peteg's blog - noise - books

I read this one over many months, dipping into it when there was nothing better on offer. As a collection of short stories from the early 60s and late 50s it is not bad, but Brunner really only got going about a decade later. There are some cute ideas but nothing scintillating, and the prose is a bit workman-like, as if he's in it just to pay for those drugs.

Some of the stories are structurally similar to his later work -- mysteries with a late twist, narrative sliced up with extraneous noise.

Better, if anything, than the first Dirk Gently. In some sense Adams wrote the magic realism of my generation, those brought up on Halley's Comet and computers that could be fully understood, born after the moon was last visited by man, not identifiably Gen X or Y. He has a very British (not just English) sensibility, complementary to Salman Rushdie's. Perhaps his most perfect confection.

This is Brunner's eco-dystopia novel, and the last of his fat books for me to read. It takes its title from Milton's Lycidas:

The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread.

The style refines that of his earlier Stand on Zanzibar; a multi-stranded plot, a bazillion characters, plot-development-by-news-flash, set pieces that meditate on the author's pet concerns. It is tighter than his earlier fat books, but perversely this generates less information overload than they did, and so it tends towards the straight-out depressing. Those damn good drugs are found in lower concentrations here, and the language would embarass your grandmother.

Briefly, the U.S.A is overpopulated and incredibly polluted. Those in charge want business to continue as usual, responding to the environmental degredation via the usual war-machine mechanisms. The green movement is discredited (as always) by its association with sundry ratbags, left wingers and alternate-lifestylers. The foreign-aid do-gooders come in for a serve too. Some of his caricatured politicians don't sound so far from what we actually get on the topic of climate change (Lord Monckton springs to mind).

I couldn't find it locally in either bookshop or library, so I bought it from the agreeable Caerwan Books in Western Australia. Incidentally both this and Amis's Success use months for chapter titles.

I haven't read Amis in ages, and I don't know what possessed me to pick this one up. I found it quite similar to, but not as off-putting as, Dead Babies. What, the upper classes of England are a bit weird, a bit separate, a bit above it all?

Amis's notion of success here is pretty feeble, barely encompassing sex and expensive conspicuous consumption. Posing, in other words. No character in this novel does anything much at all, each being purely in thrall to their empty inner lives. This indeed might be Amis's point, but it hardly seems worth revisiting now.

In an early scene a Scotts laird drops his mottled todger on the table as some sort of enticement, and while fighting this imagery I was compelled to draw the parallel with Rushdie and this novel: to wit, an attempted demonstration of manly masterfulness that failed to impress. Allowing a further 331 pages for redemption was wise but ultimately ineffectual.

Once more I find myself outside the target demographic of a historical romance. Relative to his earlier works, it is excessively scatalogical and foul-mouthed, and even worse, flaccid and unexciting. Sure, this might pass for something of an imitation of Irvine Welsh by a subcontinental tyke, but then I wouldn't have bothered reading it. It is also clear that Rushdie does not have a lot of faith in his audience, regularly explaining the jape, the rumination, the issue of the moment until it loses all lustre.

Most irritating is how seriously the author takes the book, describing how much research was involved, and even providing a six-page bibliography, to what end I know not. Thus it suffers from the same fault as Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies: it must turn a profit on every part of overmuch scavenging, and yet by the pigeon-hole principle there can never be room enough for it all.

Rushdie fails his own test of a novel: this book does not make the imagined world any larger. The Italians have already burnished their history to a blinding shininess. The tired and repetitively dissonant reduction of women to that which can "walk, talk and make love" (p323) jangles against the powerful and well-drawn females of his earlier works. This lament by a female reviewer at the Guardian captures it well:

This brilliant, fascinating, generous novel swarms with gorgeous young women both historical and imagined, beautiful queens and irresistible enchantresses, along with some whores and a few quarrelsome old wives - all stock figures, females perceived solely in relation to the male. Women are never treated unkindly by the author, but they have no autonomous being. The Enchantress herself, who turns everyone into puppets of her will, has no personality at all, and exists - literally - by pleasing men. Akbar calls her a "woman who had forged her own life, beyond convention, by the force of her will alone, a woman like a king". But in fact she does nothing but sell herself to the highest bidder, and her power is an illusion permitted by him.

