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The book reports will continue until morale improves.
No, I don’t know what that means.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve never read Chinua Achebe before, but he’s been namechecked by a lot of people as one of those writers you need to check out if you want to read more fiction from Africa. This is his first novel (published in 1958) and not only is it regarded as the first significant English-language novel to originate from Africa, it’s also heralded as a literary classic in its own right – and having now read it, I can see why.
The story takes place in Nigeria in the 19th century, and follows Okonkwo, a man at the top of the social order of his clan in the villages of Umuofia, which he had to achieve entirely on his own since his layabout debt-laden father left him with nothing to inherit. Consequently, Okonkwo is tough, mean, angry and cruel, even to his own family, and completely obsessed with his own masculinity. The first half of the story tells how he came to power – the second half tracks his downfall due to a mix of bad luck and the arrival of white British missionaries and colonists who disrupt the traditions that Okonkwo relies on to advance and maintain his position and success.
It’s a depressing and disturbing read, not least because Okonkwo is a textbook example of toxic masculinity – he hates women, beats his wives regularly, wishes his daughter had been born a man, and despises any man who shows the slightest sign of weakness (to include himself). A lot of this is reinforced by the traditions of his culture, but even other men in the village aren’t as hardcore as Okonkwo. So he’s just about impossible to like. At the same time, it’s an engrossing story, thanks to Achebe’s excellent prose that draws the reader into the culture Okonkwo inhabits and portrays him as a monstrous yet tragic protagonist. Things get really interesting when the missionaries show up, representing both the positive and negative impact of Christian missions at the time on traditional cultures. For such a short novel, there’s a lot to unpack here, and plenty of scenes stick in the mind.
Hilo: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth by Judd Winick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is my first time reading Judd Winick, and I confess I mainly picked this up in part because it turns out I’m friends with one of his cousins who hipped this book to me when it came out. That said, I also liked the art style on the cover, so I decided to give it a shot.
As the title implies, Hilo is a boy who literally falls from the sky and crashes into the Earth like a meteor, with no memory of who he is or where he’s from. He’s discovered and befriended by DJ, a nerdy 13-year-old boy, who lets Hilo stay at his house. This first volume involves Hilo figuring out why he’s here, which may have to do with the giant robot ant trying to kill him. There’s also a subplot with DJ being reunited with his old childhood friend Gina and dealing with being an underachiever in a family full of overachievers.
I can’t say it fully resonated with me, but then I’m not the target demographic – I think 13-year-old me would have enjoyed this a lot. Also, the art is great, the story well paced and the humor is reasonably wacky – it would make a good TV series on Cartoon Network.
City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is Ursula K Le Guin’s third instalment of the Hainish cycle, and (as far as I know) the first in the series to have some kind of continuity from a previous book, although it also works as a standalone novel. This one takes place on Earth (Terra), which is now a post-apocalyptic barbarian wasteland ruled by the Shing, an alien race who defeated the League of Worlds and took over Earth 1,200 years ago.
This is the backdrop for the story of a man with golden cat eyes and no memory or identity at all who stumbles out of the woods into a village. The locals take him in, and he builds up a new identity as “Falk”. Eventually Falk is told he needs to find out where he is from, who erased his previous memory/identity and why. To do this he must go to the city of Es Toch where the Shing rule. Very much walking ensues, during which Falk meets a lot of strange barbaric tribes along the way, and eventually finds out that everything he has learned is wrong. Or is it?
Of Le Guin’s first three early Hainish novels, this one works the best for me. It gets off to a slow start, but picks up speed the closer Falk gets to Es Toch, and it’s when he arrives that the real fun begins. Le Guin explores the implications of having your identity erased and restored (what then to do with the identity you’ve constructed in the interim?) and the problems of discerning truth from illusion – i.e. if someone tells you that they just told you a lie, are they lying when they tell you that they lied? I felt there was more meat to chew on here, and Falk was a more fleshed-out main character.
The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions by Robert Rankin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m a big fan of Rankin’s work, though I took a break for a quite awhile, mainly because the series that starts with this novel was released in trade paperback, and I was waiting for the cheaper mass market versions, which it turns out were not forthcoming. Fiddle de, fiddle dum. Anyway, this kicks off Rankin’s take on the steampunk genre, and doubles as a sequel to HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Around ten years after the Martian invasion was defeated (for which the British Empire took full credit), British engineers have reverse-engineered Martian spaceships, and now there is steampunk tech and space travel, and it turns out there are also Venusians and Jupiterians, who are much more friendly. Or are they?
