This is number 4 in the VentureSF series, and it's not too bad. It's 50s-style space opera by one of its top producerThis review first appeared here.
This is number 4 in the VentureSF series, and it's not too bad. It's 50s-style space opera by one of its top producers.
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It contains 3 pieces; 2 short novels and a novella -- The Altar on Asconel, The Man from the Big Dark (a novella at 40 pages) and The Wanton of Argus. The stories are set in a galactic empire centred on Argus. All are lean, straightforward adventure stories, with no pretences and a sensible economy of description.
Interesting also is the foreword, in which Brunner discusses the galactic history that might lead to the coexistence of swords and spaceships.
Wanton of Argus is replete with mysterious figures, beautiful women, swordsmen, robots in disguise, you name it, before it ends in a kind of confrontation between two mighty wills -- the kind of ending that renders much of what went before superfluous. A bit like a story in which much happens and then a comet wipes out the Earth anyway. Well, not quite as extreme as that, but that's the somewhat unsatisfactory sense it gives. It is most interesting because it is a very early work -- as a piece of fiction, it's pretty clearly little more than grist for the publishing mill of the time. Brunner wrote it when he was 17, and sold it and got paid for it, although the buyer slapped the terrible title on it that is completely unreflective of the content. It was republished as The Space-TimeJuggler.
The other stories are better constructed, as you'd expect, especially Asconel, but nothing here is a major work, and there's really no reason to read the book unless you're interested in Brunner or a fan of SF from the 50s.
The omnibus is a good read if you like freewheeling, unselfconscious space opera in the 50s style. Very much not like Brunner's major novels of the late sixties and early seventies. More like this one.
The title is not great. The story is so full of incident it becomes schematic, with little room for character. It endsThis review first appeared here.
The title is not great. The story is so full of incident it becomes schematic, with little room for character. It ends abruptly. Usually, I like how these old books are around 120, 130 pages. Modern books are so bloated by comparison, loose and not edited hard enough. These are written to a fixed format. But in this case the author has crammed so much in the book is a little compromised.
Even so, many details ring true, and I confess I found it adequate entertainment. But the bar is pretty low -- I am an easy mark for such stories. Where others watch police procedurals or murder mysteries, I read these old stories. Like a TV mystery, you know what's going to happen in broad terms, but the details always differ. The detective will, in the end, solve the murder.
This tells the story of a British antisubmarine group -- sloops and corvettes, led by a sole destroyer -- hunting for a German submarine wolf pack. Intrigue about a Nazi 'political' on the crew of the lead sub upsets the apple cart, and other incidents occur, and then it all ends.
I cannot recommend it, really, unless you're already a reader of such books; and in truth what are the odds you'd ever see a copy anyway?...more
The cover of this book, and its title, would give you the idea that the whole book is about a lone man escaping from aThis review first appeared here.
The cover of this book, and its title, would give you the idea that the whole book is about a lone man escaping from a damaged submarine at the limit of its depth range. A kind of Gravity underwater. This is only strengthened by the author's bio, which refers to Mars as a wartime submarine ace; it sounds like he was a larger-than-life figure.
In truth, the escape occupies the first few pages -- and it's pretty good stuff. The rest of the book is subterfuge and intrigue on an Italian island, complete with a villa occupied by a beautiful woman, educated in the USA and ready to escape occupied Europe with our (Australian) hero who is a much-needed expert on radar.
Commando operations, a love story, a naval adventure, brave resistance fighters -- it's all here in 130 pulpy pages. It's not going to win any prizes, but it's quite a fun read. It's just not what the cover would imply.
This is the second of three volumes. The first chronicles the rise to power, the third the Review from My blog.
The Third Reich in Power
Richard J Evans
This is the second of three volumes. The first chronicles the rise to power, the third the war; this is 1933 and the seizure of power through to the start of the war.
It is thorough and interesting. Possibly one if its most interesting aspects is the insight it gives into how the Nazis held onto power when they were so extreme and so bad for so many.
We look back and ask, “How could that happen?” Especially if you’ve grown up in a liberal democracy, the rise of the Nazis, the lack of meaningful opposition to them, the way the nation followed them into a war and all the way into complete destruction -- it all seems strange. Yet who among us would be prepared to rise against our own government in armed opposition? Would we be sure that it was the right thing to do? Who is willing to march at the front of that demonstration and take the bullets so the others can be free? Some people, yes -- but enough? Add to that the undoubted brutality of the brownshirts and the bogey men that the SS and Gestapo became (and the disappearances of people into the concentration camps). Add to that the jobs that rearmament created. Yes, they were lousy jobs with long hours and low pay, but they were seen in contrast to the lack of any work during the Depression. Add to that the international successes that Hitler accrued -- the Saar, the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, Memel -- and the pride that he gave back to many Germans ... and you see a situation in which by the time the case for meaningful opposition had become incontrovertible, nothing short of a full rebellion by the army could have stopped the coming catastrophe.
