Iain M. Banks - Against a Dark Background

[Against a Dark Background went from my To Be Read shelf to before my eyes with the news of Banks' illness. By the time he died, the review had been written for a few weeks. The temptation to sanitize it and remove any criticism was strong. One generally does not speak ill of the dead in even minor ways, after all. But reviews are not bad mouthing but rather conversation, and it seems to me far preferable for a writer for their work to be engaged with, both in positive and negative ways, after their death, rather than for their work to be eulogized in a well-lit but sterile corner.]

When not writing literary fiction as Iain Banks, Iain M. Banks was best known for his Science Fiction novels set in his famous Culture setting, my favorite of which is Player of Games. Against a Dark Background is one of his few SF works that does not share that setting, though the Golter system that it develops is not far off in terms of Banks’ usual inventiveness. Problems in its plotting and pacing hold it back, but it does still possess power in its dark conclusion.

The novel follows Sharrow, a noblewoman that once led a crack mercenary team. She is drawn back into action when a religious organization, the Hushz, obtain a legal warrant to kill her due to their longstanding dispute with her family over a long-lost and incredibly devastating weapon known as the Lazy Gun. Accordingly, Sharrow gets the old team back together and goes after the Gun herself. Things get progressively more complicated from there. Other players operate in the shadows, and each step closer to the Gun forces her closer and closer to her family’s secrets.

Sharrow’s search takes her through just about all of Golter and the planets around it, giving Banks a book’s worth of opportunities to play tour guide. Luckily, his creations don’t disappoint. Against a Dark Background’s setting is a dystopic satire of the late twentieth century filled with hilarious people, ideas, and institutions that are as zany and often as awesome as anything Banks has created. Unlike in the Culture, technological progress did not bring Golter to enlightenment. Golter’s people reached the stars, but their system was impossibly distant from anything else. As Banks writes: “[Golter] had found itself alone and it had spread itself as far as it could and produced so much, but it was still next to nothing” (p. 4020).

Technology brought no wisdom. Instead, numerous wars left humanity sitting in its own rubble. Marvels from the past, known as “antiquities” (p. 22), are hunted by teams like Sharrow’s, the world’s fragile peace is maintained by the litigious and bureaucratic World Court, and we all sit on piles of weaponry more than sufficient to annihilate one another. Religious cults of increasing strangeness abound. Some of the faithful keep themselves permanently chained to walls, a kingdom is run by the Useless Kings that style themselves the “Prime Detesters of God the Infernal Wizard” (p. 227), and a roving band of pirates is composed entirely of solipsists.

It’s a setting that allows endless, madcap adventure, and Banks capitalizes on it. As Sharrow travels to first recollect her team and then follow the clues she finds toward the Lazy Gun, the book is divided into a succession of miniature arcs that are separated by changes in scenery and that each culminate in grand set pieces. There is an SF train robbery, the thieving of priceless and closely-guarded jewels from a city of boats, ambushes in bars, escapes from armored cars, contended battles through miles of woodlands, assassination attempts via flying beasts, and much more. To all that Banks adds a series of flashbacks detailing Sharrow’s past and youth with her team and her family, many of which manage to be genuinely touching – and to explore yet more corners of Golter.

Alas, problems soon set in with these adventures, beginning with the sheer number of them. Moving onto a new chunk of Golter, or even onto a new planet, after each heist breaks up any momentum that might have otherwise built up. Save the team, everyone else is left behind, and Banks’ ingenious creations soon start to have the feel of theme park rides: thrilling and well-constructed but suited to one purpose only and best left as soon as that purpose is done. Up until the very end, the intensity of the heists itself doesn’t change much. Though the prize of the Gun does get closer with each victory, hunting down clue Y rather than clue X does not feel like appreciable progress.

