Book Review - Ancillary Justice

To win any one of the major awards in writing in a year is a major achievement, to win five of them is a feat worthy of legend, and it sets up an anticipation for the story that puts an unfair strain on the words before you even start to read them.

Cheerfully I’ve never put much faith in awards in general, so I just read the book…

Ancillary Justice is the story of Breq, who was once the Justice of Toren, a massive warship in the service of the Empress that commanded thousands of troops and brought the will of the empire to all the corners of the galaxy, now a human like so many others.  The story begins when Breq discovers the body of Seivarden, a person who should have been dead some years ago from Breq’s previous life as Justice, and makes the decision to look after them against all better logical instincts.

Progressing from two perspectives, that of the present day Breq making their way in the world and that of Justice of Toren in the past and the events that led up to Justice becoming Breq and Breq alone, and there’s nothing in the narrative that marks the difference to the two perspectives because as far as the narrator is concerned, Breq and Justice are the same creature.

This caused a particular problem for me, because while the nature of a self is a constant, time is not, and even a slight hint at the beginning of each chapter (in the manner of Game of Thrones with the name of the character whose chapter it is) would have been enough to prevent the disconnect. As it is, when you start a new chapter, you have to read till you find a landmark or character that’s unique to that section before you know which time period you’re in, sometimes immediate, oft times not. 

Not a problem for many perhaps, but I really didn’t like that about it. The other interesting point is the way in which none of the characters are categorised as male or female, particularly when you consider that the languages used on the planet have both male and female inflections and traits, and that too makes for a read that is more challenging than I thought it would have been.  I understand the idea that Justice would only ever have considered itself a ship, and so too would Breq as a result, but to have uncertainty over the gender of those that Breq meets in times future seems a little at odds.  There’s various talk over the net of it being done to make you question how you see gender and sexuality, particularly as the names given don’t conform to normal naming conventions (western anyway), so there are moments where you do question when a character you thought was male is revealed as female. 

An interesting exercise to be sure, but not something to be done in the middle of an active story perhaps...

The story doesn’t race along, but the suspense builds well, there’s a sense of foreboding about what was done in times past and what needs to be done in times future.  Ancillary Justice stands and falls with the main character, Justice as a ship is cold, mechanical, analytical, capable of looking through hundreds of eyes at once, seeing things from all angles without passion or confusion.  Breq sees only through one pair of eyes, eyes that have the hormonal taint of flesh to them, and it’s in the those hormones that the drama plays out, where Justice would only ever (and does) follow orders, Breq is faced with the psychological rebellion that something just feels wrong and is compelled to act upon it.

I haven’t said much about the book and the plot and to be honest, that’s because it’s not the most complex of plots till the last third, at which point all the intrigue starts pouring in, the truth about Justice is revealed and the book gets to go forwards from a single unified perspective.  I understand why the two stories are interspersed, but they’d have been better doing them in chronological order, with the Justice section first and the Breq section afterwards, it wouldn’t have taken anything away from the story and it would have given the reader something to hold on to with Breq, rather than trying to veil everything till the big reveal from times past.

I did enjoy this book in the end, but there was a point at which I put it down to get on with other things, something that doesn’t normally happen with me at all. I normally devour books in a single sitting, but the combination of slow pacing and figuring out which time zone the chapter was in got to me and I needed a break from it. 

By the time I’d finished the book, I was certainly into the story and interested in what would happen next, but it took me running out of other new reading material before I did go back to it.

Book Review: Station Eleven

A major part of the reading exercise was to pick things that ordinarily I wouldn’t have given a second thought, this in turn led me to question the sorts of books I’d always read and in turn, why it was I’d read those sorts of books.

I like heroes and villains, I like it when the line between them is blurred, I like fast paced and hard hitting, I like it when you have some idea of what’s coming next...

And that brings me to the first book on my review list.

Station Eleven

The quote on the back says “Beautifully written and wonderfully elegiac”

Elegiac?  Really?

Go ahead, look it up, I had to...

Station Eleven is a story about Arthur Leander, a man who dies in the first chapter of the book, on the evening that a deadly virus arrives in North America and wipes out the world within a few weeks.  Those who survived the virus did so mostly by being away from the rest of the world, or in places where the virus didn’t manage to spread to, there is no talk of anyone being immune to this virus, which is a refreshing change from the usual group of resilient survivors.

