purplecat

I've always struggled a bit with Paul Magrs' Doctor Who novels, though I liked the one original novel of his that I read. Magrs has always been something of a champion of the "silly" in Doctor Who and, while I don't like my Doctor Who particularly grim and serious, I've always had a feeling that the silliness I like about it is rather different from the silliness that Magrs likes and I've generally come away from his novels and short stories obscurely dissatisfied.

More recently (by which, inspection reveals, I mean in the past decade) Magrs has produced a series of original novels, the Brenda and Effie series, that by all accounts rested somewhere in between the magic realist tone of his early novels and the affectionate and explicit "silliness" of his Dr Who work. Somewhat belatedly I decided to give them a try and Never the Bride is the first.

Brenda runs a B&B in Whitby and lives next door to her best friend, Effie. Over the course of the novel it gradually emerges that Brenda is, in fact, the Bride of Frankenstein while Effie is the descendent of a long line of white witches. The both have a penchant for adventure and meddling. The novel is more a collection of four loosely linked novellas in which Brenda and Effie become involved with a range of characters, often drawn from the milieu of late 19th and early 20th century scientific romances and gothic horror stories (though they also meet a thinly disguised version of the Most Haunted TV team). At the core of the stories is their friendship, which is often prickly and difficult, beset with disagreements and misunderstandings. Since I currently have a daughter grappling with how to manage friendships with people who she frequently considers to be WRONG or BADLY BEHAVED, it was interesting to read this nuanced and affectionate portrayal of just such a friendship.

That said the stories themselves, that surround Brenda and Effie, left me with the same sense of encountering a style of whimsey that didn't quite gell with my own preferences, as reading Magrs' Doctor Who stories gave me. Possibly this is because I have no especial affection for either scientific romance nor gothic horror (and I've never watched Most Haunted) and suspect I was missing a lot of in-jokes as a result, I don't know.

It's a well written book and if you have a taste for whimsey, an affection for gothic horror and/or early SF, and an interest in books that examine the nature of friendship, then I would recommend it, but I don't really think it's for me.

In the name of full disclosure I should point out that, to the extent that I have ill-gotten gains from the writing of fiction, these have come via the editorial largesse of Philip Purser-Hallard writer of The Pendragon Protocol.

( NB. Also Spoilers )

I would definitely recommend this to people interested in Arthurian Legend, and in how Arthurian retellings can be integrated into the modern genre of urban fantasy. I find it harder to judge how it might work for people with less of an interest in the core myths.

Conservation of Shadows is a short story collection with a mix of SF, Fantasy and blurred-somewhere-in-the-middle tales. There are consistent themes running through the stories, most notably an idea that art has a physical effect on the world, but a lot are also about war: invasion, occupation and battle. Depending on where on the genre spectrum a story falls art may be a form of engineering (origami spacecraft in the first story Ghostweight) or art may be magic (characters from stories, cut out of paper and brought to life in Effigy Nights).

I was surprised on reading the notes to discover that many of the stories were also toying with ideas from mathematics - this was a lot less obvious to me than it was in, say, Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others. I spotted the use of mathematics as magic in Counting the Shapes which was reminiscent, in a way, of the idea from Bidmead's Doctor Who that calculation can shape reality. While it is quite common for science fiction stories to pull inspiration from the experimental sciences and engineering, it is a lot less usual to read ones that are directly inspired by mathematical concepts. I am half-tempted to try and re-read some of the other mathematically inspired stories but, I suspect, if I didn't spot the connection first time through I might just be irritated by it on a second read.

The prose is quite dense. It often took me a paragraph or two to really start following a story on the page. Mostly, I would say, it falls on the right side of purple, being lush and atmospheric without being distracting, except in the eponymous Conservation of Shadows which I found too allusive. In the notes, Lee explains that he "dialed up" the prose in this story and says "There is always the danger of overwhelming the material with tinsel" which I feel is what happened here. I also found several of the stories stopped rather abruptly. I think you could argue that, in each case, the ending had been reached but sometimes I was left unsure what to make of that ending.

I think my favourite stories in the collection were the longer, more fantasty-based ones, Counting the Shapes and Iseult's Lexicon, but I also enjoyed the more Military SF-style The Battle of Candle Arc, the timey-wimey Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain and the more contemplative Swanwatch. This kind of lyrical military SF/Fantasy is not a sub-genre I've really read much in before and despite some of my frustrations with the stories I enjoyed the collection a lot.

Windscale, 1957 is yet another book liberated from my father's shelves. It is an account both of the events that lead up to the Windscale fire in 1957 and the subsequent inquires which attempted to ascertain the cause and apportion blame.

It is mostly a fairly even-handed account. It recounts the pressures that were on the British Nuclear industry to produce large amount of weapons' grade plutonium using technology that was, at best, only partially understood and infrastructure that was barely in place. It talks through the design of the air-cooled graphite reactors at Windscale and, in particular, the regular need to shutdown the pile and then carefully reheat it in order to release Wigner energy: a process which, again, was only partially understood. It does its best to set out the causes of the fire though it seems that these will never be completely known since there wasn't adequate monitoring inside the core to really understand the sequence of events. It then talks through the aftermath, the monitoring of fallout, the milk ban, and then the subsequent inquiries.

