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Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.121.214.11
| | Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 04:59 pm: | |
Don't know when it's due out but Toby Litt's next book will be entitled "Journey into Space" and will be a science fiction story. I wonder what he's going to do in 18 years when he's exhaused the letters of the alphabet. Each new book starts with the next letter. (his first was Adventures in capitalism, his second was Beatniks etc). It's an odd little gimmick but it does mean you can put his books in order on your shelf a lot easier.
His best so far is definitely Hospital, closely followed by Deadkidsongs, followed by I play the drums which is level with Beatniks.
Hospital is one of my very few 10 out of 10 books even though I have no idea what the fuck it was all about. |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.121.214.11
| | Posted on Thursday, February 12, 2009 - 05:12 pm: | |
Actually I just found this on Amazon and it's out next month so I've ordered it.
Product Description
A vast generation ship hurtles away from a violent, troubled Earth to settle on a distant planet orbiting an alien star. Those who set out on this journey are long-since dead. Those who will arrive at their destination have yet to be born. For those who must live and die in the cold emptiness between the stars, there is only the claustrophobic permanence of non-being. Life lived in unending stasis. Then the unthinkable happens: two souls - Auguste and Celeste - rebel. And from the fruit of their rebellion comes a new and powerful force which will take charge of the ship's destiny. Journey into Space is science fiction at its most classic and beguiling: timeless, vast in scope and daring in execution.
I can't wait. |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
| | Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 01:53 pm: | |
I'm now three quarters of the way through this book and it is STUNNING to say the least. I've not read any generation spaceship stories before so I can't make any claims for originality but for sheer quality of prose this is unbeatable.
I make it a rule never to give a book 10 out of 10 but in this case I either need to make an exception or dock a point off nearly everything else I've ever read.
It's a deeply moving and human story which manages to span a couple of generations in only 250 pages. The prose is hypnotic and while you could argue that some plot developments are slightly predictable, when the book has it's velvet claws wrapped all round you and in you, gently but firmly keeping you in place, you don't care.
Everyone should read this book by one of Britain's greatest writers. |
Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
| | Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 02:08 pm: | |
I've read a few of Litt's earlier book, and liked them a lot. I should really try to catch up with his current stuff. Bought his short story collection in a charity shop a few weeks ago, too. |
Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
| | Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 02:09 pm: | |
Deadkidsongs is brilliant. |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
| | Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 02:32 pm: | |
which short story collection? A or E? |
Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
| | Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 03:17 pm: | |
The one with the sexy cover - a woman's legs. |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
| | Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 03:31 pm: | |
E - Exhibitionism |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
| | Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 05:59 pm: | |
I've not read all of Exhibitionism but I seem to remember it has a story with the title "The importance of maintaining eye contact during oral sex" which has always struck me as a rather good title.
If it has a tourbusting story in, that can also be found as part of the I play the Drums in aband called okay novel. (which is also excellent although nowhere near as good as Journey into space) |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
| | Posted on Friday, March 13, 2009 - 10:18 am: | |
I finished JIS last night and the quality stayed all the way through. This is certainly my favourite sci-fi book and vying for supremacy with Hospital as my favourite Litt. |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
| | Posted on Friday, March 13, 2009 - 05:22 pm: | |
Is Ursula K Leguin a professional reviewer? I just read her review of JIS and she spends the first couple of paragraphs talking about her own generation ship story, follows this by giving away the ENTIRE story of the book and sniffily concludes that's it's no good. Judging by the way she phrases it, she doesn't like it because it's not the way she wrote her similarly themed story. I don't think I've ever been so angry at a book review. She gets details of the book wrong eg she states the ship is two miles long when it's clearly desibed as being 998 metres long. She clearly has only speed-read the book because she's been paid to review it and she hasn't paid any attention to it.
