Over the years, Roger Zelazny has been the most reviewed author on this blog (see previous thoughts on Amber, Lord Of Light and This Immortal), which is odd because while I like his work I don't necessarily love it.
I may find him easy to write about because many of his interests - pop psychology, mythology, religion - coincide with my own. I also like the way his allusiveness - rich descriptions and deep conversations spanning the pulp architecture of his plotting - resists easy explanation.
In a way Zelazny represented the accessible end of the 'New Wave' of fantasy and SF of the late 60's and early 70's. He displays influences beyond the genre and a degree of literary experimentation, but he is a much easier entry point than fellows such as Ballard, Disch or Delany.
That said, his second novel The Dream Master (1966) is more difficult to fathom than many of his works. It follows Charles Render, a psychologist trained in the construction of healing dreams for his clients using a technowomb. Ostensibly the perfect therapist, his hubris undoes him when he attempts to give a blind woman dreams of sight.
It's a confusing book - intentionally so. Fragments of other narratives are placed alongside the main plotline, often without context. So much is hinted at, often in crucial passages that attempt to follow the logic of dreams themselves, that the reader apprehends the book as if through a glass darkly.
This gives it undeniable atmosphere. But a rushed ending in particular ultimately denies The Dream Master its potency. Zelazny himself felt the short story on which it was based did a better job, but having not read that I can't comment.
I will say that several of the supplementary narratives felt like padding (interesting, but nevertheless padding) and the one-dimensional nature of the women in the book much less easy to overlook than they might have been at the time.
Interesting enough that it begs a re-read, but flawed enough that it stands more as a statement of ambition than of craft.
The 2018 Hugo Awards for science-fiction and fantasy shortlist has recently been announced. I didn't contribute to the nomination process this time around (although I may register to vote) but here are my initial thoughts.
Best Novel
I've read two of the six novels on the shortlist. Yoon Ha Lee's Raven Stratagem is a considerable improvement on last year's Ninefox Gambit, which I admired more than I liked. I'm starting to see him as a potential successor to Iain M Banks and his intricate far-future epics. The novel is definitely a strong baseline for others on the shortlist to see if they can better, although it may suffer from being a sequel.
And with four other Best Novel award-winners on the shortlist (N K Jemisin, Ann Leckie, Kim Stanley Robinson and John Scalzi) to reckon with the competition could be steep. Scalzi's The Collapsing Empire, however, is merely default Scalzi: highly enjoyable space opera but no Redshirts, and not the remarkable work you'd expect to clinch the award.
Short fiction
Much to my surprise, I've read seven of the short fiction entries already, which is highly unusual. I've not been absolutely floored by any of them yet but here is what is setting the pace:
Novella: Sarah Gailey, River Of Teeth
Novelette: Sarah Pinsker, Wind Will Rove
Short Story: Vina Jie-Min Prasad, Fandom For Robots
Best series
A new category as of last year. I'm particularly pleased to see Robert Jackson Bennett's Divine Cities trilogy up - it started well with City Of Stairs (my review here) and finished very strongly last year with City Of Miracles.
Best film (AKA Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form)
Probably the Hugo equivalent of the Group of Death, with Blade Runner 2049, Get Out, The Last Jedi, The Shape of Water, Thor: Ragnarok and the mighty Wonder Woman all battling it out.
Best Fan Writer
Nice to see a nod for Camestros Felapton, who I've nominated in previous years.
No block voting - hurray!
After last year's changes to the nomination process showed diminishing returns for block voting tactics it's a relief to see block voting entirely absent this year. Discussing the politics of this would take a whole other post, so I'll just say that it didn't noticeably improve the quality of the work on offer to the Hugo voter and in some cases actively prevented good work making it onto the shortlist.
A couple of years back I subtitled reviews of Andy Weir's The Martian and Neil Stephenson's Seveneves with the tagline 'space is the worst frontier.'
For all their faith in science and human ingenuity, both books were unsparing in their treatment of the challenges of space and a welcome corrective to the tendency to handwave them away in favour of a ripping yarn.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora is another book which stands under this credo. It pushes back even harder against the belief that our destiny lies in the stars, to the point of almost calling it into question entirely.
