Jules Jones

This is an abridged version of the first volume of Niven's memoirs, read by Niven himself. The edition I have is 2 CDs, with a running time of about 2 1/2 hours.

It says something about Niven's talent for storytelling that as a teenager I utterly adored my parents' copies of Niven's memoirs, even though I had no idea who he was and had never seen any of his films. I picked them up because they were books and they were there, and I had a marvellous time. His anecdotes were frequently hilarious, occasionally desperately sad, and always entertaining. The books offered a fascinating insider view of Hollywood in the thirties to sixties, although I now know that some of Niven's stories were closer to fiction than fact in his quest to entertain his audience.

The audiobook of A Moon's a Balloon was recorded in 1977, and Niven is charming, funny, and a superb reader. It starts with his school and Sandhurst days in the 1910s and 1920s, and then covers his first military career (with some hair-raising stories about his antics in the Highland Light Infantry). It moves on to his initial move to the US, and how he ended up in Hollywood. Niven's later career was a glittering one, but as he entertainingly describes, he started at the bottom of the ladder, and was not the most promising of new actors when he first had a chance to break out of the ranks of the extras. The audiobook also covers his return to the UK on the outbreak of war and his (eventually successful) attempts to rejoin the armed forces -- though Niven was always reluctant to talk about his war experience, and says very little about his time with the Commandos in the print book, and even less in the audiobook. Then there's a passage about his return to Hollywood after the war.

Though some of his anecdotes were embroidered, or re-told as his personal experiences when in truth they happened to his friends, he has a knack of making the listener feel as if they could have been there. And there's real emotion as he reads some of the passages -- most movingly, you can hear him holding back the tears as he reads the passage about the death of his first wife, even though she had died some thirty years before this recording was made.

Unreliable narrator though he may be, from the perspective of a reader/listener in the early twenty-first century this is a fascinating slice of history. Fascinating, and hugely enjoyable. I'm very glad I bought this.

LibraryThing entry

Inspector Singh is back, but for a change his superiors aren't intent in temporarily ridding themselves of him by lending him to a neighbouring country's police force. This time the high profile murder is a lot closer to home, in the Singapore offices of an international law firm. The overweight, chain-smoking policeman in white trainers may be a disgrace to the force, but he's also very good at his job. Who better to lead the investigation into the brutal murder of the law firm's senior partner?

For once he has all the resources of the police force to call upon. This is a high profile case involving wealthy, influential expatriates who bring enormous value to the country, and the police administration wants it solved. But the flipside for Singh is being forced to treat the suspects a good more gently than he'd like. Not that Singh is into police brutality, but keeping both suspects and innocents with useful information off balance is part of his toolkit. He has to think of more devious means to achieve it than simply dragging them down to the nick for a surprise interview.

But as Singh starts digging, he keeps being handed potential motives. Mark Thompson had called a after-hours meeting at short notice of the senior lawyers in the office, and it's probable that someone killed him to stop him disclosing whatever it was he'd discovered was going on behind the scenes. Too many of the lawyers have something to hide, and their attempts to cover up their secrets only end up making each of them look potentially guilty of murder. Then there's the current wife and the ex-wife of the murdered man, each set on blaming the other, and with good reason. It's a long, slow process of solving each individual mystery, and Singh is going to need those resources he has on tap.

Singh has always been clearly portrayed as a Sikh, but in this book we see his home life, and his ties into the Sikh social network and culture. All the more so because by an unfortunate coincidence that causes him a great deal of grief during the investigation, the distant nephew of his wife who didn't show up to a "meet the local relatives" dinner turns out not to have done so because he was one of the lawyers called to the meeting with Mark Thompson. Singh's quite capable of keeping family and business separate, but others don't always see it that way.

The book as a whole does an excellent job of portraying Singapore and its particular blend of tension between expats and locals, and between different ethnicities. Even within the law office, sexism and racism amongst the expats from assorted countries provide fuel for crime -- and the racism isn't just whites considering themselves superior to locals.

Flint does a superb job of blending social commentary with a solidly written police procedural. Singh with his understanding of human nature has echoes of the best Miss Marple and Poirot stories, but he's very much his own man, in his own skillfully drawn setting. As with previous books, he's a joy of a character to read about, but here we learn more about him -- and about his home city. Flint has drawn on her own experience of being a Malaysian lawyer in Singapore to produce a richly detailed story with a cast of vividly written characters.

