.
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.
I just finished reading Re-Run The Fun which is a spoof autobiography sort of by Pat Sharp. By which I mean it’s written by two other people under the pretence of being by Sharp and is only tangentially connected to reality.
I’ve been really keen to read it since before the hardback came out in late 2020. The preview sections had a real tongue-in-cheek Forest Gump-esque quality to them, with Sharp taking credit for involvement in various iconic cultural moments. That’s not really a huge part of the book though and it instead largely goes for Alan Partridge territory.
It’s an odd book on the whole. It is quite funny, occasionally laugh out loud hilarious, but at the same time, it wears a bit thin and relies way too heavily on jokes about his hair. The actual writers, Darren Richman and Luke Catterson create a decent narrative voice, but it’s oddly inconsistent and I don’t think it ever really feels convincing as Sharp. And I guess that’s part of the joke, given it’s not meant to be believed. But it’s just, it feels like if Sharp had turned them down and they’d taken the idea to, say, Neil Buchanan or Ainsley Harriot, it would have ended up reading largely the same. Maybe that’s because I can’t really pin down Sharp enough in my head to have an idea of how he’d sound.
So my main takeaway from it is that Sharp is incredibly good natured and egoless to have gone along with it, given that a lot of the jokes are about him being a credulous, pathetic moron.
Dr Rat by William Kotzwinkle. A few dozen pages in and this is a wild ride. The titular character us a rat. A doctor rat. He earned his phd by the going insane due to all the experiments the scientists in the lab he lives in have subjected him to. He now spends his days observing the ridiculously brutal experiments and counselling his fellow rats, advising them to avoid the messages of potential freedom spread by the dogs in the lab, while reminding them “death is freedom”. All of this is intercut with chapters dedcribing packs of wild animals running free, battery hens realising the futility of their existence and other such scenes. It all nips along at breakneck pace. I’ve no idea where it’s heading other than madness.
After watching the TV adaptation that was on around new year, I decided to read Around The World In 80 Days and discover why I was wrong and should have instead been furious with its changes, (you know, according to blowhards on the internet).
Having now read it, my considered opinion is that the people who made the TV version should be lauded for extracting such an exciting series out of this fairly dull book.
Because seriously, this is boring. Fogg fashioned completely out of narrative teflon – nothing, at any point, fazes him, despite several set backs to his quest. I assume Verne was inspired by the English stiff upper lip cliche, but he doesn’t use that for anything interesting. He just has a boring, unknowable character gliding across the world and through misfortune using money as a super power between bouts of whist. The TV show’s decision to refashion this into Fogg being a brittle, emotionally crippled shell of a man was an excellent one that vastly improves on the source material.
It’s left to Passepartout to convey the actual jeopardy of the story, which is only of minor success. His interactions with Fix don’t really ring true, playing into a lot of questionable coincidences and convenient plotting (not least of which is the ending where they don’t realise they’ve gained a day from crossing the international date line, even though that would have had them a day off on all their travel in the US).
Aouda was dropped from the TV version and I can see why, because she’s a thin and underwhelming character, basically there to soak up some pity and make Fogg seem more human. This doesn’t really work though because that narrative is all far too detached to be exciting in anyway. It often reads more like a boring travelogue rather than an adventure story. For instance, at one point, Passepartout is kidnapped by Indians. Fogg bribes a group of US soldiers to help rescue him, which he succeeds in. But we don’t experience any of this first hand. Verne just stays at the train station with Fix (and even then doesn’t let the reader in on what Fix does to secure them further travel) and waits for Fogg and Passepartout to return from a more interesting story. It’s so frustrating.
Jules Verne wasn’t a great fiction writer. In every book (uh… ok, I’ve only actually read 4, but…) his characters are paper thin stereotypes and his plots are… well, irrelevant really. They are really pretty terrible novels.
But you have to look at his books in a different way: he’s a popular science writer. He was the French David Attenborough of the 19th century. His books were explorations of the world, with a light fictional veneer to make people think they weren’t reading a text book.
And he was actually pretty great at that.
I read this over the past week. It’s by Douglas Wolk, who has (supposedly) read every single comic Marvel has ever produced, up until around 2019 – some 27,000 comics – and then written a book about them.
Well, some of them.
I would charitably describe it as a well-meaning attempt to offer some potential entry points into the larger Marvel comics saga for a newcomer (someone who might have come to the comics from the movies, say) and to provide a big-picture perspective on the entire publishing history of Marvel comics.
But I was quite disappointed in it for its lack of any real analysis or insights into Marvel and its rich history.
Partly that’s because of the way the book is structured. Rather than try and look at the history of Marvel in some kind of logical order or natural progression, the book is largely made up of single, scattershot chapters, each of which is focused on a given character or title (so the FF, the X-Men, Black Panther, Thor, Spider-Man etc.).