Ad astra, yeah, but very much with the emphasis on the per ardua.
It's difficult to talk about without at the very least thematic spoilers, so read below at your peril.
Aurora takes on an idea well established in science-fiction, the generation starship, where a voyage to a nearby solar system can take hundreds of years in a vessel the size of a city. Heading for Tau Ceti, its mission is to colonise the moon of one of its planets, the Aurora of the title, slowly terraforming it to make it habitable for human life.
Narrative tricks
The novel kicks in a relatively short time (20 or so years) before the ship reaches its destination. We follow Freya, daughter of engineer and general systems troubleshooter Devi and doctor Badim, as she grows up onboard the ship and explores its many biomes and communities.
A few chapters in, we learn that the story is being told by the Ship's computer, a developing artificial intelligence, Devi's other de facto child and arguably Aurora's second protagonist. Ship does some quite awesome things and would be on my Top 10 literary computers any day of the week.
As a narrator, though, Ship is learning on the job and its odd perspectives and occasionally jarring prose style deliberately bring out a distancing effect in the reader. In other words: science (chiefly astrophysics, engineering, ecology and microbiology) is foregrounded; character development and reader empathy somewhat backgrounded.
Hard science-fiction often does this accidentally and occasionally ad nauseum and ad infodumpium. This could be because the author is either not that interested in the capital-I Individual or just doesn't have the chops to meet both scientific and literary criteria.
But KSR is a much better writer than that. Taking this approach intentionally as an authorial device is a) a very clever move b) allows him to provide the story with the science it needs anyway c) sneaks the heart back into Aurora from an unexpected angle, through reader identification with Ship.
Cake: both retained and eaten.
Through interstellar space on a wing and a prayer
Aurora goes into a lot of detail about the risks of travel between the stars: problems of navigation, of acceleration and deacceleration, of the constant battle by engineers and biologists against entropy, of unrest and social collapse. Whatever you anticipate as a problem and solve before the voyage starts, KSR says, there will be two more you didn't predict that you must deal with when underway.
He cautiously concludes, however, that these issues could be solved with a lot of effort and more than a little good fortune and frontier spirit.
The far bigger challenge Aurora sets, however, is what happens when you reach your destination? Could you deal with many of the same entropic challenges as you did in transit? At the same time, could you establish a safe base for you and future generations and begin to slowly terraform your new home? How would you cope in an environment outside humanity's frame of reference in which the odds of unexpected crisis therefore increase dramatically?
To put it another way, would you risk a thousand Roanoakes for a single Plymouth Colony?
Questions for the space and freedom brigade
This is a novel deeply sceptical of the case for interstellar ventures in a way which would have rarely occured in SF from previous generations. KSR might be revisiting old ground on terraforming - he's best known for his Mars trilogy on the topic - but he's drawing more pessimistic conclusions here in a different context.
He also has a long-standing interest in climate change which he's explored in previous works such as Forty Signs Of Rain and New York 2140. Aurora touches on this in later sections of the book and in doing so offers a supplementary critique of renewed contemporary interest in returning to the Moon or colonising Mars. It basically runs: this is both cool and relevant to my interests, but maybe we should prioritise getting our own planet - our actual home - in order first.
The novel is no polemic, but it is doing what SF does best as a literature of ideas: using our scientific heritage to examine possibilities and raise questions. The questions it raises about both the practicality and importance of space exploration are very relevant at a time when a very rich man has just sent his sports car up on a rocket in some kind of a symbolic ritual to rekindle our interest.
Those advocating for or romanticising space travel - whether in the short-term or the long-term - should then engage with the questions KSR is asking. They are perhaps still solvable on their terms rather than his, but ensuring any vision of the future passes the tests Aurora sets is for me a necessity of the first order.
Unclear whether Spock is standing in front of a red curtain or an 8-bit 3D canyon effect.
I've
greatly enjoyed both of Becky Chambers' books so far, primarily because of
their warmth, their concern with everyday life in an interstellar
future, and their concern with human (and non-human) relationships.
