This is a collection of mini-reviews of science fiction and fantasy books which I liked enough to recommend but haven’t reviewed at length (often because I couldn’t find time).
The collection began as a string of comments to an identically-titled post on Green Path, one which drifted away from its environmental theme and into general SF. It is structured like a blog, with the most recent additions at the top; dates given are the dates reviews were added.
Alex Irvine’s Anthropocene Rag (2020) is a roadtrip, somewhat in the manner of Spinrad’s People’s Police, through territory explored by Cory Doctorow, William Gibson and Greg Egan among others.
Consciousness is emerging in an artificial intelligence which has so much nano-tech at its disposal that it can casually make anything it likes. But it doesn’t understand itself or its own motivations. What could possibly go wrong?
(31.12.24)
The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
Zen Cho was born and raised in Malaysia and now lives in England. Her first fiction appeared in 2015 and she has been collecting awards ever since, so she is definitely a writer to watch. Here are two of her recent books.
This is a bit odd but it’s mine and I like it so I’m going to share it anyway. It raises two good questions. I will deal with the simpler one first.
What is it?
The image is a photo – a very bad photo, technically – straight off my camera. Late in the evening, when there was just enough light to see it, something hopped into the ashes of a long-cold fire pit at the Alligator Creek Falls camping ground. Shooting first and checking camera settings later, this is what I got.
The camera (DSLR) happened to be set on aperture priority (f3.5) and ISO 400, so its exposure time automatically stretched to half a second because of the dim light. The camera moved in that time, of course. The loose ash may have contributed to that nice soft effect, too, but I’m not sure. The pinks and browns were mostly invented by the camera, its automatic colour balance trying too hard to make something out of a background which was nearly all greys (there were a few pinkish fallen gumleaves in the ashes). The fact that the composition was satisfactory was mostly luck, too, since I could barely see my subject.
Really, I’m surprised that anything at all was visible in the image, let alone that it was attractive.
But is it Art?
Purely as an image, it’s almost abstract and vaguely organic. The colours and textures have reminded some people of a chalk sketch. I would be quite happy to print it and put it on my wall, but is it art?
A ‘work of art’ is firstly a work, something made, and this is something found (on my camera, that is). Not that photographs can’t be art, but art also has an intentional aspect and this image was fortuitous from start to finish. “Art is not what you see, but what you make others see,” according to Degas, and that doesn’t apply here either.
If it is art, then, my image can only be art in the same sense that Duchamp’s urinal or, more recently, the banana duct-taped to a wall are art: “everyday objects raised to the dignity of a work of art by the artist’s act of choice,” as Duchamp said.
But if it isn’t art, what is it?
As a found object, however, perhaps my image is most akin to the pretty pebbles or seed-pods we pick up on our excursions and display on a window-sill when we get home. So yes, it’s okay to frame it and hang it on the wall (which automatically and in this case misleadingly makes it look like art) even if it isn’t art.
All of which says something about how we think about art.
But what is it? Really?
Oh, you would like to know what the subject is? That’s less interesting, but okay. Here’s a more documentary, less sketchy, photo of it a minute or two later after it had hopped out of the fire-pit and I had organised my camera.
Still dusted with ash
Yes, it’s a cane toad.
If that makes us respond more negatively to my top photo than we did before, that says something about how we think about depictions of the natural world.
The fiction we now call Fantasy is largely a mid-twentieth century invention with roots in older mythologies. Here I want to look at some novels from the Dark Ages of the genre, the 1960s and early 70s, rooted explicitly in the Dark Ages of Europe. All of them are far too good to forget.
Aboriginals and Canoes at Cooktown ca 1900 by James Cossar Smith
This post was triggered by the wonderfully evocative old photo above. It comes from the Fryer Library, University of Queensland, part of a large collection indexed here.
The page will gradually grow into an anthology-style post like People in Australia before Europeans arrived and The European colonisation of Australia but covering specifically the early colonial period in northern Australia, roughly 1850 – 1930 and anywhere north and east of a line from Bundaberg to Darwin. Like those two, it will be a collection of snippets from items that deserve to be remembered, from various online sources.
A few thoughts for new retirees from someone who has been there and done that recently enough to recall some unexpected challenges and rewards…
Relevance deprivation
Your job is a very large part of your identity. For years, a key step in getting to know people has been asking each other, “What do you do for a living?” and the answer was often, “I am a [teacher chippie engineer gardener].”
Finding a good new-to-me writer and series is always a delight and I’m celebrating my discovery of Aaronovitch and The Rivers of London by putting them in the context of some books I’ve known much longer.
Charles Stross: The Laundry Files
A mash-up of Fleming – Deighton – Le Carre spy novels and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos? Why not? And some cubicle-life workplace humour for light relief? Sure. The result won’t be to everyone’s taste but some of us will find it to be great (gory, gruesome) fun.
