All Out Cover Art War!

Because every so often, a book will show up that I already have and I like to compare the covers. So, not really a 'war' at all then, I know, but sometimes you just have to go with the title in your head :o)

I'm not one for lugging hardbacks around which will explain why I'm still to crack open the copy of 'The Nomad of the Time Streams' that has been sat in a dark corner of my bookshelves for a number of years now. Hopefully, I'll have a little more luck with the re-issued Gollancz paperback that came through the door the other day (and has some of the original illustrations inside, I like that in a new book). We'll see how that goes but in the meantime, have a look at those covers...

'Sadly ignored by Graeme' edition.

'Fresh out of the box and brand new' edition.

The first thing that struck me was the ever so slight change to the title. In this brave new world of re-issued Moorcock books, Oswald Bastable is now merely a nomad of 'Time', not the 'Time Streams'. It seems like an odd thing to focus on but I would have kept the original title; that's what Moorcock's Multiverse is all about after all and it feels like the scope has been narrowed down just a little bit as a result.

That to one side though, I really can't choose between the two covers (hoping that you can). The new edition is a little more understated but captures the Imperial theme of the book just as effectively as the original. I guess the only small issue that I have is that the new cover is a little too obviously for people who don't want to be seen reading an SF novel in public. That's entirely up to them, I like to show off what I'm reading though (apart from 'Monster Massacre' but there was a damn good reason for that!) 

So, what do you guys reckon? Both covers do their job well, which one would you prefer on your bookshelf? Have some blurb as well while you're here...

Captain Oswald Bastable, an Edwardian soldier, is catapulted into the far-flung future. 1973, to be precise - but a 1973 that is very different to the one we know. The First World War never happened, and the world seems to be at peace. It is a peace that the honorable Bastable cannot allow to continue. But can one man defeat an Empire - and what will be the consequences if he does?

‘The City’ – Stella Gemmell (Corgi)

Reading fiction should be fun, whatever the reason you’re doing it. If you’re not having fun then either you or the writer has gone seriously wrong somewhere down the line. There, I said it.

What reading fiction shouldn’t be like is having a tooth pulled out; a necessary evil that you have to endure for the promise of a positive outcome. You can tell that I’ve had a few teeth out in my time can’t you…? But yeah, reading any book should never be like having a tooth extracted, no matter how good it feels to finally reach the end of the process. You have probably guessed by now that my experience of ‘The City’ wasn’t an entirely positive one. Cast your eye over the blurb for a moment and then we’ll get into that experience a little more…

The City is ancient and vast and has been waging almost constant war for centuries. At its heart resides the emperor. Few have ever seen him. Those who have remember a man in his prime - and yet he should be very old. Some speculate that he is no longer human, others wonder if indeed he ever truly was. And a few have come to a desperate conclusion: that the only way to halt the emperor's unslakeable thirst for war is to end his unnaturally long life.
From the crumbling catacombs beneath the City where the poor struggle to stay alive to the blood-soaked fields of battle where so few heroes survive, these rebels emerge. Their hopes rest on one man. A man who was once the emperor's foremost general - a revered soldier who could lead an uprising and liberate a city, a man who was betrayed, imprisoned, tortured and is now believed to be dead...

On the face of it, ‘The City’ looks like it has everything it needs to be an engrossing fantasy novel. It’s clear that this is the target that it sets itself with a tale of intrigue and revenge that hovers around the edges of a wider war. Plenty of scope then for heroism and action, all set against the looming backdrop of a vast and ancient city. It all looks good and Gemmell clearly shows that she is control of her surroundings here, taking the reader through labyrinthine alleyways and sewers that almost literally ooze with atmosphere and intent. I’ve always been a sucker for a good fantasy cityscape and ‘The City’ certainly provides that with a backdrop that you can get lost in. That’s not all though, Gemmell populates the city with a cast of strong characters that are very easy to follow, even if you (and they) don’t know what is going on most of the time.

And that’s where ‘The City’ ultimately fell down for me because what we have here is a book where the reader, and the characters, don’t find out what’s going on until just over halfway through a seven hundred page book. That’s a lot of time to tag along on the promise that something good might happen but Gemmell had laid enough groundwork for me to assume that this would be the case. It was heavy going though with characters that are very readable but bogged down in a lot of unnecessary background history that you feel you have to wade through in order to get to the good stuff (hence the whole tooth pulling thing earlier).
What really got me though is that once you find out what is going on, you then have to wait almost half the rest of the book while things are built up for the finale; a finale that is over before you know it. While I could appreciate the irony of people ultimately fighting to preserve the status quo that they want to destroy, I wasn’t keen at all on having to wait almost seven hundred pages for something that was over so quickly. Imagine having that tooth pulled only to find out that you didn’t need it done after all… Yep, that’s how I was left feeling after reading ‘The City’.


‘The City’ has a lot of good things going for it but the execution of these ultimately fell short and left a lot to be desired (the pacing of the plot needs some serious work). It’s a real shame because the potential you can feel at the beginning is something else.

