Silence

I've gotten horribly behind on LJ, both reading and posting. I'm going to try and catch up over the next couple of days, so don't be surprised if you suddenly get comments from me on weeks' old entries.

Cobweb

Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George previously teamed up to write Interface, a political thriller about media-manipulation, focus groups, brain/computer interfaces and a presidential election which was fascinating and well-written but didn't quite hang together. The same could be said for Cobweb, which is about the inner workings of the CIA and FBI and bio-terrorism all set against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I love Neal Stephenson's writing but there are relatively few of his books which I feel have managed to carry everything through to the conclusion successfully. Some of them, such as the Diamond Age, just fall apart into a bit of a mess. Cobweb is an improvement on this, the ending makes sense as do most of the events leading up to it (though I'm still at a loss as to the motive behind a series of attacks on one of the characters, dozens of other people knew what he did and the problem was clearly lack of governmental will to take action, not governmental ignorance) but at the end of the day it was a strange mixture of being a little too pat (one of the two lead characters having worked hard at solid detecting throughout suddenly has the answer handed to him in a diner), a little too simple (nothing particularly complicated was going on), and a little too unlikely (OK, I'll buy that Saddam couldn't get up to his nefarious tricks within Iraq, but why go to the trouble of getting up to them in the American midwest, of all places, rather than any number of more sympathetic and geographically closer nations?). That said, I remain a big fan of Stephenson's writing (and I'm guessing, in this partnership, George primarily brings a slightly more sober style and knowledge of the internal workings of American government to the table) and I was never bored or irritated by this book, which is a big plus.

Forever Autumn

Another day, another new who book, another viewpoint kidult. Once again this one was mostly just a bit bland. It is set in a small sleepy American town the better, I suppose, to capitalise on its Halloween setting, but it really felt just like a sleepy English village with the numbers filed off. This is clearly written as a child friendly horror novel (not unsurprising given that Mark Morris' day job is a horror writer). There is plenty of vivid imagery as various Halloween decorations come to life, but after a fairly creepy start its mostly just generic "mild" peril. Doctor Who, after all, has strong roots in child-friendly horror so its really quite hard to make this sort of fare stand out.

An interesting side-note (for anyone who's been following the "was Martha ill-treated" debate) is a passage where Martha reflects that all conversations with the Doctor inevitably find their way back to Rose. Proof that, whatever the text of the transmitted episodes, the sub-text that so many complained of was definitely intentional. As I understand matters, these books are far too carefully vetted to let something like that slip through unless it was in a briefing document somewhere.