The Remains of the Day

Mr Stevens is a butler, living and working in Darlington Hall, serving an American, Mr Farraday, who has recently bought the property. Before that, he served Lord Darlington for many years. This story is Stevens' reminiscences of his life as a butler, told as he takes a driving tour across the south of England to visit a former work colleague.

Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day is slow, beautiful, and haunting. It is told in the first person by Stevens, and is written as though Stevens is addressing a fellow butler. He ponders the nature of his duties as a butler, his professionalism, and what it is that makes a truly great butler. Stevens is always professional, almost robotic at times, and yet his humanity leaks through the corners of his story, and there is a real sadness to the way his life has unfolded. At the same time, there is much humour in his interactions with others - one thread of the story is his repeated failed attempts at humour, and trying to learn to "banter". It is set in the 1950s, and Stevens is a man struggling against the changing world, a world in which the rigid class hierarchies of pre-war England are falling apart. He felt much more at home serving Lord Darlington before the war, when Lords and servants knew their places. It's a fascinating glimpse into a very different world to our own.

This novel won the 1989 Booker prize, and continues the theme of Booker prize winners being sad stories of people whose lives have gone wrong. Is sadness intrinsically more powerful, more beautiful than happiness? I hope not, and yet I'm still waiting to read a Booker prize winner where people are happy.

Blindsight

Peter Watts' Blindsight was suggested to me by a friend at work, when I was waxing lyrical about Charles Stross's science fiction - he had similar opinions about Watts' work. And I have to agree that Blindsight is an extremely smart novel. In a lot of ways it is more a meditation on the nature of sentience and consciousness than it is a novel. It looks closelt at the latest neuroscience to try to examine what it is to be sentient - why it is we are self-aware, and what that means. It does this by involving the characters in first contact with an alien race - one of the more convincingly alien races I have read about.


It's less convincing as a story than it is as a vehicle for ideas. The characters are unlikeable and emotionally damaged in many ways. I got most of the way through the book before I could tell two of them apart - whenever they were mentioned, I had to stop to try and work out which of the two was being talked about. The descriptions of the various spacecraft were quite confusing as well - the geometry of the main spaceship, the Theseus, was frequently discussed throughout the book, as the characters moved through it, but I still couldn't picture it.

Even so, it's a worthwhile read. I don't think I've been pushed to think about these things quite so hard by any novel before. It's particularly interesting with respect to my studies - these issues are important to understanding the ways that people create knowledge - we have a lot of theories, but we still don't really understand how people learn. To understand how people learn is not only a neuroscientific issue; it is about what makes us who we are, and what the self is.

Redshirts

John Scalzi's Redshirts is a very clever play on the old joke about Star Trek's Redshirts - the security officers who always get killed off when a mission is sent down to a planet from the Enterprise. It's always been another name for "cannon fodder" among nerdfolks that I know. The premise of the novel is that a group of junior staff on the starship Intrepid start to realize that there seems to be an unusual rate of death on away missions, and start to piece together that they are extras in a badly written sci-fi show. It plays out the results of this realization from a number of perspectives, and ends up both clever and touching. It's a nice quick read, and worth picking up.

The Last Ringbearer

The Last Ringbearer is based on the premise that The Lord of the Rings was a history written by the victors, to make them look noble and justified in their actions. It is written as a revisionist history of the events following the War of the Ring.

It's a very different picture. Mordor had been a peaceful civilization, developing technology and on the verge of an industrial revolution. Barad-Dur was a thriving city of poets, writers, and intellectuals. Then the traditionalist forces of the west, spearheaded by Gandalf, pushed Gondor and Mordor into war. It's very well done - the author has an excellent knowledge of Tolkien's world, and the War of the Ring, but paints an entirely new picture.

The main characters are Haladdin, a human Field Medic in the Mordorian army; Tzerlag, an Orcish scout, and Tangorn, a Gondorian noble. They are given a mission to try to stop the Elves from dominating middle-earth, so that humans, orcs, and trolls can live peacefully together and progress towards a technological civilization.

As a novel, it's a bit clunky in places; parts of it are somewhat anachronistic, even given the premise that it a modernistic, revisionist take on the Lord of the Rings. Parts are a bit difficult to follow - when the various secret services are battling it out in Umbar, I found it somewhat difficult to work out who was on which side. But, as a huge Tolkien fan since my early teens, I found it a fascinating take on the story, and I'll find it hard to think about Tolkien's world in the same way again.

The original is in Russian, by Kirill Eskov. It has been translated into English, and is downloadable here: http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/280578.html. It's a fan translation - the author apparently has no intention to publish an official english translation, due to the litigious nature of the Tolkien estate. It's a sad indictment of modern copyright law that a work like this can't be published - LOTR has become a part of our culture's shared imagination, and these laws prevent us building freely on these shared ideas.