Which would be fine if you were going to use this approach to cover all of the major building blocks of Marvel comics – but the book doesn’t even try to be as comprehensive as that (there are maybe only nine or ten of these chapters in total), and it doesn’t really provide much in the way of original analysis or insight into these characters – and certainly doesn’t try to situate them in any kind of historical or social context.
Instead, each chapter provides lots of short plot-summaries of what Wolk deems to be the most important individual issues for each subject, giving a rough overall shape of the historical story cycle for each of these characters or titles, but little more than that.
And to be honest, these analyses are the kind of thing that any semi-informed fan of Marvel books could churn out – the kind of commentary that you’ve probably read on messageboards for years (apparently the Lee-Kirby FF is really good and full of ideas, Simonson’s Thor is the best run on the character and features some angular, muscular artwork, and the X-Men are a mutant soap opera that can also act as a metaphor for oppressed minorities! Who knew?).
And Wolk also doesn’t ever really connect the dots of how all of these stories coalesce into a larger tapestry, which seems to miss the point of the entire exercise.
Another problem is that unfortunately, the roster of characters chosen to be the focus of these chapters is pretty idiosyncratic, partly driven by what seems to be a desire to talk about how well – or not – Marvel’s publishing history aligns with modern ideas about equality and representation (which leads to some major omissions as well as an unusual amount of time spent talking about fairly minor aspects of the overall Marvel story), and also partly driven by Wolk’s personal favourite eras of Marvel, which means that certain decades – like the ’70s or ’00s – are glossed over with minimal examination.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the content is interesting and worthwhile, but it all smacks of the book being a selection of personal pet topics rather than a genuine attempt to provide an overview of all the comics Marvel has published.
Obviously decisions like this are always going to be subjective to a degree, but I can’t help but feel that if you’re writing a book about the entire history of Marvel comics and you dedicate an entire chapter to the 2010s comics of Squirrel Girl and Kamala Khan, or the specific structure of Hickman’s FF/Avengers/Secret Wars saga, or Dark Reign – but then have the entire book barely mention the likes of Hulk, Daredevil, Iron Man, Captain America, the Ultimate Universe (and more besides) – then maybe you’ve ended up letting the tail wag the dog in terms of where you’re focusing your attention.
But the real disappointment is that there are occasional glimpses of what could have been a much better book in here. Because these longer chapters are interspersed with very short (almost bullet-point in nature) “interlude” chapters, which read like undeveloped notes for essays on a specific theme instead of being based around providing story synopses for specific characters/titles.
And they’re much more interesting.
One, for example, talks about how different US presidents have been represented within Marvel comics over the years. Another talks about the Vietnam war and how it was acknowledged in contemporary comics. Another is about pop music and how it intersects with Marvel books, while another covers the various (mostly aborted) attempts to make movies about the Marvel characters in the years before the MCU. And another pinpoints the first time that Marvel comics characters really crossed over with one another, and how and why that might have been co-ordinated.
It’s all outside-world context that makes the history of Marvel comics much more interesting and illuminates it much more meaningfully – and the acknowledgment of this larger context in these short “interlude” chapters just highlights how lacking it is from the main meat of the book.
That lack of context extends to other non-Marvel comics too, by the way – so there’s barely any mention of what other publishers, even DC, might have been doing at the same time as Marvel was publishing its own comics, or any influence that this might have had on Marvel’s choices.
Which leaves the entire thing feeling fairly adrift from reality, and even woefully uninformed in places. For example, there’s an entire page worth of dissection of the design of the first Kamala Khan Ms Marvel cover that completely fails to mention (whether by ignorance or deliberate omission) that it’s a homage to the first cover from the Peter David/Gary Frank run on Supergirl, which makes it feel like it’s missing the point somewhat; and there’s another long section on Norman Osborn’s Dark Reign that totally ignores the similar ideas previously explored in DC’s universe.
Similarly, there’s very little actual examination of the actual craft of comics and how that has evolved over the decades – presumably because most of the big breakthroughs in comics history didn’t happen at Marvel but at other publishers.
The biggest disappointment comes, though, with a final short “appendix” chapter that actually goes to the trouble of tracing Marvel’s publishing history chronologically, cross-referencing major developments in the comics with events happening in the real world, and generally trying to make sense of it all.
I found myself thinking that this is what the book should have been all along – an attempt to trace the history of Marvel’s gigantic interconnected story from the outside, rather than treating it like a self-contained land that’s sealed off from the real world and which only has meaning and relevance for its own fictional characters.
In short, there’s an overwhelming feeling that Wolk has done the reading and then stopped there; that he’s felt that the gimmick of him having read every Marvel issue is enough to sell a book of fairly unoriginal commentary and plot summary; and that he hasn’t written the book that the six-decade history of Marvel Comics deserves, because he hasn’t been willing to extend his research any distance beyond the comics themselves.
