Tag: Book (Fiction)

“Black Feathers” Joseph D’Lacey

Joseph D’Lacey’s book Black Feathers is set part in a world just sideways to our own, and partly in the future of that world. The “present day” parts follow Gordon as he grows up to the cusp of puberty then has to learn to live in & deal with the dystopian & crumbling society of 2013’s Britain – a world that’s like but not like our own, where the sinister Ward have taken over the role that the police & the government should be playing. The future follows Megan, again a child on the verge of becoming an adult. Her poor but idyllic sounding childhood ends as she’s called to be apprenticed to Mr Keeper, a shaman-like figure who remembers the story of the Black Dawn & the coming of the Bright Day. Gordon & Megan’s stories are interlinked – most prominently through the figure of the Crowman. Venerated, worshipped and feared in Megan’s day, he’s just whispered about as a shadowy figure in Gordon’s time and somehow Gordon is linked to him. There’s something dreamlike about the story, which seems appropriate to both Megan’s initiation into mysteries & Gordon’s search for the Crowman. It’s a dark & twisted dream, tho – gruesome and unpleasant things happen – and it’s not clear if ultimately it’s going to come to a good or a bad end.

I’m … not sure what I think of this book. I started off really liking it, but somewhere along the way I forgot that it was the first part of a series (a duology I think) and then it just kinda stopped. There’s not much in the way of resolution to either story thread and yet I wasn’t really left wanting to find out what happened next – I’d sort of run out of enthusiasm for it. Like somehow I thought the idea only had legs for one book’s length and now I’m left thinking “oh, there’s another whole book to fill?”.

There’s stuff I did like – the ambiguity of the Crowman for instance. The things the characters say imply ultimately he (it?) is a force for or personification of something good or at least mostly beneficial even if not in ways that humanity can always comprehend. But the way the narrative shows him to the reader is as much darker and twisted, I’m not sure if there’s anything “good” about the Crowman at all. But equally he’s set against the Ward, who are definitely not good at all – they’re a menacing caricature of secret police that don’t seem to have any redeeming features at all. So this is not a face off between good & evil, but it is a face off with evil.

But overall, I’m not sure what I think. And I suspect by the time the next book is published next year I’ll’ve forgotten about the series.

“Limits of Power” Elizabeth Moon

Limits of Power is the fourth in Elizabeth Moon’s five book series Paladin’s Legacy. It’s a sequel series to a trilogy she wrote in the late 80s collectively called The Deed of Paksenarrion. They’re secondary world fantasy of a sort that is indebted to Tolkein and/or D&D – i.e. there are elves, dwarves, gnomes, dragons, the tech level is pre-industrial revolution, there are gods (of various types) who exist in some tangible sense, and magic of a variety of sorts. The original trilogy follows the story of a sheepfarmer’s daughter called Paksenarrion who joins a mercenary group, and gradually discovers that she is called to serve as a Paladin of Gird. It’s one of my favourite series of books. There’s a duology written afterwards that are set centuries before Paksenarrion’s day, about Gird – whilst he was of god-like status by Paks’s time he began life as an ordinary mortal man, and these two books are his story and the origin story of the main human society in the Paks trilogy.

Paladin’s Legacy is set after the end of The Deed of Paksenarrion, and as the name suggests it’s the working out of the consequences of the events of the Deed. It’s difficult to talk about any of the actual plot happenings in this book without spoilers, being the fourth book in an ongoing series, so I think I won’t try. Unlike the trilogy, which is all from Paks’s point of view, these books are from a variety of viewpoints. Also unlike the trilogy these characters are mostly older. One of the themes running through the books of Paladin’s Legacy so far is of the past catching up with people – people’s family or heritage becoming suddenly important after years spent living some other life whether through choice or necessity. And of people in their middle years or older facing up to change or to new circumstances. And the broader world is too – magic that hasn’t been seen for years starts popping up, other races that are thought to be legend show themselves. The consequences of events from Gird’s time & before coming home to roost. And people having to face up to duties or responsibilities they wouldn’t’ve asked for.

