“To Your Scattered Bodies Go” is an intriguingly titled, somewhat elderly science fiction novel I discovered and read last year. You might have noticed I tend not to read brand new fiction – this is half economics, half my conviction there’s a lot of old stuff worth reading too. This book by Philip Jose Farmer (who I’d never heard of) proved this ten times over.

The idea behind the series is possibly the most unique I’ve ever heard. Some time in the future – we don’t know how distant – every single member of homo sapiens who ever lived (and died) on earth is resurrected on a strange planet. A vast river snakes around this planet, issuing from (and ending at) the polar cap. The river is cordoned by impassable mountains, creating a continuous valley you can go up or down, but not over or under.

Brought back from the dead in 25-year-old bodies, all of humanity struggles with the practical and metaphysical implications of The Riverworld. Is it salvation? An experiment? Or something darker still?

In the first volume, we follow Richard Burton (explorer extraordinaire) and the group he gathers to him, as he decides to find the source of The River. Along the way he’s recruited by a shadowy stranger, seemingly one of the beings responsible for humanity’s resurrection. Burton’s told he must help to stop the “plan” from going ahead, and the mystery behind The Riverworld deepens.

The Fabulous Riverboat doesn’t quite pick up where this first book left off, but it does deliver in terms of concept development and intrigue. It’s also a neat stand-alone story in its own right. In this book, Sam Clemens decides to build the biggest, most impressive riverboat the world has ever seen, and sail it to the source of The River. The “shadowy stranger” is around to help, causing a meteor to hit the Riverworld and thus provide metals for Sam’s endeavour.

It’s not all plain sailing…King John of England is an uneasy ally and Clemen’s state of Parolando is perpetually on the brink of war with its neighbours. Some brave themes are explored, from the neighbouring king (a 20th century American) who wants an all-black state and hates white people, to the general attitude of men in this book that women are only really useful as hutmates.

Burton’s story didn’t seem so misogynistic, but The Fabulous Riverboat feels inherently sexist. It’s interesting, because this is explored to death in the third book in the series (which I’m currently reading). The author writes as if he believes these kinds of attitudes…his characters certainly do. If this is a conceit it’s a good one. Women in Burton’s story were treated far more fairly, so I think the misogyny in The Fabulous Riverboat is just an exploration of what would happen – given that the majority of women who’ve ever lived weren’t exactly “liberated”.

Sexism aside, this is a satisfying continuation of The Riverworld series. Threads are drawn together, and more questions are raised. I absolutely love the idea and a five-book treatment (the core of the series) probably isn’t enough. I guess I’ll see when I get to the end

13-year-old Ruby dreams of escaping via the canal ‘to sea’ away from the loving confines of Nan Annie. Into her life comes exotic Isa Fly with her white hair on a young woman’s head, one good dark eye and one white blind, bearing tales of looking for her long-lost sister and how she’d travelled all the way from Severnsea down the coast. Ruby hopes that Isa will take her with her when her mission is accomplished so she does all she can to help find the elusive sister.

So begins a search and various inhabitants of the town are drawn into the story. Truda Blick, the blue-stockinged heiress of Blick’s Button Factory befriends Isa, but as Truda has to take unpopular action to try to save the Factory, Isa is resented for the perceived effect she has on Truda and rumours grow of witchcraft. Ruby is warned by the Bargee of the dredger which keeps the Cut open – Belle Severn – that Isa is not what she seems.

The principal characters are well drawn – Nan Annie, the Captin, Jamie Abel (Ruby’s father), the gossipy self-righteous women of the Ruth and Naomi Club and many more.

Through the device of Isa giving Ruby a small spoon to keep her safe, the author brings together the stories of several of the characters to reveal the connecting thread which binds them. Did Truda save the factory? Did Isa find her sister? Was Ruby’s trust misplaced? What is the relationship between Belle and Isa? You will have to read it and see. The time, characters and place are so well realised that there surely must be such a town and this was an unexpectedly satisfying read.