Maybe this book would be enough to pique the interest of a Marvel fan who hasn’t really delved into the comics yet, but for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Marvel comics it all feels like a bit of a waste of time.
Maybe this book would be enough to pique the interest of a Marvel fan who hasn’t really delved into the comics yet, but for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Marvel comics it all feels like a bit of a waste of time.
Yeah, but since it only costs 12 cents (according to the cover), it’s definitely worth the price!!
I read this over the past week. It’s by Douglas Wolk, who has (supposedly) read every single comic Marvel has ever produced, up until around 2019 – some 27,000 comics – and then written a book about them.
Well, some of them.
I would charitably describe it as a well-meaning attempt to offer some potential entry points into the larger Marvel comics saga for a newcomer (someone who might have come to the comics from the movies, say) and to provide a big-picture perspective on the entire publishing history of Marvel comics.
But I was quite disappointed in it for its lack of any real analysis or insights into Marvel and its rich history.
Partly that’s because of the way the book is structured. Rather than try and look at the history of Marvel in some kind of logical order or natural progression, the book is largely made up of single, scattershot chapters, each of which is focused on a given character or title (so the FF, the X-Men, Black Panther, Thor, Spider-Man etc.).
Which would be fine if you were going to use this approach to cover all of the major building blocks of Marvel comics – but the book doesn’t even try to be as comprehensive as that (there are maybe only nine or ten of these chapters in total), and it doesn’t really provide much in the way of original analysis or insight into these characters – and certainly doesn’t try to situate them in any kind of historical or social context.
Instead, each chapter provides lots of short plot-summaries of what Wolk deems to be the most important individual issues for each subject, giving a rough overall shape of the historical story cycle for each of these characters or titles, but little more than that.
And to be honest, these analyses are the kind of thing that any semi-informed fan of Marvel books could churn out – the kind of commentary that you’ve probably read on messageboards for years (apparently the Lee-Kirby FF is really good and full of ideas, Simonson’s Thor is the best run on the character and features some angular, muscular artwork, and the X-Men are a mutant soap opera that can also act as a metaphor for oppressed minorities! Who knew?).
And Wolk also doesn’t ever really connect the dots of how all of these stories coalesce into a larger tapestry, which seems to miss the point of the entire exercise.
Another problem is that unfortunately, the roster of characters chosen to be the focus of these chapters is pretty idiosyncratic, partly driven by what seems to be a desire to talk about how well – or not – Marvel’s publishing history aligns with modern ideas about equality and representation (which leads to some major omissions as well as an unusual amount of time spent talking about fairly minor aspects of the overall Marvel story), and also partly driven by Wolk’s personal favourite eras of Marvel, which means that certain decades – like the ’70s or ’00s – are glossed over with minimal examination.
Don’t get me wrong, some of the content is interesting and worthwhile, but it all smacks of the book being a selection of personal pet topics rather than a genuine attempt to provide an overview of all the comics Marvel has published.
Obviously decisions like this are always going to be subjective to a degree, but I can’t help but feel that if you’re writing a book about the entire history of Marvel comics and you dedicate an entire chapter to the 2010s comics of Squirrel Girl and Kamala Khan, or the specific structure of Hickman’s FF/Avengers/Secret Wars saga, or Dark Reign – but then have the entire book barely mention the likes of Hulk, Daredevil, Iron Man, Captain America, the Ultimate Universe (and more besides) – then maybe you’ve ended up letting the tail wag the dog in terms of where you’re focusing your attention.
But the real disappointment is that there are occasional glimpses of what could have been a much better book in here. Because these longer chapters are interspersed with very short (almost bullet-point in nature) “interlude” chapters, which read like undeveloped notes for essays on a specific theme instead of being based around providing story synopses for specific characters/titles.
And they’re much more interesting.
One, for example, talks about how different US presidents have been represented within Marvel comics over the years. Another talks about the Vietnam war and how it was acknowledged in contemporary comics. Another is about pop music and how it intersects with Marvel books, while another covers the various (mostly aborted) attempts to make movies about the Marvel characters in the years before the MCU. And another pinpoints the first time that Marvel comics characters really crossed over with one another, and how and why that might have been co-ordinated.
It’s all outside-world context that makes the history of Marvel comics much more interesting and illuminates it much more meaningfully – and the acknowledgment of this larger context in these short “interlude” chapters just highlights how lacking it is from the main meat of the book.
That lack of context extends to other non-Marvel comics too, by the way – so there’s barely any mention of what other publishers, even DC, might have been doing at the same time as Marvel was publishing its own comics, or any influence that this might have had on Marvel’s choices.