The next chapters tell of civilisation as it falls, but not in a voyeuristic way, more in momentary glimpses of individual worlds as they ended, not knowing they were ending.  There’s no shock, horror, tactics at work, it’s simple prose narrating what (for the omnipotent narrator) is just another day on the world.

The story then shifts again, to a time many years after, when some of those who knew Arthur are now part of a travelling show that goes from town to town and performs in return for food or shelter for the evening.  Life has changed much since the removal of technology from it, modern medicines are no longer present, and while there are dangers, there are far less of them, because there are far less people in general. 

But there are still dangers...

The pace of the book isn’t fast, but nor does it crawl, what it did for me was hold my attention to the page.  I read in one chapter of the dangers presented by a new age preacher and those following him, and in the next chapter, was thrown back twenty years previous to a time when Arthur Leander was still alive, and read of things that he did in his life that unknowingly would affect a world decades after his death.

The best stories are woven, and I haven’t seen a better example in recent years than this.  There are many threads to the cloth of the story, from Arthur and his flawed existence, to Clark who preserves the civilisation of the past as best he can, to Kirsten making her way in the new world, and each of them has a distinct voice, but not so distinct that they drown out the sound of the others.  The threads only come together in the last few pages, and to put even a summation of where it went would be to ruin the nature of this book.  Life is a journey, and when you reach the end of it, you find yourself looking back and wondering what else you could have done if you’d threaded things a little different.  This book is a journey, I understand the ending, but I can also see the ways in which it could have gone so differently.

Throughout, the writing is simple, not trying to use big words to score points (Elegiac anyone?), but instead the right words, and the right words are rarely complex.  The characters are not as detailed as they could have been, but that allows the reader to imprint on them all the more, and the ending, while not triumphant (which would have been inappropriate given the setting), is satisfying, it leads to a greater sense of the world out there.

Most of all, the way in which the story strips away the nature of what we are now and presents the image of what we were once and could be again is the greatest strength of it. 

I liked this story a lot, it made me resolve to open my horizons more often... 

On Reading...

On Reading...

The thing that most writers are told to do that they don’t actually go and do, is read other books to see where they’re going wrong with their own writing.

I’ve been as guilty of this as anyone out there, so I made a decision a few months back to get back into reading things that other people had written, and in doing so I found out a few things.   

The world has changed somewhat from where it was when I was last reading things, I’m a big fan of a number of the older classics, things like Gibsons Neuromancer, Morgans Altered Carbon, Milans Cybernetic Samurai, and all those other books that I read when I was younger and had the time to sit down and read through things in detail.  I recognise that the world those books were written in has changed, is no longer there, the fears that drove writers in those days are not the fears that drive them today, and so too, the writing changes to fit the new generation.

With this in mind, I picked up a number of books, and I made sure that they weren’t in the identikit mould that a number of authors find themselves placed in because their publisher knows that’s what sells.

You know what I’m talking about...

Take Jack Reacher for example, not the Tom Cruise version, but any of the books, they follow the same pattern...

Reacher arrives

Finds injustice

Has a fight

Has a shag

Has another fight

Rights a wrong

Leaves...

Repeat Ad Infinitum...

I’m not decrying this as a bad thing to do, a lot of people like reading books that are similar to ones that they’ve enjoyed, David Gemmell, one of my favourite authors of all time, often wrote books that were very similar to each other.  The difference there was that he wasn’t worried if he ended up killing the hero half way through the book, and it’s things like that that keep you on your toes, and I like it when books keep me on my toes.  When you read a Jack Reacher novel, you know he's not going to die, not until Lee Childs finally decides he's done with it, and I can't see that happening for some time, and as with games, an unkillable protagonist is only fun for so long...

So the short list is as follows:

Station Eleven – Emily St John Mandel

Anciliary Justice – Ann Lecke

The Expanse Series – James S.A.Corey

Ready Player One – Ernest Cline

There’ll be more after this to be sure, but these will do for starters... 

Game Review - Wrong Chemistry

Sometimes you’ve been looking at a game for quite some time before you pick it up, and the anticipation of the game is often more than the game itself can live up to.  Sometimes you just pick something up and it turns out to be enormous fun...

This certainly falls into the second category...

