26. Road to Ruin by Donald E. Westlake

Richard Stark is one of my all-time favourite authors. Stark is one of the many pseudonyms of Donald E. Westlake. As Westlake, his best known creation is probably the Dortmunder books, a series of comic crime capers starring a sad-sack heister and his crew, whose jobs always go hilariously wrong. At their worst, the Dortmunder novels are light fun with an old school New York twist. A few of them are near masterpieces of crime comedy (Drowned Hopes comes to mind). Road to Ruin falls closer to the former category.

The plot setup is a good one. A formerly powerful executive gets busted for ripping off his shareholders and is basically confined to his compound in rural New Jersey. He still has tons of money squirreled away in offshore bank accounts that the Feds can't get at, plus a massive collection of collectibles, including fancy cars. Because he is so hated (his case was a big media splash), he can't get anyone to work for him. Dortmunder and crew conspire to get hired by him in order to steal his cars. At the same time, two different groups (bilked angel investors and angry union members) are plotting to exact their revenge on the executive. The characters are funny and there is a lot of entertaining stuff going on. Unfortunately, it never comes to quite the head it could and instead of exploding in the glorious chaos that often characterizes the end of a Dortmunder book, it all kind of fizzles out. It's a quick and enjoyable read and Dortmunder fans will be happy to be back in his universe. But I'd recommend some of the earlier Dortmunder's if you are only going to read a few.

25. Fear to Tread by Michael Gilbert

This all started because I went to the library. I have an on-deck shelf that is threatening to fall of the edge of the chest of drawers it is on. There are a lot of good books there I want to read. I only went to the library to return Daughter Fair before my trip out west. But I decided to take a little browse down the english mystery and sci-fi shelves. And just couldn't help take out a few books, which will do nothing to bring down the width of my on-deck shelf.

One of those books was Fear to Tread by Michael Gilbert. I have read this book (and all of Gilbert's books) several times. But it hasn't been since college and I just thought I'd take a look, see how his prose held up. Reading the first couple paragraphs in the library was enough to suck me right back in. His solid prose, his subtle, pithy characterization, his profound love for the english character and lower-middle class London, his sensible conservatism, it was all there in the first few pages where he describes the protagonist, a principal of a large public (in the North American sense, as in state) school in a working class district of London.

Fear to Tread takes place in the early '50s, as Britain is recovering from the war. The principal, Mr. Wetherall, a stubborn and benevolent figure, stumbles, through a series of minor events, on a complex syndicate that is overseeing the stealing and redistribution of goods. Foodstuffs are still scarce and there is a thriving black market for coffee, meat, alchohol, cigarettes and other common but quality goods.

Quite early on, Wetherall, comes right up against real danger. I realize now, one of Gilbert's skills is the way he structures his book. A lot of subtle things happen, so that you don't really know what is going on, but you are intrigued. However, at the same time, he somehow lays out the situation quite cleary in the first few chapters. So from my description, it sounds quite straightforward, idealistic principal goes up against smuggling mob, but when you are reading it, there is so much other stuff going on that you don't really realize how straightforward the overall story is. That "other stuff" involves the many side characters, interesting locations and minor conflicts that might not have anything to do with the main plot. They are all so steeped in the richness of the milieu and the britishness of Gilbert's world, that they are just pleasing to read. Furthermore, he is also a master at the subtle, but totally satisfying resolution moment, where some nasty gossip or manipulative council member suddenly gets theirs.

I really can't do justice to Michael Gilbert's skill. He doesn't get much recognition in North America and I wouldn't be surprised if you don't hear about him much in Britain these days. But he is truly one of the greats. Check out any of his books. You won't be sorry.

24. Daughter Fair by Peter Graaf (John Christopher)

Dug this one up at the National Archives of Quebec, through the Bibliotheque Nationale. They had it in their computer system and I had to order it. I wonder who was the last person to read it? John Christopher, whom you've read so much about here, wrote at least two detective novels under the Peter Graaf pseudonym. The detective is Joe Dust, an unlikely American living in London in the '50s. I think that's sort of the point here, to juxtapose the cliched, wisecracking American private dick against the more procedural, proper British context. It's an interesting experiment, at least in this novel, with mixed results.

