The Once and Future King

The Once and Future King is quite an epic book; the tale of the life of Arthur and those around him. But rather than a biographical style tale, it's the tale of Arthur's moral development, and his quest for the idea of a moral form of government.

The quote from the New York Times reviewer on the back cover is very apt - "A glorious dream of the Middle Ages as they never were but as they should have been". Mighty knights and quests and the holy grail and bravery and justice and love fill this bittersweet tragedy. In the beginning Arthur is a child, then a young man the small world of his guardian Sir Ector's castle and estate, and Merlin arrives to be Arthur's tutor. This warm and humourous start to the story becomes tinged with sadness and bitterness as the story progresses, and Arthur discovers his true purpose and tries to bring justice to the violent and thuggish world he was born into.

It's a powerful book, and a telling of the tale of Arthur that changes one's conception of the tale entirely.

There was something about the copy of the book that I read that added to the experience. It's the same edition as the one linked above, but it's very worn and beaten up; it is split in half, with several pages in the middle sitting loose, broken away from the spine. This gave the book a feeling of great antiquity; almost a sense that I was reading an artifact from the time of Arthur himself. To prevent further damage this book needed to be handled with an almost reverent care; this certainly added to the experience. As I move towards e-books and a more digital life, it makes me wonder if I'll be losing more than I thought I would by leaving paper behind. Having said that, while writing this review, I was able to pop open iBooks and download Le Mort d'Arthur by Malory, which is referenced often in The Once And Future King, occasionally quite amusingly.

In any case, this is a book certainly worth reading. If possible read it in larger doses than I did (one chapter per night - there are many chapters), so that you can a deeper sense of what is going on.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

My dear reading public, I'm sure that both of you are becoming rather concerned about the quality of my reading, so I thought I'd raise the tone a little bit by finally getting around to reading a classic that I've meant to read for years, The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde.

It's a story that's part of the fabric of our culture; I can't remember a time when I didn't know the basic premise of this book - that a vain young man has a portrait painted which takes on the consequences of his sin and depravity, so that he remains young and breathtakingly handsome, while the person in the picture ages and becomes hideous, and displays the evidence of all his sins.

Ten years ago Jen and I went to Egypt, and saw the Pyramids, among other things. Everyone knows what the pyramids look like, and probably can't remember the first time they saw them; they've just Always Known. But going there, I was absolutely blown away by their grandeur, by how simply colossal they were. The Picture of Dorian Gray is like that; it's far better than you'd imagine it to be.

For starters, it's frequently hilarious. Wilde is famous for his witty epigrams, but the sheer volume of them in this book is staggering. Several time I had to put the book down and just sit there, laughing. The writing is lyrical and delightful throughout. It shows that for a language slapped together by germanic peasants and invading French thugs, English can be breathtakingly beautiful.

As an aside, I just did a Google search for a page of quoted to link you off to, but the pages out there on the interwebs really don't do justice to the novel. There are some deliciously spiky barbs that are frequently quoted, but it's a book you can flip to any page and be lost in the language.

One thing I found is that I can't read it without hearing it in Stephen Fry's voice. It's not just that he played Wilde in the 1997 movie; Fry really is a modern reincarnation of Wilde. I don't know that it was a bad thing, since Stephen Fry's voice is probably the ideal way to hear Wilde's characters speak. He has in fact put out at least one audiobook of Wilde's short stories; I'm sure there are, or will be, more.

This is a book that is worth reading. Don't be put off by knowing the premise, or even the ending. There's much more to the book than the basic plot points and some witty quotes. Go, get it now. Heck, you can download it for free.

Conan the Mercenary

I promise I didn't read two trashy Conan books in a row. Honestly, I didn't. I've just been in the mode of reading several books in parallel, in different parts of the house, and it so happened that I completed this one before I finished the other one I started before I started this one. Really, I did.

In any case, Conan the Mercenary, by Andrew J Offutt, seems to be from an extended series of knockoff Conan books that may have stemmed from L Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's series - Buccaneer is listed in the "also in this series" list in the front of the book. In any case, if the Conan subgenre is literary junk food, then this one is fried pizza. It's not awful, but it certainly lacks a lot of the subtle power that makes Howard's or Robert Jordan's Conan tales shine. Relative to those, and even to the de Camp/Carter novel, this one is rather lacklustre.

It's actually two linked shorter stories; in the first Conan tries to steal from a sorcerer, and ends up with something of his own stolen; in the second one he comes into the employ of a noble lady in an eastern kingdom, in order to get back what he lost to the sorcerer. He defeats another bad guy who has been aided by a sorcerer.

Sorcerers in Conan stories seem to be always a little dull. They're two-dimensional bad guys with magic and an insatiable lust for power. I've always wanted a little more to them. The warriors are much more interesting - flawed but likable characters with some depth to them. I feel shortchanged after Conan goes up against a sorcerer - whether he wins of loses, it seems that there should have been more. More of what, I don't know. But more.

So this one I'd rate as only for the real Conan fans. Otherwise, skip it. The advantage you have with Conan over something like the Flashman Papers is the near limitless supply of reading material. I was immensely disappointed when I read the last Flashman novel and knew that there would be no more, but at least with Conan, there seems to be a good few shelf-metres of reading material to go through before I run out.

Conan the Buccaneer

To paraphrase Mel Brooks (and many, many others), Conan novels are like pizza. Even when they're bad they're still good.

There are a few other similarities too. They're cheesy and there's a lot of meat. And even though you know they're unhealthy you still enjoy them.

