Simon Ings's Blog, page 49
July 6, 2012
Frances Ashcroft’s The Spark of Life reviewed for the Telegraph
Do you make a big, satisfying book about electricity, or a small, exhilarating book about physiology? Here, the one is trapped within a not entirely successful attempt at the other. http://bit.ly/KSS4GM
June 24, 2012
Dead Water floats the Irish Times’s boat
Dead Water sails into that stormiest of seas, the Indian Ocean, to explore the murky depths of the shipping business along with those of its latter-day evil twin, piracy. In this highly ambitious, hugely entertaining novel – part sci-fi fable, part cold-war mystery, part ghost story, part hymn to the complexity of wave theory – Ings weaves multiple plots together, plunging the reader into a vortex of countercurrents from the opening page. The choppiness is dizzying, perhaps even irritating. Stick with it, though. You’ll be rewarded with such engaging characters as Roopa Vish, the Indian police probationer who ends up in bed with the gangster she’s investigating, and Eric Moyse, the shipping magnate who comes up with a wheeze for hiding the planet’s most toxic substances. The locations, from rambunctious Mumbai to odd Oman, are portrayed with visceral vividness, and so is the action, which includes a train crash and a tsunami. After reading this, you’ll never drink water with quite the same insouciance again.
—ARMINTA WALLACE in the Irish Times, 16 June 2012
June 11, 2012
Finally, I get to meet Bruce again…
… after a gap of – what? Twenty years? Last time I saw him he and William Gibson were launching their steampunk collaboration on an indifferent British public – further evidence, if any were needed, that to succeed in this game what you need most is longevity and a taste for the slow hand-clap.
Anyway, Bruce Sterling, Rachel Armstrong, Warren Ellis and I are going to be in Eindhoven, designing the city of the future this coming weekend, in a free event organised by Liam Young of Tomorrows Thoughts Today.
The exhibition Under Tomorrow’s Sky will open on August 10 at MU. (See www.undertomorrowssky.com and www.mu.nl for updates.) Our weekend-long public think tank kicks off the project by debating the social, cultural, ethical and environmental consequences of emerging technologies.
“Eavesdrop on the conversations, take part in the debates on what the future city may be and contribute to the discussions on why such speculations on tomorrow may be of critical importance for today.”
To which I would add: buttonhole me afterwards and we’ll go get a drink.
MU
Emmasingel 20
5611 AZ Eindhoven
Nederland
T +31402961663
mu@mu.nl
Saturday June 16 start at 8 pm
Sunday June 17 start at 11 am
Free entrance
Keep Friday free: we’re plotting the return of Lawrence Durrell
It’s time we revalued “the old boy”. Poet. Excoriator of Pudding Island (the British Isles to you). Cocksman. Loudmouth. Shit. Author of experimental novels. Tipped for the Nobel. Despised then and now for writing seriously and sincerely about sex.
I want to save him from the lovies. From the old club-room farts with their tales of “Dear Larry”. From the cryptocolonial world-builders, the literary pudendum-collectors, the ex-pat snob-fantasists. I want people to remember Durrell’s teeth. His breath. His savage, uncompromising, funny-weird, gut-wrenching prose. And when the British Library came along asking, did I want to chair and contribute to a panel about Lawrence Durrell today? well, I grabbed at the chance, all the while thinking, Can’t they get anyone, well, let’s face it, bigger?
No. They cannot. (Faber got Jan Morris to write a new foreword to the Alexandria Quartet recently. I’ve read it: a pompous, contemptuous flob. Please God DBC Pierre does a better job with The Black Book.)
Why is it proving such an uphill struggle to recast Durrell for a new generation? For an answer, I fear we need look no further than the title to this week’s event: Reach Upwards to the Affirming Sun. Yes, I know where this line comes from, and yes, I still hate it. Reach upwards to the affirming sun, indeed – forgetting that Durrell was the all-time undisputed master of bathos. One might just as well have quoted from The Black Book:
The robin sits upon the bough
The postman has a nasty cough
which at least has some energy about it. But we’re lumbered. Reach Upwards to the Affirming Sun: Lawrence Durrell in 2012 takes place from 18.30 to 20.00 this Friday, 15 June 2012, at the Conference Centre, British Library,
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB
Joining me – and fielding some very different opinions – will be Nicoletta Demetriou, Andrew McKie, and Joanna Hodgkin, author of Amateurs in Eden, The Story of a Bohemian Marriage: Nancy and Lawrence Durrell.
Do come if you can and watch the fur fly. The evening costs £7.50 / £5 concessions, and don’t forget the Old Boy’s secret sign (revealed below)
June 9, 2012
Sparring with Nick Harkaway at the Guardian
My Dead Water, his Blind Giant, Arc, and much general merriment.
Download: gdn-book-120808-tm-future-prospects-technology-control-books.mp3
May 30, 2012
May 28, 2012
@paulreviewsbks goes skinnydipping in Dead Water
… there are still some authors who look to the universal; who understand that focusing on the daily experiences of one man and his dog isn’t necessarily sufficient when exploring the 21st century
I missed this when it came out in Interzone. Damn.
May 27, 2012
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