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And the army ... well ... loyalty, confusion, greed, bribery, scandal, indecision ... and Hitler had them in the palm of his hand.
It's not a good thing if an army is too ready to throw out a legitimate (at first) government. But it is tempting to believe that one great German general in the right place at the right time could have stood up.
A very useful book if you want to understand a very important time and place.
Uncharitably, one could call this a well-wrought snuff tale.
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It is in fact many things. A look at the brutality and violence that fear, poveUncharitably, one could call this a well-wrought snuff tale.
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It is in fact many things. A look at the brutality and violence that fear, poverty and ignorance engender. A look at the lengths the helpless will go to to feel some sense of agency. An outline of the types of torture, disfigurement and punishment that were applied by so-called God-fearing men (and probably still are in some places). A fantasy about witches, but one that avoids the expected tropes. A look at male versus female 'power'. A love story (or two). One could argue it may be too short to contain everything the author is trying to do. It certainly has no lack of descriptions (and inferences) of brutal behaviour, including sexual violence and incest.
It is (in brief) the story of the hunting down of witches and papists in Stuart England, and the punishments meted out to them. Its presentation of the brutality of the times is unflinching. Often in a book the violence is cartoonish and you can disregard it. Here, it is the opposite. It is clumsy yet vicious, it is matter-of-fact yet beyond the pale, and you cannot even pretend it didn't happen this way.
Note, if this were a movie, it would be R18+, and is certainly not suitable for kids or the squeamish, or people who are likely to be kept awake when their mind replays horrible visions from what they've read or seen.
The writing is on the whole good. Not all the arresting images are brutal -- some are admirable figures of speech, evocative conjurings, subtle delineations of character (after all, one can skilfully and subtly describe a crude, venal or ignorant character).
It is interesting to think how lowly regarded a book covering much the same territory but written in a pulpy, exploitative style would be.
It's quite good, but that does not mean it's for everyone....more
Someone on Goodreads gave this a 1 star review because it is not what they are interested in. I confess I find that weird. I mean, a Review from here.
Someone on Goodreads gave this a 1 star review because it is not what they are interested in. I confess I find that weird. I mean, a book could be a very good example of something that you are not interested in. Why give it a poor review? Just don't read it or review it! I'm not interested in westerns, but I don't give every western a 1-star review because of that.
Anyway.
A short novelised true story about the river steamer Li Wo and its brave, futile battle against the invading Japanese in world war 2. It is perhaps enough to say that her skipper received a posthumous Victoria Cross.
The story focuses on Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Ronald Stanton RNR -- in part at least because he was one of the few survivors.
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This is told in a straightforward, commercial-fiction kind of way. Sellwood wrote a handful of popular histories of the war, and was of the same generation as the people he wrote about. The book has a very close focus on the sailors. I cannot find out, but it is quite possible, likely even, that Sellwood interviewed survivors, presumably Stanton at least, because he used this way of working on other books. This closeness to the ordinary men of the crew results in a book that tries to speak in their words and express their thoughts and points of view. So we see unchallenged 'colonial' thinking and casual racism. We don't see large-scale strategy. We are down in the dirty work, and the book is the better for it. Should they fight? Should they purely aim to survive? What can they meaningfully do? What else is going on? They have to make the best of it. We see them use their tiny, slow little vessel to dodge bombs, fight enemy ships, and try to find a safe harbour -- of which there is none. We're down in the water with them, surrounded by wreckage, as the Japanese turn their machine guns on the injured sailors. The book does not dwell on the brutality --it is pretty matter-of-fact, yet still quite evocative.
This is a good solid read about a time that drove men to their limits. Recommended if you like novelisations of real naval action....more
I got this book for 50c at a library that was selling off old books. I enjoyed Wishful drinking well enough. Though Fisher's self-From this blog post.
I got this book for 50c at a library that was selling off old books. I enjoyed Wishful drinking well enough. Though Fisher's self-deprecating shtick would I suspect have become annoying had that book been much longer, the combination of verbal wit, jokes and frankness, and a willingness to own her mistakes and weaknesses -- and also own the growth they had induced -- was on the whole quite entertaining and at times insightful.
I cannot say this book is as good. It is funny in places. It is in fact very odd and left me feeling somewhat icky, as if I had done something a little sordid just by reading it.
This review is largely about what the book is and is not; not necessarily whether it is good or bad, but whether it is what a reader might expect it to be, which they may find useful if thinking about reading it.
