Or, Another piece of self-promotion in lieu of content.
I finally finished my archives assignment last night - unfortunately I've exceeded the word count by 600 but, bah, I'm unrepentent - and so am planning on a relaxing, Wimbledon-fueled weekend. Strawberries and cream on the lawn and walks by the river and other English summer pursuits are planned, not to mention some much neglected reading. So no reviewing this weekend I'm afraid; indeed, no typing of any kind. I am going entirely computer free - it's going to be the printed word all the way!
However, I do have a little something to offer in the meantime. Over the last few weeks I have been taking part in an email discussion about Adam Roberts' ninth novel, Swiftly, with fellow Strange Horizons reviewers Niall Harrison, Paul Kincaid and Dan Hartland. Safe to say that we have all had rather different views on it - Niall and Dan admired it while I was largely sceptical and Paul hated it with a fiery passion. The debate got rather heated at times (challenges issued; gloves thrown down, etc. etc.) and I think the end result is well worth a read, if you like that sort of thing. You can find a transcript (very neatly edited by Niall) at Torque Control.
Let me fill you in on the book's synopsis:
It is 1848 and the British Empire has grown rich exploiting Lilliputian slaves - the finesse of their working allowing unheard of feats of minature engineering; even Babbage's computing device has been made to work.
But now the French have formed a regiment of previously peaceful Brobdingnagian giants and invasion looms.
In a world where humanity is both smaller and larger than it once was, love and hate loom large. Mankind discovers itself at the centre of scale. Lilliptians are twelve times smaller than us but there are those twelve times smaller than them, and twelve times smaller again and so on. And the scale of being goes up from Swift's giants also...
A rip-roaring 19th century adventure, a love story and a thought-provoking pre-atomic SF novel about our place in the universe.
[NB: Again, I shudder at the use of 'rip-roaring'. Ugh.] Sounds good, yes? And parts of it were very, very good - the first two sections were exactly the sort of scintallating pastiche that I would expect from Roberts. But I found the third and fourth sections disappointing, for reasons I attempted to articulate in the email discussion. Here is a snippet, cut to (hopefully) express my overall judgement on the book:
I think Swiftly fails because it wants to merge an early device - of fiction as a carrier for ideas - with a species of post-Victorian realism and a contemporary vision. It turns out to be like mixing oil and water, so that which ever way I look at the novel it has holes in it or strange growths sticking off it. Which makes for an interesting intellectual exercise, but not a strong, rounded novel. It would have been better, I think, had Swiftly jettisoned mimesis altogether and gone completely wild, throwing continuity and character to the wind. Better a complete disavowal of narrative traditions and the making of something new, than a clashing mismash of flesh-and-blood realism with puppet-characters and allegory. [....]The text does speaks, but only convincingly as regards theme and structure. These it ruminates over in abundance. I also think [...] that structure is meant to act as a function of character and plot. In this case, it is Roberts’ first cause, the God of his text; the structure of his world = the structure of the novel and its inhabitants. I just don’t think that it works.
With that, I leave you to your weekend. Have a good one.
~~Victoria~~