Tangled Mind

2017/98: Artificial Condition -- Martha Wells

Mon, 07 May 2018 17:01:06 GMT

2017/98: Artificial Condition -- Martha Wells

What does it want?
To kill all the humans, I answered.
I could feel ART metaphorically clutch its function. If there were no humans, there would be no crew to protect and no reason to do research and fill its databases. It said, That is irrational.
I know, I said. If the humans were dead, who would make the media? [p. 132]

( non-spoilery )

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2017/90: That Old Black Magic -- Cathi Unsworth

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 19:23:51 GMT

2017/90: That Old Black Magic -- Cathi Unsworth

"Used to be the Variety circuit, before the war," said Lexy. "Now all the beaches are full of mines and barbed wire. The people who’re left there aren’t having a good time any more. Vulnerable to Jerry attack from the sea and where the Luftwaffe get rid of all their unused bombs on their way home. Easy prey for spook racketeers." [loc 1818]

That Old Black Magic (review copy received from Netgalley in exchange for this honest review) begins in January 1941, when medium Helen Duncan apparently channels the spirit of a woman who is being murdered in a wintry wood.( not spoilery )

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2017/114: A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes --Rutherford

Fri, 23 Feb 2018 08:33:46 GMT

2017/114: A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Stories in Our Genes -- Adam Rutherford

One fifth of people alive a millennium ago in Europe are the ancestors of no one alive today ... the remaining 80 per cent are the ancestor of everyone living today. All lines of ancestry coalesce on every individual in the tenth century. [loc 1941]

A fascinating and very readable book about genetics, full of anecdotes and asides. I had no idea that the Romans had left behind so few traces in the modern British genome. Or that Charles II of Spain was more cumulatively inbred than the child of a brother and sister. Or that Icelanders have an app to check how closely they are related to one another, with a feature called Sifjaspellsspillir or 'incest spoiler' to alert them to shared grandparents. Or that two black people are likely to be more genetically diverse than a black person and a white person.

Genetics offers good counter-arguments to racism, and to issues of caste in India (not just a product of colonisation); however, as Rutherford points out, a lot of the insights promoted by companies such as 23andme is little more than 'genetic astrology'. (My own genome still fascinates me though: it is one thing to know that one is descended from people in the distant past, quite another to be told of the traces they've left in my body.)

Rutherford is occasionally wrong though:

If by some incomprehensibly reality-defying mutation a child was born with the nascent power of flight... their freakishness would probably render them an unlikely sexual partner. [loc. 4601]

Now google 'wingfic' and reflect on 'unlikely sexual partner'.

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2017/113: The Night Bird -- Brian Freeman

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 08:04:34 GMT

2017/113: The Night Bird -- Brian Freeman

"People can change their own memories without even being aware that they're doing so. The danger — and the opportunity — is that memories can also be deliberately altered." [p. 64]

( non spoilery )

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2017/112: Black Swan Green -- David Mitchell

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 07:14:35 GMT

2017/112: Black Swan Green -- David Mitchell

birdstuffedtwigsnapped silence, toothy bracken, and places you can't find if you're not alone. Time in woods's older than time in clocks, and truer. Ghosts of Might Be run riot in woods, and stationery shops and messes of stars. [p. 234]

This is a book about an adolescent boy growing up in the early 80s, who writes poetry, thinks Thatcher is great and the Falklands War will never be forgotten, and is so focussed on his own problems that he's oblivious to the momentous changes happening around him.

Why no, his name is not Adrian Mole. It is Jason Taylor, and Black Swan Green is considerably less humorous -- and more profound -- than The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole. ( not spoilery )

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2017/111: The Woman In Blue -- Elly Griffiths

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 13:33:53 GMT

2017/111: The Woman In Blue -- Elly Griffiths

Nelson takes a step back. "Who says we've found a woman?"
He half-expects Cathbad to say something about spiritual energies and cosmic vibrations, but instead he says, "I heard the milkman talking about it." [p. 8]

Ruth's Druidical friend Cathbad is cat-sitting for a friend in Walsingham, 'England's Nazareth', a small Norfolk town which many believe has a brooding atmosphere. One night the cat (who is named Chesterton: this is significant) escapes( mildly spoilery for first third of book )

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2017/110: In Great Waters -- Kit Whitfield

