Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2005)

OK, I know the original Man Som Hatar Kvinnor¹, was published in 2005, but this English translation (by Reg Keeland) is copyright 2008. Though yes, I'm colossally late either way, but this isn't a proper review, because, try as I did over the year just past, I just couldn't face ploughing down the downhill slopes after getting half-way. Indeed, seeing as the back cover and first couple of pages contain a million² laudatory quotes from people who have forgotten more about writing in general and crime fiction in particular than I'll ever know, I wonder a bit whether somehow my copy was full of different words to theirs or something....

[Though reassuringly, I see, over at his splendid blog, the writer and man Mark Blackmore has posted some notes on the books he's currently reading, where he says this about TGwtDT:

I have no problem with dumping books that become a chore. There are too many things to read to waste time on something you aren’t enjoying. I’m late to Larsson, since I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that this wouldn’t be for me, but I gave up halfway. I found the prose leaden and the mystery uninvolving, there simply as a structure on which Larsson could hang his crusading anger over sexual violence against women. I’ll still watch the film.

Which mostly, though not quite entirely, was my reaction.]

Of course, as Larsson died tragically young before his trilogy was published, he may well have written some different words himself had he lived long enough to see them into print himself, and I've only read (some) of it in translation anyway, but, you know, we can only read what we have...

Unlike Mr Blackmore, I was, in fact, rather taken with the mystery (essentially a locked room affair but with an island instead of a room) but I agree about the prose. Let us leave aside the early financial infodumping and fast forward to an early mention of Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo herself. On pp34-35 we learn that:

"when she was working at the computer her fingers flew over the keys";

that she was prone to

"wandering the corridors [...] like a stray cat";

and was considered

"a hopeless case" and "nothing but trouble".

(And also, rather oddly, that "Her extreme slenderness would have made a career in modelling impossible.") This mixture of cliche and "eh, what?" is, alas, not uncommon.

This wasn't what made me stop reading, though, especially as we (or I, at any rate) don't now how finished Larsson considered these books: it was passages like this ludicrous outbreak of computer-porn. At one point, about a third of the way through or so, Salander needs a new computer:

...she had an older desktop Mac G3 at home, as well as a five-year-old Toshiba P.C. laptop that she could use. But she needed a fast, modern machine.

Unsurprisingly, she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a powerP.C. 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 megs of R.A.M. and sixty-gig hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in C.D. and D.V.D. burners.

Best of all, it had the first forty-three centimetre screen in the laptop world with N.V.I.D.I.A. graphics and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels, which shook the P.C. advocates and outranked everything else on the market. [194]

Arrgh. Dropping a real or imaginary brand name (as Ian Fleming or William Gibson do, for example) can add flavour of course, but this is madness (whatever the merry blazes any of it means....)

I also agree that the "crusading anger" Mr B mentions (however much the reader may share it) doesn't sit well with the classic mystery plot. It's possible, of course, to make brilliant fiction out of righteous anger (Andrew Vachss is the best example, I think) but this is just too bloated....

Heigh ho, to each their own, umpteen million readers and so on. And I do still want to know what the answer to the mystery was, so will be watching the DVD this weekend...

¹ Men Who Hate Women.

² Exaggeration.

David Langford, Different Kinds of Darkness (2004)

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Seeing as Dave Langford has won about a million Hugo Awards¹, it may be stretching it a bit to say he's underappreciated. However, most of those Hugos have been for his (excellent) fan writing and his (excellent) newsletter Ansible: only one (for the title story of this collection) is for fiction, and, it seems to me, if this ratio was reversed that would be entirely justified, since Langford is, I think, One Of The The Three Best SF Short Story Writers Ever, Along With J. G. Ballard and John Sladek.

Despite the colossally cumbersome formulation above, that still might be thought a bold statement, but, to nick a title from John Clute, "look at the evidence": in this case, the book above, which collects much of Langford's serious sf from 1975 to 2003.

That word "serious" is possibly relevant. Langford is (rightly) highly regarded for his comic writing, and the wit of his remarkably long-running (and free) newsletter Ansible; and although there is (at least) one laugh out loud moment² in the volume currently under advisement (in my case, his contribution to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discretited Diseases, "Logrolling Ephesus", the contributor's biography to which begins, "Dr. David Langford had the good fortune to commit his researches at a period when relevant legislation had yet to be urgently passed"), he is also, I'd aver, a more or less peerless exponent of the straight sf story.

I can feel the words "examples abound" creeping up on me, but they do, you know...

The most famous examples here are the tales that make up the influential BLIT sequence ("BLIT", "What Happened and Cambridge IV", "comp.basilisk FAQ", and the Hugo winning "Different Kinds of Darkness"), which, via maths, terrorism, genuinely haunting and disturbing images, and pertinent points about information and childhood, detail the implications of a scary sf idea in a combined length of (think on this, fatnasty fans!) 28 pages...

Equally, "Waiting for the Iron Age", in just 4 pages (think on this fatnasty fans! -- you've done this -- Ed) sorts out the Wandering Jew legend in double quick time, whilst, as Langford says in his afterword, giving, "our man a longer run for his money than anyone else..."

Another thing with reviewing Langford, of course, touched on above, is his encyclopaedic knowledge of the sf world: if one were to, as one might, try to comment on the "The Motivation", by 'cleverly' mentioning the Christopher Priest-like nature of the title, and then try and draw a parallel with Priest's (very different) story "The Watched", one would find, on reaching the end of Langford's (excellent) story, that he's already there in his (as is typical in this collection) informative and splendid afterword. Heigh ho...

