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This is a classic look into a dystopian future, but a future that has disturbing parallels with the way we live today.
A mix of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational drugs and sex has turned everyone into happy consumers, who are unable t...more
This is a classic look into a dystopian future, but a future that has disturbing parallels with the way we live today.
A mix of genetic engineering, brainwashing and recreational drugs and sex has turned everyone into happy consumers, who are unable to question or to feel real emotion. From babyhood people are conditioned to avoid becoming connected with other people or with nature and conditioned to accept life as it will be for them in their predetermined social category. People die in dying homes where the TV volume is turned right up and no-one visits except school groups on tours to get them conditioned to accepting death as something that doesn't matter.
So in the ultimate sense everyone is alone, but at the same time in everyday life they're pressured into constant communal activities and aren't allowed time by themselves, until they get old and socially unacceptable.
Bernard Marx, the main character, somehow has maintained enough individuality to question what is going on and travels to one of the few remaining Savage Reservations where he finds life being lived as it used to be, full of the possibility of the whole range of human emotions.
This novel (written in 1932) is still a glimpse into a future of genetic engineering and social control, while offering insights into the way we live today.(less)
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Starlings is a series of interconnected stories set in the southern English city of Brighton. The characters are all vividly drawn, believable, flawed people with problems and eccentricities. Each chapter can be read as a self contained story in its...more
Starlings is a series of interconnected stories set in the southern English city of Brighton. The characters are all vividly drawn, believable, flawed people with problems and eccentricities. Each chapter can be read as a self contained story in its own right, but most of the characters appear in more than one story and the more often we meet them, often in different time frames and circumstances, the more their individual stories make sense. The various stories all come together at the end, giving a nice resolution to the whole.
There are many things I loved about this book, but for the purposes of this review, the feature I'll concentrate on is the author's eye for nature. The starlings of the title are a major feature of Brighton, roosting as they do in huge numbers on the city's piers (though in declining numbers). They don't play a huge part in the narrative of the novel, but are sensed in the background and are described beautifully when they are brought to the foreground and it's lovely to read of characters who can be moved by watching wildlife:
Upstairs in her flat, May watches the starlings flit around the Pier...... Nightly she watches their dance from her window, she thinks is the most beautiful thing she's ever seen and her heart is warmed by their beauty.
Also notable for the wildlife enthusiast are the incredibly well observed scenes with the man encouraging his dog to enjoy the sea and the urban fox's encounter with a packet of frozen peas, both of which struck me as being inspired by real events and both being of that wonderful quirky 'couldn't make it up' kind of humour that I love.
So, a brilliant book and do read it if you get the chance, though if you've got toothache or a phobia of dentists, you may wish to skip the chapter called Dentistry. It's as brilliant as the rest of the book, but a bit painful...(less)
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Juliet Wilson
is now following Nasim's reviews
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This is the second in Janis Mackay's trilogy of books about Magnus Fin, the Scottish boy who is part selkie.
Every morning Magnus goes down to the beach and spends some time with the seals. But one morning there are no seals to greet him. Magnus disco...more
This is the second in Janis Mackay's trilogy of books about Magnus Fin, the Scottish boy who is part selkie.
Every morning Magnus goes down to the beach and spends some time with the seals. But one morning there are no seals to greet him. Magnus discovers that his selkie family and all the seals in the sea are being threatened by a mysterious disease. Magnus and his American friend Tarkin set out to investigate.
Meanwhile Magnus's cousin Aquella, a selkie who has lost her seal skin is trying to adapt to life as a human. She desperately wants to help Magnus and Tarkin in their investigations but is unable to go too close to the sea.
This adventure is as exciting as Magnus Fin and the Ocean Quest and it also follows the main characters as they grow up, addressing issues around identity and belonging. Tarkin is becoming more and more Scots (with liberal use of the word muckle in all his sentences!), while Magnus is totally adapting to being a selkie:
Swimming was a joy. His strength felt boundless. He twisted, he turned. Like a bolt through the blue he plunged westwards. He cleaved through the racing currents, rounded Cape Wrath then turned north towards Sule Skerrie. On he swam, the only seal in the ocean wearing a moonstone and a silver locket, which were now tight around his thick seal neck.
