MG Farrelly

I’m actually deep in projects, but here’s what I’ve been reading before bed or stealing snatches of via audio book.

The Kraken by China Mieville
At turns it’s Neil Gaiman, Philip K. Dick and Douglas Adams with the gravitas of H.P. Lovecraft. Yes, China Mieville is of the quality of writer to be mentioned with those fine authors. A London mystery as told by a mystagogue, this is worth your yankee dollars

Matter by Iain M. Banks

I was late to the game on the Culture series, my usual abhorrence of spacey-wacy (but not timey-wimey) sci-fi kept me from enjoying Banks loopy galactic utopia. My prejudice only protected me from enjoyment. Matter is a delicate thing, it’s several narratives, all bouncing off each other, and yet not touching for great lengths of the book. Like watching two trains (or in this case three or four) on the same track, all barreling down on each other. It’s a door-stop of a book too, Banks takes his time here. I liked Excession a bit better, because it focused on the deeply strange world of “The Minds”, the enormous and often mad artificial minds that populate, and some say run, the Culture. But then, I’m dork.

The Cleanest Race by B.R. Myers

Here’s some nightmare fuel. Myers takes a fresh look at North Korea and sees something that many western observers have overlooked, racism. North Korea is often written off as a tin-pot dictatorship, Kim Jong Il is seen as a military thug kept in power by some bizarre religious devotion sprung up around his father. Myers looks past that, seeing how the extreme xenophobia and racial mania has shaped North Korea into what is arguably the most isolated nation on the planet. When you think about the possibility of such a state as a nuclear power…well…you won’t sleep easy.

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