At present, a visitor to this journal will find my book reviews are available to them, as well as some old posts recommending/talking about books; however, they'll find little else, and this policy of making only the book reviews public is going to persist.  All personal posts - political, philosophical, journal-style - are friends-locked, and thus invisible to the casual viewer.  I am, however, pretty liberal about adding friends, so if you ask to be added, you probably will be.

A note about the books I review: Those books I review are those I read, and most of those I read are those I have bought.  The majority of exceptions are given or lent to me by family or friends.  The selection will therefore be eclectic and will not be, necessarily, the most up-to-date of books, and almost certainly will not be pre-publication copies; however, I don't reckon that renders them useless as reviews or recommendations to my readers.

Thank you for your attention.

Kay's love of Provence, demonstrated in A Song for Arbonne, is the major theme in Ysabel; a concern with both the natural beauty - the protagonist's photographer father allows Kay to bring in a significant amount of discussion of light and the aesthetic - and history, which of course brings in many of the urban fantasy/ghost story elements...

The characters of Ysabel are, as we expect by now from Kay, very much rounded, human and sympathetic figures; Ned is our protagonist, who fears for his mother (an MSF doctor in the Sudan) and is anything but academic, focusing instead on athletics.  The centre of the story and the fulcrum on which it turns, Ned is drawn into something much greater and older than himself, as is typical of fantasy; but the response of Ned is the unusual (and unFionavar) bewilderment and confusion, much more realistic than most fiction of this sort.  Similarly, the other characters exhibit confusion at being thrust into the world they are now a part of, those characters already touched by it - the nameless contestants for Ysabel's love, Aunt Kim - aside; that adds a veracity and humanity not only to their characters, but to the plot created by their actions.

That plot is relatively simple; Ysabel is simultaneously a ghost story and a romance, as an endlessly reincarnated Celt and an equally reincarnated stranger - a non-Celt - re-enact competition for the love of Ysabel, a Celtic woman resurrected into the body of Melanie, and thus the fate of Provence: Celtic and unchanging, or changed by time.  Ned wants to find her first, since Melanie is his father's assistant and he feels responsible for her transformation; and thus the three-way race, in which both Celt and Roman attempt to beat Ned to Ysabel by all sorts of means, and Ned struggles to find his feet, ensues.

The plot works well, if occasionally slowly - Ysabel is full of little moments of humanity as characters interact and develop, relationships are mended (particularly between Ned's mother and his aunt), characters grow up (particularly Ned), and their paradigms shift.  The occasional bursts of violence are effectively used, to add tension without seeming gratuitous; they help define all our characters - Edward and his team, the Celt and the stranger - whilst also raising the stakes.  The novel's pace is nicely balanced between a headlong rush and a careful reveal, speeding up as we head for our climax and bringing the reader along with it; the investigations by Ned and his fellows to attempt to bring back Melanie is deeply human, and thus very understandable to the readers, not taking leaps of logic whilst also attempting the impossible.  The one possible drawback is that the plot relies heavily on coincidence; Ysabel, like much of Kay's work, has a heavy reliance on fate, albeit not rendered explicit here.

Finally, the aesthetics of Ysabel are very worth noting; Kay's evocative, beautiful writing is a feature of all his work, lending it a certain transcendental quality, but it is particularly on show here, both through Ned and his photographer's eyes, but also through Kay's own descriptive work.  The use of light is fantastic, and the brush-stroke style descriptions work fantastically to really conjure up a sense of a Provençal paradise in the reader's mind, rendering the reality of France into a sort of pseudo-fantastic setting that is otherworldly and at the same earthly.

Ysabel is, then, a beautiful, evocative, and thoughtful novel, characterised by its protagonist and his youth, and with Kay's normal light-touch but powerful descriptions and his effective use of the fantastic.  All in all, a strong demonstration of the potential of urban fantasy.

MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW for The Myriad by R. M. Meluch; DO NOT continue if you’ve not read that novel! Review also contains spoilers for Wolf Star and Sagittarius Command
 

( Seriously, dude, SO MUCH SPOILER )

Blood Music is one of those novels of ideas that the hard SF genre is often said to be about, and Greg Bear certainly takes the time to explore some fascinating ideas; what was science fiction thirty years ago is now just beyond cutting edge scientific research… and it is not entirely unlikely that it was Bear’s book which put it there!
 