In one marvellous scene Akbar's wife and mother come to show his imaginary wife Jodha how to release him from the Enchantress's spell, and in so doing are reconciled with Jodha in a moment of hilarious feminine solidarity - but the Enchantress materialises, Jodha vanishes, the women are defeated by the man's obsession. Indeed, the men in the book are as hormone-besotted as adolescents. All their derring-do, their battling for cities and empires, comes down to little more than a desire for a bed with a young woman in it. Machiavelli becomes a disappointed middle-aged lecher whose middle-aged wife "waddles" and "quacks" while he looks at her, of course, with loathing. But then suddenly, for a page or two, we slip into her soul; we feel her anger at his disloyalty, her hurt pride as a woman, her unchanged pride in his "dark sceptical genius" and her puzzlement at his failure to see how he lessens himself by scorning what he has that is treasurable and honourable. For that moment I glimpsed a very different book, almost a different author. Then it was back to the dazzling play of fancy and the powerful dreams of men.

The prose is tired and flat. There is too much needless rendering of the same name in several languages, which is really just an observation that the written once had a phonetic relation with the spoken, and the spoken sounded different to people with different mother tongues. Self-evident I would have thought. An uninteresting issue too, as Akbar could not read nor write, but I guess Rushdie needs to provide a Rosetta Stone for the bibliography. These gestures and nods to history needlessly crowd out the possibility of a deeper contextualisation with manifestly bald facts, and so he falls short of what even Ghosh achieved.

Occasionally the text swings into tune with Amartya Sen's conception of identity as plurality, such as Akbar's inner monologue about the supreme emperor's use of the first-person singular (circa p30), an otherwise spurious digression. Conversely he often reduces his minor characters to little more than "beauty", "princess", "likes being on the winning side", etc. — essentially wanton and without personality.

After talking to Nell on Thursday I realised that the best things Rushdie has done in the past twenty years or so were his short pieces, the essays compiled in Step Across this Line. So while I found this book substantially out of character for him, I could not expect him to surmount his previous efforts in this form.

I managed to dig this book out of the UNSW Library after their recent stock-take; thus it must have been merely misplaced and not lost, unlike my time spent reading it. I substantially agree with this review from the New York Times, and Reimer's effort at the SMH.

The real deal. I recalled this being a composite of his excellent Doctor Who scripts, City of Death and the unfortunately-incompletely-produced Shada. His humour is as gently raucous as ever, canvassing and expressing an English sensibility that Thatcher consigned to the landfill of history. However it is his self-knowing scatterbrained magpie tendencies, born of curiosity, that bring home the bacon. I shudder to imagine what the kids are reading these days: surely not this, with not a vampire in sight.

It has been an age since I've read anything by Douglas Adams. His style is at once familiar, an amiable bar-propping old friend, even when it is as travestied as it is here. I acquired this from Pete R.'s stash of books-to-toss, having not been tempted to read it for years, and almost wishing that I hadn't now.

Of course the prose is fine. What's lacking are those tangents, the sheer irrelevancy and irreverence to plots and characters that gave his earlier stuff its suspense and force. Then again, it might be the converse that I'm actually whinging about. This is a compilation of various rants, and most tantalisingly, bits of a third Dirk Gently. The editor goes out of his way to warn the reader that it's a let down, and don't be disappointed, it is.

