“MMS Channels Stephen King”
Score: 4/5

Bad Things

Michael Marshall

£3.77

Hmm.  I’m a big fan of Michael Marshall (Smith), and I’ve got pretty much all he’s published.  I like the the unpredictability of his books, where they suddenly go in an unanticipated direction.  (Maybe it’s just me though, and they’re quite predictable for everyone else.  I don’t care – I like ‘em.)

But this one is a little less unpredictable, a little more formulaic.  It feels curiously like a Stephen King book, if Mr. King switched to the west coast.  Partly I suppose it might be down to the offhand way he treats geography – he assumes you know where Portland is relative to Seattle (and some smaller places too – places I’d never heard of, but hey, I’m not from the U.S. so I don’t feel too bad about that).  Stephen King does much the same for the Maine area.

The more I think about it though, the more the whole story arc feels like an old Stephen King one.  Not one of the new ones he seems to be churning out, but one of the old spooky ones.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing (oops), but on the other hand it’s not really the MMS I’ve come to know and love.

It’s still a good book, and it’s a quick book to read.  But it doesn’t eclipse the Straw Men trilogy for page turning thrilleriness.

Yesterday SWMBO and I went on a walking tour of Belfast.  This is the sort of thing tourists normally do, but this particular tour was about some of the archaeological digs that have taken place around Belfast city centre and what has been uncovered.  Most folks on the tour were from Norn Iron, finding out more about their own city.

It didn’t stop everyone else from treating the tour group like we were tourists, mind you!

The tour itself was taken by Ruairi O`Baoill, who is a Real, Honest To Goodness archaeologist.  He worked on many of the digs he was telling us about, which meant he could give lots of interesting details (like the trepanation training in Skipper Street, on the other side of the road from The Spaniard).

This is the route we took (although I’m dubious about the doyble after Pottinger’s Entry – I think the GPS got a bit confused).

Here’s some more info from the Beeb on the Hidden History tour.  It’s free, and they’re running more in July.

It has been a bit quiet here lately, but that’s mostly because I’ve been busy, away, or doing other stuff.  Here’s one of the ‘other stuff’.

Sunday was the summer solstice, and the good folks at Lagan Valley Regional Park organised a walk and talk at the Giant’s Ring, a 200m-diameter henge monument in Belfast.

Here’s the route the walk took (plus a wee dander around after the end of the talk), courtesy of TrailGuru:

“Fraction Of A Book”
Score: 3/5

Found (The Missing)

Margaret Peterson-Haddix

£5.99

I get disappointed when a book cuts off before the end of the story.  If I buy a book, I want the story, not a serialisation of it over a number of instalments.  Big, thick books with small print don’t intimidate me.  Having to pay twice (or three times!) just to get the damned story finished just builds resentment.

This book contains the start of a story.  I don’t care if the author actually has seven books planned, this one only started to get going around the last chapters.  Those ‘seven books’ might actually make two or three decent real books, but what was delivered here was just a fraction of one.

That annoys the hell out of me.

Apart from that, there’s a lot to like here.  It’s a well-charactered drama for the Young Adult market, dealing with adoption.  I just wish the book finished at the same time as the story, so I didn’t feel so cheated.

“Brillian Belfast Based Book”
Score: 4/5

Mystery Man

Bateman

£7.99

The tragic loss of his first name doesn’t seem to have done Bateman (née ‘Colin Bateman’) any harm.

This is the first Bateman book I’ve read that doesn’t feature disillusioned journalist and crime fighter Dan Starkey.  This book, instead, has a new protagonist – a disillusioned shop owner and crime fighter.

OK, it may be a little formulaic, but to try to break out of that the author tries a couple of new twists.  The main one is around the protagonist’s viewpoint – everything we see in the novel, and everything we learn, is all from the protagonist’s point of view.  Nothing too startling there, I suppose.  But it means that we learn about the unnamed protagonist only through fragments from other people – usually people that already know him.  There’s none of that spelling-things-out-for-the-beautiful-scientist’s-dumb-daughter that plagues cheap science fiction.  This is a very understated way of building character, and (I imagine) quite difficult to do.

It’s all handled with aplomb here, and seeing character development done in the same way is fascinating.

The crimes are of secondary importance in the plot, which is never a bad thing.  Well, rarely a bad thing, and not a bad thing here.

But really, what I liked best about it was the Belfast setting.  “No Alibis” features prominently, and it’s a store I’ve been known to frequent.  I recognised none of the characters from the book in there, but next time I’m in I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for them all.

“For When Zombies Attack”
Score: 4/5

Emergency

Neil Strauss

£11.99

I first heard of Strauss when I read The Game, just before I got married.  It’s an eminently readable book full of generally dislikeable characters.