First, a warning. Yes, it contains diary entries from while Carrie Fisher was working on Star wars. But, and it is a big but, none of them actually tell you anything much about the movie, its history, creation and so on. What they are is the self-analysis, self-flagellating, self-critiquing of a Carrie Fisher who was trying to work out what she wants, and why she (feels like she) loves Harrison Ford when he was not actually enjoyable to be with and never going to stay with her.
Fisher is 19, 20 years old. Ford is 35 and looking for some physical pleasure while away from wife and kids filming. The book rather suggests that he initially misreads Fisher's worldliness, assumes she is able to have some fun and let it go at that, then later realises that she's not that experienced, and is rather hooked on him, which troubles him but he allows it to go on. She cannot help falling in love in the intense and sometimes hopeless way that we do when it's the first or second time, and berates herself over her lack of wisdom but does not/cannot walk away.
In other words, we're looking at a young person's deeply personal diary, that they are writing as a coping mechanism at a confusing and intense period in their life.
Even though that very person decided to publish these words, even though they bracket them in words they wrote at the age of 60, when they could be expected to know their own mind, it still, to me, feels invasive reading this stuff.
I mean, it has an honesty that you rarely encounter, in an oversharing kind of way. Can anything be more cringeworthy than teenage diaries? Would you want your teenage thoughts, poems, crushes and insecurities printed and distributed? Carrie Fisher did, it would seem. That could be seen as brave. And if you are a male novelist who wants to write a young articulate female character, it might be useful research. But by reading it I kind of feel complicit in some kind of bad decision. Like I let my friend drive drunk.
The material in the book before the diaries kick in starts off a lot like Wishful drinking; anecdotes, context from the times, that sort of thing -- quite entertaining. Then Ford starts to dominate the narrative, and it veers off into self-analysis, and then the diary entries come in, and then we get a grab bag of stuff about times since, including a long discussion of signing photographs for money.
The central scene, in a way, is shortly before the diary entries start. They are having a party, and Fisher, seemingly the only young woman on the scene, is first pressured into getting drunk, then almost carried off for possibly illegal purposes by large male members of the film crew, then 'saved' by Ford who then snogs her in the taxi, which leads to their first night together.
It is a long way from insights into how a beloved movie got made.
So it is a slightly odd grab bag with an awkward kernel that might not be what you expect based on the cover blurb....more
After the interesting We all died at Breakaway Station and the quite dreadful Come, hunt an Earthman, volume 3 of the Venture SF series is Hammer's Slammers by David Drake. It is actually a collection of linked short stories, despite Venture's blurb bravely proclaiming 'no short stories, no fantasy, no boredom'. It is a solid example of military SF, with a well-balanced mix of human story, weapon pornography and military tactics that will keep its core constituency happy -- as it must have, because many more 'Slammers' books followed, and in fact this was very much the launching pad of Drake's very successful career.
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The book shows the waste and the casual and collateral destruction of lives that fighting causes. It shows the loyalty and toughness of fighting men and women, and in doing so obliquely advertises the military life as one of a kind of virtue. For the better, it avoids the higher-level, dehumanised oversight level of story and instead puts the reader in tanks ('blowers' -- massive, hovering, nuclear-powered monsters) and in commandeered dwellings, waiting for said tanks to pass by.
Hammer's mercenaries take the money, do the job, and go, leaving destruction and death behind them. They try to make no judgement on whether they are on the 'right' side of the conflict, though sometimes they find themselves asking too many questions. They are on the side that pays them. Thus, we have a sort of foregrounded decency (individual grunts doing the best they can in tough spots, too busy staying alive to worry about rights and wrongs -- though some of them do -- kind of thing), against a background of venality. In desperate situations people can be brave, tough, brutal, resourceful and so on, yes; but often those situations need not exist. Often, the mercenaries are pure parasites -- taking the money from a government funded by the taxes paid by the struggling workers, destroying livelihoods in the fighting, and then leaving.
Yet the machinery of war is shiny and brilliant and sleek and seductive.
Anyway, I feel like I am thinking about it too much. It's a military SF adventure. If you like that sort of thing, you'll like the book....more
The central thing that can bug me with books like this one (and I should emphasise 'like', because this one is too finely wrought for this to be a proThe central thing that can bug me with books like this one (and I should emphasise 'like', because this one is too finely wrought for this to be a problem) is whether there is an underlying 'realistic' narrative (ie possible in the world, as we generally agree upon such things) and it is the subjectivity of the narrator(s) that creates the apparent inconsistencies and shifts of time and place, or are the fantastical places 'real' within the frame of the book. It's a funny thing; in some sense the ending of all fiction is 'but it was just a dream', yet it is really important for our enjoyment that it doesn't feel like that is the case. Some fiction gives us new lenses through which to look at the world, after all.
