Tomorrow's World 3

Any one who isn't jailbait must surely remember the BBC's long running science and technology program, Tomorrow's World. You can check out a video clip of the old-skool flying-down-the-middle-of-a-bar-of-Dairy-Milk opening sequence here!

Actually, I think it might be supposed to be a brain we are flying over. I'm not sure. Anyway, a few weekends ago I was checking out the sorry selection of damp and abandoned books which live on the outdoor shelves at the Castle Bookshop, Hay-On-Wye when I came across a book published to go with the series dating from 1974. “Woa,” I thought, “White heat of technology, 70s style!”. Then I opened it, saw the first of a series of very special illustrations and I was sold!

Many of my favourite parts of this book are pictures, includng an especially bizzare sequence of images from an abattoir. I can't make out whether the point of the pictures is supposed to be that the process is automated, or that it ought to be. There are a lot of men stabbing pigs in insanitary conditions and because it's the 70s, each worker has a fag on the go. In one image several dead sheep are suspended in what appear to be the showers at the SWCC caving hut.

Staying with livestock, my favourite experiment described in the book was one to see if cows could be fed on a diet of recycled paper pulp. The logic was that since cows have 4 stomachs to break down cellulose and paper is mostly cellulose, cows might be abale to eat paper. At the time of printing the results hadn't been published, but since cows are not currently chomping on old newsprint, I think the answer was “No”.

My favourite invention created by an individual, rather than a company. In 1974, Mr J Edwards of Chatham nearly invented the car navigation system. His idea was to record a set of instructions for getting from one place to another on an audio cassette, then use an odometer to work out how far the car has traveled and whether it was time to play the next instruction to the driver. It would have worked too, providing that you never took a wrong turning or found a road closed. If he's still alive today,I bet Mr Edwards wears a tin foil hat to stop the government stealing his ideas.

Another highlight was finding a reference to my former employers. The book says, “Scientists at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories have found a way of transmitting television and telephone signals down very long glass fibres.”. STL founded a group to build GPS test equipment in the 80s. After several takeovers, that group eventually became Spirent Communications who employed me between 2001 and 2006. Some of the very oldest and most dust-covered examples of our products still bore the STL logo. Unfortunately, the rest of STL was bought by Nortel and closed down.

The communcation section is generally excellent fun. The “phone of tomorrow” might just be able to handle call forwarding, if we're very lucky. There could also be a “box next to the phone” which would hold several numbers and do speed-dial for you. I like the assumption that there's no reason to build this functionality into the phone itself. I don't think I could have handled 70s telecoms; they were shit!

This book would have been even better if they had seen fit to include some predictions for the future. I would have loved a section on how they imagned we'd all be living in space by now, or perhaps some daring speculation about how one day there might be a computer in every city.

My top technological innovations since 1974

• The World Wide Web
• Mobile Phones
• GPS
• videos/HDD recorders as they allow you to watch telly whenever and avoid all the adverts.

Technology that I'm STILL waiting for

• nuclear fusion to prduce more energy than it takes to get it going
• my flying car
• 3D television
• colonisation of space

Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman

I caught sight of this book on my shelf the other day and I thought, “It's about time I read that, it must be nearly a year since AB lent it to me”. Then I thought about it some more and realised it must be closer to 3 years. Sorry!

For anyone not familiar with Neil Gaiman, he is probably best know for the Sandman Graphic novels, but has also written novels, short stories, the TV series “Neverwhere” and the film “Mirrormask”. His work is strange, funny and can be even scarier than Richard Madely. I love his prose, but I apply The Tolkein Rules which mean I don't have to read the poetry.

On the whole, I thought this was a stronger collection than “Smoke and Mirrors”. My favourite story was “October in the Chair” because it is written in the style of Ray Bradbury whose work I also love. The story that gave me nightmares was “Feeders and Eaters”, so I suppose that makes it something of a favourite too. For anyone who enjoyed “American Gods”, there's a short story about Shadow at the end.

New rule: You are allowed to fancy Neil Gaiman even if you're married because... well... he's Neil Gaiman

Singling Out the Couples by Stella Duffy

I acquired this book in an online trade set up at Bookcrossing. Despite the ominous sign that its previous owner had precious little to say about it, I was interested as I had read and enjoyed “Beneath the Blonde”, a lesbian detective novel by the same author.

The blurb says that a princess, perfect in every way except one, sets up home in Notting Hill and begins targeting smug, ever-so-in-love couples, deliberately splitting them apart. It’s a peculiar book: half of it is extremely well observed psychological stuff about the fragility of the couples’ relationships, the lies they tell themselves and each other. The other half of it is everything that is crap and embarrassing about magical realism, for example Princess Cushla literally has no heart.

For me, this book fell between two stools and would have been far, far better with the fairytale elements removed. I think Stella is trying to be Angela Carter and that’s not a good thing. I don’t like Angela Carter either.

The Carter-esque characteristics seem to draw attention to the wrong elements of the writing, if you know what I mean... It’s as if Stella is stood on a chair shouting, “Everyone be quiet and look at me because I’m going to do some symbolism now!”.

Get back to your crime fiction, Duffy!

Dissolution by C. J. Sansom

Dissolution is the first of a series of detective novels by Sansom set during the reign of Henry VIII. The title refers to the famous "Dissolution of the Monasteries", which we all had to cover in school, but is also a bit of a pun, refering to decay and moral turpitude.

The lawyer Mathew Shardlake is dispatched by Thomas Cromwell to Scarnsea Abbey where the King's representive, sent to pressure the Abbey into agreeing to disolve itself, has been murdered. Mathew and his assistent Mark (a comely lad with fancy doublets and a fashionable codpiece) must investigate the crime in a cold, sinister set of buildings inhabited by spooky monks, one of whom is a murder. If this sounds a little familiar, I spotted a nod to The Name of the Rose: the monks' library holds a copy of Aristotle's "On Comedy" but they believe it to be a 13th century fake.

As Shardlake investigates further, not only does he uncover 3 more murders and cess-pit of hidden sin amongst the monks, but he comes to see that the fine motives he has ascribed to the leaders of the English reformation (a readable bible and an end to corruption in the church) are largely absent. While he believed that the wealth of the church could be redistributed to the poor, the Dissolution is revealed to be nothing but a land-grab by the King's friends. By the end of the book his disillusionment is complete as he has found out that his patron, Cromwell has tortured confessions out of innocent men and perjured himself to get rid of Anne Boleyn. Mathew Shardlake needs a new job, but it is not clear how he will be able to resign and keep is skin... I need the next book to find out!

Of interest to me in this book was an alternative piece of weather symbolism. In many, many, many books, the weather is hot at the start and as the tension builds it gets hotter and more sultry, then there will be a huge storm at the climax of the story. I have become so bored with this pattern that one night, after wine, I ranted to a friend that I would eat the next book I found it in! In dissolution, the weather is still telling us what's happening in the story, but in a refreshing way. When Mathew and Mark arrive at the Abbey they are immediately trapped there by snow. As the mystery unfolds, it does so with a cold, clean, pure white backdrop. Once Mathew finds out about Cromwell, the thaw sets in. As his comfortable world of righteous Reformers and corrupt Catholics is torn down, England becomes one huge quagmire... and I don't have to eat the book.

What is Good? - A. C. Grayling

I had heard A.C. Grayling on Radio 4 and he conformed to my ideas of what a philosopher ought to be. You can keep your sexy pseuds like Alain de Bottom and Julian Panini; philosophers should be querulous old men like Grayling. I like to imagine that he lives in an Oxford College where he enjoys drinking sherry and looking wistfully at pretty undergraduate boys. For all I know he is a heterosexual at a red-brick university, but I have to admit I’d find that disappointing...

