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Niall Alexander

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Oh What A Miserable Winter: Early Riser by Jasper Fforde

Fri Aug 3, 2018 1:30pm 4 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Once upon a time, not so very long ago at all, you could set your watch by Jasper Fforde. This was way back when we wore watches that needed setting, but something else was significantly different in those distant days too. Something must have been, because from his debut with The Eyre Affair in 2001 until relatively recently, the former focus puller managed to put out a book a year with the kind of effortless ease that made other authors look lazy. These weren’t just books, either: these were remarkably good books, clever, funny and unexpectedly authentic tales of metafictional mystery and murder most horrid lashed with literary wit and a generous helping of humour.

Then came the 2014 release of the last of The Last Dragonslayer saga: the final volume of an arguably slighter series for younger readers that nevertheless delighted this miserable old critic. When 2015 came and went without a new book bearing the aforementioned funny man’s brand, I was crestfallen, but fine. In 2016, alas, I started to get antsy. Then came 2017: a terrible year for any number of reasons, of which perhaps the most overlooked is that it bore no new Jasper Fforde book. This year, though, the author brings his unexpected “creative hiatus” to a conclusion with Early Riser, a satirical standalone fantasy about social control and sleepy people which, given the length of time it took, I expected to be among his best efforts. Either that or a dreadful mess.

Early Riser is neither, which goes to show what I know. Oft-amusing, but only occasionally likely to elicit laughs, and as imaginative as anything he’s ever written, if woefully overburdened by worldbuilding, Fforde’s long-awaited new novel is ultimately a bunch of fun, yet it fails to leave a lasting impression like the likes of Shades of Grey, say.

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What We Will Be: Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers

Thu Jul 26, 2018 1:00pm 4 comments 1 Favorite [+]
Record of a Spaceborn Few cover art by Christopher Doll

We’ve been taught to expect our novels to be predominantly narrative in nature, but Becky Chambers is here to say that there’s another way. As I wrote in my review of what is by leaps and bounds the most hectic episode of the Wayfarers series so far, the plot of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet appeared almost an afterthought when all was said and done. If that proved a problem for you, A Closed and Common Orbit, with its still slighter storyline, would have been far from the follow-up you fancied—yet in its doubling down on the close, character-focused moments that made its self-published predecessor such a personable pleasure, A Closed and Common Orbit was, in its hearteningly humane way, no less of a success than Chambers’ multiple award-nominated darling of a debut.

Record of a Spaceborn Few is at least as remarkable, yet regrettably, isn’t going to win over anyone who’s been underwhelmed by these books before. Indeed, it’s never been clearer than it is here that this is a series about people—people as opposed to the things that happen to them, assuming anything happens to them at all. To be sure, a few things do in Record of a Spaceborn Few—there’s a tragic mishap at the outset, and an equally disastrous accident as the text progresses—but the third of Chambers’ loosely-connected Wayfarers works is only interested in events insofar as these events affect the five folks that are the focus of this practically pacific work of fiction.

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Paradise Crossed: The Cloven by Brian Catling

Mon Jul 16, 2018 2:00pm 1 comment 2 Favorites [+]

Adventurers, archaeologists and adherents alike have long sought—only to be stymied in their search for—the site of the Garden of Eden, that portion of paradise where many people believe humanity took root. In his phenomenal first novel, the poet, painter, and performance artist Brian Catling posited that it might at last be located in the Vorrh, a vast (albeit fictional) forest in the heart of Africa. In the ambitious if middling middle volume of what in 2017 turned out to be a trilogy, he expanded the scope of his suggestive story substantially, to take in characters from Bedlam in London, the colonial compound of Essenwald and a retirement home in Heidelberg: a litany of lost souls that would only be found, finally, in or in relation to the good woodland.

The Cloven closes the book on those disconsolate characters at the same time as advancing the overarching narrative of Catling’s exceptionally weird series, which can be seen in sum as a sinister subversion of the Christian tale of creation. Adam and Eve, it has it, were never meant to be anything more than minders in the Garden of Eden—they simply grew too big for their boots when they tasted of the forbidden fruit. The knowledge it contained was meant for the trees, you see, and they, as much more multifarious beings than we mere people can see, have had a chip on their sturdy shoulders ever since. Now, though… now the time has come for them to take what’s theirs, and I dare say it won’t end well if we stand in their way.

