A while ago, just after I finished Old Man’s War, I threatened to come back to the blog and give a scathing account of why John Scalzi’s fantastically entertaining space opera was the single most wrongheaded book I had ever read. It was, I was going to tell you, a filthy piece of right-wing shittism of the kind that I thought even the sci-fi reactionaries had left behind. I was going to set Mr Scalzi straight on a few things, I can tell you.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed. The very clever Niall Harrison from Torque Control had the good grace to stop me making an even bigger arse of myself than usual by pointing me in the direction of Nicholas Whyte (who, god bless him) took a bullet for the rest of us and got there first.

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Posted November 1, 2007 Comments(6)

I’ve finally had the chance to sit down and read the latest issue of comedy magazine Mustard, and I just thought I’d point it out to anyone who happened to be passing.

I first picked up Mustard in some comic shop and laughed throughout my train journey home (to the point where someone complained to the conductor! Well I was sitting in first class… and everyone knows that no one in first class has a sense of humour).

Anyway the latest issue is the first of a relaunch – featuring some new content (including a lengthy piece with Father Ted, The IT Crowd genius Graham Linehan) and a sort of “best of” collection of pieces from the magazine’s earlier incarnation. The new version is more professionally designed and has big splashes of colour. Nice.

There’s a lot of very funny and very clever stuff in here as well as some very funny, very stupid, stuff as well, which, obviously, are the bits that appeal most to me. There’s a couple of good superhero spoofs, I particularly liked “Middle Man”, and a general cross over between geekdom and comedy.

It’s not expensive, it’s small press publishing, and it’s funny.

Click here to buy Mustard…

Posted October 28, 2007 Comments(0)

Helix – Eric Brown

This is a likeable book without being particularly good.

The story has a colony ship (humanity’s last hope following environmental disaster on Earth) crash landing on a vast big-dumb-object, the titular helix of worlds, strung around a star. The small crew must set out to find a spot where the surviving colonists – still hibernatign – can thrive. On their journey they meet aliens both violent and benign across a variety of wild and unfamiliar environments. There’s something slightly old-fashioned about this set-up. One could almost imagine the basic outline being used for one of those Irwin Allenesque sci-fi shows (like The Time Tunnel or Lost in Space or, more recently, Quantum Leap or Sliders) where our heroes encounter a new planet every week which must be explored and overcome before, like The Littlest Hobo or Bill Bixby in The Hulk, they must move on in their apparently endless quest (which actually ends ingnominously about half way throught the third season when the studio pulls the plug and we never find out what happens) to the sound of a poignant piano theme. Interspersed with this is the story of Ehrin Tesla an airship designer of an alien species whose world is ruled by a rigid and cruel theocracy. Read more »

Posted August 14, 2007 Comments(0)

Time for a quick catch-up on some of the things I’ve been reading recently.

Brasyl – Ian McDonald

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.

Let me start by setting out the causes of my disappointment.

Once, not too long ago, I had an idea for an epic story set in Brazil that would spiral out from a favela through wealthy Rio and into the jungle. As a result I did quite a bit of research on Brazil, from the football through capoeira to religion, music, dancing and then the mythologies of the jungle. Of course being (i) a lazy bastard and (ii) a mentally constipated idiot, I never got beyond the planning stage of my epic. But I did have the background research, notes, a plot outline all in place. I knew my subject pretty well.

So, where McDonald’s last novel River of Gods took me to a nation I really knew very little about and amazed me with the wildness of it all, there was a sense when reading Brasyl that I could feel McDonald going over the same areas that I’d covered and not, necessarily, showing me anything I hadn’t have uncovered myself – I literally groaned when the “fateful final” entered the story as a plot point. Read more »

Posted August 14, 2007 Comments(0)

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).

Chabon’s journey through the genres was, by some distance, the more enjoyable experience. Read more »

Posted July 5, 2007 Comments(1)

This review originally appeared on the extremely short-lived “Scalpel Magazine” site.

Since that’s all ended in acrimony, and the review no longer seems to be available from there, I thought I’d repost it here.

Gradisil – Adam Roberts
Gollancz, London, 2006, 458pp, £18.99, h/b, ISBN 0-575-07587-2
Reviewed by Martin McGrath

Gradisil is a novel of undeniable ambition. Adam Roberts has constructed a cast of complex, difficult characters and worked them into a dense plot that curls and twists itself around a set of intricate and challenging ideas. From one angle it is a novel about politics, from another it is a generational novel about a dysfunctional family, while from a third it is an adventure stretching across decades.

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Posted June 23, 2007 Comments(2)

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.

For someone who has been a political activist and worked on the edges of politics, uninformed ranting about politics sometimes makes me despair.

Not, of course that sf writers are alone in this. Politics is one of those things – like music, art and sport – where the fantastically incapable, the never-bothered-trying and the wilfully ignorant feel perfectly happy in putting forth opinions that the expect to be taken seriously and pass judgements on those who have devoted time and effort to developing skills and experience in the area.

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Posted June 22, 2007 Comments(1)

Coming back from holiday gave a chance to catch up on three episodes of Doctor Who – and it was absolute treat.

The last part of Paul Cornell’s excellent “Family” two-parter managed to combine an excellently scary foe (those scarecrows were classic Who) with a poignant story that managed to bring something new to the Doctor. I didn’t quite buy the Kiplingesque “King and country despite it all” stuff – but I did think it worked well within the story. And then the ending… I like the Doctor most when his alien side shows, and the cold cruelty of the way the Doctor finally dispatches his enemies, was superbly handled.