In Daughter Fair, Dust is hired by a wealthy, eccentric to find his favorite, youngest daughter, who has disappeared from the estate while on sick leave from her private school in Paris. The estate itself is a viper's nest of aristocratic weirdos. The rich guy's other two daughters live (and are trapped) there with their two husbands, all dependent on the patriarch, forced to follow his rules and lacking the money and balls to leave.

The Joe Dust character is always wisecracking, to the point of being rude. It's just slightly off. If it had been written by an American at the time, I suspect the american character would have been a little more circumspect and less arrogant. Dust's behaviour reflects the British post-war insecurity towards America's growing success and power. Even weirder, about halfway through the novel, a British inspector shows up, one who has had a history with Dust. They get along fine, in the traditional begrudging relationship of the cop and P.I., but it is the inspector who really seems to figure everything out and do all the right stuff, whereas Dust just seems to hang around and get on everyone's nerves. Daughter Fair is almost like a passive-aggressive version of Conquest in California, where the American is placed as the hero, but ends up ultimately getting shown up by good old fashioned British police work.

The mystery itself was actually quite clever and I enjoyed it's unfolding. All the simpering, dissipated upper class characters were also well drawn out and deliciously contemptible. If there has been one theme throughout Christopher's wide range of books, it's a constant critique of the aristocracy.

23. 5:45 to Suburbia by Vin Packer

I snagged this one in a box of super-cheap paperbacks at one of the larger used bookstores on Bloor street in Toronto (the one that is open quite late; the bookstore scene in Toronto is quite thriving, it seems). I got it mainly for the cover, which as you can see is quite awesome. The back cover blurb reminded me of a John D. MacDonald novel, without the violence. The lack of violence is usually a deal breaker for me in a book, but something about the set-up, with the guy commuting from the suburbs into the the city in the '50s called to me.

This book is what you'd call a "novel", you know, one of those books that isn't really about anything, where nothing actually happens, but they aren't classics by recognized names where you can at least pretend that there is some kind of "theme" to pull out of them, the kinds of books grown-ups used to read for reasons that were unfathomable to me at the time (the time being most of my life). My aunt flipped through it and aptly labelled it a "Harlequin romance for men".

The protagonist is the second-in-command of a magazine publishing house in New York. He was the right hand man to the president, but his position of power is threatened by an aggressive young newcomer who uses cheap psychology and modern methods in a bid to reshape the company and take power for himself. Another important character is an older, single, female executive (a "C-cup bitch" as the bad guy labels her) who had her day in the company but has now become an alchoholic and is in the upstart's sights as dead wood to be cleared away. She and the protagonist had also had a long-running affair.

That's the basic plot structure, but a lot of the book concentrates on the protagonist's emotional history, his humiliations in high school, his first love in college, the early years of his office affair, his relationship with the boss. It is actually a fairly thorough and believable portrait of a middle-aged, upstate New York, white guy in the '50s. The book overall was quite enjoyable. I got caught up in it and found the resolution very satisfying. The conclusion was a bit on the easy side, but done in an intricate and intelligent enough way that it wasn't until you got there that you realized it was all going to work out in a cool way. So I guess it was kind of a male Harlequin romance. I don't think I need many more of them, at least not with some good punching and shooting in between, but it kept me happily reading for a few days.

I also note that this book would have made a perfect storyline for the current hit TV series about '50s ad executives, Mad Men, an episode of which I happened to watch with the same wise aunt the week before.

22. Scapa Ferry by Antony Bridges

The cover style and blurb "qoute" made me think this was going to be a WWII nautical adventure book, which it is, in a sense. But I thought it was going to be a fictional story about a single adventurous enterprise. It doesn't say it's a true story anywhere, but I'm pretty sure it's actually a real-life account. It's about a guy who loved sailing and wanted to join the navy, but because of a slightly bum leg, was not able to. Instead he set out, with his wife, to contribute however he could, which he found out was to set up a charter boat to ferry supplies back and forth across the Scarpa Firth, a treacherous piece of sea between the northern tip of Scotland and the Orkney Islands. The British were building a naval base there at the beginning part of the war (if you look at a map, you can see that the Orkneys are strategically very important) and getting supplies to keep the construction moving was difficult due to lack of resources, skilled manpower (everybody was being sent to fight) and lack of mobilization of existing local freight and fishing vessels.

