Recently in Fiction Category

Peter O'Donnell died on the 3rd of May aged 90. Who's Peter O'Donnell? He's the creator of that sexy feminist secret agent and adventurer who could beat up any man and take down any super villain, yes, Modesty Blaise. When not being a successful romance novelist under the pseudonym Madeleine Brent, O'Donnell was the long time writer of those endless Modesty Blaise newspaper comic serials beginning in 1963 and wrapping it up in 2001 with many papers promptly reprinting it from the beginning.

So far you can pick up 17 adventures as graphic novels with volume 18 due in August and more to follow. And due to the success of the comic strip O'Donnell also penned 11 Modesty Blaise novels & 2 short story collections. The first novel titled, naturally enough, Modesty Blaise was published in '65 and remains in print as a key cult crime/adventure novel.

There have been a number of film and TV adaptations but the one of interest is the messy but entertaining '66 film that captures the wonderful European style of the hedonistic bon vivant. It has Monica Vitti in hot '60s fashions, Dirk Bogarde in snazzy suits and Terence Stamp as Willy Garvin in trendy threads, you can't beat that for styling.

Ok, I'm back from my mini-sabbatical and I'm pleased to say that during which I saw dugongs and Eric the opalised pliosaur? Two more things I can strike off my list.

Salinger

I see that while I was away Mr. Catcher in the Rye J D Salinger entered the tall grass for the last time. As I predicted a year ago, when celebrating his 90th on this blog, that we'll see a lot of new material be published after his death; looks like it will be at least two novels and several collections of short stories. I have a feeling it might be a lot more than that. And can you imagine the attention if it includes continuing adventures of Holden Caulfield?

Avatar vs. District 9

Having finally seen both Avatar and District 9 I was quite surprised how much they have in common. Both are about humans exploiting alien culture and their willingness to destroy that culture in the process. Both productions were heavily dependent on the talents of people under the employ of Peter Jackson. Both have climaxes involving walking power armour.

After that, though, they diverge radically.

One is a visually rich and intense cinematic experience that doesn't compromise storytelling and characterization while still staging complex and intricate action sequences, ramping up the tension while continuing to raise serious moral questions about human nature and how far we'd go for selfish dehumanising greed, all within a package of top notch special effects that integrate live action and computer animation flawlessly, creating a new sense of fantastical realism, and thus elevating the art of the cinema aesthetic and contributing to cinema art in general. The other film is Avatar.

Don't get me wrong, Avatar is a very pretty movie, one of the most handsomely produced ever and it's entertaining enough, well, for a kid's movie. And it is especially enhanced by the 3D experience, but it is ironic that District 9 is actually the 3 dimensional movie. Also I can't ignore the fact that District 9 cost one tenth of Avatar yet is ten times a better science fiction actioneer slash morality tale with far more convincing aliens and a heaps more interesting central protagonist (who must have come close to a Oscar nomination, but sadly missed out, like Sam Rockwell for his performance in the sublime Moon).

The Gone-Away World

I am the master of reading the first few chapters of novels, so it was refreshing to have enough time to actually finish a book. In this case it was Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, a post-apocalyptic adventure with nasty ninjas, enigmatic pirates, evil corporations and mutant monsters. Yes, it's a sci-fi martial arts epic extravaganza. Or so I thought, until I got to my first digression. Can't wait to get back to the action, you ask. Not when I realised the digressions are actually what are the soul and core of the novel. Harkaway's satirical wit and socio-political commentaries enrich this alchemical potboiler. It's like combining Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Jackie Chan's Drunken Master with Christopher Hitchens adding the footnotes. It's Thomas Pynchon doing Indiana Jones, Chuck Palahniuk doing Mad Max, Clive James doing Kickboxer. Very entertaining, insightful and, best of all, it is groovy and cool.

What now?

