Sarcade’s Weblog

A seven-part space opera epic by Kevin J. Anderson.

I picked up the first of these, Hidden Empire, whilst trapped in Kalgoorlie with an utterly shite movie channel, desperately trying to find something to do read. The scope of the series had initially put me off (sixth book, Metal Swarm, has only just some out with the seventh and final tome, The Ashes Of Worlds, due in a month or two… and each book is in excess of 700 pages) but endless boredom in a hotel room makes you want to try something different (and time-consuming) and so I gave it a whirl, hoping for something as good as Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy.

And it is, thankfully, almost as good — not better, but almost as good. Certainly I’ve devoured my way through four-and-a-half of them thus far with no particular intention of slowing down.

The Saga of Seven Suns is basically about a moment in human history where we’ve built ourselves an interstellar empire. Humanity coexists with an equivalent alien empire, the Ildirans, who gave faster-than-light technology to the humans as a benevolent gesture, and are all interconnected via their Imperator, who controls his people via intangible threads of power called thism. Everything that the Ildirans have ever done is part of a vast oral/written history called, unsurprisingly, the Saga of Seven Suns, which is supposed to be a perfect record of their race’s history and munificence.

Except some of this Saga may have been edited, and some of it may be lies…

In the first book a warlike, utterly alien menace called the hydrogues rise from the depths of gas giant planets throughout the galaxy in vast, city-sized spherical diamond-hulled spiky warships. Indiscriminate slaughter and hilarity ensues, with the result that both the human and Ildiran empires begin contracting and stagnating rapidly as they can no longer access the hydrogen that they mine from the atmospheres of the huge planets. Diplomatic relations fall, and things get worse… and worse… and worse. Because the hydrogues aren’t the only hostile, all-powerful aliens out there — and there are many, many enemies within.

The Saga… is well written (or rather well-dictated and transcribed: Anderson apparently talks out his chapters but the subsequent writing style is clean if occasionally slightly over-simple), with short, jutting chapters that kept me frantically reading just a little more to find out what had happened to a favoured cast member. It’s also nicely bloodthirsty on occasion, and the odds against everyone seem appalling. I really don’t know whether anyone’ll be left at the end of it. Titanic space battles wiping out moons and suns, burning city-sized hydrogen mines, invasions of hundreds of thousands of insectile razor-armed robots, an internal android revolution, sentient trees clawing alien gunships out of the sky… it goes on and on, and just when one disaster is either averted or responded to, another five loom on the horizon.

Like I said, not finished yet. But thus far it’s been worth every second of the reading time. The only real quibbles I’d have would be the occasionally thin characterisation (given the amount of characters jostling for page-space, that’s not a huge problem) and that it’s not really hard sci-fi — the author doesn’t appear to have a particularly scientific background so the majority of the concepts are just there, rather than explained in physicist-level detail. But, y’know, I don’t really mind that either. What I’m getting out of this is a hell of a read, a hell of a story, mass destruction and triumph and tragedy against mind-numbing odds, all on richly detailed and well-imagined worlds and with vast amount of action and intrigue.

And that’ll do me. Roll on book seven.

Note: the books in order are:

• Hidden Empire
• A Forest Of Stars
• Horizon Storms
• Scattered Suns
• Of Fire And Night
• Metal Swarm
• The Ashes Of Worlds

Tired. Apologies to my zero readers, and mainly to myself: been away, stuck in the middle of nowhere for a few weeks for work purposes, and my enthusiasm is low. It’s an effort to write anything at all at the moment.

Having said that, yes, I’ve been reading, and these are a few of the choice — and not so choice — cuts of late:

Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary, by Lydia Lunch — recommendation: avoid. Non-stop dismal sex, drugs and the fringes of rock’n'roll. Autobiographical, I believe: I’m surprised she didn’t kill herself. Reminds me of Ken Russell’s Whore.

Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail ‘72, by Hunter S. Thompson — I wanted to see the inspiration behind Transmetropolitan and its Thompsonesque protagonist, Spider Jerusalem. After I’d finished this I felt a bit sad, to be honest. I like Transmet, but there’s so much of Fear And Loathing… in it that it goes well beyond what I’d consider homage towards a rewriting. This book is good — it made me interested in American politics, which is well-nigh bloody unbelievable — and exceptionally written (except for the last 50 pages or so, when Thompson was so drugged out he had to dictate everything and the climax came across as a series of less interesting interviews rather than his lyrically malevolent prose) but it threw Transmet up in a bad light. An overly derivative light, I’m afraid. In that regard, I wish I hadn’t read it; I could’ve kept the magic of the comic series alive a little longer.

The Ushers, by Edward Lee — short, brutal horror stories. Nihilistic, unrelenting and about as far from the mainstream as you can get. Breath of fresh air, frankly, even thought said fresh air in Lee’s world is sprinkled with bodily fluids, unnatural sex acts galore, horrific torture and endless monstrosities. Cost a packet: it’s a specialty thing, well well well out of print, but worth it. I’m constantly re-impressed with Lee: yes, he’s probably one of the hardest of the hardcore horror writers and the majority of his work would never get published in the mainstream, but his stories are genuinely clever and information-filled as well. From detailed Civil War history through the detailed workings of police forensic and detective departments to (accurate) musings on philosophy a la Kierkegaard and Nietzsche… it’s all there amongst the blood, guts, strange new orifices and psychopathic rednecks.

What else?

Gardens Of The Moon, by Steven Erikson — first book of a projected 10-part epic fantasy series. I wanted a new long-form series to devour, and some completely dead time working in Goomalling (population 600, four streets and seeing a tumbleweed was one day’s highlight) allowed me to finally give this a shot. Was slightly discomfited when the first thing I read in my edition was an introduction from the author saying that roughly half the people who read this book gave up halfway through; the others perservered and are now lifelong series devotees. Unfortunately, although I finished it, I fell into the first bracket and have no particular urge to continue. It wasn’t because it was too dense, or there were too many characters, or the world didn’t open up quickly enough, which seem to be the major bones of contention for most reviewers. For me, characterisation was flat and I was bored by the thus-far less-than-epic story. If I’m ever in Goomalling again (and haven’t offed myself from boredom) then maybe I’d look at the next book, Deadhouse Gates, but otherwise — life’s too short.

Sex, Drugs And Power Tools, by Edward Lee again — paid a stupid amount of money for this simply because it has the rarer-than-hen’s-teeth short story ‘Header’ in it. The titular concept is a particularly tasty aberration practised by those good ole boys from the deep hills that Lee is so fond of; I won’t spoil exactly what it is. And the money was well spent on this one. >:)  (Apparently they’ve made a movie about it, but can’t find distribution because of the, er, subject material. Not surprised, personally!)

Dogwitch Volume III: Mood Swings, by Dan Schaffer — FINALLY I get to find out whether Violet Grimm ever gets out of the Banewoods, who or what the serial killer Elastic Head is, see the clockwork sex-doll cheerleaders in action and… you don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Go buy all three volumes of Dogwitch and find out. Dark and unquestionably brilliant graphic novel storytelling.

‘Nuff now. Let’s see if I can get back into it on a more regular basis, hmm?

[Oh yeah, and sorry for the quality/layout of some of the images. WordPress appears to have made an unneeded 'improvement' to the image posting system which renders them in a shiteous fashion, sigh]

Iron Angel, by Alan Campbell.

Well. Scar Night was good: very good, in fact, and not just ‘good-for-a-first-novel’ good, but a genuinely interesting and oftentimes quite bloodthirsty fantasy in an exceptionally well-realised new world. Then came the limited edition Lye Street novella, which I’ve reviewed earlier so have no need to go through again. And finally we have this, the official second book in the Deepgate Codex.

