.
Frozen Hell by John W Campbell Jr. Written in the 30s and never released in it’s full, unedited form until recently. A cutback version saw publication as Who Goes There which was the inspiration for movies The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing. I’ve been on a serious early/mid 20th century sci fi kick for some time and I’m a massive fan of The Thing so this should hopefully be right up my street.
Just finished reading GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD, a very interesting take on the man generally thought of as a barbarian but who was actually very progressive. Now I’m reading a collection of six short novels by John Steinbeck, beginning with TORTILLA FLAT.
Dead Astronauts update: one of them has met a fish. I think it’s an actual real fish and not a metaphorical but I can’t say for 100% sure.
Was it the salmon of doubt?
That’s funny, Dave, but on this thread we DOLPHINately need to improve the fish puns, otherwise we’re just KRILLing ourselves for no reason. I know I’m GILLty of telling some bad ones, and I know I COD do better but for now I need to SCALE back. We have an opporTUNAty to become the ofFISHal site of bad seafood puns, better than those other ones you’ve been HERRING about on the internet; but for God’s HAKE we’ve got to put some effort into it!
That’s it; I’m done….
Ok Jerry wins.
That’s only because he threatened to put your head on a pike.
The Waterproof Bible by Andrew Kaufman
There are three things going on in this book: Rachel is a woman who broadcasts all her emotions to everyone around her and has learnt to store the really strong ones in objects, which she hoards in a storage facility; her sister has just died and the bereaved husband/bandmate struggles to cope with it; an aquatic-human woman called Aberystwyth travels on dry land for the first time to find her mother.
While some of those things tie together (Aby’s mother runs an inn that Rachel’s estranged husband works at) none of it feels well developed and at no point comes together as a cohesive whole. The widower’s plot strand in particular feels utterly pointless. Rachel’s clearly has the strongest concept (and when I originally stumbled on this book literally years ago, it was the only one I thought it had and was enough to convince me to – eventually – read it) but it’s hugely under-developed and ends incredibly limply.
These really feel like a few short stories awkwardly bolted together, becoming less than the sum of their parts. I found myself more interested in the manager of the self-storage facility, who helps Rachel with her “power” and seems to know a lot more about them and similar. That would have been a better concept to centre a novel (or anthology) on.
As it is, this is just an underwhelming mess. I don’t think I’ve ever been left so bemused by a book.
The Short Novels of John Steinbeck is a collection of six novellas and short novels written by Steinbeck between 1933 and 1947. It’s a mixed bag of styles and genres, including comedy (Tortilla Flat) and tragedy (The Pearl), multi-character tales (Cannery Row) and smaller, intimate stories (Of Mice and Men), but all written in Steinbeck’s classic voice and style. If you went to high school in the US, chances are you’ve been required to read something by John Steinbeck; but he’s definitely an author whose work you should revisit now as an adult to appreciate his gift of capturing the American voice.
Next up for me: Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find.
If you went to high school in the UK you’ve probably been required to read something by Steinbeck too (unless my school was just unusual). We read Of Mice and Men, and the memory of it stayed with me well into adulthood. I finally read The Grapes of Wrath as an adult, and I would list it as one of my all-time favourite books.
There are a lot of book choices on the curriculum and they select a couple so there’ll be variation. I never did Steinbeck but I think my brother did ‘Grapes of Wrath’. Our ‘modern prose’ was Brave New World by Huxley, there should have been another but I’ve forgotten.
Out of curiosity I checked the current list and Steinbeck is on there..
I’ve only read four of those, and three of them were set books at school (Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird). All of them I would recommend to anyone who hasn’t read them, but probably would never have read them myself if they hadn’t been set at school.
So I guess school is useful for something after all 
I should probably get back to Steinbeck’s longer novels now.
If you read no other Steinbeck, you MUST read his epic, The Grapes of Wrath. I’ve read it twice as an adult, and look forward to reading it again. Someday…
The English even showed us the 1940 movie of it with Henry Fonda. I have had no desire to revisit it.
I’m enjoying the idea of an entire population across the Atlantic forcing old movies on Texan children.
It was probably during the Thatcher administration.
I read this fairly recent book by Alan Moore which is essentially a medium-length essay on the historical intersection of sex and art.
Well worth a look just for his lovely, warm, readable prose but it’s also quite thought-provoking and convincingly presents the argument that sex-positive attitudes in civilisations that openly acknowledge sexual desire and depict it in art are progressive, whereas restrictive and prudish societies that push sex underground and attach feelings of shame and secrecy to it are regressive and harmful and undesirable.
It also makes a very decent case for the need for a better standard of pornography and essentially laments how the free availability of low-quality porn has essentially led to a race to the bottom (stop it) in terms of consideration of artistic value.
There are also some nice illustrations featuring various artworks on the theme from over the centuries.
I’ve been reading recently, for the first time, Dracula. Not only have I not read Stoker’s version before, I don’t think I’ve ever actually read or watched a direct adaptation of it before, beyond the first couple of chapters of Roy Thomas and Gene Colan’s comic version serialised in Dracula Lives (which doesn’t get very far into the story). Certainly I’ve read and watched a lot of vampire stories (and I really like Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula), but not specifically this original. But I saw a bit of a ballet adaptation on BBC Four the other week and was curious to see how that’d work, but figured I should read the story first to see.
Anyway, it’s been… underwhelming, I’d say. Frustrating.
