Song of Kali

An American writer is dispatched to India to trace a poet thought dead, but who seems to have made a reappearance with a new manuscript. He takes with him his wife - and cultural liaison - and baby daughter, and becomes embroiled in a cult that reanimates the dead, and has more than a couple of links to the Hindu goddess Kali.

Thus goes Song of Kali, Dan Simmons 1985 début novel. Before he brought the world The Hyperion Cantos he was terrifying it with stories of an Indian underworld that brought out the worst in humanity. There is a lot of familiar ground that anyone who has previously read his work will notice - literary references, strongly-drawn characters, overwhelming bleakness, and out-and-out terror.

India is apparently ripe material for writers to plunder for their horror, and Kali seems to have found herself being used more often than others. Rememeber the bloodthirsty scenes in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? You'll find there's that common ground here - with cults obsessed with death and running things behind the scenes. It makes sense to a point - Indian culture and religion is alien to those with Western sensibilities, even with the constant modernising Western influence of these days, and it's easy to find something destabilising in the unfamiliarity of the land and its customs. It worked for George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg, and it works for Dan Simmons.

As ever, Simmons prose is tight and eminently readable. And on this occasion there's a real intensity to the prose akin to the Father Dure scenes in Hyperion. The intensity comes in no small part from the constant undercurrent of violence that Simmons manages to infuse every scene with. Calcutta promises violence from the word go, and it never loses that level of threat. Add to it the very real horror in the depictions of slum towns, rats running from place to place, children grown up before their time and the admission must be made that the backdrop is superbly painted.

The book always feels an uneasy read, but it's always compelling. There are a few scenes where Simmons skill at making the skin crawl comes through - one forty-page flashback sequence leaves the reader breathless and troubled. And then there's one scene near the end that will haunt you for days - I can't stop thinking about the horror of it. It's not nice, easy reading. It's horror at its psychological best.

But it's not all darkness. Like the ending of Endymion, there's some brightness to be seen. Simmons has that trick of creating a near-relentlessly dark world, but just giving the reader the chinks of light to see a potential happy outcome. Perhaps Simmons is a proponent of the Dark Knight Rises school of giving people hope to induce despair. Whatever he is, it's masterfully managed.

If you're a horror fan, read Song of Kali. The most haunting scenes will stay with you for an age. You may not want to read it again (I don't), but it's a sign that it's done its job. It's a book to get inside your head, and that you'll feel glad to have experienced. Just expect to want to take a shower straight after.

The year's challenge

Every year I like to set myself a reading and writing challenge. Normally I set myself a number of books to read (this year it's 60, exactly the same as last year), plus something a little different. In 2011 it was to 'read the alphabet' - so for 'A' it would be Asimov, 'M' Mieville and so on. I failed. I didn't read any authors whose last names began with X or Y, among others. But it gave something a bit different to my reading and made me read things I wouldn't normally try.

This year my challenge is to split my reading between male and female writers, as well as to read a short story a day. In the past I've neglected too many talented ladies because I've had the works of male writers who I liked to read through. Already this year I've read five books - four of which have been by men, and the one woman whose novel I've read was well known to me. I never meant to not read the work of women. It just happened. But I intend to remedy it this year, with Connie Willis, Robin Hobb, Alison Littlewood, and K.J. Parker all waiting to be read. No doubt I'll be picking up more as the year goes on - the excellent SF Masterworks imprint from Gollancz seems to be releasing many more works by women at the moment, and I have no doubt I'll be picking up a dozen or so of those this year (with The Female Man top of the hitlist).

As for the short stories, I'm already well ahead of target. In 23 days I've read 35 stories, and kept my resolution to read a short story a day.

Sadly, the writing is a different story. There's no word count target in place this year, but I've yet to really start work on my monthly short story. I seem to be stuck in a rut where I sit down to work, do some work... and then leave the land fallow where an idea should go. It's not been helping that I have a few big ideas clamouring for attention, but that's no excuse. I need to write.

Sand on the wind

Imagine for a moment, if you will, a piece of science fiction written and published today. It focusses on the problems of ecology facing the world. It's up-front with its message: we need to do something about global warming now or we'll lose the lowlands of the world, and all the species they are home to.

