Book list

I haven't posted in the new year yet. I'm mired in a book that I am only slowly poking my way through, but I am determined to finish it before moving on. I have this horrible completist streak in me, and it is so hard to shake these kinds of things off. And since it is the second half of a two-volume novel, I have already invested some time and effort into the effort.

At the same time, I have carefully avoided the movie theatres, true to my self-pledge not to go see the remakes and revisions I noted late last year.

I considered another reasoned diatribe about what's going on at DC, but that's getting old. I find it fascinating that my pull list is growing shorter and shorter through no effort of my own.

So, I found this in my daily perusal of SF blogs; a list of the 149 science fiction and fantasy novels that "everyone must read" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/22/1000-novels-fiction-fantasy-introduction, by way of SF Signal). It's a fascinating list; some novels I would not have considered science fiction or fantasy, some novels acting as prototypes for what speculative fiction will become, some novels I didn't even know existed…some novels not even novels. And it being from the UK, there feels like a decidedly English tilt to the list. I highly recommend going to the link and reading through the list, since the post actually talks about the novels and why they were included. It is of course, all opinion.

Desperate to put something in my blog before the first month of 2009 gets by, I've reprinted the list (not the discussion) here, bolding the books I've read. It's an experiment of sorts….

Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

Brian W Aldiss: Non-Stop (1958)

Isaac Asimov: Foundation (1951)

Margaret Atwood: The Blind Assassin (2000)

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale (1985)

Paul Auster: In the Country of Last Things (1987)

J.G. Ballard: The Drowned World (1962)

J.G. Ballard: Crash (1973)

J.G. Ballard: Millennium People (2003)

Iain Banks: The Wasp Factory (1984)

Iain M Banks: Consider Phlebas (1987)

Clive Barker: Weaveworld (1987)

Nicola Barker: Darkmans (2007)

Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships (1995)

Greg Bear: Darwin's Radio (1999)

William Beckford: Vathek (1786)

Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination (1956)

Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

Poppy Z Brite: Lost Souls (1992)

Charles Brockden Brown: Wieland (1798)

Algis Budrys: Rogue Moon (1960)

Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master and Margarita (1966)

Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race (1871)

Anthony Burgess: A Clockwork Orange (1960)

Anthony Burgess: The End of the World News (1982)

Edgar Rice Burroughs: A Princess of Mars (1912)

William Burroughs: Naked Lunch (1959)

Octavia Butler: Kindred (1979)

Samuel Butler: Erewhon (1872)

Italo Calvino: The Baron in the Trees (1957)

Ramsey Campbell: The Influence (1988)

Lewis Carroll: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

Angela Carter: Nights at the Circus (1984)

Angela Carter: The Passion of New Eve (1977)

Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000)

Arthur C Clarke: Childhood's End (1953)

GK Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell (2004)

Michael G Coney: Hello Summer, Goodbye (1975)

Douglas Coupland: Girlfriend in a Coma (1998)

Mark Danielewski: House of Leaves (2000)

Marie Darrieussecq: Pig Tales (1996)

Samuel R Delaney: The Einstein Intersection (1967)

Philip K Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968)

Philip K Dick: The Man in the High Castle (1962)

Thomas M Disch: Camp Concentration (1968)

Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

Michel Faber: Under the Skin (2000)

John Fowles: The Magus (1966)

Neil Gaiman: American Gods (2001)

Alan Garner: Red Shift (1973)

William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Herland (1915)

William Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)

Joe Haldeman: The Forever War (1974)

M John Harrison: Light (2002)

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

Robert A Heinlein: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)

Frank Herbert: Dune (1965)

Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker (1980)

James Hogg: The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824)

Michel Houellebecq: Atomised (1998)

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Unconsoled (1995)

Shirley Jackson: The Haunting of Hill House (1959)

Henry James: The Turn of the Screw (1898)

PD James: The Children of Men (1992)

Richard Jefferies: After London; Or, Wild England (1885)

Gwyneth Jones: Bold as Love (2001)

Franz Kafka: The Trial (1925)

Daniel Keyes: Flowers for Algernon (1966)

Stephen King: The Shining (1977)

Marghanita Laski: The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953)

CS Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56) (Book 1 at least)

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Uncle Silas (1864)

Stanislaw Lem: Solaris (1961)

Ursula K Le Guin: The Earthsea series (1968-1990)

Ursula K Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

Doris Lessing: Memoirs of a Survivor (1974)

