mtvessel | Recent Entries

Jan 2018
The Fifth Season - N.K. Jemisin – Publisher, 2015 (Kindle edition)
* * *
I am mildly miffed. Back when I was a teenager I developed what I believed was my first original fantasy world, a roleplaying setting called Valtherion. This was a geologically unstable continent with frequent earthquakes and a large number of active volcanoes which brought misery to its hapless inhabitants. My brother was one of the players and his character, Rhogo, had the power, or curse, of causing earthquakes when he became angry. We played a few sessions and then stopped, partly because I realised that I knew what I wanted to happen next, leaving very little agency for the players, and partly because I left home to go to university. My grand plan was for Rhogo to master his powers and learn to block volcanoes, which would eventually lead to a spectacular climax where the entire planet split in two, solving the volcano problem forever (the people would survive, of course, thanks to the awesome and convenient magical abilities of the other player characters).

So here is a Hugo-winning fantasy set on a tectonically unreliable continent called the Stillness where frequent major eruptions - "fifth seasons" - bring misery to the people, and the viewpoint characters are orogenes, people with the magical ability to control earthquakes. I admire the way Jemisin has developed her world, which is more realistic and mature than my teenage imaginings. But I still think that she has somehow psychically stolen my ideas.
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Dec 2017
13th Age - Rob Heinsoo and Jonathan Tweet – Pelgrane Press, 2013
* * * *
Roleplaying games have been a big part of my life. I started playing them as a socially awkward teenager and became rather less socially awkward as a result. Through them I have made several life-long friends whom I love dearly and who have mostly stopped me from becoming a crazed hermit. So as far as I am concerned, roleplaying games matter vitally. Which is why I am going to attempt to review one here.

I picked this one because it is co-authored by Jonathan Tweet, the designer of Everway, the game I have been running for the last twenty years. Everway has some lovely ideas - I still think the use of tarot-like cards in place of dice is inspired, and his all-too-brief notes on the city itself were enough to inspire my most sophisticated attempt at developing a fantasy metropolis - but suffers from a few flaws, particularly in the magic and experience systems. Having overseen the development of third edition Dungeons and Dragons, I was interested to see whether Tweet's follow-up game would address these issues.
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Dec 2017
The Desert of Souls - Howard Andrew Jones – Head of Zeus, 2013
* * *
This is a fantasy set - initially - in the mystical Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid, the wise caliph who appears in the several of the tales of The 1001 Nights, and his wily vizier Jaffar. However, the Caliph himself does not appear - instead the author has rather cleverly selected two minor members of Jaffar's household - Asim, the captain of the Guard, and Dabir, the tutor of Saphirah, Jaffar's pert niece - as his viewpoint characters. While they and their master are wandering around Baghdad in disguise (as you do), a stranger thrusts an ancient tablet into their hands, begs them to look after it, and is then murdered. When the tablet is subsequently stolen from Jaffar's palace, Asim and Dabir are sent to get it back. In the process they uncover dark goings on related to Ubar, the mystical lost city in the desert, that could threaten Baghdad itself.

I am a sucker for Arabian Nights-style swords and sorcery, and the author does a better job than most in conveying an authentically Islamic feel, with feelings of honour and loyalty being strong motivating factors. Asim is a pleasingly straightforward warrior protagonist and his friendship with Dabir is very engaging. Sadly Jones is not imaginative enough to find ways of giving his female characters much agency in the traditionally sexist setting, but otherwise, it's a fun read.

Nov 2017
Children of Time - Adrian Tchaikovsky – Pan Books, 2015 (kindle edition)
* * * *
I am pretty certain that the author has a pet tarantula; this is the second book of his to feature sentient arachnids, so he clearly has a thing for them. Unlike Spiderlight, however, this one is a science fiction thriller in the mould of A Fire Upon The Deep, with which it shares more than a passing similarity. And it's good, which makes Tchaikovsky one of the few authors who can challenge Zerothin's Law of Genre-hopping.
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Oct 2017
Penric's Demon - Lois McMaster Bujold – Tor, 2015
* * *
Let it never be said that mature authors are not up to trying new things. Bujold has been experimenting of late with stories told in ebook-friendly novella form. This one, set in her fantasy world of Challion, concerns a mild-mannered younger son who is saved from a loveless betrothal by an encounter with a dying temple sorceress who passes on to him a demon called Desdemona. She has been homed in a variety of previous bodies which were all female, which causes a certain amount of confusion, not least for Penric who gets a forceful lesson in what women really want as they try to set up their shared consciousness. Other stuff happens after that including some mild peril, but to be honest I've forgotten the details. The setup is fun and the characters are engaging; however the short length means that they lack depth and memorability. This is only the first of a sequence of Penric and Desdemona novellas, so I suspect that the later ones will add the emotional complexity missing here. But on its own this was a slightly disappointing reading experience.

