Books I read recently
Sep. 9th, 2005 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinRecently I spent weeks hauling my way through Alastair Reynolds' massive "trilogy" of Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, and Absolution Gap. Actually, the marketing of the series as a trilogy is a little confusing; there's another volume called Chasm City that I gather really goes between the first two, and I didn't read that, but the other books do seem to refer back to it.
This is the epitome of British New Space Opera: gigantic, relentlessly gloomy and apocalyptic, filled with ultra-tech, AIs, genocidal ancient super-aliens, and amoral antiheroes who gradually become more heroic as the story goes on. In large, it's the story of various warring factions of interstellar humanity in a sort of post-utopian age of decline, running to save their butts from mysterious alien destroyers called the Inhibitors. Reynolds' big ground rule is that nobody has faster-than-light travel (though he does put in some other causality-violating stuff, like fragmentary communications from the future), but they do have working relativistic ramjets of mysterious construction, so the story necessarily turns into a multigenerational epic.
It isn't terribly escapist reading when one is having all sorts of angry and apocalyptic thoughts anyway. Nobody ever seems to have much fun in Reynolds' universe, except for the torture fetishists. I found the last volume, Absolution Gap, the most imaginative and engaging; Reynolds manages to do a few novel things involving a bizarre religious movement on an icy colony moon, and the super-cool, stone-killer characters he's been playing with all this time start to develop some sympathetic qualities. Unfortunately it doesn't make a lot of sense unless you've read the rest of it, and Redemption Ark in particular is rough going, basically a novel-length chase sequence. So I had to take breaks and read some other things.
My brother-in-law Paul calls Ilf and Petrov's 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs "the Russian Seinfeld"; it's apparently a huge part of the shared in-joke culture there. While I suspect it would probably be immensely funnier if I were Russian, I got plenty of laughs out of it anyway, and I can see why Mel Brooks once made a movie out of it; the character dynamic is similar to The Producers. It recounts the adventures of a nobleman-turned-municipal-clerk who teams up with a con artist to recover the jewels the clerk's mother-in-law hid during the revolution in one of a set of twelve identical chairs, now scattered around the Soviet Union. In the process, they come in contact with a cross-section of early Soviet society and meet many goofy people and social mishaps. The con man, Ostap Bender, is a great larger-than-life comic figure; in the TV miniseries I'd cast John Barrowman.
Terry Pratchett's Going Postal is, I think, one of his better Discworld books. The closest previous equivalent is The Truth, which introduced a number of new characters working to create Ankh-Morpork's first newspaper; here, another set of new characters work to revive its moribund postal service. This one also deals directly with the semaphore-tower telecommunications revolution that has been going on in the background of the past few novels, and there is thinly-veiled satire of dot-com startups and telco machinations that works pretty well; Pratchett's engineering background comes through. It's not as politically meaty as Night Watch, but not one of the really lightweight ones either.
Having gotten to the end of the Reynolds, I desperately needed more light reading, so I read the brief and particularly bizarre Doctor Who tie-in novel Verdigris by Paul Magrs, an apocryphal adventure of the Pertwee Doctor. It's difficult to describe except as a sort of surrealist pulp fiction, incorporating a Time Lady who flies around in a double-decker bus and seems to know that she is a character in a tie-in novel, an invasion by aliens disguised as 19th century literary characters who disintegrate for no apparent reason (this part reminded me of something Mike Pederson wrote in high school), characters wearing disguises over their disguises, UNIT soldiers becoming two-dimensional and foldable or hypnotized into believing they are supermarket staff, and a blatant parody of The Tomorrow People. There is more shameless fourth-wall-breaking than you can shake a stick at. They put some mighty peculiar things in those Doctor Who books. Non-fans will find it unintelligible.
This is the epitome of British New Space Opera: gigantic, relentlessly gloomy and apocalyptic, filled with ultra-tech, AIs, genocidal ancient super-aliens, and amoral antiheroes who gradually become more heroic as the story goes on. In large, it's the story of various warring factions of interstellar humanity in a sort of post-utopian age of decline, running to save their butts from mysterious alien destroyers called the Inhibitors. Reynolds' big ground rule is that nobody has faster-than-light travel (though he does put in some other causality-violating stuff, like fragmentary communications from the future), but they do have working relativistic ramjets of mysterious construction, so the story necessarily turns into a multigenerational epic.
It isn't terribly escapist reading when one is having all sorts of angry and apocalyptic thoughts anyway. Nobody ever seems to have much fun in Reynolds' universe, except for the torture fetishists. I found the last volume, Absolution Gap, the most imaginative and engaging; Reynolds manages to do a few novel things involving a bizarre religious movement on an icy colony moon, and the super-cool, stone-killer characters he's been playing with all this time start to develop some sympathetic qualities. Unfortunately it doesn't make a lot of sense unless you've read the rest of it, and Redemption Ark in particular is rough going, basically a novel-length chase sequence. So I had to take breaks and read some other things.
My brother-in-law Paul calls Ilf and Petrov's 1928 novel The Twelve Chairs "the Russian Seinfeld"; it's apparently a huge part of the shared in-joke culture there. While I suspect it would probably be immensely funnier if I were Russian, I got plenty of laughs out of it anyway, and I can see why Mel Brooks once made a movie out of it; the character dynamic is similar to The Producers. It recounts the adventures of a nobleman-turned-municipal-clerk who teams up with a con artist to recover the jewels the clerk's mother-in-law hid during the revolution in one of a set of twelve identical chairs, now scattered around the Soviet Union. In the process, they come in contact with a cross-section of early Soviet society and meet many goofy people and social mishaps. The con man, Ostap Bender, is a great larger-than-life comic figure; in the TV miniseries I'd cast John Barrowman.
Terry Pratchett's Going Postal is, I think, one of his better Discworld books. The closest previous equivalent is The Truth, which introduced a number of new characters working to create Ankh-Morpork's first newspaper; here, another set of new characters work to revive its moribund postal service. This one also deals directly with the semaphore-tower telecommunications revolution that has been going on in the background of the past few novels, and there is thinly-veiled satire of dot-com startups and telco machinations that works pretty well; Pratchett's engineering background comes through. It's not as politically meaty as Night Watch, but not one of the really lightweight ones either.
Having gotten to the end of the Reynolds, I desperately needed more light reading, so I read the brief and particularly bizarre Doctor Who tie-in novel Verdigris by Paul Magrs, an apocryphal adventure of the Pertwee Doctor. It's difficult to describe except as a sort of surrealist pulp fiction, incorporating a Time Lady who flies around in a double-decker bus and seems to know that she is a character in a tie-in novel, an invasion by aliens disguised as 19th century literary characters who disintegrate for no apparent reason (this part reminded me of something Mike Pederson wrote in high school), characters wearing disguises over their disguises, UNIT soldiers becoming two-dimensional and foldable or hypnotized into believing they are supermarket staff, and a blatant parody of The Tomorrow People. There is more shameless fourth-wall-breaking than you can shake a stick at. They put some mighty peculiar things in those Doctor Who books. Non-fans will find it unintelligible.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-09-10 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-10 05:53 pm (UTC)I'm also partial to Carpe Jugulum (in some ways a rehash of Lords and Ladies, but an improved one) and The Truth.