‘The Situation’ – Jeff Vandermeer

Just because I want to see if I can go a day on this blog without mentioning Stella Gemmell’s ‘The City’… Damn it. Anyway…

Who here works in an office? Okay, a few of you. Who works in project management or has been a part of a project? Who here has worked on a project and slowly come to realize that senior management haven’t got a clue what they actually want to achieve (let alone how they will go about it)? Yep, me too.

Jeff Vandermeer’s ‘The Situation’ is a timely message of support to all of us in those kind of roles, isolated from any sense of normality by changing requirements and the treacherous nature of office politics. It’s okay guys, it really is. Vandermeer not only totally gets how weird and utterly senseless office life can be (and it really can be), he also shows his reader that the grass is actually a lot greener where they are right now. You may have a tough job but it could be a whole lot worse, just look at our protagonist and his attempts to negotiate an increasingly fraught and dangerous workplace; all the while trying to make a fish that swallows children as a means of educating them.

This is a re-read (because you can’t just be looking at the next new book all the time…) and while the horror of the workplace, and the surrounding city, is still very much in evidence, what really struck me this time is how Vandermeer uses weird horror to highlight underlying themes that you come across in offices all the time (paranoia and futility to name but a couple). This approach manages to serve two purposes, gently poking fun at how seriously people can take office life but (at the same time) reminding us that it can be a horrible experience being stuck in this situation and with no clear way out. I loved the imagery of an office clique taking on literal physical shape for example. We've all had jobs like that haven’t we? What you end up with then is a tale that is darkly humorous and very unsettling all at once; very much like an episode of ‘The Office’ but one where David Brent is a giant bear that just stands and glowers at you.

The terror of life in the city outside makes for a fitting backdrop to what is playing out in the company; again, Vandermeer is highlighting our fear of what life will be like if we lose our job (no matter how much we may hate it). It’s a tough life and maybe the only answer to ‘The Situation’ is to show a little love, just like our protagonist.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed this story, loads and loads to think about.

'Kane' on Kindle!

SF Gateway (part of Gollancz, I think...) already have good form for finding old SFF classics and publishing them in eBook format. This time though, I think they've outdone themselves. A little poking around on Amazon led me to find out that SF Gateway are in the process of publishing all of Karl Edward Wagner's 'Kane' series. If you have a Kindle (or whatever) and like your Sword and Sorcery dark, violent and bloody then you should be all over this if you haven't read the books already. They're short reads but very entertaining; you don't hear a lot about Kane these days but he occupies a well deserved place on my list of 'Hard bastards of Fantasy literature' (may or may not be a future post) and would make a lot of today's anti-heroes squirm uncomfortably and wish they were somewhere else.

Go have a read, you can thank me later ;o)

Almost there...

Sorry for the brief radio silence, the last few days have been crazy busy and (in a break from the norm) all for good reasons. Apart from breaking my toe that is, that wasn't so good but anyway...

Reviews will start appearing again, promise! It hasn't helped though that 'The City' seems to be turning into a book that promises much if you keep reading but doesn't deliver on that. I'm far enough in now that I'm going to push on for the end but it hasn't exactly been fun reading in the meantime...

So what have I got for you today then? Well, I've been mooching around a couple of second hand bookshops today and realised that I'm actually closer than I think to completing my Fantasy Masterworks collection. The list is below and will be a handy thing for me to refer back to when I'm tempted by Amazon (which happens most lunchtimes). If it's bold then I have it, bold and italics mean that I've read it (although there aren't too many of those. It's been fun collecting these books, now I'm turning my thoughts to collecting the old SF Masterworks. We'll see what happens there...

1 - The Book of the New Sun, Volume 1: Shadow and Claw - Gene Wolfe

2 - Time and the Gods - Lord Dunsany (need to double check if I have this already as part of another book)

3 - The Worm Ouroboros - E.R. Eddison

4 - Tales of the Dying Earth - Jack Vance

5 - Little, Big - John Crowley

6 - The Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny

7 - Viriconium - M. John Harrison

8 - The Conan Chronicles, Volume 1: The People of the Black Circle - Robert E. Howard

9 - The Land of Laughs - Jonathan Carroll

10 - The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea - L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