I read this book in an afternoon, and I suspect I’ll get more out of it the next time I read it – this time was to gallop through & find out what happened to everyone. I think once I have the fifth book (next year I guess) I’ll have to go back to the beginning & read them all again 🙂

“Greywalker” Kat Richardson

This book opens with the protagonist, Harper Blaine, being beaten to death. Quite literally. She’s actually only technically dead for about 2 minutes, due to the wonders of modern medicine, but the experience hasn’t left her unchanged. She’s now a Greywalker, and sees ghosts & can venture into the in between world where they exist. That’s a … state of being, rather than a profession – her profession remains the same, she’s a private investigator. And new cases come in – a missing person case, a missing heirloom to track down. Only her change of state hasn’t gone unnoticed & there’s more of the paranormal around in Seattle than she’d realised before she died & came back.

I liked this – having read far too much urban fantasy a few years ago I burnt out on the formula that so many seem to follow but while this book ticks many of the requisite boxes I think it does something more interesting with them than just follow along formulaicly. Yes, the protagonist is a tough young woman – but she’s tough in a “is a good PI” sort of way, not in a “can kick supernatural ass and make sarcastic quips” sort of way. Yes, there’s a love interest, but that didn’t quite go where I was expecting. Yes, there are the normal collection of supernatural beasties – vampires for sure, werewolves probably, a necromancer or two, ghosts of course – but they tip to the horror side of the spectrum rather than the fantasy side in my opinion. Blaine’s reactions to her new status feel real, too, and grounded in her job & personality. And not everybody she meets is supernatural – some of the people are still just people, some dodgy goings are just straightforward crimes.

My criticism is that Blaine appears to’ve come from nowhere despite feeling real. It’s been a couple of weeks since I read this, so perhaps I’ve forgotten if there’s an explanation for why she doesn’t seem to have friends that aren’t connected to this new world. There’s a business associate or two, but there doesn’t seem more than that, and yet she connects to people easily – there’s not a feeling of a “traumatic past that means she doesn’t deal well with people”. But I feel awkward writing this, coz maybe I’m an idiot who has forgotten something in just two weeks. Or maybe for all the solid feelingness of the world building it doesn’t have enough past. It’s a problem that cures itself, of course, because over the series (yes, it ticks the ongoing series box too) these’ll be the past friends for the new books.

So, yes, I liked this but I think it’s in the fun-read-once category. Still, I liked it enough to reserve the next one at the library.

“King’s Dragon” Kate Elliott

King’s Dragon is the first book in Kate Elliott’s seven book Crown of Stars series. I’m pretty sure I read the first few a longish time ago (this one was first published in 97 so there’s a lot of scope for “longish” time here). And then I must’ve caught up with publication or something & lost track and never finished them. A mention somewhere (tor.com, perhaps?) reminded me that I vaguely remembered liking them so I should give the series another go. Glad I did, I really enjoyed this one – now I just have to decide if I’m going to buy them or get the rest from the library one by one.

(Please no spoilers for the rest of the series, I’m enjoying figuring this one out as it goes along.)

The world they’re set in is not ours nor is it a one-to-one analogue of ours, but it’s flavoured by English history – it partly reminds me of the Anarchy (the 12th Century English civil war), and partly of Anglo-Saxon England in the time of the Viking raids. There’s a religion that’s analogous to Christianity, with a saviour figure that died for mankind in some sense. A major difference is that instead of God the Father, there’s Our Lord and Our Lady – and the two have equal billing. This is extrapolated through the society, women have a much better place in this world than in the analogous medieval England. In particular women can be biscops (analogous to bishops) and perhaps that’s only women that can be, I’m not sure – the two we see most are. Women can also inherit titles & crowns in their own right with no questions about ability. They go to war as soldiers too. There’s even a respected (although not mainstream for the kingdom we’re in) strand of thinking that inheritance should pass solely down the female line because it ensures you know the heir is a true heir.