The part I liked the most was the presumably previously unpublished Turncoat from October 2000. Here's the bit that struck the chord, slab-quoted Ramsey-style:

But nowadays everybody's a comedian, even the weather girls and continuity announcers. We laugh at everything. Not intelligently anymore, not with sudden shock, astonishment, or revelation, just relentlessly and meaninglessly. No more rain showers in the desert, just mud and drizzle everywhere, occasionally illuminated by the flash of paparazzi.

Creative excitement has gone elsewhere, to science and technology: new ways of seeing things, new understandings of the universe, continual new revelations about how life works, how we think, how we perceive, how we communicate. So this is my second point.

Where, thirty years ago, we used to start up rock bands, we now start up startups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and playing with the information we exchange. And when one idea fails, there's another, better one right behind it, and another and another, cascading out as fast as rock albums used to in the sixties.

There's always a moment when you start to fall out of love, whether it's with a person or an idea or a cause, even if it's one you only narrate to yourself years after the event: a tiny thing, a wrong word, a false note, which means that things can never be quite the same again. For me it was hearing a stand-up comedian make the following observation: "These scientists, eh? They're so stupid! You know those black-box flight recorders they put on aeroplanes? And you know they're meant to be indestructible? It's always the thing that doesn't get smashed? So why don't they make the planes out of the same stuff?"

The audience roared with laughter at how stupid scientists were, couldn't think their way out of a paper bag, but I sat feeling uncomfortable. Was I just being pedantic to feel that the joke didn't really work because flight recorders are made out of titanium and that if you made planes out of titanium rather than aluminium, they'd be far too heavy to get off the ground in the first place? I began to pick away at the joke. Supposing Eric Morecambe had said it? Would it be funny then? Well, not quite, because that would have relied on the audience seeing that Eric was being dumb — in other words, they would have had to know as a matter of common knowledge about the relative weights of titanium and aluminium. There was no way of deconstructing the joke (if you think this is obsessive behaviour, you should try living with it) that didn't rely on the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did. It sent a chill down my spine, and still does. I felt betrayed by comedy in the same way that gangsta rap now makes me feel betrayed by rock music. I also began to wonder how many of the jokes I was making were just, well, ignorant.

RIP DNA.

I am glad I didn't buy this book. It is like digging up the old lino in an ancient kitchen, erratic brilliance and occasion littered with cockroach droppings and obscurity. At his best, Ramsey was insightful and brought context and perspective to the events of the week, perhaps even wisdom, all of which are beyond the reach of any of Fairfax's current Australian political reporters. (Not, I note, beyond their aging foreign correspondents.)

The best were the timeless articles, his specials around Anzac Day about the wars and returned soldiers, the monuments and disillusionment. Perhaps he should have turned his hand to this, something like military history, rather than crank out the rather tired prose of the last five years of his reign. And this is the key problem with the collection: nothing dates like political opinion, and so the selection does not, could not, reflect his oeuvre.

Structurally it would have been much better if someone else had selected the articles, for as it stands there is the niggling feeling that some whitewashing has occurred; for example, I recall only one or two references to Howard as "the toad" in this book, but it seemed to roll around every Saturday while the man was PM. The Latham boosterism seems much abridged, and there are no comments on Rudd's blandness. Also some glue text would have helped immensely, setting out the issues of the day. His postscripts needed prescripts.

Pete R. observed that he must have had trouble getting the copyrights on all his slab-quotations. There are only a couple in this collection.

I can't remember when I last read this, though I have been recommending that anyone and everyone do so for many years now. The first two books flow beautifully, and then I had the same trouble as last time: Parvati feels like a half-sketched pawn, little more than a mechanism for Saleem to acquire a son of the requisite biological connection. The war in Bangladesh is a bit too abstract. It all gets a bit too impersonal, unmagical, sad.

I wonder now if Rushdie was trying to set things up for a sequel, on the children of midnight's children. It seems that a Deepa Mehta film is in the works.

