Reading, 5

Books in the order that I read them …

William Gibson is now a favorite SF author and I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve read by him recently. But reading his first novel, Neuromancer, soon after it was first published in 1984, I recall thinking then that his subject matter was hard to grasp. Whether due to the way he talked about it, or just the mere unfamiliarity … I think a combination.

At the time of that reading, I lived ‘on the road’, traveling Australia. Down-times we spent reading but in general, life was simplified to the extent it was often hard to remember what was going on in the rest of the world. Living out of a modified Toyota Landcruiser, I found it hard to figure out Gibson’s meanings. Often I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Back when Gibson wrote Neuromancer, much of the tech was new and its words hadn’t yet entered commonality. The computer and internet age had only barely got going and Gibson was describing how that world was developing. Reading the Neuromancer trilogy now, in 2026, I am right there with the characters.

Book 11. Mona Lisa Overdrive by Willian Gibson, first published in 1988 by Gollancz.

Mona is a girl “with a murky past and uncertain future” sold to a plastic surgeon to be surgically altered to closely resemble a famous star.

I picked this up secondhand, because it was a William Gibson and I hadn’t read it yet, not realizing it is the third of his early books set in the Sprawl-universe. While enjoying Gibson’s descriptions as usual, and easily recognizing his trope of high-tech set in the slums of the future, I got hopelessly lost in the first half of the novel, reading about four very different POVs, characters that seemed to have nothing to do with each other. I was continually anticipating where and how they’d meet or intersect.

Discussing the matter with my SF reading buddy, I learned I was reading part three of Gibson’s first trilogy. That some of the characters had appeared in Neuromancer, and that all three novels—Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive—as well as some of the stories in the Burning Chrome collection are set partly in the Sprawl, and partly in a future Japan.

The Sprawl, the fictional equivalent of the “Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, an urban environment extending along most of the East Coast of the United States” from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprawl_trilogy; the Japanese scenes seem to take place primarily in Chiba …

Let me tell you, in 1984 I did not yet know what a coffin hotel was, and since the internet had only barely got started in those years, there were no quick looking-up opportunities. Wikipedia, for example, started in March 2001.

Gibson often mentions the matrix and in fact he invented that concept, as well as cyber space and virtual reality. The movie that introduced the public domain to the matrix hails from 1999, fifteen years after Neuromancer hit the bookshops. All three concepts part of our ordinary understanding these days.

From the backcover of Neuromancer: “The Matrix: a world within a world, a graphic representation of the databanks of every computer in the human system; a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate users in the Sprawl alone.”

Nowadays even people not reading SF are aware we live in that reality.

Then, since we happened to have the whole rest of the series on hand, I re-read …

Book 12. Neuromancer by William Gibson, first published in Great Britain in 1984 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Also from the back cover, continuing from above … “And by Case, computer cowboy, until his nervous system is grievously maimed by a client he double-crossed. Japanese experts in nerve-splicing and micro-bionics have left him broke and close to dead. But at last Case has found a cure. He’s going back into the system. Not for the bliss of cyber-space but to steal again, this time from the big boys, the almighty mega-corps. In return, should he survive, he will stay cured.”

Book 13. Count Zero by William Gibson, first published in Great Britain in 1986 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.

Part of the back cover reads … “In the matrix of cyberspace — zaibatsus fought it out for world domination and the computer jocks risked their minds scuffling for fat crumbs — the lives of three human beings were inextricably scrambled.”

The future has totally caught up with these stories, the so-called futuristic slang sounds normal.

There are one or two concepts that even read like anachronisms. Tapes and cassettes. Polycarbon variants. Slanting gro-lights that dangled from twin lengths of curly cord.

Book 14. Burning Chrome by William Gibson and various other authors, first published in Great Britain in 1986 by Victor Gollancz Ltd.

There’s an excellent prologue by Bruce Sterling, also a well-known SF author.

The four books above are said to be a trilogy + a collection of short stories, all set in the same universe centered in the so-called Sprawl. Not a trilogy in the way of a sequence of one story too large to tell in one novel but more a threesome of books all set in the same fictional universe, and sharing some characters, at least in the case of Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive.

