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McAuley, Paul J
Mearns, Dave
Miéville, China
Montford, Andrew
Morgan, Richard
Paul J McAuley
Paul J McAuley's homepage: http://www.omegacom.demon.co.uk
Red Dust
Red Dust
========
Wei Lee is a humble technician and citizen of a partially terraformed and very
Chinese Mars. Charged by the ghost of his great grandfather to solve the mystery
of his parents' disappearance, Lee soon finds himself caught up in a much larger,
scarier and more convoluted adventure.
================================================================================
Written in the early 1990s, just when exciting new concepts such as nanotechnology
were starting to blossom in the public imagination, Red Dust is a novel
just bursting with juicy ideas. There are posthumans, clones, virtual people,
ideas as viral infections - add to these the idea of a partially-terraformed Mars,
colonised by the Chinese (who have become humanity's dominant culture) but
starting to revert to wilderness and succumb to insurrection, and we have a potent
and interesting recipe indeed.
Aside from the bravura display of high-tech cleverness, the story of Red Dust
is basically a quest. Lowly agronomist Wei Lee is caught up in a series of ever
more complex adventures, starting out on a search for his long-vanished parents,
and ending up in a struggle to save Mars; in this, he has a passing resemblance to
another farmboy in a galaxy far, far away.
There are scenes from this book that have lingered in my imagination - Yankee yak
herders plying the frozen plains of Mars, the Army of the People's Mouths
preparing to put down pro-democracy demonstrators in Xin Beijing, ray hunters
skimming across a sea of dust in a passage reminiscent of Bruce Sterling's
Involution Ocean. There are marvels galore on McAuley's version of the Red
Planet.
A scene which impressed me, in particular, was where Lee is fighting with a
cloned mercenary fighter, in a cool, speeded-up combat sequence that could have
come straight out of The Matrix.
However, these flashes of brilliance come at a price. A lot is going on but we
never get to know very much about the wider picture. How did the Chinese become
the dominant colonial culture? What would a Chinese civilisation on Mars be
really like? I would have liked to find more depth here, a little more flesh on
these sparkling bones. The other downside is that Wei Lee is rather too passive
to be a convincing hero - more reactive than proactive, he mostly dances to the
tunes of others, be they ancestors, totipotent viruses or the King of Cats. I
wanted him to be stronger, more stubborn and inner-directed.
However, I found it hard not to like Red Dust. Those of you who, like me,
are beguiled by the future wonders of nanotechnology and posthumanity will surely
like it too, and be pleasantly entertained. Plus there's a bonus, in the form of
a splendid, dynamic cover illustration by the renowned Jim Burns, reason in itself
to have this book in your collection.
© Alex Cull, 5th December 2006
Top
Dave Mearns
Person Centred Counselling in Action (with Brian Thorne)
Person Centred Counselling in Action
====================================
Person Centred Counselling in Action is a detailed and thoughtful
explanation of the person-centred approach to counselling; the authors are Dave
Mearns (Professor of Counselling at Strathclyde University) and Brian Thorne
(Director of Counselling at the University of East Anglia.)
================================================================================
Planet Bookworm review: Being familiar with the nuts and bolts (as it were)
of person-centred counselling, as developed by psychologist Carl Rogers, I half
expected to find a rehash, more or less, of what I already knew. Of course the
authors do cover the essentials of person-centred therapy, namely the core
conditions of empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard. However,
they go well beyond describing the basics, and have succeeded in writing a book
which is both informative and highly inspiring.
One of the ideas explored here is that of the therapist making use of his or her
intuitive capacity as an instrument to gain insight into what the client is
feeling. The authors describe the "edge of awareness", where the therapist is
helping clients put their feelings about their experience (or their "felt sense"
of their experience) into words; these terms come from the work of philosopher
Eugene T Gendlin, whose concepts the authors have found extremely helpful.
I remember reading Gendlin's book Focusing in the late 80s, while I was
living in Japan, and found it fascinating, although I struggled to understand
concepts like "felt sense" at the time. I think I've got to the point now where
I'm ready to re-read Focusing, especially as Mearns and Thorne have shown
how Gendlin's ideas and techniques can be applied to person-centred counselling.
The authors also look at the blocks that can hinder counselling, not least the
therapist's own theories and beliefs. It is difficult to underestimate the
negative effect these can have; this tallies both with my own experience and with
some opinions expressed in books by other counsellors. Phrases like "depressed
people can't think well" or "rich people don't have 'real' problems" illustrate
the point nicely.
