PS Publishing, 2010. 394 p.

I have progressed halfway through this collection (in which appears my own story Osmotic Pressure) but have laid it down temporarily as I have more time to devote to longer works when I am on holiday. I will review it in full later.

Tor, 2007. 293p.

Having now read both it is apparent that Bloodmind and Williams’s previous book, Darkland, are indeed a thematic unity. While both are capable of being read as stand-alone novels they are essentially one book split into two.

Bloodmind is a lessening of sentience, a reversion to animal status, which occurs naturally from time to time to the inhabitants of the planet Mondhile, and in reverse to the creatures known as Selk on Vari Halsdottir’s world, Muspell. It is also induced artificially in the women of Nhem by their male rulers. This last barbarism is strictly necessary to neither plot nor resolution and, apart from being a piece of gender politics, it is difficult to see why else it has been included beyond giving one of the viewpoint characters a reason for being more or less on her own. (I did, however, note that Nhem is men spelled backwards with the interpolation of an h, which may or may not be significant.)

The narrative flits between the three planets and the women whose fates, along with that of the Selk, become intertwined but is mainly carried by Vari, the protagonist whose story links the two books.

As in Darkland the SF and Fantasy elements of Bloodmind do not sit well with each other. The tale is at base a fantasy with SF trappings bolted on and as a result fails on both counts.

Not one of Williams’s best I would say.

There is a span count of 1, sadly.

Kraken utilises Miéville’s common setting of London, albeit a strange London. This otherness beside the familiar is a strand in his work evident from King Rat and Un Lun Dun through to THE CITY AND YTIC EHT.

This one started out as if it may have been written with a film or TV adaptation in mind – one with a potentially light-hearted take – but soon veers off down strange Miévillean byways which may be unfilmable. For these are the end times and cultists worshipping all manner of weird gods abound.

It begins with a kind of locked room mystery as a giant squid, Architeuthis, has been stolen – formalin, tank and all – from its stance in the Darwin Centre, a natural history museum where Billy Harrow is a curator. He helped to prepare the squid for show and is thought to hold the knowledge that might allow all those interested in its recovery to find it. The police fundamentalist and cult squad, the FSRC, is called in to help investigate the disappearance which becomes more involved when Billy discovers a body pickled (in too small a jar) in the museum’s basement. And these are merely the first strangenesses to be encountered in this book. We also have the consciousness of a man embedded within a tattoo, a tattoo which moves and speaks. Then there is the double act of Goss and Subby – two shapeshifting baddies from out of time (they shift other people’s shapes) – and weird sects, cults and mancers of all sorts.

Never short of incident and brimming with plot the novel is probably a bit too convoluted, with too many characters for its own good, and its one-damn-strange-thing-after-another-ness can verge on overkill. But this is an unashamed fantasy, a form to which I am antipathetic when it is taken to extremes; and Miéville is not one for restraint.

While Kraken sometimes skirts along the edge of comedy it never fully embraces it. There are too many killings and acts of violence for comedy to sit comfortably. I might have liked the novel better if it had. Its main fault is that it never manages to settle on which sort of book it is meant to be, straddling various narrative stools such as police procedural, one man against the odds, woman in search of the truth about her vanished lover, etc.

This may be a reason why it failed to make the award ballot for this year’s BSFA Awards.

Pedantic asides:- Miéville did make me think what the plural of quid pro quo might be. (To my British mind Miéville’s anglicised formulation “quids pro quo” would mean getting money for something rather than a mutual back-scratching.) Taking the phrase as meaning “this for that” then the English plural, for the phrase as a whole, would be quid pro quos. For the Latin plural you would have quae pro quibus (these for those.) There are two other semantic possibilities; quid pro quibus (this for those) and quae pro quo (these for that.) Miéville also seems to think that “law” and “lore” are homophones. Not where I come from they aren’t. And the establishment is a dry cleaner’s, not a dry cleaners.

I believe Miéville’s next is to be set in space. It’ll be interesting to see his take on that.

Mutation Press, 2010. 270 p.

This is a collection of “Strange Fiction” with music as the linking theme. The stories range through various different types of SF and fantasy with some diversions into Horror. The authors mostly have low profiles though they all seem to have previous publications. In at least some of their contributions the relationship of the tale to the theme was tangential and most did not depend on music for their resolution. That is how it should be, though; a story has to work as a story after all, not fit an arbitrary arrangement.

To my mind the most successful tales were Richard J Goldstein’s Dybbuk Blues, concerning a charmed cornet and the fates of its players, Susan Lanigan’s The Accompanist, where the spirits of Robert and Clara Schumann inhabit the bodies of a teacher and pupil in a Music College, L L Hannett’s Breathing Life Into The Dead, about err…. breathing life into the dead and Gavin Inglis’s Fugue, where a driver crashes on a lonely road and hears a choir singing. Special mentions too to Jim Steel’s The Shostakovich Ensemble, a discography of a rock group from a Stalinist Britain, and Neil Williamson’s Arrhythmia, a kind of 1984 with added songs.