Gibson is the king of adjectives, he parses out meaning and description in every phrase, with every verb, every noun. And metaphors? An all-round joy to read. How can you not enjoy reading the following … ?

“Rubin inserts a skinny probe in the roller-bearing belly of a sluggish push-me-pull-you and peers at the circuitry through magnifying glasses with miniature headlights mounted at the temples.” From The Wintermarket, p 149 in Burning Chrome.

Mongrel, 40 & 41

The rabbit-hole, when asked for an image of silver water pouring, coughed out this illustration for an article on colloidal silver. Then of course it had to be screen-shotted, resized and otherwise groomed to take its place in this story. In the process I lost the name of the website-of-origin, my apologies. Let me know if you recognize it as yours and I shall reference you.

40. Rita de Heer, Mongrel Download

41. Rita de Heer, Mongrel Download

Mongrel, 38 & 39

Various species of Leptospermum, or Teatree, an Australian native genus have been made into balms and other medicinal products for thousands of years. Here the flower and fruit of the Pink Teatree (Leptospermum squarrosum)

By JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6655154

38. Rita de Heer, Mongrel Download

39. Rita de Heer, Mongrel Download

Reading, 4

Next up is a book I’ve been wanting to read for about 20 years. When it was first published, the title grabbed me … Matthew Flinders’ Cat. I already knew that Flinders had a cat he’d named Trim, and had seen the bronze statue of Trim at the State Library of New South Wales.

I didn’t research the story beforehand as nowadays I usually do, just looked forward to reading a blow-by-blow account of Matthew Flinders’ voyage mapping the coastlines of what was then New Holland, accompanied by his cat.

Usually I wait until a book comes out in paperback before buying it, so when I didn’t see it appear in the local bookshop a year later, forgot about it. Since then I’ve seen it a few times in libraries without there ever being an opportunity to borrow it, and a couple of weeks ago saw it on one of the two bookshops I now frequent.

And so bought it. Because I needed a new, chewy read, and for the expectations I just described, but still not knowing anything about it apart from the fact that Trim might be one of the main characters.

Book 10. Matthew Flinders’ Cat by Bryce Courtenay, this edition published in 2006 by the Penguin group.

How did I miss that it was written by Bryce Courtenay? I’ve read a few of his but generally don’t like his style. To me they’re the kind of book I might read if there is nothing else available.

Such as when stuck in a camping ground by the roads being flooded and Bryce Courtenay book is the only thing to be found in the camp laundry. That’s where I found The Potato Factory and read that. But that’s by the by.

Reading the first paragraph of this book I knew it wasn’t going to come to my expectations but, I reminded myself, that was my own fault. And since I had given out good money for it, I would read it.

‘Billy O’Shannessy woke to the raucous laughter of two kookaburras seated on top of adjacent telegraph poles.’

There is Billy O’Shannessy … Courtenay does this thing that I was taught as a new fiction writer, make the first two words about the the main character. In that same first sentence there is also setting the scene, in this case the Australian scenario with the two kookaburras. And there is the modernity of telegraph poles, if a slightly old-fashioned term for them telling us the story is set in the present. Telegraph poles might’ve been normal for 2002, when the book was first published. I don’t remember. The rest of the paragraph tells of his hangover and that the birds served as his ‘regular alarm clock’.

In the next paragraph I learned he was lying on a park bench with a canopy of leaves over him. It’s only on the third page that Trim gets a mention and then only his life-sized bronze statue on a window ledge of the state library

By en:User:PanBK – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Trim-the-illustrous.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1182097

The Wikipedia page about Trim is interesting. He’s got several more statues, one in Donington, UK and one in Port Lincoln, South Australia, as well as a glowing epitaph by Matthew Flinders himself.

Alas, this book is not primarily about Trim, or even Matthew Flinders.

Purporting to be a novel, it seems to me to be written as a tribute to the Salvation Army, the Twelve Step Program to recover from drugs and alcohol abuse and rehab, and the many services helping homeless people and troubled children in Kings Cross, Sydney. All very worthwhile people and services, I’m not denying that.

