August, 2025 Reading: "But curiosity is itself a form of hope." Madison Smartt Bell, STRAIGHT CUT

More poetry in August, sitting on my back deck once the sun has moved to the other side of the house, shaded, a cold drink in front of me, notebook close at hand.

My idea of nirvana.

Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett

Cited by many as their favourite of the Discworld novels, it’s certainly one of the more quotable books of the series, at least in the sense it has more quotable lines of commentary than the sort of bad jokes people like to quote (but really shouldn’t). The one about Vimes and his boots - a serious point, not a joke - has had a lot of airplay on social media over the years.

Men at Arms is the second of the City Watch novels, featuring many of the cast from Guards! Guards!, published four years earlier. A new recruit, human but brought up by dwarfs, is unknowingly the heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork (which has not had a king or queen for centuries), and a prominent member of the Assassins’ Guild has decided restoring the monarchy would be good for the city and his own much-reduced fortunes.

Meanwhile, the Night Watch has taken on some other recruits under a new hiring initiative, including a dwarf, a troll and a woman. They are, of course, completely inept, except the woman, who’s actually a werewolf. They investigate a series of random murders, and begin bonding as a squad. Sergeant Vimes is due to marry a duchess, the richest woman in the city (although, to be honest, the eccentric animal (dragons, in this case) sanctuary-obsessed aristocrat is a bit of a tired cliché). And the aforementioned assassin has stolen the “gonne”, Discworld’s only firearm, and is using it to murder people to discredit the Lord Patrician, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork.

It can hardly be a surprise the new recruits foil the plot, more by accident than by design, but that’s how these sorts of stories work. Pratchett has fun with his characters, using them to mock various institutions and attitudes, both Ankh-Morporkian and real world. There are several laugh out loud lines, and a number of bitter-sweet moments. II’s easy to understand why so many pick Men at Arms as a favourite.

And a much longer review, of The Ministry of Time, a nominee for this year's Clarke Award:

https://medium.com/@ian-93054/the-ministry-of-time-kaliane-bradley-da55d556f35f

Read last month:

The Maniac by Benjamín Labatut- Loved it a few weeks ago and like even more now. Fascinating subjects. Creepy. Labatut's scientists are always so melodramatic. Great read.

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin- Martin comes across as very sensitive and very smart, very likeable. I wish he had spent more time talking about the concept behind his comedy persona, and why it touched a nerve in the 70's. Entertaining read. Somewhere around 4 stars or close.

All Fours by Miranda July- It's a very well written book but to be fair I'm not the intended audience. I really wasn't moved by the main predicament. After all my eye-rolling, I did find the ending unexpectedly touching. 3.5 stars is about right for me.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden- The beginning was very restrained, very delicate. I thought it was going to be a psychological portrait of a stunted character. Eventually it becomes a full fledged Dutch telenovela. There are a few extended sex scenes that don't really advance the plot but overall I think it was a fairly good debut novel.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong- A beautiful book about the sensory variety in animals and the ways they interact with the world. Great read, full of fascinating ideas. I will say, it was not a long book but it was a bit overwhelming. I tuned out several times. Highly recommended though.

Wish I Was Here, M John Harrison

Subtitled “an anti-memoir”, Wish I Was Here is actually, well, a memoir. It’s M John Harrison writing about certain periods of his life, and how he thought about it then, or at least how he imagined he thought about it then, and how he thinks about it now. It’s not about his writing per se, although his writing career is often mentioned. Nor is it his life, although that does provide the book’s narrative arc.

Harrison was born in the Midlands - Rugby, to be exact - to a middle-class family but struggled to find a career. He moved to London, he became a writer, he fell in with the New Worlds crowd. He moved north, he became a climber. He moved back to London, his writing career benefited. He moved to his current address, where he can now look back in relative comfort to a life that had few periods of relative comfort.

