Reading, Listening and a Bit of Drinking

Sunday 2nd November: This is the second weekend in a row when I haven't been to see any bands - not that the opportunity wasn't there, but November could turn out to be busy in terms of music so I took the decision to stay in with the family. So, what have I been up to instead?

For a couple of days this past week, I was working in Norwich. This coincided with the annual CAMRA beer festival in the city and my colleague and I decided to wander along to sample an ale or two (or three, or four, or... well, you get the idea). This was my first visit to a beer festival, even though I profess to being a fan of real ale and like trying different ones. I was a little surprised by the payment method used. On entering the hall, you purchase a "starter" kit - a pint glass (used to hold whatever drinks you decide to try) and a number of "tokens", basically a perforated sheet of paper made up of a number of stamps worth 10p each. Each beer then has a token value for either a pint or a half and you hand over the relevant number of tokens for whatever you are trying. This means that all cash is held in one place in the hall and, to my mind, could work better. At the end of the evening, my colleague and I had a small number of tokens left - less than £1's worth but unspendable unless we went back and bought more and, even then, only by careful planning of which drinks to try. The drinks themselves were priced similarly but not all the same - between £2.20 and £2.80 per pint, if memory serves. To my mind, this whole system would work a lot better if the drinks were all priced the same - say £2.50 a pint, £1.25 a half - and tokens were to the value of £1.25, meaning 1 token per half pint bought. Much easier to work out than counting out twenty-eight small paper tokens once you have had a few drinks.

That aside, it was a pleasant evening. We tried seven different beers, after working out that the pint glasses were also marked with half pints so we didn't have to buy a pint every time. It felt a bit strange drinking halves all night but we soon got used to it. Being honest, I don't think I could remember which beers I tried even if I were to look through the event's programme booklet, but I enjoyed all but one of them to one degree or another.

On the way back to York I heard on the radio of somebody who had received eighty different beers for his 80th birthday and has, so far, tried over 750 different British beers. That's a record worth going for, in my opinion. I really must start recording which ones I have tried.

A few days ago I finally finished Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy - Redemption Ark (2002) and Absolution Gap (2003). I'm not going to write full reviews of them, partly because I didn't make any notes while reading them and partly because I couldn't say too much more than I have in past reviews. Although I read these slowly (normally a sure sign that I'm not enjoying a book) Reynolds writes excellent science fiction. These books are so full of ideas that it is practically impossible to read them quickly. Sentient spaceships; pigs genetically altered to be almost on a par with humans (much like David Brin's Uplifted dolphins); humans genetically altered to be more than human; doomsday weapons; the death of planets; the death of suns; messages from the future; a whole religion based on an accident; mighty cathedrals slowly moving across the face of a moon in order to be constantly underneath the parent planet; far future galactic collisions and, perhaps most challenging of all (for me anyway), the concept of Brane Spaces - multi-dimensional spaces layered on top of each other. All these and much, much more are used to stunning effect to tell the story of a small group of characters, but much larger group of people, against a backdrop of interstellar destruction being wrought against Humanity by the ancient Inhibitors.

The third book, in particular, as the story rushes towards its conclusion, shows how Reynolds uses different styles within one trilogy. Absolution Gap tells its story across three different times and two different planets and the interstellar space in-between. At the end of the trilogy, the Revelation Space universe has been irrevocably changed with many of the locations used in the series being destroyed or totally changed.

At first, I was a little disappointed with the end - a huge, galactic scale war was ended off-page, almost as thought Reynold's had backed himself into a corner and needed a Deus ex Machina device to enable him to complete the story. After a bit a musing, however, I realised that the large scale story had always been in the background. The story I was reading was more to do with the various members of the smaller casts - always involved in the war but only really on the periphery (well, apart from starting it all off in the first novel). Then the ending made sense. I believe that there are a number of short stories and another novel set in the Revelation Space universe, which add to and expand the overall story. I will be looking out for them when my "to read" pile is a bit more manageable.

Since finishing the Reynolds books, I have been trying to get through some smaller, easier to read books in order to boost my total for the year. I'm not going to review them but I have recently just completed a handful of the Doctor Who novels put out by the BBC a while back. I was buying them as they came out but stopped after a while, while the Doctor portrayed was still Paul McGann. The few I have just read are variable to say the least but, in the light of the new version of the TV series, it is vaguely interesting to see the direction that the books were going in, portraying the Doctor as a fallible half-human.

Finally, notes on a couple of the CDs I bought recently. Again, I'm not going to write full reviews but just give some general thoughts.