Now imagine that same piece of science fiction thirty years in the future, in a future where worries of global warming have been eased - at least in terms of icecaps melting and raising sea levels - because of a series of dykes that have been raised the world over by pioneering Dutch engineers. The story becomes dated and easy to place - the second decade of the twenty-first century. It loses relevance. It may be a classic of its type, but there's every chance that it'll be forgotten and drowned beneath the tidal wave of new fiction concentrating on other contemporary problems, which in turn will be swept away by subsequent fiction of the same sort.

So how do you make sure a story set in its time remains relevant?

I would argue that the answer can only be found in fiction that doesn't tackle issues head-on - but tackles them through its cast of characters. Take Frank Herbert's Dune, for instance. I'm going to come clean and say that it's one of my favourite books, not least because I'm in love with the story (so I may be a little biased). I'm also going to say I'm not going to waste time and talk about the heavy-handed and over-preachy sequels written by either Frank or his son, Brian. If you want to read them, be my guest, but don't expect them to measure up to the magnificence of the original.

Dune was first published in 1965 and isn't about ecology - but it so easily could have been. It could also have been about resource wars, and I have no doubt that were it released today it would be taken as commentary on American foreign policy in the Middle East. And it's not really about resource wars either. What Dune is about is people - in particular, politics and religion, and often how those two combine. This may as well be explained in the first chapter, as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood demonstrates the purpose of her order to Paul Atreides, Ducal heir and protagonist. As time goes on, Paul moves with his House to Arrakis, the only place in the universe where the spice Melange may be found, a desert planet with a savage climate. The family are put there by their ruler, and they find themselves engaged in vendetta with the Harkonnens, holders of the previous fief over the planet, who mined spice and provided the universe with its most precious commodity.


All I mentioned above - ecology in particular - form part of the background themes of the novel, but because of the vendetta and the politics that take place as a result of it and subsequent manoeuvrings the focus is forced onto the people - and more specifically, onto how those people react and behave and react to events around them.

People are the one perpetual truth in society and literature. Everything in life comes back to humanity and what's best for it. Even the biggest themes in literature - such as the old Arthur C. Clarke favourite of the human race's place in the universe - have the human element. But things relating to humanity change, while humanity does not. The world moves on while mankind exists in perpetuity. Mankind's invented interests - politics not least among them - travel with humanity like a second skin, unlike the events we react to such as global warming (see: ecology).

And this is what Dune is best at. It distils everything to a human level. And because it's not tied to its non-human themes, it means it can continue to be relevant.

If I were to go on and talk about how only science fiction can really do this (as other forms of literature are tethered to their time of writing in many ways) I'd be able to make a fair case. But it isn't one for today. My point has to be that the human side of writing is more important than the contextual side - one is a constant and this has to be remembered.

2012: We Survived

I may be speaking prematurely, but I'm fairly certain the year 2012 will end without the end of the world. The much-discussed end of the Mayan calendar didn't bring with it scenes akin to The Day After Tomorrow or Krakatoa's eruption. North Korea's continued attempts to blow itself (and by extension the rest of the world) up with an ill-thought-out nuclear rocket prestige programme have, as yet, failed to cause mayhem in the Pacific. My completion of my first novel in six years caused little other than a small ripple of applause from fellow writers and was not, as predicted by some experts, the harbinger of doom that it should have been.

It's been an odd year. From a personal stand-point, I spent the year employed as a paralegal at a solicitors in Dewsbury after spending the last six months of 2011 despairing of unemployment, and I'll start the year continuing to discharge my duties there. Work has brought structure and discipline back after half a year of lacking both those things, no matter how hard I tried. I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed all my work - I don't - but it's a good job, and one that gives me a good starting point in the chase for pupillage.

Away from work, I've had an interesting year in terms of relationships. I won't go into depth here, other than to say that the last four months have, in a strange way, been a relief. Being single and under no pressure has been nice, though I can't shake the feeling that I should be meeting someone soon.

The sporting year has given unforgettable highs and very few lows. Huddersfield Town's promotion at Wembley in May goes down as one of the best moments of my life, never mind in sport. The Olympics gave everyone hundreds of wonderful memories, and with the right support they will prove to have inspired a generation. And then there was the raw drama of the last day of the Ryder Cup, and the Miracle of Medinah. In terms of my own status as a sportsman, I've started playing for the Mirfield Panthers after a 3-year hiatus - one goal in sixteen games since we started playing again doesn't sound impressive, but it's been great to get back into competitive football, even more so as I've not struggled with injuries like I did in my last few months playing in 2009.