The main problem is that it’s damned slow. Initially, I was ok with that. A slow burn can work well and all the bits of Jonathan Harker in Castle Dracula works pretty well, as he slowly comes to understand the nature of Dracula and his situation. That all works pretty well. But then it shifts to Whitby and ambles along. It’s not til about halfway in that you finally get Van Helsing stake out the nature and rules of vampirism and the book starts to use the word vampite and “Un-Dead” regularly. “Aha,” thought I, “it’ll get going now. They’ve spent so many chapters compiling, transcribing and comparing notes, surely it’ll kick into high gear now!” Except not so much.
In fact, it gets worse at that point. Because despite the group spending ages getting each other up to speed and Stoker, through Van Helsing, intricately laying out the rules and nature of vampirism, the characters all immediately start holding idiot balls and fail to notice Dracula feeding on Mina for three nights. Even Mina, who is easily the smartest of the group outside Van Helsing, just fails to grasp what’s going on. “Oh, I’m feeling so weak and tired and had a really awful dream last night that something was in the room with me. Oh well, probably just nerves”. Jonathan sees Mina sleeping late and being weak and just dismisses it as stress. Come on, this is literally what just happened with Lucy FFS!
It doesn’t really improve from there, with the book just devolving into a lot of talking about finding crates. Dracula himself is largely a non-entity once the book leaves Transylvania and it’s hard, from reading this, to see the roots of a character that’s become a staple of pop culture for over a century (I know the stage adaptation had a large hand in that). His plans are disappointingly bland (I suppose that’s because I’m used to him in Tomb of Dracula, where he’s an actual character who does stuff) and that he just runs off out of London so quickly is pretty boring. The version of Dracula here is not one who warrants sequels.
A character that does though, sort of, is Van Helsing. As I said, I’ve not read or watched any direct adaptation of the original Dracula, so my knowledge of Van Helsing was really just the idea of Peter Cushing in a velvet jacket as a vampire lore guy. So finding him to be a proper medical doctor was interesting. He’s a smart guy who, presented with a mystery, has an open enough mind to consider possibilities outside of the expected and the accepted. That’s a great concept, one which is essentially the root of a lot of later heroes of speculative fiction (the Doctor, for instance) and one who could have been the root of non-vampire-centric sequels. Van Helsing as a catch-all paranormal investigator seems more compelling from this than Dracula coming back. (Although, admittedly that’s what the Hugh Jackman Van Helsing movie tried to do, with limited success).
That said though, he’s not a brilliant character. A brilliant concept, yes. But Stoker somewhat ruins it with his dialogue. Having Van Helsing not only talk in broken English, to signify that he’s a foreigner, but also in great reams of rambling, uninterrupted postulating and theory is a real drag. Quite often I’d just find myself drifting from the page, when not reading it all in a comedy Dutch accent.
The other problem that hinder Van Helsing, as well as the other characters, is that the book hasn’t aged well at all in some regards. It’s incredibly Victorian, from all the men deciding that Mina shouldn’t be involved in hunting Dracula (despite she being the one that had put most of the information together) to the general pious, God-fearing and gyno-reverent writing. The pedestal that Stoker has his characters put Mina and Lucy on is just sickly to read, as it verges on fetishisation of women, while at the same time completely patronises them.
One element of the book I found interesting though is how much of Stoker’s rules for vampirism have survived through to other titles in the genre and which have been quietly dropped. The running water thing, which is a key element of the plot here, I don’t think I’ve seen in any other vampire story. Similarly, the use of communion wafers as a weapon is something I’ve definitely not seen elsewhere, but is crucial here, getting more use than crucifixes and not challenged at all by holy water. The standardised rule of sunlight being lethal to a vampire seems to be absent here, in favour of a muddied and confused (in my understanding at least) thing about them simply not being able to transform in daylight. And speaking of transformation, there’s loads more than I expected. Bats, cool. Turning into mist? Always seemed a bit odd to me, but whatever. Wolves, seems to have been quietly dropped in favour of letting werewolves have their own thing. Being able to apparently shrink down to any size or width to get through the gaps in doors? Just really odd. The weakness to wild roses is one that surprised me. Why on earth did that get forgotten and fall away while garlic persisted?
So, yes, in all, a bit of a trudge. Badly paced, some really bad dialogue, a thin plot and villain and somewhat hindered by its epistolary format (the Victorian equivalent of found footage, I guess). But I am glad I’ve finally read it. Might now watch that ballet version. And possibly a translation of the contemporary Icelandic translation, which no-one noticed was significantly different to the English original until 2014.
Yeah, it’s an interesting experience reading it today after so much vampire lore has accumulated and seeing what was and wasn’t there originally.
Funnily enough I’ve seen the running water thing referenced quite a few times in vampire stories, although it’s certainly less common than garlic and sunlight and crucifixes and so on.
The running water stipulation is a weird one too because there’s a slack tide loophole that Dracula uses, but even at slack tide, it’s still running water, really. And how is not being able to walk onto a boat while the tide’s up different from being on a boat while it travels across the sea or down a river? It’s not like he’s helpless while that happens, because he kills all the people on the boat to Whitby and uses his powers to speed along the boat back to Galitz.
It’s also a bit weird how sunrise and sunset are more important – especially when it comes to Mina’s psychic link – than day/night itself.
So, yes, in all, a bit of a trudge.
