Recently in Books Category

... with a couple of Jan and maybe one from Dec.

In the past I've called this segment "Fav Covers". But screw it, I only called it my favourites cause I didn't want to come off as a tosser announcing what is superior design and art when I have no qualifications to do so. Then I realised that those who are "qualified" are simply people other people have allowed to be qualified as "qualified". So if you allow me, here are my best selects for the season.

And click on the pics to get a better scrut.

Here's the ten favourite books to come out in 2009 as picked by the Planet Books crew. It's not intended as a ten best list and not everyone's choices could be fitted in but it's still an interesting list all the same. It's in no intended order, just the way I threw it together. 

Ransom

by David Malouf

With learning worn lightly and in his own lyrical language, David Malouf revisits Homer's ILIAD. Focusing on the unbreakable bonds between men - Priam and Hector, Patroclus and Achilles, Priam and the cart-driver hired to retrieve Hector's body. Pride, grief, brutality, love and neighbourliness are explored. 

Boilerplate : History's Mechanical Marvel

by Paul Guinan & Anina Bennett

Designed by Professor Archibald Campion in 1893 as a prototype, for the self-proclaimed purpose of "preventing the deaths of men in the conflicts of nations". Campion and his robot also circled the planet with the U.S. Navy, trekked to the South Pole, made silent movies, and hobnobbed with the likes of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla. [Expect me to write more about this fellow]

Miss Herbert

by Adam Thirlwell

As Flaubert finished Madame Bovary, Miss Herbert, his niece's governess, translated the novel into English. But this translation has since been lost. This book is not a novel, but an inside-out novel - with novelists as characters. It demonstrates a new way of reading internationally - complete with maps, illustrations, and helpful diagrams. 

The Tree Show

by Mark Ryden

Never reluctant to freight his work with layers of reference that range from Renaissance landscape and Neoclassic portrait painting to occultism and literature, in his latest works Ryden combines the arcane with popular cultural images as ground from which to make his carefully executed leaps into fantasy. [I did a piece on Mark Ryden last year]

Dog Boy

by Eva Hornung

Extraordinary tale of a latter-day Mowgli in post-perestroika Russia is a devastating story of childhood, survival, family and life on the harsh edges of society.
 
There Was An Old Lady

by Jeremy Holmes

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly...a bird...a cat...a dog...a snake...a cow...and a horse. Do you know what happened to her? Of course you do! But with his distinct art style and a clever format, acclaimed graphic designer Jeremy Holmes has given the universal rhyme a unique makeover that is clever, funny, and unexpected.  Sum : Forty Tales from the Afterlives

by David Eagleman

Sum is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered-each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now.

These wonderfully imagined tale-at once funny, wistful, and unsettling-are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity.

Gentlemen of Bacongo

by Daniele Tamagni

Daniele Tamagni's wonderful pictorial essay brilliantly manages to capture the ebullience of sapeur culture at its source in Bacongo, a sprawling suburb of Brazzaville in The Congo. The sapeur style and relationship to clothes is unique - a throwback to a lost world of pre-colonial elegance and decadence and at the same time it is futuristic. [This reminded me of The Sartorialist. Perhaps Gentlemen of Bacongo deserves similar treatment]

The Window Seat

by Archie Weller

The Window Seat is a collection of his best short fiction - some award-winning and some previously unpublished. These stories are honest, brutal and often moving. In 'The Window Seat', we witness an old woman's final journey home and the view of the reluctant white traveller who sits beside her; in 'Stolen Car', a young Aboriginal man learns his first lesson in rough justice; and in 'Dead Dingo', we see another rallying against what his friends, life and fate are offering him.

How We Cheat Each Other

by Odd Nerdrum

A textbook on human deceit, as narrated by Odd Nerdrum. It consists of six short stories in dialogue form, drawing on Nerdrum's experiences in Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Russia and Germany, and spanning "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant" in the eighteenth century through to our time, and into the future. [Mr. Nerdrum sounds like a guy to write about in the future]

Here's my favourite book covers for titles that have arrived in Planet Books during November picked for design and execution. Two titles actually came in October but I had overlooked them at the time. I didn't think anyone would mind.

There's a movement of British writers who take the familiar tropes of generic science fiction, the real sci-fi ones of spaceships, alien worlds and the like, apply sociological or political dogma and turn them into kick-arse statements on the modern world. At the forefront are Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, Charles Stross and Ian McDonald. But there is another who is too often overlooked, that being Paul McAuley.