Which leaves the entire thing feeling fairly adrift from reality, and even woefully uninformed in places. For example, there’s an entire page worth of dissection of the design of the first Kamala Khan Ms Marvel cover that completely fails to mention (whether by ignorance or deliberate omission) that it’s a homage to the first cover from the Peter David/Gary Frank run on Supergirl, which makes it feel like it’s missing the point somewhat; and there’s another long section on Norman Osborn’s Dark Reign that totally ignores the similar ideas previously explored in DC’s universe.
Similarly, there’s very little actual examination of the actual craft of comics and how that has evolved over the decades – presumably because most of the big breakthroughs in comics history didn’t happen at Marvel but at other publishers.
The biggest disappointment comes, though, with a final short “appendix” chapter that actually goes to the trouble of tracing Marvel’s publishing history chronologically, cross-referencing major developments in the comics with events happening in the real world, and generally trying to make sense of it all.
I found myself thinking that this is what the book should have been all along – an attempt to trace the history of Marvel’s gigantic interconnected story from the outside, rather than treating it like a self-contained land that’s sealed off from the real world and which only has meaning and relevance for its own fictional characters.
In short, there’s an overwhelming feeling that Wolk has done the reading and then stopped there; that he’s felt that the gimmick of him having read every Marvel issue is enough to sell a book of fairly unoriginal commentary and plot summary; and that he hasn’t written the book that the six-decade history of Marvel Comics deserves, because he hasn’t been willing to extend his research any distance beyond the comics themselves.
Maybe this book would be enough to pique the interest of a Marvel fan who hasn’t really delved into the comics yet, but for anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Marvel comics it all feels like a bit of a waste of time.
Here is an interview with the author that aired this morning.
To me, the guy got on my nerves. He seems very punchable.
Thanks for the review of that, Dave. I’d heard about it a few months ago and was waiting for the paperback, but from your review it really doesn’t seem worth the bother.
Disappointing to read that Wolk’s Marvel book fails to meet the mark. I wonder if the project would have been served better (though obviously wouldnt have been as profitable) if it had been served up like his Dredd Reckoning blog in which he wrote about a Dredd / Dredd-verse collection on a weekly basis over the course of a couple of years.
It’s probably not as viable financially as a book but you probably would think something that comes out of reading 27,000 comics would be better served by a continuing blog. It seems a bit unavoidable it’s going to skirt over too much.
Something like Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men where they cover every X-Men story has run for 370 hours now and they are still only around 1995.
Thanks for the review of that, Dave. I’d heard about it a few months ago and was waiting for the paperback, but from your review it really doesn’t seem worth the bother.
Yeah it’s really nothing you couldn’t gain from reading a few blog posts or long forum comments on the same subjects. Just piecemeal commentary on a handful of books/characters.
It’s probably not as viable financially as a book but you probably would think something that comes out of reading 27,000 comics would be better served by a continuing blog. It seems a bit unavoidable it’s going to skirt over too much.
What I was hoping for was something a bit bigger-picture. You could trace the overall shape of the history of Marvel comics and maybe bring in some historical context, some comics history, some knowledge of current affairs, politics, culture etc. to illustrate how the comics responded to and interacted with all that. Maybe ending at the point where Marvel becomes a dominant cultural influence itself via the MCU.
But that would be a much bigger, more ambitious and more demanding project.
My Kickstarter copy of Gamesmaster: The Oral History finally arrived today.
Should be a fun read, with the promise of some juicy behind-the-scenes anecdotes from Dominik Diamond.
My Kickstarter copy of Gamesmaster: The Oral History finally arrived today.
Should be a fun read, with the promise of some juicy behind-the-scenes anecdotes from Dominik Diamond.
I finished this very quickly and it was a great read.
As well as providing tons of great anecdotes and behind-the-scenes details about Gamesmaster, it also brilliantly captures a moment in time that’s larger than the show, somehow.
It’s about gaming suddenly reaching the mainstream but also about how TV changed during that era too. It really sums up the 90s in a way, without being too mawkish or nostalgic about it.
And there are some great candid contributions from people who either had valid criticisms of the show (like Violet Berlin, who comes across well here) or people whose time on the show ended badly (like Dexter Fletcher or Dave Perry) but without which it wouldn’t have felt like a proper full account of Gamesmaster’s history.
Ive got the Gamesmaster book and the Alan Moore collection waiting too @davewallace. Very much looking forward to getting stuck into them and will hopefully get a bit of time over the school holidays to do so.
I almost bought the Moore book on Saturday, didn’t because Waterstones didn’t have it in stock, got home and found it had come through the post 
I’m reading the correspondence of Gustave Flaubert and it’s glorious. What a man. He had a visceral dislike of all politics of his time and lived for his art. But he was also very sentimental about human suffering, giving touching descriptions of the things that happened around him, despite saying he didn’t care about any of it. It gives the impression of someone trying to be stoic while secretly wiping away a tear.