Well, now I get back to the regular blogging of snazzy, keen things. Plenty on my things to blog list; plenty of artists, writers, filmmakers to talk about before even thinking of anniversaries and historical landmarks in pop culture and the artistically neat. I will try to be a little more informal in my style, addressing some supportive criticism that I was a little too dry. And thanks for that support, including the majority of you who prefer commenting on my facebook.

Anyways, I'm back and lets get the show on the road for 2010.

And dugongs are very cool.

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?

Ursula Le Guin has just turned 80 and is going strong. But if she decided to retire this instant it would be as a writer whose legacy to imaginative fiction would be hard for anyone, and I mean anyone, to beat. I would expect little rational argument against Le Guin being the most significant writer of fantastic fiction still working today.

This reputation was launched with the 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness. From the onset it established what would be the strong themes in almost all her work, the exploration of sociology, anthropology, ecology and sexual identity, often in the context of depicting details of life and living in alternate cultures.

Le Guin's next big soft science novel comfortably sits in almost every critic's top 100 works of the speculative. The Lathe of Heaven (1971) explored the territory of the metaphysical telling of a man who can alter reality through his dreams. It has been adapted to film twice.

Within 1974 she published what would become an essential text in almost every academic course on science fiction and speculative writing. The Dispossessed is a flagship on the arguments of utopia and dystopia and pitting the two together. The ideas are weighed against each other with complexity and with rich imagination. It is one of the most important works in the field.

Now, if you are already familiar with Le Guin then you know I've been omitting a very important part of her career, she is the author of the Earthsea saga. Began in 1968 with A Wizard of Earthsea this series of young teen fantasies has become one of the most beloved sagas close behind Narnia and Middle-Earth. And sure, J K Rowling over-shadows it these days but there's little guarantee that Harry Potter will still be around in a hundred years while Earthsea will certainly be. These books are true classics of young adult literature.

This high standing as a master of letters is not just for the above but as much for the rest of her vast library of acclaimed works, including well over twenty novels and novellas, including the lauded The Word for World is Forest, ten collections of stories, six books of essays, six books of poetry, more than a dozen children's books and even a rendition of the Tao Te Ching. All this and she is the subject of endless PhDs, has been translated in countless number of languages, not to mention all the multi-media adaptations, makes me think she is a worthy contender for a Nobel.

However, I believe she'll never get one. Why? Because she is too closely associated with that gutter genre called science fiction. And despite her works being studied at universities and being the favourites of major writers and artists throughout the decades the tainted mud of that genre term means she'll never receive that ultimate recognition.

Perhaps this is why she is so vocal when a critic puts down the SF label and she has made public comments about fantastic writings that distant themselves from being referred to as science fiction. Margaret Atwood's future tales and Cormac McCarthy's The Road easily come to mind. Mind you, Le Guin isn't shy when expressing her views.

She was harsh in her opinion of the Earthsea mini-series and expressed quite mixed feelings over the Studio Ghibli adaptation of Tales of Earthsea. Personally, on the Ghibli, I have some reservations over the narrative structure but I certainly didn't mind it.

Anyway, when the time comes Ursula Le Guin will just have to rest her laurels on, amongst other things, her five Hugos, six Nebulas, nineteen Locus Awards, being made a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, given the status of Living Legend by Library of Congress.

But she isn't resting yet. Who knows what else will come from the hard working Le Guin and what other acclaims she'll garner. Even her most recent, Lavinia (2008), is being praised for its feminist retelling of Virgil's Aeneid by a character that never spoke a word in the original. But like I said at the beginning; if nothing more was to come from Ursula Le Guin we have already a monumental body of work that is ever-growing in value to literature and the imagination. And in all understanding will keep growing for centuries to come.

William Gibson's debute novel Neuromancer just turned 25. So why should you care? After all, Neuromancer is not one of the greatest novels in the last quarter of the twentieth century, nor one of the biggest selling or most awarded. Regardless, it has become perhaps the most influential work of literature for the twenty-first century.