First up is Asia - Live in the U.S.A. (recorded November 1992 at Chestnut Cabaret, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). This was the seventh show of the Aqua (fourth album) tour, featuring Geoff Downes (keyboards), John Payne (vocals, bass), Vinny Burns (guitar) and Trevor Thornton (drums), with a guest appearance from Steve Howe (guitar). This is a fabulous live recording, the sound is raw and you feel as though you are actually standing in the audience as, at times, you can hear people chatting in the background (thankfully between songs rather than during). Originally, this was one of a three part "official bootleg" series and lives up to that name by not appearing over-produced or tidied up to any great degree.

Apparently, the Chestnut Cabaret was a night-club with a stage for live bands. I have seen it described as a mid-sized room. It no longer exists but sounds as though it could have been a good place for live shows - during the encore of this performance Downes is heard commenting that it's 01:15 and people are still wanting more. Asia are one of my favourite bands (I plan to write more about them when I've had a chance to properly listen to their latest release) but this is the first live album I've bought by them. While definitely a product of it's time - big sounding, keyboard-led prog rock - limited by the size of venue, I consider it to be a very god addition to my collection.

At the other end of the venue scale is Roger Waters' In The Flesh tour from 1999. Originally planned to be held in small venues, tickets sold so well that many shows were upgraded to much bigger locations, despite Waters' apparent disdain for stadium concerts. This two-CD recording is one of those annoying types that, instead of being a genuine representation of a single concert, takes bits and pieces from a number of shows and links then with crowd sounds. Not that you would know from listening to it. I only realised when reading the accompanying booklet.

Without delving too much into the politics and personalities of the members of Pink Floyd (another of my favourite bands), I was a little surprised by how much this concert sounded like a Pink Floyd show. I'm not an aficionado and haven't heard a great deal of the solo releases by either Gilmour or Waters but I did see the recent (shortened) airing on BBC4 of the former's Gdansk show which, although featuring some Floyd songs, was definitely a Gilmour concert. Waters' In The Flesh shows seemed to me to almost channel Floyd and, being honest, most of the tracks on the album are Floyd songs.

Apart from Waters himself, the band comprises of Doyle Bramhall II (guitar, vocals), Graham Broad (drums), John Carin (keyboards, lap steel, guitar, vocals), Andy Fairweather Low (guitar, bass, vocals), Andy Wallace (hammond, keyboards), Snowy White (guitar) and Katie Kissoon, Susannah Melvoin and P P Arnold (vocals). The more musically-knowledgeable may recognise more names from that list than I did.

Overall, a good live album just, tinged with a similar disappointment to finding out that Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous wasn't a true live album.

More Welsh SF

Sunday 28th September: I nearly didn't have anything to write about this weekend. Having had a cold and two very late nights (due to work) during the week, I chose not to join the group for Friday night's visit to the Duchess. I did see Leeds beat Hereford yesterday but, to be honest, I don't think I'm the best football writer in the world. (Cue cries of, "Yes, but you're not the best music/book writer, either!!")

Despite it being two weeks since I last posted book reviews, I was nowhere near finishing the next Alastair Reynolds. I'm enjoying his books but they are quite hard-going. The one I'm currently reading had a short paragraph describing the relative velocities of two objects approaching each other at light speed which I had to re-read a number of times and I'm still not sure I understand it. I wonder if that's why they call it "hard science fiction"... because it's hard to understand?

Anyway, for a few tens of minutes on Friday evening I found myself with some spare time but bereft of said book. There was nothing else for it but to start another one. I chose another Reynolds, but one about a third of the size of his others and with much less dense print.

Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days (2003) brings together two of Reynolds previously published novellas. Both are set in the universe of the Revelation Space novels and contain aspects of that universe to tell stories unrelated to the novels.

Have you ever worried over a puzzle, gradually getting closer and closer to the answer, but finally realising that it is to hard for you? Only for it to nag away at the back of your mind until you start looking at it again? If you have, you will feel some sympathy with the characters in Diamond Dogs. They form a team, put together by a Chasm City resident previously thought dead, in order to breach a mysterious spire on a barren world. The spire contains a number of rooms which the team have to enter in sequence, solving mathematical puzzles in order to open each door. As they get further into the spire the puzzles get harder, the doors smaller and the time they are allowed to answer the puzzles shorter. A wrong answer, or no answer in the specified time, results in horrific injuries. Eventually a secret is revealed, but it is not the spire's.

On Turquoise, an isolated water-planet inhabited by the mysterious Pattern Jugglers, a communication blackout put in place as a spaceship is detected approaching causes two young researchers to swim with a Juggler, before they have the proper training. One dies and two years later, as the spaceship arrives, her sister tries to get closure by getting to see the Ultras that she believes caused, if indirectly, the death. Thus starts a series of events that changes the world of Turquoise forever.

