Category: Books

Alien3 – the unproduced screenplay by William Gibson (novelisation by Pat Cadigan)

July 10th, 2022

Goodness, what a lengthy title, even if I did edit it down somewhat. And I couldn’t superscript in the headline, unfortunately.

This took me quite a while to get through, because although it’s a novel and not a movie, it was meant to be a movie: and all movies are too long.

So this was too long. If it was a movie, it would be at least half an hour too long, like most of them are. You could shake this novel and lose that half an hour. There are a few too many characters, for example. Maybe too many p.o.v. characters, but certainly too many in general. I won’t go on before firing off the spoiler horn™, as my podcast friends call it.

Spoilers follow

You have been warned. Everybody knows that the original Alien³ was no damn good. You will find some people willing to defend it, I’m sure, because the universe is infinite and full of monkeys, but most right-thinking people were out of that movie as soon as Newt and Hicks turned up dead.

Alien³ had a long and painful development process, and along the way the producers commissioned and then rejected a couple of screenplays by renowned science fiction author William Gibson. If you’re dedicated, you can find them online. This here novelisation is by renowned science fiction author Pat Cadigan, a person I like to imagine always wears a cardigan when she writes.

So why wasn’t this made? And why did they choose instead the utter shit that they did?

Now, if you know your science fiction you know that Gibson was not the natural choice for something like this. His brand of cerebral cyberpunk thriller might make a decent movie, but how that would fit with the Alien franchise, I don’t know. Dan Simmons would have been around at the right time, as would Cadigan herself. Orson Scott Card, maybe? Or, hell, just someone who could write a decent screenplay.

So what happens here? Well, Ripley and Newt and Hicks and Bishop all survive, but (and here’s your first clue as to why this was rejected) Ripley is in a coma, and does not feature except as an unconscious figure in a clinic. Newt is around for a bit, but is then sent off by Hicks on a ship bound for Earth. And given what goes on here, we should say a doomed ship.

Hicks is the protagonist. Bishop his supporting player, though they don’t get many scenes together. Which is a bit like DeNiro and Pacino in Heat, which is why I’ve always thought that was shit too.

The survivors from Aliens are picked up by the denizens of two different space stations: one of them some kind of communist workers’ paradise, the other owned by The Company. To cut a long story short, on both stations, people decide to run experiments on the weird alien DNA and hijinks ensue.

In one case, of course, The Company are entirely responsible; in the other, it’s just a cold war arms race scenario.

Aliens are everywhere, but there no longer seems to be any rhyme or reason to their lifecycle. One of the things I quite liked about the first two films was the sense that the aliens made a sort of sense. Queen lays eggs, eggs hatch facehuggers, facehuggers spawn chestbursters, chestbursters become drones who feed the queen. But in this hot mess, the aliens can apparently grow inside any organism who comes into contact with the weird black stuff that is their highly adaptable DNA equivalent, and there can be multiple queens, and apparently more aliens than there ever were host bodies. It’s all a bit much. And the weird black stuff seems very reminiscent of the shit that turned up in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, in case you were wondering where those films got their shit ideas.

All of this is because we start with the problem, if they killed the alien queen at the end of Aliens, how can there be another film with more aliens? The answer is, *waves hands*. This is a shame, because I suppose with an evil Company in the picture, there are any number of ways that you could get more aliens. And presumably, if they left eggs behind on one planet, they could have left eggs behind on any number of other planets. Or it could have turned out that someone on LV-426, before they all got killed, had previously fired off a drone with an alien sample on board. Which just so happens to arrive at the space station here as Hicks and co are rescued.

As I mentioned above, there are a few too many characters here, so that it’s hard (without them being on a screen in front of you played by different actors) to differentiate them or care about them—especially as most of them get killed. And especially as none of them are Ripley. One thing’s for sure: there seems to be a rule that only a maximum of three humans can be left alive at the end of the film. And it being a movie, anything that can go wrong does go wrong, all authority figures are useless, The Company is evil but also stupid, and only Hicks (or Bishop) can save them.

Cadigan is not a bad writer, but the 428 pages of this novel do drag a bit, so it’s a shame she didn’t have better source material to work with.
Recently read…

July 9th, 2022

Sea of Tranquility – Emily St John Mandel

I awarded this (very short) novel four stars as soon as I finished it, but on reflection I am deducting a star because it seems to have been almost completely forgettable.

