Miscellany – August 2008 Bonus Issue

Yes, I have finished four of my ten globalization books. I've also managed to read quite a few others!

1. Alexander McCall Smith's The Careful Use of Compliments is the fourth installment in the ongoing and philosophically problematic story of Isabel Dalhousie, professional philosopher, doting aunt, and now single mother. It is all a tangle, but not complicated except for the social implications and the philosophical musings. It gets more entertaining when perfect but previously unseen paintings by a long-dead artist begin to surface...

2. Kage Baker's The Sons of Heaven somehow manages to tie up all the major threads and loose strands in her sequence about the Company, that fabled time-travelling corporation which seems to know everything and be everything. How do immortals fight eternals? And what kind of God is running the whole show? Some people might consider such questions blasphemous, but I'm sure Isabel Dalhousie (and Kage Baker) would not.

3. I read through Charles Stross's Halting State without coming to a halt. Like Gibson's Spook Country and others, it is about the near future and the consequences of having an omnipresent Internet. Unlike the Gibson however, Halting State is a deftly-woven tale about money, gaming, technology, people, espionage, and the fate of the world. Well, it superficially resembles the Gibson in themes and tropes, but trust me when I say it's a lot better. And it will make you think of MMORPGs in a very different way.

4. Locke Lamora is back! Scott Lynch's second novel, Red Seas Under Red Skies, might have a pretty unwieldy title, but the nearly 800 pages went by altogether too quickly as Locke and his friend Jean work their way backwards and forwards through people as corrupt and clever as they, for the ultimate prize. But hang on, everyone has a different idea of what that is, and how it might be attained. Lynch is a lot like Matthew Hughes and Jack Vance, but he remains his own person, and I think he is much better at evoking humanity and true humour than the other two.

5. Matthew Hughes's Majestrum is a gem of its own. Somewhere between Zelazny and Vance in the fantasy spectrum, Hughes has managed to create Henghist Hapthorn, world-travelling discriminator of a distant future millennium. Hapthorn is very much the Vancean hero, sometimes at a loss but mostly sharp, clever and sarcastic. He is also a Zelaznian hero in the sense of possessing a unique take on a change that will soon overtake the world, as well as being divided within himself, almost literally. For Henghist Hapthorn is actually two people in one body, a man of science and a man of magic – and the two distinct persons are not very happy.

6. David Lynn Golemon is back again! The master of the cheapish sensational thriller ripoff has written Legend, more or less a sequel to Event, which I reviewed here. I went back to look at Event for comparison's sake. I think that St Martin's Press should shoot their text editor; the new potboiler has a lot of grammatical errors of the 'agreement' kind, which a good text editor would have corrected as a matter of course. Story has cryptozoology, lost treasure, ancient history – all the stuff which Matthew Reilly and James Rollins do so well, and which the team of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child excels at. So why read this at all? Simple: spotting errors of fact and grammar has never been so entertaining!

Note: I've wondered for a while if 'Golemon' is itself a typo for 'Goldman'. Or perhaps it is a command word for a humanoid construct: 'Golem, on!' Then again, maybe it's an adequate descriptor: 'Go lemon.'

7. Robert Sawyer's Rollback is yet another fine balance of SF and human-interest from the Canadian excellence-mill. Sawyer is prolific and yet he is able to turn out a range of very different characters whose pains are easily empathised with. This time round, he gives us the story of Sarah and Don Halifax. She's the one who first makes contact with an alien race. He's the one who gets a successful rejuvenation while hers (offered by a wealthy magnate) fails. She's in her eighties, he's now physically 25. The whole sad story becomes a happy one. The aliens? Well, something interesting happens there too.

8. While delving in the depths of a second-hand bookshop, I was able to retrieve three books by Anthony Price. For those of you who don't know who Price is, here's a summary. He is certainly one of the five or six finest espionage/thriller writers I've read, a specialist in how the nasty dark corners of history can ambush us in the present. I got The Alamut Ambush, in which the Israelis and Egyptians play a bluff/double-bluff game forced upon them possibly by the British in the worst of ways; The '44 Vintage, in which a very valuable... unknown item is about to be sneaked out of Nazi-occupied France as the Germans retreat towards Berlin; and A Prospect of Vengeance, in which a trap involving a long-dead intelligence officer wakes up and bites a lot of people. At the centre of each mess is Dr David Audley, rugby-playing Cambridge historian and reluctant intelligence man. He isn't the protagonist all the time, but he can always be relied upon to act the antagonist to whichever poor sod is in focus.

Well, it was a great August! Back to my books on globalization then...