Reprint: Scientists

Tags

Angela Carter, C.P. Snow, Carter Scholz, Charles Dickens, Charles Harness, Clifford D. Simak, Connie Willis, Don DeLillo, Frank Herbert, Gregory Benford, Iain Pears, Ian McEwan, Ian Watson, John Banville, Jonathan Swift, Lucius Shepard, Michael Crichton, Nancy Kress, Pamela Zoline, Piers Anthony, Rafael Carter, Roger Zelazny, Russell McCormmach, Thomas More, William Boyd

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. This one first appeared in Vector 211, May-June 2000.

Analysis

Tags

Christopher Priest, Connie Willis, David Hartwell, James Morrow, John Banville, John Clute, Kathryn Cramer, Kathryn Morrow, Pamela Zoline, Simon R. Green, Tom Godwin, Tony Daniel, Ursula K. Le Guin, Vernor Vinge, Wyn Wachhorst, Yevgeny Zamiatin

I had always planned to end my run of daily posts on this blog on my birthday, but illness meant shifting it a day earlier.

I had a couple of things in mind when I started this exercise back at the beginning of August. The first and simplest reason was that I have, over the years, produced an awful lot of material that has only ever appeared in print media. So I thought it would be useful, for my purposes as much as anything, to start putting in online. It’s a start only. I’ve now put online a reasonable if random selection of reviews, articles, columns and interviews that have appeared in Vector, New York Review of Science Fiction, Foundation, various fanzines and convention publications over the last 14 years. It’s not everything from that period by any means, and I’ll periodically put up others over the next weeks and months, I just don’t intend to do it on such an intensive basis. As for earlier material: I’d like to do the same for that, but in those cases it will require scanning or retyping the pieces, and at the moment I have far too many other things on my mind.

The second reason was to revitalise the blog. I’ve never been systematic in putting pieces up here. At times, months can pass between posts. My intentions for the blog have always been low-key, but I had never intended such neglect. So I thought this would give me a regular pattern of posting for a while, with other reprintings waiting in the wings to sustain a more regular presence. And that worked, rather better than expected. Regular traffic on the blog has increased (a side effect, but welcome), and it has also inspired more original pieces from me than I think I’ve managed in any similar period for a long time.

So far, so good, therefore. But then …

Reprint: Pharmakon

Tags

Dirk Wittenborn, John Banville, Russell McCormmach

Today I am spending the day feeling particularly unwell, and getting rather short-tempered with my laptop to boot. Still, I have managed to put together another post, this time a review of Pharmakon by Dirk Wittenborn that first appeared in the New York Review of Science Fiction 248, April 2009.

Reprint: The Infinities

Tags

John Banville, Keith Roberts

I’m going to start this regime of uncovering old reviews from print-only venues with The New York Review of Science Fiction, and in particular with one of my favourite authors, John Banville. This review of his 2009 novel The Infinities appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction 258, February 2010.

Simenon and evil

Tags

Georges Simenon, John Banville, John Gray

Off to the London Review Bookshop yet again, (by way of a Starbucks where the bacon and egg panini seemed to consist mostly of mushrooms) to see John Banville in action once more. This could get to feel like stalking. This time he and John Gray are talking about Georges Simenon, whose books I’ve found unreadable though I’ve enjoyed the Maigret dramatisations on the radio.

Flaws in the Matrix

Tags

John Banville, Keith Roberts, Rudyard Kipling

Anyone who has driven along the dispiriting stretch of holiday homes overshadowed by the grim sea wall at Dymchurch will understand well enough why the fairies chose to flit from there. But as Rudyard Kipling wrote it, the fairies left because Britain changed from being Catholic believers to Protestant sceptics.

I’m only omniscient some of the time

Tags

John Banville

A photograph never quite tells the whole story. I recognised John Banville the moment he walked into the London Review Bookshop, he was exactly like his photographs. Yet there was still something different: he was shorter and heavier than I had anticipated. His face seemed the result of high gravity, the flesh had descended loosely around cheek and jaw but was tight across the brow. He had that mournful, Clement Freud look, offset by an attractively self-deprecating sense of humour.

o thalassa

Tags

John Banville

There are, to my mind, two forms of novel by John Banville. In the one he appropriates a real life as the skeleton around which to hang his story, as in the historical novels which first attracted me to his work, Kepler and Doctor Copernicus, or more recently Anthony Blunt in The Untouchable or Paul De Man in Shroud. In the second, what we might call his more attenuated works, he goes into the febrile mind of a man (usually called Max Morden, an appropriately death-fixated name, though I am never entirely sure if we are meant to believe they are all the same Max Morden) who is addicted to remembering, so that all, past and present, acquire an etiolated quality. I enjoy both types, but the latter, though slimmer, are usually much slower to read, and The Sea (Picador 2005) is definitely of the second sort.