Miscellany — Christmastide 2010

This, in a sense, is a short supplementary note to my reading endeavours this December. It doesn't cover the whole range. Instead, for once I am only going to showcase a narrow segment of reading because these books seem to work well together.

Over the last few months, I've been playing the wondrous online adventure Echo Bazaar. It's about a London that never was, except in the most fevered dreams of its creators.

Recently, I have also come across some books on tangentially-related themes. Here they are.

1. S M Peters has produced two very different but mostly wondrous novels. Whitechapel Gods feels a bit like Gaiman's Neverwhere and yet is full of more mechanical technology. It is hard to describe why Gods works, but it works exceptionally well in conjunction with the Bazaar. The other novel is Ghost Ocean, which reminds me a lot of American Gods.

2. Jay Lake has produced two related but also wondrous novels. These are Mainspring and Escapement, with more to come. The major premise of these ostensibly Victorian-era novels is that the world is indeed an object rotating around the sun on massive brass tracks, with the universe run by an absent clockmaker. Or is it?

Well, that was my holiday reading. It was all great fun.

Miscellany — October/November 2010

Yes, I have been neglectful of this blog. I have been struggling with paperwork, although that is not a very good excuse. After all, paper is one of the major reasons why there is such a blog in the first place.

I have managed to clear a lot of my 'slush pile' of unread books over the last two months, so this is a bigger post than usual. Here are the 'victims', in chronological order. Note that I've become a bit more explicit in terms of recommendations.

1. Daniel Abraham's The Long Price finally came out in two omnibus volumes of two books each from Orbit. His world is an interesting one; philosopher-poets bind concept beings called andat through the use of explicit definition. It is an exercise of Description Theory which brings magical power to those who succeed and a horrible death to those who botch the process. But what happens over these four well-paced, intriguing, and powerful books is an exploration of what it means to think, to be alive, to have meaning. I recommend this sequence for any reader who wants something to think about and doesn't mind it being well-written fiction at the same time.

2. Ooi Kee Beng's In Lieu of Ideology: An Intellectual Biography of Goh Keng Swee is a solid performance in terms of extracting a man's nature from his expressed thoughts. Since Ooi confines himself to a highly structured discourse with little speculation or extrapolation, his conclusions are interesting but seem rather stifled. I'd recommend this book for people interested in the philosophical basis of Singaporean single-party politics.

3. I didn't much enjoy Meltdown, Ben Elton's latest satire. In a sense, it is a modern comedy of manners, one which reminded me of the Instant Sunshine song, Nouveau Poor. Man gets rich and screws it up by overleveraging his wealth in the current financial environment. Entertaining, no doubt. Savagely witty, yes. But it didn't appeal to me because of lack of empathy; I can't remember rooting for any of the characters in the story at all.

4. Lee Child's 61 Hours was the usual stuff. He is always entertaining. You could make any of his books into a movie blockbuster. This one has terrorists in it, and a mindboggling drug conspiracy. That's all you need to know if you already know Jack Reacher. Highly recommended for the thriller crowd.

5. Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon are known for their modern urban horror and other such writings. Together, one might have hoped they would transcend their individual flaws. With The Chamber of Ten, they have failed spectacularly. The undead of Venice are extremely gory and yet unconvincing. The story flails around with amazing ideas that seem to come from nowhere, like a cheap synthetic version of a single chapter from Tim Powers's The Stress of Her Regard.

6. Just Another Judgement Day is Simon Green's 9th book in his Nightside sequence featuring John Taylor, the private investigator who is feared by most supernatural beings. This time, apocalypse beckons (again), courtesy of God's own enforcer, and JT has to stop him. As usual, Green produces a huge fantastic cast of over-the-top characters, a cracking plot, and a dramatic resolution. Pure entertainment. I like short books with punch. This is one. Green is fun.

7. He's also started a new series with Ghost of a Chance. The problem is that after a while, all his writing looks like the same stuff permutated sideways, just as Zelazny's Amber series did. This one is about agents who investigate supernatural events. It's urban horror comedy. Disturbingly, it contains ties to a few of his other series as well, which is happening more often in his books.

8. Matthew Reilly's The Five Greatest Warriors is the work of a thriller writer who unlike Greg Rucka, Lee Child, G M Ford or John Maxim, has not continued to improve or change. Like Tom Clancy, he has deteriorated with time, but more quickly. Since it is the third installment of the series that started with Seven Ancient Wonders, I am braced for more pain. I actually thought he would get better, you know.