This is the backdrop for the story of George Fox, an innocent lad with big dreams who works for Professor Coffin, who runs a sideshow circus with freakish attractions. Together they end up on an epic quest to find the ultimate sideshow attraction – the fabled Japanese Devil Fish Girl, who may or may not be a goddess. This being Rankin, there’s also lots of conspiracy theories, a monkey butler, and cameos from famous historical figures, including PT Barnum, Charles Babbage, Nikola Tesla, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, regardless of whether or not they were technically alive in 1895, because who says you can’t do that?
I’m not big on steampunk, but I do like Rankin’s humor and his lyrical, whimsical writing style, and he does tell a good tall tale. He also has a lot of fun with the premise, and while he does sometimes go a bit overboard with the British Empire love, and the bit with the jungle cannibals is in questionable taste, they do serve as a satire of Victorian adventure literature that tended to put a premium on both British Empire and stereotypical jungle savages as convenient dangers for the hero to wallop, which I think is what Rankin intended. Anyway, I liked it.
A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Written in 1960 – well before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon – this novel from Arthur C Clarke imagines a future in which mankind is colonizing the solar system and numerous bases have been established on the Moon to the point of enabling tourism, which includes tours of the surface on “dust cruisers” that ski on the film of dust covering the ground. The moon dust also collects in lakes – some of them quite deep.
That’s the backdrop for the basic plot, in which the dust cruiser Selene sinks into the so-called “Sea of Thirst” without a trace following a rare moonquake. As Captain Pat Harris tries to keep his passengers alive (and calm), on the surface Chief Engineer Robert Lawrence is racing against time to locate the submerged Selene and rescue the passengers and crew.
This is the kind of stuff Clarke generally does well – create a hard-science future and throw the characters (usually scientists) into a situation that they have to repeatedly science themselves out of. Like pretty much all of Clarke’s books, he’s less adept at the human characters – especially when it comes to women and relationships, or really anyone who isn't a male scientist or engineer, who as a group Clarke tends to portray as calm and professional (he also stacks the deck here by making the majority of the Selene’s passengers academic types, perhaps to insure against the inevitable panic scene). In any case, it’s a relatively fast-paced rescue story that holds up surprisingly well (apart from the moondust itself, which is the major scientific inaccuracy, which Clarke himself acknowledged in post-Apollo editions).
View all my reviews
Done and dusted,
This is dF
No, I don’t know what that means.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua AchebeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve never read Chinua Achebe before, but he’s been namechecked by a lot of people as one of those writers you need to check out if you want to read more fiction from Africa. This is his first novel (published in 1958) and not only is it regarded as the first significant English-language novel to originate from Africa, it’s also heralded as a literary classic in its own right – and having now read it, I can see why.
The story takes place in Nigeria in the 19th century, and follows Okonkwo, a man at the top of the social order of his clan in the villages of Umuofia, which he had to achieve entirely on his own since his layabout debt-laden father left him with nothing to inherit. Consequently, Okonkwo is tough, mean, angry and cruel, even to his own family, and completely obsessed with his own masculinity. The first half of the story tells how he came to power – the second half tracks his downfall due to a mix of bad luck and the arrival of white British missionaries and colonists who disrupt the traditions that Okonkwo relies on to advance and maintain his position and success.
It’s a depressing and disturbing read, not least because Okonkwo is a textbook example of toxic masculinity – he hates women, beats his wives regularly, wishes his daughter had been born a man, and despises any man who shows the slightest sign of weakness (to include himself). A lot of this is reinforced by the traditions of his culture, but even other men in the village aren’t as hardcore as Okonkwo. So he’s just about impossible to like. At the same time, it’s an engrossing story, thanks to Achebe’s excellent prose that draws the reader into the culture Okonkwo inhabits and portrays him as a monstrous yet tragic protagonist. Things get really interesting when the missionaries show up, representing both the positive and negative impact of Christian missions at the time on traditional cultures. For such a short novel, there’s a lot to unpack here, and plenty of scenes stick in the mind.
Hilo: The Boy Who Crashed to Earth by Judd WinickMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is my first time reading Judd Winick, and I confess I mainly picked this up in part because it turns out I’m friends with one of his cousins who hipped this book to me when it came out. That said, I also liked the art style on the cover, so I decided to give it a shot.
As the title implies, Hilo is a boy who literally falls from the sky and crashes into the Earth like a meteor, with no memory of who he is or where he’s from. He’s discovered and befriended by DJ, a nerdy 13-year-old boy, who lets Hilo stay at his house. This first volume involves Hilo figuring out why he’s here, which may have to do with the giant robot ant trying to kill him. There’s also a subplot with DJ being reunited with his old childhood friend Gina and dealing with being an underachiever in a family full of overachievers.