Where it loses its impartiality a little is in its defence of the men conducting the Wigner release. The first inquiry, intended as a purely technical investigation had interviewed them on the understanding that it was purely an attempt to understand the sequence of events. Indeed the initial confidential report form the inquiry restricted itself to technical matters. However as the report made its way through the political process towards a public summary a sentence was inserted which spoke of "faults of judgement by the operating staff". This was obviously deeply resented by men who were over-worked and who were following standard procedures (insofar as anything can be described as standard when it has only been performed 9 times before and when the process it is controlling is only partially understood). Windscale, 1957 clearly considers part of its job to be setting the record straight on behalf of these men and offers little explanation of the opposing point of view which presumably felt faults of judgement had occurred.

This being the 30th anniversary of Chenobyl, there has been a lot of coverage recently of the far more serious Chenobyl disaster. One thing that has struck me in that coverage is that one of the root causes there was pressure from the Soviet government for the plant to produce ever more power, leading to the bypassing of safety procedures. While safety procedures were not bypassed at Windscale, it nevertheless seems fair to say that the the political pressure on the industry to expand meant that power stations were being built and operated right at the edge of our understanding of how this could be done safely.

It is easy to say that lessons have been learned and it is extremely unlikely that a fire like the one at Windscale could reoccur (if only because nuclear power station design has vastly changed), but I'll confess I'm not sure the general lesson, that politicians should be careful of placing too great demands upon dangerous technologies, has been learned.

The Idylls of the Queen is one of my favourite Arthurian novels, so I was interested to learn that its author, Phyllis Ann Kerr, had written a fantasy sequence (or at least duology) with rather pretty titles (do not underestimate a the power of a pretty title). I obviously wasn't paying enough attention however and so ended up with Frostflower and Windbourne (the second in the sequence) rather than Frostflower and Thorn (the first).

( More Under the Cut )

I appreciate intellectually what this book is trying to do, presenting a different take on a medieval society with magic, which focuses on the small scale and has distinct characters but I found it an oddly unsatisfying read. I feel it would get a fairer hearing from me if I had read the first book but, on the other hand, I didn't really enjoy it enough to want to make the effort of tracking the first down.

I was given A Sixth Sense while on a work visit to Schlumberger's research centre in Cambridge. It is a biography of Henri-Georges Doll, the brother-in-law of the two Schlumberger brothers who founded the company, and the key technical and scientific mind behind the company's development of well-logging techniques upon which its success is, in part, based. It must be said, I went into it with fairly low expectations, reasoning that any history a major global company gives you as a freebie is going to have more than a little of the hagiography about it.

I was pleasantly surprised. As far as I can tell it is an honest attempt at a biography, since adopted by the company, rather than something commissioned by them. That said, it is clear, especially in the later chapters, that the necessity to keep on the right side of the Schlumberger family in order to access records means that some aspects of company politics have had to be alluded to in passing, rather than examined in detail. Pierre Schlumberger's time as the head of the company was presumably troubled, but this is visible only as a few passing references to a difficult personality and then his sudden removal from control. Doll himself suddenly ceases to have active control of the Ridgefield Research centre that he founded, and moves to Manhattan to become chairman of the board but, it would appear, is a chairman in name rather than actual fact. He commented ruefully that decisions were made and apparently signed off by him without his even being aware of them. The politics behind this demotion dressed as promotion are not discussed.

Where the book is excellent though is in discussing Doll's early years of technical innovation, as he seeks develop the use of electrical resistivity to help locate oil-bearing layers in exploratory bore holes. As well as being a discussion of scientific discovery, this is an interesting look at the conduct of science in a commercial setting, where the need to be profitable (or at least solvent) has a strong bearing on the direction and pursuit of research. All this plays out against the backdrop of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, including an ill-fated collaboration with Russia (which ultimately ends when the head of Schlumberger's Russian branch is arrested, his fate at the hands of the regime only finally revealed decades later) and the company's flight to America and participation in the American war effort.

It is a flawed book, but its flaws are those of historians constrained by their sources and the wishes of the living, not of writers for hire for a global corporation. As gifts in corporate goodie bags go, this was pretty classy.

At Eastercon in 2014 I found myself on a panel with John Meaney (on `How Smart is my Smartphone', or possibly `Why isn't my Smartphone smart?' - I can't quite remember) who was one of the guests of honour. I was pleasantly surprised to find he was a bit of a program verification and functional programming enthusiast on the quiet. It seemed only reasonable to buy one of his novels, therefore, which all seemed to be in series so I picked Absorption which is the first of the Ragnarok Trilogy.

I actually really enjoyed it, though I may have gone in with fairly low expectations since "the author seems like a nice guy" doesn't necessarily translate into deathless prose.