So here we are, a couple of weeks later, and I’m struggling to remember its point. You may have read that there’s a time travel element to this, and there is indeed a knotty timey wimey plot worthy of Steven Moffat. Fine: I’m always here for that. But then there’s also the stuff about a writer on a book tour during the pandemic, and it all got a bit Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Allow me to explain: traditionally, when a rock band releases their first album, it’s often full of the good stuff they’ve honed and developed coming up through the clubs and building a following. Then comes that difficult second album, and if they’re any good and have a following wind, a third.

All their early songs will be about their lives and experiences up to then.

But then they might be on the road, promoting those first three albums, touring incessantly, and before you know it, all their songs are about the record company executives who blight their lives, their hotels, and what it’s like to never stop moving.

And then the plane crashes.

I feel like this slight, novella length outing is probably best considered an unfortunate by-product of being an author who was on a book tour during a pandemic. Mandel is a good writer, and Station Eleven is still my favourite book of the last decade, but I’ll probably never read this one again.

Without Fail (Jack Reacher #6) – Lee Child

I’m not a Reacher superfan, so I’m no expert, but this seemed like an atypical Reacher novel to me. I mean, I’ve only read two or three before, and I’ve seen the recent TV series and the films, but I reckon you could substitute some other character’s name for Reacher’s here, and it would be a fairly bog-standard thriller about a threat to the life of a politician.

What did I expect? A lot more conversations in which Reacher told bad guys what was going to happen before beating the crap out of them, I suppose. In fact, this novel didn’t really kick into gear until after halfway through (64% on my Kindle), having spent its first half putting Reacher in an unusual (unlikely) – for him – situation and establishing an unconvincing relationship with a secret service agent on the Vice President’s protection detail.

I’ll explain my rating: three stars is always “all right if you like this kind of thing” while four or five stars are “good” and “excellent”.

So I’m afraid this doesn’t even get three stars, because if you like this kind of thing you probably won’t like this because Reacher doesn’t beat enough people up. He also sits in meetings and wears a suit, if you can believe that. I’m actually being generous with two stars because there’s a completely pointless fridging as well. Jack Reacher: The Afternoon Meeting.
The Midwich Cuckoos

June 7th, 2022

Although all science fiction tends to be about the context of its creation, the classics can transcend their eras and their malleable meanings can speak to different generations. Invasion of the Body Snatchers might have been a straightforward reds-under-the-bed political allegory in the 1950s, but by the 70s it reflects the political cynicism of the post-Watergate era; even later, it reflects (post)modern fears about personal identity and authenticity. “I feel like a pod person,” as one of Douglas Coupland’s characters says in Generation X.

From pod people to brood people: the brood parasites of The Midwich Cuckoos. John Wyndham’s 1957 novel was a British take on the “enemy within” genre — with a patriarchal slant — as civil servants and dutiful military officers take charge of a small English village when all the women of childbearing age become pregnant with alien babies.

Sky Max’s television version immediately reflects the times we live in. The quaint village of the original has become the “historic market town” of 2022: complete with new-build cul-de-sacs and far weaker community bonds. The well-meaning officials of 1957 become the slippery technocrats and compromised law enforcement officers of 2022. The white people who all have blonde haired children in 1957 become the ethnically diverse melting pot de nos jours. And so it goes. At least the wigs remain reassuringly, distractingly bad.

The reviewer in the Guardian wasn’t keen, awarding two stars and complaining that this new version was a missed opportunity, post #metoo, to talk about women’s reproductive rights and the rest. A classic case of reviewing the show it isn’t rather than the show it is. As it stands, this is a fairly faithful adaptation (although I haven’t seen it to the end) that allows Wyndham’s allegory to work its magic. Of course, there is a reproductive rights angle, but these telepathic babies put a stop to any such terminations from inside the womb, and there’s not much more you can say. They’re a telepathic hive mind: a new kind of human, or something else altogether.

So what does it all mean, in 2022? My mind couldn’t help drifting to thoughts about Generation Z and snowflakes, and Twitter pile-ons, and the lack of tolerance for any kind of offence or discomfort. I was thinking of it today when a colleague was surrounded by aggrieved teenage girls in a classroom when she attempted to introduce a new seating plan. You get this vibe from the Midwich children: how dare you make us feel bad?

More straightforwardly, Midwich in 2022 is about how you can’t trust the government, or the police, or your kids, or your spouse. But the wigs are perhaps the most disturbing element; and that baby cuckoo’s mouth in the title sequence looks like a vulva.