Inheritance to the throne is also interesting in that it requires fertility – when the monarch’s children get to adulthood one will be sent out on an heir’s progress for a year, and will only become heir if they get pregnant or get a woman pregnant during that year. The central political conflict in this book hinges on that – Sabella, the King’s sister, went out on her heir’s progress first but failed to become pregnant. Henry got a bastard son on his subsequent heir’s progress and has inherited the throne. Now Sabella is raising a rebellion against him (as she finally has a child). Another of the conflicts in the book also has this custom as its starting point – the King’s favourite child is his bastard son who proved his fertility, yet that son cannot inherit only the subsequent legitimate children can do that.

The characters whose eyes we see all this through aren’t the major players in the political dance. Instead one of the central characters is Alain, a bastard child destined for the church. He’s brought up in a village, by the man he believes to be his father, and while he yearns for adventure his path seems set. And over the course of the book it feels like it would’ve been a good path for him – there’s something a bit saintlike about him (although he’s also still a very realistic boy), he’s paid attention to the teachings of the church & tries his best to follow them, particularly where compassion is concerned. But he gets caught up in the chaos of both the rebellion, and the raids by the non-human Eika. Being a bastard child he seems set to be The Chosen One whose origins aren’t what they seem & one of the suggested “true stories” of his birth seems to be validated by events towards the end of the book. But I’m not sure that’s the true answer – it feels like Elliott is doing something more clever to play with the trope than that.

The other central character is Liath. Her father is a sorcerer – magic is real in this world, and perhaps forbidden by the church depending on which bit of the church you ask. Actually that’s something else I like about this story, “the church” is not a monolith – it has schisms & heresies & councils that decide on what’s orthodox & what’s not and so on. Anyway, Liath has been on the run with her father since early childhood after her mother died, and her story opens with her father’s death. Liath doesn’t have much coherent idea about who her parents are/were nor why they’re on the run – but clearly someone or something was after them. I felt a bit like her father should’ve told her more because he should’ve realised his death was a high risk, but the justification of protecting her through her ignorance does seem realistic. Liath is initially sold into slavery, as she can’t pay her father’s debts (well, it’s engineered so that this is the case). She’s another Chosen One archetype and again Elliott isn’t retreading the well worn path with this story – for instance when Liath meets a man who fits the mentor slot she doesn’t trust him because of what’s gone before. The Eagles, the branch of the King’s army/messengers that Liath & her friend Hanna join, feel like a more realistic version of Mercedes Lackey’s Heralds of Valdemar. No telepathic spirit horses, no special mind powers and most importantly no sudden spiritual healing and family-formation to make up for the abuses of the joiner’s childhood. But nonetheless there’s something reminiscent about them.

There’s a host of secondary characters as well, both male & female. All the characters in the book felt like people to me, but there’s some that stand out as a second tier of protagonists. There’s Hanna, Liath’s friend who also joins the Eagles. There’s Rosvita, a cleric who is perhaps an analogue of the Venerable Bede or Geoffrey of Monmouth – certainly now she’s in her old age she’s writing a history of the country. And there’s also Sanglant, bastard son of the King, whose origins we know are otherworldly from the prologue. That prologue also sets up an expectation that he & Alain and Liath are somehow in opposition – agents of different otherworldly factions. But so far the pawns don’t seem to be quite marching to their master’s tunes. Again I think Elliott is setting up the “standard” tropes of epic fantasy and then doing something much more interesting with them.

And now I really want to know where the story is going. Best decide on buy or borrow first though! 🙂

“Think of the Children” Kerry Wilkinson

I picked this book up at the library coz the title (“Think of the Children”) caught my eye & then it turned out to be a crime story so I started to read it. It’s billed on the front cover as “A DS Jessica Daniel novel” so I guess it’s part of an ongoing series (although I do read in the crime genre, I don’t read much or keep up with it in any way).

