Aquarionics

Okay, only just “Tomorrow”, but I’ve been busy. Dragon Age, as a wise man once said, does not play itself.

The other two short stories in the Mean Streets anthology I mentioned yesterday were Remi Chandler and John Taylor. In the other order, then:

Take Neverwhere. Neverwhere is one of my favourite books in the world, so this is a good start. Take the central conceit – a world parallel to London that is full of weird shit – and literalise it. The Nightside is a hidden world within London town, a classic fantasy subcity of out of time adventurers and out of universe horrors; of evil beyond your mind and technology beyond our ken; a world that normality may occasionally stumble into, but never lasts long within. Then put a PI there, give him a hidden backstory and a genre awareness, season with mixed metaphors, and continue into the future. It’s a darker side of the same concept Neverwhere explored, with back story and structure where Neverwhere had whimsy and flow. Where it occasionally trips over is a need to explain the world around it, though this builds a deeper universe you feel you comprehend. In both cases, you understand the world you’re in as the character does. Oh, and there’s always the rising tide of bad juju.

An angel gave up on heaven and came to live on earth. He works as a private eye. He can understand his dog. Heaven occasionally needs his help to interact with humanity. There’s a rising tide of bad juju. It’s exactly like that, yes. It suffers somewhat from a lack of characters with a “normal” viewpoint, but given that this is a story about an immortal angel fighting his basic nature and trying to stay human against the background of aforementioned juju, that’s excusable. Possibly the weakest of the Mean Streets stories, but still pretty damn strong.

Now you should start recommending things at me :-)

In the last couple of years, I’ve got into something of a subgenre. What it’s a subgenre of depends on who you talk to, or which bookshops you visit, but it appears to be the intersection of “Crime”, “Fantasy” and – in some shops – “Horror”. The best inclusive tag I have for it is “The weird shit all around”, but that probably needs work. They sometimes get lumped in with the rest of “Urban Fantasy”.

The format is generally “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. I, $foo, am one of the few that am part of that world. Here are my stories”.

I first got into them though Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series, which I’ve talked about before, they are based on a Chicago Wizard – Harry Dresden – and his attempts first to help his clients, and then over the rest of the series to fight against the rising tide of bad juju.

Next was Wm. Mark Simmons‘ Half Life Chronicles starting with “One Foot in the Grave“. The Csejthe books are mostly about vampires to start with, and branch out through werewolves into general horror mythology, and then over the rest of the series to fight against the rising tide of bad juju. They’re a little more pulpy than the Dresden files. Being on Baen, the first six chapters are available for free on the site to see if you like it.

While staying with Clare at some point last year, I picked up a book by Mike Carey called “The Devil You Know”. I vaguely recognised the name (I should have done, he wrote the comic graphic novel Lucifer and a large swathe of Hellblazer), and shortly afterwards bought the rest of the series. The Felix Castor books start out being about a London-based exorcist/private eye, but shifts over the rest of the series to fight against the rising tide of bad juju. The books are wonderfully written and occasionally truly creepy. The latest book closes out the longest running plot-arc, but since the juju’s still rising I can only hope there’s going to be some more…

Then Mr Cooke lent me “Mean Streets”, which is an anthology of short stories in this genre, primarily because it contained a Dresden Files story I hadn’t read yet. At the same time lending me the first book of one of the other series’ in the anthology. I promptly went out and bought the first couple of books of each. Mr Cooke is occasionally bad for my wallet.

Greywalker was the book Mr Cooke lent me. In it, Harper Blaine is working as a private eye in Seattle until she dies for two minutes, after which she can see into the “Grey”, the layer of reality under this one which ghosts and such inhabit. Afterwards, she works as a private eye in Seattle attempts first to help her clients, and then over the rest of the series to fight against the rising tide of bad juju. I’m guessing about the last bit, as I’ve only read the first couple. She’s also coming to terms with her new status as a “greywalker” and learning how it works. They appear to be very good, with believable characters acting, for the most part, without the idiot ball.

…this is taking longer than I thought it was going to, and I have to go to work now. Part two tomorrow, probably.

So, New job, new commute.  Advantage over the old commutes is that instead of taking the bus to a station and getting on a train, I now just take a bus. It takes as long as it ever did (40-50 minutes), but is a longer block of time.

New job is at Skimbit, incidentally. Forgot to mention that here.

My girlfriend has introduced me to the series of alternative history books that begin with 1632. I’m enjoying them – mostly in ebook format from webscriptions. The basic premise is that a southern US town is sliced out of the late 90s and dumped into Germany in – drumroll – 1632, bringing modern diplomacy, weaponry and government to a world in the grip of kings and churches having petty squabbles. It has a kind of Tom Clancyesque obsession with the details of weaponry at times, but not enough to make me hate it. The gung-ho, overtly smug “America, Fuck yeah!” bits where they prove how much better Europe would have done had it been ruled by 21st century American ideals are slightly more irritating, but the number of books I’ve thrown out of a window count remains at precisely one, and this hasn’t even graced the doormat of the thousand foot tower representing reasons I threw “Mirror of her Dreams” across a room. The series is fun, and well written, and worth reading if being occasionally preached at doesn’t really irritate you.

