Books...

Christopher Columbus: The Dream and the Obsession - Gianni Granzotto (1984, UK 1988, Grafton, ISBN 0 586 20099 1) This biography tells us as much about Columbus' three famous voyages as it does about what his thoughts and motivations might have been, and also about the nature of research itself as Granzotto is never afraid to marshall his facts and delve at length into the relative reliability of the documentary evidence: a process almost as fascinating as Columbus' delusions and greatness. A fine story, analyzed carefully, with a clear, solid translation by Stephen Sartarelli. Uncanny Banquet - (ed.) Ramsey Campbell Uncanny Banquet contains a black jewel of horror, THE HOLE OF THE PIT by Adrian Ross, a full-length novel first published in 1915 and never republished until now. Ross's story has the panache of William Hope Hodgson, the weird imagination of Lovecraft, the characters and setting of Mervyn Peake, the organization and style of Moorcock and the dark shuddering horror of M. R. James. The language is difficult, or delicious, depending on your taste for the outré. The Starry Wisdom - A Tribute to H. P. Lovecraft - (ed.) D. M. Mitchell. (1994, Creation Books, ISBN 1 871592 32 1)   A blend of writers from Burroughs to more traditional entries to the Cthulhu Mythos canon like A Thousand Young by Robert M. Price. Black Static by David Conway is a revelation. Starting boldly with apparent ravings, the story solidifies into a classic Lovecraftian inter-dimensional stand-off. It is hard to imagine a more up-to-date scenario than the virtual reality interface used by the worshippers here. Although the story reads like a fifth-form HPL wannabe effort at times, the bravura opening and Conway's powerful imagination makes this the stand-out story. A Dream of Wessex - Christopher Priest Mind projection experiments result in an alternative sunny, ideal version of England, in a novel worthy of comparison with Alan Garner's classic Red Shift. Rebel Radio - The Story of El Salvador's Radio Venceremos - Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil (1991, UK 1995, Latin American Bureau, ISBN 0 906156 88 2) The guerrillas' and the church's struggle against overwhelming (U.S. financed and trained) oppressors, told with much humour and energy. In the face of genocide and appalling atrocities the rebels manage to keep their humanity (and the radio station) intact. Even popping out to boil water for the coffee is to risk being attacked by helicopter gunships. This is such a marvellous book, I'd like to type it all out here so you could enjoy it too! Many of the scenes will live with me forever. May be still available from The Latin American Bureau. Jonas turned up at my house in Mexico.   "We've got to have a radio station," he said. "We'll bust our balls to get it." Invasion: Earth - Harry Harrison. (1982) (Orbit, 1991, ISBN 0 7221 4532 2) Not to be confused with the 1998 BBC TV production Invasion: Earth, this is pretty good and an easy read. A spaceship crashes into New York. Colonel Robert Hayward of Air Force Intelligence leads his crack team into the ship to find an Oinn chained up, and the Blettr crew all dead except for one that attacks them - and then the Blettr falls onto its gun which explodes... It emerges that the Oinn-Blettr war is expanding into our part of the galaxy. As the US and Russia join forces to aid the Oinn in repelling the forthcoming destruction of Earth by the Blettr, Rob and his new ally -- the ice cool Russian beauty Nadia with a mind like a steel beaver trap -- start to have serious doubts about things... This is hard-edged action, told with a light touch and a sixties flavour. Planet of No Return - Harry Harrison. (1981) (Orbit, 1991) A newly-discovered planet is a graveyard, littered with the gigantic war machines from a forgotten war, their rusting hulks mostly blown apart. But the first two men to go down to investigate never came back... Brion Brandd, a telepath and his partner Dr. Lea Morees try a more scientific approach and find the war is far from over. Harrison is enjoying himself here with a well-paced adventure. Quest of the Three Worlds - Cordwainer Smith. (1966, Victor Gollancz SF, 1987) Smith's fantastic imagination brings us the little girl T'Ruth, grown from a turtle, that the planet Henriada's administrator is powerless to kill although he continually plots her death. Casher O'Neill struggles to understand just how much more she is than she appears to be, as he seeks the power to destroy the dictator that has usurped his own planet Mizzer. As ever Smith weaves a complex fantasy of