The story opens with the protagonist, Jessica Daniel, pretty much stumbling across a case – she’s driving to work when there’s a car accident in front of her & when she goes to check on the (dead) driver she finds a body of a child in the boot of his car. It’s her team at the police force that get the case (partly because she’s the one that was first on the scene) which quickly generates several leads linked with other missing children in Manchester.

One of the things I liked about this book was the sense of reality – there’s political infighting between the various departments of the police force, and sometimes the need to look like they’ve done something is what’s driving the press releases rather than actually finishing off the investigation. Also not every lead turns out to be linked, some things are red herrings, some things are just superficially related. I also liked the way even tho it concentrated on the case at hand there was a feeling of a slice of the lives of not just Jessica but also her friends.

But all that made the conclusion of the main bit of the case feel more jarring. It felt like the novel had suddenly descended into unreality and storybook territory – Jessica comes up with a scheme to get the villain to confess what’s actually going on and her scheme is both illegal & rather implausible. And it’s a sudden descent into a more vigilante attitude on her part, rather than the rest of the book where she’s much more presented as working within the structure of the police force. It was much more the sort of thing I can think of Tempe Brennan doing in Kathy Reichs’s novels, and felt out of place in this book. (I like Reichs’s books, just they’re a different sort of story to the way the bulk of this book felt.)

Another niggle is that the author more than once did the “I know something but I’m not telling you” trick. Jessica gets ideas and makes plans & tells a colleague or whoever about them but we the reader don’t find out till it’s unfolding. It feels too much of a cheap trick to heighten suspense & I’d’ve preferred the author to find some other way to do that.

Overall fun, but flawed. I’ll probably pick more up at the library if they catch my eye, but I’m unlikely to go searching for them.

“The Wasp Factory” Iain Banks

The Wasp Factory is technically part of my great re-read of the fiction on the shelves. It’s on the shelves, but I’ve never read it before. My brother had a copy when we both still lived at home (and he probably still has his copy) – so that must be late 80s or early 90s – and I remember flicking through a few pages here & there and deciding not to read it. I also remember my father reading it and mentioning it was gruesome. The copy on the shelf is one that J bought some time ago, and when I asked him to get it off the shelf (I can’t reach the top shelves of the bookcases without standing on chairs, it’s easier to ask) he said “oh, well that’ll be a ‘fun’ read for you”. So I approached the book with some trepidation …

Rightly so, as it very much lived up to the reputation it had built up in my head. And yet while I can’t say I enjoyed it per se, I’m glad I finally read it. Except now I’m stuck with trying to think of something to say about it! 😉

We’re inside the head of Frank, our 17 year old protagonist. Frank is not what one might call sane, to put it mildly. He’s been brought up in semi-isolation by his not entirely mentally stable father since the unfortunate incident when he was 3 years old. The story picks up when his older brother Eric escapes from the loony bin and starts to make his way home. Frank thinks about the past as he prepares himself & his home for his brother’s return & we learn about what he’s done & what his brother’s done & eventually what made him & them as disturbed as they are. I clearly read a bit of the end of the book before – I knew what the big reveal was for Frank. And I equally clearly hadn’t chanced across the big reveal for Eric’s own unfortunate incident, as I’m sure I’d’ve remembered it if I had.

As well as the black humour I think what saves it from being gross & instead made it a compelling read is the matter of factness of the presentation. Frank admits to being a little eccentric, but as he goes about blowing things up and killing small animals to make wards for the island you can see as the reader that he’s deeply deeply fucked up, but he just trundles along with an air of “well, obviously I’m doing that, it’s so clearly the right thing to do”. I picked there a couple of the milder indications of Frank’s disturbed nature – there’s a lot of death in this book, and a lot of it caused deliberately by Frank (although not all). Very much not for the squeamish reader.