I do not know very much about philosophy (for years I thought that Jeremy Bentham was that bloke who played Sherlock Holmes in the ITV series) but I do like a good think. 32 years of thinking have yielded the following results: I really don’t see why there should be a god. For a while I was worried that I had now had no basis for ethics, but was just making up stuff as I went along. Then it occurred to me that unless you are a moron fundamentalist, if you follow a religion, you still have to decide which bits of it you are going to practice and how you will resolve its contradictions, so there isn’t really much difference for atheists. Everyone who isn’t actually a complete mental is having to make it up as they go along.

Professor Grayling has been thinking much longer than me and come to a rather more extreme conclusion that religion is not just unnecessary to moral and ethical thinking, but actually inimical. The whole book is presented in terms of two steps forward in the form of advances in thought made by secular scholars, followed by one step back of religious backlash. Grayling sees religion as a force for evil in the world, which has been temporarily compelled to pretend to be nice by its unpopularity and shrinking power base in the developed world. And it’s hard to argue with him once he gets going in on this theme, with religious wars and inquisitions to back him up. However, there is still the occasional inflammatory statement left in the text with no surrounding evidence. E.g. “Islam is by nature fundamentalist”. WTF? Maybe this correct (how would I know, I know buggerall about Islam but what I see on telly), but I don’t think you can damn a whole religion without supplying a line of argument and some facts to back it up. Especially if the thrust of your whole book is that reason is better than dogma.

For reasons beyond my feeble intellect, the book deals only with Western philosophies. Why? The title is “What is Good?” not “What Have Various Europeans Believed Through History?”. For example, all I know about Confucianism is that it was a Chinese ethical system with no god. I would have liked to know more, and I'd have thought a book by an atheist philosopher might have told me.

Obviously, the book doesn’t actually tell you how to live (distrust anyone who does!) but if, like me, you think Kierkegaard is probably an Ikea shelving unit, it will give you a starting point. Now that I have read Philosophy 101, I've decided to become a Stoic, like Marcus Aurelius. (Anyone who has seen me coding will know I have a long way to go.) My favourite aspect of Stoicism, is the bit where you get to be Emperor and swan about in a long cloack while having Russel Crowe unleash hell on your behalf.

Terminal Beach by J. G. Ballard

In the midst of life, we are in death. Especially if we’re reading Ballard. His abiding interests seem to be sex and death and, to be honest, I think he likes death better. His work often seems to deal with our destructiveness and self destructiveness and his view of humanity is pretty bleak, but perhaps that’s unsurprising for someone who spent their teenage years in a Japanese POW camp.

My favourite story was one about a dead giant which washed up on the beach. Crowds turn up to see him, but soon their wonder turns into thoughts of how to turn a profit from this new resource and a little industry sets up around the giant, cutting manageable chunks off him and carting them off to rendering plants until nothing is left. The most disturbing story in the book is probably “The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon” in which a man recovering from temporary blindness chooses to gouge out his eyes, Oedipus style, in order to better enjoy vivid sexual fantasies about his mother. This kind of thing is pretty much par for the course when one reads Ballard.

Many of the stories feel rather dated now; especially those ones which seem to fit the pattern of Heart of Darkness. There are several of these which feature an upper class white Englishman choosing disease and death amongst the natives in some corner of the Empire, rather than going home to safe and insipid civilised life which would involve having to pull himself together and stop behaving like a nutter. The colonial attitudes of the characters are jarring for the modern reader but I think they might have been pretty standard when the book was written in 1964.

I enjoyed this collection, but not as much as my favourite Ballard book, "Crash". I heartily recommend that one. It is grotesque and disturbing, but still tempts you to corner far too fast while listening to The Pixies.

Ballard himself has been in the news of late as by virtue of publishing an autobiography which reveals he’s dying of prostate cancer. Looks like JGB is occupying one of the best sun loungers on the Terminal Beach.

Mappa Mundi by Justina Robson

As you can see, I have been on a bit of an SF binge. I blame Mary Barton, I really do.

Mappa Mundi was 600 plus pages of technothriller that saw me through my holiday this year. A huge scientific project to map the human mind is entering its final phases and it becomes clear that the US military means to use the technology for mind control. In the meantime, a Yorkshire academic working on the project accidentally becomes infected with her own mind expanding nano-hardware. Will she be able to use her enhanced intelligence to thwart the US military industrial complex and prevent humanity from becoming mindless slaves? (Clue: If you think the answer is “yes”, you are right.)

It’s an odd book which seems to lurch between the very clever (thought-provoking ideas on the nature of identity and the importance of free will) and the very daft (a handsome FBI agent on the trail of a mad scientist). I only found one actual crime against physics in it (a definition of fermions and bosons which was inaccurate to the point of being a lie) which isn’t bad going for an author whose background is linguistics. I give it a sci-fi rating of 3 spaceships out of a possible 5.

The best thing about this book though, is that it written by a lady SF writer who actually writes science fiction, rather than crapping on about bloody Elves.

Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds

It’s been a while since I read any space opera and “Pushing Ice” was an enjoyable read which ticked all the boxes: spaceships, aliens (some nice; some nasty) and technology so advanced it might as well be magic.

The book is set in the near future when the asteroid belt has been opened up as a source of raw materials. Bella Lind and the crew of her ship the Rockhopper capture these lumps of rock and ice and push them back to earth, hence the title. When the moon Janus turns out not to be a moon at all but an alien artifact accelerating out of the solar system, the Rockhopper is the only ship close enough to study it before it passes beyond the reach of us humans forever.

I rather enjoyed the depiction of the macho culture of the asteroid miners. I lost track of the number of times in the opening chapters that one of the crew laconically remarks, “We push ice. It’s what we do.”. I tried introducing, “We push bits. It’s what we do.” at work, but nobody wanted to join in...

I like the fact that much of the book is character driven. The older I get, the more it bothers me that much “hard SF” reads as if it has been written by an adolescent boy with Asperger’s. The only problem is that I did stop reading it briefly because the interaction of the characters was just too real. As the stresses and strains of the mission cause the team to fracture and begin stabbing one another in the back, it started to remind me rather too much of being at work. At least we haven’t had any actual murders here...

There is a slightly odd structure to “Pushing Ice”. It is (as Dr M who lent it to me observed) a book of three halves. That is, rather than one overall plot, we appear to have three largely separate stories arranged sequentially. The very best science fiction books like “Salt” or “The Handmaid’s Tale” are not only cracking reads, but carry a political message, or tell us something fundamental about the nature of humanity. What do we learn from “Pushing Ice”? That you can’t trust corporate bosses? That when women fall out they are meaner than men? That just because you feel like you’re in an inertial reference frame, it aint necessarily so? The lack of a big concept or philosophical theme means that the book remains a well-executed piece of genre writing, but there's nothing wrong with that!

The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries

This month I have mostly been reading The Mammoth Book of Locked-Room Mysteries and Impossible Crimes. I once tried to write a locked-room mystery, and it sucked surprisingly hard. Many of the stories here suffer from the same problems as I did; the characters' motives don't seem sufficiently strong to explain their extreme behaviour, making the whole story appear contrived. There were some very enjoyable stories hidden amoungst the chaff, though.

One of my favourites was “The Burgler who Smelled Smoke” by Lynne Wood Block and Lawrence Block as it featured death by halon extinguisher (one of the Bastard Operator's favourite methods for dealing with IT managers). I also liked “Ice Elation” by Susannah Gregory. In this case I thought the setting – a team of scientists in an Antarctic research station drilling their way into Lake Vostok – made for a more interesting story. Perhaps the finest example of a locked room mystery in the book is “Murder in the Air” by Peter Tremayne in which the victim is somehow murdered whilst alone in an airplane toilet.

