Over on Ken MacLeod’s blog he recently posted he’d had an acceptance from the SFX Book Club (whose selections of classics are here) for his review of James Blish’s Cities In Flight.

Of their 49 (+ 1) listed SF and fantasy books the ones in bold I’ve read. The italicised one I’ve read as the short story on which it was based. The asterisked one is in my tbr pile. The ones with question marks I may have read years ago but the mists of time have descended. # means I’ve read other works (most likely short stories) within the same setting.

1. The War Of The Worlds by HG Wells
2. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury ?
3. Ringworld by Larry Niven
4. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
5. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller
6. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
7. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey #
8. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke
9. The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
10. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
11. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner ?
12. Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
13. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin
14. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick
15. The Player of Games by Iain Banks
16. Pavane by Keith Roberts
17. Neuromancer by William Gibson
18. Collected Ghost Stories of MR James
19. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
20. A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
21. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
22. Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
23. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein ?
24. Blood Music by Greg Bear
25. Non Stop by Brian Aldiss
26. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift ?
27. Dune by Frank Herbert
28. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
29. A Case of Conscience by James Blish
30. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
31. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
32. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
33. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R Delany
34. The Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham
35. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
36. Vurt by Jeff Noon
37. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
38. The City And The Stars by Arthur C Clarke
39. Strata by Terry Pratchett
40. The Centauri Device by M John Harrison
41. Earth Abides by George R Stewart*
42. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
43. The Death of Grass by John Christopher
44. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
45. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
46. From The Earth To The Moon by Jules Verne ?
47. Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice
48. Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard
49. Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
50. Cities In Flight by James Blish

I recently mentioned the SF Masterworks index. Over at the SF and Fantasy Masterworks Reading Project there is also a Fantasy Masterworks Index.

The ones in bold I’ve read. The one marked * I think I did but a long time ago.

Given my lesser liking for fantasy as compared to SF it’s not surprising there are so few in bold on this list.

1 - The Book of the New Sun, Volume 1: Shadow and Claw – Gene Wolfe
2 – Time and the Gods – Lord Dunsany
3 – The Worm Ouroboros* – E.R. Eddison
4 – Tales of the Dying Earth – Jack Vance
5 – Little, Big – John Crowley
6 – The Chronicles of Amber – Roger Zelazny
7 – Viriconium – M. John Harrison
8 – The Conan Chronicles, Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle – Robert E. Howard
9 – The Land of Laughs – Jonathan Carroll
10 – The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea – L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

11 – Lud-in-the-Mist – Hope Mirrlees
12 – The Book of the New Sun, Volume 2: Sword and Citadel – Gene Wolfe
13 – Fevre Dream – George R. R. Martin
14 – Beauty – Sheri S. Tepper
15 – The King of Elfland’s Daughter – Lord Dunsany
16 – The Conan Chronicles, Volume 2: The Hour of the Dragon – Robert E. Howard
17 – Elric – Michael Moorcock
18 – The First Book of Lankhmar – Fritz Leiber
19 – Riddle-Master – Patricia A. McKillip
20 – Time and Again – Jack Finney

21 – Mistress of Mistresses – E.R. Eddison
22 – Gloriana or the Unfulfill’d Queen – Michael Moorcock
23 – The Well of the Unicorn – Fletcher Pratt
24 – The Second Book of Lankhmar – Fritz Leiber
25 – Voice of Our Shadow – Jonathan Carroll
26 – The Emperor of Dreams – Clark Ashton Smith
27 – Lyonesse I: Suldrun’s Garden – Jack Vance
28 – Peace – Gene Wolfe
29 – The Dragon Waiting – John M. Ford
30 – Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe – Michael Moorcock