I’m not quite sure what I think of it as a book, nor what I think it was about under the twistedness of it – a lack of anything intelligent to say here I’m afraid. While I’m glad I read it, partly because it’s been on the periphery of my awareness for so long, it’s not filled me with any desire to read any of the rest of Banks’s non-SF books (luckily for me we don’t own any more of that side of his work).

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“Nightfall One” Isaac Asimov

The final book by Isaac Asimov on my shelves is another anthology. Nightfall One is the first half of a two volume collection of stories by Asimov, first published in 1969 (as a single volume). There are five stories in the book originally published between 1941 & 1951, with introductions by Asimov. One thing that struck me about these stories are that they have aliens in them, which is relatively unusual for Asimov. They’re also further demonstrations that Asimov is more of an ideas storyteller than a character one. I’d prefer to have both but at his best Asimov’s ideas are good enough to carry the somewhat shallow characters (and it’s not a surprise that the story I think is the weakest in this volume also has the least “Big Idea” to it).

“Nightfall”

This is (as Asimov points out in his introduction) often regarded as Asimov’s best story – he finds this a bit irritating because he wrote it in 1941 and feels that surely with practice he should’ve improved. The story is set on a planet which orbits one of a cluster of six stars. Every couple of thousand years there’s an eclipse when there’s only one sun in view and the people who have evolved there see darkness & the stars for the first time. Civilisation collapses, the people return to barbarism & the cycle begins again. Technically these are aliens, but it’s more an exploration of what people & society would be like if this was the case than any attempt at creating aliens. It is the best story in this collection, in my opinion. Partly because of the idea itself and the way Asimov plausibly extrapolates what effect never seeing darkness would have on society. And partly because of the little touches that show just how hard it can be to overcome cultural & biological conditioning with your intellect, like the various characters trying to insist that they themselves aren’t affected by darkness. And how even when you think you’re thinking outside the box you can still be blinded by your assumptions – like the scientists who are going to photograph these “stars” they’ve theorised the existence of talking about how there might even be as many as a dozen of them because they have no comprehension of the scale of the universe.

“Green Patches”

Second best story of the collection, for me. They’re actually ordered in publication order, but for me it was almost in order of quality as well. This is a Bradbury-esque tale of a human spaceship that has gone to an another planet and an alien lifeform has stowed away on the return trip with intent to convert Earth life to the gaia-esque existence that the alien life has. The captain of the previous spaceship to investigate this planet had blown up his ship when he realised that the alien lifeforms were converting his crew. Best bits are the segments from the perspective of the alien, which is satisfyingly not-human. It’s disguised as a piece of wire & is having to hold itself back from rescuing these “life fragments” as it thinks of earthlife – it is trying to wait till it reaches Earth.

“Hostess”

A future where we have interstellar travel, and have met five alien species. All share several characteristics that humans don’t, and in fact humans are more like diseased aliens (in some specific ways). This is one of those “awful truth” stories – by the end of the story we find out why humans are different & it’s not because we’re wonderful 😉 The protagonist is Rose Smollett, a biologist in her mid-30s, and also central to the story is her husband. She’s only been married a bit under a year, and is still (mostly happily) surprised her husband should’ve wanted to marry her. This personal plot intertwines with the interstellar politics, and by the end of the story we & Rose know the “awful truth” about her marriage, too. Very very 1950s social mores, in a way that dates the story so much that is has to be “alternate history” rather than “set in the future”. But still reasonably good.

“Breeds There a Man … ?”

This is a “what if” story where the universe is not quite the way it seems – makes me think of some of the 1930s stories in Before the Golden Age where the planets are eggs or other such flights of fantasy. This isn’t as extremely fantastical but it’s still in that sort of category. The main character is an atomic physicist but we never get his perspective, instead it’s all told via the various police & mental health professionals he encounters when he has a breakdown. He’s figured out what the world really is, and is driven to suicidal thoughts because of it. I liked it better than “Hostess” – although the “awful truth” here is equally as implausible I thought it was a cooler idea to base a story round.