[Insert joke about blonde-haired, blue-eyed parasite in Downing Street here.]
A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris

June 1st, 2022

This second volume of diaries has a different tone than the first, Theft by Finding. That earlier (2017) volume covered years (1977–2002) during which Sedaris wasn’t yet a successful essayist and public speaker. In that first volume, the younger Sedaris spent indigent years as an addict and odd-job person before finding his voice in Santaland. This second volume covers the years in which the hugely successful Sedaris flew around the world signing books, giving public readings, and shopping.

And everywhere he goes, he collects outrageous stories. Whether they come from his people, or are simply his observations of the terrible things human beings do, they are all grist to his mill. At one point, he ruefully mentions one of his pieces being “fact checked” by The New Yorker. He writes non-fiction, but not really. His main subject has always been himself, and these diaries give you access to the base material before it is honed.

His people are the ones who stop him on the street to share an anecdote or off-colour joke, or attend one of his readings, or line up in a book store to ask for an outrageous dedication in the front of his latest publication. Be careful what you wish for, by the way: one man asks for such a dedication in a book he planned to give to his mother. Sedaris wrote, Your son left teeth marks on my dick. Don’t come here if you’re the type to take offence.

A Carnival of Snackery takes us from 2003 to the end of 2020; it’s not so much a day-by-day account of that time as a quick-fire tour, edited highlights, not even week-to-week as it is month-to-month. It’s still a hefty read: 562 print pages, giving each year (on average) just over 30 pages. Sedaris writes in the foreword that he has missed out the multiple entries about mice infesting their house in France, for example.

It comes across as a restless, magpie existence. The flat in Paris, the house in Normandy, the London pad, the apartment in New York, the beach house in North Carolina, the house in West Sussex. And this doesn’t include the hotels, the airports, the bookshops, the cars and coffee shops in which Sedaris encounters his people. He enjoys the fruits of his success: the first class seats, the five star hotels, the VIP treatment. At the same time, he’s not remotely squeamish or standoffish, and has made a career out of his willingness to “go there”, whether “there” is a swimming pool someone just took a shit in, or a slightly dodgy neighbourhood in Bucharest, or the roadside verges of West Sussex, where he famously picks litter.

Sedaris’ lack of squeam is his brand, which means that some parts of this are a bit gross for someone like myself. You might also end up horrified at Americans in general, as almost everyone he meets seems to hold views that are beyond the pale. And Sedaris collects all these stories because he is able to withhold judgement — or at least appear to at the time.

Reading these diaries might mean that you decide never to swim in a public pool again, and you will certainly wonder about every surface that you touch in a public building from now on. It’s ironic for such a globetrotter to have ended up locked down in New York City in 2020. Of all the places he could have landed, this surely must have felt the most claustrophobic.
Archangel by Robert Harris

May 1st, 2022

So I finished this book, but I’m going to avoid mentioning the country in which it is set because I don’t want their bots/trolls coming here and taking an interest, which is what happened the last time I mentioned The Country to the East.

You’ll have noticed that I have been reading a lot of Robert Harrises lately. There was a day on the Kindle store when a whole lot of them were 99p. And unlike the time I bought a load of Inspector Montalbano novels for 99p and then discovered that I didn’t enjoy them, I do enjoy a Harris.

I was discussing a different novel with someone the other day (Station Eleven, as it happens), and they said something along the lines of, “It’s good, but I wouldn’t consider it literature.” Which, coming from my background, I don’t even know where to start. So literature seekers beware, you might not consider a Robert Harris thriller to be Art or Literature, but there is a whole world of highly competent, readable novels out there, written by the kind of writers who seem to be able to reliably knock ’em out on an annual basis.

The premise of Archangel is that an underachieving historian, Christopher Kelso, stumbles across an extraordinary rumour. A former leader of The Belligerent Country to the East – arguably the worst monster in history – who conducted a reign of terror, murdering or starving millions through purges and famine, left behind a notebook. And Kelso meets someone who claims to know where it is.

Chasing this rumour around the capital city of The Belligerent Country to the East, Kelso finds himself, by turns, frustrated, tempted, threatened, followed, arrested, and so on. Eventually, he reluctantly joins up with an American (journalist? CIA?) and they find themselves in the Northern city of the title. This is a place of rusting submarine hulks, decommissioned weapons, and grim, endless winter. What do they find there? Well, that would be the Big Reveal. Needless to say, this being The Belligerent Warmongering Dictatorship to the East, they are followed. To be fair, the novel is set pre-Dictator, in the régime of the Drunken Galoot called Boris (not that one).