An idea that I find exciting and worthwhile in this book is the role of
imagination in therapy. The authors state that "essentially it is the imagination
which needs to be stimulated and enriched if the counsellor's empathic ability is
to develop" and they recommend therapists to read novels and poetry in order to
develop their own imaginative capacity. I find this idea splendid and liberating;
I have always thought that imagination is one of the most powerful but underused
faculties that we possess, and agree whole-heartedly with the authors that it is
central to counselling. What is the ability to stand in another's shoes if it is
not imagination?
To sum up, not only is Person Centred Counselling in Action an excellent,
thoughtfully-written and well-structured introduction to person-centred
counselling, in my view it is also an extremely interesting and useful resource
for those who are already familiar with the basics of this subject.
© Alex Cull, 9th January 2006
Top
China Miéville
Iron Council
King Rat
Looking for Jake: Stories
Perdido Street Station
The Scar
Iron Council
============
Times are changing in New Crobuzon, as an expansion of the rail system brings an
explosive new cycle of economic growth. But then comes a disastrous war, and in
the resulting state of chaos, the people look to a new source of leadership -
the Iron Council.
================================================================================
Just when I started thinking (yet again) that China Miéville's stupendous
imaginative powers must flag at some point, he does it once more - produce
another fantastic novel which is bursting at the seams with sheer inventiveness.
Unlike Miéville, I'm beginning to run out of vocabulary just to say how impressed
I am.
Iron Council is set some time after the events of Perdido Street Station.
There is the same heady mixture of magic (thaumaturgy) and technology, except
that the technology has advanced somewhat (the flintlock has given way to the
pepperpot revolver, indicating to me that New Crobuzon is now roughly at a
mid-nineteenth century level of mechanical know-how.) And there is indeed rather
a nineteenth-century feel to the events in Iron Council - with runaway
expansion and land-grabbing reminiscent of the Wild West coupled with national
piracy on a scale comparable to that of Europe in its most imperialist of phases.
This latest novel is more overtly political than its predecessors, with the
author's left-wing leanings well to the fore. Anyone familiar with late nineteenth
and early twentieth century history will recognise echoes of the Paris Commune,
the Russian Revolution, the Russian and Spanish civil wars and probably scores of
other focal points of past conflict. In keeping with this turbulent legacy,
betrayal and martyrdom are two powerful themes recurring throughout the novel -
and, as I've possibly remarked before, China Miéville and happy endings do not
always go together.
One observation I'd like to make is that although the author has tried to get
away from the sort of reactionary good vs. evil split that he probably dislikes in
The Lord of the Rings, the Collective and the Iron Councillors are generally
treated with a great deal more sympathy than the militia, who at times resemble
orcs in their cruelty and barbarism. This is perhaps a measure of just how
difficult it can be to escape from the rules of traditional fantasy, or indeed
simplistic interpretations of history.
But the main impression that I've taken away from Iron Council is of the
sheer consistent fecundity and exuberance of the author's imagination - every
chapter seems to bring with it a multitude of fresh wonders and horrors. Flesh
elementals, predatory inchmen, tortoises with cities on their backs, golems
of every description, a hundred new kinds of grotesque and heroic Remade and
fReemade - well, I won't even attempt to describe all these properly, you
will have to read the book for yourselves.
My favourite new creatures are the hotchi - hedgehog-men who ride upon huge
fighting roosters, very handy with their bows and arrows and useful in a scrap.
If I was ever fleeing through Rudewood from the New Crobuzon militia, I'd want
a few of these at my back.
© Alex Cull, 16th January 2006
King Rat
========
Saul Garamond's life is turned upside down when he is arrested for the brutal
murder of his own father, but then he has an unexpected visitor, and begins to
discover just who he really is.
================================================================================
Having steamed through, and thoroughly enjoyed, Perdido Street Station and
The Scar, I just thought I'd catch up with China Miéville's very first novel
King Rat. Unlike the other two, it is not set in Bas-Lag but in London,
although it is an edgier, grimier and altogether darker London than the one I'm
familiar with.
Now, having finished it, I can see what the fuss was about; there is a freshness
and energy to Miéville's writing that is addictive, and in the main I thoroughly
enjoyed the book, tearing through it as enthusiastically as a rat-superhero on
speed, you might even say. It has an imaginative slant on the Pied Piper legend,
and there is a sort of anarchic mix and match approach to Miéville's sources,
which I liked - for example, one character deriving from West African folk
stories, another from the paintings of Max Ernst.
Saul's life as a super rat also has its appeal - the passages depicting his
dramatic journeys through the sewers and across the rooftops of London are
exhilarating in the manner of The Matrix or some of the better martial-arts
films. Who would not want to be a dark hero with boosted physical strength and
agility, shinning up walls, making superb, death-defying leaps, crossing whole
city blocks using secret pathways? This is truly the stuff of dreams. I wouldn't
fancy the food, though, as rat cuisine could not be described as particularly
wholesome.