The plot of Blood Music is a relatively standard one for hard SF; take an idea, and follow it through to its ultimate logical conclusion.  In this case the idea is independently intelligent, self- and other-progamming and communicant cells; thus Bear predicts Biocomputing and AI in one fell swoop.  What such an independent cell might do is, of course, the question that brings us the events of Blood Music… alongside how humanity would react, and the answer to that is variously, depending on the individual!
 
The characters of Blood Music are a little mixed. Vergil, the first character we meet, is deeply problematic; that is, he’s amoral, hypercapable (as able to do top-end genetic engineering and research as hack into ultrasecure computers), and manipulative, but at the same time appears unable to understand other people.  This puts him at the Heinleinian superman end of things with situational psychopathy or autism, but only when it is convenient to the plot; Bear really doesn’t do a good job of convincing the reader that Vergil is more than an authorial construct for plot convenience, especially with Candice, his girlfriend, in the picture.   On the other hand, the rest of the cast, especially Suzy and Bernard, seem much better portrayed; more rounded and human characters, we can relate to them and their emotions, their turbulence at seeing what is happening in the world, and so when the novel refocuses on them, it is much smoother and more effective, since we are connected with a believably human touchstone.
 
The plot of Blood Music is an odd one; again we have an example of near-violenceless science fiction that would please Jo Walton (although there are one or two moments of violence, including one implied rather than explicit), because what Bear is doing is exploring the ideas.  Thus we have people engaging in various kinds of thought – scientific, philosophical, pragmatic – about the consequences of the intelligent cells, and whilst some of Bear’s more outlandish ideas seem rather strange and ridiculous, the plot itself works well, moving us through various stages so we come to understand the ideas Bear is expressing at much the same pace as the characters do; this, of course, allows for a more interesting and intelligent novel, and one that brings the reader with it, rather than leaving us behind whilst engaging in high-level speculation.
 
Blood Music is certainly not the most well-written science fiction novel I have ever read, but it is not only an interesting and intelligent one, it is also prescient; and it is an enjoyable novel, with some very beautiful turns of phrase. I’d recommend it, albeit a little cautiously…

This - the only shortlisted novel for the 2012 Arthur C. Clarke Award that Christopher Priest thought deserved to be there - is a strange novel, thrust into the centre of a controversy at a time when its politics might be thought more relevant than the genre-scene politicking surrounding it.  The question is, however, what about the novel beneath the politics? Is The Testament of Jessie Lamb a good book?

The novel's plot is nearly impossible to describe without spoilers; The Testament of Jessie Lamb is told in the form of a piece of writing by Jessie Lamb, over several days.  It opens with her held captive by her father because of a decision she has made, and over the course of the novel we discover what that decision was, and why she - and her father - took the actions they have done to bring them to this point.  The central conceit of the novel is that something called MDS - Maternal Death Syndrome, a sort of marriage of AIDS and CJD taking advantage of pregnant women's altered immune system, is causing every expectant mother in the world to die, often killing the foetus at the same time; and Jessie grows up in the shadow of this, and we see how it affects her.

The characters of The Testament of Jessie Lamb are well-formed, but only by the end of the novel (with the exception of Rosa, though the first-person nature of the text explains why her characterisation is so thin, it's just unfortunate Rogers felt the need to throw a lot of OOO TRAUMATIC PAST at her at the close of the novel).  Jessie herself naturally shines through strongly from the start, as does her father through a combination of the opening present-tense and first narrative retelling of the past; but the rest of the characters emerge over the course of the novel, to be seen - through Jessie's eyes or through the readers', more willing to read into them than Jessie at times - as fully rounded and interesting individuals, with motives all their own and driven by a combination of personality and history, with a dash of political ideology. 

Indeed, it is this understanding of politics that really underlies The Testament of Jessie Lamb; people's politics aren't defined by their views, but what happens to them, and not always in the obvious a-to-b logical manner.  The infighting of the left is deservedly highlighted, whilst the right seems generally let off (as not involving itself in what happens at all); and individuals are driven to distraction by their politics, but able to maintain friendships despite them.  It's a deeply political novel, but almost in a detached manner: the politics bear little relations to those we might be used to seeing in the modern world, in many ways, which for a near-future novel is perhaps problematic.

In the end, as a character study of Jessie Lamb and others, The Testament of Jessie Lamb works very well; as a political comment, which clearly is an underlying intention of the novel, on animal liberationists and feminists (who Rogers seems to have a very poor view of with FLAME), it is far from even-handed and deeply problematic.  Worth reading, but prepare to be angered by the politics, both explicit and implicit.

