Ian's 100

I joined the 50 in 2009 group, but managed to read well over 50 books. And in 2010, I joined the 75 books group, but read over double that number. So now it's time to join the 100 books per year group. I fully expect to read more than that in 2011, but never mind.

yea Ian's here!! I'm glad; I may not always agree with your opinions but I always enjoy reading them and expressing my disagreement! ;-)

Debate is always good :-)

Hi Ian, and welcome to the group!

And I agree with kcs_hiker, your opinions are always good reading. Nice to have you here now!

Book 1: The Adventures of Blake & Mortimer 8: The Voronov Plot, Yves Sente & André Juillard
Edgar P Jacobs, who assisted Hergé with Tintin, invented the characters of Blake, a captain in MI5, and Mortimer, a nuclear physicist. They appeared in several adventures in the Tintin magazine. Cinebook have been republishing them in English, and have begun extending the original series. The Voronov Plot isn't bad - the story makes more sense than many of Jacobs' did, but it still has a tendency to rely heavily on great wodges of dialogue or explanatory text. Voronov is a Soviet scientist who decides to use a deadly space bacteria found on a test rocket after it fails to reach orbit to kill both Western and Soviet leaders. The story is set during the 1950s, but it is only at the end that you discover exactly when. But for the huge chunks of dialogue, this would have been an excellent installment in the series.

Book 2: The Passage, Justin Cronin
Given the hype, it's impossible to go into this without high expectations. Almost none of which it meets. The opening third is very good, and clearly shows Cronin's literary origins. But then the book bogs down badly in the middle, and proves a chore to read... before picking up towards the end... before finishing on a cliffhanger. Further, there's very little that's new in this book: everything seems to have been ripped off from films - not even from books. There's I Am Legend, Mad Max, a host of vampire and post-apocalypse films... but no references to the literature. The only original idea is that of Sanctuary, where kids are kept in ignorance of the outside world until the age of eight. I suspect the only reason this book was lauded so highly was because the publishers and Ridley Scott paid so much for it...

Book 3: Genesis, Bernard Beckett
I remember this getting rave reviews a year or two ago - and most of those reviews are copied on the ffep of my paperback copy of Genesis. Unfortunately, I can't quite see what all the fuss is about. That the book is YA isn't, to my mind, a defence. It's written as a transcript of a 4-hour oral examination of a teenage candidate for entry to the Academy, the ruling elite of The Republic. As a result, the first few "questions" result in great wodges of back-history. None of which actually reads like dialogue. It's not until halfway in that the actual story itself begins - a legendary figure did something which changed The Republic. There is, I admit, a nice twist at the end, but it's not enough. Nor is Beckett's fine prose. The science fiction is old-fashioned, the central conceit is not especially original, and the way the story is presented is not rigorous enough to suspend disbelief. Disappointing.

Oh, I'm slightly relieved to read something non-hyped about The Passage. Makes me feel better about not getting around to reading it.

I should have given up after the first third. I'd have liked it better then. And the story would have been just as unresolved...

re: The Passage; even the Sanctuary idea reminded me a bit of City of Ember. I'm with you guys, the book WAS definitely over-hyped (I actually read it as an ARC so missed some of that); the middle third of the story did sort of ruin the rest of the book.

But the first couple of 100 pages were excellent... setting the hook.

When a publisher pays $3.75 million for a trilogy, they have to justify their spend somehow...

Book 4: 0.4 (AKA human.4)*, Mike Lancaster
I was sent this for review by Interzone, but it turns out it's YA novel and so not suitable for the magazine's readers. But I read it anyway because it was short and an easy read. The ARC claims Lancaster is a "phenomenal debut talent in science fiction", although I can't see it. Every sf reference in 0.4 is for a film, not a book. All, that is, except the cover quote: "It's a brave new world.". The central premise is mildly interesting, but the style grates - the book is written in 1-, 2- or 3-sentence paragraphs. And they're short sentences. And very repetitive. I realise I'm not the book's target audience, but I don't think I'd even have been that impressed if I'd read it when I was twelve or thirteen. I was reading EE Doc Smith, Asimov, Heinlein and Herbert then, for a start.

* No, the book isn't titled Human.4 but some eejit has entered it on LT as such. Have a look at the cover art, it quite clearly states "0.4".

Book 5: The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein
This was the first book of my 2011 Reading Challenge: Women sf writers. I forget where I first came across mention of Kirstein's novel - it's not as if it's well-known (at least on this side of the Atlantic). It sounded like it might appeal. Later, I found a copy in a charity shop, and so bought it. And... appeal it certainly did. Rowan is a steerswoman in what appears to be a generic Dark Ages fantasyland. Steerswomen are sort of mapmakers and collectors of knowledge. They travel the land gathering information. Anyone may ask them a question, and they must respond. But if anyone refuses to answer one of their questions, they will be banned and never again ask anything of a steerswoman. Rowan stumbles across a strange jewel, and tries to investigate its origin. This brings her to the attention of the wizards, who set out to capture or kill her. With the help of Bel, a warrior woman from the Outskirts, and William, a 14-year-old boy who has discovered magic on his own, she uncovers the origin of the jewels and learns more about her words. The Steerswoman initially presents as fantasy, but as the story progresses it becomes clear that the "magic" is actually science. William's charms, for example, are crude chemical explosives. And it's this which lifts the book above others of its ilk. The central trio are well-rendered, but the world itself is a little too generic - steerswomen and wizards aside. But because the book is actually sf, it made it for me a more enjoyable read. I liked this one. I think I'll track down the rest of the series.

Does sound rather interesting, but difficult to find! I'll have to keep my eyes open in the second hand shops...

It does sound interesting! Another one to keep an eye out for...

Book 6: Music for Another World, edited by Mark Harding
A review of this will be going up the SFF Chronicles website this weekend. I'll post a link here when it's up. For the time-being, this is an anthology of 18 science fiction and fantasy stories about music. Given that the stories are all by new writers - only one has a novel out from a mainstream publisher, and that was published in 2010 - it's a surprisingly strong anthology. The stand-out is Neil Williamson's 'Arrythmia', and it has been rightly shortlisted for the BSFA Award.

My review is now up on SFF Chronicles here.

Book 7: Spreading My Wings, Diana Barnato Walker
Read for reasearch for a story I'm working on. Barnato Walker was an early British female aviator, not quite an contemporary of Amy Johnson, but only some 15 years younger. During WWII, Barnato Walker was one of the ATA Girls, female pilots who ferried combat aircraft around the country from the factories to the RAF airfields. After the war, she continued to promote flying, and became the first British woman to pilot a plan through the Sound Barrier in 1963. Her autobiography is written with clear prose, and contains plenty of entertaining anecdotes and details. She was a remarkable woman.

Book 8: The Sodom and Gomorrah Business, Barry N Malzberg
The country has been split into Landscape and Network - the former is the rural areas, the latter are the cities, which have been walled off and whose debased populations have been imprisoned. Sort of like "Escape from New York". Two student Enforcers from the Institute for Urban Control enter New York City without permission, and are captured by a gang. The surviving Enforcer learns that things are not quite as he'd been told, is "deprogrammed", and helps the gang lead an attack on the Institute. This read like Malzberg was trying to do Ballard, and failing badly. When the promise was straightforward, it wasn't too bad - although the premise is far from original. But when he was trying to do New Wave, it just didn't work. And there was no good reason for women-as-chattel argument the book presents. Avoidable.

Book 9: Spacesuits, Amanda Young
This odd-shaped book - it's tall and not very wide - was published by the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and covers exactly what its title says. Most of the spacesuits used by NASA and USAF were gifted to the NASM, but over the years many have deteriorated badly. New efforts are being made to restore them, and meanwhile there's this book to document the collection. It contains some lovely photographs of the various spacesuits used in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, MOL and other programmes. The text gives a brief history of the spacesuit, beginning with Wiley Post and finishing with the Shuttle pumpkin suits. I'll be reviewing this book on my Space Books blog, and I'll post the link here when it's done.

As promised, review is up here.

Spacesuits does sound like a nice volume!

Regarding Spreading My Wings, I'm not sure what research you've read it for, but it reminded me of West With The Night by Beryl Markham which I've dipped into (and which I must read properly). She was a pilot in Africa, contemporary & friend of Karen Blixen, the author of Out of Africa (which is also on my stack of books to read...).

I think I'll track down a copy of Spreading My Wings; it sounds fascinating, and as my daughter's 'current' boyfriend (a very smart kid) has expressed his career goal to be an 'international freight pilot', this might be a good one to pass on to her...

*it must be noted that the boy's mother wants him to be a dentist... so international freight pilot may be just a bit of rebellion

Book 10: Sylvow, Douglas Thompson
After 0.4 proved unsuitable for review for Interzone, they sent me this instead. I'd bought Thompson's first novel Ultrameta at Fantasycon last September. Sylvow was launched at the con, but I didn't buy it. Just as well, I suppose. The title refers to a European city of no fixed location - it's equal parts British, German and East European in feel. Nature is beginning to take over the city, and its slow encroachment is described in its effects on a small group of people. It all reads very Ballard-ish, and a little bit East European. It's also a little uneven in tone and quality. But overall, it's good. And Thompson could well prove to be a name to watch.

Book 11: First on the Moon, Jeff Sutton
This is real potboiler stuff, with manly men and, er, manly men. It was published in 1958, so it's not very technically accurate. The hero, Crag, commands the first Us mission to the Moon, which takes off in secret after repeated sabotage attempts by the nasty Soviets. En route, their supply rocket is destroyed by a rival Soveit mission, but they manage to land safely. And then witness the Soviet rocket crash. But one cosmonaut, an East German, survives. Oh, and one of the US crew is a secret Soviet saboteur. I bought this book because of the cover-art, and because I'm interested in fictional representations of missions to the Moon.

Book 12: Reflections from Earth Orbit, Winston E Scott
This thin book, albeit copiously illustrated, from Apogee Books is Scott's autobiography, with especial reference to his career as an astronaut. It's the usual life-affirming, you-can-do-it-too sort of stuff: under-privileged black kid in Florida finds tough-but-fair mentor in first non-segregated school, excels academically, goes to university (studying music, strangely), joins US Navy as aviator, and then is picked by NASA. It's an easy read, and some of the details of Shuttle missions are good - Scott gives a good idea of what it was actually like. I just wish my copy didn't smell of mothballs.

Book 13: American Adulterer, Jed Mercurio
The adulterer in question is JFK, and Mercurio's novel is a retelling of JFK's short presidency but focusing almost entirely on his health and promiscuity. The tone is not unlike a medical report (Mercurio is a doctor), and is impressive for its attention to detail and authority. Several of JFK's speeches are reproduced, although I was disappointed to find the Moon speech wasn't. Mercurio's Ascent impressed me a great deal when I read it a few years ago. The subject of that appeals more to me than American Adulterer's, but this is still an excellent book. I certainly plan to watch Mercurio's career.

Book 14: People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
The book in question is Jewish haggadah, created in Spain in the late fifteenth century, but that has miraculously survived to the presence - passing through Spain, Venice and into Sarajevo. Hanna Heath is an Australian expert in conserving ancient manuscripts, especially Hebrew ones. In 1996, she is called to Sarajevo to work on the haggadah. Within its pages, she finds several mundane items left by previous owners. From these Brooks, creates stories of the book at various points in its history, and tells how it survived. Meanwhile, Hanna is having trouble with an overbearing mother... Bits of this book I liked, but it felt a bit info-dumpy and the writing was way too melodramatic in places. Interesting, but not an especially great read.