In truth, many novels of that era are a tough slog today. Much of Charles Dickens’ works were originally written for weekly or monthly serial publication, resulting in a lot of dragged-out threads and lots of repetition when read in one sitting, and yet he’s considered the best writer of that era. Still, I think it is important to read the early horror classics (Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, The Invisible Man, Dorian Grey) just to experience the origins of these long-lasting iconic characters. These books were written in a vacuum of sorts, without a lot of prior horror stories to draw from and use as a model. I feel the same about early science fiction novels from Hugo, Verne, Wells and their contemporaries — those books feel dated now, but they are important building blocks for the entire genre and deserve our attention and recognition.
I’ve been reading recently, for the first time, Dracula. …
I think that’s a fair review, but I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy it more. It had a huge impact on me, the only book I’ve read that actually had me wake screaming in the night (this was as a adult). It’s Stoker’s prose style that affected me (despite all the flaws you point out)</span>, more than the actual plot or characters.
But I just like Victorian prose in general, especially in horror writing.
Yeah, back when I read it I thought Harker’s journal was brilliant, as was the way the ship’s journey is told, and it all goes downhill from there. Towards the end, all the Christian pious talk immensely went on my nerves.
Martin, if this means you’ve never seen the Coppola adaptation, this would be a good time for it. That movie keeps all the good stuff from the novel and manages to make the rest more interesting by injecting some erotic/romantic tension and by turning van Helsing into a bit of a fanatic madman that Anthony Hopkins is playing with manic energy. Or at least that was my impression back then; who knows how it’s aged…
There’s also a very fun version called the unredacted edition which was done as an in game reference for the Dracula Files campaign, which operates that Dracula was published after he went against British Intelligence when they tried to recruit him via Harker.
I watched that Dracula ballet I mentioned previously last night and this morning and given we don’t have a ballet thread (a shocking oversight, now I come to think of it) and it relates to the book, I thought I’d talk about it here.
It actually makes some changes to the plot of the book (as you’d expect given it’s adapting a long epistolary novel into fancy dancing), which are largely improvements. Dracula is more of a presence when he arrives in England. Lucy is turned just before her engagement party, which she turns up to with Dracula, and shows the change of vampirism through lusty flirting. Mina and Jonathan are both present at that, and it’s there that Dracula notices Mina. He feeds on her for the first time while the men are distracted with dealing with the risen Lucy. The biggest change is (and I’m going to spoiler tag this because if you can, I recommend you watch the ballet, it’s on the iplayer for another 6 months) Mina really gets into having been turned and, at the end, just kills herself.
A lot of those changes actually make the story flow better and would have been good for the novel. Dracula starting to feed on Mina when the men are distracted by Lucy especially, as it avoids the big problem Stoker has of all his characters looking like absolute idiots for not noticing it happening, if they’re all out at night dealing with Lucy.
It’s very much an adaptation of the concept of Dracula and vampirism than just the original novel though, as it plays heavily into the “vampirism as sexual awakening allegory” concept that is a prevalent thing, but frankly just isn’t there in Stoker’s original. Maybe at a push it is for Lucy – with her seduction of wayward children, I suppose, showing the heartless acts of a fallen woman – but for Mina, it’s all played very much as a rape allegory if anything. The woman despoiled against her will by the wicked man, now seen unclean in the eyes of god, forced to bear a visible mark of her shame until the men in her life reclaim her honour by killing the one who tainted her. It’s not a particularly sexy novel in general, but Mina’s part don’t even have the trace of it that Lucy and the brides do.
The ballet though, really sexes it up. Which I guess makes sense, given it’s a ballet and they need to heighten the emotions for the dancing to work. But as well as really turning Lucy into the stage-prancing equivalent of a harlot, it shows Dracula and Mina’s relationship as, well as a relationship at all is a big change, but it’s a mutual seduction. There’s a lengthy duet of them as Dracula’s entered Mina’s bedroom and it’s as much her seducing him as it is him corrupting her, culminating in him feeding on her and then pretty much looking like they’re having sex when they’re discovered and Dracula’s chased off. It’s a much more interesting angle than Stoker’s take on it.
So yeah, definitely go watch the ballet if you can. I can’t say I’ve ever actually watched a ballet before but I really enjoyed it. I did keep thinking of a line of Eddie Izzard stand-up, when talking about how bees communicate through dance “Brian, just tell us where the honey is”, but once you get onboard with the inherent silliness of the medium, it’s fun and surprising how much narrative depth can be conveyed through dance. I’m not sure I would have been able to follow it entirely without having read the book first (though the TV version does give a plot summary at the start of each act, which seemed a bit unnecessary to me and I didn’t look at that after the first).
we don’t have a ballet thread
Oh, I think this is a different version. It’s by the UK’s Northern Ballet and choreographed by David Nixon. I mean, he may have ripped off the Houston one, who knows?
https://northernballet.com/dracula
The Northern Ballet version was set to music by Schnittke, Rachmaninov, Pärt and Daugherty (I’m afraid I have no idea who Daugherty is), so probably not at all copying the Liszt version.
It may have also been a case of parallel development.
If the parallels are about the changes to the story, it has to be said that it pretty much follows what the Coppola movie did with Mina and Lucy. But then again, it’s pretty much what you would do to make it interesting, especially in a ballet. I can easily believe them developing this independently.
I just finished Piranesi by Susanna Clarke (known for Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell). It was really, really good, but too short at slightly more than 200 pages. I also thought that Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell with almost 800 pages was too short…
I am currently reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Half of a Yellow Sun”, a 2006 novel that takes place before and during the Nigerian Civil War in the 60s. I am doing this because Nigeria has taken the place that until recently India had in our curriculum, so I now have to find out about Nigerian history, politics and literature.
