First Nicholas goes looking for Quin and finds him. Then Nicola, his twin, goes looking for Nicholas, and he finds her. Then Shadrach, Nicola's lover, goes looking for Nicola and then for Quin. It's all set in the city of Veniss, wrapped in a wall a mile thick to keep the desert out. Decaying, decadent, fragmenting, inward-looking, Veniss is one of the last, lingering enclaves of humanity, and it's sitting on top of a vast, hellish underground labyrinth where Quin rules supreme.

Quin is a genetecist and mad scientist who has created intelligent meerkats with human arms and blue, multi-limbed ganeshas. His kingdom is packed to the rafters with grotesqueries and abominations and left-over atrocities. It's Shadrach who, like Orpheus, must venture into this hideous underworld for love and revenge, with a meerkat's head tied to his arm, to find the man who made it all.

This is a short, dense, structurally clever book that might be unbearable if it wasn't so well written. Vandermeer makes poetry out of the horrors and the odd flash of beauty, and there's plenty of conceptual wit, staggering visions and flashes of beauty to keep the reader engaged. It's hard not to emerge from this book feeling a ghostly fraction of the transformations undergone by the characters, and look at the world and people and other books a little differently. It's a mad book about a mad world. Recommended.

This is turning into the year of the reread for me. Normally I'm yearning to get the next new book in my sweaty paw, but at the moment it seems just too much like hard work. I haven't got it in me to break in new authors, the authors I like don't have anything out. I think it's partly because what I'm really in the mood for is a clutch of fast and furious and smart thrillers and i just can't find any. So let us regress to comfort reading! Yay cyberpunk dystopian urban neon nightmare!

I suppose the attraction here is that it is the quintessence, if not the very first example, of hard boiled crime merging seamlessly with science fiction, bringing the computer jocks and cloned ninjas and enhanced warrior women and immortal corporate fiefdoms to the down and dirty street-level grime and sleaze and cool that was always a vision of the present as refracted through our imagined future. At heart, Neuromancer is a heist novel, perhaps even a jailbreak and, heck, the bulk of it takes place in space. It's funny how we (or I, anyway) equate Gibson with films like the The Matrix or even Inception where our heroes battle it out in unreal environments, but, though crucial, cyberspace is minimally used as a setting, and Case's addiction to the fleshless sizzle of the matrix is only one aspect of the novel. Never forget Molly and her claws, or poor schizoid Corto, or monstrous Riviera, all broken and fractured psyches, all knocked down and built up and set running by god-like intelligences waiting to be born.

The prose is cut like crystal and surprisingly heavy for something that flows so fast. It's always a shock to find yourself halfway through a paragraph and suddenly wonder if you're reading a poem of some kind. Violence is swift and brief and brutal. There are passages of lingering horror, usually Riviera's grotesque visions, and others of sudden clarity or beauty. It's dated, because there's no wi-fi or tablets or touchscreen and nobody has phones, but it's still a sleek, shining novel of the eighties, of money and crime and technology churning and transforming and full of danger

So what exactly is this book about? It's set after the Second World War in the small town of Magrit whisch is home to a cereal mill which turns out America's most popular breakfast cereal and produces one of America's most popular housekeeping magazines, all presided over by the fictional construct that is Maggie Collins. The young women work together in the scientific kitchen, experimenting with recipes and housekeeping tips and putting a nickel in the jar every time they refer to Maggie as something other than a real person. There are no young men in Magrit. None of them came back after the war. They weren't killed, they just never came back, and the marriage prospects for these young women seem quite poor. Two young men turn up and hang around in the course of the book, but this isn't really a romance.

Henry Collins, the lovable, energetic, benevolent mill-owner sets up a woman's baseball team consisting of the young women in the kitchen and they travel around over the course of one Summer playing games in small towns, but though love of baseball infuses the book, this isn't really about sport.

Perhaps it's Henry's second wife, Ada's fascination with Ghandi and her attempts to emulate his non-violent philosophy and bridge the divide between complacent Lower Magrit and poor drowned Upper Magrit. Or maybe it's the mystery of who is writing the subversive columns somehow appearing in the housekeeping magazine under Maggie's byline. Or perhaps it's the ghosts of the drowned houses of Upper Magrit and the ghost of Maggie herself said to haunt the lake and waterfall above the town.