It's relatively light in tone, although it doesn't pull away from showing the harsher side of Singapore law, and there are some emotionally wrenching moments. A great read, and you don't need to have read either of the previous books in the series to enjoy this one.

ISBN: 978-0749929770
LibraryThing entry
The Singapore School of Villainy (Inspector Singh Investigates) at Amazon UK
at Play.com
Inspector Singh Investigates: Singapore School of Villainy Bk. 3 (Singh Investigates 3) at Amazon US
Inspector Singh Investigates: The Singapore School of Villainy -- Kindle edition (which is sold from Amazon US, but looks as if it might be available in the UK as well, along with the first two books in the series)
at The Book Depository

UK edition of a selection of Blish's short stories and novellas. This has somewhat different contents to the US edition under the same collection name.

Common Time
Short about a test pilot flight of a faster than light ship (using the Haertel overdrive, a common strand in Blish's work). The two previous test flights left successfully but never came back, so this one is under total computer control and Garrard's primary job is to stay alive long enough to report back. The opening sequence is a vivid description of the effect of drive on time perception, with the perceived time rate decoupled from the physical time rate. This section is very hard sf in tone. It then goes into a passage that feels very New Wave to me, even though the story predates the New Wave movement. The juxtaposition is rather disconcerting. I've always loved the opening sequence, but I seem to be getting old and cranky as regards the middle section.

A Work of Art
One of my favourite pieces by Blish. Richard Strauss finds himself alive again in 2161, the product of a mind sculptor. As is quickly explained to him, his personality and talent has been recreated in the body of a musically talentless volunteer. Strauss welcomes the chance to write new music, and adapts well if crankily to the changes in society over 200 years, but is not impressed by modern music. He gradually comes to realise what the true artform of this era is. A moving exploration of identity and personality.

To Pay the Piper
The survivors of an apocalyptic war have been living in deep bunkers for years. The war goes on, but one side develops a method to re-educate the population so they can survive on the plague-ridden surface. The hard part -- it's a slow process that for practical reasons is to be restricted to the troops who will be sent to do final battle, but the civilian population want *out*. A politician exploits popular sentiment to lean on the scientists to give him priority...

Nor Iron Bars
Set in the same sequence as Common Time, but somewhat further on in the development of the Haertel overdrive. Space colonisation has begun, but the Haertel overdrive is not yet fit for shipping large numbers of humans. This is an experimental flight of another ftl drive -- and it too has strange effects, this time a disconnect between spatial dimensions. But this ship has passengers, giving the captain an added incentive to find a solution before the various side-effects kill people. Notable for showing an inter-racial couple in a story written in the 1950s.

Beep
Short story later expanded into a short novel, The Quincunx of Time. There's a spreading interstellar culture, and the intelligence service is using the top-secret Dirac transmitter, a communication device that offers instantaneous transmission over unlimited distances. Any message sent on a Dirac device can be picked up by any other Dirac, anywhere. Blish explores the practical and philosophical implications of the technology. I like this a lot, but a lot of people don't.

Beanstalk
Novella about a group of genetically engineered humans, and the problems they face in being accepted by standard issue humans. The group are tetraploids, with features common in polyploid life-forms -- longevity, large size and low fertility. It's an interesting way of looking at racial and cultural discrimination, as the group are of the same genetic stock and culture as the host culture, but are clearly differentiated by their much greater height, and have created their own sexual mores to deal with the twin problems of low fertility and the skewed gender ratio that has resulted from prospective parents being far more willing to use the treatment on male embryos than female. But it somehow falls a bit flat for me.

Overall, the collection's worth reading, but some stories are definitely more interesting than others.

I was recently offered review copies of the second and third books in the Inspector Singh Investigates series by Shamini Flint, about a Sikh detective in the Singapore police force. I was pleased to accept, as I thought that the first book was very enjoyable, if flawed. I'm very happy to say that the second book, A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul, makes good on the promise shown by the first. The story's just as good, but the writing's much smoother in this episode of the Inspector's adventures, without the choppy pacing and info-dumping of the first in the series. The character of Inspector Singh is a wonderful concept, and this book offers a plot to do him justice.

