Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter- The Long Earth

The Long Earth

Terry Pratchett & Stephen Baxter

2012

Other Terry Pratchett Reviews- The Colour of Magic - The Light Fantastic - Equal Rites - Mort - Sourcery - Wyrd Sisters - Pyramids - Guards! Guards! - Eric - Moving Pictures - Reaper Man - Witches Abroad - Small Gods - Lords and Ladies - Men At Arms - Soul Music - Interesting Times - Maskerade - Feet of Clay - Hogfather - Raising Steam - A Blink of the Screen - Sky1 Adaptations- Dodger - The Long Earth (w Stephen Baxter)

“Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.”

With Sir Terry markedly increasing his output over the past few years, certain releases fell by the wayside for me, the most notable of which was this curious co-authored start to a new science fiction series. The origins of The Long Earth novel and series began more than twenty years ago in an uncompleted Pratchett story entitled The High Meggas, which was included much later in Pratchett's recent collection of short fiction A Blink of the Screen. When I read that collection a year ago that particular story didn't capture my attention because I couldn't get invested in an unfinished concept, though the basic idea itself was interesting. Clearly the process of assembling Blink of the Screen inspired Pratchett to go back to his idea, and he collaborated with respected science fiction author Stephen Baxter (who I've never read anything else by, since I'm not that interested in new sci-fi thanks to the amount of classic stuff I've never read). 

I wasn't expecting too much from this book then, thanks to Pratchett's varied level of quality over the past few years and the fact that this was a venture into a somewhat new genre for him (I say somewhat because I don't believe that sci-fi and fantasy necessarily sit that far away from each other). The plot is essentially a high concept one, in that it all revolves around one single idea taken to Pratchett and Baxter's versions of a logical conclusion. It's all about parallel universes, which obviously isn't an original subject by itself, but is defined well enough with its own set of rules and mysteries that it stood out to me as a well-developed concept. The set-up is thus; a mysterious scientist has discovered a way to travel to parallel dimensions with the aid of very simple home-made machinery, which he posts in certain places on the Internet for children and adolescents to replicate. Suddenly a whole bunch of inquisitive kids create their own 'stepper' boxes, and use them to 'step' away from our Earth to adjacent dimensions.

TP & SB

Obviously this doesn't go unnoticed, as suddenly humanity has to come to terms with the new power to travel through an apparently infinite number of different Earths, none of which contain any human beings or living civilizations, essentially meaning that problems of world hunger or lack of space are a thing of the past; though, crucially, metallic objects can't be taken with you when stepping,  meaning migrating humans have to fight hard to survive and create their own lives in their new homes . The authors jump forward a few decades after establishing this to introduce their main character and set up the plot for this first installment of the series. Main character Joshua Valente is a natural stepper, able to traverse the dimensions without the need of a stepper box, seemingly making him the perfect person to join a mysterious expedition to travel further through the worlds than anyone else has.

Despite establishing its own set of rules, this book is not hard science fiction. It's a science fiction adventure story with more in common with the works of Arthur Conan Doyle than Frank Herbert, for example, and with the pen of Terry Pratchett driving the adventure on I (inevitably, in hindsight) ended up completely loving this book- so much so that it took my just two sittings to finish the whole thing. It's not Pratchett's best work by any means; some of it is clunky (particularly the specific references to famous sci fi novels and films, which felt very forced), probably due to a clash between authors, but the vast majority of it runs very smoothly. It's not a literary classic, it's not even a science fiction classic, but it takes just enough inspiration from genre classics and contains just enough mystery and suspense to hook the reader very early on.

The Long Earth was my favourite piece of light reading for a long time. I found it takes concepts from and pays obvious (but well-mannered) tribute to classics like 2001 and Planet of the Apes, as well as 90's TV standbys Sliders and Quantum Leap a mixes them up well enough to create a fictional universe that offers ample opportunities for sequels. In the time it took for me to buy and read this book Pratchett and Baxter have released the next two installments in the series with another two to come, so I hope the same sense of adventure prevails through them all, so I can praise them when I finish reviewing them in about three hundred years.

George Orwell- Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia

Penguin Classics

George Orwell

1936

Other Orwell Reviews- Burmese Days - A Clergyman's Daughter - Homage to Catalonia - Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

“When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.” 