Or maybe these are just part of the story told by Irini Doyle, one of the kitchen girls, about that one Summer, as remembered years later by her daughter and told to us through this book. But not just told. Irini is good-hearted and hasn't a bad word to say about anyone. Her story is rather plain and bare, so her daughter tells us up front and right from the start that she, a born liar, has embroidered and embellished and filled in the details. This should be an annoying invocation of the unreliable narrator, but for various reasons, it isn't.

And so we get a rich, subtle, funny, almost whimsical tale of the forties, a vision of near-perfection, peace and neighbourliness and community and ideas, small-town jealousies and rivalries and friendships that look positively bucolic, all rendered utterly believable. And so we can't quite believe it, and neither can Irini's daughter, or rather she can, she just has a different perspective. Irini longs to escape Magrit, but she also believes that to excel at something, like baseball, will harm her chances of marriage. This is the agreed consensus, and it may even be true. Hemmed in by the darkness of the war behind and the betrayal and paranoia of the fifties ahead, nobody polices the behaviour and expectations of the girls. Nobody except the girls themselves.

This is a brilliantly written book. Every page has a quotable bit, whether funny or profound or slightly surreal. The characters are warm and alive, the town is a vivid setting and the story keeps you guessing and keeps you involved, but also challenges you to pay attention to what isn't being said, until the final page and an invocation of feminine power to destroy and to create, an evolving, mutating avatar of motherhood that is both terrifying and dangerous, seemingly out of place with the rest of the book, but which may have been the point of it all along.

Before this book there was nothing like it. After this book nothing like it could be done again, not as well and not the same way. This book took narrative, plot, character, theme, story, poetry and held them up and subjected them to a long and pitiless examination, then threw them down and subjected them to degradations and tortures not dissimilar to those inflicted on the author, Trellis, holding back from destruction only at the end in a moment of conscience and mercy. O'Brien pierces the drunken pretensions and tedious intellectual self-aggrandisement of the middle-class Dublin drunk but cannot in the end deny his affection for it. A brilliant, daring, anarchic novel of wit and intelligence and linguistic dexterity. There is nothing else out there like it at all all. You might even say it's yer only man.

I have a couple of distinct memories of this book from the first time I read it: the cop getting into trouble and then getting involved with a TV show about cops who get in trouble; and the vision of the city building itself when Chevette puts on the glasses. What I didn't notice, or don't remember noticing at the time, is that Gibson, compared frequently to Chandler for reasons I never quite cottoned to, is clearly doing Elmore Leonard. It's slightly easier to spot now, because Rydell immediately appears on page as Timothy Olyphaunt playing a younger, rawer Raylan Givens, so that was a bit of a joy to behold.

Published in 1993 and set in 2005, Virtual Light knows it's going to be passed out by the present, and is very much about the late eighties, early nineties. Haunted by the secular ghost Shapley, martyred to cure AIDS, or, no, who helped cure AIDS and was martyred: AIDS hysteria would have been just past its height, and was probably AT its height when Gibson was writing it. What else? There's nanotech, bicycle couriers, a kind of reality TV that seems like an offshoot of COPS, balkanisation, the huddled masses of the poor, earthquakes, the rise of private security, crazy religions and a black president.

So much for the future. Story wise: a courier impulsively steals a pair of glasses and bad people chase her. Rydell, ex-cop-in-trouble and now ex-private security is hired to drive for a man looking for a missing pair of glasses. It's all go from there, but centre stage is Virtual Light's great image of the Golden Gate bridge wrapped and encrusted with the shops and shelters of the poor and the homeless who took it over and made it their own.

Can't believe how long it's been since I've read an Elmore Leonard. Not since Out Of Sight came out, I think. Wow. I used to eat these up, and now I remember why. Funny, cool, savage, wild and actually kinda romantic, helped in particular by the setting, this is a deliciously enjoyable read.

