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Read in October:
WJ Burley -- Wycliffe and the Dunes Mystery (reviewed 24/10/09)
Poul Anderson -- The High Crusade (reviewed 31/10/09)
WJ Burley -- Wycliffe and the School Bullies (reviewed 31/10/09)
Gregory Benford -- Timescape (DNF, reviewed 11/10/09)
Wycliffe Omnibus, containing the following novels:
Wycliffe's Wild Goose Chase
Wycliffe finds a gun discarded on the beach at the bottom of his garden. Soon afterwards, the body to go with it turns up in one of the village businesses. Some digging finds an obvious suspect for murder, but Wycliffe starts to suspect that all is not as it seems, and that he's being sent on a wild goose chase.
Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin
Wycliffe goes to stay with an acquaintance in a remote Cornish village for Christmas, and find himself mixed up in first a missing teenager case, and then the double murder of her parents. Digging into the past finds a lot of family secrets, some of which go back to a previous unsolved case.
Wycliffe and the Cycle of Death
When the current head of a family of booksellers is murdered, the family closes ranks. Then one death appears to lead to another, and Wycliffe is offered a nice convenient scapegoat. But he's not convinced, even if the press are...
(Yes, I've been on a bit of a Wycliffe kick. This is because The Works, a specialist remainder bookshop chain, has been running the books in their 3 for 5 pounds section for the last couple of months, and every 2 or 3 weeks there's a new pair of titles, plus something else I'm happy to try at that price.)
And I started on Galaxy Volume 1, the first part of a two volume anthology put together in 1980 to celebrate the 30th birthday of Galaxy magazine.
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This book follows one of Burley's standard formats, with a flashback prologue showing the reader a motive for a crime, then showing the crime that first brings Wycliffe into the story, and following the process of solving the crime. Here the motive is the vicious bullying of a young teenager on a school trip, and the crime is the separate murders of two young women. At first there appears to be no link between the two murders, but as Wycliffe digs into their past, he starts to find connections. Connections that lead him to a motive, other potential victims, and a race to find the killer. It's not difficult for the reader to work out who the killer is, but the point of the story is to follow along as Wycliffe pieces together the fragments of information that might lead him to the next victim before the killer. It's an entertaining read with some interesting character sketches, although be warned that the prologue could be triggery for bullying victims.
LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK
at Amazon US
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In the year 1345, an alien spacecraft lands in the small English village of Ansby, expecting an easy defeat of the local primitives. Unfortunately for them, the local primitives are preparing to go on Crusade, and their reaction to having one of their number burned where he stands is a disciplined military reaction. That discipline and the aliens' surprise results in the English capturing the ship. Unfortunately for the English, the last alien survivor manages to lock the ship onto an autopilot program that will return it to its base. Unfortunately for the alien empire, that gives the Baron 10 days of travel time to come up with a plan to conquer the garrison on the alien colony planet...
It sounds daft, and it is, but Anderson was a good enough writer to pull it off. Sir Roger may be a mediaeval baron, but he has an open mind, an excellent grasp of tactics, and a sound understanding of practical psychology. That makes him a formidable opponent for an empire that hasn't had to deal with serious opposition for generations. It also makes for a very funny story, particularly when Sir Roger cheerfully lies his way through various negotiations, presenting himself as the representative of a large multi-planet empire.
First published in 1960, this is a short novel by today's standards, but just the right length for the story it tells. It's enormous fun, and well worth a read.
LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK
at Amazon US
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I first read this book about twenty years ago, and remember enjoying it then, even if I found it a slog at times. There was some good exploration of the hard science behind how one might attempt to send a message to the past, along with a look at the problems of irreversible environmental damage. I picked it up earlier this week, and bounced right off it. It's partly that I've got a cold and wasn't terribly receptive anyway, but I think the passage of time has given me disbelief suspension problems. This book was written in 1979, and is set in the then-future 1998 for the section dealing with irretrievable breakdown of both the physical and economic environment. When I read it in the late 80s, that was still an at least plausible, if unlikely, future. Now 1998 is a decade in the past, and while we have problems, they're different problems.
One for the charity box, I think. Twenty years ago I would have given it another try, but here and now I have a To Be Read Mountain of new books, and lots of other books I actively want to re-read, and there are dozens of 1p copies on Amazon if I feel the urge to try it again.
