Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances

by Neil Gaiman, 4 stars

A genre-hopping collection of short fictions from Neil Gaiman, intended to unsettle and disturb, which overall worked very well (for me – someone who much prefers novels to short stories).

As with any short story collection, this is something of a mixed bag – I have zero time for Doctor Who, even if he’s written by Neil Himself, and so Nothing O’Clock was definitely not my kind of crack, and I could have also lived without the Sherlock story The Case of Death and Honey, but these were completely overshadowed by my favourites which either took already familiar tales and twisted them (The Sleeper and the Spindle) or took mundane-looking lives and shone a light on their weird underbellies (My Last Landlady, Jerusalem, Feminine Endings). But my favourite by far, and a tale which alone made the book a must-buy for me was Black Dog, in which we catch up with American Gods’ Shadow as he visits a typical English country boozer and gets drawn into the lives of a local couple.

Perhaps strangely, one of the others that really stood out for me was the book’s opener, Making A Chair, in which our author writes about – you guessed it - making a chair. Quite an odd one to become a favourite, but it illustrated perfectly to me how much of a writer’s work is less inspiration and more actual work and that, much like an aspiring athlete needs to train, the most important thing any aspiring writer can do is just that – write. This somehow makes my work chore of pulling ‘stories’ out of one word emails for the weekly bulletin so much easier to bear…

Space Captain Smith, by Toby Frost

1 star

I ought to have loved Space Captain Smith, a silly space romp starring a moustachioed hero heading a crew consisting of a skull-coveting alien and a renegade sex toy, and facing off a race of evil space ants to protect a wispy new age lady who dresses like she’s from Totnes. 

It’s possible that I’m still holding a grudge against books that aren’t Eleanor and Park, or I may have simply had a sense of humour failure. Either way, this pun-tastic comedy fell flat for me with most of the jokes barely managing to raise a smile, let alone a laugh, and the nods to other works like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Clockwork Orange just made me remember how much better those books were.

Beyond Lies The Wub, by Philip K Dick

The Collected Stories of Philip K Dick, Vol 1 - 5 stars

Considering how prolific Dick was, it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that a collection of short stories, mostly written over nine months during his early twenties, would house a few duds.

Beyond Lies The Wub never dips below excellent, but simply varies the different flavours of awesome it delivers with each.

Containing a wealth of ideas, imagination and humour and covering a variety of familiar themes, some of the stories I enjoyed most were some of those I least expected: Roog, starring a dog tormented in attempting to defend his family's rubbish from the garbagemen, Expendable, in which a man realises his insignificance in an insect war, Prize Ship's take on Gulliver's Travels and Out In The Garden's Leda and the Swan. Colony, Meddler, The Defenders, The Great C and Nanny were also treats, but if I named all those worth your time I'm going to pretty much sit and type out the table of contents.

Honestly, the only thing better than finishing a volume of Philip K Dick stories is knowing you've already got another volume sat waiting for you on your shelves.

Foundation, by Isaac Asimov

4 stars

After The Stars My Destination and now this, I’m going to have to add a lot more 50’s sci-fi to my reading list. I’d initially thought that my attempting to take on Asimov would be a little like this…

Happily, I found that Foundation was not at all dryly academic as I’d anticipated and is, in fact, really accessible and surprisingly funny.

Hari Seldon is a psychohistorian, by which I don’t mean that he’s into Henry VIII and stabs people. Instead, psychohistory is an advanced form of mathematics applied to large populations, through which Seldon can accurately predict the fall of the Galactic Empire and the thousands of years of barbarism which will follow. The fall cannot be averted, but through the application of psychohistory Seldon can do something about how long the age of barbarism will last, by manipulating humanity onto a path towards a new Empire through the successful navigation of a series of crises.

Less a story and more a series of glimpses into those crises and the people pitted against them, there’s not much ‘action’ within but there are a lot of ideas and a lot of outwitting of enemies and events in a series of conversations in which one of the players, at least, is always a few moves ahead of everyone else.

If I had any criticisms it would be that our main players, regardless of who they are or at what time they’re floating about in (sort of) history, they all sound like the same man. And it also seems that men writing sci-fi in the 50’s don’t seem able to imagine women in any roles other than the ones they already held at that time and so we are either invisible or, as in the case of the lone woman we meet, easily distracted by jewellery.

Still, it wasn’t enough to detract from what was, ultimately, a great little read.