Buying the first book in a trilogy is always a gamble – what happens if you don’t like it? Can you start a story and abandon it just like that? It feels like a waste of time, almost a betrayal if a trilogy hooks you then doesn’t deliver.

The Mistborn series has a great hook. It asks a simple question: “What if the Dark Lord won?”. I was really looking forward to reading it, especially since Brandon Sanderson is an author I’ve wanted to check out for a while. He’s finishing the Wheel of Time series (of which I’ve read at least eight) so I couldn’t wait to see what his own books were like.

There’s a really cool map at the start of The Final Empire, and I was intrigued by the time I started reading. Being completely honest (and the Bookowl always is) I almost gave up ten pages in. The language didn’t seem right, the writing style felt sloppy, and the scene was set using clichés that made me cringe. I had to force myself to keep reading to see if it got any better, and luckily, the story took over.

The Final Empire concerns Vin, a young Skaa urchin with vast hidden powers. She lives on an Earth either parallel to ours or far in the future, where a battle was fought long ago and Evil won. The Skaa are an enslaved underclass, and the nobility are those people who remained loyal to the evil overlord. In this first volume, Vin learns of her powers and becomes part of a plan (lead by the charismatic Kell) to overthrow the empire.

At over 600 pages this is a chunky book, but the story is fast-paced, with enough explanation for everything to make sense. There’s also some cool world-building, with a whole system of “supernatural talents” and lots of weird and wonderful creatures – some of which have been left for the sequels to explain. After the awkward first chapter I really enjoyed this book, and a girl being the central character makes a really nice change.

Even so, certain things jarred. Sometimes the language was really formal, with a random Americanism thrown in. The text didn’t always feel polished, and I don’t know if that’s simply because Sanderson’s American and American English reads differently. I’m probably being pedantic but every so often I’d read a sentence and think “I’d have re-written that”.

Almost all of the characters have one-syllable names, making them seem interchangeable. Maybe that’s just the way things are in that world, but it felt a bit lazy. I also know people called Vin and Kell in real life, but that’s just unlucky

I know I sound really critical, and apart from a few niggles I genuinely liked The Final Empire. It’s a page turner – a great idea backed by strong writing, good characterisation and attention to detail when it comes to the setting. I can see why Sanderson was asked to finish the Wheel of Time series, and if The Final Empire is anything to judge by he’ll have done a good job. I’ll definitely be reading the sequels, and I would definitely recommend this book.

The good point: it has a foreward by Neil Gaiman. I absolutely loved Stardust, aided as it was by the incredible illustrations of Charles Vess. I suddenly wondered if this was where Gaiman got his inspiration…

The King of Elfland’s Daughter concerns the valley of Erl, whose men want to be ruled by a magic lord. Their king, eager to please his people, sends his son Alveric to find Elfland and bring back the King of Elfland’s beautiful daughter Lirazel. He does, and Lirazel soon has a half-human, half-elvish son called Orion.

The King of Elfland isn’t happy with this arrangement, and uses a powerful rune to bring his daughter back to Elfland. Alveric sets off after her, but the borders of Elfland have disappeared and he wanders the land for many years with a group of madmen. In the meantime, Orion grows up to rule over Erl, his magical side eventually causing havoc for the townsfolk who realise they don’t want so much magic after all.

Lirazel, back in Elfland, misses her son and begs her father to return her to Erl. Eventually the King relents and allows the borders of Elfland to touch earth once more. Lirazel is reunited with Orion and Alveric, and everyone lives happily ever after.

The bad points: This may be a simple fairytale, but the language is stuffy, the phrasing repetitive (“the fields we know” appearing what feels like every second sentence) and the setting almost dull.

