, that the human species is doomed to exhaustion and dieback if it does not get itself into space, and soon, while we have the technology and the resources, a window of opportunity shuttered by NASA’s inept bureaucracy. They really do believe that humans could be educated to their full potential and far beyond the levels reached by the tick-the-box grading systems of modern colleges, if we exploited available computer- and nano-technology. To them (some of them) mathematics is not just fiddling with abstractions but a guide to ultimate reality. Some of them think we need never die. In every case, though, there is strong awareness of the obstacles in the way of converting possibility to hard fact, some of them theoretical or technological, but even more of them social, financial, attitudinal.

It’s nice that Shippey likes advocacy-based sf, but it would be even nicer if he realised it’s only one of the strings to sf’s bow. I mean, at the moment it looks like he thinks the many sf writers who don’t believe these things simply write bad sf.

Links Shake the World

I’m in Glasgow for most of this week, for work-related reasons, so posting is likely to be light; but I can at least catch up on my linking.

EDIT: I knew I’d forget something. Can anyone work out, based on these reviews, whether 2666 is a work of the fantastic?

Third Annual Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass

Location: University of Liverpool
Dates: June 10th, 11th and 12th, 2009

Class Leaders: Joan Gordon, Adam Roberts, Paul Kincaid.

The Science Fiction Masterclass is held in conjunction with the University of Liverpool. The aim of the Masterclass is to provide those who have a serious interest in sf criticism with the opportunity to exchange ideas with leading figures in the field, and also to use the SFF Collection.

The Masterclass will take place from June 10-12th at the University of Liverpool. Each full day of the Masterclass will consist of morning and evening classes, with afternoons free to prepare. Class leaders for 2009 will be Joan Gordon, Adam Roberts, and Paul Kincaid.

Applicants should write to Liz Batty at sff.masterclass@googlemail.com

Applicants must provide a short CV of either: academic credentials, essay/book publications, reviews and writing sample (this may be from a blog); all of these will be valued equally as we are looking for a mixture of experiences and approaches. A range of hotel recommendations will be forwarded to those accepted.

Applications will be assessed by an Applications Committee consisting of Peter Wright, Joan Haran, and Farah Mendlesohn.

Completed applications must be received by 31st January 2009.

Feel free to forward this advert to anyone you think might like the masterclass. Niall’s summary of last year’s event is here.

Story Notes 1

I’ve not been reading that much short fiction this year but, with an eye to being a half-way informed voted by the time Hugo nominations roll around, I’ve started to play catch-up. I’m going to try to post brief notes on what I’ve been reading every other week or so; and I’m going to dot around as the mood takes me, so don’t expect reviews of complete issues or anthologies.

“Fellow Traveller” by Hari Kunzru
“Collecting” by Zhu Wen
“A Matter of Timing” by Bernadine Evaristo
(The Guardian, August-October)

The three entries so far in the Guardian’s “China Reflected” relay of stories, which alternates contributions by Western and Chinese writers, riffing off each others’ ideas and themes. Kunzru’s “Fellow Traveller”, probably the best of the three, is a gently comic piece in which a Western traveller finds himself a guest at a hotel on the summit of “Queer Stone Mountain” without quite remembering how or why he got there. By day he goes for aimless walks along misty paths, takes photographs of what he sees, and finds himself harassed by talking pandas who object to his choice of subjects:

“Many things to take pictures in China. Bridge over Yellow River. New Beijing Stadium. Development in autonomous regions. Three Gorges Damn.”

“It’s just a house.”

“House never just house, when photo taken by imperialist lackey.”

The hotel bartender is contemptuous: they’re throwbacks, she says, wishing it was the Cultural Revolution all over again. Gradually the narrator acclimates to his situation, without ever full understanding it. Zhu Wen’s short essay picks up on the idea of pandas as a Chinese national treasure (“Serve Chinese people by harness power of childlike feature, soft two-colour fur and pretending we about to have sex,” they say in Kunzru’s story. “We play major role in cold war”), and describes differing attitudes to collecting and cultural preservation in Britain and China, among other things reframing the tale of the communist party’s use of last emperor of China, Aisin Gioro Puyi, as a form of collecting.

Bernadine Evaristo’s story in turn picks up on the idea of individuals as cultural treasures, and satirically imagines a museum in a near-ish future China which presents, among other things, an “Exhibition of Britain”. Features include his former Royal Highness, King Charles III (“forced to wear, at all times, a heavy ermine cape and a rather tacky papier-mache-crown”), an ex-Beefeater held up as a “typical, everyday Englishman”, as well as more traditional treasures such as the Domesday Book, the statue of Eros from Piccadilly Circus, and a reconstructed Stonehenge. So the targets never really move beyond the obvious, but the story doesn’t outstay its welcome, and the pointed final image offers a welcome counterbalancing seriousness.