Too many of Paul's books have not stayed in print. This has been to his detriment in keeping his name up with people like Banks who's space operas are increasing becoming mainstream bestsellers. So I was pleased to see Gollancz do a reprint collection of choice McAuley novels, a relaunching, so to speak.

Now it's not like Paul McAuley is a nobody in the world of SF. His first novel 400 Billion Stars, a far future space opera, won the Philip K Dick Award in 1988. No small business. The sequel Eternal Light also received good recognition and was recently reprinted as part of Gollancz New Space Opera collection.

Right from the start, with his short fiction and 400 Billion Stars, Paul McAuley employed his specialist knowledge as a research biologist. Before fulltime writing he worked in places like Oxford and UCLA, plus six years of lecturing in botany at St Andrews University. All this science stuff is a crucial part of his vocab.

But he's a smart goog in the other fields too. All coming together - futurism, terraforming, politics and poetics - in my favourite novel of his, Red Dust. I can't try to describe this book. In fact, I'll cheat and give you the book's blurb:

"Mars has been partially terraformed by the Chinese, but now it is dying. With the help of Yankee Yak herders, a hardwired assassin and a little girl god, Wei Lee, dupe, womanizer and holy fool, stumbles on a plot that has been spinning for decades, and is catapulted on a journey that will take him to the summit of the biggest volcano in the Solar System and a battle in virtual reality for the future of Mars and humanity. Sex and drugs and rock'n'roll . . . and Mars."

Come on, how can that not entice you? It's a dream fever of a novel. My fav book set on Martian soil and, having a thing for Mars, I've read a lot of them.

That post-cyberpunk, post-new wave thing McAuley can turn on is full bore in his other groovy novel Fairyland. Full of designer drugs, gene manipulation and high-powered consumerism this is a lovechild of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. If you are into early Neal Stephenson then you should check out Fairyland. And it scored The Arthur C Clarke Award  and The John W. Campbell Memorial Award as well.

It's good to see Pasquale's Angel is part of this set of reissues; it won him the Sidewise Award and is a superior alternate history novel - 16th Century Florence where Leonardo Da Vinci's machines reign supreme. It really shows he's a clever clogs. I also recommend you seek out White Devils, his corporate thriller with gene splicing and Ballardian jungles.

I have to admit I've yet to read his two most recent novels. Cowboy Angels is alternate histories and multiple worlds manipulated by crazy right-wing Americans. But I might jump over it and go to his latest The Quiet War. Shortlisted for The Arthur C Clarke Award, this book is getting the big attention. It's his return to way out there space opera utilizing all his science and psychology. It is being compared with the best, even hailed as the leading surfer on the wave of New Space Opera. The sequel Gardens of the Sun is due in paperback round Feb '10

Meantime, I hope that this relaunching of the McAuley label means more of his other out-of-print books are to follow. I particularly hope to see his far-future Gene Wolfe influenced Confluence trilogy, his distopian thriller Whole Wide World and The Secret of Life, one pf his best, a biological disaster epic with more of Mars. Did I tell you I have a thing for Mars?

Here's the best book covers for titles that have arrived in Planet Books over the last month. And by "best" I do mean my favourites. I try not to pick through a particularly intellectual process, but it is easy to see I am attracted to the artwork or the overall layout, usually the combination of the two.

Click on the image to get a bigger pop-up for inspection. The certain hairy book with eyes is Wild Things by David Eggers.

Book trailers are still a developing art form and only very recently been worth something to check out at all. Two particular trailers did get my attention.

First is for Scott Westerfeld's young adult steampunker Leviathan...

... and the second is Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice (which I'm currently reading) which has Pynchon himself sounding like The Dude.

 Here's a selection of book trailers I thought worth a bit of a look see.

And this last trailer has a lot I find irritating and it feels more like it is meant to run on loop in some bookchain, but the pop-surrealist (Ryden doll style) art work for this edition of Wizard of Oz makes it worth the look.

Feeling lazy this week, so instead of some overlong essay on some obscure French film here's something I plan to do round once a month. I love the art of book covers and good book cover design. I will admit that a good cover has once or twice sold me the book even before I've read the back.

Anyway, here's my favs for this month.

And here's Nick reading an excerpt of his new novel.