9. Cory Doctorow has been writing quirky and entertaining novels for a long time. They are hard to further classify within the 'speculative fiction' genre. I've just read his Makers which is about what people do with machines that can make anything and Somebody Comes To Town, Somebody Leaves Town which seems to be some sort of urban-legend/fairy tale hybrid with many disturbing elements. Both are hilarious and thought-provoking.

10. She-Lover of Death is the 8th Erast Fandorin novel by Boris Akunin. As always, it is quick read with a twisty plot and memorable characters. Akunin deliberately set out to use a different style and genre variation in each of his Fandorin books. This one is about a suicide club with a deadly secret, which might seem a bit obvious. With Akunin's books, the obvious is not always so obvious. Highly recommended (as a series) for readers of period detective novels.

11. Wired For God? is Charles Foster's interesting analysis of the philosophical and biological reasons why humans have God-concepts. There's something to like or dislike here for everyone. I guess there is a place for such writing. It feels a bit light-weight, though.

12. Greg Rucka's latest Atticus Kodiak novel, Walking Dead, follows the usual Rucka pattern of digging up the seamy underside of humanity and making us learn more than we would otherwise have wanted to know. This time it's about human slavery and the protagonist's quest to save a young girl from an organisation that will never let go without a fight. It's gritty and realistic, down to our eventual realisation that they won't let him go either.

13. The Edge of the World is Kevin J Anderson's latest contribution to a genre whose greatest exponent is Guy Gavriel Kay. He has created a world a lot like ours in terms of general geography, history and culture. Then he's twisted it a bit; for example, the city at the centre of his rather Mediterranean world is called Ishalem. But it's a cracking read, to see how people deliberately make trouble for people even when most of them want peace. It's very human, flows smoothly, a good read — but it's not a must-buy.

14. David Golemon is at it again. Unlike Matthew Reilly, however, Golemon has improved a lot since his last three novels. The fourth in the series, Leviathan, is actually pretty good. It isn't beautiful, but it is far better than the others. Put together characters like the Count of Monte Cristo and Captain Nemo, together with assorted historical figures, and you have a pretty good conspiracy technothriller (or whatever).

There are a handful more which I would normally include, but I'll save them for the next post, due in mid-December. Thanks for reading, and I hope it's been helpful.

Miscellany — September 2010

As I writhe in the torrid throes of my thesis, I can take consolation only in the fact that I have done a lot of interesting reading. Since I last posted, here's a quick rundown (in more ways than one):

1. Management of Success: Singapore Revisited, edited by Terence Chong, is a quirky fat book in which many people say obliquely interesting things about the island city-state nation entity which so many love to hate or hate to love. And it is fun, like eating corn chips till you feel bloated is fun.

2. The big anthology, Stories edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio, is a delight to read. The problem with a title like that is that you would expect nothing but the very best; this means you become more critical than the stories deserve. They are mostly very good. But I wouldn't buy a second copy.

3. On the other hand, Frank Beddor's Arch Enemy, the final part of his Looking-Glass Wars trilogy, is not a bad conclusion because I had much lower expectations. I thought the whole thing would fall apart, being a retelling of the Alice in Wonderland thing. But it hung together and finished nicely. I wouldn't go through it again either, though.

4. The one outstanding book of my last few weeks, however, was Adam Roberts's Yellow Blue Tibia. It is not quite an alternate-history novel; rather, it is something odd and unusual all to itself. It purports to tell a story of Soviet Russia and events hiding out of sight behind the Cold War. It is not the supernatural tale that is Tim Powers's masterpiece, Declare. But it has UFOs in it!

5. Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock is a wholly different kettle of fish. It is a post-apocalypse American novel which is a nice novel, but that is all it is. Young rustic hero, tragic hero, good life, bad end, and some odd undertones which you can discover for yourself.

6. James D MacDonald's The Apocalypse Door is a good one-off adventure tale. Think noir detective and creepy plot to destroy the world through the use of extra-dimensional monsters. Well, sort of.

7. God's Demon, by Wayne Barlow, was another highlight. Barlow is an illustrator with a rather potent imagination. He's brought this to bear on the problem of what would happen in Hell if a demon lord should repent and seek to return to Heaven. There are many interesting ideas here, although it's not a particular beautiful novel.

8. David Hewson's The Blue Demon has nothing to do with hell or demonic entities; rather, it is an intense look at the left over and very dangerous remains of the Cold War in Italy. Everyone comes off looking bad, dead, or very annoyed. If you want a really good spy thriller with murders and assassinations, as well as political secrets and uncomfortable people, this is it. Oh yes, it's a Nic Costa novel too.

