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Reading Challenge #10 - Radix AA Attanasio

November 17th, 2009 (08:20 pm)

Tags: 2009 reading challenge, aa attanasio, book review, science fiction

When I decided this year to reread books I remembered fondly from my teens, it was a given that some - if not all - might not survive the experience. After all, I'd like to think I'm a more discerning reader now. I'm certainly a more experienced one. And what I look for, and expect to find, in fiction has changed a great deal over the past few decades. So, ten months in, and the results of this year's reading challenge have not been entirely unexpected - and yet, there have been surprises too. I hadn't expected to hate The Stainless Steel Rat so much that I'd purge my book-shelves of it and its sequels. I hadn't expected The Left Hand of Darkness to impress me so much all over again.

And so, for October, albeit somewhat late, we come to Radix, AA Attanasio's debut novel. Which I'd expected to survive a reread. (The cover below is not the edition I own - a Corgi B-format paperback from 1983 - although mine does also feature a naked man.)

I don't think anyone would ever describe Radix as a "classic", although it was shortlisted for the Nebula Award in 1981. Certainly it impressed me enough on my first reading that I subsequently followed Attanasio's career, buying and reading each of his novels as they hit paperback. And during the 1980s and 1990s, Attanasio churned out a succession of well-regarded and reasonably successful genre novels. Not all were sf - for example, Wyvern was an historical novel, the Arthor series was fantasy, and The Moon's Wife was an urban fantasy. At the start of the new century, however, Attanasio seemed to drop from sight. He returned only recently, with a pair of YA fantasies.

(Rest of post on It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

Readings & Watchings

November 9th, 2009 (01:59 pm)

Tags: books, films

Somewhat later than usual, but here's the usual roundup of readings and watchings...

Books

The Chimpanzee Complex 1: Paradox, Richard Marazano & Jean-Michel Ponzio (2009), is another European graphic novel published in English by Cinebook. The opening is a killer. It's 2035, and an unidentified spacecraft is detected heading for a crash-landing in the Pacific Ocean. The US Navy sends a flotilla to intercept it. The spacecraft proves to be... the Apollo 11 capsule, containing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. So who were the three astronauts who returned to Earth in 1969? Unfortunately, Paradox can't quite keep the sheer effrontery of that opening premise going. The military determine that the reappearance of Armstrong and Aldrin justifies a trip to the Moon, which subsequently takes place. Clues then point to an unknown Soviet mission to Mars contemporary with Apollo. So off they head to the Red Planet. Paradox is done well, with excellent artwork, and designs that have clearly been thought about. The sequels, The Sons of Ares and Civilisation, are already on my wants list.

Orbital 2: Ruptures, Serge Pellé & Sylvain Runberg (2007), is the sequel to Orbital 1: Scars, and continues immediately from it. The secret of the world of Senestam proves to be less than inventive than I'd expected, but Pellé and Runberg still tell a well-rounded story with excellent artwork. For a sf graphic novel, it's surprisingly political - which is no bad thing. Apparently, two more books have been, or are due to be, published in France: Nomads and Ravages. Hopefully, they'll be published in English by Cinebooks soon. Interestingly, according to an interview here, Runberg claims Iain M Banks's Culture novels as an inspiration for Orbital.

T is for Trespass, Sue Grafton (2008), is the latest in the continuing alphabetical adventures of Kinsey Millhone, a private investigator in an invented city north of Los Angeles. The next, U is for Undertow, is due to be published in January 2010. Grafton has my respect for keeping this series going for so long, and managing to keep the characters and world consistent throughout. Since the books began in the early 1980s, and the internal chronology doesn't map onto the real world, T is for Trespass takes place in late 1987. In this one, an elderly neighbour takes a tumble and is too injured to look after himself, so his niece hires a nurse to look after him. But the nurse is a sociopath who makes a living from selling off her charges' assets, emptying their bank accounts, and then murdering them.

The Translator, Leila Aboulela (1999), is the first novel by a Sudanese writer, who was resident in Aberdeen but apparently now lives in Abu Dhabi. The title character is Sammar, a Sudanese widow living in Aberdeen. She translates work for the university and becomes involved with a Scottish Islamic expert, Rae Isles. I'm in two minds about this one - Sammar frequently describes things as though she is seeing them "through fog and mist", and that's what reading this book felt like. I like lyrical prose, but this often felt over-done.