And ’tis wonderful. From the Time Bandits-esque spectacle of a man dragging a city-sized, rotting Flying Dutchman manned by gods and the dead across continents*, the rope around his waist cleaving through buildings and armies alike as he walks, to the surreal and monstrous depiction of Hell and its honeycombed, decaying hives of the subconscious being torn asunder by the visually astonishing Worm… and these are just elements of a whole that smacks you over the head almost every page with something new, often grotesque and always marvellous. (I can’t get the scene with the archon being pursued through Hell by a Door [of all things!] out of my head: you have to read it to experience it — just sheer bloody storytelling) The death throes (or are they?) of the eponymous Deepgate city, hanging over the abyss into Hell, are also brilliantly written and genuinely horrific in places.

I can’t say it’s entirely perfect, much as I want to: as other reviewers have mentioned, the scarred, homicidal and insane angel Carnival isn’t in it nearly enough and when she is she’s pretty much worse than useless. And it ends on the most teeth-gnashing I-want-part-III-sodding-now cliffhanger you can think of. Hopefully Campbell’s already writing it, because I for one can’t wait.

I can’t honestly comprehend why anyone remotely interested in fantasy isn’t reading, and loving, Campbell’s work here. And if, for some reason, you couldn’t get into Scar Night, definitely please try this. It’s… well, I’ve run out of superlatives. Just get it.

Recommended to Hell and back. >

(oh, and here’s the US cover, which is quite flash, actually… )

* Methinks I remember some similar kind of mad spectacle in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen too, which I am very pleased to see exists on DVD and will therefore shortly be acquired. Must’ve seen it twenty years ago but there was a Grim Reaper figure in it that was one of the best and most nightmarish renditions I’d ever seen…

Er, right. End of digression :O )

Well, various bleak things anyway. Don’t know why I put myself through them, really.

I’m in a phase (that I’ll very shortly be out of it, ref the whole bleak thing) of reading Japanese fiction, and the only real reason I can think of is that I’m trying to find a kind of idealised Japanese cyberpunk thing I can immerse myself into. For my mind, this ideal is a Blade Runner environment salted with the early, capsule-hotel/mad-tech/Chiba City-inspired elements of Neuromancer and seasoned with Cayce’s fleeting, surreal visit to Japan in Pattern Recognition. Trouble is, I can’t find anything like this anywhere. And why are so many Japanese to English translations so bloody flat?

Digressing. Out and Grotseque, by Natsuo Kirino.

Out was interesting. It’s the story of a quartet of Japanese women who work the soul-deadening nightshift at a lunchbox factory, preparing prepackaged lunches for the hungry Tokyo masses… probably a uniquely Japanese concept since we don’t have anything like that here. They have insipid, squalid, nihilistically boring lives and one of them snaps, killing her husband after she finds out he’s gambled away their life savings. Without anywhere else to go, she asks her friends at the factory to help, for money and favours, and they do, dismembering the body and getting rid of it. But one of them, who is pressed into body-part-disposal service very much against her will, doesn’t hide the head very well and things begin to fall apart. Cue an utterly psychotic Japanese mobster who indirectly loses his business concerns because of the murder, a police investigation and, bizarrely, a woman who develops a taste for what she’s done and finds that there’s money in the body disposal business…

It’s noir, it’s dark, it’s grim, it’s miserable and it’s full of sad, brittle, broken characters whose ennui and hopelessness keep them endlessly tottering on the brink. And some most of them fall. Depressing, true, but the twists keep coming and some of them are truly out of left field. Thus: cautiously recommended.

Grotesque, on the other hand, is not. “Cool, angry and stylish,” it says on the tin. Uh-uh. Ostensibly the story of two women who descend into prostitution on the mean streets of Japan and eventually get murdered, it takes forever to get going — endless boring crap about school lives and dysfunctional families and >>yawwwwnnn<< — and then meanders to a creeping, boring halt. Yes, the lives of prostitutes are horrible; yes, the world is a bad place; yes, bad things happen to innocent people.

But it could have been interesting, and it’s not. It’s cluttered with the trivia and minutiae of the lives of schoolgirls and boring nerds and sad, sad people and it doesn’t work. I found myself skipping great chunks of it just to find something actually happening, rather than people just talking about existential grief and the crapness of their lives and how little fun it is to sell yourself for ¥500 or whatever. Frankly, a complete waste of the three hours of my life I took to skim-read this drivel. Sigh.

