Anno Dracula

Anno Dracula begins where Bram Stoker's Dracula didn't end, with Dracula defeating Van Helsing's posse, and proceeding with his plans to take over England. The novel starts several years later - it's 1889, vampires, both rich and poor, are common in London, and society is undergoing a massive upheaval to cope with the changes. Vlad Tepes is now married to Queen Victoria, and as Prince Consort is ruling the land. The plot centers around the hunt for Jack the Ripper, who is killing vampire prostitutes in Whitechapel.

The novel is a lot of fun - Kim Newman pours in historical and literary references by the bucketload - pretty much any historical figure I could think of from the late 19th century was at least mentioned in the books, as well as pretty much every vampire character from the era. It reminded me an awful lot of many of the games run by my good friend Ben, and is filled with similar wit and delight in the characters and settings.

It's well worth a read. It stands up quite well by itself, but it is also the first in a series, which will follow Dracula through the 20th century.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a tough read. It takes away all the action, oddity, and adventure that most post-apocalyptic novels deliver, and leaves in just the bleakness. And yet, it's really about more than that; it's about how, when everything else is gone, what you have left is your love for people, and how that alone is enough to live for.

It's the story of a father and his son, trying to survive in the ashes of our civilization. Something happened, and civilization ended, and most people just died. Most of the survivors have joined murderous gangs or insane cults. The father and his son are just traveling through the remains of our civilization. They are, they remind themselves, "The Good Guys", who "carry the flame". They struggle to find food and shelter, day after day. The son was born after the end of civilization; he has only ever known this world, and has spent his entire life only in the company of his parents. Through this hopeless, dangerous, terrible world, they keep each other going, and each is the reason the other keeps going.

I found this novel hard to put down. I read most of it today, and I don't often read most of a novel in a day. I've got a presentation to prepare for (the first presentation I'll be giving on my PhD topic), and I should have been spending my evening doing that, but instead I just read. It's a novel I've heard about often, and have been warned about the overwhelming bleakness of it, and how depressing it is to read, but that's not what I got from this book. To me, it was more about the bonds of family, and the love of a parent for their children. It's a harrowing, but it reminds you of what is important in life.

Best Served Cold

This is Joe Abercrombie's followup to his First Law trilogy, which I read a little while ago. It's a tale of revenge and redemption, in which a mercenary captain, betrayed by her employer, seeks revenge on the seven men who betrayed her. It is set in Styria, a land distant from the main action of the previous books, a few years after the first series, so there isn't too much direct effect from the events of the first story in this one.

It suffers from a common flaw of followups to popular trilogies, where a suspiciously large number of characters from the previous story happen to end up embroiled in the new plot (I'm looking at you, George Lucas). Apart from that, it's a good read - a story of seven revenge attacks could easily get repetitive and dull, but at no point does the pace of this story flag; a range of minor characters - some well rounded characters, some caricatures - kept things lively, and the main plot is sufficiently epic, twist-filled, and interesting.

The world-building in this novel is much stronger than in the previous trilogy - partly because it had already been partly done in the trilogy, but also because this story isn't spread across quite so many continents, so Abercrombie gets a chance to fill in the details. This means it feels like a story set in a real world, rather than one in which the world is merely just another prop used to move the story forward (I still can't help but compare it to A Game Of Thrones, where every minor village a character wanders through seems full of people with personalities, and each of those people has a personal history, and awareness of how they have been affected by the wider course of history).

It's an improvement over the first trilogy, and I'm getting the impression Joe Abercrombie is going to become a very good writer.

The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood really is smarter than anyone else out there writing novels. I remember feeling like I hadn't quite understood what all of Oryx and Crake was trying to tell me, though I thoroughly enjoyed it; but The Handmaid's Tale was just absolutely superb dystopian fiction. I'd place it up there with the greats - 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World. If you liked any of those, you should read this.

It's the story of a woman who lives through the foundation of the Republic of Gilead, theocratic totalitarian state that replaced the United States. She is (somehow) leaving a memoir of her time, and describing how she lives, and how people are treated in this new regime. It is very reminiscent of 1984, with the complete lockdown and control of society; but in this case it's all based on God's Will and the Bible. It's very much a Christian version of the Taliban. Given the current trends in US politics, and some of the loopy christian movements springing up, this book gives a scary premonition of a possible future. It was published in 1985, but the future it portrays seems even more possible now than then.

Second Foundation (and eBooks, oh my!)

The third part of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy wraps up the events of Foundation and Empire, and then jumps to yet another timeframe to wrap up the series. I had expected some kind of dramatic end to the series, but in a way it kind of fizzled. In Foundation we were introduced to Seldon's Plan, which involved setting up the Foundation, a small group of bright folks that would weather the collapse of the Galactic Empire, and which would inevitably lead to the creation of a Second Galactic Empire within a thousand years. The story jumped across the centuries that followed, and it felt kind of natural to assume it would end with a somewhat triumphant establishment of the Second Galactic Empire. But it was not to be, and I couldn't help but feel a little let down. I assume this is why Asimov jumped back on the horse thirty years later in the 1980s, and wrote Foundation's Edge, a followup to the original trilogy. I'll probably have to read that at some point, to get some kind of closure.