Allegiant, by Veronica Roth

1.5 stars

A disappointing and messy ending to what had been, up until this point, a decent little sci-fi series, in this instalment we find out what's outside the gates of the city as well as finding out that it wasn't worth finding out, some peripheral characters meet their ends and I struggle to care, Tris is a hypocrite who's not only never, ever wrong but a bit of a dick about it too, and Tobias gets to narrate his own chapters while I wish he wouldn't, as he's quickly revealed to be squirmy with fear and self-doubt, and I soon learn to hate his parts.

Starting in the aftermath of the Prior video, Tris and co have been arrested by Evelyn and the Factionless who've not only taken over the city and abolished the faction system, but banned anyone else from leaving too. Tobias is working for his ma, while slinking not at all stealthily about behind her back to secure Tris's release. Which is achieved through Tris doing what she's best at, and lying her head off.

Quickly joining the Allegiant, a secret club who want to stick to the city's apparent founding purpose and send a Divergent army out into the world, Tris and her friends (plus a few others) are soon hurtling towards the gate and the outside world. Which is where we start to learn that the whole series up until this point has been bollocks, that everything we think we know about Tris's world is a lie and, unfortunately, that the truth is a little nonsensical and not very interesting. There's no need for a Divergent army outside after all, and we're certainly not going to be seeing any apocalyptic battles any time soon. Instead we'll be stuck in a compound not far into a society that's still divided (over genetic purity, this time) where we'll be learning some dodgy stuff about genetics, meeting lots of new characters that I don't care about, finding out that Tris's mum had a boring love triangle, discovering that there's a Bureau for Genetic Welfare and that they're idiots, and deciding that it's totally cool to do something you think is evil if you're the one doing it.

**********SPOILERS BELOW**********

Turns out that the city is an experiment. The Government, having started screwing with people's genes in an effort to promote more desirable traits, screwed up and damaged them instead. This resulted in the Purity Wars, which in turn resulted in half the country dead. So the Bureau did a few 'corrections' and popped people into secure areas, cutting them off from the outside world in the hope that in several generations' time the bad genes wouldn't have just been passed down but would have healed themselves instead. They would know it was successful when a number of Divergent emerged, at which point they'd be scooped out to share their good genes with the outside world.

With Tris's city on the verge of blowing the experiment and Evelyn threatening to unleash a death serum on the population, the Bureau now want to re-set the city's memories and brainwash them back to square one. Angry that the Bureau would stoop so low as to steal people's memories, Tris proposes to stop them...by re-setting the Bureau's memories instead. Trouble is, the resetting serum is in a room where the air is full of death serum, and so whoever takes on the task will be undertaking a suicide mission...

Whilst I hadn't expected the series to be able to live up to my expectations after the opener, having suffered a bit of a lull in Insurgent, I still hadn't expected to see such a big drop in quality. Tobias's chapters didn't add anything for me other than irritation, and at times sounded virtually indistinguishable from Tris. After two books getting us here, Roth had awful lot of information to cram in about how the world actually did work and didn't handle it particularly well, having our new characters take giant information dumps all over the pages. With everything from entering the outside world on making me want to yell at the book, I found that while I liked that Roth went where she did with the ending, and while in keeping with Tris's character, it was robbed of any punch by my having long stopped caring what happened to these stupid people and their stupid societies.

Insurgent, by Veronica Roth

3 stars

Picking up exactly where we left off, Tris and Four have managed to stop the Erudite-controlled simulation that had turned the Dauntless into a mind-controlled army. Trouble is, quite a lot of the newly awakened Dauntless have decided to stick with Erudite anyway to continue their assault and so Tris, Four and their small band of survivors have nowhere left to turn but to the remaining factions, Amity and Candor. Asking a bunch of peace-loving stoners and people who can't lie to harbour fugitive goes about as well as you'd expect, however.

Also seeking shelter for a spell with the factionless, it's not surprising to find that the people most oppressed by the faction system have had it up to here with it, and would quite like to bring about a change in regime. Which they plan on doing by destroying the information that sparked Erudite's war against Abnegation - information that confirms there's a whole world outside their gates, one in which the Divergent will play a big role.

Suffering slightly from second album syndrome as it tries to tell us the middle of a story, I also found Tris a little more annoying this time around. A lying liar who wants to die, she's apparently no longer able to so much as touch a gun due to her guilt over events in the last book, but isn't about to let that stop her from trying to win the Martyr of the Year award by continually throwing herself into dangerous situations. She's just doing it without any weapons now.

Still, with the big 'reveal' (which wasn't much of a shocker, to be honest) I'm still into this enough to jump straight in to the next book.

Divergent, by Veronica Roth

4 stars

I've seen people on Goodreads squeeing over this series for a while now but, having been taught a harsh lesson by George RR Martin, I'm now refusing to read a word of a series until they're already published. Now that the last part of this series, Allegiant, has made its entry into the world (and with a movie adaptation about to be unleashed upon us) it's safe to start.

