Karsa Orlong

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson 2005 - Gollancz SF Gateway ebook - 458 pages From Goodreads: One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives. Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger. Thoughts: So I don't really feel like writing reviews at the moment, but I have to say something about this book. It's a story about the end of the world, and begins as Tyler Dupree and his two friends, brother and sister Jason and Diane, are looking up at a regular night sky when the stars suddenly disappear. As openings go, it's a good 'un. I don't want to spoil too much by saying why they disappear - I think it's enough to say that it's one of several big ideas that are brilliant in this book. It's actually told in retrospect, jumping backwards and forwards to tell what happened in the immediate aftermath of the blackout and to Tyler in the present day, where he is on the run in Sumatra from unknown pursuers, where a huge, mysterious archway has appeared, reaching from the Earth's core and up into space. Reading some comments online - most of which are positive - it would seem to be a book that a few hardcore sf fans don't like so much - in fact, I'd say it's science fiction for people who don't normally like science fiction. See, although Spin is a book with huge ideas, it is primarily a book about characters. It is told in the first person, by Tyler, as he writes his memoire before injecting a drug that may very well cause severe amnesia. The chapters set in the past cover many years, from when he was 10 years-old right up to his present day, and are heavily built around his relationships with Jason and Diane. Personally, I loved this. In the little author biography at the end, Wilson says Stephen King is the best science fiction author alive today (nonsense!), but the comparison between Wilson's writing and King's is quite apt, I think, because Wilson writes characters much like King does. A few readers seemed to find their stories boring. I didn't - I genuinely cared for these people and wanted to know what happened to them. Also, the world falls apart around them as it hurtles towards its end. There is civil unrest, reckless behaviour from various governments, and religious cults spring up and become increasingly fanatical. I found these aspects affecting, but they could perhaps have been done better. They only really affect Tyler at a couple of points and otherwise stay in the background, by and large, which is a shame. I guess it's not the kind of book Wilson was trying to write - it's not a disaster novel or something akin to The Stand - and I found everything else worked so well it's really only a minor complaint. There's a nice line in dry humour, too, as Tyler relates the end of the world. "The Guatemalans," he observes, "indifferent to the end of the world, were still harvesting coffee." Or, when he's discussing matters with Jason, and how the spin has encouraged immorality and crime, Jason remarks that it's also increased deficit spending and screwed up the actuary tables - "If the world doesn't end in the next thirty or forty years," he said, "we may be facing disaster." I also found the book quite moving in places. Don't get me wrong, though - although it sounds like it's depressing as hell, it really isn't. Ultimately, it's a book about friendship and hope and human curiosity and the will to survive. I thought it was tremendous. Spin won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2006, and is followed by Axis and Vortex, but stands well enough on its own. 9/10

And thanks for yours, too Haven't done much reading since last post. I did re-read Ben Aaronovitch's The Rivers of London as a refresher with the intention of going on and reading the others but, when I finished it, I didn't have the enthusiasm to read the next one! Don't feel like writing another review of it, so the original's here if anyone's interested. I'd probably knock the score down to a 7. It's good but not great. Since then I've been reading Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. It's taking me a while cos I haven't felt much like reading. And, purely because it's 21/12 . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iTEvPzqj_s

The downside is that I feel guilty about it, as I had loads of work to do before Christmas, so I've ended up doing as much of it as I can from here, at home. It also means I'm missing the Christmas party tomorrow. I wouldn't mind, but it's the first one we've had for about three years! How can they not pay you for it? Is that legal??

Ach, I feel your pain! I have had a persistent cough for over two weeks now and haven't been able to sleep because of it. My boss told me not to go to work because he didn't want to catch it - ironic, because I think I caught it from others who had been in the office Went to the doc's yesterday and found out I now have a chest infection, so I guess I won't be at work again until 2015 (as I have next week and the week after booked as leave) Glad to hear you're feeling better Nice to know there's an end to it

Blimey, that's cool! I wonder what she'll make of it As it goes, it's not his best, but it is completely stand alone, so not a bad one to choose. And it's got one of my favourite last lines ever - assuming she makes it that far I don't think 79 year-olds were his target audience, though

Thanks Yes, it was odd. I know there had been hints at it earlier on, but I felt either there should have been more of it through the rest of the book or it should have been left out completely. I'm sure there are better ways he could have dealt with it. I'll keep an eye out for when that one comes down in price, thanks I've got the urge to re-read Firestarter at the moment, no idea why Yeah, the first person surprised me a little, as I'm used to him getting inside the heads of several characters, so it was strange being limited to just the one. But I thought he did it very well.