“C-Chute”

For me this was the weakest of the stories in the anthology. Several men are on a spaceship when it’s captured by an alien race with whom humanity are at war. They aren’t comrades, but are flung together by circumstance so there is much tension and eventually one of the least likely of the men to do something heroic manages to carry out a daring plan & they rescue themselves. As I said in my intro paragraph to this post wasn’t really a “Big Idea” to this one so all there was to carry it was the characters, but sadly I found them shallow & the story boring.

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“Blackbirds” Chuck Wendig

Miriam Black can tell when you’re going to die. She’d actually rather not know, but it only takes a bit of skin on skin contact and she knows when, of what and maybe a bit of where. A nicely packaged vision that only takes a couple of seconds real time but lasts for as long as it needs to to show her the details.

The book opens with Miriam waiting for an unpleasant specimen of a man to die in a motel room so she can rifle through his wallet and take enough money to get a few more dinners & a few more motel rooms. This is how she lives, hitch-hiking around the US, surviving rather than living. She’s got a foul mouth and an attitude and underneath the bluster she’s broken but she’ll be damned if she lets anyone else see. The story is told both moving forward from the opening scene and through a series of flashbacks & dreams & other people’s stories. Miriam meets a trucker (who she actually likes, not a common occurrence) who’ll die in a particularly gruesome murder with her name on his lips – the climax of the thriller plot line. And a con man who has a proposition for her, and who isn’t nearly as clever as he thinks he is. The flashbacks & dreams tell us how Miriam got here, why she’s broken & on the road and give hints as to how her power works & where it came from (as far as she knows).

One thing I liked about this book is the gender flipping of a couple of clichés. Most obvious is Louis the trucker as the damsel in distress and murder victim, with Miriam trying to figure out if she can stop it happening. Louis is also the catalyst for Miriam to become more actively engaged with her life again rather just drifting along waiting for death – in a “redeemed by the love of a good woman” sort of way (Louis is the “good woman” here, in case I’m not clear). Also notable, Miriam’s got a troubled past (well, duh) but Wendig avoids the cliché of rape. The bad shit that did happen to her feels appropriate for what it’s done to her, and thematically appropriate for the story rather than “woman with trauma, must’ve been rape”.

While the story is satisfyingly complete in itself there’s a sequel and there’s definitely hooks for a wider story. Miriam figures out more of the rules of her powers by the climax of the story. There’s also a (gruesome) scene where she talks to a psychic to try & learn more about her power – she doesn’t get answers but it’s clear that there’s something there to learn. Which kinda sums up that side of it for the reader too – we don’t know any more than Miriam, but it’s clear that Wendig knows where he’s going with this.

I liked this book a lot. It’s pretty dark, but with a current of optimism running through it. I thought Miriam’s cynicism was clearly presented as part of how she’s broken rather than the truth of the world. And the ending holds out hope that she might be able to make her own world better. It’s a fairly gruesome book tho – I wouldn’t recommend it if you’re easily disturbed by written descriptions. I’m squeamish myself, but when reading I’ve perfected the art of Not Visualising things so books (including this one) are generally OK. But there’s stuff in this that I’d not want to see in a film.

“Second Foundation” Isaac Asimov

This isn’t quite the post I thought I’d be writing when I started the book, I thought I’d be concentrating on the details of the plot or the characters. Instead there was a scene in the middle that shifted my perception of the overall arc in an unexpected way.

I’ve always thought of this book as ending the trilogy on an upbeat note – the Second Foundation has wrenched the course of the civilisation of the galaxy back on track to form the Second Empire in accordance with Seldon’s Plan. The first section of the novel is about how The Mule was defeated and changed from a conquering dictator to a benevolent despot whose empire would fall apart after his death. The second section follows a group of Foundation citizens who are searching for the Second Foundation – they are tricked into thinking they’ve found & removed it. This is necessary for Seldon’s Plan to come to fruition in part because it relies on the majority of humanity being unaware of the details of the plan. And also because “We still have a society which would resent a ruling class of psychologists, and which would fear its development and fight against it”, in the words of the First Speaker of the Second Foundation. Which is a summary of the plot of this section of the novel.

