Recent Reading
My fortnightly summary of what I’ve been reading and listening to.
Predator’s Gold by Phillip Reeve
Paperback from my own collection
Amazon link
This is the second volume in a quartet of sf novels aimed at young adults, a series sometimes dubbed “The Hungry City Chronicles”. In any case, the sequel to Mortal Engines. The basic premise is that hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now the Earth has been all but destroyed in “The Sixty Minute War” and the remaining cities have found that to survive they have to become mobile. Mounted on vast traction engines, cities like London prowl the devastated world, hunting down and consuming smaller cities. It’s a wonderful conceit, and Reeve really brings it to life with both humor and pathos, and some very interesting characters.
In this second novel, the main (surviving!) characters from the first, Tom and Hester, find themselves aboard the city of Anchorage, facing many perils. Their relationship is severely threatened, and the danger ratchets up as the book goes on. Hester is a really interesting character, horribly disfigured and tormented, but fiercely determined to get what she wants. A really strong female character, going right against the grain of most female stereotypes you find in novels aimed at this age group.
Really very superior teen fiction, in my view. I’m looking forward to reading the other novels in the cycle.
One minor note – the Scholastic editions are attractive, but the cut-outs in their front covers are unlikely to survive much handling before they rip.
The Great War:American Front / Walk in Hell / Breakthroughs by Harry Turtledove
Audiobook
Amazon link
I finally completed listening to Turtledove’s “Great War” trilogy, a total of some 72 hours in audiobook format, goodness knows how many pages in hardcopy.
Brilliantly done alternative history, starting with a seemingly trivial change in events early in the American Civil War, leading to the failure of the United States to prevent the southern states from seceding from the Union. Turtledove deals with the Civil War itself (or the “War of Secession” as it is described in later books) only very briefly at the start of How Few Remain, a 24-hour long prequel to the current series, mainly devoted to the “Second Mexican War” in which the Confederate States again defeat their northern neighbour in the 1880s over the issue of the CSA acquiring two new states from the Empire of Mexico.
This work basically covers the period of World War I (“The Great War”), as the United States finds itself allied with the Germans and Austrians against the Confederate States allied with Britain, France and their colonies. The USA is thus fighting the CSA to the south, and Canada to the north. A war which bogs down as it did in Europe in trench warfare, with mustard gas, tanks and aerial dog-fights.
As someone who is not an American (I was born in England, emigrated to Australia in my teens) my knowledge of the actual American events (and particularly geography) is a bit restricted, and this perhaps limits my understanding of what is going on, but I didn’t find this a major problem.
Turtledove’s historical alterations are done very subtly, all of them very logically deriving from his original premise. His writing technique is based on episodically featuring the lives of a variety of different individuals, perhaps a dozen or so, to whom we keep returning as the general flow the story proceeds. In this way he makes the events of the time very personal and moving.
Among his cast of characters, he follows a couple of African-Americans in this trilogy (in How Few Remain, he followed Frederick Douglass) and it is clear that he is very sympathetic to their plight of their race. In this alternate world, of course, slavery takes its time to be abolished, and blacks are still treated appallingly in the South and not much better in the North as the novel opens. The use of the ‘n-word’ is extremely frequent, but is perfectly in context and it would have been absurd to avoid it. I do also wonder whether in this new history there is a single word ‘damnyankees’ because ‘yankee’ is never used without the adjective.
There’s some very tragic material in here, but also a good deal of humor – the bumblings of the 75-year old Lieutenant General George Custer (who never got to Little Big Horn and so survived) and his head-to-head confrontations with President Theodore Roosevelt (still in office in 1914, Woodrow Wilson being President of the CSA) are just a delight.
Absolutely fascinating stuff, though, and really well-done characterisation and story-telling. I expect eventually to move on to his American Empire trilogy in the same timeline which deals with the period of the Second World War.
Die Trying by Lee Child
Ebook on my iPod
Amazon link
I’m a sucker for thrillers (as you can probably tell) and I thought I would try this author, who has a whole series based around his ex-Marine character Jack Reacher.
I couldn’t get hold of the first novel in the series (“geographically restricted“, grrr!!), but was able to buy this one.
Reacher finds himself caught up, literally, in the kidnapping of a female FBI agent. For a long while, the reason for the kidnapping remains obscure, but all is of course eventually revealed. There’s a lot of violence – if I ever read again about someone’s head ‘exploding into a pink mist’ when shot I shall be sick – and some interesting plotting.
I may try Lee Child again – if this is only the author’s second book, it wasn’t bad. But there’s some awfully weak or silly plot points – why Reacher isn’t killed and disposed of by the villains at least five or six times in the novel is pretty well inexplicable. The kind of plot which only works because most people involved act like total idiots and against their own obvious interests.
Double Star by Robert Heinlein
Ebook on my iPod
Classic 1950s science fiction from a master of the craft. Quite a lot of fun to re-read this kind of book, but there’s not a lot to say about it.
An actor is recruited to play the double of a leading politician (on Mars) because the politician has been kidnapped. Then the plot thickens, but not much. It’s also the kind of sf which really doesn’t take much advantage of the genre – nothing about the plot requires the science fiction, planet-travelling background, but could almost just as easily have been set in the modern day.
Current Reading
I’m currently part-way through:
- The Appeal by John Grisham (Audiobook)
- South by Sir Ernest Shackleton (E-Book)
- Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin (Hardcover, my own library)
