Book Club

So I've been sick. I worked from home on Monday, but ended up working ridiculously late (or early, more accurately), which didn't help the state of my illness. Feeling generally miserable, I took today off.

When I'm sick, I read. When I have nothing else to do but read, and I'm reading for pleasure and not to get through it, I usually get through about one and a third novels per day.

Marsbound by Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman is famously the author of The Forever War, a seminal piece of literature and excellent example of everything that is good and true about science fiction -- presenting relatable characters in extraordinary, speculative circumstances to deliver a point of view which cannot be as readily presented any other way, using as it does the trappings of SF to bypass your preconceptions and opinions and making you think about something as if for the first time.

Marsbound isn't really that sort of book, but to be honest, any of us would be lucky to come up with one of those in a career.

What Marsbound is, is a fairly standard and workmanlike piece of SF. People in a recognizable future go to Mars. They find aliens, and then more aliens. The aliens aren't what you were expecting, but rather part of a fairly linear plot which unfolds at a steady pace. The characters are interesting without being particularly memorable, there aren't too many surprises, and things end up pretty much as you'd expect.

An entertaining enough book but not one of his greater works, for sure.

Transition by Iain M Banks

Iain Banks is probably one of my favourite working writers. He has that most unlikely of talents -- every book of his that I've read, without exception, has been engaging, surprising, deft, and elegant. He is a craftsman in the truest sense of the word.

He writes both genre and non-genre works, the former with a middle initial and the latter (usually) without one, so you know there will be at least a patina of science fiction about this work. I hadn't read any reviews of this new book, so I was pretty much coming into it blind.

It reminds me greatly of China Mieville's latest book, The City & The City, in a few ways. You start out in a generally recognizable modern world, are presented with an intriguing and involved story deftly told, and very quickly come to the conclusion that you have no fucking idea what is going on.

Transition is a masterful piece of storytelling, much of which is concerned with the gradual elucidation of the central fantastic conceit of the story world; it is a skein of wildly dissimilar threads which all, eventually, draw together into a satisfying whole. It is also a critique of capitalism and modern economic thought, sometimes very shamelessly so, sometimes excessively expository; but the plot and the characters are more than solid enough to carry you through.

This is, and yet isn't, a good starting place for an introduction to his writing. It lacks much of the heavy-classical-science-fiction trappings that he tends to write (his best known books concern the Culture, a post-scarcity human-ish-dominant interstellar civilization which could be best described as what Star Trek's Federation would actually look like if everybody had working replicators). The setting of this book is much more familiar to 'normal' people, and that might make it more accessible for someone who isn't necessarily a hard-core SF fan, but at the same time it deals with a number of complex ideas, and doesn't necessarily explain them up front.

Overall, one of his better works, and that's saying something.