Hunger Games fever is currently sweeping the world, with the release of the film of the first novel in the trilogy taking interest in the books from a fanaticism quietly shared largely online amongst mostly-YA folk to a noisy, mass-movement of fandom somewhere between Harry Potter and Twilight in its scope and reach (in terms of gender and age).  So, it seemed like the right time to tackle the novel that started it all... and boy, was I in for a disappointment.

[ETA] The basic plot of The Hunger Games - along with all its real worldbuilding - can be given in a few sentences; in a dystopian future, the 12 Districts of Panem are ruled by the Capitol, and kept in line by the technological power in the hands of the Capitolines. This is reinforced annually by the celebration of the Hunger Games - 2 young adults from each district are dropped into an arena, and only one can walk out alive. Katniss volunteers to replace her sister in the arena when her sister's name is drawn, and the fun and games begin...[/ETA]

The first problem here is the characters.  YA fiction seems to have two modes for characters; Daughter of Smoke and Bone and The Night Circus opt for one, with intelligent, mature, self-aware and thoughtful characters, whilst novels like Leviathan opt for a more childlike version of teenagedom, with much simpler and more sketchy characters. Of these two approaches, The Hunger Games takes the second; Katniss is a hard-bitten exterior built around a core of softness that only appears at times, and she's also variably entirely unable to understand other people or completely able to understand them on only the scantiest of evidence.  Between these things lies very little, and that isn't helped by the way we see the book: in an immediate and yet deeply unimmediate way, theoretically first-person present but never quite pulled off enough to make me believe it as a reader.  The other characters are equally problematic, although more for their one-note nature and the way in which they only appear in order to do something for or to Katniss - from Rue, whose death motivates Katniss to win, to Peeta, who exists to provide a romantic subplot laden with conflict (thanks to Gale's existence), through Haymitch, no one seems to have an existence independent of what they do to Katniss' plot.

The Hunger Games is, as one might expect, an incredibly fast-paced novel for much of its length, although at times it does seem to get terribly bogged down in worldbuilding exposition or statements of the obvious (despite a first-person narration - things Katniss ought to know are explained to her at multiple points for the readers' benefit).  That the plot is so straightforward doesn't help; the few twists are pretty obvious, right up to the end, where we have a few moments which are genuinely interesting, but it does at least get us from a to b, and sets us up for c, the start of the next in the trilogy.  The Hunger Games is also, of course, a violent novel; but for a violent novel, it's terribly sanitised - the violence isn't visceral, the deaths are rarely felt, and almost all of them happen off-screen.  Katniss kills a stunningly small number of times, and the way the novel works makes it all feel rather unreal; the violence is just there, like the romantic plot between Katniss and Peeta, for cheap emotional thrills rather than genuine substance, especially given its deployment.

In the end, then, The Hunger Games is indeed disappointing; a somewhat fun, sanitised-violent and sanitised-romantic YA romp which never delivers on the serious engagement with the world that it keeps promising and hinting at nor takes itself seriously enough to make the reader believe in itself... Read something else instead, would be my recommendation.

( 44 titles... )


The first quarter of the year has us off to a good start, with 44 books read - albeit February appears to have been a bit light (22 books in January and 16 in March conceal the minimal extent of my reading in that month, or rather, the rate at which I slowly worked through Romanitas). That takes us up to a 7-book excess on a quarterly plan of at least 36 book reviews (Wolf Star went without a review) giving a little leeway for the rest of the year, but it'll be easily used up if I don't keep working on it!
This quarter has seen a mix of new discoveries - such as Laini Taylor and Robert Jackson Bennett - and returns to old favourites, such as Eric Brown and Ken MacLeod.  A few authors - Cherie Priest, Lavie Tidhar - popped up multiple times, and both R. M. Meluch and Chris Beckett made not only their first but also their second appearances this quarter; not great for adding new names, but truly fantastic authors.  There's been a relatively even split between science fiction and fantasy, with a few crime/noir novels creeping in, and some classic pieces of genre fiction balancing some cutting-edge recent releases; and in terms of quality, it's been overall high, but with some more mixed and even one or two outright poor novels slipping in again (and making me question other writers on the genre I otherwise tend to respect).  On the up side, of 44 novels read, almost half - 19 - were written (or in two cases, co-authored) by a woman; it looks like they're on the rise in my reading, so let's see if I can keep this up...