Book 15: A Far Sunset, Edmund Cooper
Another from my list of British SF Masterworks here. A Bit disappointing. My full review is on my blog here.

Book 16: Empress of Outer Space, A Betram Chandler
Gah. I don't know why I continue to read Chandler's fiction. It's terrible. And this one is among the worst by him I've read. The titular empress is Irene, who before being selected by an imperial committee was an officer in a tramp freighter out on the Rim. When her Imperial yacht is stolen while quelling a mutinous navy officer's conquest of a low-tech world, she has a light cruiser adapted for automation, and sets off in hot pursuit with her doctor, lady-in-waiting, an engineering officer, gunnery officer, and the narrator (a Survey officer seconded to the Navy). The entire story takes place on the first world on which they land looking for the mutineers. They step outside... and into a patch of lichen which releases an hallucinogenic gas... and the narrator and Empress Irene promptly dream a series of adventures mixing up ERB's Barsoom, Fleming's 007, Shakespeare, and various other pre-time-of-writing works. This could have been cleverly postmodern, but it's just an implausible and silly adventure which reads as though it was knowcked out in a weekend.

And I still have to read the other half of the Tor double...

Book 17: To Open the Sky, Robert Silverberg
A relatively early Silverberg from 1967. An invented church finds itself under attack by a sect which broke after a schism, the main church controlling Earth and the other Venus. One church is an expert in longevity, the other in ESP and associated mindpowers. but it's all a plot to help humanity make it out into the stars. Very dated, although there are one or two good ideas in the book. Mostly forgettable, though.

Book 18: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier, Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
I'm half-convinced Black Dossier is proof positive that Moore has disappeared up his own fundament. There are so many references and jokes in this story, it makes it seem as thought they're the reason for its existence rather than the actual plot. Like Watchmen, Black Dossier is a story told in several different documents - but much more so than the former. It even includes a Lovecraft/Wodehouse mashup, for example. And one section is printed in 3D, although a pair of 3D glasses are provided (assuming you don't mind ripping out one page of the book). The story is apparently a sourcebook leading into the events of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910, although it is actually set in 1958. The story ties together numerous fictional works, from H Rider Haggard to Ian Fleming, taking in Billy Bunter, George Orwell and Bulldog Drummond, among others. It's a difficult work to read, and the reason why it was written is not entirely clear. Annoyingly, it has never been published in the UK, only in the US - which makes it hard to find and expensive here.

Book 19: Winterstrike, Liz Williams
This was the second book of my 2011 reading challenge, and I've reviewed it here.

Book 20: Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, David Pringle
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Except for that "best", of course. Pringle explains his choices in a lengthy introdiction, and freely admits that some of his picks are not actually very good, nor does he like them very much. But he considered them important so he included. He also points out that sf as a whole is not an especially well-written genre. I would guess about 70% of the books mentioned I'd classify as rubbish, and their stature within the genre is, to me, no good reason to hold them up as "best". Um, there's an idea for a project: my own choice of 100 best novels, posted one a day to my blog...

Book 21: Stretto, L Timmel Duchamp
The fifth and final book of Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle. These books do what the very best sf should do: make you think about the world around you. It's been a long and harrowing journey from book one, Alanya to Alanya, to Stretto, and I really need to take time to sit down and write about the quintet. The first book is, I think, the most accessible and perhaps the closest to a traditional sf narrative. Books two and three bog down a little as they set up the chain of events which lead to the plot of book five - which in turn is the least traditional of the five as two of its plot-threads are written as journal entries (one of which provides the best window on the world of the book of all five books). At some point, there'll be a length post or two about the Marq'ssan Cycle on my blog. I'll post the link here. But first I have to finish the second post on Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love Cycle - and I read the books four or five months ago...

Book 22: Nocturnes, Kazuo Ishiguro
A collection of five stories featuring Ishiguro's trademark self-deluded, and not entirely likeable, narrators. The five stories all feature music in some fashion, and are set variously in Venice, London, Malvern Hills and Los Angeles. Like most of his fiction, the story-arc seems to dribble and die rather than actually finishing, but the writing is very good throughout. I suppose if you wanted an introduction to Ishiguro's writing, this collection would be a good start.

Ian you certainly do read some interesting books! I'm contemplating the first L Timmel Duchamp, Alanya to Alanya, (available, surprisingly, for the kindle and affordable as well).

Have you read or heard of Randolph Lalonde's stories... I've started Origins Spinward Fringe.. it was a free book for the kindle, and I noticed that there are several books in the series. Being a bit wary of 'free' things, I wondered if you had an opinion.

I've not come across his name before. I've seen plenty of really bad self-published sf, and one or two quite readable ones. I even had a bash at it myself - under a pseudonym, of course :-)

And speaking of Kindle, I republished some of my stories which had appeared in various magazines as Kindle books - you can find them here.

>32 iansales:

Don't you have enough stories for a collection? I know I had seen quite a lot of them... :)

I've only had 9 published to date, and I've not sold any since the last one (not for want of trying, though). Maybe when I've got 12 or 15, I might see if anyone's interested in a collection.

>34 iansales:

Hm - I thought I had seen more than that... Good luck in selling a few more :)

Book 23: Voices from the Moon, Andrew Chaikin
Excellent coffee-table book containing photos of the Apollo programme and appropriate quotes from the extensive interviews Chaikin did when researching his A Man on the Moon. I'll be putting a review up on my Space Books blog and will post a link here when it's up.

Book 24: An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro
Ishiguro's second novel and an improvement on his first, A Pale View of Hills. The book is set in Japan in 1948 and 1949, and the titular artist is about to marry off his twenty-six-year-old daughter and reflects over the events in his life before and during the war. Something he did may cause the marriage negotiations to fail (as they had done once before), but as usual Ishiguro doesn't say what and only circles around the topic. In fact, An Artist of the Floating World is even more discursive than other books by Ishiguro I've read. The narrator is, typically, self-deluded - and, in this case, self-important too. The novel isn't as good as his later ones but it's a definite improvement on his first.

My review of Voices from the Moon is now up on my space books blog - see here.

Book 25: Son of Heaven, David Wingrove
This is the first book of the rewritten and relaunched Chung Kuo series. I had to review for the book, and interview the author, for Interzone.

Book 26: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, CS Lewis
The third book of the Chronicles of Narnia, which I'm slowly working my way through. I'm way too old for these books, which is probably why I find them so annoyingly patronising, but I'd like to think I'd have felt the same if I'd read them when I was 8 or 9. This one is at least better then the previous two, and has a bit more of a plot. Lucy and Edmund, and horrible cousin Eustace, fall into a painting and find themselves aboard the titular ship with Prince Caspian. He's heading east for the edge of the world to find seven missing lords and, perhaps, Aslan's Land. They have adventures en route, and Eustace learns how to be nice. There's not much charm in these books, but Lewis certainly proves he can stick the knife into his "muggles" so much more effectively than Rowling ever managed: "They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarian, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes." Best line in the entire book, and it's in the opening paragraph...

Book 27: The Adventures of Blake and Mortimer: The Sarcophagi of the Sixth Continent, Part 1, Yves Sente & André Juillard
I don't normally include graphic novels in this list because they're such quick reads. But this one is worth mentioning: The characters of Blake & Mortimer were invented by Belgian Edgar P Jacobs in the 1946 and first appeared in Hergé's Tintin magazine. Blake is a captain in MI5 and Mortimer is a physicist, and together they've had numerous science-fictional adventures. Sente & Juillard have, since the millennium, added Jacobs' series, and they're doing an excellent job. Sente's scripts are very much grounded in the period in which the stories take place - the 1950s - and real-world events are cleverly used. In this one, it's India's struggle for independence which drives the plot.

Book 28: The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson by, er, Kim Stanley Robinson
A collection of KSR's best stories, as selected by Jonathan Strahan. It doesn't open especially strongly, but then moves onto two of his absolute best, 'Black Air' and 'The Lucky Strike'. Reading this collection, I was reminded again just how good a writer KSR is, though he has a tendency to drop in the odd clanging sentence: "the blood smelled like blood", for example. The Best of Kim Stanley Robinson may not do exactly what it says on the tin, but it's still an excellent sample of an excellent writer's oeuvre.

Book 29: Time of Hope, CP Snow
This is the first book, in internal chronology, of Snow's Strangers & Brothers series. Lewis Elliott is the son of a bankrupt in a provincial Midlands town during the early 1920s. After leaving school with good exam results, he becomes a local government clerk in the education department. But he dreams of better things. After making friends with George Passant, a qualified lawyer working as a legal assistant in one of the town's practices, Elliott decides that the law is the career for him - but not as a solicitor, as a barrister. He crams for the Bar examinations, passes them, uses contacts to get himself into an Inn, and so progresses his career. Meanwhile, he's fallen in love with neurotic but beautiful Sheila Knight, although she trust him but does not love him. He also develops "pernicious anaemia" and is very ill for a while. But when this is re-diagnosed as secondary anaemia, he seems to miraculously recover - probably the only false note in the novel. Snow draws deep psychological portraits of his characters - it's all told from Elliott's point of view, but he's a deeply analytical person. I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected. I certainly plan to track down the remaining ten volumes and read them.

Book 30: Wormwood, Terry Dowling
Dowling's story in The New Space Opera 2 intrigued me enough to want to read more stories set in the same universe. But the only stories he's written set there are in this linked collection. Which was published by an Australian small press. And so is almost impossible to find. But I tracked down a copy and... The world - an Earth conquered by an unknowable alien species, and on which now live a host of other alien species - is indeed fascinating. Sadly, the stories don't quite live up to its promise. The opening one is just a long lecture about the world, with a small puzzle at the end to solve. Another has a pair of thieves break into an alien's house and make their way through a series of trap, which is what those particular aliens fill their houses with. The aliens are all intriguingly alien, but the stories are unfortunately all too earthly. Disappointing.

Book 31: Easy Meat, John Harvey
This is a Charlie Resnick novel. Resnick is a police detective in Nottingham, a city I sued to know well. I'd forgotten how easy it is to read thrillers and crime novels. When I lived in the Middle East, I was a member of a subscription library and used to get out these sorts of books and read them in a single day. Which is what I did with this one. It's a bit grim, and paints an unflattering picture of Nottingham. It was published in 1996 but read as mostly present-day except for some odd period details which kept on throwing me. A young offender commits suicide in a secure home, and the police officer heading the investigation is subsequently found beaten death in a park. The crimes are not really linked, although a link does come to light. A fairly routine thriller.

Book 32: Midnight Fugue, Reginald Hill
I used to get a lot of Dalziel & Pascoe books out of that same library, and I seem to remember enjoying them. But I've read a couple of the past few years and found them poor. These latest ones read like Hill bangs them out between cups of cappucino. Dalziel is asked to hunt for a police officer who disappeared seven years ago, but a recent photograph of whom has just been sent to his "widow". A bog-standard thriller.