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Disconnect the Dots: 84K by Claire North

Thu May 24, 2018 2:30pm 2 comments 3 Favorites [+]

Having dealt so memorably with death in The End of the Day, Claire North sets her sights on life in 84K, a powerful and provocative novel that nods to George Orwell at the same time as narrating a tale not even he could tell so well. It’s not an easy read—not that you’d take Nineteen Eighty-Four to the beach either—but buckle up, because what it is is brilliant.

At the core of North’s newest is a question oft-asked yet rarely answered to anyone’s satisfaction: can you possibly put a price on something as sacred as life? In 84K you absolutely can. You can put a price on the taking of life, and come up with numbers that basically negate any other crimes you’ve committed—and that’s exactly what the man called Theo Miller does on a daily basis.

Theo—though that’s not his real name—works for the Criminal Audit Office, which “emerged some seven or so years before human rights were judged passé” and utterly disrupted a justice system that just didn’t work, according to the Company. Prison, as its inordinately influential opponents put it, “was a deeply inefficient way of rehabilitating criminals, especially given how many were clearly irredeemable, and despite privatisation efficiencies overcrowding and reoffending were a perennial problem.” Better, the alarming argument went, to assign fines to each and every illegal act, and pack off any lawbreakers who are unable to pay their way to so-called Commercial Reform Institutes, which is to say work camps where the poor can at least be trusted to be productive.

[Chilling, isn’t it?]

No End to the Universe: The Outsider by Stephen King

Tue May 22, 2018 1:00pm 3 comments 2 Favorites [+]

Flint City is one of those places. Unless you’re thinking of retiring, or starting a family, you drive through it, not to it. It’s big enough to have a Little League team, but small enough that everyone—and I do mean everyone: baseball’s a real big deal here—knows the coach to nod at. Terry Maitland is his name, though to most he’s Coach T. And given how well the Golden Dragons have been doing in recent years, he’s become something of a local hero.

You can imagine the reaction, then—the hysteria that spreads like salmonella in street food—when Terry is arrested for the brutal rape and murder of a boy in full view of the something like sixteen hundred sports fans that had come to Estelle Barga Recreational Park to scream for the team he leads. All of a sudden they and theirs have a whole other reason to scream, and a brand new target, too.

You might think the local PD had a point to prove, apprehending Coach T in such a dramatic fashion, and you’d be quite right. Flint City as a whole had been on edge since little Frank Peterson’s butchered body was found, and a very visible arrest would do wonders for the community’s sense of security—not to mention look mighty nice on certain civil servants’ résumés. But let’s not by such cynics. Detective Ralph Anderson, the closest thing The Outsider by Stephen King has to a protagonist, is decent police—honest and humane—and even he believed he had his man.

[That he was wrong just goes to show: you really never do know.]

You Break It, You Buy It: Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel

Thu May 3, 2018 2:00pm 5 comments 5 Favorites [+]

According to Only Human’s About the Author, Sylvain Neuvel has counted journalism, soil decontamination, furniture sales, translation and linguistics among his many and various vocations—and that’s not to mention his hobbies, which he happily admits have seen him tinkering in this and dabbling in that. In The Themis Files so far, he’s brought together most, if not all, of his areas of expertise, demonstrating a range that has certainly kept readers of said series on their feet. It was an etymological mystery one moment, an incredible mêlée of mechs the next, and after that? Why, that’s when the aliens invaded.

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The Red Planet Runs Red: One Way by S. J. Morden

Thu Apr 12, 2018 3:00pm 4 comments Favorite This

The principle of the criminal justice system is simplicity itself: if you break the law, you’ll be punished, and if the law you’ve broken is big enough and bad enough, the punishment, in all probability, will be imprisonment. In practice, alas, implementing the penal code has proven… problematic. Corruption is commonplace, wrongful convictions are rife, and the sheer number of people incarcerated each year is distressing at best. In the US alone, there are more than two million individuals under lock and key as we speak, and that number may even have increased by 2048, when the bulk of One Way takes place.

