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 🙂

Well, as I write this post a very nice man is having a look at the insides of our front-door lock for the second time in as many months. Fortunately this time around I managed to get into the flat before it died, but still… here’s hoping I won’t have to see the nice man a third time.

Traditionally, this time of year is given over to taking stock of life, noting what happened in the previous year, and planning what you would like to happen in the next. It seems that, on the Internet, life is no different. Seeing as how my sheep-genes seem to be taking control, I feel that I should do the same.

2005 – the good, the bad, and the slightly unpleasant bits.
Well, 2005 has been a bit of a mixed year for me. Mainly good, but with a few things I could have done without. Known forever more as ‘the Year of the Thesis’, 2005 was, not surprisingly, heavily dominated by my completing an MSc in Archaeological Computing. Much fun was had, a fair amount was learnt, inordinate amounts of tea (and beer) were drunk, and a complete nervous breakdown was headed off at the pass. Just.

If anyone would now like to hold long conversations with me about the democratization of information, multivocality, hypertext authoring, social computing, wikis, archaeology, GIS, and a whole host of other scary things, then I am now fully qualified to talk about them. As much as the next person, anyway, so long as the next person isn’t Jerry Huggett.

Elsewhere in the land known as “the Past”, 2005 was also the year that I started Bright Meadow. Though you can trace the origins of the blog back through several geocities sites (which now exist only in the cobweb laden blog archives), April 5th 2005 marked the very first post at the new brightmeadow.blogspot domain, and at the close of the year, December 14th 2005 marked the appearance on the scene of brightmeadow.co.uk, a self-hosted, WordPress powered version of the blog.

2005 will also be remembered as the year in which:

• Moose and myself moved into Meadow Towers.
• I had fun seducing Canadians 😉
• I raised nearly £200 for the Race For Life.
• Curly Durly was forced to wonder if the universe hates her.
• I wrote of my beloved car back in February 🙁
• I watched far too many movies and purchased more DVDs than really I should have.
• I met some wonderful new people through the blog
• And I learnt that, whilst it is technically possible to fit six people in the back of a Nissan Micra, it is not advisable. Especially when you are attempting this in someone else’s car.

2006 – a space odyssey.
So what does 2006 have in store for Cas? That really is the 60 carat diamond question.

Off the top of my head:

• I’d like to put a few plans I have into action regarding the future of brightmeadow.co.uk
• I need to find a job, though I’d like to find a career.
• It would be nice to think about starting a Ph.D, but I don’t think I am silly enough to do that to myself.
• There’s a few guest articles I’ve been asked to write. I really should get on with writing them!
• More in the way of fiction writing should be coming your way. Maybe. Perhaps. If you’re nice to me.
• I really want to get my teeth into some proper coding. I have this bug in my brain for some application mods/new apps that I think might be quite groovy, but, well, I need to learn proper programming first! If anyone has tips on good places to start (i.e. a good beginners/intermediate book, or a fluffy language that won’t scare me too much), comment or drop me a line

According to the dude on Jools Holland last night, because this is a New Year without a new moon (rare, apparently), resolutions made this year will actually come true. In that case, mine are:

1. Get fit – yes, I know, unoriginal, but I’ve got the past three months of slacking to make up for. Loosing weight isn’t my main goal. Rather, I need to tone up what I’ve got. The loss of a few pounds would be nice though 🙂
2. Get some direction in my life. I need to find that… thing… to get me out of bed in the morning. I’m drifting right now, and I’m not a fan of drifting.
3. Lastly, just be happy. Easy to say. Not, in reality, that straightforward. Here’s hoping!

Anyway, that’s me. What are your resolutions?
Hope you all had a wonderful New Years, and here’s hoping 2006 has even more fun bits than 2005 did!