There is also an aspect of the book that deals with music, specifically drum-
and-bass (also known as DnB or jungle) about which I know almost nothing
(except that it is probably extremely loud), so I won't go into that very much.
Incidentally, what's with the nicknames, such as RudeGirl? The rudeness of
youngsters has little shock value left these days, and I would have thought that
monickers such as PoliteGirl or ConsiderateBoy would be far more outrageous
(sorry, just me being a fogey, here. Yes, I know it has something to do with
the music, actually.)
I think that if there is a downside to King Rat it is the characterisation,
which tends to be rather shallow. We get to know very little about anyone -
even Saul, whose backstory is a bit of a blank. We know that before returning
to his father's flat in London he was staying somewhere near the sea, but what
was he doing there? What sort of life did he have? How is it that he embraces the
life of a rat with scarcely a backward glance or much of a struggle against his
disbelief. If I were visited by some sort of rodent-like superhero claiming to be
my long-lost relative, I would need a lot of persuasion, believe me.
That aside, I had great fun reading King Rat, and acknowledge it as yet another
demonstration of China Miéville's unique brand of fantasy. So there we are.
© Alex Cull, 14th October, 2005
Looking for Jake: Stories
=========================
China Miéville's first published collection of short stories includes a novella -
The Tain - and a graphic story illustrated by Liam Sharp. Most are set in
London, but one - Jack - is set in Miéville's fantasy world of Bas-Lag and
chronologically fits in after the events of Perdido Street Station.
================================================================================
I found Looking for Jake: Stories to be rather a mixed bag, ranging from the
superbly imaginative and chilling, to the rather uninteresting. From his novels,
I know China Miéville to be a highly innovative and distinctive writer, so the
uneven quality of these stories was a little disappointing at times.
Mind you, when he's good he's very good indeed. He can turn any mundane object,
be it a mirror, a puddle, a decorative window or even a pattern of cracks in
the wall, into a sinister and mysterious entity. My favourite stories in this
collection include one about sentient streets which are at war with one another,
and a haunted children's playroom in a store which is never named but seems very
similar to Ikea. Oh, and the one about this man who has to pass on strange
messages he receives in grey plastic containers. There's something of Franz
Kafka in Miéville's writing, also Jorge Luis Borges (especially, I thought, in
the one about a single word which has very special and unpleasant properties.)
Some of the stories are not quite as good as the others, however. An End to
Hunger seemed to lack a point, or maybe the point was just too obvious.
There's also a story about Christmas where the author displays a sense of humour
that seems uncharacteristic and heavy-handed, as if he is awkwardly applying it
with a rather large trowel. I was not particularly impressed with the graphic
story either, although I concede that it is in keeping with the rest, in its
tone.
Most of these little tales are set in London, a grimier, edgier, more
Kafkaesque London than the one you and I am familiar with. Grubby streets and
buildings in which lurk nasty secrets waiting to reach out and grab the
unwary passer-by. Whole zones which have somehow become infected or invaded by
spectral, chaotic alien presences. This is the London of King Rat but without
any bewhiskered or arachnid superheroes swinging to the rescue. The sort of
place where anyone with money or sense has already escaped to the suburbs.
One story, however - Jack - is set in New Crobuzon (itself a kind of
mirror-London) and is about the shadowy, anarchic figure of Jack Half-a-Prayer
who also makes an appearance in Perdido Street Station. Reading this
immediately made me very nostalgic about the Bas-Lag novels and motivated me to
get a move on and start reading Iron Council.
I would love to read more short stories by Mr Miéville, and hope that he will
go on to write lots of them set in his fantasy world. I live in London already,
and know all about the grime, the traffic, the grubby streets and so on
(although thankfully I haven't encountered many ghosts, sinister windows or
invaders from my shaving mirror.) What I want to read more about is New
Crobuzon.
© Alex Cull, 15th January, 2006
Perdido Street Station
======================
Maverick scientist Isaac der Grimnebulin has an unusual and difficult commission -
to enable Yagharek, a mutilated garuda or bird-man, to fly again. However,
during the chaotic course of his experiments, Isaac endangers the lives and the
sanity, not only of himself, his lover and his friends, but the entire population
of the vast, ramshackle, sprawling metropolis of New Crobuzon.
================================================================================
If the inhabitants of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Castle woke up one day to find
their home had expanded to become a full-sized city, and that it was populated by
hordes of fantastical creatures plucked straight from their nightmares, the result
might be similar to New Crobuzon and its citizens. There are spiny cactacae,
flying wyrmen and garuda, amphibious vodyanoi, scarab-headed khepri women - and
these are just the everyday folks, not the real monsters. The place they
inhabit could be best described as a bustling, overcrowded city-state, ruled with
a rod of iron by mayor Bentham Rudgutter and his sinister militia, but also
perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos.
