Author: David Hebblethwaite

Greg Egan, ‘Yeyuka’ (1997)

4th March 2012 / / 2 Comments

Egan’s story is set in a future where most diseases can be cured by a single device built into a finger-ring – but not all parts of the world enjoy equal access to that technology. Our narrator is Martin, an Australian surgeon who goes on a three-month stint to Uganda, where he has volunteered to treat Yeyuka, a new form of cancer to which surgery is the only halfway-effective response.

I rather liked this story: cleanly written, and painting a thorny moral landscape. There’s a tension between Martin’s altruistic and other motives for going toUganda(he acknowledges that this could be his ‘last chance ever to perform cancer surgery’, so there’s an element of career-advancement at play); and the issues faced by other characters are no less clear-cut.

Rating: ***½

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Not the Only Planet.

The Afterparty giveaway winners

4th March 2012 / / 0 Comments

The entries are in, and, thanks to a handy random number generator, we have our winners:

The books will be on their way to you soon, and I hope you enjoy them. Thank you to everyone who entered, RT’d the giveaway on Twitter, or left kind words about the review’s being quoted.

 

Lisa Goldstein, ‘Tourists’ (1985)

3rd March 2012 / / 1 Comment

Charles wakes up on vacation unable to remember where he is, and with no sign of his companion, or his passport; the rest of the story chronicles his attempts to make sense of – and get away from – the place in which he finds himself.

Goldsteiin builds the strangeness of her tale slowly: there is nothing out of the ordinary in the first few pages (and Charles’s disdain for the natives who don’t speak English is a familiar attitude), until a few odd-sounding place names appear. Even then, it often feels as though we could be on Earth; it is central to the affect of ‘Tourists’ that the nature of its setting remains uncertain.

But the crux of the story is its ending, which both disorientates as the best sf should, and is satisfying in storytelling terms, as Charles gets his just deserts..

Rating: ****

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Not the Only Planet.

Damien Broderick (ed.), Not the Only Planet (1998)

3rd March 2012 / / 9 Comments

I never had Lonely Planet down as a publisher of fiction, but here is an anthology of science fiction travel stories published by them. I bought it in a book sale some years ago, and recently came across it again on my shelves; I thought it would be fun to read as a story-by-story review project, so here’s what Damien Broderick selected:

Lisa Goldstein, ‘Tourists’

Greg Egan, ‘Yeyuka’

Brian W. Aldiss, ‘The Difficulties Involved in Photographing Nix Olympica’

Gene Wolfe, ‘Seven American Nights’

Stephen Dedman, ‘Tourist Trade’

John Varley, ‘In the Bowl’

Garry Kilworth, ‘Let’s Go to Golgotha!’

Joanna Russ, ‘Useful Phrases for the Tourist’

Robert Silverberg, ‘Trips’

Paul J. McAuley, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’

The titles above will become links to my review posts as we go on. Let the journey begin!

Simon & Schuster bloggers’ event, 29 Feb 2012

1st March 2012 / / 3 Comments

Yesterday, those fine folks at Simon & Schuster opened their doors to a group of bloggers for a panel discussion with four authors. I don’t think I’ve ever seen four more different (and yet similar – in, for example, the sense of craft underlying their work that came across from all) writers together on the same panel. Here’s who they were:

Rebecca Chance

I’ll read most sorts of fiction, but it is fair to say that Rebecca Chance writes the kind of books that aren’t for me. She was fabulous in the discussion, though.

Penny Hancock

The other writers on the panel were all first-time novelists. Penny Hancock’s book is a psychological thriller about a middle-aged woman who becomes infatuated with a teenage boy, to the point that she holds him captive in her garage. I read about half of Tideline on the train home, and it’s intriguing so far.

Lloyd Shepherd

Lloyd Shepherd piqued my interest in his historical mystery The English Monster when he talked about being influenced by horror/speculative fiction; though his mention of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy made me a little wary – the proof will be in the reading.

Benjamin Wood

The Bellwether Revivals was a book I’d already pegged as one to read; if it hadn’t been, I suspect that hearing Benjamin Wood speak here would have encouraged me to pick it up. Comparisons with Donna Tartt, and a synopsis mentioning a brilliant student conducting medical experiments with Baroque music, sound promising. It’s a very nicely designed volume, too.

After the panel came an opportunity to mingle… and browse a few books. As well as the Hancock, Shepherd, and Wood books, I earmarked copies of Edward Hogan’s The Hunger Trace (about which some of my fellow-bloggers have been very enthusiastic); Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (a hotly-tipped title which falls squarely at the mainstream-speculative intersection that interests me); and The Humorist by Russell Kane (who I’m hoping will, like Mark Watson, prove to be a comedian with a flair for fiction).