None of this is especially surprising, or offers any real insight to what he writes and why. But Harrison here is writing about his life much as he writes about the peripheral characters and events in his novels, and it’s plain how the two are related. There’s little doubt now Harrison is one of the finest writers UK genre has produced, and if his position in the wider UK literary scene is less certain it’s only because of anti-genre snobbery. But they’re gradually coming round and, as Harrison celebrates his 80th birthday, the quality of his fiction is becoming more widely recognised.

Myself, I’ve always admired his writing, although I’d like to reread all those novels I read back in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, as I think I’d appreciate them more. (Happily, I have copies of all of them, although many are in storage.) I was surprised on reading The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again last year, and Wish I Was Here, how readable his prose is. I mean, I’ve always felt he had a superb ear for dialogue - it's so effortlessly realistic - but I’d formed the impression he was a difficult read. He’s not. Wish I Was Here demonstrates this in abundance. It’s so straightforward that it actually suggests it's anything but. If that makes sense.

Every time I read a novel by M John Harrison, I want to go back and reread all his previous novels. Wish I Was Here is not a novel, but it has the same effect. Much as Harrison revisited his memories to write this “anti-memoir”, I want to revisit my memories of his books, the ones I read ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago. And explore them afresh, admire them all over again, perhaps for different reasons. Which is the whole point.

Red Mist, Patricia Cornwell

The nineteenth book in the Kay Scarpetta series, and following straight on from the previous one, Port Mortuary. Scarpetta has been invited to the Georgia Prison for Women to speak to the woman who sexually abused Jack Fielding (Scarpetta’s deputy, who was murdered in Port Mortuary) when he was twelve, and whose daughter is the psycho genius responsible for his death (and several others). Scarpetta is then contacted by Jaime Berger, no longer DA responsible for sex crimes in New York, but now based in Savannah - and it turns out she manipulated Scarpetta into visiting Georgia. Because she thinks a young woman on death row who brutally murdered a respected doctor and his family ten years prior is innocent.

Scarpetta resents being manipulated, but then Berger is murdered… and the hunt is on for a poisoner, who may be linked to the prison and responsible for the the deaths of several inmates who died of “natural causes” just hours before they were due to be executed. The whole gang is in Savannah - Marino, Lucy, Bentley - and it seems the poisoner was actually responsible for the doctor’s murder ten years ago.

The plot is, to be honest, a bit weak. Once again, Scarpetta's reputation is attacked (the murderer from the previous book is claiming Scarpetta tried to kill her). There’s another psycho genius hiding in the background, and whose identity is pretty easy to guess. Everyone seems particularly slow to spot things, including Scarpetta, and the killer is found more or less by accident. But there’s some good autopsy scenes and some good deductive science in identifying the poison.

Red Mist seems to close off a two-book story arc, so I expect the next one, The Bone Bed, will introduce yet another psycho genius who will murder a few people, then twists the facts of the case to make Scarpetta look like the villain, before being shot and killed while trying to murder Scarpetta... But we shall see.

Rutger Bregman's latest, MORAL AMBITION, isn't merely a call to arms for progressives, it's a blueprint and roadmap for how we can effect real change on a community and global scale.

I've been a huge fan of Bregman's since he reduced Tucker Carlson to a spluttering rage, have followed his work ever since.

Proceeds from this book are being directed to an organization Bregman has helped found which assists people in acquiring the tools to become more effective at highlighting and funding good causes. Bregman believes a few good people really CAN transform the world into a better place and after reading this book, even an old, vicious cynic like me is tempted to subscribe to that view.

https://www.moralambition.org

Long review of The Mars House by Natasha Pulley, which I really liked, despite thinking her earlier The Kingdoms was not very good.

https://medium.com/@ian-93054/the-mars-house-natasha-pulley-c41c0fe47fcb

I've been reading Theodore Roszak's Flicker, a 1991 novel which starts out exploring film history in an era (the early 1960s) before that was fashionable, and ends in a very different place. It pre-shadows many of our current obsessions, both for good and bad. My review:

That ending tied with the original Twin Peaks finale in terms of sticking with (and unsettling) me for a solid while.