China Miéville's powers of invention are stupendous. As I progressed through
Perdido Street Station I was continually half-expecting him to run dry at
some point, but no, this did not happen. New Crobuzon, and the imagined world of
Bas-Lag which encompasses it, are endowed with a seemingly endless supply of
fantastical new races, creeds and monstrosities, and reading the novel is like
exploring some vast and intricately detailed canvas by Hieronymous Bosch.
Perdido Street Station is set in a world where a crude Victorian-age
industrial technology is flourishing, alongside various forms of thaumaturgy
or magic, which would place this book (otherwise difficult to pigeon-hole) in the
category of fantasy steampunk. Railways, printing-presses, flintlocks and
mechanical computers exist, as do various forms of practical sorcery, for
instance the watercraeft of the vodyanoi. I find the steampunk
genre fascinating (I'm also a great fan of the Thief series of computer games,
which feature a similar mix of tech and magic) so in this sense, Perdido Street
Station is a constant delight.
However, I would warn all those who love happy endings that this is no overly
comfortable or rose-tinted fantasy. Bad things happen to the best of characters,
and there is plenty of harshness and uncertainty, which lends the story a
certain edge. This novel may not suit all tastes, and I certainly felt - well,
challenged may be the best word here. Miéville's characters are complex,
flawed and vulnerable; there is absolutely no guarantee that any of them will be
sane and whole by the end of the book. Moreover, few of them could be labelled
entirely good or bad; there is always a sense of moral complexity and depth,
which makes Miéville's creations stand out and distances his books from many
others in the fantasy genre.
As well as the personal stories of Isaac, Lin and the others, there is a
political dimension to the novel, as it is also about the use and abuse of power.
The rule of Bentham Rudgutter appears autocratic verging on tyrannical, to those
of us brought up under more liberal regimes, yet on occasion his harsh measures
seem understandable, necessary even. When does the end ever justify the means?
And at the end of the day, how do you govern a place as huge, diverse and
chaotic as New Crobuzon, without taking steps that appear cruel and arbitrary?
The author provides no easy answers to these questions.
The world of Bas-Lag is so richly described and generously populated that I can
see room for plenty more stories set here, in addition to The Scar and recently
published Iron Council. In the meantime, I will find it very difficult to
forget the events in Perdido Street Station and the city of New Crobuzon,
which has the feel of an actual place. China Miéville's fantasy world, like that
of Mervyn Peake, is special, and I'm sure I'll be back there again before too
long.
© Alex Cull, 2nd September, 2005
The Scar
========
Linguist Bellis Coldwine is aboard the ship Terpsichoria, heading out from New
Crobuzon to a new life in the colony of Nova Esperium. However, the voyage comes
to a dramatic end on the high seas of Bas-Lag, when the ship is boarded and
captured by a band of ruthless pirates, operating out of Armada, a huge and
fantastical floating city. Theft is not the ultimate goal of Armada's rulers,
though - their grand plan goes far, far beyond mere larceny.
================================================================================
Having read and enjoyed Perdido Street Station, I was wondering whether
China Miéville would be able to sustain the level of sheer inventiveness that he
displayed in the earlier book. Silly me, needn't have worried - The Scar is
a terrifically imaginative work of fiction, and I found myself completely caught
up in it. It was simply a pleasure to read.
In The Scar China Miéville ventures beyond the gloriously teeming squalor
of New Crobuzon to explore the wider world of Bas-Lag, in which that city-state
is a major power. Exotic new creatures and monstrosities abound, such as the
crays (crustacean-human hybrids), the sinister aquatic Grindylow, the scab-
mettlers (with their highly unusual blood chemistry) and the avanc, which is like
space in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that it is big - really
big - you just won't believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I
thought the scariest creatures were the anophelii - voracious, blood-sucking
mosquito women who you would really not want to encounter on any camping
trip.
As in Perdido Street Station the characters are not your standard
fantasy types. Bellis Coldwine and her sometime associate Silas Fennec are
secretive loners, cold and emotionally inexpressive. The closest person to a
hero is Tanner Sack, one of the freed Remade prisoners (Remade are convicts who
have been physically altered by amputation and/or by grafting machinery or exotic
body parts onto them, as a form of punishment) who finds himself in his element,
literally, adjusting well to a life on (and under) the ocean waves.
Also familiar to anyone who has read Miéville's previous novel is the steampunk
mixture of technology and magic, his signature blend of thaumaturgy and heavy
quasi-Victorian manufacturing. This is definitely part of the appeal of his books,
for me; his world - for example, where massive drilling rigs extract valuable
mineral rockmilk from the seabed, which is used as fuel to generate
stupendously powerful spells - is an infinitely fascinating and unsettling place.
