• The Atlas Room - Iris
• Oen Sujet - Circled. Centred
• My Brightest Diamond - The Diamond (Son Lux Alternate Remix)
• Why? - These Hands (Son Lux Remix)
• Holosud - Alaune
• Autechre - known(1)
• Autechre - see on see
• Lexis - Hypnotise (Autechre Slow mix)
• Funckarma - Moor
• Funckarma - Nays of Dight

Reading:

At the risk of too much bubbling enthusiasm (cf the “genius” comment re Paul McAuley below), I have to say it:
Terry Pratchett is a genius.

He really is, though. While McAuley’s book might constitute “genius” of a sort, Pratchett transcends just about everything else, to be simultaneously hilarious, wise and very very entertaining. He’s single-handedly invented a new genre, with its roots in comic fantasy, yet serious about the scientific understanding of the real world, as well as society and culture; seemingly (especially with the witch books) based in folk psychology, yet often commenting perspicaciously on very contemporary understandings of how the mind works…
I’m not even going to bother to go through and find choice quotes from this book. Suffice to say that, despite being one of the Discworld children’s books, there’s a lot to learn for adult readers here too, as well as a lot of fun to be had.
And there are some sideways pokes at the Harry Potter world (Tiffany Aching, our heroine, being a born-to-be-a-witch type), including a big witching competition where nothing quite goes as expected. This comes as highly recommended as any Pratchett from me – ie, it’s essential.

While I was reading White Devils (which I started as soon as it arrived, it being a new Paul McAuley and all), I was inspired to write very fannishly of it:
Paul McAuley’s new novel White Devils is genius.
And it pretty much is. My excuse for that little outburst was that I was very behind in my book reviews, but clearly I couldn’t hold myself back. Now that I’m here, let’s see how I followed that blatantly silly (and not terribly grammatical) sentence:
Marketed as a thriller, it is that, and thus it’s fast-paced, present-tense, and doesn’t leave a lot of room for characters you grow to know and love, but it’s also pure near-future hard-sf, with incisive scientific and political extrapolation, a very deep moral sensibility, and some fun ideas about cognitive science.

So. Hard science fiction can get blamed for caring too much about the ideas and not enough about creating believable characters, and some of it does do that. McAuley, however, is well and truly capable of insightful characterisation. So when he’s doing the thriller thing, you can be sure that any superficiality of characterisation is deliberate.
White Devils is, very explicitly, a 21st-century Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s harrowing book (I found it a harrowing read – hardly any paragraphs! Prose as dense as the jungle!) explores colonialism and industrialism in the early 20th century, and here we are taken on a similar journey into the heart of the “Green Congo”, in an Africa torn apart by civil wars and biotech plagues, spawning huge numbers of refugees and atrocities.

Nicholas Hyde (yes, his surname, like the Conrad references, is a little too deliberately over-heavy with connotation) is a humanitarian worker investigating a recent massacre, when he’s called off to another massacre site. While the crew investigate the site they get the feeling something sinister’s going on – heads smashed open and brains devoured – and then they’re suddenly attacked by some very weird creatures, looking like “shaved albino chimpanzees”, with armour under their skins, fangs and claws, and a viciously carnivorous belligerence towards humans. Nick only just escapes, and in doing so rescues an African baby – the first of a number of naïvely and doggedly righteous acts that only get him into worse and worse trouble.
And immediately Nick is in trouble, because the authorities want to cover up the existence of these “white devils”, insisting that they were white-painted child-soldiers, and Nick will have none of it. The plot gathers momentum as he searches for the truth, and we learn that his own secrets may be part of what motivates him…

While Nick can be counted as the main protagonist, he’s by no means the only viewpoint character. McAuley excels at multi-threaded plots where the different point-of-view characters can put radically different slants on what we’re shown. Matthew Faber is one of the many mad scientists in the novel; he’s become unhinged due to some past experiments on mind, and lives on an island with a beloved tribe of genetically engineered proto-humans. Meanwhile his sassy daughter Elspeth is on a dig somewhere else in Africa, making an apparently revolutionary anthropological discovery… Christian eco-terrorist and mercenary-assassin Cody Corbin is out to kill anyone who tampers with God’s DNA; and there are yet more mad scientists and other colourful characters.
McAuley – who is a biologist himself – has always painted a world where morality is far more than black & white, and here the number of factions and opinions is overflowing. Mixed in with this is some interesting commentary on the filters between our perceptions and the truth, whether it’s guessing games in anthropological investigation, attempted reverse-engineering of human evolution (and the evolution of mind), or indeed spin-doctoring by corporate and poltiical interests.

If this all sounds over-the-top, it’s remarkably believable in the book. It’s set only 30 years in the future, carefully drawn out from the current world. McAuley fans will note some continuity with previous McAuley works, from the seminal and brilliant Fairyland (set in a future Europe of refugee camps and rogue biotech, and presumably taking place a little after this book) to The Secret of Life, to Red Mars and many short stories, both older and newer. And it’s reassuring and fun to see the recurring McAuley character Darlajane B making a typically important-yet-fleeting appearance.

White Devils is a very fine work indeed, and hopefully will sneak past the radars of those who don’t think they like hard sf.

