Miscellany – November 2007

One would have thought that with a fractured toe and the influenza, one would have more time for reading. Sadly, no. More time for sleeping, perhaps – and as the green-eyed one says, whining.

1. Paul Malmont's The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a singular work of pulp fiction which also happens to be a New York novel and a novel about authors, dreams, and modern China. Five thumbs up! (Oops, only have two; sorry!) In it you will encounter H P Lovecraft, Mao Zedong, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and... yes, you've guessed it! The Death Cloud!

2. Robin Jarvis's Deathscent is about alternate universes. No. Well, Elizabethan England? No. Vampiric aliens! No! Strange essences and steampunk... No. Well, no. And yet, yes. It is about lethal fighting styles, automata, artificial intelligence, humour(s), assassinations, alarums and excursions! Yes yes, many thumbs up!

3. Julian May's Sorcerer's Moon is the concluding part of The Boreal Moon Tale. Almost high fantasy, it is probably a better account of sorcerous power than Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is marvellous to read but rather silly in spots. The price of power is pain, as always, but why? And how? Read Conqueror's Moon and Ironcrown Moon first, though.

4. T A Pratt's Blood Engines is a humdinger of a novel. It's like Lukyanenko but having all three parts of a trilogy crammed into one tightly-woven book. It is realistic, political, gritty – as far as a modern-magick type novel can be anyway. Good job, interesting magical theories, and many fine and entertaining details. The protagonist is a wonderful lady too. Heh.

5. Annie Murphy Paul's The Cult of Personality Testing is an amusing read. While totally written with serious intent, it spends too much well-written prose describing its subject matter. It is a history of personality tests, and the oddballs who invented them, and why they're nonsense. Essentially, the point is the same as Gould makes in The Mismeasure of Man: if you reify the complex and intricate, you lose information and create garbage in the process. The statistics provided are entertaining too, especially the parts about which tests are (mis)used for what purposes and why people still use them.

6. Jon Courtenay Grimwood's End Of The World Blues did not disappoint. A sentient castle, the Japanese underworld with some curious gaijin heroes, a heroine who acts like a cosplay reject and slices holes in reality – these are all the familiar Grimwood tropes dressed up. Essentially, he has confused heroes who don't know what they're doing there (which is fine, because we don't know either), dropped into situations which they know nothing of (but which we can guess at), leading to an incredible denouément of some sort. It hasn't failed yet.

7. Kage Baker's The Machine's Child is the latest installment of her Dr Zeus sequence. We learn more about time travellers, clones, peculiar radiation, other kinds of humanity, and nifty technology than is healthy for us. But it is fun anyway, and I don't mind reading a few more as long as she keeps it coming like this.

Actually, the reading has been good. It has taken my mind away from the niggling pains of this world.