Another great looking videogame-oriented book just arrived from Read-Only Memory (following a Kickstarter that I feel like I backed in a past life now).
Did you pick this one up too, Bruce?
“Like a hurricane” sounds like a Scorpions unofficial biography or some shit xD
Another great looking videogame-oriented book just arrived from Read-Only Memory (following a Kickstarter that I feel like I backed in a past life now).
Did you pick this one up too, Bruce?
I thought about it but, in the end, passed on it as Street Fighter didn’t really have a huge impact on me growing up.
I’ve been reading the SFII book but to be honest I haven’t found it hugely compelling – there are some interesting nuggets in there and some fun nostalgia stuff, but for an oral history many of the quotes aren’t that extensive or revealing (and many of the accounts are a bit confused or contradictory), and I feel like it needs stronger connective tissue to hold the whole thing together.
So for a bit of a break I put the SFII book down for a while and instead read another videogame-history book that a friend recommended.
And it’s really good, a fun read that not only goes through the history of the game and its place in the larger context of gaming (with loads of fun anecdotes and unexpected cameos along the way) but also brings the story to life in creative ways, making what is a fairly straightforward factual account of the game’s history feel like a real page-turner, with plenty of drama and humour attached to the whole thing.
For me it’s shown the value of being able to not only put the facts together but also present it in an engaging way. The NBA Jam book really has some life to it.
This one was available via Amazon UK (and for less than a tenner), so I got it via that route.
I’m keen to get the Goldeneye one that came out more recently, but I haven’t seen any UK outlets selling it yet. Not sure I want to pay for international shipping as the books themselves are quite small digest-size paperbacks and I’m not sure they’re worth the extra cost.
The GoldenEye one is very much what I’ve been eyeing up. Kicking myself as i missed a humblebundle for ebook versions of the collection. Let us know if you find the GoldenEye on from a UK seller.
Will do!
Had a great time tonight at Garth Marenghi’s Q&A and book signing for his new release, TerrorTome, including meeting the man himself.
But the highlight might have been watching the first episode of Darkplace with a full live audience, which was great fun.
Had a great time tonight at Garth Marenghi’s Q&A and book signing for his new release, TerrorTome, including meeting the man himself.
But the highlight might have been watching the first episode of Darkplace with a full live audience, which was great fun.
Just finished the audiobook. Lots of fun, though the first third is easily the best part.
I didn’t like the first story in Alan Moore’s Illuminations. It was well written, obviously; I just didn’t care for the subject.
The second story, Not Even Legend is the cleverest thing I’ve read since … probably since Jerusalem. Even if I hate the rest of the book (which I don’t expect to), I feel it was worth it for this one story.
Alan Moore is still an unequalled genius.
Let us know if you find the GoldenEye on from a UK seller.
Hey @bruce, just saw that Blackwells have this in stock.
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781940535296
Although weirdly I got it a little cheaper by ordering from them via Abebooks.
Either way, looking forward to reading it.
Let us know if you find the GoldenEye on from a UK seller.
Hey @bruce, just saw that Blackwells have this in stock.
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781940535296
Although weirdly I got it a little cheaper by ordering from them via Abebooks.
Either way, looking forward to reading it.
Thanks for the heads up Dave. Ordered this during a staff meeting at work which made the whole process that little bit more tolerable.
Finished this last night and really enjoyed it. It nicely captures the end of an era where small indie dev teams could make AAA titles with real personality, as well as a lost golden age of local multiplayer that’s now sadly largely been replaced with a more solitary online version. It’s great to think that so many gamers around the world had such a common experience with this title.
But the book is more than just an exercise in nostalgia and has lots of interesting stories of how various aspects of the game came together. Hope you enjoy it too @Bruce.
My copy of the GoldenEye 64 book arrived last week. Took an age to get here (I imagine due to the ongoing postal strikes) but finally got round to starting it the other day. A couple chapters in and enjoying it so far and my comments would very much mirror the praise @davewallace gives it.
I’ve read two interesting non-comics recently.
Just finished Slaughterhouse 5, which a good friend of mine recommended to me many years ago and I finally got around to. I’m not sure if I liked it, weirdly. It’s an interesting take on PTSD caused by war, portraying Pilgrim’s delusions and flashbacks as literally true through the format of science-fiction. But I didn’t really care for or about Pilgrim, nor liked Vonnegut’s general tone and prose style.
