Books I’ve read

Take a sunny coast location, with palm trees and sandy beach, where it never rains. Add a hill (that has no sign) covered with a bunch of trees and known as Holy Wood. Supplement that with some novel work being carried out by the alchemists in a nearby city (Ankh-Morpork, as ithappens) on octocellulose and ‘clicks’.

The clicks work by passing the (highly unstable) octocellulose strip in front of a lens, behind which demons - very small ones who have a fag during their breaks - paint the scene before them very quickly, many times a second. When the public become familiar with this new technology, there are near riots in the streets to get the leading players’ autographs. All the clicks are silent, but I don’t recall there being a piano player or orchestra involved.

Is this beginning to sound familiar? It should be - it’s Pratchett’s wicked parody on all things movie-making, particularly the centre in California.

Not one of my preferred Discworld novels, but very enjoyable nevertheless. It has many of the usual characters (such as Gaspode, the talking mutt and CMOT Dibbler), not to mention the wizards at the Unseen University - who do get involved, eventually.

The hill mentioned earlier has a strange influence on the prime leading lady and leading man (her more than him), causing her to sleepwalk and do strange things! And Gaspode discovers some other talking animals - another familiar link to the present day’s film industry.

CMOT takes charge of one of the studios, and as is his normal wont, tries to make far too much far too quickly, which causes a strike. Even the trolls join in.

Nevertheless, as is always (?) the case with Pratchett, good triumphs in the end (and the ending is worthy of an early classic - or several of them), and peace returns to the Holy Wood.

For now…….

It’s taken me a while to get this onto the screen - it wasn’t that I had stopped reading; just took time to find the impetus to get it down for posterity, as it were. Ther are another 10 backed up in the queue.

This hardback edition published by Gollanz in 1990.

Available from Alibris.co.uk and Abebooks.

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This is the third book in the first Uplift trilogy.

What is ‘uplift’? In a world of the future where we have discovered (or have been discovered by) a multitude of Galactic races. Part of their heritage is that all their distant ancestors were (or they believe they were) brought up from near-sapiency to full sapiency by The Progenitors, back in the mists of time, millions of years ago. Each race (and there are some weird ones involved in the series, including sun-creatures, birds, sap rings, tree-like oddities and smaller mammals of several sorts) has ‘uplifted’ one of its own intelligent species (usually not related) to sapient status, where it serves a fifty-thousand year indenture as a client race - then it may be allowed to do the same thing itself. The whole process is now, and has for countless ages been, supervised by the Uplift Institute, an apprently incorruptible organisation that sounds a little like the old United Nations.

However, before the human race meets the rest of the Galaxy, it has already, by its own intelligence and without any apparent hints, uplifted both the dolphin and the chimpanzee, not to mention having pulled our own species up by our own boostraps to the same state. As we cannot remember who our patrons were - and claim that there never were any, we are disdainfully regarded as the ‘wolflings’. Shades of Romulus and Remus.

Nevertheless, the ‘wolflings’ manage to cause disturbances all over the place. Not because they’re stirrers, but more likely through ignorance of a civilisation (or rather, hundreds of them) that has been at the Uplift game for aeons. In this particular case, the Gubru - a bird race, who do everything in threes - Propriety, Cost and Caution, Beam and Talon being the pseudonyms for religion, bureaucracy and military - have decided the hold to ransom a human-settled planet in order to force humanity to divulge what the dolphins have discovered (read the previous book - Startide Rising for the full story) and how it relates to the long-lost Progenitors.

They lay siege to and land on the planet, called Garth, and manage to collect all but a handful of humans onto a string of islands (and thus control them). They do not consider the neo-chimpanzees - remember them? - to be a problem, but they are wrong. The Gubru are also fooled into thinking that there is an as-yet un-uplifted species on the planet, known as ‘Garthlings’, and spend heavily in both monetary, manpower and pride terms to seek them out. Most of the chimpanzees (known as chims and chimmies) are loyal to their Patrons (us). With the help of a couple of humans and a father-daughter pair of Tymbrimi (psycho-sensitive humanoids who can alter their shape a little, but have years of practice in the Galaxy, are our allies and like a good practical joke, the more dangerous the better), the chimps manage to put up a fair amount of resistance - guerrilla warfare, in fact. And yes, the word ‘guerrilla’ in its mispronounced form does have an influence on the outcome of this story.

David Brin has a really far-reaching imagination, all of the scenarios plausible, as are his characters. He does try to avoid humanising them, but that is a difficult problem to overcome when you are writing for humans in the first place. I think he succeeds in this, where many others have failed. It is a page-turner, the chapters are not over-long, and they concentrate each time upon one or other of the major players - in other words, there are several, fixed voices in the story.

I have read all of the first two Uplift trilogies. This is the third book on the re-read, and I have to say that I enjoyed it more the second time around, perhaps because it hadn’t been so long since reading the last one. When you buy the books as they’re published - as I did first time around - it is difficult to remember the scenarios. But yes, very enjoyable, and I look forward all the more to reading the second trilogy (and the third, if there is one).

This edition published by Orbit SF in 1996.

Available from Alibris.co.uk and Abebooks.

Now this is what I call good detective fiction; but then I’ve thought that everything done by Mr Rankin that centred on John Rebus was good, so no surprise there. This is, I think, the nineteenth in the series, so he must be doing something right.

