"Inversions" by Iain M. Banks

I'm still working my way through the last remaining Iain M. Banks novels, and have recently finished "Inversions".

This book alternately presents two stories of unrequited love set in a medieval world. One story follows a court physician through the eyes of her apprentice. The other follows the king's bodyguard and chief concubine through war, intrigue, and treachery. Both are very well handled, and as with other non-Culture books like "The Algebraist", Banks shows that he can do just as well starting from scratch as he can extending and expanding his own ideas.

Like "The Steel Remains" by Richard Morgan, "Inversions" is a departure into a new genre, or at least a new facet of the same genre. In fact, if it weren't for a few key points handled in a skillfully vague way, this would be a period romance rather than science fiction.

For readers who are familiar with Banks' Culture novels, there are often forays by citizens of the Culture into less advanced societies. Banks does a great job of taking two engaging and only tangentially related stories set on the same world and making us question whether there isn't some kind of interference by a group like the Culture at work. It would be hard to argue that there wasn't one agent of a higher power at work in the book, and it's tantalizing to consider who (if anyone) might also be more than they seem.

This is a lovely book that still has its share of blood, but is a whole lot lighter than "Against a Dark Background", "Use of Weapons", and "Consider Phlebas". It's a great book, and makes me want to give some of the author's mainstream fiction a try.

"Riverworld and Other Stories" by Phillip José Farmer

In between reading "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" and "The Fabulous Riverboat" by Philip José Farmer, I took a brief detour and read "Riverworld and Other Stories", which contains the original novella on which the Riverworld series is based.

I would recommend reading the Riverworld novella after "To Your Scattered Bodies Go". As a reader, it's a lot easier to digest the background concepts if you're reading about them as a character experiences them for the first time. In the novella, we join the characters some years after the initial resurrection, without a lot of clear exposition up front. Without having read them, I think of the novella as a beta version of the fifth and six novels, which cover side trips outside the main arc of the Riverworld storyline.

Although the Riverworld novella is the highlight of the collection, there are other entertaining moments. I was surprised to learn that "The Henry Miller Dawn Patrol" was first published in Playboy, and yet "J. C. on the Dude Ranch" was not. Both are fun and raunchy stories, and wouldn't be out of place a few pages away from a centerfold. "The Problem of the Sore Bridge" was also a fun one for anyone who's a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle with a lot more humor and a dash of Lovecraft thrown in for good measure.

In short, if you can find a copy of the collection, pick it up, but read the novella at least after "To Your Scattered Bodies Go".

(If you want more information about Philip José Farmer and his work, I'd suggest taking a look at www.pjfarmer.com.)

"To Your Scattered Bodies Go" by Philip José Farmer

I finally got a chance to swing by the excellent Book Exchange here in Amsterdam. Although the owner claims not to know much about Science Fiction, they have a pretty impressive collection way down in their basement.

Having heard about "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" from my good friend Antranig, I scooped up a copy along with four or five other books soon to be featured in their own reviews here.

With most Science Fiction novels, there are a few central conceits that take life beyond what we consider normal at the moment. The ability to teleport by thought alone, as in "The Stars My Destination", for example. The central conceits of "To Your Scattered Bodies Go" are grand in scope and presented well.

At a stroke, Farmer erases the physical realities underlying almost all of the world as we know it. All of human history has been recorded, and 36 billion humans are resurrected at the same time and laid out along a great river than winds around the surface of an entire planet. All are reborn in a youthful and vigorous body based on their own, minus any defects or injuries. No one ages physically beyond the apparent age of 25. Injuries heal at an amazing rate, eyes and limbs lost regrow. Those who die in this new world are reborn yet again somewhere else along the river.

There is time, land and food enough for everyone to live in peace and comfort. Instead, humans quickly recreate the concepts of scarcity and wealth, and soon move on to recreate slavery, trade, and war. War and preparations for defense drive men to develop technology. In this installment, society progresses to the Stone Age within days of the resurrection.

One of the chief ideas of this new world is the idea of the soul. Later science fiction authors like Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod, Richard Morgan, and Philip K. Dick treat human experience as something that can be recorded and replayed. A clone with our experiences is in essence the same as the original. Each copy of a person that is killed falls into nothingness, even if a new and identical individual is recreated at a later stage.

In the Riverworld, Farmer makes it clear that each recreated body houses the same original soul. If two of the same bodies are recreated, only one will be animated with the living spirit of its owner. There is a connection between soul and body (a silver cord, if you will). If a person dies too many times, their soul loses its affinity for its body and is lost. If a person reaches a state of enlightenment, they become one with the oversoul.

This emphasis on philosophy and religion is a current that travels throughout the series, and is part of its enduring charm. We are not reading about Flash Gordon narrowly cheating death time and time again. We are reading about characters who continue to live and grow beyond the bounds of our short terrestrial lives. They have seen beyond the veil of death and only have new questions confronting them.

It's a classic in the best sense, and well worth the time.

Review: "The Steel Remains" by Richard K. Morgan

I just picked up Richard K. Morgan's latest ("The Steel Remains") at the American Book Center here in Amsterdam. His previous novels (the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy, "Market Forces", "Black Man") have all been science fiction, this is his first fantasy novel.

"The Steel Remains" has swords and sorcery, but the latter is treated in a way that reverses Arthur C. Clarke's famed quote: in this world, magic is indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced technology. Instead of a spirit world, for example, the principle baddies in the novel travel in a world that lies between all possible worlds and in which time is flexible. Gods and wizards are simply more advanced beings, with their own inhuman agendas. There is even a race who achieve through science what others achieve through evolution.