9. The Equivoque Principle and The Eleventh Plague by Darren Craske are Victorian conspiracy adventure novels of the gaslight/steampunk affiliation. They are entertainments, pure and simple. Not the best, but enough for a slow evening. An interesting hero, though. More than meets the eye.

10. The quirkiest book I've read recently is Tim Davys's Amberville: A Mystery. It is about a city of stuffed toys, and what happens when they start getting killed. You have to read it to believe it. This isn't Toy Story or Who Killed Roger Rabbit? This is more sinister than either one.

11. I've also managed to complete Peter Hamilton's The Dreaming Void. Don't get me wrong; I love space opera and I think Peter Hamilton's thick tomes (remember The Neutronium Alchemist et al.?) are excellent reads. But they take way too much effort. Nobody else takes that many pages to spin grandiose plots. That said, his Void trilogy looks good all round, although it might be better for you to spend your time reading a combination of David Brin, Alastair Reynolds, and Iain M Banks.

And that's more or less it for now.

Vendetta

What really irritates me about Steve Berry and James Rollins is their frequent use of 'may' instead of 'might' in reported speech. As in, "He thought that he may go mad."

Don't they have any half-decent editors left these days? 'May' and 'might' are often interchangeable, except in a handful of cases — one of which is where 'might' acts to indicate something reported as a past event.

That is why Steve Berry's latest, The Paris Vendetta, gets a special place in Purgatory from me. It is a pretty fun read, a sort of mindless Dan Brownish romp through Paris and a few other points of light, with billions of dollars in treasure and a fair amount of world peace at stake. But I encountered the may/might problem at least a dozen times.

Argh! And I'm quite sure these are not the only offenders. If I had them in my angry little fists, I might kill them both. Might, not may. [See also: past subjunctive mood, modal auxiliary.]

Miscellany — August 2010

If I thought June had been difficult, July was worse. The floods returned a couple of times, the family was many kinds of 'interesting', and I was running around a lot. Yet, even in the darkness and confusion, there are points of light and hope. Well, mostly.

1. George Mann's The Affinity Bridge is the first of a steampunk sequence which has a rather gruesome take on artificial intelligence and how it relates to natural intelligence. It's an action-packed pseudo-Victorian mish-mash with fairly interesting characters and offers some promise for the later books in the series.

2. Mark Tiedemann has been passing off Mirage as something set in Asimov's universe. It has positronic robots and suchlike. And even Three Laws of Robotics. But I found it an awful read. It might as well have been set in Tiedemann's universe. (Ha, ha, ha!)

3. The ever-productive and awesomely prolific Bernard Cornwell has produced the fifth of his books about the beginnings of England. In The Burning Land, Cornwell's protagonist Uhtred finds himself having to save Alfred's idea of England somewhat against his will. As always, meticulously researched and full of colour and entertainment.

4. I really enjoyed Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, about an obsessive quest for the real Dracula. Her second novel, The Swan Thieves is just as obsessive, but it doesn't quite compete; in fact, I found it rather painful to read. I suspect this was not because it is a worse novel, but because it deals with French Impressionists and not historical vampires. Ah well.

5. On the other hand, Charles Stross's The Fuller Memorandum is not written half as beautifully and yet seemed to me infinitely more enjoyable. This is the third book in the Laundry chronicles, about a secret occult intelligence service operating out of London. The other two were The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. This time, the mayhem begins with a mysteriously haunted plane that needs exorcism and ends with humanity on the brink of cosmic horror.

6. I found Transition, Iain Banks's latest non-series SF novel, a difficult but well-crafted read. It complemented Stross's book well, being the story of shadowy goings-on and parallel universes. It reminded me a little of Kage Baker's Company series. What I really enjoyed, however, was the way this novel seemed so much like the earliest Banks novels — The Bridge and Walking On Glass, for example, in tone and colour.

7. Stephen Baxter's Ark was a good return to proper SF by an author I've sometimes found boring, odd, or just unhealthy to read. Ark is the sequel to Flood, in which a Ballardian event leads to the end of the world as we know it and at least three different humanity-preserving missions are launched. This novel is mainly about one of them, but the other two (three?) get woven in as well.

8. A Grey Moon Over China starts with a world suffering from energy wars. Thomas Day's novel quickly introduces a McGuffin in the form of a quantum battery, a hyper-efficient energy source. The world realizes that there's only one way out: to use the batteries to send ships into space, led by drone intelligences who will set up a gateway at a distant star. Easier said than done. The complications kick humanity in the butt early, and leave some unspoken existential problems behind. Excellent. Goes well with Ark.