Oct 2017
The Invention of Nature - Andrea Wulf – John Murray, 2016
* * * *
Alexander von Humboldt should be a hero for Guardian readers. Like James Cook he was a scientist-explorer, and his books were a strong influence on Charles Darwin. Unlike Cook, he genuinely seemed to like and respect the native people he met. He loathed slavery and supported radical political causes, meeting and corresponding with Thomas Jefferson and Simon Bolivar. He was probably either gay or asexual - he never married and his surviving correspondence shows that his close emotional relationships were with men, but he claimed that he "didn't know sensual needs". His holistic view of nature led to the establishment of ecology as a discipline, and inspired John Muir who in turn was influential in the creation of National Parks in the United States. I think it is safe to say that without Humboldt, there would have been no David Attenborough.
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Sep 2017
The Windup Girl - Paolo Bacigalupi – Orbit, 2010
* * * *
Unlike the Becky Chambers books in my previous review, this novel, a worthy winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, has all three ingredients of my perfect SF trifecta. It is set in a memorable future Thailand. Its four main characters are all nuanced and intriguing, and serve to illustrate the various facets of the political thriller plot, which has a proper shape. It's just a shame that it's all so grim.
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Jun 2016 / Aug 2017
A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet / A Closed and Common Orbit - Becky Chambers – Hodder and Stoughton, 2015 / 2016
* * * * / * * * *
The very best SF novels are a perfect trifecta of interesting, nuanced characters, ideas and world-painting that make you go "wow", and an engaging plot (and if the style is original and interesting, so much the better). Getting all three of these to line up is perhaps one of the greatest challenges is writing, so it is no surprise that many writers dodge one or more parts of the trifecta while they hone their skills in other areas. Becky Chambers has adopted this approach, and it has paid off in two novels full of engaging characters and interesting settings. It's just a shame that neither of them has much in the way of a plot.
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Aug 2017
Just One Damn Thing After Another - Jodi Taylor – Accent Press, 2015
* *
This is a (mostly) lighthearted book about Madeleine Maxwell (Max), a historian who is recruited by a university institute based in a stately home that uses time travel technology to send adventurous academics to study historical events at first hand. If this concept sounds very familiar to you, it is probably because you have read something by that fine writer Connie Willis. Many of her books use exactly this setup, except that they start in 2060s Oxford.

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with this. Most artists start by emulating the ideas and styles of the people that they admire before putting their own spin on it - Beethoven's early symphonies closely follow those of Haydn, for example, and Picasso's early work is a follow-up to El Greco and the Symbolists. Indeed, one could say that the essence of creative development is thoughtful plagiarism, which is why the strict enforcement of copyright laws is one of the great evils of modern western culture because it is killing art. But if you are going to copy someone else, it needs to be a good copy, and alas, this is not. The "comedy" R&D department with its bumbling professors left me seething (I am so tired of scientists being portrayed as lacking common sense when the opposite is the truth), personalities change arbitrarily to accommodate the plot, and at one stage there is a three year gap that I did not notice because none of the characters altered in the slightest during it. Worst of all, Taylor's descriptions of the past periods to which Max and her fellow historians are sent are bland in the extreme, unlike Willis' sensitive and thoughtful evocations. Taylor can string a sentence together and her action scenes are pretty good, but I find it depressing that her books appear to be best sellers on Amazon and Willis' are not.