In Wrong Chemistry, each player tries to manipulate the playing board to form new elements, working from the position where the last player left off.  There are various different levels of element, the lower point values being easier to build from the base structure, the high point values requiring far more planning to make them work. 

In turn, each player gets four moves, these moves can be used to move the place of an empty hex, reverse the polarity (flip over) and empty hex, and remove, add, or move a white or black counter in the formation somewhere.  They can also make use of two special abilities that are not unique to any player, being the Restartium and Extramovium options, the first resets the structure back to the starting position and the second allows the player to give up one of their already scored elements in return for three extra moves.

Very simple, nothing to learn, and given that the elements you’re trying to build are clearly shown on the cards, it’s a game that appeals to a broad age range.  For me, part of the attraction was that while you want to score the big cards, you also don’t want to hold on to them because in keeping them in your hand, you neglect the possibility of getting more cards to score.

This was the mistake I made on the first game, got a couple of high scoring possibles that looked like they wouldn’t have been too hard to score, three turns later with the other players having scored another few single pointers, I threw the cards to the discard and got back into the game.

There are a number of alternative rules that can be used, from the addition of scientists that give individual players extra abilities, to the high scoring dark matter elements, and the ability to choose between which elements you want to go for, rather than the usual random draws from a unified deck.

The game takes between thirty minutes and an hour, depending on which version you’re playing and how many players are in the game, and because you can’t plan your moves in advance due to the nature of the board changing with every players turn, it’s far less mentally taxing than many games where you spend the entire of the other players turns trying to figure out what you’re going to do next.

All in all, an excellent game, not expensive (base set around £15), and good for any age range, well recommended...

But a word to the wise, avoid playing the game with Nuclear Engineers and Molecular Biologists, they seem to have the basics hardwired...

That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it... 

Observations on year one at a new Convention: Longcon

Interesting when you're doing a convention for the first time, you have an idea for how you think things will go, and you plan accordingly, but for lessons already learned for next year...

1: Two day games will only be of interest to groups of people who've already played together, there was practically no interest in any of the two day games from the general public, which I think is certainly something to consider when thinking about what games to put forwards.

2: Most importantly, don't run the convention opposite another major established convention, I could have easily sold out on Pathfinder had not Paizo con been running the same weekend, but two things to consider on that one being that I don't actually want to have nothing but pathfinder at the con, and if it was all pathfinder, I might as well call it Paizocon 2...

3: Dungeon games, no interest at all, when you're sitting down for a game that takes all day, you want more than just bashing things...

4: There is no back up plan with these sorts of games, if you haven't got players sorted out before the day, there will be no other games that are running in the same slots that *might* need players, the whole focus of this is having it planned weeks in advance so all the preliminary stuff between players is taken care of, and dropping in people on the day won't work (Or will negate the extra prep time everyone else has put in).

5: We've got no traders in this year, for several reasons, the first of which being that having a trader present disrupts the games, and for the most part, if the games are running properly, there won't be many people taking breaks from the games to go and visit the traders, so it won't be worth their while, the second of which being that it suggests there's more to do at this convention than just games, and that's just not true...

So it's been an interesting process and there's been sufficient interest that I'm not going to bankrupt myself on the matter, which is cheerful. Don't get me wrong, most year one conventions run at a loss, and I was already prepared for that in the interests of getting it off the ground and seeing if it would work, so no problems there, but four games running with a good number of players is around 66% of all games loaded in advance, which I'm happy with.

I'll be interested to see the feedback from all concerned at the end on if the general feedback is that the convention will work going forwards.

http://doddherderofcats.wix.com/longcon

The BBW Club - Fourth Outing

We’re running out of places that we can head to without having to take a car to get to them or repeating routes, and while that’s a pain in the ass all its own, it means that we’re looking further afield with a view to finding interesting places to go to.  In this particular week, we took the car to get to the start point, and with no round route to work on, we took the straight path up and then took it straight back.

While there’s still the company of friends to pass the time, it always makes for an easier walk when you’re heading in a direction you haven’t yet walked in, and while the road out was interesting enough, the walk back was very much “Been here before...”, and so for next week, we’ll be looking for something with a circular route.

That said, what we did find in the route...

Not all signs are created equal, some take time and effort and are worth all of it...

When you wander off the path anywhere in Yorkshire, you find bridges...