The first time I read Homage to Catalonia, a borrowed copy about six years ago, I didn't really like it. This left me with the nagging sensation that this was unacceptable; a feeling that grew with each subsequent novel by George Orwell that I read. I habitually drew out the process of reading through bibliographies of my favourite authors, and when I finally finished off the set with Burmese Days I still couldn't get over it, so a re-read was absolutely necessary. I fear that when I first read it I rushed it and was far too distracted, but I found it to be not what I was expecting. My love of Orwell was, at the time, completely entwined with my love of Nineteen-Eighty Four and its subversiveness, and I felt a lack of similar traits made it seem, well, just not cool enough to care about.

Upon re-examining the book, the things I found most immediately curious about Homage to Catalonia were firstly the sheer nerve of the whole thing, and secondly the more passive, observational tone of the prose. Orwell barely touches on his arrival in Spain in the midst of civil war nor his reasons for doing so (most of these details are saved for the two appendices- more on those later), with his need to join the fight against the progression of fascism in Europe really needing no justification. The relative lack of political commentary, usually so prevalent in Orwell's books, is very noticeable, and is almost certainly what upset me about it upon first read. Bearing that in mind as I started again gave it a better chance for its particular style to sink in, but in hindsight the genuine lack of that cutting, insightful analysis Orwell is so revered for does leave Catalonia a step behind his best work.

What Orwell does instead is write a very descriptive and well-constructed account of his time trudging across Spain with a misfit militia, occasionally encountering great danger, constantly enduring great discomfort, and eventually becoming an enemy of the police state. It has all the ingredients of an enthralling narrative, and Orwell's typically dry prose becomes much more observational than usual (except for perhaps Down and Out in Paris and London). As an Englishman myself I tend to read Orwell's work in one hundred percent relation to British society and sensibilities, and so the humid Spanish atmosphere comes across as positively alienesque, reflected through Orwell's disposition and occasional struggle to communicate away from home. The heavily observational style hugely benefits in this regards, capturing this period in time superbly and leaving me enthralled at times- but I have to reiterate that the lack of a more powerful, decisive analysis of the events as a whole leave this trailing Orwell's best.

The narrative is engaging to the end, where it the book is concluded by two additional appendices in which Orwell attempts to untangle the various political parties and figures that clashes to create the whole mess in the first place. When I first read the book I was excited to reach this, hoping for the real facts of the matter to come to life for Orwell to viciously tear apart. Instead, Orwell actually warns the reader that these segments will be boring for those not interested in party politics, and that the reader should skip these if this doesn't interest them. The first time I tried they bored me to tears, so this time I skipped them. It's a really disappointing ending to the book to be honest, since it really did need a more reader-friendly conclusion to put things more in context.

It's undeniable that Homage to Catalonia is another massively important step on the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially in giving the author a personal view of the advancing effects of facism, but for me my enjoyment came from the differences in Orwell's style here as a first-person non-fiction narrator, creating a more adventurous, thrilling tone in a strange (well, to me anyway) environment. I enjoyed this much more than the first time I read it, though it does suffer in comparison to some of Orwell's bibliography. To me it's more of an intriguing curio that I can't really see myself returning to for a long time, if ever, but it shouldn't disappoint any prospective Orwell completists too much.

Not Books IV- Unintentional X-Men Edition

TV Shows-

Star Trek- The Original Series- Season Three (1968-1969)

As I finally came around to finishing my leisurely stroll through the most influential science fiction series of any medium of all time, it was time to find out if the general consensus regarding this season was true. Almost every post on the Internet regarding TOS agrees that the third and final season is unfortunately a big step down from the glories of the previous two, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to be unoriginal and conform to the standard, because it's absolutely true. Not that Star Trek in its first two seasons was really ever a true artistic classic, comparable with the advance storytelling of modern television, because it wasn't really about that for me. The reason why I enjoyed the show enough to prefer it to every other Star Trek series (including The Next Generation) was its basis in the traditional format of sci-fi. The stand-alone episodes allowed the writers, inundated as they were of a time featuring plenty of sci-fi adventure parables, to explore the then-fresh philosophical dilemmas and implications of the genre, dress it up with a bunch of people wearing terrible make-up, and then fortify it with the use of fantastic characters with established personalities.

The problem is with season three of TOS that the writers lost their inspiration, perhaps even got lazy, and the show massively suffers with inconsistency. There are a lot of episodes of the 26-episode season where the writer seems to have come up with a basic idea for a sci-fi concept requiring moralising, then failed to see the idea through to any satisfying conclusion. The fifty minute episode lengths perhaps required too much plotting, but then many of these episodes lose steam far earlier than that, and simply devolve into stupid set-pieces leading to boring endings. Reading further into the production histories of these episodes (like the nerd I am) very often enlightened me to established scripting problems often caused by clashes between the writing and production staff. It seems the wheels had well and truly come off by this point, resulting in a really laboured TV show, and episodes so stupid (yet memorably so) they seems like a parody of the much more focused, serious ideas of earlier. As a result of all this it took me a long time to finish the show, but I am looking forward to getting around to watching the movies (of which I think I've only seen two already, because I'm bad at films), and possibly the animated series.