(Rest of post on It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

DVD reviews online

November 2nd, 2009 (08:44 am)

Tags: film reviews, videovista

This month's Videovista is now up with my reviews of Fragments (see here) and Steven Seagal's The Keeper (see here).

(Cross-posted from It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

That sound you hear is my ears ringing

October 25th, 2009 (09:36 am)

Tags: anathema, mithras, music, tinariwen

It's been a musical week for me. On Tuesday 20 October, I saw Tinariwen in concert. They're a Tuareg band from Mali. I've liked their music since seeing a documentary on the Festival in the Desert seven or eight years ago. They proved much better live than I expected. I bought their new album, Imidiwan: Companions, at the gig, and it's better than the previous one. Here's some Tinariwen:

And then I spent Saturday 24 October in Leeds at the Damnation Festival. I'd thought about going to this the last couple of years, but the line-up never appealed. This year, it definitely did. I got to see three bands I like a great deal - Mithras, Anathema and Akercocke. Mithras played with their new line-up, with Sam Bean, ex-The Berzerker, replacing Rayner Coss on bass and vocals. Anathema performed a somewhat over-the-top "best of" set, but it was bloody good. Akercocke weren't wearing suits. Also there were Rotting Christ, whose last album Theogonia is good. The headline act was Life of Agony, but I wasn't too impressed. But still, a good festival - much better than I'd expected.

(Cross-posted from It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

People of Fact in Fiction

October 25th, 2009 (09:33 am)

Tags: my fiction, science fiction

There's an interesting article on the Aqueduct Press blog regarding the use of real - dead or alive, historical or celebrity - people in fiction. This has apparently been kicked off by AS Byatt's comments on Man Booker Prize winner, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. Byatt has said in an interview that it is "appropriation of others' lives and privacy", and "I really don't like the idea of 'basing' a character on someone, and these days I don't like the idea of going into the mind of the real unknown dead."

As a writer of science fiction, how relevant is this to me? After all, sf is set in the future, right? In space. With aliens. It's not real.

Well, yes it is.

Science fiction is as real as any other genre. Sf is not just spaceships and robots. Sf is not divorced from, or irrelevant to, the real world.

I don't have a problem with fiction writers using real people in their stories. I've done it myself. I've even had it done to me - I've been horribly dismembered in at least two stories by writer Jim Steel.

But I do have a problem with writers who confuse their fact with fiction.

(Rest of post on It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

Space Flash

October 19th, 2009 (05:54 pm)

Tags: flash fiction, my fiction, science fiction

The writing group I belong to is having an open night this evening as part of a local literary festival. Each of us will read out a flash fiction piece we have written. I've decided to publish mine on my blog as well. It's here. Enjoy.

(Cross-posted from It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

Advance warning: my reading challenge for 2010

October 16th, 2009 (07:53 am)

Tags: 2010 reading challenge, fantasy

Since starting this blog in late 2006, each year I've run a reading challenge - read one book per month to a theme, and blog the results. In 2007, it was my favourite sf novels. In 2008, it was twelve classic authors I'd not read before. This year, it's a dozen sf novels I remember fondly from my teen years.

I've been thinking about what I should read next year.

And I had a jolly good idea. I'm going to read a fantasy novel each month. Specifically, I'm going to read the first novel in a fantasy series. And then I'm going to write about it, about what I thought to the book, about whether or not the book is good enough to make me want continue to read the series. However...

I don't know which books to read. So I'm looking for suggestions. I'd like people to recommend the titles of epic fantasy novels, the first books in series. There are a few caveats - well, one caveat: there must be at least three books in the series currently available. I don't want to read a book, only to discover I've got wait a few years until I can read the next one.

(Rest of post on It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

An Unreliable Review: Transition, by Iain Banks

October 11th, 2009 (12:35 pm)

Tags: book review, first look 2009, iain banks, science fiction

"Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get."

So opens Iain Banks' Transition. It is a science fiction novel, set among and across many alternate worlds; but it has been published in the UK without the defining "M". Transition is ostensibly about the Concern, an organisation from an alternate Earth which operates an undefined number of agents who have the ability to "transition", to travel between alternate realities. In order to further an agenda which never quite becomes clear. Chief among these operatives is Madame d'Ortolan, who heads the Concern's Central Council and so runs the organisation. Set against her is the rebel Mrs Mulverhill. And caught between the two is Concern agent and assassin Temudjin Oh.

