purplecat

`The British counterpart to Alexander McCall Smith's' The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency said the pull quote on the front cover of my copy of Maisie Dobbs. This was a little too reminiscent to `Comparable to Tolkien at his best' to fill me with a great deal of confidence.

( More under the cut, but I'm basically a bit `meh' about it )

The book passes the time, but I don't think I'll be reading any others in the series.

Long time readers of this blog may recall that I have been somewhat underwhelmed by BBC Books Dr Who New Series novelisations and may have realised that I eventually broke my completist habit and stopped buying them. The problem I have, having decided that I no longer need to own all of something is that I quite rapidly decide I don't need any of them at all and I hadn't really bought a Dr Who book since. However I kept hearing vague rumblings that some of the newer books were good and the ones by Una McCormack were mentioned, so I put them on the Amazon wish list and some duly turned up for Christmas.

I'm not going to write about it at length because I feel about it much as I've felt about the other New Series novelisations. It's OK. It's a solid enough tale, treats the companions (Amy and Rory here) well, is dealing with themes of being a non-combatant left out of a war (either by choice or necessity), and has a nice spooky Who-ish central premise. And yet, and yet, and yet, I can't help feeling it would have been a better book if it hadn't been aimed at the younger end of young adult. I feel I've said that, to a greater or lesser extent, about every New Series book I've read.

I think I'm getting a bit bored of Urban Fantasy I thought to myself about one chapter into Fated, by about chapter 4 I was gripped.

( More under the Cut )

I can't quite make up my mind about this book. I liked both the central character and the plot, but the world they existed in was flimsier and less convincing than I generally like from Urban Fantasy.

The Command of the Ocean is the second of Rodger's books on the History of the Royal Navy, following on from The Safeguard of the Sea. Despite the fact the history has now reached the period I was particularly interested in (that involving baggy shirts and dapper waistcoats) I didn't enjoy this instalment nearly as much and, in places, found it something of a slog to get through.

( More under the Cut )

I still enjoyed this book, and it is hard to criticise it for the scholarly attention to detail it brings to its subject matter. However, I suspect, that the level of detail available for the 17th and 18th centuries moves it more towards an academic audience and away from a general one when compared to its predecessor.

Full disclosure. Marc Read and I are old friends. Our children, when not in rooms at opposite ends of the house, refusing to speak to each other, are good friends, so, you know...

New Stars for Old is a series of vignettes fictionalising the lives of famous astronomers. The vignettes range over a number of forms including letters and diaries, as well as subject matter, sometimes focusing on a single moment from an astronomer's life, while at other times they take in the grand sweep of events. Similarly sometimes the astronomer is at the heart of the story and at others the focus is on someone, real or fictional who was drawn into their orbit. At the end of each chapter Marc provides a short section outlining the history behind the story.

Marc writes well, the vignettes are easy to read and none outstay their welcome. However, I was beginning to chafe a bit about half way through. In spite of the different takes on the basic premise it was all a bit samey, but the book picked up a lot as it moved into the late medieval and early modern periods. I suspect this has a lot to do with the amount of historical evidence Marc had access too. Suddenly the characters seemed a lot more individual and interesting and the stories had more to say, I was particularly taken by Kepler and Bellarmine, but Tycho Brahe is also vividly drawn over several chapters. When the book finally stopped at Newton, I was disappointed it wasn't going to carry on into the Englightenment.

New Stars for Old is good book, definitely worth getting if you have an interest in the history of science or astronomy. It's at its best when fictionalising people and events for which a reasonable historical record exists, but its pacey and well-written enough that even the patchier sections pass by easily.

For Reasons, I decided I wanted to know more about the Age of Sail, but along the way I somehow got side-tracked into the history of the Royal Navy. The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 by N. A. M. Rodger, you will observe, stops short of the Age of Sail or at least those parts of it involving baggy sleeves and dapper waistcoats.

( More Under the Cut )

A fascinating book all told, and one I'd recommend to anyone interested in reading a narrative of Medieval and Early Modern English history from a specific unique viewpoint.

The Moon over Soho is the second in Ben Aaronovitch's "Rivers of London" series. I enjoyed the first book a lot though I complained about the rather extended denouement. The Moon over Soho is much more satisfactorily put together in that regard and considerably less gory since the magical enemy this time around is mysteriously giving people heart attacks rather than bludgeoning their heads in. I think it is probably the more accomplished novel of the two, though it lacks the verve and surprise of the first where Aaronovitch is having a lot of fun setting up his world. D. C. Peter Grant is a likeable, yet flawed character, though one is sometimes a little surprised that some random supernatural creature hasn't eaten him for breakfast by now. Mind you, a lot of the people in the novel are clearly equally surprised about this! Unlike the Rivers of London, the novel is also busy setting up a recurring villain for the series. I was impressed with the way this was done without too obviously compromising the book's ability to stand on its own.