Films-

 

X-Men- First Class (2011)

With the newest film in the X-Men about to hit cinemas and me about to go see it, I thought it was definitely time to go back and re-watch the last installment for the first time. Though it had been a couple of years since I watched it, I vividly remembered my detailed analytical thoughts basically consisting of 'it's quite good'. Luckily for me I didn't have to bother finding my own copy to watch because it was on TV, so I was able to re-familiarise myself with this continuity-breaking prequel starring younger versions of the old actors that I really liked. I was happy to report that my updated opinion is that it's actually definitely quite good, but not brilliant.

Seriously though, First Class is a perfectly acceptable, three-star blockbuster Hollywood super-hero film that does everything decently, but for me failed to stand out enough on its own merit. I enjoyed the performances in general, though couldn't help viewing them as inferior to Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, enjoyed the action sequences as to be expected, and enjoyed the villains led by Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw. It's all fine, and certainly the best X-Men film since X-Men II, but unfortunately fell flat when put up against Brian Singer's first two X-Men films. Those two really got me excited for the potential of comics on the big screen, those and Sam Raimi's first two Spider-Man films showed how a talented director could transpose the gigantic overall themes and moral dilemmas prevalent in the best superhero comics onto the big screen. First Class is a good standalone film, a well-made alternative X-Men movie with some great ideas and effort, but it fell short of making a big impact to me thanks to the lack of gravitas.

The Wolverine

I was never really hyped much for Wolverine's second solo film, there didn't seem to be anything interesting about it going in. Sure, Hugh Jackman is the definitive face and voice of Wolverine, but was anybody really crying out for this film, what with the infinitely more exciting Days of Future Past coming out shortly after? It does have a comics credibility factor thanks to its basis in the Chris Claremont/Frank Miller miniseries (which leads me to wonder how much Chris Claremont got paid for coming up with the plots to two multi-million dollar X-Men films in a row- probably much less than he should have), but that comic isn't really a classic story, but a spectacular collection of Frank Miller art.

Still, it was a little refreshing to know that the script for this film was designed to mostly step away from the quagmire of continuity surrounding the X-Men movie franchise and Wolverine in particular. The X-Men Origins- Wolverine film was unspeakably bad (maybe even worse than X-Men III... maybe), turning the carefully crafted big-screen Wolverine character of X-Mens I and II into just another cartoon character. Sending him to Japan to be all dark and brooding, and hopefully have a bit of genre-fun was a good idea on paper, but unfortunately it all ended up being far too plain. I'm trying to think of how to explain the plot, but I seem to have forgotten most of it for being really boring- it's full of seemingly-Japanese plot devices like ninjas, crafty businessmen and impish women of completely indeterminable age.

 Of course what I really want is a Wolverine film with a higher age restriction and buckets and buckets of blood. It's never going to happen obviously because of what the character really is, but it would be really nice.

 

X-Men- Days of Future Past

I was confident from the start that I was going to love this movie, as soon as Brian Singer was announced as director. His first two X-Men films sit just behind Spider-Man 2 as my favourite superhero films of them all, due to a combination of themes and styles pulling together comic films that really felt like comics books. Days of Future Past, then is all that and then more; the most comic book-like of all the comic book films, and a movie that manages to capture the positive essence of the X-Men in the characters and stories on almost a meta-level. It's particularly so in this film because of the way Singer ties together the past two generations of X-Men casts and does his best to meld the character's continuity that was so confused by the events of First Class (and it doesn't work and fit absolutely perfectly, but works far better than most ret-cons I've ever seen).

While I loved the inclusion of all the older X-actors (especially the unexpected ones at the end), it was basically the younger cast plus Wolverine that get the absolute bulk of the action, and none of them disappointed. In regards to the new actors; as everyone else has already mentioned, Quicksilver was absolutely brilliant and needs to return for the next film, but I was a little (lol) disappointed that Peter Dinkage as Boliver Trask didn't get that much to do despite technically being the lead villain. I'm getting bored of writing about X-Men and everyone on the Internet has already reviewed this film properly, so all finish up by saying that I need to re-watch this to confirm if it cracks the top echelon of comic book films, but it's looking good.