In a recent review in the NY Times, Gerald Jonas says of Neal Asher: “Like his fellow Brit Richard K. Morgan in his Takeshi Kovacs novels, Asher assumes that science’s success in extending life will only multiply the opportunities for inflicting pain.”
I was a little bit in two minds about reading Altered Carbon, the first of Richard Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels, and it wasn’t just the violence putting me off. After all, I know Morgan’s politics are pretty sturdy (anti-globalisation etc) and I do enjoy a bit of rollicking cyberpunk. However, I’d read Paul di Filippo’s review in Asimov’s and, positive though it is, he does mention how unlikely it is that the world 500 years into the future would be as Morgan describes. I like my sf to be as believable as possible, but hey – I’d heard lots of good things about this book.

So anyway, it turns out that the time thing is a bit of a problem for me; not fatal to the book, but it’s a bit disturbing. Altered Carbon’s just far-future cyberpunk; where’s the nanotech? The biotech is pretty much just “neurachem”, conditioning of the “sleeve” to make it really good at martial arts, ya know. What are sleeves, you ask? Well one’s mind in Morgan’s future is saved on a cortical stack, rather like Greg Egan’s Ndoli devices, only different. Stacks can be remotely backed up, and in certain circumstances can even be duplicated. When the stack is fitted into a new body it’s known as “re-sleeving”, and that body may well have been owned by somebody else previously. And indeed they may not have taken that good care of it…

The book is set five centuries in the future to facilitate the particular political climate, especially important because central to the plot are the ultra-rich who can afford to keep clones on ice, and in effect never grow old: the meths (after Methusalah of course). Takeshi Kovacs comes from off-world: the war-torn colony planet Harlan’s World (sounds a bit like Sky’s Edge in Alastair Reynolds‘ Chasm City), where he was trained in basically black ops… This history gives ample opportunity for harrowing back-story glimpses, a familiar technique in gritty cyberpunk (see the splendid Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s works, for instance). Captured as a criminal doing something shady or other, his stack is put into storage for some extreme length of time (basically this is the ultimate punishment), but his particular abilities are requested for an interesting seeming-suicide case on Earth, so the contents of his stack are squirted to Earth using some seemingly-faster-than-light technology, and off we go with the rollicking plot.

There was a point about a third of the way through this book when I almost stopped reading. Those familiar with the book will know immediately what I’m talking about: it’s the virtual reality torture scene, and to be honest, I still wish I hadn’t read it. Being an Amnesty International Human Rights Defender (ie supporter) I get to read more than enough about the extraordinary brutality with which humans can treat each other. What this passage brought home (and without wishing to disparage what is a great read, this is probably the one original aspect of the book) is how mind-uploading and VR gives a limitlessly-expanded scope for torture and cruelty.
Mind you, there’s plenty of real-life violence and brutality here too. Basically Altered Carbon is far-future cyberpunk noir, hard-boiled as it comes, fast-paced and very well plotted. It really does all fall together by the end, the (really bad) baddies really are ultra-bad and the, well, particularly grotesquely bad ones get their come-uppance. Thing is, even our hero Takeshi is technically a baddie, although it’s never clear what’s that bad about him; we sortof have to take that on trust.

Nevertheless, despite the fairly low-brow high-action plotting, and despite my disbelief at the rate of technological change, and despite the fact that none of the ideas are really that new, Morgan does come up with some very nice philosophising about such things as the physiological basis for sexual attraction (and how that relates to love), the culture-shock (of sorts) of being downloaded into a new body (in a cute twist, Kovacs’s host is a smoker, and he spends much of the book relieving the sleeve of that particular dependency), the amorality of the near-immortal ultra-rich (an oft-visited sf trope, mind you), and the way some things just never change.
So it is thought-provoking enough (despite being steadfastly derivative), its morals are in the right place (despite many stomach-churning moments, and that one sit-up-at-night-going-I-don’t-want-to-have- dreams-based-on-that passage), and, well, it’s not way-hard science fiction but it doesn’t do too badly.

I’m still not sure whether I want to read more Morgan though. I’ve had a reading copy of his newie, Market Forces, for months & months (well before it came out) but I’m not sure. Jon Courtenay Grimwood slowly got over the penchant for ultra-violence, and maybe Richard Morgan will too. I’ve been staying away from the formerly-mentioned Mr Asher for similar reasons… Although I think I’ve read a good short story in Interzone and he’s debuting in the June Asimov’s (arriving soon I hope)…

Listening:

• February 2010
• April 2009
• January 2009
• November 2008
• October 2008
• July 2008
• May 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• June 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• December 2006
• November 2006
• October 2006
• September 2006
• August 2006
• July 2006
• June 2006
• May 2006
• April 2006
• March 2006
• February 2006
• January 2006
• December 2005
• November 2005
• October 2005
• September 2005
• August 2005
• July 2005
• June 2005
• April 2005
• February 2005
• January 2005
• December 2004
• November 2004
• October 2004
• September 2004
• August 2004
• July 2004
• June 2004
• May 2004
• April 2004
• March 2004
• February 2004
• January 2004
• December 2003
• November 2003
• October 2003
• September 2003
• August 2003
• July 2003
• June 2003
• May 2003
• April 2003
• March 2003
• February 2003
• January 2003
• December 2002
• November 2002
• October 2002
• September 2002
• August 2002
• July 2002
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• January 2002
• November 2001
• October 2001
• September 2001
• July 2001
• February 2001
• January 2001
• December 2000
• November 2000
• October 2000
• August 2000
• July 2000
• June 2000