Singh's a good detective, with a track record in catching killers, but he doesn't fit into the current force culture. So once again inspector Singh's senior officers are only too glad to get him out of their hair by volunteering him as their contribution to a major police investigation in a neighbouring country. In this book the country is Bali, and the crime is once again murder, but this time on a large scale. As the book opens, he's feeling frustrated because for all his skill at catching killers he has no experience relevant to the investigation of a terrorist attack. But soon there is work for him, for Flint has taken the real life tragedy of the Bali bombings, and added a separate murder mystery. One of the skull fragments recovered from the bomb site has a bullet hole through it. One of the dead was already dead at another's hand *before* the bomb went off.

Singh might be a fifth wheel on the bomb investigation, but murder on the individual scale is a completely different matter. He takes on the task of finding justice for the one victim out of dozens he can help in death. His temporary assistant this time out is an Australian policewoman from the bomb investigation team. Bronwyn Taylor has also been sidelined by her superiors for perceived insubordination, and her expert area is Indonesian language and culture, not murder. Her personality is far from a perfect match for Singh's and he often finds her irritating, but nevertheless the two make a good team for this case.

The book's viewpoint moves around between disparate groups who have had their lives disrupted by the bombing. The primary focus is the two police officers; but there is also a group of rather unappealing British and Australian ex-pats, one of whom has been missing since the bomb, a small group of Indonesian Muslims from another island, and of course some of the local Bali people, both within the police force and without. Singh and Taylor have a long slog piecing together the clues, even after an early breakthrough in identifying the shooting victim, but gradually the different threads they hold start to twine together, leading to a thrilling climax.

It would be very easy for a book using this subject to slip into exploitation, but Flint treats it with great sensitivity. One of the strengths of the first book was the way Flint showed multiple culture clashes from multiple angles, and this book develops the same themes. There is no demonising of any one group, and there is a thoughtful examination of how and why the different groups are motivated to behave as they do. The book is often gently funny and relatively light in tone even though it's using such a grim background and tackles some serious subjects. This can be a difficult balancing act to pull off, but this book does it well.

As with the first book, Singh himself is a marvellous character, and the other characters are well drawn. Team this with a good story and an evocative description of Bali, and you've got a book that's well worth your time. I'm looking forward to reading the third book, which is set in Flint's current home, Singapore.

http://www.librarything.com/work/9086827
http://www.librarything.com/work/9086827
Inspector Singh Investigates: Bali Conspiracy Most Foul: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul (Inspector Singh Investigates 2) at Amazon UK
Inspector Singh Investigates: Bali Conspiracy Most Foul (Inspector Singh Investigates 2) at Amazon US

(Book 26 for 2010)

Fifth Torchwood tie-in novel, and the middle one of the trio released for the second season. This one has a couple of references which place it late in second season, but no spoilers, and you don't need to know anything but the basics about the universe to enjoy it.

Michael Bellini's a Cardiff dockhand, part of a workgang waiting to unload a ship late one night in 1953. A ship whose cargo includes a crate marked "Torchwood". A strange explosion leaves him in hospital, the only one of his mates to survive. But that's not the worst of his worries. There are the men who say they're from the union, but who are clearly government agents. They're not nearly as frightening as the men in black suits and bowler hats, who aren't men at all.

In the present day, a quiet Sunday in the Hub is interrupted by the intruder alarm. A young man has suddenly appeared in a locked room, and he's riddled with a strange form of radiation. It doesn't take long for the team to establish that he's a local boy, but out of time. Not so strange for Torchwood, but there's a twist -- they've all encountered Michael before. Owen was a junior doctor, learning the necessary art of forgetting about his patients at the end of the day. Tosh was a little girl in Japan. Gwen was on her first day with a new partner, and somehow feeling as if it was her first day in the police force. Ianto was in his second week at Canary Wharf, making friends with another recent starter called Lisa.

And Jack? Well, Jack's been with Torchwood a long, long time. His own encounter with Michael was out of hours, but he still knows something about Michael's first encounter with Torchwood, and the alien artefact that sent Michael leaping through time. And a few more things besides.

This is a beautifully constructed novel, which uses Michael's leaps back and forth through time to tell a solidly plotted story around Michael and the artefact, while giving some lovely backstory and characterisation for each of the main cast. Something I particularly liked is that we see the characters when they were younger, and in those scenes they feel like younger versions of themselves, before various things happened to them. There's also some good characterisation in the present-day scenes. The nature of the book means that all of the main cast get a good share of the word count.