And what great titles, though! ("In A Land of Sand and Ruin and Gold"; "Blossoms That Coil and Decay"; "The Lions in the Desert" etc.)

Seriously, everyone should have this....

¹ An exageration. Just!

² I mean here the genuine laugh-out-loud moments that render you actually unable to speak even when reading alone, rather than as a shorthand for "quite funny". For more of these, see He Do The Time Police In Different Voices.

Tully Zetford, Hook: Star City (1974)

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I have an unquenchable fondness for the sort of unpretentious (and short!) adventure sf and fantasy that used to be published, to coin that ghastly phrase, "back in the day." This means I also have an unquenchable fondness for the works of the late Kenneth Bulmer, who wrote more or less a million such yarns, most famously of course the Burroughs-influenced Kregen/Dray Prescott sword-and-planet series.¹

For the Hook series², of which Star City is volume three, Bulmer is hidden behind the "Tully Zetford" pseudonym. The hero of these books, the splendidly sweary ("By Dirty Bertie Bashti!" [100]) Ryder Hook³, is not a fellow to be messed with:

If a man tried to kill Ryder Hook, that man went in peril of his own life. [7]

Although he's not without his nicer qualities:

Like any civilised man, Hook drank tea whenever he could. [12]

It would be terribly ill-advised of us to let this fondness for tea fool us into thinking Hook is basically a gentleman, though; in many other ways he is a cad of the most unscrupulous kidney:

Apart from her legs, which Hook - being the ungraceful galactic adventurer he was would call short and fat if called upon to describe them - the lady Terifa was seemingly a most nicely fitted-together representative of the female section of Homo sapiens. [34]

Most importantly, though, the proximity of a Boosted Man confers on Ryder Hook special powers, which, for example, mean that when a homicidal maniac smashes him over the head with a giant steel bar, this happens:

The steel bar bounced. For any normal man that steel bar powered by all the dark ferocity of a homicidal maniac would have shattered his skull into bloody fragments. Blood and brains would have spurted past the splintered bones. But, then, Ryder Hook was not a normal man. [16]

Bet he still had a headache, mind.

My favourite bit in this book, though, is when Hook realises what spending time on Star City, which, as the blurb puts it, is a "mighty complex housing many thousands of humanoids devoted entirely to the pursuit of pleasure", has done to his ungraceful, hard-man space-adventurer demeanor:

Hook knew he'd been growing spineless and weak and a great ninny in star city. [100]

Great ninny! Ah, they don't write them like this any more, alas....

¹ I was once surprised and delighted to come across a positive notice of this sequence ("this jewel of a series") in, of all things, a set of wargames rules. The Wargames Research Group's 1991 set Hordes of the Things, by legendary Phil Barker, Sue Laflin Barker, and Richard Bodley Scott, also, marvellously, includes relevant Army Lists ["IMPERIAL VALLIA: Hero General (Dray Prescott - typically in red loin cloth and loaded down with assorted swords and longbow, mounted on a nickvove or zorca.) @ 4 A.P"] I love it that I live in a world where that sentence exists.

² For more Hookery, not to mention Lynan Synkery, see Dave Langford's sfx magazine column on Bulmer and Robert Sheckley here.

³ For more of Hook swearing, see Dave Langford, again. (Scroll down to "God's Hooks")

Lionel Fanthorpe, Galaxy 666 (1968)

Last Thursday was World Book Day.  I learned of this via the medium of a note from my daughter’s school asking if she could bring in a couple of her favourite books.  (We searched through her shelves and found a soon-to-be-topical-again book about animals searching for Easter eggs, and an old favourite about a bovine heribove with an acute upper respiratory tract infection.)

Later, I decided to enter into the spirit of the day myself, and picked something from the days when sf paperbacks would not only think a suitably blurred picture of something looking suspiciously like The USS Enterprise would do for a cover, but also have a full-colour piece of card stuck in half way through the book advertising cigarettes. (Kent Deluxe in this case, with “the famous micronite filter”.  If you have a taste for quality, you’ll like the taste of Kent, apparently.)

Yes, Galaxy 666 by the legendary and prolifically splendid Lionel Fanthorpe.

Here [p56] is the famous passage regarding the over-all impression of the colour of a bit of rock:

Between their own position and those two hillocks, there was an expanse of flat smooth rock, so flat and smooth that it was difficult to walk on.  There were pink-ish streaks among the rock, and it seemed that some of the chromatic tint from the atmosphere owed its origin to these.  There were a number of white veins in the rock, which bore some kind of resemblance to marble, but the majority of it was grey.  It gave an over-all impression of greyness streaked with pink and white, rather than an over-all impression of whiteness tinged with grey and pink, or an over-all impression of pink streaked with grey and white.

Greyness was the dominant background shade; neither black nor white, but something midway between the two.  It was a light rather than a dark grey, yet it could never have been so light that it might have been mistaken for an off white...

Later [pp 132-133] a character delivers a lengthy speech about cosmology, only part of which goes:

The whole universe is order; it’s a gestalt; it’s a pattern.  This galaxy is non-gestalt, an anti pattern.  This universe is the back of the tapestry, the discord in the music, the vortex of chaos at the bottom of the plug hole which allows the bath water to run peacefully away in an orderly fashion.  Without this the bath water would not be able to run...

After his lecture, the speaker, brilliantly, sums up with:

Do I make myself clear?

(Nicely, one of the other characters volunteers: “I think so.”)

Then there’s the enigmatic ending [p138]:

...but the strange enigmatical nexus between Korzaak and Ischklah remained as enigmatical as ever...