If the author is working with a universe that I can hope to understand -- no matter how filtered through the perceptions, lies and limitations of narrators -- that's one thing. If they are pulling rabbits out of hats, that is quite another.
Further, whether a story is set in London, England, or Jethra, Faiandland, it remains words on a page. Does the London of a novel have any more 'reality' than a Jethra, or do both depend on the writer's skill and have only as much reality as something can when it is evoked in our minds? Well, not if you've been to London, I suppose. Clearly someone could present London through pure description of the real thing -- no talent or imagination needed, just sheer weight of words would, if the reader could be bothered, suffice to at least transmit some information, however incomplete. Jethra must be imagined; but what if the author describes (say) Lyon but changes the names?
Should we assume that when a story is set part in London and part in Jethra, the London parts are the 'real' parts? We are certainly inclined to do so, but maybe the author depends on that...
The Affirmation begins with a youngish man, (Robert) Peter Sinclair retreating to the country to try to pull himself together after a series of blows -- death of his father, loss of his job, end of his relationship, loss of his flat. A friend says he can stay in a little cottage rent-free if he'll do some repairs. While there, to get a handle on himself, he starts to write progressively more fictionalised autobiographies (approaching, he says, a higher truth), culminating in one set in Faiandland and the Dream Archipelago, before his sister comes and rains on his parade, and we discover that Peter does not always tell the truth; he often feels a need to protect himself from it. Yes, we are in 'unreliable narrator' territory.
The novel is told (mostly) in alternating chunks set in England and in the Dream Archipelago, though the chunks are not the same as chapters. As the two streams move forward, we see Peter cope rather poorly with life in England, and rather better in the islands, where he wins a lottery and the prize is immortality, and a rather pretty young woman befriends and then loves him. Which does rather suggest that the islands are the fantasy.
There's a lot more to it than that, of course and -- more than in most books -- the fun is in the telling.
What should I say beyond that? A few points:
Withhold judgement of the story until you get to the end of chapter 5 or 6; it does not begin as it goes on (or vice versa). It's interesting to think about the assumptions many of us make as readers. Some of them are pretty fundamental and we might not realise we've made them. This book exploits that. The prose can seem a little flat and repetitive, and I confess I found Peter's endless, somewhat repetitive agonising over what he should do tiresome at times; but both have functions. In a story that plays with structure and narrative, having a clear, precise, unadorned prose style works, overall, extremely well. It must be clear to avoid the reader feeling that any lack of certainty is coming from overcomplicated grammar or exotic vocabulary. By keeping the telling clean -- precise is a word that comes to mind -- Priest focuses on what is being told, rather than the telling. Complex prose in a complex story with a complex structure would be at least one complex too many. Further, he does evoke the many places with effect and economy. And Peter's agonising? Suffice to say that when you're following troubled souls (or a troubled soul) through two stories, you're going to have twice as much soul-searching as following a troubled soul (or souls) through one. I read the book very quickly (for me) -- in three or four days. I wanted to know how it all fitted together. I confess I am not sure that I do, but I should say that I have tentatively worked out what I think the underlying narrative might be. I should also say I don't like spoilers, so I'm not going to put it here. (I'm also not going to put it here because I am quite likely embarrassingly wrong. It's that kind of book.)
When I finished it I began flipping though it and making notes, putting pieces together, and reading the narrative out of order (but not at random) to see if I could work out the construction of it. That I got that engaged is unusual for me, and I guess that must act as some kind of recommendation. It's not me being obsessive (much) because I've never before bothered to do such a thing.
I liked it. A lot. I liked The Separation a lot too, and Inverted World and The Prestige. I recommend this book to anyone interested in fiction and how it operates, or in puzzles and enigmas, or in how we gain and keep the pictures of ourselves and the world that we build up in our minds and use to help us make our way though life.
If in a novel someone developed a way to move between adjacent universes, where adjacent means similar in some way, and every person had their own setIf in a novel someone developed a way to move between adjacent universes, where adjacent means similar in some way, and every person had their own set of universes that were related precisely because versions of that person could be found in each, and time moved at slightly different rates in each universe, so that moving to an adjacent one might seem like moving in time, and moving between these universes was triggered by encounters with versions of the technology that permits moving between them, and this technology got out of hand and got dispersed through the multiverse, and in one universe the protagonist encountered the man (and equipment) who opened up these universes, and if the story included events in the lives of many versions of the protagonist, but did not make the links for you, and the worlds started bleeding into each other, then you would have a complicated, elusive, frustrating and fascinating reading experience.
If you have read Priest's work, then you'll know what I mean if I say this is a very Priestian novel. If you've not, then that means a story that moves forwards and backwards in time, and across settings, and does not always make the connections between the pieces obvious. It also means the prose is relatively unadorned, as if the author knows that complex prose in a complexly constructed novel with complex characters would be one complex too many.