It’s a decent enough page turner, though it didn’t grab me by the throat. When the grabbing doesn’t happen, I find myself focusing on silly details, like the lack of sleep had by the protagonist, or the lack of food, drink, washing etc. These kind of mechanical details shouldn’t matter, and don’t, but you can’t control reception.

Anyway, decent. Of course, there’s a ~~film~~ TV mini series (Daniel Craig), just as there was for The Ghost (Pierce Brosnan). I should have a mini Films Based on Robert Harris Novels Starring Actors Who Have Played James Bond festival.
The Ghost by Robert Harris

April 21st, 2022

Hot on the heels of the not-very-good Peston novel, and entirely by coincidence, I picked up The Ghost by Robert Harris.

As I indicated at the end of my Peston review, Harris’ prose was an immediate breath of fresh air, but here was yet another portrayal of a Blair-like politician, this one at the opposite end of his Prime Ministerial career.

The ghost of the title is a ghostwriter, hired to polish the ex-Prime Minister’s memoirs, which have been drafted (poorly) by an aide who has apparently committed suicide by jumping from a car ferry on its way to Martha’s Vineyard.

This guy is a professional, used to turning the coals of celebrity anecdotes into polished diamonds for the best seller lists. But this is his first foray into politics. He finds himself in the slightly toxic inner circle of a former Prime Minister accused of war crimes, who is apparently having an affair with one of his officials while his wife snipes from the sidelines. The Blair-like character cuts a sad figure: a man who once pulled the levers of power, who now has nothing to do but collect hefty fees for lectures.

The ghostwriter finds him curiously reluctant to talk about some parts of his life, and is warned against touching certain subjects. But then he finds himself obsessively investigating what became of his predecessor.

Typically for Robert Harris, the plot rocks along at a good pace, and this is an easy read. My one criticism would be that the big revelation at the end doesn’t really have much shock value. But then some would argue that endings don’t matter.

There’s a film of this, which I might look out for.
A podcast by me: The Lodge

April 15th, 2022
With my younger daughter, I’m thinking about doing a podcast version of her university radio show, which is otherwise only available live. There are a few hoops to jump through before we get to that, but part of the thinking has involved setting up some recording equipment and doing some test recordings. Because of various things preying on my mind, I needed a side project this week, and this was it.

What I decided to do as a precursor project was record an audio version of my (inter)National Novel Writing Month project from last November. It lends itself to podcasting because – thanks to the nature of NaNoWriMo – many of the chapters are about the same length. This gave me a reason to both revise each chapter and set myself up on Apple Podcasts Connect (and Anchor/Spotify), meaning that if I do get around to the other thing, we’ll be ready to go.

The NaNoWriMo project is called The Lodge: a ghost story, and I think we’re going to end up with about 21 episodes of around 15-20 minutes each. It has been quite an interesting exercise to record myself reading this, because of the difference between speech and writing. Something that looked okay on the page would sometimes be too clunky or difficult to read out loud. I’ve got a lot of practice reading stuff aloud (I’m a teacher), but it has been a good number of years since I read any of my own material.

The show has it’s own page on this blog, where I’ll post links to each episode. I think the sound quality is okay, although my nice microphone is really meant for singing rather than speaking.

Links above. Please give it a listen / follow.
The Whistleblower by Robert Peston

April 12th, 2022

What is a “scoop”? A utensil resembling a spoon? A novel by Evelyn Waugh? A “piece of news published by a newspaper or broadcast by a television or radio station in advance of its rivals?”

Waugh’s 1938 novel is about a hapless countryside columnist who gets mistaken for someone else and sent to a war zone. It’s a satire on the cynicism of the news media and its indifference to human suffering. A variation on the supposed William Randolph Hearst telegram to an illustrator: “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.”

Although the use of the word scoop saw a steady increase in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, it saw a dip in the (less cynical?) 1950s and 1960s before a sudden and precipitous rise from the 1990s to this day. I may be wrong, but I don’t think this increase has to do with a global obsession with a means of removing dry or semi-solid substances from a container. In other words, the tremendous increase in the usage of the word scoop coincides with the era in which “publishing the news ahead of your rivals” is about as meaningless a metric as you can get.