In my spiritual life, I've been all over the place - physically, if not mentally. I'm now on the planning committee for OneWord, the bi-monthly youth worship event in the Kirklees circuit, and I've graduated on from doing the lights to doing the words on the screen. The next event is scheduled for 26th January - so pop by and say 'hi', all Christian folk. I've been going to a youth group in Huddersfield (and intermittently attending the church itself, but I have my misgivings about the leadership, if truth be told, even if I like the rank and file), and doing more than a little private study. But I'm still Methodist at heart.

My writing year has been up and down. After setting myself a target of 100,000 words this year, I've managed to make it to 70,000, over 50,000 of which came in NaNoWriMo. Despite this shortfall, I've managed a couple of what I believe to be reasonable short stories. But by and large, it's been frustrating, despite these successes. Too many projects have been left half-complete or not even started. This is a situation that needs remedying in 2013.

It's also been a frustrating year for reading. A quick check of Goodreads tells me I've read 73 books this year, 18 of which have been re-reads. I've only rated 2 new books as being five-star reads. Either I'm getting more cynical, or I haven't read very many books of the very highest quality. Embassytown by China Mieville stands out as probably the outstanding book of the year, being a richly complex and experimental read that at least tries to break out from tired narratives and engage the reader in intelligent discourse. A full review of it would be difficult, such is it's complexity and depth, and I'd rather leave that to the people who have the time to really analyse it.

I've not read as many short stories as I would like. Counting stories I've listened to on podcasts in the total, I've read perhaps 150. As ever, Interzone provided a good source for high-quality short SF. 'The Indignity of Rain' by Lavie Tidhar was one of the best short stories it published this year, as well as its sequel 'Strigoi' - both form part of his connected Central Station series. The always excellent Jason Sanford entertained with 'Mirrorblink', though in my opinion it wasn't as good as some of his other work, such as 'Sublimation Angels' and 'The Ships Like Rain...'. Other short stories that impressed me included 'Ship's Brother' by Aliette de Bodard, and, from Interzone's sister magazine Black Static, 'Sunshine' by Nina Allan.

So what do I want from 2013? The world continuing to not explode under my feet would be a fair start. I'd like to get the mini-pupillages that make it possible for me to apply for pupillage in October, and continue in my post as a paralegal for the time being. It'd be great if I could meet someone, obviously, but in the mean time, being single isn't the worst thing that could happen. I want to stay fit, and score a few more goals for the Panthers, hopefully getting up to 100 games for the team in the process. I want to read more quality work, and increase the quantity of short fiction I get through.

But in terms of all my personal non-professional targets, the most important has to be in my writing. I have to start finishing work far more often. I can't keep stopping stories halfway through because of an over-sensitivity to it not being good enough. I know I won't improve until I start completing things and then working on them. Of all my targets, this has to be one that takes precedence.

Blackout/All Clear

A quick glance at my bookcase(s) should tell you that I'm no stranger to either the doorstopper or the epic series. So when I start a review talking about a book's length, you need to bear in mind that I got A Dance With Dragons in hardback on release day, read The Stand in under a fortnight, am in the process of re-reading Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings series, and in general don't mind a good long read.

Connie Willis's Blackout/All Clear is certainly a long read. It's one of few novels I've read that's had to be split into two heft volumes, such is its length - 1,400 pages of time travelling, the Blitz, and agonising over whether the course of history has been changed.

For such is its premise. A group of historians are sent to England in 1940 on separate assignments from the time travelling labs at the University of Oxford in 2060. Once there, they find they can't get back home. The greatest worry of the protagonists - Polly, Eileen, and Mike, to use their 1940s cover names - is that they might do something that cost the Allies the War through their actions in the Blitz.

If that sounds like it isn't enough to fill a 1,400 page novel, you'd probably be right. There's a large incidental cast of characters, and the plot isn't quite as simple as it sounds from above (more of that later), but my main complaint does come down to the fact that there's about 400 pages of filler over the two volumes. Willis would no doubt argue that her world-building (which is excellent) and character development (which is less so) justifies the length, and she'd have a fair argument. What could be argued on the other hand is that she'd done so much research that she felt obliged to include it, hence the dragging middle section.