This book is strongly in the tradition of The Affirmation, The Separation and The Prestige; in some ways, it is like the intersection of these books. Indeed, it namechecks J. L. Sawyer, protagonist of The Separation, and partly takes place in the Dream Archipelago, and includes a couple of characters who are stage magicians, one of whom dates from the time of world war one, making him contemporary with the later years of the duelling magicians of The Prestige, though I have not enough knowledge to work out if there is any explicit connection with that book (perhaps like the name of a theatre or some character) quietly dropped in. Yes, the Dream Archipelago links quite a few of Priest's works, but the link to The Separation is the real head scratcher. Given that some (most) of the novels -- especially this one -- are built from various oblique, filtered views of some central events, then one could view the novels themselves as various perspectives on the same central preoccupations, such that the novels bear the same relationships to each other as the scenes within a novel do to each other, only on a larger scale.
We encounter a highly mutable and shifting multiverse, in which some of the timestreams are very much like our world (as per The Separation), while others (the Dream Archipelago) are (at least geographically) more different, and not even self consistent (or are there several parallel Dream Archipelagos? Why not?). When we conflate this with the author's use of unreliable, and in some cases possibly not completely sane, narrators, we get a multiverse that includes internal and external universes.
Now, all this is not to say that the novel cannot be readily read in isolation from the author's other works.
But ...
The story forced me to make a choice.
Either ...
to let the complexity wash by, enjoy the story as it goes (and much of it is enjoyable) and refuse to worry about how it all hangs together, and thereby perhaps not get as much out of the book as I might, but on the other hand sleep better
... or ...
wrestle with how it all fits, with which people or events are echoes of which other events or people (and what that means for what 'actually' happened) and with what the architecture of Priest's universe(s) might be, and perhaps get more out of the book, or just get more frustrated and feel like no matter how hard I try I'm missing something crucial, and then wonder if that key really is there or I just expect it to be there and instead ought to move my expectations.
As you can imagine, that does not lead to a satisfactory reading experience if you like your plots tied up neatly on the last page, with lessons learned and the characters suitably rewarded or otherwise.
The book is a challenge. Many of the common expectations of popular fiction are not met, and in some ways you could even call it experimental fiction, though page by page it is highly readable and often very entertaining, and the prose is not dense or affected or hard to follow. No page-long sentences or punctuationless stanzas. We always know what is happening -- or at least we can clearly picture what we are being told to picture (well, except perhaps one key event) but the cumulative structure remains hard to discern.
Ian Serraillier's The silver sword is now a classic. It is the story of 4 children -- 3 of them siblings -- making their way across postwar Europe in Ian Serraillier's The silver sword is now a classic. It is the story of 4 children -- 3 of them siblings -- making their way across postwar Europe in a quest for their parents. It is a fine story, with well-drawn characters, especially the irascible Jan and the dependable Ruth.
The book says it is aimed for 10 to 14 year-olds, and I think 14 would be the oldest. The prose is economical, but simplified, and the adult reader may find it a little too simplified. But the story is gripping, the characters interesting, the setting fascinating and the humanity and empathy of it all rather inspiring.
Recommended for kids of all ages. Smaller children would I think enjoy hearing it read out -- they could identify with little Bronia -- and there are strong protagonists for both boys and girls to look to. Something for everyone, and something to reflect on, too, as the war in Ukraine continues.
This book reads to me like an itch the author had to scratch. It is a page turner, all right, but it does run around in circles a bit, and hammers a fThis book reads to me like an itch the author had to scratch. It is a page turner, all right, but it does run around in circles a bit, and hammers a few points a little too hard.
Would have been better if it were somewhat shorter. Highly readable, and generally pretty plausible, and with a few things to say about truth, openness and human fallibility; but to me it feels like a relatively minor work.
If this is the only Priest book you have read, and you're unimpressed, have a go at something else; if you like the playing with narrative order, the confused protagonist who is searching for answers and the difficulty of being sure of the answers that are found -- all of which are pretty true to life! -- then have a go at another one; maybe The Separation or The Prestige or The Affirmation. I also enjoyed The Adjacent, but I think that one would be more interesting to a reader who had read the other books I have listed first.
On the whole, not bad but not at the first rank of the author's work. I expect it took some bravery to publish it -- author runs the risk of looking like a nutjob conspiracy theorist, rather than a writer using a major real event to explore the power of stories, the personal need for some kind of truth and the manipulation of the media and of public attention, all of which are topics well worth exploring.
It would be easy to fail to understand what the author is trying to do and then denigrate the book accordingly.
