In Christopher Brookmyre’s superlative One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, he invents the concept of BDQ: Bullet Deadliness Quotient. Essentially it is the rule that you can’t go changing the rules halfway. If you want dangerous realism in your action movies, it’s got to stay that way, and not turn into “your John Woo movies: zillions of ( Read more... )

I finished Ken MacLeod’s The Star Fraction. Excellent book. It had some fantastic quotes in it which I now can’t remember. I’ll see if I can find them when I get time to look at the book later.

It’s sort of dystopian, but with a different slant than normal. There is less of the social darwinist ferocity of Neuromancer or Bladerunner, and more of ( Read more... )

After my indecision last week whether to read The Star Fraction or The Children of Men, I went with the latter. h2_the_foodie bought me it for Christmas after we saw the film, which was very good.

The book is quite different in feel. For a start, the ruggedly handsome Theo from the film is a weary fifty-year-old Oxford academic in the book. I thought this ( Read more... )

I finished A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil (Christopher Brookmyre’s latest book) and I must confess to not being impressed at all. In fact, I’d nearly go so far as to say it was his worst.
( Some spoiler action )

I’m reading Anansi Boys, and it’s very good. And naturally, for a book about the progeny of the West African spider-god, all of the main characters are black. The hero, the heroine, the weird aunts from childhood, and so on.

But in my head that’s not how they look. They all look white. I suppose this happens all the time when I read, it’s just ( Read more... )

On Wednesday, as mentioned, I passed my driving theory test. Hah! And then I went to Waterstone’s and bought myself books as reward: one Christopher Brookmyre and two Neil Gaimans (Gaimen?).

• A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil, Brookmyre (latest)
• Anansi Boys, Gaiman (latest)
• Smoke and Mirrors, Gaiman (old; collection of short stories; ( Read more... )

I’ve just finished making my way through a pair of popular science biology books: Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and Steve Jones’ Y: The Descent of Men, both of which were pretty good.
( Read on for thoughts on both books )