More importantly, Banks somehow manages to find the perfect, unbalanced position between a character that can do anything and a character that is helpless against the odds, and the result is a near total lack of tension. When Sharrow and her team hatch a scheme, it will succeed. We never see them outwitted in action, at least not for long. Whenver they decide to avoid the Hushz, they do so with ease. But, with no warning at all, Sharrow is frequently outwitted and captured. Those scenes are so abrupt that not only can Sharrow do nothing against them but also the reader has no sense of building danger. Whether or not a given scene plays out in her favor seems entirely out of her hands or anyone else’s. Banks doesn't so much incorporate both Sharrow’s abilities and the danger she faces as he does veer wildly between them.

Despite all that, the last hundred or so pages do manage to tie much of the novel together and to deliver a powerful thematic punch. The comedic, light adventures of pursuing the Lazy Guns and the clever wit packed into the guns themselves and the quest is set against the titular dark background of Golter’s degenerate state and even of mankind itself. As the novel nears its conclusion, that background grows, and we watch it swallow the tiny pinprick of light that is our main characters and their quest. The reader has the tendency to clutch onto the light all the harder, to hold onto it like a man dangling over a cliff. But Banks stomps on our fingers and lets us fall.

Golter is a world shaped by violence, a world scarred by the destruction wrought upon it to the extent that men can never forget it, keep circling it endlessly, afraid to move away lest any change trigger more upheaval. As Sharrow knows, “All I’ve ever been was made by weaponry and death” (p. 483). The only way out, Geis tells us, is to tear it all up and move on: only a new order can save poor Golter, only some new message can win people’s hearts and minds. All you see here, however precious it might be to us, might have to be sacrificed. Perhaps we need a new beginning; a clean slate. Perhaps that is our only hope (p. 473). Reform is impossible. The system must be torn up entirely and remade anew.

It is this kind of reformation that Sharrow comes to oppose in the novel’s (stupendous) final chapter. Destroying the remnants of the past system will only lead to further horror. The well-intentioned upheaval planned by Geis will be an upheaval like any other save that it will be even worse for its totality. As Sharrow acts to destroy his new order, rejecting his half-hearted apologies for the carnage and his offers to her to join him, she thinks: Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming (p. 484).

By its final pages, Against a Dark Background has become a clear-sighted and devastating work. Banks acknowledges the horrors of the world. He doubts that any subtle, peaceful reform can change it. But he also knows with a cold certainty that any attempt to tear it up, to force disobedient and warring men into a utopia is a cure worse than the disease – indeed, is a cure that only revitalizes and intensifies the ailment. Though the institutions that we have cause great harm, Banks tells us, the horror is not truly in them. It is in us. No new configuration can change that. His is a novel that, despite all of its fun and wit, brings us up to the problem of the world’s darkness, and, instead of offering an easy way out, it discards the solution that the people of Golter (and of Earth) have tried so often in the past.

After all that, Against a Dark Background is a rather hard book to review. It has problems. The pacing is off, the thrills are not spectacularly thrilling, and much of its middle quests pointlessly. But it also has some of Banks’ strongest, most cutting writing and thinking. Though I wouldn’t start here, I will say that I think that Against a Dark Background is an essential work for anyone that wants to grasp Iain M. Banks’ full vision.

Iain M. Banks - Consider Phlebas

Consider Phlebas was the first published Science Fiction novel of Iain M. Banks. The massive scale and thematically-conscious plotlines that mark Banks's style are both present here, but the novel is still a far less mature work than next year's Player of Games, and it is littered with structural and pacing problems.

The plot focuses on a war between the Culture and the militant and theocratic Idirans. Our viewpoint is actually an enemy of the Culture, a shifter agent named Bora Horza Gobuchul. He's sent to retrieve a Culture mind that was forced to crash land, but the Culture, too, is coming. And yet none of that takes up even close to a majority of the novel's page count. I've said before that Banks is more about the journey than the destination, but Consider Phlebas takes that to new, digressive levels. In his later novels, Banks is a master of structure – which is why it's so surprising to see the structural mess that this book is. The main plot is forgotten about for chapters on end while Horza falls in and out with mercenaries and gallivants around an unrelated Orbital.