The Revelation Space universe, while full of standard SF wonders is a dark place. These two stories show somewhat different sides of it. Diamond Dogs is interesting not for the central theme of the spire and its puzzles - any story which can reference the films Cube and Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as Algis Budry's novel Rogue Moon (1960) is well aware of its roots - but for the somewhat horrific ways that it treats its characters. The injuries sustained by them in the course of their explorations are treated in such ways to let them continue. It is the lengths that the characters are willing to go to to try to find the Spire's secret that makes this story one of the most disturbing that I have read in the genre.

Turquoise Days, on the other hand, is a fairly straight forward adventure story with just the slightest of twists. In other hands, perhaps those of an author handling emotion better, it could have been a tear-jerker. But, while Reynolds writes fully developed characters he doesn't really seem to do emotion. That doesn't, however, make this a bad story. It is exciting in places and sheds a bit more light on the Pattern Jugglers and the worlds that they live on, while using the differences between Human factions as its basis. I also have a bit of a soft spot for stories set on oceanic worlds.

Two more stories that show that Reynolds is, in terms of current British science fiction, up there with Stephen Baxter and Peter F Hamilton.

A Rare Bit of Welsh SF

Sunday 14th September: No music for me this weekend (but that didn't mean a weekend without going out - last night, Debbie and I went for a very nice Thai meal at York's Siam House, as part of a friend's birthday celebrations.) It does, however, mean that you get me waffling on about my current reads.

I had taken a few Alastair Reynolds books with me on holiday, intending to get a long way into his output while sitting by the pool. Unfortunately, it took me so long to finish the Starchild Trilogy that I only just managed to start his first novel. Nearly three weeks later and I've finished the first two.

Reynolds is a Welsh writer of space opera. He's had short stories published since the early 1990's and his first novel was published in 2000. He is also a trained scientist - a former research astronomer with the European Space Agency.

Revelation Space (2000)
Although Reynolds had already written about the Revelation Space universe in short stories, it remained unnamed until the publication of this novel. In it, Dan Sylveste, archaeologist is trying to determine what event caused the total destruction of the Amarantin on the planet Resurgam. At the same time, a group of Ultranauts aboard a lighthugger spaceship are heading towards Resurgam in the hopes that Sylveste can help them heal their captain, who has fallen victim to the Melding Plague. Also on board the ship is a cache of weapons, some of which are powerful enough to destroy worlds.

The Revelation Space universe is limited by the fact that faster than light travel is not possible, meaning that voyages between the various planets colonised by humans take years. In the main crews and passengers travel in reefersleep but those left behind age normally. Parts of the universe have also fallen foul of an alien plague of unknown origin. This plague corrupts technology, from the buildings of Chasm City on the planet Yellowstone to the nanomachines used by humans to achieve near immortality. The universe also, once, contained a multitude of different intelligences, but most of these have now vanished and it is the reason why that lies at the heart of the story.

There are so many ideas crammed into this novel that it is hard to do it justice in a short review. Vast spaceships, alien artifacts, nanotechnology, weapons (large and small) and different factions of humanity all vie for space in what is a complex book. I didn't find it an easy read, but for different reasons that I sometimes struggle with older novels. It's not the style of writing, nor the language used, it's the sheer scope of the novel. Once I got properly into it, though, I found it hard to put down and, apart from the slightly bizarre ending, found it a very enjoyable read.

Chasm City (2001)
Chasm City is set before the events of Revelation Space, but is not a true sequel. It does feature the origins of a hunting game which one of the characters in the earlier novel is playing when first introduced and, indeed, I think that the character herself (unnamed in this novel) is seen briefly at the end of the story.

Tanner Mirabel is a security specialist who, after one assignment goes horribly wrong, travels to Chasm City to hunt down Argent Reivich. Arriving at the city, he finds it mutated by the Melding Plague, rather than the utopia he was expecting. Hunting Reivich through the city, he comes into contact with many of the strange factions of humans living there.

Or, rather, that is how the novel starts. By the end of it the origins of the Melding Plague have been revealed, identities have been turned on their heads and Mirabel's dreams (both sleeping and waking) of Sky Haussman, founder of Sky's Edge, Mirabel's home world have been explained.

I found Chasm City to be an easier read than Revelation Space, despite it being full of mostly unlikable characters. Mystery is laid upon mystery and action sequence follows action sequence, making it a much livelier read. The main character, however, is the city itself. As Mirabel travels through the city, discovering its various locations and inhabitants, it seems to come to life.

Like the first novel, the ending is a little strange. In this case, however, it is more a case of having to work out who exactly is who by the novel's end, rather than any sort of implausible ending.

So far, I'm enjoying exploring Reynolds' universe and, with another four books of his in my to read pile, three of which are set within the Revelation Space, I hope to continue doing so.