I feel bad, reading the quotes on the back of this book. Arthur C. Clarke called Lord Dunsany “one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century”, and John Clute called this a “seminal fantasy”. I *can* see why. I can see how this influenced other writers – Stardust is a retelling – I can see how Lord Dunsany explores typical fantasy themes, and how he uses the language of fairytale as if he invented it. Even so, The King of Elfland’s daughter was no pleasure to read. It was like reading a piece of history for a school project. I’ve read it, I know what happens, but I’ll probably never pick it up again.

My favourite snippet in this issue is from a story on meteor sightings in medieval times, when people thought they might be “magnetic effluvia” or any number of weird phenomenon (except, y’know…rocks from space). The article talks about some of the ancient folk tales that mentioned what must have been meteors. I quote:

“The statue of the goddess Diana at Ephesus (probably carved from a meteorite) “fell from the sky”.

I went to Ephesus a few weeks ago so this really piqued my interest. The Temple of Artemis where the statue would have been housed isn’t actually in the ‘ancient city’ itself (it’s nearby but not on my tour unfortunately). The statue itself is long gone, but I found a pretty snazzy engraving of her depicted with fruit and hunting dogs and all kind of weird stuff.

Now, if it really was made from a meteor that would be awesome, but Wikipedia says it was “carved of wood”. The only real reference I can find on the interweb is this page, which says it’s a “common myth”. Hmm. I wonder why the FT said it was “probably” true?

Another slip of the pen is an “upcoming event” taking place in June 2010 on the shores of Loch Ness, where psychics, witches etc will get together to try to summon the spirit of Nessie. This event will be streamed live online…oh wait, June was last month. Oops!

One of their authors, Lauren Beukes, is coming over from South Africa next week to publicise her next book Zoo City. Her first novel Moxyland looks to be a bit Cory Doctorow-esque and should certainly appeal to the Twitter generation.

Lauren will be signing books at Forbidden Planet next Thursday. Alas, I don’t live in London anymore so I can’t hang out with all the cool kids, but if I did, I would. (Did that make sense?)

I wasn’t looking forward to reviewing this book. I’m going to apologise now for what’s probably going to be an incoherent, rambling blog post…and also make my defence. I started Viriconium on holiday – reading some of it on the plane and some on a verandah in 35 degree heat, in the brief rests between gambolling around in the sea. Not, I soon realised, the ideal setting in which to read such a complicated story.

Viriconium isn’t actually one story. In the Fantasy Masterworks edition there are ten – several short stories and at least three novellas – one of which by my reckoning would make a fantastic novel in its own right.

The opening tale, “Viriconium Nights” reminds me so much of other books – City of Saints & Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer, and Perdido Street Station by China Mieville really came back to me when reading it. In Viriconium Nights, a young man (a thug, a fighter, a gentleman?) is hounded through the city into a stranger’s house, only to stumble out some time later into a city that’s not quite the one he left.

I found Time to be a strong theme throughout each part of the book. Viriconium is a city some thousands of years in the future, when the “Afternoon Cultures” have fallen, leaving behind a ruined landscape but also fantastic machinery buried in the wastes. Some, like crystal airships and energy-swords, are still used but little understood. Others are hinted at, rediscovered by prospectors who try to discern their purpose, or put them to new uses – usually violent ones.

The stories jump back and forth in time, but the city doesn’t stay the same. Sometimes the characters are the same….but their histories and roles are different, almost as if that particular Viriconium is a parallel universe of the one we were reading about before. Sometimes the timeline is continuous – taking place just a generation after the last story. Sometimes the timeline seems continuous, but the city is called Uroconium, or Vriko, and the facts have shifted slightly.

This continuity/discontinuity between the stories is confusing and enlightening at the same time – taken as standalone tales, each story in this book is a gem in its own right. At first I kept trying to hold onto the characters and the names and the facts and the places, but if you let them go as each story ends the next one makes a lot more sense.