Thanks to all at S&S, and the writers, for a fine event!

February wrap-up

1st March 2012 / / 2 Comments

Book of the Month

This is a tricky one, because the best book I read in February — Lucy Wood’s marvellous collection of stories based on Cornish folklore, Diving Belles — is one I haven’t reviewed yet; and the best book I reviewed on the blog — Everyone’s Just So So Special by Robert Shearman — was one I read last year. Oh, just go and read them both; they’re brilliant books.

Reviews

Features

A guess (not a prediction) at the Clarke Award shortlist: 2012 edition

28th February 2012 / / 2 Comments

So, this year’s list of Clarke Award submissions is out, and a number of things immediately strike me about it. One is the number of eligible books that aren’t there. Last year’s pool of submissions felt fairly comprehensive to me; this year’s, despite being a longer list, feels less so. Admittedly I’ve paid more attention to what’s eligible for this year’s Clarke: I compiled a list of mainstream-published science fiction last year; if you add on the additional titles mentioned in the comments (and disregard the one I got wrong!), only two were submitted for the Clarke. That leaves at least a dozen mainstream-published sf novels that weren’t even submitted (my list was by no means exhaustive), and no doubt a fair number of genre-published titles weren’t either (Niall Harrison suggests a few in his post).

Of course, the Clarke submissions pool was never going to be entirely comprehensive, and sixty books is plenty enough for the judges to read and construct a decent shortlist. There would also have been no small amount of discussion over eligibility this year: there seems to be an unusually high number of submissions that fall outside the science fiction box (even by my own inclusive standards). Some of these (like Grimwood’s The Fallen Blade, or Oyeyemi’s Mr Fox) are clearly fantasy; but others are more ambiguous: Nicholas Royle’s Regicide (for example) doesn’t sound like sf – and I wouldn’t expect a book by hm to be sf – but I can’t be sure of that. The same goes for plenty more on the submissions list.

This makes trying to predict the shortlist all the more difficult, because there’s every chance that one of these borderline titles may be good enough – and sf-nal enough – to make the cut (it’s worth remembering that two of last year’s shortlisted titles – including the eventual winner – were just such borderline novels). And then, as Niall pointed out to me on Twitter this morning, there are the core science fiction titles which have so far garnered relatively little attention. With so many unknown quantities, how do I begin to guess what might be shortlisted for the Clarke?

Well, I’ll start where I always do: with the high-profile genre releases that feel like sure-fire Clarke material. This year, that’s China Miéville’s Embassytown (the closest thing to science fiction he’s yet written), and Christopher Priest’s The Islanders (a major return by a very significant author). I don’t think these books are their authors’ best work, but neither can I conceive that they’d be omitted from the Clarke shortlist.

Priest and Miéville are previous Clarke winners, and two others have had works submitted, so I need to consider whether they might be shortlisted. What I know of Neal Stephenson’s Reamde suggests that it falls far enough towards the thriller end of the thriller-sf continuum that I have my doubts. Ian R. MacLeod’s Wake Up and Dream is almost certainly a very fine book, but MacLeod doesn’t feel like a shoo-in for the shortlist in the way that Miéville and Priest do.

There are a number of sequels among the submissions and, whilst it’s not unheard-of for such titles to make it (Monsters of Men did last year, of course), I don’t think that will happen this time. Sophia McDougall’s Savage City is my guess at the most likely such candidate, but I’m going to leave sequels out of my guess.

Adam Roberts is a genre author I’d usually turn to as a Clarke contender, and here I can actually consider a book from a position of knowledge. I think By Light Alone is good, but not quite up there with Roberts’s previous two novels (and I haven’t been able to put my thoughts on it in order, hence no review from me as yet), so I’m inclined to discount it.

So far, I’ve mainly been ruling books out; which can I nominate in the affirmative? There’s one more genre sf title which has really stood out for me in terms of its positive coverage, and that is Osama by Lavie Tidhar. It sounds to me like a Clarke contender, so I’m going to put it on my list.

Turning to mainstream-published works, I must include The Godless Boys by Naomi Wood in my selection, because I think it’s a great book, and I want the Clarke to recognise it, and for it to be read more widely among the sf community. It’s the novel that, overall, I most want to be shortlisted for this year’s Clarke Award.

Staying with non-genre titles, I’d agree with Niall that Colson Whitehead’s Zone One sounds like the sort of book that might get shortlisted for the Clarke, and it has had enough positive reviews that I’m of a mind to include it.

Which leaves me with one vacant slot, and I’m not sure where to go with it. I don’t want to take a wild guess at a book, so I’ll play it relatively safe, and suggest Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb, which of course gained its attention from being longlisted for the Booker.