Are there any legal implications to kidnapping the woman, strapping her to a chair and forcing her to read it properly? |
Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch)
Username: Mark_lynch
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.74.96.200
| | Posted on Friday, March 13, 2009 - 07:06 pm: | |
>>I've not read any generation spaceship stories before
Hmm. Stephen Baxter reckons that the Litt book is a poor example of it, too. My money, like Baxter's, for best of them all is on Aldiss's NON-STOP. Not read it since I was a teenager, but I recall it being brilliant. Baxter has a good stab at it in his fine and ambitious novel RING. |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
| | Posted on Monday, March 16, 2009 - 11:22 am: | |
Wekll Steven baxter reckons it wrong as well. It's a fantastic book |
Zed (Gary_mc)
Username: Gary_mc
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.219.8.243
| | Posted on Monday, March 16, 2009 - 11:51 am: | |
Don't listen to Lynchy, mate; he's an enthusiasm vampire.  |
Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch)
Username: Mark_lynch
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 212.74.96.200
| | Posted on Monday, March 16, 2009 - 07:26 pm: | |
This is true. I get depressed looking in the mirror when all I can see is the wall behind me. 
I hope the Litt book is good. I'd like it to be. I'll probably borrow it from the library. But my fear is it's written by a bloke who's unfamiliar with the genre so may have pulle dout allt eh stops to find out those same stops were pulled out by Brian Aldiss fifty years ago. PD James did much the same with her book CHILDREN OF MEN, which Aldiss had also written a version of eyars earlier . . .
But I hope it's good. |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 10:38 am: | |
Litt is well versed in science fiction and has been a fan since he was a child according to interviews he's done. Believe me it's a cracking read. Anyone who's read Hosp[ital knows he can handle "not normal" fiction. |
John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert)
Username: John_l_probert
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 213.253.174.81
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 02:09 pm: | |
My money, like Baxter's, for best of them all is on Aldiss's NON-STOP. Not read it since I was a teenager, but I recall it being brilliant.
I agree - Non-Stop is excellent, and so is its precursor, Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky. Here's my review of the Geinlein book from Amazon which has somehow now been attributed to 'A Customer':
This entry in Gollancz's classic reprint series was originally published in two parts in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction back in 1941 and if you bear this in mind while reading it you'll appreciate what an achievement this was. Despite the efforts of H G Wells and others, science fiction was still very much in its infancy, and I would imagine that works of fiction that quoted Newton's inverse square law of gravitation (hilariously misinterpreted near the beginning of this book) or tried to compare the concepts of space travel with knitting a sweater or baking a cake must have been pretty thin on the ground. Read it with this in mind and you'll enjoy this rather brief tale of a starship community which has existed for generations, succeeded in misinterpreting its flight manuals and lost all concept of the fact that it is, in fact, flying through space. Don't worry, I haven't given anything away that isn't mentioned on practically the first page of a story which presumably inspired Brian Aldiss's later 'Non-Stop'- a novel which tells a similar tale though perhaps without quite so many slit throats and two-headed mutants. The attitude to women and to the ship's mutant community is what one would expect for the time in which it was written but doesn't serve to detract too much from Heinlein's rapid pacing. Probably ground breaking for its time and still a pretty good read today |
Mark_lynch (Mark_lynch)
Username: Mark_lynch
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 80.225.218.53
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 07:39 pm: | |
Geinlein sounds like a cross between Neil Gaiman and Robert Heinlein!That'd make for an interesting novel.
Heinlein's pretty underrated. Why do SF writers fall off the radar so quickly? Seems wrong, somehow, that their fiction dates the fastest. |
Huw (Huw)
Username: Huw
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 218.168.179.240
| | Posted on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 - 07:47 pm: | |
Weber, I've no idea whether Le Guin is a professional reviewer or not, but she's certainly a professional writer (and a damn fine one at that!). Dunno about the strapping-to-chair part... |
Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston
Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.47
| | Posted on Friday, March 27, 2009 - 10:17 am: | |
His next book will be King Death.
Interesting title... |