There are a host of well drawn minor characters in this book - the mysterious winkle picker; the helpful but elusive crab and the gang of angry fish with their faces scarred with fishing hooks.
Can Magnus and Tarkin find out what is causing the disease and save Magnus' selkie family? You'll have to read the book to find out!(less)
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I was delighted to recently have been at the launch of Magnus Fin and the Selkie Secret by Janis Mackay, whose Children's Fiction evening class I'm so enjoying at the Office of Lifelong Learning at University of Edinburgh.
In this novel, Magnus Fin fi...more
I was delighted to recently have been at the launch of Magnus Fin and the Selkie Secret by Janis Mackay, whose Children's Fiction evening class I'm so enjoying at the Office of Lifelong Learning at University of Edinburgh.
In this novel, Magnus Fin finds out that someone has stolen the treasure that belongs to Neptune, King of the Sea. This is no ordinary treasure but includes all the instructions for how to rule the sea, such as how to make waves. Magnus believes that the strange kist that has washed up on his beach contains Neptune's treasure but he has to find the key before he can find out and then return the treasure to the king.
Meanwhile, Magnus' teacher Mr Sargent has become puzzled by the behaviour of Magnus, his cousin Aquella and their friend Tarkin. A chance remark in the pub about the children being 'aliens' is overheard and leads to a chain of gossip that leads to the paparazzi hitting the village. Well, actually only Billy, the tea boy in a tiny magazine, who wants to be a journalist, but that's enough for the selkie community to feel threatened.
This third in the Magnus Fin trilogy follows Magnus and Tarkin as they try for a while to be 'normal' to put their teachers off the scent of what's really going on. Of course underwater adventures aren't quite compatible with being normal so things soon get difficult.
Can Magnus return the treasure to Neptune? Will Tarkin ever see his Dad again? Will Billy and Mr Sargent learn to accept people who appear different? And whatever happened to that gang of angry fish with fish hooks studding their faces?(less)
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I was delighted to be sent an advance readers copy of this book of short stories. Some are very short indeed too! Most of the stories revolve around young men, whose attitudes and characters wouldn't necessarily normally appeal to me. But it's a sign...more
I was delighted to be sent an advance readers copy of this book of short stories. Some are very short indeed too! Most of the stories revolve around young men, whose attitudes and characters wouldn't necessarily normally appeal to me. But it's a sign of the quality of both the writing and storytelling that I was drawn right into every story. The voices in the stories are very convincing, I was particularly impressed with the way a male writer could inhabit the world of a girl on the cusp of womanhood - Rachel, who spends most of No Retreat waiting for her first period to start while on a Catholc girls' retreat that she doesn't want to be on.
The back cover of the book claims that these vignettes are 'refreshingly void of clear meaning' but at the same time the reader can't help but grasp some sense of what life and relationships are really about in almost every one of these stories. I Am and Always Will Be for example is a small but perfectly formed tale of how a young man reconsiders his judgement of the 'morbidly obese middle-aged lady' who lives near him.
The writing is consistently tight and infused with humour. To take an example from The Dog in Me, in which the narrator adopts a dog from the rescue to help him win over his attractive neighbour:
'The plan was simple enough. Next time I saw my neighbor out watering her flowers in her short shorts and bikin top, I'd put Otto into action. Parade him casulally by. Let him work the cute. Nudge him to flutter those big brown eyes and give that floppy tongued smile. To make sure he truly understood what was at stake, I even showed him my view of things inching my bedroom curtain aside to reveal her sunbathing in her back yard. Otto licked his nose, gave a toothy yawn and went right on panting in appreciation. He was on board. All we needed now was an opportunity.'(less)
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I was delighted to receive my review copy of Birds Nobody Loves - A book of vultures and grackles by James Brush. It is a beautiful looking book with a striking black and white picture of a grackle on the front. Inside is a selection of excellent poe...more
I was delighted to receive my review copy of Birds Nobody Loves - A book of vultures and grackles by James Brush. It is a beautiful looking book with a striking black and white picture of a grackle on the front. Inside is a selection of excellent poetry about these two types of misunderstood birds along with more black and white illustrations.
