Recommended: yes

Having enjoyed the first book I was keen to read the next in the series, but while I enjoyed it, it was a bit of a let down by comparison.

Sea of Monsters sees Percy reunited with Annabeth and a new friend, Tyson, a young Cyclops. Camp Half-Blood is under attack and its magical borders will fail if they can’t retrieve the golden fleece. Percy is also having weird dreams about his friend Grover, who is on a quest to find the God Pan.

Again, the pace of this book is relentless, with Percy and co lurching from from crisis to the next, and it’s relatively short, so quick to get through. I didn’t think it was as well rounded as the first book, but it was still good enough that I bought the next book in the series.

1 Sep 2010

Recommended: yes

I’ve been a big fan of the Mortal Engines books since the very first one. Aside from the roaring adventures and interesting characters there was a fantastical world where cities sat on tracks and consumed other cities or standing settlements.

So it was a bit disappointing when the series came to an end with A Darkling Plain. Have no fear though, because Reeve has started work on some prequel novels, the first of which is Fever Crumb.

Set before London becomes a traction city. Fever is found as a baby and taken in by the Engineers Guild and trained as one of them. When a well-known archaeologist requests her for an assignment she is a bit suspicious and rightly so. She has strange memories from before she was born, memories of a time and place before the last uprising, the Skinners War.

As with all of the novels, the ideas are inventive, the characters endearing and the story fast. New ideas, novel twists on the contemporary (simple things like how the names of famous places have been twisted over time) and clever development draw you in and hold your attention to the end. This certainly isn’t a cheap shadow of the main series, designed to please fans and make money, it’s a great story on its own.

I’m looking forward to the next two books (A Web of Air and Scriviner’s Moon).

31 Aug 2010

Recommended: yes

Football, long the game of street urchins, largely a cover for fighting and a big draw for the crowd, is going legit in the city of Ankh-Morpork. In large, because the wizards of Unseen University have found out that if they don’t play a game they lose a large chunk of the funding that allows them an easy life.

So, with the help of the of a few unlikely individuals and the suspicious backing on the Patrician, they set about inventing the modern game.

As ever, Pratchett isn’t just writing a story with brilliant and entertaining characters but is using the subject for social commentary and insight. It’s a style no one else seems to play in the same way and it made for yet another maddenly addictive read.

Now, if we can just get him off the YA stuff (the next book is YA, but he had announced a new book, called Snuff, featuring Sam Vimes, my favourite of his characters).

If you have never read a Pratchett novel I urge you to give them a try, they may be classed as fantasy but they are far more than that.

30 Aug 2010

I have been listening to the audiobook of Bill Bryson’s At Home, which is superb.  I like Bryson’s work anyway and was a particular fan of A Short History of Nearly Everything.  So I am very much enjoying At Home and the insights it brings (he does like asking questions you don’t generally think of, like why do we have salt and pepper on the table, why those condiments specifically and nothing else?).  One of the bizarre historical stories that appears (to do with guano, which is about fertilization, agriculture and leads back to gardening and the humble lawn) is about the Bat Bomb.

This was an idea pioneered in WWII as a weapon to use against the Japanese.  Although many bat species are endangered today, at the time bats were around in huge numbers (several million in a large cave was not uncommon), which meant they could be used in large numbers for maximum affect without harming the population.  The idea was simple, catch a lot of bats (they were planning on releasing over a million), attach small incendiary devices to them with timers, load them onto a plane and release them over Japan near morning.  The bats would, in the approaching dawn, find a roost and then the timed devices would detonate causing mass fires.

It sounds like something cooked up by a second-rate comic book villain, but this was a real project, known to the military as Project X-Ray.  In fact, it had several test runs.  One with dummy weapons and one, for some reason, with live fire weapons at an airbase in the south-western United States.  It proved so successful it burnt down most of the new airbase and a general’s car.  The problem was it was completely indiscriminate.

In the end, while still working out the kinks, the atomic bomb (Manhattan) project came to fruition and it was decided the bat bombs were no longer needed.  There’s a book on the subject if you’re inclined to find out more.

These were by no means the only animals to be used for military means, in WWII alone there were projects for pigeon-guided missiles, anti-tank dogs and the US Navy still uses dolphins and sea lions.

29 Aug 2010

Recommended: yes

I’m a fan of near-future science fiction, especially stuff which is neither dystopic or eutopic, because the world is neither now and will not turn into either in the future. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of choice though, this sub-genre is fairly small, with most sci-fi featuring alien worlds, spaceships and, more recently, space operas.

I’d heard of Altered Carbon from a number of places and it was on my wishlist for a while. So when I was in the mood I added it to an order and finally sat down to read it. I’m glad I did.

Aside from the Earth-based futurism there is also a degree of noir detective thriller as well, another genre I like, so it worked out well and I ploughed through it quickly.

It certainly doesn’t pull any punches, this is a hard edge story filled with sex, torture and all sorts of violence but it’s also stuffed with interesting ideas on what the future of technology holds and what impact they’ll have on society.

More importantly, the characters are well drawn, the plot fast-paced and the action relentless, drawing you in and holding your attention to the last page.

28 Aug 2010