The classic sandals-and-machine guns saga by Lawrence of Arabia. Like the movie (but more so), it is an incredibly long and repetitious account of Lawrence's efforts during World War I to forment and support the Arab Revolt. Amongst these 700 pages one might hope that he would provide more context more regularly; often people are mentioned once or twice only, using just a surname or nickname, and the composition of caravans is left implicit. This makes it difficult to keep track of who is where when, what the military objectives were, and who is feuding with whom over what.

The language is pretentiously florid, as if the author is trying to write a Bible of Arab insurgency. Lawrence introspects regularly, albeit with a knowingness that does not work well with a non-specialist such as I, and the progress of his thinking is obscured. Reglarly my eyes glazed over and vast tracks made little impression. George Orwell continued in this tradition of siding with anti-establishment sentiment and writing about it, but realised early-on that flowery language gets in the way of clear apprehension.

Still, it is a fabulous tale. The land is vast, the camel rides heroic. The best parts analyse Arab culture on the road: feasts, sexuality, what is fair game to raid, what is valued, and so forth. Lawrence's motivations, where I could divine them, seem romantic: he would have been just as happy helping in the liberation of the Indians, it seems, if he had been digging up their antiquities instead.

Also interesting are the power relationships amonst the English and Arab hierarchies. Lawrence venerates General Allenby and Emir Feisal as the great men of the day, respects Auda for his ability in battle, and the technical knowledge of his sappers and troops. The Turks are regularly rubbished though, in contrast to the Germans who are deemed an enemy that one can be proud to have.

The international relations of the day seemed a lot more gentlemanly, centering on personalities and lobbying by venerated (upper-class) parties, and there was a lot more emphasis on direct control of the dominion, rather than the indirect approach of Pax Americana. I put that down to the technological limits of the times.

I guess I am more interested in the post-WWI history of the Middle East; after the efforts of King Hussein of Mecca and sons in the region stretching from Hejaz to Syria, how did Saudi Arabia come to occupy the two holy cities? — Lawrence's maps show just a relatively small kingdom around Riyad, which may also have been called something like Wahibistan. Wikipedia has some answers. From a local perspective the British efforts may well have looked like the last crusade.

Somewhat sadly, Feisal did not last too long in Syria, ruling from Damascus; the French ejected him in 1920. It seems that Jordan is the last remnant of the Hashemite regimes, and from this distance it appears to be one of the more tolerant, stable and successful countries in the region.

I'll have to watch the movie again.

The recent media racket over the boys of St Paul's reminded me that I meant to read Peter Cameron's tale of debauchery and intrigue at St Andrew's in the 1990s. It turns out that he left at the end of 1995, coincident with the arrival of my mates from our country boarding school.

The book is probably most interesting when it is salacious, though there are a lot more details about the drinking than the shagging. I'd totally forgotten about the phantom arsehole, a symbol that was once ubiquitous around Sydney Uni. The politics between the Principal and the Council is tedious beyond belief, and the text slides into self-justification and repetition, and becomes occasionally unsound: Cameron makes it clear that he kept the students at arm's length as much as possible, but also claims that he knew them well enough to capture their essences in a few brief unflattering stereotypes, and that there was a lot of mutual respect floating about.

Overall it is as well-written as one would expect from a heretical lawyer-minister. Cameron himself comes across as initially clueless about Australia, almost inexcusably so after all of Donald Horne's fine work. I wonder if they ever did get another Principal of any calibre.

Funnily enough the wheels fell of the 'drews Rawson Cup monopoly circa 1998, well before the women totally routed the traditionalists in 2002. mrak tells me that was the death knell of the Andrewsmen.

Here Winchester recounts the life of Joseph Needham, author of the authoritative series of books on the history of science in China. His press minions were sufficiently active last year that I somehow recalled the title of this book while looking for something else.