The sword (and lance-staff) fights in this novel are handled well, as are most of the other period details. As our own middle ages were, the world of "The Steel Remains" is a nasty time and place to be alive. Bloody death comes quickly, as do betrayals, intrigue, and sex. Only occasionally do we get the sense that a modern concept is being translated into its fantasy equivalent for the sake of expedience.

In short, Morgan brings his style to a new genre pretty much intact. It's a fantasy novel, heavy on the noir influences. The epilogue in particular should be familiar to anyone who's read (or seen the film version of) a Dashiel Hammett story. The story's not over until the hero has tracked down and repaid a betrayal of his trust that we should have seen coming all along. (This isn't technically a spoiler, as pretty much all of his previous novels have also shared this feature).

It's a guilty pleasure if ever there was one, but still definitely a pleasure.

Review: Revisiting "The Early Stories" by John Updike

With his recent passing, I was reminded that I have the excellent but partly unfinished "The Early Stories", a collection of John Updike's short stories from 1953 to 1975.

I have a mixed reaction to some of his longer works (although admittedly I've only read two or three). With the longer form, he seems to get caught up in laying scene after scene at the expense of the characters. Loving detail and exquisitely fine prose drip off of every morsel of the natural and urban landscape. The characters are equally well observed and described, but somehow the overall effect is a bit distracting for me.

I greatly prefer his short stories, in which the detail is more restrained. These more tightly focused scenes hold their proper place as parts of the larger world into which characters propel themselves. The details that travel into each person's interior world via their ears, eyes, and sense of touch are presented to us in enough detail that we can imagine their experiences in context. Their thoughts and emotions make sense as reactions to (or distractions from) their environment.

His short stories also have a fantastic economy, a rightness to their pace. The endings come just in time, and usually are both the natural outcome of the rest of the story and also just a little bit surprising.

Maybe the longer works have the same flow, and I've just learned to read Updike better. I'll have to pick up a "Rabbit" omnibus edition one of these days.

In closing, I thought I would share a pair of stories (one from 1972, the other from 2005) that come to mind when I think of Updike.

• "How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time" (free abstract, paid story)


• The Roads of Home (free story)

The first link is sadly only available with a paid subscription to the New Yorker. When the copyright finally lapses on Updike's work, the public domain will be quite a bit richer for it.

A picture is worth 300 words...

Here's a quick visualisation of this blog as produced by Wordle.

Review: "The Mind of a Mnemonist" by A. R. Luria

I finally got a chance to read "The Mind of a Mnemonist" in the midst of a business trip. As with "The Man with a Shattered World", also a later work of Luria, "The Mind of a Mnemonist" is a case study following one of Luria's subjects over a large portion of his life. Where "The Man with a Shattered World" detailed the life of a man with severe visual and memory defects, "The Mind of a Mnemonist" details the life of a man whose prodigious visual memory (and imagination) are both his greatest strength and weakness.

There are memory-improving techniques that urge students to train themselves to construct mental landscapes, patterns of items connected to each other in space, each of which connects with and leads to the remembrance of the next item. "S" (the subject of this book) easily creates these types of mental landscapes, but in greater detail and over a greater area than seems possible. He can walk through and recall precise details in immense landscapes even decades later.

In his story "Funes the Memorious", Borges prefaces his use of the word "memory" by saying that we ordinary mortals hardly deserve to use the word compared to the subject of his story. With apologies, "S" also lays claim to that word in a way very close to that of Funes. In addition to memory, "S" owns the word "visualisation" in a way that few of us will ever do. Three words into reading a novel, "S" has already established the time of day, the architecture of the house, the clothing of the characters, their appearance, all far out of proportion to what is described. This owes in part to his synesthesia, which allows the sound of words to spill over into additional sights, smells and sensations that colour his perception.

What is remarkable about this story is that "S" is very nearly a prisoner of his visualisations. As a child, he was late for school because he would either hold the memory of the clock as it read at half seven (and thus think he had plenty of time to prepare) until it was after nine, or because he would imagine his doppelganger dressing and going to school, and did not realise that in reality he had taken no action.

His life is a waking dream, filled with rich but nonsensical images. People's faces seem incomprehensible, because he cannot recognise some kernel of their appearance as being consistent between all the angles and lighting conditions that are possible. When compared with utterly faithful imagined worlds and utterly faithful (or perhaps perfectly well imagined) worlds of memory, the present itself seems somehow dimmed to "S", like only one possible channel to which the mind can be tuned.

When I finished this book, I was sitting in a pub I had visited perhaps a year and a half earlier. Looking across at the sea on a dark winter's night, I was able to recall (dimly) the view in summer, and each of the individuals who had been with me the last time I was at the pub. It seems to me that my recollections were based on a series of abstractions. The place itself was recreated from multiple observations over a handful of visits that summer. The people were recalled as they appeared when I saw them over the course of days or even months, and generally in terms of key details (their faces, their hair, a particular expression, a typical cut of shirt or trouser). This ability to generalise over varied experiences and to store only salient details is key to functioning in daily life.

We do not need to recall what our coworkers looked like on a particular day last summer to interact with them today. We only need to be able to identify them today based on the key details of their appearance. It is not necessary for our daily lives to recall where we parked five days ago in precise detail. We only need to remember where we parked today, and in fact are better served if little trace of the previous location lingers in memory. So what can we learn from a mnemonist, whose experience is structured so differently from our own? Looking beyond the limits of what we are likely to experience helps us question the role of memory, nostalgia and fantasy in the life of a fully functioning adult.

This is a well-written and utterly engaging book, and a very quick read. Very highly recommended.