Finally, my top five novels of the quarter, in alphabetical order...
1. Dark Eden & Holy Machine by Chris Beckett.  I'm cheating to combine the two Beckett novels, naturally, but there are common themes; both Beckett novels have religious themes, a similar take on human nature and the future of humanity, and a complex, thoughtful, indeed brilliant set of ideas underlying them and explored through the two novels.  Both pieces are brilliant alone, but in combination they really do open up a whole set of philosophical ideas and concepts; a stunning work of philosophy through storytelling that is well worth exploring.
2. The Myriad by R. M. Meluch. Meluch's space opera is, on the face of it, a brilliant piece of Romans-in-space joyful happiness; despite the threat of the Hive, it's something of a happy universe with a happy ship, and really such an incredibly fun and fast-paced piece of fiction that feels light as a feather, but on consideration it's somewhat heavier.  The characterisation and style of the novel work fantastically together to create an enjoyable and fun atmosphere, but especially at the close of the novel, which puts the preceding chapters, in a completely different light...
3. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. This is a young adult novel, with a steampunk tinge; its light, romantic fantasy has more than a touch of the gothic and the epic tragedy about it, and Morgenstern's ability to paint a fantastical and beautiful scene with a sure and deft hand is incomparable.  The simple plot and nature of the novel are perhaps drawbacks, but with wonderful characterisation and stunning visuals, it more than rises above its problems to be a truly wonderful work.
4. Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds. The only piece of hard SF on the list, this African-centred work of optimistic science fiction is thoughtful and interesting; unlike much utopian SF, this is a believable future, in which we've overcome our problems, rather than one in which they turned out not to be problems.  Reynolds has clearly put a lot of work into this, because the relative lack of violence and the nature of the conflict all point towards an attempt to move away from the standard tropes of SF, and this novel more than vindicates those difficult attempts.
5. Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor. Like The Night Circus, this is YA fantasy romance; unlike Morgenstern's novel there's very little that's light about it, but neither is it tragic, in many ways giving an uplifting picture of humanity and the world, able to rise above things.  The incredible gothic influences, and the stunning aesthetics of the novel which sing those influences to the world, create an atmosphere in which the impossible becomes possible, and the romance at the heart of the novel really does gain power over the course of the story. A beautiful and brilliant piece of writing.

Brown's fiction is, to my mind, some of the most interesting science fiction you're likely to find out there, and Penumbra does nothing to contradict this viewpoint. Its increasing religious themes are a little heavy-handed, and its use of Christianity as oppressive and seeking to destroy the truth somewhat disappointing from this writer, but the novel as a whole still works and tells a story that is both good and interesting...

Penumbra begins with a failure on the part of Joshua Bennett as a pilot; a failure that seals his fate for the rest of the novel. It also begins with the promotion of Rana Rao, a promotion she can't refuse, to the homicide division of the Calcutta police.  Finally, it begins with a murder committed by Ezekiel Klein... through Charles Mackendrick and the mysterious Galactic Rim planet of Penumbra, all these separate events and characters are tied together, in a brilliant way, reliant on coincidence as few writers would allow themselves to be but also explaining and justifying that coincidence brilliantly.  The softscreen that Rao owns, Klein seeks, and ends up affected Bennett through his association with Mackendrick equally lies at the heart of the novel, which has a whodunnit plot following both the killer and the investigator (well-written, but less whodunnity because, of course, we know who did it, and saw him do it) as well as a space exploration element; the pace of the action scenes and the clarity of the more procedural scenes are brilliant, and the evocative descriptions really do make us feel like we're there with Bennett and Ten Lee in their crafts, or in Calcutta with Rao.

Penumbra's characters are another point on which it doesn't fall down; every one brings something to the table, even the quiet, withdrawn Ten Lee whose calm and peculiar outlook on the world, whilst perhaps over-emphasised by Brown, serves as a counterpoint to the furious lives of every other character.  Bennett's hang-up about his dead sister Ella, which seems to drive his every action, retreats over the course of the novel to reveal an interesting, mature man who has a life of his own and is a thoughtful and intelligent character; meanwhile Rao's attachment to the homeless children of Calcutta and her fear of a mysterious discovery about her past are increasingly explained by reference to that past, which is revealed slowly to tie in with Klein himself, whose religious mania is emphasised again overheavily, in contrast to Ten Lee.  They're not two-dimensional characters however, and they all have very individual thoughts and feelings, alongside interactions with a host of secondary characters who people Penumbra in such a way that it feels like a world, not just a collection of characters making up a novel.