Autofiction and Snakes And Earrings, by Hitomi Kanehara

Autofiction: more bleakness. Yea, verily? Indeed, although a much shorter book and interlaced with a nicely psychotic turn from the protagonist, who basically goes insane with jealousy whenever one of her paramours disappears out of her sight. The story runs backwards, beginning on a plane when she is returning from a second honeymoon and her husband disappears into the toilet (she thinks he’s shagging the stewardess and her mental state spirals downwards from there) back through three instances of her history as the reasons for her chaotic mindstate are quite eloquently revealed. There isn’t a great deal of closure but it was at least interesting, with the authorial voice quite compelling throughout. Again: cautiously recommended. -ish.

Snakes And Earrings is much better, possibly because it touches upon my idealised cyberpunk Japan as wistfully noted early in this entry. It’s a short piece, a little over a hundred pages, and the author’s first novel: according to the inner jacket blurb she left school at age eleven, started writing at fifteen and fired off her stories to her father who translated for them for publication. If that’s true, it works: it reads very autobiographical and very much the seedy, countercultural side of Japan, with a nod towards the Harajuku Girls and a sordid wink at Cronenbergish body modification horrors, albeit realistic ones (yay, split tongues!). It’s about body piercing, physical mods and the strange, twisted lives of those who live in this culture — and how they end. There isn’t a lot of hope in it, but in this case that works well: a short, punch piece like this is defined by environment and characterisation and they shine through like the edge of a razor blade. Definitely a good read, this one.

Finally, still in Bleak Genre but well out of Japan, we have a film: Frank Darabont’s adaptation of the Stephen King novella The Mist:

Darabont did two of the best Steve King adaptations, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Here’s his opportunity to cut loose a little and just make a balls-out horror film, and he did it in style. The Mist is about what happens to a little Maine community when a mysterious fog envelops the town, trapping most of the residents in the supermarket, who then find out that bloodthirsty monsters lurk in the bleary white world without. As per usual when people are put in a confined space and forced to try to get along to survive, it invariably turns into disaster.

The special effects are marvellous (although people really aren’t just thin balloon-skins of meat with hundreds of gallons of high-pressure blood waiting to spurt beneath it… however since I’m quite happy to see blood and guts in a movie I’m prepared to overlook this, and indeed even encourage it), the acting is more than acceptable (occasionally a little over the top or wooden, but that’s often a problem with Stephen King writing as source material: his dialogue doesn’t always translate well into what someone would really say), and the inexorable rising of the horror and despair is deftly handled.

And then there’s the ending, which… let’s just say that in the novella, King left things rather open. This doesn’t. It’s one of the most brutal, bleakest things I’ve seen in a long, long time. Brrr. And well done.

Enthusiastically recommended — but you won’t walk away with a smile on your face. You may, however, not want to drive into fog again. Ever. :O

I Am White Ninja And You Are My Pickle Sidekick, by Scott Bevan and Kent Earle.

Unutterably stupid and weirdly popular comic series now collected into the above handy chunky book form. Appeals very much to my no doubt equally unutterably stupid sense of humour. For example:

Support some struggling artists — and by the artwork sample you can see why they’re struggling, oh yes — by buying what’s actually a very funny product. You won’t be sorry: well, you might be, but it would be too late then.

After The War, by Tim Lebbon

Two novellas set in Lebbon’s fantasy world of Noreela, the subject of the excellent duology Dusk and Dawn, and forthcoming novels Fallen and The Island.

Lebbon writes gritty, often bloodsoaked fantasy: it’s mud, blood and the hell of battle rather than cute elves and dwarves. His well-realised world of Noreela contains such grim highlights as organic battle machines, unkillable Red Monks and underground drug demons, amongst many others. Magic is a commodity that is very often unreliable and generally has to be paid for in lives — usually many lives.