So this guy and his wife buy a small sailboat, make their way up the coast (dangerous in itself), deal with the bureaucracy of the British government and military (even though they were trying to help, they keep getting stopped for not having the right paperwork) and set themselves up to take dynamite and blasting caps between Scranton Scrabster and Lynness and a few other points. It's really more of a chronicle.

What it really is, is some hardcore sailing porn. And because of that, I'm putting this one in the mail immediately to Jarrett, owner of the Redwing. I suspect this will keep his mast upright long into the night. For me, it was really tough going in the first half because I barely understood half of what was going on, there is so much specific vocabulary. There are of course tons of things on the boat that are named and not described. There are also actions of the boat and weather behaviours. I slowly picked up some stuff and there was enough characterization and funny human anecdotes along the way, that I stuck through. There also is a ton of geography, and I did have to take some google maps research breaks to figure out where they were, though there also were some cool little maps and diagrams in the book itself. By the second half, once they get established in Scranton, the story and struggles of their daily lives came to the forefront and I really got into it.

See, one of the things I love about these British adventure authors from the 60s and 70s is their attitude. It's that classic stiff-upper-lip, let's be sensible and not cause a big fuss but do what we have to do attitude that is so lacking in everything and everyone around me these days. Though not being a fictional adventure, this book is full of that attitude. At one point, early in the book, his wife loses the top of her left index finger in the middle of a harrowing attempt to untangle their anchor from another boat in a bad storm. She doesn't even mention it until they get out of the situation and then it's simply and quietly bandaged. Later, he mentions that he realizes it was quite lucky to only be her finger, that the whipping cable could have badly injured or even killed her. But there is no unnecessary histrionics or drama and his wife's stoicism only reminds him of what a good egg she is.

I struggled through the first half, but it ended being worth it. A very satisfying read which reinforced some of my own personal values.

21. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

My sister strongly recommended this graphic novel to me and judging by the high-level accolades on the cover, she is not alone. This was the hot comic of the year and I completely missed it. It's the biography of a girl growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the 60sand 70s. Her father is gay and she figures out pretty quickly that she is too. Their relationship is complex and difficult. The book is structured in a very complex way as well, as Bechdel jumps back and forth in time, revealing different things here and there, going back to already revealed incidents and adding layers of understanding to them. It makes for a very fulfilling read because by the time you get to the end of it, you really get the "ah, yes" sensation where everything comes together in a rich and real way. The ending isn't necessarily happy. The family difficulties are not solved or absolved, but you as the reader get a sense of really understanding the situation, even being a part of it. This is why sometimes comics are better than books.

Despite my appreciation of the structure, the subject matter is not the most endearing to me. It's very academic and intellectual, with heavy references to Proust and Joyce. If you had studied them, I imagine the book would have even more depth, but I don't have so much time for that kind of literature of melancholy. The same goes for the struggles of the young lesbian, several of which I experienced first hand in liberal arts school (most whom lasted a few years before the inevitable defection to heterosexual marriage and procreation). In this case, the struggle seems genuine, but it just doesn't interest me all that much (compared to say something interesting and straight like one man trying to shoot or stab another man). But those are my personal preferences and should not detract in any way from what is a really engrossing and satisfying graphic novel.

20. Trunk Music by Michael Connelly

Grabbed this thick paperback for a loonie at the thrift store near our house. Michael Connolly delivers solid procedurals based on a career as a crime journalist in Los Angeles. He knows his stuff and spends most of the time on the crime and the investigation. This leads to lots of good interaction with a range of mostly dark and corrupted characters (in and out of the force) and excellent locales.

Here, Harry Bosch, the LAPD detective who is effective but generally in trouble with the brass investigates the murder of a succesful B-movie producer. He is found in the trunk of his Rolls with a single bullet hole in the back of his head. The trail is long and windy, passing the wife, his stripper girlfriend, the mob, the FBI and a few others. It's mostly solid and enjoyable. There is a section where Bosch hooks up with a past love that I found a bit forced and thus distracting, especially since her presence was used as a minor red herring. But it's a small part and the rest of the book chugs along. Perfect for a train ride to Toronto.

