“The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet” by Becky Chambers
The starship Wayfarer does something that would seem extraordinary to us, but commonplace to its crew. Their job is to build wormholes to make it easier for other starships to travel between the many planets of a galaxy-spanning alliance of alien races. Half of the crew are humans, who are one of the junior members of that civilisation. Rosemary Harper is the crew's newest recruit, a seemingly ordinary recent graduate fleeing a secret in her past who has the unenviable task of trying to bring some organisation to the ship. She has to adjust to the new crew, including some alien races she'd never even heard of, while at the same time preparing for the ship's biggest commission to construct a wormhole to a planet in the middle of what was recently a war-zone.
I don't think the book was exactly what I expected it to be, but I did like it. The initial setup (new recruit joins the crew of a small spaceship) immediately made me think of the likes of Firefly, the Paradox trilogy or The Tales of the Ketty Jay, but I think this was a bit misleading because it's got a lot less action than any of those other series and while the crew may have their own secrets and eccentricities they're much more law-abiding than the rogues that make up most of the other crews. I wouldn't count this as being space opera, instead it is more of an interstellar travelogue with a big focus on the characterisation and in particular how different species of humans and aliens interact with each other.
I liked the characters, and I liked the way they interacted with each other and how they had to all adjust the way they behaved to take into account they were sharing the ship with three other alien races (and even the humans have big cultural differences, some of them being from a culture of committed pacifists who won't accept the use of weapons even when heading into a potential warzone). The aliens had a convincing mix of behaviour that is comprehensible and some ways of thinking that are different for us to understand (some of the other crewmembers find it difficult to adjust to a crewmember of a reptilian race who only count their children as people once they start to become adults). It takes a while to really get to know them but I thought there were some great scenes in the second half of the book. If I had a criticism I'd say the plot maybe takes a bit too long to get going, but by the time of the finale it has becomes a compelling story. I'm definitely interested in seeing how the story develops in the sequel.
Rating : 8 / 10
“Slade House” by David Mitchell
Slade House if a difficult place to find, seemingly only accessible by a small black door off an alleyway in a nondescript suburban housing estate. This book tells the story of some of the unlucky people who manage to find the house and encounter its inhabitants.
This short novel is a companion-piece to Mitchell's "The Bone Clocks" which I read last year, unlike that book which mixed a number of different genres this sticks to a single genre, in this case a haunted house story told through the tales of five people who encounter the house and its malevolent inhabitants over the course of four decades. I thought "The Bone Clocks" biggest weakness was that the supernatural fantasy elements of the story felt a bit out-of-place compared to some of the other plotlines and the more mundane plotlines tended to be better. In this book I thought the supernatural elements of the story worked a lot better, probably due to being more integral to the whole story.
It's a fairly short novel but I think it's about the right length, any longer and it might have risked getting repetitive. I think Mitchell's characterisation is one of his strengths and I think it works very well here, he does have a knack for making characters seem interesting and well-rounded in a short space of time.
I think this would work well as a stand-alone but the little references to Mitchell's previous work do add something, particularly in the final section where there's probably a completely different reading experience if you recognise the name of one of the characters.
Rating : 8 / 10
“The Best of Ian McDonald” by Ian McDonald
In this book, there are many varied stories. Kenya gets invaded by alien lifeforms, an Irish music-hall star tours a post-War of the Worlds Mars, a family find a supernatural secret in the gardens of an Irish stately home, corrupt Nigerian politicians are harangued from the afterlife and an eccentric traveller promises he can make it rain in a drought-hit Arizona town.
I was interested in this because I've really liked several of Ian McDonald's novels that I've read, but hadn't read much of his short fiction (other than the "Cyberabad Days" collection which I thought was very good).
I thought it was a really good collection and the writing was of a consistently high quality all the way from the late 80s up to the present day. My favourites were probably the high-concept space opera of The Tear and the two stories set after alien artefacts land in Kenya and start reshaping the landscape, Towards Kilimanjaro and Tendeleo's Story. I know he's written some novels set in the same setting as the last two, I might have to read them sometime. A couple of stories didn't really work for me, "Verthandi's Ring" felt like a weak counterpart to "The Tear" and I feel like I haven't seen enough Hitchcock films to get all the references in "The Blue Motel", but other than that I liked them.
One of the things I liked about his novels was the varied settings, there aren't many Science Fiction novels primarily set in India or Turkey or Brazil (or Ian McDonald's native Northern Ireland). The short stories are similarly diverse, while there are a few in the typical settings of Britain or the US there are also plenty from various places around the world (and sometimes out of the world). There's a lot of diversity in the stories, from the dark (the Holocaust-set "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" or the dysfunctional family of "After Kerry") to the comical ("A Small Well-Mannered Uprising of the Dead") to the surreal ("Unfinished Portrait of the King of Pain by Van Goch").
Rating : 9 / 10
“Medusa’s Web” by Tim Powers
Scott and Madeline Madden have been trying to ignore their strange childhood as much as possible, but after their aunt commits suicide by grenade they are drawn back to their childhood home to meet with their estranged cousins. They are unable to resist the temptation to investigate some of the mysteries of their childhood, including their parents' disappearance, and the bizarre legacy their aunt left for them.
I really like Tim Powers' books, I think he has some fantastically imaginative stories and a real knack for making bizarre plotlines seem strangely plausible. Unlike most of the Tim Powers books I've read which tend to be historical fantasy this is (mostly) set in the modern day. I think this is maybe a bit of a problem because it makes it more glaring how how odd some of the characters' behaviours and motivations is, admittedly that may be somewhat explained by some of the traumatic events the characters have in their past but I think it's easier to accept the eccentricities that Powers' characters tend to have when they are (for example) 19th Century Romantic Poets rather than young adults in modern-day Los Angeles.
Occasional problems with characterisation aside, I did find this an entertaining book to read and Powers does his usual trick of taking surreal and magical events and make them seem like they have their own skewed logic to them. In this case, the key plot decide is the so-called 'spiders', drawings of mysterious eight-legged figures which when viewed give the person who looked at it a vision of the past or future. The viewing into the past element leads to a lot of overlap with Golden-Age Hollywood, and Powers is maybe more comfortable with the scenes set there rather than in contemporary LA.
Overall, I wouldn't rank this among Powers' best books, but even an average Tim Powers book is still worth reading.
Rating : 7 / 10