LibraryThing entry
Wikipedia entry
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Just to keep track of what I've read (or not read) so far this month:
WJ Burley -- Wycliffe and the Dunes Mystery
Poul Andersen -- The High Crusade
Wj Burley -- Wycliffe and the School Bullies
Gregory Benford -- Timescape
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This is one of the series of Torchwood audiobooks read by cast members, and the first to be read by Gareth David-Lloyd. This one is only available as an audiobook, not in print. I bought it because I'd heard a sample of David-Lloyd reading an audiobook, and thought he was a good reader. It was well worth the money. The story's the usual competent tie-in work I've found with previous Torchwood books, and David-Lloyd is an excellent audiobook reader.
The story itself is set between series 2 and series 3, with references and foreshadowing that tie it firmly into the series universe for those who've seen the referenced episodes, without excluding those who haven't seen them, or overwhelming the story. The basic plot is standard monster-of-the-week fare for the Torchwood corner of the Whoniverse -- an alien castaway courtesy of the rift, its threat magnified by the meddling of local humans who don't understand what they're playing with. In this case it's alien insect larvae which feed on human emotions, and a vicar who thinks he's found a way to heal people of their sins and guilt. It's competently written, with a good look at love and the complexity of human emotions, but there's nothing particularly noteworthy here.
What does stand out is the characterisation, which is as good as you'd expect from the man who was script editor for the show. One thing which I particularly liked was that it showcases both the Gwen/Rhys and the Jack/Ianto relationships, while still acknowledging the attraction between Jack and Gwen. There are a lot of small details which build on what we've already been shown in the tv series, showing how the characters and their relationships are developing and changing. It's a particular joy to see the playful and affectionate side of both romances.
Gareth David-Lloyd does an excellent job of reading the book. He's a good reader when it comes to the mechanics of reading aloud, well paced and with good tonal colour. He's also very good at portraying the various characters already known to listeners from the tv series, getting most of them spot on in their dialogue. It's usually clear who's speaking, even without dialogue tags -- and you can tell the difference between narrator and Ianto's dialogue. He even mostly gets Jack's American accent right. I hope he's invited to do more of the audiobooks.
At two full-length CDs, it's a lot longer than a standard tv or radio episode, but with it being an audio book you'd expect that for the same basic story. I didn't feel that it was padded or too long. It feels about the same as reading one of the print tie-in books. Minchin makes good use of the format, taking advantage of being able to show interior monologue without crossing too far into telling rather than showing.
I enjoyed this a lot, and happily listened to it again a couple of weeks after the first time through. Definitely worth the attention of Torchwood fans in general, and very much recommended for fans of both Ianto Jones and Gareth David-Lloyd -- both the character and the actor are well served by this title.
Available as both CD and download.
LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK
at Play
at Amazon US
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Well, I was going to get my book log for the month done on time for once, and then I got home on Thursday night and found that the network had crashed. Joy...
Anyway, here's the list of books I read (or in one case listened to) in September. I've reviewed one already, others may or may not follow depending on whether I get time while I can still remember them in enough detail.
James Coltrane -- Talon
1978 technothriller, reviewed 27 September
Peter Anghelides -- Another Life
First of the Torchwood tie-in novels. As with the others I've read, enjoyable tie-in that uses the features of the Torchwood universe to good effect.
Brian Minchin -- The Sin Eaters -- read by Gareth David-LLoyd
Torchwood audiobook, one of the ones published only as an audiobook and not in print. This is the first and so far only one read by GDL, which is why I bought it -- I'd heard a sample of GDL reading Lovecraft and thought he was a good reader. This is a good tie-in story, and GDL reads very well. Recommended if you're a fan of his.
WJ Burley -- Wycliffe and the Pea-Green Boat
One in the long running police procedural series. This is one of the ones where a crime from the past leads to a crime in the present, it's fairly clear to the reader what the main thread is, and the fun is in watching Wycliffe work it out and seeing the side-stories unfold.
I've probably forgotten something, but I'm away from home and don't have the stack to hand to check. There may be additions later.
ETA: The one I'd forgotten was Alan Garner's Red Shift.
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Joe Talon is an anachronism. He's a hippie ex-surfer with a James Bond complex working for the CIA, barely conforming at work and not hiding it. But Talon is very good at his job of checking anomalies in satellite photos. Too good. Talon spots an anomaly where no anomaly was marked for his attention, and starts digging into it. Talon's attention to something nobody was supposed to notice focuses attention on him--the sort of attention that has him running for his life.
