Lives of Photographs, 45

This photo of the enormous ceiling of Beijing Capital International Airport's Terminal 3 (the largest airport terminal building in the world) is now part of a photostream illustrating an article at NowPublic on China setting new standards for air passengers before the Olympics.

2008 books

50) Thomas M. Disch, 334, 1972  ( RE-READ )

"It's not just that I think you're stupid, though I suppose I do, but that you have so well trained yourself in that difficult form of dishonesty that you call "faith" that you can't any longer see the world the way it is."

This is the novel (or more correctly, set of linked stories) which for me showed how Disch was often too clever by half for the rest of us (the novella 'Angouleme' included here was the subject of a book-length critical essay by Samuel R. Delany, who argued that despite the absence of scientific themes its speculative setting made it inherently science fiction). A snapshot of the 21st century lives of the people who live in 334 East 11th St, New York, it ranges from being at turns darkly comic and farcical to sharply realistic and unfailingly sympathetic. The science fiction is there in places but played down to the everyday while the social realism is played up, to the point that 334 takes the reader into immersive layers of intricacy, and with a Dickensian eye for detail that shrugs off the fact that this is all meant to be about 'the future'. Neither was it ever meant to be a fun read in the way that Camp Concentration could be, and if Disch's last posts on his LJ were indicative of the direction his thoughts were heading in his last weeks, he'd been there already in fiction with 334's last sentences. Someone – and really I can only mean Terry Gilliam – could probably make a very decent film of this.

2008 books

51) Christopher Priest, The Dream Archipelago, 1999
Six stories (two of which are novellas) set on a chain of equatorial islands that are the focus of a long continental war, on a world that permanently sits beneath a strange vortex in time. These are very English stories in their manner as well as the romance of the setting, the archipelago representing an ideal locale for the perfect escape except that it is far less than perfect in reality, and is also where these stories' protagonists get to face themselves in unexpected and uncomfortable ways. Best of all is 'The Miraculous Cairn', which turns around at least one of the reader's suppositions brilliantly, and 'The Watched' which combines a smattering of quantum theory with a rather Jungian fixation. Loaded with metaphor and dream symbolism, Priest is something of a master at depicting unresolved sexual tensions. Highly recommended.

2008 books

52) Stefan Grabinski, The Dark Domain, 1993  ( RECOMMENDED BY CHINA MIÉVILLE )
Grabinski was an early 20th Century Polish writer who achieved brief notoriety with a few self-published collections of his own stories, before disappearing almost without trace, as he himself fully expected he would. All written between 1918 and 1922, these eleven stories are urban supernatural horrors in a fashion perhaps more populist than Lovecraft and more akin to Edgar Allan Poe, fairly straightforward in plotting and yet at the same time somehow more maverick. Best is the slightly science fictional 'Saturnin Sektor', in which a madman tries to kill off our concept of time and replace it with his own, but it's the solitude and imagined-horror-made-real impact of 'The Area' which perhaps best expresses Grabinski's own sense of artistic alienation. The re-emergence of Grabinski has been slow, starting in 1949 with his inclusion in an anthology of influential Polish fantasy tales, yet he's now often mentioned in the same breath as Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, and it's not difficult to see why.