‘Vale of Blood Roses’, the first of the two tales within, tells of the repercussions of a group of mercenaries finding an apparently hidden valley where magic is still working and the machines still live. The mercenaries, as is their wont, already driven half-mad by endless war, begin slaughtering indiscriminately until what resides within the valley rises against them in a truly grotesque way. There is a reason this valley was hidden from the rest of the world, after all…

The second tale, ‘The Bajuman’, is the story of the titular character, a societal pariah who lives by finding things that most people don’t want found, and his search for a missing fodder: a human creature once bred for food although the practice is now frowned upon. The search, set in the aftermath of the Great Plagues, takes him through the worst of Noreela City and, ultimately, beneath it into the catacombs from which no-one has ever returned before. With good reason…

Grim and often hideous, provocative and inventive, these are certainly not stories for those who like their fantasy cosy, or are overly enamoured of happy endings. Or with, y’know, fairies and things. But for those wanting a little raw meat on their fantasy bones, preferably still buttered with blood, you can’t go wrong with Lebbon’s ‘Noreela’ series, and these two shorts are perfect introductions.

One word of warning: this is a Subterranean Press limited edition, with no plans as far as I know for a mass market release. Copies are up on the various Amazon sites, but I’d imagine once they’re gone, they’re gone, and aftermarket editions will undoubtedly appreciate very quickly in value. My advice? Get it while it’s hot.

House of Suns, by Alastair Reynolds.

Sprawling, epic sci-fi set something like six million years into the future, House of Suns is, somewhat ironically, about the legacy of mistakes of the past. It follows the fortunes of a guild, or ‘Line’, of people known as shatterlings: clones of a single person created in the distant past whose sole raison d’être is to wander the infinity of known space watching human civilization rise, fall, diversify and mutate, and to meet every two hundred thousand years to share these experiences. Effectively godlike voyeurs, the shatterlings of the Gentian Line live by gathering the memories of their fellows, including every new technological and genetic advantage, functioning as a kind of benevolent hive-mind, loath to interfere in human development because they believe they are beyond that, but always intensely curious as to how everything is progressing.

Until someone — or something — starts killing off individual shatterlings…

This is a novel of many parts, and some of them are stunning: the incredibly surreal and conceptually stunning Vigilance, the form of interrogation called ’sectioning’, the baroque and art deco Machine People, the various starcraft used, the ideas of trove collections and memory strands and the whole, epic, grandiose nature of the ideas behind the shatterling groups themselves. It is, however, quite sprawling, as I mentioned at the start, and occasionally in this sprawl of mad ideas, hard science and futuregasming a few things seem a little lost: what really did happen to Meninx, for example? Why, if we’re so far into the future, does so much of the technology used seem so recognisable? And it’s a little unfortunate that occasionally some of the bigger issues happen off-screen or are only alluded to (the predecessor Machine culture… and its predecessor as well).

Still, minor flaws which didn’t really spoil my enjoyment at all. Riveted from start to finish and wish it were longer. In some ways I’d class it as experimental Reynolds — him stretching his wings and moving away a little from what he’s been more comfortable with in the past — and for that I can easily forgive him the occasional aforementioned dissonance. I would rank it just behind his excellent The Prefect and the utterly wonderful Pushing Ice (which I rank most things behind, actually: it’s probably in my Top Ten favourite books, that one), but still recommend it hugely: it tries very hard and, in all the ways that matter, succeeds splendidly.

Line War, by Neal Asher.