Talon's choices are simple--die, disappear for good, or find a way to expose the conspirators within the Company while he's on the run. All three look like good choices to him at various times during the course of the novel, but Talon's final choice is to fight back.
Talon isn't a trained spy, just a highly specialised clerk; but he's bright and desperate and he's stolen some interesting goodies from work over the years. The ensuing chase makes for a thrilling read, with a lot of careful world building going into making the story feel realistic. The book was first published in 1978, so the technology is very dated now, of course; as are some of the social attitudes. But it's still a good read, even today.
LibraryThing entry
Talon at Amazon UK
Talon: A novel of suspense at Amazon US
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1978 printing, so presumably the original and shorter version of this novel, which has apparently been published at two different lengths and under several titles. First published in 1965, and thus dated in odd little ways -- not least being the lack of some 1990s-level consumer technology in a story set in a then near future where we have the technology to send a manned mission to Jupiter.
The story opens with that manned mission's return to earth in dramatic fashion, with an emergency landing right on top of Kennedy Airport in New York, one which wreaks havoc on the airport. Young emergency room doctor Sam Bertolli is part of one of the first ambulance teams on the scene, and is directed to the ship itself. Thus he is the first to encounter the sole survivor -- who dies within a few minutes of a deadly disease brought back from Jupiter.
There follows a medical mystery drama, as the city medical services follow standard quarantine procedures, and the situation escalates. Harrison does an excellent job of showing the hard decisions that need to be made and the human reactions -- the people desperate to protect their beloved animals from a vital culling programme, the people trying to cover their own backs in the political games being played, the conflicting priorities in the battle to prevent the disease from spreading beyond the city. There's a lot of good world-building detail about what the medical teams actually *do* in such a situation, rather than simple hand-waving. Unfortunately the mismatch between extrapolated technology levels and what we really ended up with can break suspension of disbelief for current audiences, in part because Harrison did such a good and careful job with this. But for all that it's dated in places, it's a good read, with a strongly drawn near-future world, some great characters, and a deadly serious task for them to do.
LibraryThing entry
Plague from Space (Sphere science fiction) at Amazon UK
Plague From Space at Amazon US
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Book log, because I'm going to have to read this again at least once before I can even hope to review it. It's nominally YA, with a fantasy feel to it, first published in 1973. It's not an easy read, in either style or subject matter, but I found it very rewarding, if depressing. There's a good description of Red Shift at Wikipedia.
LibraryThing entry (with reviews)
Red Shift (Collins Voyager) at Amazon UK
Red Shift (Collins Voyager) at Amazon US
at IndieBound"
at Powells
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New Writings in SF was an anthology series that ran from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, doing exactly what it said on the tin -- showcasing what the editor considered examples of the best in new authors and new techniques in written science fiction. Volume 10 is from 1966, and as such a fascinating look at what was new and exciting more than forty years ago. It's a slightly surreal experience reading an introduction to "new American author, Thomas M Disch"...
Seven stories in this volumes, plus an introduction by editor John Carnell.
The longest is "The Imagination Trap" by Colin Kapp, and I suspect this one was the reason I bought the book in the first place when I found it in a second-hand shop, because as a teenager I was very fond of Colin Kapp's work. It's a fifty pager about a test flight of a new faster-than-light ship; a test flight that is almost certain suicide, as it's a last ditch attempt to find out why most of the previous test flights didn't come back, and those that did had suffered strange dimensional effects. It's an interesting combination of serious thinking about psychology and about physics. It's also very sixties in feel, not least because it comes over to me as being partly an attempt to describe the time/space distortion and hypersensory experiences reported by LSD users in controlled experiments with the drug which were being carried out at that time.
John Baxter's "Apple" is something that required me to actively operate my disbelief suspenders, because it uses an apple mutated to the size of a hill by the after-effects of nuclear war as a metaphor for... well, something. But it was well worth gagging the bit of my brain that insisted that this is not physically possible. There's a lovely brief exploration of human nature woven through a clever piece of world-building in this short.
G L Lack's "Robot's Dozen" is an exchange of letters between a gentleman who has rented a robot to impersonate him as a burglar deterrent while he is on holiday, and the firm from which he hired it. The outcome is predictable enough, but that's not the point -- the joy is in watching how the story gets there.
Joseph L Green's "Birth of a Butterfly" considers an expedition to find intelligent life, and how easily humans might recognise it once they had found it.
