User Profile

If I recall correctly, China Mieville wanted to write a novel that his mother might read. Presumably she was into crime fiction or political thrillers. What came out at the end is just as weird and inventive as China's other work. In fact it's up there with his best.

Mieville's approach to genre fills me with joy. "Mainstream" fiction, he argues, IS a genre, a niche. In other words, we genre fans are not the weirdos, you supposedly conventional readers are. In that light it's no surprise that his take on a crime/political thriller comes out as a bizarre, mutated version which is completely in keeping with his fantasy and science fiction works.

A city which is divided politically and ethnically not by a green line, but by the life-long psychological training and conditioning the denizens are given, is so weird that at first you think it's about a city with a dimensional rift or a gateway to an imaginary realm intersecting the physical space . But no, it's the tyrannical imposition of a political reality, embraced by the majority of the populace. It's a societal hallucination which is turned from a social construct into something so close to a physical reality that the reader and the non-citizens in the novel, often falsely perceive it to be a concrete phenomenon.

Over time this idea has gained strength, because the whole of the United States, with its red and blue divide, is starting to look like "The City and the City" since the book was written.

My good review comes with a caveat. China Mieville's writing is so crammed with ideas and unfamiliar concepts, it can sometimes be hard for the reader to latch on to his stories. Sometimes they are just not "page-turners". Or as a fellow SF and F fan puts it "China's just too boring". In some of his other books I've felt that. Sometimes his unique strengths in other areas make up for it. Sometimes, dammit, his stories ARE page-turners, especially "Railsea", another of my favouirites by China.

Anyway, "The City and the City" MIGHT NOT be for you. But it is definitely for me.

I have complicated feelings about Barack Obama. On the one hand, the vast power of American racism is so great that his breakthrough in 2008 was a monumental achievement in itself. On the other hand, it's wrong to focus only on the racial aspect of his life. We need to consider the extraordinary abilities and actions that allowed him to become the first black US President, and assess his politics and whether we agree with them.

I have to say I really enjoyed reading this memorable book. Obama's parents feature heavily, and although his father is mentioned in the title, he gets a massive amount of reality from his mother rather than just dreams. His time in Indonesia, and his mother's revelation that there were certain "American values" he was missing out on, is a turning point in his life.

In the end it's his "belief in America" that turns me off Obama. After the nightmare of Trump, I no longer believe in America. America is over as far as I'm concerned. Trump brought it home, but it was already over long before 2016; it was over as soon as Reagan got elected. Then Clinton and even Obama maintained the features of Reagan's America established in that dark period. Anyone who aspires to be President, and indeed achieves it, must be a morally flawed person.

That aside, I can't imagine a better flawed person than Obama, who could weave their way through the extraordinary process of winning the Oval office. Especially when you compare him with Trump. In so many ways he was by far the worst, worse even that Nixon.

There is a certain orthodoxy derived from summarising the events since any given date. Andy Warhol for instance, is seen as a world-beating artist whose paintings fetch millions at auction. But in 1966 his crew were on a gruelling national tour with their multimedia show The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, meeting rivalry on the west coast where Haight Ashbury happenings were a world away from Warhol's New York weirdness. There was hostility and indifference in other venues across the USA.

Jon Savage tells you that other, lesser known story. It's still epic, like a tale from Mount Olympus, but it's an alternative version of the classics. And Savage's research is like physical evidence for the existence of Zeus and Poseidon and Hera. Rather than archetypes, summaries of certain emotions or events or human traits they have come to represent, Savage gives our heroes real life, everyday drama, like Robert Graves fleshing out the lives of the Roman emperors in "I, Claudius".

The characters are not gods and emperors. They are Jagger, Lennon, Joe Meek, Dusty Springfield, and countless others. Unlike Graves, Savage doesn't just make up the details. The facts are all there, plucked from primary sources and interviews with people who witnessed them. A history which became a mythology is turned into history again. But it's still epic.

It's hard to describe the setting and the feelings this novel evokes because it's so original. It's like looking at a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, with its mysterious, unnerving ancient buildings looming in the background, casting imposing shadows across a sunset landsacpe. You crane your neck to see what is beyond the edge of the frame. What else is in this strange, surreal world? But you are limited by what the painting can show you.

De Chirico was my frame of reference, but the book was inspired by another artist I was unfamiliar with, and his name was also Piranesi. In Clarke's novel, the path between our reality and the surreal world is opened, for a moment. It's like a waking dream.

Those who would deny reality are the villains, yet the beauty of the dream world remains. Somehow we wish we could be the Piranesi at the start of the book, living in the mysterious, endless halls of his dreamlike dimension, a dangerous and lonely universe, but somehow beautiful at the same time.

Unlike its genre cousin science fiction, fantasy has closer bonds to backward looking types of storytelling. It is linked to the older forms like myth and fairy tale, and that can make innovation a bit more tricky. We can't just keep on recycling "chosen one" tropes; at some stage we need to say something new, or our original stories risk being redundant compared to the superior rivals already in the canon.

At the same time, we can't depart from the form too much, or in the wrong way, or else it seems inauthentic or a sellout.

For some, Abercrombie might have strayed from the marvelous and primal form that gives fantasy its great strength. But for me, he has breathed life into the genre. "The First Law" trilogy and its sequel "The Age of Madness" are well worth the investment of your time.

Having read all six of Abercrombie's books in this series, as well as all five "Song of Ice and Fire' novels, I felt like George RR Martin's most famous work is not worth the considerable investment of time you need to get through his excessive verbiage. Just watch the tv series, it's bloody good.