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 08:33:24 GMT

2017/110: In Great Waters -- Kit Whitfield

Let the Switzers be ruled by landsmen, let nations with no sea borders keep their old ways if they wished, but there were navies to maintain, and the deepsmen of the sea were no longer neutral, no longer sailors' yarns, but an engaged force with loyalties of their own. [p. 43]

( non-spoilery )

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2017/109: The Beauty of Murder -- A K Benedict

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 06:50:57 GMT

2017/109: The Beauty of Murder -- A K Benedict

'I feel more alive standing next to something dead. Don't you?' [p. 57]

Stephen Killigan, newly arrived philosophy lecturer at a Cambridge college, stumbles home one drunken evening via the kebab van on Market Hill, and discovers a corpse. Unfortunately, when he leads the police to it, it's no longer there.
( very minor spoiler )

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2017/108: The Midnight Queen --Sylvia Hunter

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 07:57:00 GMT

2017/108: The Midnight Queen --Sylvia Hunter

[The temple] might just as well have been dedicated to the Breton sea-queen Dahut as to Neptune. This Gray supposed to be the reason the Professor had described Duke Gaël's refurbishments as insufficiently ambitious; a man more convinced of the superiority of Roman worship, law, and custom he had never yet encountered. [loc. 638]

A fascinating alternate history, set in an early nineteenth century comparable to the Regency period, but with no Napoleon and with Henry XII on the throne of Britain -- a Britain which does not include Alba or Eire, but comprises the provinces of Cymru, England, Kernow, Normandie, Maine and Breizh. Magic may be studied at Merlin College in Oxford, where Graham ('Gray') Marshall is an undergraduate, tutored by Professor Callender, Regius Professor of Magickal Theory.
( slightly spoilery )

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2017/107: Dzur (Vlad Taltos Book 10) -- Steven Brust

Mon, 05 Feb 2018 07:56:31 GMT

2017/107: Dzur (Vlad Taltos Book 10) -- Steven Brust

With cooking and murder, there really shouldn't be a "good enough." You need to get as close to perfect as possible, otherwise find another line of work. [loc. 3998]

Reread, though I didn't realise it and nothing seemed familiar: only when I tried to add the book to LibraryThing did I realise it was already there ... Apparently I enjoyed the novel very much when I read it in December 2006: eleven years later, it felt rather less satisfying.

See that earlier review for plot details: I came away this time reminded that cooking and murder both require patience; that with any Vlad Taltos book it's wise to review the story so far, from notes or Wikipedia or whatever (perhaps some people rely on their memories?); and that I become irritated with long conversations where I have to count lines to work out who's talking.

I do like this series, though: must work out where I'd actually got to, so I can carry on from there.

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2017/106: The Man Who Remembered The Moon -- David Hull

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 17:33:05 GMT

2017/106: The Man Who Remembered The Moon -- David Hull

He suffers a first-order false belief: the belief that there was once a thing called a moon, which disappeared and sucked the evidence that it had ever existed into the black hole of its absence. [loc. 518]

This is an odd novella, deceptively simple: the premise is that the moon no longer exists, has never existed, and Daniel Hale is the only person who remembers the world where there was a moon.
( not spoilery )

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2017/105: The Pearl Thief -- Elizabeth Wein

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 10:24:24 GMT

2017/105: The Pearl Thief -- Elizabeth Wein

What's your proper work, Julie? I would like to be a theatrical escape artist, I think, like Houdini, or a circus owner like Bertram Mills. I want to dazzle people and be applauded for it. I am good at it, and it is thrilling. Walking a tightrope when you've had too much to drink – dangerous and wonderful. [loc. 1992]

A prequel, of sorts, to Code Name Verity: the heroine of that novel, Julie Beaufort-Stuart, is fifteen in The Pearl Thief, returning to her ancestral home for one last visit before the house is sold. ( slightly spoilery but not for plot resolution )

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2017/104: The Muse -- Jessie Burton

Fri, 02 Feb 2018 08:12:23 GMT

2017/104: The Muse -- Jessie Burton

"I thought London would mean prosperity and welcome. A Renaissance place. Glory and success. I thought leaving for England was the same as stepping out of my house and onto the street, just a slightly colder street where a beti with a brain could live next door to Elizabeth the Queen. ... There's the cold, the wet, the rent, the lack. But – I do try to live." [p. 26]

