Books I’ve read

The book’s subtitle is ‘If you’re not paranoid, you’re not human’. And I suppose that does give a flavour of the story, which takes place in sometime America, Britain and the mythical central Asian republic of Urgistan.

Let’s see if I can remember the gist of the plot; the Black Government (as in Men in Black) are trying to discover who are the members of the ‘Committee of 300′, who seem to be running the world behind the scenes. The MIBs thought that they did. However, we don’t know if they (the Committee, that is) are autonomous or being manipulated by yet another, higher entity. They do apparently comprise most of the major players in world economics and politics. Read the rest of this entry »

The Moon, late twenty-third century; Mars has also apparently been colonised, although it seems that the colonisation of the Moon has been fraught with difficulties and they have, to some extent, fallen out with the Earth. Though they are still talking to them and visiting there, so I am none to certain of the actual circumstances supposedly in effect.

On the Moon, families or groups of families have established themselves and formed commercial ventures, known as BMs - Binding Multiples. Each family group tends to one speciality, but they have those who do research, those who do the engineering and so forth. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the timeline sequel to the last book I reviewed, ‘As I Walked Out One Misummer Morning’,  which ends with the author crossing back into Spain over the Pyrennes in December 1937. This current book, however, took Laurie Lee a long time to put down and publish. It wasn’t until 1991 that it was published, when his eyesight was already failing. He said afterwards that he could not dictate to anyone; the memories were too painful to him (and he assumed that others would see it the same way). So he wrote it himself, but slowly.

As the book starts, Laurie Lee must have spoken reasonable spanish, but he seems to have not tried to plead his case particularly strongly when he was turned in to the authorities - who arrested him on suspicion of being a Francoist spy - by the family who put him up on his first night over the border from France. He was incarcerated in Figueras in a hole in the ground, Read the rest of this entry »

A young man of 20, living in a West Country English village in 1934, gives up his office job to take to the road with nothing but a few clothes, some meagre rations and a violin (which he could play). He spends several weeks walking to London, via the south coast to see the sea that he claimed never to have set eyes on before. He paid his way - sometimes - by busking.

In London, this intelligent lad stays initially with a friend from the same village, but quickly moves out once he has a job on a building site and is able to afford some digs - where the landlady and her daughters seemed to fawn over him. He found the work hard, but seems to have enjoyed it, and continued to indulge his passion for reading and writing poetry. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the second book about the world of Spatterjay. I admit to not having read the first. This story’s origins would hopefully have been clearer if I had.

Spatterjay seems to be a world covered mostly by ocean (with a few islands) that are home to many species of odd fish and molluscs that spend all their time trying to eat one another - or anything else that strays into their space. These creature include such things as the Whelkus Titanicus (the giant whelk) - the one we meet is about 20 metres high, and weighs a hundred tons. But even this leviathan is subject to predation by other, larger denizens of the deep.

One particular specimen of Spatterjay’s sea life contains in one of its internal organs a susbstance whose refined form is quite a valuable poison/drug known as sprine. The unrefined sprine in the ocean creates a virus that changes both people, fish and animals, making them almost indestructible. It also seems to give long life and increased strength to a certain set of humans known as the Old Captains, whose purpose in life seems to be to build boats and sail these dangerous oceans. Each boat seems to have at least one living sail, another of the planets weird lifeforms. Read the rest of this entry »

The subtitle is ‘Never say die’. Surprising for this author, it isn’t really sci-fi; more like a scientific thriller.

Hal Cousins is a biologist in search of the secret of long, though not necessarily eternal, life - through scientific means; hence the subtitle. He has been trying for years, as has his twin brother, to wrestle the secret out of the tiny fragments of living tissue found in primordial organisms found around deep sea vents.

I have to admit that the first few chapters had so much detailed information (whether factual or fanciful I have no way of knowing) on these mitochondrial bits and pieces that I almost put the book down. Happily, I continued and found a fascinating science-based adventure story almost in the tradition of Indiana Jones, with good guys and bad guys popping up all over the place. The problem was to figure which was which! Read the rest of this entry »

It would be fair to say that I have liked all of Barbara Nadel’s books where the story centres on the investigation of crimes by the Turkish police in Istanbul, particularly one Inspector Cetin Ikmen - except this one.

Most of the time, the stories have dealt with the bizarre and slightly abnormal subjects, but the content in this one was just a little too surreal to be anything like believable. That isn’t to say that I did not enjoy reading it, I just didn’t like it. I should point out, though, that I find the background material on life and work in Turkey (in all her books) to be extremely interesting; it gives an insight into how things are done, and how that may affect those of Turkish extraction we may find in our own country.

Having said that, some explanation is required! Read the rest of this entry »