Trains, Swords and Potatoes
Recent reading: Railhead by Philip Reeve. YA stuff, but I'm young at heart, so that doesn't matter. In a setting where artificially intelligent trains travel interstellar distances via a gimmick called a "K-Gate" (apparently a sort of wormhole you can safely install underneath a viaduct, which is a pretty neat trick when you think about it), young sneak-thief Zen Starling is recruited by an enigmatic character named Raven, who wants Zen to steal something from the personal train of the imperial Noon family who govern the whole of the interstellar rail network. Things go wrong; Raven has a personal agenda, and Zen is driven to develop one of his own. Meanwhile, the imperial police are after both of them - in particular, one policeman who has pretty much devoted his career to hunting down and killing Raven; he's killed him hundreds of times....
It's lively enough stuff, though I think there are themes recurring from Reeve's earlier Mortal Engines tetralogy. Anyway, the setting is interesting and fun, there are lots of intriguing gimmicks (the trains, the "Guardian" artificial intelligences who run things behind the scenes, and the Hive Monks, who are colonies of cockroach-like creatures that get together and fail to pass as humans. If you have a thing about bugs, skip the scene where Zen disguises himself as a Hive Monk), the writing is clean and unpretentious... it all zips along at a decent pace, it's entertaining, it's generally fun to read. Good solid YA stuff, really. Wouldn't expect anything less from Philip Reeve, I suppose. It's not world-shakingly profound literature or anything, of course... does it need to be? Personally, I could have spent a bit more time exploring the interesting setting details, and a bit less with young Zen's character development. Maybe I'm not young enough at heart to appreciate a good Bildungsroman these days.
Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Blades is a direct sequel to City of Stairs, and shares several of its characters, including Shara Komayd and the inimitable Sigrud. The focus, this time, though, is on General Turyin Mulaghesh, whom we met in City of Stairs and who takes centre stage in this one. She is, perhaps, not the ideal diplomatic envoy for the Saypuri government to send to the conquered city-state of Voortyashtan, even though she doesn't swear all that much, only shoots people non-lethally the first time, is sober a good deal of the time, and is hardly implicated in historical war crimes at all. Still, she is the sort of person who gets results, so when a Saypuri official goes missing, and a trading company turns up an unusual substance which might be something to do with Voortyashtan's dead patron divinity, Mulaghesh is sent out to stir things up. Which she does. Oh yes indeed.
The setting is familiar from City of Stairs, with Saypur, once conquered and oppressed by the Continental city-states like Voortyashtan, now striving not to be quite as oppressive in return, now that the Saypuris have killed or driven off the Continentals' gods.... What is it with killing gods in fantasy fiction right now? Between this and Max Gladstone's "Craft" series, it's a pretty rough time to be a god at the moment. I would ask Messrs. Bennett and Gladstone what gods have ever done to them, only that'd probably involve more theodicy than I care to go into at this time on a Tuesday evening. Anyway. We get to learn a bit more about relations between Saypur and the Continent, and see some more of the gods in action... given that the now-deceased goddess Voortya was basically a divinity of war and death, it's only to be expected that some of the action is quite spectacularly gory. And there are some moments (most notably the bit with a Divine-powered monster rampaging across the city) where I suspect Bennett of repeating some effects from City of Stairs. But they're effects worth repeating, and Mulaghesh's final resolution of the problem... is both uncomfortable reading, and a very satisfactory conclusion. Good stuff, but beware, the author pulls no punches.
Also finally got round to reading Andy Weir's The Martian, and I must say it lives up to its reputation. Absolutely diamond-hard near-future SF, with hapless astronaut Mark Watney accidentally stranded on Mars and having to scramble and improvise to survive. MacGyver would have been proud of the lad, that's all I can say... and Weir manages a pretty tough balancing act; the mechanics of the situation (mostly, the orbital mechanics) means it takes place on a long timescale, and it would be very easy to get the narrative into a place where the characters are just marking time, waiting for the inevitable. Weir, however, manages to keep the tension going, right up to the final act - and interjects the right amount of humour, too, to leaven the story. This is, without a doubt, a first-class piece of SF writing. (I do wish, though, Watney had found a use for some red-painted cylindrical container. Then it would have been Watney's Red Barrel, you see. All right, all right, I'll get me coat.)
