Well that was a blast. One thousand pages of a blast, which is quite some blast, when you think about it. I honestly think that the last time I read a thriller that was over one thousand pages long was Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six and I have no compunction admitting that I skipped huge chunks of that rubbish. Didn't skip a page of this, though I think Clancy may have been a touchstone: it is after all a big chunky international thriller with the Russian Mob and ruthless Jihadists, and while it's not a techno-thriller per se, much of the plot depends on cutting-edge tech, specifically an MMORPG called T'Rain. Ludlum also springs to mind, but mostly when he does, or Clancy, or Dale Brown it's to think how much more fun this is than having to wade through their sub-literate tosh. Oddly enough, the climactic shoot-out in the wastes of the Canadian-American border was strongly reminiscent of James Crumley's The Mexican Tree Duck. When I first read Stephenson's Zodiac, he wrote a forword where he acknowledged Crumley's influence, which prompted me to check out Crumley, for which I am eternally grateful. Anyway, I have to write a straightforward review of this for the Tipp Tatler no less, so I'll come back and do that tomorrow, I just wanted to get my initial thoughts down quick.

Here we go:

It’s rare to find a thriller that clocks in at over a thousand pages, and rarer still to find one that can justify it. Tom Clancy, in his heydey, churned out a few tomes that needed their own forklifts to carry around, but the longer Clancy’s books got, the less readable they were. Not so with Reamde.

The unpronounceable title is the name on a computer file, a misspelling of Readme, and in this file is a highly contagious virus that takes over your computer and locks all your data in an unbreakable encryption, the key to which is available on the payment of a small ransom. The ransom has to be deposited in a certain area of a virtual world, the setting for the online game T’Rain. The game’s creator, Richard Forthrast, has just hired his niece, Zula, to work for his corporation. Her boyfriend, Peter, is selling some illegally obtained credit card numbers to the Russian mob. The mob’s American connection plays T’Rain. The mob’s data gets locked up by Reamde. The mob want the data back, and fast. Paying the ransom online proves difficult, so the mob grab Zula and Peter, fly to the Chinese city of Xiamen and commence a hunt for the hacker who created the virus.

Phew. This sounds exhaustive and exhausting, but it’s all set up for for what follows and is both fast-moving and entertaining. What happens next is an explosive gun battle that sparks a small global war as Zula is captured by terrorists and the small group of unlikely friends she has made in Xiamen set out against all odds to rescue her, while her family desperately try to find out what happened to her. The whole thing ends in a lengthy running gun battle in the cold wild wastes of the Canadian-American border.

Despite its length, the pages fly by. Between the excitement of the action, the dry wit used in describing Richard’s life and times and the globe-hopping descriptions of modern life, there is never a dull moment, and the book can be both hilariously funny, deeply absorbing and incredibly gripping. Highly recommended.

Tommy Taylor, on the run, up for auction, plunging into his father's sordid and horrible past. The series continues, clever, literary and literate, a fantasy thriller with more than a touch of horror.

At the leading edge of the Mongol Empire as it flows remorselessly into Europe, a group of knights from an obscure martial order hatch a mad scheme to thwart the invasion. The group splits, the young warriors to fight in the Khan's circus, the other, more seasoned men head deep into Mongol Territory to assassinate the Khan of Khans.

There's a lot going on here, a lot to take in, and it doesn't help that we seem to begin the novel in the middle of the story. It feels as of a few chapters have been left out - a feeling reinforced by the fact that there appear to be prequel stories available for the kindle but not in the print edition. Sucks to be old-fashioned, I suppose. Anyway, once past the abrupt opening, and the tale spreads out to a young Mongol warrior learning courtly manners and a pair of defeated Asian warriors, it all warms up a bit and and draws the reader in. Until it ends, again rather abruptly. Oh well.

The list of authors seems vast, and it stands to their credit that they manage to achieve a uniform style throughout. This does not read, for example, like a Neal Stephenson book, though his influence is everywhere. It's not an especially dazzling style, but it's not bad for an amalgam. Anyway, I found myself enjoying it, and felt it ended too soon after it got going properly. I think there are two more volumes, one of which is out, and I hope to get them, but I hope they're not reserving too much exclusive stuff for the Kindle. Grr.

Well, this is an odd one. New arrivals on a flagship of the Universal Union space fleet, the Intrepid, quickly work out that the appalling death toll amongst the lesser ranks on away missions are only the tip of a weird nightmareberg where the laws of reality and physics, not to mention story logic, regularly bend and twist themselves into horrible shapes all in service to what appears to be some hackish sense of drama. Dun-dun-dunnn! They're trapped as disposable extras on a really bad science fiction show! They don't wanna die horribly and uselessly and stupidly service to driving moments of unearned suspense and pathos!