Compounding this particular problem is the irrefutable fact that every prisoner has rights. Not necessarily to liberty, but to life, in that they can still count on meals and a place to sleep at least. That’s neither offensive nor expensive in itself, but multiplied however many million-fold, the prospect of three hots and a cot can start to cost an awful lot. To square that essential outlay away, standard procedure today is to put prisoners to work, and it’s to that practice real-life rocket scientist S. J. Morden appends his text’s premise. What if, he wonders in One Way, we sent some of them—the lifers and the like that have nothing left to lose—to Mars, to make a base?

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Reaching Out: Arm of the Sphinx by Josiah Bancroft

Wed Mar 14, 2018 1:00pm 6 comments 1 Favorite [+]

On the back of the outstanding surprise that was Senlin Ascends, The Books of Babel only get better as Arm of the Sphinx expands its every aspect massively, like a balloon blown by a breathless baboon. The scope of the story, the extent of the setting and the small matter of the last narrative’s serviceable secondary characters—all are brilliantly embiggened in this superlative successor.

When schoolteacher Thomas Senlin lost track of his dear Marya at the foot of the Tower of Babel, to which otherworldly wonder they’d come to spend their hard-earned honeymoon, he imagined it would be a simple enough thing to find her before forging on with the rest of their R&R. How wrong he was. Instead, he was led on a merry chase to and through a few of the distinctive ringdoms that make up the aforementioned monolith, only to find himself drawn into the disputes of desperate men again and again. Unfortunately, for all the pains he’s taken, Senlin is no closer now to reuniting with his wife that he was on that first frightful night.

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She Sang Out Her Song: The Strange Bird by Jeff VanderMeer

Mon Mar 5, 2018 4:00pm Post a comment 2 Favorites [+]

In her dreams she’s a woman: a human woman with willpower and wonder and the wealth that comes from having a companion who cares deeply about her—and, crucially, about her future.

But when she wakes, she’s avian in nature, albeit “overlaid with Homo sapiens” and a miscellany of other chromosomal material: an “unstable melange” of life-forms nipped and tucked so very cleverly together by the evil genetic-engineering empire known only as the Company that made Mord (a giant flying bear) and Borne (an amorphous multi-coloured mass) before her. She’s the Strange Bird: the long-suffering subject of the exceptional novella that bears the designation she takes as her name.

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One More Time: Spare and Found Parts by Sarah Maria Griffin

Thu Feb 8, 2018 2:30pm Post a comment 2 Favorites [+]

Though it would be wise to question this quote, it was Sir Arthur C. Clarke who supposedly wrote that whether we are alone in the universe, or we are not, either possibility is equally terrifying. That’s as may be for many, but not so much for Penelope Crane, the young woman at the heart of Spare and Found Parts. I suspect she would be happier to see aliens invade than spend another second feeling like the loneliest girl in the world.

To be clear, Penelope—Nell to her nearest and dearest—has people. She has a friend, a father, and a fancy-man. But Ruby Underwood is increasingly nervous around Nell; Julian Crane is too busy making amazing machines in his basement to take the slightest interest in his disconsolate daughter; and Nell has never felt anything other than resentment for Oliver Kelly, who’s so popular he makes her appear a pariah by comparison.

Nell’s unpopularity among her peers is not the only thing that sets her apart, sadly. Among the population of the Pale, “it was commonplace to sport an arm, a leg, a set of ears, two fingers, or even the bottom half of a jaw crafted from exquisite, intuitive prosthetic. Absent limbs were part of the price the people of Black Water City paid for surviving the cruel touch of the epidemic. Nell, however, was the only person with all her metal inside. She was the only person who ticked.”

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Up, Up and Away: Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft

Wed Jan 17, 2018 2:00pm 3 comments 5 Favorites [+]

Self-published several years ago to next to no notice, Senlin Ascends has a second chance to enrapture readers by way of its wide release this week—and enrapture them it surely shall. If you liked The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, consider this your ticket to some equally fine times.

Incredibly creative in its conception and no less confident in its crafting, Josiah Bancroft’s dazzling debut concerns a couple on a honeymoon that goes to hell in a handcart when their destination of choice disappoints. This pair, though, haven’t popped off to romantic Paris or plotted some vibrant adventure in Venice: rather, they’ve travelled to the Tower of Babel, a monolithic column in the middle of Ur said to be a “great refuge of learning, the very seat of civilisation” and the source of any number of wonders.