The Affirmation, Christopher Priest

I’ve read a number of Priest’s novels over the years - I think the first was The Glamour back in the late 1980s. And there was a period in the late 1990s when I read each new novel by him as it hit paperback. That ended with The Separation, which I seem to recall had a troubled publishing history. It was nearly a decade before his next book appeared, by which point he’d sort of dropped off my radar, before slowly creeping back intermittently over the next couple of decades.

Which is not to say I didn’t like what I’d read, and I’d always admired his writing, and sort of planned to catch up with the works I’d missed. Hence The Affirmation, which was originally published 44 years ago, and joined the SF Masterworks series in 2011. It’s also the first novel to feature the Dream Archipelago, which Priest returned to several times, in a collection and a further three novels.

In 1976, twenty-nine year old Peter Sinclair suffers a breakdown after a string of appalling luck over a few weeks - his father dies, he’s made redundant, his landlord evicts him, and his girlfriend dumps him. He decides to write his autobiography as a form of recovery. But as he writes, he searches for a “greater truth” by disguising its setting. So the UK becomes Faiandland, London is Jethra, and everyone in Sinclair’s life is given another name.

In this “autobiography”, Sinclair has won a lottery for immortality treatment, and travels south by ship to Collago, an island in the Dream Archipelago. There is a side-effect to the treatment: amnesia. So Sinclar must document his life in order to help the clinic’s therapists restore his memories. But this version of Sinclair has written an “autobiography” too, about his life in London…

The narrative drifts back and forth between Sinclair in the UK and Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago, each one muddying the other. UK Sinclair is clearly in a bad state. He’s rescued by his sister, and then his girlfriend turns up and the two reconcile and move in together. It does not go well. Faiandland Sinclair is not sure he wants to be immortal, even after entering into a relationship with the Dream Archipelago avatar of his girlfriend.

The Dream Archipelago is first presented as an invention of Sinclair, which explains its inconsistencies and the somewhat unharmonious names. It’s equatorial, the northern continent is inhabited, the southern continent is uninhabited, but there’s a war and the islands form a neutral zone. The point being Sinclair’s invented world is not very convincing. But Sinclair is so invested in it - intellectually and emotionally - that he has trouble determining which is which. Details slip and slide between the two, especially after Sinclair has taken the treatment and is trying to regain his memory.

The Affirmation is… unsettling, and cleverly done. Priest covered similar ground in later novels, and in a manner that was more sophisticated. Which is hardly surprising. He had a singular oeuvre, which is definitely worth exploring, and I clearly have more catching up to do.

>11 iansales: One of the interesting things about The Affirmation is that the reader's reaction to the Dream Archipelago may vary depending on whether you've already read any of the other stories set there. If you haven't, then it's easy to think of the Archipelago as a construct of Peter Sinclair's disintegrating personality. But if you have read any of Priest's three preceding short stories in the same setting, then something different is happening, because to those readers, the Archipelago has an independent existence beyond Peter Sinclair's imagination.

Just to add to the authorial games here, The Affirmation is also the title of a novel referenced in Priest's earlier story The Negation, which is also set in the Archipelago. The two books are not the same.

>12 RobertDay: Within the novel, it's clearly a construct of Sinclair's mind. The fact Priest has used it before doesn't really change that reading.

Witch World, Andre Norton

I remember reading some novels by Norton back in the 1970s, but I don’t remember if Witch World was one of them. Probably not. Nothing in it seemed remotely familiar. Or particularly good. Although it was on the Hugo Award shortlist in 1964. The only memory I have of the novels by Norton I read back then is that they were science fiction adventure stories, on a par with something like the Hardy Boys. And with, I seem to recall, mostly teenage or young adult protagonists. Enjoyable, but not memorable. To a teenager, at least.