MG Lewis: The Monk (1796)

David Lindsay: A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)

Ken MacLeod: The Night Sessions (2008)

Hilary Mantel: Beyond Black (2005)

Michael Marshall Smith: Only Forward (1994)

Richard Matheson: I Am Legend (1954)

Charles Maturin: Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)

Patrick McCabe: The Butcher Boy (1992)

Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2006)

Jed Mercurio: Ascent (2007)

China Miéville: The Scar (2002)

Andrew Miller: Ingenious Pain (1997)

Walter M Miller Jr: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960)

David Mitchell: Cloud Atlas (2004)

Michael Moorcock: Mother London (1988)

William Morris: News From Nowhere (1890)

Toni Morrison: Beloved (1987)

Haruki Murakami: The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (1995)

Vladimir Nabokov: Ada or Ardor (1969)

Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler's Wife (2003)

Larry Niven: Ringworld (1970)

Jeff Noon: Vurt (1993)

Flann O'Brien: The Third Policeman (1967)

Ben Okri: The Famished Road (1991)

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)

Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club (1996)

Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)

Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan (1946)

Frederik Pohl & CM Kornbluth: The Space Merchants (1953)

John Cowper Powys: A Glastonbury Romance (1932)

Terry Pratchett: The Discworld series (1983- ) (A few of them)

Christopher Priest: The Prestige (1995)

Philip Pullman: His Dark Materials (1995-2000)

François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34)

Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

Alastair Reynolds: Revelation Space (2000)

Kim Stanley Robinson: The Years of Rice and Salt (2002)

JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997)

Geoff Ryman: Air (2005)

Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses (1988)

Joanna Russ: The Female Man (1975)

Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry: The Little Prince (1943)

José Saramago: Blindness (1995)

Will Self: How the Dead Live (2000)

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)

Dan Simmons: Hyperion (1989)

Olaf Stapledon: Star Maker (1937)

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)

Rupert Thomson: The Insult (1996)

JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit (1937)

JRR Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)

Mark Twain: A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889)

Kurt Vonnegut: Sirens of Titan (1959)

Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto (1764)

Robert Walser: Institute Benjamenta (1909)

Sylvia Townsend Warner: Lolly Willowes (1926)

Sarah Waters: Affinity (1999)

HG Wells: The Time Machine (1895)

HG Wells: The War of the Worlds (1898)

TH White: The Sword in the Stone (1938)

Angus Wilson: The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)

Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)

Virginia Woolf: Orlando (1928)

John Wyndham: Day of the Triffids (1951)

John Wyndham: The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)

Yevgeny Zamyatin: We (1924)

59 out of 149. Looks like my reading list just got a lot bigger.

On Basilisk Station

Since this is a choice for my book group, this will be a briefer post, discussing only one facet of the work.

Admittedly, though I referenced it in an earlier post this month, my knowledge of military science fiction is somewhat thin. I've read Starship Troopers (which I think must be the archetype, if not the prototype, of military SF) many times, as well as Forever War. I've read most of the Berserker novels by Saberhagen, and a great deal of the Man-Kzin stuff from Niven and his followers. I've also read William Forstchen's Lost Regiment series. And yet they all strike me as being somewhat different from what David Weber accomplishes with this first novel in his Honor Harrington series in two important ways.

First, in the other novels I mention, there really is not a lot of detail spent in the science fictional aspects of the story-telling. Weber spends a lot of time in On Basilisk Station describing his world-building, from the political set-up of the various "star nations" (his term) surrounding the planets in question to the intricate political maneuvering of the nation whose territory Basilisk Station is. He spends numbers of pages describing the science behind not only the weapons systems but the propulsion systems of the starcraft. The setting he has created is extraordinarily and realistically deep and wide, and he does a fine job of describing it, getting us into those descriptive passages in fairly clichéd ways but breathing a different kind of life into them, perhaps because of their sheer magnitude. While Heinlein's Starship Troopers does similar things with the politics of the Earth, that novel does so because the military part is secondary to the political conjecture that is at the heart of the novel. Weber's work, however, piles up thins information as background to the events and decisions that its characters make. Of course, we know a great deal about the Kzin in Niven's Known Universe, but that is because so much as been written about them while Weber provides all of his depth, and a good deal of action, in a single novel.

