Unlimited Evil

My good (and talented) pal Simon has decided to dip his toe in the virtual book market and released the very funny Evil UnLtd on Kindle via Amazon.,

The first volume of their exploits - Evil UnLtd: The Root Of All Evil - is now available, from the Kindle store on

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evil-UnLtd-Root-All/dp/B00457XLMI/ref=pd_ts_kinc_16?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text

and, for readers in the US

http://www.amazon.com/Evil-UnLtd-Root-All-ebook/dp/B00457XLMI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A7B2F8DUJ88VZ&s=digital-text&qid=1286532276&sr=1-1

Trust me, there's no greater volume of Evil.

And don't worry, if you don't happen to have a Kindle device the Kindle software is available to download FREE for a variety of platforms: PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android and Uncle Tom Cobbly and all.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd?docId=1000425503

Go on -- buy a copy!

Weekending Shenanigans Part 1

Paul was up at the weekend, for our by now traditional (can two years count as a tradition?) Edinburgh Festival drink and books get together.

It's not a complicated tradition or anything - just a chance to sit around, gabbing about books and telly and people we know, fuelled by alcohol and chinese takeaway. The specific plan this time round was to watch telly and get drunk on the Friday night, then go book shopping on Saturday, followed by dinner and more drinks.

As it turned out, Julie, Paul and I managed to get the chinese meal ordered and eaten, contrived to fill up sundry glasses with red wine, cider and vodka (not all at once, you understand) but then ended up gabbing and drinking until about 11 o'clock and so by the time we turned the tv on, we were all a bit half-cut and nodding off.

Which might explain the disparity between...

Friday Night Viewing (planned)

The Love Boat (pilot episode)
My Family and Other Animals (an episode with Brian Blessed as Spiro)
Crossroads (random black and white episode)
Raven (an episode not already on the Network DVD Look Back sampler dvd)

Friday Night Viewing (actual)

Crossroads
The Love Boat (abandoned half way through due to drunken tiredness)

Crossroads in 1966 was a far different beast to that in 1979, we discovered. Like Coronation Street at the same time, it's a more realistic series than soaps nowadays, with nothing very much happening and a lot of the screen time being taken up with characters talking to one another.

There's no sign here of campness or cheapness, no wobbly sets or comedy ethnic characters. In fact it's not even really about the motel at all, merely using that as a base around which the staff live their lives. A pre-accident Sandy gives evidence in court, Miss Diane (looking very young and just plain 'Diane' at this point) worries about something or other to do with tea, and an equally young but still not very attractive Audrey Roberts bats her eyelids unconvincingly at all and sundry (presumably Wendy Richard wasn't available for the role on the day required?). Noelle Gordon is even more brilliant than she is later on (though sadly she doesn't sing) and all that I really missed from the 70s series I watched at tea-time is the dashing figure of David Hunter (actually, where was Jane Rossington, I wonder?)

The other unexpected thing (and again, similar to contemporary Corrie) is how quickly an episode shoots past. We watched it for what felt like five minutes, paused the dvd to talk about Noelle's hair and her resemblance to Thatcher, turned it back on - and it was finished! Presumably part of that is down to the short running time, once adverts have been removed, but even so, for a show full of talking it was no great trial to get through...

To be honest, all I can remember clearly about The Love Boat was the presence of Phil Silvers, some plot bits about the ship's doctor having been a newly wed woman's old friend and a jealous husband threatening to belt him one. And some sort of bedroom swap, but things were going a bit blurry and cross-eyed by that point. I did laugh though, I think so worth re-visiting.

Saturday's goings on, including scary giant bears, posh ladies, ill-informed booksellers and overly screechy teenagers, later...

Strange Girls and Other Stories

I took the train across the Pennines from Manchester to Leeds in the spring, with the hills all verdant and the little train stations we stopped at glistening and bright from spring showers. The sun was shining in that weak, tentative sort of way it has in March and April and every town and village the train passed through looked like it was probably packed with second hand bookshops and winding streets full of junkshops and little cafes.