Neuromancer's importance is not for its freaky cool futuristic ideas or for its slick yet elegant merging of classic and techno language, but for creating a culturally fertile mindset. When it comes to the way society and technology have come together in a pop cultural sense, there was before Neuromancer and then after.

Sure, it's considered the patron work of cyberpunk (and Gibson its saint), and though I think from a literary sense cyberpunk began and ended with Neuromancer, the cyberpunk movement, despite or because of a unclear interpretation, has morphed into distinct cultural trends that range from street fashions to sound system design, film & TV, cyberspace imaginings to philosophical musings of our techno-destiny and even made big headways into the debate of what is human. And all this with some credit to its slick veneer of dark future noir and badass pretensions that gave birth to black leather trench coats at Goth clubs.

Now if you catch a hint of cynicism in my voice I should point out that Neuromancer is one of my very favourite novels because though Gibson has gone on to be a better writer with works like Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, he has not surpassed the rich, poetic, intellectual, yet entirely visual writing of his first novel.

Neuromancer deserves still to be read as a significant and ever-so-cool work on its own and its extraordinary legacy left to be contemplated on a different occasion.

[I have previously spoken about William Gibson and discussed the documentary No Maps for these Territories which you can check out here]

Mad Max is 30

It is thirty years since Mad Max first appearred on screen and become Australia's best known cinematic work (Crocodile Dundee is a close second). What it did for Mel Gibson needs little mention. But, to quote from a past blog:

One of the most important films to come out of the colony; it established the Australian Car Mythos and then exported it to the world. Hard to believe such a well made film came from so small a budget. Again, audiences reacted to the brutality but it revamped the hero myth and made its indelible mark. Its sequels pushed it into the popular consciousness.

Here's the first ten minutes, just for the hell of it.

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Goodbye Marilyn

Marilyn Chambers first appeared on the box of a leading washing powder pretending to be a blonde housewife lovelingly holding her smiling baby. A year later that image became famous not for increasing the sales of Ivory Snow but for that wholesome looking lady being a lead in one of the most celebrated porn films of all time. Indeed, Behind the Green Door (1972) is considered a classic transcendent of its sordid roots (well, a bit) and was the first hardcore film to get a nation wide release in America. Plus, her performance in this film caused Marilyn Chambers to be regarded as a pioneer of interacial sex in cinema (for reasons I'm sure you can guess). Of interest, the events of the early part of her career, particularly Behind the Green Door are depicted in the film X-Rated as directed by Emelio Estervez.

Throughout her career she made adult and mainstream films, but her most significant role, outside of Green Door, was as the lead in David Croneberg's breakthrough zombie movie Rabid (1977). Chambers also had a hit disco single in 1976 and ran twice in presidential elections. She recieved a Lifetime Achievement at the FOXE Fans of X-Rated Entertainment awards in 2005.

Marilyn Chambers died on April 12th at the age of 56. Her passing has been acknowledged by pop culturalists,  counterculturlists, independent, adult and horror movie fans, and even the hip hop community.

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David Gemmell Award

The shortlist has been announced for the inaugeral David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy. This award is given to the best fantasy novel written in the "spirit" of the herioc adventure writings of David Gemmell.

Gemmell passed away in July of 2006 at the age of 57 but not before writing over thirty novels, most of them best sellers, and building a remarkable fan base internationally. Much of his work features charsmatic or enigmatic heroes and their daring-do in dark fantasy worlds. I read a handful of his earlier novels and though I felt they were becoming repetative they were slick, easy, fast and darkly fun reads. I will always have a personal fondness for his first novel Legend. And what I liked most about that book was the central character of Druss. Indeed, as much as an action adventure, Legend was a character study of heroism and all it entails, both good and bad. And this set up the central theme of much of his entertaining literature.

Gemmell was well regarded in the publishing industry, not just as a success, but as a committed professional and honourable, likeable fellow. It is in this spirit that the award was established by friends and professional collegues to celebrate David Gemmell's professional and personal legacy.