This time Peter does get to add improbably wish-fulfillment sex to the improbable wish-fulfillment mansion and the improbable wish-fulfillment vintage jaguar. These seem to be staples of at least a subsection of the urban crime fantasy genre (or at least what little of it I've read) but I still find it odd in a set of books which are otherwise striving to be fairly down-to-earth about their world.

I'd say these look set fair to be a good solid series of genre books, assuming you like the detective novel meets the supernatural basic set up. It's got a number of strong supporting characters, some intriguing hints at back story, a nice mash-up of British myth and history with modern multi-cultural London, and (mansion and jag notwithstanding) enough of an implicit crisis in the magical establishment to make sure the stakes are always high and the protagonist's position is not too secure and cosy.

When I blogged about The Wierdstone of Brisingamen there was a collective shout of Albanac from my flist. A sufficiently enthusiastic shout that I thought I'd check out The Moon of Gomrath as well. I can't honestly say I enjoyed this as much as Wierdstone though I think it is, in some ways, a more mature book but it felt oddly disjointed to me like the ideas hadn't quite coalesced in Garner's mind before he set out.

( More under the cut )

The Moon of Gomrath isn't a bad, or even a mediocre, book by any stretch of the imagination but I don't think it is as good as its predecessor and ultimately I was disappointed.

Ben Aaronvitch wrote the Dr Who episode Remembrance of the Daleks which catapulted classic Doctor Who into the Cartmel era. It represented a hugely dramatic shift in style to any Doctor Who that had gone before and it is difficult to evaluate it properly. I suspect to new eyes today it would look over-lit, over-earnest and self-conscious, but it did a combination of things radically differently to what had gone before, its inter-cutting between scenes and shots was much faster, it relied on the audience to do a lot of the mental legwork to join the storytelling dots, the companion was relied upon by the Doctor to act independently*, and it explicitly sought to deal with "issues" and use metaphors.

Aaronovitch went on to write novelisations of his own Dr Who episodes which were distinctly more ambitious than many of the series novelisations though not quite as stand out as the actual episodes had been. Once the series ceased, he wrote a couple of original novels the first of which I've always thought of as Aaronovitch writes William Gibson (and was incredibly controversial which says much about the reading habits of Dr Who fans) and the second of which I've always thought of as Aaronovith writes Iain Banks. Despite their incredibly derivative nature, both novels were stand outs in the range. A third original novel was hugely late, suffered from a computer crash and was eventually completely by Kate Orman - I've never personally rated that one very highly.

The upshot of all of this is that I've always thought it would be interesting to see what an Aaronovitch novel looked like when he was writing himself rather than a more famous author. I finally have my answer and I'm impressed.

( Mild spoilers beneath the cut )

*The odd thing at the time was that although this was stark contrast with Doctor Who of the 1980s, the 1970s was awash with independent and resourceful companions. I've always found the 80s back-sliding in this regard very peculiar and it is difficult not assume it was related to script-editor Eric Saward's "macho" approach to storytelling. Remembrance of the Daleks comes a year after Saward's abrupt departure from the job and coincides with the new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, clearly beginning to find his stride.

We got given Moxyland by Lauren Beukes as a freebie at Eastercon in 2010 and since then I've heard Beukes' name spoken of fairly regularly on various blogs about SF literature. This is the sort of book I normally really like, it's a slightly dystopian short jump forward into the future, with plenty of world-building and the added bonus that it is written from a South African rather than the more normal American perspective. However, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, I never got drawn into the story nor really wanted to know more about this world. It's possibly telling that, of all the characters in the book, the only one I ever really engaged with was Lerato, a ruthless and unprincipled "company woman" who I suspect was intended to be the least sympathetic of the book's four protagonists. This may be because she was the only one who seemed to have both the gumption and the drive to make anything of her life, while it was hard to imagine any of the other protagonists making much of themselves. I think I also found the world itself a little derivative. Books that are carried by world building need to present themselves, to some extent, as a puzzle box leaving the reader a trail of bread-crumbs that let's them piece the world together. Moxyland features "PlusLife" a thinly veiled version of "Second Life" which is a homage to the "Metaverse" of Neal Stephenson*. You seem reassuringly familiar when your near future detail is riffing off a world-building concept that first appeared in 1992 and the reader is almost encouraged to feel they know all about this world, rather than getting a tantalising glimpse of just some part of it. There's nothing bad about this book, the writing is vivid, the characters are all distinct and the plot holds together but it failed to excite me, feeling more like a re-tread of much of the dystopian fiction of the 1990s than something new.

*though I note that Wikipedia now asserts that Second Life was not inspired by the Metaverse, presumably in much the same way that Gary Gygax wasn't inspired by Lord of the Rings.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/48060.html.