By about half way through I became temporarily obsessed with these mysteries. I spent longer than is healthy trying to work out a method for the impossible crime of killing my MD while he was in his glass office in full view of 20-odd programmers. I failed entirely, but my husband did come up with a rather neat method for murdering someone using a central-heating system. The best I was able to do was to come up with the ass-kickingly brilliant title, “Murder on the International Space Station”. Unfortunately I had no idea how such a murder might be committed and solved. If you're clever enough to write the story, I'll let you have the title for free!

Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Well the Bookclubof1 blog has been pretty quiet recently. That's because I've been chipping away at the Cannon again. I have been reading Mary Barton and I think I now understand why until relatively recently Mrs Gaskell has been so incredibly unfashionable. My aim here is to supply both of my readers with everything they'll ever need to know about Mary Barton in order to seem cultured without having to read the bugger.

Mrs Gaskell was the wife of a Unitarian minister and lived in Liverpool. “Mary Barton” was her first book (and the worst one of her's I've read so far) and was apparently very controversial in its day – although it's pretty hard to see why now. It was written during the recession of the 1840s and details the hard lives of the mill workers in Manchester. The plot runs something like this:

Mary's Mum dies leaving her with her father who works as a weaver in a dark, satanic mill. She gets a job as an apprentice dressmaker and everything goes well for a time. Mary is lucky enough to have a choice of two admirers: sensible, hardworking Jem Wilson who has a good job as an engineer or Harry Carson, the dandy git who is the mill owner's son. Being an idiot who thinks a rich man would marry a shop-girl, Mary initially prefers the latter but eventually come to realise Jem's sterling qualities. Unfortunately, this is where things start to get difficult. The recession comes and workers are laid off at the factory or have their hours cut. Many of them can't feed their families anymore and the people are sick and starving. John Barton is part of a Trade Union delegation which attempts to negotiate better conditions with the mill owners. Not only do the negotiations fall through, but Harry Carson finds the workers' raggedy appearance (caused by his own greed in the first place) hilariously funny. The union come up with a plan to murder him: they draw lots and whoever draws the marked piece of paper has to kill him. John Barton gets the job. When Carson is murdered the blame falls of Jem Wilson who was seen having a fight with him in the street over Mary. Mary guesses her dad is the killer. She wants to prevent Jem being hanged for murder, but can't bring herself to turn her dad in so she goes chasing about the country to find someone who can give him an alibi. Finally she confesses her undying love for Jem from the witness box while being cross-examined. It's cheesy. Cheese on toast.

And it's all cheese from here on in. Mary's Dad reappears wracked with guilt, confesses the murder to Harry Carson's father and then drops dead on the spot. Why couldn't he have done this 10 chapters earlier and saved Mary and Jem a whole load of hassle? The whole story just felt really contrived and unnecessary at this point. Anyway, Daddy Carson now decides that the way to prevent things like this happening in future is to be a nicer kind of mill owner, but at the point where we leave him he still believes that it is “The Market” that is starving his workers, not him. Bloody Adam Smith has a lot to answer for. Mary and Jem get married and emigrate to Canada where they live happily ever after, even though Jem's “frabbit” old mother comes to live with them. The cheesiest bit of all is right at the end though... throughout the book, Mary has a friend called Margaret who is a fantastic singer, but blind. Right at the end she and Jem get a letter from England which reveals, “They've done something to Margaret to give her back her sight!”. How crap! Very early laser surgery, I expect...

What you can't really appreciate from this precis is how very religious the author is. (And you can tell what the author thinks about bloody everything from the long expositiory lectures, planted like booby-traps in the text. That's something that you just don't get in modern novels – and a good thing too!). In some ways this is a good thing as it is Gaskell's religion that gives her sympathy for the poor which was mostly lacking in middle class people from her era. A lot of the time it makes her annoyingly sanctimonious: for example, it's a sin for the workers to feel downcast while watching their children starve as they should have faith in God. Also, the bourgoisie should conduct themselves in a moral and upstanding way to set a good example to the ignorant workers!

However progressive Gaskell might have been in her attitudes to the proles, in this book at least, she is no supporter of women. Early on John Barton complains: ”That's the worst of factory work for girls. They earn so much when work is plenty that they can maintain themselves”. Well, Heaven forbid that we should be able to take care of ourselves and not have to whore ourselves out to men! There's also lots of author's commentary about how inappropriate it is for wives to work because when the husband gets home all tired and finds that his missus hasn't tidied up and made him dinner it drives him to that den of sin known as the pub. Why don't working husbands drive wives to the gin shop? Before any one thinks that I am judging someone from the past by modern standards, I'd like to point out the The Vindication of the Rights of Woman was written some 50 years before Mary Barton, so Mrs G could have chosen to suck a lot less than this!

There are lots of critiques on the Internet which begin with statements about how Mrs Gaskell's writing is far too sentimental for our sophisticated modern tastes. I disagree. Yeah, she's too sentimental for anyone with intellectual pretensions, but look at the huge number of misery memoirs sold and try to tell me the Great British public are too sophisticated for Gaskell. She'd be entirely right as a scriptwriter for Hollywood romantic comedies. She'd also have been at home working on 'Stenders. And she'd have LOVED Brookside. In fact, I think that's a great essay question right there: If Elizabeth Gaskell were alive today, Brookside would still be on TV. Discuss.

The Night Watch - Sergei Lukyanenko

In Moscow, amoungst the businessmen, prostitutes, drunks, petty criminals, organised criminals and blameless citizens living in their grey concrete appartments and cooking with Remoskas are the Others. Some of them are nice and some of them are nasty. After years spent in conflict which nearly destroyed both sides, the Others have come up with The Treaty. Light and Dark magicians have agreed to a truce where neither of them will influence normal humans. 2 forces have been set up to police it: The Night Watch observes the Dark Side while the Day Watch ensures that the Light forces live by the truce. For example, the Light has to allow vampires to eat a certain number of humans, provided they are hunted according to rules agreed by both sides. To a casual observer, there can often be precious little moral difference between the Light and the Dark.

Anton is a 30-something programmer (I like him already!) and lowly officer of the Night Watch. He is quite at home running queries on the Big Database of Magic Stuff and keeping the servers of the Light up. He's definitely not at home walking the corridors of the Metro with a clip full of silver bullets looking for a rogue vampire. Unfortunately, while the Dark is over-subscribed and probably has a waiting list to join, the Light is always short-staffed. Anton's problems don't end with the Dark; his own boss, the staggeringly Machievellian Boris Ignatievich, is quite capable of sacrificing pawns from the Light in the cause of a larger strategem against the Dark. And then there's Anton's new girlfriend who is turning out to have the makings of a top-notch sorcercess. Pretty soon, Anton will be the intellectual equivalent of tumble-drier-fluff to her and that makes it kind of hard to feel pleased for your partner. The book is essentially three stories centred on Anton in which he has to try and stay alive, not break the Treaty and avoid causing evil in increasingly difficult circumstances.

One of the things that really works for me in this book is the setting. Maybe I absorbed too much Yankee propaganda during the Cold War, but I find Russia intrinsically sinister and have no problem believing that Moscow might be full of vampires and werewolves. Maybe it's the endless snow and greyness, maybe it's the terrifying architecture (I've included a picture of one of the “Stalin Buildings”, scariest buildings in a scary, scary city), maybe it's the fact that the population appear to have recently voted to hand their country over wholesale to the KGB. When I think of Russia I think of Stalin's purges, the 3 am knock at the door from the secret police and (latterly) of a country where the politicians and the gangsters are impossible to tell apart. Think of all the “psychogeography” bollocks that has been written about London and imagine doing the same thing with a city which is equally old, but also has a rich history of seige, torture and tramps freezing to death. I visited Moscow in 1993 as part of a school history trip and rode on the Moscow Metro and as Mr Snipes says, “There are worse things out there than vampires”.