The prologue is terrific, it must be said, poor Ensign Davis, but after that, instead of laying on the satire and the surreality as one might expect, Scalzi appears to rather clumsily start writing a science fiction novel where a cast of likeable characters discover something wrong with the universe, set out to find out what it is and despite the craziness and seeming impossibility, devise a plan to fix it by deducing the suspended reality rules of logic and using them to their advantage. Classic science fiction, but at first clumsy and even clunky as our characters examine clunks of satirical Star Trek tropes from the point of view of a science fiction universe where the logic has been thought out a bit better. So, not quite the sparkling knowing romp you might expect, especially if you're thinking about, say, Terry Pratchett's Guards Guards! a novel about disposable extras from a different genre. Instructive, the differences, as the science fiction characters rebel against a power that is not only deterministic, but gracelessly deterministic, in an effort to make their own choices, while the fantasy characters learn how to adapt to what is yet another form of magic with its own laws and loopholes.

But the story of Redshirts ends after two hundred pages, leaving us with three codas set in the real world, and what are we to make of these? Individually they are quite nice, minor characters from the main narrative dealing with the fallout from the actions of minor characters from a TV series. I wasn't quite sure Scalzi actually succeeded in synthesizing a theme out of all this in the end, and yet the ending felt satisfactory so...

Then I started writing this review and realised that I'd enjoyed this book more than I thought, despite what I perceived as clumsiness in the first chapters. Scalzi didn't set out to simply take the piss out of Star Trek. He set out to lay bare the differences between good and bad storytelling, the cheap hacky tricks of The Chronicles Of The Intrepid, versus stories where the world and the logic have a minimum of integrity, however lowbrow, and an author who stays true to that integrity and how, this being the case, at the end there can be moments of love and loss and hope and uncertainty that are, in fact, earned. It doesn't matter if it's a silly science fiction show, or a light but clever science fiction novel, or stories about loosely connected people living their lives in LA: fidelity to your creation makes for better fiction that generates actual emotions on the page and in the reader.

Gaiman's sly, secret prose takes us on a trip across the Scottish Highlands with two men, searching for a cave full of gold, gold that exacts a price, but there's more than gold at stake and more than greed at work. Utterly fantastic, a Neil Gaiman story with Eddie Campbell layout and art, a lovely book, both as object and story.

More mad Culture fun, this time involving a sci-fi Rapture and the complications attending when a deep dark secret, only not really, threatens to come out making life very difficult for people and ships alike. A lot of this is about life and death, immortality and afterlife and meaning and the things you do to pass the time between birth and death and why you even bother, making the whole thing almost painfully poignant and significant as it turned out to be the last Culture novel and the next-to-last Banks novel. This is incredibly sad and at the same time it has all the magnificent bravura, panache, energy and utter disregard for scale that you want from a truly popping space opera with big visionary ideas and brain-melting scenery and blistering action and scathing dialogue between god-like machines and yet the same old fears about life and death and the meaning of it all no matter what the scale. You don't want it to stop. Then it stops.

Amazingly weird doings set around a new Mexican Governor's campaign for the presidency, complicated by the candidate's unexpected abduction by aliens. She resolves to keep her experience secret, but intends to use the power of high office to discover the truth and prepare for a possible alien invasion. This is an awesome comic, even though unfortunately the series was cut short, there is one more volume which hardly seems enough to develop and conclude the ideas set up here, but what the heck, bring it on.

Probably Abercrombie's best book to date. He's an excellent writer but his books, like many of his characters, tend to be formidable, interesting, complex but fundamentally unlovable. Nothing necessarily wrong with that. The masterful cyncism of the plotting in the First Law trilogy was a superb deconstruction of fantasy tropes, though one that was hardly badly-needed or unique. What was more interesting was the way it all ended up being more like a noir than anything else. Red Country is unabashedly Western in its influence, a genre that has deconstructed its own myths thoroughly in print and on screen, making it a good fit with Abercrombie's savage world. Two things in particular make this novel stand out. One is the characters, particularly the supporting cast, who are allowed to develop and survive and whose positive attributes - usually a deadpan fatalistic humour and tough dogged pragmatism - seem more appropriate to the world than the sort of starry-eyed idealism or arrogant entitlement that the author seems to enjoy knocking down so much. Related to that is the dialogue, straight out of Portis or Lansdale or McMurtry, which is often a pure joy to read and alleviates the grimness considerably. Other than that there's the violent, blood-soaked, action-packed quest across the dying frontier to keep the reader enthralled and turning the pages at a ferocious rate.