Thomas Disch's "The Affluence of Edwin Lollard" examines the problem of wilful poverty in a society wealthy enough that nobody need be poor. The editor suggest that it's about the end product of the welfare state, but to me it looked much more like the end product of conspicuous consumption.
Brian W Aldiss's "A Taste for Dostoevsky" is another heavily psychological piece, one which didn't really work for me even though I can see objectively that it's good.
John Rankine's "Image of Destruction" is a space opera romp, a short from a series of stories about the character Dag Fletcher. Lots of fun, if rather dated now.
I didn't like everything in this anthology, and some of it looks dated by current standards, but it's a solid collection which lives up to its stated aim.
LibraryThing entry
New Writings in SF 10 at Amazon UK
NEW WRITINGS IN SF 10 at amazon US
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Several books this month. One reason is that I worked out part of why I can read the Cybook on the bus, and applied that to print books -- I glance up for a second during the page-turn flash on the Cybook, and that helps minimise motion sickness. It's not the only thing going on there, but it's enough in combination with sitting over the back axle (thank you to micavity for the tip), that I've been able to read some print books as well. Thus I can grab a print book even if I've forgotten to load some new ebooks.
Oh, and I entered 600 books into LibraryThing this month...
Gerald Durrell: The Stationary Ark
Brief review on LJ, DW and WP
James Blish: Mission to the Heart Stars
Brief review on LJ, DW and WP
Harry Harrison: The men from PIG and ROBOT
Brief review on LJ, DW and WP
James Anderson - The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy
An affectionate and funny spoof of the classic 1930s country house murder mystery, with a great many nods to the masters and mistresses. Rather too many characters and their independent but interlocking intrigues for me to keep track of what was going on, and the characters and their intrigues aren't quite interesting enough for me to not care about that. I'd probably have enjoyed it more if I'd read all of the classic mysteries alluded to. And I'm not convinced that it *is* possible to work it all out without guessing, even if I adored part of the solution to the primary mystery itself. I don't regret buying this, but I'm glad I paid remainder price rather than cover price.
LibraryThing entry
The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy (Burford Family Mysteries 1) at Amazon UK
The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy (Burford Family Mysteries 1) at Amazon US
John Carnell: New Writings in SF 10
Anthology series, with issue with 7 new-in-1966 stories, edited by John Carnell. To review later. [review]
WJ Burley: Wycliffe and the Winsor Blue
One in the long-running police procedural series. To review later. [review]
ETA: knew I'd forgotten one...
Harry Harrison: Plague from Space [review]
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Short YA novel, a sequel to "the Star Dwellers". I found that I could read and enjoy this book without having read the first one, as there's enough backstory worked into it that new readers aren't left floundering. It's set in a relatively near future, not long after mankind has first developed an interstellar drive and made contact with other intelligent species. One of those species is an energy-based lifeform which has been around since the Big Bang, but which is nevertheless culturally compatible with humans. The Angels have sponsored humans for membership in another galactic culture, one that is short-lived by the standards of the Angels, but still remarkably long-lived and stable by human standards. So long-lived that even having the normal probationary membership period cut in half at the Angels' urging means waiting 50,000 years for full membership.
Naturally, some politicians are too impatient to wait. And so begins the mission to the Heart Stars, a journey to the heart of the empire to ask in person for immediate full membership. Along the way, the crew of the diplomatic mission ship see exactly how that peaceful, prosperous stability is achieved.
The book has a reasonable balance of engineering and social commentary. The science behind the faster-than-light drive is pseudo-science, but it's the sort that's extrapolated from real physics and internally consistent, not pure plot-devicium powered. It's a little too overtly preachy, but that's largely a result of it being a YA book written in the mid 60s. I'm not sure I'll keep it any longer, but it's a book I enjoyed enough that I've read it more than once.
LibraryThing entry
Mission to the Heart Stars (A Panther book) on Amazon UK
Mission to the Heart Stars on Amazon US
at Powell's
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As will be obvious from recent posts, I'm busy unpacking the book collection that has been in storage for the last decade. This involves giving serious consideration to whether in fact I want to keep any particular book, or whether I should dispose of it (blasphemy! cries a large chunk of my flist). My views on Simon R Green's output run the full range from into the "dispose of" box without even thinking about it, to "prise from my cold dead hands". Unlike some of the other authors whose books are about to get drastically pruned, this *doesn't* reflect a change in my tastes in the last ten years. The ones that are going are the Deathstalker books, and that's because around ten years ago I got part way through the latest one, and realised that not only did I not feel like finishing it, I never wanted to read another Deathstalker book again. Not even the first one, which I'd really enjoyed a lot.