The Muse is set in London in 1967, with a backstory that takes place fifty years earlier in the south of Spain, just before the Spanish Civil War.
( slightly spoilery? )

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2017/103: Rotherweird -- Andrew Caldecott (illustrated by Sasha Laika)

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 08:27:04 GMT

2017/103: Rotherweird -- Andrew Caldecott (illustrated by Sasha Laika)

"...we're forbidden to study old history – by law."
"Why?"
"Ha, ha, that's a good one – I'd have to study old history to find out, wouldn't I! So just remember to keep it modern. 1800 and after ..." [loc. 420]

The town of Rotherweird has been isolated from the rest of England since Elizabethan times. It is a small town in a quiet rural setting, located on an island in the River Rother (not the Rother in Sussex, though), and featuring gorgeous Italianate architecture, a highwalk known as the Aether Way, twisting cobbled alleyways, and a main street called the Golden Mean.
( non-spoilery )

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2017/102: Five Children on the Western Front -- Kate Saunders

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 07:45:03 GMT

2017/102: Five Children on the Western Front -- Kate Saunders

"I saw a couple of pictures of ladies who looked a bit like Mother, and might have been me or Jane. But I didn't see any grown-up men who looked a bit like you boys – I wonder why not."
Far away in 1930, in his empty room, the old professor was crying. [loc 123]

A fine example of the genre I like to call 'literary fan fiction': this is a sequel of sorts to E. Nesbit's Five Children and It, in which the eponymous 'five children' (Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and their baby brother, known as the Lamb) encounter a Psammead, a grumpy being that claims to be a sand fairy, and grants wishes which seldom turn out as the children intend.

Nesbit's novel was published in 1902: these children will grow up and come of age just in time for the First World War. Kate Saunders' novel deals with that, and with the Psammead's own past. ( not significantly spoilery )

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2017/101: The Stars My Destination -- Alfred Bester

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 07:17:54 GMT

2017/101: The Stars My Destination -- Alfred Bester

He was one hundred and seventy days dying and not yet dead. He fought for survival with the passion of a beast in a trap. He was delirious and rotting, but occasionally his primitive mind emerged from the burning nightmare of survival into something resembling sanity. [loc 247]

A classic of the genre which I had either never read, or read at an early age and forgotten: I decided it was about time I did read it, primarily because Bester is an author cited by Ada Palmer as an influence.

It's an epic space opera, with a huge canvas -- the Solar System of the twenty-fourth (or twenty-fifth*) century -- and a(a anti-) hero whose need for vengeance is worthy of Greek tragedy. Gulliver 'Gully' Foyle, marooned in a wrecked spaceship, thinks his salvation is at hand when another ship approaches: but it ignores his distress signal and leaves him to die.
( mildly spoilery )

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2017/100: The Dark is Rising -- Susan Cooper

Mon, 29 Jan 2018 19:32:57 GMT

2017/100: The Dark is Rising -- Susan Cooper

Then he was flying again, at large in the blue-black sky, with the stars blazing timeless around his head, and the patterns of the stars made themselves known to him, both like and unlike the shapes and powers attributed to them by men long ago. The Herdsman passed, nodding, the bright star Arcturus at his knee; the Bull roared by, bearing the great sun Aldebaran and the small group of the Pleiades singing in small melodic voices, like no voices he had ever heard. Up he flew, and outward, through black space, and saw the dead stars, the blazing stars, the thin scattering of life that peopled the infinite emptiness beyond. And when he was done... he knew the mystery of Uranus and the despair of Mercury, and he had ridden on a comet's tail. [p. 105]

Reread, with the intention of joining in with the seasonal read-along: in the end I didn't, but wallowed in fond memories, tinged with a wistful sense of 'if only real-world evil were that simple'.
( somewhat spoilery )

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2017/99: The Will to Battle -- Ada Palmer

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 19:13:14 GMT

2017/99: The Will to Battle -- Ada Palmer

Grounded by conscience, the Utopians are not brave enough to let billions die while they hide away to safeguard everything. They won't abandon this world to destruction, not even to protect all better ones. They bind their fate to Earth's. No second chance. [p. 309]

This third novel in the Terra Ignota series (preceded by Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders) will make little sense to anyone not familiar with the first two books. It does suffer somewhat from 'middle book' syndrome: the bridging section between wrongness and resolution. Yet it's not the larger plot that enthralls me: it's the small-scale interactions between the characters (some of whom are more real than others.)
( spoilery for this and previous novels in the Terra Ignota series (also, quite long) )