It’s been a couple of years since I went to Amsterdam for Xalior’s stag party, and it was slightly before that that I stood in Waterstones in Tunbridge Wells casting around for books to take on the plane. There was nothing new from any series that I was remotely involved in, but I was drawn in by the cover of a book. It said:

“Magic. It can get a guy killed”.

It was styled like a notebook with coffee stains on it, and the blurb on the back introduced Harry Dresden, a wizard in Chicago. It looked interesting, and so I picked it up, bought it, put it in my luggage, and forgot about it until the trip home from Amsterdam. I failed to read it until I discovered I would have to wait an hour at Gatwick for the next train to London. A while later, I nearly missed the train out of Gatwick, and shortly after that I nearly failed to get off the train in Bedford where I was living.  It wasn’t long after I got home that I finished it, which saved me accidentally nearly missing anything else. Over the next few days I bought the next four books – wondering how Jim Butcher had managed to write so many without my finding out about them.

The basic premise is as described above, to start with. Dresden’s a wizard, he works in a world where that’s a real career choice, although the general public don’t know.  For the first few books it’s pretty much a thriller-mystery formula with more vampires and werewolves. As Dresden gets more and more involved in the cases he fights, and increases in power, and gains experience, contacts, scars and lasting status from being so involved in the other side, the crazy ramps up into war and chaos and a grand overarching plotline. It does this very well indeed, and as the series progresses the slightly 4-colour-comic original cast get depth and reason.

There has been a pattern over the last couple of years, starting with my parents, of my recommending or lending people the first couple of books of the Dresden Files, and then getting them back shortly afterwards with either a demand for the next four or the news that they’ve just bought the entire series. The books are good, and I’d recommend them. The first book is called Storm Front.

I’m rereading Pratchett, Gaiman and Neal Stephenson (pre-Quicksilver, anyway). You probably don’t need me to recommend those.

Last month sucked.

It didn’t appear here, mostly it was on other places or my ranting at people in the pub, but over the course of one extended fortnight  last month my bag was stolen – containing my brand new laptop, as well as passport, keys, wallet, phone etc – I left my job, I had a legal threat over something I had no idea about, and – to cap it all – had to go to an Industrial Estate in Barking at 8pm on a Friday.

After my bag was stolen, me and Clare wandered off to her parents’ house for food and mutual raging at the youth of today (Her bag was also stolen), and I looked for a book to read. I found one. It was called “The Devil You Know“, and it’s by Mike Carey. If you read comics (or graphic novels) then Carey is the man behind the Lucifer and also wrote for the Hellblazer series. Otherwise, he wrote (bits of) the books that the Keanu Reeves film “Constantine” was based on, and the movie isn’t a patch on the original.

Devil You Know is the first of the Felix Castor books, of which there are now four (The fourth came out in paperback this moth, the fifth will come out in September). If you’ve read the Dresden Files, then just go and buy them, you will like them a lot. They’re similar to Dresden, but start off as dark as the later ones and then get blacker faster. They’re all based around the post-death form of the supernatural, with Castor as an exocist in London after the dead have started to rise again. The London Carey presents is pretty much spot on, the characters are – where they are human – human, deep and empathic with a lot of the rough edges of the early Dresden books already shorn off Carey’s s style. I picked up the latest book on Friday at lunch time, started it on the bus home, and pretty much didn’t stop until I’d finished it in a way that only Pratchett’s books usually grab me. Highly recommended.

Continuing my advance into urban magic books, Kate Griffin’s “A Madness of Angels” is interesting. A book about urban sourcery set around a(nother) whodunnit plot based around Matthew Swift, a sourcer summoned back into this world by things he doesn’t understand yet. A mythical London based around small gods and a magic system based around the natural flow of power around the city, the concept is very interesting. I am patently not going to get to the end of this review without a comparison to the central pillar of mythic-London fantasy, Neverwhere, which is a little unfair. The works stand part, though the whimsical flow of language occasionally throws the comparison together again. For all that I haven’t finished it yet – it got broken up by my buying the latest Felix Castor – it is a well-written, well realised work that is a pleasure to read. For faults, it has the occasional opaqueness of major characters, the mistrusting of most of the cast for each other coupled with the confusion of the main character occasionally means it’s more difficult to get a grip of the story as it flows, but it’s not a major flaw. So get this too.

I’ll do one of these for Podcasts at some point.