For what it's worth, here are my pretentious theories about what the deeper meaning of the book might be: It seems to me that the theme of the book is compromise and appeasement which leaves everyone tainted, but avoids open warfare. Perhaps this is meant to represent the way the USSR has been divvied up between robber baron business types the elected authorities. The difference between Light and Dark is all in their attitude to normal people. The Light is protective (communism?) while the Dark magicians seek to exploit the ordinary folk for person gain (capitalism?). Both sides are capable of murderous or duplicitous actions and are locked in stalemate. So perhaps the book is not a metaphor for modern Russia and it's really the Cold War all over again. Or maybe it's just a Russian fantasy novel...

Whatever, The Night Watch might not be literature, but it is an absolutely cracking read. I can give no higher praise for fiction than this: this book gave me nightmares. It fired up my imagination such that I spent the whole night trying to evade Dark magicians on the Moscow Metro.

I now fancy reading more sinister soviet goings on in the form of “The Master and Marguerita”. Hope it has Roger Delgado in it. He was my favourite Master.

Many thanks to L for lending me this book – sorry about the page I got marmalade on. Couldn’t put it down for breakfast!

Modesty Blaise - Peter O'Donnell

When I was a kid, there was only one kick-ass babe to serve as a role model, and that was Wonderwoman. These days I seem to be armpit-deep in Buffies and Laras and Trinities, all exhorting me to express myself via the spinning kick. If I didn't have to earn a living, I would spend a couple of years on a women's studies PHD*, on an academic quest to find the very first kick-ass babe. One contender for the title would be Modesty Blaise.



Before reading the book, I had assumed that Modesty was some kind of cowgirl, but she is in fact an ex-international-jewel-thief-turned-secret-agent. She is of course fantastically beautiful as well as having her own, somewhat unrealistic fighting style. Modesty would fit in very well with our current Nuts culture in which stripping and feminism seem to have become confused, as her clothes come off pretty regularly. One of her preferred moves is "The Nailer", which consists of getting her nawks out and then taking advantage of the surprise this causes. Hilarious, but only a male author would think hand-to-hand fighting with unrestrained hooters was a good idea.

Modesty also comes equipped with Willie Garvin, her surprisingly likable right hand man. Willie is a cockney ex-criminal and in many other books in the "silly thriller" category would just have been a generic forelock-tugging representative of the lower orders. However, it soon becomes clear that he lays on the "apples and pears, guv'nor" stuff because it suits him to have the toffs write him off as an idiot.

Modesty's prefered weapon is also absolutely cool as... well, too cool for corroborative nouns. She favours the yawara, a tiny, handbag-sized blunt instrument. I was so impressed I considered making one for a bit, then decided that any hard object which will stick out a bit from your fist (phone, pen, hairbrush, cutlery) could be used the same way, without the legal implications of having a purpose-built weapon.

I can see myself searching Abe for the rest of the Modesty Blaise books, now. The only thing that can touch them in terms of adventure coupled with high camp is the Saint books. And would Simon Templar ever distract the guards by dropping his kecks, then take them on in unarmed combat with his tackle swinging about? He would not.

*Yeah, I'm well aware of the irony that only kept women have the time to pursue academic feminism. Nevermind, I'm living the dream instead.

Great Apes - Will Self

Will Self is a love him or hate him kind of author. I've loved his short stories ever since I read "Grey Area" back when I was a student. I think that his deliberately overblown writing style is well-suited to the short form and becomes wearing if you have to read more than 10 pages of it. I had previously read "How the Dead Live" and didn't rate it much. I thought that the premise that when you die you just have to move to an unfashionable part of London was a good idea for a short story which had been padded out to novel length. And then there's his use of deliberately obscure words. There are 2 ways to go about reading anything by Self. The first is to have his book in one hand and the dictionary in the other. The second is just to assume that any words you don't know are probably rude. You won't go far wrong with this second approach.

Simon Dykes is an annoying Young British Artist happily spending his time getting wasted with his YBA mates and having unsuccessful attemts at drug-fuelled sex with his almost-entirely worthless girlfriend Sarah. One morning he wakes up to find that Sarah has turned int a chimpanzee... so has he... and so has everyone else in the world. Screaming and raving, Simon is sectioned and meets the notorious Dr Busner (a recurring character from some of Self's short stories) who makes it his mission to help Simon come to terms with his "chimpunity" at least partially because there might be a TV series in it for him.


One of the first things you cannot help but notice about chimps is their upsetting backsides which looks as if they’ve had a rectal prolapse. This is not glossed over, but dwelt upon with loving attention to detail. The chimp characters admire one another's floppy pink arse bits. In fact the phrase, "I revere your anal scrag" is used by the subservient chimps to suck up to the alphas. The whole book is pretty much obsessed with the wrong end of chimps. And with perineums. Most of us can g0 hours (actually, maybe months) without thinking about our perineums, but Will can only manage a few pages - it's a compulsion! I complained to a friend about it and he suggested that Mr Self's obsession is because he doesn't have a perineum himself. We think he has just one hole for everything, like birds do.

Anyway, back at the book, the apes represent everything about humans that we try to pretend we don't do, from indiscriminate public rutting, to hurting one another to enforce the pecking order, to picking horrible things out of their bum cracks. Apparently, this is satire. I just wish it was shorter satire! The quote on the front describes "Great Apes" as "Prodigiously original and very funny". I think I would have chosen the words "long" and "scatological" instead. As a short story writer, I revere Will Self's anal scrag, but there is a limit to the number pages I want to read about ape arses.

Don't go to Sedbergh...

I am sure that "Sedbergh" means something nasty in The Meaning of Liff, and whatever it is, the place probably deserves it.

Sedbergh is supposed to be a "book town" in the style of Hay-On-Wye, although it only has 4 bookshops and one of them was closed when I visited. It was full of confused tourists wondering about, looking in the windows of closed shops (this was on a saturday). Like Budleigh Salterton, the place looks like it could use a short, sharp lesson in capitalism.

Of the three bookshops I could enter, all but one seemed to deal exclusively in musty hardbacks about Victorian cricketers.

I tried to make the best of Sedbergh by finding a cafe to sit and read the book I had with me. Alas, I was kicked out when the cafe shut at only 4pm! The pre-teen serving closed the cafe in the face of American tourists wanting traditional English tea and cake. Do the Yorkshire folk have no idea of economics?

Anyway, that's Sedbergh. I've been so that you don't have to.

On Finishing the Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy...

Altered Carbon won the Philip K Dick Award in 2003, and it was a well-deserved win indeed!

It's a science fiction detective story (love a bit of crossover, me!) and also a kind of noir pastiche - it always seems to be night in the city and raining. One of the central ideas of the series is that a throughout their life a person's consciousness is continually backed up to a small storage device at the base of the skull, the “cortical stack”. The first consequence of this is that death is not necessarily permanent. For example, after being gunned down following some kind of botched criminal activity, Takeshi Kovacs wakes up in the rather used body of a Policeman, to find that a millionaire has paid to have him downloaded from the giant prison hard disk on which his data had been residing. The millionaire took his own head off with a plasma weapon a couple of days ago and had to have his last off-site backup downloaded into one of his spare bodies. Although it appears that no-one else could possibly have committed the crime he refuses to believe that he would ever kill himself (even temporarily) and has hired Kovacs as detective and enforcer, to find his murderer.