19. The Prestige by Christopher Priest

I am not a big fan of the unreliable narrative or whatever it's called. Christopher Priest writes such enjoyable prose (I might call it modern Victorian, or would that be post-modern?) and his stories so engaging that I excuse him. But it was tough reading this book, because I was constantly weighing my suspicions of the narrative against the very narratively solld (and clever) screenplay of the movie version of The Prestige. It's almost always tough following a movie with the book, but it was especially distracting for me in this case as there are some significant mysteries in the movie that are fully resolved. The story in the book has a lot of differences and I kept wondering whether Priest was going to resolve the mysteries in the book. I had this constant concern in the corner of my vision most of the time I was reading.

All that individual context aside, the story is a really cool one. It's the narrative of a career-long rivalry between two Victorian stage magicians, framed by their modern-day ancestors who stumble upon each other and try to solve the various mysteries their legacies left behind. The world of Victorian stage magic is so richly drawn and the pursuit of the two rivals careers so enjoyable that this part of the book is worth the read alone. The twists, tricks and mysteries Priest perpetrates on the reader (which are not anywhere near as open to interpretation as The Separation thus making The Prestige a much more satisfying read for unsophisticated empiricists like me) are extremely well-crafted (not unlike the stage props the magicians use) and move this book from good to great. Priest is a smart fucking guy and he does his work. I'd love to read about his technique because the structure of his books is so solid, from the whole down to the smallest detail. The Prestige could be annotated (not profusely; maybe a note or two every few pages). It would make for a very interesting read because you know that Priest hides little clues in the tiniest details. Sometimes they are facts in the narrative themselves. Other times, they are textual tricks in the grammar or use of certain words. These "annotables" do not get in the way of the narrative. They just add to the depth of the experience and the feeling that you are in the hands of a real craftsmen. I really enjoyed the movie, but you should definitely read the book first.

18. The Possessors by John Christopher

That's right, we're all John Christopher, all the time here at Olmansfifty. Actually and sadly, this is the last John Christopher book (at least in english) in the Bibliotheque Nationale. There is a mystery of his written under a pseudonym that is stored off-site and which I have ordered as well. I'll scour the tattered remains of the english library system in Montreal, but my initial searches were fruitless. He also hasn't shown up in used book stores here or Toronto. Even the tripod trilogy is not all that easy to find.

The Possessors is the story of a group of people snowed into a Swiss ski lodge in the early 60s, who are slowly taken over by an alien parasite. It starts off in a very similar way to Sweeney's Island, with a group of mostly British bourgeoisie. It looked like Christopher was going to savage them in a similar way and I was a bit concerned that we were heading into repetitive territory. Both The Possessors and Sweeney's Island were published within a year of each other. Happily, The Possessors veers away from such a similar theme of social critique (which was good in Sweeney's Island, good enough that I didn't need it a second time) and heads towards a straight-up alien invasion thriller. And it was a really good one. A nice balance of character-driven behaviour and general efficiency. People who made mistakes did so because it made sense based on who they were, not just because they were stupid. The stakes are high and the challenges higher, so you are sweating for the protagonists. And they figure out the general outline of the situation quickly enough without spending a lot of useless time not believing. Tight and gripping, The Possessors is a great little novel of alien invasion. Snag it if you find it.

17. Sweeney's Island by John Christopher

From the few biographical snippets I've read about John Christopher, he was a very prolific writer in the early part of his career. It really was a career for him and until the success of the Tripods trilogy, he had to write as much as possible. He cranked out several books a year, in several genres. He also never did any rewriting beyond the first chapter, supposedly. I don't know, his books read pretty well to me. Sweeney's Island is one of those, written in 1964. It's about a group of London bourgeois hangers-on of a very wealthy and connected guy named Sweeney. During one of his cocktail parties, Sweeney asks them to stay after where he proposes an impromptu trip on a new yacht he has just bought. He has clearly planned this very carefully, knowing that each of them either is dependent on his future generosity or is free enough to be able to just take off for a few weeks of ocean paradise.

However, it becomes apparent that Sweeney's plans are a little more elaborate than that when the ship ends up going into untrafficked routes far into the Pacific and then stops at an uninhabited tropical island far from any shipping lanes. Well, seemingly uninhabited. There are signs of previous habitation and even surprisingly organized agriculture. A constant cloud hangs over the islands larger two peaks, hiding it from view and there are other disturbing signs which I won't reveal.