One of many things we disagree on I watched Beneath the Planet of the Apes last night. Such a grim film.

I haven't felt like writing any reviews in the past few days so this is just a quick catch-up on what I've been reading: The Curse of the House of Foskett (Gower Street Detective Book 2) by M.R.C. Kasasian 2014 - Head of Zeus ebook - 416 pages From Amazon: 125 Gower Street, 1882: Sidney Grice once had a reputation as London's most perspicacious personal detective. But since his last case led an innocent men to the gallows, business has been light. Listless and depressed, Grice has taken to lying in the bath for hours, emerging in the evenings for a little dry toast and a lot of tea. Usually a voracious reader, he will pick up neither book nor newspaper. He has not even gathered the strength to re-insert his glass eye. His ward, March Middleton, has been left to dine alone. Then an eccentric member of a Final Death Society has the temerity to die on his study floor. Finaly Sidney and March have an investigation to mount - an investigation that will draw them to an eerie house in Kew, and the mysterious Baroness Foskett... I found this a perfect antidote to the self-indulgent clap-trap of Willful Child and, for me, a prime example of the kind of humour I like in books, because the laughs come naturally as a result of brilliant dialogue between wonderfully well-realised characters. It seemed to me to be effortlessly funny in places, with the kind of wit that makes one snort with laughter. The relationship between Sidney Grice and his ward, March Middleton, continues to grow as they investigate a particularly gruesome series of murders involving a 'last death' club. Basically, these primarily elderly people have each put a sum of money into safekeeping which the last of them left alive will inherit. Naturally, when they start to drop like flies, this points the finger of suspicion at, well, practically all of them. The tone of this one is quite a bit darker than the first (The Mangle Street Murders), so the humour is quite important for alleviating the grimness. There were a couple of things that niggled at me, such as the fact that March is forever being told how plain and useless she is, and there's one particular episode involving a few thousand cats which was pretty unnecessary. Apart from that, though, I thought this cemented everything I loved about the first book. Can't wait for the next one. 9/10 After that I spent a couple of days being unable to decide what to read next, and finally settled on: Revival by Stephen King 2014 - Hodder & Stoughton ebook - 417 pages From Amazon: In a small New England town, in the early 60s, a shadow falls over a small boy playing with his toy soldiers. Jamie Morton looks up to see a striking man, the new minister, Charles Jacobs. Soon they forge a deep bond, based on their fascination with simple experiments in electricity. Decades later, Jamie is living a nomadic lifestyle of bar-band rock and roll. Now an addict, he sees Jacobs again - a showman on stage, creating dazzling 'portraits in lightning' - and their meeting has profound consequences for both men. Their bond becomes a pact beyond even the Devil's devising, and Jamie discovers that revival has many meanings. So I had trouble deciding what to read, then I nearly gave up on this quite early on. From the time Pet Sematary was published (the first book of his that I read) through to Misery, Stephen King used to be my favourite author. I devoured and loved his earlier novels. After Misery I hung around for a while longer but I kind of fell out of love with his work. I eventually gave up completely with Bag of Bones (although I did read Black House, the sequel to The Talisman, written with Peter Straub). I've been tempted back a couple of times, and I did re-read The Stand a couple of years back, but this is the first of his novels new to me that I have read in 15 years or so. Revival is very slow at the start. Fortunately, I decided to stick with it and ended up enjoying it quite a lot. It's written in the first person, which is quite different from those earlier novels I loved, but he still has that innate ability for characterisation and getting me inside his characters' heads. Here he takes the readers through roughly 50 years of Jamie Morton's life, and I really liked the way he did it. The story occasionally leaps forward by a number of years, but then Jamie will go back and fill in some of the gaps, and King's narrative voice is as easy and fun to read as it ever was. There's some family drama, a tale of first love, and of a character falling off the rails and ending up in some bad places, all tied together by Jamie's encounters with Charles Jacobs. It's not a horror story, for the most part, although there are occasional peeks behind the reality of the characters' every day lives, brought about by Jacobs's experiments with electricity. I'll say no more than that. I didn't find it particularly creepy or scary and, when King finally throws the doors open I felt it lurched off the rails a bit. Considering 99.9% of the story had been firmly based in reality, the revelations at the end just seemed a bit lame, to me anyway. On the plus side, Revival is reasonably concise, unlike the overly long, poorly edited bore-fests he churned out in the 90s. It doesn't overstay its welcome. So, I enjoyed it, I thought it was very good, but it's still nowhere near his glory days, in my opinion. 8/10 Since then I wasted a couple of days trying to read C J Cherryh's Foreigner, but I've been a bit under the weather and, this morning when I realised I was reading the words but not taking them in, I put it back on the shelf. Too many pages-long info dumps for my brain to handle at the moment