And I think you’d have to be a teenager to put up with the awful cod-mediaeval dialogue Norton uses in Witch World. The plot is simple: Simon Tregarth - who is not a teenage or young adult protagonist - is on the run after a life of adventure post-war, not always on the right side of the law. He meets a man who promises him a new life, where he will never be caught. Tregarth goes with him, and learns the man is the guardian of the Siege Perilous, a magical stone which can send people to other worlds. Tregarth gets sent to one. Cue adventures.

The world is vaguely mediaeval, with the odd bit of high tech, which even Tregarth thinks is weird and inconsistent. There’s also magic, but he doesn’t blink an eye at that. Nor the fact it’s only women who can perform magic, and they lose the ability if they’ve had sex (which is a bit annoying for Tregarth, as he fancies one of the witches big time). But then it turns out he has magical abilities - a man! inconceivable! - and he’s definitely not a virgin.

Anyway, Tregarth joins the Guards of Estcarp, and plays a pivotal role in a war against the Kolder, human invaders from another world - Norton comes within an inch of describing them as “Yellow Peril” - who turn those they capture into robot zombies. Despite proving unstoppable for much of the novel, Tregarth manages to stop them. There are, of course, a few diversions along the way - failing to defend the trader city of Sulcarkeep, meeting the misogynist Falconers of the mountains, a pogrom against those of the “old blood” in Karsten, a forced marriage in Verlaine, and even discovering the tomb of one of the ancient race who occupied the planet before the humans arrived. It’s all very thrilling…

Witch World went on to spawn a series of more than twenty books over four decades, not all by Norton alone. I have the second book of the series, Web of the Witch World, but I very much doubt I’ll be reading any further.

Subspace Explorers, EE Doc Smith

There is a Brian Aldiss story, ‘Confluence’ - I’ve referenced it a number of times in reviews - which consists of amusing dictionary definitions of words from an alien language. Such as “SHAK ALE MAN: the struggle that takes place in the night between the urge to urinate and the urge to continue sleeping”. And, “YUP PA: a book in which everything is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it”. Sadly there’s no word that means “a book in which everything is understandable except a person’s reason for reading it”. Which is certainly true when it comes to the works of EE 'Doc' Smith, and most especially Subspace Explorers, published in 1965. It was a reread for me, but I last read it when I was twelve or thirteen, and I remembered pretty much nothing of it. Sadly, I cannot go back to that state of blissful ignorance.

Several centuries from now - exactly when is impossible to tell as the world-building is extremely poor - the Earth is split into a WestHem and EastHem: the first is a corrupt democracy controlled by corrupt unions, and the second is a tyranny masquerading as communism. In fact, the entire political set-up of the novel is cobbled together from US knee-jerk right-wing myths: communism evil! unions bad! politicians corrupt! big government bad! monopolistic corporations good! There are also colonies on a number of other worlds, all of which were settled, and are run, by corporations. Spaceships travel through subspace to journey between these worlds and “Tellus” (the Latin name for Earth, which Smith, bizarrely, used in all his fiction).

A spaceship, the Procyon, suffers some sort of catastrophe in subspace. There are only five survivors - the first officer, the astrogator, the daughter of the owner of the biggest oil company in existence and wed to the first officer only hours earlier, her friend who is also the girlfriend of the astrogator, and a scientist who later turns out to be the giantest brain in all of human history. The oil magnate’s daughter is an oil dowser, and the subspace wreck has given her super mind powers, which she then teaches to the other four…

Meanwhile, the nasty old unions in WestHem are trying to break the corporations, who want to automate everything in order to keep down inflation (er, what?). The copper miners threaten to strike, because copper is apparently vital in the future. But the psionic five can dowse for metal, and they find a huge copper deposit on another planet for GalMet, the mining monopoly, also based offworld. The copper miners’ strike fails, so the milk truck drivers go on strike, because centuries in the future milk is once again delivered to people’s homes in bottles and this is so vital to life on Earth that a strike could cause society to collapse… The corporations break the strike using giant-sized battle tanks to deliver the milk (yes, really).