It’s very good novel that paints a fascinating picture of Nigerian society of the time, with characters including a variety of viewpoints on it. It’s told mainly through the points of view of a village boy who becomes the houseboy to a professor at a university, of that professor’s lover (and later wife), and of her sister’s lover (who is an Englishman). Their personal stories are involving and the way in which the Biafran War takes over their lives is heartbreaking.
Here’s the list of the books I read in 2020 (NF indicates non-fiction):
1. Krampus – Brom
2. Troublemakers – Harlan Ellison
3. Making Haste From Babylon – Nick Bunker NF
4. Brother – David Chariandy
5. Bright and Distant Shores – Dominic Smith
6. Empire of Blue Water – Stephan Talty NF
7. Hybrid – Brian O’Grady
8. Virtual History – Niall Ferguson NF
9. Bear Town – Fredrik Backman
10. 1776 – David McCullough NF
11. A Drink Before the War – Dennis Lehane
12. The First Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Geo Washington – Brad Meltzer NF
13. The Best of Robert E. Howard Volume 2: Grim Lands – Robert E. Howard
14. Six Years – Harlan Coben
15. The Iliad – Homer
16. Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick – Philip K. Dick
17. Flight of the Earls – Michael K. Reynolds
18. The Force – Don Winslow
19. Dune – Frank Herbert
20. O, Pioneers! – Willa Cather
21. New York – Edward Rutherfurd
22. The Last Quarry – Max Allan Collins
23. Lovecraft Country – Matt Ruff
24. The British Are Coming – Rick Atkinson NF
25. The Ocean At the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman
26. Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era – Mark A. Vieira NF
27. The Cider House Rules – John Irving
28. Almuric and Other Fantasies – Robert E. Howard
29. Little Girl Lost – Brian McGilloway
30. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World – Jack Weatherford NF
31. The Short Novels of John Steinbeck (Tortilla Flat; The Red Pony; Of Mice and Men; The Moon is Down; Cannery Row; The Pearl)
32. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories – Flannery O’Connor
33. Those Girls – Chevy Stevens
34. North River – Pete Hamill
35. The Pioneers – David McCullough NF
36. An Easy Death – Charlaine Harris
Currently starting off 2021 by tackling the 1,182-page HAMILTON biography by Ron Chernow; I’ve been putting it off too long now.
I got this book for Christmas and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Yes, it’s exactly what it looks like – a book about typefaces used in arcade games.
Having dropped hints to my wife and kids about it, they were a bit baffled as to why I would want something so niche and geeky (maybe they don’t know me as well as I thought). It is literally pages of different fonts, with a little commentary on each, and occasional pages that show more images from the games. Like this:
The great thing about it is that all of the fonts included conform to exactly the same rules: every letter, number or symbol is drawn in a simple 8×8 pixel grid. Which you would think would make things boring and repetitive.
But in fact it becomes a wonderful showcase for creativity within these limitations, with various techniques and styles and use of colour allowing for a huge variation in fonts, ranging from simple letterforms to elaborate script or handwritten effects, retro-futuristic fonts, shadows and embossed effects and much more – all within the confines of just 8×8 pixels per character.
Toshi Omagari’s informed commentaries manage to include not only some interesting observations about each font, but also a quick summary of each game (often quite tongue-in-cheek and absurd in tone, given some of the weirder and more obscure titles covered) and some intetesting historical context that gradually teases out a broad web of influences and derivations that lets you perceive all sorts of interesting evolutions and trends in the field.
It’s all written in an exuberant, enthusiastic tone that brings real life and energy to what could be a dry subject, and it really makes the book a joy to dip into.
This is the third book from Read-Only Memory that I’ve read, after the Megadrive and Dreamcast books, but all three have been very enjoyable reads. On the strength of these I’ve just ordered the Sensible Software and Bitmap Brothers books too (I think @Bruce recommended the latter a while back) and I’ve also backed the Kickstarter for their upcoming Street Fighter II title.
This is how books on videogames should be: informed and interesting but also brimming with enthusiasm, and entertaining in their own right.
I got the exact same book form xmas too @dave. It’s a great read and I’ve enjoyed dipping in and pit of it.
I also ordered the Sensible Software book the other day too. Lucky to get hold of it as it’s been out of print for ages and the only reason it’s in stock at the moment is because they found a couple of boxes of it in the back of their warehouse.
They arrived this morning – fast work considering I only ordered them on Tuesday afternoon.
I’ve been reading Wild & Crazy Guys by Nick Semlyen lately. It’s subtitled “How the comedy mavericks of the 80s changed Hollywood forever” which is a bold assertion that it never really manages to live up to. I suspect that was a marketing guy’s addition. If anything the book shows that Hollywood rolled on without said “mavericks” once their few minutes of fame were up (while also glossing over other people changing Hollywood at the same time).
The book is a pleasant enough read – a potted history of the careers of Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Bill Murray, John Candy and Rick Moranis, or up til the mid 90s anyway. It in no way feels definitive though, it has no great argument or case to make about anything. If, like me, you enjoy 80s movies, you’ll probably find bits to like, but it is very light. It maybe could have done with a different structure, as it tends to blur timelines to fit its narrative (even though it’s a pretty weak, ambling narrative at that), maybe a year by year thing or individual profiles of each guy in turn. The notes at the back say that the author actually had face-to-face interviews with Moranis and (surprisingly) Murray (in 2013 though, six years before the book’s publication, which given the lightweight nature of it makes you wonder what Semlyen was doing for 6 years) and part of me thinks that maybe just transcripts of those would have been as interesting and informative as the full book is.