As in almost all of the Rebus books, action centres on Edinburgh. The skeletons of a woman and a baby are discovered under the concrete floor of a pub cellar in the eponymous Fleshmarket Close. But they turn out to be a dismantled medical skeleton (albeit from a real long-dead woman) and a plastic one respectively. So it looks as though it may be a hoax, a publicity stunt for the pub to be included in the local tourist-oriented ‘Ghost Walks’. But is it?

An Kurdish immigrant is found stabbed to death in Knoxland, a notorious high-rise estate - is it a racially-motivated murder, or something equally sinister? What else does Knoxland conceal? Rebus is reluctantly drawn into joining the investigating team.

Several years previously, a young girl had been raped in Banehall, near Edinburgh, an ex mining community that is now dependent for its employmnet on Whitemire, an old prison converted to an immigration detention centre. The perpetrator of the rape was caught and sent down, but not long afterwards, the victim committed suicide. The girl’s parents were distraught, and have now come to Rebus’ colleague, DI Siobhan Clarke - who was involved in the earlier case - to ask for help in finding their younger daughter, who has left home without warning. Her sister’s rapist has just been released from jail; perhaps this has something to do with it?

All these things are not obviously interconnected. But now, read on! For good measure, throw in cockle-picking by illegal immigrants; other immigrants being incarcerated (in the above-metioned Whitemire) pending deportation or hiding from the authorities; Rebus befriending, or being befriended by, a long-time lady protester on a Greenham Common-type vigil near the detentian centre; his old nemesis ‘Big Ger’ Cafferty. John Rebus still can’t stay away from his booze or his fags, but all in all, it makes him very human.

Up to Rankin’s usual standard - eight out of ten.

This paperback version published in 2005 by Orion Books.

Available from Alibris.co.uk and Abebooks.

Classified on the cover as ‘British SF at its best’, but then publishers are wont to exaggerate, aren’t they? I’m certain we produced better science fiction fare than this.

This wasn’t a brilliant book, but it was just about readable, and it was literate. If you can imagine a tame version of the ‘Midwich Cuckoos’ meet ‘Vee’ meet ‘The Time Machine’ ….

Storyline:

Manager Val Mathers, who runs the only insurance office in a relatively old and obscure middle England town (can you imagine him as an action hero?), finds that a bunch of tall young people - he calls them the Giants - have set up a camp across the river from his house. He sees one of the girls in the town, and she appears to be wearing a see-through dress, but then convinces himself it was a trick of the light (it wasn’t). He lunches at the pub, finds a group of these Giants there, and despite shorts and summer frocks - it has been the hottest summer in living memory - they are all immaculately dressed, with not a hair out of place, or a crease in their clothes. Suspicious? You bet!

On top of all this, his childhood friend returns from exile (thrown out by the Mr Action Man for attempting to seduce his wife), and appears to have some affinity for this crew of adolescents. He gets much deeper into it, as it appears that these kids are with their teacher of history (she of the see-through bits) from another time/space, and appear to want to watch the Great Fire that is about to happen in the town. All fire insurance courtesy of Mr Mathers, being the only insurance office in town, which becomes important.

How they all fare in this conflagration is the part of the plot I won’t reveal, but suffice to say that it is almost predictable that the hero ends up being just that, the hero. The complete action only covers a couple of days, so it isn’t too difficult to keep abreast of the plot.

Verdict: If I had a scoring system, I suppose three out of ten, even allowing for when it was written, 1967.

This edition published by Corgi in 1969.

Available from Alibris.co.uk and Abebooks.

Wow! Not unlike William Gibson, in its way, but without the internet or any hint of drugs of any sort. Pohl always did produce fascinating books, and his collaboration with Kornbluth (at least this one) is superb. This is the fourth such co-written novel, the previous ones being The Space Merchants, Search The Sky and Gladiator-at-Law. This one was published in 1959, but they had apparently been co-authoring short stories since around 1940. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t knowingly read the three mentioned above - but I will!

Set in the relatively far future, though it isn’t particularly futuristic. The Earth has beenliterally captured by an unknown agency’s planet (that just happened to float into the Earth’s vicinity) and moved bodily away from the Sun. It is now in a cold area of the galaxy, but the mysterious Pyramids, the captors, set fire to the Moon (yes, our moon) every five years, to keep the humans alive.

Although not totally decimated, the human race seems to have shrunk somewhat, food is quite scarce, and the main section of society seems to have little to do except develop a very bizarre system of manners with which to connect with one another. There is another faction, whose adherents are known as Wolf - hence at least part of the book’s title - are more practical, and though not actually plotting the downfall of the others, is always wary of what is offered to them. Usually, a cry of ‘Wolf!’ will result in the miscreant being allowed to take the ultimate Donation of Fluid - by lumbar puncture. The result is always death.

One man, a Son of the Wolf, somehow escapes the Donation and ends up being translated to the captors’ planet, that is a huge industrial complex - of a sort. The humans are apparently considered as Components that the Pyramids find useful, putting many of them to work, after joining octets of the species together in both mind and body. This is where it gets a bit Gibson-ish. The octets are there to transmit signals to the various industial equipment somewhere on the planet, while the aliens do something else.

The story of how Glenn Tropile (the escapee) deals with his situation is what most of the book is about, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you by revealing any more of th