Takeshi Kovacs is a man with a past, or more accurately a whole heap of them. Until recently, he served in the Envoy Corps, the most feared soldiers anywhere in the “Protectorate” of human worlds. In this version of the future faster than light travel is not a possibility, but FTL communications are. This means that if you don't want to end up in a “Forever War” situation, you can send digitised humans to wherever you want to deploy your forces, download them into specially-built combat bodies. The Envoys are trained to deal with finding yourself on a new planet, wearing a new body with people shooting at you. As well as being trained in practical things like shooting and killing, they are also trained to observe, recall, learn to fit in and infiltrate. As a result they are so mistrusted that ex-Envoys are barred from nearly all positions of any power or responsibility in civilian life.

I think the reader can appreciate that when Kovacs works out who has been pulling his strings on Earth and why, he's going to embark on an ass-kicking spree of epic proportions.

How good was this book? It was so good that by the time I was half-way through, I was having nightmares about my time in the Envoy Corps. It was so good that I slightly resented the other two books in the trilogy for not being Altered Carbon (a bit of an own goal for Mr Morgan, that).

Broken Angels

I was rather sad to see that after playing detective Takeshi Kovacs is now back to killing people for money, serving with “The Wedge” (feared, but nothing like so much as the Envoys) in the civil war on Sanction IV.

By the time the book begins he's desperate to extricate himself from the war by any means possible. He is approached by a pilot and a younng archeologist who claim to have discovered some sort of portal leading directly to a fleet of abandonned Martian spaceships. Never mind the intellectual excitement of alien technology, the salvage on that lot has to be worth enough get the hell out Sanction IV! So a crack team is assembled by sorting through a bucket load of cortical stacks found on the battlefield, looking for special ops personnel with the right qualities for a spot of extra curricular speed-archeology. Getting to the Martian fleet before anyone else isn't going to be easy, especially since the area containing the portal is now full of illegal, experimental nano-tech wepons...

I felt that Broken Angels lacked a lot of the style of Altered Carbon, but it was enjoyable enough. The bad-ass spacemarine Wedge Commander aggrieved at the defection of his pet Envoy makes a fitting end-of-level baddie for the big fight at the end. And we get to find out more about the mysterious Martian artifacts left hanging about which humanity as used to jump-start their colonization of other planets, 2001-style.

At the start of Woken Furies, Kovacs is now killing for fun rather than profit, attempting to slowly wipe out the entire priest caste of the religion that killed his ex-girlfriend, Sarah. While running from the law in a damaged synthetic body he falls in with deComs, teams of mercenaries hired to decommission the 300 year-old weaponry which has been cluttering up his home planet since the Quellist uprising known as the Unsettlement. One of his new deCom friends has an unfortunate mental problem in that she appears to be sharing her head with someone who claims to be the long-dead revolutionary leader, Quellcrest Falconer. (Like Communism, Quellism has some excellent slogans and quotations, one of my favourites being, “When they ask how I died, tell them: Still angry.”).

Once again, it was nothing like as good as Altered Carbon, but “Woken Furies” still inspired me to vote Quellist at the local elections on May 1st.

While reading this trilogy, I had some logical problems with the cortical stack - why would the state pay for everyone to get one? Especially when the Protectorate is Uber-capitalist in all other ways. When do you fit one? Can the very young be killed off completely? Humans being what they are (and they do not seem to have become any less violent in Morgan's future) I suspect that the invention of the cortical stack would be followed pretty swiftly by the invention of some stack-frying EMP weapons.

On the whole, I was rather surprised to find that I like Takeshi Kovacs much more when he's being nice. Maybe I'm getting soft in my old age... I understand the concept of the flawed hero, and I totally get the premise that we can have a lot more tension in the story with a rather amoral lead charater, 'cos we never really know which way he'll go. Unfortunately, the downside of this is that if I don't really like the hero, I don't really care if he's properly killed, "stack irretrievable" or not. Sorry Tak!

Richard Morgan won this year's Arthur C Clarke Award (http://www.clarkeaward.com/) with “Black Man”. Llet's hope this means a return to Altered Carbon standards!

Tricks of the Mind - Derren Brown

There are not many occasions when I feel that I have to justify my choice of reading material to anybody, in fact, this is the first one. I bought this book mainly in order to annoy my friend E. As I was examining the back cover in Waterstones she came up behind me and said in her finest disparaging tones, “You’re not buying Derren Brown, are you?”. “I am now!” replied the part of my brain that just likes to be contrary. Another motive was that whilst I find Brown creepy but fascinating, my husband refuses to watch any of his TV shows on the grounds that he is “a stinking wank-pixie”. You can’t argue with logic like that. You can only quietly buy the book instead.

As well as trying to persuade my chosen life-partner to watch “Trick of the Mind”, I had also seen Derren on a number of documentaries about the paranormal, on which he was pleasingly damning about stage mediums. I was puzzled, though, by fact that he seemed to think that preying on people by pretending to contact their dead relatives was a bit think, while persuading them to knock over a Securicor van was OK.

The book is divided into sections on magic tricks, memory, hypnotism and the paranormal. For my money, this final section is pretty much redundant. I can’t help feeling that the ground covered here has been covered better already by other books (Carl Sagan’s “The Demon-Haunted World”, for example). Fortunately, the other sections are far more interesting, and possibly even useful...

The section on memory takes a while to get to anything useful (Why would I want to remember lists? The only reason I can think of would be to show off my list remembering abilities to family and friends. And they'd only be entertained the first time round.) like memorizing sequences of digits. I don't yet have a Hanibal-Lector-style memory palace, though. I am still trying to find all the items to remember I've placed in an imaginary version of my house amongst the clutter. I think than when using the location technique in future, I should imagine a clean and tidy version of my home, rather than an exact copy.

I was a bit disappointed to read that, at least according to Derren, there is nothing particularly magical about hypnotism and that (according to him) the trance is not even a special mental state. Apparently it works though the facts that:

• People tend to do whatever they're told anyway
• They've been told about a magical thing called hypnosis which will make them do what they're told even more.

So, in the immortal words of Thom Yorke, you do it to yourself. There was a section I really enjoyed with instructions for using some of the prnciples of NLP cure yourself, or a friend from phobias caused by traumatic incidents in your past. Alas! I have no phobias to experiment on and I can't really imagine any of my phobic friends letting me have a go of theirs...

ME: Oh, go on. I promise you, I know what I'm doing. I read a book about it.
THEM: (skeptically) Oh yeah?
ME: Yes. By Derren Brown.
THEM: Fuck off.

Possibly I should try doing the opposite to the instructions and see if I can give myself a phobia.... The bit I'm most eager to get out and practice is spotting lies, though, as I can see immediate real-world uses for this skill at the poker table.

Book Derren does not seem the same as his stage/screen personality which is heavy on the sinister, and long on black coats. Perhaps I should have guessed that nobody can spend all their time hamming it up like a pantomime villain. He's also a lot cleverer than I ever gave him credit for, but very, very pleased with his own cleverness!

As I think you can tell from that last paragraph, I want to like him, but every so often he goes and writes something so jarring that we are back to square one. I can give no better example of than in the section on pacing and using leading language during “hypnotism” to achieve a given result on your patient/client/victim: “Think of it,” says Derren, “As a seduction..”.

(Bear with me people, I'm going for an extended metaphor here.) Go to your local Chinese takeaway and buy a tub of their glutinous sweet and sour sauce. Let it go cold, or better still, chill it in the fridge over night. Now arrange to have a friend take you by surprise at some point during the day and tip the whole lot down the back of your neck so that clammy, gellid slime drips down the line of your spine... Done it? Well, that is EXACTLY the sensation I feel when Derren Brown asks me to think of anything as a seduction.

Also rather disturbing are the pictures of portraits Derren has painted, which I can only describe as Gerald Scarfe meets Max Ernst.