Anyway, the corporations defeat the nasty unions, inadvertently triggering a nuclear war, but never mind, the corporations’ “superdreanought” spaceships manage to destroy the missiles before they cause any important damage. The corporations trigger a WestHem election, but lose it to a coalition of all the political parties - which are all corrupt and evil, of course. But never mind. “Enlightened self-interest”, AKA unregulated corporate operations, will win out eventually. Then the corporations' blockade of Earth Tellus is broken by a mysterious fleet of superdreadnoughts from an unknown planet.

Then it turns out one corporation, previously unmentioned in the novel, has for more than 200 years been running a secret world with a strictly-regimented "feudal" society (it's not feudal, of course, because Smith clearly doesn't know what feudalism is). That’s where the mysterious fleet came from. (The Company Agents are all electrically-charged, and they wear rubber-soled boots, so if anyone touches them - which is just, no, just too fucking stupid for words.) Our hardy heroes, the five from the shipwreck mentioned earlier, with the amazing mind powers, who by now have taught pretty much everyone on the corporation-run planets their amazing mind powers, free the Company serfs on The Company World. But the Company serfs had been infiltrated by agents from a secret world settled by the USSR! And with only five pages to go our hardy heroes defeat them too!

I went into Subspace Explorers with low expectations. It not only failed to meet them, it dug a bottomless pit and then dived into it. Reading the infantile take on politics and economics used by Smith, his hatred of unions and valorisation of unregulated corporations, the implication inflation is more dangerous to a nation than nuclear war, I can only wonder how many of the techbros responsible for the shit state of the world today were influenced by it. We may mock sf and its “Torment Nexus”, but right-leaning politics as understood by a five-year-old such as that described in Smith’s novel, has probably caused more damage. Subspace Explorers is not just bad, it can cause brain damage. Techbros may well name-drop the Culture, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn Musk, Altman, Andressen, Thiel et al have read and assimilated this novel.

If you ever meet anyone who claims to like Subspace Explorers, back away slowly from them. Then turn around.

And run.

PARASITES LIKE US, Adam Johnson's first novel, written back in 2003.

I'm an enormous fan of this guy, who also authored THE ORPHAN MASTER'S SON, big prize-winner, and FORTUNE SMILES, the best short story collection I've read this decade.

In PARASITES, Johnson's genius is already front and center. Detailing the life of a mediocre anthropology professor in a mediocre university who is unlucky enough to come across a cache of strange artifacts relating to the "Clovis" people, who crossed the land bridge into America 12,000 years ago (and promptly wiped out over 30 mammals native to this continent).

Funny, chilling and thought-provoking.

Hallmarks of Johnson's work.

Highly recommended.

Discworld 16: Soul Music, Terry Pratchett

I’ve heard it said the Grateful Dead were not actually very good live, but every now and again everything would sort of fall into place and it would be an almost transcendental experience - and it was those moments which led to their popularity. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but I do know that such moments can happen at a live performance. I remember one gig at Corporation in Sheffield - I forget the year, or who was the main act, but a support act was playing. I was standing with two guys, complete strangers, and none of us was impressed. Then the band started a new song and all three of us said, “Now *that’s* interesting.” (For the benefit of non-Brits, that means it was good.)

In Soul Music, Pratchett takes those moments - generated here by magic, and by some magical force for its own ends - to chart (see what I did there?) the invention of a new kind of music in Ankh-Morpork. A harpist from Llamedos (read it backwards) moves to Ankh-Morpork. Unable to afford a license to perform, the harper falls in with a troll and a dwarf, and the three form a band, The Band With Rocks In (because the troll is a drummer and his drums are, er, rocks). The harper’s, er, harp is broken at an unlicensed performance, but he finds a new one in a mysterious shop that mysteriously appears mysteriously. And that changes everything. Suddenly, all The Band With Rocks In’s performances are like those mythical Grateful Dead performances.