Then there was “Blink” Stephen Moffat’s absolutely fantastic stand-alone story that managed to make an absolute virtue of being a small budget piece using relatively limited resources to deliver what must be amongst the best single episodes of television science fiction ever committed to tape. Moffat just gets Doctor Who – the mix of scariness, sentimentality and humour was spot on. The sequence where the male character had to try and keep staring at the statues was excellent, the tricking of the statues into trapping themselves, and the neat resolution of the story’s hanging threads all really worked and added up to a fine forty-five minutes entertainment.

Finally this weekends “Utopia”- without a shadow of a doubt the best episode of Doctor Who that Russell T Davies has so far written, a frantic and thrilling piece of misdirection that delivered a twist in the final third that left me with an enormous grin on my face. The only downside is that now Derek Jacobi and John Simm will never be able to play the Doctor.

And it proved that at lease somewhere in the heart of the Doctor Who crew there are still those that recognise that there is scope for Captain Jack to be an exciting, charismatic, roguish character – not the dull, slightly spoddy, authority figure that they’ve made him in Torchwood.

I’ve heard people grumble about this series of Doctor Who. Personally the Daleks in New York two-parter didn’t work for me (not least because I thought they threw away the chance to make some interesting historical points and the human-dalek thing was just silly) and the “Lazarus Experiment” was too knowingly smug – Mark Gatiss just annoys me – but I liked the first three episodes (especially the genuinely funny “The Shakespeare Code”) and the last five (from “42” onwards) have been golden. That’s a pretty high strike rate for any show.

Now if they can just carry us through to the finale with a bang then this might be a classic Who season – the best of New Who (Nu Hu! yuk!) certainly. And up there with the glory days of Douglas Adams, perhaps?

Posted June 19, 2007 Comments(0)

Anyone who has seen me in the (more than ample) flesh, will be entirely unsurprised to discover that my idea of a holiday does not involve white water rafting or hiking across unspoilt wildernesses.

No, all I want is a reasonably quiet, well lit room and a stack of reading material.

It must be inside – no reading on the beach, I’m Irish, I start blue and go straight to lobster red if I spend more than twenty seconds in sunlight.

Of course, with a young daughter and a wife whose grew up in a family whose idea of a holiday was a forced march across the Andes, my quest for peace and quiet (or outrageous laziness if you believe those who stare at my prostrate, somewhat less than mercurial form and sigh in disbelief) is often forlorn.

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Posted June 19, 2007 Comments(0)

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.

The Americans live in the sunlight of publicity and hero-worship while Yefgenii – partly through his own pride and partly through the machinations of the Soviet system – finds that the end of the war thrusts him deeper into obscurity. He find himself,  literally, out in the cold in the far north flying patrols against an enemy who will never come, not least because the age of the bomber has passed and the age of the missile has arrived. But, even here, Yefgenii’s skills can’t be denied and ultimately he wins back his status. 

From there the only way is up. Yefgenii is enlisted into the cosmonaut corps and, as the Americans open up a lead in the race to the moon, he is strapped aboard an untested craft for a long-shot at glory.

Ascent is a tragedy. Yefgenii’s fate is set from the start – his separation from the world is unbridgeable, the emotional detachment and calculation that make him a great pilot forever distance him from the rest of humanity. Forced to choose between the comforts of family and domesticity and the faintest chance of glory, Yefgenii barely pauses before taking the more dangerous path and his regrets, though real, are vague. 

This was the hardest part of Mecurio’s characterisation for me to accept. Perhaps because I am what one of my friends calls a “soft dad” – one who certainly can’t imagine deliberately making the choice to forever separate myself from my family – I found Yefgenii’s final decision harder to believe. That said there’s no doubt that Mecurio’s writing earns his character the right to make the hard choice. Like all true tragedy, this is the story of a man whose greatest qualities are also those which will eventually bring him down. Even as we will Yefgenii to take the safe path home, we know that his fate does not lie down that road. 

As well as being a solid examination of character, Ascent is an enjoyable read. Were it not for the fundamental bleakness of it all it would be tempting to compare this to the boys’ own action of The Right Stuff or Apollo 13. Its relative brevity and fast pace meant I raced through it, but it is also packed with convincing technical detail.

Mecurio is a qualified pilot and the depth of his research is obvious throughout, but the prose deftly avoids crude info-dumping and the mass of information becomes immersive rather than distracting. If I were critical I would say that the character of Yefgenii’s wife is poorly treated, but then this is consistent with the isolation and drive of the central character. There are a few too many, too similar, dogfights in the Korean section of the story and Mercurio’s technical precision – the unbending focus on which pilot and machine can turn more tightly than the other – while absolutely accurate is perhaps overdone. There are moments of improbability too (Yefgenii’s just a bit too good a pilot. Thirty-three kills is an awful lot. And is it really possible for one MiG to nudge another without fuel to keep it flying?) but Mecurio succeeds in carrying us deftly across these potential pratfalls and in the end there are many more thrills than spills.

More a “hidden history” really, than an “alternate” one, this a “mainstream” novel that deserves to find an audience amongst sf fans. No doubt Mercurio, his publishers or someone else will eventually offend fandom by proclaiming that this isn’t that horrid “sci-fi” stuff and earn a prize place amongst the ranks of “as others see us” – so read the novel now, before something like that sours your pleasure. 

Ascent is a shoo-in for the 2007 Clarke shortlist, surely?

Posted April 19, 2007 Comments(0)