Consider Phlebas tries to hold itself together with theme – Horza being exposed to various elements of both the Culture and the universe and their implications – but the themes aren't carried through. The text is built on the ideological struggle between the Culture's arrogant utopia and the rest of the world living as is, but the resolution is an inherently human one. The thematic elements aren't wrapped up, because there's no real way to handily do so and the side that Banks favors is obvious throughout. A character-focused resolution after so much attention to theme leaves the reader feeling like huge tracts of the book were bloat, simply getting between the opening and the ending so that Banks could play tour guide for a while longer. The book's ultimate conclusion is the difficulty of one man in making a difference, in the titanic, inevitable and perhaps irrelevant nature of war and grand change, but those elements are diluted by the book's other explorations and vica versa.

Shortly after joining Kraiklyn's "free company," Horza and the other mercenaries raid a temple to try and take the treasure. The firefight is tense, the twist unpredictable, and Banks builds the entire confrontation into an interesting metaphor for the war by the end of the subplot. But the whole thing is ultimately and utterly unnecessary. The raid has no effect on the book's overall plot. It's an inventive whim embarked upon and concluded without altering the book's main arc in any way shape or form. One or two such diversions are, of course, fine, but Consider Phlebas is practically constructed from them.

Some of the individual sections, too, are not as thematically persuasive as Banks no doubt intended them to be. There is a lengthy section where Horza is captive on a desert island staffed with religiously fervent cannibals, forcing Horza to confront the brutality that the Culture opposes. It's not a convincing section, however, because the cannibals are simply silly. They're pushed to such an extreme that they feel more like something that should be found in Gulliver's Travels, and comparing them to the brutality of some of the books other sections is beyond jarring.

When it comes to high octane, super sized plot, Banks still displays skill, though his abilities are, again, more scattershot here. There are several gripping action sequences in which Horza and other characters defy expectation again and again, but there are also several drawn out set pieces that don't feel nearly as exciting as one would hope, more ponderous than monolithic.

The characters are expected to give us continuity throughout the whole affair, but they, too, aren't a complete success. Horza is a sympathetic narrator, and credit must be given to Banks for allowing his views to feel just as convincing as the other sides. Horza's main opponent, Culture agent Perosteck Balveda, is also well done. She's not a particularly deep character, but her beliefs and travails humanize her. The rest of the cast is a far weaker. Horza's love interest matters to the reader because she matters to Horza, but she's never developed, and the rest of the crew is a list of names, some of which are given a characteristic to help us distinguish them, some not.

Banks' prose has never been flashy, but his writing in his later books is assured and descriptive, humorous and evocative. It's obvious here that he tries for some of the same heights, but for the most part his writing is simply there, neither a positive or negative. The main missing element is the humor that comes to so characterizes much of Banks' style later. Consider Phlebas isn't a dry book, but it does go for an unrelenting seriousness that leaves what levity there is muted and often hard to spot till it's dropping out of sight.

Consider Phlebas is an interesting book, but it's far from Banks' best and is plagued with odd decisions, lacks the stylistic and structural flair that defines much of Banks' catalog, and has several sections that simply do not work. Once you know something about the Culture, this book will give further depth to those ideas, but I'd not recommend starting here.

Reading in February

Abercrombie's latest is blood soaked, grit under your nails fun – the kind of fun that's had watching two big groups of men smash into each other for three days and watching their honor, morale, and bodies fall to pieces, all described in starkly modern and sarcastic prose. The book's structure was interesting, and it will certainly be enjoyed by fans of Abercrombie's prior work, though I don't think that he's yet managed to reclaim the revelatory power of The First Law.

 Reading an established author's debut is often an interesting experience, as well as a somewhat worrisome one. Are you going to get to see an unfettered and fresh version of the brilliance you've grown to expect or will it be a sodden, meandering mess? In the case of Consider Phlebas, it's a bit of both. Review coming.