Ian, I have a few Terry Dowling books gathering dust around the house, Wormwood included (although I only seem to catalogued Twilight Beach here). I do read them as I buy them, but I think I'm mostly buying them to be supporting local sci-fi, I've never really been blown away by them.

If you want to read more and you're having difficulty getting hold of any of his works, let me know, I might be persuadable to letting one or two go. :)

Thanks for the offer. I think Wormwood is the only book by Dowling set in this universe.

Book 33: CCCP Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, Frédéric Chaubin
This huge book contains photographs of modernist buildings found throughout the former Soviet Union. Not all still exist - some of have been demolished since Chaubin photographed them. The buildings are strange but quite beautiful.

Book 34: Dark Space, Marianne de Pierres
This is the first book of the Sentients of Orion quartet. It was my March book for my Women in sf reading challenge. I reviewed it here.

Book 35: Pig Tales, Marie Darrieussecq
This book was apparently much-lauded on its original publication, both in France in the UK (for the English translation). It's a short novel - I read it sat in a pub while waiting for friends - and written in a simple style, intended to ape the voice of the somewhat dim-witted narrator. She turns into a pig. Initially, she finds herself more attractive to me, but then they behave more like animals. Meanwhile, a politician is voted into power, and turns the state into an authoritarian nightmare. Pig Tales is, quite simply, rubbish. It reads like it was written by a child - everything is made-up. It has no rigour. The narrator career as a prostitute is not convincing; the Orwellian state which later results is not convincing. The language is littered with hoary old expressions and clichés. One to avoid.

(Note to self: don't put colons in book titles - it breaks the touchstones)

I really should get a copy of that CCCP book, it really does look excellent.

Nice review of Marianne de Pierres - an Australian author I've never heard of! I don't mind a bit of space opera, I'll keep my eyes open for her books. (Actually, having found her books on the local sci-fi bookshop website, I do recognise the covers, so I have seen them.)

Book 36: Engineering Infinity, Jonathan Strahan, ed.
This is presented as an anthology of hard sf, but the contents barely fit the theme. Which is not to say they're bad stories. On the contrary, most of them are good. It's a strong sf anthology, it's just not a strong hard sf anthology. I'll be posting a more comprehensive review on SFF Chronicles shortly. I'll post the link here when it goes up.

Book 37: Blindsight, Peter Watts
Lots of friends told me I should read this book, it was just the sort of sf I like. Which does make me wonder a bit what people think about my taste in sf. Because I did think this was an interesting novel, but I also didn't like several things about it. Some time later this century, a spacecraft is heading to the edges of the Solar system to investigate what may be a first contact with an alien species. Several years previously, a network of mysterious objects, known as the Fireflies, burned up in Earth's atmosphere. Clearly not natural in origin, no one has figured out what they were or what they were for. Now, intelligent signals have been detected from what looks to be a black-body Jovian planet in the Oort Cloud. Aboard the spacecraft are a vampire captain, a multiple-personality linguist, a marine major, a biologist who can send out his consciousness into the equipment into which he plugs, and the narrator, who has had half of his brain replaced with machinery after a childhood diagnosis of severe epilepsy. At the Jovian planet, nicknamed Big Ben, they find an alien craft, which they investigate. As first contact novels go, Watts succeeds in creating a truly alien race (although parts did remind me of Williams & Dix's Orphans of Earth), and the prose is thick with authority. But the book struck me as a cutting-edge sf novel from the mid-1990s, rather than a twenty-first century one. Little things stood out: a character who smoked, the word "spam" used as a pejorative from human beings who interface with computers, the general nastiness of the world Watts creates... A good sf novel, but if it had been published ten years earlier, it would have been a great sf novel.

Book 38: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
This is apparently her second novel after a 24 year gap. You have to wonder why. Did real life get in the way? Or has she spent the last two and half decades polishing the prose in Gilead? Because it's a beautifully written novel. It's framed as an extended letter from a dying reverend in 1950s Iowa to his young son (although he is not intended to be given it until he's much older). There are some lovely anecdotes, and some interesting - and very personal - history. But. I was never really convinced by the narrator. He's meant to be a pastor in his sixties or seventies, and yet he seemed a bit too, well, maternal in places. He seemed too sensitive, too considerate, to actually be a man, especially a man of the 1950s. Otherwise, a very good novel.

Book 39: Ghostwritten, David Mitchell
Mitchell's novels never seem to add up to the sum of their parts, and this is especially obvious in this, his first novel. It opens in Okinawa, with the first -person narrative of a terrorist hiding out after a gas attack on the Tokyo subway. The terrorist is quite bonkers - completely in the thrall of a cult leader. The nest section is set in Tokyo, and the narrator is a young slacker who works in a jazz record shop, and falls in love with a half-Chinese half-Japanese young women visiting relatives. She lives in Hong Hong. Which is where the next section is set, but the narrator is a bent broker, like Nick Leeson, who somes a cropper when he loses the money he's laundering for a Russian mobster. And so on... The book is structured as these short, mostly independent sections. There are links between some - and occasional events and characters do cross over. About halfway through, we're suddenly introduced to an "incorporal", a bodiless person who inhabits the mind of one of the characters, and can transfer from person to person. The final section features what is obviously an AI, tasked with preventing was from ever recurring but having trouble policing this. Those two genre elements are just too odd and disconnected to sit comfortably in what had initially seemed a series of linked stories with an overall story-arc. There is, it has to be said, some really nice writing in Ghostwritten, and it's a very readable novel. But it just feels like it doesn't quite add up.

Book 40: Evening's Empire, David Herter
Russell Kent is a composer, commissioned to write an opera based on Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (I have that book somewhere, I really ought to read it one day). Kent returns to the out-of-the-way Oregon town of Evening for inspiration. Several years before, he visited there with his wife, but she died in a fall from a bluff overlooking the sea. Kent stays at a B&B run by Megan, is introduced to some of the town's more eccentric characters, and is invited to a "Winter Gathering", an annual party at the mansion which overlooks the town. Initially, Evening's Empire reminded me of John Crowley's fiction - which is, of course, high praise - it's the same sort of gentle, beautifully-written small-town American fantasy. There's a lot of very convincing detail about composing the opera, the characters are drawn extremely well (if a little broadly, in places), and the town of Evening feels like a real place. Somewhere around the middle of the book, the story takes a strange left turn, and turns into something quite unexpected. Certainly, it's plain from the opening chapter that there's a secret at the heart of Evening, but when it's revealed it's not at all what you'd expect. In a good way. Describing it would, I think, constitute a spoiler. I suspect Evening's Empire may make it onto the by Best of the Year list for 2011. I'm surprised this novel isn't better-known.

Book 41: Say Goodbye, Lewis Shiner
This book is subtitled "The Laurie Moss Story", and that's pretty much exactly what it is. But not her entire story. It's the story of an episode in her life, the start of her musical career. Moss, a fictional character, is a young woman who heads to LA to discover fame and fortune. Of course, it doesn't happen like that. She clearly has something, she's clearly talented and special - but that's no guarantee of success. Fortunately, she hooks up with a garage band comprising three accomplished session musicians and legendary 1970s folk-rock guitarist singer.song-writer Skip Shaw. They're impressed with her, and their presence is enough to see her signed to a label. But it all goes wrong on the tour, and then the record label shafts them. Shiner is an excellent writer, and he has written music journalism, so it would not be unreasonable to expect much of Say Goodbye. Sadly, while it's well-written and its cast are well-drawn, it all feels a little mundane. A disappointment.

Book 42: The Space Station, Kent Alexander
I reviewed on my Space Books blog here. A strangely blinkered discussion of what would have been Space Station Freedom, published in 1988. Lots of nice illos of aerospace companies' concepts for a space station, but the text is not up to much.

Book 43: The Quantum Thief, Hannu Rajaniemi
The sf debut of 2010. Good. but is it award-worthy? My review is here.

Book 43 sounds interesting, even given your caveats. Is Rajaniemi writing in English as a second language, or is it translated? And could that have any bearing on the quality of his prose?

He wrote in English, tho it is his second language. But then Joseph Conrad wrote in English and it was his second language too...

Book 44: Cinco de Mayo, Michael J Martineck
A friend's first novel, published by EDGE, a Canadian small press. I'll be posting a full review soon on SFF Chronicles, but I will say I enjoyed a great deal more than I expected.

Book 45: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
Written in this book is my name and my old school number - which means I've owned it for over thirty years. So I surely must have read it before... except reading it this weekend, none of the details seemed especially familiar. I knew the general story, of course - it's one of those books whose story has entered popular culture. But the details felt new. Especially the endless lists of fish and other marine fauna. Every chapter seemed to have pages and pages of it. And Verne makes Nemo so determinedly mysterious it almost counts as "anti-characterisation". I'm glad I finally did read it, but it's going on that list of "classics" which are known solely for their stories because their actual prose will burn your eyes and fry your brain - like Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Ian, have you read Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor? It is the only Nebula nominee I have not read.

No, not read that, although I am aware of it.

Book 46: Phase Space, Stephen Baxter
This is a short-story collection from 2002, featuring short fiction chiefly pendant to Baxter's Manifold stories. Reading them now, some of them come across as crude (though they appeared in Asimov's), with a structure Baxter uses far too often. By definition, a single-author collection is not going to be especially varied, but the stories felt even more alike than that. There are a couple of good ones - 'War Birds', for example, which rings the changes on Apollo 11 exploding on reaching the lunar surface. Others are less successful, perhaps because of the similarity of the vein they mine. One of fans, I think.

Book 47: High Vacuum, Charles Eric Maine
While I'm interested in the Apollo programme, I also enjoy reading pre-Apollo realistic fictional depictions of lunar landings. Except they're not actually that realistic. They usually feature giant pointy rockets, which take off and land intact, without ditching stages; they describe the lunar landscape as jagged. This one is no different. A British rocket from Woomera crashes on approach to the Moon, right into a crater with a highly-radioactive floor. The astronauts must hike out of the crater in order to survive, and find somewhere to build their base. Workmanlike prose, science and technology that's badly dated, a potboiler plot... A guilty pleasure.

Book 48: Seven Pillars of Wisdom, TE Lawrence
This was nothing like I expected. I've seen the film, of course; in fact, it's a favourite. So I was certainly expecting a narrative, a story of Lawrence's years assisting the Arabs revolt against their Ottoman masters. But Seven Pillars of Wisdom reads like a report aimed at people who are already familiar with the story. There is some lovely writing, and some odd moments of weirdness that not only suggest the Bedu world is very different to ours but that the England of the 1920s is very different to the UK of the twenty-first century. It's a long slog of a book, and one that requires close concentration. It's a book you should read at least once but I doubt very much I'll ever return to it, much as I'm interested in the history of the Arabian peninsula.