And it's no coincidence that A Closed And Common Orbit is the only one of the Hugo-nominated novels I can see being adapted for the big or the little screen, as these are much more common traits of SF film and television than they are of novels and short-stories.
Orbit is a spin-off from its predecessor, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet, following several of its supporting characters: Sidra, a starship's AI now hiding in an illegal android body and Pepper, the gadgeteer acting in loco parentis for her. It follows both Sidra's attempts to find a place for herself in a new and confusing world planetside, while also telling Pepper's backstory as a young refugee from a backwater colony built on genetic manipulation.
So, it's a double Bildungsroman, or less pretentiously, a coming of age story, a YA novel in adult clothing. And I mean that last as a compliment - both Orbit and Planet are about young people making their way in a confusing universe, learning life lessons and looking for somewhere to fit in and belong.
And while fantasy turns out young adventurers by the score, SF has lost the art of this somewhat in recent years and it's nice to see Chambers do an good job of redressing the balance. Her work is very well suited as a gateway into the wider genre.
So, it's an enjoyable read, but is it the best book on the Hugo shortlist? In a way, Orbit has the opposite problem to Yoon Ha Lee's Ninefox Gambit, which is hard to truly like but easy to respect. Chambers give us memorable characters, snappy dialogue and moves the plot along smoothly - in short, she gives us fun - but these are all virtues of writerly craft rather than of art. And you've got to have both.
The themes she explores - artitificial intelligence and a genetically modified underclass - aren't particularly new or refreshed either. And the climax of the book is also somewhat underplayed, given how emotionally invested in the outcome the reader should be by that point.
Another way of putting it is that while there is much good in it, even the every good in places, Orbit isn't quite the complete package. For me, it also lacks the uncanny superlative (that Bill and Ted 'Woah' factor) that in different ways characterises the best of both SF and fantasy.
A Hugo nomination for what is still only Chambers' second novel reflects how far she's already come, however, and I look forward to reading (or indeed watching) more by her in the future.
Hugo Rankings So Far
1. Charlie Jane Anders, All The Birds In The Sky
2. Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit
3. Becky Chambers, A Close And Common Orbit
I've seen a great deal of appreciation in some quarters of the internet for Yoon Ha Lee's Hugo-nominated debut novel Ninefox Gambit. Me, I'm still trying to decide if I actually liked it or not.
Now, likeability isn't necessarily a sign of a great book, but if it's not aimiable it has to have other things going for it. And what Ninefox Gambit does have is a great idea: that of a totalitarian regime consciously shaping its own consensus reality through control of philosophy, physics and mathematics; right down to the calendar and how time is measured.
This might seem far fetched, until we recall revolutionary France's new calendar which renamed the months and introduced a ten day week, or the Cambodian Year Zero. Control of time, of information, of language is something we are all too familiar with from the last century.
Lee simply takes this to a logical endpoint. And then goes right over the edge with the idea that mass belief can generate special combat effects like something out of a role-playing game (or the human machine code of Snow Crash, or Julian May's psychic protagonists combining their powers in metaconcert).
Needless to say, there is something of a tension between the serious and the silly in Ninefox Gambit.
As a story, it plays out as philosophical military SF - a war of competing ideologies, but also of guns and ships powered by those same beliefs. There are scads of space battles, close-quarter fighting and political intrigue here to enjoy.
My reservations? It's not as sure footed in its storytelling or world-building as it thinks it is, and could do with a wee bit more exposition. Tonally, it's all over the place too, with ill-fitting comic moments not really working in a much grimmer bigger picture.
But having said that, Ninefox Gambit is a novel I'd like to think I would have published had I the opportunity - it may not be likeable but it sure is interesting. It's a calling card for a new talent and I'll certainly read it again, if only to get a better handle on it.
'Accelerando on downers' is probably not the synopsis Charles Stross would choose for Glasshouse (2006), although it does take the former's (relative) optimism about posthumanism and drastically flip it.
So, let's try again.