So, my guess at the Clarke shortlist is:

ChinaMiéville, Embassytown

Christopher Priest, The Islanders

Jane Rogers, The Testament of Jessie Lamb

Lavie Tidhar, Osama

Colson Whitehead, Zone One

Naomi Wood, The Godless Boys

I’m not calling this a prediction, because I don’t really think I’ll be right – and, indeed, in a way I hope I’m wrong, because I would like to be surprised by one (or more) of those borderline books. As to whether I will be, that will have to wait until the Clarke shortlist is announced at the end of March.

TV Book Club Best Reads 2012: Part 2

24th February 2012 / / 1 Comment

Time for a look at the next four books on this season’s TV Book Club list (my first post on this series is here); these novels are all debuts.

Elizabeth Haynes, Into the Darkest Corner (2011)

In 2003, Catherine Bailey is on a night out in Lancster when she meets the handsome and charming Lee Brightman, and quickly embarks on a relationship with him. Four years later, she is a shadow of her former self: living in London with OCD, her life ruined by Lee’s abuse; her new neighbour, Stuart Richardson, may represent a chance for Catherine to move on – but there’s a threat around the corner.

Elizabeth Haynes portrays the change in Catherine’s character particularly well, right down to a difference in name: the bright, vivacious Catherine becomes the timid Cathy; the contrast between her personality in the two time periods is striking, and great at drawing one into the tale. Perhaps the novel feels a little overlong as a whole, but Haynes shows vividly how Catherine becomes trapped by Lee even as she knows he’s dangerous, and how Lee charms his way into the affections of Catherine’s friends, turning them against her. In this, Into the Darkest Corner is a sharp examination of domestic violence.

Amor Towles, Rules of Civility (2011)

New Year’s Eve, 1937: Katey Kontent is out at a Greenwich Villagejazz bar with her roommate, Eve Ross, when in walks the dashing and wealthy Tinker Grey. They get talking, become friends – and all their lives change over the following year, but don’t necessarily stay in parallel.

I’m ambivalent about this book: there’s some lovely writing and observation (‘from this vantage point [a pier on the Hudson] Manhattanwas simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise – that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving’); but I can’t muster the same enthusiasm for the plot. As the title implies, we see various examples of characters’ doing what it takes to fit in to particular social circles, which is elegantly done; but, as a whole, Rules of Civility doesn’t quite do it for me.

Amor Towles’s website

Katie Ward, Girl Reading (2011)

I read (and really enjoyed) this last year, so I’ll reproduce here what I wrote then:

In Girl Reading, Katie Ward imagines the stories behind a number of portraits of girls and women reading; the portraits range in past time from Simone Martini’s Annunciation (1333) to a photograph on Flickr in 2008, and a concluding chapter set in 2060 provides context for the previous six. Ward has a distinctive writing style that creates a strong atmosphere for each of the time periods, and allows her to weave in details very subtly. I’ll single out her portrayal of Gwen –  a girl in love with an artist in 1916, and who sees a rival for her affections in a visiting woman – as one of my favourite moments, but there are plenty more from which I could choose.

The chapters of Girl Reading are not linked overtly (though some of the portraits do appear in later chapters, and it can be nicely disconcerting to see the gap between what later characters think of the subjects and what we’ve seen of them previously); it’s more that there are contrasts and connections in theme and content. For example, Ward shows the variety of functions which the portraits might fulfil – an expression of a political alliance, say, or a tangible reminder of what has been lost. Similarly, literacy represents different things to different characters; the act of creating each portrait has varying significance; and so on.Girl Reading is an intricate tapestry of a book, and one that leaves me with little notion of what Katie Ward may write next, though I do know that I’ll want to read it.

Jessica Francis Kane, The Report (2010)

The Report revolves around a real-life event from the Blitz: the night when 173 people died in a crush on the way into Bethnal Green tube station (which was being used as an air-raid shelter). Jessica Francis Kane imagines the inquiry into the disaster, undertaken by magistrate Laurence Dunne; and follows the lives of characters involved in the tragedy, such as Ada Barber and her surviving daughter Tilly (Ada’s younger daughter Emma having been killed in the crush). A parallel narrative concerns Dunne’s being interviewed thirty years on, by a documentary-maker with close ties to the Bethnal Green incident.

The Report is very effective at portraying the disaster itself: in the scenes set during the crush, it’s impossible to gain a full picture of what is happening – yet these scenes, and Dunne’s subsequent questioning of those involved, bring home the horror of the event. But Kane also examines issues of truth, and how lasting knowledge of events can be constructed after the fact; Dunne’s attempts to give a particular impression to the people he’s interviewing for the inquiry slide into questions of what should by reported, and how – and there are no simple answers.

