April, 2025 Reading: “Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.”

This month's quote from Vladimir Nabokov's MARY.

Starting my April with Judi Dench's SHAKESPEARE: The Man Who Pays the Rent.

About halfway through and it's wonderful, a master class on the Bard.

Davy, Edgar Pangborn

The Hugo Award has never aligned with my taste in science fiction. Occasionally it’s picked novels I like and admire, but more often than not I find its nominated works uninteresting or poor. So why I’ve been picking up and reading novels from old Hugo Award shortlists, I’ve no idea. Such as Davy, which was nominated in 1965, but lost out to Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer.

The title is the name of the narrator, who lives in a balkanised USA several hundred years after a nuclear war. A rise in sea level has reduced the country to some three thousand square miles somewhere in the north-east of the original. The novel is presented as his memoir, written many years later while he’s fleeing across the Atlantic from a coup that saw him and his friends ousted from power. The ship reaches the Azores, where it founds a settlement.

The novel opens with Davy at fourteen, working as a yard-boy in an inn. In the first chapter alone, there’s child labour, indentured labour, slavery, sexual assault, capital punishment and religious oppression. America is now a pre-technological society, with several small nations and city-states all under the thumb of the Holy Murkan Church. There are mutant births - a popular, and long-since discredited, trope in US sf in the 1940s and 1950s - which has somehow led to a stratified society, with an aristocracy. None of the world-building is at all convincing, despite the narrator’s attempts to convince the reader. (This is definitely a story aimed as a reader, explicitly so, as it's a memoir, and features footnotes by Davy’s wife and friends.)

Unfortunately, Davy is also badly structured. Davy the narrator is in his thirties, but fourteen when the novel opens. While he mentions events immediately before he began the memoir, two-thirds of its length only covers his escape from indentured labour and a handful of years afterwards. He meets up with some survivors from a neighbouring nation of a battle, and travels with them, and then joins a travelling caravan of musicians - making Davy explicitly a carnival novel, an over-used pattern in US genre fiction.

I don’t like carnival novels, I didn’t like Davy. I thought its world-building unimaginative, and its structure badly unbalanced. Also, as critics at the time noted, nothing actually happens in it. I’ve yet to read Leiber’s The Wanderer - I have it on the TBR - but I’m hoping it’s better than Davy.

ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS by Omar El Akkad.

I'm a fan of Akkad's fiction but this book is something entirely different.

To call it a cri de coeur doesn't do it enough justice--it's a HOWL from a wounded soul who simply cannot bear the slaughter in Gaza, all the dead children, unnamed and forgotten here in the West, their plight making no impact, their lives meaningless.

While most of us avert our eyes from cold-blooded murder, Akkad refuses to--making this one of the most uncomfortable, important and powerful books I've read in years.

Highly recommended.

A review of Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey: https://medium.com/@ian-93054/dragonflight-anne-mccaffrey-edaca9ca8690

The Blood-thirsty Agent: The Adventure of the Incognita Countess, The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum, The Adventure of the Naked Guide and The Adventure of the Golden Woman, all by Cynthia Ward

We’ve been here before - in a comic, and then a poor film adaptation. The comic is one of the best things Alan Moore has done, and he’s produced a lot of very good stuff. I am, of course, speaking about The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in which Alan Moore imagines a British government-organised undercover team of late Victorian and Edwardian fictional heroes. There was Mina Harker and Allan Quatermain and Captain Nemo and Edward Hyde and the Invisible Man. Later sequels stretched through the twentieth century, and incorporated more fictional characters, from Mycroft Holmes to Cthulhu.

Mycroft Holmes also makes an appearance in Ward’s quartet of novellas, as does Mina Harker. They are the parents of Lucy Harker - Holmes is actually her stepfather and, as in Moore’s League, he is also M, head of the British Secret Service, and Lucy’s boss. Lucy is a dhampir, the daughter of a vampire (Dracula, of course), which means she has the powers of a vampire, but still possesses a soul, does not need to sleep on the soil of her homeland, and is unaffected by religious symbols.