Meanwhile, Death has left his post, upset over the death of his apprentice and adopted daughter, so his granddaughter takes over the role. But she’s not especially good at it. When she turns up to the Mended Drum at which the harpist - now calling himself Buddy (referencing a pop star who died, um, 66 years ago), and the troll has taken the name Cliff (a rock joke, and referencing a pop star who, I suspect, will never die)... The harpist is supposed to die at the gig, but instead Death’s granddaughter allows him to live, which only makes the music magic more powerful…

Pratchett has a great deal of fun taking the piss out of the music industry, although many of his references are a good thirty years earlier than the year the book was published. And some of the jokes about bands on the road were already clichés when Pratchett made use of them. Neither of which means the book isn’t amusing. And the Death/Death’s granddaughter narrative makes for a good contrast - and introduces some interesting characters (and makes use of several old ones).

I find the music industry a more interesting target than some of the targets in earlier Discworld novels, but it does occasionally feel like the jokes are a little too obvious and the commentary not as pointed or insightful. Having said that, my taste in music is… niche, and quite specific, and has regularly been misrepresented in popular culture. So perhaps that got a little in the way when I read Soul Music. All the same, I enjoyed it, although I wouldn’t put it in the top five of Discworld novels (of the ones I’ve read).

Black Wolf, Juan Gómez-Jurado

The second book in a trilogy featuring Antonia Scott, a neurodivergent super-genius who works for a secret European agency dedicated to solving high-profile crimes. She’s assisted by Jon Gutiérrez, a gay Basque police detective. The two first appeared in Red Queen, published in 2018 and adapted for television in 2024.

The pair are asked to assist in investigating the attempted murder of a Russian mobster’s girlfriend in Malaga. The girlfriend escaped, and is now on the run, but the mobster did not - and it turns out she was the financial genius behind all his shell companies and money laundering schemes. And because of that, the head of the Russian mob in the area wants her dead. So he asks his superiors back in Russia to send him some help, and they send the Black Wolf, a renowned assassin.

But when Scott and Gutiérrez stumble across a shipping container containing dead women who’d been trafficked to Spain, and the container is linked to the dead mobster, Scott is determined to take down the Russian mob in Malaga. But things aren’t as simple as they seem. Someone is attacking the organisation Scott works for, the police in Malaga are not as honest as they should be, and even the Black Wolf has her own agenda.

It all comes to a head in a villa in the woods near Madrid during a snowstorm. The Russians attack, and the handful of good guys - Scott, Gutiérrez et al - in the house have to hold out until the police arrive. Black Wolf is a more straightforward narrative than Red Queen, and its focus on the Russian bratva in Spain leaves less room for social commentary. There are still plentiful hooks to the third book, White King, however. This is a good series, with a pair of engaging leads, and already being compared to Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, although I’d argue it’s probably better, and I can understand why the first book was adapted for TV. It would be nice to see the other two adapted as well.

Chatterton, Peter Ackroyd

I knew I’d read this before, but I thought it was back in the very early 1990s. It turned out I was thinking of Hawksmoor and although I'd read Chatterton before, it was in 2004. Ackroyd is one of those authors whose books I don’t make an effort to search out, but will happily read and enjoy when I stumble across them… as I have done around half a dozen or so times to date. I should probably read more of them.

Chatterton is about Thomas Chatterton, a precocious poet and satirist, who committed suicide at the age of seventeen in 1770. He’s chiefly known for forging the poetry of an invented fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, and influencing the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth-century. Ackroyd’s novel has three narratives: Chatterton’s life shortly after he moved to London and leading up to his death; the circumstances surrounding the painting of 'The Death of Chatterton' some 80 years later by Henry Wallis, using Romantic poet George Meredith as a model; and in the present day, unsuccessful poet Charles Wychwood stumbles across a painting which suggests Chatterton faked his suicide, and later finds papers suggesting Chatterton forged a number of famous poem by Romantic poets.