This book is subtitled 'a global history of World War II', and with the main matter stretching to 920 pages, it certainly has a go at it. On the whole, I would describe the book as interesting, thoughtful and thorough. If we consider its subtitle, I would say that it is perhaps not quite as global as may have been the original intent -- but how could the book have been kept to a publishable length if it were otherwise? Inevitably it focuses on the main combatants, with thumbnail sketches of what is going on in the more peripheral places.
Perhaps inevitably -- living as I do in Australia -- this strikes me. Australia occupies maybe a couple of pages of the 920. Say 0.2%. The rest is implicit; like when the North African fighting is mentioned, Aussies were there, but the author cannot be expected to always note this.
The book focuses on the big picture. How did the Allies come to agree on a 'Europe first' approach? How did the western powers manage to work with a soviet Russia that had, before the Germans turned on it, invaded Poland and provided the raw materials that powered the Nazi assault on France and fueled the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain? A Russia that withheld information, spied on the Americans and the British, and then demanded they send thousands of planes and trucks? No matter what Stalin demanded of the West, it was sanctified by the millions of Russian dead; no matter how hard he was to work with, no-one could say the Russians were not making remarkable sacrifices. And of course, the West worried that Russia might make a separate peace -- something that, in truth, Hitler's ideology rendered extremely unlikely. These sorts of considerations form the meat of the book. There is a little about technology, a little about espionage, quite a lot about signals intelligence (which was hugely important, as the book makes clear) and a lot about why the various leaders did what they did (as far as can be known).
The book is on the whole highly successful. It is unafraid to make judgements on leaders. Roosevelt comes out well, Churchill as less objective but fundamentally sound, Stalin as strong and effective but very difficult to work with. Montgomery comes out badly, King and Marshall well, and Eisenhower comes out well too; better than, say, the egomaniacal MacArthur.
The biggest military operations are described in a little detail -- enough to then back up analysis of how they affected the broader position, or why they justified the recall of a general, for example. The overall ebb and flow of fronts is more the book's style. And then we get an interpolated chapter describing, for example, the home front, or the evolution of key weapons (jets, radar, atom bombs, rockets, that sort of thing).
The book makes it clear that as the war went on the Red Army was not only large, it was also good, something not all histories admit. It pays close attention to deals made over borders and suchlike, and shows how these things had repercussions after the war and up to today.
I would not say the prose is elegant. It is effective enough, but at times I had to reread a sentence or two. There are no pictures apart from a useful set of maps in the back. It is a book that knows what it is about -- understanding the big picture, not minutia. You could almost call it a political history of the war (rather than a military hitory), and as such it is an excellent summary for the reader who is not going to go to primary sources. The author is not afraid to synthesise the material and make his own judgements, and on the whole, from what I know, they are generally interesting and most likely perceptive.
If what you want is what the book aims to deliver, it comes thoroughly recommended.
The book is subtitled, 'A sortabiography', and begins with a statement that '...I've glossed over all my shorReview from darrengoossens.wordpress.com.
The book is subtitled, 'A sortabiography', and begins with a statement that '...I've glossed over all my shortcomings ... It is the case for the Defense ...' in other words, it is mostly true, but it is also not everything.
This is, of course, entirely reasonable. Nothing can contain everything, so to speak. Idle is just being honest when he says he is going to omit as he sees fit. This does not mean the book consists purely of the good bits -- he criticises himself thoroughly for the behaviour that lead to the breakup of his first marriage -- but it does not dwell on the less successful events. Oh, he admits that some of the movies he's been in could have been better (for example), but on the whole he focuses on the good news and admits to the existence of the bad without actually presenting it.
It all makes for a light, fast, funny read. Yes, he drops names relentlessly, but -- as be points out -- those are the people he knows. If you were a golfer, you'd know golfers and a lot of your stories would be about golfers. If you work in movies and TV, you know those people, and it just so happens that so do lots of the rest of us. It's a fair point. I think partly it is intentional because he wants to show us that George Harrison and David Bowie and so on were just people. They liked a laugh, and a holiday, and they had sense of humour and all that. They felt they couldn't be themselves in public, and Idle has, I think, chosen to show us just a glimpse of the normality behind their extraordinary public personas. Just a glimpse. Partly because time is running out to do so. That generation is passing and, with the example of Terry Jones's dementia before him, it was time to put it on paper.
Pete Townshend's Who I am is rather heavy on the self-analysis, and Keith Richards's Life perhaps too light on it (Keith comes across as a man who has failed to learn a lot of lessons). Idle seems to have learned a bit, but doesn't feel the need to put us through the wringer.