For that criticism, however, it does have to be said that the research is put to good effect. Although much of it fails to advance the action, it lends an authentic feel to events. Constant references to real bombings slipped in to speech remind the reader that the Blitz is a real and present danger in 1940, and the day-to-day lives of Londoners in the Blitz are faithfully represented in the shelters and the department stores where the protagonists sleep and work. However, it's as if Willis felt every aspect of her research had to be represented, hence long sections where little happens but characters point out things that were bombed in the middle of repetitive conversations about how they'll return to Oxford, or make side-journeys that serve only to bog down the pace.

But when the action does advance, it can be exhilarating. There's a section surrounding 29th December 1940, the night the fire watch saved St Paul's Cathedral, which is tense and fraught and genuinely exciting. Multiple plot threads come together and are expertly handled in a brilliant sequence which takes place while bombs hit London and characters are forced away from their introspection and into decisive action.

And, of course, there's the plotting. Connie Willis needs congratulating on her handling of a dozen intricate plot-threads. Some twists can be seen coming from a mile off, it has to be admitted, but when everything comes together it can be seen how well the novel works as a unit. Time travel as a plot device does give a writer licence to obfuscate and then reveal, and if done badly it can be painful to read, but Willis does it quite beautifully.

Blackout/All Clear is too long by some distance. But when it gets things right, which is more often than not, it proves to be an excellent read. As the winner of the Hugo for best novel in 2011, I was expecting a good read, and so it proved to be. It's difficult to think of too many books I've read this year that either equal or better it. And to quote a great man, you'll like it if you're into the wibbly wobbley timey wimey... stuff.

The Hyperion Cantos

If I were to be asked right now what books I would take onto a desert island, with a maximum limit of ten, there would be very few automatic picks. Dune would go, as would The Windup Girl and Use of Weapons. However, beyond those three there would be very few easy picks. Would I take A Game of Thrones? Is Perdido Street Station worth reading again and again as one of very few books I'd read for the rest of my life? In short, I'd struggle to pick, in no small part because I would only want the very best with me.

Books one and two of the four-volume Hyperion Cantos would be among the contenders to go. If anyone hasn't read my reviews of both of them (Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, if you don't know the titles), I'd recommend they go and read them now. If you just need a recap, I think they're two of the finest space opera novels I've ever read. Both offer something different, with book one being a scene-setter for the apocalyptic second volume. Book two takes a more traditional structure, whereas book one adopts a structure not dissimilar to The Canterbury Tales, forcing each of the Shrike pilgrims to recount their backstory amidst a trek to save the universe as humanity knows it.

What I don't have is the time or inclination to explain in detail the world of Hyperion, other than that it's a richly detailed and multi-layered complex of advanced humanity. It's not simple. To get a real grasp on it, you need to read the books and gain understanding of the subtle interplays. We have the familiar extrapolated into the future. Familiar institutions such as the Catholic church and Judaism play an integral role. And then there's the mixture of the political and the personal and the technological, ranged against a backdrop of humanity's fundamentally fragile position.

With humanity in the form of the World Web under threat from the alien Ousters, the Shrike pilgrims are sent to Hyperion, a backwater planet, to visit the Shrike in the Time Tombs. One of the pilgrims will have their request - as explained in their back-stories - granted. The others will find themselves killed by the Shrike. In the mean time, we have the political intrigues and other dramas away from Hyperion, which mostly take place in The Fall of Hyperion.

The richness and the complexity of those two books is nothing short of remarkable. Without reading them it's difficult to appreciate all that goes into them. It would have been so easy for Dan Simmons to have written a simple adventure with cardboard cut-out characters and wafer-thin intrigue, but he didn't. The quest itself takes on an almost mythic scale as it progresses. The decision to go back and have each character tell his or her own backstory and motivations in what count as 80-page novellas helps this scale no end. The immersion is wonderful, made even more so by Simmons not taking us away from the main quest until the second book. But by then we've already seen the World Web, and it doesn't feel jarring to be moving among a separate set of characters - especially as the stories in the first book cover such a range of the experiences to be found in the World Web.