Tim Burton's version of Planet of the Apes is an embarrassment! The more recent Rise and Dawn are both brilliant, though Planning on re-watching Beneath the Planet of the Apes tonight

A couple of vids someone posted from Saturday. We were downstairs. The first vid's worth it just for the bit about 5:30 in where they stand in a square and play their own instruments with one hand and one of the other's instruments with their other hand. Show offs! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7URINv4yt2w

Planet of the Apes (1968). Still fab

Went to see Epica at The Forum last night. They were awesome! When I bought the tickets there was no mention of this, but Dragonforce were added as co-headliners. I'd seen them before, but it was Epica I wanted to see last night, and I was a bit annoyed that it meant Epica would be doing a shorter set. As it went, Dragonforce were bloody brilliant. Silly name, very silly music, but they're just so irrepressible it's hard not to like them. They're just so much fun

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. So, so good. Haven't been that thrilled by a film in a looooong time

Arrow 3x07 The Flash 1x07 The Walking Dead 5x08

Oh I don't know, he's had a pretty good innings, it's just that my tastes seem to be moving away from epic fantasy at the moment, and humorous books have never been my 'thing'

I'm currently 190 pages into The Curse of the House of Foskett by M. R. C. Kasasian and so far it's every bit as brilliant as the first book, The Mangle Street Murders.

^^ The only one of Neal Stephenson's books that I've read is Cryptonomicon. I wasn't overly keen on it - the writing style was fine, but it was too long for its own good and became a chore to read in the end. Snow Crash is about half the length, though

Willful Child by Steven Erikson 2014 - Transworld Digital ebook - 349 pages From Amazon: A wickedly entertaining spoof SF space adventure by Steven Erikson, life-long 'Star Trek' fan and author of the multi-million copy selling 'The Malazan Book of the Fallen' series. Thoughts: I fancied something completely different after the epic Shogun, so this seemed to fit the bill. It's Steven Erikson's attempt to write a spoof sf adventure. It's about Captain Hadrian Sawback and the crew of the starship ASF Willful Child causing chaos across the galaxy in a succession of very politically incorrect ways, as their vessel gets dragged into a number of episodic encounters that will ring bells with anyone who's watched Star Trek. It riffs mainly on the original series with Sawback returning from every encounter with his shirt ripped to expose at least one nipple (as invariably happened to James T Kirk ) and making passes at every woman who has the misfortune to wander into his line of sight. He also has the habit of hurling himself sideways at groups of aliens and knocking them down like bowling pins (again, like a certain other captain . . . ). The ship gets taken over by an artificial intelligence, named after Tammy Wynette of all people, which proceeds to dump the crew in the deepest mire and pretty much start interstellar wars at the drop of a hat. And there's an alien species that may or may not resemble the Borg. Erikson has digs at practically every sf trope going. Unfortunately, Hadrian is such an unsympathetic character, obsessed with sex, spending most of his time ogling the women crew members and not giving a hoot about who he offends on the way, that it's tough to care. Some of the jokes are, admittedly, funny, but they are thrown at you with barely a pause for breath, in page after page (after page) of supposedly witty dialogue, with very little in the way of a coherent plot. I think I've said before that I have a problem with books that set out to be humorous. They very rarely work for me and, even here where I knew so much of the source material he was poking fun at, I found it wearisome, largely unfunny, lacking in character (barring that which was required to write the dialogue) and almost completely devoid of direction. I much prefer to have a proper story where any humour comes naturally because of great characterisation. Erikson achieved this himself brilliantly in books like Midnight Tides, but here it fell completely flat. Apart from the doctor who's like a beach ball and deflates every time he says more than a sentence, and the 'Hit it Tammy!' line, to be followed by country music blasting out of the intercom. But those instances are almost drowned by the incessant inanity that surrounds them. I'm starting to think that Erikson and I are reaching a parting of the ways. His last couple of books have disappointed me greatly. Too much of a good thing having read the Malazan books two or three times a piece, maybe. I was hoping to find this book entertaining but it is woefully self-indulgent. It's mercifully short and quick to read but, whilst I found it mildly amusing at times, I generally thought it was pointless and a bit crap. If Hadrian Sawback has any more adventures I won't be going along for the ride. 4/10

Thanks I saw mention that Fox were thinking of making a new mini series of Shogun, but that was last year and it seems to have disappeared from view

Re-watched Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Falcon!!!!!