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.