Miscellany – October 2007

This month's reading has been fraught with all kinds of odd difficulties. The largest obstacle to reading is work, but it helps that part of my work is reading. And so, without much further ado, here is the All Hallows' Eve Edition.

1. Sergei Lukyaneno's Twilightwatch was fairly worth waiting for, with its extensions to traditional mythology. I've reviewed Nightwatch and Daywatch earlier. It's probably a good idea to read it with the other two in the trilogy; his episodic style might make them seem a little disconnected, but the modern narrative-in-parts, almost epistolary in nature, works well when trying to patch together the fragmented modern world.

2. Kim Stanley Robinson's Sixty Days and Counting ends off his trilogy fairly well. Again, more of the episodic style, very modernist-fragmented, with Buddhism and environmentalism combining in the counterpoint to an ambitious plan to save the world. Nuclear-powered battleships plugged into the PRC power grid, forsooth. Good ideas. Satisfying on a human level.

3. Elizabeth Bear's Blood and Iron and Whiskey and Water are good writing, but not good enough to cure me of a dislike of jumped-up Faerie novels set halfway between Faerie and modern North America. Enough already. The whole idea is crapulent to me, that the invaders from the east (the Irish, English, and what-have-you others) have imposed their mythology so much on the geography that a Faerie invasion would bridgehead itself in Times Square. Urgh. America-centric junk.

4. K J Parker's Evil for Evil finally made it to normal paperback size, part 2 of 3. I would advise everyone to read all of Parker's peculiar bildungsromanen. The characters are always sociopaths at best, psychopaths at worst, humanly believable and horrible flawed in a huge and heroic way. Engineer Ziani Vaatzes is no exception; he is out to destroy what he thinks of as the civilised world as far as I can tell. Thank goodness he doesn't have siblings or we'd be wallowing in three times the death by now (as in one of Parker's earlier trilogies).

The non-fiction has been disappointing. Won't share it this time round.

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Edit: Oh yes, I have to mention the very disappointing Testament by Eric van Lustbader. I have enjoyed van Lustbader's writing since I was a toddler (well, sort of) because it has always been graphic and full of poetic death. I began with his Sunset Warrior trilogy and the very satisfying Beneath An Opal Moon, which some years later reminded me a little of Tim Powers's The Drawing of the Dark. But Testament, a kind of Da Vinci Code knock-off, is turgid, unappealing, unimaginative, and not even full of poetic death. It is pathetic, and hopefully will be van Lustbader's last of the kind.