The core of this book is about the people, the power and personality struggles that arise among them. Normally, I am not so interested in that path being emphasized but Christopher takes things to a pretty awesome extreme here. Shit gets really twisted. In some ways, this is very much like a Lord of the Flies with adults. Or more specifically, Lord of the Flies with british bourgeois adults from the mid-60s, a social group that Christopher rips to pieces in this book. Very satisfying.

I really enjoyed this book. The element of isolation and the social hierarchy reshaping itself once released from the strictures of authority and civilized society put this very much in the Post-Apocalyptic tradition, even though there isn't actually an apocalypse. Even if that genre isn't interesting to you, this is still a really entertaining and enjoyable book. It's turned up the intensity of my appreciation of John Christopher. I was at first only interested in checking out his PA books, but now I'm grabbing anything I can get my hands on.

14, 15, 16 The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher

Got these through the 50 books network. Jarrett found the first one and sent it on to the Lantzvillager, who passed it on to me with the second one as well. I found the third (in a special reprint with a new forward from the author) at the bibliotheque nationale. I am compressing all 3 in one post because my two predecessors did a better job than I in providing the overview of the plot of each book. In short, it is the story of a young man brought up in a post War of the Worlds earth, where humans are kept docile by a "capping" ceremony done to them when they reach puberty. Giant metal tripods patrol pastoral and sparsely-populated human lands. The young man avoids the capping and discovers a cell of rebels. He joins them and works to take down the alien oppressors.

I found these books to be fast, a bit shallow, but thoroughly enjoyable. I think the lack of depth is actually the lack of "boring stuff" that most 13-year old boys would not find interesting. In that view, these books are extremely tightly structured. It does get richer, though. I found Christopher's portrayal of the aliens nuanced. At first, you hate them, but you also get enough of a glimpse of them that you can't hate them. Since their behaviour very much reflects our own human colonization (of other humans and animals), you can't ultimately hate them without hating humans. Christopher is smart like that. He doesn't let his readers off easy, which is great for adolescent boys who just want to kick some alien ass (though there is a good amount of that as well).

The period where the heroes are in the alien city is quite disturbing and frightening as well. It's all been quite well thought through. The other thing I enjoyed was the pastoral nature of the world. The lack of technology and competition for resources kind of makes the alien-controlled earth a medieval fantasy land, which Christopher does a great job of describing. He throws out enticing details like food in a market stall or modes of dress that efficiently add richness to the atmosphere.

These really are fantastic books and I strongly recommend them for anyone looking for a gift for a young reader (probably better skewed towards the males).

Lantzvillager's review of the first and second books (I guess he hasn't finished the trilogy yet!)

Jarrett's review of the first, second and third books

13. The City Dwellers by Charles Platt

Found this one at a crazy, disheveled used bookshop way out on Mont-Royal. In the basement floor they had a few bins of english books, mostly crap from the late 80s and 90s, but I found this old british sci-fi book. It was thin and nicely yellowed, perfect for my travels to come. I didn't really know much going in, beyond that it was about characters in growing and dieing cities and it had some nice written language at the beginning.

The uniting story line is the concept of our future world becoming completely dominated by cities and the human race slowly dying out because of them. For unknown reasons, we stop reproducing. There are four parts, each one at least a generation after the previous. The first story is about a hyper-decadent rock star trying to find meaning. The second about a pair of hipster artists who have fled the city, only to have it (in the form of their decadent friends) come to them (with news about the forced devacuations as the cities die). The third is in the rundown ruins of the crumbling cities where only a few cling to tradition and the rest run around destroying things. The final chapter is a dystopia of a few running humans surviving off the empty cities, while teeny enclaves of mostly men hunt down any women they can find to reproduce with.

It's an interesting read and, though the central conceit of humans stopping reproducing (if only) due to some kind of urban malaise and special surrender is a bit far flung, I found that it held some interesting conjectures and ideas. The situations were cool and the characters engaging, but because it was more like 4 novellas strung over a greater concept, it lacked the overall narrative that would have made me really loved it. Cool find, though.

