Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
Blimey, after finishing Anathem this morning I feel like someone’s been attacking my mind with some arcane knowledge injection technology. If this is what it feels like after finishing a Neal Stephenson book, I wonder what it actually feels like to be Neal Stephenson! It’s taken me a week and a half to read Anathem, a book I have been salivating at the prospect of since about this time last year. Despite my excitement, I didn’t buy it when it came out, and despite being given it for Christmas, I didn’t read it straight away. There was something not very appealing about the cover, and I knew carrying it to work and back every day would give me a dodgy shoulder (reach for those violins!) – but prompted by its nomination for the BSFA Best Novel Award, I decided to take the plunge.
My first reaction was that my initial reservations must have been founded on an instinct that this book was totally unlike anything that has preceded it – the stunning cyberpunk of Snow Crash, the grand sweep of the Baroque Cycle or the hard-to-classify techno-thriller Cryptonomicon. With Anathem, what Stephenson has actually invented is almost a new genre in itself: hard spec-fic. We are used to hard SF (red shift, relativity, acceleration burns and stuff that requires us to use our brains), but I have never encountered a book before that marries speculative fiction (the term preferred by the author over science fiction) with such topics as geometry, quantum physics, the nature of perception, alternative realities, and other blurry areas where science and philosophy collide. The topics are explored in extreme detail, through the use of proofs and Socratic dialogues, and there are times when this gets pretty involved – but you can’t skip over it because it’s utterly central to the plot. Before I say any more I had better give you a bit of an idea about the initial set-up…
The Black Butterfly, by Mark Gatiss
Famous as one quarter of the League of Gentlemen, Mark Gatiss is the proud owner of a grotesque streak a mile wide. His Lucifer Box novels, of which The Black Butterfly is the third and probably last, star a decadent, late Victorian aesthete; a high-society portrait painter with a secret life as one of Her Imperial Majesty’s top secret agents.
Over the series, Lucifer Box comes across as a heady mix of Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. He is a wit, a dandy, a poly-sexual lothario, and according to his creator, “a rotter but not a complete shit”. In short, Lucifer Box is great fun.
Each book pastiches a different popular genre. The Vesuvius Club is Sherlock Holmes versus a James Bond master villain, in steam driven, fin de siecle London. The Devil In Amber transported the series to the 1930s and is a Dennis Wheatley/John Buchan-esque thriller, set amid blue-shirted, devil-worshipping, fascists. Now comes The Black Butterfly, and an ageing Lucifer Box finds himself firmly in the world of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, as he battles his own decrepitude and another would-be world conquering, super villain in Istanbul, Jamaica and London.
Planet Chicken: The Shameful Story of the Bird on Your Plate, by Hattie Ellis
To celebrate the launch of his new food books blog, Tastybooks.co.uk, James A reviews one of the least appetizing but most important reads of the year.
Planet Chicken is a well-informed look at the world of chicken farming. It takes us on a journey through the history of chickens from farm birds to their current state as ‘lumps of matter’, via cockfighting and the salmonella crisis of the 1980s. But this is not predominantly a history book, it is an issue book. The issue being that we humans as a race are eating so much chicken that the only way to sustain our habit at pricing point we have come to expect is by employing methods of intensive rearing so horrific, that if someone were to be caught on camera doing it to just one backyard bird, it could plausibly form the basis of an RSPCA fundraising video.
Having said this book is centred around an issue, the main prong of which concerns animal welfare, it does so while managing not to be a tub-thumping, vegan-shoe wearing, carnivore-hating pamphlet. By looking at the facts, the author takes us through the possible health implications for humans and the appealing alternative of eating less – but much much nicer – chicken.
Happy Birthday to us! To celebrate, we’re giving you presents! [closed]
Yes, today Bookgeeks is one year old. Simon A’s first review, of Iain M Banks’ Matter, went live a year ago today. Since then, Simon and Mathew have been joined by some superb additions to the crew, and between them have reviewed about 150 books in a year.
We have moved to our own server, had a proper identity designed for us, and hopefully gotten better as we have gotten bigger. To celebrate our joyous day, we would love to give you all cake, but we sense that would be a tad impractical, so instead, we are offering you a chance to win proof copies of some of the books we have read and reviewed over the last year. The following titles are up for grabs:
- Last Argument of Kings, by Joe Abercrombie
- Principles of Angels, by Jaine Fenn
- The Bird Room, by Chris Killen
- Show Me the Sky, by Nicholas Hogg
- Under Control, by Mark McNay
- We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, by James Meek
- The Steel Remains, by Richard Morgan
- House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds
- Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts
- Far North, by Marcel Theroux
Douglas Jackson, author of Caligula
Douglas Jackson’s debut novel Caligula (recently reviewed and enjoyed by Simon A) is the first in a three-book series set in ancient Rome, and centres on the character of Rufus, a young slave. Douglas Jackson was born in Jedburgh in the Scottish borders and now lives in Bridge of Allan. Caligula grew out of his love for history, which was ignited as a boy when he grew up in the shadows of 12th century Jedburgh Abbey.