The shortlist is selected by popular vote (on the Award website) from a longlist submitted by the editors of the various publishing houses who feel the work is in the spirit or tradition of Gemmell's.

David Gemmell Legend Award for Fantasy shortlist:

The Last Argument of Kings by Joe Abercrombie (Gollancz)

Heir to Sevenwaters by Juliet Mariller (Tor UK)

The Hero of Ages by Brandon Sanderson (Tor US)

Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski (Gollancz)

The Way of Shadows by Brent Weeks (Orbit)

In June the winner will be selected by a panel of genre experts and announced at a special ceremony in London.

James Morrow has been round a long time quietly writing semi-classics of social satire and spiritual mischief. Steadily he has been building his following. But though Morrow seems to keep missing the big literary fame loveboat the pier it departs from is over flowing with fans of his master works like This is the Way the World Ends, Bible Stories for Adults, Only Begotten Daughter and especially his Godhead Trilogy of Towing Jehovah, Blameless in Abaddon and The Eternal Footman. Recently, though, the broader literary-scape has come to the party with praise, good reviews and good sales for his last two major tomes, The Last Witchfinder and The Philosopher's Apprentice.

James Morrow is a wordsmith and a philosophical prankster and he deeply understands the role of storytelling and the role of the narrator. Though there's always a surface of clever wordplay, it is to break up the clouds of literary illusion to shine through to the truths below. Even though he has many awards and honours to his name, he deserves to be read more widely. And readers who's fav authors range from Kurt Vonnegut to Neal Stephenson to J G Ballard to Michael Chabon to Salman Rushdie should check out the works of James Morrow.

Shambling Towards Hiroshima, his latest, is a short novel set during the last years of World War II. It is a tale told by a reminiscing actor of cheap '40s monster movies, usually having played the monster itself. He is thespian of the old school, basking in the adulation of his horror loving fans, but he readily accepts a secret mission to don a monster suit to convince the Japanese to surrender or prepare to have giant mutant lizards destroy their cities. Might sound a tad absurd, but In the hands of Morrow this becomes a clever political satire on military, politics and war. It's funny and very clever in the way it brings old Hollywood and the military industrial complex together. Yes, funny clever, but the message underneath it all is a most somber one.

Back in the mid-eighties William Gibson inadvertently began the cyberpunk lit movement with a handful of short stories and his first novel Neuromancer. Though exciting at the time - I was a full on cyberpunk enthusiast - one can debate the final value of this post-modern SF movement outside of Gibson's own work.

Regardless, Gibson and the movement fed into a part of postmodern fiction that is a significant aspect of contemporary literature. Today's key players include Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross and Cory Doctorow, and spill over into the writings of people like Elizabeth Hand, David Mitchell and Jonathan Lethem. But throughout this William Gibson has remained a leading post-modern, post-millennial light.

This guru status was at its premium at the turn of the century. Not surprising that a documentary about Gibson was made at that time. No Maps for these Territories did a successful turn around the extended festival circuits and took its time for release on dvd. Even though the content is close to a decade old it still holds up as a study of Gibson, at least pre-2001 Gibson.

The premise is that Gibson sits in the back of a limousine decked out to the full audio/visual and travels around the US (from his current home in Canada) espousing about anything asked by the driver who is treated as some ethereal/net presence. There are stops for readings, not that the car stops. At one point Bono is reading the opening passages of Neuromancer on a large wall screen on the side of a building. Gibson can see it from out his passenger window and hear it inside the car. Gibson responds to the reading, but then Bono asks him a question, which suggests that this was a live interaction. Just as cute is when passing a diner and inside is felow guru Bruce Sterling to give a mini-interview.

Lots of pretty visuals, cute tricks and some arresting music, but it's all there to make this feel less like a feature length interview. But I'm not really complaining, as the interview was more than enough to justify this film. It's a good thorough exploration of Gibson as person, thinker and writer, allowing him to express, in his enigmatic Gibson style, about all the things Gibson followers want to hear, from why he writes, where does he get his ideas, the future, the now, media, culture, the persona of William Gibson.