Book 49: Icehenge, Kim Stanley Robinson
This was a reread, although I could tell you only that I last read it back in the 1980s. I've always thought it was one of KSR's best books, and this read confirmed that. It's structured as three novellas, the first two of which mention the titular icehenge - a henge of giant ice blocks discovered on Pluto - and the last one which actually discusses icehenge's origin. There's a quaintness to the future KSR describes, with the Soviet Union still existence right up through the 27th century, and the technology is like early internet/email. But neither detracts from the story. The first novella is the journal of a woman who witness the departure of two converted spacecraft carrying rebels for the nearest star. The second novel, set 300 years later, describes the discovery of the journal during an archaeological dig on Mars and how it brings to light a rebellion the Martian government had erased from the history books. The final novella is set a further 60 years later, and is about a mission to Pluto to uncover the origin of the icehenge - believed up to that point to have been built by the rebels who left the solar system. Icehenge, however, is not merely a puzzle sf novel, but also a discussion on memory, and the reporting of it, and how true is the past if no one remembers it, how much is a person who lives for 500 years the same person as they once was if they can't remember their past. Recommended.

like you, I read Icehenge sometime in the 80's... guess I'll dig around and see if I still have a copy. KSR has long been one of my favorite SF authors... but I find that haven't really read him for quite a while. I should dust off the Three Californias series and then maybe tackle the Mars series again (I confess to not finishing that trilogy).

Both The Years of Rice and Salt and Galileo's Dream have been sitting on my shelf for a while, casting accusing looks at me. I really need to find the time to tackle them.

I once started the first of KSR's "Mars" series, but didn't get very far. I think I should probably return to him one day, and Icehenge does sound rather interesting...

Book 50: Winterlong, Elizabeth Hand
This was April's book for my 2011 reading challenge, although I didn't manage to read it until this month. I wrote about it on my blog here.

Book 51: The Silver Chair, CS Lewis
This is the fourth book of the Chronicles of Narnia by publication date, but the sixth book by internal chronology. Useless Eustace and new-found friend Jill Pole escape from bullies at “modern” school Experiment House (dear god, but Lewis shows his reactionary side with his description of the school), because Aslan wants them to find Prince Rilian of Narnia, who was abducted ten years before. Aslan gives Jill four clues, which she manages to screw up, but it all works out in the end. And everyone gets lashings of buttered scones and hot chocolate at the end, or something. These books are a bit like your old Daily Mail-reading grandad telling a bedtime story – the only bits missing are rants against immigration and falling house prices…

Book 52: Orbital Vol 3: Nomads, Sylvain Runberg & Serge Pellé
This is the third book of a bande desinée series published in English by Cinebook. It’s heartland sf, but far more adult than you’d expect of a science fiction "comic". Earth is a reluctant new member of a galactic federation, after a war with the alien Sandjarr. A pair of special agents, one human and one Sandjarr, must ensure the celebrations in Kuala Lumpur to mark the end of the war, to which a Sandjarr delegation has been invited, goes without a hitch. But a nomadic alien race has settled nearby, and something is killing all the fish and the fisherman are not happy about it… Good stuff.

Book 53: The Arctic Marauder, Jacques Tardi
Warren Ellis raved about these on his blog, so I thought it might be worth trying one. Tardi is a famous comic-book writer/artist in France but isn't well-known in English. Fantagraphics are translating all of his best-known works into English, and publishing them as handsome hardback volumes. I admit, it was the cover art which caused me to pick this one - and it was a good choice. The story is like Jules Verne on drugs. A young man survives a mysterious attack which sinks the ship he is travelling on in the Arctic. Later, he returns to solve the mystery, and discovers a pair of mad scientists in a floating fort disguised as an iceberg. Tardi's style is very distinctive, but the story is very quick. I'm glad I bought it, though. I think I'll buy some of the other volumes...

Book 54: A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
This novel had been recommended to me by lots of people as an American comic masterpiece. Perhaps they had over-sold it. Because I didn't like it all that much. I'm a firm believer in the Confucian maxim that "the funniest sight on the whole world is watching an old friend fall off a high roof". In other words, slapstick makes me laugh. A great fat over-educated arrogant and self-deluded idiot like Ignatius J Reilly doesn't. There is some wit in A Confederacy of Dunces, notably in the black characters' dialogue, but too often the story is asking to laugh at Reilly and not with him. Disappointing.

Book 55: The Female Man, Joanna Russ
I read this in honour of Russ's recent death, and was surprised at how well the book has aged. It's set chiefly in 1969, although it was published in 1975, so perhaps it's unsurprising that it still reads like a book set in the late 1960s. But even the overtly sfnal sections have aged quite well. As the story progresses, so does the book's anger. Towards the end, it reaches quite astonishing levels. One chapter seemed more familiar to me than the rest of the book - which I've read only the once before during the 1980s. It didn't take me long to figure out why - I'd read it as a short story titled 'An Old Fashioned Girl' in the anthology Final Stage when I was about twelve years old. That anthology was one of the first sf books I ever read, and its stories have stuck with me over the decades. I still have that original copy on my book-shelves. But The Female Man. I have the SF Masterworks edition, and it's a worthy addition to the series - it's one of those remarkably few sf novels which can change the way you view the world. Definitely worth reading.

My review of Michael Martineck's Cinco de Mayo is up on SFF Chronicles here. I'd have posted the link sooner but the site had a problem with viruses - all fixed now, though.

Great review of The Silver Chair - it made me laugh. I loved the books as a kid (and still don't mind reading them when I'm in a nostalgic kind of mood, or am too busy to focus on grown-up books), but the older I get the more unpleasant I find his prejudices. I think that the Horse and His Boy is the worst with that sort of thing - why did Lewis hate olive oil so much?

Thanks for that. The Horse and the Boy is the next one I have to read...

Book 56: The Secret History Omnibus Volume 2, Jean-Pierre Pécau
In prehistoric times, four "archons" were each gifted with immortality and a rune if power. In the centuries since, they have fought each other, independently and in temporary alliances. During the early years of the Holy Roman Empire, an experiment went awry, resulting in the birth of William of Lecce, a monstrous boy who is committed to bending the world to his evil ends. Three of the four archons have battled William ever since. This volume takes the story from 1918 to 1945, opening with St John Philby in the Empty Quarter hunting for the fabled city from which the Queen of Sheba ruled, and continuing on through both world wars to Hitler's defeat. The Secret History cleverly stitches real historical events into its plot, and it's especially obvious in this second omnibus volume. The story's inspiration as the Tarot Deck is also clearer. The story is not yet complete, though I think it continues in another series under a different title. A quality graphic novel series. Worth reading.

Book 57: Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
If you're feeling a little depressed, you probably shouldn't try reading this book. It's unremittingly bleak and its cast behave like animals. A troop of Indian hunters in Mexico during the 1850s ride around the area, attacking both innocent and guilty Indians and Mexicans and collecting their scalps for a bounty. The writing is lovely, especially of the landscape, and the characters have no redeeming qualities and you can only wonder why they were permitted their depredations for so long. This is a good book but I'm not convinced it's a great one. Turning cowboys into monsters may have been a novel approach to the western, but I can;t see that it adds anything to the genre.

Book 58: China Mountain Zhang, Maureen F McHugh
This was May's book for my 2011 reading challenge to read one book by a female sf writer I've not read before. So I'll writing about it on my blog. I'll post a link here when it's done. For now, I'll say it's very, very good, and definitely worth reading.

Book 59: The Styx Complex, Russell Rhodes
Dear me, I'd forgotten how badly written most airport-bestseller books are. This one was published in the mid-1970s but there's been very little increase in quality in the decades since. Ava Bardoff is the mysterious, and beautiful, head of a global cosmetics empire which seems to have discovered the secret of eternal youth and which seems to control a great many important people around the world. Philanthropist billionaire Hugo Montcrief has been trying to break Bardoff's conspiracy for years but has failed. Along comes Bardoff's god-daughter, Sarah, a trust-fund babe, who has decided to settle down. The billionaire recruits playboy athlete Michael, whose estranged father is a senior officer in Bardoff's cosmetics company, to use Sarah to infiltrate and investigate Bardoff's chateau headquarters near Cannes. The prose is eye-stabbingly bad, the plot is ludicrous, the characters are wildly implausible, and I can only wonder why I bothered to read it. Ah well.

re: Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian; while I've not read anything by McCarthy (I KNOW he's good, but I just don't like depressing books)... the current political swing of the pendulum seems to be leaning back towards thinking that the Indians (Native Americans) were horribly barbaric and deserved what they got (and are still getting...casino wealth notwithstanding). Because of that I suspect that McCarthy is reviled in conservative circles for pointing out that soldiers and cowboys were often as bad if not worse than the Indians. It's a story that needs to be repeatedly told.

"The prose is eye-stabbingly bad". That's a phrase I'm going to have to remember. :)

Regarding McCarthy, I've read The Road (so very, very depressing) and All the Pretty Horses, which I liked much more, but he's still not someone you'd read for fun. Both were excellent books, I think he's a great writer, but I need to have a bit of an emotional run-up before I can tackle another McCarthy. (I have No Country for Old Men and the full Border trilogy to read - All the Pretty Horses is the first.)

I've read All the Pretty Horses, but I wasn't entirely convinced by the plot - the main character seemed much older than he was supposed to be, I couldn't figure out when it was set, and the section where they were released from jail didn't really convince. I also have No Country for Old Men on the TBR.

Book 60: The Horse and His Boy, CS Lewis
Yet another book in the Chronicles of Narnia and Lewis is at his most hectoring in this one. It doesn't help that it's not set in Narnia but in Calormen, which is full of nasty foreigners of a 1001 Nights persuasion. They even smell a bit. Not to mention practicing slavery. And one such young slave is rescued by a horse which reveals it can talk - because it's a Narnian horse. So the two try to escape across the desert to Narnia, with the help of a young princess fleeing an arranged marriage and her talking horse, and en route they foil a fiendish plot to attack and conquer Narnia's nearest neighbour by the Calormen. Even more so than the other Narnia books, The Horse and His Boy suffers from outdated sensibilities that really shouldn't be taught to children in the twenty-first century. There isn't enough charm in this book to offset that.

Book 61: Catastrophia, Allen Ashley
I'm working on a longer review of this, which I'll post when I'm done. For the time-being: it's a good anthology and worth getting hold of... and I'm not just saying that because it has one of my stories in it.

Book 62: The Legend of False Dreaming, Toiya Kristen Finley
Finley had one of the more inventive stories in the anthology Text: Ur, and I liked it enough to track down some of her other fiction online. Her stories are strange and elliptical, and not always told in a straightforward fashion. That's part of the appeal. Unfortunately, The Legend of False Dreaming is much more conventional narrative-wise. A young woman, fleeing her family, arrives in a town in which the inhabitants refuse to acknowledge the presence of its transient population, who are themselves trapped by a strange magical fog which won't permit them to leave. Not a bad story, but not as good as other ones by Finley I've read.

Book 63: The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing
A young middle-class liberal couple buy a big house they can't really afford because they want to fill in with children and live like bohemians. They get a bit of help from well-off parents and out plop a succession of kids. The relative come and stay for the holidays and a good time is had by all. But then another little sperm slips through and the titular sprog appears. Only this one is different. Physically, he resembles a Neanderthal. Temperamentally, he resembles... well, some sort of cunning animal. And the happy home is no longer a happy home. Though a light read, this book packs quite a punch. Lessing's deceptively simple prose style lets the story slip down, though it's an unpleasant one and, perversely, you can't help feeling sorry for the fifth child.

Book 64: Heat of Fusion and Other Stories, John M Ford
A collection of short stories and poems from a much under-rated sf author. These are cleverly done, though some are more involving than others. 'Erase/Record/Play: A Drama for Print' is especially good - a powerful story that refuses to tackle its subject head-on but works all the better for not doing so. Worth tracking down a copy of this and reading it, if you can.