I can’t say it fully resonated with me, but then I’m not the target demographic – I think 13-year-old me would have enjoyed this a lot. Also, the art is great, the story well paced and the humor is reasonably wacky – it would make a good TV series on Cartoon Network.
City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le GuinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is Ursula K Le Guin’s third instalment of the Hainish cycle, and (as far as I know) the first in the series to have some kind of continuity from a previous book, although it also works as a standalone novel. This one takes place on Earth (Terra), which is now a post-apocalyptic barbarian wasteland ruled by the Shing, an alien race who defeated the League of Worlds and took over Earth 1,200 years ago.
This is the backdrop for the story of a man with golden cat eyes and no memory or identity at all who stumbles out of the woods into a village. The locals take him in, and he builds up a new identity as “Falk”. Eventually Falk is told he needs to find out where he is from, who erased his previous memory/identity and why. To do this he must go to the city of Es Toch where the Shing rule. Very much walking ensues, during which Falk meets a lot of strange barbaric tribes along the way, and eventually finds out that everything he has learned is wrong. Or is it?
Of Le Guin’s first three early Hainish novels, this one works the best for me. It gets off to a slow start, but picks up speed the closer Falk gets to Es Toch, and it’s when he arrives that the real fun begins. Le Guin explores the implications of having your identity erased and restored (what then to do with the identity you’ve constructed in the interim?) and the problems of discerning truth from illusion – i.e. if someone tells you that they just told you a lie, are they lying when they tell you that they lied? I felt there was more meat to chew on here, and Falk was a more fleshed-out main character.
The Japanese Devil Fish Girl and Other Unnatural Attractions by Robert RankinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
I’m a big fan of Rankin’s work, though I took a break for a quite awhile, mainly because the series that starts with this novel was released in trade paperback, and I was waiting for the cheaper mass market versions, which it turns out were not forthcoming. Fiddle de, fiddle dum. Anyway, this kicks off Rankin’s take on the steampunk genre, and doubles as a sequel to HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Around ten years after the Martian invasion was defeated (for which the British Empire took full credit), British engineers have reverse-engineered Martian spaceships, and now there is steampunk tech and space travel, and it turns out there are also Venusians and Jupiterians, who are much more friendly. Or are they?
This is the backdrop for the story of George Fox, an innocent lad with big dreams who works for Professor Coffin, who runs a sideshow circus with freakish attractions. Together they end up on an epic quest to find the ultimate sideshow attraction – the fabled Japanese Devil Fish Girl, who may or may not be a goddess. This being Rankin, there’s also lots of conspiracy theories, a monkey butler, and cameos from famous historical figures, including PT Barnum, Charles Babbage, Nikola Tesla, Adolf Hitler and Winston Churchill, regardless of whether or not they were technically alive in 1895, because who says you can’t do that?
I’m not big on steampunk, but I do like Rankin’s humor and his lyrical, whimsical writing style, and he does tell a good tall tale. He also has a lot of fun with the premise, and while he does sometimes go a bit overboard with the British Empire love, and the bit with the jungle cannibals is in questionable taste, they do serve as a satire of Victorian adventure literature that tended to put a premium on both British Empire and stereotypical jungle savages as convenient dangers for the hero to wallop, which I think is what Rankin intended. Anyway, I liked it.
A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. ClarkeMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Written in 1960 – well before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon – this novel from Arthur C Clarke imagines a future in which mankind is colonizing the solar system and numerous bases have been established on the Moon to the point of enabling tourism, which includes tours of the surface on “dust cruisers” that ski on the film of dust covering the ground. The moon dust also collects in lakes – some of them quite deep.
That’s the backdrop for the basic plot, in which the dust cruiser Selene sinks into the so-called “Sea of Thirst” without a trace following a rare moonquake. As Captain Pat Harris tries to keep his passengers alive (and calm), on the surface Chief Engineer Robert Lawrence is racing against time to locate the submerged Selene and rescue the passengers and crew.
This is the kind of stuff Clarke generally does well – create a hard-science future and throw the characters (usually scientists) into a situation that they have to repeatedly science themselves out of. Like pretty much all of Clarke’s books, he’s less adept at the human characters – especially when it comes to women and relationships, or really anyone who isn't a male scientist or engineer, who as a group Clarke tends to portray as calm and professional (he also stacks the deck here by making the majority of the Selene’s passengers academic types, perhaps to insure against the inevitable panic scene). In any case, it’s a relatively fast-paced rescue story that holds up surprisingly well (apart from the moondust itself, which is the major scientific inaccuracy, which Clarke himself acknowledged in post-Apollo editions).
View all my reviews
Done and dusted,
This is dF