This is David Mitchell's debut novel, and third by him I have read, my God that's a clumsy sentence construction, and it has very much elevated me from a liker of his work to a bit of a fan. With a structure only a little less ambitious than that of the later Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten is nine stories, interlinked, that span the globe, mapping human folly and endeavour and nobility through ghost stories, love stories, science fiction, noir and the travelogues of the disembodied. It all ends in a short, tenth chapter in which everything we have come to know seems crowded into a small space by the random vagaries of chance and the incomprehensible subatomic glue of physics, terrifyingly vulnerable and possibly doomed but carrying on regardless.

And the last of the Sprawl trilogy. You can see Gibson growing as a writer and you can see him knocking up against the limitations of cyberpunk - once you've left the meat behind and taken up residence in the matrix what is there for you to do? Yeah, he gives us an answer, but it's an answer that takes him out of his sphere of interest, out of the human, or even the post-human. Post-humanity's always been Bruce Sterling's thing, anyway. Gibson's fascination is with the present, the now, the fulcrum where people and technology turn and change and the wonderful, unexpected strangeness that is often utterly unpredictable.

Mona Lisa Overdrive - the Sprawl books have the best titles - rounds up the dangling threads from the first two books and weaves them together. Heck, it even gives Case an offhand happy ending. We have the daughter of a Yakuza boss sent to London for her own safety, where she meets a formidable woman with mirrors over her eyes, but not, apparently, retractable claws in her nails, which signifies some sort of growth and maturity, if not any actual aversion to swiftly delivered violence. Sally, Molly as was, is not and never has been and never will be a nice person. There is Mona, a sweet, naive, teenage junkie prostitute sold by her pimp to men who are interested in her resemblance to sim star Angie Mitchell. There's Angie Mitchell herself, saved by Turner in Count Zero, now a famous star just out of rehab. She used to be able to talk to the voodoo gods of cyberspace thanks to the bio-chips in her head, but they haven't come to her for years, and her boyfriend is missing and someone left drugs in her coat pocket. And Slick Henry, way out in the toxic junkyard of Dog Solitude, building his kinetic sculptures to deal with the prison program that leaves him susceptible to short-term memory loss, is asked by Kid Africa to look after a body wrapped in bandages and hooked up to a mysterious machine called an LF.

What's interesting is all the POV characters are innocents, even super-celebrity Angie. They've all suffered, used and abused by life, by others, by the system, by circumstances, and now forces they do not understand or comprehend are moving around them and coming for them, and often what saves them is their own lack of malice or cynicism. Others are mad, obsessive, violent and duplicitous, but these four just want to be themselves, whatever that might be.

A great book, a satisfying ending to a great, groundbreaking, decade-defining trilogy. These books are still the best way to re-experience the eighties, to remember the energy and the attitude, and, whatever bits of it we brought with us to the now, be glad they're left safely in the past.

In Civil War era Seattle, a steam-driven mining machine has run amok and opened a volcanic fissure that releases a zombifying gas. The damaged area is walled off, the inventor responsible disappears and his young wife is left to fend for herself. Years later Briar Wilkes toils in the outskirts of Seattle to support herself and her teenage son, Zeke. Determined to discover the truth about his father, Zeke crosses through the wall, and Briar follows close behind determined to save him. Inside the wall, full of poison gas and hungry zombies, they discover a community of dogged survivors living underground and in sealed-off buildings, including a certain sinister doctor who produces amazing inventions but exacts cruel prices.

Okay, so this is the first proper steampunk novel I've read in ages. Back when I read The Difference Engine, I'm not even sure it was even a thing. Anyway, frankly, this dragged. For a bog chunk of the middle, I just wanted it to be over. It didn't help that one of the two protagonists was a young idiot, your actual punk, and I kept wanting him to fall down a hole and die. I reckon if it had been a hundred pages shorter it would have been fine. It's tight, well, if rather plainly, written and the setting is fantastic. If anything, Priest's big mistake is in her restraint. A few more bells and whistles, or gears and cogs, added to the plot, to baroque the story up a bit, give it a bit more attitude, make the book a lot more ornery. A few elaborate secrets and mysteries, a few more gonzo characters and situations. As it is, it feels like she's carefully contained the necessary madness behind a high wall and won't let it out. Which is a pity.