The other thing is Fever Knights: Official Fake Strategy Guide. Made by comic artist Adam Ellis it’s a very faithful homage to the style of 90s video game strategy guides, but for a game that doesn’t exist. And I’m kind of torn on this too. Because it certainly nails being a guide and the fake game looks great – Ellis’s art is lovely and it feels like it’d be a solid JRPG like Chrono Trigger and the SNES FFs – but as a story in its own right, it’s rather lacking. It’s a boiled down guide to what would have been a relatively thin story anyway (if a real game), which doesn’t make for a great narrative. A pitch document or design portfolio, sure. But as an actual story in its own right it doesn’t quite work. But it’s still interesting.
I’m not sure if I liked it, weirdly. It’s an interesting take on PTSD caused by war, portraying Pilgrim’s delusions and flashbacks as literally true through the format of science-fiction. But I didn’t really care for or about Pilgrim, nor liked Vonnegut’s general tone and prose style.
That’s exactly how I felt. A non-SF-reading colleague pushed it on me, claiming that it was the best thing that had ever happened to SF because it was, you know, Deep, and Meaningful and Important.
And, yeah, ok it was interesting but I didn’t think it was everything he seemed to think it was.
I love Vonnegut but his style definitely takes some getting used to. An acquired taste.
I went through a period about 10-15 years ago when I really got into him as an author and devoured most of his output. I loved it, and felt like I’d really tuned in to him by the time I read a few of his books, but towards the end I also started to find some of his tics and preoccupations a little repetitive. So I can definitely appreciate him not being to everyone’s tastes.
I think Slaughterhousefive is one of his greatest though. So at least you’ve judged him fairly on his best work.
You know, the plus side of having dragged my feet so much on getting the entire Discworld series (something I’m trying to rectify this year: six down, nine to go) is that it means I still have a few “new” vintage Pratchetts waiting for me. Such as Witches Abroad, which I just finished today.
Pretty good, I’d say. Works a familiar seam for Discworld (the invasive, otherworldyness of ideas, stories and tropes) but the “witches on tour” aspect is fun.
I also thought it was a great example of another important Discworld seam, which is the role of identity and self-awareness. Granny is repeatedly pitched against mirror-like foes who suffer from delusions of grandeur, or put great importance on appearances and Granny mainly defeats them using her knowledge of her own self. It’s very well executed in Witches Abroad, and I always loved the reverse voodoo thing and Lily’s punishment in the hall of mirrors (and how easily Granny defeats that one).
I also thought it was a great example of another important Discworld seam, which is the role of identity and self-awareness. Granny is repeatedly pitched against mirror-like foes who suffer from delusions of grandeur, or put great importance on appearances and Granny mainly defeats them using her knowledge of her own self. It’s very well executed in Witches Abroad, and I always loved the reverse voodoo thing and Lily’s punishment in the hall of mirrors (and how easily Granny defeats that one).
My favorite is Granny’s defeat of the vampires.
The Recollection
Having enjoyed Gareth L Powell’s Embers Of War trilogy, the sentient, part-dog warship Trouble Dog being one of the stand out characters, I gave this much earlier work a try.
It’s a smart twin track tale with arcs starting in the present and four centuries in the future. Due to how the travel works across vast distances, the present day story jumps into the future piece by piece. Towards the end the two plots combine in a way that is logical and satisfying.
It’s an interesting resolution in that it isn’t resolved entirely, but the openness of the ending doesn’t hurt it. A good set of characters, with motivations that add up, and some excellent sequences make for a fun read.
The Meg by Steven Alten. Absolute trash but goddamn it a giant prehistoric shark just tried to eat a helicopter so the book is doing exactly what was expect of it. Best waste of £2.63 I’ve spent in a while.
The Meg by Steven Alten. Absolute trash but goddamn it a giant prehistoric shark just tried to eat a helicopter so the book is doing exactly what was expect of it. Best waste of £2.63 I’ve spent in a while.
I’ll bet it would make a fantastic film!!
Oh, wait….
I’ve just finished How the War Was Won by Phillips O’Brien. He’s a professor of history (currently at Edinburgh I think), who I started following on Twitter a year ago as he was posting some really interesting ideas about the war in Ukraine. Then I found out he was basing his thinking on the ideas he developed for this book written a decade ago, so I had to read it.
The book is his thesis on what was important in winning World War 2. His basic idea is that in modern war, battles are unimportant. You don’t win a war by taking land or even by destroying tanks, you win it by destroying the means of production. He’ll say something controversial like “Kursk was completely incidental to defeating Germany”, and I’m like, yeah sure, everybody knows it was the decisive battle of the war, and then he backs it up with charts and stats that show how much of a minor blip it was, and by the end of the chapter I’m like, yeah, he’s right, Kursk was irrelevant 
Of course, all this points to the (highly controversial) conclusion that Russia’s contribution to the war was minor (because they were involved in no strategic bombing or naval campaigns), which puts him at odds with just about every other modern military historian. But… he argues it really well.