31 – Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams – C.L. Moore
32 – The Broken Sword – Poul Anderson
33 – The House on the Borderland and Other Novels – William Hope Hodgson
34 – The Drawing of the Dark – Tim Powers
35 – Lyonesse II and III: The Green Pearl and Madouc – Jack Vance
36 – The History of Runestaff – Michael Moorcock
37 – A Voyage to Arcturus – David Lindsay
38 – Darker Than You Think – Jack Williamson
39 – The Mabinogion – Evangeline Walton
40 – Three Hearts & Three Lions – Poul Anderson

41 – Grendel – John Gardner
42 – The Iron Dragon’s Daughter – Michael Swanwick
43 – WAS – Geoff Ryman
44 – Song of Kali – Dan Simmons
45 – Replay – Ken Grimwood
46 – Sea Kings of Mars and Other Worldly Stories – Leigh Brackett
47 – The Anubis Gates – Tim Powers
48 – The Forgotten Beasts of Eld – Patricia A. McKillip
49 – Something Wicked This Way Comes – Ray Bradbury
50 – The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales – Rudyard Kipling

Pan, 2007. 522p.

This is Miéville’s first book for younger readers. It is also copiously (and well) illustrated by the author. In it Zanna and Deeba, two of a group of normal young teenagers in London, are beset by strange occurrences. They are attacked by smoke tendrils, freaked out by an ambulatory umbrella and Zanna is addressed as Shwazzy several times during different chance encounters in one of which she is given a card naming her as such.

Soon they are both transported to a strange place where the sun is too large – and doughnut shaped – weird and colourful characters abound and telecommunications work through the medium of what can only be described as carrier wasps. Zanna is revealed as the choisi – chosen – the girl who will save the abcity of Un Lun Dun (unLondon) from the menace of the Smog. She is presumed to know the details of the Armets and their secret weapon the Klinneract which saved real London and drove the Smog to Un Lun Dun. (This parallel existence also contains other abcities such as Parisn’t, Lost Angeles, Sans Francisco and Hong Gone.)

The book which contains the Shwazzy prophecy – and which speaks morosely a la Eeyore or Marvin – turns out to be wrong, though, and Zanna is unable to help. She is incapacitated by the Smog whose attack is only driven off by using specially slit and treated unbrellas made by Mister Brokkenbroll to ward off the smog’s projectiles. With this apparent victory Deeba and the still far from well Zanna return to London. But Deeba cannot forget her experiences, realises that not all may be well in Un Lun Dun and so makes her return. On her quest to find a weapon to defeat the Smog she is accompanied by the aforementioned Book of Prophecy, Bling, a silver furred locust, Diss, a brown bear cub, a four-armed, four-legged, many-eyed man called Cauldron, a half-ghost, half-normal boy called Hemi, and Curdle, an animated milk carton Deeba adopts as a pet.

There are some nice coinages – mostly portmanteau words like smombies, Propheseers and smoglodytes. Mister Brokkenbroll – the Unbrellissimo – is a particularly redolent case. There are also glazed, wooden framed, eight legged things called Black Windows. These are just a few examples of Miéville’s playful linguistic invention.

There is more than a hint of Alice in Un Lun Dun though generally Through The Looking Glass rather than Adventures In Wonderland. This is underlined on page 296 when the Speaker of Talklands echoes Humpy Dumpty by saying, “WORDS MEAN WHATEVER I WANT.” We also have a pair of Tweedledum/Tweedledee-ish mitre-wearing clerics, in white and deep red robes respectively, who only move in zig-zags. There are parallels too with THE CITY & YTIC EHT Miéville’s recent adult novel, which I reviewed here.

Un Lun Dun is an enjoyable romp. For its target audience I would have thought it might be more than a touch too long, though its young readers may welcome a long immersion in Miéville’s skewed world.

Orion, 2006, 364p

Voices is the second of the Annals Of The Western Shore, the first volume of which, Gifts, I reviewed for Infinity plus.

For a children’s book, Voices mentions surprisingly adult material very early. Our narrator, Memer, of the House of Galva, is revealed to be the child by rape, by invading soldiery named Alds, of a citizen of Ansul. The city was once called Ansul the Wise and Beautiful for its University, Library and architecture but under occupation has remained in ruins, its citizens hungry and fearful.