In The Adventure of the Incognita Countess, Lucy is tasked with killing a three-hundred-year-old vampire travelling to New York on the RMS Titanic. The ship is powered by reverse-engineered Martian technology, from the failed invasion a decade before, and there are fears a German spy is also aboard with stolen plans of the Nautilus submarine. The expected happens, and the ship hits an iceberg. However, Lucy and the vampire, the Countess Karnstein, have fallen in love - and a German super-scientist now has the stolen plans, and he manages to escape as the Titanic sinks.

The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum takes place a few years later during World War I. Lucy is assigned as bodyguard to Winston Churchill on his visit to the front. A squad of brain-controlled werewolves kidnap Churchill. Lucy, with her vampire lover, travels behind enemy lines and eventually finds Churchill at the mountaintop laboratory of the German super-scientist from the first novella, Krüger, where he is about to implant control electrodes in Churchill’s brain. She rescues him but Krüger escapes down a tunnel into the hollow earth.

Which is where The Adventure of the Naked Guide picks up - Lucy has followed Krüger into Pellucidar. With the help of a local huntress, she tracks Krüger to a secret lab in which he has been building mechanical men. M turns up with troops, Krüger is captured and forced to work for the British, angering Lucy, who believes he should die.

The mechanical men are behind the plot of The Adventure of the Golden Woman, which is set during the 1930s in Berlin, in a Germany which is now a protectorate in a British Empire occupying even more of the globe than it did historically. Krüger has built a spaceship, which will launch from Peenemünde. But Lucy and the countess are determined to sabotage his plans - and by extension M’s - but are captured and held prisoner aboard a British flying aircraft carrier. They’re rescued by a mysterious golden woman, built by a scientist called Rotwang. Lucy and Karnstein help the golden woman, who is a sentient robot, steal the spaceship, so she and her kind (there are two male golden robots) can settle the Moon.

There’s a lot of fun in these books, and not just from spotting the references, and sorting out the historical from the fictional. It starts with Stoker, drags in Conan Doyle and Wells, then Verne and Lang, mentions Ruritania and other invented places in passing, and finishes up with Isherwood and Sally Bowles. A pair of engaging leads, commentary on early twentieth-century mores and politics, and a clever steampunk setting. They’re not as metafictional as Moore’s comic series, and the breakneck plotting sometimes means it’s all over just as it’s picking up pace. Best read back to back, and definitely recommended. Also: support Aqueduct Press; they publish excellent books.

>2 iansales: I'm guessing you're not going to like The Wanderer. Not unless you have a very odd liking for cats.

Last month's books:

The Vegetarian by Han Kang: I mean, it's not a bad book, there clearly is superior narrative skill here. The melodrama just didn't grab me and I felt detached. The point is made halfway through and then the rest is anticlimactic. Meh.

The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History by Isaiah Berlin: A good deal of it went over my head and some of it was too specialized to be of interest, but I enjoyed the main argument, and the way it was delivered. Felt magisterial.

Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation by Alan W. Watts: A bit rambling but has some useful ideas here and there.

The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein: Solid reporting. Clear presentation of the situation immediately before and after hurricane Maria, and how it is part of a pattern repeated around the world. The neoliberal playbook.

The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker: A very complete portrait of a British working class artist. Written with what strikes me as genuine affection, even if there probably are ulterior motivations.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar: Has the verve, ambition, and showiness of a debut novel. Also the narcissism, and self importance. Everyone is enlightened and very quotable. Everything is tidied up and explained. Lots of pyrotechnics. Not a bad book at all. It's just a bit too much. Closer to 4 than to 3.

How to Focus by Thich Nhat Hanh: Lovely little book. Very straightforward. More grounded and practical than Alan Watts. A bit unfocused but always interesting.

Mundo cruel by Luis Negrón: Stories from the Puerto Rican gay world in the 90’s. Too local to be of interest outside of the Caribbean but I loved it.

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner: I was left confused but very impressed. Kushner can write. The book has fullness and vitality. Not sure that it all comes together in the end but I was struck by Kushner's intelligence and boldness. No timidity here. Closer to 4 than to 5. Looking forward to read more of her work.

Outline by Rachel Cusk: Interesting project. A multitude of stories barely sketched, all beautifully written. There is a kind of abundance and vitality, and a kind of understated boldness. I have to admit I wasn't terribly drawn by any of the stories so I admire the book more intellectually than emotionally.