Gollancz have been doing some interesting things with book packaging over recent years. First was Future Classics, followed by Ultimate Fantasies and then Terror 8, all with well designed covers, some excellent choices and no duds. With their new set called Totally Space Opera they've got another interesting line-up, but I'm more enthused than normal because with the design of these books they've excelled themselves.

Designed by just 23-year-old Sanda Zahirovic I think these set of covers capture a fresh feel to genre books, allowing them more freedom to roam outside the genre sections of the bookshop. Thanks to recent space opera writers, those who works are often referred to as New Space Opera, particularly Iain M Banks and Alastair Reynolds, it has had a massive increase in mainstream appeal. So it is with good timing that Gollancz have released this set.

Olaf Stapledon is one of the very fathers of far future fiction and what is often referred to as Future History. Last and First Men is an astonishing work considering it first came out in 1930. As well as being an interesting novel that's ideas hold up for philosophical scrutiny, it is historically an important piece of work within science fiction as literature and as a vehicle for ideas. It's a true long-life classic and it will be around longer than some of the other books I will mention here.

Larry Niven's Ringworld is regularly in the top SF lists and is still the flagship novel for a sub-genre I'm particularly fond of called Big Dumb Objects. It rockets along and plays with a lot of the space opera motifs one becomes accustomed to through movies, aliens, weapons, slick space ships, etc, but Niven gives it the new wave edge and uses it to decorate some serious ideas of science and future technology.

Ringworld came out in 1970, same year as Poul Anderson's landmark novel Tau Zero. This novel is a great example of taking a complex idea, in this case traveling closer and closer to the speed of light, and exploring all it's scientific, mechanical philosophical and anthropological implications. It is a real hard science fiction novel. Compelling more for what is going through Anderson's mind than what's going on in the story.

Three years after Niven and Anderson, Arthur C Clarke, my SF hero, came out with what is still my favourite science fiction novel, Rendezvous With Rama. I did first read it when I was twelve so that probably has had a big influence for where I rate it. This is my personal vote for best Big Dumb Object novel. No one is better at presenting lofty ideas about the universe to a lay audience than Clarke. He portrays that sense of almost divine awe in the scope and breath of the cosmos, while still keeping a childlike curiosity.

I'm impressed that this set includes The Centauri Device by M John Harrison. He is an extraordinary writer who uses genre as a literary tool, often using the motifs in an ironic sense. Written in 1975, Centauri Device can almost be described as an anti-Space Opera novel. It comes across as an attack on what pulpy SF was doing during the last decade while writers like Philip K Dick and J G Ballard were typing away with less attention from the commercial markets. But irony can work both ways. Harrison's novel became an influence on future writers, a beacon to literary SF with space settings. So now it has a deserved place within significant Space Opera cannon. Harrison, still writing, genre bending work today, I'm sure is chuckling.

Continuing with Big Dumb Objects is Greg Bear's most important novel Eon. With this 1985 novel Bear became the next generation's A C Clarke. A novel of awe, wonder and theoretical physics, it feels inspired by Rama but Bear takes it all in a very different direction. A great idea, marvelous description, but bear with the slightly dragging middle, because it will get there and make it all worthwhile. Greg Bear is a versatile writer having written one of my other favourites, Blood Music, but it is novels like Eon he maintains science fiction as the genre of ideas.

I am a fan of Paul McAuley, an intelligent and entertaining writer who knows how to draw out tension and some groovy ideas. His Red Dust is on my fav shelf, but I admit to having not read his 1991 novel Eternal Light as yet. So I'm glad I picked this up now through the publication of this new edition. I'll also have to skip Adam Roberts' 2002 novel Stone, though I'm aware of its positive reviews as being a smart, exciting space adventure. And no direct comment about Alastair Reynolds' Century Rain, published five years ago. I greatly admire Reynolds, his debut novel Revelation Space was a great read and deserves to be a flag ship of this new far future fiction sensibility.

I can talk a bit about the final book in this awesome set. Published in 2003 Dan Simmons' Ilium just keeps building his reputation as a versatile, intelligent and all-round professional storyteller. This is a novel that has post-humans, now in machine bodies, departing the Jovian moons for an expedition to Mars to discover the Greek gods have returned and are replaying the Trojan Wars with resurrected twentieth century historians recording the events. That he pulls this all of so easily as a well constructed mainstream friendly novel is extraordinary. The research of gods, ancient wars, Martian terrain, and far future humanity is all smoothly combined. Just be warned, you'll need to pick up the follow-on novel Olympus. Really, it's a huge, huge epic novel sensibly split into two.