Tom Holt: Blonde Bombshell (2010)

Tom Holt's latest novel seems to follow in well trodden footsteps. An advanced alien civilization finds itself threatened by the Earth's broadcasts through space, as music (not a concept previously known to them) is addictive to the Ostar. They send an intelligent bomb  to destroy the Earth, only to loose contact; Blonde B ombshell concerns their second attempt,  to find out what the Earth's hidden technology which put paid to the first bomb could possibly be, and carry out the destruction mission. All gung ho, the second bomb arrives, and sends down a probe, putting a copy of its mind in a human body created for the purpose. While it realises that "Mark Two" would not be an acceptable name for human culture, it decides that "Mark Twain" would be - a slight variation on the choice of "Ford Prefect" as the name used by the alien guide researcher in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (albeit one which is likely to go out of date less quickly).

Holt's writing generally relys on characters who are fish out of water to provide much of the humour, and Blonde Bombshell is no exception. Here, there are both machines trying to pass as human and the Ostar relationship with people: they are shaped like dogs, and keep pets who are like humans, and the inversion is a natural source of jokes. But the jokes are all essentially the same, and this lack of variety palled for me quite quickly. In essence, the problem I had with Blonde Bombshell is that I didn't find it very funny. Some Tom Holt books do strike me this way, including Wish You Were Here. This one is not as bleak, being instead a tired repeat.

I like Holt's work, but not in this case: my rating - 4/10.


Edition: Orbit, 2010
Review number: 1410

Marie Brennan: Midnight Never Come (2008)

The Elizabethan age was obsessed by Faery, something most famously seen in several Shakespeare plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream, the spirits in the Tempest, the Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet, and the pretend fairies in The  Merry Wives of Windsor being just some of the best known examples), but most developed in Spenser's enormous allegory The Faery  Queen, which parallels Elizabeth with the queen of the Fae herself.

Folklore graduate student Marie Brennan has taken this thought and put together a story  of a connection of a different kind between the two queens, a pact which guarantees the security of the English realm and its fae reflection. But it is not a treaty without cost, and the queen's spymaster Francis Walsinghamn has begun to suspect that tere is an unknown player in the game with direct access to Elizabeth. He chooses one of his agents, William Deven, to investigate, knowing that the young man is already more involved than he realises: Deven has been courting Anne Marston, waiting lady to the Countess of Warwick, and known to Walsingham as a likely agent of this unknown power. And indeed Anne is a  glamour put on by Lune, a lady of the Fae Onyx court below London, to appear human so she can act as a spy for Invidiana, the Onyx Queen (the name meaning "hateful", as opposed to Elizabeth's allegorical name Gloriana, "glorious").

Atmospheric, interesting and with good characters, Midnight Never Come is well worth a read. I don't normally like books based on role playing game scenarios (I probably wouldn't have read it if I'd realised it was before borrowing it from the local library). It's biggest problem for me was the title, which comes from a play by Marlowe and which in context gives away important aspects of the ending. My rating - 7/10.


Edition: Orbit, 2008
Review number:  1409

Henry Porter: The Dying Light (2009)

Henry Porter's fifth novel is intended, so the author tells us in the afterword, to fulfil three purposes. It is obviously a thriller readable as a standalone story, but is additionally intended as a contrast to his previous novel Brandenburg and as something of a political call to arms. It is set in a near future Britain, where high-powered lawyer (and former spy) Kate Lockhart returns to the country after several years working in the States for college friend David Eyam's funeral. Eyam, was a civil servant involved in security at the highest levels, but he resigned and hid himself in a tiny town on the Welsh borders before making a sudden trip to South America to be killed in a terrorist bomb attack. Kate is told that she is Eyam's heir, completely unexpectedly; and when Eyam's lawyer is killed by a sniper driving down an English country lane and she discovers that child pornography has been planted on Eyam's computer to discredit him, she realises that she has inherited not just his possessions but a dangerous secret worth many deaths to those who wish to keep it hidden.

From this point on, The Dying Light is a political thriller with a conspiracy theory at its centre, set in a dystopian Britain in which every move is watched by the authorities. The development of the systems which allow this and the accompanying erosion of civil liberties are Porter's main concern.He mentions the way in that events he was describing as he wrote the novel turned out to be true as he was writing, not a comforting prospect for someone writing a dystopia. Most of Porter's work has made me think him the natural heir to Len Deighton; but the campaigning nature of The Dying Light is more akin to John le Carré's recent novels, such as A Most Wanted Man. The agenda may be different, but a similar sense of outrage comes through. The comparisons to le Carré and Deighton are not just thematic, too. Porter is one of the best thriller writers to emerge in the last decade.