I have always (well, ever since The Affair of the Big Glass Box) wanted to see David Blaine and Derren Brown fight to the death. I believed that whichever it went, the winner would be society as a whole. It’s still an appealing image, but I think I’d go as far as cheering for Derren now. Maybe I’d even hold his sinister, black coat for him.

And at least he’s not Paul McKenna! I have a horror of Paul McKenna. Just typing the name makes me shudder so hard I think my muscles are trying to detach themselves from my skeleton in order to slither off to some hypnotist-free bolt-hole. I think it is because he looks a bit like alleged celebrity sex-attacker Michael Barrymore. It is one thing to be convinced to eat raw onions on stage and quite another to find yourself dead in a swimming pool with a sex-toy up the bottom.

The Tenderness of Wolves - Stef Penny

Like most right-thinking people, I have a bit of a fear of prize-winning novels. Despite feeling a weird sort of moral obligation to read them, I frequently find them boring, turgid, overwritten and without a sufficiently strong story to support the weight of all those words. If any of you have been living in fear of “The Tenderness of Wolves”, you can stop now. Despite winning the Costa Book of the Year 2006, it’s a very readable detective story and actually a real page-turner. In fact, I found it so enjoyable that I began to wonder why this counts as literary fiction while, say, the Inspector Morse novels don’t. So far, I’ve no answer to that.

At the start of a Canadian winter, a middle aged settler, Mrs Ross gets up one day to find that her neighbour, Laurent Jammet has been murdered and scalped during the night, and her teenage son has also gone missing. Pretty soon the gossips are suggesting that the two events are related. Some officials from The Hudson’s Bay Company (like a sort of Canadian equivalent of the Eat India Company) are sent to investigate and they get to work trampling on the feelings of the locals and busting some heads. As winter approaches, Mrs Ross chooses to set off through the snow in search of her son, in the hope of clearing his name.

I note that the Hudson Bay Trading Company is not only real, but is still trading. A wonder that it hasn’t sued Ms Penny as the story doesn’t show it a particularly good light. Mind you, I doubt that any of the unpleasant things the company and its representatives do aren’t historically accurate.

Anyway, if you’re planning to read this book for yourself, then stop reading this blog because I couldn’t work out how to discuss the book further without giving away some of the ending.

My overall impression is one of bleakness. Firstly we have the beautifully described Canadian winter, complete with frostbite, snow blindness and having to defrost the ink before you can write letters. Bleaker still, though, is that every single character seems to be an outsider. Everyone is isolated and alone in the world:

• Mrs Ross carries the burden of her past as an asylum inmate and laudanum addict. By the time the story takes place her marriage has deteriorated to the point where her husband does not look at her or speak to her. I imagine them both looking as miserable as the couple in this famous picture. Mrs Ross’s son, Francis has also stopped speaking to her for reasons of his own...
• Francis Ross cannot tell anyone about his romantic involvement with the murder victim, because it’s the 1840s and he’d probably be jailed or thrown in the loony bin. Nevertheless, his father guesses and becomes moodier than ever.
• Donald Moody is deeply neurotic and convinced of his own inferiority. He has come from Scotland to work for the Company but hates the cold, the hardship, and the rough men who spend all winter drunk because there is nothing else to do. His motivation in aiding Mrs Ross is not so much a desire for justice, but to cover his arse out of fear that he will be deemed to have screwed up and his career will be over. He wastes a good deal of time mooning over the beautiful Susannah Knox before realising that it her clever, challenging sister, Maria he wants. Unfortunately, this realisation comes a bit late in the day, and Donald is shot by the villain before he can tell Maria about it.
• Maria Knox is now doomed to die alone and be eaten by her cats, thanks to Donald’s death. Eclipsed by her prettier younger sister she has become a forbidding intellectual type and up to now, men have bolted at the sight of her.
• Mr Knox has thrown away his status as local magistrate by allowing the half-Indian prisoner, William Parker, to escape. Knox couldn’t allow the Company investigators to beat up a prisoner, but he brings shame on his family and barely escapes jail himself for doing the right thing. He loses his position and with it his sense of purpose. All of this leaves him a broken man at the novel’s end.

And so it goes on! We are each of us ultimately alone in a world without mercy according to the mind behind this novel. It’s probably true, but in the interest of preserving sanity, I’m not going to think about it anymore.

One Virgin Too Many - Lindsey Davis

What did the Romans ever do for us? Apart from the roads, the aqueducts and decreasing the population of ancient Britain they provided historical fodder for Lindsey Davis’s popular detective novels about Marcus Didius Falco. Falco scrapes a living as a private informer in Rome under the Emperor Vespasian. Vespasian is probably my favourite emperor because he was in charge of the 2nd Legion (stationed in Exeter, you know) and marched around the west country, um... killing my ancestors. I think this gives us a connection.

Like American detectives of the 1950s, Falco gives us a first person narrative of his investigations. He’s an ex-legionary whose tour of duty to Britain (cold, rainy and full of violent, woad-spattered ancestors of the bookclubofone) lurks in his backstory in much the same way that ‘Nam or WW2 do for tough-guy American detectives. This is where Falco’s macho credentials end though. As a good Italian boy, he has an extended family including a domineering mother, spirited girlfriend and slightly bullying sisters to keep him in line. This tends to be what keeps this series in the “cozy mysteries” category. Unlike more morally dubious detectives (like Aurelio Zen, for example ) there is never any doubt that Falco will do the right thing in the end; if he didn’t his female relatives would hound him to the ends of the earth.

In this the 11th book in the series, Falco gets a visit from a six year-old child from one of Rome's foremost families who insists that one of her relatives wants to kill her. Unfortunately, he's in no mood for precocious children, having just come back from telling his favourite sister that her ne'er-do-well husband has been thrown to the lions in Tripoli during the 10th book. Alas, he sends the kiddie packing, only for her to go missing a couple of days later. In the meantime, his girlfriend's layabout brother is trying to get into a religious cult called the Arval Brothers (who sound like Animal House for grown up Romans). He gets blackballed... and then trips over a murdered body while leaving the feast in a big strop, so Falco has two mysteries to solve.

If you are already a fan of the series, well read on as this is much the same as the last couple. If you've never read any of these books, my advice would be to start with The Silver Pigs. That is the first book and I found it much edgier and more suspenseful than most of the others. And Exeter features briefly!

Open the door, get on the floor, everybody walk the dinosaur!

Boom! Boom! Akkalakka-boom-boom!

Hands up who wants to see cave men fighting dinosaurs? Yep, that's pretty much everyone. The only problem is that millions of years separate cave men and dinosaurs making feasible combat unlikely. So how about, right, an alternative world in which the meteor that caused the K/T extinction never hit? In such a world cavemen could fight highly evolved, super-intelligent dinosaurs! And that would be even better! Harry Harrison's “West of Eden” is set in just such a world and delivers fantastic, enjoyable SF hokum together with top-notch caveman/dinosaur* action.

The book features 2 made up languages (one dinosaur, one human), which results in the kind of cheerful gibberish you really only get in SF books:

“It stood, it walked like it was human, Tanu. A murgu, father but it has hands like ours.”

“Commander, you will take 10 of your strongest crewmembers ashore at once. Armed with hesotsan. You will have the uruketo stand by here.” Great stuff.

The plot, well... the plot doesn't really matter, but it goes a bit like this: Humans and dinosaurs meet and it doesn't go well. The more advanced dinosaurs track down and eliminate a whole tribe of humans, except for one boy who the take as a research subject. This boy Kerrick, learns to speak dinosaur and eventually comes to be highly prized by their leader for his ability to say one thing and think another (the dinosaur language is based on their body language making it extremely difficult for them to lie to each other). Kerrick eventually escapes an uses his knowledge of dinosaur society to help the humans destroy the dinosaur city.