“[a ghost samba]” by Ian McDonald (Postscripts 15).
Not, so far as I noticed, directly connected to Brasyl, but set in the same country and making use of the same basic sfnal concept, this is as story narrated by a 40-something music obsessive who tracks down the only copy of a young prodigy’s second album (said prodigy having died in a fire) and then obsesses about completing it. At times it reminded me of both Stephen Baxter’s “The Twelfth Album” and Alastair Reynolds’ “Everlasting”. It’s probably a better story than either of them; arguably less sfnally ambitious, but as you’d expect, McDonald writes extremely well about the sound and sensation of music, and that’s what gives this tale its force.

“Glass” by Daryl Gregory (Technology Review, November/December)
The problem with “Glass” is that it’s too short – not that much longer than one of Nature’s Futures – although whether that problem originates with constraints of the venue or with Gregory I couldn’t tell you. The story is constructed as another neurobiological thought experiment, a la “Second Person, Present Tense” or “Dead Horse Point”, except that this time there’s a literal experiment involved: a trial of a new drug that stimulates mirror neruons. Dr Alycia Liddell is administering the drug to a small group of convicted criminals — sociopaths — with the hypothesis that it will provoke empathy. That she finds herself having to talk one patient out of a violent confrontation turns out to be evidence of a not entirely anticipated kind of success; and although that confrontation is tense and focused, and the story has a vicious final turn, there’s an an inescapable sense that it ends just when it should be getting started.

“An Honest Day’s Work” by Margo Lanagan (The Starry Rift)
I enjoyed this a lot; although there’s a serious story at its heart, I think this is one of Lanagan’s more playful stories (at least compared to the likes of “The Goosle”). It also happens to be the third story I’ve read this year – after Adam Roberts’ Swiftly and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s “Sense and Sensibility” – that riffs on the idea of humaniform life on a different scale. The narrator, a disabled boy, lives in a coastal village whose economy is built around capturing and carving up giant human-like creatures. The story deals with one such event and, even without the obvious resonance of the central image, provides plenty of opportunity for Lanagan to showcase her imaginative reach with characteristic vividness.

“Arkfall” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (F&SF, September)
This is a story with a very interesting background – indeed, the story seems to exist in large part to allow the ecology and culture of the setting, a waterworld with the rather unconvincing name of Ben, which in the process of being terraformed, to be described. But the story itself is flat and predictable. After an accident, three characters – Okaji, one of the waterworld’s inhabitants, her mother, and an uber-obnocious Heinleinian go-getter with the unironic and stunningly hackneyed nickname of “Scrappin’ Jack” – are trapped together in one of the living vessels that contribute to the terraforming process. Okaji, and the culture from which she comes, are everything that Jack is not – in his terms, passive and introverted; though they seem actually to function perfectly well on their own terms, even if their habit of referring to each other in the third person grates after a while – and so, unsurprisingly, the two come into conflict. The simplistic nature of their interactions is intensely frustrating, as is the fact that one of the key events in their journey – they discover an undersea alien city, which admittedly is quite spectacular – apparently requires us to believe that the terraforming project was initiated before a thorough survey of the planet was carried out; and the conclusion is, as I said, is predictable. To nobody’s surprise, Okaji and Jack gradually iron out their differences and bond, their plight being resolved when Jack has a “Bennish” idea and Okaji admits her urge to explore for exploration’s sake. I’ve rather enjoyed other stories by Gilman, particularly her earlier novella “Candle in a Bottle”, so this was a real disappointment.

Welsh Reading Roundup

What I did on my holidays: I read ten books. (And a whole bunch of short fiction, but that’s for a later post.)


And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts
Autism’s False Prophets, Paul Offit
Bad Science, Ben Goldacre

Three pieces of non-fiction, on aspects of medicine ranging further than the science. And the Band Played On is a classic account of the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the US, covering the terrifying bureaucratic and political slowdowns of the government response while more and more men fall ill with mysterious immune diseases. It’s a long book, which feels even longer because the lessons never get learned, and while I was most interested in the science, it was the aspects of gay politics and culture that I learned most about. Autism’s False Prophets and Bad Science cover similar ground, with the former specifically about the bad science surrounding autism and the desperate search for any treatment which leads to the use of often damaging therapies and the current vaccine scare, and Goldacre’s book is a more wide-ranging primer on evidence-based medicine and the problems of media coverage of science. the Offit is a fine book, but more specialised and a little American-centric, while the Goldacre is not only a good layman’s introduction to a useful branch of science, but also extremely funny about a subject which is extremely depressing.