He is now an assistant editor at The Scotsman, and wrote Caligula on a packed commuter train between Stirling and Edinburgh every day on his way to work. He was signed up by a literary agent when he asked for feedback on his writing on www.YouWriteOn.com.
The Bookgeeks caught up with him to ask him about the inspiration for his debut, the research behind it and what’s next for Rufus and the Emperor’s Elephant…
Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon
In his afterword to this book, Michael Chabon talks about his original name for this story, Jews With Swords, as an attempt to refute the idea of Jews throughout history as a passive, non-violent people. The title may have changed, which is all to the good I think, but the concept is still central to this ripping yarn. Chabon channels the spirits of many pre-20th century writers to create a thrilling, witty and wonderful adventure – I can definitely detect Cervantes, and a hint of Voltaire’s Candide, but you would have to be a lot better read than I am to do catalogue the many authors than must have inspired this book.
The setting is the Caucasus mountains, around 950AD. The gentlemen of the title are the Frankish Jew Zelikam, a skilled surgeon, thief and adventurer with the apperance of a “black-hatted scarecrow”; and his partner in crime, the Abyssinian giant with a Viking axe (affectionately known as ‘Defiler of All Mothers’), Amram. We first encounter them staging a fight to the death in an out-of-the-way inn, to earn a share of the betting that will inevitably result. They are showmen, thieves, mercenaries and anything else that will make money, though they seem to be down on their luck – and when a chance encounter leads them in to the service of a member of the royal family fleeing the Jewish kingdom of the Khazars after a violent change of government, they may not feel their luck is much improving. Against their better judgment, they find themselves increasingly embroiled in an adventure to steal back an empire, and they bicker constantly along the way.
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Far North, by Marcel Theroux
In Marcel Theroux’s Far North we have a classic example of that occasional occurrence, the literary science fiction novel. Following in the footsteps of Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake) and Sarah Hall (The Carhullan Army), Theroux has created a vision of life after the fall of civilisation, and as in those books, many of the details are kept relatively opaque. What distinguishes Far North in some ways is the focus on a very unusual set of communities and how they are affected by the terrible events that must have befallen the world. American religious communities, Quakers and such, were invited to settle in Siberia, founding a number of towns – but when disaster strikes, the communities are too shallow-rooted to survive and their stateless citizens succumb to all manner of hardships.
CAUTION: Review contains mild spoilers
Our narrator, Makepeace, is a law officer in one such town – although by the time we are first introduced, there are hardly any people left and Makepeace is focused solely on survival. I can’t sustain for the duration of this review the same trick that the blurb writers use for Far North, which is to avoid the use of any pronouns – that means I have to reveal the surprise, sprung on us a few chapters in, that Makepeace is actually a woman. It’s an effective trick: everything about both the set-up (self-sufficient law enforcer trying to hold back the tides of disorder) and the actual narrative voice is designed to imply that Makepeace is a man, right up until the point she reveals her true gender. Physically and emotionally scarred from things that happened to her during her teenage years, she has suppressed her identity as a woman, subsuming it in to a lawman persona that’s wholly convincing, no more so than when she takes bloody revenge on a Tungu herdsman who tries to cheat her out of goods she traded for fair and square.
Lowboy, by John Wray
John Wray’s Lowboy is a thriller, a coming of age novel, and an immersion into the head of a schizophrenic boy. It is a mystery, a race that pits a detective above ground against the boy below. Its setting, New York City, is a character in itself, a world that vibrates and mutates under the eyes of a sixteen year old boy who is desperate to find somewhere safe. It is an unclear world, though, viewed as though through the peephole of a door with some things centred, magnified, given weight out of all proportion, and others only vague shapes on the side, lost and out of focus.
The story follows the journey of Lowboy, a boy who has run away from the hospital where he was being treated for schizophrenia. He begins with flight and destiny, twining the reader immediately into his worries and obsessions.
On November 11 Lowboy ran to catch a train, People were in his way but he was careful not to touch them… The doors had closed already but they opened when he kicked them. He couldn’t help but take that as a sign.