He’s also not complimentary about Churchill (stupid to push for the invasion of Italy) Harris (stupid to focus on levelling cities instead of factories), MacArthur (just stupid in general) and others who he claims needlessly prolonged the war. And then again, he argues it well enough that you’re convinced. (I mean, ok, it didn’t take much convincing in the case of MacArthur.)
If you have any interest at all in military history, I would recommend you check this book. It’s fascinating.
Interesting. I am now reading an Atlantic article by him.
By overlooking Russia’s systemic weaknesses, Western analysts helped create the mess that democratic nations find themselves in today. The presumption, based on weaponry counts, that Ukraine was far too weak to resist Russia in open combat delayed the provision of significant military aid to the beleaguered nation. This was a perverse circular argument: Because Russia is strong and Ukraine is weak, we should withhold assistance from Ukraine.
Yeah, that’s certainly what Scholz did, the little fucker.
Fortunately, that argument has proved impossible to sustain. A third lesson of this war—and many others since 1945—is that underestimating the importance of national identity leads to military disaster. By conventional criteria, Ukraine is far stronger relative to today’s Russia than Afghanistan was relative to the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s—and than North Vietnam was to the U.S. in the 1960s. Both Cold War superpowers were humbled by their attempts to suppress local resistance by force, and both had to withdraw.
Nevertheless, in the prelude to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for much of last year, many in the West failed to appreciate how much Ukrainians value their independence and their democracy. Some Russia-focused scholars seemed to have accepted Moscow’s view of Ukraine as a weak, artificial entity with shallow popular support. Skeptics of NATO support for Kyiv focused on Ukrainian corruption (while conveniently ignoring the impact of corruption on Russian power). In the most extreme cases, some analysts even doubted that the Ukrainians would care enough to sustain an insurgency against Russian military occupiers.Such judgments and doubts now look foolish. Ukrainian identity was strong and resolute from the start. Many analysts overlooked the military advantages that democracies—even imperfect democracies—have over dictatorships. Although the former frequently appear messy and divided when they are under threat, they can react more forcefully, flexibly, and intelligently in part because their citizens feel empowered to improvise and show initiative as combat circumstances change. That pattern has held true in Ukraine. Despite initially having fewer advanced weapons, Ukraine fought back hard, inflicting deep consequences on Russia, which has lost an estimated half of the main battle tanks it possessed at the start of the war.
Sounds about right.
I finally read this over the past few days, having enjoyed a lot of Dick’s work in the past but somehow never having read this one.
I really enjoyed it, and was interested by both how much in common it has with Blade Runner and also how differently the stories are told. They make great companion pieces.
I love the light sense of absurdity of the book, and also the slightly stronger sense you get of what’s going on the wider world. And I also like the way the book handles the ideas around identity and empathy, often in a different way to the film.
But it doesn’t quite capture the same atmosphere and mood as the movie – it’s more mundane and grounded, intentionally I think.
It was also interesting to see that some of the ideas that are central to Blade Runner 2049 are seeded here, which I didn’t expect.
It’s well worth checking out if you haven’t, anyway – it’s a relatively quick and easy read.
I found the themes around empathy and caring to be particularly interesting. It’s a book that’s very much about a world in which people are desperate to care about something and because there’s so little left in the world they retreat to the Mercer Boxes and that’s probably the most prophetic part of the entire novel.
Yes, lots of it feels very prescient in terms of where technology has led and how people relate to it – that combination of isolation and artificial attachment definitely resonates today.
Yes, lots of it feels very prescient in terms of where technology has led and how people relate to it – that combination of isolation and artificial attachment definitely resonates today.
It’s been talked about before, but I continue to be amazed by the diversity and volume of PKD’s work that has been adapted into successful films. Mindblowing to think that BLADE RUNNER, ADJUSTMENT BUREAU, A SCANNER DARKLY, TOTAL RECALL, MINORITY REPORT, and the streamed series THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (among others) are all based on stories from the mind of the same writer.
On Bullshit
Depending on your view, this essay by Harry G Frankfurt is famous or infamous. I first heard of it when studying but never got around to checking it out.
The edition I read was a small 2005 hardback, not a fan of small books but this is a compact read. Originally published in 1986, the book gets a boost whenever there is a lot of crap in circulation – the 80s, the early noughties, the age of Trump, Johnson and Brexit – it fits well to each of them.
Frankfurt’s exploration of how distinctly different bullshit is from lying focuses on both how each happens and the relationship, or lack of, to truth. The latter is particularly important to how the likes of Trump and Johnson operate, supplying scandals at a speed that prevents scrutiny of each.
This is a short essay so it cannot cover everything, but what it does supply is arguably essential for the world we live in.
Descendant Machine
This story is proof that if you want stupidly ambitious, off the scale sci-fi stories, books are the place to go to.
Planet sized wormholes, a story that spans a billion years, 800km long starship, along with a sharp take on populist politicians and their policies, this was a great read.