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Conceptual Mass: Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

Fri Jan 12, 2018 1:30pm Post a comment 5 Favorites [+]

It’s been nearly ten years since Nick Harkaway kung fu kicked his way into fiction with The Gone-Away World, a Douglas Adams-esque epic that announced the arrival of an author with an imagination to die for—and a sublimely sardonic sense of humour, too. There were of course those critics quick to dismiss him when he flexed some of the same muscles a second time in the underrated Angelmaker, but his next novel, 2014’s terrific yet tragic Tigerman, showed that Harkway had more to offer than madcap shenanigans punctuated by fits of wit.

Make that much more, if Gnomon is anything to go on: it’s easily his most ambitious book, and arguably his best yet. It’s certainly his biggest. Constructed like Cloud Atlas—and at least as long—its vast canvas takes in tales of inexplicable ancient history, our appallingly prescient present and, fittingly, the far flung future, all of which orbit Gnomon’s central Orwellian thread like spy satellites on an imminent collision course.

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The Way the Wheel Turns: Persepolis Rising by James S. A. Corey

Fri Dec 8, 2017 9:00am 22 comments 1 Favorite [+]

Over the six novels of The Expanse saga so far, Captain James Holden and his incredible crew have been through the wringer repeatedly. They’ve weathered wars and tangled with extraterrestrial tech; they’ve been hunted and they’ve been haunted; they’ve played their parts in power struggles aplenty and dealt with disaster after disaster, not least an uprising, a rebellion and, of late, an apocalypse of sorts.

The times, to be sure, have been tumultuous. And inasmuch as they’ve affected the series’ setting—what started in the Sol system is now an interstellar affair thanks to the arrival of the ring gates—they’ve also had a dramatic impact on the ongoing narrative’s characters. Holden, Naomi, Amos, and Alex—along with relatively recent recruits like Bobbie and Clarissa—are not the idealistic whippersnappers we met in Leviathan Wakes. In the canny hands of Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham, collaborating here as James S. A. Corey, they’ve grown, be it for better or for worse, both as individuals and as a team. They’ve grown… and guys? They’ve gotten old.

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Smuggler’s Run: Artemis by Andy Weir

Mon Nov 13, 2017 3:00pm 7 comments 1 Favorite [+]

It’s been six years since Andy Weir became a self-publishing success story on the back of The Martian. A scientifically fastidious yet satisfying work of fiction that spoke of a stranded astronaut’s struggle to survive on the ruthless red planet, it—and Ridley Scott’s subsequent adaptation of said—made sci-fi fun for some; specifically for folks who had previously sneered at the genre for its seeming self-seriousness.

Those readers will be over the moon to hear that Artemis is, in its attention to technical detail and its prioritisation of play as the order of the day, The Martian’s perfect partner, though more demanding fans of the form are likely to find it slight: derivative, dreadfully slow to start, and rather lacking in the heart department. But for better or for worse, Weir’s new novel is in many ways more of the same problem-solving stuff that made him a household name.

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Let It Go: Strange Weather by Joe Hill

Mon Oct 23, 2017 1:00pm 1 comment 1 Favorite [+]

“After writing a couple seven-hundred-page novels back-to-back,” Joe Hill has it in the afterword to his electric new collection, “it felt particularly important to get lean and mean,” and Strange Weather is exactly that: it’s not long, and damn it, it’s nasty.

A striking selection of novellas ranging from the playfully apocalyptic to the wickedly political, Strange Weather starts with an actual flash in “Snapshot,” the unsettling story of a boy who crosses paths with a man in possession of a magical camera. This old Polaroid captures more than just those Kodak moments, of course: it captures the very memories of those moments, in sum leaving its subjects with holes in their souls.

Michael Figlione is just a kid when “Snapshot” begins, so when he sees his old babysitter Shelly Beukes walking around the street they share, barefoot and swearing, he assumes she’s simply senile. As a decent human being he does the decent thing and takes her home to her husband, who gives Michael ten bucks for his trouble. It’s only when he goes to the local truck stop to spend his earnings and sees a creepy guy pointing a camera like a pistol that Shelly’s seemingly insane story—about a man who’s been stealing her essential self, picture by painful picture—starts to make sense.

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