the weird and the wonderful that somehow all seems real. The Joy Makers - James Gunn (1961) Why be miserable? Dial P-L-E-A-S-U-R for Hedonics, Inc. Unlike most people, John Hunt smells a skin game and refuses to go along with the offer. Just give all your money and possessions to Hedonics, Inc. and you are guaranteed happiness for the rest of your life - who needs money when you're happy and the corporation will take care of you? But Josh doesn't want any of it. After all, unhappiness isn't a crime - yet. Gunn's novel gets very serious as it moves into the future dilemma of a Hedonist who discovers an underground network of non-hedonists, and further in the future there doesn't seem to be many people about. Thoughtful stuff. So Bright the Vision - Clifford D. Simak (1968, Methuen 1985) This collection of four stories is so readable and Simak's characters are so likeable that I've just read half the book again, while writing this review. It must have been a real pleasure to read these stories in the sf magazines of the late 1950s while I was busy being born. Galactic Chest is about a newspaper reporter who notices a lot of serendipity around and puts two and two together; the story of The Golden Bugs develops from a moving refridgerator to a fully-fledged alien invasion of crystalline insects; Leg. Forst. concerns a stamp collector who has problems keeping up with all the new planets issuing stamps, missing tongs, mice, a widow pursuing him, spilt broth and but that would be telling ha ha; So Bright the Vision is about writing machines called yarners and a living blanket. Now I've gone and read the whole book again! The Hollywood Nightmare - (ed.) Peter Haining Haining's anthology, with an introduction by Christopher Lee and an essay by Boris Karloff in which he attempts to explain that he is just a regular chap, has stories by Bradbury, Leiber, Bloch, Matheson and a few authors better known for their sf than their fantasy, like Chad Oliver and William F. Nolan. After reading this book one wonders how a film ever gets made! Some of the stories seem to have a Lovecraftian theme, especially Henry Kuttner's story of an underground film producer who has a rather convincing monster and a penchant for filming sacrifice scenes. Best of the bunch is J. G. Ballard's haunting Vermilion Sands. Out of the Shadows: Women, Resistance and Politics in Latin America - Jo Fisher (1993, Latin American Bureau, ISBN 0 906156 77 7) Women's fight against machismo, or just to get out of the damn house, in 70's and 80's Argentina, Chile, Paraguay and Uraguay. While fighting their husbands, unions, factories and opposition-crushing military dictatorships, the women become organized and discover things like politics and feminism for the first time, once freed from the male heel. A huge amount of research is in evidence here and my only criticism is that the book only covers events up to 1992. The Man Who Had No Idea - Thomas M. Disch. (1982, Bantam, ISBN 0-553-22667-3) The title story is about a man seeking endorsements to support his application for a licence to start a conversation! It is hard to believe that this collection of laconic, humourous stories from the pages of F&SF, SF Monthly, Omni, Rolling Stone, High Times and so on, was written by the author of Camp Concentration, 334, The Genocides and Echo Round His Bones, but it was, and indeed Disch's grasp of human motivation is as strong as ever. You may also find it hard to believe that one story (first published in 1978 and written in 1975 for one of Harlan Ellison's never published anthologies) is about something very like the World Wide Web we know today. Concepts concerns a woman falling in love with another hyperspace user after dealing with religious "spam" and a low-life's onanist avatar. The lovers also help the web bureau after they become the only link between two hyperspace areas. The Affirmation - Christopher Priest (1981, Arena, 0 09 930680 8) With so many readers seeking escapism, it is quite bold to start a novel by describing an ordinary man, but this man soon tries to escape his situation by writing his own novel that parallels people and events in his own life. Priest cleverly manipulates the reader's relationship with his book in which our own world seems to be a fiction in a novel within a novel. Fascinating! Cocaine Nights -J. G. Ballard (1996, Flamingo, ISBN 0 00 655064 9) Charles Prentice arrives in an exclusive British town on the Spanish coast to find out why his brother, owner of the club at the centre of the resort's social life, is in jail following a horrific arson attack on the community's leading family. Ballard has written a detective novel (!) that is underpinned by the decadent splendour of Estrella de Mar, an English enclave with its morality slowly rotting in the sun, informed by his sixties sensibilities and as worthy of redevelopment as any of the concrete and steel landscapes of his earlier books. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (1860, Penguin) A book so wonderful that I didn't want it to end! This intricate melodrama doesn't let up the tension in all its quarter of a million words, and delivers revelation upon revelation with some brilliantly-staged scenes. The characters are superb, from the clever, moral Marian and the angelic Laura to the dastardly Count Fosco and the repellent Sir Percival Glyde. Collins builds up each character with dozens of details until you know them perfectly. From the moment that the principal character, Walter Hartwright, is dumbstruck by the appearance of The Woman just off the Finchley road, I was hooked. Screwrape Lettuce - Jack Trevor Story (1980, Savoy) The remarkable Caroline Latimer "a girl from Ox filled with impersonal pronouns" swears like a trooper and screws around. She keeps coming back to the priapic Ben Dobbin's organ. Dobbin is a policeman attached to Operation Sycamore, trying to solve the problem of the aphrodisiac red lettuce that could bring the country to its knees. Caroline joins the secret sex-police on the river. This novel is detailed, crazy, subversive and extremely English. I loved it, and Caroline. "Did you, John?" - that's her catch-phrase. Previously published by Duckworth as Up River, this Savoy Books edition is profusely illustrated (by Dave Britton?). The Screwrape Lettuce is JTS's original title, and here it is straplined: A wild, sexy romp in which the British police get the horn! The Quorum - Kim Newman (Pocket Books 1994, ISBN 0 671 85242 6) This is like a modern morality tale with the loathsome tabloid magnate, Leech, being assembled from the flotsam of the Thames, starting with a dog turd for a meal and a single one pound sterling. But the media giant is only the starting point for the fable, setting four friends against each other in a Faustian pact, each of the quorum perhaps representing the worst of the last four decades. Hugely entertaining with it's cultural references, and fascinating to see the friends lives unfold, the suffering feeding Leech's strange device.

Space Lords - Cordwainer Smith (SFBC, 1970) Anyone who has scanned the lists of sf awards will remember these titles from the 60s: Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons in which one old woman defends a planet from attack, The Ballad of Lost C'Mell (the girlygirl "she got the which of the what-she-did") or A Planet Named Shayol which is a living hell where long-term prisoners are sent and bits of them keep coming back. All classics, all set in the far future of Smith's Instrumentality when Man has conquered the galaxy in the planoforming ships piloted by the Go-Captains, where Man wields terrible power especially against the underpeople who are almost human, being grown from animals. Smith's inventiveness is staggering and his stories are very real for all their weirdness - his writing has a mythic quality. I'm lucky to have hunted down this book. I can't believe he is out of print: he should be as famous as Lovecraft or Moorcock. Good Hunting! The Devil on May Street - Steve Harris (1997, Vista 1998, ISBN 0 575 60162 0) Steve's sixth (published) novel (not counting The Switch which no publisher will touch) is well up to the standard of his early books. Which is to say it's a gutsy modern horror novel with more invention and pure brio than a hundred episodes of Star Trek. Stevie and Johnny see another boy disappear on a swing, at the top of each arc he fades out and then is gone. They might want to follow but their dog Duke is not so sure, especially when he is attacked by a gobbling. There is a way through to the May Street of the 1960s where their parents lived and dealt in drugs until they came up against a really evil hard case. There was one self-mutilation scene I couldn't read but that maybe just me. Unlike the woman with the pin, I'm only scratching the surface of this complex and intricately-plotted story which has nothing of the gothic about it and more than a little love. Steve even has some fun with film titles in his chapter headings. Now I shall always remember that once a year is Kool Day! The Last Leap and other stories of the Super-Mind - Daniel F. Galouye (1964) If you're as old as I am you may have read Galouye's