a-cubed.info

So, I arrived at Narita airport this morning expecting to get on a plane at 10:30 to fly to Kuala Lumpur on business. I should learn to check flights before leaving home as the departure time was listed as delayed until 19:25. Having checked in (it took 90 minutes, because I’m not flying with the airline alliance I have status with) so at 10:15 I headed home. THey later delayed the flight departure expectation to 22:10 and this has now been confirmed. So, I’m still at home for another half hour before heading back to Narita again (but this time having to take awkward trains since the Keisei Skyliner doesn’t run this late ). Instead of a nice daytime flight I’ll now have an overnight flight to arrive in KL about 6am. In fact, the further delay may well have been so that we can arrive amongst the first landings allowed at KLIA in the morning (I’m not sure if they have an overnight shutdown there).

Current Mood:  jealous

As part of my research I need to look into Amazon.com’s Kindle account offerings. Because of their setup with geographic rights restrictions it’s difficult to set up such an account without a US-registered credit card. Does anyone reading this have an Amazon.com Kindle account who is also available to help us get information about their practices? It’s nothing bad, it’s that we’ve been told Amazon.com provide a “Family Account” with features we’re recommending more service providers should give, but which aren’t available on Amazon.co.uk (and Amazon.co.jp’s account information is mostly in formal Japanese which is a bit beyond me).

A non-Culture SF book by Iain M. Banks. According to something I read online there were some claims by non-M fans that this should have been an Iain Banks novel, becase it was mainstream not SF. Clearly the Margaret Atwood school of genre-definition – if it doesn’t include spaceships and space squid then it’s not SF. Rubbish of course. While a non-Culture novel, this is an SF novel in a grand tradition. Parallel universes have been a staple SF trope for many years. There are more than a few hints of Richard Meredith’s Timeliner Trilogy here, though with Banks’ take on it. There are multiple viewpoints, though only one told in first person, the rest in over-the-shoulder third person. There’s a complicated temporakl structure with flashbacks and time-skipping (of some kind, perhaps just moving to a near-identical parallel world which lagged behind the rest in time progression). This jumping around in time and viewpoint is perhaps a little over-contrived to turn what is actually a fairly simple story into something more complicated. Worth perservering with, but not his best non-Culture SF novel.

Current Mood:  restless

Having finally figured out how to approach a book featuring Minds as the primary protagonists in Excession, here Iain M. Banks approaches another of the difficult elements of his Culture universe: the Sublime, that step off into another reality, or retreat into the tightly wound other dimensions that are one of the models of the universe we have now. Following a society at a similar tech-level to the Culture (a potential Culture founder, in fact, which decided not to join) as they approach their entry into the Sublime. The sublime itself remains an unexaplained, in fact pretty much unexplainable mystery, but the way a civilisation approaches it and the general attitudes of the Culture towards Life, the Universe and everything non-sublimed is explored using this mechanism. The Hydrogen Sonata of the title is a piece of music written for an unimagined instrument, which had to be invented in order for the piece to be played. The reasons for and structure of the piece and instrument are described in the book, as is the principle character, a member of the race approaching sublimation, who has set herself the highly difficult task of playing the piece “perfectly” before the sublimation. She is torn away from pursuit of this by the major events chronicled in the book, featuring the deep secrets behind the holy book of the subliming race. The Sonata is an interesting reflective sphere within the book, much as the play is within the Book of the New Sun, providing a microcosm of the overall situation and its eventual denouement. Along the way we are treated to Banks’ peculiar imagination, though not much of his trademark gut-churning.

A good addition to the Culture stable, though not receommended for first-timers to that universe.

The year just turned in Tokyo. Despite some illness this year my life is generally pretty good and I’m happy with it. I hope you are with yours, or at least that 2013 gets better for you.

Current Mood:  happy

Yet another Harry Dresden installment. Having recovered from being dead (hey, this is a fantasy novel after all) Harry is plunged into his role as the Winter Knight withhout much in the way or mercy (well, what did you expect from the Winter Court). He’s also thrust into a wider world of magic in which a bunch of the previous threads going all the way back to Book 1 are either explained, or even have their apparent original explanations yanked away and a deeper truth revealed. It’s pretty skillfully done, though, so I think quite a lot of the stuff here was in Butcher’s mind from way back (not necessarily all the gory details but the general thrust of things at least). There’s some nice twists in this tale and a brilliant sense of impending doom, only slightly averted by the denouement here. Lots of excretory intersections with air moving devices still to come from this and doubtless further threads to be explored. IMHO Butcher is doing a pretty good job with the levelling up issue and isn’t shying away from the character implications for both his hero and the supporting characters.

Current Mood:  accomplished

A collection of the various shorter pieces Jim Butcher has written in his urban fantasy series. These are quite a varied set of stories, a couple of which I’ve read before, but most of which were new to me. There are two stories written from the points of view of other characters (Thomas and Murphy) which is somewhat interesting, though I’m not sure they work as well as the Harry-viewpoint ones, probably because Butcher hasn’t had time to really develop their “voices” are narrators. There’s definitely more than a hint of unreliable narrator in the Thomas story.  It’s nice to see the background story that’s mentioned in one of the novels (what Maeve did to Billy and Georgia’s wedding). It’s also interesting to see his first story written about Harry, though as he acknowledges his writing skills at that point were much more limited. Some of these are clearly written (as he more or less admits in the introduction to them) on specific commission and not springing from his own imagination directly, so something of a mixed bag. Worthwhile for fans of the series, though. Better value than the standalone publication of Backup (the Thomas story) that was well overpriced.

Current Mood:  accomplished

The umpteenth Harry Dresden novel by Jim Butcher follows up on the previous one titled “Changes” by exploring that changes made in the universe in the last installment. Harry’s back, but after being assassinated he’s back as a ghost, with the task of solving his own murder as well as helping his friends with the fallout from his previous apocalypse. Things have got darker in Chicago in his absence, and his friends are not faring so well in this not-so-brave new world. Meanwhile, most of them can’t see Harry and even if and when they can, they don’t all believe in his identity and/or good intentions. I’ve seen some criticism of this from people who feel the series has jumped the shark but I think he’s dealing well with the inevitable levelling up that Harry’s been going through n the previous books, setting new challenges, all tied in to earlier plot threads that he’s dropped along the way.

Current Mood:  accomplished

A one-off collaboration between Steven Brust and Megan Lindholm. A mixture of police procedural in Lakota, Ohio and Gypsy/Celtic mythology. Written well before the modern trend for urban fantasy, though after De Lint’s Jack the Giant Killer and Drink Down the Moon. An interesting set of authorial voices (a both Burst and Linholm tend to create) combine with a deep twisting of European folklore in a lovely little tale of murder, good, evil, temptation and redemption.

This is one of those books that’s sat on my shelf unread for many years and I’m glad I finally got round to it.

Current Mood:  accomplished

A recent (very) occasional strip published in 2000AD comic, the two so far are collected in this somewhat overpriced Graphic Novel (GBP12 for around forty pages). The title of the volume is that of the first of the two stories. This is a Cthulhu-mythos-inspired tale of an upper class gentleman and his servant (a bit of Lord Peter Whimsey and a bit of Bertie Wooster) who go around investigating and fighting incursions into our reality by elder things. There’s a shadowy government conspiracy lurking in the background but no real details on that given in these two tales, just its introduction. A fun little read if you like the Mythos, reasonably well-done and the characterisations aren’t derivative per se, though it’s difficult in such a short selection to really distinguish them from so many other 20s/30s pairings of post-war upper and lower-class former soldiers. Decently drawn to reflect the settings and action.

Current Mood:  calm