Book 65: The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro
I like Ishiguro's novels, though I find them a bit variable and often insipid. And now that I've read The Unconsoled, I've read all of them. But I wish I hadn't bothered with this one. Ryder is a world-famous concert pianist, come to an unnamed East European city to perform. But there's something strange about the city, about the people who live there, and about what he is supposed to do. Everything is dream-like: he is driven for miles out into the country to visit someone, then steps through a door in their house and is back in his hotel. The city constantly changes, Ryder finds himself rushing around from one errand to another, suddenly recognising the people he meets and remembering things about them... And the people, when they speak to him: they waffle, they repeat themselves, they go on and on and on... I was expecting all this to be explained when I reached the end of the novel - it's clearly fabulist, but in service to what? And the details dropped during the story - Ryder's role, for example... I expected answers. There are none. It just finishes. Bah. Rubbish book. Avoid.

Book 66: How Spacecraft Fly, Graham Swinerd
Does exactly what it says on the tin, although it was pitched a bit lower than I really wanted. I've reviewed it for my Space Books blog here.

Book 67: Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?, Brian Fies
This graphic novel was lent to me by a friend because he knew it would appeal. And so it did. It's a lament for the future promised the US - and by extension, the world - in the decade or so after World War II. Drawn in a very simplistic style, which I didn't think really helped, and very talky too, it nonetheless managed to evoke nostalgia for a time that never existed.

Book 68: Metropolis, Thea von Harbou
This is the novelisation of Fritz Lang's film. I reviewed it for SF Mistressworks here.

Book 69: The Noise Within, Ian Whates
I have to review this for Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, so I won't say too much about it. It's old-fashioned and slapdash, and the neat idea at the core of it is never properly used. But I've spoken to lots of people who like the book, and can only think that the fact it's a pacey read is more important to them than rigour or consistency.

Book 70: The noise Revealed, Ian Whates
Also for review. According to Whates himself, the story was originally pitched as two books but as he wrote this one he realised he needed a third. Solaris turned down his pitch for the third book, but as The Noise Within continued to sell well, they approached him for a sequel. Unfortunately, it'll be a while before he can schedule in writing it. Certainly this novel feels like its story is unfinished.

Book 71: God's War, Kameron Hurley
This one had been on my radar since Night Shade first started promoting it - it's set on a world with a society derived from Arabic muslim society. I read the first chapter online, but was not especially encouraged to buy the book. Then Niall Harrison began raving about it on twitter, and so I decided to try it. And... it's good. Hurley's does a very good job with her world-building (except for a couple of small mis-steps), and the plot rockets along. The only thing preventing it from being one of the best of the year is that it's a brutal story populated by brutal characters. I'll be buying the sequel, Infidel, when it's published next year, though. And I'll be writing about it on my blog soon, so I'll post the link here when it's up.

Book 72: The Third Eagle, RA MacAvoy
MaCAvoy's Lens of the World trilogy is one of the best fantasy series I've read, so I had high hopes for this space opera. Unfortunately, it's disappointingly weak. The plot doesn't actually kick into gear until two-thirds of the way through, and the title only peripherally relates to the story. I'll be reveiwing it for SF Mistressworks and will post a link here when it's up.

Book 73: Robopocalypse, Daniel H Wilson
This is this year's mega-hyped genre title from the US. Wilson has a PhD in Robotics, and is television's go-to guy on the subject. He's previously written other books on the subject, some of which, like Robopocalyspe, have been optioned for movies. So there's plenty of money behind him. But, like all such books, there's not much in the way of substance. The story is presented as a series of vignettes of a future war with robots. Some are better than others. The structure is actually quite annoying, and I'm very much unconvinced by some of the robotics used in the book. I'm reviewing this book for Interzone and it probably won't be getting a positive review.

My review of The Third Eagle is now up on SF Mistressworks here.

Book 74: The Year of Our War, Steph Swaintson
This was (delayed) June read for my 2011 reading challenge. I've posted a review to my blog here.

Book 75: Hav, Jan Morris
A review of this - well, the first part of it, Last Letters from Hav - will be appearing on SF Mistressworks today.

Book 76: Bluebeard's Egg, Margaret Atwood
A short story collection. I especially liked the title story, and the opening story, 'Significant Moments in the Life of My Mother'. Some of the others didn't do much for me.

Book 77: Cloudcry, Sydney J Van Scyoc.
I reviewed this on sfmistressworks here.

Book 78: Packing for Mars, Mary Roach
Disappointing. See here.

Wow, Packing for Mars sounds really annoying. I'm glad I don't have to read it now. Are all her books like that?

I've no idea - it's the first one of hers I've read. And I only read it because of the subject.

As promised, here's my review of God's War.

Book 79: Beirut Blues, Hanan al-Shaykh
Al-Shaykh's debut novel, Women of Sand and Myrrh, is excellent, so I had reasonably high hopes of this, her second novel. Sadly, it's not as good. It's framed as a series of letters addressed to a variety of people, from the narrator's best friend to Billie Holliday. Through the letters, the writer, Asmahan, describes life in war-torn Beirut. Some of the writing is lovely, some of the story is quite heart-breaking, but the format unfortunately distances the reader and nothing has quite the impact it feels it ought to. Worth reading, however.

Book 80: The Goda War, Jay Blakeney
This was a reread for review for SF Mistressworks. I like Blakeney's novels - her The Children of Anthi and Requiem for Anthi are especially good - though this one is really just mind candy. My review is here.

Book 81: Desert Governess, Phyllis Ellis
Ellis was an actress and dancer who took up TEFL after the death of her husband. She applied for a job teaching English to the teenage children of a Saudi prince, was offered the position and accepted it. She spent a year in Hail, in the centre of the Arabian peninsula, as English teacher - not really a governess - to the son and two daughters of HRH Prince Muqrin bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, the youngest son of ibn Saud. Ellis seems eager to learn and understand Arab/Muslim culture, but equally unwilling to accept some of its elements - resulting in incidents which caused offense and could have clearly been avoided. She is homesick for much of the time, and finds the life too restricting. Eventually, she leaves after a year. Desert Governess provides an interesting insight into the lives of Saudi princesses to some extent. The writing is mostly acceptable, and there are some mistakes in the transliteration of the Arabic (though they might have been typos). The book is a quick easy read, spoiled somewhat by Ellis' reluctance to wholly embrace or respect the culture in which she found herself.

#68 & #69> I've read all of Mary Roach's books, except Packing for Mars, and yes, she is flippant to the core. I enjoy them though, I found them entertaining reads. (I'm obviously less worried about technical inaccuracies than Ian is. :)

Loving the SF Mistressworks site, I should add some of those books to my wishlist. For some reason, I rarely seem to read sci-fi (or fantasy) by women, with the exception of *ahem* paranormal romance. Which is trash. No time like the present to improve my reading choices there.

Just discovered the SF Mistressworks site through Adam Robert's blog. Great site!

Thanks. If you fancy contributing any reviews, let me know.

Book 82: Resurrection Code, Lyda Morehouse
This is actually a prequel to Morehouse's AngeLINK quartet, which I've not read. I think Amazon recommended it to me when I purchased Kameron Hurley's God's War, and it looked sort of similar so I bought it. It's an interesting mix of cyberpunk and angels, set in a post-apocalyptic Cairo. I plan to write about it on my blog and will post a link here when I've done so. I think I'll see if I can hunt down copies of the other AngeLINK books: Archangel Protocol, Fallen Host, Messiah Node and Apocalypse Array.

Book 83 : City of Veils, Zoë Ferraris
This Ferraris' second crime novel set in Saudi, featuring the same two characters from her first, The Night of the Mi'raj: Nayir Sharqi, Palestinian desert guide, and Katya Hijazi, a forensic scientist. I thought that first book interesting, though somewhat flawed - and I wasn't convinced by some of the details. City of Veils is a much better book - perhaps because it has a larger cast and a much more satisfying central mystery (most of which proves to be a sub-plot, but never mind). A young woman's body is found washed up on a Jeddah beach. she is later identified as Leila Nawar, a young film-maker who seemed determined to court controversy by filming subjects certain to offend the Saudi authorities. Meanwhile, Miriam Walker, an American, has returned to Jeddah after a month's leave back home, and hours after she arrives home with her husband, he vanishes. Miriam doesn't live on a camp, and can't speak Arabic. Ferraris weaves the two incidents together into a mystery, one which drags in both Katya and Nayir. The characters seem better-drawn in this novel, but the plot does get wrapped a little two quickly. Still, I enjoyed it and I'll read the next one when it's published.

Book 84: Zoo City, Lauren Beukes
This was July's book for my reading challenge, and I wrote about it here. Much, much better than I was expecting. Recommended.

Book 85: Solitaire, Kelley Eskridge
I reviewed this one on SFF Chronicles here. Excellent novel, highly recommended.

Book 86: Troika, Alastair Reynolds
This has been shortlisted for the Hugo this year, but I read the Subterranean Press edition. A Soviet mission to a mysterious Near Earth Object goes somewhat awry, as described by the survivor, who has just escaped from an institution. This is alternate history - the USSR never fell - crossed with BDO science fiction, and it's not one of Al's strongest works. Shouldn't even be on the shortlist, in fact.

Book 87: Correspondence, Sue Thomas
I reviewed this for SF Mistressworks here.

Book 88: My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time, Liz Jensen
I enjoyed Jensen's The Rapture, so when I spotted this in a charity shop I grabbed it. Like that other book, it's sf disguised as mainstream. In this case, it's time travel. A prostitute in late 19th century Copenhagen goes to work as a cleaner for the widow of an inventor who vanished several years before. In the basement of the window's house, the prostitute finds a strange device... and is inadvertently catapulted to modern-day London. The story is told entirely in the prostitute's voice, which gets a little wearying after a while. But it's a fun book, and it all seems to add up reasonably well. Entertaining.

Book 89: Silversands, Gareth L Powell
I picked this up when it was launched at Fantasycon last year. It's a solid sf thriller set on a colony world. When a ship from Earth arrives - it's important to the plot that the wormholes which connect the colonies can't be navigated - it triggers a series of events which threaten to bring down the colony's government. Though only short, the novel is well-paced, the characters rounded, and the setting sketched in with skill. Despite all this, it's not especially memorable, perhaps because its one big idea is peripheral to the plot and only impacts at the end.

Book 90: Heaven's Shadow, David S Goyer & Michael Cassutt
Another big fat mega-hyped genre novel for the this year, and you just know it's not going to be very good. Goyer is a screenwriter, responsible for, among others, The Dark Knight. so, of course, they've already sold the screen rights to the book. Cassutt is a mid-list sf author who's books have never made it across the Atlantic. The story is Rendezvous with Rama meets To your Scattered Bodies Go, but told in the style of a techno-thriller. The space travel is depicted more realistically than usual, but still leaves a lot to be desired. The story is bloated well past its sell-by, and what initially starts out as an entertaining no-brainer soon turns dull. I won't be bothering with books two and three of the projected trilogy. Might go and see it if they actually do make a film of it, though.

Book 91: Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years, Pamela Sargent, ed.
An anthology of sf short stories by women writers from 1978 to 1995. The quality is high, though the types of sf are varied. I'll be reviewing it for SF Mistressworks.