Life Moves Pretty Fast by Hadley Freeman (horrible TERF though she is – thankfully none of that comes up in the book) covers similar ground but more beyond as well (looking at all kinds of 80s movies) and is probably the stronger book for it
I also ordered the Sensible Software book the other day too. Lucky to get hold of it as it’s been out of print for ages and the only reason it’s in stock at the moment is because they found a couple of boxes of it in the back of their warehouse.
I finished reading this last night.
It’s a really interesting run through the history of Sensible, anchored by a long interview with Jon Hare (aka Jops) – that seems to have taken place over a bottle of wine or three – but also brings in lots of other key voices at relevant points in the story.
It’s really interesting for me to discover the real people and personalities behind the names like Jools and Jops that I remember mainly from the Cannon Fodder honour rolls.
It’s written in broadly chronological form and divided into chapters on all their key games, but in amongst this it teases out the broader story of the development of Sensible, from an initial partnership of two to a successful small team to an overly large group that ended up losing its way with the advent of a new generation of 3D gaming and some overly ambitious projects that ultimately never saw the light of day.
It feels like it really captures a moment in 80s-90s UK gaming when a small cottage industry grew up and found success (all the talk of magazine cover disks and demos evoked a lot of nostalgia for me) and then ultimately struggled to survive and got folded into bigger companies as gaming became a more mainstream big-business pursuit.
It also really effectively captures the different personalities that were at the heart of Sensible, and paints a great picture of how they all fitted together at various points in the company ‘s history.
The tone of the conversation is occasionally a bit overly mate-y and laddish in places, there are times when key voices feel missing from the story, and there are some weird editing errors where footnote references to images printed at the back of the book sometimes don’t match the relevant pages – but aside from those small quibbles it was a great read.
Ringworld by Larry Niven. One of those books that I’ve been aware of for years but have only just gotten around to reading now. Solid, slow burning first half. Plenty of hard scifi with a strong lick of humour too. Things heat up and get more interesting when the cast actually arrive at the titular Ringworld. The author does a good job of describing the worlds and universes we find ourselves in but leaves enough out to let our imaginations do the rest.
I read Carmilla by J Sheridan Le Fanu this week. It’s interesting because it’s a story with a pretty assured take on vampires, about 20 odd years before Stoker’s Dracula. Conceptually, it’s good – the premise is solid and some of the details – like Carmill’s coffin being filled with blood when she’s found resting in it – are more interesting than Stoker’s. Plus it quite blatantly deals with lesbianism, which I suspect wasn’t that commonly done at time of publication.
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t really work as a story. It gets about halfway into telling one and then has another character show up and recount, at length, what happened to his ward (which is what’s happening to the story’s narrator) and then wraps things up rather perfunctorily without almost zero drama at the end. Le Fanu’s prose style is also incredibly dense, with long run-on sentences, that groan under the weight of all their clauses. It feels at times like it’s been poorly translated from a different language.
Hammer’s the Vampire Lovers movie is an adaptation of the story and it gives it a much better resolution.
Oh, I’ve been looking forward to this.
I’m halfway through another novel at the moment (Bonfire of the Vanities, which I’d never read before and am enjoying) but I’m tempted to put it on hold and bump this to the top of the pile.
Bonfire of the Vanities
BONFIRE is a book I’ve wanted to go back and read again, but I was afraid it might feel dated. Have you been enjoying it, @Dave?
Yes. I’m maybe a third of the way through it so far and I’m enjoying it quite a bit.
While some of it is dated in terms of specific details, the themes and ideas still feel very relevant – worryingly so in some respects, given how little society has progressed in some areas.
It reminded me a little of American Psycho like that – it’s a novel that’s very of its time in some ways, but also timeless in others.
One thing I would say is that it’s very male-centric and the world is so far presented entirely from that viewpoint. Consciously so, I think. But it might be a book that was written differently if it came out today. Certainly I think there might be a little more balance in its treatment of women.
I also love the picture it paints of New York more broadly, the good and the bad. You’ll be better placed than me to say how accurate that is (it’s somewhere I’ve always wanted to go but have never been) but it paints a good picture either way.
Like I say though, I’m only a third of the way through it so I literally don’t have the full story yet. I’ll have to check in here again when I’m done.
A tale of two trilogies, each of which shows up the difference developmnt over time has on a writer’s skills and ability.
First, Alastair Reynolds’ Inhibitors trilogy. It’s hard not to look at this set of books, published 2000-2004 and not conclude someone at Bioware was taking inspiration for what would become Mass Effect‘s Reapers. Each is built around the same set of concepts and execution – the ideas of what the reality of space travel would look like and its effect on time. So it is there are multiple timelines that eventually come to intersect. It’s an interestong idea but these books are quite different to the far later and more entertaining Revenger. Revelation Space is the strongest of the trio, Redemption Ark starts flagging early and Absolution Gap, though not without some late act redeeming aspects, is a slog to get through. Despite this, it is an intriguing universe and I’m hooked enough to see what Reynolds can do now for the ext book out in August, Inhibitor Phase.
In contrast, Hamilton’s Salvation Sequence trilogy is by an established writer who has been spinning stories for quite some time and it shows. One of his earlier weaknesses was a penchant for having characters literally screwing around. Sure, sex gets a look in here, but nowhere near as much as his earlier work and the story is better for it. A trilogy covering an alien invasion of Earth and humanity’s fighting against it on a very, very long-term scale, Hamilton seems to also want to experiment with stucture.
