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Jun. 5th, 2011 01:37 amNow that livejournal is completely empty I feel like I should start writing in it more often. I've been resisting the diarying thing lately because I was sick of people turning their lives into stories and selectively editing out truth to make it all fit a narrative. Also, tweeting is much easier and pithier. Worse, if I ever talk about work on a blog I think it'd be time to end it all right there.
Read the latest Miéville - some extremely tops soft SF with all the China hallmarks. It's possibly his best work in many ways and couldn't be a better antidote to Kraken, which... isn't. Also just finished Fatherland, which I rather like. The second time I've read it in fifteen years or so. For some reason Xavier March's observation made in an opiate fug after being brutally tortured by the Gestapo that one of his tormenters hadn't shaved properly was the only thing in the novel to have stuck with me in the intervening fifteen years, I feel it likely that this reading will be more fruitful. In all it reads like a very solid piece of journalist's research that paid off in a believable setting and a good well-characterised thriller. Mostly it feels like a comparatively soft and easy going take on Nineteen Eighty-four, but suffused with the special Nazi horror that gives one the sense of having had a close shave. On some level it does remind one that as accepted a historical fact as the Holocaust is, it once happened for real, happened in secret, and was allowed to happen despite the fact that such a monumental secret could never be kept without the suspicions and inactivity of a populace, and at some point had to be discovered and disclosed. The horror of that, and the impact.
Next on the block is the recently republished Anno Dracula by Kim Newman. Been looking for this one in a half-arsed way for about five years. Any book in which Queen Victoria marries Count Dracula lays a strong foundation on which to build a tale in my mind. Looking forward to it.
Read the latest Miéville - some extremely tops soft SF with all the China hallmarks. It's possibly his best work in many ways and couldn't be a better antidote to Kraken, which... isn't. Also just finished Fatherland, which I rather like. The second time I've read it in fifteen years or so. For some reason Xavier March's observation made in an opiate fug after being brutally tortured by the Gestapo that one of his tormenters hadn't shaved properly was the only thing in the novel to have stuck with me in the intervening fifteen years, I feel it likely that this reading will be more fruitful. In all it reads like a very solid piece of journalist's research that paid off in a believable setting and a good well-characterised thriller. Mostly it feels like a comparatively soft and easy going take on Nineteen Eighty-four, but suffused with the special Nazi horror that gives one the sense of having had a close shave. On some level it does remind one that as accepted a historical fact as the Holocaust is, it once happened for real, happened in secret, and was allowed to happen despite the fact that such a monumental secret could never be kept without the suspicions and inactivity of a populace, and at some point had to be discovered and disclosed. The horror of that, and the impact.
Next on the block is the recently republished Anno Dracula by Kim Newman. Been looking for this one in a half-arsed way for about five years. Any book in which Queen Victoria marries Count Dracula lays a strong foundation on which to build a tale in my mind. Looking forward to it.