Overall it is quite well written, if a tad too salacious, and a tendency towards a shallow engagement with the academic side of things. (I object to his overly salacious treatment of Needham's eroticism.) More background on the political organisation of the Middle and Celestial Kingdoms in antiquity would have been most welcome, as would be a discussion on how China related to the region; technologically speaking, what came out of their entanglement with the Mongols, Indians and Vietnamese? The extended section on how Buddhism got introduced is the sort of thing there should have been more of, but even a thorough journalistic biography of Needham himself is probably beyond a book of this length.

The Needham Question, as to why China's progress stalled for so long, receives a cursory treatment and is largely dismissed along "you can't prove a negative" lines. I struggle with this attitude, as it implies that historicism can never really isolate the causes and effects of events, a charge that Popper levelled against Marxism. Also I fail to see why a similar question can't be asked of Egypt, India and Arabia, with their early innovations in mathematics and engineering. Perhaps the question cannot be resolved in some absolute way, but the kinds of discussion it generates are fascinating. For example, one line is that Western thought allowed the natural (phenomenological) to be decoupled from the supernatural (noumelogical), whereas the Chinese approach required holistic explanations. Roughly, that perhaps science proper requires modularity, some means of delimiting the claimed scope of purported laws of nature.

Winchester gives the impression that the ancient Chinese were excellent and creative engineers, but somewhat less interested in building abstract models of scientific phenomena; he (but perhaps not Needham) says nothing about Chinese parallels with the great strides taken by Newtown, Leibniz et al in developing the differential calculus in the 17th century. I really would have liked to understand what sort of logic the Chinese employed.

I was irritated to find that the bibliography is enormous; the non-specialist reader would have been better served by a much shorter list of entry points into this expansive topic.

I've been meaning to read this book since I read a review in the Smage last year, which they pinched from The Guardian. I picked it up just now because the UNSW Library copy of Salman Rushdie's latest has apparently been subjected to a five-finger discount.

Somewhat like In an Antique Land, this novel exhibits Ghosh's talent for anthropological scholarship, flawed by a lack of discipline: the imperative to house as much of his raw material as possible, even at the expense of fidelity, plausibility or pacing, overpowered his finer judgement. He successfully captures the settings of circa 1838; the slave boat, the opium factory, the streets of Calcutta, the villas of the upper crusts, the economic situation of the Indian everypeople, and so forth are vivid. But it is too much, the period too rich a seam, with England at the height of Empire, trying to bring the Chinese markets into their sphere of influence via the opium trade, to fit entirely within even a multi-ply narrative.

Unlike the portrayal of opiate abuse in Trainspotting, the drug scenes here are brief and finesse the cliched moral quagmire of recreationalism and fatalistic destructiveness without much humour.

The narrative is occasionally discontinuous through what feels like carelessness. Whatever became of the judge with the hots for Paulette? — and was the story she told Zachary about Mr Burnham fiction or truth? Either way, I found it a tiresome piece of tawdry prurience, shocking in its unoriginality. The gomusta is the glue character, possessed by his spiritual aunt, capable of making just the right things happen at just the right time. Deeti's shrine is a cute continuity device, but it has apparently no significance beyond forward referencing.

Ghosh's romances are irritating, as his heart is not really in it. Deeti and Kahlua get unofficially hitched within a page or so of becoming free, whereas Zachary and Paulette, who are bleedingly obviously intended for mutual deflowering, barely manage a snog interruptus before the 471st page. They are young and the author treats them childishly. Some other characterisations are a bit clunky; Kalua's transformation from bullock to Deeti's cool-headed weapon of mass destruction stretches credulity; Neel's transformation from Raja to a Jesus-like figure jangles against his occasional recurrence of snottishness.

A movie is clearly in mind: imagine! Ghosh is daydreaming of having Keira Knightley segue from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean to fill the corset of Paulette, and somehow reuniting the extras from Slumdog Millionaire to inflate the lascars and sundry unsavoury types onboard the Ibis. There'll be a couple of song-and-dance numbers to leaven the roti. Hmm, we still need some strapping young blokes for Zachary and Jodu... and who else but Michael Caine for the dragon-chasing Captain? Maybe Salman Rushdie's ex might just be perfect as Elokeshi...