My old Nemesis, Stairs...

There are moving areas in any canal...

The green bits are often very interesting in a “Why’d they build it like that...?” sort of way...

Not all Bridges are created equal, and when you’re built like us, you walk on the spine of them...

Of places you thought you’d find a mechanised fountain, in the middle of a fishing pool wasn’t one of them...

Not all Railway Bridges are walkable...

Speak Friend and Enter...

Be prepared that sometimes being narrow is a bonus...

Once there were piers...

The entrance to Rivendell is also to be found in Barnsley...

This Bridge was once far wider...

The wildlife doesn’t stand still for you to photograph it...

Some Bridges are only good for one man at a time...

We’ve looked into the possibilities for some of the walks that are further away, including a few reservoirs, more on that next week...

The BBW Club - Third outing

This time, having found ourselves in Notton more than once in the last few weeks, we decided to circumvent that problem by heading the opposite way to the village and heading the other way down the canal.

An excellent plan, somewhat circumvented by encountering a large gate where there should have been a thoroughfare and a large set of dogs where there should have been grass...

Plan B, go back up the way and go along the canal proper to get to the other path, and we know that the we’re on the path because it actually looks like a railway...

With a half dismantled bridge halfway along it...

And what looks to be the storm drain outlet into a larger tunnel that we know is the remains of the canal...

Which begs the question of why is the drain opening out into the canal...

But this is way behind where people will ever see (unless they’re us)...

So why not...

We learned that sometimes sleeping horses do indeed lie...

You need a bridge to go over a five inch wide stream...

But seriously bridges are awesome...

And we’re going to be going further afield from this point onwards, the actual walking is excellent, because we chat s*** about everything from Game of Thrones to the nature of the games industry, to writing and all things that matter to us, and somehow between those conversations, another seven miles are gone...

We were considering starting up a full time walking group for those built like us, with the caveat that if you can’t walk half a mile without falling over, we’re not the starting point, the question would be how many people built like us want to take up on walking...

Question posed...

The BBW club, Second outing

No, it still doesn't mean what most hope it does...

I posted a while back about a Big B******* Walking club for the larger types amongst us, and since then, it went quiet, and when I say quiet, the whole world went quiet because I’ve been busy doing other things, but then I was reminded that last year was the busiest year I’ve ever had, and I still found the time to do other things somehow, and so I started dusting off everything else. 

There’s been three walks since the first, and I’ve got the images from two of them (which is a real shame, because the first of the bunch was a truly epic thing, and one that we’ll have to repeat at some point to get the images of all the things that we saw.

But I digress, the key point here is in getting walking in the first place, and it’s a dull thing to do for a lot of people, but far less so when you’re in good company, and I wonder for many if that’s the reason why no one goes walking.

That and you don’t want to be in the company of slim types all dressed in expensive walking gear leaving you behind and discussing middle England...

So this time we took a walk down from my place to the Barnsley Canal, and from there along the canal to the edge of Notton and then back to my place, here’s what we found along the way...

There’s a lot more green in Barnsley than many think...

There is such a thing as a Canal Club...

The Canal once flooded its banks, to the point that they built an overflow into the side of the canal to channel any such problems safely away, however, in the thirty years since it overflowed, it’s never even got as far as the overflow...  Still, best prepared and all that...

There are strange cthulhoid markings on the path, with indications of what you can find in all directions (even if you can’t go in those directions...)

There are maps that cheerfully point out where you are, and just how damn far it is before you get to the next stopping point...

Stand by Me isn’t the only place you can find railway tracks to walk next to, although there were decidedly less trains to dodge here...

There used to be a lot of bridges in the area, many of them leading to who only knows where...

Some of them led to nowhere...

And so we finished up walking along the indicated path that said that the way home was this way, and ended up walking all the way down a ragged field wondering where it was leading, as it turns out, it was leading down to a large set of dogs and a semi understanding owner, who gave us the option of crawling through hawthorns or walking the two miles back across ragged fields to go the other way.

We elected to take the hawthorne route, and so established that large pairs of armoured gloves are your friend when walking (if you can get a set that look like Marine Power Fists, let us know, we’ll take two), and that walking in T shirts isn’t as smart as it is cool.

All in all, good number of miles done in excellent company, and we’ve done it again just recently, so more on that shortly.