My favourite part of Viriconium is The Pastel City, the first novella-length tale in the book. In it, Lord tegeus-Cromis and his band of old Knights defend the city and its young queen from northern barbarians. It’s full of brilliant ideas – the crystal airships, the Name Stars (created by the Afternoon Cultures and spelling out a message no one living understands), and one of the most striking concepts in the book – the Reborn Men. These thousand-year-dead soldiers are discovered in the wasteland and resurrected, inheriting the broken culture they left behind. They know the secrets of the past, but in a later story (A Storm of Wings) they slowly go mad as they struggle to come to terms with a changed world.

What else is there? Viriconium hints at an eons-long forgotten past, an aeronaut attempting the impossible task of flying to the moon, a flooded city, a man who might not be a man (but can’t remember any more – this reminded me of Daneel Olivaw in the Foundation Series), and a reality that shifts even as you watch it. Viriconium is like a study in fantasy writing, as if M. John Harrison is practising his craft by breaking down and rebuilding his world time and time again.

It’s a difficult read, but rewarding. It helps that the ideas are so stunning. Each one could be distilled into another tale, and the only downside I found was that the stories weren’t longer. I could have read 500 pages of The Pastel City and probably wanted more.

I don’t know if the likes of City of Saints and Madmen were directly influenced by Viriconium, but they’re certainly connected in my mind. To say it’s now a “classic”, Viriconium would rank pretty high in my list of modern favourites. Find a quiet spot, a cup of tea, and enjoy this amazing book.

Starting a few months ago I decided to read the whole of the Discworld series. I’ve just finished the fifth book – Sourcery – but this is the first one I’m going to review. I’ll probably write up the first four at some point, if only to demonstrate why I’m kind of disappointed with this one.

Yep…I didn’t really enjoy Sourcery. It started off kind of similar to Equal Rites – in that book, the 8th daughter of an 8th son was *gasp* a Wizard. In Sourcery, there’s an 8th son of an 8th son of an 8th son, who is a Sourcerer – a source of magic – something that hasn’t been seen on the Disc since the Mage Wars. The Sourcerer, a young boy called Coin, has a magic staff inhabited by his bitter father which persuades him into taking over Unseen University. The aim of this is to make Wizards a powerful force on the Disc once more, but it has terrible consequences for the universe and Must Be Stopped.

So far so good. Rincewind comes into the story – we assume to save the day – but then it all gets a bit confused. He meets a beautiful heroine, daughter of Cohen the Barbarian, and after some unfortunate events they end up in Al Khali where they meet the Seriph and a wannabe Hero called Nijel.

Coin the Sourcerer, the most interesting thing about the story, basically drops off the page and we don’t see him again until the showdown begins. It’s not that I don’t like hearing about Rincewind’s misadventures, it just felt like one too many characters were introduced and the sideshow became the main event.

In the end, Coin, who has been happily causing havoc as the backdrop for Rincewind and Co, changes his mind in the blink of an eye and puts everything back the way it was. He leaves the Disc for his own magical world and is never seen again. It’s a pretty quick ending, and I was left wondering if the story even needed a Sourcerer at all.

I’m sure Conina (the heroine) and Nijel will be back in other books, and maybe they’ll do better there. Sourcery just lacks coherence, leaping from one scene to another and abandoning (what I thought should have been) the central theme. What started out as a really cool idea just got lost in the same old “Rincewind’s having a bad day” story.

I have to be honest, Sourcery disappointed me This is the first Discworld book I haven’t liked however, so all in all that’s pretty good going.

I’m a big fan of the Masterworks series but didn’t realise just how many books were in it! Even though I’m familiar with most of the authors, I’ve not read a lot of the titles that SF Masterworks chose (despite owning half a dozen Philip K. Dick books, there are still another 6 to tick off the list). As pointed out by others, the list below includes titles that have yet to be published.