And yet the best bit of my trip south was none of that, but was when the train slowly chugged its way through the outskirts of northern industrial towns like Bolton and Blackburn, past abandoned factories and tumbling red brick walls, the signage long gone but the names of forgotten places still visible greyly amongst the soot. Obviously working factories are to be preferred to derelict ones, but I love industrial history and abandonment is perversely usually the only way to preserve industrial places as they once were.

That, and writing about them.

Co-incidentally, I picked up a copy of Sallie Day's The Palace of Strange Girls on another trip south, this time in Ilkley in Yorkshire. I bought it in one of those two books for a fiver deals you get in bookshops occasionally, and in another peculiarity showed it to Paul, who I was meeting up with in Ilkley, and he said 'I was on the judging panel who gave that book the Portico Prize you know'. Small world and all that...

The Palace of Strange Girls is set in that unfashionable post-war decade or so which existed before the Beatles and the sexual revolution. It's a particularly British period - or at least it feels that way to me - of austerity and want giving way to affluence and possession. It's an era amrked by masses of working class British teenagers aping their American counterparts for the first time, but in an awkward, not quite right, way that I recognise from my own teenage years in the early 80s but which no longer exists due to the Internet and the swamping of British television by US imports nowadays.

And yet at the same time it's a period of industrial upheaval, of layoffs and factory closures, as traditional working practices lose out to innovations generated by the wartime economy now filtering down to the country at large.

The story is of the Singleton family's trip to Blackpool in 1959: sickly Beth recovering from a heart operation ('A fifty/fifty chance of success' according to the surgeon), big sister Helen hoping to assert herself an an adult and parents Jack and Ruth bickering about everything, but mainly their differing ambitions.

It's a delightful, intricate sort of story, as the family interacts with other Blackpool inhabitants, permanent and transitory, and large and small tragedies loom out of the pages to come like speeding cars in the dark. In a very first novel sort of way, subplot layers upon subplot but unlike many first novels this kitchen sink approach works on every level.

And in the background, the destruction of the Lancashire cotton industry is tied neatly in to the familial strife, as Jack decides whether to take a job as a factory manager or as an area rep for the Union, and Ruth begs him to go with the union so that they can move to a bigger, better house.

It's Jack's story in many ways, in fact, which comes as a surprise in a book which could easily be read as very superior chick-lit. He has the glamorous past, the responsible and successful present and the promising future. His actions and inactions make or break everybody's future: financially, socially, personally, emotionally. His physicality - described at various times as a soldier, a worker, a fist fighter and a passionate lover - is contrasted with his intellectual abilities and more gentle nature: there's a gorgeous passage, for instance, where Jack wanders round the hotel dining room, naming the weaves in every different kind of cloth as Beth points to curtains and tablecloths, clothes and napkins. And in the end, even while the author claims that he is 'not a sentimental man' it's Jack who ensures that all of those who matter to him get what they want, even where it's not entirely what they deserve.

A lovely book all round, really - one character says towards the end of the book that he'll be glad to see the back of the fifties, but I'd have been happy to stay with the Singletons a little longer.





Blackpool in 1959

* Factory image courtesy of Mzacha

Attack of the Killer Cucumbers

The Butcher of Smithfield: Chaloner's Third Exploit in Restoration London (2008)

Susanna Gregory's Matthew Bartholomew books are entertaining if slight medieval murder mysteries set in and around 14th century Cambridge University. More efficient than inspired, they're the kind of books you buy to take on holiday and then leave in the hotel for the next guest.

They pass the time enjoyably enough, but you're unlikely ever to want to re-read them, basically.

What they're definitely not is Patricia Finney style medieval spy novels, Smiley in Elizabethan times, with richly described historical detail, intricate and logically consistent plots and a cast of finely sketched characters moving around a wholly believable world.

Which is why I should have suspected Gregory's second series of historical detective novels might be a bridge too far for the author - and for the reader. The Thomas Challoner books are set immediately post the restoration of Charles II, with the eponymous hero a spy for the Earl of Clarendon - a position he formally held under Cromwell's government. It's a promising set up and an interesting and relatively unexplored period, but where in the hands of a Finney or Martin Steven I'd expect something deep and layered, here the prose is at best workmanlike and - more importantly - the central puzzle has so obvious a solution that the failure of Challoner to spot it for several hundred pages serves only to make him look an idiot.