Giveaway: The Afterparty by Leo Benedictus

22nd February 2012 / / 11 Comments

The Afterparty is a playfully self-referential novel about the events of one night, during a celebrity’s birthday celebrations; it spends enough time on the right side of the line between charming and annoying to be a very good read. The publishers ran several competitions in connection with the book, including one that would see two reader reviews quoted in the jacket of the mass-market paperback edition — and, as it turns out, one of those reviews is mine.

The first I knew of this was when a parcel arrived yesterday containing five signed copies of the new edition. One of them is personally inscribed to me, so of course I’ll be keeping that; but I want to give the other four away to readers of my blog. If you’d like the chance to win one, just leave a comment on this post.

A few notes:

  • Owing to postage costs, this giveaway is UK only.
  • Closing date for entries is 11.59pm (UK time) on Wednesday 29 February. I will select four winners at random shortly after.

Good luck!

 

Book notes: Cossé, Levine, Unsworth

18th February 2012 / / 4 Comments

Laurence Cossé, A Novel Bookstore (2009/10)

A Novel Bookstore is the ninth novel by French writer Laurence Cossé (the translaltion is by Alison Anderson); one of the launch titles for the UK imprint of Europa Editions; and a celebration of literature. Ivan Georg is a bookseller who has reached his forties mostly drifting through life; but that all changes when he meets Francesca Aldo-Valbelli, a fellow-lover of literature, with the wealth to turn a vision into reality – and the particular vision which the pair has is a bookstore which will stock only good novels, as selected by a secret committee of writers. The Good Novel bookstore duly opens inParis, and is a great success; but there are those who seek to discredit this well-intentioned enterprise – even to the point of physically attacking its committee members.

Though Cossé’s novel is framed as a mystery, its structure (with a lengthy detour in the middle detailing the history of The Good Novel) – and, indeed, the very resolution of the mystery – suggests that this element is not the main point of A Novel Bookstore; rather, it’s about the value of literature itself. There are direct statements of what good novels can do – literature ‘prepares you for life’ (p. 150), it ‘bring[s] like-minded people together and get[s] them talking’ (p. 81) – but we also see how literature has enriched the lives of the characters who write and read it in the book.

There are aspects of A Novel Bookstore which seem less disruptive here than I’d usually find them in a novel – such as the passages where Ivan and Francesca discuss books, passages which are detailed but don’t drag – and I’m not sure whether I am just cutting the book more slack because I share its enthusiasm for literature, and it imagines a place where I’d love to shop. Well, if that’s the case, so be it; for today, the celebration is enough.

Reviews elsewhere: A Common Reader; Of Books and Reading; Books are My Boyfriends; Nonsuch Book.

Sara Levine, Treasure Island!!! (2012)

Sara Levine’s debut novel (another Europa UK launch title) also revolves around the transforming power of literature, though here it’s one work in particular, and the result is perhaps not as positive. Levine’s (unnamed) narrator is a twenty-something graduate with a penchant for the easy (one might say lazy) option, until reading Treasure Island inspires her to be more like Jim Hawkins, and be bold and adventurous in her life. So she takes money from the Pet Library where she works in order to buy a parrot (which does not go down well with her boss), and goes on from there.

The crux of Treasure Island!!! for me is the narrator’s lack of self-awareness: her inability (or unwillingness) to acknowledge the negative effects her actions have on others; to recognise that the changes she’s making in her life are not as daring as she thinks; to countenance that other people might have aspirations and lives as complex and important as her own. The protagonist’s narrative voice veers between wry and snarky, which adds to the portrayal of someone who is unsympathetic, but not entirely alienating. One’s reaction to her is held in tension to the very end, where there’s a suggestion that the narrator may finally be finding her way, despite everything.

Reviews elsewhere: Bluestalking; The Well-Read Wife; Muse at Highway Speeds; Em and Emm.

Simon Kurt Unsworth, Rough Music (2012)

Now a new chapbook from Spectral Press, this time by the ever-reliable Simon Unsworth. It’s the tale of a man named Cornish, who’s been hiding an affair from his wife Andrea, and is now having to cope with a bunch of masked figures making a racket and acting out some strange performance beneath his bedroom window every night – though nobody else seems to notice them. From the start, Cornish is not exactly a sympathetic character; but Unsworth gradually and effectively reveals just how cold and calculating the protagonist is, which makes his inevitable comeuppance all the more satisfying. The ‘rough music’ outside also works well, as it shifts back and forth between having a metaphorical function and driving forward changes in the story. All in all, nicely done.

Reviews elsewhere: HellBound Times; The Ginger Nuts of Horror.

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