I've posted my review of Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years. It's in two parts: here and here.

I've also posted my review of Heaven's Shadow - see here.

Book 92: Adventures in Capitalism, Toby Litt
To be honest, the most interesting thing about Litt's career so far has been his intention that each of his book be alphabetically titled. Which is not say that those of his books I've read so far have been bad. I quite enjoyed Corpsing, and while Journey into Space was a little old-fashioned I did think it nicely-written. But the stories in this collection, Adventures in Capitalism, are somewhat variable, and several of them are, well, a bit dull.

Book 93: Spin State, Chris Moriarty
Polished brutal hard sf which is surprisingly not better known than it shuold be. I'll be writing about it on my blog shortly.

Book 94: The Magician's Nephew, CS Lewis
Only one more to go and I cross off this series of books. This one is a prequel of sorts, set in the Victorian era. Two kids use their uncle's magic rings to travel to another world and inadvertently bring a Witch back to London. So it's up to them fix it. It's all jolly spiffing, and about as Victorian as bakelite, though Lewis' comedy cockneys are amusing.

Book 95: From Russia, With Love, Ian Fleming
I don't know how many times I've seen the film, but I can never seem to remember its plot. I certainly don't remember it being like the one in the book - a honeytrap for Bond. Beautiful Russian pretends she has fallen in love with Bond so he can be conveniently assassinated when he goes to meet her in Istanbul. I remember visiting Istanbul during the 1970s, and my father and I saw Sean Connery in a gun shop in the bazaar. He was posing for photos as Bond, although he was apparently in the city filming "Murder on the Orient Express".

Book 96: Orbital vol. 4: Ravages, Sylvain Runberg & Serge Pellé
I suspect this may be the last of the series. It follows on directly from Orbital Vol 3.: Nomads. A large celebration of the peace between humans and sandjarr is about to take place in Kuala Lumpur, but something strange has been killing fish, and later people, in the nearby mangrove swamps. The locals blame it on a race of nomadic aliens who have briefly settled in the area. Of course, it turns out not to be their fault, but things get close to the sire before the true culprit is found. This is solid space opera fare, but very nicely drawn.

Book 97: Dancer of the Sixth, Michelle Shire Crean
I reviewed this for SF Mistressworks - see here.

Book 98: SS-GB, Len Deighton
This is the granddaddy of alternate history stories: Hitler wins World War II. In this case, Britain surrenders after the farce that was the BEF, and the UK is now an occupied country. The protagonist of SS-GB is a Scotland Yard detective, working under the SS, but still solving the sort of crimes he solved before the war. The plot kicks off when the body of a dead scientist is found in a flat above an antique shop in London, and goes on to take in the German Army's secret research in atom bombs, a plot to break King George VI out of the Tower of London and smuggle him to the US, and the ongoing struggle for power between the SS and the Wehrmacht. I've enjoyed Deighton's novels in the past, but I found the writing quite clumsy in this one, and most of the characters were ciphers. The central conceit is interesting, and the research is well-handled, but I suspect there are better novels based on the same idea.

Book 99: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1969, Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
I really like the idea of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - a group of fictional heroes called together to protect the Empire. And the first two books were pretty good. But from The Black Dossier onwards, the seres does feel a little like it's slowly disappearing up Moore's fundament. As the title makes clear, this one is set in 1969, and it's all hippies, occult powers, and a free concert in Hyde Park. It reads like Dennis Wheatley meets Flower Power. There is a third book in the series to come, and I'll likely get it, but I'm beginning to wonder why.

Book 100: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec Volume 1, Jacques Tardi
And here's another graphic novel which tells its story in a way which is either really clumsy or cleverly subversive. A pterodactyl is terrorising Paris, but that doesn't really have anything to do with Adèle Blanc-Sec as she uses it for cover to progress her own investigation. But the two are linked, are in a fashion. As is revealed in a final scene, in which one villain after the other explains what they were after, only to be trumped by the next in line. The second story in the volume, 'The Eiffel Tower Demon' follows straight on and is relatively straightforward. A series of murders appear to be linked to a statuette of an ancient Sumerian demon, and Adèle Blanc-Sec is dragged in due to her involvement in the previous story. A film has apparently been made of this series by Jean-Pierre Jenuet, and starring Audrey Tatou. It might be worth seeing.

Book 101: Author's Choice Monthly 3: Daily Voices, Lisa Goldstein
Four stories by Goldstein, all of which are deceptively fantastical. Longer review to come shortly.

Book 102: The Lifecycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang
This won the Hugo, which is hardly unexpected given the author's name. Having said that, I don't think it's the best thing he's done. A company makes software "digients" (AIs), which must grow and learn, but not everyone is keen on parenting them. Except for a small group who continue to do so after the company has folded. There is, as you would expect from Chiang, much thoughtful discussion on the ramifications of the central idea. But. That idea isn't especially striking, nor does the novella take it anywhere particularly striking. There's nothing wrong with thoughtful, but you'd expect more for an award-winning story.

Book 103: Gravity Dreams, Stephen Baxter
This is the latest in Baxter's long-running Xeelee, and is actually a sequel to the series' first ever story, 'Raft', which was itself expanded into Baxter's first novel Raft. In fact, the original story is included with this novella. It's far-future sf, full of info-dumps, with action set-pieces offset by lecture scenes. Not one of Baxter's best.

Book 104: Red Plenty, Francis Spufford
I had somehow got the impression this book was science fiction, though it's stretching the definition quite a bit to make a case for it. It's actually non-fiction presented as fiction: a series of vignettes detailing episodes in the lives of assorted Soviet Russians from the 1930s up to 1968, showing what life was like under Communism, how they tried to build a utopia, how some of them believed and worked toward that dream. That they ultimately failed doesn't invalidate the attempt. This is a great book and carries its vast research lightly. A possible contender for my best five books of the year.

Yes, I liked the first two League of Extraordinary Gentlemen too, but I'm not sure I'll be continuing past them. Especially not with hippies.

Red Plenty does sound interesting, thanks for the heads up.

And congratulations on reaching 100!

Hmm I agree loved the 1st two League of Extraordinary Gentleman but everything I had read since then (1910 and The Black Dossier) has left me cold. I do tend to like a plot with my comic book.

Oh and congrats!

Book 105: Debris, Jo Anderton
I have to review this for Interzsone. Though it says "Filer Under Science Ficiotn" on the back-cover, this actually reads more like fantasy to me. An interesting world, but Anderton keeps far too much close to her chest and it makes the plot feel like it's been dragged out beyond its length.

Book 106: Leap of Faith, Gordon Cooper
The autobiography of Mercury astronaut Cooper, and quite an odd one as such books go. I reviewed it on my Space Books blog here.

Book 107: Snakehead, Ann Halam
A retelling of the myth of Perseus, the Medusa, and Andromeda as a YA novel. The story focuses more on the relationship between Perseus and Andromeda than it does the quest to kill the Medusa, but that's no bad. Perseus is a teenage boy, well brought-up, thoughtful, but a bit stronger than his peers, and not at all phased at being the son of a god and so immortal. Halam's (AKA Gwyneth Jones) treatment of the Greek gods is interestingly different - almost science-fictional, in fact. Enjoyed this one quite a bit.

Book 109: The Old Funny Stuff, George Alec Effinger
This is #1 of Author's Choice Monthly. The stories in it are certainly old - 1982 to 1985 - but they're not funny. They're pretty bad, in fact. Most of them read like they were written in the 1940s. 'Mars Needs Beatniks' works reasonably well as its a pastiche, but it's spoofing something really old which is a really old idea. Avoid.

Book 110: A Quiet Flame, Philip Kerr
Bernie Gunther has arrived in Argentina, in the company of an ex-SS Panzer captain and Adolf Eichmann. Shortly after his arrival, Gunther is taken to meet Perón, and he admits his real identity to him. Which works out quite well, because there's been a recent murder which is very similar to an unsolved case Gunther investigated in Berlin in 1932. The implication is that the murderer is one of the Nazis hiding out in the country. So Gunther is drafted into the secret police, and set loose on the German community. Flashback chapters detail the case in Berlin, which was during Hitler's rise to power. Everything proves a lot more complicated than it initially seemed - and, it has to be said, a little implausibly orchestrated - but this is a good read. It's not a book to make you feel good about your fellow human beings, however. Recommended.

Book 111: The Coming of the Terrans, Leigh Brackett
This is a collection badly disguised as a novel and comprises a numbr of stories which allegedly share a single timeline. They're Brackett's Mars stories - The Beast-Jewel of Mars', 'Mars Minus Bisha', 'The Last Days of Shandakor', 'Purple Priestess of the Mad Moon' and 'The Road to Sinharat' - and some are more successful than others. But it's all good stuff.

Book 112: Charlotte Gray, Sebastian Faulks
I'm fairly sure I tried reading this in the late 1990s, but gave up. I know I've seen the film. This time, however, I managed to read the book to the end, and I'm glad I did. It takes a long while to get where it's going, but the end is worth it. The title character is a young woman who volunteers during WWII to be parachuted into France as a courier. But she stays on because her lover, a RAF pilot, is missing somewhere in the countr.y Charlotte gets involved with locals resisting the German occupiers in Vichy France, and learns something about their methods. I'm not convinced the writing is especially brilliant in this book, and the pacing is near glacial, but it certainly leads to an emotional climax.

Book 113: Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
Some time in the future, rogue genius Crake unleashes a plague on the world, killing off everyone except a handful of genetically-engineered humans he has bred and his friend Jimmy. Now calling himself Snowman, Jimmy acts as a beneficial god/shaman to the Crakers, while trying to survive in a world in which he no longer fits. His life is interspersed with flashbacks detailing his friendship with Crake, how we went to work for him, and how the world became as it is. There's some good bits to this, but most of the satire is so blunt as to be ineffective. And the "trendy" names Atwood uses for all the corporations, like RejoovEsense, just annoys. Not one of her best.

Book 114: Hardball, Sara Paretsky
I've been a fan of the Warshawski novels for many years, though they have been a little uneven at times. Hardball is not the best one, but it is a slight return to form after the disappointing Fire Sale. Warshawski is asked to find someone who disappeared decades before during Martin Luther King's march in Chicago, and it turns out her father was involved. There are a lot of angry men in this novel - in fact, it seems every male character is angry, usually at Warshawski. Happily, the plot is convoluted, political, and provides a window on some of the history of the US civil rights movement.

Book 115: Shadow Man, Melissa Scott
This was September's book for my reading challenge and I wrote about it here.

Book 116:Valerian Vol 1: The City of Shifting Water* and Book 117: Valerian 2: The Empire of a Thousand Planets, JC Mézière & P Christin
These are the first two books in the Valérian and Laureline bandes dessinée, originally published in French in book form in 1970 and 1971. While the series has been translated into a number of languages and is available throughout Europe, only 7 of the 23 books have ever been previously published in English. These two are a little clumsy, and the first one contains some very inelegant info-dumping. But they're fun, and they do get better.

