There is no point mincing my words. As a work of fiction, Bernard Beckett’s Genesis is a bit of a disaster. While there are interesting philosophical points raised, Beckett has made the fundamental mistake of forgetting that the first task of a novelist is to engage and entertain. If instruction is the author’s goal – and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with that aim – then it should emerge from the plot and characters. Genesis is too didactic. Beckett is too determined to teach us a lesson – even to the point that the story is told through the framing device of a viva voce examination. Continue reading →

Before starting this review I want to congratulate artist Chris Moore and the (uncredited) designer at Penguin responsible for the cover of this book. It was a brave design choice to park the title and author’s name on the little spaceship in the bottom left hand corner of the cover, but the masses of negative space created, and the minimalist feeling it lends the cover, immediately creates the feeling that this book is a classy artefact and delivers an image of smallness and isolation that is wholly apt. Very nice. Continue reading →

Does anyone need another reworking of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? It’s not like there’s ever going to be a re-imagining of the story that’s more balls-to-the-wall than Apocalypse Now, so what more needs to be said. Continue reading →

Or “In a Chinese Room, not far from the loo”

I have been a little unwell. Nothing serious, a stomach bug that my four-year-old daughter shrugged off without so much as a backward glance to check whether there was any puke in her curly locks (there was, we found it later) but which put dad in bed for two days. Rubbish? Me?

Of course being too sick to move far enough from the toilet for long enough to go to work but not so sick that you can’t sit up in bed with an endless supply of weak lemon drink does have advantages – like the chance to read, uninterrupted. Continue reading →

When I first picked up Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction in 1995 I hadn’t been reading much science fiction for a while but I had just picked up Red Mars, which had gone a long way to reigniting my interest and I was looking for more.

I don’t know what attracted me to MacLeod’s book – the black cover wasn’t that remarkable – but pick it up I did and read the blurb. Then I distinctly remember opening the book and reading the first chapter, dragged along by the opening action.

It was like someone had written a sf book just for me. Continue reading →

I’ve just finished reading Ascent, the newish novel by Jed Mercurio. It’s the story of Yefgenii Yeremin an orphan of Stalingrad and “the great patriotic war against fascism”. Yefgenii is blessed with a talent for mathematics and engineering and supremely acute eyesight. This combination of skills take him into the VVF, the Soviet air force that is fighting a secret war against the Americans in Korea, and thence to legendary status amongst his peers as “Ivan the Terrible”, ace of aces. In the background as Yefgenii rises are his opponents – American pilots like Grissom, Armstrong and Schirra – who would go on to form the backbone of the Mercury and Apollo programmes. Continue reading →

I’ve said before that, for a genre that so often finds its writers dealing with big political ideas, relatively few science fiction authors demonstrate any sense that they have a clue about how politics really works. This leads to things like the sci-fi revolution and improbable conspiracies (sci-fi governments are good at keeping secrets, real governments are crap – politics is a career for people who love talking) and half-arsed characterisation. Continue reading →

Sometimes reading throws up odd sychronicities – and my experience of reading Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (a ‘mainstream’ writer’s take on both sf (alt-history) and the crime thriller in one book) came shortly after I’d finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and No Country for Old Men (a ‘mainstream’ writer’s take on both sf (post-apocalyptic trek) and the crime thriller in two books). Continue reading →

This is a book that, for me, ended up being more than the sum of its parts.

There was quite a lot here that I found disappointing, at first, but as McDonald interleaves the three different plot threads across three different worlds/times I found myself being drawn by the story and worrying less about the niggles.

Continue reading →

I finished reading Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road yesterday. It’s a wonderful book – a straightforward action-adventure story in the very old style but lifted way into the stratosphere by Chabon’s mastery of language. Continue reading →