Published two years after Courtenay’s divorce, I did wonder whether he was writing a semi-autobiographical novel, that he was a recovering alcoholic. The fact that it is his twelfth novel might explain why an editor would do less editing, leaving unchanged the info dumps, for example, consisting of half or three-quarter pages describing people and places.

But I’ve often wondered how people go about writing a tribute novel so in that respect this was an interesting read. First, he had a professional researcher … the results of research are big in this novel. There are screeds of explanations. Over pages 333-334 there’s a paragraph of over 200 words. That’s almost a whole page. Commonly called a wall of text. It seems very 19th century-ish.

In places it feels like Courtenay inserted a whole paragraph straight from the source. That can’t be right, of course. Courtenay was a well-respected author. I like to think there would’ve been at least one rewrite to make the material his own.

In addition, most professional people wouldn’t hesitate when approached by a famous author to tell them about their world, any extra mention is going to help promote their concerns, right? That also shows in the detail about organizations such as the Salvation Army. I imagine there’s a fine line between wanting to do one’s sources justice and keeping the story from dragging the weight of excess information.

The bits about Trim were the story Billy O’Shannessy told Ryan, the ten-year-old other main character. Trim is imagined in the talking-animal style with a lot of agency. Which left me wondering whether the adventures described had any truth in them. They read like fantasy.
Probably I’ll try to find something nearer to Matthew Flinders’ own account of his and Trim’s circumnavigation of Australia.

Reading, 3

The third post of this series already though I haven’t settled into a routine yet. Today had the better idea of what to do about the illustration. Instead of letting just one book have all the glory, why not give them all a chance to attract readers? Will give that a go shortly.

The longer without a routine the better, I used to think before I was pole-axed by ME/CFS. Come Easter, I’ll have lived with this malady for 29 years. Somewhere along the line I learned that making decisions is a stressor that saps my strength.

The idea out there—in the public domain—is that the more non-important decisions we encapsulate in routines the more energy we’ll have to make important decisions. It’s not wrong … routines enable me. Interesting article on decision-making … https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision-making

Then I thought what about at the end of the year? Won’t I want to know how many books I actually read? That is the project after all. I saw myself counting through the posts. Got to be an easier way. Just number them already. So … started that today.

Book 5. The Light Pirate by Lily Brooks-Dalton, 2022. Published by Grand Central Publishing of New York.

This is the only book out of the five that I’ll recommend. I might’ve mentioned before on this blog that the climate change apocalypse, and its associated nightmare horsemen are my Sword of Damocles, and that the thread the sword is hanging by is wearing mighty thin and frayed.

The Light Pirate is set in the near-future and describes how the Florida coast is being engulfed the sea. It’s a blow-by-blow account of the way one family dies and adapts and is taken and finally evolves for a new existence. Ninety percent stark dark reality and ten percent luminous hope.

This is a book I would like to own. Read the good bits every now and then. This story speaks for everywhere there is low ground by the sea.

Book 6. Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg, 1969. First serialized in Galaxy Magazine it was published in 2015 by Gollancz in their SF Masterworks.

Although I’ve been reading science fiction since I was about 13, and Robert Silverberg has written hundreds of stories, I haven’t read all that many. Scanning through the titles in the front, I see only one that I own. Most don’t ring a bell. This little classic is said to … “blend mysticism, worldbuilding and literary references in an inventive mix …” from the backcover.

It’s probably about 60 thousand words, a common size in the 1970s, with a single storyline, the journey of the main character, Gundersen, returning to the planet after a ten year absence, out of guilt and needing to do penance for his mistreatment of the native species.

When I read old science fiction I’m forever fielding echoes. In this book I was reminded of some of Oscar Scott Card’s work. Comparing the dates of Silverberg’s and Card’s work, I think probably Card got his idea of the melding of the two species from Silverberg. Although, they could both have got the idea from Earth’s own panoply of creatures. Most insects, for example, have vastly different life-stages.

Book 7. Iron in the Soul by Jean-Paul Satre, 1949. This edition translated by Gerald Hopkins and published by Penguin Classics, 2002.

Despite that there was plenty of Jean-Paul Satre around when I was a young student, I was never tempted to read him then. Now I thought, browsing along the shelves at Carindale Library, why would Penguin choose to republish him as one of their classics if there wasn’t something to him?

