The Sound of the Mountain

Yasunari Kawabata, 1954 [Edward G. Seidensticker, 1970]

(January 2015)

“Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.”

-Joe Haldeman

The Centauri Device

M. John Harrison, 1975

(January 2015)

  

Good lord but this but this guy can write. Maybe it’s just because I’m coming off a couple of novels whose prose could be charitably described as ‘utilitarian’, but this was an absolute pleasure. Such a relief to read someone who views language as a thing to bring pleasure instead of a bluntly functional tool with which to bludgeon concepts into the head of the reader.

Fables

Volumes 1-15

Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, et al, 2002-2011

(January 2015)

I recently came into a couple of hundredweight of comics.

Oh Christ. Not like that.

A Killing in the Sun

Dilman Dila, 2014
(December 2014)

Reviewed over at Strange Horizons, he said all nonchalant like.

The Cage of Zeus

Sayuri Ueda, 2004 [Takami Nieda, 2011]

(January 2015)

  

Before we begin, I’m going to refer you back to a previous post, specifically the opening paragraph, which I think must now stand as my standard disclaimer for Japanese SF. All clear? Good. So you’ll understand why I wasn’t expecting great things from this in terms of craft, but even so the first few pages of The Cage of Zeus must count as one of the most inelegant, leaden, and bluntly cack-handed opening scenes I’ve ever read in a professionally published novel.

All Men Must Die

With the turning of the year, as with the turning of the tide, one’s thoughts are inevitably drawn towards the cyclical nature of life. This arbitrarily designated point on our terrestrial orb’s procession around the solar sphere fittingly provokes consideration of where one has come from and where one is heading; while we may appear as if we are endlessly retreading the same repeating path around our own personal orreries there are nonetheless perturbations; the precession of our equinoxes are far from regular as we pirouette about whatever attractor is placed at the centre of our worldly existence. This time, then, as we literally turn the page on the ledger of our years, allows us a pause, a moment, in which to take stock to consider, to reconsider, what we have come to understand; to wonder what it is we have learned and what it may befit us to unlearn.

  

Cat Country

Lao She, 1932 [William A. Lyell, 1970]

(January 2015)

One of the main strengths of science-fiction as a genre, one of its main attractions for writers and reader alike, is how use of the speculative allows for a more honest examination of the real. The observer paradox is an ever-present concern in the social sciences, exacerbated by the fact that it is an essentially reciprocal process: the act of observing changes that which is observed, but as a component member of the observed the observer is themselves also changed. The trappings of SF allow for a certain distance, a cleaving of subject and object.