The theme is personal freedom, and the way in which the British public  have allowed their politicians to whittle away at personal rights to an unprecedented degree: the United Kingdom is now the most heavily surveiled nation in the world, so that  our rulers know more about what we do (theoretically) than those of North Korea or China. As with the curtailment of liberty elsewhere in the Western world, the excuse used is the fight against terrorism, which is at first sight a reasonable idea but is less so when the possibility of emergency powers being abused (as has happened on a small scale with local councils using anti-terrorism powers to track down benefit fraud) or when it fails to halt attacks. The inquests into the deaths of those killed in the 7/7 bomb attack on the London underground are happening as I type: clearly the new powers and surveillance, almost all in place in 2005, were unable to save these lives. The bombers were identified on CCTV footage, but only after the attack itself took place. At the same time, the Guardian has reported that counter-terrorism would be kept safe from the government's massive programme of cuts: the UK will still be spending billions on surveillance of its citizens. (Most of the links in this post come from the Guardian not because of its political leanings, but because of its interest in civil liberties beyond that of much of the UK press.)

One legislative move which particularly concerns Porter is the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (official description / critical assessment).This gives wide ranging powers over a thirty day period to the government in the event of a disaster (natural or otherwise), removing the right to assembly, allowing movement to be restricted to and from "sealed areas" and mobilising the armed services. It didn't originally define the emergencies in which it could be used very stringently, leading to accusations that events dealt with by the emergency services as part of their normal working would be possible triggers for the act; this has since been amended. It still doesn't provide any sanction for misuse (if the "emergency" turns out not to be one). It has been described as making it possible that "at a stroke democracy could be replaced by totalitarianism".

I have gone into detail about this partly because, as Porter points out, it is important and yet ignored by those it affects. I was already aware of the surveillance, but had never heard of the Civil Contingencies Act: this is a novel which made me want to write to my MP.

The relationship with Brandenburg is that the earlier novel is about the fall of the Soviet bloc communism, so is about the gaining of rights, while The Dying Light is about the extinction of rights. To me, the title and theme suggest Dylan Thomas' famous lines (about death):

Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light

To give away our rights without protest is to gently acquiesce in the dying of the light of our civilisation.

Edition: Orion Books, 2009
Review number: 1408

Andrzej Sapkowski: The Last Wish (1993)

Translation: Danusia Stok (2007)
Edition: Gollancz, 2008
Review number: 1407

"Geralt is a a hunter", the front cover tells us. Not only is this hardly the most eye-catching tagline in the history of publishing, it really undersells the virtues of Sapkowski's novel. This is not a simple fantasy novel, though this (combined with the advertising for the associated computer game on the back pages) makes it look as though The Last Wish is just a violent fantasy, the story of a bounty hunter. This is particularly ironic, as Geralt himself is continually telling prospective employers that he is not a bounty hunter.

Geralt is in fact a "witcher"; he is a hunter of supernatural monsters, and The Last Witch describes a series of his adventures in this role. The structure of the novel suggests - and I haven't looked this up to check whether it is true or not - that most of it originally appeared as a series of shorter fiction. It is episodic, with a linking thread provided by interludes between the episodes, which are thus presented as flashbacks. This is a fairly common structure in novels stitched together from shorter fiction, and needs the episodes to be quite uniform in style and quality with the linking story having some interest of its own in order to work: Sapkowski does this at least as well as any other example I can think of.

Although The Last Wish appeared in English in 2007, the story was written in the 1980s. Then, the idea of a hunter of this type would probably have evoked Bram Stoker's Van Helsing in Dracula, rather than Buffy the Vampire Slayer or possibly Anita Blake. But The Last Wish is not really like any of the stories involving these characters; it reminded me most of Jack Vance, particularly the Dying Earth stories. Much of the setting, the tone, and the dry humour are similar, particularly in the way in which Geralt's world weariness is portrayed. Laurell K. Hamilton is less interested in humour and more in the relationships - particularly sexual ones - between the characters in her Anita Blake novels; the humour in the Buffy TV series is generally darker or derived from smart banter between the teenagers; and Van Helsing is deadly serious.

This is an excellent fantasy novel, and I will looking out for more by this writer - 8/10.

Robert J. Sawyer: Wake (2009)

Edition: Gollancz, 2009
Review number: 1406

J.K. Rowling aside, who is the most successful science fiction / fantasy writer of all time? One candidate would be Michael Crichton, who wrote more books turned into famous films than any other writer I can think of: Jurassic Park, Westworld, The Andromeda Strain. He's not an author I like very much, either as a novelist or screenwriter; although his books are really thrillers with SF themes, I tend to find them dull and have never actually managed to get to the end of any of them; the films work rather better, but even so are not my cup of tea. This is a view I appear to share with others in SF fandom; as a writer he was rarely nominated for an award (the only major one being the British Fantasy best novel nomination in 1995) despite his popularity.