This is my favourite of the novels so far. That's partly because it plays to things I like, but it's also because it's well written. And while the canonicity of the Whoniverse tie-in material is ambiguous, I think this one adds a little more depth to the Torchwood world, not just another monster-of-the-week story.

LibraryThing entry
Play.com
Book Depository

This is a slightly unusual entry in the book log -- it's fanfic. But it's novel-length, and it's very good, and as far as I'm concerned it belongs in the book log.

A while back Sam Storyteller posted a Whoniverse short story about Jack Harkness, I Were The Heavens, Rating: PG for language, Summary: A sixteen-year-old boy from Boeshane is going to win the war. The Time Agency has a vested interest in children like him -- and so does the Admiral of the Fleet.

Now he's posted a novel-length story about what happened next. And it's set both just after that short story -- and just before Children of Earth. But this is no simple fix-it fic. This is a carefully crafted consideration of time paradoxes, and the potential for damaging your own past/future. It's difficult to discuss it in much detail without heading into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that Jack Harkness's convoluted timeline gives a distant future Jack a pressing reason to pull Ianto Jones into the 51st century -- and it's nothing to do with saving Ianto from an untimely death in the 21st century. Jack not only barely remembers Ianto, but to preserve the timeline will have to put Ianto back where he got him from once the job is done...

You'll need to have at least some familiarity with the Torchwood universe to follow this story, but it's a fine example of how good fanfic can be in the right hands.

Your Face Is Turned -- part 1 of 9
Sam's description:
Rating: R (more sex than you can shake a dick -- a stick! I mean a stick! More sex than you can shake a stick at.)
Summary: Lo Boeshane has a promising career ahead of him as he enters his first year of Fleet Officer Training, but the war is still with him and life at Quantico Station can be difficult. Meanwhile, Ianto Jones is just trying to figure out why the Doctor kidnapped him to the fifty-first century and why Jack abandoned him at a school for the Fleet's military elite. He suspects it may have something to do with Lo, but his attempts to help the troubled young veteran may damage his own timestream beyond repair.

Book 13 for 2010.

The scene is the Portobello Road in London, home to a sprawling market and to people from all walks of life, the wealthy middle class and those with no hope of a job. A middle-aged antiques dealer finds some cash dropped in the street, and rather than hand it to the police, advertises locally for the owner. Half a dozen lives cross and are entangled as a result, some knowing and some unknowing; setting them all on a path that will change some forever, and leave others dead.

Rendall starts with stock stereotypes, and then draws their lives in intimate detail, showing them as rounded characters with a mix of good and bad in their personalities. This is a psychological thriller, but it's about ordinary people living ordinary lives; and how everyday pressures and events can lead into, and out of, tragedy. It has a mostly happy ending, and even the dead get some justice in the end, but these things depend on the small coincidences of ordinary life.

There's a very strong sense of place in the book, excellent characterisation, and an engaging story. My own reaction to it was that I thoroughly enjoyed it and am glad I read it -- but I have no desire to read it again, and no urge to go out and buy more by the same author. I'm not quite sure why this is so, as the book certainly doesn't rely on the shock value of seeing the events unfold for the first time.

LibraryThing entry
buy from the Book Depository

This is the fourth title in Andre Norton's Beast Master series. The first two (The Beast Master and Lord of Thunder) were written by Norton in 1959 and 1962. Three sequels were published as collaborations in the 2000s. The cover says by two authors, but it was obvious within a couple of chapters of this one that the only input by Norton herself was a story outline, if that. It got only more obvious as the book went on, because McConchie a) has not written a convincing pastiche of Norton's writing style, b) is not as good a writer. McConchie's own website states that all three of the "collaborations" were written solely by McConchie from brief collaboratively written outlines.

I don't have a problem with high quality sharecropped novels -- after all, I like good fanfic, and I'm perfectly happy to pay for pro-published fanfic if it's good enough. However, for me this example isn't good enough to buy, although it's worth checking out from the library if you want to read more about the beast masters. A particular irritation for me was that McConchie is addicted to head-hopping, and is not good enough to make it transparent. This is not just using an omniscient point of view -- this is dropping into a different character's head for a paragraph or two, sometimes in mid-paragraph, in order to provide information that the main character for that chapter can't know. By contrast, Norton had very tightly controlled point of view -- and as a result was the author who got me thinking at a young age about how different POVs work, and how it can be used to give different effects. Thus the head-hopping had a fingernails-down-blackboard effect on me, although other readers might not be irritated by it.