The Face that Must Die is a deeply unpleasant novel, a nightmarish trudge through a deranged and hateful mind, a novel filled with innocents who seem unable or unwilling to save themselves and predators that are twisted, loathsome, and, above all, human. It is, in other words, damn fine horror. Review coming.

 As I said after finishing the first Sandman collection (Preludes & Nocturnes), I simply don't understand how the early issues can be immature compared to the later ones. The Doll's House more than the first collection shows signs of relative immaturity, and there were some weaker moments, but if the rest of the series truly does put the beginning volumes to shame it will have to be quite mind blowing indeed. Review coming when I finish the series.

I've had a fairly mixed experience with Hamilton. He's written scenes and arcs that I've loved, and scenes and arcs that I've hated, and so far I've yet to read a book he's written without at least one of each. This, his debut, is a rather different beast. It's far more focused than his later works, though fans of the author's imagination will probably not be disappointed by it here, even if his creations are a tad reigned in. Still, I'm so far unconvinced that the Greg Mandel novels are capable of the same highs as the Night's Dawn trilogy. I suppose Hamilton's still got two books to prove me wrong. Review coming when I finish the trilogy.

 Noctuary is a quieter, subtler work than Songs of a Dead Dreamer was, though it's not quite as refined as Teatro Grottesco. Perhaps the most interesting part of the collection was the final part of three, a collection of a good deal of Ligotti's flash fiction. Besides those miniature tales, Conversations in a Dead Language proved to be my favorite of the collection, a devastatingly sad tale that's fairly unique in Ligotti's catalog. Review coming.

 I think it's pretty well established by now that I read Ligotti's work twice, and Noctuary was no exception. On second read, slower building tales like The Medusa and The Tsalal came into their own.

City of Ruin reads like a supercharged version of Nights of Villjamur, expanding on the strengths of that first novel and patching up many of its weaknesses – though that is not to say that it fixes all of the debut's problems. Review coming.

 This is the kind of book where you finish and then have to mull over what you've read for hours, reveling in the spell woven on you. Palmer's writing is excellent, and his story's deliciously bittersweet. Though it had some pacing problems, The Dream of Perpetual Motion is an excellent read. Highly recommended, just don't expect anything even approaching typical.

 To make sure that, after my rather scathing review of Frankenstein, I hadn't simply lost all affinity for classic horror, I went back and reread a dozen or so of Poe's finer tales and  found them just as fine the second time around (though, to be fair, it's closer to the fourth or fifth for a few). While I can't say that I'm as devout a follower of Poe as I am of Lovecraft, his mastery is undeniable.  The Masque of the Red Death, in particular, is pitch perfect, a bare handful of pages that couldn't be improved by a collaboration of the genre's top artists given a decade to improve as much as a single image.

 I was excited going into Frankenstein. No, really, I wasn't setting out to spear the classics. I was expecting a stunning read, a book that showed the origins of one of my favorite genres, a book that scared me, a book that made me think. Instead, I ended up bitterly disappointed. Review here.

Catherynne M. Valente's prose is versatile and opulent, and her writing is a tide of images that bears hapless readers to distant, often beautiful and often traumatizing, shores. Ventriloquism is a spellbinding collection, and, since much of its contents can be found online, there's no reason at all to not go immerse yourself in some of Valente's short fiction. Review coming.

Iain M. Banks - Player of Games

"This is not a heroic age," [Gurgeh] told the drone, staring at the fire. "The individual is obsolete. That's why life is so comfortable for us all. We don't matter, so we're safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore."

"Contact uses individuals," Chamlis pointed out. "It puts people into younger societies who have a dramatic and decisive effect on the fates of entire meta-civilizations. They're usually 'mercenaries,' nto Culture, but they're human, they're people."

"They're selected and used. Like game pieces. They don't count." (p. 22)

Player of Games is a book of layers, intricately constructed and meticulously engineered. Ferociously clever, Player of Games manipulates reader and character as one and makes its mark through its shifting focus and through what's there just off-screen to be either interpreted or rendered inconsequential. At the same time, it also manages to be a damn fun book.