The reason I bring up Michael Crichton is that I expected Robert J. Sawyer to be a similar writer. I first came across his work through the TV series of Flashforward, based on one of his novels. I watched the first two episodes, then gave up because (like Heroes) it seemed to be rehashing the same thing every week and neither moving forward at any speed in the overall story arc nor having interesting single episode stories. But the basic idea was interesting, and seemingly tailor made for TV adaptation, especially because the final episode was scheduled be shown on the date that everyone had seen on their vision of the future. While the plot meant that a TV adaptation seemed more appropriate than film, this seemed to me to be a very Michael Crichton style idea. So I didn't really think of reading any of his novels.

I'm not entirely sure why I added Wake to my list of books to read after giving up on Flashforward. I probably saw a favourable mention in a blog somewhere, or a review on SF Site. (A bit of checking reveals that it is because of its nomination for the 2010 Hugo: one of a large number of awards and nominations.) But I am glad that I did. It turns out, you see, that Sawyer is not at all like Michael Crichton as a writer. Wake is more like Neal Stephenson or Charles Stross: someone who knows about computers and has interesting ideas about their future which they discuss through science fiction. (He is one of the most enduring online presences in science fiction, as his home domain name, http://www.sfwriter.com/, suggests.)

After that long digression, I should at least say something about what Wake is about. There are three strands to the story, all of which are about cognitive awakening. The main one is the story of Caitlin, who was born blind and who is offered the chance to regain sight through an operation which connects her visual cortex to a hardware device which she nicknames the "eye-Pod". But as well as learning to see - and this is very interestingly imagined by Sawyer - she also discovers that connecting the device to the Internet means that she can "see" the structure of the Web. And part of what she sees forms the second major strand: in the background, there are what appear to be cellular automata, which begin to seem to be an emergent intelligence from the lost an corrupted packets which never expire (Internet communication is made up of packets with a "time to live" value, decreased by one each time they pass through a router; if this value is corrupted or they pass through routers with buggy software, this could lead to packets which never reach their destination and are never destroyed). The third strand is about a chimpanzee which begins to produce representational art: recognisable portraits of one of the people who look after it. This is not so closely integrated into Caitlin's story, but that may well be left to the second part of the WWW trilogy.  A fourth strand, about a dissident Chinese blogger, has loose ends which will clearly be picked up later.

The theme is clearly the development of consciousness, and is heavily influenced not just by current ideas about how machine intelligence might arise but also by the writings of Helen Keller, on how it felt to begin to be able to connect with other people after living blind and deaf since childhood - unlike Caitlin, she was not born blind but became so following an illness as a baby. Another background influence is the work of Julian Jaynes, who controversially argued that the modern human consciousness did not come into being until very recently (3000 years ago or so), early literature describing individuals who did not act in ways commensurate with fully integrated minds. Caitlin, as a bright teenager interested in such topics because of her blindness, makes a good conduit for Sawyer to introduce the concepts he wants to discuss.

This is one way in which Sawyer achieves one goal of good science fiction writing. In a genre derided for clumsy "info-dumps", finding a naturalistic way to explain the clever ideas and concepts behind your writing is important to many authors. Readers do not want to see endless conversations in which the participants tell each other things they already know, for the benefit of the reader, or to have lengthy explanatory sections or footnotes. Sawyer manages to do this really well here, and the combination of interesting ideas and good writing makes for a fascinating and enjoyable reading experience. As the Hugo nomination shows, this is one of the SF novels of the year, and is deservedly so. My rating: 9/10.

Eoin Colfer: And Another Thing... (2009)

Edition: Michael Joseph, 2009
Review number: 1405

I borrowed this book from the library expecting to hate it. Even though I didn't like the end of the Hitchhiker series as it stood at Douglas Adams' death, I couldn't imagine anyone else continuing it in the way that he might have been able to (if he'd overcome the blocks he experienced in the later part of his writing career). I'd also read Artemis Fowl, which made Colfer's name, and didn't think much of it.

And, when And Another Thing... came out, it was serialised on BBC Radio 4 as an audiobook, and I listened to that and did indeed hate it. Hitchhiker was always hilarious, and the abridged version - 340 pages in 75 minutes which I'd estimate means leaving out 75% of the text - failed to raise a smile. Of course, that could have been the cuts ("let's leave out the jokes to keep the plot comprehensible"), or the way it was read (not Steve Mangan's finest hour and a quarter), or some of the plot decisions (the way Colfer got out of the problems caused by the ending of Mostly Harmless seemed trite and unconvincing to me). Would the book itself be more worth reading? Friends who might have read it turned out not to have done. So, there was only one way to find out...