But the Kzin and Saberhagen stories rely on their characters to drive most of their action (and in the case of the Kzin, sometimes the main characters are mankind's "enemy"). And Weber really only develops one character in the course of On Basilisk Station, and that would be the heroine's first officer, Alistair MacKeon. The heroine herself, Honor Harrington, remains a mostly flat caricature of a ship's officer throughout the novel. Even though we are allowed to see some of her thought processes, those thoughts often serve as the jumping off point for Weber's description of the setting. Her actions are predictable, and a great deal of the humanity of the novel comes from other characters' reactions to her. Even the opposing captain in the climactic space battle is given emotion that gives his character depth. Harrington, at least in this first novel, never seems to rise above the caricature of the Good Captain.

Nonetheless, On Basilisk Station is a solid read, containing suspense and action that reaches its peak in the final battle scene (which takes up a fifth of the novel). The writing style is workmanlike—nothing ground-breaking here—but enjoyable, as the story is engaging and fast-moving. But it is driven by technology and thus in some ways feels flatter than other "military SF" I know of, which rely on character development to move their stories along.

Transporter 3

Three Jason Statham movies in a year? How can that be? Allow me to introduce you to the lovely Mrs. Speculator, a tremendous Statham fan, who has gotten me to see that he really is quite a fun actor. He stretched his range somewhat in The Bank Job, going beyond the traditional action film starring role, but Transporter 3 is right in his wheelhouse.

I enjoyed this movie a good bit, even if it does follow the same old formula from the first two movies—in fact, isn't that why we go to see it? Statham remains cool as Frank Martin, a man who will drive any package anywhere for a price. There is plenty of stunt-driving, including a couple of jaw-dropping maneuvers involving a train. And there are a few martial arts scenes, in which inexplicably, Statham always ends up without most of his clothes. There is something kind of funny about the way he uses his jacket, shirt, and tie as weapons, but he destroys them along the way and goes back to his trunk to get more clothes. Of course, the female viewers may appreciate this, as my fairly unbiased opinion is that he has gotten even more ripped than from his previous roles.

This time around, Statham is bullied into delivering an unknown package to a destination that is being provided to him via a GPS device. The bullying involves a device attached to a bracelet he is wearing that will blow up if it is more than 75 feet from the car (this is pretty clearly stated, but really only enforced when it needs to be). Accompanying him is a sullen young Ukrainian woman, Valentina (played by newcomer Natalya Rudakova), whose role in all of this is pretty clear to the audience but a mystery to Martin. She too wears the explosive bracelet, and they both know that they are to be killed after Martin delivers his package, so they spend their time driving trying to figure out how to get away from the evil Johnson, played by Robert Knepper (heh, he said "evil Johnson").

It all moves along smartly, working to the denouement we've come to expect, flashy car and fight scenes, the bad guys discovering you just don't mess with Martin in a car or in a suit, and the good guys winning out in the end with a last-second save. A lot of it is over the top (inflating dufflebags with enough air from the tires of a car to float that same car out of a lake? And then driving off in the same water-logged car…with flat tires???), but it's fun and it pulls you along for the ride rather willingly, even if the acting of Rudakova is horribly wooden and her accent nearly requires subtitles…after all she alternates between exceedingly cute and fairly sexy, and if the women can have their eye-candy with Statham, the men deserve a little something other than floating cars.

It's only after the movie ends and you think back along its plot that you realize it's just completely ridiculous. Or instance, if Valentina really understood her life was in peril, wouldn't she have told Martin that she was the package and exactly why she's the package? And if Johnson is the very best at what he does, why does he make so many clumsy mistakes, like giving Martin access to a cell phone so he can call his friends to help bail him out? Or even worse, why does Johnson concoct such a ridiculously complex plan as he does other than if he doesn't, there's no reason for the movie whatsoever?

But as I said, these moments of clarity only come along after the movie is over. During the course of the movie, the distractions really are Valentina's accent and the utterly unbelievable romance that sets up between Valentina and Martin. Everything else is just tons of fun, including references to gags in the earlier Transporter movies. All in all, the movie is at least worth a matinee viewing, if only to see the cool and suave Martin do his thing. I think I really could enjoy a Transporter 4 if they decide to make one. Just remember, if you decide to buy an Audi, make sure you get those extra capacity dufflebags with the extra capacity tires to inflate them. One never knows when one might have to drive off a bridge into a lake.

(yeah, the trailer for The Spirit was before the movie, and even it didn't ruin the fun we had watching T3)