Like most Culture books, Player of Games is not focused on the utopian Culture. The novel's main setting is the Empire of Azad, a brutal and imperialistic place focused on exactly what the Culture is not. In the Empire, people are defined by their status. Position in worth in the Empire are decided by the game of Azad, a game so complex and challenging that it is believed to be an accurate representation of life itself. The winners in the tournament rise in their careers, and the ultimate winner becomes the emperor.

Of course, a game to determine the emperor is a concept so bald facedly absurd that it's hard to approach it seriously, a metaphor so obvious that it seemingly loses all effect. In order to make the game work, Banks needs to draw a fine line – a step too far into the alien renders the concept comprehensible but unaffecting, a step too far to the familiar renders it absurd. This is a line that Banks walks well. Creating a world where everything is decided by a game would serve to cheapen and render silly the rest of the world. That's not what Banks has done. Instead, Banks has created a world of games within games, with only one of the layers being so brazen as to announce it as such. Azad society and interaction is itself artificial, devised and constructed, and it soon becomes clear that, in many ways, the Empire did not shape a game to resemble it but rather shaped itself to resemble a game. As a high ranking Azad official says two thirds of the way through the book, the Azad try to live according to the laws of God, Game, and Empire. (p. 220)

Azad is rendered exotic by several means beyond the game, some of which work better than others. Their society is divided into three sexes - male, female, and apex - but the division feels generally superficial, more for differentiation's sake than anything else; the apex's are human males for all intents and purposes. Still, such things are ultimately inconsequential when the feel of an area comes through as well as Banks depicts the Azad cities. For the majority of the book, we're cut off from the mainstream of Azad life as Gurgeh broods in hotel rooms and dominates in stadiums, but the moments when he enters the city at large are excellently rendered barrages of bizarre imagery:

They half walked, half ran down twisted wooden corridors, past many rooms and doors. He was lost in a maze of sensation; a welter of sounds (music, laughter, screams), sights (servants, erotic pictures, glimpsed galleries of packed, swaying bodies) and smells (food, perfume, alien sweats). (p. 160-1)

Coming from the Culture to the Empire of Azad, the "Player" of the book's title, is Gurgeh. Gurgeh does not fit in with the Culture, his very nature running counter to its central tenants. Left adrift in the Culture's post-scarcity society, Gurgeh has tried to give his life meaning through games. He has risen to the top of his field, and yet contentment did not follow success. Gurgeh lives for the rush that comes with winning a game and values himself according to his status and possessions; amidst the Culture's benevolent state of enlightened near-anarchy, Gurgeh is left with nothing he can truly achieve. When Gurgeh joins the Azad tournament, the competition's eventual turn into an ideological struggle is an obvious development, but that doesn't render it any less powerful. Walking through its cities, Gurgeh's viewpoint of the Azad is startlingly negative, and the events seen, the almost absurd pace with which atrocities are on occasion thrown at the reader, feels almost blatantly manipulative…

Which, of course, it is. The Culture may be benevolent, but it is surely not a fan of live and let live ideals. The fact that the reader is aware of the Culture's manipulation and the narrator is not does little to change its effects; the Empire of Azad is a horrifying place, and the reader cheers as the Culture targets the tyranny within it. But that's not to say that this is a black and white read. Reading the final pages of the novel leaves the reader with a feeling of deep ambivalence. It's near unquestionable that the Culture's society is "better" than the society of the old Empire, and yet this was not the natural movement of progress but rather liberty at the point of a foreign sword. While they may have been the "good guys," it's difficult for the reader to get over the final images of the Culture's Special Circumstances quite literally playing games with other civilizations, no matter their ultimate intentions.

Player of Games is far from the only intelligently crafted Banks novel. Far from it. In fact, you could even say that admirable structures that subtly reinforce the novel's theme are sort of Banks' thing. A more up in the air element is, sometimes, how the already referenced clever structure restricts the novel's success at being, you know, enjoyable. Matter, for instance, was arranged in a way that excellently highlighted the various levels of power at play – an organizational strategy that rendered the finale utterly unsatisfying even while it was intellectually interesting.

