Further Random Reading
Some I finished, some I missed out of the last entry.... Two I forgot to mention were Allen Drury's books about Akhenaten, A God Against the Gods and its sequel Return to Thebes. I have an old battered ex-library copy of the first, somewhere, but never got the sequel, so I'm glad they've turned up in shiny new e-book format.
Historical novels, set in the turbulent reign of the Pharaoh Akhenaten and his immediate successors.... Akhenaten, who experimented with monotheism and realistic art at a time when Egypt was a bit dubious about both of them, is one of history's more peculiar characters; the records of the time - the fourteenth century BCE - are more than a little incomplete, and Drury is drawing off only one of many competing theories about the Egyptian royal family and its history. Still, it makes for an entertaining yarn, if nothing else. The story hops from narrator to narrator, each one in first person and present tense, promoting a sense of immediacy and making it quite clear that these are subjective impressions.... it can stay with one narrator for several pages, or only a single line (as with the unfortunate whose last appearance in the book consists only of "....aaaaahhhh".) The writing is lucid enough, and the characters are sharply defined; it may be only Drury's dramatization of one possible view of Egyptian history, but it hangs together well enough.
The actual storyline, involving a long-term power struggle between the priesthood of Ra and the Egyptian royal house, gets suitably complicated, and involves any number of memorable characters. There are assassinations, schemes, long-lost rival claimants to the throne, all sorts of good stuff, really. Akhenaten himself is presented as a sincere visionary, or, at least, as someone who manages to convince himself that he's sincere... the main trouble being that his visions don't work all that well with the practical politics of the time. The family relationships read like I, Claudius on crystal meth; Akhenaten marries his cousin Nefertiti, has several daughters, marries some of them in an effort to father a male heir, and then shacks up with his brother Smenkhkare. (Who is his son Smenkhkare according to other Egyptologists, but never mind.) It's all thoroughly lurid and entertaining, no matter how accurate the Egyptology of it all. I liked these books.
Also finished: Christopher Hodder-Williams's The Main Experiment, as mentioned in my last. Determinedly cerebral present-day SF; heavy on character development, and with a distinctly abstruse central gimmick. Even though the early chapters seemed a bit too heavy on the "we will not tell you anything directly, you will have to work it out for yourself" (the sort of heavily oblique hinting that kept The X-Files going for at least two seasons longer than it should have), by the end of the book everything had come clear and was actually pretty exciting. I liked this one, too.
I'm less enthused about Paul E. Cooley's The Black, which I delved into for a change of pace. There seems to be an entire naff sub-genre of books about people on oil rigs drilling too deep and awakening dreadful sub-aqueous horror. This is one of them. I suppose oil rigs work pretty neatly as settings for a "base under siege" story, as loved by Sixties-era Doctor Who; a restricted environment, but one with enough nooks and crannies for a monster to hide in and pick off the redshirts one by one, while a massive storm cuts everyone off from civilization and help. Anyway... well, like I said, this is one of them. The titular "black" is a shapeless ooze that dissolves and eats people; it's awoken by the drilling and, apparently having an insatiable appetite for cardboard, chows down on the cast until they drop magnesium flares on it and blow it up. Apparently, thirty-odd magnesium flares is enough to kill a monster that's large enough to be mistaken for an oil deposit. Some of the cast survive, though I honestly couldn't tell you which ones. It's not aggressively bad, mind, just very bland and generic. I think this is what you get when you turn your word processor on, set it on autopilot, and walk away. Well, I wanted a change of pace after The Main Experiment - a novel with character development, and one I had to think about - and that's what I got. Fair enough, then.
Historical novels, set in the turbulent reign of the Pharaoh Akhenaten and his immediate successors.... Akhenaten, who experimented with monotheism and realistic art at a time when Egypt was a bit dubious about both of them, is one of history's more peculiar characters; the records of the time - the fourteenth century BCE - are more than a little incomplete, and Drury is drawing off only one of many competing theories about the Egyptian royal family and its history. Still, it makes for an entertaining yarn, if nothing else. The story hops from narrator to narrator, each one in first person and present tense, promoting a sense of immediacy and making it quite clear that these are subjective impressions.... it can stay with one narrator for several pages, or only a single line (as with the unfortunate whose last appearance in the book consists only of "....aaaaahhhh".) The writing is lucid enough, and the characters are sharply defined; it may be only Drury's dramatization of one possible view of Egyptian history, but it hangs together well enough.
The actual storyline, involving a long-term power struggle between the priesthood of Ra and the Egyptian royal house, gets suitably complicated, and involves any number of memorable characters. There are assassinations, schemes, long-lost rival claimants to the throne, all sorts of good stuff, really. Akhenaten himself is presented as a sincere visionary, or, at least, as someone who manages to convince himself that he's sincere... the main trouble being that his visions don't work all that well with the practical politics of the time. The family relationships read like I, Claudius on crystal meth; Akhenaten marries his cousin Nefertiti, has several daughters, marries some of them in an effort to father a male heir, and then shacks up with his brother Smenkhkare. (Who is his son Smenkhkare according to other Egyptologists, but never mind.) It's all thoroughly lurid and entertaining, no matter how accurate the Egyptology of it all. I liked these books.
Also finished: Christopher Hodder-Williams's The Main Experiment, as mentioned in my last. Determinedly cerebral present-day SF; heavy on character development, and with a distinctly abstruse central gimmick. Even though the early chapters seemed a bit too heavy on the "we will not tell you anything directly, you will have to work it out for yourself" (the sort of heavily oblique hinting that kept The X-Files going for at least two seasons longer than it should have), by the end of the book everything had come clear and was actually pretty exciting. I liked this one, too.
I'm less enthused about Paul E. Cooley's The Black, which I delved into for a change of pace. There seems to be an entire naff sub-genre of books about people on oil rigs drilling too deep and awakening dreadful sub-aqueous horror. This is one of them. I suppose oil rigs work pretty neatly as settings for a "base under siege" story, as loved by Sixties-era Doctor Who; a restricted environment, but one with enough nooks and crannies for a monster to hide in and pick off the redshirts one by one, while a massive storm cuts everyone off from civilization and help. Anyway... well, like I said, this is one of them. The titular "black" is a shapeless ooze that dissolves and eats people; it's awoken by the drilling and, apparently having an insatiable appetite for cardboard, chows down on the cast until they drop magnesium flares on it and blow it up. Apparently, thirty-odd magnesium flares is enough to kill a monster that's large enough to be mistaken for an oil deposit. Some of the cast survive, though I honestly couldn't tell you which ones. It's not aggressively bad, mind, just very bland and generic. I think this is what you get when you turn your word processor on, set it on autopilot, and walk away. Well, I wanted a change of pace after The Main Experiment - a novel with character development, and one I had to think about - and that's what I got. Fair enough, then.