12. Night Walker by Donald Hamilton

I have toyed with Donald Hamilton in the past. It was a reading encounter with great promise that led to a real deflating letdown. He is best known for the popular Matt Helm series of manly paperbacks found in drugstore racks in the 60s and 70s. His early books were also said to be a big influence on the Parker books (written by Donald Westlake under the nom de plume Richard Stark), otherwise known as the best crime books ever. There were one or two books in particular whose titles I forget that I did read and they really did kick ass. I was so psyched because Hamilton had written so much more and they are so easy to find. I even had hope that the Matt Helm series might be competent. Unfortunately, something happened to Hamilton along the way and the other books I read by him had lost the tight, cold intelligence that had attracted Westlake. They were, instead, pandering to the audience (obvious macho tropes) and, far worse, demonstrated inefficient and emotional character behaviour. So I had to let the other Hamilton books on my on deck shelf and let go of that relationship.

I found Night Walker in a box of paperback discards that Lantzvillager was trying to get rid of (though there were many attractive covers there, they didn't quite reach the high standards of his paperback collection shelf). This looked like it might have come from the early Hamilton and I needed a book for the flight home, so I gave it a whirl (I think Lantzvillager was hoping I'd take more than one book).

It's about a Navy officer after the war on his way back to the base after leave. He is really reluctant to go back. His reluctance is given temptation as he gets a lift from a friendly salesman, who then knocks him out and leaves him for dead in the burning wreck of the car. He also leaves him his identity for some reason. Our narrator finds this out when he wakes up in a hospital room. He decides to take on the identity and see what happens. It's an interesting moral situation with an intriguing set-up and I got caught up in it.

In the end, it is a decent read. It reminded me a lot of a non-Travis McGee John D. MacDonald novel, in the setting, the situation and the nature of the ultimate antagonist. I'll put early Donald Hamilton back on the list of books that won't be too painful to read on the plane.

(Note: the edition I got is the original, not the Hard Case crime reprint. I just couldn't find the image online and didn't have time to scan it. Hard Case Crime is doing great work in any case.)

11. Bad Company by Liza Cody

I picked this one up at the Kitsilano branch of the great Pulp Fiction bookstore in Vancouver. The British packaging caught my eye and the blurbs made it sound like it might have the right stuff. The protagonist is a female private investigator in contemporary London. Bad Company might not have been the best place to start since the heroine spends the whole time kidnapped, but it was an entertaining and well-written read nonetheless. The London underworld is richly portrayed and the lowlifes, from the stupid, inexperienced thugs who pull off the kidnapping to the serious hard and well-dressed ones who are trying to stop them as well fit well into the British empirical mold. The ending was a bit anti-climactic, but I think realistic. I'll be keeping an eye open for other Liza Cody books.

10. Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne

Again, a really cheap buy. I probably should have done my research first (actually probably should have sucked it up and read the original in french) because I'm pretty positive this is one of the many badly-translated, brutally chopped english versions of Verne's books. His books were translated as children's books and had a lot of their heart removed from them. It was only recently that proper, faithful translations had been released and I'm pretty sure this wasn't one of them.

It was still an interesting book that moved forward very steadily and intriguingly. It is taken from the perspective of a young man who follows his scientist uncle to discover the centre of the earth. There is a lot of traveling and not a lot of conflict, but the voyage is quite fantastic and the ideas imaginative, so you get caught up in it. I think I owe Verne a second, proper read.

9. A Story of Days to Come by H.G. Wells

This is a short (as many of his novels are) H.G. Wells novel that I found somewhere while traveling. It has a hilariously wrong yet accurate cover of a man and woman fighting off a dog in some ruins. It's wrong because though this scene actually happened, the picture looks like a Vallejo-esque barbaric fantasy. In the book, it is two wimpy future city-dwellers who, dissatisfied with modern life, make out for the country. At one point, they do get attacked by dogs, but the scene emphasizes how hopelessly unprepared they are for life outside of the city. I really should have scanned that cover, but I left it in the free bookshelf in the laundry room of my mom's apartment. Somebody took it so maybe it got read again, which would make it worth it.

The plot follows a young couple who fall in love. The woman had been promised to a rich but unattractive industrialist, but she is in love with the idealistic young man and chooses him instead. The industrialist goes about ruining the young man. It takes place in a future where the countryside has been almost entirely abandoned by humans. Agriculture and fuels are produced by automatic machines and everyone lives in vast cities, with an extreme social and economic hierarchy. The story is a romance but also a condemnation of man's separation from nature and the skills of survival. It is also an opportunity for Wells to do all kinds of interesting speculation on technology, the future and how it will affect human society.

