Ray Bradbury
The Illustrated Man
[rate 3.5] This book epitomises the reason I love science fiction so much – in no other genre is it possible to explore so totally the different directions society could go in.

This is a collection of short stories by one of the greats of short-story telling. Some people sneer at short stories, saying that they are a cop out and not proper literature. Not true in my opinion. A well crafted short story can be a gem, making us think of things in a new way, and at his best Bradbury excells at the art. The Illustrated Man, unfortunately, is not Bradbury at his best. Which is not to say that you shouldn’t read it – Bradbury on an off day is still better than the majority of people on a good day – and there are one or two in the collection of 16 that are really rather supreme. It was published in 1952, which should clue you in to the mind-set it was written from. America had recently proven they had the power to wipe us clear off the face of the Earth, racial tensions were reaching critical mass, the space race was just in its infancy, and new technology was appearing on the scene faster than ever before.

The Other Foot: This starts out amazingly. The premise of the story is that in the 60’s, Mars was settled entirely by black people, and, whilst they are making a great community, back home on Earth it’s WW3. Cut to 20 years later and a lone rocket, with a few (white) surviors, lands on Mars, ready to extend the hand of friendship. For Earth has been effectively destroyed and they want to move the remaining hundred thousand or so to Mars to start over. Cue much racial tension, hatred, and reverse apartheid action, for the Martians haven’t forgotten all the Earthlings had done to them and theirs.

Up till the last page of this I was totally hooked, thinking what an amazing tale this was, and how cleverly Bradbury had, by turning the tables with whites being the oppressed, made a clear and powerful statement of the stupidity of segregation and the need for reconcilliation. This has all the makings of a modern day parable I thought to myself. And then, he goes and wimps out. Read it for yourself to find out why, but I closed the book in disgust, went into the kitchen, and wailed at Jo for half an hour about what a chicken Bradbury is.

The Highway: Apparently, The Highway is famous in American/Atomic history circles for being an insightful look at apocolyptic America. I went into it with an open mind and enjoyed it, though it is really short, even for a short story (5 pages), but I wouldn’t say it was amazingly insightful into post-apocolyptic America. The bomb is mentioned once and I am still not certain why the people were streaming north INTO America, but what the hey. For me, the story tells you more about the rich ignoring the poor on their doorstep and how, even when one way of life is wiped off the map, everyone else just keeps on going. The complete surprise and total lack of regret expressed by the Mexican when the American says ‘the world is over’ is beautiful in its simplicity and applicability to todays climate. What do they mean, ‘the world’?

Kalidescope: Got to love those gory, drawn out, death scenes in space. You are given no clue as to what went wrong, no real idea of why these men were in space in the first place, but you don’t need that. The Kalidescope is a wonderfully written piece looking at how people face certain death. The ending is a little corny, but that can be forgiven, because you get a glimpse of a society where space is seemingly travelled by hardened Mormon vetrans (one guy has at least three wives on three separate planets. Brave guy). Yes, the image of space/colonies as the modern Wild West, is now passe but remember – 1952, not so much.

The Man: A space-age collection wouldn’t be complete without at least one tale of the search for God in the cosmos. Patchy writing, good ideas.

Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
[rate 5] I could, and do, read this book over and over again, and it never gets old. So I know what happens, but I still get a lump in my throat at the sad bits, and get all weepy with a warm fluffy feeling at the end. Definately a desert island book.

This is a book that, hopefully, needs no introduction. If you are too lazy to read (shame on you), get your mitts on a copy of the BBC adaptation with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle, as it is a damn good version. But back to the book. It tells the story of the trials and tribulations experienced by the two eldest Bennet daughters (Jane and Lizzy), and the course of true love. That’s the surface. The more you read it, the more you realise that Austen had a wicked sense of humour and that she beautifully crafts her characters.

If you’ve seen the BBC adapation, I am sorry to have to break it to you, but there is no wet-shirt scene in the book. Sorry.

Margaret Attwood
Oryx and Crake
[rate 3.5] Just above the average three-penguin, but not quite up to a four-penguin standard. Fans of Attwood, whilst enjoying this, won’t feel it is her best. People new to Attwood might be advised to read Blind Assassin or Robber Bride first to get a feel for her work.