It's lively enough stuff, though I think there are themes recurring from Reeve's earlier Mortal Engines tetralogy. Anyway, the setting is interesting and fun, there are lots of intriguing gimmicks (the trains, the "Guardian" artificial intelligences who run things behind the scenes, and the Hive Monks, who are colonies of cockroach-like creatures that get together and fail to pass as humans. If you have a thing about bugs, skip the scene where Zen disguises himself as a Hive Monk), the writing is clean and unpretentious... it all zips along at a decent pace, it's entertaining, it's generally fun to read. Good solid YA stuff, really. Wouldn't expect anything less from Philip Reeve, I suppose. It's not world-shakingly profound literature or anything, of course... does it need to be? Personally, I could have spent a bit more time exploring the interesting setting details, and a bit less with young Zen's character development. Maybe I'm not young enough at heart to appreciate a good Bildungsroman these days.
Robert Jackson Bennett's City of Blades is a direct sequel to City of Stairs, and shares several of its characters, including Shara Komayd and the inimitable Sigrud. The focus, this time, though, is on General Turyin Mulaghesh, whom we met in City of Stairs and who takes centre stage in this one. She is, perhaps, not the ideal diplomatic envoy for the Saypuri government to send to the conquered city-state of Voortyashtan, even though she doesn't swear all that much, only shoots people non-lethally the first time, is sober a good deal of the time, and is hardly implicated in historical war crimes at all. Still, she is the sort of person who gets results, so when a Saypuri official goes missing, and a trading company turns up an unusual substance which might be something to do with Voortyashtan's dead patron divinity, Mulaghesh is sent out to stir things up. Which she does. Oh yes indeed.
The setting is familiar from City of Stairs, with Saypur, once conquered and oppressed by the Continental city-states like Voortyashtan, now striving not to be quite as oppressive in return, now that the Saypuris have killed or driven off the Continentals' gods.... What is it with killing gods in fantasy fiction right now? Between this and Max Gladstone's "Craft" series, it's a pretty rough time to be a god at the moment. I would ask Messrs. Bennett and Gladstone what gods have ever done to them, only that'd probably involve more theodicy than I care to go into at this time on a Tuesday evening. Anyway. We get to learn a bit more about relations between Saypur and the Continent, and see some more of the gods in action... given that the now-deceased goddess Voortya was basically a divinity of war and death, it's only to be expected that some of the action is quite spectacularly gory. And there are some moments (most notably the bit with a Divine-powered monster rampaging across the city) where I suspect Bennett of repeating some effects from City of Stairs. But they're effects worth repeating, and Mulaghesh's final resolution of the problem... is both uncomfortable reading, and a very satisfactory conclusion. Good stuff, but beware, the author pulls no punches.
Also finally got round to reading Andy Weir's The Martian, and I must say it lives up to its reputation. Absolutely diamond-hard near-future SF, with hapless astronaut Mark Watney accidentally stranded on Mars and having to scramble and improvise to survive. MacGyver would have been proud of the lad, that's all I can say... and Weir manages a pretty tough balancing act; the mechanics of the situation (mostly, the orbital mechanics) means it takes place on a long timescale, and it would be very easy to get the narrative into a place where the characters are just marking time, waiting for the inevitable. Weir, however, manages to keep the tension going, right up to the final act - and interjects the right amount of humour, too, to leaven the story. This is, without a doubt, a first-class piece of SF writing. (I do wish, though, Watney had found a use for some red-painted cylindrical container. Then it would have been Watney's Red Barrel, you see. All right, all right, I'll get me coat.)