It is quite funny. I did laugh out loud a few times. I would have liked a few more glimpses behind the scenes of Do not adjust your set, which gets about a page, which seems a little thin. It could have been longer (despite his comment that he would 'leave you wanting less'), but if you want a quick, fun read that gives you a look at the world through Idle's amused eyes and is told in his amusing and witty voice, then a book by Eric Idle is the only place you'll get it.
It is not heavy enough to use to press flowers, but too heavy to swat flies. This is my only real criticism.
The book contains some nice ideas, some good characters, and if you can overlook some clunky plotting, it's potentially quite dramatic. What I mean is, the plot hinges on some military tactical decisions that seem unlikely at best. The portrayal of women is ... interesting. The novel includes plenty of women who affect the outcome, plenty in positions of authority, plenty who are strong; and yet there's often a sense of women as objects and still looking to men when it comes to the crunch. It's odd.
The strength of the book is really in the desperation of the central characters. Earth is at war with the incomprehensible Jillies, who are known to have cut up live humans and who seem set on destroying humans despite there being plenty of room in the galaxy. So advanced is technology that people who have died can be reassembled -- as long as they are got into cold sleep soon enough.
So we have 3 starships, crewed by resurrected people who have been temporarily repaired, with mechanical parts replacing faces, legs, guts, whatever it was that killed them. All remember being killed, and want nothing more than to get back to Earth and get fixed up properly and forget. But then Breakaway Station is threatened. The station is a link in a communications chain that can deliver information to Earth -- information about the Jillies' home world -- that might turn the war around. And the Jillies are coming for it, and there's nobody to defend it but the 3 battered ships, crewed by the resurrected, haunted dead.
The stakes are high, the people are desperate, the odds are against them ... despite its flaws, this is an entertaining book, and better-than-average space opera. (And not as dated as some books of its age.) Meredith's career was cut short. He was still evolving as a writer at the time, and this is not a great book (though it is very good), but he might well have had a couple of great books in him. His Timeliner trilogy is worth a read.
He wrote some short fiction, but to my knowledge it has never been collected. There's a good task for some specialist publisher who can get hold of those old SF magazines!
A good story, first and foremost. It is built around the idea that there are pockets of ancient woods, and that this is where 'myth imagos' -- mythagos -- can be found, creatures of the mythical past or subconscious, perhaps creations of the collective imaginations of cultures, going back thousands of years.
And, of course, they are seductive and fascinating. They successively draw in 3 members of the same family.
This is a good book, well written. The writing is effective and evocative. The story is engrossing, and the world described is interesting and, given the fantastical assumptions, solid and convincing. Do not be put off by the fact that is spawned a bunch of sequels; it does stand on its own. It leaves plenty of room for successor tales, but does not demand that you read the next volume, which is something I very much like.
(I do not like books that are really just parts of a much bigger book, unless this is made very clear from the outset and I know what I am getting into, and can then refuse. I recall one book I read years ago that basically ended on a cliffhanger. There was no sign on the cover or inside material that it was part 1 of anything, it just stopped. Very unsatisfactory, and a salutary lesson. You know the experience. The book is rushing headlong, lots is happening, you are wondering 'how are they going to get out of this?', and the pages go by, and at some point you realise that they are in fact not going to get out of it, not in this volume, anyway. I never read the next book, nor anything else by that author.)
In the 1970s English publisher Robert Hale put out a series of smallish-format hard cover SF novels aimed at libraries. They were not all bad -- World of Shadows by Australia's Lee Harding certainly aimed to be something interesting -- but they were not, typically, good. I believe they may have been constrained to all be the same 192 page length, for example, to keep costs down.
Philip High had been publishing novels and short fiction for 20 years when he wrote small cluster of books for Hale. This is one of them. When Venture SF started up in the 80s, their mission was to put out SF adventure stories, and they were to be novels and to have not been published in the UK in paperback before. Hence, the series consists of old UK hardback titles that never made it into paperback (like this one), US fiction had not yet had a UK paperback edition, and a few omnibuses, in which they could combine things that had been out in paperback, on the grounds that the omnibus was new. By volume 3 they had already published a collection of stories, albeit as a kind of fixup. The best of them are good examples of the kind -- early works by Roger MacBride Allen, for example. The worst of them ... are not good. But, then, they can't all be gems.
This book begins with a premise that could have been well-suited to a successful action-adventure story in a Deathworld kind of way -- a jaded, decadent galactic empire has discovered Earth and set it aside as a game hunting reserve (Predator, anyone?). Hence the title. One could imagine it being one of those 1950s-type US stories in which humans turn out to be superior to the aliens because we can whistle, or something. In such a story, the alien overlords get more than they expected when they tangle with us ingenious Earthfolk, and we end up running their empire.