The two historical narratives are great. Chatterton in period is convincing. Wallis, Meredith and Meredith’s wife, Mary, are even more convincing in London of eighty years later. Unfortunately, the present-day narrative (as of the year the book was published) is not so good. The characters are grotesque, mostly caricatures - not just the old couple who own the hidden-away junk shop where Wychwood finds the painting, but also Wychwood himself, and especially the ageing spinster novelist, Harriet Scrope (I mean, look at the name!), who then gets involved.

It’s a shame. It’s a fascinating mystery - or rather, it isn’t a mystery, but Ackroyd manufactures a mystery of it and does it well. But pretty much everyone involved in Wychwood’s present-day investigation is unlikeable and contemptible (with a handful of exceptions). Also, while Ackroyd’s wordplay works for the historical narratives, it feels over-egged in the contemporary narrative.

Having said all that, I’d actually remembered nothing of the novel from my previous read. So I’m glad I reread it… and it reminded me I really should read more of Ackroyd's fiction.

Walking Practice, Dolki Min

The debut novel of a South Korean illustrator, recently translated and published in English, and one of four winners of the Otherwise Award this year. The narrator is an alien living in Seoul who must concentrate on presenting a human appearance, or they’re liable to sprout arms and legs and eyes in odd places. They enjoy dating people online, arranging to meet them at home for sex and then, well, eating them. Yes, the narrator presents as both male and female during the story, and the title refers in part to the different gaits required to pass as each gender.

The prose tries to maintain a chatty tone, which I found grating. I know almost nothing about contemporary Korean literature, so I’ve no idea if it’s a popular style there (although I recall something similar in Greek Lessons by last year's Nobel laureate Han Kang when I read it earlier this year). I’ve read enough translated fiction, and even fiction in its original language and then translated into English (Swedish and French fiction, mostly) to know there’s a difference between translation and transliteration - and sometimes the latter often fails to take culture into account, both the original and that of the language being translated into (the same occurs all the fucking time from UK to US English, of course). The English translation of Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers didn't work for me because it relied too much on American idioms, and I don’t expect to find them in a Russian novel. Larsson’s Millennium trilogy was translated by an American who’d lived and studied in Denmark but was unfamiliar with many elements of Swedish culture and society. It showed. On the other hand, the English subtitles for a Swedish detective show I watched recently failed completely to transliterate a common Swedish expression because there was no obvious way to do so and keep the original sense.

Then there’s the writing system… Korean, of course, has its own writing system, Hangeul, and it’s very different to the variations on the Latin alphabet used by many other languages. An afterword by the translator points out the difficulties she had representing the author’s Hangeul orthographic tricks in the Latin alphabet. The nearest she could manage was through varying the kerning - which, as she admits to worrying about, does indeed look like bad typography or misprints.

Obviously, there’s more to Walking Practice than the tone of its narrative and the fact the English reading experience is a poor copy of the Korean reading experience. There’s a cinematic feel to the story, but unlike a movie there’s no story arc or resolution. Korean cinema doesn’t follow Hollywood story paradigms - it’s something to do with cats at present, isn’t it? - which is a good thing, and I’ve seen many excellent South Korean films. In future, I think, I’ll stick to their movies.

MAGDALENE, a 2017 collection of poems by Marie Howe.

I'm previously alluded to my admiration for Ms. Howe's verse and MAGDALENE only reinforces my high opinion of her.

I cannot believe how intimate and honest she is, her willingness to disclose and reveal all.

Highly recommended.

BOY and GOING SOLO by Roald Dahl.

Considering the many close shaves Dahl survived, from a terrible car accident in childhood, to serving with the badly under-staffed RAF in the Middle East during the Second World War, it's amazing Dahl lived to a ripe, old age.

Two gripping autobiographies, packaged together with illos by the great Quentin Blake.

Recommended.

MARSHLANDS, a novella by Andre Gide (from the NYRB imprint).

