No Middle Name

Last night I helped my lovely wife finish off setting up our new bookshelves. We were running out of space on the old ones, and so decided to cover a wall and a bit of the study with Ikea's finest . Wendy bought them, got them delivered, assembled them. I was used mainly for heavy lifting and for swearing practice (she's getting really good). We now have a lovely expanse of shelving, acres of wide open, bookless, tracts of self-assembled glory. Now, clearly, I have to go shopping for books to fill the space. Book shopping! About the only kind of shopping I'm good at. I've just finished the last of the three books I bought a few weeks ago, so I've got nothing right now. " The Cyberiad ", by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, reminded me of all the asides in Hitch Hikers - mainly the Deep Thought parts. Cyberiad is all about a universe populated mainly by robots, and two in particular: Trurl and Klapacius, constructors of marvellous machines. Their adventures are...

I think I may give up on writing book reviews on here, and just stick them straight onto goodreads instead. I'm reasonably diligent about keeping that up to date with what I'm reading, but I just can't be bothered to write anything here. I suspect that is because I don't think my reviews are particularly useful ("it was good, read it. it was not good, don't read it"). That does mean I'll have to come up with something to put on this blog, otherwise it will fester and rot. In the meantime, here is a a set of one-line reviews for the 8 books I've read in the last 8 weeks or so. The Fantasy Writer's Assistant : Collection of Jeffrey Ford's older stories (up to about 2003), one of my favourite authors, mixture of unsettling, weird stories and uplifting fables. Great stuff, but if you've not read anything by him before, try him out here: Empire of Ice Cream . McSweeney's Issue 18 : short stories for hipsters and poncey fans of "lit...

Review backlog again. " Thirteen " (or "Black Man" outside the US), is another Richard Morgan techno-noir thriller, with all the kick-ups, shagfests and beatings you expect from his previous work. Takeshi Kovacs Carl Marsalis is a chiseled killing machine, a hit with the ladies, and a genetic experiment. Complicated plot involving lots of violence, shagging, more violence ensues. Keeps ensuing. Never seems to stop. Eventually does, pointlessly. If you've read "Altered Carbon", stop there. The rest of his books are pretty much the same. His prose style hasn't improved much, there are still viewpoint changes mid-paragraph which dump you out of the action and make you re-read to work out who's thinking what about whom and whose leg just got splintered by someone's obscure martial art technique. At 600 pages, this book could have done with a hell of a lot of trimming and a lot less plot. " Behemoth ", the last of Peter Watts' Rif...

Review backlog to clear. Let's keep it short. " Clean Code ", by "Uncle" Bob Martin , is a manual for programmers that care about their craft. I went to one of his tutorials at JAOO last year in Sydney , where he successfully explained the Liskov Substitution Principle to us. Lots of good advice in this one, and I'll be recommending it to all my minions. " This Modern Life " is the third in Steph Swainston's series of books that started with "The Year of Our War". As always, interesting, different and exciting fantasy, with a little sneaking in of SF via the backdoor. " Maelstrom ", by Peter Watts, is the second of his three (maybe four) Rifters books. Lenie Clarke rampages across America, spreading a deadly microbe in her wake. Good stuff, with plenty to think about like all good SF. " Mainspring ", by Jay Lake, a master of short fiction. I was hoping for great things from this story, and while the worl...

I have just finished reading " Free Culture " by law professor and Internet hero, Lawrence Lessig. It is, of course, available as a creative commons licenced download from his website. I read it on my iPhone, using Stanza , one of the technologies that didn't exist when he wrote the book but whose existence he was trying to foster. Stanza's great feature is the ability to download copyright-free books to read on your phone. This feature uses the public domain to give access to thousands of books that otherwise would be out of print. It also gives you an easy way to buy books, but I haven't used that because I don't want my books encumbered with nasty DRM. Lessig describes the problems with current copyright law, how by extending copyright terms indefinitely at the request of big corporations we are destroying the public domain, losing the 98% of works that make no money and are out of print so that the 2% left can be milked. All art borrows from the past, b...

" Brasyl ", by Ian McDonald, is the second of my bargain 50% off purchases from Reader's Feast. I wasn't sure about it, having given up on "River of Gods" after a couple of chapters. I'd heard good things though, and it was half price. I'm glad I did. It is three narratives, all taking place in Brasil, but separated by time. There's a modern day tv producer, a wide boy in 2030 wheeling and dealing, and a Jesuit missionary in the 18th century. You know these stories are related, the fun is working out how. While River of Gods annoyed me with far too many characters rolled out at the start, making it hard to remember who was who, Brasyl is a lot more focussed, the characters and settings more distinct. The culture of Brasil is made to sound exciting, different, and dangerous. The heavy use of Portugese words in the text deftly immerses you, although I've read reviews where this turned people off. If you read SF a lot, you're used to imputin...