Book 118: On Green Dolphin Street, Sebastian Faulks
The van Linden's are a diplomatic couple in 1959 USA. Charlie is an analyst at the British Embassy, and was something of a rising star. But his career is starting to wane, mostly from his drinking. When Frank Renzo re-introduces himself at a party, it results in an affair between him and Mary van Linden. This comes to a head when Charlie has a breakdown during a trip to Moscow, and Mary has to go and fetch him. If I'd thought Charlotte Grey was slow, then this is almost stationary. I definitely recall trying to read it years ago but not getting beyond the first chapter. This time, I finished it, but the nice writing was often not enough to keep me reading. I kept on going because I was waiting for something to happen - much like the final section of Charlotte Grey. But nothing does. Disappointing.

Book 119: The Gondwana Shrine, Yves Sente & André Juillard
This is the eleventh volume of the adventures of Blake & Mortimer and follows on directly from the previous one. Like the others, it's very talky, but the plot is completely bonkers, with its discovery of a secret base left by a human civilisation which existed 250 million years ago on Gondwanaland. They're still cleverly done these.

Book 120: Ascent, Jed Mercurio & Wesley Robins
This is a graphic novel adaptation of Mercurio's ecellent novel of the same title. While the hardware is drawn well, the rest looks a bit, well, amateurish. Disappointing.

* touchstone doesn't work. I thought they'd fixed the touchstones earlier this year?

Shadow Man sounds interesting; but not available in Australia. (I've added it to my BookDepository wishlist.)

I'm enjoying your reading challenge this year, it's been good hearing about books I wouldn't have otherwise.

I've read a number of Scott's books, but Shadow Man is one of two sitting on my tbr shelves. Thanks for the review.

If you like Le Guin's sf, then Shadow Man is definitely worth reading. It's not available in the UK either, and I ended up ordering a cheap copy on eBay.

Book 121: The Kings of Eternity, Eric Brown
A reclusive writer living on a Greek island in 1999 falls in love with the painter who has moved in next to him, but is still reluctant to reveal himself. Four friends in 1935 meet at the country home of one of them and in the woods nearby witness the opening of a portal from another world and rescue the creature which comes through it. The link between the two narratives is not difficult to guess, but that doesn't spoil any enjoyment this novel might have. The narrative set on the Greek island has a somewhat Fowlesian feel to it, though perhaps a little more sentimental than Fowles ever wrote. The other narrative is Wellsian, though it uses Wellsian types tropes with the sophistication of a twenty-first century sf writer. Is this Brown's best novel? Hard to say. I still like Kéthani a lot, and any feelings of familiarity I might get from The Kings of Eternity is likely a result of reading the novella on which it was based, 'The Blue Portal', some years ago. It's certainly a very good novel, however.

Book 122: Silicon Embrace, John Shirley
This one, however, is not a good novel. I like Shirley's fiction, but he can be slapdash. And Silicon Embrace is one of the slapdash one. It's a post-apocalyptic US crossed with UFO mythology, featuring a Damnation Alley-style journey across California and Nevada, with a secret underground base staffed by a military in league with Greys. Then it heads for New York, and turns into something slightly different. This book wasn't very well edited, with far too many ellipses left in, and a number of silly mistakes, like a mention of "Neil Stephenson" (sic). Disappointing.

Book 123: It Was the War of the Trenches, Jacques Tardi
This is a bandes dessinée treatment of WWI from the point of view of the soldiers. Tardi has picked out some of the worst and most horrific stories, and given them a graphic novel treatment. Like the one about the Sicilian soldier who could not speak French and so didn't go over the top when ordered, and was subsequently tried and shot as a deserter. Or the officer who ordered machine-guns to open fire on his own men because they were being mowed down by the Germans and were trying to get back to their trenches. The more you learn about the First World War, the more you realise that the wrong people were killed. Anyone who reads this and continues to glorify the military is clearly an idiot.

Book 124: Maul, Tricia Sullivan
This was October's book for my reading challenge, and I'm still working on my blog post about it. I'll post the link here when it's done.

Book 125: The Joy of Technology, Roy Gray
This is a chapbook published by Pendragon Press. The author is a friend of mine. The technology in question is that used in sex clubs in Germany in order to better titillate customers. The customers, in this case, are a coachload of football fans from the UK, visiting Germany as their team is playing away. A father introduces his son to the joys of travelling onto the Continent to see a footy match, and also to the delights to be had before and after the match. Gray pulls no punches, and if his story dehumanises its characters I suspect that was its intent. It does trail off a bit towards the end, and perhaps would have been much improved by a punchier finale.

Book 126: Synthajoy, DG Compton
Compton was one of the best British sf writers of the 1970s, and the more of his books I read, the more convinced of it I become. This was excellent. See my review here

Book 127: Dead Girls Act 1: The Last of England, Richard Calder & Leonardo M Giron
This is the first part of an ongoing graphic novel adaptation of Calder's debut novel. It simplifies some things - making the dolls, and the changes they have wrought, much more understandable, but in the process loses a bit of the novel's baroque atmosphere. The art is very good, and suits the story perfectly. If you like Calder's Dead trilogy, it's definitely worth owning. But you'll have to move fast: Murkey Depths only has a handful of copies left.

Book 128: The Unit, Ninni Holmqvist
There is lots of praise on the covers of my paperback copy of this book, and I'm not entirely sure why. In a near-future, or alternate present, Sweden, anyone over the age of fifty without children, or who has not made a significant contribution to culture or industry, is deemed "dispensable". They are taken to luxurious centres - the "unit" of the title - where they have free housing, food and healthcare, and are encouraged to use the copious leisure facilities. While there, they must volunteer for medical experiments and, over a period of years, donate whenever necessary their organs. Dorrit is one such woman. Something of a loner, inside the unit she finds friendship, and then love. At which point, of course, she no longers wants to be dispensable. The concept of the unit is, I admit, quite neat, though it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. From the description, it would cost far more to run than it returns in the form of drug testing or donated organs. The rules on who is dispensable are also open to abuse, especially for those who are childless but have contributed in some highly-recognised fashion. Also, the fact that survival is predicated on having children will also push women back into their traditional roles, undoing decades of feminism. None of this seems to have occurred to Holmqvist. She makes Dorrit a bit mannish, and has her enjoy being passive and feminine as if it were something to aspire to. I also thought the writing was very clumsy in places, though that may be more the translator's fault than the author's. I suspect this is one of those books can see little beyond the central conceit - like Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, for example, which has a brilliant central idea but is appallingly written. And yet those same people will sneer at science fiction because so many of its fans look only at its ideas and ignore all else in a text.

Book 129: Warlord of Mars Volume 1, Arvid Nelson, Stephen Sadowski & Lui Antonio
I have a love-hate relationship with John Carter. Or rather, with the books in which he features. Barsoom is a great invented land, and the idea of his characters are really cool. But the prose is often quite painful to read - not only is the style horribly dated, but Edgar Rice Burroughs was a hack. But there's something in John Carter and Barsoom which fires the imagination... even if every incarnation of it to date has yet to quite match expectation. This miniseries is an attempt at a more faithful comic adaptation of the first book of the series, A Princess of Mars. However, like all such it stands or falls on the quality of its art... and here it's not too bad. Okay, so Dejah Thoris is improbably buxom and near naked - though, to be fair, in ERB's novel all the character are naked all the time. And the Tharks do bear a suspicious resemblance to the Tharks in Marvel's 1978 John Carter, Warlord of Mars comic. Overall, it's not too bad, though it does make the source material appear more shallow than it actually is. Meanwhile, I'll have to wait until Pixar's film adaptation is released in March 2012...

Ian, you capture my feelings about John Carter and Barsoom. I absolutely loved the stories as a kid... not so much as I reread them now. Thanks for the review!

Pixar is adapting John Carter? I'm slightly boggled, but looking forward to it, they usually produce excellent movies.

Check out the trailer here. Looks pretty cool.

But don't get it confused with The Asylum's 2009 Princess of Mars, which is really crap - see here.

Book 130: The Uncensored Man, Arthur Sellings
A forgotten British sf author from the 1960s. This is his second novel. I reviewed it here.

Book 131: Warlord of Mars, Dejah Thoris: Colossus of Mars, Arvid Nelson & Carlos Rafael
After the disappointing adaptation of A Princess of Mars (see book 129 above), this is much better. The artwork is lovely, though Dejah Thoris is still improbably bosomed. And mostly naked. But Dejah Thoris is certainly the heroine and drives the plot from start to finish. The story is set hundreds of years before John Carter appears on Mars, when Greater and Lesser Helium were at war and both owed allegiance to another city-state. The jeddak of that state finds an ancient colossus and goes on a rampage, but Dejah Thoris manages to ally the two Heliums and leads a force to defeat him. not bad. I'll be keeping an eye open for the next book in the series.

Book 132: The Testament of Jessie Lamb, Jane Rogers
This was, I believe, longlisted for the Booker, but since the plot summary made it clear it was sf-written-by-a-mainstream-author I picked up a copy just before Waterstone's abolished their 3-for-2 promotion. And it's certainly sf, in the same way The Handmaid's Tale or Children of Men are. Or even Nineteen Eighty-four. At some point in the near-future, a virus is released which infects everyone. But when women become pregnant, it turns into full-blown Creuzfeld-Jakob Syndrome and is always fatal. In other words, women can't have children anymore - or they die. And it's a particularly horrible death, as their brain dissolves in their skulls over a period of weeks and sometimes days. Jessie Lamb is 16-year-old whose father works at a clinic attempting to find a cure to Maternal Death Syndrome. While around them the world slowly falls apart. The first section of the novel, in which Jessie tries to come to terms with the world, and in which the role of women in society slowly erodes, is very good indeed. But about halfway through Jessie volunteers to become as "Sleeping Beauty" - she joins a programme which will keep the mothers in comas so the babies can be born safely, though, of course, the mothers will not survive. At which point, the novel turns into YA story and is all about Jessie trying to convince her parents that her choice is the right one. Yet the trigger for that choice doesn't seem especially obvious. The Testament of Jessie Lamb is a pretty good book, but it's also half of what could have been an excellent one.

Book 133: The Garments of Caean, Barrington Bayley
Bayley's fiction was always slightly odd, and this one's no exception. It's 1970s hackwork, but it starts from a point, with a conceit, that no self-respecting sf hack would ever have tried. But Bayley makes it work. Sort of. In the Tzist Arm of the galaxy there are two major cultures, the Ziode cluster and Caean. The Ziodeans are just like contemporary Anglophone Westerners, but with spaceships and few other sf trappings of the day. The Caeanites, however, are entirely different. They have developed tailoring to such a degree - they call it the Art of Attire - that clothes do indeed maketh the man. So when a black marketeer liberates a cargo of Caeanic clothing from a crashed spaceship, it threatens the already minimal relations between the two groups. The prose veers from serviceable to the odd piece of fairly good writing. About two-thirds of the way through, the plot takes a turn that makes a nonsense of the book's set-up up until that point. And there's a casual mention of rape which is really quite offensive in this day and age. Not one of Bayley's best. There were much better books written by British sf authors during the 1970s. Don't bother with this one.

Book 134: Infidel, Kameron Hurley
This is the sequel to God's War, which I thought very good indeed. I reviewed the book for SFF Chronicles here.