The Case of the Imaginary Detective, Karen Joy Fowler
Dreamers of the Day, Mary Doria Russell

Two mainstream novels of genre interest, both ultimately a little disappointing. The only previous Fowler I read was The Jane Austen Book Club, which failed on both the plot and the meta level, because I hadn’t read any Jane Austen. The Case of the Imaginary Detective (or Wit’s End, for you US-types) works much better. Rima Lanisell goes to stay with her godmother Addison Early, the famous mystery writer, whose works include a fictionalised version of Rima’s father, Bim, and the local isolated cult – or are they fictional? There’s lots of fun to be had with the ideas about fans, fan-created works, how fiction and reality collide (sometimes in Real Person Slash!), but the underlying story is slight, and while Rima is appealing enough, the other characters are pretty thin. I enjoyed it while I was reading it, but it’s pretty disposable.

Dreamers of the Day is only disappointing when compared to Mary Doria Russell’s previous novels, as both The Sparrow and A Thread of Grace were powerful, moving stories, with character deaths which actually made me cry (something which only a handful of books have ever done). Dreamers of the Day gave me the same sense of foreboding, knowing that the story of Agnes Shanklin and her life-changing trip to Cairo during the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference was unlikely to end happily ever after. And it doesn’t, although not in the tragic way of Father Sandoz or Renzo Leoni, but in a gentler way – Agnes escapes the control of her mother only when tragedy befalls her family, and while the trip to Cairo certainly changes her and her life, it seems too little too late. My reservations about the book stem from the coverage of the Cairo Conference, which is not the story that Russell is interested in telling but is one which is more interesting to me, and gets a fairly cursory treatment for an issue as large as drawing up the boundaries of the Middle East as we know it. I’m also not convinced the narration from a land beyond the grave adds that much.


Song of Time, Ian R. MacLeod
The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Robert
The Night Sessions, Ken MacLeod

Four SF novels from 2008 (or early 2009, in the case of the Roberts), and all worthy of your attention. While I like Ian MacLeod’s short fiction, I have previously failed to finish The Light Ages, my only attempt at his novel-length fiction, and now I feel slightly guilty that a book as fine as Song of Time is coming out from a small press and may not get the size of readership it deserves. I largely agree with Niall’s earlier review – I too was guessing at the identity of Adam only to be completely wrong, and the revelation feels like it would be unsatisfying in the hands of a less skilled writer, but works perfectly here. I think it’s time I gave The Light Ages another shot.

The Knife of Never Letting Go is hard to say anything about without giving away the plot, but it’s a fairly standard YA coming-of-age story done very nicely in an interesting setting of colonising the frontier which happens to be another planet, and with some thoughtful gender roles. The protagonist is a little too stupid and irritating at the start, but that does leave a lot of room for character growth, and while the constant interruption of the villains just when we’re about to learn an important plot point starts to grate, it still rushes along quickly and doesn’t seem 500 pages long. The biggest problem is that it is book one of three, and I would like to read book two right now. (It’s also the third book I read last week to feature a cute dog, which does make a nice change from all the cats.)

Yellow Blue Tibia is probably the strangest of the books I read last week, but in a good way. A story of SF writers in the post-war Soviet Union, who wrote a story about aliens which starts to come true, it is narrated by an ironic, alcoholic and elderly Russian writer and reads like one of the more farcical Coen brothers films, although this might be the effect of a recent viewing of Burn After Reading. There’s even a strange love story going on, in between the jokes about Scientology and testicles and the SF plot, and it’s refreshingly different from almost anything else I have read this year.

I liked The Night Sessions a lot when I was reading it, partly because I had been wanting to read some proper SF and this was one of the few books I had with space elevators and robots and AIs and all those skiffy things, but upon reflection I’m not sure it’s as good as I thought it was. The plot is a fairly linear crime story about preventing terrorism in 2037, only it’s a future where the result of the “Faith Wars” started by America is that religion is driven out of public life. It’s an intriguing premise that doesn’t quite go into enough depth, especially when the action is mostly set in future Scotland and I want to hear about all the rest of the world, and the characters aren’t that deep either. It’s good, but it feels a bit MacLeod by the numbers.