So how does Player of Games fair when it comes to the more visceral aspects of any novel, namely the reader's reaction to the characters and their drive to continue reading? Quite well, as it turns out. I wouldn't say that Player of Games is always as much fun as Surface Detail, but the novel also manages to accomplish far more. This is the best integration I've yet seen of Banks' two sides, namely the Let's Discuss Ethics, Right, and Motivations side and the Let's Build A Huge Space Ship With a Ton of Guns one, and the whole thing is spiced up by Banks' humor. While he's not as openly jocular here as in some later works, this is still a book that refrains from taking itself too seriously, something made abundantly clear by ship names like Gunboat Diplomat and So Much for Subtlety.

As Abigail Nasbaum noted in her review of the novel, Player of Games is structured like a sports story. Though there is the occasional – generally brief and not particularly satisfying – action sequence, the mainstay of the novel is the game of Azad and Gurgeh's struggles, both in-game and out, against the Empire's various master players. When dealing with a fictional game the rules of which are never disclosed, it's frankly a miracle that Banks manages to make Azad not only interesting but gripping enough to sustain the novel and draw the reader on.

Of course, most sports stories have a rather obvious conclusion: in the end, the good guy, the underdog, is going to win. It's possible that that's a statement more of my inexperience with sports stories than it is of the genre itself, but it still seems like a reasonable bet that the sympathetic guy who just happens to have a camera/author behind him every step of the way has slightly better odds than the antagonist when push comes to shove in the last scene. Furthermore, the revelation of Culture and Special Circumstances having been involved all along is roughly as surprising to the reader as the revelation that the trade paperback wasn't copied out by hand.

But this isn't a plot focused book in any sense of the word, something made abundantly clear by the lackadaisical pace of the opening section. This is, instead, a story of themes explored via characters, and Banks succeeds admirably at both of those goals. Gurgeh is not precisely likable, a result of his frequent callousness and naiveté, but he is still sympathetic, and the society of the Azad is vivid enough that the reader will read on for every new scrap of information they get. Moments do drag here and there – most noticeably at the several points when Gurgeh just figures he'll sit back and let things play out – but none of those moments are anywhere close to fatal.

Player of Games is a masterful science fiction novel, one of the clearest examples of Science Fiction as a vehicle to explore ideas and ideologies that I've ever seen. This is a thought provoking novel that will thrill you while it troubles you, and this is (so far) the best novel I've read by one of Science Fiction's most imaginative and intelligent authors. Essential.

Reading in January

[Note: I decreased the cover size because the post felt far long, and I don't want this blog to become an endless succession of cover art. If this new format's grotesque, please say so, and I'll change it back.]

Player of Games is Banks at the height of his powers. This novel's deeply intelligent and carefully constructed, but it's also a thrilling book that's consistently amusing throughout. Highly recommended for science fiction fans. Review coming.

The Westeros book of the month.  Beat the Reaper is one of the greatest page turners that I can ever remember reading. The prose drags you on with all the force of a hurricane and the attitude of…well, a Mafioso-cum-doctor, I guess. The book is jam packed with digressions that are generally quite amusing, though occasionally a bit too out there (the holocaust thread feels unnecessary and too disconnected from the rest), but there's not a single moment in the book where the spell is truly broken, and that's a definite accomplishment for an author that goes so gleefully over the top as Bazell does so often here.

The Postman Always Rings Twice is one of the three novels that I've been repeatedly told (since starting this whole Crime thing) started noir. The novel is brutal and bare bones, with the only sympathetic character cast as the antagonist and the amount of descriptive prose throughout the whole thing not being quite enough to properly fill a tea cup.

Goodis's classic crime novel is digressive, character focused, and bleak as can be. Review coming.

