Asking the Wrong Questions

My latest Political History of the Future column discusses Altered Carbon , which recently received an appropriately neon-lit, grimy-yet-expensive-looking adaptation from Netflix.  My emphasis in this column, however, is more on the original, 2002 novel by Richard Morgan.  I reread the book before watching the show, for the first time in close to 15 years, and wasn't terribly surprised to discover that some of its hardboiled-cyberpunk tropes hadn't aged terribly well.  Nevertheless, Altered Carbon remains a terrific thriller with a great central idea, one that Morgan explores with insight and verve. Peeking in between these crime story elements, however, are glimpses of a world in which your body has become just another one of your possessions, like a car or a phone. Something you can insure. Something you can trade up. Something the state can, under certain circumstances, lay claim to. Something the rich get better versions of. The show, in comparison, only glosses ...

I've been posting these less often because most of my reading has either been for reviews or has ended up in longer posts, but I've finally worked up enough of a backlog to make up a post. Scar Night by Alan Campbell - the first in the Deepgate Codex trilogy (followed by Iron Angel and God of Clocks ), Scar Night is busy, complicated, and unrelenting.  This is quite a bit of fun for a couple hundred pages, as Campbell doles out more and more bits of information about his fantasy city and fantastically complicated premise.  A crumbling empire, Deepgate hangs by ancient, allegedly indestructible chains above a chasm that allegedly contains hell itself, and is ruled by an ancient religious order dedicated to providing the dead, whose bodies are tossed into the chasm, a way of navigating to salvation, in pursuit of which goal it rules the city with an iron fist.  There's a lot of blood, gore and destruction involved--in the wars between Deepgate's rulers and the rebell...

Some of my recent online reading. Hal Duncan writes about Battlestar Galactica , and, as on most topics, does so intelligently, forcefully, and at great length.  Lots of interesting ideas here: some more exploration of what it means that the show's premise maps more accurately to the Holocaust than to 9/11 (I hadn't, for example, thought of Gaeta as embodying the cliché of the victim made monstrous by his victimhood, mainly because I was too busy being aggravated by the fact that the show's one and only acknowledged homosexual character was being depicted as a villain who kept seeking out powerful, charismatic men to follow), some provocative meditations on just how telling it is that its writers have favored the 9/11 parallel, and mainly a lot of insights into the kind of story the writers produced as opposed to the one they thought they were telling. Dan Hartland is rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories in order of publication.  I read these stories, and the Holmes nove...

I read 66 books in 2008, a slight uptick from last year but nowhere near the numbers I used to rack up when I was gainfully unemployed. In terms of quality, too, 2008 showed a slight but noticeable improvement over 2007, though it still wasn't as exciting a reading year as I could have wished. Genre-wise, the books I read this year clustered mostly around SF and contemporary-set literary fiction. I've been reading less and less fantasy and historical fiction for several years now, and in 2008 I seem to have bottomed out with both genres. On the other hand, the number of nonfiction books I read this year is quadruple that of last year (which is a more impressive way of saying I read four nonfiction books) and I've started to get back in the habit of reading graphic novels and YA fiction. Of my reading resolutions , I failed to meet only one--I had planned to read something by Willa Cather, or George Orwell's less-known books, but never got around to either. The one...

I've written already about Richard Morgan's Black Man ( Thirteen in the US), which on Wednesday was the highly deserving winner of this year's Arthur C. Clarke award, in my review of the Clarke shortlist for Strange Horizons . I left some of my thoughts on the book out of that review, partly because I wanted it to be roughly the same length as my write-ups of the other nominees, but mostly because Strange Horizons didn't feel like an appropriate venue for discussions that include massive spoilers. This piece, therefore, isn't precisely a review of Black Man , but more a continuation from and expansion of the one from Strange Horizons . This means that I'm not going to repeat the points I made in that review, and that in order for this post to make sense you should probably read the Strange Horizons piece first (and, as I am going to be revealing major twists and plot details left, right, and center, that you should have already read Black Man --which ind...

AtWQ's sources reporting live from the Clarke ceremony reveal that the winner is... Richard Morgan's Black Man .  As you'll know if you read my Clarke review, I am very, very pleased with this result, and not the least because I wasn't expecting it--all the buzz seemed to be for The Execution Channel or The H-Bomb Girl .   Black Man is an excellent novel and a stepping stone in Morgan's career, and for all the controversy surrounding the Clarke this year (not that the Clarke is ever not surrounded by controversy), I don't think it can be denied that the judges selected an excellent book.  Congratulation to Mr. Morgan and the Clarke jury.

Part two of my Clarke award review is now online. Also, in case you missed the update to the previous post, Adam Roberts's Clarke review is up at Futurismic, and Nic Clarke continues her Clarke series with a review of Matthew de Abaitua's The Red Men . And, of course, the award itself will be announced this evening. UPDATE: Nic's review of The Raw Shark Texts is also up, completing her overview. Way to come in under the wire!

...and some people obsess over genre literary awards. The shortlist for the 2008 Arthur C. Clarke award has been announced (Niall Harrison, one of the Clarke judges, has a comprehensive list of reviews here ): The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter The Red Men by Matthew de Abaitua The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall The Execution Channel by Ken MacLeod Black Man by Richard Morgan Which just goes to show that you can know and frequently correspond with two of the judges for this award and still have only the faintest hope of guessing the nominees (which is not to say that either of these judges have spoken out of turn--merely that I think I've developed a sense of their taste in books). I'd guessed that both Sarah Hall and Richard Morgan's novels would be nominated, because both have received a great deal of praise in the circles whose tastes the Clarke tends to mirror (not coincidentally, these are the two nominees which I had already bee...