Bold means I’ve read it, italics means I own it too

1 – The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
2 – I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
3 – Cities in Flight – James Blish
4 – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
5 – The Stars My Destination – Alfred Bester
6 – Babel-17 – Samuel R. Delany
7 – Lord of Light – Roger Zelazny
8 – The Fifth Head of Cerberus – Gene Wolfe
9 – Gateway – Frederik Pohl
10 – The Rediscovery of Man – Cordwainer Smith

11 – Last and First Men – Olaf Stapledon
12 – Earth Abides – George R. Stewart
13 – Martian Time-Slip – Philip K. Dick
14 – The Demolished Man – Alfred Bester
15 – Stand on Zanzibar – John Brunner
16 – The Dispossessed – Ursula K. Le Guin
17 – The Drowned World – J. G. Ballard
18 – The Sirens of Titan – Kurt Vonnegut
19 – Emphyrio – Jack Vance
20 – A Scanner Darkly – Philip K. Dick

21 – Star Maker – Olaf Stapledon
22 – Behold the Man – Michael Moorcock
23 – The Book of Skulls – Robert Silverberg
24 – The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
25 – Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
26 – Ubik – Philip K. Dick
27 – Timescape – Gregory Benford
28 – More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon
29 – Man Plus – Frederik Pohl
30 – A Case of Conscience – James Blish

31 – The Centauri Device – M. John Harrison
32 – Dr. Bloodmoney – Philip K. Dick
33 – Non-Stop – Brian Aldiss
34 – The Fountains of Paradise – Arthur C. Clarke
35 – Pavane – Keith Roberts
36 – Now Wait for Last Year – Philip K. Dick
37 – Nova – Samuel R. Delany
38 – The First Men in the Moon – H. G. Wells
39 – The City and the Stars – Arthur C. Clarke
40 – Blood Music – Greg Bear

41 – Jem – Frederik Pohl
42 – Bring the Jubilee – Ward Moore
43 – VALIS – Philip K. Dick
44 – The Lathe of Heaven – Ursula K. Le Guin
45 – The Complete Roderick – John Sladek
46 – Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said – Philip K. Dick
47 – The Invisible Man – H. G. Wells
48 – Grass – Sheri S. Tepper
49 – A Fall of Moondust – Arthur C. Clarke
50 – Eon – Greg Bear

51 – The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
52 – The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch – Philip K. Dick
53 – The Dancers at the End of Time – Michael Moorcock
54 – The Space Merchants – Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth
55 – Time Out of Joint – Philip K. Dick
56 – Downward to the Earth – Robert Silverberg
57 – The Simulacra – Philip K. Dick
58 – The Penultimate Truth – Philip K. Dick
59 – Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
60 – Ringworld – Larry Niven

61 – The Child Garden – Geoff Ryman
62 – Mission of Gravity – Hal Clement
63 – A Maze of Death – Philip K. Dick
64 – Tau Zero – Poul Anderson
65 – Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
66 – Life During Wartime – Lucius Shepard
67 – Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang – Kate Wilhelm
68 – Roadside Picnic – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
69 – Dark Benediction – Walter M. Miller, Jr.
70 – Mockingbird – Walter Tevis

71 – Dune – Frank Herbert
72 – The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress – Robert A. Heinlein
73 – The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
74 – Inverted World – Christopher Priest
75 – Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle
76 – H.G. Wells – The Island of Dr. Moreau
77 – Arthur C. Clarke – Childhood’s End
78 – H.G. Wells – The Time Machine
79 – Samuel R. Delany – Dhalgren (July 2010)
80 – Brian Aldiss – Helliconia (August 2010)

81 – H.G. Wells – Food of the Gods (Sept. 2010)
82 – Jack Finney – The Body Snatchers (Oct. 2010)
83 – Joanna Russ – The Female Man (Nov. 2010)
84 – M.J. Engh – Arslan (Dec. 2010)

These three are currently on my reading list – I’m about halfway through Viriconium but it’s one of those books that needs a lot of attention so should take a while to finish. There’s nothing on the Kindle at the moment, but I need to write a review of Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery which I finished just before last week’s holiday.