Oy, have we got a bargain for you: two reviews for the price of one! First up is " The Yiddish Policemen's Union " by Michael Chabon. (My apologies to my large(ly imaginary) Jewish readers for my first line. I've never met anyone that talks like that, but I've seen them on tv and tv would never lie to me) Meyer Landsman is a detective in an alternative future where the Jewish homeland is in Alaska. He's investigating the murder of a heroin-addicted, chess-playing, deadbeat who may have been the Messiah. Or just a very naughty boy. Excellent writing, as always from Mr Chabon, that perfectly immerses you in Sitka, Alaska. A good plot, twisty and turny just like a good detective story should be. Loved it, great book. Next, Bradbury's classic collection of short stories, " The Illustrated Man ". I found this in the 50% off pile at Reader's Feast in Melbourne (thanks Tessa ). I don't think I'd have picked it up if it wasn't a bargain ...

" Fast Ships, Black Sails " be a treasure trove of tales from the high seas. Oh, and the high skies, some ice, and a noggin of vacuum. They's all yarns of a piratical bent, as generous with adventure as the first mate is dispensin' licks o'the cat. Standout examples of swashbucklin' are from Howard Waldrop (pirates of penzance meet captain hook), Garth Nix and Conrad Williams. Fine seamen all, and I'd be proud to sail with 'em.

Is it wise to review a book when half-pissed, on the train home typing on the crappy iPhone virtual keypad? Probably not; every lurch of the train turns my stomach, every acceleration reminds me of the Thai red curry I've just eaten. Anyway, " Blindsight " by Peter Watts, is another discourse on the nature of consciousness, like Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Where it differs is in its conclusion: Anathem takes consciousness as a quantum phenomenon, harnessing the many worlds theory for fun and profit; Blindsight takes consciousness as an epiphenomenon, a side effect. It is all wrapped up in a decent story, a good read with thought-provoking ideas.

An early sixties childhood in Florida. Roadside attractions, racism, a child's relationship with his father. All of these things are in Will Shetterley's " Dogland ". You can read it that way and you'll get an enjoyable memoir where the point of view character, eight-year-old Chris, learns a lot about people. A seasoned SF or fantasy reader can't help but pick up on the strange cast of supporting characters, who could possibly be Satan, Mary, Joseph, Odin, Thor, or other more obscure mythical people. It's never stated, but the clues are there. It adds a clever extra layer to what was already an interesting, moving tale. A mashup of "To Kill A Mockingbird" and Neil Gaiman's "American Gods". Good stuff.

My back is rejoicing that I've finally finished Neal Stephenson's " Anathem ", because I no longer have to lug it to and from work to read on the train. Typical Stephenson: 900 pages of infodump/textbook masquerading as a story. The subject of this work was the quantum theory of consciousness. Previous works have covered the history of economics, cryptography and nanotechnology. But you don't care, because they are awesome to read. The first part of the novel reminded me of " A Canticle for Leibowitz ". Scientist-monks, preserving knowledge while the rest of the world collapses. Anathem is much more than that, though. There's an action story where scientists save the world, embedded in dense discussions of heavyweight science. Which is great for a geek like me, but I think it'd probably scare off casual (=normal people) readers. Narrated by Erasmus, one of the scientist-monks, he begins the story acting as an amanuensis (a bit like a note-keeper)...

Another Tor freebook read, this time on my iPhone using the BookshelfLT app. It is free, reads mobipocket format ebooks, and works quite well. Can't complain. " In The Garden Of Iden ", by Kage Baker, is the first volume in what looks to be an infinite series of novels about The Company - a standard, sf-style, shadowy entity whose own operatives know little about. Except these operatives are immortals, made so by time-travelling scientists, living through the past collecting rarities for sale in the future. Did I mention this is a historical romance set in Elizabethan England? It's a good read, funny, exciting. Not bad for free.

Cal Henderson, chief geek at Flickr, wrote an O'Reilly book about making big websites . Big as in, serving millions of page views a day. That big. The website I work on is not that big, but we get millions a month, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to know how the big boys do it. The first couple of chapters are aimed at the small, one-man-band, startup dev team. They cover source control, development environments, that sort of thing. The last four or five chapters are the meaty parts, covering caching, identifying bottlenecks, layering your application to improve flexibility, monitoring and defining apis. The focus is definitely on open-source tools, which is good, but he does cover some of the more common paid-for alternatives when needed. He also gives you some useful rules for working out what to choose, in terms of hardware and software. There's some good stuff in here, that outweighs the less-relevant (to me) chapters.

Paul Auster's " New York Trilogy " is three literary detective stories. This means that he takes the interesting parts of the detective genre (twisty turny plot, action, crime) and replaces them with navel-gazing, wordplay, and characters that spend the whole wondering about their own motives for doing absolutely fuck all for a few hundred pages. Yawn. " Orphans Of Chaos ", another Tor freebook, written by A. Pervert, starts off pretty well as a Famous Five find out they are Ancient Gods trapped in a boarding school. Things start getting a bit weird when the heroine (whose exact age is unknown but varies between 14 and 20, depending on how pervy the author was feeling at the time) decides she loves being dominated by men, tied up, spanked, etc. But it's all ok, because the plot reveals that she was made this way by one of the naughty mythical supporting characters. Promising plot ruined by dodgy perviness. Of course I read it all.

