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The second Drake Maijstral book is a great follow-up to the first. Williams clearly had this (in fact all three) in mind when he wrote the first as, although they all stand alone as novels, there’s also a significant amount of plot and character development which proceeds through the three books.

This time Maijstral is up against another thief in a head to head battle for supremacy in the league of rankings of professional thieves. In the meantime there’s slapstick, romance, and some piercing commentary on human nature (some of it disguised via alien nature – one of the reasons for reading SF is the ability to compare and contrast different elements of the human condition by playing human and alien cultures side by side in this way).

Another fun romp and, again, highly recommended.

This is the first of (unfortunately only) three humorous SF novels by Walter Jon Williams. It introduces both a wonderful main character and a brilliantly absurd universe. At some point in the near future (but the far past from the book’s point of view) humanity is conquered by an alien race who are represented as the acceptable face of imperialism. After centuries or perhaps millennia in this empire, humanity stages the first successful rebellion ever and creates its own separate area called the Human Constellation. That was in the time of the main character Drake’s grandfather (more on him in book 3). Drake Maijstral would be a waistral but he prefers a more comfortable life and in this bizarre world one can be a registered thief. The rules are that the original owner must be able to afford the loss, the thief must do it themselves directly (henchmen can help but not enter the premises) and they must retain the stolen goods on their person or in their abode for 24 hours, after which they own them.

Amongst stealing to support his own lifestyle, Maijstral takes commissions and one such turns out to have major political ramifications and puts his wits to a severe test.

Artfully and archly written, this is a really funny tale, providing one can suspend disbelief far enough to let it run. Definitely recommended.

The Geography of Prejudice, maps of the world according to cultural or other sterotypical viewpoints. Absolutely brilliant!

The third Bob Howard Laundry Files novel is just the novel, but two shorts are available on Tor.Com (Down on the Farmand Overtime) and both of those are worth reading before tackling this. I’m not cognisant of the spy novels that form that structure of this one (by Anthony Price) but it’s a brilliant piece even without knowing that. Given Stross’ attention to detail I’m sure it’s a pretty good take on that style. In addition to lacking a finial short, this takes a darker turn again after the exuberence of the Jennifer Morgue. The Stars are “Coming Right” and Bob’s world is getting darker. Rather than contrast the horrors of real life and those of the Mythos, in this book they’re intertwined in what Stross himself describes as the scariest thing he’s ever written. It’s very dark, though the leavening of human prevents it from being unbearably so (I like my horror with a good leavening of black humour). A nice British variant on the Hellboy concept is thrown in for good measure, while Bob finds out more about the past, present and future of the Laundry, himself and the world (maybe even the universe).  Great stuff. I’m looking forward to The Apocalypse Codex (next but one book from Stross, IIRC) and hoping for at least one Laundry short in the meantime given his current resolution to write more short fiction this year.

Oh, and if you’re waiting for Stross to take on LeCarre, you’ll have an interminable wait. Not only does he thinkg it doesn’t fit with the Laundryverse, it’s also been done (Tim Power’s Declare, which I read last year on Stross’ recommendation).

Still not caught up on the book reviews, I’m afraid, despite today’s ist of entries. Intercontintental business trips mean I read but don’t write up. I’m catching up a bit, though, with four outstanding just now though of course I’m reading new stuff as well so that may go up again if I don’t get round to writing them up for a few days again, particularly as I’ll be off on another ICBT next week.

As with The Atrocity Archives, this is a novel and short combination. The novel features the eponymous Jennifer Morgue while the short Pimpf introduces Bob’s first subordinate. Bob’s middle names are introduced in the Jennifer Morgue but I must shamefully admit I didn’t get the joke until the title of thoe short and name of Bob’s subordinate hit me over the head with a mallet. Stross had clearly been planning that little joke from the start. It even works in-character since Bob is an acknowledged pseudonym for the memoir writer.

Having done Len Deighton for The Atrocity Archive, Stross takes on Fleming for the Jennifer Morgue. Well, actually it’s a bit more Broccoli than Fleming, for obvious in-story reasons. Stross isn’t content just to riff off Mr Bond, though. He take the Bond mythos well through its paces while subverting most of its tropes on the way through. This is a little more lighthearted than the Atrocity Archive, due mostly to the emulated style and approach. It’s still firmly embedded in the Chulthu Mythos as well, though.

Pimpf, in addition to the Travaglia pun, is a nice little tale of internal ambition and MMORPG danger in a world in which the right (or is that wrong) sort of computation is actually applied demonology. A nice little addition to the series.