And the sentence that I’ve quoted just above is part of the scene which changed my perception of the story, and I’m not sure if it was supposed to or not. Here’s a description of the Second Empire that the Second Foundation is working towards, extracted from a longish conversation that’s part of the examination process for a new member of the ruling elite of the Second Foundation:

[…]it is the intention of the plan to establish a human civilization based on an orientation entirely different from anything that ever before existed. […] It is that of a civilization based on mental science. […] Only an insignificant minority, however, are inherently able to lead Man through the greater involvements of Mental Science; and the benefits derived therefrom, while longer lasting, are more subtle and less apparent. […] such an orientation would lead to the development of a benevolent dictatorship of the mentally best – virtually a higher subdivision of Man […] The solution is the Seldon Plan […] six hundred years from now, a Second Galactic Empire will have been established in which Mankind will be ready for the leadership of Mental Science. In that same interval, the Second Foundation in its development, will have brought forth a group of Psychologists ready to assume leadership.

So the Seldon Plan is actually the blueprint for the ruling elite of the Second Foundation to take over the galaxy. They will rule by Psychology – which is like our science of psychology but has been developed in this far far future to include mental powers. Including the ability to alter the memories and the emotions of other people, by directly tampering with their mind in a way they can’t protect against unless they too have this training and the ability to use it. The first section of the novel makes it clear that The Mule is conquering the galaxy using a cruder (mutant) version of this power, and the Second Foundation are both more powerful than him and subtler & more sophisticated in their use of these powers. The Mule is explicitly said to be able to change people from non-loyal to loyal and fix their minds there. The Second Foundation aren’t that crude, but it’s implied that’s within their capabilities just they prefer not to be that obvious. They are explicitly said to be able to alter someone’s memories such that they can’t tell it was done. The Mule isn’t stopped because what he’s doing to people is an atrocity (and I think it is). He’s stopped because he’s getting in the way.

The Second Empire will be a place where if you’re not one of the elite then your mind could be changed by an external force, against your will and without your ability to stop it – if you’re one of the elite it could still happen but you’d be more likely to know it was being done (until they altered your memory of it having happened …). The difference between it and the society of The Mule’s empire is that in the Second Empire it will be done with Science and For Your Own Good. I don’t see that as being a significant difference. So now I see the end of the book as a tragedy, the win by the Second Foundation is a loss for humanity in the long run.

But I’m not sure if I’m supposed to think that, what Asimov’s intent was. I can’t remember feeling that way about it last time I read it (20 or more years ago). I think I accepted unquestioningly that Seldon’s Plan was “the way things were supposed to work” and that it was a net good for humanity (reducing the time of barbarism between the two civilised Galactic Empires for instance). And the tone of the book still feels like that’s how I’m supposed to be reacting. I know in the later books (“Foundation’s Edge” and “Foundation and Earth”, neither of which I own) Asimov writes in a third way that’s not the First Foundation’s type of Empire and not the Second Foundation’s one either so perhaps he too wouldn’t want to live in the Second Galactic Empire? I can’t remember enough about them though to know if that addresses my issues with the mind control side of the Second Foundation’s plans (but from what I remember mind control and loss of individuality is still a part of the future of the galaxy). I think my mother owns the books, I shall have to borrow them next time I’m in Oxford and see what I think now (I certainly remember them as being stylistically more pleasing – being written in the 1980s rather than the 1950s so “current” for when I was reading them last).