A word on dinosaur technology: dinosaurs are heavily into wet-ware having become masters of DNA manipulation to create life forms to use as tools (like Justina Robson's Forged but less cool). Trouble is, they don't use fire, or work metals, so I'm not sure how they got this technology in the first place. For example, they have created an artificial life form which is all googley eyes and lenses to use as a microscope, but before this was invented, how would they be able to see the structure of DNA and meddle with it in order to create the googley-eye-beast-microscope in the first place? There are chicken-and-egg problems there.

Another point which annoyed me repeatedly is that the author has used the word “sentience” when he means intelligence. As I understand it intelligence enables me to solve problems and perform complex tasks, while sentience is self awareness; sentience is the little voice in your head that's doing the director's commentary on your life. For example, he talks about light emitting plants which the dinosaurs use to guard the perimeter of their camps. Apparently these have been bred “sentient” to enable them to detect motion and light up attackers. They don't want sentience for that, intelligence will do! No-one wants a sentient weapon. Well, no one who's ever seen Dark Star...

West of Eden comes with the book equivalent of a DVD of extra material: dictionaries of human and dinosaur languages at the back of the book, a history of the world according to dinosaurs and notes on each of the different culture. I paid the exactly as much attention as I do DVD extras.

The review of a book which is such good fun should end on a upbeat note, so here goes: Cavemen! Dinosaurs! You have to imagine the furry thongs and bikinis yourself but any regular reader of SF will be able to do that without any trouble.

* I should point out that I do not mean “caveman slash dinosaur” in the sense of “slash fiction”. Well, except for one very wrong and mercifully brief scene...

Dawn of the Dumb - Charlie Brooker

I love Charlie Brooker. Love him for his demented rants born from having any kind of conscience in the modern world, love him for his balls-out rudeness about minor celebrities and reality TV idiots (all of whom are asking for it, in my opinion). Yes, I think I have a bit of a crush on him, despite the fact that I've a shrew notion he'd be whiny and high-maintenance in person. Anyway, you don't want to hear me say it's funny, you want a look at the funniness itself:

• “My least favourite Hazel McWitch lookalike” = Gillian McKeith
• “If a penis could chose its own wardrobe and hair stylist, chances are it'd end up looking like Duane “Dog” Chapman star of Dog the Bountyhunter.” I especially liked the bit about how Duane's hairstyle looks “like the entire cast of The Lost Boys crossed with a gay lion”.
• “Slough looks like it was never actually built, merely crapped into position by a misanthropic, mediocre God.”
• Deborah Meaden of Dragon's Den, “could chew the tin balls off a Cyberman”
• A BB contestant is described in the following terms, “With a face like a perineum with tiny dots drawn on it for eyes, he was the human equivalent of a cock- shaped novelty pen with ego problems”

So the Brooker book (which the whole English-speaking world except for me got for Christmas) is pretty funny. It's also ecologically sound, being constructed entirely from recycled Guardian columns.

One thing which strikes me as bit unfair about Brooker, though is this: He's funny, but is he actually funnier or cleverer than the people you know in real life? I'm not sure he is. CB's humour reminds me strongly of my friend TLO - I suspect that the only reason Charlie has a newspaper column and a TV show and TLO doesn't, is that TLO is actually better equipped for real-life and therefore able to hold don a 9-5 job.

What are the scores, Jorge Borge?

This month I have mostly been reading "Labyrinths" by Jorge Luis Borges.

Apparently, Mr Borges writes “metafiction”so the first thing I had to do was look up what the hell that was. I also looked up “symbolism” as that was allegedly a big influence. Having read the definition of symbolism, I felt no wiser as to what it actually was so I just had to get on with reading the book in continuing ignorance.

The book is collection of short stories and essays. The stories are short, but at the same time immensely dense, referencing any number of other pieces of fiction inside them. This is really, really confusing as Borges’ fiction also makes liberal use of describing books that don’t exist, false biographies and deliberately false attributions. I end up feeling that I must have guessed wrong at least once about which bits were fact and where the words have come from, therefore I have been proven to be as daft and ignorant as all those people who thought Ghostwatch was a genuine documentary. Not only that, but the subject matter takes in big philosophical questions about such things as identity, free will, consciousness and reality. And the words are really hard.

My mind is pretty much blown.

Much like the film Primer, I have enjoyed Borges, and I’d recommend him, but I can’t honest claim to have understood the half of these stories. I liked the “Library of Babel” which struck me as much like the internet in that it contains everything you might ever want to know hidden amongst tides of lies and crap. I also liked the story about the magician who dreams a man into existence. This was easier going for someone who spent their youth with PKD!

How many words did I have to look up? LOTS!

Cosmogony – The study of the origin of the universe

Numina - Plural of “numen” which means a presiding divinity or spirit of a place; Creative energy; genius.

Verisimilar – having the appearance of truth; probable

Apodictic - Necessarily or demonstrably true; incontrovertible

Tetrach - A provincial ruler or vassal king who owed allegiance to the Roman Empire.

Nitid – bright, lustrous.

Teleology – I wish this meant the study of television, but alas it does not. Apparently it is the belief that everything has an ultimate, original cause and the search for evidence of design in nature. Sounds like a cross between a child recursively asking “Why?” and the endlessly moronic “intelligent design” doctrine. The study of this ology looks like a waste of neurons. I am cross that such a word even exists. Why not join with me in deliberately misusing it to mean “The study of television”? Eventually, the meaning will change!

Pullulate – to send out shoots, to breed or multiply, to swarm or teem.

Panegyric – an elaborate formal compliment.

Borges is another person who is done no favours at all by the modern desire for photos of the author. He was obviously scarily intellectual, but looks like a cross between a basset hound and a Galapagos tortoise.

Pulp Fiction for January

There are some who probably believe that January is the month for tackling the weighty tomes that have been sitting unread on your shelf for the past year, making you feel guilty. I could not disagree more. With the outside cold and dark and all my money spent long before payday, January already has plenty of potential for misery without making things any worse. Therefore I have indulging in a bit of pulpish genre fiction to cheer myself up.

All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses An Eye – Christopher Brookmeyer

This book is currently the top contender for “Airport Novel of the Year”, and award (bestowed in a star-studded ceremony which takes place in my imagination) which I give for the most entertainly daft paperback thriller I've read all year. Previous winners include “Good News, Bad News” by Mark Wolstonecroft and a delightfully silly book about an ex-navy seal going cave diving, so it's pretty prestigious. In real life All Fun and Games was winner of the 2007 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic writing – although this is no guarantee of anything; the same prize was won by DBC Pierre's “Vernon God Little” which is unspeakably depressing!

Anyway, the plot is that a top scientist goes missing from his job at a secret weapons research facility. He is being hunted by all the major arms manufacturers in order that they can either make use of his research, or ensure that it is never completed. The leader of a team of mercenaries hired by the scientist's original employer comes up with a brilliant plan: he will hire the one person who will stop at absolutely nothing to find the missing scientist... his mum! His mum is a forty something Scottish housewife who has never committed so much as parking offence. All this is about to change as wee Janet goes AWOL from her suburban life and finds the skills learned in boxercise proove very useful in the cut-throat world of international espionage.

As I race towards middle age myself, I find that I particularly like books and films which are kind to ladies of this age (Check out Kung Fu Hustle – it features a chain-smoking, plump, middle-aged lady kung fu master!). I like to think that I will still be allowed to have adventures when I'm forty. One thing I didn't like was the sex scene between Janet and the international man of mystery who has recruited her. I think this is partly just me (I prefer my sexual tension unresolved) and partly because it felt like the author was writing to a formula (e.g. hollywood blockbusters must have 3 explosions and a car chase, international spy stories need at least one sex scene) rather than allowing his characters to behave consistently. Nevertheless, I was enormously pleased when Janet left her annoying, complacent husband at the end. Bugger girl power, this book has middle-aged-woman-firing-two-9mm-barettas-at-once-power.