I found the polyglot of the dialogue mostly easy to follow, though that may be because I didn't delve into it much. How much I missed I'll never know.

This novel terminates just over a cliff, and there does not seem to be any news yet of a followup to this, the first of a purported trilogy. Damnit, the spoon's in the flame.

A late-career off-beat spy anti-thriller that I picked up on the strength of his perhaps-unrepeated The Quiet American. A tad too dreary to be really enjoyable.

Well, Thompson was right: Steadman shouldn't try to write, or in any case I shouldn't try to read it. Much preferrable would have been more art and less prose, and certainly less indulgent self-contradiction.

This is an old Stephenson that I stole from mrak's shelf a while ago. It seems to lack the cachet of Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, but I get the impression that this author's prose is systemically flawed, so I won't be reading another. In some ways he reminds me of Philip K. Dick in that the ideas are not so hot, or have been absorbed into the ambient culture, or whatever.

At the centre of this book is a purported marriage of Victorian values with a nanotechnological society that is mostly hanging off the ex-colonial coastline of China. The aesthetic is borderline steampunk at times, more fantasy than futuristic, with some dodgy and somewhat tedious analysis of the ethics of the "Victoria I" era and Confucianism. I came away thinking that Stephenson must have recently visited the place, with his lack of Gibson's perceptiveness, the ability to scope the locality to the novel and vice-versa, resulting in this occasionally xenophobic, sometimes sinophilic melange.

This being scifi or cyberpunk or something, he is obliged to slip in some unerotic deviant sexuality. Strangely enough, the three heroines (one somewhat fleshed out, the other two skeletal) are virginal for all we know, even though the fleshy one works as an overblown architect of narrative in a high-class brothel. Possibly virginal until the sexual assaults, anyway, that are presented as a fait accompli to the sort-of revolutionary Chinese Fists. In any case, all the characters seem to be bound in overweening power relationships that lack personality.

The nanostuff is fairly plausible but not too imaginative: it generally behaves like programmable organics, and the story could have been told using biochemists rather than nangineers. Indeed, the nanostuff seems to largely bioactive in effect, apart from producing horrendous architecture and justifying an entirely predictable making-stuff-by-hand-for-rich-people unicorns and blacksmiths district.

Stephenson uses Turing machines as a plot point, firstly by having the "young lady's illustrated primer" be one, for the most part, and secondly by portraying vast numbers of young chinese girls as being entirely programmable. I found it ironic that he pronounces that Turing machines have no soul, and cannot do what a human can (yadda yadda), even while railroading his shallowly characterised actors into overly predictable fates. "Castle Turing" read like a high schooler's account of a book by Raymond Smullyan, missing the logic for the scenery. Neologism ahoy, how cheap.

The narrative stalled something fierce in the middle, and entire plotlines are left hanging variously through the novel. The children's stories from the primer are jarring rubbish. Anyway, why didn't they commercialise the book? Surely they could have been more broadly subversive without too much additional cleverness, and there'd be a huge market for it, just like TVs as "educational" child-pacifiers. Also Stephenson seems to believe in the DRM fantasy, that you can control what a user does with a digital artefact through some clever encryption: I found it impossible to believe that Dr X could not fabricate more books after he has created the first.

I never really got a handle on what the Fists were trying to achieve, or what the Seed was supposed to be. In some ways the Feed reflects the current internet: centralised to some extent, but distributed enough that the paranoid can get enough redundancy, privacy, etc. for the most part. If each Matter Compiler logs too much info, well, compose your artefact out of many things and use many Matter Compilers...

The text itself tends towards patronising flabbiness, with a subtext that the author is uncertain his jokes and allusions are going to be understood, possibly because he lacks faith in his audience, but more likely due to him not really grasping what he's trying to talk about. The section titles telegraph the action to the point where there is no tension or subtlety to be found. Ultimately this is more fantasy that scifi or cyberpunk or whatever, and not a patch on Brunner's world-building.

