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Yet more Alastair Reynolds. I’m halfway through the two-novella book Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days. Well, three quarters, actually as I’m halfway through the second novella Turquoise Days. The book title is just the two novella titles run together. The first provides a bit of backstory to some of the characters in Chasm City, and an explanation of some of the weird physical appearance of a couple of characters in there.
While some of Reynolds’ other works come close, to me this is the first piece of his that actually crosses the line into being horror. The main difference for me is that the strange bodily transformations in this one aren’t accidental or for a necessary and over-riding purpose. Here they are rather futile in search of the solution to a puzzle rather like the movie Cube (which reference Reynolds hangs a lampshade on early in the story). In some ways this story also reminds me a little of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, with the same sense of partly inevitable, partly chosen horrific consequences, due to inconceivable alien intent and technology. I’m not one much for out and out horror, though I do read/watch a little of it (see Books – Neonomicon for example). I didn’t dislike this story, but it’s beyond my tolerance for re-reading.

Well, this was the first Alastair Reynolds book I didn’t like. I think I can see what he was trying to achieve here and as JMS once said about one of the few (IMHO) terrible episodes of Babylon 5, “If you never fail, you’re not pushing the envelope hard enough.” However, the flaws I see in this book somewhat remind me of the critical reviews I wrote for Vector of a couple of Juliet McKenna’s books. In those she was giving us an inside-the-head point of view from, in the first case, a villain and, in the second case, a hero from a very different cultural mindset. In both of these cases I found that my interest in the tale was significantly though not fatally diminished by my antipathy to the viewpoint characters.
Spoilers for Pushing Ice (more…)

Alan Moore’s contribution to the Cthulhu Mythos. A suitable horrific addition to Lovecraft’s legacy. Like many recent versions this uses the conceit that Lovecraft was writing about something real but presenting it as fiction. There’s always been that element in some of the Cthulhu Mythos but stuff written lately and set in the modern day has often used this. It was part of a Supernatural episode, for example, with one of the characters commenting that he wouldn’t read horror since his “day job” was bad enough.

As one would expect of Alan Moore, both the short, orignally one-off, The Courtyard and the longer sequel Neonomicon are well-told and have wonderful artwork to accompany them. He pulls no punches in the graphic displays and is faithful to the concepts of the Mythos while adding another layer of terror and psychedelia to them. Well worth seeking out if you’re an Alan Moore fan or a Mythos fan, but not for the faint of heart.

Continuing with my reading of my stock of unread Alastair Reynolds books. Century Rain is, I think, his first published novel not in the Revelation Space universe. It’s an interesting mix of a bit of alternate history, detective novel and nanocaust. He seems to be coming up against the singularity problem: how to write interesting fiction that’s accessible to human 1.0 readers about human 2.0+ characters. He falls back on the discovered alien ruins for a major plot macguffin as well. A similar “network” of FTL travel systems that various others have used (Cherryh’s Gates from Morgain, Zahns “Night Train to Rigel” being the two that come straight to my mind but there are plenty of others). As befits a stellar physicist his system has more detail about how it operates (not how it works, but how it’s used) that most of the others.

A story which cracks along at an intense pace for all of its 500 pages combining some compelling human drama along with whiz-bang pyrotechnics and interesting science speculations on the links between the very large and very small scales of physics. The only thing I didn’t like about it was the last sentence which seemed unnecessary and rather against character for that protagonist. I’d have preferred that line to be left as unwritten, though the consideration that led up to it could have been left in. I think that kind of unfinished thought would have also given more weight to the possibility of a “frozen in time” outcome as well. That may have just been me, though.