An incredibly straight-forward and obvious anagram turned ludicrous co-incidence, a scattering of clues so completely telegraphed that they may as well have been written in a different font to the rest of the text and a tendency to change the intelligence of each character from page to page in order to shove the story onwards, made this a real struggle to read.

Add in a habit (admittedly slightly less pronounced than in the Bartholomew novels) of devoting paragraph after paragraph to pointless and unconnected historical data which serves merely to highlight that the author has done some background reading, and this is a book - and I suspect series - to avoid like the mysterious and poisonous cucumbers which kick off the mystery (that's not as interesting as it sounds, incidentally).

Competition Time

Paul Magrs, mine host for the Novelcon later this month in Manchester, has book four in his excellent Brenda and Effie series out next month, and he's giving five copies away for free on his website.

To grab a freebie copy of Hell's Belles, go to http://www.paulmagrs.com/competition.php and say why you'd like to go to Whitby and meet the ladies...

NovelCon in Manchester

A limited number of tickets remain for NovelCon, the upcoming Doctor Who event dedicated to the long history of Target books, Virgin New Adventures and BBC books to be held on Sunday October 11th at the Lass O'Gowrie pub in Manchester.

Appearing on the bill will be...

Paul Magrs, Mark Morris, Mark Michalowski, Steve Lyons, Paul Dale Smith, Andrew Cartmel, David McIntee, Daniel Blythe, Justin Richards, Simon Guerrier, Martin Day, Trevor Baxendale, Paul Cornell and Gary Russell.

Various panels will take place throughout the day, with conversation covering the various forms of Doctor Who novel from TV adaptations to readings and some fun stuff thrown in.

If you're a lover of Doctor Who literature, then you cannot miss NovelCon - it takes place at the superb Lass O’Gowrie pub in Manchester on Sunday, October 11th.

Full address is:

The Lass O’Gowrie
36 Charles St
Manchester M1 7DB

T 0161 273 6932
E info@thelass.co.uk

For more details of the pub, visit www.thelass.co.uk - note that at this late stage there is no guarantee tickets will be available on the door.

This is a murder in a 19th century public school, so the leaves must be falling

I went to grab a new book to read the other day and found myself shoving tie-in paperbacks and gritty Harlem detective novels back in the bookcase, prefering instead to immerse myself in a hot bath ato read The Sudbury School Murders by Ashley Gardner.

It must be autumn.

Having spent the summer reading bright, shallow Star Trek: Enterprise novels and brittle autobiographies of Carry On people, I can tell it's autumn now because I find myself buying and reading mainly historical crime books.

I just finished The Galleon's Grave by Martin Stephen and before that James Anderson and now I find myself eyeing up The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale which I can see from my seat, balanced precariously on top of a copy of James White's The Watch Below, which I raked out of a box in the shed the other week having mentioned it online somewhere. It's something to do with the warmth this kind of book engenders: not quite the cosy England of Rosemary and Thyme and the like, but with a certain taste in their settings of mulled wine and the feel of brown crackling leaves underfoot, with hardy protagonists defending the reputations of near fallen young women and solving baffling crimes in the orange light of lamps and lanterns.

The Sudbury School Murders could serve as a template for these sort of books - rarely empoying a flashy turn of phrase, Gardner writes solidly and well, and creates a world where nothing is too awful. She fills that world with misty canals and public schools, retired army captains on half pay and notorious dandies with more money than sense, crisp nights of adventuring and warm pints in village pubs.

There's something terribly appealing and Octoberish in it all...

Classic SF Books Memery

I picked up a copy of John Clute's excellent Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in a chairty shop in Poole last week and, flicking though, came across a section which lists the essential and classic sf texts which you really should have read.

And I was a bit surprised to see how few of them I'd actually read, given that most people I know would say I was a sf geek; and also a bit surprised at the amount of Robert Heinlein in the list, frankly.