The Alds, from Asudar in the eastern desert, have a harsh religion which proscribes books. Galvamond, the house where Memer has been brought up, was ransacked repeatedly by the Alds in an effort to find and destroy any books and also the entrance to their version of hell which they believe is concealed there.

Memer’s mother has subsequently died. This is an unusual twist on the absent parents scenario as her father is one of Memer’s hated Alds and is probably still alive (though we never meet him.)

Her first memory is of writing her way into a secret room in the house; a room which contains a host of books – some of which groan or bleed when she touches them – along with other, stranger, manifestations. Galvamond also has in its courtyard an oracular fountain which has not flowed for two hundred years. The house’s patriarch, Sulter Galva, known as The Waylord, was tortured by the city’s occupiers to reveal the house’s secrets but told them nothing. He is the only other person with access to the secret room but does not realise Memer’s knowledge of it until one day she enters while he is there. He teaches her to read.

Orrec and Gry from Gifts arrive in Ansul. He is now a famous travelling poet/storyteller. They have a halflion as a pet. As a result of it spooking one of the Alds’ horses Gry befriends Memer and they come to live in Galvamond for the duration of their stay. Orrec’s presence is later crucial to the unravelling of the plot and the conflict, as is Memer’s role as messenger. Le Guin’s approach to her resolution is again refreshingly out of the ordinary.

All this is conveyed in a clear, liquid prose which flows like a river; everything necessary is there, all the inlets it laps into bear meaning and purpose. The excursions into magic realist territory are not overdone. Le Guin’s assured touch means the book is a delight. Despite being intended for young teenagers Voices is worth reading for anyone who relishes an intriguing story well told, with added insights into the human condition for good measure.

Tor, 2009, 435p

See my review of Campbell’s Scar Night for the usual caveat.

This is volume 2 of The Deepgate Codex and features characters from that book – some of whom are dead. It is in three parts which at first seem totally unrelated but do begin to interweave.

There are some startling images within its pages. A giant skyship pulled along on a rope tether by a man named John Anchor. The Iron Angel of the title, a vast mechanical construct driven by the soul of one of the characters (inspired perhaps by the Angel Of The North?) A hell where characters inhabit themselves – embodied as walls, floor and ceiling.

It was here I began to lose interest a little as the characters could manipulate “reality” at will and generate objects out of thin air. This is one of my quibbles with utter fantasy. When anything is possible how much actually has any meaning? And what jeopardy is present when people are already dead? (OK, there is, perhaps, eternal torment to avoid but is this sufficient to carry us through?) Hence my preference for SF.

The Deepgate of Scar Night, while refreshingly post-mediæval, was pre-mass industrial; yet here we have battleships, locomotives and steamboats. We also have the intrusion of a plethora of gods and their adherents. The more focused vision of Scar Night has become somewhat diffused.

What made that earlier book so memorable and distinctive was the city of Deepgate itself, a gloomy, brooding presence, hanging over an abyss from a network of chains, and the complex interactions of the characters who lived there. Since, towards the end of Scar Night, most of Deepgate fell into the chasm over which it was suspended we no longer have that unique vision to bolster the narrative. A whiff of contractual obligation hangs over proceedings.

Yet Campbell can write. Some of his descriptions are excellent and he has an eye/ear for portraying character with subtlety and a few telling phrases.

Personally I’d have liked him to try his hand at another scenario but I suspect the commercial imperative to follow Scar Night with something similar in order to please its fans weighed too heavily in the construction of Iron Angel. And, disappointingly, despite a climactic battle, this novel is not truly rounded off. The ending here is something of a cliffhanger, probably to set up the third Deepgate Codex volume God Of Clocks. (Which does have an excellent prologue. It’s printed at the back of this edition; a practice by publishers which is rather naff. I read it earlier – as a writers’ group submission. On the basis of that alone I will read God Of Clocks.)