11 - Lud-in-the-Mist - Hope Mirrlees 

12 - The Book of the New Sun, Volume 2: Sword and Citadel - Gene Wolfe

13 - Fevre Dream - George R. R. Martin

14 - Beauty - Sheri S. Tepper

15 - The King of Elfland's Daughter - Lord Dunsany

16 - The Conan Chronicles, Volume 2: The Hour of the Dragon - Robert E. Howard

17 - Elric - Michael Moorcock

18 - The First Book of Lankhmar - Fritz Leiber

19 - The Riddle-Master's Game - Patricia A. McKillip

20 - Time and Again - Jack Finney

21 - Mistress of Mistresses - E.R. Eddison

22 - Gloriana or the Unfulfill'd Queen - Michael Moorcock

23 - The Well of the Unicorn - Fletcher Pratt

24 - The Second Book of Lankhmar - Fritz Leiber

25 - Voice of Our Shadow - Jonathan Carroll

26 - The Emperor of Dreams - Clark Ashton Smith

27 - Lyonesse I: Suldrun's Garden - Jack Vance

28 - Peace - Gene Wolfe

29 - The Dragon Waiting - John M. Ford

30 - Corum: The Prince in the Scarlet Robe - Michael Moorcock

31 - Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams - C.L. Moore

32 - The Broken Sword - Poul Anderson

33 - The House on the Borderland and Other Novels - William Hope Hodgson

34 - The Drawing of the Dark - Tim Powers

35 - Lyonesse II and III: The Green Pearl and Madouc - Jack Vance

36 - The History of the Runestaff - Michael Moorcock 

37 - A Voyage to Arcturus - David Lindsay

38 - Darker Than You Think - Jack Williamson

39 - The Mabinogion - Evangeline Walton

40 - Three Hearts & Three Lions - Poul Anderson

41 - Grendel - John Gardner

42 - The Iron Dragon's Daughter - Michael Swanwick

43 - WAS - Geoff Ryman

44 - Song of Kali - Dan Simmons

45 - Replay - Ken Grimwood

46 - Sea Kings of Mars and Other Worldly Stories - Leigh Brackett

47 - The Anubis Gates - Tim Powers

48 - The Forgotten Beasts of Eld - Patricia A. McKillip

49 - Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

50 - The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales - Rudyard 

Kipling

There's a few more still to get but that's not bad going at all :o) If I get this new job, interviewed for it today, then maybe I'll treat myself to a couple more.

I know I keep saying this but the plan is still to read my way through this series. Anyone have a particular title that they would like me to start off on?

‘Ghost Omnibus, Volume 3’ – Various (Dark Horse)

If you were around for the last blog then you probably heard the story of how I got into reading ‘Ghost’ and many other comics when I went to college (roughly half a lifetime ago now but who’s counting?) If you weren't around for the last blog, ‘Ghost’ was a relatively new comic that offered me the chance to jump on board without having to know the minutiae of what happened in #960 etc, you know how it is.

What kept me reading though was the mystery of Elisa Cameron; who she was and why someone had killed her. There was a real depth of characterization that really made me care about finding out the answers to those questions (set against the glorious backdrop of Arcadia, grimy noir if ever I saw it).

I read along for a bit but then life went down different paths and I left ‘Ghost’ behind, until now that is. Thanks to the collected volumes (unwieldy phrasing I know but I still need to find out the plural of ‘omnibus’…) I’ve been catching up, two more volumes to go after this one. Volume Three it is then…

We've now reached the point with ‘Ghost’ where we’re not quite ready for the answers but we’re being prepared to receive them in Volume Four. Things start to become a little clearer then and, amongst all the regular stuff that Ghost does so well, I found myself strangely reluctant to continue. The mystery is the whole point of ‘Ghost’ and when that’s gone there’s nothing left, the story has to finish. I guess I’m not ready for that to happen just yet.

In the meantime though, there is plenty to read with Arcadia still trying to tear itself apart and Elisa trying to get her head round what happens next now that she has rid herself of a major threat. Eric Luke and a team of artists all combine well to show us the battles that Elisa must face in Arcadia as well as within herself. Sometimes these two themes merge and the introduction of the villain Silhouette makes Elisa really face up to who, and what, she is. It’s a compelling read, albeit tinged with a little sadness that the end is coming. The big ‘3’ on the cover is a not so subtle clue that this isn't the place to start if you’re a newcomer to the series; long term readers will find a lot to enjoy though. On to Volume Four…

Books In The Post (Aftermath Edition...)

Okay, aftermath is a strong word but it kind of felt appropriate after coming downstairs this morning and seeing birthday presents strewn everywhere. Hope turned four yesterday, where have the years gone? It doesn't feel that long ago that Hope was just starting to turn burbling noises into proper words; now she is trying to negotiate sweets for breakfast when I don't let her have chocolate cake...

But anyway... In amongst the debris were some books that turned up en-masse and are demanding room on the shelves. Check them out (apologies for the slightly blurry pic)

I want to read all of them but 'Crown of Renewal' didn't make the cut. Nothing against the book at all; it's the nth book in a series though and I don't have the time to get all caught up, not when there are other books that I want to read first.

The other books though will all be read, some sooner than others. I need a few laughs in my reading so 'The Serpent of Venice' will be read very soon as will 'God's War'; not a funny book at all (from what I've heard) but very well regarded and I want to see what the fuss is all about. The plan is for that to lead on to a read of 'Infidel' in the near future.

And what is that book in the bottom right corner? Would that be an ARC of Mark Lawrence's 'Prince of Fools'? It is and despite my being well behind in reading about that 'loveable rogue' Jorg Ancrath, I am really keen to get into this book. You might have to wait a little bit for the actual review though (I think that people are being asked to hold off reviews until a little closer to the publication date).

What else am I reading/watching? I'm still plodding my way through Stella Gemmell's 'The City' (just enough to keep me going but it's a real slog at times) and I'm halfway through the first season of 'Game of Thrones' (feeling very sorry for Gregor Clegane's horse, everyone else seems to be getting what they deserve though). It's awesome, why didn't you make me watch it sooner...? ;o)

What about you guys? What are you reading?