>6 justifiedsinner: I like cats. I had one before I moved to Sweden. Not sure that's considered odd, though...

Starting reading Patriot, Alexei Navalny's remarkable posthumous memoir. It's also serving as an excellent crash course in recent Russian political history.

>8 iansales: Wrong choice of words pervy would be more apt.

>10 justifiedsinner: okaayyy...

Bit of a long review of Consider Phlebas and New British Space Opera and New Space Opera... https://ian-93054.medium.com/consider-phlebas-iain-m-banks-49ea5282fc24

Little Fuzzy, H Beam Piper

Another allegedly classic sf novel, which was nominated for the Hugo in 1963. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle won that year, and was easily the best of the shortlisted novels. Little Fuzzy, on the other hand, is slight, not in the least bit plausible, and opens from a position of such comprehensive US hegemony its story is pretty much unrecoverable.

The title refers to the indigenous race on Zarathustra, waist-high cute-looking furry creatures with an average intelligence comparable to that of small children. Humans have been on the world for several decades before the first “Fuzzy” appears, and the corporation which owns the planet quickly realises that a native race invalidates their ownership of the world and all its resources. So they play dirty in an effort to prove the Fuzzies either non-existent or not intelligent. A situation which comes to a head when a company bigwig stamps on a Fuzzy, killing it, and a company bodyguard is shot and killed in self-defence.

Like a lot of American sf of the period, this is resolved by people coming together, some homespun legal wizardry, a general distrust of the government (and governing corporation), and a handful of native backwoods cunning from several of the cast. While the local governor is corrupt, the local Navy base is packed to the gills with upright honest officers and personnel. The corrupt mayor is a cliché, but so too is the valorisation of military probity - at least in 1962, before the Vietnam War. There are entire Hollywood movies from the 1930s through to the 1950s which use any one of those tropes on which to hang a plot. And each one is as hokey as the next.

If anything, Little Fuzzy multiplies the hokiness. It’s a novel with far more mouthpiece characters than it needs or the reader deserves. The Fuzzies may be intelligent enough to determine their own destiny, but the humans on their side seem to treat them chiefly as precocious pets. There are many arguments to be made about the European invasion of continental North America, but this novel doesn’t even come within spitting distance of them. It’s the colonisers defending the colonised against the colonisers’ own kind, for reasons that are best not examined too deeply.

Hotel du Lac, Anita Brookner

Apparently a surprise winner of the Booker Prize back in 1984. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun was the favourite, although Lodge’s Small World or Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, the only other books on the shortlist I’ve read, would have been a better winner than Hotel du Lac. It’s not that Brookner’s novel is bad - it’s nicely written, with some sharp insights. But. It’s set at the time of writing but reads like it takes place in the 1950s or 1960s. It’s horribly old-fashioned.

Edith Hope is a single woman in her late thirties, who writes “women’s fiction” under a pseudonym, reasonably successfully. She has a lover, a married man, and lives alone. She accepts an offer of marriage from a man, but jilts him at the altar (well, outside the registry office). Her friends, upset with her, arrange for her to spend a week or two at the titular hotel in Switzerland. It’s the end of the season, and there are only a handful of other guests: Mrs Pusey and her daughter, Jennifer; La Comtesse de Bonneuil, a caricature of a early twentieth-century European grandmother, and Monica, an anorexic (although this is never said) and beautiful minor aristocrat. A group of men stay at the hotel, among them Mr Neville, the well-off owner of an electronics company, in his fifties, smug and successful. He later proposes to Edith - marriage, but a partnership predicated on comfort and position, not love.

Throughout her stay, Edith writes long letters to her lover back in London, but does not send them. Various little scenes are enacted, Edith learns more about her fellow guests, their back-stories and their personalities. Mrs Pusey is quickly revealed as selfish and mistaken in her level of consequence. Her daughter, who is the same age as Edith, is little more than an accessory. Monica is a snob and dismissive, but surprisingly friendly. Madam de Bonneuil is deaf and a figure of (gentle) fun.