In fact, there is something for everyone here - outlandish creatures, complex
characters, weird science and monsters of the deep, plus the occasional
gargantuan sea battle. The floating city of Armada is another of Miéville's
inspired creations, both similar and different to its landbound counterpart New
Crobuzon - similar in its grime and chaos, with mismatched elements lashed
together in uneasy partnership, different in size, in its fluid nature and
also in that its leadership is (although no less tyrannical than the New
Crobuzon regime) volatile and ultimately more vulnerable.
If I had to think of anything that I found lacking, the best I could come up
with is the fact that some of the story's threads don't seem to lead anywhere
and are somewhat anticlimactic (for instance, the Uther Doul/Brucolac
relationship.) But in the main, I found The Scar an excellent, stimulating
and worthwhile novel. It has motivated me to read China Miéville's first book
King Rat (review coming soon.) and to look forward to getting hold of his
next one in the Bas-Lag series, Iron Council. What more can I say, other
than: China Miéville rocks, yes he does.
© Alex Cull, 26th September, 2005
Top
Andrew Montford
Bishop Hill blog: http://bishophill.squarespace.com
The Hockey Stick Illusion
The Hockey Stick Illusion
=========================
Published just as the ClimateGate scandal was breaking, The Hockey Stick Illusion
is, to date, the definitive story behind the famous - and highly alarming -
graph that purports to show unprecedented global warming in the 20th century.
================================================================================
Think of the global warming debate, and what image springs most readily to mind?
For some it is the iconic lone polar bear on a dwindling ice floe, or maybe the
puffs of water vapour above a power station cooling tower. But for many others it
has to be the Hockey Stick graph, which made its world debut in a 1998 article in
Nature magazine by a climate scientist called Michael Mann. The graph depicts
global average temperatures (as reconstructed from a number of "proxies" such as
tree-ring data) remaining relatively stable from the year 1000 AD onwards, then
abruptly soaring at the start of the 20th century and threatening to go right off
the scale. An alarming picture it is indeed, and was used to great effect in Al
Gore’s slideshow during his 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth, albeit with
its y-axis slightly confused.
If there was a contest to be the number one emblem of runaway catastrophic man-
made climate change, the Hockey Stick graph would be a major contender.
The Hockey Stick Illusion, by Andrew Montford, is about the story behind the
graph, and about the efforts of one man in particular – semi-retired Canadian
mining consultant Steve McIntyre – to uncover its flaws. Published at the
beginning of 2010, it follows the trail of events which started with the
publication of Mann’s papers MBH98 and MBH99, and with McIntyre’s initial 2003
request for information regarding the original datasets for these studies. As the
chapters unfold, a complex tale of scientific bungling, whitewash and obfuscation
begins to emerge.
Put baldly like that, the book is in danger of sounding just a little dull, but
this is actually not the case at all. It reads, if anything, rather like a good
detective novel – specifically a police procedural, where the protagonist leaves
no stone unturned in his long quest for the truth. Along the way, there’s no
shortage of statistical detail (which is where the devil is, as they say) but
thankfully, for readers who like myself are more comfortable with words than
numbers, the author has managed to explain statistical arcana, such as principal
components analysis and "short centring", in terms that the layman can readily
grasp but without dumbing down the subject matter. Andrew Montford has managed
to tell this complex story with a spareness and a clarity that in other
circumstances would merit a Crystal Mark from the Plain English Campaign.
This is an important book, I believe, and one which will grow in importance. Not
because the Hockey Stick graph is, by itself, crucial to the scientific case for
catastrophic man-made global warming – it isn’t. The Hockey Stick Illusion is
important because it anatomises the modus operandi of the scientists whose work
has been used to sound the alarm on global warming and justify the rushing through
of ill-conceived changes to the way we all live. And where we would have expected
to find scientific rigour and thoroughness, we find (or rather, Steve McIntyre
found) laziness, secrecy and corner-cutting instead. It is rather like taking the
cover off a shiny new stereo to discover a rat’s nest of malfunctioning components
and badly soldered wiring underneath.
To take a single example from the book (one of many) – Mann’s studies made use of
data from various locations, but McIntyre discovered that he had used
precipitation data from Paris (France, not Texas) in gridcells that related to
precipitation in New England, across the Atlantic Ocean, obviously, and thousands
of miles distant. The error was brought to Mann’s attention, but has never been
acknowledged or corrected, and indeed was repeated in a new paper published in
2007. Unlike the matter of the bristlecone pines (which is far more serious and
would take too long to go into here) this may not have actually been crucial to
the study’s conclusions; the point, however, is that it was one of a catalogue of
mistakes that were made by Mann, challenged by McIntyre, then ignored and repeated
by Mann.