I read a few pages in the middle—that’s the way I test books for readability—and thought it might be interesting. A whole other viewpoint about the Second World War, this one from the POV of the rank and file of the French Army.
Thousands were taken to Germany and, I read just now, more than ten thousand French soldiers fought alongside the Germans. I wonder if they were given a choice, fight for us or we shove you in a work camp? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_during_World_War_II

Book 8. Wolf Girl: Into the Wild by Anh Do, 2019 with illustrations by Jeremy Ley, 2019. Published by Allen & Unwin.

Seriously, was a bit of light relief, I zipped through this in about an hour. A story aimed at 8-10 year olds that my grandson lent me. I was interested to read how Anh Do, serious artist, translates into Anh Do, children’s author. His style reminds me of Enid Blyton’s.

There are about a dozen installments. A money-spinner, if you ask me. And yet, Enid Blyton’s vast output was great for struggling readers, giving them lots and lots of practice of the plain vocabulary that they needed to become good readers. So perhaps this is the place for Anh Do’s output in Australia.

Book 9. The Woods by Harlan Coben, 2007. Published by Orion Books.

Returning a bunch of books to the in-house library in the community center, I picked up The Woods because Coben wrote it and I hadn’t read it yet. Pure indulgence. A fast forgettable read. Suspense? Of course. All the t’s crossed and the dots dotted? Yes. “The modern master of hook and twist,” says Dan Brown on the front cover. (Wonder what he got or did to get his name on someone else’s front cover?)

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The so-called Australian Meat Pie … a traditional savory delicacy if you can eat gluten and beef … that nowadays comes in many different flavors, of meat as well as sweets. traditionally eaten out of the hand, not from a plate with a knife and fork. Although pubs do plate them and serve them with mashed potatoes, peas and gravy. Not in the case of Jay Jason though, he’ll bag them.

By Finbar.concaig – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93219006

35. Rita de Heer, Mongrel Download

Reading, 2

The project continues.

Next up was Chasm City by Alistair Reynolds, published in 2001. “A hardboiled pursuit/revenge thriller set in the RS universe,” from the author’s website. RS = Revelation Space, which I don’t know anything about other than what I’ve just read. Thriller? Nah.

An eight-day read, worked at diligently. Dense and detail rich. According to my research after reading it, this is Reynolds’ second published novel. And also second in reading order, it’s a ‘stand-alone’ as the Reddit experts tell it, but which surprised me as there seemed quite a bit of bloat. Stuff, that for the sake of the pace, readers could’ve done without. Stuff that I wanted to skim, but ended up plodding through because of not knowing what was essential to the plot.
There goes my theory that editors don’t look as closely at authors with a lot of books already published.

At times I thought I was reading about Mars. I think it was a case of stories bleeding into one another due to proximity. In this case, me watching The Expanse Series by James S A Corey on television. I think probably due to the sheer size of the chasm. Very Martian. Though in this case, it’s a planet called Yellowstone and a large part of the chasm is domed over.

Life in the chasm is very interesting, regional. As can be expected the upper classes live in the Canopy, the slums are in the Compost. Travel is by semi sentient vehicles that claw their way up and down and along hanging vegetation and cables. The slum dwellers are all about making a living. The rich play at turkey shoots, where they free a prisoner and force them to run for their lives.

The two main characters, with at first separate stories, eventually seem to meld into one another. The POV character keeps changing identities, and is as slippery as an eel to keep hold of. I found that quite disconcerting as the story is complex and I found it easy to get lost in. I did a lot of re-reading.

Why didn’t this turn into a DNF read? (Did Not Finish for those of us at war with acronyms). It could’ve, to be honest. But Reynolds also wrote the Revenger trilogy… Revenger, Shadow Captain, and Bone Silence. Three of my favorite modern science fiction reads.

Fantastic worldbuilding, great characters, piracy and treasure hunting, a gripping plot, a steampunk flavor. Rave, rave, rave.

Reading Chasm City I kept wanting to give Reynolds more time to come good, to tell the story with as much verve and vitality he’d shown in Revenger. I think now, knowing the Chasm City was only his second novel, that he was still learning.