Nothing to do with the quality of the collection or its execution but one thing which irritated me was the occasional tendency for the font size to alter and then soon revert. I found it very distracting trying to decipher what the reason for this might be before concluding there was none.

As in all anthologies, or indeed collections, the quality was variable, but the stories here were never less than readable.

Puffin, 2004. 211p.

Nick Gifford is the name under which Keith Brooke writes fiction for young adults.

Matt Guilder finds out shortly after his grandmother dies that he is descended on his mother’s side from a long line of guardians of an interface between the normal world and Alternity, a place where dark forces lurk, eager to breach the gates and flood into the mundane world. His immersion into this long-standing struggle is precipitated by his parents’ break up and the subsequent move to live with his cousins near to the ancestral home, seat of the local transition point.

Even though the treatment is necessarily sketchy – the target audience doesn’t want to be bored, I suspect, and things move along swiftly – the author depicts his characters with skilful economy. We are given more than enough knowledge to understand their motivations despite there being nothing spare in the narrative. Nor is Matt free from doubts and fears.

This is young adult reading from which adults can also gain enjoyment.

Tor , 2007. 424p

We first meet Vali Hallsdottir on the planet Nhem, on an assassination mission. Due to an unfortunate love affair with a man who she feels betrayed her (it is a moot point, or insufficiently delineated, whether he actually did) she has come under the influence of the Skald and has vowed not to have sex except as an aid and precursor to killing someone. Vali’s Skald training means she can utilise the seith, a set of enhanced intuitions which is inbred but nevertheless has to be honed.

Asides. 1. The prelude to the assassination is described as a rape but, while to the man concerned it is – as by implication are all the sexual encounters on Nhem, where women have been reduced to the state of animals and are treated as possessions – Vali is complicit in the act (and moreover has to be to fulfil her mission) so the word is not entirely appropriate. Admittedly the true mot juste does not spring readily to mind.
2. Williams describes Vali’s usual sexual abstinence as celibacy. It is, rather, chastity; there is a difference.

Vali’s disguised ex-lover, Frey, accompanied her to Nhem where he seemed to betray her again. He is from the part of the planet Muspell known as Darkland which severed ties with the set of islands known as the Reach a long time before the action of this book since some men disagreed with women’s rights. As the depiction of life on Nhem illustrates, the book is riddled with sexual politics such as these.

Darkland is home to the vitki, people with even more enhanced powers than Vali’s. When Vali subsequently travels there to seek out Frey and gain her revenge she encounters a vitki called Thorn who has plans for her.

Williams has her characters on Muspell descended from islanders – specifically from Orkney, Iceland, Greenland and Eire. As it is set 2000 years after these people left Earth I’d have thought old names might have been forgotten. Yet places are called Stronsay, Tiree and Coll, and a stretch of water is known as the Minch. (This is a curious echo of Mike Cobley’s Humanity’s Fire trilogy where Scots, Russians and Scandinavians settled a planet they named Darien.)

Darkland often veers over from SF into fantasy territory; no more so than in the other strand of the narrative set on the planet Mondhile, where a young man called Ruan is strongly attracted to a mysterious tower embodying a dark energy of some sort and to the strange girl called Gemaley who lives there. The off-worlder who is also entangled with Gemaley is of course Frey. Alerted to Frey’s whereabouts by Thorn, Vali soon arrives on Mondhile, where the bulk of the book is set.

The novel is actually two different stories; a first person narration SF one centred on Muspell, the Reach and Darkland and a third person crypto-fantasy on Mondhile. Williams does attempt to give the dark powers on Mondhile an SF gloss but it is never convincing. So too with the presence of Frey on Mondhile which seems merely to be a device to bring Vali there. The SF-ness of the Muspell sections and the fantasy slant of the Mondhile segments did not sit well, I thought.

The problem may be that the overall story was probably conceived as being longer and had to be split for publication. (SPOILER ALERT – Darkland ends with a cliffhanger.)

The “sequel” – I wait to read it before being certain – is called Bloodmind. The idea of bloodmind is mentioned several times in this volume and is a temporary switching off of humanity in Mondhile’s inhabitants: again given a somewhat unconvincing, not to say sketchy, technological rationale.

I’ll reserve full judgement till I’ve read that book.

Pan, 1999. 421p

Saul Garamond is arrested when his father is found dead having fallen, jumped or been pushed, through a window of their house. Saul is sprung from custody by a mysterious figure who calls himself King Rat and asserts that Saul’s mother was a Rat. King Rat is able to move freely between the London which Saul knows and the unnoticed spaces which constitute a hidden Rat city. Under his tutelage Saul becomes rat-like too but King Rat, of course, is not quite what he seems. In this netherworld Saul also meets the Bird Superior, Loplop, and Anansi, head of the spiders. Meanwhile Saul’s friend Natasha, a creator/DJ of Drum and Bass, is befriended by a mysterious flute player called Pete and Police Inspector Crowley is increasingly puzzled by the spate of bizarre and bloody murders occurring on his patch.