Penumbra is, then, a strong, interesting novel, well-written and evocative, with a number of elements coming together to give the plot a complexity and inevitability which is both typical of Brown and rare in the field; a really stunning and thoughtful work.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The Death of Cassandra Quebec

Reminiscent of K. J. Bishop's The Art of Dying, this story combines art and death in a deeply macabre way; but also in a very Eric Brown kind of way, that makes it work powerfully and effectively rather than horrifically.  Indeed, the characters - Eva, Corrinda, and Maltravers - are an interesting set, and what Brown molds them into - within a very short space - is a complicated mix of emotions.  There are some elements there which are inevitable - the final reveal for instance - and others are rather telegraphed, but as a whole the story is fascinating and fantastic, a tribute to Brown's craftsmanship.

Kiernan's psychological horror is in the same sort of vein as The Red Tree, but with a greater emphasis on the psychological; as we read the novel we see increasingly the importance of understanding Imp's underlying psychological issues.  This is a very different novel to anything I've read before, and a novel built of ambiguity and strangeness, taking the idea of the unreliable narrator to new levels; how we understand that is, perhaps, an open question...

The Drowning Girl is a novel told in instalments by Imp herself, spread out over an uncertain period of time after or during the events of the novel itself (and certainly, some of the parts of the novel are parts of the story of the novel as well; time and again we see Imp showing parts of the manuscript to other characters).  They don't present a single, unified or uniform version of events; Imp's psychological issues - paranoid schizophrenia - play into this, as does the strangeness, and we see the varied timelines lining up into a single one and splitting off again repeatedly over the course of the novel, leaving the reader deeply uncertain which is real and which isn't, especially in the wake of the seventh chapter, a prism through which the rest of the novel must be viewed, difficult as it might be to puzzle out and read through, told as it is by an Imp off her meds. The plot develops and appears slowly, and is never fully revealed until right at the end, at which point - in the tenth chapter - we are given another lens through which to view the whole story, one that conflicts with and yet compliments that of 7/7/7.

The characters of The Drowning Girl are almost all ciphers.  Dr. Ogilvy and Abalyn are the closest we come to fully rounded people other than Imp; the former is a cipher because she is Imp's therapist, the latter because Imp never really seems to understand her, but the reader has a much greater grasp of Abalyn's psychology, brilliantly drawn by Kiernan (Abalyn, like Kiernan, is a transsexual, and Kiernan appears to have taken the opportunity to portray a real transsexual rather than the media image of a transsexual, and to present a transsexual who isn't perfectly good or living the perfect life).  It is Imp herself we understand most fully, with her vulnerability, her strange and dark history from which she must and yet cannot escape, her paranoid schizophrenia colouring the real with the unreal to the point where there is a huge ambiguity over what is true.

The biggest problem I had with the novel came after it was over; stopping at the end of chapter 10 is the reader's best bet, because up to that point, the ambiguity built up by Kiernan, the combination of elements which lend a sense of inevitability to each separate part of the novel and makes it an inextricable and beautiful whole - the repetitions, the facts and dates, the 7s, the brief self-conversations and diversions into even more metawriting than Caesar's third-person autobiographical writing, all create a sense in The Drowning Girl that doesn't work when one reads the Back Pages, which squander much of that work, taking the ambiguity from some of the novel and resolving things which seemed better left open.

In the end, though, The Drowning Girl is a powerful, strange and unique book; it is beyond description and categorisation, in many ways, and very much worth reading, because Kiernan has created a powerful psychological portrait as well as written a chilling horror novel. If only it stopped slightly sooner!

Agatha H. and the Airship City is a novel by the Foglios which translates the first two years or so of the webcomic Girl Genius (from this strip to this one) into prose form.  Unfortunately, that's precisely what it does; before we start the review of the novel, it ought to be noted that Girl Genius is a fantastic webcomic and well worth reading, telling an interesting and amusing story by turns, with some fun steampunky ideas behind it.  The novel is not.