Orbit, 1998. 565 p

Tim Powers has written several books I have enjoyed, most notably The Anubis Gates and The Drawing Of The Dark. His On Stranger Tides was also a good read as I recall. His work is usually a blend of fantasy and horror. Like most of his œuvre Earthquake Weather leans more to fantasy. I picked it up in a bookshop sometime during the past year. I didn’t realise it was part of a series including Last Call and Expiration Date – which I have read but which didn’t leave so much of an impression on me – until I looked here. I must have missed it at the time.

Fantasies in a modern setting are relatively unusual – a lot tend to inhabit cod mediæval worlds – so Powers is to be commended on eschewing that default.

In Earthquake Weather, the Fisher King of the whole American West, Steven Crane, is dead but his body is not decomposing. His putative successor, recognisable by a wound that bleeds continuously, is a young boy named Koot Hoomie Parganas who occasionally likes to say, “Call me Fishmeal.”

Sid Cochran, a psychiatric patient, along with a woman named Janis Plumtree who hosts multiple personalities (including among others Cody, Flibbertigibet, Valorie, Tiffany, Omar Salvoy, changes between whom are accompanied by electromagnetic disturbances – lights flickering and such) – escape hospital and seek out Parganas and his companions, with whose help they attempt to kindle Crane’s ghost personality back into his body. Plumtree’s Omar Salvoy incarnation was the person who killed Crane (with a spear point.) It is partly guilt because of this, but also to protect Koot, that the other personalities wish to resurrect Crane. However, when Salvoy is in possession of the mutual body, he collaborates with the novel’s bad guys.

It sounds daft, doesn’t it? And it is. This is a universe where ghosts hang about ‘phone booths, can speak to the living on the telephone or jump into people’s heads at moments of trauma and where trucks can start themselves (and even drive themselves) but the action is set in a USA recognisable as our own in the late twentieth century. Yet Powers’s matter of fact prose and descriptive (ahem) powers render the scenario entirely reasonable when reading it. For good measure, as a centuries old wine is a key plot device, there’s a short ongoing history of viticulture injected into the story every so often. Plus the wine god Dionysus gets frequent mention as a background presence. Also crucial to the plot is a palindromic poem. In Latin.

Amid all this – a symptom of Earthquake Weather’s complexity – the datum that the ghost of Thomas Alva Edison once inhabited Koot’s personality is a mere throwaway. Other writers would have milked this dry.

The book is not short of incident, then. The climactic scenes, though, as well as containing a flurry of split infinitives, show a drop in the overall quality of the writing, perhaps a sign that Powers was rushing to his finish.

One other thing. I’ve noticed that blood – spilling it, using it for spells, even drinking it – seems to be very important to the writers of fantasies such as this. An unhealthy obsession, methinks.

I did spot a flourescent – it’s fluo, people; flew-oh, not flew – and a paremedics*. Inevitable, I suppose, in a book so long.

To those unfamiliar with Powers’s work I’d recommend The Anubis Gates as a better starting point than Earthquake Weather, whose peculiar title seems to derive from Dionysus’s involvement with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

*I like the idea of paremedic as a word. I can imagine such people existing in uninformed medical times. They would obviously either flense or flay their patients to effect their cures. It’s only a small step beyond bleeding after all. Let’s see them in your mediæval fantasies, boys and girls.

The Book Of All Hours: 2.
MacMillan, 2007

Disclaimer: Hal Duncan is another of my SF contacts. Since he is a long standing member of the Glasgow SF writers’ group, with which my own group has many links, I have known him for a long time. If you ever encounter him at a Science Fiction convention you won’t have a dull time.

Ink contains Volumes 3 and 4 of The Book Of All Hours, the first two volumes of which were published as Vellum The Book Of All Hours: 1 in 2005.