If I make errors, in my modest line of work, I’m expected to correct them, learn
from them and not repeat them. If I failed to acknowledge my mistakes, and
persisted in my erroneous ways year upon year, I would be disciplined and would
even face losing my job. And my work is not that important, in the grand scheme
of things. It isn’t cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for
instance, or used by national governments all over the world to formulate their
domestic policies concerning trade, industry and energy use. However, the work
of Dr Mann, and that of his colleagues Phil Jones, Keith Briffa and others, has
been influential in precisely those ways. When it comes to climate science, a
rigorous and painstakingly thorough mode of working would surely be an absolute
requirement, and the irony is that this is something that has consistently been
demonstrated by climate auditor Steve McIntyre, but alas, not always by Michael
Mann and his fellow researchers.
The Hockey Stick Illusion is a book that I would recommend to anyone interested in
the climate debate. Even for those convinced of the case that man-made climate
change is a potential threat to civilisation (and this is a category which, I
believe, includes Steve McIntyre himself) there is enough here, surely, to lead
to some deep misgivings about the way climate science has thus far been conducted.
To quote Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and
if that evidence is revealed to be sketchy, badly-documented and error-ridden,
it does not inspire confidence.
As for Andrew Montford (or Bishop Hill, as he is known to those of us who follow
his blog), I think a companion volume to this excellent book is definitely in
order. To my mind, nothing less will do than an in-depth (and much-needed)
analysis and exposé of the IPCC itself, but I look forward to his next lucidly-
written endeavour anyway, whatever it may happen to be about.
© Alex Cull, 17th June 2010
Top
Richard Morgan
Altered Carbon
Broken Angels
Market Forces
Woken Furies
Altered Carbon
==============
Laurens Bancroft has been brutally murdered. This has naturally made him rather
angry, and also extremely keen to find out who and why. The police have written
it off as suicide and closed the case, but super-rich Bancroft has now hired his
own private investigator to find the truth of the matter. And who better to hire
than an ex-UN Envoy?
================================================================================
If Raymond Chandler had been strapped into a time machine and spun forward a few
decades, something like Altered Carbon might have been the result. It has a
hard-boiled, almost retro film-noir quality that reminded me very much of
Chandler. The 'tec in this case is Takeshi Kovacs, a hardened, street-wise
veteran from a rough colony world. Kovacs is an ex-member of the Envoys, an elite
UN soldier-cum-special agent force. In keeping with the downbeat nature of the
story, he is also in deep disgrace with the authorities, hence his availability
for hire by Bancroft.
In a 1940s style detective story Kovacs would have rented a seedy office smelling
of cigarettes; in this 26th century version he temporarily inhabits a seedy human
body, that smells of cigarettes and is not his own.
Let me explain.
Richard Morgan's vision of the years to come is a bleak one - the Earth is more
or less run by cold-hearted corporations, while a monolithic UN Protectorate
rules the off-world colonies with an iron fist. In this version of our future,
the individual human mind and consciousness in its entirety can be digitised and
stored in a miniature computer drive, a cortical "stack", which is implanted at
the base of the skull and which receives constant updates. When the body dies,
the stack can then be transplanted into a new body, which will then host a
continuation of that person's personality.
Human bodies, or "sleeves", have thus become interchangeable; by switching
stacks, I can be you and you can be me, for example. I can also cross
interstellar space at the speed of light by "needlecast", travelling as data to
be downloaded into a vacant sleeve at the other end (which is how Kovacs gets
to Earth at the start of the novel.) Imprisonment is a simple matter of
isolating the offending stack, consigning the prisoner to a virtual limbo.
Immortality is by no means guaranteed, as "real death" can still occur if the
stack is destroyed (in an explosion or firefight, let's say) and if there are
no back-ups (this provides a grim new meaning to the expression "to blow one's
stack".)
Digitising the human soul is not a new idea. What gives Altered Carbon the
edge is the way Morgan has taken the idea to its logical and cold extreme. On
Morgan's dystopian future Earth, life is cheap and flesh is disposable but
longevity can be bought. At the top of the food chain are the "meths" -
reptilian, long-lived individuals who are wealthy enough to be re-sleeved ad
infinitum and who are the movers, shakers and string-pullers of this world.
This chilly vision of the future is very well-depicted, and the violent twists
and turns of Kovacs' investigation are entertaining to follow. Even for those,
like myself, who seriously doubt that human consciousness can be stored
electronically, Altered Carbon is a good, involving, gritty read. There
are surprising moments of spiky humour reminiscent of Robocop - my
favourite being when Kovacs' fully-automated hotel deploys a gun turret in its
lobby to get rid of some rather unwelcome guests.