This third part of the series gets a little wooly, examining the mental powers of the Second Foundation folks, and how (or whether) they control events throughout the galaxy by manipulating people with their Enormous Brains. Asimov seems to be positing that with a sophisticated understanding of statistical psychology, one would develop the ability to control the brains of others. I don't think I enjoyed this as much as the previous two for that reason. Otherwise, it was very much in the model of the first two books. Reasonably shallow, relatively interchangeable characters, but a vast scope of space and time, and a strong sense of destiny (Asimov's twist being that it's destiny in the scientific, statistical sense, not a mystical, teleological sense).

Interestingly (for me, at least), halfway through reading Second Foundation I switched over to e-Reading. I grabbed a copy of Second Foundation from the interwebs (I don't really consider this kind of format-shifting to be piracy in any relevant sense), set up Calibre, converted it to an appropriate format, and read the second half on my iPad. It was Erica Sadun's article on TUAW that pushed me over the edge, prompted me to give it another try. I think I'm a convert. I think it'll also mean I get more reading done. My iPad goes most places with me, whereas whichever dead-tree novel I'm reading generally sits at home, on my bedside table. So there's just more opportunities to read a chapter. What this will mean in terms of getting PhD work done will be an interesting question; but I usually only do PhD work in time I specifically set aside of the purpose - I find it hard to get anything productive done study-wise in those little gaps of waiting time, or when surrounded by kids, or when cooking, or the myriad of other things where I find having something to read in amongst frequent distractions would help pass the time pleasantly.

Foundation and Empire

As was to be expected, the plot has thickened in the second book in Asimov's Foundation series. The Foundation is very successful, but an unexpected adversary, The Mule, turns up, and threatens to overthrow the Foundation. Exciting things unfold.

As Krin pointed out in her comment on my post about Foundation, the way technology is handled in the books is interesting (or off-putting, depending on how you take it), from a retro-futuristic perspective. It's all about the "atomics" - all the cool advanced tech developed by the Foundation is atomic powered. Miniaturization is key - it's what makes the Foundation's tech way better than that of its opponents. And computers basically don't exist. It's an interesting window into a time when information was scarce, and even authors like Asimov didn't imagine a future in which technology would bring about an information-abundant world like ours is today. The plot of Foundation and Empire occurs when the Galactic Empire is in the last stages of its collapse, and people just don't know what is happening on the other side of the galaxy. I found it hard to comprehend; that people aren't able to just go and look that stuff up. A novel written today, even if it didn't allow for hyperspace communication, would have the traders (who can cross the galaxy in weeks with a series of hyperspace jumps) carrying CDs full of data about what's going on around the wider galaxy, which would then get bought and cheerfully uploaded to local planetary editions of wikipedia.

But, it was written in 1952, and Foundation is a look at the future as envisioned then. In other aspects, it still holds up, and it's interesting to see echoes of other science fiction in here - certainly, I can see some of its influence in Iain Banks - the space-opera-ness, and the wide whole-of-galaxy unfolding-history feel of the story. There are a surprising number of people and place names I recognise from the Star Wars series (plus the whole "Galactic Empire" thing (oh, and Trantor, the city-planet, basically identical to Coruscant)).

Foundation

Every once in a while I look at my bookshelves, and think "OK, it's time I read ", and with weary heart I pluck it off the shelf and haul it upstairs to start reading. Often, the classics are hard going - written for a different time, written without the mass market in mind, but good for the mind - they're the Brussels sprouts of novels. Such were my feelings when I decided to read Isaac Asimov's Foundation. It's undoubtedly one of the greats, but as a sci-fi novel written in the fifties I was expecting a slow-going, cardboard-charactered read.

Foundation turned out to be a nice surprise. The characters are disposable and cardboard, but the story is rich and deep, and spans a scale of decades, across an entire galaxy. It starts with a scientist who is the greatest Psychohistorian ever, studying psychohistory, the science of predicting the big-picture future (this was written thirty years before chaos theory was invented, so at the time it was written, it was possibly scientifically credible). He realises the galactic empire is crumbling, and starts putting things in place to ensure humanity won't go into a 30,000 year dark age. The Foundation series is the story of what follows, with the first book broken into five sections, each with a mostly different cast of characters, set decades apart.

Each section works well, and it's enjoyable to see the history unfolding. It's also interesting to read in terms of the groundwork it laid for science fiction as a genre. It's certainly worth a read, and I'm following it with the rest of the original Foundation trilogy.