It only has one weakness, no talking cat character, which it’s predecessor Stars And Bones had. It needs a moggy but bar that, it’s excellent.
I’m halfway through reading The Dangers of Smoking In Bed short story collection by Mariana Enriquez, and enjoying it. Her writing reminds me a little of Stephen King in the way she combines the creepy and supernatural elements with the day-to-day details of life and relationships, and her Argentinian background and settings give it a distinctive flavour.
I’ve just received the second collection for Christmas so will look forward to more.
It only has one weakness, no talking cat character, which it’s predecessor Stars And Bones had. It needs a moggy but bar that, it’s excellent.
This sounds great. *sigh* One day, I’ll have the time to do some proper sci-fi reading again.
Both books are well worth your time but can be read in any order.
I read The Con Artist by Fred Van Lente this week. I got through it in about a day partially because it had me hooked, partially because I had a lot of time to kill and partially because the used copy I ordered online turned up thoroughly beaten up, but I didn’t have to return it immediately, so I thought I’d read it first to see if it was worth getting a nicer copy of (which I’m now also doing with The Silent Stars Go By by Dan Abnett, which also turned up in horrible condition. I’m 0 for 3 on “very good” used books this week).
And I’d say it is worth buying again. It’s a murder mystery story set around San Diego Comic Con. It’s filled with loads of thinly veiled analogues to real people and companies in the comics industry (while also referencing all the real ones), so god knows how it reads to someone who doesn’t know much about the comics industry. But I am and I really enjoyed it, and thought it told a good story, which is ultimately based around how Marvel screwed Jack Kirby. It never felt particularly gratuitous in its references and mentions, especially given it’s at SDCC, when those are inescapable set dressing.
The narrator is an artist called Mike, who was recently a big deal thanks to a run on “Mister Mystery”, described as a legacy title on a par with Batman and Spider-Man etc. Three years ago though, Mike found his wife cheating on him with his despised editor at a convention and he just didn’t go home. He booked more and more conventions to the point that lives in an endless chain of hotel rooms, with storage lockers across the country in which he has prints, banners and clothes stashed, and living off doing con commissions. What’s really interesting about this is that I’m pretty sure this is how comic artist Mike McKone lives (or lived – I can’t remember when I noticed it from his social media, might have been pre-COVID and big pando would have thrown a spanner into it). And McKone is named in the thanks page at the back, which makes me think Van Lente based “Mike M” on McKone. He is also as much Van Lente though – Mike made a lot of money off a creator-owned comic called Gut Check that was turned into a terrible movie, which is similar to what happened to FVL with Cowboys vs Aliens.
The book also has a gimmick. Because he’s an artist, Mike processes things through drawing and does sketches of various things – some people he meets, a crime scene etc. And these sketches are included in the book, drawn by Tom Fowler (how fitting would it have been if they had been by McKone?). They’re a cute addition, though does mean the book is a large trim paperback.
So yeah, it’s fun. Check it out.
I found an old copy of The Demon Headmaster along with its sequel The Prime Minister’s Brain in some boxes recently, so decided to read them. Brits of a certain age will absolutely remember the CBBC series, where Terrence Hardiman starred at the Headmaster who hypnotises most of the kids in his school into being perfectly obedient little robots and plans to use them to gain national power. This double copy I’ve got is a tie-in edition to that, with Hardiman on the cover and I think I actually read it at some point as a kid. I was terrible for getting books and never actually reading them (and yet would devour things like Redwall and Goosebumps).
It’s an interesting (pair of) book(s). The main character is Dinah Glass, an orphan taken in by the Hunter family as a foster kid. Her new foster brothers, Lloyd and Harvey, are immediately dismissive of her, not entirely because she’s a girl or interloper, but because she turns out to also be susceptible to the Headmaster’s hypnotism, whereas they’re two of the handful of kids who are immune. There’s an interesting element about blended families across the two books, though it’s not really made a huge deal of. The other thing is that Dinah is, from a modern perspective, clearly autistic. She’s incredibly clever but masks it to avoid standing out. She’s frequently described as emotionally restrained to the point of being cold. That isn’t called out by the book, possibly because it was written in 1981 (which feels weird for something that, thanks to the TV adaptation, feels resolutely 90s to me) and autism just wasn’t a thing then, but possibly also because it’s about her being accepted for who she is, rather than labelling her and making her stand out. Probably the former, I suspect.
I’m not recommending anyone go out of their way to read this. It’s very much just a kids book (and I’m not sure it’s aged brilliantly for modern kids, both in terms of the early 80s microcomputer elements in The Prime Minister’s Brain and some of its passing attitudes, like Dinah saying of another character “I know she sounds thick, but she’s really quite clever”), but an interesting thing to revisit.