Conan the Buccaneer isn't one of Robert E. Howard's* original Conan works, but rather by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter**. Conan is the captain The Wastrel, plundering the coasts of Argos and other neighbouring kingdoms, and he runs into a spot or two of trouble and winds up tangled in the plot of a devious nobleman and some vile Stygian priests to overthrow the king. Along the way he gets caught up with a hideous god on a mysterious isle, a tribe of amazons capture him, many battles are fought, and monsters and evildoers slain. What more could you ask for?

de Camp and Carter were very deliberately tidying up and finishing off Howard's legacy with this series of novels, turning Howard's loose collection of stories into something like a narrative of the mighty Cimmerian's life. Buccaneer is a rollicking adventure, and does feel like a natural continuation of the originals; but it comes across as somewhat muted. There are the standard Conan fixtures of a buxom, beautiful, headstrong princess who ends up disrobed on a number of occasions; Conan defeats his foes, be they human, beast or supernatural. There are nods in the direction of H P Lovecraft in the way the supernatural, and religions in general, are treated. But it's missing some of the vibrancy that characterized Howard's work.

All the same, it's a great read. It's also quick (150ish pages), in the way fantasy and sci-fi novels could be before the last few decades when a 400 age minimum seems to have become de rigueur. I picked up a few other Conan books at the same time, by other authors, so expect more Conan reviews from me in the coming months.


* Holy crap! Just looked at that Wikipedia article for the first time. Robert E Howard looked like that?!?! I'd always thought of him, from the biographical snippets I've read, as a weedy pale little guy. He's totally gangsta!

** Linwood Vrooman Carter? Lyon Sprague de Camp?!? Where the hell are these people getting their names***? I used to chuckle quietly when reading fantasy novels at the outlandish names, but to these people Ator, Conan, and Thongor must be like John, Paul, and Steven to us normals.

*** Yes, I know what my kids' names are. Silence, you!

Kingdom Come

I found this one a little odd. Kingdom Come, by J. G. Ballard, is on one hand a nicely written novel with interesting characters, but on the other hand a somewhat hamfisted parable about fascism being the natural consequence of excessive consumerism. I've not read any other Ballard, but I've heard a lot good said about him, so it leaves me wondering if this is one of his lesser novels.

It's the story of an advertising exec, Richard Pearson, who heads out to the burbs when his father is shot in a shopping mall. He proceeds to investigate, and is drawn into the weird politics that is evolving in the suburbs surrounding the Metro Centre where is father was shot.

The story is really a vehicle for Ballard's obvious distrust of consumerism and sport, and he seems to believe that they naturally segue into racism and violence. As someone who would be very much considered a product of a consumer society, I find it all a bit hard to swallow. I found Dawn of the Dead made a more pertinent commentary about the failings of consumerism than Kingdom Come.

In any case, it's an interesting tale, and certainly hasn't turned me off this author. Kingdom Come is his last novel (he passed away last year), and I've get his second (from 42 years earlier) sitting on my shelves waiting to be read.

Halting State

(Disclaimer: I finished this a couple of months ago, so its not so fresh in my mind).

Again I delve into the worlds of Charles Stross. I will get through them all eventually, and then only be reading the one or two per year he writes, but until then, expect more Stross fan-blather from me.

Halting State is set in near-future (2017, according to the chapter that is the CIA World Factbook entry for Scotland in that year) Scotland, where everyone has access to virtual world overlays of the real world, and can be actively involved in MMORPGs all the time. Even the police have an virtual world called CopSpace that gives them all kinds of additional information about everything they look at - maps, suspect databases, current activity, etc. All the kinds of things that we'll get once they get VR headset drivers for iPhones and Android phones.

It's an investigation style novel - detective novel, if you will, about a cybercrime that blows out of proportion. Published in 2007, which means he was writing it in 2005 or 2006. Back then it was sci-fi; but now it's just a straightforward What's Happening Soon. If you're reading the right blogs, the reaction to certain news items is "well, Halting State is no longer fiction".

As always, good story, well written. Characters that any nerd can identify with and enjoy. It's nice to read stories from the nerd viewpoint; stories unafraid to talk about TCP routing and MMORPGs and facial recognition software, but that still deliver an exciting story with believable people in them.

All in all, a very cool book. I don't think it was quite as awesome as some of his other books, but still worth reading. It leaves you with a definite sense of how the near future will look, with what feels like a lot more accuracy than many other visions. And the way the world has developed since the book's release has made it look more prescient than it may have looked three or four years ago.

Dr Dan?

Well, there it goes, off into the ether, winging its way across copper and fibre, onto a pile of disks in a darkened shelf somewhere in Ultimo. I've just sent off my CV to see if they're interested in letting me do a PhD. It took me over a week to respond to their email asking for it. Had they thought I'd forgotten or changed my mind?

This whole thing is rather intimidating. My Honours years (now seemingly an aeon ago) weren't exactly the masterpieces they could've been (though I tend to cite various extraneous factors as excuses). With a full-time job and a wife and three small kids, is taking on a PhD a smart idea? Have I got what it takes to do this? It'll take smarts (which I can usually successfully fool people into thinking I have), and hard work (most people aren't aware, but I have been known to do it on rare occasions), and a whole lot of energy (rarely my strong point, despite the medically inadvisable amount of energy drinks I consume).

It's still not final, and I'm still a fair way off being actually enrolled in anything, but each step closer fills my gut with a roiling brew of dread, excitement and worry.