This is a novel and a short story. The novel is called The Atrocity Archive and the short is called The Concrete Jungle. Having endured Gene Wolfe’s abysmal Cthulhu Mythos story and Jonathan Howard’s mediocre one, I felt like re-reading a better modern take on the Lovecraftian Oeuvre. Actually, I’m currently also working my way through “Necronomicon – the Best Weird Tales of H. P. Lovecraft” (which will take me a while being all his Mythos short stories and the short novels to boot in one beautiful edition, but I’d go mad if I tried to just read straight through it, I think). This is, I think, my favourite Stross book. I still rate Glasshouse as his best book, but this is my favourite. Its a wonderful blend of comedy and horror. It’s rather reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in juxtaposing the horrors of real life (in this case the Kafka-esque horrors of working for the UK Civil Service) with the beasts from the outermost darkness. With his usual skill, Stross has added a consistent explanation for the ability of the Mythos creatures to do things like possess people’s minds. Things lurk at the bottom of the Mandelbrot Set and mathematics and computation are all that is needed for applied demonology. Combining the myths about Nazi obsessions with the occult (mostly false, but they make a good basis for fiction) with the droll tone of a Len Deighton spy novel, the Atrocity Archive is a dark but immensely funny tale.

The Concrete Jungle “explains” just why there are so many CCTV cameras in the UK (something I’ve struggled to do as part of my work). It’s all so obvious when explained by the story’s protagonist, Bob Howard. The infamous new town of Milton Keynes forms the backdrop to a great short addition to the memoirs of Landry Agent Bob Howard.

Billed on the cover as the “long-awaited sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle”, which is a bit bizarre given the much earlier existence of Castle in the Air, this is the third book set in the world of Howl’s Moving Castle. Like the earlier two the writing is highly accessible to adults and children alike, I think. As with Castle, Howl and Sophie appear but are not the primary characters. They are more in evidence in this one that in Castle, though. This has a little bit of a darker tone than the earlier two (Castle is slightly lighter than Howl, but this is darker than both, I think) and features both a nasty supernatural being and its horrible offspring (more horrible in some ways because they just about appear human). The main magical gimmick this time is the epnymous house which appears to have only two rooms but if one turns immediately upon entering the doorway between the two rooms, one ends up elsewhere. In fact almost all of the doors operate this way. Combined with various magical appurtenances for breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner, this makes life in the house interesting and potentially fattening. It has a wonderful library as well with a humorously twisted spell-book. Once more, highly recommended.

The sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle. In this one Jones riffs on Arab mythology with the whole genie-in-a-bottle thing, but mixed in with her own take on things magical and mundane. The characterisations are wonderful and once again I find no difficulty with the style which I would judge to be highly accessible to older children as well as teenagers (if anything, even more so than Howl’s Moving Castle). The magic carpet, the genie, the princess and the carpet-seller all provide a merry romp that is highly recommended.

I don’t read much juvenile (what’s often referred to a Young Adult these days, a term which I hate – Young Adult has a perfectly good natural meaning of “recently became an adult”, i.e. 18-21 or thereabouts; the use of it to refer to teenage or juvenile is pandering to a desire to claim a misleading description by teenagers, which should not be indulged – rant over) fiction. I can’t cope with the limited vocabular and simple sentence structure in much of it. However, Diana Wynne Jones (lovely lady that she was) manages not to trigger my issue in this and its sequels. I was mostly inspired to read this by the Miyazaki movie. It’s interesting comparing how closely the movie follows the book. The movie is a fairly free adaption, and misses out on a bunch of backstory as well as introducing some other material not in the book. THe apprentice in the book is a youth rather than a child, for example. I try, though, not to judge adapations on faithfullness but rather on quality in their media and the movie is generally very good as a movie with just a couple of bits (like Sophie’s mother, step-mother in the book) which don’t proparly make sense.

The book has a more complicated structure than the movie and gives a much more complete picture of the people and the world. Not surprising, as this is common in movies made from books. It’s hard to do even a juvenile book in a 90 minute or two hour movies in all its details.

This (series, not just this book) is one of my comfort reads, alongside things like Barry Hughart’s Master Li & No. Ten Ox books. Highly recommended, even if like me you don’t generally read juveniles. In particular the author’s knowledge of and twisting of the tropes of fantasy keeps things very interesting.

One of my current research projects (DESVALDO, funded by the CIGREF Foundation) involves surveying people about their use of digital data. While our primary target is non-expert computer users, expert users are also welcome to take it. This is the survey.