It's a fun, quick read, with some crazy ideas. Wells was a man of his time but beyond it as well. The class structures in the book are strongly Victorian but still don't seem wildly off (though one could argue that nothing has really changed for us since the Victorian age in terms of class). The tech is much farther off course, though much more the fun for it. One cool conception he had is a giant ring of moving platforms inside the city. The rings on the inside and outside move at 5 miles per hour. Each consecutive inner ring moves at 5 mph faster so that by the time you get to the middlemost ring, you are moving at 70 miles per hour. You can step from ring to ring quite easily because the difference between each ring is easily manageable, thus allowing you to move short or long distances quite quickly.

H.G. Wells is as cool as Evil Spock:

In honour and gratitude...

We interrupt the regular review of books for a moment of silence to remember and thank the man who gave us the tools to step into the books themselves, be the characters and live in those worlds. Thank you, Gary, you gave me a whole hell of a lot. May you rest in peace and roll well on that great table in the sky.



Gary Gygax 1938-2008

Globe & Mail obit

8. The World in Winter by John Christopher

I went through a lot of mild ups and downs with this book. I think that I approached it believing I had Christopher pegged and I think that was a mistake. The premise of this post-apocalyptic book is that the world gets colder and colder until the previously powerful northern countries crumble and the equatorial nations become the new powerhouses. But I'm already getting ahead of myself, because the first section of the book is much more personal and limited in scope. It's about a tv producer and his relationship with another couple (of which the husband has an affair with the protagonist's wife). It's here that I felt like we were going to be spending a lot of time in that weird 60s british guy sexual anxiety zone.

Fortunately, the book veers off and ends up going in a lot of interesting directions. It proceeds to show the life of expat europeans in Africa who have suddenly become second-class citizens (that's putting it mildly; they are actually desperate refugees, forced to begging, prostitution and servitude). This is really fascinating and I would love to see a longer and more in-depth treatment of this kind of reversal of class and power in the world.

The third section than becomes an adventure, where a team of Nigerians try to go back to frozen London and claim it for themselves. They take hovercrafts and follow a similar route across the English Channel that the hero of a Wrinkle in the Skin took on foot when it was waterless.

Because of the three-part structure, a World in Winter is less focused than a Wrinkle in the Skin and you get less detail of the kind us PA fanatics look for. But it also keeps the book moving along and the reader intrigued. I was very satisfied in the end.

Here's MtBenson's take (with a good storyline summary).

Here's a link with some other cool editions of the paperback.

7. After the Rain by John Bowen

[For you paperback geeks out there, the image on the top is the version I found, a reprint from '65. The one on the bottom I found at the Fantastic Fiction page for the book and I suspect is the original cover. I find it interesting how thematically close they are, almost identical, yet they hired an artist to redo it. Why? And where are all these artists today?]

























From the back cover:

The British are a hardy island people. At least two aspects of this country are world-renowned - the astonishing number of high calibre writers they produce, and their climate. AFTER THE RAIN is an impressive combination of both. In fact, Angus Wilson says: "If you like cataclysmic novels John Bowen's AFTER THE RAIN is as exciting as any deluge you can hope to find: but if you think deluges are too trivial, John Bowen has a surprise for you: his novel turns out to be satire of the first order."

I share this blurb with you, dear readers, because I found it gives an interesting peek into the marketing and mindset around this kind of sci-fi when it was published. The paperback I found is a reprint from 1965 (the book was originally published in 1959). I guess even back then the british authors had a certain reputation for writing "cataclysmic novels" (the latter is also an interesting term; I wonder when "post-apocalyptic" came about?).

If you haven't figured it out already, the cataclysm in this case is a non-stop, worldwide rainfall that soon floods the entire planet. The incessant rain and society's reaction to it is over quite quickly and most of the story takes place on a raft. Here the hero and a young girl he had met before join up with another group who have a full stock of Glub, an all-purpose food substitute. They are led by a guy called Arthur who first is the only one to demonstrate will and leadership. He then decides to become a god, then the head priest of that god. There is a lot of anxiety over the young girl hooking up with the simple bodybuilder guy on the boat (again with the 60s british sexual inadequacy; what was up with these guys!?).