Dark Universe, a curiously effective novel about a sightless race of people. This collection of stories is in a lighter vein. In The Last Leap teleportation becomes a natural ability for the subjects of a new process, but they all disappear permanently, unable to say where their leap is taking them in case they visualize it. Kangaroo Court reveals how to get away with murder in a society where everyone can read everyone else's mind. Fighting Spirit is a most sobering tale. A man keen to play his part bluffs his way into an elite army corps, not realizing exactly how he will be fighting the Wispies. This really is a tale of the unexpected! Drunkard's Walk - Frederik Pohl (1960) Cornut is a maths teacher, which accounts for Pascal's triangle on page 25. He keeps trying to kill himself and by the end of this amusing short novel we know why. If you liked Asimov's Mysteries you'll love this. Cornut's superior, Master Carl, a man obsessed with the Wolgren anomalies and paranormal research, assures him that telepathy has nothing to do with his attempted suicides and furthermore that there is no such thing as telepathy. Guess what? The title, by the way, refers to the random movement of a molecule colliding with its neighbours. Shadow on the Hearth - Judith Merril (1951, Compact SF 1966) The cover showing the burnt plastic of a child's toy doll sets the mood, as from the beginning the patterns of quotidian family life are shaken up in this well-structured novel. This is one mother's story. Atomic bombs are guided in by transmitters planted on the ground by fifth columnists. She tries to bring her daughters through the crisis while she waits to see whether her husband survived the bomb above Manhatten. Most of the men seem to cope by immersing themselves in their emergency rôles - and most of them are interested in her, potentially as much of a problem as the radiation or the curfew, but on her side is her cleaner, Veda, and the mysterious Dr. Levy. These little atomic bombs were bad enough! Goddess help us now. The Planet Buyer - Cordwainer Smith (1964) This is Smith's first novel. Not quite as good as Space Lords (see above) but few books are, or could be, as good. Rod McBan the 165th, forced to relive his childhood because he cannot "hier" thoughts or "spiek" with his mind, faces a date in the dying rooms after a trial chaired by Lord Redlady, the local commissioner of the Instrumentality. There follows a strange journey from Old Norstrilia, where the luxury goods tax is 20M%, to old Earth itself. Smith's lyrical prose and wit abounds as usual: I should warn you about the mutated sparrow. (The edition that I have is probably a first, from Pyramid Books in October 1964. I believe that until the mid-seventies, US paperbacks and comics were used as ships' ballast. I could certainly buy the books in quantity at Woolworths at 15p each back then. Happy days :-) The Fittest - J. T. McIntosh (1955, UK Corgi 1961) Quite a find, an English disaster novel in the Wells/Wyndham tradition. Experiments on animal intelligence produce the "Paggets": pamice, parats, pacats and padogs. The cunning little devils manage to destroy our fragile civilization almost overnight with their co-ordinated attacks, even though they also fight amongst themselves. Reminiscent of Terry Nation's Survivors but with jarring fifties sexism in that every woman's appearance is minutely detailed, although to give the author his due most of the women turn out to be real characters. The hero is a visiting American, which makes me wonder whether this book was written for the US market or with a film in mind. A good old-fashioned page-turner describing the breakdown of society well, with tense set-pieces. Hell's Cartographers -(ed.) Brian W. Aldiss & Harry Harrison (1975, Orbit 1976) Six of the biggest names in sf: Bester, Knight, Pohl, Silverberg, Harrison and Aldiss, each give an account of their lives and writing careers. Moorcock was too modest to be included. How normal and yet how extraordinary these writers seem. They sensibly skip over the trauma of life like painful divorces and dwell more usefully on lovely people they have known (Damon Knight in particular sums up a person with a telling phrase) and enjoyable places they have lived. Of course the world was a different place when these men first made their mark, "between the Bomb and Apollo", but as a separate section is included in which each of the authors describes how they work, this seems to me to be a nod to the reader to follow their example. I'd quite like to follow Bob Silverberg's example and become a millionaire. The