The first book, Salvation, is more a set of flashback short stories, one for each of the main characters, and which has far more to do with the present day than any of them are aware. The second book, Salvation Lost, like all those in a trilogy, has to both advance the plot but not too much. It also suffers from the youth characters being a bit too much “how is it going, fellow kids?” in its portrayal of them. The final volume, The Saints of Salvation, is a pretty epic finale involving some very clever and well executed ideas that make for a very strong conclusion.
Just finishing up a good non-fiction book: 1861 The Civil War Awakening by Adam Goodheart. Instead of a dry history of the reasons behind the American Civil War and the battles therein, this one spends each chapter detailing one or two unsung individuals and their impact on the War (or the War’s impact on them). Some fascinating tales that add more depth to my understanding of that conflict.
Next, something lighter, I think…
At this rate, you will get your next GoT book literally over his dead body. And even then, that’s still not a guarantee.
Honestly, at this point I’m not sure I will bother picking up the next ASOIAF book when/if it is finally released. I probably won’t be able to recall what happened in the previous novels versus what the TV showrunners created on their own.
Superheroes and Philosophy
The Wisecrack channel on YouTube sounds like a far superior version of this, though they look at various aspects of pop culture and mainstream culture through a philosophical lens as well.
The Wisecrack channel on YouTube sounds like a far superior version of this, though they look at various aspects of pop culture and mainstream culture through a philosophical lens as well.
Yes, they used to be a smarter version of CRACKED back when Cracked was really crackin’! Actually, Cracked is improving gradually lately as well but not like the good old days.
However, the main complaint I have for Wisecrack lately is that it cancelled its funniest shows and while most of its philosophical musings are interesting, they aren’t really that funny.
I’d say my favorite comedy channel on YouTube today is THE INTERNET HISTORIAN and its side channel INCOGNITO MODE.
I read The Red Badge Of Courage over the last… oh god, it felt like months. It was one of the books I’d decided to read after playing Code Name: STEAM, which used a load of characters from 19th and early 20th century American literature and man, I never thought I’d believe anyone who said video games are a bad influence on people, but now I’m not so sure.
It was a real trudge. A tiny amount of plot groans under weight of Crane’s imagery heavy prose. He for some reason decides not to name any of the characters in narration, which is an odd choice as they all tend to blur together. Is that an intentional commentary on the nature of soldiers? I don’t know, I’d assume not because it’s a pretty stupid one to make when your book only has about half a dozen main characters. And it’s undercut by the fact that they’re named in dialogue anyway. It just ends up being an odd affectation.
My main takeaway from the book though is that it is the most incredibly emo thing I’ve ever read and I was on fucking MySpace in its heyday. I know that sounds like I’m trivialising the subject matter, given it’s about a war, but seriously, inside the head of Henry Fleming is not a pleasant or enjoyable place to be. And the idea that by the end he’s learnt something or matured somehow is laughable. He was in like two skirmishes where he got swallowed up by blood lust. He may not have been scared any more, but it doesn’t make him mature and it really doesn’t atone for him leaving that one guy to die on his own.
I didn’t know it was based on a book, but I watched the film a long time ago and was completely underwhelmed. I had the idea I was supposed to be impressed, because it was such a weighty subject and the narration was so earnest, but I finished feeling… “meh”. It hadn’t even crossed my mind in the intervening years until I read your post.
I’ve been meaning to for years, and I finally got to the Red Dwarf novels by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor from the early 90s, which are a mixed bag.
The first one, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, starts as a much more expanded version of the pilot, giving Lister and Rimmer more backstory, explaining how and why Lister got on board, spending much more time on their lives before the accident, etc.
It works well, even if the writing is a bit too similar to Hitchhiker’s at times.
The second half works less well, mashing up several episodes of the show (Future Echoes, Kryten, and Me²) and trying to fit a continuing narrative to them. It almost works, and seems to be heading for a climax that resolves the various plot threads that are set up, but then they just give up and make the last part of the book a version of Better Than Life, with the crew trapped in a VR game that fulfils their desires.
One issue with the second half of the book is that they seem to constantly forget the Cat is around. After his initial appearance, he’s only in three or four scenes in the rest of the novel, and never impacts the plot at all. They have slightly more success on including Kryten in stories he wasn’t originally in, but only slightly.
Weirdly, the first book doesn’t end with them leaving their VR Prison, and leads directly into the second book, Better Than Life.
I was worried that this would be entirely set in the VR world, but thankfully it’s only the first third. That’s still too much, as there’s little in there that wasn’t covered in the previous novel, and the point that Rimmer hates himself can only be made so many times.
Even more annoyingly, after that rough start, the rest of the book is surprisingly great. It’s mostly another mash-up, mixing White Hole (without the white hole parts) with Marooned, Polymorph, and (briefly) Backwards, but it makes much better use of the cast, and goes in some interesting original directions.
It’s a surprisingly dark book, while still being funny. It’s just a shame that the opening third is so bad.
After that is where it gets weird. Grant and Naylor had stopped writing together, so they decided that rather than pick one of them to write the sequel to Better Than Life, they each wrote their own sequel, completely contradictory to each other.
Naylor’s book, Last Human, is an attempt to do a less comedic Red Dwarf, and it doesn’t work at all for me.
The lack of humour wouldn’t be so bad if it had a good story, which it doesn’t. It’s mostly an original story, so rather than a mix of existing episodes, it’s a mix of well-worn genre clichés, such as evil twins and long-lost sons.