This novel, being a direct prose translation of a comic strip, has some major problems.  Reading through the plot, it is increasingly clear that the Foglios directly translated their multi-panel three-strips-a-week plot into text directly, without any work to smooth it out, sand down rough edges, clear up inconsistencies, or simply even up the pacing; as such, Agatha H... ends up with a plot about as evenly paced and smooth as sandpaper, transcribed in a strip-by-strip format from the webcomic with such devotion that redundancies, running gags, switches of viewpoints and other tricks that work perfectly in thrice-a-week text-and-visual instalments are incorporated into a prose work which one works from beginning to end of, rather than awaiting the next instalment.  It's a decent plot; Agatha H... does manage to bring that across, to give it credit, and makes sure that the events which set up the overarcing plot do happen, but without any particular flair.

Agatha H... also suffers from a lack of character.  Whereas in a webcomic visuals do a lot of work to create a person, in prose it's all down to the words; so rather than having a mental image of Agatha, let alone anyone else, or her character, we're left simply with a set of actions hung on one person.  This early in the webcomic the Foglios hadn't got a consistent character down for Agatha, and it shows through clearly in the novel, but worse; because we don't have a consistent image to attach characteristics to, or better yet a slightly changing and developing one, we're left with a set of ciphers, people who do things without us ever really getting inside their heads, because of course the webcomic never got inside anyone's minds.  People act for strange motives and the reader is left outside, not caring.

Neither of these is the biggest problem suffered by the novelisation of Girl Genius. Agatha H. and the Airship City is weighed down by one very simple thing; an overwhelming temptation on the part of the Foglios to translate, literally and directly, the complex, detailed, beautiful visuals of a webcomic into the much more fuzzy, vague, evocative medium of text.  Thus we end up with descriptions which capture nothing of the original art whilst also falling far short of evoking any images in the reader, because they're too precisely detailed whilst not ever giving a sense of anything; and it's that sense of things which is the great strength of prose description, because it is impossible to precisely detail enough to get an exact image across to the reader.

In the end, this is a deeply disappointing prose work; Girl Genius and the graphic novel volumes of it are fantastic, well-drawn, and well-written, but the Foglios attempt to turn it into a series of novels have sadly fallen far, far short of the mark...

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is not my normal kind of reading; a young adult urban fantasy romance isn't my usual speed, after all. But Laini Taylor's gothic-tinged take on the (arguably overcrowded) genre has been blurbed by Patrick Rothfuss and compared to the writing of Neil Gaiman; both of those are incredibly strong recommendations, and I wanted to see if the novel lived up to the hype.  In the end, I read it between Leuchars and London Kings Cross, after finishing Princess of Mars and before starting Agatha H. and the Airship City on the same journey...

The primary reason for that, above plot and characterisation, is the writing.  There is a reason that the novel's style has been compared with that of the great Gaiman; more than the undeniable gothic influence on each, Taylor has a lyricism, a beauty, an evocativeness and a deft, light, powerful touch in common with ol' Scary Trousers that marks her head and shoulders above most practitioners of the dark arts of YA romance.  Reading this book isn't just easy, it's a joy and a pleasure; it draws the reader in fast and hard in a way few other novels do and keeps hold of them from first to last with a prose style that is more poetic than much verse, and that really conjures clear images and sensations for the reader with intense clarity and brilliance.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone doesn't suffer for characters either; Karou isn't a teenager angsting about nothing - although there is a little touch of emo-angst to her character, there is a supporting there there (and indeed the emo-angst is actually setting us up for later developments absolutely brilliantly).  She is independent, intelligent, able to be petty and to rise above pettiness, will go out of her way and give her all for those she loves (and indeed, she does go far above and beyond the call on behalf of those she cares for), and fiercely passionate; she's the sort of protagonist the reader falls in love with, and does so for good reason, since she is a whole complete person in a way few other fictional creations are.  The rest of the cast are actually just as well realised; with their own motivations and emotions, their own personalities and needs, they don't simply act as background to Karou's story but have stories in their own right, stories we get glimpses of but never really see clearly.

The plot of the novel, after that complexity, seems terribly simple; Karou, having been brought up by a group of chimerae led by Brimstone, is cut off from them completely shortly after nearly being killed by a cherub, as the doors to Elsewhere - the place the Chimerae inhabit - are burned from existence by cherubim.  Daughter of Smoke and Bone demonstrates the strength of the bond between Karou and Brimstone, and how much she needs and cares about him, whilst setting us up for the inevitable severing of the connection before doing this severing suddenly and unexpectedly earlier than she could handle, and thus we see Karou trying to regain access to Elsewhere whilst the cherub she fought, named Akiva, tries to understand his obsession with her.  The plots tie themselves together deftly and even the flashback which comprises much of the final part of the novel works well, integrated into the story and explaining things powerfully and beautifully for reader and characters both, to a satisfying yet open conclusion.