Aug 2017
A Fire upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge – Gollancz, 2013
* * *
Any author trying to write space opera has to deal with its plausibility problem. Pretty much by definition, the action must span star systems or even galaxies, but if human-level plotting is to be possible, the timescale must be kept to within a human lifetime. This means that every writer of space opera has to consider how to address the faster-than-light elephant in the room. Most simply ignore it, postulating ansibles, warp drives or wormhole generators that effectively mean that their stories take place in an alternate universe where, presumably, there is an aether or other privileged coordinate system to avoid the necessity of a cosmic speed limit to preserve causality. Vernor Vinge, to his credit, has avoided this cop-out and come up with an original background in which he has embedded a conspiracy thriller of a godlike Power seeking to enslave galactic civilisation, and a much smaller scale young-people-in-peril story set on a single low-tech planet. The density of original ideas is hugely impressive, so it's a shame that the background is, in my view, flawed.
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Jul 2017
Junk DNA - Nessa Carey - Icon Books, 2015
* * *
This book has a number of annoying features, of which the most irritating is its downright fallacious title. This is something of a personal matter, because it relates to what is probably my most cited academic paper, a report by the DNA committee of the Human Genome Mapping 10.5 workshop held in Oxford in 1990. Needless to say, this had nothing to do with my research. As a post-graduate student, I was recruited as a runner for the committee, passing messages on good old-fashioned paper to the other committees (there was one for each chromosome). I got on so well with the chairman that he insisted on listing me as an author of the report. Anyway, the committee's job was to assess some DNA sequences that were not part of genes but which were nonetheless of scientific interest. So I like to think that in a small way, I contributed to the most surprising discovery of the Human Genome Project, which was that just 2% of the 3 billion DNA bases in the human genome are in genes (defining a gene as a sequence that codes for a protein). The remaining 98% appear to have no obvious purpose, though some sequences are highly conserved. So what are they doing there?

When I was an active academic, there were a number of hypotheses. One was that it is simply junk, an artefact of evolution that nature hasn't got around to clearing up. Another was that it is involved in the structural organisation of genes. Each human cell contains around 1800 mm of DNA packed into a nucleus just 0.006 mm in diameter, so ensuring that genes are physically accessible to the transcription enzymes that start the process of protein creation is clearly an important consideration. A third involved the interesting new area of epigenetics, a form of gene control based on chemical modification of the DNA and its scaffolding proteins. Now, some 25 years later, a great deal more research has been done and a great deal more is known. So which of these hypotheses is true? Well, this is nature, so the answer is - all of them, at least to some extent. But the one that is least true is that it is junk.
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Jun 2017
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky tr. David McDuff - Penguin Classics, 2004
* * * *
Dostoyevsky's characters often experience extreme and conflicting emotions, and the two books of his that I had read before this one did much the same for me. I really liked Crime and Punishment for its thoughtful exploration of the mind of a proto-terrorist, and really disliked The Brothers Karamazov for its religious browbeating. The Idiot, I am pleased to report, is very much at the Crime and Punishment end of my affections, largely due to its wonderfully hilarious premise of a guileless man entering the snakepit of a corrupt society and causing utter chaos. Not that this was the author's intention, of course.
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Jun 2017
A Darker Shade of Magic - V.E. Schwab - Titan Books, 2015
* * * *
This is a book that I bought on the strength of its opening lines: "Kell wore a very peculiar coat. It had neither one side, which would be conventional, nor two, which would be unexpected, but several which was, of course, impossible." From which we can conclude that Schwab is a fan of Douglas Adams, a fact also attested by her style which emulates his lightness of prose while lacking his epigrammatic inventiveness. Still, the setting she has come up with, a many-worlds suite of fantasy Londons differing in their degree of magic, is an interesting idea with a contemporary allegorical edge.
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May 2017
Deadly Election - Lindsey Davis - Hodder, 2015
* * * *
The Flavia Alba series is still going strong with this tale set in the thoroughly corrupt world of Roman local politics. Flavia is hired by her definitely-not-lover Manlius Faustus to discredit the rivals of a man he is supporting for the post of aedile. Flavia, however, has other concerns, specifically the decomposing corpse that has been found in a chest that was about to be auctioned by her family. But with investigations in that direction stymied, she does a little digging, unearthing the usual unedifying collection of misdemeanours. Strong characters abound and there are some cameos by old friends that last just long enough to give long-term readers a warm glow but don't outstay their welcome. The murder plot is not a good whodunnit, but its unravelling, and its ending, felt true to the setting.