Despite being less of an adaptation of existing episodes (there are part adapting DNA and Emohawk: Polymorph II that feel completely out of place), Naylor still brings in elements from the show since the last book, like the lack of Red Dwarf and Holly, and Rimmer being hard-light, as well as things he would add to the show later, such as Kochanski joining the crew, and “positive” viruses.
After going to the bother of adding Kochanski to the cast, Naylor fails to give her literally any characteristics at all. Practically everything she says (and it’s not a lot) is generic dialogue that any other character could be saying. This is demonstrated by the one role she has in the plot, taking the luck virus near the climax, being given to Rimmer with almost no changes when they put it into the TV show a few years later.
It’s mostly a Lister book, and the other characters largely feel out of character, often just acting to further the plot rather than what it ever feels like they would actually do, which is especially frustrating when the plot is so hard to follow.
Most of the attempts at genuine emotion fall flat, due to the thinness of the characters and the confusing plot, as well as the sense that anything bad that happens to the main cast will be quickly undone anyway.
It’s trying to do new an interesting things, but it’s a complete miss for me.
The Rob Grant third book, Backwards, is much more in line with the first two, if not as successful. It’s based on stretched out versions of the Backwards and Dimension Jump episodes, though the actual plot is mostly original, with a new set of cyborg villains, the Agonoids.
Despite being written separately to Last Human, there’s some odd parallels, in that both bring in alternate versions of the main characters: Evil Lister in Last Human; Ace Rimmer here. Ace works better, but I wish the book spent more time with regular Rimmer to drive home the comparisons.
The main problem with the Backwards part of the book is that the Backwards world doesn’t make much sense, and spending so much time contemplating the logistics of it doesn’t help. The opening “reverse chase” sequence is far too long and hits the same beats over and over. The idea later in the book of them spending so much time in Backworld that Lister and Cat revert to being teenagers is fun, but the characters as they usually are are so immature that it’s hard to tell the differences.
I listened to the audiobook version of the novel, which eliminates a large section in the third act adapting the Gunmen of the Apocalypse episode. I’m not sure if Kryten and Rimmer’s deaths work better in that version; it comes across as very harsh and out of keeping with the tone here. The ending is actually fairly similar to a standard Rick and Morty concept, where the universe at the end of the story is screwed up, so Lister and Cat jump to another one where things are slightly better (except that their counterparts died at the end of the first book).
Overall, it’s a decent book, which is a bit slight until its suddenly super-dark ending. Better than Last Human, but nothing in it is quite as good as the best parts of the first two novels.
I listened to the audiobooks of all of these, though only the first two, read by Chris Barrie, are available officially digitally. Barrie’s a great narrator, and his impressions of the rest of the cast are uncanny.
The other two audiobooks were apparently only ever released on cassette. They’re on Youtube now, and they suffer for the lack of Barrie: Craig Charles reads Last Human, and his attempts at the voices range from dodgy (Cat, Kryten) to non-existent (Rimmer, Kochanski).
Backwards is read by Rob Grant, who’s an okay narrator. His voices don’t match the actors, but are distinctive and recognisable enough.
Anyway, I’m glad I read the series, and wish there was more. It’s put me in the mood for a rewatch, which I haven’t done since before Red Dwarf X.
Funnily enough over the last year-and-a-bit I did a full reread of all four of those novels too, as part of a book club running on a Red Dwarf fansite.
I’d read them as they came out, but it was interesting going back to them as an adult as there was a lot of stuff I’d forgotten.
Overall my feelings on them pretty much line up with yours – the first two are pretty great, and they expand upon and reinvent some of the original episode ideas quite well, while also adding quite a lot of interesting new stuff. Last Human is basically a mess (even though some of the ideas have potential) and Backwards is a bit more of a return to form and feels more like the ‘true’ third novel of the trilogy.
Interestingly though on the Grant Naylor split stuff, Last Human was actually written by Doug at quite short notice – they had originally planned a third full Grant Naylor novel called The Last Human before their partnership dissolved, but still owed the publisher a novel – which perhaps explains why it feels so rushed and haphazard. Some stuff is basic proofreading errors, other stuff major plot holes. The kind of thing an editor should catch.
And apparently when writing the first two novels, they worked in a room together but Rob Grant did all the typing/writing of the prose, which is probably why Backwards feels more of a piece with the first two novels.
I listened to the audiobook version of the novel, which eliminates a large section in the third act adapting the Gunmen of the Apocalypse episode. I’m not sure if Kryten and Rimmer’s deaths work better in that version; it comes across as very harsh and out of keeping with the tone here.
I’ve read the full unabridged version of the book, but I listened to that section of the audiobook recently for comparison, and I do think it’s jarring the way those deaths are so sudden in the audio version.
It happens a little more gradually/meaningfully in the book version. And the adaptation of Gunmen is pretty great, with some fun expansions. It’s a decent read, despite Gunmen being a fairly visual episode.
After going to the bother of adding Kochanski to the cast, Naylor fails to give her literally any characteristics at all. Practically everything she says (and it’s not a lot) is generic dialogue that any other character could be saying. This is demonstrated by the one role she has in the plot, taking the luck virus near the climax, being given to Rimmer with almost no changes when they put it into the TV show a few years later.
Interestingly with this example it was the other way around – Quarantine was a Series V episode so came a few years before Last Human. So during that section she has a fair bit of reattributed Rimmer and Lister dialogue, which makes the point even more clearly that Doug didn’t really have a distinctive voice for her at that point.