This is another book recommended by Moose. Really should stop talking to that girl – she is being detrimental to my studies 😉 Anyhoo, those of you familiar with the Attwood canon of work will find all you are expecting in Oryx and Crake: dual story lines, messed up chronologies, with a post-apocalyptic setting remeniscent of Handmaid’s Tale. The chronology/story-line isn’t quite as confusing as Blind Assassin with it’s four (or five depending on how you count) parallel themes, but I prefered Assassin to this. Not that Oryx and Crake is bad, it isn’t, it is very good, especially at its chilling view of the near future and humanities downward spiral to self destruction, but I felt no connection to Snowman/Jimmy, and something was missing from the Children of Crake, so that I couldn’t picture them fully either. Perhaps that is the point?

I am musing out loud now, so forgive me if I ramble. The more I think on that last point, the unreality of the Craker’s, how they are missing something, perhaps that is Attwood’s point? Because the Children were designed to be a new (read better ?) form of humanity, with certain traits omitted, we just cannot identify with them. It is the very flaws omitted from the Children which make us human.

Hmmm, I am just talking out of my hat. The idea I want to express is on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t seem to put it into words right now. Don’t be surprised if this review isn’t rewritten a couple of times! As for the ending – pah! Left gloriously open so you can make up your own mind as to the fate of Snowman, humanity, and the Children of Crake, but I was left with a lingering sense of disapointment. Am I being too morbid in that I project fullscale destruction of the Children by the remaining humans? I can’t see the two groups living together somehow. Part of me wants a Planet of the Apes-type ending, where the Children reign supreme, but if war/strife/etc simply isn’t part of their makeup, how can that be? Or will the essential ‘humanity’ of the Children resurface. After all, they have started to make art…

I don’t know. Something was off about this one to me. It didn’t quite hit all the buttons I have come to expect Attwood to hit.

Now if you will excuse me I am off to read Blind Assassin once more to restore my faith in her skill. Not Handmaid’s Tale though, that just plain freaked the hell out of me.

Cherith Baldry
The Roses of Roazon
[rate 3] You know it’s not going to let you down, but it doesn’t challenge you in any way, or over stimulate you at all.

I really rather liked this one. I wasn’t expecting on it, seeing as how I just grabbed it off the shelf as I was passing in the Library, but it turned out to be one of those one-day books I get sometimes. You know, the ones that you start over the morning cup of tea at 8am, and next time you look up you find its 1230 and you’ve finished. It is also one of those rare books – the one volume epic. There has been a notable (and rather depressing) trend in fantasy lately for the trilogy. Sometimes this works (Robin Hobb‘s three related trilogies are exquisite), but more often than not it is just an excuse for laziness. Often times you find enough ideas for one book stretched between three, sometimes more. Robert Jordan (will the Wheel of Time sequence NEVER end?) is more than a little to blame for this I feel, but I am sure Hollywood with it’s love of sequels should shoulder some of the culpability, that, and other causes. But that’s not what I want to get into now.

Roses isn’t bad. It has a good premise – a medieval Brittany analogue, but where visions of the future and other slightly unconventional things (I hesitate to say magic) are the norm – the characters are nicely sketched out, and the tension builds to a pretty climatic ending. It’s slightly predictable in that who ends up with who is clear from a good few units-of-distance-measurement away (bar one relationship that, whilst clearly doomed, wasn’t totally obvious), and (I don’t think I am going to surprise anyone here) good triumphs, but it is definitely a cut above the standard fantasy you find giving the genre a bad name.

If I have a problem with the book, it is with the ending. The last two or three chapters felt a little rushed – the sort of rush you get when the editor goes “Um, we’re at 500 pages already and you’re showing no signs of wrapping it up…” – and there was a uncomfortably forced messianic parallel which left a bad taste in my mouth. Think the Neo’s ending in Matrix Three and you get where I am headed.

Other than that, I would recommend this book. Perhaps not enough to buy it full price, but get it out of the library again, and buy any other books of hers that I find (going cheap/on special offer). And make a mental note not to start reading one if you have to get an early night or have important work to do!

Baldry

John Wyndham
Stowaway to Mars
[rate 2] I want it to be more, I really do, but I have to obey the rating system!