Daughter of Smoke and Bone is a relatively simple novel, on the surface, but with its evocative and lyrical writing, its stunning characterisation, and the powerful plot, it is much more than a quick glance at the surface reveals; far from run of the mill, this is a YA novel I'd be happy to recommend to anyone as absolutely stunning...

In preparation for watching the critically slated Disney film John Carter, I decided to read the original novel that started it all; Edgar Rice Burroughs' Princess of Mars.  A pulp novel by one of the fathers of pulp and inventor of Tarzan (a more famous, and filmed, creation), this Lowell-influenced boys' own adventure has had a huge influence, from Star Wars to Carl Sagan via Superman.

This is something of a surprise, given the qualities of Princess of Mars.  As far as characterisation goes, Burroughs has produced a set of basic figures who have one characteristic apiece, each of them being wholly defined by that characteristic, be it loyalty or love, honour or degeneracy.  This is especially true of the Martians, who do not fit the model that Burroughs builds for them - Red Martians aren't the simple, basic beings that have no understanding of loyalty and friendship; Burroughs' way to build the Red Martian society in fact contradicts the model of their psychology that he has built, whereas we never really get any such construction for the Green Martians.  John Carter himself is a cipher; the reasons for his actions are never really clear or emotional, but instead are claimed to be based on emotion or honour without ever actually displaying such honour in reality.  Princess of Mars ends up displaying a certain lack of individualism and characterisation, rendering it rather bland.

The plot is equally problematic; Princess of Mars is incredibly weak, being an episodic white man's burden kind of travelogue, wherein John Carter by virtue of his humanity and his extraordinary power becomes a kind of superhuman leader of the Red Martians, and then the Green Martians; he is also the only one who can unite them against rivals; and indeed displays abilities which render him something of a Gary Stu.  Following this plot, therefore, makes for an incredibly dull story; episodic and slow-moving, it doesn't have a solid pace, or a consistent style, to keep it readable, and replaces these with a series of set-pieces that aren't detailed or exciting enough to be fun or credible, and yet don't manage to use that incredibility well.

Overall, despite its influence, Princess of Mars is a book that has suffered dramatically with age; as newer, better science fiction has come along, its thin characters and lack of plot vanish into a kind of thinness that is not really worth reading.  Better to consume the media that it has influenced that the work itself, I think...

Hambly's Search the Seven Hills (also published as The Quirinal Hill Affair) is an entry in a long tradition of historical whodunnits taking in authors like Steven Saylor, Lindsey Davis and many more.  It is also an exploration of ancient attitudes and ideas in Rome itself, set slightly later than Davis' Falco series, albeit with modern influences on those ideas.

The plot of Search the Seven Hills is a relatively straightforward one on its face, following Marcus Silanus investigating the kidnapping of his would-be girlfriend Tullia Varia from outside her Senatorial home in Rome.  The initial clues point to it being a Christian kidnapping, which the various Romans take at face value given the prevailing attitude to Christianity at the time; to prevent a general persecution catching the innocent up with the guilty, and to try and get Tullia back alive, Silanus attempts to investigate first, mentored by Sixtus Julianus, one-time governor of Antioch (or perhaps more accurately from a Classicist's point of view Syria) and a rather Holmesian character (down to the reading-at-a-glance).  The way Hambly structures her plot lays a series of red herrings down for the reader, moving toward and away from the Christian hypothesis that is the default assumption, and allows Hambly to unpack Roman attitudes to Christianity, monotheism, other beliefs, slavery and slaves, and their Empire, all the while producing an excellent noir-inflected whodunnit mystery.