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“Life After Life” Kate Atkinson

“Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson is an astonishingly hard to categorise book. Part historical fiction, part alternate history, part historical fantasy. And probably properly classified as “literary fiction”. We follow the life of Ursula Todd, born on 11th February 1910 to a well-to-do middle class English family as she lives her life over & over again. Every time she dies she starts all over again, and each time things go a little differently. Atkinson tells the story through a series of vignettes of the key events in each life. It’s very much a book where the journey is the point rather than the destination, and the structure of it reinforces that. We loop back over & over to the snow of February 1910 where each time the same(ish) scene is told differently. At the end of each life the refrain is “Darkness fell” (or words to that effect).

At first each life lasts a little longer than the previous one as Ursula avoids the pitfalls of early childhood. Just as I was starting to wonder if Ursula could remember anything from life to life Atkinson started to make it clear that there was some leakage – Ursula would have a sense of deja vu or a sense of dread. Later the memories that carry from life to life are more complete & there’s a sense that Ursula can choose how things are going to go this time round. There’s also the way that Ursula chooses more adult solutions to problems in later lives – at first to successfully get past a death from influenza in 1918 she can only resort to pushing Bridget down the stairs when the sense of dread hits her. In a later go round she engineers a falling out between Bridget & her fiancé which is a much more subtle way of preventing the trip to London (and gets Ursula into a lot less trouble).

The book doesn’t end where I thought it would – neither way I thought it would end, in fact. At first I’d thought that perhaps we’d see her live longer & longer – getting past the knot of deaths of influenza in 1918, and through the Second World War (another knot of deaths). But the life where we see her make it to 1967 & retirement isn’t the end. Another ending that wasn’t the way it ended was when we looped back to the very first vignette in the book – which isn’t Ursula’s birth, it’s 20 year old Ursula assassinating Hitler. It’s the classic time travel theme – prevent the Second World War by killing Hitler. And we do loop back to that, and it’s clear that Ursula is doing this knowing the consequences of Hitler’s rule of Germany. Interestingly, it’s not precisely the same scene that opened the book, some of the details are different. So we’re not seeing all the lives that Ursula lives, just key ones to give a flavour of the possibilities (just like each life we only see the key moments). But this is not where the book ends, either.

Which left me feeling a bit like I’d missed something with how the book did end. One of the phrases running through the book is “Practice makes perfect”, often said by Ursula’s mother. And there’s a strong impression that the last life we get a couple of scenes from is supposed to be the closest to perfection yet – Ursula’s mother manages to prevent Ursula’s death at birth despite the non-arrival of the doctor by having the right tools at hand. And Teddy, Ursula’s favourite brother, survives the war. Which implies that the war is somehow necessary? But then how would Ursula know – she doesn’t survive the assassination of Hitler either time we see it happen, so she doesn’t know if the world is better. Maybe I’m reading too much into that – maybe it’s just meant to be a sign that there isn’t an ending and Ursula will continue to live through all the possible permutations.

The characters are well drawn, and through the repeated lives you get to see how the core personality of each person stays the same but the way events fall out changes how that manifests. The centre of the story is always Ursula, but also prominent are Sylvie (her mother) and Izzy (her father’s younger sister) who are two opposing poles of role models for womanhood. Sylvie is a respectable housewife & mother whose whole self is poured into those roles. Izzy elopes at 16, she has a child out of wedlock, she writes novels & newspaper columns, she lives in London on her own. She is the epitome of the new freedom a single woman can have in the London of the 1920s & beyond. At first Sylvie seems the more sympathetic character, and Izzy to be rather selfish & scatty. But over the course of several lives Sylvie seems less selfless & a lot more concerned with appearances and with respectability, and Izzy is always there when Ursula needs someone.

This was a really good book. This time I’ve read it as a library book, but I think I might buy myself a copy – it’s a book that will be good to re-read. In particular later tellings of similar scenes often reveal a little more about some character’s motivations/personality so when you re-read you will get a bit of a richer experience. It seems apt that this is a story with themes of repetition with variation & of the journey being more important than the destination, and it’s a book about which both of those things are true.