9. I finished July with two Alastair Reynolds novels, Pushing Ice and House of Suns. He's a true master of space opera, from the gritty chase that the asteroid miners of Pushing Ice find themselves in, leading to encounters with aliens and awful decisions to be made; to the huge-scale posthuman drama of House of Suns, in which enormous betrayal is the order of the day. I found both to be excellent reads in which strong characters elicited quite a bit of my sympathy and yet made me feel a little ambivalent towards them.

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That's it for this month. I can't help but note that I felt a little depressed after reading all those books; most of them dealt with humanity's rather dire possible futures, based on well-known flaws of human nature. If we can't defeat our worse natures, we will get the future we deserve, I suppose.

Miscellany — July 2010

June has not been a good month for reading; it has been full of alarums and excursions. Yet somehow I have managed to clear a lot of backlog and steer my way to a less cluttered set of 'local' shelves — that is, the shelves I stock around my desk and bedside.

1. Haruki Murakami's Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is one of his few collections of short stories. He's always written weird, skewed, very personal stories about human events and human lives. This one is good without exception.

2. The Yiddish Policemen's Union is Michael Chabon at his inventive best. With the same sad, angry and utterly melancholic tone as The Final Solution, this one is all about an alternate universe in which the Jews never got their homeland in Palestine, but were moved to Alaska instead. It begins with the death of a man calling himself Emanuel Lasker, after the late world chess champion. And it ends with global disaster. Excellent. The best of my June books.

3. Tom Holt, on the other hand, is adept at serious comedy. His May Contain Traces of Magic is another of his more recent novels about commercial and professional life in London. It answers a lot of questions about where magical items come from and why things work out the way they do. If you like a more mundane sort of fantastic comedy, this is good for an evening's entertainment.

4. Giles Milton recently decided to take up fiction. His According to Arnold is as obsessed with mushrooms as his previous Edward Trencom's Nose is obsessed with cheese. Mushrooms become the centre of a huge conspiracy, which later requires drastic resolution. It's comedy too. Sort of.

5. Joel Spring's Globalization of Education: An Introduction is a good summary of recent research on this topic. However, it is rather too facile a read — not all of it is solid, and it contains several obvious and several not-so-obvious untruths. It's a pity because what is valuable is very good indeed.

6. From Jonathan Lethem, Karl Rusnak and Farel Dalrymple came a remake of Omega the Unknown, Marvel's 1970s peculiar hero who didn't seem quite human and later found out he wasn't. It is an excellent remake, a sort of post-modern take on the theme that includes all the old icons and gives them new meaning.

7. Brantley L Bryant exposes his complicity in Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog: Medieval Studies And New Media. Very few suspected him of being the modern voice of the mediaeval story-teller. Now the truth can be told. Re-reading the blog posts and the commentary on them is an uneven experience, but fun if you like that sort of thing.

8. Lavie Tidhar's The Bookman is another odd novel from Angry Robot Publishers. It is about steampunk and truth and lies and adventure and the secret underpinnings of the world. Is it about reality at all? Is this an adult novel or one for the young? I don't know. I would hesitate to call it good. But it is certainly a wonderful adventure.

9. James Rollins's The Doomsday Key follows the old Rollins formula of ancient conspiracies with modern consequences. I read these the way I watch action movies — for the pace and adrenaline. It's OK otherwise. Not particularly convincing.

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I have to add that if you're wondering how come most of what I read is rated well, it's because I get to choose what I read. When I pick a lemon, it's not so frequently because I normally can detect lemons early. :)

Miscellany — June 2010 (with Gnomish special)

The last few weeks have been a frenzy of mad reorganization as my dissertation slouches towards Bedlam to be born. However, some reading was done. And a lot was undone too...

Very shortly after my previous post, the Gnome died. The Gnome was a hero of ancient Atlantis, which is my mythic reconstruction of modern Singapore. It just so happens that a few of us were busy writing two commemorative volumes about his life when he gave up the ghost. This resulted in two things: a) a sudden need to spend a lot of time reading and re-reading the source material; b) a greater urgency with regard to finishing the writing. There is a lot of material on the Gnome, so it was with a sense of calamity-struck incredulity and amusement that I saw people posting all kinds of odd things about the man.

Here, then, is a list of stuff that I've read, beginning with the stuff I was forced into reading and re-reading.