Now I like John Wyndham, correction, I love John Wyndham. The man, I thought, could do no literary wrong. Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes are two of my all time favourite books, bar none. The Midwich Cuckoos is also a cracking read, and an even scarier film (the Village of the Damned). As I said, Wyndham is a master of classic science fiction. Note I say ‘classic’ science fiction. By this I mean the story happens in the real world, based on Einsteinian & Newtonian physics, and quite firmly does not subscribe to the fantastical in any way. The stories are more to do with how ordinary people react to situations that, if a little odd, have their basis in what is happening hear and now. If you ignore the alien causation ^*1*, The Kraken Wakes is as relevant a tale about global warming today as it was when it was written in the 1950s. Ditto Day of the Triffids on genetic modification.

So I was more than a little disappointed by Stowaway. I hadn’t heard of the book before, and after reading it, I can see why. Published in 1935 under the pseudonym John Beynon, this is pulp pure and simple. Not even very good pulp at that. One thing I always liked about Wyndham’s work was that the women weren’t your stereotypical bimbos – they were strong, in many cases saving the day time over time – which is rare even in modern science fiction, let alone pieces written over half a century ago. In Stowaway the two women are plot devices with no redeeming features. The wife of the main character is an educated woman who, once married, looses all idea of self-worth and reverts to stereotype, whilst the other woman… Again, meant to be a strong educated woman, but not so much with the brains. She’d been in the book one page and I was rooting for her to be pushed out of the nearest airlock, and I’m not a violent person!

Nothing about this book recommends it to the reader. The prose is forced, showing none of Wyndham’s characteristic lyric turn; the dialogue is laughable and memorable only in its sheer appallingness; and there is no tension. Zip. Nada. On practically the very first page you are told that all the characters reach Mars, have fun, and survive the return trip to try again another day. Ok, Wyndham never was one for killing off his main characters, so we’ll let that one slide a bit, but I felt no anxiety about what was happening, no curiosity about how it was going to turn out ok. There was no connection between the reader and what was happening on the page.

If I could come up with one redeeming feature, it is this: there is a constant undertone of the media as corrupt, wielding too much power, and willing to destroy anyone in the way of a story. In one lovely scene, two journalists are talking about how the wife of the main astronaunt/billionaire/playboy/adventurer couldn’t bring herself to say goodbye before her husband set off to be the first man on Mars ^*2*. The first journalist is bewailing the lack of good photos. His friend turns to him and says “you should see the montage your photo people put together last night. Very touching. Bring tears to your eyes”. Spectacle, throughout the book, is more important than facts.

Wyndham does try to get in the expected biting subtext, warning us of something in our present day culture that could easily go wrong in the future. He’s a good little science-fiction writer in that respect. But it just goes wrong.

I wanted to like this book and am going to read it again just to make sure I didn’t miss anything, but I don’t think that I did. It just misses on all counts. When you read it, it is clear that it was one of those stories churned out for the pulp magazines in their hundreds. Something to pay the bills, but not to stand the test of time. It is a great sadness that John Wyndham didn’t write more books, so we wouldn’t be so desperate for any scrap of his genius left.

Endnotes:
^*1*Yes, he resorts to aliens, but only as plot-device. In most of his ‘alien’ books, you never even see single alien from cover to cover.
^*2*For she is a woman, and all women hate and fear machines, because they threaten our reproductive prerogative. Yeah, I have no idea what Wyndham was on when he wrote this either.

If you want a truly… odd… eight minutes (and 29 seconds), then go download JB’s first (and he claims last) podcast. There really is nothing quite like listening to someone’s voice for the first time to completely screw over your impressions of them.

Trust me, got a grin on a mile wide.

Among other things, I have just learnt that Austin Powers: the spy who shagged me, is Austin Powers Delux in Japanese. Sure to come in handy next time we get invaded by Canadians at Meadow Towers and go on a mammoth Trivial Pursuit drive.

Oh, and before you ask, no. Definitely not. I won’t be doing a podcast any time soon ever. If you’re curious, my accent is apparently posh with a side order of Somerset wurzel. If you are really curious, I think there’s about 10 seconds of me on one of the Race For Life videos, but I’m not helping you out by linking to them.

(And oddly enough, my spell checker likes the word “wurzel” without any input from me. Cool.)

I just had a bit of a scare when I checked the blog-stalking map and saw three blobs. Panic not! 2005 has just been archived by the system. We get to start a fresh in 2006 🙂