Alastair Reynolds is the Hal-Con Overseas GoH this year. Years ago I read Revelation Space (a couple of years after its release) and really liked it. I started buying his books, mostly in hardback. However, Reynolds’ work is deep and complex, in plot, fictional structures, science (fact and fiction) and writing style. None of this is a bad thing, but through most of the period from 2003-2010 I was rarely up to reading things this complex. So, I kept buying and storing his books but never getting around to reading them. I kept them when I did the great cull before moving to Japan, though. Like my growing unread Gene Wolfe pile, I always wanted to get back to being abe to read things like this and now I can. My new circumstances give me the energy to tackle things like this again, so I’m catching up on at least some of his work. I started last year with what I thought was the Inhibitors trilogy by re-reading Revelation Space and then reading Chasm City and Redempton Ark for the first time. I’ve got but haven’t read the related short story collection Diamond Dogs, Turquois Days. On returning to Reynolds this year I looked at the order of his books and found that Absolution Gap was the fourth and final Inhibitor book. Oops. This was something of a mistake on my part. In particular it was probably the worst point at which to break the story. Everything that happens in the first three is needed to understand this one. There is no handy “what has gone before” revision guide. The in-text in-character descriptions just about sufficed to bring me up to speed, but I struggled occasionally with understanding bits that depended on knowing the previous history between the various characters. Definitely not a book to recommend for stand-alone reading. However, as the finale to a series that started out with stunning scope and widescreen baroque science fictional concepts, it works tremendously. With each book weighing in at around 600 pages, the 2400 pages of this series takes in so many concepts of science fiction it’s impossible to list them all (Charlie Stross is another author who throws fifteen ideas in where more parsimonious writers would flog one out for each book). From group minds to bio-engineered sentient pigs. From just-slower-than-light travel with time dilation, life extension and cryo-sleep to nano-plagues and brane theory both impacting on brains. It’s a wonder that he manages to fit a plot in around all the high concept stuff here, but the characters are all believable, even the inhuman, non-human, post-human ones. The depiction of the madness of Quaiche (deliberately dosing himself on indoctrinal viruses to shore up his religious faith), the twisted semi-group minds of conjoiners like Skade, Remontoire and Clavain and the mystical child messiah of Aura, are all tours de force. Not in this book, but in Redemption Ark, the one descriptive piece that really stayed with me is the brief point-of-view element from the Inhibitors and their creation of a short-lived “intelligence” to fulfil their mission of removing star-faring intelligence while retaining as much as possible of the rest of the ecosystem. Wonderful stuff. I’m continuing on with Reynolds now, reading Century Rain. I must read the Inhibitor universe short stories before my memory of the setting fades again, but I’m not in the mood for short stories just now.

I started re-reading Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden urban fantasy series just before new year. I had the latest (and it turns out, probably last) in the series and I often though not always re-read the entire series with a new book. Since I can’t remember which ones I finished before the new year and which ones after I’m just going to give a qick description of the entire series. Particular now that Total Eclipse appears to be the last in the series, this seems appropriate. These nine books are a nice little urban fantasy series about people with elemental powers to control earth (includes healing), fire (may include electricity) and air/water (weather). The viewpoint character (Joane Baldwin) is an interesting mix of shallow fashionista with a somewhat incongruous love of and knowledge about fast cars. She’s very powerful and goes through a Jack Chalker’s Dancing Gods series of adventures periodically losing some or all of her powers (sometimes along with her memories) but gradually “powering up” to become one of the most powerful humans on the planet. Alongside these humans are the Djinn. Caine does a nice job of taking the arabic djinn myths (including the afrit variants) and building a rationale for the binding of very powerful entities into breakable bottles. Baldwin occasionally does stupid things in the furtherance of the plot and many of the NPCs (human as well as Djinn) are rather overly venal, but the action races along well enough that mostly this can be overlooked. It’s pretty well-written and has a very good sense of continuity given the fairly complex system Caine posits. There’s a romantic sub-thread running through all nine books, but it only descends into masturbatory sex scene descriptions twice or so. To me this series definitely falls into the “urban fantasy with a romance sideline” “rather than the “romance set in an urban fantasy world” genre. Well worth a look if you like light urban fantasy.