It's not very stand alone. As I understand it the trilogy has three main protagonists, Ulfr (a Viking), Gavriela (a jewish scientist in 1930s Europe) and Roger (A university student on the futuristic world of Fulgor - also a spy). This volume focused primarily on Roger and the events on Fulgor which were relatively self-contained, took place over a few weeks and came to a fairly clear climax, if not conclusion. However numerous other plots, not just those involving Ulfr and Gavriela, but also a handful of other characters were left hanging, no doubt to be concluded in later volumes. The overarching story that binds these characters together across time (and seems to involve Norse mythology, Quantum Mechanics and Wormhole Physics) was largely only hinted at.

I liked all three main characters and while they occasionally did stupid things, it was generally for good reason. Even with all the temporal jumping around, the story maintained a pretty good pace and I cared about what was happening on Fulgor. I also liked the ideas: the Pilots, the only people who can navigate through hyper mu-space; Quickglass, the flexible material that pervades Fulgor and out of which everything is built; the artificially "upraised" Luculenti (even if the code snippets we got, illustrating how they worked, were a little cheesy).

If the book has a flaw, it is in the details of the world-building though. Neither the futuristic societies of Fulgor or Roger's people (the Pilots) feel quite detailed enough, and the historical detail of both 1930s Switzerland and Germany and 9th century Scandinavia also feel a little sketched in. This is most noticeable with the supporting characters, many of whom are pretty two dimensional. Given its a pretty chunky book already, it is possibly excusable that the detail is light for characters like Roger and Gavriela's student friends who exist largely to demonstrate that the characters have a social life. But its a bit of a problem with more siginficant characters. Roger's mother, for instance, is present throughout major portions of the book but we learn virtually nothing about her beyond that she is a loving wife and mother. We don't even find out what she does with her time, she appears to be a Stay-at-home-Mum, but given Roger is now at University and she lives in a society where your house redesigns (and presumably cleans) itself, one assumes she has hobbies and interests. She is also a Pilot, like Roger and his father, but she apparently has no ship. Roger's father is vaguely shunned by the Pilots because it is (incorrectly) believed he has no ship, but his mother is not shunned so presumably she has a ship? or I don't know, I can think of details of the society which would explain their different treatment even though she has no ship, but I don't think its there in the text. If she has a ship then parts of the story (particularly her somewhat inevitable fridging) would have played out differently.

Still, despite a vague irritation that some of the details don't quite mesh or are glossed over too much. It was an enjoyable read. I even have vague plans to purchase the next two in the trilogy.

sophievdennis gave me A Slip of the Keyboard, a collection of Pratchett's non-fiction writing, as a birthday present. I was, inevitably, about half way through it when news of his death was announced. It's a collection of short pieces, mostly written either as speeches or for newspaper columns. As a result many are quite slight and, in volume, they can become repetitive as he revives a turn of phrase, or makes the same point a second (third, or fourth) time for a different audience. Still, there is a lot here of interest. They are grouped together more or less thematically, starting out with pieces about writing and meandering through his experiences on book-signing tours, his championship of fantasy writing and some more biographical pieces until the final section documents his diagnosis of Alzheimer's and his championship of the right to an assisted death. I think I most enjoyed his advice to book stores on how to host a signing, though his convention speeches were entertaining as well. Sadly I think the last section is the weakest, possibly because he was no longer at the top of his game, but equally possibly because, for a change, he was seeking to be serious about something serious and that was somewhat out of his metier. The arguments lack breadth, particularly in regard to the state of the NHS and its causes, and a betray a somewhat rose-tinted confidence in the wisdom, stubbornness and clear-sightedness of the elderly.

When all is said and done though, he was very clear that he wished to die in his garden, listening to Thomas Tallis. I gather he died at home, with the cat on his feet. I hope that Tallis was playing.

In my late teens I devoured all the then available V. I. Warshawski books in quick succession. Wikipedia tells me that Sara Paretsky has been writing these novels since 1982 although there have been lean patches (especially in the 90s) when they did not appear very frequently. I certainly stopped reading them at some point under the impression they were no longer being written and then discovered a new one, to my surprise, a few years back. I've now lost track a little of which one's I have read and which I haven't, although this is the first I have read in a long time.

( More Under the Cut )

I'm torn between thinking I should look out the V. I. Warshawski novels I don't think I've read - it looks like there are at least two published since this one came out, and the titles of some of a couple of the previous ones don't ring any bells. But then I look at my to read pile and wonder slightly if she's worth the effort.

A good book. However, although I'm not surprised it won a Hugo, I'm sort of a little disappointed because I didn't feel it was that good a book. In fact, of the two Scalzi's I've read, I would say that I think Old Man's War is better.

( More Under the Cut, I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, but I will discuss the basic premise, structure and characters )

As I say I'm not surprised it won the Hugo. Scalzi has a very high profile online presence and is cheerfully self-publicising. Moreover, if you're not familiar with the kind of meta-fictional games this book is playing (which are, I suspect, more common in fan fiction than elsewhere) then I can imagine the premise is startling and original, and there is no denying that it is mostly extremely well executed. Redshirts could easily have been a one-joke novel but it's never content to simply rest on its central idea. The dialogue which drives most of the novel is consistently witty and often clever. I just have a suspicion, I suppose, that Scalzi wrote better stuff when he was less famous.