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On the Gnome, being a short list of readings on a great man:

Most of us begin with his four key works, as far as Atlantis is concerned. These are

• his great trilogy of collected speeches, talks, lectures, and rants — The Economics of Modernization (1972), The Practice of Economic Growth (1977), and Wealth of East Asian Nations (1995); and
  
• the fulcrum by which he moved Atlantean education, Report on the Ministry of Education (1978) (1979).

Although there are other writings, these probably provide the best window into his intellectual life. There are also books about him and the people he worked with, the Whites and the Greys. The ones that were most useful were

• Goh Keng Swee: A Portrait (2007), by his second daughter-in-law;
  
• Lee's Lieutenants (1999) by Lam Peng Er and Kevin Tan;
  
• A Mandarin and the Making of Public Policy (2006) by Ngiam Tong Dow, edited by Simon Tay; and
  
• Creating the Technology Edge (2002) by Melanie Chew and Bernard Tan.

A lot of incidental material could also be found in books written by and about his peers, the Thunderer, Black Diamond, Golden Mountain and others. The Thunderer and his get, in particular, had a lot to say and said less than they could have. Probably a good thing too. The rest of the list will be found in the bibliography and notes attached to the forthcoming publication. Wait for it. Heh.

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1. I happened to have the dire misfortune of succumbing to sequelimania, in which I bought a copy of Jane Lindskold's Nine Gates, the successor volume to her earlier Thirteen Orphans. It is an indifferently-written tome, in which you will see the reflection of Roger Zelazny's Amber series, but with Mahjong tiles instead of Tarot cards as the inspiration. It is horrible, and you will realise I have not mentioned anything about the plot, because there isn't enough of one even to make a Hollywood B-movie. But I hate leaving a trilogy dangling, so I guess I will still read the third one and pray that she doesn't do an Amber.

2. Boris Akunin's The Coronation is out in paperback, and it is the usual blend of Russian culture, romantic detection, and swashbuckling action. Moscow in 1896, with kidnapping, murder and mayhem. I still feel that all crime and detection enthusiasts who like the feel of the last two centuries should read everything that Akunin (not his real name) has written.

3. Chronologically further away is the Spain of Arturo Perez-Reverte's Captain Alatriste: The Man in the Yellow Doublet, in which the king is apparently murdered and our hero is framed for the crime, and in which a lot of brutality results in a lot of cynicism. I like Perez-Reverte's writing, in the courtly southern European style. I can switch between him and Zafon with no dissonance.

4. The Red Wolf Conspiracy is great fantasy fiction by Robert V S Redick. Politics, naval life, awful monsters and unreliable narrators (and narratives) all come to ghastly, enthralling, amazing life in this work of derring-do. If you like naval drama and political intrigue, this one's good. I will certainly read the sequel, if only because I will now probably read Redick until his first bad book (if ever). I ended up reading this in parallel with the first two books of Glen Cook's Starfishers trilogy, back in print. Excellent.

5. The Rook by Barry Reese is... sigh. It is pulp fiction. Awfully derivative but very enthusiastic. Uses Fu Manchu, Doc Savage, the Spider et al as a backdrop. Early to late 20th century, lots of conspiracies, fantastic technology, Nazis, vampires, zombies, well... everything. But the WORST part was the terrible proofreading. After a couple of pages, I found myself armed with a pencil and marking all the typos. Not good. I kept hoping it would improve, but it never did.

6. On the education front, I finished Diane Ravitch's great recantation of her entire life's work, The Death and Life of the Great American School System. Poor thing. Spent years in academia talking about how American education could be improved and now writes a book on how she was wrong all along. Very brave, though.

7. I also managed to get hold of John Taylor Gatto's Weapons of Mass Instruction, which is subtitled A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. It's a good look at the bad parts (from origins to outcomes) of its subject material. However, Gatto seems a bit less than honest in pursuit of his thesis; the selective sourcing gives it away. Really good try though, and his points remain valid most of the time.

8. Lim Kim San: A Builder of Singapore by Asad-ul Iqbal Latif is an excellent read in a rather underpopulated field. Golden Mountain was one of the Thunderer's key henchmen, but you hardly read about the man who literally raised Atlantis from the slums. And more, which a dedicated or intended Singapore-watcher really should read about.

9. Which brings me to Tom Plate's Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew, in which a veteran journalist beards the Thunderer in his own lair and shares the experience. Very insightful, amusing in parts, and possibly the best look at the Thunderer as a mortal since Michael Barr's piercing look in Lee Kuan Yew: The Beliefs behind the Man (2000).

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That's it for now. I am off to re-read David Brin's Uplift trilogies for the third time. Nostalgia.