Clocking in at over 1,000 pages in total, the two books aren't short reads, but then this is the sort of duology you don't want to be short. I'd be lying if I said that it was a perfect space opera (because it isn't), but it's an absolutely essential read for anyone who likes a range of fiction. At times gasp-out-loud horrifying and at others heartwarming, this half of the Cantos might just be on that list of desert island books. That the ending actually manages to surprise and live up to its billing only adds to that high recommendation.

Unlikely to be on that list, however, are volumes three and four, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion. I'll start by pointing out that this isn't because they're bad books: far from it. When I read them over the summer I thoroughly enjoyed them both, but they fell a way short of the standards of the first half of the Cantos. The depth of the previous duology just doesn't exist in these books, which is what most readers will feel the most keenly. Never mind that there's another brilliant connection to be felt with the characters, nor that the story itself is a pretty good one overall, the comparable shallowness comes across starkly with every page.

At the outset, Raoul Endymion is a tour guide on Hyperion, when he comes to commit murder - or so the courts say. At his execution he finds himself rescued by Martin Silenus, one of the Shrike pilgrims of the original books, and sent out on a quest through human space to protect the new messiah, Aenea. With the all-powerful Catholic church on his tail, it becomes a two-volume epic of high adventure.

Taken on its own, the Endymion part of the Cantos is excellent space opera. It just struggles with not being as deep or as epic (despite being longer) as the first two. It might just be me, but the prose never felt as dense or rich as it had been formerly, but that had no impact on how much I enjoyed it. The characters were still superbly drawn and there were still scenes to thrill and shock. Once again the ending of the second volume lived up to billing and brought with it a glorious poignancy and emotional depth that hadn't been seen since halfway through Hyperion. Everything ended up tying together in a satisfying - and most definitely not happy - ending.

However, there were drawbacks. Certain things felt cheap and ill thought-out. Take the re-emergence of Colonel Kassad, who feels like he's been thrown in simply as filler to make the last volume longer. It's not as tight, and there's a very little amount of bloatedness to it that doesn't become the lean, mean machine that The Hyperion Cantos is as a whole. But, that said, the drawbacks weren't integral to the book, and practically everything else was well plotted and superbly executed.

There's a lot I've missed out in this quick review of the four novels that make up the Cantos. There are a few reasons behind this (one of which is laziness, if truth be told - it's a Sunday afternoon and I don't particularly want to work too hard at anything), one of which is that I don't think I can do the series justice in just a few hundred words. The best thing anyone can do to do The Hyperion Cantos justice is to read it, because I guarantee a sensational read.

Nano and future plans

I finished Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin this morning. After a few days off work, which have been spent deep in fiction both of my own and others' devising, it was satisfying to complete it. As ever, GRRM realised his world well and sucked me in with believable and sympathetic characters. OK, so it wasn't A Song of Ice and Fire, but then what in fantasy is? I can think of maybe two series which rival it, and none which surpass it, although I have to make the admission that this could all change in time, with the last two books of the series yet to even have publication dates.

After 17 days and almost 34,000 words, the NaNo novel is well on the way. I'm not happy with the quality of writing, but the point is that I have to keep ploughing on. Once I finish it (with the target date the 27th of the month, rather than the 30th), it will be consigned to history. But it's helped me get writing on a large scale again, which is more important than the quality. It's also forced me to keep going where otherwise I would have given in. Rediscovering my stubborn streak might prove to be important.

When I started writing this post, I was taking a day away from writing to recuperate. I had forgotten how hard writing was when it was done over a period of time, and when it wasn't trivial amounts. The last time I completed a novel was March 2006, after a six-month blitz. Six and a half years down the line, I'm certain I'll finish this novel, lacking in quality though it is. It lacks so many things. There's no depth, no description, no real character. There's some human interest, but it's limited. With 1/3 of the novel to write, I'm going to start ratcheting up the action to the point where it becomes a caricature of the vampire novel.

But what's next? There's a few projects I want to work on, only one of which is of novel length. Most of the short stories I have in mind will probably take me a couple of weeks at 500 words a day (quality over quantity - NaNo's lesson needs to be learned, in that I can't produce both, unlike many writers). But I'm building up to the big one - there's a certain epic fantasy series that's been sitting unwritten for far too long. Once the little projects are out of the way, it's time to knuckle down and write it.