I Am Legend – Richard Matheson

This book is number 2 in the “SF masterworks” series. Does this mean that it is officially the 2^nd best SF ever? Don't know about that but really good for its time and well worth a read if you haven't already. In fact, go and read it right now as I'm about to give away the ending.

Robert Neville might well be the last human left alive. A mystery virus seems to have turned everyone else into vampires. By night he cowers in his fortified house and by day he repairs his defences, then seeks out and stakes as many sleeping vampires has he can find.

Eventually his house is infitrated by Ruth, part of a group of people infected with the virus, who have managed to stave off full undeadness (with magical mcguffin tablets of some kind). This allows them to retain their personalties and intelligence and now they are rebuiling society – for vampires. When members of this group finally capture Neville and sentence him to death, he realises that from their point of view he his the night salking thing of terror who comes and kills them when they are helpless in their beds. He notes with grim satisfaction that he has become a creature of legend.

My husband I both read this recently while off work with the flu and it becoes particularly resonnant if read when you've been at home all day on your own, bored, lonely and feeling like you might well be the last person alive. Much of the point of the book seems to be about the dehumanising nature of hardship. After the death of his wife and daughter Neville seems to have lost the capacity for any feeling oter than anger. His constnat conflit with the vampires has made him nable to think of them as anything other than blood-seeking animals, desite observing intelligent behaviour in some of them – he even captures some of them alive to experiment on when he is trying to investigate their condition.

Not sure if I can go & see Will Smith film as I fear some Hollywood arse-wit will have gone and stuck a happy ending on to it.

If King Arthur had worn tweed...

For ages now I have been reading “The Once and Future King” by T.H. White. This is essentially a retelling of Arthurian legend, viewed through the prism of 1950s politics and morality. It comprises of 4 books: “The Sword in the Stone”(famously adapted by Disney), “Queen of Air and Darkness”, “The Ill-Made Knight” and ”The Candle in The Wind”. The first two books are rather good, but the second two threatened to bore the living arse off me.

“The Sword in the Stone” is clever and funny (the Disney film is actually surprisingly true to the book). Arthur is still an interesting character at this point because he's just a boy and still fallible and human. Further into the saga, Arthur is just so damn good, wise and kind that he becomes terribly dull. Merlin overseas Arthur's childhood and works to instill a sense of right and wrong into him, as opposed to the standard education for a mediaeval monarch which would have been learning endless manners and protocol and absorbing the idea that you are better than everyone else and can impose your will on the peasants through violence. In some places, the writing is actually very funny with characters such as Sir Ector and King Pellinore given dialogue that makes them sound like overbred upperclass twits. In many places though, there's just too much detail on the habits of the mediaeval aristocracy. For example, I don't need an exhaustive rundown of all the different breeds of hunting dogs and the protocol for handling each. I don't need a list of heraldic animals and I don't care what the difference between lions couchant, rampant, or passant regardant is. Despite these information dumps, this book still contained my favourite moment in the whole saga:

King Pellinore has spent his whole life hunting the Questing Beast (aka The Beast Glatisant), a weird creature which has the head of a snake, the body of a lippard (lizard?, leopard?) and the hooves of a hart. It makes a noise like a pack of hounds and only a Pellinore can catch it. The years of sleeping in forests and fields begin to take their toll on King Pellinore, and he accepts an invitation from a fellow knight to stay in his castle, sleep on a feather bed and have a bit of a holiday from the Questing Beast. On a Boxing Day boar hunt, they find the Questing Beast lying half-dead in the snow – it has been pining away without King Pellinore to chase it! He takes it home and feeds it bread and milk until it is healthy, then gives it a head start and sets off after it with renewed vigour.

The second book was also a pretty good read. In this book Arthur is trying to secure his new kingdom against rebellious Scots, and old-style robber barons reluctant to sign up to his new order of niceness. As part of this process, Arthur and Merlin invent the round table to that knights gagging to fight someone can harness their testosterone and use it for good. It is also in this book that Arthur sows the seeds of his destruction by accidentally sleeping with his half sister, Morgause. And crazy, cat boiling, brother humping Queen Morgause really does steal the show in this book. A woman so deluded she offers to be the bait in a unicorn hunt, despite having four strapping sons! She may be mad and bad, but since all the other women in the whole saga are a waste of space, I can't help feeling some grudging admiration...

Now we come to “The Ill-Made Knight” which deals mostly with the story of Lancelot and Gwenevere. I have never had any sympathy for those two and nothing Mr White had to say changed my mind. Faithless, whorish people often whine the excuse: “You can't help who you fall in love with.”. Maybe, maybe not, but you definitely CAN help who you have sex with. There is no excuse for having a personal life like something from Deidre's Casebook; it is just plain sluttish. Please remember that it is only polite to break up with one lover before you move on to the next. my contempt for the protagonists made this book pretty hard going. The structure of it seems to be that somebody accuses Gwenevere of adultery and trail by combat is used to prove her innocence or guilt. Lancelot then acts as her champion and kills the accuser. This is repeated about seventeen times.

The monotony is slightly relieved by the quest for the Holy Grail. I would have liked to have more details about this but the way that the story is told is that the reader is left hanging about Camelot with Arthur and Gwenevere, getting only sketchy impressions of what happened from returning knights. One good result is that following the Grail quest, smug, virginal, boring Galahad (Lancelot's accidental son – it's a long story) becomes so chuffing perfect that he evolves into a life-form made of pure energy and buggers off... like the tedious, pixie-eared girl from Voyager.

By the time I arrived at the final book, I have to admit I had begun to skim a bit. Modred hatches a scheme to destroy the round table by waiting til Arthur is off somewhere on business, then catching Lancelot red-handed in Gwenevere's bedroom. The lovers flee to France and the Round Table broken up as some knights are loyal to Arthur while others side with Lancelot. Arthur pursues Lancelot, mostly to appease Gawaine, who's brothers got in the way of Lancelot's escape and were cut down while unarmed. There is an extended and particularly pointless battle in which people who are friends try half-heartedly to kill each other in order that honour be satisfied. Meanwhile Mordred is left in charge of England, where he raises an army of fascist supporters in black uniforms, declares himself king and tries to marry Gwenevere. By the time Arthur realises the danger it is too late – all his knights are dead and he is a worn out old man left to fight a battle he can't possibly hope to win. His final action is to dispatch a messenger boy with orders to tell everyone he meets the story of a legendary king who tried to make things better by persuading people to be nice to one another.

To my disappointment, many of my favourite bits of Arthurian legend, such as getting Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake, Gawaine & the Green Knight, going to the Vale of Avalon etc. aren't in the book at all. And in all the other versions of the legend I've read, Morgause's role is played by Morgana Le Fey. That's the thing about legends, though: they're always a bit vague.

White assumes his assumes the readers will have already read Mallory's Morte d'Arthur. Maybe this was true in the 50s (after all there was no lolcats then, noPeepshow, no Heroes so people might have been desperate enough) but it certainly isn't true in my case. I have read stories of the individual knights in books of Celtic myth which I bought in the hippy crystal shops of my wild, impetuous youth. I have read “The Mists of Avalon” by Marrion Zimmer Bradley, which is told from the perspective of Morgana Le Fey, but not Mallory. Unfortunately, White seems to have left out many bits and pieces on the grounds that he'd just be going over ground already covered by Mallory. But one of my reasons for reading him was so that I wouldn't have to read Mallory!