The characters of Search the Seven Hills go a long way to making that mystery have the power that it does.  Marcus Silanus is our viewpoint-character, although the novel is third person (giving it a less claustrophobic feel, even in its noir influences, than The Big Sleep), and it is through the prism of his viewpoint that we understand what we see.  Silanus is an interesting character for a Roman, one who despises his father and is willing to show it, but cares more for his mother; who philosophises with a Stoic, but refuses to practice Stoicism (although oddly, this is presented as a fringe view, rather than the standard opinion that Stoicism had become, typified by Tacitus' Agricola and the work of Seneca); who mentally taints Christianity with the blood-libel, and shies in disgust from Christians, but also respects them.  The contradictions make him human, and interesting as a protagonist.  Our other characters are equally fleshed out, although often more defined by a single characteristic - brutal, thoughtful efficiency for the Centurian of the Urban Cohort Arrius, sharp but empathetic intelligence from Sixtus, and a less trained intelligence mediated with intense loyalty to his master from Churaldin; but they make up a well-written cast,

Search the Seven Hills, for all its minor inaccuracies, paints a vivid and evocative portrait of ancient Rome, and peoples it with characters we can relate to; Hambly's mystery is well-written and intelligent, and the whole comes together to provide a readable, enjoyable novel.  A great piece.

Foundation, the first novel of the famous Foundation Series, and a major work of science fiction in terms of impact and scope.  A product of the 1950s, it has dated a little, and has some flaws which can't simply be written off as a product of the times, but reading the novel it still has some fascinating concepts, such as psychohistory; and of course, with the news of the purely online publication of the next edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, it seems a sensible time to revisit the Foundation...

The biggest problem Foundation has are its characters.  Nothing really differentiates the men of the Foundation: every one is a hypercapable Heinleinian superman, logical, unemotional, detached and able to see a solution no one else can, despite other intelligent men being available to look for such solutions.  Be it Hari Seldon himself, the archetypical superman who through psychohistory (a discipline he invents) can see the future with pretty perfect clarity, or his later disciples (all male - there's only one woman who appears in the whole novel, and then only briefly as the wife of an outlander, not a power in her own right), there's a real problem with the pure rationality of these characters who have no personal feelings and follow a plan they don't know without religious reasons for it.

The plot of Foundation, on the other hand, is a better prospect; Asimov's ideas about power are fascinating - because the Foundation is proven powerful through a series of crises through soft, rather than hard, power.  Be it political, religious, economic or other forms of power, the Foundation comes through crises internal and external by intelligent leveraging of power and by taking no action until there's an alternative; whilst the plot relies on the characters' impossible characteristics, it is still an intelligent, thoughtful and powerful story that has a sense of inevitability about it, and a demonstration of the nature of power that focuses not on the military, but on the intellect.  But again, the focus of the plot is ideas, and the plot itself rather falls apart after that; that is, it is unbelievable and poorly written as anything but a set of ideals.

Foundation might therefore be read as a post-war pacifist's utopia, but it does have a lot of reality behind it; Asimov's novel isn't a great story, especially given its canonical status in the field, but as an exposition of ideas it is an excellent piece of work.

The Big Sleep is one of the most famous, and most quintessential, pulp noir stories in any format; the original 1930s novel by Raymond Chandler demonstrates precisely why - and what makes a good noir story, helping define the genre for decades to come.  It is an excellent, and well-written, story that is worth a read by anyone interested in the genre... but that isn't to say it is without its shortcomings.

The central character of The Big Sleep, PI Philip Marlowe, is the character on whom the rest of the novel hangs.  Marlowe is a proper noir hero: hard drinking, clever but not quite clever enough, down on his luck, shady ethics, homophobic and misogynistic (in line with the age, rather than more or less so than it).  Marlowe, then, forms the core of a cast of characters who are all shadier than him; indeed, Marlowe is the closest to a clean man it comes in the novel.  The rest of the cast are to varying degrees tied up in pornography, organised crime, or just nepotistic covering up of criminality; but they're interesting characters, with the women's strong and powerful characteristics conveyed powerfully and effectively as well as the men's, filtered through Marlowe's perceptions.

The plot is nicely grim; Chandler is deeply pessimistic about humanity and human nature, with The Big Sleep showcasing everyone in varying shades of grey, no-one either morally black or white.  The way the mysteries unfold, extend, and demonstrate the way their tentacles enter every aspect of Marlowe's actions in the novel, and the way more and more elements build into the story, are powerful and effective; they build on each other and Marlowe's actions only make things more confusing until the reveals at the end, which give the reader a sudden demonstration of how the story works, a demonstration that ties all the strands together without ever contradicting earlier elements of the novel.  Indeed, Chandler's storytelling has a certain sort of inevitability about it when you reach the end of the novel that only makes the earlier mystery more effectively.

In the end, The Big Sleep is a fantastic novel, and an excellent demonstration of the noir form; a problematic product of its age, admittedly, especially in its attitudes to women and sexuality, but Chandler's work is well worth reading.