As you can perhaps sense, After the Rain, falls into the allegorical category of PA literature. It takes a little while to get there and there is some humour and tragedy along the way (and a very good and disturbing scene of a mountaintop refugee camp from the rain), but the primary mission of the book seems to be about society and religion and how man may start over. Once again, this book made me think of Earth Abides. It skims along very similar themes. I kind of got into the book, in the end, because the characters were interesting and I wanted to see where it would all go. It also has a good sense of humour. I would have preffered a truly gritty and detailed look at what would happen to our world if it never stopped raining. We have enough allegory in the world today. When it comes to the end of it, I want details!

I did very much agree with the ending, which had the seemingly dull-witted bodybuilder kill the Arthur-god for going too far. It was a triumph of practicality and simple morality over excessive theorizing. Too bad the author didn't make the same choice at the beginning.

Here, I found a quote by him, where he admits as much, "My second novel, After the Rain, began as an attempt to do for science fiction what Michael Innes had done for the detective story: I failed in this attempt because I soon became more interested in the ideas with which I was dealing than in the form, and anyway made many scientific errors."

He had a fairly prolific career in television, including writing a screen adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's A Dog's Ransom! I would love to get my hands on that. His biography can be found here (and it's where I found his quote as well).

Here's Lantzvillager's review, with a very different and cool cover.

6. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

One more classic in the PA genre, Alas, Babylon falls into the short-term category, where the novel follows the events of the cataclysm itself and the immediate aftermath. In this case, it is a very realistic Cold War nuclear exchange. In some ways, Alas, Babylon is more of a Cold War novel than a true Post-Apocalyptic novel. Though in content it is in every way an "after" novel and a really good one, I suspect that the primary goal of the writer was to address what many considered a very real possibility of the time rather than to explore an alternate future of our collapsed society.

It all takes place in a very small town in Florida. The protagonist is a young lawyer and Korean War vet from an old local and upper class family. He is a bit down and unmotivated, taking out a lot of women and drinking bourbon in his coffee every morning. His brother is a high-ranking intelligence officer and he sends him a coded message that basically says the shit is going to hit the fan. Within a day, the hero in a disorganized scramble tries to prepare for the oncoming nuclear war. He also must take in his brother's wife and two kids.

The preparations and the small town's reaction to his change in behaviour are portrayed in some detail. The theme is this guy trying to get his head around what he has to do and realizing how much of his life and the lives of those around him is totally dependent on the civilized technological infrastructure. The town is portrayed as being even more clueless than him. A black family lives on his land and they are shown to be the most resourceful because they have been kept at such a low level relative to the white society. They know how to fish, farm, get clean water from the aquafer, cook local flora and fauna.

When the bombs do hit, it's quite exciting and really well done. You see it all from the protagonist's eyes, from a distance because there are no direct hits near the town. This isn't a case of total and sudden chaos, because the town stays intact. But radio and television service stops as do incoming deliveries. The first thing to really go is the local economy. I will stop going into geeky detail here, because a lot of the pleasure of the book is watching it all come apart. It really is very thoughtfully done.

Of all the other PA books I've read, Alas, Babylon makes me think of Earth Abides the most. Both are from an American perspective, from very similar times. The major difference is the timescales. But they are saying similar things. Our society rests on a very large and fragile framework. Though this book has greater faith in our human and American traditions, suggesting that with work and organization we can bring them back.

There was one thing that struck me was how incredibly removed from nature the people of this town in Florida are. They sound worse than we are today. For example: "Before The Day, except in hunting, or in war, a five- or ten-mile walk would have been unthinkable." Really? I find that surprising. Also, a woman says that they are going to have to go back to the "old-fashioned" way of feeding babies, breastfeeding. I know that they were insane about their doctors in the 50s, but I assumed most people still breast fed.

An excellent book. I strongly recommend it.

Here is Mt. Benson's better written review. We look at it with very similar perspectives, but I think his point that Pat Frank "doesn't question whether a codified society will survive; he wants to assure us that it will take a firm hand to guide us there" is well made and does differentiate Alas, Babylon from the more final Earth Abides.