I have another of his books on my to-read pile - “The Rules Of The Game”.  It got a thumbs-down from SWMBO, so I haven’t been rushing to read it and then this one got priority when it came out.

Here are some plusses about this book:

1. It’s eminently readable too,
2. It’s full of good ideas on what to do in an emergency,
3. It has hints on planning for when bad things happen,
4. It’s a good story.

Some of the minuses include:

1. He just doesn’t seem to be that nice a guy,
2. The story, he admits, has been mucked around time-wise to make a better narrative,
3. There isn’t really any advice that you couldn’t figure out just by sitting down and thinking.  (Except one – how to open a padlock using a coke can was neat.)

He writes well.  That’s something I find very annoying, because he seems to be a bit of a plonker.  But it’s well written, it flows well, and that makes it an easy page turner.  Damn him!

So, buy this for the story. Or buy it for your loved-ones to read so they know how to react in an emergency.  Or buy it so you too know how to open a padlock without a key.  Just don’t buy it hoping to learn things you couldn’t figure out on your own.

“So So Sci Fi”
Score: 3/5

Protector

Larry Niven

£4.70

This short novel manages to pack in thoughts on where mankind came from, how it got to the stage it’s at, where it’s going, and what could stop it.  It’s very much in the ‘hard science fiction’ category where the likes of Arthur C. Clarke reign.

That said, it feels a little unfulfilling.  I can’t explain why.  Maybe it’s because he brought the ‘protectors’ into another of his series, the Ringworld books, so there wasn’t much surprise around them.  Or maybe not – maybe it’s just not a fulfilling book.

Still, it’s not a bad book, and it’s easy enough to read.  Faint praise indeed…

“A Plain, Unexceptional Rankin”
Score: 3/5

Sex and Drugs and Sausage Rolls

Robert Rankin

£5.59

Each chapter in this book is preceded by a poem.  Sometimes the poem relates directly to what’s going to happen, sometimes it’s a bit of back-story for one of the characters and sometimes it’s just a fragment of bizarro-world.

The first verse of the first poem before the first chapter is absolutely the best bit of the entire book.  This is it:

“There’s a frog in the Kenwood blender.
There’s a cat in the microwave.
There’s a mouse in the waste disposal.
There’s a chef and his name is Dave.”

Now that I’ve shown you the best bit, you don’t need to buy this book.  It’s not bad, as such, but he’s written better books and when he’s on-form he’s brilliant.  Here, he’s not.

“This Made Me Angry”
Score: 4/5

Little Brother

Cory Doctorow

£6.39

I don’t often get angry when I’m reading a book.  OK, sometimes (like TV) I get a bit ranty when things get obviously stupid.  I had to stop watching Primeval because of the scientist’s blissful ignorance of science, for instance.  I never actually threw anything at the telly, but SWMBO certainly had to put up with some shoutiness.

The fact that they’re now making a movie of Primeval doesn’t bode well.

But the anger from this book is different.  It’s not that there’s anything wrong or unrealistic in the book, it’s because bits of it are all too realistic.

It’s hard to place when this novel is actually set.  Bits of it are very much current tech, that would date quite quickly.  Bits of it, like the ‘Xbox Universal’, are maybe a year or two further out – Microsoft wasn’t happily giving Xboxes away free last time I looked, but I can imagine the business model allowing it.

Nonetheless, it’s very much a novel of the later Bush years.  The DHS, waterboarding, ubiquitous CCTV, enemy combatant status and detention without trial are all here.  And while you can make good cases for all of those things, sometimes, well, they’re just not used for the best of reasons.

It’s not hard to find examples of misuse.  For example, in Britain we’ve had a council using RIPA to spy on a 3-year old.  There are many more examples, and the internet has certainly given them visibility (although I’m not sure that’s a wholly good thing).

This book is really a call to arms for geeks everywhere.  Like Howard Beale shouting “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more”, Doctorow wants you to stand up to the wrongs that you see, and he gives you some tools to help you make that stand.

Although, frankly, if we can’t even get rid of our MPs when we can prove they were defrauding the public I’m not sure how much good it’ll do.  That makes me angry too.

“London You’ve Never Seen”
Score: 4/5

Neverwhere: The Author's Preferred Text

Neil Gaiman

£5.99

I read the BBC version of this many years ago, but somehow SWMBO acquired this ‘preferred text’ edition.  I didn’t even know there was such a beast.

It’s basically like the BBC version, only more so.  It’s a bit longer, so the author has a bit more space to go into details that were left out, but it’s just a fuller, more complete version of the story rather than a re-telling or, worse, ‘re-imagining’.

If you liked the original BBC book ‘Neverwhere’, this is worth a read.  If you haven’t read it, this isn’t a bad version to start with. (Or ‘isn’t a bad version with which to start, for the grammar pedants out there.)