Pimping a review

My review of Roger Levy's Icarus (shortlisted for this year's BSFA Award), is finally up at Strange Horizons. Much delayed, thanks to coalescent for his patience.

February 2007: 10 best photos

kongkang trees
Bang Saphan Yai, Thailand.   ( 5 FEBRUARY )
Next time I'm there I want to shoot these trees at sunrise.

( + 9... )

2007 books

24) Barry Lopez, Resistance, 2004
Nine loosely connected short stories about how individuals, at times of upheaval or personal challenge, have circumvented the self-defeating behaviours that often seem hardwired into us by our monolithic Western culture. Where a common response would be to live in fear of government, respond to violence with revenge or find salvation in consumerism, greed or misguided wars, Barry Lopez takes his characters on alternative courses of action with each one side-stepping into different ways of thinking, the kind of thing that happens when the irresistable force of the spirit meets the immovable object of a dehumanising but personal circumstance. Resistance seems to be precisely where I hoped to arrive at with my recent reading of Lopez because it all makes precisely the kind of uncommon sense I always look for yet rarely find. Resistance may be rooted in the counterculture of the ’60s but Lopez does not take easy refuge in either platitudes or cynicism; he preserves the restlessness of that era but reinvigorates it with maturity, a global awareness and a cautious optimism. A finely-balanced and necessary book, totally relevant to life in the West today. I will be recommending and, I hope, lending this to family and friends.

words of the day
coulee (n.): a deep, steep-sided ravine, formed by erosion; a natural inversion of a levee.
niłch'i (Navajo, n.): the Wind within one, a force invisible but essential to life that creates beneficence around us. The absence of niłch'i is a kind of stagnation of the spirit.

2007 books

A couple of years ago my reading was turning into a self-proscribed, pre-arranged list, a habit I felt I had to shake off. So instead, for one month, I read nothing but books by people called Jack. (Chalker, Finney, Haldeman, Kerouac, London, Vance, Williamson, Womack...) It was refreshing. These days I keep my proscribed reading down to a minimum (but always welcome recommendations), so similarly, just for the hell of it, this month I will mostly be reading: books with garish yellow covers. Starting with this one:



25) China Miéville, Looking for Jake, 2005
I'm glad I finally got round to picking this up as it's been near the top of my reading pile for too long. This collection of short stories and a novella is a rather diverse mixed bag while at the same time being unashamedly London-centric, though it is often only this locale that would identify many of these stories as being Miéville's in a literary 'taste test' (OK, there's some typically Miéville vernacular too, and thankfully one set in New Crobuzon). 'Reports of Certain Event in London' is Lovecraftian in intent if not in content, others like 'Go Between' and 'Different Skies' are fairly unremarkable but well-constructed fantasy fare, and there is one co-written effort that simply doesn't convince at all ('The Ball Room'). Thankfully the lefty politicking is mostly kept in check (something that took all the fun out of Iron Council for me), but when a story does have a strong political essence such as in 'An End to Hunger' and '’Tis the Season', he is often sharply funny. A re-read of 'The Tain' was worth it too, the only piece here that really stretches Miéville's considerable talents.

words of the day
conjuration (n.): the act of summoning a spirit by witchcraft.
kwashiorkor (n.): a type of childhood malnutrition, believed to be caused by insufficient protein intake.
tain (n.): the foil of reflective tin encased in a mirror.

I get a bad feeling about this

QuickTime trailer of the latest PKD film adaptation, Next, with Nicholas Cage and Julianne Moore. On the plus side, it also has Peter Falk and the music is by Mark Isham.