The fattest Brunner I've yet read, and I doubt he topped these 515 pages. This, not Jagged Orbit, was his first fat book. It is deservedly tagged as his must-read novel.

Brunner must have been on some very good drugs in the late 1960s, and I guess those of the earlier 60s had had time to settle in and make his brain their own. One must wonder if these sorts of books furthered the cause of liberated recreational drug use that the author favours, for at this point in history, none of his fantasies seem to have come through. Indeed I would expect that the late-in-life Brunner was doing the same stuff as the Brunner who wrote this book.

This book is expansive, being perhaps the most holistic attempt at world building I've read. Apparently this sort of thing is called social science fiction. The author's voice, and sometime deus ex machina, is the sociologist Chad Mulligan, whose "hipcrime dictionary" channels Bierce's Devil's Dictionary, and more broadly runs a line echoing the technoculturalists of the day, Alvin Toffler and Marshall McLuhan in particular. The news flashes, the limited attention spans, the population pressure: as speculation, it is top notch.

Let us not dwell on the plot any longer than the author did.

I find it amusing that all the old-school models of computers were way off, positing some small number of humongous machines with incredible IQs that managed the affairs of the world. I reckon we'll only have general-enough AI for this sort of thing after almost everyone has enough computing power to run private instances, totally changing the dynamics of these speculations.

There's lots of racial commentary here, especially on post-colonialism and within the borders of the U.S. These issues were massive in the late 60s but seem to have been stage-managed into timidity now. The eugenics in this book remains as unappealing now as it probably was then, though I do note that choosing the sex of your offspring is becoming socially acceptable.

Here's another review.

Brunner is on some good drugs here: it's the end of the 1960s and this is (?) his first fat book: almost 400 pages of splintered narrative and psychedelic scenery. In fact, all the characters are on drugs too.

In essence this is a fairly standard story about a computer that tries to predict the future and goes crazy in doing so. It amounts to something like Arnie in Terminator 2, banging on about a future that is somehow going to be avoided and yet somehow can't be, except in this case it is because the Skynet-equivalent is not so much involved in the killing but is merely trying to maximise sales for its arms cartel owners. Uh-huh.

He has some cute devices but all are entirely dispensible. There are no unattractive women here, and all are geek ideals. Utopia ahoy... barring the urban decay, but that's OK, presumably we're all holed up at home on drugs. The writing is self-indulgently flabby and there's a good chunk of condescending say-don't-show in the latter parts. Can't we have a deus ex machina with a smaller mouth?

I didn't get into this one; perhaps I read it too quickly or wasn't paying attention. The central conceit is suicide institutionalised at the cultural level, and the book explores the putative causes thereof. Too much plot-furthering explanatory dialogue, not enough action.

Some other bloke has been ploughing through Brunner this year and posting his thoughts. His grasp of the genre is admirable.

A somewhat dreary memoir, reminiscent of the Victorian weather, but a page turner nevertheless. The episodic structure wears a bit thin as variety dries up: escape to a shearing shed, so-and-so shore so many sheep per unit time, hit the booze, wake up and wonder about the (future) wife and kids.

The hook is the entirely Australian and now entirely alien life of the shearer, addicted to increasing productivity, always needing to be faster. The sketch of the industrial relations history is somewhat interesting as it covers the time immediately preceding the disintegration of unionism in Australia; the key issue in the early 1980s was the use of the wide comb.

I reiterate the general complaint that the ending is too sudden; we start with a car crash and end with a whimper. Apparently he got a Masters in English literature in the not-too-distant past, and the story of getting from the shed to there might've been worth wiring in. Drawing a parallel with Henry Lawson is a long bow, for this bloke is not pretending to be a poet.

Coincidentally the author is currently reading the book on Radio National's First Person.