So in a fit of minor memery, here's the list:

[Books I've read in bold, books I own but have never read in italics and the rest waiting to be picked up.]

Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
After London - Richard Jefferies
From the Earth to the Moon - Jules Verne
A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur - Mark Twain
The Time Machine - HG Wells
Two Planets - Kurd Lasswitz
War of the Worlds - HG Wells
A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs
RUR - Karel Capek
Ralph 124C 41+ - Hugo Gernsback
We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Dawn of Flame - Stanley Weinbaum
Swastika Night - Murray Constantine
Out of the Silent Planet - CS Lewis
Star Maker - Olaf Stapledon
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Slan - AE Van Vogt
Skylark of Space - EE Doc Smith
Consider Her Ways - Frederick Grove
Dark Carnival - Ray Bradbury
Beyond This Horizon - Robert Heinlein
Sixth Column - Robert Heinlein
The World of A - AE Van Vogt
1984 - George Orwell
Earth Abides - George R Stewart
I, Robot - Isaac Asimov
Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
City - Clifford D Simak
The Demolished Man - Alfred Bester
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Childhood's End - Arthur C Clarke
The Space Merchants - Pohl and Kornbluth
More than Human - Theodore Sturgeon
Brain Wave - Poul Anderson
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Double Star - Robert Heinlein
Mission of Gravity - Hal Clement
Tiger! Tiger! - Alfred Bester
The Green Odyssey - Philip Jose Farmer
Andromeda - Ivan Yefremov
A Case of Conscience - James Blish
Starship Troopers - Robert Heinlein
The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
A Canticle for Leibowitz - Walter M Miller
Solaris - Stanislaw Lem
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Martian Time-Slip - Philip K Dick
The Burning World - J G Ballard
The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch - Philip K Dick
Dune - Frank Herbert
The Einstein Intersection - Samuel Delany
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
This Immortal - Roger Zelazny
Lord of Light - Roger Zelazny
Stand of Zanzibar - John Brunner
Rite of Passage - Alexei Panshin
Camp Concentration - Thomas Disch
Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K Le Guin
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Ringworld - Larry Niven
A Time of Changes - Robert Silverberg
A Maze of Death - Philip K Dick
To Your Scattered Bodies Go - Philip Jose Farmer
The Gods Themselves - Isaac Asimov
334 - Thomas Disch
Dying Inside - Robert Silverberg
Rendevous with Rama - Arthur C Clarke
The Embedding - Ian Watson
The Dispossessed - Ursula K Le Guin
The Mote in God's Eye - Niven and Pournelle
The Female Man - Joanna Russ
The Forever War - Joe Haldeman
The Condition of Muzak - Michael Moorcock
Man Plus - Frederick Pohl
The Fountains of Paradise - Arthur C Clarke
Gateway - Frederick Pohl
Engine Summer - John Crowley
Timescape - Gregory Benford
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
The Snow Queen - Joan D Vinge
Lanark - Alisdair Gray
Foundation's Edge -Isaac Asimov
Downbelow Station - CJ Cherryh
The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe
The Helliconia Trilogy - Brian Aldiss
Blood Music - Greg Bear
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Through Darkest America - Neal Barrett Jr
Cyteen - CJ Cherryh
Islands in the Net - Bruce Sterling
Hyperion - Dan Simmons
The Uplift War - David Brin
Queen of Angels - Greg Bear
The Difference Engine - Bruce Sterling & William Gibson
Take Back Plenty - Colin Greenland
Sarah Canary - Karen Joy Fowler
Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick
Steel Beach - John Varley
Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robonson
White Queen - Gwyneth Jones
A Fire Upon the Deep - Vernor Vinge
Doomsday Book - Connie Willis
Coelestis - Paul Park
Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
Beggars in Spain - Nancy Kress
The Broken God - David Zindell
Somewhere East of Life - Brian Aldiss
Brittle Innings - Michael Bishop
The Ultimate Egoist - Theodore Sturgeon
Feersum Endjinn - Iain M Banks

I wonder if the gap after Neuromancer co-incides with my leaving university or my getting back into Doctor Who?

Go on, have a go...