This may have been the first series in which I hit the "are you ever going to finish this story?" barrier. I will read very, very long series -- I'm still enjoying Discworld. But the long series I will still read essentially consist of new stories in the ongoing history of that universe. Deathstalker turned into the sort of series where the author keeps thinking that one or two more episodes will finish off this story -- and then finds that another million words have somehow sneaked in there, and the end of the arc is still a couple of books away.
I know that this is not necessarily a cynical spinning out of the story over unnecessary numbers of books just to keep the money coming in. Often enough it's simply that the characters *will* not leave the author alone, or a nice simple outline turns out to need three times as many words as expected to deal with all the ramifications that spring up when you start writing the thing. I've watched a couple of friends get caught in that loop; and on a shorter scale, I'm the person who turned a 1500 word short story into a series that currently has around 120 kwords out in the wild and at least another 40k waiting to be written. But there comes a point at which I have to be just as interested as the author is in this soap opera in order to keep reading, and a lot of the time I'm not.
And yet one of the books on the "prise from my cold dead hands" list is also set in the Twilight of the Empire universe. Mistworld is one of the short novels in the same setting which came out before Deathstalker. Not everyone likes this, but I adore it. It's one of the books I actively missed when it was in storage all those years, and the main reason I didn't go out and get another copy was that by then I had a To Be Read pile that was threatening to turn into a mountain.
There's a definite correlation with the length of the book, but that's more a reflection of the length of the story unit. I'll happily read the two Blue Moon doorstops, because even though they tie into the Blue Moon universe and you'll get more out of them by reading the whole sequence in order, you don't *have* to read any more than the one book out of the universe. And the standalone Shadows Fall is going to have to wait until when I have the time and attention to give to a complex doorstop, but it's going on the shelf, not in the box.
I think this is partly that I'm feeling less inclined to read doorstops at all. But it's also partly because Green's work was, in my view, a lot more disciplined in the Blue Moon books.
I've never read any of the Nightside books, and that's largely because I didn't trust them not to turn into the sort of thing that annoyed me about the Deathstalker books. Maybe once I've made some inroads on the TBR mountain, I'll give them a go.
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In the far future, the interstellar law enforcement body is thinly spread and has to use more subtle methods than simply sending in a battleship. Here are two tales of the specialist corps which work undercover, sending in a single man with some very specialised help -- the men of the Porcine Interstellar Guard, and the Robot Obtrusion Battalion Omega Three.
This pair of novelettes were written for children, but are equally entertaining for adults. Each story is a nicely constructed sf mystery, with both genres well integrated. In the first, a pig farmer arrives on a frontier planet with a ghost problem. But the pig farmer isn't a farmer, and his herd includes a collection of very bright mutant pigs with a talent for trouble. In the second, one travelling salesman shouldn't seem much of a threat to a cattle-ranching planet, but the locals are sufficiently paranoid to think otherwise. But not quite paranoid enough to notice just how many robots of all shapes and sizes will fit into that battered old spaceship... Deftly sketched characters, a pair of interesting plots, and often very funny, this is a cheerful short read.
LibraryThing entry
The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. at Amazon UK
The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. at Amazon US
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Nowadays, a good many zoos are seriously involved in conservation work, the last hope for some of the most endangered species on the planet. In the 1970s, that wasn't the case. This book was Durrell's polemic against the keeping of wild animals purely for entertainment purposes, an impassioned plea for things to change. In a series of seven essays he set out the case for zoological gardens to be genuine centres of scientific excellence devoted to the preservation and breeding of the animals in their care, and described the work of the zoo he had set up for this purpose. He made himself highly unpopular in some quarters with his stinging criticism of then-current practice, not least because it's well and entertainingly written, a successful appeal to the public at large to support his campaign. The first chapter is a little dry, but after that this is a fascinating description of the work of the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. Funny, moving, and utterly devoted to the animals without ever lapsing into saccharine sentiment, this is well worth a read.
LibraryThing entry
The Stationary Ark
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Because I have been so successful at actually reading a book or two this month, the list so far before I forget what they were. Reviews may even follow for some of them.
Gerald Durrell -- The Stationary Ark
James Blish -- Mission to the Heart Stars
Harry Harrison -- The Men From PIG and ROBOT
James Anderson - The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy
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at Amazon UK
at Amazon US
at Amazon UK
at Amazon US