The novel comprises a number of different narratives, none of which progress in chronological order. One featuring "Patient 8262" does very little until the epilogue, which gives his identity without actually explaining it. Another narrative is that of a Yuppie barrow-boy-turned-trader, who is peripherally involved. And there's another, which appears only a handful of times, about an American film producer trying to get a project green-lit.

(Rest of post on It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

Waking the Dead

October 10th, 2009 (01:50 pm)

Tags: television, waking the dead

The eighth series of Waking the Dead finished a couple of weeks ago. And it's difficult to know what to make of it. One character died, one resigned but then seemed to stay, one transferred out of the team, and one handed over to a replacement while she went into hospital... but her replacement cocked things up and so might not be taking over after all.

Waking the Dead, for those of you who have never heard of it, or don't watch it, is a BBC drama about a police team which investigates old unsolved case, the Metropolitan Police's Cold Case Unit. The programme has been broadcast annually since 2001, and each series usually takes the form of four to six two-hour episodes, each one split over two nights (typically Sunday and Monday). At present, the Cold Case Unit comprises Detective Superintendent Peter Boyd (Trevor Eve), psychological profiler Dr Grace Foley (Sue Johnston), Detective Inspector Spencer Jordan (Will Johnson), Detective Sergeant Stella Goodman (Félicité du Jeu), and forensic pathologist Dr Eve Lockhart (Tara FitzGerald).

I don't normally write about television programmes on this blog - well, not unless they're science fiction... But Waking the Dead is one of my favourite series. And that's despite not being much of a fan of police procedurals. Waking the Dead, however, is not only classy drama, with high production values, it's also very watchable. And - it is probably this which appeals to me the most - each series it does something interesting... as a police procedural and as a television drama. Past series, for example, have been themed, with each story an interpretation of the theme. It has run story-arcs in the background over multiple series. And in series eight, it put the entire cast at risk, and then failed to resolve their fates.

(Rest of post on It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

Anatomy of a Story: Thicker Than Water

October 9th, 2009 (07:35 am)

Tags: my fiction, science fiction

The second of the two stories I've put up on this blog is 'Thicker Than Water', a hard sf story set on a moon of Saturn. It was originally published in Jupiter sf magazine, issue 23, in January 2009.

Major Gina Priest lives on Tethys, a moon of Saturn. When two raiders from another moon, Titan, attempt to steal some of the fullerenes found on Tethys, they are captured. Gina is shocked to discover that one of the raiders is her brother. She learns she was abducted from Titan at a very young age. After another officer disobeys her orders and tortures the raiders, Gina decides to help the Titans escape and return with them to to her long-lost mother and father.

Here's the PDF. You might want to read the story before you continue reading this.

The plot of 'Thicker Than Water' is based on the story of Iphigenia from ancient Greece. She was abducted as a child and taken to Tauris, where she grew up and became a priestess of Aphrodite. A pair of Athenians then raided the temple while Iphigenia was present. She learned they were her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades. So she lied to the Taurians, and returned to Athens to join her long-lost family. With the statue of Aphrodite they had stolen.

I forget where I originally came across Iphigenia's story. It was back in the early 1990s, so it wasn't on the Web. I'd also found a mention of a mysterious dark patch on Tethys in a planetology textbook I'd bought for reference - Exploring the Planets by Eric H Christiansen and Kenneth W Hamblin (1995). The book's a bit out-of-date now, but I have the Web instead. I decided that the dark patch was buckminsterfullerenes - carbon molecules in the shape of spheres or tubes, which were thought to be artificial but do occur very rarely in nature. This idea came partly from another story, 'Black Rain' (available in Set It In Space And Stick A Robot In It), which is set on Titan, and takes place in an earlier version of the universe of 'Thicker Than Water'. In that story, the settlement's manufactory was destroyed by a blow-in of Titan's noxious atmosphere, and the superconductor cultures were poisoned. So, instead of Aphrodite's statue, I'd have Orestes and Pylades, natives of Titan, travelling to Tethys to steal fullerenes in order to re-seed their superconductor cultures. It all slotted very neatly together - and this is actually mentioned in passing in 'Thicker Than Water'.

(Rest of post on It Doesn't Have To Be Right...)

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Reading Challenge #10 - Radix AA Attanasio

Readings & Watchings

DVD reviews online

That sound you hear is my ears ringing

People of Fact in Fiction

Space Flash

Advance warning: my reading challenge for 2010

An Unreliable Review: Transition, by Iain Banks

Waking the Dead

Anatomy of a Story: Thicker Than Water

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November 2009

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