The background conceit of both books is that the universe is akin to a piece of wrinkled parchment (Vellum) extended to infinity, with lives and histories experienced within the parchment’s folds. Like in parallel universes, history in the folds is different one to the next.

Both Vellum and Ink are presented as series of interleaved narratives, some in different typefaces, which at first apparently bear little relation to each other.

Duncan’s invented Book of all Hours within the book – written in blood on the skin of angels, no less – “has as many histories as the world itself …. fused as one confused and rambling tale, a sort of truth but full of inconsistencies and digressions, spurious interpolations and interpretations,” which is about as good a description of Ink (and Vellum) as any I could conjure. As you might expect then, Ink is full of characters historical, biblical, Shakespearian and mythic, as well as fictional.

At the end of each chapter Duncan inserts a coda labelled Errata where the underlying themes are teased out and underlined.

In Volume 3 the prose in one of the narratives is rhythmic, almost Shakespearian in its metricality, with rhymes to heighten the effect, though it is laid out in the normal (non-poetic) manner. In an afterword Duncan reveals this narrative to be a reworking of Euripides’s The Bacchae. (His epilogue is based on Virgil.)

In one small section Duncan enumerates the inhumanities man perpetrated on man, woman and child during the (real) twentieth century, a year on year account of unremitting strife and conflict. Who now remembers the Armenians? is a telling tagline.

Yet Duncan, despite living there, seems to relish laying fictional waste to the city of Glasgow. Sorry, as this a different fold, make that Kentigern.

As a medium, ink is of course liable to be erased and the underlying vellum written on again, made into a palimpsest. This novel, Ink, is concerned with the efforts of various characters to get hold of the Book of all Hours and amend or destroy it so that history can unfold differently.

Replete with allusion, alliteration, assonance, outright rhymes, repetition, puns on names (Guy Fox,) deliberately altered spellings (eg photogram, an ancient city called Themes, endless variations on the name Thomas) and not afraid to display its historical and classical knowledge, Ink is dense, layered and complex; a tour-de-force. This is not a book with which to while away the easy hours.

Bantam, 2006

This is a nigh on 1,000 page fantasy novel, fourth in a series called A Song Of Ice And Fire. In the main I dislike fantasy novels and series both – not to mention books resembling doorstops. Martin, however, wrote a fair few short stories and novels in his early career that I greatly admired (even including a vampire novel, Fevre Dream, and I cannot usually take vampire stories seriously) so I was prepared to give his fantasy a go. I still resisted starting off reading A Song Of Ice And Fire as Martin hadn’t completed the cycle and I didn’t want to be kept waiting too long for the conclusion. When this fourth volume came out the fifth was promised soon, so I embarked on the first, A Game Of Thrones, and was immediately enthused.

This is a fully envisioned world. This feels real. You could call the setting a default mediaeval one but there is a grittiness to this and an attention to detail that sets it far above most fantasy novels. Every named character, even minor ones, even ones we meet only fleetingly, has an extensive back story and a fully fledged psychology. The environments and habitats described are also convincingly delineated and differentiated.

It’s a cruel, nasty and vicious world to be sure. There is so much killing, rape, pillage and worse that it makes you wonder whether Martin’s world will run out of people to suffer these outrages or take part in the various battles, conspiracies etc but then this is what happens when the dogs of war are let slip and anarchy is loosed upon the world.

It is possible that Martin is reworking the Wars Of The Roses in a fantasy setting. (There is a set of warring houses, one of which is called Lannister, a crookback prince, battles galore, with various crowns changing hands, betrayals and shifting allegiances; there is strife within as well as between families.) If he is, for an American to be doing so is remarkable but (to my limited knowledge of those times) he has strayed far from that template. The scope of A Song Of Ice And Fire is enormous.

So much so that at times the detail can be overwhelming. How Martin keeps track of who is who among his assorted Kings, Lords, Ladies, Bannermen, Knights, Squires, sellswords, bandits and smallfolk is a miracle as it can be confusing to the readers if they do not pay enough attention. A helpful cast of characters listed by Royal House is appended to each book. This is one of the few occasions where such an affectation may be justified.