Altered Carbon also emphasises the vital importance of backing up data,
which is a very good point indeed. Now where did I put that CD-R?
© Alex Cull, 4th May 2004
Broken Angels
=============
A dirty little secessionist war is sweeping the backwater world of Sanction IV
and in the midst of the action is the elite mercenary force known as Carrera's
Wedge. To become a deserter from the Wedge is not a decision to be taken lightly
- however, with the chance to cash in on a truly cosmic mystery, ex-Envoy
Takeshi Kovacs is willing to take a few risks.
================================================================================
After the excellent Altered Carbon I was expecting something rather less
impressive; however, I was glad to be wrong-footed, not for the first (or last)
time, as Richard Morgan's second book is as good as, if not better, than his
first.
One thing that makes Broken Angels special is that it is no mere re-run
of Altered Carbon - this time, Kovacs is wearing his mercenary hat, and
the scope of the novel has broadened from murder mystery to wide-screen war story
mixed with a little palaeo-xenology (did I just invent that word?)
As before, Morgan brings home the consequences of the technology he describes.
In the 26th century, the individual human psyche, together with all its memories,
can be loaded into a miniature storage device known as a "stack". This makes the
human body (or "sleeve") a mere add-on - if the body is killed, the stack
containing its conscious mind can then be implanted in another one. In this
future war zone, casualties become largely irrelevant, as soldiers can be reused
again and again, until combat stress finally turns them psychotic. The image that
sticks in my mind is the scene where a dumpster spills its contents - heaped
stacks recovered from dead soldiers - which are then raked through and sorted
like pebbles, each one an electronic cell storing a human life.
"Real death" can still occur in Kovacs' bleak universe, and when it does, it can
still shock in its finality. Computer-generated reality is not safe either -
virtual torture is far worse than the real thing, as subjective time can be
stretched out to a pain-filled eternity within the confines of the stack. Back
in the insecure real world, friends are almost non-existent, partnerships are
riddled with paranoia and deceit, sexual relationships are all too brief and
serve mainly to provide a quick, highly-charged respite from the constant
presence of conflict and death.
In the hands of a lesser writer, all this could have left me feeling thoroughly
depressed. In fact, I found it made for compulsive (if not comfortable)
reading. The pace never flags, and as ever I found the interaction between
humans and all that slick future tech constantly fascinating.
The "broken angels" of the title are, in one sense, the Martians whose winged
images have been found in long-abandoned ruins in several star systems. There
is enough mystery surrounding their disappearance and possible demise to fuel at
least another book or two in this sequence, and I for one am looking forward
to reading them.
In another sense, the broken angels are us. In Richard Morgan's novels,
humanity has reached the stars, but brought all its dysfunctional baggage along
for the ride, stuck in a nightmare of conflict and oppression. Plainly we have
come too far too soon, and like Icarus, our trajectory is looking decidedly
doubtful.
© Alex Cull, 10th May 2004
Market Forces
=============
Chris Faulkner is the new boy at the "Conflict Investment" division of Shorn
Associates, bringing with him a certain amount of kudos. But this will not be
enough - it is the year 2049, in a world where to climb up the corporate ladder,
he will need to rely not so much on his business acumen, but his company-issue
handgun and his formidable, souped-up armoured Volvo.
================================================================================
When I first picked up this book, I was reminded instantly of Car Wars,
the venerable Steve Jackson game of duelling cars (ah, that takes me back).
Other, more erudite, reviewers have compared the settings of Market Forces with
those of Mad Max, and indeed the two have a lot in common - fuel shortages, a
general state of post-apocalyptic grunginess, and, of course, drivers of
ridiculously powerful vehicles battling it out on the roads. But there I think
the similarity ends.
The UK (and indeed the world) of Richard Morgan's 2049 is a changed place. Yes,
certain aspects such as corporate greed, violence, urban decay and so forth, are
familiar to us, and in one form or another have been part of our surroundings for
a long time. But the author takes all of these to a chilling new level. To
understand and appreciate this brave new world, do a mind experiment and take a
few of the most rabidly psychotic Thatcherite yuppies from 1986 or thereabouts,
harvest and distil their darkest, most outrageous fantasies, add a twist of lime
and voila.
This dangerous era is one of extremes. The haves are far fewer and are safely
protected by barriers from the have-nots, who languish in their vast sprawling
super-council-estates called the Zones. Corporate warriors are no longer just
so in a figurative sense but are actual fighters, engaging one another in high-
speed gladiatorial clashes along Britain's deserted motorways. The companies
themselves are meddling in the affairs of impoverished nations all over the
globe, not in some shadowy, difficult-to-prove sort of way but in plain view,
brazenly raking in profits from civil wars and revolutions, openly trading in
human misery.
