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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I’ve moved on to Wolfe’s Sword Of The Lictor this week and, readers, I’m starting to think that Severian might not be a very good dude. This week it’s Still Wakes the Deep, Little Orpheus, and Robocraft designer (along with many others) and current lead technical level designer at Half Mermaid, Robert McLachlan! Cheers Robert! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
The Best of Gene Wolfe – a collection of his short fiction. The Death Of Dr Island was very familiar to me already, as a mainstay of sf short fiction anthologies since it was written a year after I was born – I could happily read it every year for the rest of my life. It was also part of his collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories – maybe the best ever title for a short story collection? Anyway, I’ve finally read his short story The Fifth Head Of Cerberus, which felt like a golden missing link connecting some of my favourite sf, such as Emphyrio and The Miracle Workers by Jack Vance, and stories from Ursula Le Guin and Cordwainer Smith.
What did you last read?
The Rider by Tim Krabbé – a gripping and unforgettable description of Krabbé’s attempt to win a cycle race; a train of thought running through exhaustion and struggle, filled with anecdotes about cyclists, cycle racing and life in general. I love cycling, but I think I’m too pathetic to actually enter a race.
What are you eyeing up next?
I’m debating re-reading Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. It’s set in a past/near/far future Kent, a post-apocalyptic mix of horror (black trees, black forests, mud, dogs and death) and beauty (Punch and Judy, St Eustace, rebirth), written in a version of English as wrecked as the nuclear-blasted landscape. It’s bleak – though not quite as brutally resistant to re-reading as The Road – and now I’m older with kids in this modern world, the thrill of reading the apocalypse is replaced with uneasiness and fear, but what an amazing piece of work. Apparently Hoban couldn’t spell properly for the rest of his life after finishing writing it.
Hoban was an American who spent half his life in London, and this superficial fact made a connexion (in Riddley Walker speak) in my mind with another book I read this year, by a genius writer who also made England their home – W. G. Sebald. The Rings Of Saturn is also written around the East of England and its boundary with the North Sea, although there’s so much more to the book than that. There’s a real desolation and liminality in his descriptions of the towns and landscapes which lie along the restless North Sea coast… Who knows what secrets lie beneath those waves?
What quote or scene from a book has stuck with you?
“Things are very difficult! Things are very difficult!” from the grotesque Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim is a perfect thing to say to family members facing genuine life challenges. I’m very helpful like that, you Sam?
My favourite scenes from books, for sheer thrills that I enjoy each time, tend towards the finales where Everything Happens At Once… I’m thinking of the final game in Iain M. Banks’ The Player Of Games, and the final end of Fido the Rat Thing in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.
What book do you find yourself bothering friends to read?
I have to be careful lending books to people; I lent Perdido Street Station by China Miéville to my brother in law, who told me later with great satisfaction that he’d thrown it in the bin – how’s that for literary criticism? My copies of Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson and The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin, while hopefully not in bins, are still with the people I lent them to years ago. So, I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that the best single fantasy novel is Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, but they can buy their own copy, they can’t have mine.
What book would you like to see someone adapt to a game?
I’m not sure how you’d do it (or get the money to do it properly) but it’d be Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks. It has my favourite megastructure in fiction, and I’m a huge sucker for megastructures. Occasionally I see indie games come out that take a stab at the subject, like NaissanceE, Manifold Garden – and the upcoming Lorn’s Lure, which I’m really looking forward to. BLAME! casts a long creative shadow in the genre, but there’s something special about Bascule (another spelling-challenged hero!), the crypt and the fastness. If someone gets the licence can I make it with you please?
I don’t want to alarm any of you, but I’m starting to think that I’m just setting myself up for a regularly-scheduled dose of disappointment by expecting our already generous guests to name every book ever written. Should I abandon this hope? It is, of course, a very secret goal, so I doubt anyone will even notice. Ah, well, you can’t have everything (ever written). Unless, of course, next week’s guest breaks the trend. Book for now!