Each section has a different viewpoint character, some of whom are antagonistic to each other. Martin manages to make all of their internal musings believable and even to engage our sympathies with them all, despite their conflicts, as the unfolding story is revealed through their individual activities and interactions. His technique echoes that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not in that he reveals the meat or meaning of a scene at the start, but that he grows it towards the climax. In A Feast For Crows this more often than not twists the story in a new direction.

The setting of A Song Of Ice And Fire is largely inimical to Martin’s female character, of course, but, as is natural for our less hide-bound 21^st century times, he gives his readers a fair few strong ones, some of whom kick against the prejudices inherent in their world.

There are some suggestions in the text that this may actually be Science Fiction rather than fantasy, that people arrived on this world some time in the distant past from elsewhere and wiped out the original inhabitants. Phew! Fantasy prejudice saved. However; here be dragons! (I’ve always wanted to write that.) The dragons, though, are merely mentioned in A Feast For Crows. We met them earlier in the series but there is so much here that their story and that of some characters encountered in earlier books have been held over for volume five. There are also: a profusion of religions, reanimated corpses and apparently supernatural weirdnesses of other sorts. (In previous volumes we had direwolves with a telepathic link to particular humans and wights who can only be killed with obsidian.) So maybe not SF then.

Four years on we are still waiting for publication of the fifth book, whose content Martin has significantly foreshadowed in A Feast For Crows. Martin has been subject to criticism and even abuse for this delay. I’m not surprised he is experiencing difficulty, the number of corners he has potentially painted himself into.

As far as I’m concerned Martin can take as long as he likes to finish; or not as the case may be. I want the rest of the series to be as good as the first four offerings. He needs time to make sure it/they are. If it/they never arrive we’ll all just have to make up our own fitting endings. And we’ll still have a feast in the books already printed.

Two fellow members of the East Coast Writers’ Group have had books published recently.

Alan Campbell’s third novel, God Of Clocks, has garnered some good reviews, notably these ones in Strange Horizons and Scotland On Sunday.

I reviewed his first novel Scar Night, here.

Poet Jane McKie’s second collection is called The Sun Is Green. Her first, Morocco Rococo, won an award for best first book.

Unicorn (Unwin), 1986

I came to Colin Greenland late, when he turned to SF rather than fantasy and Take Back Plenty won all those awards. I first met him at a Science Fiction convention in Leeds and he’s a really nice bloke, one of nature’s gentlemen. I’ve had the pleasure of his company at other cons since. This is me catching up with his back catalogue.

Daybreak on A Different Mountain was Greenland’s first novel, the start of a fantasy sequence. In the city of Thryn, walled off from the outside world for ages, the local priestess of the god Gomath identifies one of the aristocratic Agui, Lupio, as some sort of messiah, called the Cirnex. Dismayed, he breaks the law by leaving the city, teaming up with Dubilier, who has different reasons for escape. Together they venture off towards a distant sacred mountain. The book chronicles their odyssey.

The novel has an interesting symmetrical structure. Two sections set in Thryn bookend the longer middle part which is itself symmetrical as Dubilier and Lupio have various adventures on their way to the mountain and on the way back meet characters they encountered on their outward journey.

(The next sentence contains a slight spoiler.)

They find the city they come back to is very different from the one they left and the way their encounters are mutated and transform into the mythology Lupio was trying to escape is cleverly done.

The book is 25 years old now, being first published in 1984 and is of its time. Yet while Greenland’s deftness with character is already evident here there is that fantasy quirk whereby many are given strange names. Piripheis anyone? Hirfan? Ibet?

If I were recommending a starting point for anyone unfamiliar with Greenland’s work I wouldn’t suggest Daybreak though it is a worthwhile read. Try instead Take Back Plenty or, better still, his excellent mainstream novel Finding Helen.