The primary focus of this book is Laris, a young woman who accepted bonded servant status to a circus owner to escape a refugee camp. Laris has a valuable talent with animals, and is used both in the ring acts, and behind the scenes to look after the animals. In her time with the circus, she's realised that it has ties to the Thieves' Guild -- and the latest scheme is the abduction of beast master's animals. When the circus heads to Arzor, she's used in a plot to acquire Hosteen Storm's animals. Laris's sympathy is with Storm and his family, but Laris has a beast companion of her own to protect... There's enough backstory dropped in that you could read this as a standalone, although I'd really have to suggest you go and get the original pair of books instead.

The story's enjoyable and fits in well with Norton's world, even if I didn't like some of the writing. Would I read the other two novels McConchie wrote using Norton's setting and characters? Yes, but going by this one I wouldn't go to any great trouble or expense to acquire them, and I probably wouldn't keep them once I'd read them.


LibraryThing entry

First of the Torchwood tie-in novels, and set a few weeks after the start of the series, i.e. after the second episode and before the fourth.

The book opens with a second-person role-playing game scenario -- except this game's not in the computer, and when the "you" loses a life and hopes for better luck next time, it's a real body that dies. Of course, it takes Torchwood a little longer to work out why their serial killer has just cheerfully committed suicide...

In a second story strand, Owen's been spending a lot of time in a more conventional multi-player game, though he's taking advantage of Torchwood technology, and Toshiko's technical skills, to ramp up the online experience a little. When he runs into an old girlfriend in the game and discovers that she's living in Cardiff, he sees it as both a personal and professional opportunity -- he wants to prove his theory that the game is a good initial screening tool for potential Torchwood recruits, and Megan's just the sort of person who would make a good recruit for Torchwood.

While Jack, Gwen and Tosh are tracking down who their serial killer was working with and what he's done with a set of stolen nuclear fuel rods, Owen and Megan stumble across part of the solution quite by chance. And all the while the rain pours down on Cardiff, as the Rift's latest problem plays havoc with the local weather system...

The mirrored plotlines make it obvious early in the book what's going on (intentionally so). But the real puzzle is who's doing it, and what their motive is. Anghelides carefully weaves the different strands together so that the reader can see the pieces falling into place, as what seem like separate stories start to interlock. By the end, what seemed like pieces of characterisation and scene-setting turn out to be crucial to Torchwood winning the day.

This is a nicely constructed novel, with an interesting story and good characterisations. There's a good spread of scenes across most of the characters, and even Ianto gets some nice characterisation vignettes, even though the book's set at a point in the series timeline when he was mainly a background character. Notably, that includes a fair bit of the flirty banter between Jack and Ianto that was in the tv episodes at this point in the timeline.

I liked this book a lot, and think a fair number of my friends would too. While it's a tie-in, Anghelides does a good job of working the universe set-up into the first few scenes, and I think the book should also work well for someone who hadn't seen the show, although obviously you'd get more out of it if you're already familiar with the characters.

It's also available as an audiobook read by John Barrowman, which I haven't heard.

LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK
at Amazon US

This is often described as Clarke's non-sf novel, but it has a very similar feel to some of his hard sf. There is the same world building and sense of wonder inspired by science -- but the world he brings to life here was real and recent history. For this novel is a fictionalised account of the development of Ground Control Approach radar during the second world war, and Clarke draws upon his own experience of working on the project to safely talk down aircraft by radar.

It might sound dry, but it isn't. Clarke does a fine job on showing both the the technology, and the people who created the technology, with the interplay between different personalities, and the little and large incidents that make up life in a developmental project. The main character's not always that likeable a person, but in a way that makes him a believable viewpoint character rather than a stock hero. There's plenty of dramatic tension, and lighter moments as well, with both clearly being drawn at least in part from Clarke's own experiences. Glide Path is well worth a read for both sf readers and WW2 History buffs.

LibraryThing entry
at Amazon UK