Money makes this violent world go round - and violence, in turn, is the engine
that generates the money.
Market Forces is intensely readable and there are some breathtaking action
set-pieces. It is also very vivid, in the way that an unpleasant nightmare
can be vivid. After finishing the book, I felt relieved when I reflected that I
do not inhabit this thoroughly nasty world, or ever will. In that sense the
novel functions like a cautionary tale, and does its job well.
But I found it difficult to warm to any of the characters. Chris Faulkner,
for all his strengths and weaknesses, his choices and dilemmas, remains a
corporate thug in a thuggish world. And he is the best of the bunch. His
girlfriend, along with the other partners and the entire cast of lower-echelon
people really, is not much more than a cipher (I cannot even recall her name,
or whether she is actually his wife) although she does display some positive
qualities, such as loyalty. There is a fundamental coldness in this book, a
lack of compassion. By comparison, Mad Max, for all his road-warrior machismo,
has a human heart beating under that leather-jacketed facade. There's a
difference.
Apart from this lack of warmth, the other thing I had trouble with was the
fact that no-one ever stops and wonders "How did we get here?" or "What is
this madness?" Like characters in a video game, the people in this distorted
mirror world are contained and defined by the narrow limits of the brutal
imaginary reality they inhabit. No-one (among the main characters, at least)
seems to be able to remember or imagine any other way of being, and this makes
them less interesting.
Well, hopefully Richard Morgan will be returning to form with his next book
Woken Furies - out this year (2005). I'd like to think so, anyway -
welcome back, Takeshi.
© Alex Cull, 8th February, 2005
Woken Furies
============
Takeshi Kovacs is back on his home turf of Harlan's World, a planet under the
authoritarian thumb of a single ruling family and otherwise riddled with
organised crime. His ongoing mission - to rid the world of the religious
hardliners who doomed his wife and daughter many years ago. On the plus side,
an incredible opportunity now presents itself, along with the potential answer
to a longstanding mystery; on the minus side, Takeshi is also facing more than
his share of enemies, including someone who seems strangely familiar.
================================================================================
I found Richard Morgan's first two books - Altered Carbon and Fallen Angels -
excellent, and found his third book Market Forces less than terrific but still
good. My wish was that Woken Furies would mark a return to form - and my wish
came true.
Woken Furies continues the gritty, high-tech future-noir themes of the earlier
books. The future is a scary, bleak place, where entrenched political regimes
keep an iron grip on the reins of power. On Harlan's World teams of mercenary
"DeComs" are employed to hunt down and destroy tribes of rebellious robotic
weapons (or "mimints") on the remote island of New Hokkaido, but otherwise the
First Family are firmly in control of their planetary fiefdom. Even they,
however, have to obey a prohibition against flying machines above a certain size,
as beams of deadly "angelfire" lance down from ancient Martian orbiters to
annihilate transgressors. Kovacs' homeworld is not a warm or forgiving place.
As in Richard Morgan's earlier books, the high-tech gadgetry pervading all human
life is cool; in fact, in Woken Furies it goes beyond mere cool to verge on the
positively icy. My favourite item is the Dracul swoopcopter, an elegantly
Gothic and menacing piece of flying hardware - if I were the dictatorial ruler
of some remote future waterworld, I would definitely amass an eyrie full of these.
And I'd also have a few of those sleek, predatory rayhunter boats. Nice.
Another great thing about this book is that it is not just an action-filled
thriller; it has something serious to say about political movements and their
leaders. What happens to revolutions when their guiding personalities are
killed? How dependent are political ideologies on the all-too-vulnerable humans
who think them up? And what would have happened if, say, Leon Trotsky or Che
Guevara had not met untimely deaths but resurfaced alive, decades later? Lots of
thought-provoking stuff, but nothing that interferes too much with the action,
thankfully.
A couple of minor quibbles. Firstly, the plot takes a while to coalesce, and for
much of the first two-thirds of the book, I was still trying to figure out
exactly what was happening. But it all picks up very nicely in the final third,
I'm happy to say. Secondly, there are a lot of rude words here (more
accurately, there's one rude word that's repeated an awful lot.) Imagine
Quentin Tarantino writing a screenplay for an SF flick (something like Starship
Troopers, let's say) and you get the idea. So if you don't like profanity
levels through the roof, be warned.
Otherwise, Woken Furies is just very (and violently) good, and a fitting
end to the trilogy (if indeed a trilogy this was.) I'll be waiting very
expectantly for Richard Morgan's next book.
© Alex Cull, 12th August, 2005
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