Initially, my reaction was positive. At greater length, the unravelling of the finality of the ending of Mostly Harmless, while still not very imaginative, worked better and contained some amusing touches. But things do go downhill from there. Some of the issues are with the characters as created by Douglas Adams. I have always found Zaphod Beeblebrox verging on being more irritating than funny, and Colfer makes him a particularly important character here and he becomes an annoying manipulator of the plot: more self-centred than ever. Wowbagger, the immortal being who is insulting every being in the universe in alphabetical order, also turns up and is made a major character: Colfer's attempts to make him more than the brief joke he is for Adams make him at least as unsympathetic and irritating as a dealmaking Zaphod. And finally, Colfer seems to share Adams' interest in Norse myth, and a lot of the book (even more in the radio abridgement) is about Zaphod's dealings with Asgard - all very dull compared to the meeting with Thor at a party in Mostly Harmless.

All this could be forgiven if And Another Thing... had turned out to be as funny as the first few Hitchhiker books were on first reading. In this aspect, I got the impression that Colfer didn't work too hard, settling for the obvious and poor pun rather than thinking hard about exactly what would be funny. (Apparently Douglas Adams used to agonise about individual words for ages, and this shows in the inventive quality of the first three books in particular.) The way that the book-within-the-book of the actual Guide is handled here is partly to blame for the lack of laughs. The "Book" extracts are among the highlights of the original stories, being extremely funny and often explaining how the bizarre situations Arthur and Ford find themselves in arose. Here, they are intrusive, irrelevant and humourless asides (though it is fairly obvious that Colfer thinks them hilarious). Some attempt has been made to make them stand out typographically, something I don't think Adams ever did, and this, like so much else about And Another Thing... is depressingly unimaginative: the entries are printed in italics. So much more could have been done here to indicate their peripheral nature and liven up the presentation of the book.

Colfer is obviously a fan, and this makes him a good choice as a writer of a sequel. But he is not really very funny at all, even when writing his own books. (I've read Artemis Fowl, and it seems like a good idea - a child evil genius - let down by a lack of imagination and lazy writing, though many people seem to think it extremely funny.) In the end, And Another Thing... reads like a not very wonderful piece of fan fiction, of the sort published in vast quantities on the Internet: and I feel sure that there are likely to be better sequels to Hitchhiker available free at fanfiction.net. My rating - 2/10.

Lindsey Davis: Nemesis (2010)

Edition: Century, 2010
Review number: 1404

After the (to me) unreadable Rebels and Traitors, Davis returns to the Roman crime series which made her name, with the nineteenth Falco novel, Nemesis. But this addition to the series is much darker than most of them: this is not quite the wise-cracking Falco of old.

The darkness starts right at the beginning of the novel, which opens with the deaths of Falco's infant son and his father. The death of new born children has been a part of life throughout history. Take for example Queen Anne, who had the benefit of better medicine and all the care a British Queen could command at the turn of the eighteenth century, but none of whose fifteen children survived to adulthood. And the death of children plays an important part in novels by writers such as Charles Dickens. Yet it is something which is generally skipped over in modern historical fiction. With larger families and more infant mortality, death was a part of life in a way which, at least in the Western world, it is not today. That of course does not mean that parents then did not mourn the death of their children as much as parents today do.

So Nemesis is really about Falco's mourning for both his son and his father, even if in the latter case he doesn't want to show that he is strongly affected. The plot of the story concerns an investigation begun by Falco when he is looking into an unfinished business transaction of his father's. This spirals into a hunt for a family of serial killers, who seem to be protected by someone highly placed in the Roman government, and it becomes a case which pushes Falco onto a morally darker path than he has yet travelled - presumably because of the effects of his bereavement on his emotional state. He becomes a much more ambiguous hero than usual in this series; no  matter how bad his life became (the episode in which he went undercover as a slave in a mine is a prime example), he always previously seemed to be a basically good person. In hard boiled detective terms, the Falco of Nemesis is more Dashiell Hammett's tainted Continental Op than a wisecracking Philip Marlowe.

Pushing a character to do nasty things because of his own emotional pain is all very well, but after eighteen more or less humorous novels in a series it comes as something of a shock to readers. More points for literary quality, then, but fewer for enjoyment of the story. I'd give Nemesis 6/10 as a result - angst is not why I read Falco novels.