But I stress that this is William Gibson and Gibson's world just before September 11. When the planes hit the towers a lot of gurus dropped in status having lost their bearings when the world so dramatically shifted. But Gibson was true to his philosophy that there are no maps for these territories. Since that time and that documentary Gibson has come out with two novels, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. Both are set facsimiles of our contemporary type world very aware of 9/11 and very sensitive to it. The former novel is set soon after these events and reflects on them as we follow a logo zeitgeist specialist making her way through the media maze to find the underground filmmakers who may have the key to a new level of viral marketing. The novel considers the need to find meaning, or patterns, in what seems like cultural white noise.

Spook Country is about looking past the patterns and seeing what is hidden underneath the seemingly random noise of the media and politics. In a fashion lighter of heart than all his previous works, Gibson addresses our want for meaning, for value in the patterns. Spook Country takes the structure of an espionage novel and focuses on the action within this world rather than just the mere observation. With a hint of tongue in cheek he puts forward his view that all the understanding of our new media rich millennium means little if you don't act upon it.

Perhaps that is why that though I've enjoyed all eight of Gibson's novels, Neuromancer my favourite, Pattern Recognition my second, there was something more satisfying about Spook Country because Gibson has his characters not just be witnesses and survivors of out new world but be players and in some small way be part of what determines how we move on in this new age. He makes the reader feel they are participating in this change, even if it's just by reading this book.

Another great is gone. John Updike did not just stand as one of America's most important novelists; he was a supreme master of the short story and highly regarded essayist, critic, reviewer and poet. He was an indelible part of the New Yorker over the decades and will be missed there more than anywhere else. He won the Pulitzer twice, both for works in his Rabbit series, four novels and a novella, about the decades long adventures of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom in his mid-American life. In fact, Updike will be remembered as the chronicler of mid-America, small town life and the sexual awakening of mundane suburbia over the '60s and '70s. His novel Witches of Eastwick made a pretty decent film and one of the last books he wrote was the sequel The Widows of Eastwick. Witches, like a lot of his work, contributed to the debate over sexuality in the US and though John Updike sparked controversies along the way his work on that issue will cement him as an icon of modern American literature.

John Updike    March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

On the first of January, J. D. Salinger, the author of the seminal work The Catcher in the Rye, turned 90. It would not surprise me that some of you had no idea he was still alive. We have heard nothing from him in decades. In fact, his last published work was in 1965 with a novella in The New Yorker. His last interview was in the early '80s. So what happened to J. D. Salinger?

The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951 when Salinger was 32. It was published to controversy that followed it even up to the late '80s. But, though it was first infamous it became one of the most famous novels of the 20th Century. It certainly seems to be one of the most important works of American literature. Regardless, though originally intended as an adult novel, it has become the text for disenfranchised youth and kept that mantle over generations. Holden Caulfield, the pro-antagonist of the novel, has become a beacon for teen rebellion.

Over 75 million copies of Catcher in the Rye have been printed and it is a best seller every year without fail. Naturally, that would draw a lot of attention towards Salinger himself, something he did not welcome. He disliked it so much that he withdrew from the public world. What's more, his experiences with the business side of writing discouraged him from the whole publishing scene.

But it did not discourage him from writing. Although many speculations, bordering on myth, have surrounded Salinger as a mystery man, it is known that he has kept writing profusely for half a century. Writing, not for anyone else but himself. And all this writing is only to be published after his death. Apparently, he has files and files of work and it includes at least two novels.

How much there is in its entirety, few know. But you can be sure that when the day comes for all this material to be released (over years, I'm sure) it will be one of the most significant events in literature and publishing for decades to come. Think of all the PhDs that will result from it. How many works of critical analysis? How many discussion groups will form to discuss it?

And whether J. D. Salinger's new works are greeted with love or disdain, there is little doubt it will shake up the literary scene for a mighty long time.

I very much hope it does.