This issue of F&SF has actually been in my possession for a while. I got it when I was first considering reading some genre magazines, back when this was the current F&SF issue, and then promptly forgot about that goal – and this issue – until just now. The contents – and especially the longish Paradiso Lost by Cowdrey – were good enough to make me take out a subscription, which led to…

…my first sent-in-the-post issue of F&SF. As can be expected when going into a publication with various authors, there are a few stories more and a few less to my taste, but the magazine is quite powerful throughout and even the weaker tales boast impressive prose and ideas. My favorite story was probably Mathew Corradi's The Ghilish Blade, an engrossing and beautiful fantasy tale. Cowdrey's contribution to this issue, The Bogle, was also high quality and surprising in its genre (compared to his SF Paradiso Falls from the above issue), though the content itself wasn't particularly twisty.

This was the second of the three noir-cornerstone novels mentioned above (the third being The Big Sleep, which I read back in December). The Maltese Falcon is the kind of classic that's still a page turner decades after its initial publication, and the stark and declarative prose has lost none of its impact. This is a novel of complex twists and turns, with numerous characters each with separate agendas, but the plot never feels unfocused or artificial. When it comes to morality and characterization, Hammet is perhaps the least outspoken of the noir authors that I've read so far. We never come to understand Spade, and even at the end there's the question of just what his motives throughout were. It's a testament to Hammet's skills that, upon finishing the book, I was really saddened to learn that Spade, unlike Chandler's Marlowe, does not get his own series.

My thoughts after reading the first few pages of The Scarlet Letter were that Hawthorne could write very good prose. After another few pages, I amended that to good but wordy prose. By the end of the book, my opinion had distilled down to wordy. Hawthorne's writing seems enjoyable in small doses, but this novel is a piece of obviously plotted flash fiction stretched out to an agonizing (though objectively moderate) length. I think it says something that Hawthorne's introduction is forty-five pages of nothing, literally a third of the novel's text.

Under Heaven is a tightly focused and beautifully written epic fantasy. The main characters are immensely sympathetic, the oriental-esque setting is vivid and rich, and the book is impossible to put down. If I'd read this when it was released, I can guarantee that it would have made my list of best 2010 releases.

 Crampton is the screenplay that Ligotti penned with Brandon Trenz to try and get onto the X Files, which was later redone into a longer, un-X files-related version. (I read the original.) Though the themes are familiar to longtime Ligotti fans, this is, by necessity, a different style, with the author's traditionally dense and layered prose replaced with stage directions and dialogue. Different, however, does not always mean bad, and the rhythm that Ligotti manages to establish as the tale builds to its conclusion is extremely powerful – even if the ending itself did not really live up to what preceded it.

My Work is Not Yet Done consists of two short stories and a novella, the latter being the longest continuous piece of fiction that the author has yet created. Though the supernatural is a decided part of the work, My Work is Not Yet Done is far more human-focused than much of the author's output. Review coming.

The Crucible was a powerful play that, in my eyes, deserves its legendary status. The various characters grow sympathetic as the scenes pass, and the town's descent into insanity is both believable and frightening.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman was a sort of odd read for me. The fact that I named After Dark as one of my favorite reads of last year is probably enough to show that I'm a huge fan of Murakami's prose, and this collection of twenty-four stories is as deliciously smooth and thought provoking as always. That being said, many of the collection's pieces, especially towards the beginning, were more beautiful than sympathetic, and, though some of the later tales did succeed to draw me in emotionally, many of the early stories feel more like fascinating displays than immersing experiences. If you're a fan of Murakami's writing, you're unlikely to be disappointed here, but I'd recommend experiencing his novels first.

The concluding volume of K.J. Parker's Engineer Trilogy was a powerful read that made the most of the promises established in earlier volumes. Review coming.

Shock Totem was actually the magazine that kicked off my magazine-reading quest,and the first issue didn't disappoint. Review here.

The second issue of Shock Totem didn't feel as even as the first, but its heights were even higher, cementing the magazine as essential reading in my opinion. Review coming.