Fifth and final volume in probably one of the best space opera series ever, in-my-very-humble-but-increasingly-well-read-in-the-genre-opinion (IMVHBIWRITGO?? kthxbye). In Line War, loose ends are tied up, megadeath becomes gigadeath (two million dead and a planet razed in the first twenty pages), Cormac and the AIs suffer a ‘falling out’ (my understatement gland just spontaneously imploded) and I enjoyed it so bloody much I’m going to gibber away in ridiculously uninformative dot points, sue me:

• Jain tech — how can you not love a biological weapon that’s designed to eliminate intelligent society by the trillions? Especially when people infected with Jain tech don’t die when the ‘good guys’ kill them, but rather sprout horrible slaughterous organic weaponry from the death-wounds
• Did I put ‘good guys’ in parenthesis? There’s a very good reason for that
• Scale — hello Erebus and your tiny invading army of a mere 20,000 wormships. Yes, wormships. And a big shout out to the Cable Hogue, a close contender for largest battleship ever described, which finally makes a suitably apocalyptic appearance (and can’t orbit worlds because it’s big enough to affect tides)
• Dragon — an organic lifeform/weapon/future intelligence many kilometres across… and the notable fact that several of those kilometres of subcutaneous matter are ‘weaponizing’…
• War Runcible! And more war drones! Including a massive iron bedbug called Bludgeon and much more of Arach the spider drone with his twinned abdominal Gatling cannons, amongst many others.

And, yep, I am enjoyed and satiated into comprete complete incoherency now. Go forth and acquire as soon as possible, along with its predecessors in order: Gridlinked, The Line Of Polity, Brass Man and the utterly brilliant Polity Agent (poor Four-Pack). The man’s a genius, and he writes science fiction with the impact of a scotch bottle to the side of the skull: up there with Alastair Reynolds and Richard K Morgan.

Which is to say, the best you can get.

Lye Street, by Alan Campbell.

Already out of print, so hunt the specialist booksellers. I don’t know how many copies were done but they went like snow on an Australian morning.

Lye Street is a limited edition novella, albeit a reasonably thick one, set between Campbell’s excellent Scar Night and his forthcoming Iron Angel. Mired in the gloomy, rusting, theocratical city of Deepgate, which hangs on massive chains over an abyss within which the God of Death lurks, it goes into greater detail about the angel Carnival, the scourge of Deepgate who has been hunting and killing one descendant of one particular family every fifty years for a very long time. The current descendant is attempting to summon a demon in an attempt to stop her, and Carnival herself, wherever she alights in the city, is finding messages scrawled and gouged into the bricks and ironwork telling her to go to Lye Street… that everything ends there…

Creepy and brutal, with many scenes still haunting me long after the story was done; in particular a moment when Carnival, broken memories surfacing and swirling, tries to bring herself back from her psychotic, endless mission and succumbs to the insistence of another that she could stop being a monster and be beautiful…

You need this. Hopefully when Campbell is established enough it’ll be reprinted as part of a collection for those who can’t find this edition, but I’d imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to find even if technically out of print at the moment; it’s very recent. Also get Scar Night, at least, and hopefully Iron Angel, which is just about out now and I’m hoping will retain the elevated standards of excellence and imagination that the previous two works have so effortlessly aspired to.

The Scalding Rooms, by Conrad Williams.

Excellent, this. A short novel set in a decaying semi-dystopian world where the poor fight amongst each other to rifle the pockets of hanged execution victims as their bodies rot and tumble from rusting bridge spans, where a vast and collapsing abattoir creates a new, grisly form of life as well as takes it, where gang warfare and hits are just another way of making ends meet. It’s the story of Junko Cane, an abattoir worker in the hideous, run-down Eyes abattoir, battling to live and provide for a family he’s becoming increasingly alienated from, trying not to back to his old life in the gangs as a killer, and slowly becoming aware that there’s more to the abattoir — and the world — than he could have imagined.

Williams’ world is horribly brutal: everything is falling apart, rotting or rusted to death. Machines and society alike are breaking down, and the survivors are scrabbling more and more hopelessly, trapped in endless cycles of pain and despair. Monsters called Mowers come out at night seeking blood and the unwary, but are they really monsters at all…?

It’s a story reminiscent of China Miéville’s worldbuilding at his grittiest and most nihilistic, but even more depressing if that’s humanly possible. My only complaint? Too short — I wanted books and books, worlds and worlds of this.

Enthusiastically recommended. It’s a signed limited edition, not very expensive, from UK-based PS Publishing, and quite difficult to get elsewhere. Buy from them direct. You won’t be sorry.