The other city conceit seems to be one of Miéville’s running themes; it also occurs in Un Lun Dun and THE CITY & YTIC EHT though of course this would be its first appearance. (King Rat is the last in my attempt to catch up with Miéville’s oeuvre apart from his latest Kraken.) This one is very London-centric though, which annoyed me strangely.

The language of the novel is simple; even a little sketchy at times. In this it has pre-echoes of Un Lun Dun. Indeed, were it not for the violence and the expletives this could well have been a tale for young adults.

Though the plot strands do cohere and music is integral to its resolution, at times the novel appears diffuse, as if it does not know whether to be a fantasy, a musical odyssey or a police procedural – though it has embedded within it a nice retelling of the Pied Piper of Hamelin story told from the rats’ point of view. Miéville also takes the opportunity to throw in a minor bit of political consciousness raising.

Had I read this on first publication I could certainly have foreseen an Un Lun Dun – though perhaps not a Perdido Street Station.

But… One of the characters seems to be under the impression that layered music never existed before Drum and Bass. Come off it.

Orion, 2007. 391p

Powers is the third in the Annals Of The Western Shore, Le Guin’s latest story cycle for young adults. Gavir is a boy slave in the Household of Arcamand in the city of Etra. He and his sister are Marsh people stolen from their real home when they were very young. Gavir has visions of the future (the ability to remember things before they happen) but has to keep this talent secret as the city people don’t like those who have such powers.

Le Guin’s description of the relationships in the Household is masterful. The imbalance between the children of the house proper and the slaves is particularly well done. However there seems to be a default antiquity to the scenario – and pre-echoes of Le Guin’s Lavinia which I read recently but was published after Powers – which is perhaps a little too pat. (This could be a criticism of the Annals as a whole.) The inevitable tragedy occurs as Gav’s sister is killed and, in a daze after the burial, he wanders off and becomes a runaway. The remainder of the book is more or less a travelogue as Gav falls into one person’s orbit or another.

The various authorities (powers) with whom Gav comes in contact and in whom he trusts till he learns not to – The Father of Arcamand; Cuga, the hermit who first takes him in; Barna, leader of the runaway slave enclave Gav joins for a while; the elders of his Marsh people to whom he eventually returns – all have different flaws, faces to them which we can see but Gav doesn’t, till changed circumstances force his hand.

Gavir’s power is on the face of it a clever method of foreshadowing but is ultimately unsatisfying as it lessens tension. As a result, though others most certainly are, Gav himself never seems to be in jeopardy. Also, his ability as a seer is never really a focal point of the story, which does rather diminish the (ahem) power of the book’s title.

Not as convincing, then, as the previous instalments in the Annals Of The Western Shore, Gifts and Voices, but Powers is still a Le Guin and consequently a cut above the average.

Final aside. The book’s cover shows a figure, presumably Gavir, fording a river carrying a girl. When he finally does this in the story the girl is actually disguised as a boy.

Last week I attended the Edinburgh launch for the new anthology Music For Another World.

Several authors including Writers’ Bloc‘s very own Gavin Inglis read extracts from their stories. All sounded excellent.

Highlight for me was Neil Williamson. This is the first time that I’ve witnessed an author accompany a reading on the piano.

After these extravaganzas we were treated to further musical performances by the Markee de Saw and Bert Finkle. Another first: witnessing a woman playing a saw in the flesh. (Or a man come to that. There were sometimes saw players on the TV when I was young but there have been none for a long time now I think.) The sound is weird and ethereal; a bit like a theremin but slightly less other worldly.

The Markee can sing well too.

Tor, 2009. 373p

The usual caveat applies to this review.

This is an unusual one. It is nominally a fantasy yet about two thirds of the way through we suddenly encounter time travel and temporal paradoxes, which was in retrospect quite elegantly foreshadowed, and it begins to resemble more a work of SF. That was the point that the book, for me, sparked to life. Up to then it had been a (I hesitate to say typical, as Campbell’s skill as a writer elevates it above the norm) fantasy and consequently I found it difficult to engage with. And the solution one of the characters adopts to the deleterious consequences of her previous choices on the timeline she has thereby created is well out of the ordinary, not to say drastic.

Far from it merely happening there is also a rationale – a mechanism, no less – given for the ability to travel in time. The God of Clocks for whom the book is named inhabits a building where clocks abound and rooms with portals to other times open and close on their unwinding.

Certain characters from the two previous Deepgate Codex books reappear – Dill, Rachel Hael, John Anchor and also the angel, Carnival. The vision which illuminated the first, Scar Night, though, of the city Deepgate suspended on huge chains over a chasm, has been missing in the latter books, which suffer as a consequence since the setting lies closer to the default mediaeval of the general run of fantasy. There is also too much murder and mayhem for my tastes but this is evidently what aficionados of the form appreciate.

In God Of Clocks there is a quest, of sorts. So far, so fantasy. Yet at its end the status quo ante is not restored – or only in (small) part. This too is more characteristic of SF than of the standard fantasy novel. Is it possible that Campbell secretly yearns to be a writer of SF? Whatever, he is certainly twisting the tropes of fantasy in new directions.

(The book blurb states he lives in south Lancashire. I think that, just perhaps, might be south Lanarkshire.)