If we wind back time to the 1990s, to an era of AOL disks, dial-up modems and slowly loading web pages, we find ourselves in the milieu of Robert Peston’s 2021 novel, The Whistleblower. Being a journalist, Peston got an easy ride from his fellow hacks on the review pages when this came out (‘BRILLIANT’; ‘CRACKING’; ‘WINNING’), but the scoop on The Whistleblower is that it’s not very good at all. If you hate spoilers, look away now, but especially don’t look at the tagline on the book cover, which gives the whole game away.

Preston North End is a football club which is currently resting at 13th place in the English Football League Championship division. Robert Peston is an irritating television presenter with a background in print journalism who struggles to finish a spoken sentence and yet unaccountably became a news celebrity during the 2008 financial crisis. All I could think of as I started to read The Whistleblower was that it must have been a shock to his system to have to finish so many (bad) sentences.

You’d call this a roman à clef, except that the key is so comically large that it’s like one of those you used to get with 21st birthday gifts, back in the mists of time. And Peston really wants us to know we’re back in the mists of time, throwing in so much clunky period detail that it’s like being caught in an explosion at a car boot sale.

So there’s this journalist, see, who works for this financial newspaper, and his dad is like this Old Labour grandee, and his sister gets knocked off her bike. Gil Peck is the name. A quick glance at Peston Forth Bend’s Wikipedia page reveals that Peston used to work for the Financial Times, that his dad was a Labour peer, and that his sister was once… knocked off her bike. Let me give you a hand with that giant key.

It’s 1997, an election is due, the Tories have descended into a hapless mess of corruption and sleaze, and the leader of ~~New~~ Modern Labour is set fair to be the new Prime Minister. Gil Peck, when he’s not snorting cocaine at the Groucho Club or juggling one of his mobiles or repeatedly describing the gothic architecture of the Houses of Parliament, is investigating his sister’s sudden death and – hold on to your hats – the pensions policy she was working on just before she died. (I don’t think Peston’s real sister died as a result of her bicycle collision.)

The first third of the book is overwritten, trying too hard to be writerly, and focusing on needless descriptive detail. There’s definitely too much information about the tax arrangements of pension funds. It’s like Peston doesn’t know what a Maguffin is. Peck also keeps talking about his “Nokia”, just in case we forget that he has two of them and that it’s 1997.

Instead of something like, “I checked my diary and remembered I had a lunch date with…”, we get ¾ of a page on the history and importance of the Filofax, which is one of the car-boot period details Peston squishes in, quite unnecessarily. If you’re going to lampshade the Filofax so obviously, then it had better have some kind of pay off later in the book, but no. Loads of similar threads are left dangling. There are purloined documents, never mentioned after the first third; a stolen notebook (no consequences); another stolen notebook (no consequences); possible attempts on the protagonists’ life (no consequences).

And this is the bubble we’re reading about: the one in which the only thing that matters is the scoop, and the cynical lack of interest in the consequences means that we’re never really outside that bubble. Which, in a sense, is a realistic depiction of the privileged and rarified world of politics and the media in which diversity means you went to Cambridge rather than Oxford.

I was talking about this bubble with a friend. I often wonder about these people, especially politicians, who seem to have no hinterland beyond their ambition for power and money. In terms of the news media, it’s people who have no hinterland beyond their obsession with the scoop, with tripping people up, catching people out.

(And here I will remind the reader that the very notion of a “scoop” is laughably irrelevant in the post-1997 world. As soon as news appears, it’s tweeted and shared and quoted, and nobody knows or cares who got there first.)

I try to imagine these peoples’ worlds, beyond political manoeuvring, especially Tories. Do their lives consist of gymkhanas, shooting weekends, dinner parties? What do they talk about? When Tories go on the attack against the BBC or Channel 4, they seem to do so in a vacuum, with only superficial knowledge of why people care about these institutions. I can’t imagine Tony Blair or David Cameron or Nadine Dorries (or Jeremy Clarkson?) sitting down to watch Gentleman Jack, or The Good Fight. Their remoteness from the lives of ordinary people is a well-known problem, but it extends beyond politics into the heart of the media. There’s a clear difference, as I have often observed, between working in the media and consuming it as culture. I’m talking here about a version of those Radio Times interviews, where a prominent actor, promoting their latest appearance, would be asked, And what do you watch on TV? And they would reply, I don’t really watch TV.

What I’m driving at here is that the bubble world portrayed by Peston seems all too real, in the sense that his protagonist can’t see beyond his next headline — but also in the sense that The Whistleblower seems to be a novel written by someone who hasn’t read many novels.