Abercrombie, on the other hand, IS worth your time. Actually it's not Abercrombie. It's Glokta, Jezal, Bayaz, and Logen that you will be visiting, rather than their creator. Vivid, primal characters in a brilliantly-conceived fantasy world which I enjoyed immensely.

Where and when you find a book will determine your view of it. For me it was 1973 on my family's little farm at Canowindra. I was ten, I loved Alfred Hitchcock's Three Investigators and the Brains Benton mysteries. My Mum and older brother were digging John Wyndham so I picked up "The Day of the Triffids", aware that it was an "adult" book, a new experience for me. I think it might have blown my tiny mind. I was like Dave Bowman, a normal human when I started, and an embryonic trans-galactic starchild by the end.

Nowadays, whether it's "Station 11", "The Last of Us" or "Sweet Tooth" the apocalypse is front of mind. But back then there was "Triffids" and George Stewart's "Earth Abides", written in 1951 and 1949 respectively. After that, there'd be a long time between (fictional) world-shattering catastrophes. These two are the ones to beat in the post-apocalypse sub-genre.

"The Day of the Triffids" has so much going for it... the marvelously original nature of the catastrophe; the addition of the triffids as its unlikely second wave; the role of industry and military in both these disasters; the reality of re-establishing agriculture and manufacturing when scavenging becomes impossible; the competing rebuilding strategies, be they military or science based, regressive or progressive; the relative futility of redundant moral positions, like monogamy.

The main female character, who pre-apocalypse had been a controversial author of mainstream erotica, is another great Wyndham woman. Yet again the influence of the author's partner Grace Wilson is in evidence. In a short novel, characterisation is handled economically. The relationship between Masen and Josella is beautifully complemented by the arrival of their adopted daughter Susan, giving the book a bit more heart than much SF of the time.

It's also the kind of apocalypse where the survivors are like the chosen ones. Much as mass death and disease are not fun, you can't help imagining what it would be like to be one of the survivors. I don't think this makes it what Brian Aldiss called a 'cosy catastrophe'. There is a certain sentimentality in the novel, as the characters say goodbye to the old world as they see it decaying. It's a sort of warm, loving sadness, but it is not 'cosy'. I get the sense that there was a bit of generational rivalry between Aldiss, as a representative of the 60s new wave, and Wyndham, a pre-war pulp alumnus, albeit one who tried to be innovative and forward-looking like the 60s writers who came after him.

I can't think of a single quibble about this book. I don't think it's dated, unless you also think "The Time Machine" or "The War of the Worlds" are dated because of their contemporary setting.

This brilliant novel seems like an entirely new book every time I re-read it. At first it's a tragic coming-of-age story as a man recalls the traumas of his boyhood. Every reader feels for young Leo, when we remember the squirming torture of being a self-conscious child, gasping for breath when being forced out into the airless world of adulthood, .

Then there's the story of forbidden love, a doomed affair between a working class man and an upper class woman, so tragic and compellingly told by Hartley, whereas D.H. Lawrence was always so turgid and ugly.

It can be about class: the alliance between the aspirants Leo and the working man Ted, up against the landed gentry Marian and Hugh - and above all the disgusting Marcus, Leo's supposed friend who is the only one to let his true self show in all its supercilious ugliness.

It's about history and war. Even in 1900 the men are scarred by it, threatened by it. As the older Leo looks back through the lens of the mid 20th century, not only are his personal hopes shattered, all his childhood dreams of a new era have been replaced by the real history of two atrocious world wars. Most of the players in the drama of his childhood have been killed in a futile conflict.

It could be read as a coded expression of Hartley's own homosexuality, especially in the lingering descriptions of farm labourer Ted and his radiant masculinity.

And it's also a tapestry of nature and symbolism, with the summer heat, the deadly nightshade, the idyllic pleasures of the decadent aristocracy. Even a cricket match is woven into the meaning and emotion of the story. And I loathe cricket.

I'm normally a genre fiction enthusiast; somehow the hyper-real worlds of science fiction and fantasy cut through and reveal more about reality to my particular array of neurological receptors. But "The Go-Between" transcends that. The past is another country, but it might as well be another planet, home to another species. That makes it somehow more revealing about us and our own real world in all its beauty and terror.

"The Chrysalids" is one of my favourite novels and it stands up well on each re-reading. The heart of it is the religious zealots who insist on genetic purity. Their leaders make compelling villains, analogous to the religious authoritarians we still have today. Shockingly they are in the ascendancy in some political settings as I write, ensuring the ongoing currency of "The Chrysalids".

Wyndham's deliberate move away from the action-packed sci-fi of his pulp days led him to more contemplative narrative styles, often relating events through second hand accounts by lesser characters (especially in "The Kraken Wakes"). Here he puts his protagonist at the heart of the action, making it a thrilling read, but never diluting the novel's themes. The telepathic link between the characters takes the internal narrative to a higher level, culminating in what amounts to a description of the erotic intensity of telepathic sex. Wyndham's biographer Amy Binns feels this episode is inspired by the author's relationship with his long-term partner Grace. He wrote many heartfelt love letters to her, some of them so soppy and over-the-top you can't believe it's the same writer. But he adapts the experience beautifully in the fictional setting.

The villainous children of "The Midwich Cuckoos" in their bucolic present setting are also inverted here, with the post-nuclear mutant children hunted by the elders of their own community.

The only jarring note was the "ubermensch" attitude of the children's rescuers. It had a hint of the master race about it. I note from the wikipedia entry on the book I'm not the only one to be slightly disturbed by the "kill or be killed" approach. Maybe it's not so bad coming from the aliens in "The Midwich Cuckoos", but from the future residents of New Zealand, it doesn't ring true. Our kiwi cousins would never abandon compassion and decency so readily!