Edge Issue 7 -(ed.) Graham Evans This is uncannily like reading New Worlds nearly thirty years ago, but with a contemporary Edge. Here's a remarkable new Jerry Cornelius story "The Spencer Inheritance" by Michael Moorcock, satirizing post-Diana England. Robert Meadley analyzing David Britton's novels, one of which was banned following the Greater Manchester Police's raids on Savoy Books. An excellent interview with M. John Harrison by David Kendall. Gerald Houghton interviewing James Sallis about his crime novels and making me want to go and read all of them. Mark Chadbourn's love story is neatly done, and there are some superb film, video, book and magazine reviews. Simon Whitechapel takes a holiday from gritty horror and confesses his charity shop addiction. And much more. Hours of intriguing reading from a deceptively slim magazine. Getting Things Done - Edwin C. Bliss (revised 1991, Warner 1997, ISBN 0 7515 0570 6) I was given this book on a Time Management course, and it certainly covers all the main points, listed from A to Z. Hmm, velleity and xenelasia: two things I didn't realize I was guilty of. If you want to find out how to be able to look back on some achievements at the end of each day, then this book is a good start. Although written to help in the business or personal world, the lessons here can be applied to any area of life, maybe even the sexual arena where it pays to be effective rather than efficient, and accomplished rather than merely active! Java for Students - Douglas Bell & Mike Parr (Prentice Hall, 1998.) This is the main reason I've not updated this web page for eight months, that and buying a Mac PowerBook! Which is to say that far from being a mere tutor of commands and syntax, this book takes time to explain the concepts behind every code fragment, meaning that in the end one wants to go out and paint the whole world in Java. I feel like a rest after lugging this book around all that time. With only the tiny caveat that void is not well-explained, I would recommend this as a starter book for anyone who wants an introduction to this new computer language, whether they want to write a few applets for their web-site or go on to write applications as a career. There is no CD but all the programs are available on the net. A second edition is out now. C: Because cowards get cancer too... - John Diamond (Vermilion, 1998) Everyone should read this. John Diamond is someone with whom I've probably chatted to on CIX, I've seen reports of his marriage to the lovely Nigella Lawson and now he has cancer. It's very common to get cancer, but no-one has ever documented his life so wittily, honestly and absorbingly under these circumstances. After reading, i feel I don't need to get cancer, thank you very much, I now know what it's like -- although of course if I do get it my reactions would probably be quite different. If anyone already has cancer they should still read this, and find out what the doctors may not be telling them or what questions they should be asking. There's humour here too, memorably in John's insights into how the alternative quacks get away with it, or even into the smugness of writers who are proud of not knowing how to use a word processor. You can probably tell that I have quite an emotional reaction to "C". It will become a standard work. A paperback edition has just been published in which John adds another chapter, written in April 1998. The Mac Bathroom Reader - Owen W. Linzmayer (Sybex) I think a new edition of this has been published; if you read all the Mac magazines and websites every day and you can't get enough then this is for you. Don't be put off by the gaudy fonts and the "Way Cool" (whatever that means) description on the cover, because there is a lot of obscure stuff here about the early days of Apple Computer which should interest anyone. The endless details about what happened to this or that obscure software company, however, I could have done without. The Underworld - Cordwainer Smith (Panther, 1975) Another novel in Smith's far-future, picking up the story of Rod McBan the 165th from The Planet Buyer (see above). Quite a short book at 140 pages, detailing Rod's involvement with the Underpeople who are strangely more human then real people, or so it seems. My unhappiness at not having a few hundred more pages to read was solved when Orbit published a new collection of his work, probably the first for twenty years in this country, for which I blame Star Trek and Star Wars and other crap for crowding real sf off the shelves. The new book is called The Rediscovery of Man.