Five pages into " Waiting for the Barbarians ", by J.M. Coetzee, I realised that the main character was already as fully-formed and real as any other I had read. Five pages, and I knew enough about the man to like him, understand his motives and behaviour, the world he inhabited, and still want to know more. I guess they don't give out the Nobel Prize for Literature for nothing. The novel concerns a rural village magistrate, whose easy life is disturbed by the arrival of soldiers preparing to fight the barbarian hordes that threaten the Empire. The prose is simple, direct. No flashy wordplay or obscure metaphors. It does not get in the way of the story. Number of times the word "quiddity" used: 0. The obvious question in the story is who exactly are the barbarians - the largely unseen nomads who roam the plains and mountains, or the soldiers and villagers who grow increasingly hysterical over the non-existent threat. But there are more subtle themes in here too:...

Book review backlog time again. " A Piano in the Pyrenees ", by Tony Hawks (not the skateboarder) is another in the peculiarly British genre of "Humourous Books In Which The Author Does Stuff For A Bet/Laugh/No Good Reason". Hawks is a past master of the form, his first book being "Round Ireland With A Fridge" in which the author makes a bet about hitchiking around Ireland with a small refigerator. Dave Gorman's books are othr examples of this blossoming area. In "Piano", the author buys a house in France. Amusing things occur, and we learn a bit about life in rural France. A funny read, good for passing the time. (My wife was once sat on the tube in London, reading the aforementioned fridge book, and was asked by the man sat next to her if it was any good. She replied that it was ok, and took no further part in any conversation as is right and proper on the tube. It was only when the man got off that she realised that it had been the author ...

Phil K. Dick's final novel, " Radio Free Albemuth ", is weird. That's like saying it is in English. Redundant information. Every Phil Dick story is weird, from his early short stories to the later novels, getting weirder as the author got older. This one is different, though. There are two main characters: Nicholas Brady, who receives messages from aliens telling him what to do; and Phil, his science fiction writer friend he bounces theories off. Phil is the sane one, Nicholas is batshit crazy. Aliens talk to him through the radio, the soviets send him coded messages in shoe adverts. Or maybe he's not. The aliens also cure his son's birth defect and help him recover from a car accident quickly. Nicholas and Phil could well be the same person, and read this way the novel is a glimpse into the mind of someone with mental illness. He hears voices, creates theories to explain what to him seems frighteningly real. It becomes difficult to separate the real events fr...

Jon Courtenay Grimwood's "Arabesk" trilogy, "Pashazade", "Effendi" and "Felaheen", is a flawed gem. It is brilliant, funny, exciting, an exhilirating combination of white knuckle ride, crime thriller and travel guide. Set in an alternative and future North Africa, it dazzles and beguiles, drawing you into the dusty, hot, world. Like the Islamic notion that perfection only belongs to God, these books are not perfect. It confused me, I was never entirely sure what was going on. This may have been intentional, since Ashraf Bey, the hero, spent almost all of the story convinced he was insane. It was still one hell of a ride, though. Executive summary: arabs, German techno-assassins, female circumcision, arse-kickery. Read it.

Let me recount to you a tale I was told by a Mr. Jones of the Antipodes. I have verified as much of it as I could, corresponding extensively with the eminent Dr Whately of Crouch End, the expert in the field. I digress, my apologies, I will proceed directly with this shocking tale. Mr. Jones claimed to have picked up a collection of absurd tales from his local library, "Selected Stories of H.G. Wells" . This much I can vouch for: the library exists, and does indeed contain a volume under that name. The librarian would not tell me if Mr. Jones had indeed borrowed it, and rightly so. Down that road lies anarchy. Jones told me that the volume consisted of about two dozen short stories. The majority are recounted in a journalistic style: a tale told by an otherwise sensible person, to a writer, who supplies background checks to provide an element of verisimilitude to an otherwise fantastical story. That these stories were a little dry, repetitive, but showing occasional flashes o...

Another freebook, but not from Tor , this time straight from the horse's mouth. Cory Doctorow has a long history of giving away his stuff for free , and has championed the Creative Commons licensing system to help others give stuff away without missing out on the chance to make money. As he has done for most (if not all) of his novels, he allows anyone to download " Little Brother " from his site, and remix it into different formats and media - as long as you're not trying to make any money from it. The idea is that this kind of thing boosts publicity, aids in getting word-of-mouth out, and boosts sales of the dead tree version. It all goes to combat obscurity, an artist's main problem (paraphrasing Tim O'Reilly, I think). The book is typical Doctorow standard - packed with great ideas, a neat plot and well-drawn characters. It details a city's slide into paranoia and fear after a terrorist attack, and the ways a small group of teenagers try to keep hol...