January Books 3) 1610
3) 1610: A Sundial in a Grave by Mary Gentle.
Let's be quite clear. Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History is one of the best genre books I have read. When I discovered, shortly before Christmas, that she had a new novel out, I went out and bought 1610: A Sundial in a Grave at huge expense in hardback from the massively over-priced Waterstone's in the middle of Brussels.
Well, I should have trusted John Clute rather than Cheryl Morgan. 1610 is a good book, all right, a fascinating and somewhat kinky look at the year of the title and the possibilities of changing history. But of course any fictional scenario involving deterministic prediction of the future has to actually find a way of averting said deterministic prediction to make the plot interesting; I have never seen that done convincingly and this is no exception. I felt I recognised too many elements from both Ash and the only other Mary Gentle book I've read, The Architecture of Desire (also set in a seventeenth century that never was - cf Pepys) without really much new being added. And basically it is too long. A good book, but you should wait for the paperback.
Let's be quite clear. Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History is one of the best genre books I have read. When I discovered, shortly before Christmas, that she had a new novel out, I went out and bought 1610: A Sundial in a Grave at huge expense in hardback from the massively over-priced Waterstone's in the middle of Brussels.
Well, I should have trusted John Clute rather than Cheryl Morgan. 1610 is a good book, all right, a fascinating and somewhat kinky look at the year of the title and the possibilities of changing history. But of course any fictional scenario involving deterministic prediction of the future has to actually find a way of averting said deterministic prediction to make the plot interesting; I have never seen that done convincingly and this is no exception. I felt I recognised too many elements from both Ash and the only other Mary Gentle book I've read, The Architecture of Desire (also set in a seventeenth century that never was - cf Pepys) without really much new being added. And basically it is too long. A good book, but you should wait for the paperback.