A perplexing work: modern, self-reflective, satirical. A book called MARSHLANDS about an author writing a book called MARSHLANDS.

Not sure I completely got the joke but there were some segments that definitely raised a spock-ian eyebrow.

Sound translation by Damion Searles.

I notice, like Criterion re-issues of cult or neglected films, this edition of MARSHLANDS features deleted scenes and various appended notes. Is this becoming more and more common in the publishing world?
If so, it's a trend I can probably do without.

A Million Open Doors, John Barnes

Nominated for both the Nebula and the Clarke Awards. Barnes seemed to have a moment in the mid-1990s, with a Hugo nomination, three Nebula nominations and three Clarke nominations. But no wins. And nothing since then except appearances on the Locus Award/readers’ poll pretty much every year until a decade ago (for his last published novel, in fact). A Million Open Doors is only the second book by Barnes I’ve read - I read Mother of Storms back in 1999.

A Million Open Doors is the first of four novels set in the Thousand Cultures. Set several centuries from now, Earth has colonised a number of worlds, each of which is home to one or more “cultures”, groups of people - ethnic, national, religious, some even completely invented. Like Nou Occitan, which is supposed to be some sort of Iberian Romantic culture of troubadours and duellists, but is really just massively sexist. The worlds were colonised by slower than light ships, but now “springers”, instantaneous transport, even across interstellar distances, connect them together.

When Giraut catches his paramour in flagrante delicto with a gang of “Interstellars” (youths aping what they think is an Earth culture by “beating up and degrading young girls”), he accompanies a friend to Caledony, which has just received its first springer. Caledon is a religious culture, which uses Christianity to justify some garbled economic philosophy. Giraut opens a school to teach Occitan culture - music, duelling, poetry, dancing, painting, etc - to the joyless Caledons. Unfortunately, the success of the Centre for Occitan Arts prompts a coup by hardliners, house arrest for the previous government, martial law and armed mobs on the streets.

To build support, Giraut and his liberal Caledon friends stage a camping trip across the continent, but there’s an accident in the mountains, resulting in several fatalities. While dashing back to get into comms range, Giraut discovers the ruin of an alien city. Meanwhile, while he was away, Council of Humanity troops have overthrown the hardliners…

Reading A Million Open Doors, I had trouble working out why it was science fiction. Yes, other planets, springers, spaceships, etc, but you could set the story on Earth. Some community full of rapists, another full of nutball religious types - I’m pretty sure you could find two towns that qualify in the US. Even the alien ruins could be the ruins of some prehistoric American culture. All the rest is just bells and whistles.

And when a science fiction novel is not science fiction, then what’s the point of it? And you also have to wonder why the novel appeared on two science fiction award shortlists. In other respects, it’s all just a little too textbook. Giraut is a sexist pig, but he comes to value and respect women - and even falls in love with one who’s not even attractive and whose physical faults he mentions repeatedly. Two characters are killed irretrievably - the technology exists to bring people back using personality recordings, and there’s even an example to illustrate it, the victim of a brutal sexual assault, torture and murder. (This is not so much everyday sexism as it is everyday sexual assault.) The bad guys get their just desserts - except, well, not really, a friend who insulted Giraut is humiliated (with a spanking, ffs), and the villainous pastor who seized power on Caledony is imprisoned off-world.

A Million Open Doors lost the Clarke to Jeff Noon’s Vurt, and the Nebula to Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (Sarah Canary or China Mountain Zhang would have been better winners). Even so, it didn’t belong on those shortlists. It’s mediocre, its one idea is in service to a story that doesn’t even need to be science fiction, and it’s offensive in parts.

Last book of the month, SEVERANCE by Ling Ma.

Entertaining end-of-the-world novel, engaging characters and swift, gripping plot. Wonderful detail, small touches that lend more credence to the narrative--God, I love tales about empty cities and decimated populations.

Misanthrope, that's me.

*Wrong thread. My bad.*