Blast from the past, by Ben Elton
Saturday, March 20th, 2010
“…every young person is just an older person waiting to happen, and it happens a lot sooner than anyone ever thinks…”
Archive for March, 2010
Woken Furies, by Richard Morgan
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Great Britain, 2005, Gollanez
Woken Furies is a science fiction novel set on a far distant world in a distant future. Humans have colonised the galaxy, using star charts found in ancient Martian cities (the Martians have been gone for at least half a million years).
The main character, Takeshi Kovacs (aka Micky Serendipity) is an un-likeable criminal. He had joined the military at age 17, and ended up in the elite “Envoy Corps”, who’s job it is maintain the status quo across the human Protectorate. Some hundreds of years later, and he’s out of it.
Now, for reasons best known to himself, he likes to collect the cortical stacks of priests from the “New Revelation” religion. A cortical stack is a piece of sophisticated hardware that enables humans, via a process of “backing up” the mind, to change bodies (“sleeves”) easily, so that if the body they are in gets too old, or damaged, they get get a new one. It also makes things nice for people like Kovacs, they can swap to a synthetic body, commit a crime (for example killing priests of the New Revelation in the middle of their citadel), and then swap back to their real body. It also means that humans can live a lot longer than previously.
This is an excellent book that brings together different strands that have been explored before in SF and weaves them into a tight story. The different aspects all mesh well together into a coherent whole. And though there are minor small aspects that bothered me (Martians being one, and the other main one the concept and method of “sleeving” used in the book), they don’t detract from either the story, or from the method and style of writing.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in modern SF. The political aspects appealed to me while reading the book, but were not what prompted me to pick it up in the first place, nor should they turn someone away from it.
This is a great book, with revolutionary politics, criminal gangs, long deceased (or simply departed) aliens, uploadable consciousnesses, and two people with literally the same history. A complex science fiction story, which, apparently, is part of other stories by the same author, set in the same universe (with the same characters).
Two quotes:
“Has it occurred to anybody that …” “… the whole of human history might just be some fucking excuse for the inability to provide a decent female orgasm.” page 45.
“This enemy you cannot kill” … “You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.” page 91
This review is extracted from a longer unfinished review which is, as yet, unpublished. Expect to find the longer review on my website at some time in the future.
With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed by Lynne Truss
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
First published in 1994, the copy I read was published in 2004 by Profile Books in the UK.
This is a short, funny book cataloguing the demise of a niche gardening magazine in the UK. One of the columnists, who interviews famous people about their sheds, has gone out some out of the way backwater to interview an American actress. However, the bed and breakfast he and his friend stay at is run by someone with the same name (and from the same village) as the author of two quite distributing letters he received. The situation deteriorates as the father and son team that run the B&B also know the actress. And as more and more staff from the magazine make their way to Honiton, and a famous crime writer as well, things start getting quite silly. So who did kill the niece in the end? I think it was the crazy mother, but I could be wrong.
By the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a non-fiction look at grammar that I’ve heard really good things about, but haven’t read, this is an amusing, short read. Would I read it again? Quite likely, if there was nothing else around. Would I suggest it to anyone else? Yes, find it, and read it. But would I buy it? No, no really, I’ve got too many books as it is, and many of them are far better.
