Magical London – Gaiman, Stross and Aaronovitch

Finding a good new-to-me writer and series is always a delight and I’m celebrating my discovery of Aaronovitch and The Rivers of London by putting them in the context of some books I’ve known much longer.

Charles Stross: The Laundry Files

A mash-up of Fleming – Deighton – Le Carre spy novels and Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos? Why not? And some cubicle-life workplace humour for light relief? Sure. The result won’t be to everyone’s taste but some of us will find it to be great (gory, gruesome) fun.

The Atrocity Archives (2004) and its sequels follow a ‘computational demonologist’ working in the Laundry, a secret British occult intelligence organisation. Magic in this series is dangerous, as are the supernatural entities, but real enough that modern technology can help keep it under control.

Stross’s earliest work was SF, and very good too.

Ben Aaronovitch: The Rivers of London

This series (2011 onwards) is very similar to the Laundry Files but lighter. The leading character is a London police constable assigned to a minuscule unit dealing with crimes with a magical aspect. His boss is a magician and he has to be trained in the art himself.

The ‘rivers’ of the title are the gods and goddesses of the Thames and its tributaries; other supernatural entities appear, too. The magical tradition here has descended, master to pupil, from the work of Isaac Newton, and depends on Latin spells, ‘mental forms’ and magical objects. (Do we detect a harrypottery influence? Probably.)

We’re a long way from the classic police-procedurals, in a London which is realistically multi-ethnic as well as magical, but the form works as well as ever.

Neil Gaiman: Neverwhere

If the Laundry Files and the Rivers of London are siblings, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) is a second cousin. It’s a hero’s journey set in a contemporary London which has a hidden aspect, London Below, a parallel society invisible to ordinary Londoners. Strange and magical people and creatures live there.

Gaiman flits from comics to books to video to audio with astonishing ease and skill, and many of his works appear in several forms. Neverwhere is a good example. It began as a  (very good) TV series, was published soon afterwards as a novel (which I think is even better) and has also appeared as an audiobook and a comic series (which I haven’t seen). Wikipedia has the details.

Breath

Breath by James Nestor - coverBreath, the new science of a lost art

James Nestor, Penguin 2020.

Nestor, a science writer, explains in the introduction to Breath that he was alerted to the possibilities of breath-based health therapies (conventional and not) when his doctor sent him to a yoga breathing class to fix up his own chronic poor health. It worked, and sent him on an intermittent quest  (he wrote another book along the way) to learn more.

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Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet coverZen and the Art of Saving the Planet

Thich Nhat Hanh

Rider, 2021 plumvillage.org/books

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet is a very worthwhile book with a couple of odd aspects.

The general reader is likely to read it exactly as it is presented, as a book by Thich Nhat Hanh (“Thay” to his many followers) with commentaries from one of his senior students. As such, it is wise, gentle and encouraging, like everything else of his that I know.

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Black Swan – a Koorie Woman’s Life

Black Swan coverBlack Swan – a Koorie Woman’s Life

Eileen Harrison and Carolyn Landon

Allen & Unwin, 2011

All reviews say more about the reviewer than they pretend to, but this one is far more personal and autobiographical than most.

Black Swan came to me as a review copy when it was first released, but the newspaper I freelanced for wasn’t interested so I set it aside for myself. It has been on my shelf ever since. In the aftermath of thinking again about Singing the Coast, its time has finally come: its parallels and contrasts with that book and with my own life made it particularly relevant to me this year.

Eileen Harrison was born into a large, close-knit family on the Aboriginal Mission at Lake Tyers on the Gippsland Lakes. She grew up there, attending the mission school while I was attending the state school in Leongatha, 250 km away. I went on to secondary school; she was not allowed to. Rather, she and her family were uprooted by a new government policy and sent to the Western District, far from extended family.

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SF bookshelf

This is a collection of tiny reviews of science fiction and fantasy. They are books which I liked enough to recommend but haven’t reviewed at length (often because I couldn’t find time). The collection is structured like a blog, with the most recent additions at the top, and dates are the dates of my mini-reviews, not book publication. It began as a comment-string to an identically-titled post on Green Path which drifted away from the environmental theme of the books reviewed there and into general SF.

Here’s an index, now that it’s long enough to need one:
The Year of the JackpotChildren of MemoryFuturistic Violence and Fancy SuitsReconstructionThe Seven Moons of Maali AlmeidaThe AnomalyFlyawayFrom Here On, Monsters

The Year of the Jackpot

In Robert Heinlein’s 1952 novella, a statistician attempts to make sense of a world gone mad in an apocalyptic sci-fi scenario. Potiphar Breen has been carefully noting a rise in odd behaviors all around him in the hope of discovering some pattern or meaning in them. Then one day, he comes upon a beautiful young woman at a bus stop who is taking off all her clothes – and she doesn’t even know why.

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