Oh, I’m sure he has read some things. I’m sure that all these politicians and political journalists had formative years. I think there was probably a time when even Tony Blair read a book or watched a film. But then I think that stopped, and it all became some kind of nebulous idea about what other – less busy and important – people do with their time.

By chance, the next book I picked up to read was The Ghost, by Robert Harris. Here we have another fictional portrayal of a Tony Blair–like politician. Blair’s legacy: to be portrayed as the very worst example of a big fucking disappointment. Whereas Peston was writing about a Blair–like leader on the cusp of his first term, Harris’ version is in the aftermath, on the lecture circuit and writing his memoirs while being accused of war crimes. But apart from that spooky coincidence of Blair-like legacy, the contrast in writing styles after 394 pages of Peston Dearth Penned was stark. Here is Harris, a proper novelist, who can string sentences together and make you feel you’re in a safe pair of hands; and there was Peston, slippery fingered hack, who can string clichés together but can’t write. One is a Premier League novelist; the other is 13th in the Championship—at best!
Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod

April 6th, 2022

The first in a trilogy: now, there’s a phrase to make the heart sink.

On the one hand, this is a straightforward piece of hard science fiction about the development of FTL travel, set in an intriguing future in which England and Scotland are in an (even more) uneasy relationship, as part of separate polities. One of them is clearly based on the European Union; the other a kind of bastard coalition of the US and client countries. There’s a third polity, something to do with Russia, don’t mention the war.

As the first in a trilogy, this is not a book in a hurry to unfold its secrets, so the reader is confronted with a narrative split into several different strands. One strand follows a mathematician-scientist who gets a letter from her future self; another follows a ship building cooperative in Scotland; another seems to be on a lightyears-distant planet where scientists and colonist-squatters have an uneasy relationship with the local rocks; and then there’s an orbiting science station exploring Venus.

Needless to say, these threads will pull together, as the reader trusts when setting out. It’s not a bad read: quite entertaining, though it does take the reader a while to follow the various threads because there are so many of them. I like Ken MacLeod’s style, though I’ve not read much of his stuff. To be honest, there’s a whole confusion of Scottish-named science fiction writers and it’s not easy to keep track. This seems to be becoming a theme. Ian McDonald, Ian R MacLeod, Ken MacLeod: I’m not joking. It’s really hard to keep track of who writes what. Anyway, I’ve read some of Ken MacLeod’s short fiction, I think, and I’ve read Learning the World, and possibly Cosmonaut Keep, though don’t quote me.

Quite entertaining, but you know what I’m about to say: it doesn’t have a proper ending. And the question is, if this wasn’t 99p would I have tried it? And if the sequel comes along and it’s £8.99 or more, would I be desperate to read it? And the answer, I think, to both of those questions, is no.
Six things about The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi

April 4th, 2022
1. I read the inside flap only after I’d read the whole book and I was frankly nonplussed by the amount of plot the blurb gave away. I mean, it’s under 260 pages, so to give away anything is too much. I read it from a position of almost complete ignorance. So if you too know nothing about this book, just read it first. I promise you’ll enjoy it more that way.
2. All I knew about this was the following: John Scalzi is a good writer, who has a light, breezy style that can be very funny and is hard to replicate. Scalzi takes a hard thing and makes it look easy. I didn’t even know what a kaiju was, and my only clue was the dinosaur-like silhouette on the cover*.
3. 258 pages, and yet the cover price for the hardback is £17. We’ve been here before, with the alarmingly slim Silverview by John Le Carré. £17 is a lot of money for something this slim. I did not pay this amount: in fact, someone loaned me their copy. I would not pay this amount, even though this is very entertaining.
4. The friend who loaned me this copy recommended I read the Author’s Note at the end, first, which I did. Scalzi is very entertaining on how this book came to be and how the book he was supposed to be writing didn’t.
5. Jaimie Gray works in marketing for a food delivery company. He goes in for his six month performance review, full of ideas about how to make more money for the company and is promptly fired. This is the realistic frame story to this book: there’s a pandemic, and precarious work is about to get even more precarious. Pointless office jobs are going to be revealed as truly superfluous to society’s needs. For Jaimie, the gig economy beckons.
6. I don’t want to say more because it truly was a joy to read this knowing nothing about it. There’s a lot to be said for the complete media blackout. This is a quick read, a fun read, and you can’t help thinking that it would also make great telly. It’s full of cultural references (films, games, other books) that went right over my head, but I didn’t care.
*I really didn’t! I’ve never seen any of those films, never even been remotely interested. None of which matters at all.