The hunt for a Culture Mind hiding on a planet off-limits to both sides in the galactic war they're raging with the Idirans. Only the Changer, Horza, has a chance of being allowed to land on the world, and he works for the Idirans. After being ejected from an Idiran craft attacked by a Culture ship, he's picked up by a rag-tag group of mercenaries and manages to fight his way to a slot on the team. It's not the most elite or even lucky gang, and one disaster follows another until they end up on a massive orbital about the be destroyed to deny either side using it as a strategic asset, and Horza seizes his chance. 

Packed with big ideas about diffeernt societies and ideologies as well as a number of set-pieces that privide dramatic action and retinal kicks, with a protagonist sincerely opposed to everything the Culture stands for, a crew of oddballs that's rapidly whittled down and a grand finale in an ancient underground train system, this was an explosive addition to the New Space Opera revival of the late eighties, early nineties, and of course the first of the now-legendary series of Culture novels. Still manages to impress with tis daring and bravura and thrills, but the more than ever I'm convinced the bit on the island with the cultists should have been cut or reduced significantly.

Ooh this was a big one. Took me a whole bloody month to read, partly because I had to rearrange the furniture every time I wanted to open it.

The thing about this is that it's all about a world where scientific progress comes about through the efforts of ancient monastic enclaves who devote their lives to the study of scientific theory and philosophy, letting the outside world get on with believing whatever madcap delusions they can draw from passing cloud blocking out the sun or whatever. Oooh, clever inversion.

I knew monks. I grew up near a monastery. They weren't that much like these guys, but I don't think they were much like other monks, either, being a fairly wealthy and extroverted order who sent missionaries to Africa and Asia and came back with groovy beaded rattle things and dried snakeskins. Oh, there were more than a few saintly beatific brothers with benign expressions and faraway eyes who preached sermons about the ineffable thingness of wotsit (seriously, listening to them was like... well, even as a kid I actually kind of liked them, especially compared to the Bush-like eloquence of the parish priests, and anyway they were short.) Mostly, though, they were what college students would be like if they didn't drink or swear or have sex or do drugs, so I apreciate what Stephenson is getting at here. Also, the singing.

I also knew nuns, seeing as Anathem's monastries are coed. I went to a convent school, and there's nothing quite like seeing tiny, hunched, female figures in black putting the fear of almighty God in the hearts of strapping six foot farmer's sons. Sister Agnes, who taught us Irish, would stand beside us (we were sitting, she was standing, and the tallest wisp of grey hair that poked out of the front of her wimple came up to our shoulders despite the massive heels on her shoes) and stick her arm out from her elbow at a ninety degree angle, rotate her hips and repeatedly strike our arms and say 'Nil pheac deanta agat!' What did that mean? No idea. Never learnt a word of Irish. I assume it's Irish. The suurs in Anathem don't do any pheacing, so that aspect didn't ring true for me.

Anathem's a lot like The Baroque Cycle in that science and philsophy and technology are all discoursed on in various ways by the characters while the plot ticks along in the background, except it's all rephrased and reformulated because it's a different world, same physics (or is it?) Our hapless hero is summoned by the saecular power to help out with this problem they're having which may involve the end of the world, and all that. Epic stuff happens with the usual Stephensonian aplomb, some of it funny and witty, some of it not, all of it eminently readable and fun.

Ok, that was a lot about nuns and monks in the precedingreview. ON REREADING - this has aged remarkaby well. Somehow the conceit of a world divided between monastic enclaves devoted to rational thought and a secular world that will think any old thing seems more apposite than ever. It valorises the warrior-science-monks in a way that is perhaps not entirely helpful and more than a little wish-fulfillment, but in terms of metaphor it is effective. It's also pure Neal Stephenson - big chunks of people thinking out loud about stuff interspersed with, or driving, or responding to, dramatic world-shaking events, with a big epic set-piece finale. I have to say, that full-on assault on a broad range of ideas was sorely missing from the climate change book. Howsomever

A middle-aged writer has a visit from his ex-wife in the middle of the night, and she tells him she's missing. Sure enough, after she vanishes from the porch and goes looking in her apartment, she and her new husband are nowhere to be found. Did smething happen in connection to the weird saucer cult with the donut shops she was part of? He and his brother and his brother's girlfriend and a young freelance reporter dig in, and find a whole nest of snakes willing to torture and kill to keep their gravy train going. 