It is this unique and compelling voice, one that sees signs everywhere and manages to make the reader see them as well, that makes the confusion and pathos of schizophrenia approachable, if only just bearable. Readers feel as if they are looking at the same world that Lowboy is and that they, too, are involved in his flight from “Skull and Bones” and his search for his true calling.
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My Work Is Not Yet Done, by Thomas Ligotti
Thomas Ligotti knows something we don’t, something so dark and indescribable that we might go insane should we encounter it first-hand. We should be thankful to him, then, that he merely hints at whatever he sees in his writing, but even toned down you’ll find it difficult to ignore or deny the profound black emotions he portrays.
My Work is Not Yet Done brings together ‘three tales of corporate horror’ (as was the original Mythos Books sub-title) – the eponymous novella, a novelette I Have a Special Plan for This World, and a short story The Nightmare Network, and marks an evolution in Ligotti’s endeavours. Earlier collections immersed the reader in oddly bleak small town landscapes, the terrors of emerging memories and latent fears, coulrophobia, masks, puppets, loneliness, insecurity and anxiety. Indeed Ligotti has suffered from the latter condition all his life and this manifests strongly in many of his stories, especially in the seemingly personal and very accessible horror that is My Work Is Not Yet Done, but, and this is the evolution, so does a healthy vein of black, black humour.
Caligula, by Douglas Jackson
If you can tell a lot about a book by its cover, then it’s clear that Caligula sets out to be a mainstream accessible Roman thriller, and on those terms it succeeds enjoyably, if not spectacularly. The title is somewhat misleading, as while this is a book about the court of the Caligula, and has a few chapters from his perspective, it’s mainly a book about the slave Rufus, who is plucked from obscurity to serve as the keeper of the Emperor’s elephant. Rufus is dragged in to the courtly intrigues, murderous plots and vicious whims of his Emperor, and in Jackson’s rewriting of history, is present for Caligula’s untimely end.
The author has not made any effort to challenge the traditional picture of Caligula as a hedonist, capable of incest and murder, cruelty and avarice – his court is a depraved and dangerous place to be. Rufus finds himself uncomfortably close to the centre of things, thanks to his responsibility for the Imperial pachyderm, and along with his friend, the gladiator Cupido, is drawn in to the deadly schemes of the head of Caligula’s bodyguard, as well as the freedman Narcissus, right-hand to the Emperor’s uncle Claudius, and many other intriguers. It all gets quite convoluted at times, but it reaches a suitably adrenaline-fuelled conclusion with the death of the tyrant.
Seeds of Earth, by Michael Cobley
Michael Cobley’s new space opera hits the launchpad, and I must confess that intitially I was seriously worried it was going to crash and burn: the Prologue, a brief taster of the Swarm War that nearly caused the extinction of the human race, is overblown and rather hackneyed, with a strong echo of Starship Troopers (the film, not the book). Moving beyond that, the initial setup was so strongly reminiscent of Ken McLeod’s excellent Cosmonaut Keep that for a little while I couldn’t get past it – descendants of Earth settlers, living on a new world, in an co-operative alliance with an enigmatic race of indigenous aliens, even the use of airships to get around, all seemed vividly familiar. HOWEVER, my persistence was rewarded – once Cobley gets in to his stride, this is a compelling and impressive book, and one that I really enjoyed.
The people of Darien arrived on their world in full flight from the Swarm War, one of only three colony ships launched as humanity’s last hope. The settlers, a mix of Scots, Scandinavians and Russians, exist peacefully with the Uvovo, a mysterious alien species who dwell on the forest moon (no, they’re nothing like Ewoks) and have an enigmatic, symbiotic relationship with the forest they call Segrana. When a spaceship from the Earth arrives, revealing that the human race survived the Swarm War, the people of Darien have to rapidly assimilate a new reality – Earth has powerful allies, the Sendrukans, and they’re very interested in Darien for reasons dating back to an ancient conflict between immensely powerful forces.
Prize-winning geek
We are pleased to report that our very own Mathew F. Riley has been writing more than just book reviews…
With three short stories forthcoming in genre magazines All Hallows, Necrography and Dark Horizons, the exciting thing is that he’s just won the British Fantasy Society’s Short Story Competition, 2008, with the spooky little number, Seems Only Right.
The winning story will be published in New Horizons later in the year. More information over at the BFS.
Congratulations to Mathew!