The poetry is well observed, here is someone who clearly watches birds carefully and has a way with words to describe them in striking ways. The poems show the more engaging sides of the birds and also comment more directly on people's hatred of them. This latter is particularly captured in the prose poem God Hates Grackles:
They / marched up and down the street outside the capitol / chanting verses from Leviticus about unclean birds.
While in the haibun The Grackle Tree people are shooting grackles out of their tree because their droppings have landed on a car.
But many of these poems are full of the wonder of the birds:
Overhead turkey vultures soar
on steady outstretched wings
folding sky and letting it move
around and over them
from Summer Solstice
This poem captures the wonder of vultires in flight, while the character of the grackle is beautifully rendered in Grackle Ghazal:
I hang for hours on back porches, strumming
old guitars, swapping lies with folksy grackles.
There's also the understanding that vultures have an important role to play in ecology:
Now I understand
vultures too, are beautiful:
they clean our messes.
from Patton's Army
and in Lines Discovered in an Aging Ornithologist's Field Journal, the narrator asks, when he dies, to be left by the highway for the vultures to find him so that he could:
finally fly on dusky wings
outstretched,
buried in the sky.
By the end of this book, I'm sure that grackles and vultures will no longer be birds nobody loves, but birds that fascinate and intrigue!(less)
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At the beginning of the book, Magnus Fin is almost eleven, his parents have some strange disease that has aged them well beyond their years and Magnus has no friends his own age. Then along comes Tarkin, a cool American kid who quickly becomes Magnus...more
At the beginning of the book, Magnus Fin is almost eleven, his parents have some strange disease that has aged them well beyond their years and Magnus has no friends his own age. Then along comes Tarkin, a cool American kid who quickly becomes Magnus' friend, brought together by their common love of the sea and the beaches.
On his eleventh birthday, Magnus discovers that his father is a selkie and that he himself is part human part selkie. This means that he can move between the worlds and he iscalled by his selkie family to help to save them from the false king who has stolen the kingdom of the sea from Neptune. The false king takes his energy from the human waste andrubbish that is poured into the oceans and forces sea creatures to work for him.
Can Magnus defeat the false king and save his selkie kin?
Such an exciting adventure and such lovely writing, always in tune with the natural world:
'Then suddenly, as though reading Fin's thoughts, (the seals) all started clapping their flippers and yelping and singing. Magnus Fin's fears disappeared. He grinned. Never had he heard such a joyous deep trumpeting sound.
"Welcome" they seemed to be saying. "welcome son of Ragnor, welcome cousin, nephew, grandchild, friend".
And while Magnus Fin stared, mesmerised by this circle of seals swaying around him, they began to dance. They swam over and under each other. They did backflips. They somersaulted. They flicked their tails and made the water bubble.'(less)
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This novel published in 1998 is set in an imagined Antarctica of the early twenty-first century
There is an odd feeling of reading about a future that isn't quite the future but nor is it the present that it's somehow supposed to be. Other than that t...more
This novel published in 1998 is set in an imagined Antarctica of the early twenty-first century
There is an odd feeling of reading about a future that isn't quite the future but nor is it the present that it's somehow supposed to be. Other than that though, this is an excellent piece of speculative fiction - gripping and meticulously researched (Robinson spent time in Antarctica as part of the US Antarctic Program's Artist and Writer Program).
This is an Antarctica fought over by African oil companies and eco terrorists while scientists continue their studies and an international group of 'ferals' try to develop an indigenous way of life on the continent. Meanwhile Val leads groups of tourists on extreme adventures, recreating the journeys of the original polar explorers. Stories of these explorers intercut the narrative in a very effective manner, giving the reader a sense of the real history of the continent.
The narrative is very intense in places, there are long passages outlining scientific experiments, political manoeverings and an expedition that Val leads, which doesn't go to plan.
The technology is worked into the narrative really well, wristwatch computers, recordings a trek participant makes for TV-masks and the intelligent fabrics that everyone's clothes are made from. Similarly the ideas around the ferals' construction of a potentially permanent way of life are well explored.
It's a compelling read and one that makes the reader think deeply about the future of the world's last great wilderness. And as this month marks the centenary of Scott's failed expedition to reach the South Pole, what better time to read this book?(less)
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