Book 135: The Man Without A Planet / Time To Live, Lin Carter / John Rackham
Ace didn't half publish some crap back in the old days. These two very short novels are pretty much perfect examples. In the Lin Carter one, a war hero returns to his homeworld but finds things not to his liking and is reluctantly pushed into the arms of a displaced empress who wants her planet back. It's very much words & spaceships, with stupid cod mediaeval dialogue and most of the cast wearing next to nothing as they fight each other. I suspect it was written slightly tongue-in-cheek. I also suspect a lot of readers lapped it up without realising that. The Rackham, on the other hand, is the sort of stuff a long-time hack bangs out over a weekend, starting with an amnesiac opening and then making it up as he goes along. The amnesiac in this case is on the run for a murder he doesn't remember committing on a planet whose native population are immortal, stunningly good-looking and have mental super-powers. It's all a plot, of course, and he's not really who he thought he was, and he didn't commit the crime. It's all the fault of the evil scientist who wants those mental powers for himself.

Book 136: Apollo Spacecraft News Reference (Lunar Module)
This is a facsimile edition of a document produced back in the 1960s for the press. I reviewed it on my Space Books blog here.

Book 137: Songs of the Dying Earth, George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois
I had to review this for Interzone. It's not a book to read from cover to cover as the contents all get very samey and blend into each other. Some of the stories are better than others. Kage Baker's stands out, as does Lucius Shepard's, Elizabeth Hand's and Jeff Vandermeer's. Some are quite bad, but most are meh. This is more a book for obsessives than merely fans.

Book 138: Isles of the Forsaken, Carolyn Ives Gilman
A new fantasy, the first half of a diptych, from the author of Halfway Human. I though this was excellent and wrote about it on my blog here.

Book 139: The Silent Land, Graham Joyce
Expect this one to appear on a few shortlists next year. It's been getting some excellent notices, and yet... I was a little disappointed. A young couple are on a skiing holiday and get caught in an avalanche. They manage to rescue themselves, but when they return to the village where they are staying, they find it deserted. Then certain things don't seem quite as they should - candles don't burn down, meat doesn't go off, things don't taste as they should, whenever they try to leave they find themselves circling back to the village... The couple are drawn exceedingly well, but most readers will probably figure out what's going about halfway through, and it's the lack of a final unexpected twist that left me slightly disappointed. Otherwise, a book definitely worth reading.

Book 140: The Nemesis from Terra, Leigh Brackett
I really Like Brackett's Martian stories, but she did write a couple of duff ones. Like this one. It's just a western transplanted to Mars, and not done with a great deal of subtlety. The dialogue has that 1940s Hollywood snap and zing, and there are references to the mythology built up in other worlds, but it's all a bit too predictable.

Book 141: The Last Battle, CS Lewis
The final book of the Chronicles of Narnia, in which a great battle-- Er, well, no. It's not a great battle. There are less than a hundred on each side. A Talking Ape finds a lion skin and persuades his somewhat dim Donkey companion to dress up in its skin and pretend to be Aslan. Of course, everyone is taken in by this, so the King of Narnia is somewhat surprised when he learns someone is chopping down the dyad's trees. And that someone proves to be Talking Animals in thrall to a group of Calormene. Who are, of course, smelly and evil and foreign. But then Eustace and Jill appear and help the kind discover what's really going on. Then a few more Pevensies turn up and there's a small battle and Aslan turns up and Narnia gets rolled up and everyone ends up in a walled garden which has the whole world inside it including friends and loved ones who have died because it's really Heaven and if everyone is jolly nice then that's where they'll end up when they die. I'm glad I've read these books because it means I'll never have to read them again.

Book 142: Solaris Rising, Ian Whates
An anthology of recent sf by well-known names. Variable. I will be reviewing it on SFF Chronicles in the next week or so.

Book 143: The Witches of Karres, James H Schmitz
Dear me, 1967 can't have been a good year if this got onto the Hugo shortlist. Humorously incompetent space captain inadvertently rescues three young girls, and then discovers they are from the titular planet, where everyone has magical powers. His life falls apart as a result, it turns out he has relatives from Karres, and he goes off on adventures, which brings him into conflict with some evil worms. This is complete nonsense, and not even very amusing. It's bad mainstream thinly disguised as sf. At one point, his ship detects another ships "just ahead, some nine light years away". That's 85 trillion kilometers. We can currently detect planets at that distance by their effects on their parent star. People writing this nonsense seem to think space is no bigger than the Atlantic ocean. Complete rubbish. Avoid.

The Witches of Karres not only made it to the Hugos but is also on the the "Locus SF Best SF of All Time" and the Harris Bernardo "Classics of SF". I'm not sure how these list were compiled.

I was a Narnia fan as a child (and still have an immensely soft spot for it), but not even I liked The Last Battle.

Was catching up on some podcasts last night of Radio National's "The Book Show" (sadly next year it's going to be a books-and-arts show instead, and while I like arts, I'd rather they just keep the books bit) and there was an interesting short bit on CS Lewis. (And I'm glad they explained that a "Christian apologist" isn't someone who goes around saying "I'm sorry for Christianity", but someone who gives a reason for their beliefs. I'd always wondered.) They did a tour of Belfast, where he was born, and chatted about his beliefs and friendship with Tolkien. Doesn't look like they do transcripts anymore, but you can get the audio here, for those interested.

#98 By idiots clearly.

My review of Solaris Rising has now gone up on SFF Chronicles - see here.

Book 144: Blood Count, Robert Goddard
Goddard has been writing potboilers for decades and, for some reason, I continue to read them. his books are the sort which win the WH Smith "Thumping Good Read" Award. Which means there's no good looking in them for deep meaning, wonderful prose or profound insight. Instead, you get an everyman made victim to a conspiracy and which he must puzzle out to save himself. In Blood Count, it's a surgeon who performed a liver transplant on a Serbian warlord who is now under trial at the International Court of Justice. The warlord's daughter blackmails the surgeon into approaching the warlord's ex-accountant as he has control of the family's ill-gotten gains. But it's all a plot within a plot within a plot, and people get murdered and the warlord escapes and... Goddard's books are fast, entertaining reads, and this one, I have to admit, was one of his better ones.

Book 145: Engleby, Sebastian Faulks
The title character is a working-class boy who makes it to Oxford University on a scholarships. He's an odd creature - highly intelligent but poorly socialised, who was bullied heavily at school and has been petty thieving ever since. He falls in love with a fellow student and though he pretends she returns the affection it's plain she barely knows him. And then one day she disappears. It's pretty obvious what happened to her, though Faulks drags out the reveal. Whether he imagined doing so constituted an actual plot twist is impossible to tell. If so, it's an inelegant one. The final third of the novel sees the narrator in an asylum fro the criminally insane. Which means Engleby is certainly not a mystery, but neither does it really succeed as literary fiction. On the other hand, the plot moved a good deal quicker than On Green Dolphin Street.

Book 146: The Manual of Detection, Jedediah Berry
I saw a review of this by Michael Moorcock in the Guardian a couple of years ago and it was enough to pique my interest. But it took a while before I stumbled across a copy in a charity shop. And what an odd book. The story feels more suitable for a comic than a prose novel, which means it often feels like it's not really working. The main character is a clerk for the Agency, a huge detective agency which seems to be the most important company in a 1950s-type city. When the detective whose reports the clerk fils goes missing, the clerk is promoted to detective and stumbles across a conspiracy which appears designed to rekindle the rivalry between the Agency and a villain based in a run-down carnival. Except it's really about the way the Agency operates, and how it has changed and grown since its early days, and what it now does. The detectives is called Travis S Sivart, but nothing is made of the palindrome... which makes you wonder why the author bothered.

Book 147: Black Swan Green, David Mitchell
The narrator is a thirteen-year-old boy in the eponymous village in Worcestershire in 1982. He is being bullied at school, and his parents' marriage is on the rocks. His big sister is like every boy's big sister. Mitchell handles his voice really well, and evokes the period with skill, but... It all felt a bit stereotypical, a bit soap-opera-ish. There are parts where it is anything but, the overall effect was of a soap opera from 1982. It's a better book than his first two novels, but not as good as Cloud Atlas.

Book 148: Of Men and Monsters, William Tenn
The Earth has been conquered and the remains of humanity now live like rats in the walls of the giant aliens' dwellings. Eric the Only is a hunter in the forward-burrow tribe that calls itself Humanity. It's his job to leave the tunnels and fetch alien food or artefacts - or, at least, small enough such things that he can carry them. It's a conceit that doesn't quite stand up to scrutiny - aliens so large aren't that plausible, nor is a human civilisation surviving as household pests. Still, Of Men and Monsters is a neat little fable and an easy read. I'm not entirely sure whether it really belongs in the SF Masterwork series, though there are certainly worse books already in the series.

Book 149: Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
I borrowed this from my brother-in-law. It's a history and explanation of comic art, told as a graphic novel. McCloud makes some interesting points about the artform, but the book is twenty years old now and not everything he explains still holds true. Those bright four-colour superhero comics are long gone, and it's now all realistic painterly superhero action. Still, an interesting read.

Book 150: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, Tariq Ali
This is the first book of the Islam Quintet, and opens in 1500 CE in Moorish Spain. The Catholic Spaniards reconquered Granada eight years previously but now a new archbishop has arrived and is determined to stamp out Islan. This is in direct contravention of the treaty signed between the Moors and the Castilian king and queen. But never mind. I mean, he's doing it for God, so that's all right isn't it? That makes it okay to kill women and children, to burn books, to forbid the Moors from speaking Arabic or wearing their dress, to steal their lands from them, to torture them into confessing crimes/sins they have not committed... The story is told from the viewpoint of a single family, and it's strong stuff. Ali's frequently inelegant prose often works against the story, but never mind. I shall probably read the rest of the quintet, though I won't be dashing out immediately to buy them.

Book 151: The Recollection, Gareth L Powell
This was my last book of 2011, and I thought it best to end the year on a book published during the preceding 12 months. The novel starts in the near-future when a series of arches appear all over the planet, and prove to be wormhole gates leading to other worlds. Ed Rico's brother, Verne, falls into one such arch and vanishes, and so Ed resolves to go after him. With Verne's wife - with whom had been having an affair - Ed goes travelling across various alien worlds, following his brother's trail. Meanwhile, several centuries hence starship captain Kat Abdulov is welcomed back into the bosom of her powerful family because only her ship can reach Djatt in time to beat rival trader, and ex-lover, Victor Luciano. Throw in an vast ark of enigmatic aliens, and an explicable scourge which appears halfway through the book and eats everything indiscriminately in its path, and you have the elements of a good contemporary sf novel. And so it is, for much of its length. I liked the wormhole gates, and the two plot threads based on them, but the space opera future felt a little too generic in places - a random mention of "inertial compensators", a rotating spacestation that appeared to have artificial gravity - and the Recollection itself reminded me too much of Peter F Hamilton. Some will no doubt see the latter as a good thing, but I'm no fan of Hamilton's novels. The Recollection is good, but for the first half it promised to be so much better.

>103 iansales:

Haven't read that one yet but lately a lot of the novels in the genre start great and loose something somewhere in the middle - and end up just good... but nowhere as good as they started and could have been. Almost as if the authors are making sure that people stick with the story long enough... and then just let it go knowing that they will finish reading it. Or maybe it is just a question of not knowing how to finish it properly after the buildup...

#151 Sounds a bit like Robert Charles Wilson's Spin.