Bloodheir, by Brian Ruckley
The second volume in Brian Ruckley‘s Godless World trilogy significantly ups the stakes, and anyone who enjoyed the first volume, Winterbirth, will not want to miss out. The rank used as the title, Bloodheir, alludes to the young successors to the various Thanes whose fiefdoms are at the centre of the story – Orisian, who came to be the Thane of the Lannis Blood at the end of Winterbirth following the deaths of his uncle and cousin; Roaric, intemperate heir of the Kilkry Blood; Aewult, Bloodheir to the Thane of Thanes, general of the army intended to throw back the marauding armies of the Black Road; and lastly, Kanin, until recently Bloodheir of the Gyre Blood, now Thane. These young men face significant peril in navigating a world thrown in to chaos and facing the spectre of forces none of them are really prepared for – some of them will acquit themselves better than others.
Ruckley significantly ramps up the magical elements in this volume – the hybrid Aeglyss, having survived the attempt to crucify him on the Breaking Stone at the end of the previous volume, has acquired power in the Shared not seen for generations. Aeglyss can now mesmerise humans and Kyrinin (‘elves’), occupy the bodies of others and inspire a level of devotion that is positively unhealthy. Kanin increasingly has to recognise that the invasion he started in to the lands of the True Bloods has been hijacked by this charismatic intruder, and it starts to acquire the character of a crusade as more and more Black Road followers flock to follow him, bolstered by the deadly warriors of the Battle Inkall. Kanin also has a personal motive to hate Aeglyss – his sister, Wain, is one of the first to see the power in him, and eventually pays the price.
The Coronation, by Boris Akunin
Having read and reviewed The State Counsellor a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t have long to wait for the next installment of this wonderful series. Witty, stylish, enlightening, exciting and resonant, the Erast Fandorin novels really are everything you could possibly want from a series of historical crime novels.
These are unashamedly intelligent books, with convincing portrayals of a specific place and time, yet they wear their erudition lightly and the historical details never get in the way of what is mainly a rattling good read. As I said before, the Erast Fandorin books really are everything you could want from a series of historical crime novels.
Each instalment is written in a different literary style that pays homage to a different genre. After the relatively downbeat seriousness of the Conrad-esque The State Counsellor, The Coronation sees Fandorin back into rollicking entertainment territory.
It is the run up to the coronation of the new Tsar, and a young Grand Duke is kidnapped. Shortly afterwards a ransom letter arrives from Dr Lind, international Moriarty to Fandorin’s Russian Sherlock Holmes. And we’re off and running again, with Fandorin working to catch the super criminal and save the Grand Duke and an empire that may well no longer be worth saving.
Shadow Gate, by Kate Elliott
Kate Eliot’s Shadow Gate suffers, a bit, by standing in the unenviable position of the second book in a series. Much of the character and world building is out of the way, but enough grand action must be left for the books that follow to give them a reason to exist. Luckily, Shadow Gate is buoyed up by an interesting cast of characters and a well-crafted ending that leaves the reader satisfied that something has happened but without making the stories feel finished and the next books superfluous.
It begins with Marit, a reeve and main character in the first book, Spirit Gate, collapsed on a Guardian altar and remembering, quite vividly, being murdered. Her continued existence is not the result of a rescue or healing, but of some sort of unclear transformation. After being ambushed, she manages to escape dying in front of the soldiers through the intervention of a winged horse, and she finds herself waking, again, collapsed on a Guardian altar with only a new scar to show for her most recent death.
Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre
In which readers are once again given permission to laugh at the illogical gullibility of their fellow human beings…
Science and pseudo-science have been formally separated for many years, yet we somehow live in an age where the sales of pseudo scientific “medicine” are positively thriving. So why is it that otherwise clever and educated people believe in the efficacy of products for which there is no supporting evidence? Are the millions spent on these treatments simply a tax on the gullible or are they genuinely harmful? This is the subject of Ben Goldacre’s brilliantly hilarious book, of the website, of the weekly Guardian column, Bad Science.
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Kat Falls
Kat Falls grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and now teaches at NU, where she is continually inspired by her students’ creativity. She started writing Dark Life as a writing exercise. Knowing that her 12-year-old son loved reading about the ocean, Wild West pioneers and, of course, the X-Men, she combined his interests and created the premise for a story that kept her up nights plotting and world-building.
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The Book That...
Robert Lloyd Parry: The Book I Would Like To Be Buried With…
This special twentieth Bury Me… features grand panjandrum and actor Robert Lloyd Parry, the man behind the Nunkie Theatre Company, responsible for many an uneasy evening with the master of English supernatural stories…
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The Bookgeeks Competition
The Richard T. Kelly Column
Richard T. Kelly
Richard T. Kelly’s exclusive monthly column, in which he addresses various matters literary, writers and their books, the publishing business and his own experiences as a writer. Richard is a novelist, screenwriter, biographer and journalist, and you can read his column exclusively on our sister site, Bookhugger.co.uk.Connect with Bookgeeks
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