Terrific mystery thriller from the master.

Short stories based on, inspired by or in tribute to fairy tales, transmuted by the unique sensibility and style of Kelly Link into sharp, acerbic, eerie, beautiful, elliptical and thoroughly modern stories, each one a strange and sometimes terrible and always amazing world unto itself. 

The final story, Skandar's Veil was in the Shirley Jackson trbute Anthology, Things Get Dark. Halfway through the story, when the bear begins to tell its story, I started to cry. I don't know why. Perhaps it was the sheer accumulation of subtle enchantments in the story, in the series of stories, that reached some kind of peak at that single ineffable moment. It's weird, I can still feel the state persist as I type, the state of having read a Kelly Link story and started crying when a bear speaks. Was it grief, or happiness, or memory, or loss, or envy, or longing? I think it was mostly the good things, with maybe one of the bad things. Or it was something else entirely, unrelated to a Kelly Link story, unrelated even to myself, something that passed through me on its way to somewhere or someone else. It happened, though, and I am recording it here so that even though I might forget, I will at least have written it down before moving on and getting on with my life.

A group of women go on a hike in the bush as part of an executive team-building exercise. They emerge battered and bruised and snake-bit and down one member of the group. A search begins. Aaron Falk received a phone call from the woman the night she went missing, because she is Falk's source on financial shenanigans in the company. What happened out there and where is the missing woman? The usual Jane Harper tale unfolds - it's never what you expect. 

Rather different, more intense and horrifying instalment in the series as Elizabeth is accused of witchcraft by her wretched husband and the scheming Lord Spymie and an even schemier witchfinder. It's brutal, all the more so for Carey's enforced dithering while she endures torments as he tries to marshall forces to rescue her and come up with a plan that won't see them both hung, but also behaving quite unheroically - Finney has never been starry-eyed about the nature of her main protagonist, though there's no doubt he is doing his best for his one true love. There is a mystery element there - what are Spymie and the witchfinder's ulterior motives for this? But it's mostly an agonisingly suspenseful thriller following Elizabeth's ordeal and the struggles of various allies to come to her aid. The pov is divided out amongst quite a few characters, something I've always liked about these books since Finney's gifts for characterisation are formidable. Still a severely under-rated series, Finney's determination to keep it going is laudable.

A concentrated chamber-drama-at-sea. Leaving the awful penal colony of Botany Bay, Jack is disgruntled - something is amiss. He soon diccovers that a stowaway is on board, a female convict brought on board by one of the officers. Through no real fault of her own, she causes strife and dissension amongst the other officers, leaving Jack, with a new set of orders to carry out, in a towering fury while Stephen looks on and lends a sympathetic ear. At the core of the book is Clarissa's own awful story, related without self-pity or apology.

The first novella is brilliant. Gorgeous, moving, sublime and wonderful The second... eh, struggles to achieve the same effect and doesn't quite get there. Really, realy good, only weak compared to the first. 

A bunch of characters board a train - they're a mix of people from different strata of soceity, they're a small cross-section of America, they're planning murder, suicide and heists, and it's all told in a strange syncopated style of blank-verse prose, like one long jazz improv. If it was Cormac Mcarthy or James Ellroy it'd be eaten up, but Grady remains borderline cult obscure despite creating one of the most iconic espionage characters of the seventies. Who may or may not also be on this train.

I was a big fan of the Mayo books way back, but that was before I read Ambler and Davidson, and more LeCarre. This is the first in the series, and really quite good, a strong showing in terms of plot and character and writing, but the bones of it are a more obvious to me and frankly, almost none of the characters are actually all that likeable - no, scratch that, the shady and villainous ones are actually likeable in their way. Still enormously readable, though.