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.