 Thor- The Dark World

My second favourite superhero film I happened to watch over the past two months was a full-on CGI fest of wonder and magic. While I didn't particularly like the original Thor for seeming just a bit too generic and unimaginative for me, I much preferred this sequel, thanks to improvement in pretty much every area. Visually Thor II is absolutely sublime, perhaps the best-looking big budget film I've seen in a while thanks to the fantastically imaginative design put into the CGI constructions of Asgard and the other eight realms. It also wasn't afraid to the throw the viewer right in to the concept sci-fi/fantasy storyline, which, while not exactly mind-blowing, was plotted tightly enough to work.

Also, despite the lashings of money all over the place, there was something about the dark elves characters and Christopher Ecclestone's Malaki in particular that somehow conjured up similarities to many minimal-budget children's fantasy television shows from the UK that I grew up with. Going in to the film I didn't know Ecclestone was in it, and for a second I thought Malaki was played by Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boosh. No point to this, just felt like I had to mention it. Quality film reviewing here.

Toby Young- The Sound of No Hands Clapping

The Sound of No Hands Clapping

Toby Young

2006

Over a year ago back in February 2013 I read and reviewed long-standing English journalist Toby Young's first novel How To Lose Friends and Alienate People as an example of some lightweight non-fiction, offering a few laughs alongside copious amounts of gossip regarding the strange world Young encounters as he desperately tries to make his name writing in the US. Later adapted into a film starring Simon Pegg (which I just can't sum up the enthusiasm to watch), the book became an unexpected best-seller on both sides of the Atlantic, as it documented Young's employment as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, and his inevitable falling out with absolutely everybody. It's a decent book, written by an author who's very comfortable using his particular languid, conversational prose style, and he does a good job establishing himself as a (mildly) lovable loser who always messes things up for himself. It does, however, lose a lot of steam the more it continues on.

It was really just a bit of obsessive-compulsiveness that led me to read the sequel. I found The Sound of No Hands Clapping in a second-hand bookshop, and it sat on the to-read pile for about a year before I very nearly decided to abandon my plan to read it, and give it back to the charity shop. My expectations weren't high, since the hook of the book didn't seem that interesting, and also because in my experience follow-up memoirs from media-types are usually quick cash-ins lacking the heart and the purpose of the originals. The basis of No Hands Clapping is Toby's immediate future following the release of his last book, and his decision to seek his fortune as a Hollywood screenwriter, following a couple of opportunities from both the adaptation of his first book, and a random from an offer from an unnamed Hollywood bigwig to write a bio-pic.

The handsome visage of Toby Young

On the surface this does seem to offer up the potential for some Hollywood insight, but ultimately (spoiler alert), what we get is two-hundred and fifty pages-plus of Toby completely failing to gain any sort of foothold in Tinseltown whatsoever. In hindsight it's almost completely baffling to me how badly planned this book must have been, something that's completely evident in the lack of structure, adventure or character development. I know this is a piece of non-fiction but it's appeal is completely based upon the success and entertainment of Young's first book, which was a much fuller, well-organised narrative that did have some of those things (though not in abundance); but then that book also had the advantage of covering a wider time period in a more interesting set-up. The Sound of No Hands Clapping has none of the advantages of a set-up as interesting as working for magazine publishing dynasty Condé Nast. Instead it's just Toby Young and his long-suffering wife living back in England, snatching at show-business tit-bits, embarrassing in a far crueler way than his hi-jinks of the past.

It's almost as if this book was a back-up plan for Young in the event that his screenwriting career might somehow not take-off, and that as a result he didn't have the foresight to apply himself to settings and situations that might make his book more interesting. The meetings with the mysterious Hollywood bigwig are genuinely interesting, as are other conversations with people in that game, but there's just not enough of it. Instead there's plenty of stuff about Toby Young and his wife, the vast majority of it cloaked in that godawful British tabloid sens of humour where acting like a misogynist is apparently okay if it's self-aware behaviour. Young goes into great detail about his family, which (really boring spoiler alert) grows by two babies during the course of everything else. That's nice and everything, but it's as boring as hell since by this point Toby Young is nowhere near endearing or established enough as a character for me to possibly care. It felt like I was reading some bizarre mixture of Tony Parsons (probably the most boring, pointless author I've ever read, author of Man and Boy amongst other crap) and Jeremy Clarkson, playing a good-old politically incorrect British rugby club bore. These segments killed the book stone dead for me, and as they became more and more prevalent further on, the less and less interested I became, to the point where I was racing through it just to put it down afterwards.