We find ourselves a world where all of the old identifiers - religion, race, culture, money, whether you're the type of person who ties your jumper around your waist or your shoulders - are no longer important and people's lives are determined by which of five 'factions' they belong to: Abnegation, Erudite, Candor, Amity, or Dauntless. Abnegation are selfless, the Erudite value intelligence over all else, Candor about all about honesty, Amity about peace and the Dauntless are brave...

...well, at least that's what they're supposed to be (although they're mostly just pointlessly reckless, but more on that later).

Reaching 16 means it's time to choose - right after a personality test (I love those! And I initially think this would rock and that I would totally be in Erudite, with a smidge of Abnegation as I have a habit of acting the martyr, although whenever I've had a drink I'd belong to Candor, before realising that I'm actually a bit of everything depending on what day it is, what the weather is like, whether I'm at work or not, etc, etc). Joining Beatrice Prior as she chooses which faction to belong to, we find out that (as noted above) there are many people who find it difficult to think within such narrow perimeters, and that there's a word for these people - Divergent. And that having aptitude for Dauntless, Erudite, and Abnegation, Beatrice is Divergent too, a secret she must keep at all costs for fear of becoming factionless, or even killed. 

Choosing to join Dauntless, we're then thrown into initiation alongside the newly renamed Tris and things get a bit Ender's Game. As Tris is in Dauntless, initiation means she has to do things like no longer enter buildings via doors but by jumping off their roofs instead, hurling herself on and off the moving trains that are her main means of transport, beating her fellow initiates unconscious, and getting tattoos, piercings and wearing black clothes (as that's what the truly dauntless do. Which must mean that the wispy teenagers draping themselves over the sundial and hanging around Blue Banana are all actually triple-hard bastards). Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering how they go about their lives, there aren't many adults within Dauntless and so we shouldn't be too shocked when it turns out that the kids in charge have somewhat twisted its original ideals in favour of being pointlessly vicious and quick to punch people instead. Being cold, occasionally cruel and nearly always surly, Tris fits right in.

The biggest part of Dauntless initiation involves facing your fears in simulations (it's via these simulations that Tris's instructor and love interest got his silly nickname, Four. He only has four fears, you see, something which is apparently awe-inspiring although I think it just means he's spectacularly unimaginative). Unfortunately for everyone, those simulations and their methods of transmission were all designed by the Erudite, and are about to come in very handy during their attempt to seize power.

With an interesting world set up and a great pace this was an excellent start to the series that kept me turning pages long into the night. I'm interested to see where the attack will lead us and how it will affect the factions, as well as seeing if we'll find how those fences the Dauntless are supposed to guard are important. However, I really couldn't give two hoots about Tris and Four's relationship (even though he's actually quite a refreshing love interest who doesn't stalk his intended, nor treat her like she's weak and stupid, or throw a strop if she has an independent thought, and doesn't get violently possessive around other men) and wish that just once we could have a YA heroine whose relationship status doesn't become a large part of the story.

Still, the niggles are all fairly small in the grand scheme of things, and they're certainly not enough to keep me from diving straight in to the next book.

The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester

5 stars

Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination

Slightly hungover after attending back to back Christmas parties (I know, I know, it’s still early yet) I was stumbling around the flat looking for something to distract me while I waited for NikNak to return from a weekend away. Six hours later, after becoming so engrossed that I’d barely managed to grunt on NikNak’s return, my tiny little mind had been blown.

Gully Foyle is nobody special. He’s almost spectacularly unspecial, in fact, a slightly thuggish less than average Joe. Mechanic’s Mate 3rd Class, his attributes are listed in his official records:

Education: None
Skills: None
Merits: None
Recommendations: None

He’s also been adrift in space for one hundred and seventy days, running out of air and rations, when salvation arrives in the form of a spaceship, Vorga. But the Vorga abandons Gully to his fate, and:

“So, in five seconds, he was born, he lived and he died. After thirty years of existence and six months of torture, Gully Foyle, the stereotype Common Man, was no more. The key turned in the lock of his soul and the door was opened. What emerged expunged the Common Man forever.”

And we’re off, dragged in Gully's wake as he blazes a searing trail of vengeance, hunting down those who left him to die. Fizzing with ideas and hurtling along at a breakneck pace that had my heart beating wildly, I’m incapable of saying much more about this one (that always happens with the ones I adore), other than that this a truly stunning and vital slice of sci-fi, and one you must read. Now. Go on...