There's a bit of that here, but the superscience silliness and unlikeliness of almost all the action, the complete lack of characterisation and humour and the stiffness of much of the dialogue combine to make the story quite a slog after the somewhat intriguing set-up is complete. The further you get into the story, the worse it gets. The last few pages went by slowly, even though the book is only 170 pages long.
I think there is a kind of attempt at the sort of story in which the scope keeps widening. You think it's about Earth -- no, it's about a local confederation of worlds. No, it's about the whole galaxy ... no! It's about the whole universe ... no! ... and so on.
High clearly had plenty of ideas. The book amply demonstrates that ideas are one thing, an interesting narrative peopled with interesting people quite another.
Also, and not the author's fault, the book is woefully badly produced. Quite a lot of explicative paragraphs end with closing quote marks, as if the typesetter got to the end and thought it was dialogue (perhaps they had tried to avoid actually reading the text). I noticed 'in' instead of 'it' (or the converse) now and again, and a few other things.
The Venture SF series begins rather promisingly with We All Died at Breakaway Station, and the next book is the competent military space adventure of Hammer's Slammers, but if the series editors wanted punters to 'start collecting them now' as the little blurb inside the front cover suggests, they ought to have placed this story a little later in the series.
Very handy guide; predominantly for DW1 and 2, but covers the way DW3 varies from DW2. Very easy to follow -- comes from the days when authors assumedVery handy guide; predominantly for DW1 and 2, but covers the way DW3 varies from DW2. Very easy to follow -- comes from the days when authors assumed you had never touched a computer before.
Who would read this in 2022, other than the odd old writer who insists on using their favourite old software from years ago, I do not know....more
Here we have The eighty-minute hour, subtitled 'a space opera', which perhaps it is, though not in the way you mWell, my Aldiss read-a-thon continues.
Here we have The eighty-minute hour, subtitled 'a space opera', which perhaps it is, though not in the way you might expect.
[image]
The cover of this edition – 1975, Leisure Books
I feel like I ought to begin by talking about the physical aspects of this edition. First, it is replete with typographical errors – every few pages there's some typesetting error. It is not badly edited, but it is badly set. Leisure Books does not give the impression of being a premium publisher. Nor terribly literate. The back cover tells us 'You may have to wait until 2001 to read a better Aldiss. But don't count on it.' This was presumably to slip a 2001: A space odyssey reference in there, but I'm not sure it says what they meant to say.
At least it doesn't have any cigarette adds in the middle.
Having said all that – and I could add cheap paper, though a generous typeface – the somewhat random nature of the presentation rather fits with the contents, because this is a strange book. Not always in a good way.
Aldiss is in freewheeling mode here. He throws in allusions to many other books (including intelligences vast, cool and unsympathetic), now and again the characters burst into song (that's the opera part). There's a sword and sorcery subplot, time travel, space travel, world war III and resulting scrambling of time periods, sending people back in time unpredictably. And on and on it goes. The book is endlessly inventive, often amusing and aphoristic, and verges on the chaotic, yet I think it all ties together.
Some quotes:
[she was] not only misanthropic, but the cause of misanthropy in others it was either a glacier or an iceberg with ideas far beyond its station if you refuse to accept the conditions of life, you become slave to them mankind's most-used vehicles: prams and coffins ... and so on...
The most crucial quote is a bit of verse:
...Our fate is that we have our fate
Pre-cast, yet feel that all is still at stake!
And this is perhaps the main problem with the book – a sense of sound and fury, signifying nothing. There's a little stuff on determinism, quite a few interesting thoughts thrown off, the old 'time loop without end' time travel plot, espionage, superscience (indeed, whole new sciences), strange words, twists and turns, but somehow it does not add up to more than passing amusement.
I guess it comes back to what we look for in fiction. The central game in much fiction is that we know it is not real, yet we agree to take it seriously. We agree to care about the created characters, or the world, or defeating the terrorists, or something that keeps us reading. Some fiction, generally of more limited appeal, is essentially more directly about fiction and writing (even if it does have characters, or at least figures in it), and we must care about the process of fiction and the skills involved in writing good sentences and constructing interesting metaphors and suchlike if we are to be entertained. Such books are inevitably more for a coterie than is a thriller or a romance. (And I am not sure such books are really better, though they are often perceived as such.)
The very playfulness in this book kept reminding me that it was an amusing construct, cleverly assembled by a skilled craftsman. Like a puzzlebox or a Rubik's cube. So while I could admire Aldiss's ingenuity, his breadth of allusion, his creativity sentence by sentence, his simultaneous knowledge of, manipulation of, and subversion of genre tropes, and so on, I could put the book down at any time to go off and do something else, and I had to choose to finish it – rather than wanting to finish it.
Plenty of books fail to entertain. This one does not fail. But there is a sense that it adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
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