May 2017
City of Stairs - Robert Jackson Bennett - Jo Fletcher Books, 2014
* * * *
This book was in the running for the 2015 World Fantasy, Locus and British Fantasy Awards, but won none of them. This is perhaps not surprising, for it breaks a number of the cardinal rules of fantasy. For a start, it is not set in a mediaeval world, but in something closer to our own; there are guns and trains. The obvious cultural influences of its two main nations are unusual - "the continent" and its great city of Bulikov are clearly Russian-influenced, while the island state of Saypur, which has conquered the continent, is a small-scale India. So we have white-skinned Continentals being ruled over by brown-skinned Saypuris. But the most striking feature is the treatment of religion. Most fantasy worlds have at least some sort of pantheon (perhaps as a necessary psychological prop when arbitrary magical powers render rational explanations impossible), but in this world, Richard Dawkins has won. Saypur is an atheist nation whose culture is based on science and technology and its Worldly Regulations ban the people of Bulikov from worshipping their six gods. There is a good reason for this - until 70 years ago, the gods actually existed and terrorised the world until they were killed off with a mysterious weapon invented by a legendary Saypuri hero called the Kaj.
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Apr 2017
The Eight - Katherine Neville - Harper, 2009
* * *
This is a female version of The Da Vinci Code and is just as silly. The plot is a world-spanning conspiracy thriller about a macguffin chess set that has Mysterious Powers. The main character, Catherine Velis, is a competent and capable woman, at least until the handsome Russian chess player turns up, when she promptly loses her heart and her agency. She has an annoying sidekick called Lily who likes driving fast cars and has an indestructible lap dog which the author likes far more than I did (I was going "kill the dog! kill the dog!" in the hope that Neville would use it to drum up some otherwise lacking dramatic tension). There are many interludes allowing a large number of historical personages, from Charlemagne to Napoleon to Catherine the Great, to be in on the plot. If you can switch your brain off sufficiently to let all the absurdity wash over you, it's actually quite fun.

Mar 2017
The Fuller Memorandum - Charles Stross - Hachette Digital, 2010
* * *
The difficult second album is a well-known cliche, but with series where each book is a self-contained story, it is more often the third that goes awry. Typically the first has a new setting and characters to get to know, and it is generally easy to extend both in a sequel. But in the third, the plot really has to start interrogating its own background or readers will begin to suspect a lack of depth; hinted-at romantic attraction must become overt, an institution's dark secrets must start to come to light, and so on. As a result, the freshness and surprise of the first two books can be lost. To some extent, this has happened in The Fuller Memorandum.
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Mar 2017
Life after Life - Kate Atkinson - Black Swan, 2013
* * *
Uh oh, another mainstream writer has decided to write a book based on a science fiction idea. To be fair, however, it is a relatively unused one - Hugh Everett's many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. SF writers have, of course, been playing with this idea for years - however, I am hard pressed to think of a classic SF novel that specifically uses parallel versions of its characters in any meaningful way (by contrast, genre TV and movies from Star Trek's mirror universe onwards have used them so much that they are now cliche). So all credit to Kate Atkinson for at least giving the idea a go. But I wish she hadn't used it as the basis for what turns out to be yet another dreary novel about the Blitz.
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Feb 2017
Shadow and Betrayal - Daniel Abraham - Orbit, 2007
* * *
This is a compendium of the first two books of the Long Price Quartet, a fantasy with a dense construction and a pleasingly different oriental feel. However, I remember relatively little about it. To be fair this may be more middle-age memory loss than anything else, but I do think its grimdarkness is partly to blame.
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Jan 2017
We have always lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson - Penguin Classics, 2009 (Kindle edition)
* * * *
I can't help but suspect that Jackson must have had an evil grin on her face for the entire time that she wrote this, because it is a masterpiece of dark humour. Ostensibly it is the story of a rather odd teenage girl, Mary Katherine (Merricat) Blackwood, who lives with her sister and her uncle Julian in a ramshackle house in rural New England. As she says in the first paragraph, "I like my sister, Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

And so it continues, with little details, like the "safeguards" that Merricat buries in the grounds of the house, adding to the unsettling atmosphere. To a modern reader, Merricat shows several autistic traits, but to classify her as simply being on the spectrum would be a disservice. You could just as easily say that she's a witch, with her fetishes and her words of protection, but that's not really true either. Constance is also a fascinating character, a loving sister who is seemingly a doormat but is strong in her own way.

There is a mystery with a fairly obvious resolution, but that is not really the point of the book. It's about a strong relationship between two women and an atmospheric location. To analyse it more would be to spoil it, and Merricat would not approve. And you don't want to annoy Merricat. You really don't.

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Mark's Booklog

Twenty years of arguing with books

Recent Entries

Stone Age Magic

Icons and Iconoclasts

Traditionally Arabian

The Aliens Among Us

Thin Gruel

On the Origin of David Attenborough

We're all Doomed

The Journey, not the Destination

A Cheap Copy

Tine Team

It's not Junk

Holy Fool

Colours of London

Corpus Politicus

Don't Mention the Gods

Kill the Dog!

The Difficult Third Novel

The Best Version?

A Pose of Indifference

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