It’s all very smooth, and Edith is an engaging, if overly introspective, protagonist. But it’s all so horribly outdated. Neville takes Edith on a boat-trip across the lake, and wears a deerstalker hat. In 1984? Seriously? Edith wears gloves to her aborted wedding. Women rarely wore gloves to church - or registry offices - in the 1970s, never mind the 1980s. The women are dismissive of feminism, and define themselves in relation to the men in their lives, or who were once in their lives, or all men in general. This is not the early 1980s I remember.

If Hotel du Lac} had been written and presented as historical fiction, it might have read better. Having said that, even then it wouldn’t have deserved to win the Booker.

Cat Karina, Michael G Coney

The late Eric Brown, a friend of many years, was a big fan of Coney’s fiction, but for some reason Coney was one of those authors I never seemed to pick up. The first, I think, was Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975, UK) about fifteen years ago, and I thought it quite good. I’ve read more in the last few years, and found his Amorph trilogy of Mirror Image (1972, UK), Syzygy (1973, UK) and Brontomek! (1976, UK) good examples of a type of expatriate English science fiction of the 1970s which I find strangely appealing.

Cat Karina (1982, UK) is not that. It’s set in the far distant future, the Greataway, on an Earth populated by many races that have been genetically melded with assorted animals, and in which technology is anathema - in fact, even fire is banned. The novel is explicitly framed as the telling of a legend, so much so it inserts commentary on later distortions and interpretations of the story. And alternative timelines, happentracks, predicated on decisions made by Karina and others which might affect the future, or Ifalong.

There’s a prophecy, but it’s really a millennia-long plan to bring about the birth of someone who can free Starquin, “the greatest person the Earth has ever known”, and it involves the title character, who is a Specialist, a human with animal genes, and a felina, meaning the animal genes are from jaguars. Karina lives in a village on the sailway line, a wooden monorail with wind-powered sailcars. One section of the track is too steep for wind-power, so the sailcars must be hauled up to the summit. By teams of felinos. The chief cargo on the sailway is tortugas, a highly-prized fruit grown in the mountains on heavily-guarded farms.

A handmaiden of the Dedo, a part of the Starquin’s body “in human form”, tries to manipulate Karina so she follows the plan, but Karina has a mind of her own… but eventually ends up making the right decisions. The main story follows the preparations for an annual sailcar race to deliver the season’s first tortugas to the coast, and the plan to use a sailcar built using forbidden technology - ie, metal - but this will mean there will no longer be a need for gangs of felinos. Which results in a revolution, with the Specialists overthrowing the True Humans.

There is little, to be honest, all that original about the plot of Cat Karina - it runs on rails as well-greased as the sailway. And, it must be said, the novel does a great deal of heavy-lifting when it comes to filling in the back-history of the universe (there is a later trilogy set in the same universe), but it does so with some really quite smart neologisms and an impressive economy. I don't think Cat Karina privileges world-building over story, a common fault is science fiction and fantasy, but its world-building is certainly more original and accomplished than its story. Karina is an engaging hero and well-characterised, and it never feels like she’s being pushed and prodded by the plot, even though the narrative often details other happentracks. There’s some nice invention in places, the secret of the tortugas, for example, which is an important plot-point, unlike the secret of the tumps (huge torpid meat animals), which is not.

Cat Karina is a well-crafted novel, and a good example of its particular type, To be honest, I much prefer Coney’s near-future sf, but for fans of sf set so far in the future it might as well be fantasy, Cat Karina, and, I expect, the trilogy which followed it, are good reads.

And now I have finished a re-read of The Adjacent. I'm beginning to think that Chris Priest's novels are actually all one novel, looked at from different angles and through different eyes in different worlds in each book. In The Adjacent, a lot of these different viewpoints come together; some of them are trying to occupy the same space at the same time...

Only managed to read a single book while we were overseas (loving up the grandkids took all my time), but it was a good one: Gottfried Benn's IMPROMPTUS: Selected Poems, translated by the great Michael Hofmann.

A modernist poet with a dark aspect--his first collection was a volume called MORGUE & OTHER POEMS, which kind you gives you the idea of his oeuvre.

Favorite poems included "Threat", "Turin", "Think of the Unsatisfied Ones", "Restaurant", "What's Bad".

Not an easy poet, but a rewarding one.

Recommended.