The Y series seems to be getting better and better with each volume. I found the ultimate fate of the astronauts a bit of a cop out here, but that's a relatively minor thing when compared with how gripping I found the rest. The characters are continuing to develop, and I'm looking forward to the fourth volume.

(I'll point out here that my review of the first Y was taken down from the list. Looking back over it, I didn't feel like it was up to snuff, and I'd prefer to review the series as a whole once I've finished it. Sorry if you were waiting for the review.)

Snake Agent was a gripping and inventive read, a mixture of bizarre imagination and carefully orchestrated suspense. The occasional twist was too easy to see coming – something not helped by the spoiler-filled back cover blurb – but the novel was enjoyable enough to render any such issues trivial. Recommended.

Reading in November

A very good, but not great, Culture novel. This was my third Banks book, and I’ll happily admit that I’m quite converted, now. Review here.


I was a bit worried going into this one. I’d heard that it was less focused than Thunderer, less plot driven, and I’d already found Thunderer’s pacing and resolutions to be a problem. I needn’t have worried. Gears of the City is an excellent novel with some of the best prose that I’ve ever read. Review on the way.


The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms set itself up as a traditional fantasy, but soon abandoned that and went off to do something far more interesting. I can’t say that it totally succeeds, but I’m glad that it tried, and the read was generally a good one. Review coming.


Though I have yet to review any of his work on the Rack, Martin is one of my absolute favorite authors. Which is probably obvious considering the amount of time I spend on Westeros, but whatever. I’ve been meaning to go through his short story collections for a while now; this is the first one that I’ve gotten to. The stories that were in Dreamsongs were, for the most part, just as good on reread, and several of the new stories were certainly worth the price of the collection. There was a weaker tale or two, but that’s something to expect in every collection.


To me, Year One was a disappointment. It traded depth for style, and what style it had was generally lost due to the artwork. Review here.


The only thing stopping me from making another comics epiphany post about V for Vendetta is that I’d already Watchmen, so it didn’t hit me quite as hard. Still, Moore is absolutely without peer from what I’ve read of the format. I’ll be writing more on this.


Murakami is one of those authors I’ve had on my list to be read someday for a while now, but the Westeros book club helped give me a kick in the ass. I considered a review, but the discussion that was already done on the book covered most of the points I would’ve, so, if you’ve just read the novel, I’ll direct you there instead. As for my own impressions in brief: Murakami conveyed complex and thought provoking ideas with clear and readable prose. I’ll definitely be reading more of his work.


This was an amusing epistolary novella about power and ideology, but it was stopped from being great by the format. Deprived of the space to circle around the events and give them the context that they deserved, the twists were interesting, but not gut wrenching. An enjoyable read, though I don’t know if it’s worth the thirty plus dollars that you’re likely to find it for.


I enjoyed Devices and Desires, but I wasn’t without my reservations. Evil for Evil takes most of my points of contention and rips them to pieces. I think the most remarkable thing about this trilogy is the almost ridiculous degree of plot motion. Each of the two books so far could easily have been multi volume sagas. Review coming after I finish the final volume, The Escapement.


Honestly, I’m underwhelmed, and I’m not sure if it’s a fault in the book that caused it or just that I’ve read so much more (and more widely) since I read the first eleven volumes straight and loved (almost) every word of it. Yes, this book had a lot of plot motion compared to other Wheel of Time books. But Wheel of Time books aren’t the only standard out there, and, compared to much of what I’ve read lately, the plot was bloated beyond comprehension, the characters so plot shielded that danger can’t get within the same zip code, and the pacing so ugly that clusterfuck barely begins to describe it. I didn’t dislike the book, mind you, but I certainly didn’t love it. I ranted about some of my (spoiler filled) thoughts upon finishing it here; there won’t be a review because, really, I think most people have heard of the Wheel of Time by now and have a decent idea where they stand on it.


Cycles was fast paced, decently clever, and good fun. I’m still not wow by Y, but the series has been very enjoyable so far. And the quasi-review of the first volume is coming soon. Really.