So yes, The Sound of No Hands Clapping is a worthless book; I gave it one star out of five on Goodreads. But at the same time it did have some potential; Young's style is assured and he seemed to have a gateway into a world that would give him some fantastic content, but instead he completely choked on his opportunities and ended up writing about his wife getting pregnant twice. Good for him, but not something that hasn't happened to a few other billion people on this planet.

W. Somerset Maugham- Cakes and Ale

Cakes and Ale

W. Somerset Maugham

1930

Other Maugham Reviews- Cakes and Ale - The Magician - The Razor's Edge

"You see, she wasn’t a woman who ever inspired love. Only affection. It was absurd to be jealous over her. She was like a clear deep pool in a forest glade into which it’s heavenly to plunge, but it is neither less cool nor less crystalline because a tramp and a gipsy and a gamekeeper have plunged into it before you.”

Cakes and Ale is a very curious book, at only two hundred pages long (in my edition) it's almost a novella that tells a meandering story and begins in a style and setting that gave me certain expectations then suddenly defied them with a flourish. W. Somerset Maugham is an author who I find massively intriguing, a man whose image, background and reputation combine to offer a certain reputable image that, I'm increasingly finding, exists as only the tip of the iceberg when compared to the depth of personality he brings to his writing. My paperback edition has a quote on the cover from George Orwell, describing Maugham as 'the modern writer who has influenced me the most', and prior to reading I'd pondered that statement, not sure if as an Orwell fan I had seen such influences yet in my small experiences with Maugham. I'd really enjoyed reading The Magician as a dark Gothic horror story, and I'd admired the prose quality of The Razor's Edge (though perhaps not fully appreciating it), but it was only two-thirds of the way through Cakes and Ale that it all began to click properly in my head, the key themes that Maugham had been exploring in each of these novels, attacking them from different angles with different outcomes like George Orwell (or Paul Auster).

To be absolutely honest, until that point I wasn't greatly enjoying Cakes and Ale. I liked it, sure, thanks to Maugham's essentially perfect prose writing and his colourful characters of London literary society, but beyond that it was falling flat in the sense that I couldn't bring myself to care enough about his satire on said literary society, I couldn't see anything further than that. Maugham writes from the first person through his surely somewhat autobiographical creation William Ashenden, who is asked suddenly by a literary biographer for information regarding the life of his deceased contemporary Edward Driffield. Most of the novel is framed through Ashenden's account of his memories of Driffield, from their young manhood as aspiring authors to his eventual demise. Drifting in and out through key moments over the years (similar to Maugham's own meta-narration of The Razor's Edge) Ashenden recalls a controversial story of love and of freedom mostly regarding Driffield's first wife Rosie, a stand-out character who the events of the plot revolve around.

It wasn't really until the Ashendon becomes a more active part of the events, as one of Rosie's lovers that I really caught on to the novel's themes. Maugham writes Rosie as a completely free-loving character who seems like a force of nature, impossible to control or keep but a perfect muse for the literary men of the novel. I wouldn't call her a hippy, but Maugham was ahead of his time in the creation of a character with many of the same attributes. Through Ashendon, who for a time falls in love with Rosie, Maugham eventually philsophises on the nature of love and obsession, of fidelity and freedom in long passages that I loved (and which made the Orwell connection make more sense to me, compared to something like Coming Up for Air). The elder, narrating Ashden's ruminations of the winding events of the story lead him to defend the liberal notions of romantic freedom against the condemnation automatically placed upon them by his contemporary society. Maugham even gives the reader the happy conclusion that I know I wanted, when Ashendon is finally reunited with Rosie decades after last seeing her.

In a sense it seems odd to me that I'm now so upbeat about a novel that for two thirds of I had only enjoyed in patches, but this is a novel that requires some perseverance, as though Maugham's descriptions of the lives and sensibilities of decent society needed such emphasis for the sense of satire to push through. Personally I didn't find the book funny at all; the biting commentary on the establishment is incredibly dry, and the fullness of the characters and poignancy of Ashendon's observations seemed so strong to me that the satire felt more tragic than anything else. The ending really does a lot for the book, and while I'm hesitant to fully spoil it I will say that it came across as a decisive victory for the liberal spirit of Rosie Driffield, and almost a reward for the reader when learning of her eventual fate. The themes of the novel are so entwined within the characters, and Maugham is such a patiently-spoken narrator that the ending felt very satisfying for me. I think this might be the book where I really properly began to understand Maugham and his most important literary themes, with the reward for struggling through the groundwork making it all entirely worthwhile.