(Arguably the Series VII version of Kochanski was even worse though, with the prissy pony club stuff and the Kryten jealousy. At least in Last Human she’s fairly competent and unfussy and seems to have the respect of the rest of the crew.)
Anyway, I’m glad I read the series, and wish there was more.
Rob has returned to the world of Red Dwarf in recent years after a long absence, and has hinted that he might like to write another novel, so who knows.
Unfortunately though there’s a legal dispute involving their GNP production company and Doug Naylor that is casting a bit of a shadow over all things Red Dwarf at the moment and seems to be a barrier to new stuff (including the TV show) getting made.
Suburban Dicks by Fabian Nicieza.
This is a pretty solid debut novel. It follows a disgraced Pulitzer winning journalist and a college prodigy criminal profiler who ended up becoming a housewife instead of joining the FBI as they team up to investigate the murder of a petrol station clerk in their small New Jersey town.
It’s quite funny, as you’d hope of Nicieza, with decent characters and a good plot. It does start to drag somewhat, with the narrative tension fizzling out, in the third quarter though. And early on Nicieza has a tendency to overuse brand names in narration, which ends up feeling partway between American Psycho and a Mark Millar comic, but that calms down after a bit.
Good overall though and I’d be up for reading another novel from Nicieza.
Penguin are finally re-recording the audiobooks for Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, starting next year: https://www.facebook.com/pratchett/posts/10158079647560025 (Announced today as it’s the fiftieth anniversary of Pratchett’s debut, The Carpet People.)
Colin Morgan reading the Wizards books, Indira Varma reading the Witches, Sian Clifford on the Death books, and Andy Serkis on Small Gods, with Bill Nighy reading footnotes and Peter Serafinowicz as the voice of Death throughout.
No word on who will read the Guards books or the later series.
I love Nigel Planer’s narration on the old audiobooks of the first half of the series, but the sound quality was fairly bad on the early books. I was less of a fan once Stephen Briggs took over, his voices never fit as well.
They’ve said there will be 40 audiobooks, so probably Eric has rights issues, as Josh Kirby’s estate co-owns it.
Coming up on the end of the year, here is the list of books I read in 2021; NF indicates nonfiction books:
1. Hamilton – Ron Chernow NF
2. The Silence – Don DeLillo
3. Modern Love – Constance De Jong
4. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage – Haruki Murakami
5. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
6. News of the World – Paulette Jiles
7. Hellboy’s World – Scott Bukatman NF
8. The Oracle Year – Charles Soule
9. Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
10. Stoner – John Williams (re-read)
11. Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight For the American Dream – David Kushner NF
12. Going to Meet the Man – James Baldwin
13. Savage Country – Robert Olmstead
14. Blood Meridian: or The Evening Redness In the West – Cormac McCarthy
15. A Hundred Thousand Worlds – Bob Proehl
16. When Jesus Became God – Richard Rubenstein NF
17. The Hunter and Other Stories – Dashiell Hammett
18. A Brief History of Seven Killings – Marlon James
19. When the English Fall – David Williams
20. Dreams of El Dorado: A History of the American West – H. W. Brands NF
21. Whispers in the Dark – Walter Mosley
22. The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead
23. The Peculiar Miracles of Antoinette Martin – Stephanie Knipper
24. Celtic Tales – Fairy Tales and Stories of Enchantment – Kate Forrester
25. 1861: The Civil War Awakening – Adam Goodheart NF
26. 1984 – George Orwell
27. The Most Dangerous Game – Richard Connell
28. Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen NF
29. The Complete Crime Stories – James M. Cain
30. Orphan Train – Christina Baker Kline
31. After the Civil War – James Robertson NF
32. Our Man in Havana – Graham Greene
33. The Best American Noir of the Century – James Ellroy & Otto Penzler, editors
34. Butch Cassidy: The True Story of an American Outlaw – Charles Leerhsen NF
35. The Terminal List – Jack Carr
36. Far From the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
37. End of Watch – Stephen King
38. Shadow Show: All New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury – Sam Weller and Mort Castle, eds
Two! 
26. 1984 – George Orwell
Ah, a bit of light escapism to take your mind off the nightmarescape that is 2021 (aka 2020 part 2)
26. 1984 – George Orwell
Ah, a bit of light escapism to take your mind off the nightmarescape that is 2021 (aka 2020 part 2)
Is it better or worse if one were to point out all the literally Orwellian things happening in society right now?
How do you learn from this?
In the final moment of the novel, Winston encounters an image of Big Brother and experiences a sense of victory because he now loves Big Brother. Winston’s total acceptance of Party rule marks the completion of the trajectory he has been on since the opening of the novel.
I’m sorry but an ending that evokes pathos and tragedy does not strike me as better in anyway. maybe my being American affects my take on the outcome.
Is it a generally European take that allows one to view tragedy as a positive thing? or is there a nationalistic view that promotes happy endings over pathos?
Is it a generally European take that allows one to view tragedy as a positive thing?
No. That is pushing it too far but I do think US media in general works on a massive element of artifice.
Very little output reflects the reality of 90% of the population. The “Friends” are often unemployed but can happily rent a central Manhattan apartment and socialise as they fancy. Al Bundy is nominally represented as a ‘loser’ but he lives in a huge house and his wife is hot. That’s nothing a real shoe salesman would actually experience.
Hollywood is represented as a land of dreams, you go there and it’s a shithole. Half the shops are boarded up and what remains is just selling tat.