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2017/97: The Convenient Marriage -- Georgette Heyer

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 08:59:26 GMT

2017/97: The Convenient Marriage -- Georgette Heyer

Mr Walpole's face wore an approving smile, though he regretted that his god-daughter should be marrying a Tory. [p. 32]

Another Heyer Georgian novel, reread: when I first read The Convenient Marriage I was mostly interested in the heroine's feckless brother Pelham, but this time I found myself appreciating the Earl of Rule rather more than before.
( mildly spoilery )

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2017/96: Clockwork Boys - T Kingfisher

Sun, 14 Jan 2018 10:32:44 GMT

2017/96: Clockwork Boys - T Kingfisher

"Oh, come on, if your friends aren't willing to strangle you, what kind of friends are they?" [p. 123]

A forger, an assassin, a paladin and a scholar ride through a war zone in search of a solution to the secret of the Clockwork Boys -- an unstoppable army of centaur-like soldiers whose very nature is a conundrum.

So far, so RPG. Kingfisher (a pseudonym of Ursula Vernon, award-winning childrens' author) fleshes out her characters interestingly, and with more depth and variety than the standard gaming stereotypes. ( spoilery )

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2017/95: The Black Moth: A Romance of the 18th Century -- Georgette Heyer

Sat, 13 Jan 2018 10:07:37 GMT

2017/95: The Black Moth: A Romance of the 18th Century -- Georgette Heyer

"It suited you that Jack should be disgraced? You thought I should seize his money. You— you—"
"Rogue? But you will admit that I at least am an honest rogue. You are — er — a dishonest saint. I would sooner be what I am." [p. 163]

The Black Moth, set in England in the 1750s, is Georgette Heyer's very first novel, which I reread after becoming aware that it was effectively a prequel to These Old Shades and Devil's Cub -- albeit a prequel in which the characters had different names and rather less rounded characters. ( spoilery, if you regard plot details for a romance as spoilery ... )

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Fri, 12 Jan 2018 14:16:20 GMT

2017/94: A Sword, a Star, a Flame -- Helen Lerewth

"...he is a doughty warrior."
She gave me a hard, piercing look. "I thought you were such a great warrior," she said, "and he’s womaned you." [loc 1076]

Alternate-world fantasy, set in a medieval Europe analogue where the Teutonic-flavoured Order of the Star fights against the Mongol-flavoured pagan Shee.( not spoilery: contains content warning )

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2017/93: The House at the End of Hope Street -- Menna van Praag

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 21:03:29 GMT

2017/93: The House at the End of Hope Street -- Menna van Praag

"The eyes of others are our prisons; their thoughts our cages."
Alba frowns. "Really?"
"Dismiss that warning at your peril," Dorothy says. "Literature is strewn with the wreckage of writers who have minded the opinions of others." [p. 176]

Alba Ashby is (was?) a PhD student whose world is falling apart. She ends up on the doorstep of a house on Hope Street that she's never noticed before, and is invited in ( not significantly spoilery )

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2017/92: Slouch Witch -- Helen Harper

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 07:44:34 GMT

2017/92: Slouch Witch -- Helen Harper

If I could make him believe that I wasn’t quite as lazy as he thought, I reckoned I’d be able to get away with more – by which I actually meant less – in future. [p. 118]

( non-spoilery )
First in a series (The Lazy Girl's Guide to Magic), and I will probably read the next one at some point when I want cheerful, entertaining urban fantasy. Plus, I'd like more of Brutus, as I find this particular talking animal horribly credible.:

From somewhere above me, there was an irritated hiss. "Food."
"Hi, Brutus."
"Food, bitch."
I sighed. "I've told you time and time again, if you call me that I'm not going to feed you."
"Food."
"Give me a minute."
"Food."
"I'd like the chance to get a cup of tea first."
"Food."
"Piss off."
"Food."

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2017/91: The Cold Calling -- Phil Rickman

Mon, 18 Dec 2017 21:47:49 GMT

2017/91: The Cold Calling -- Phil Rickman

... by daylight, the whole idea of a cross-dressing actor-ventriloquist who believed he was into a mystical tradition with a direct line to the megalith-builders seemed a whole lot less convincing than it had last night. [p. 239]

( non-spoilery )

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