In Stross' body of work, Glasshouse is perhaps the equivalent of the 'difficult' prog/metal experiment: all dystopian ideas, arcane technology, ultraviolence and unusual time signatures. And I mean the part about time signatures pretty much literally, since the novel opens with a glossary of time as measured in the far future setting, all kiloseconds, megaseconds and giga.... well you get the picture.
It follows that the convoluted plot, summarised and compressed here, will make limited sense. Key to following it all is comprehending the idea of posthumanism/transhumanism - the theory that in the future technology will allow humanity to transcend its physical and mental limitations and be whatever it or individual members of the species want to be. In twenty-first century space opera (like Glasshouse) this often goes hand in hand with interstellar or at least inter-planetary civilisation.
Done badly or indifferently, it just makes for a lot of hand-waving science-indistinguishable-from-magic special effects. Done well, it also raises questions about the provisional nature of our humanity under technological pressure and the ethical problems which arise whether we embrace or resist change. Glasshouse is one of the latter.
Our protagonist Robin, is an amnesiac posthuman in a new body, recovering from PTSD after a cosmic information war. He volunteers for the interstellar equivalent of Castaway or a gigantic LARP, a psychological experiment in recreating Dark Age (read: twentieth century Earth) society. Needless to say, things aren't quite what they seem.
Stross throws out ideas, leads and lures in such quantities that the book properly fizzes. This is both a strength and a weakness: it takes a while to work out what's going on and at least a couple of sub-plots are left hanging without proper resolution. The antagonists, too, are more sketched out than fully developed in a way which weakens the philosophical elements of the book.
As is traditional, he doesn't quite land the ending either, rushing through it in a few scanty pages. There's a lot going on in Glasshouse and for me it's one of those rare novels that would benefit from more than the 388 pages it has. A Director's Cut, maybe?
This review would also not be complete without mentioning that this is a righteously angry book in polemical dialogue with the present and recent past, particularly with gender roles and the answers provided by (for example) Christian fundamentalism. You can probably guess which aspects of twentieth century American society the experiment tries to replicate with imperfect information, and the resulting body horror places Glasshouse closest in mood (sombre, oppressive, skin-crawling) to The Apocalypse Codex in the Stross canon.
It falls very much into the category of gloriously messy, ideas-driven, heart-on-sleeve flawed-but-fascinating science-fiction novels that I love almost as much as the ones that do all of this and bring it all on home. A rewarding, if occasionally frustrating novel.
I came home today to the news this year's Hugo Award nominations had been announced.
And you know what, it's mainly good news.
Getting the inside baseball point out of the way first, the first reason to be cheerful is that it's not a re-run of the problems the awards experienced in 2015 and 2016. After changes to the nomination process were agreed last year, the power of block voting has been much reduced.
Granted, former block voters the Rabid Puppies are still around, having adapted their approach to the new rules. Their picks have secured at least one nomination (out of six candidates) in around half of the categories. But even the bare fact it's a much more open field than the last two years is cause for celebration; it will be interesting to see if it translates for this reader into an improvement in overall quality.
Let's take a look at the contenders and see what leaps out.
Best Novel
I've read precisely one of the nominees - Charlie Jane Anders' All The Birds In The Sky - which I thought was a solid four-star effort and voted for its inclusion on this list. Previous 2015 and 2016 winners Cixin Liu and N K Jemisin are back with a trilogy-closer and a sequel respectively, so are presumably the early favourites.
And it's interesting to see Becky Chambers up for A Close And Common Orbit; having enjoyed A Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet a great deal but not necessarily seen it as award-worthy, let's see what this loose sequel does for me. Yoon Ha Lee and Ada Palmer, on the other hand, are entirely unknown territory.
In short, an intriguing mix of the known and unknown, and just the sort of line-up to see me paying up for my Worldcon membership to become a Hugo voter so I have an excuse to read my way through them. :)
Short fiction categories
Essentially the Hugo's are my opportunity to read what I hope is some of the best short SF and fantasy fiction of the year, as they don't normally form part of my literary consumption patterns. So I'm excited to see Lois McMaster Bujold, N K Jemisin (again) China Mieville and Alyssa Wong among the nominees, especially the last-named, as her entries last year were excellent. And those are just the authors with which I'm already familar...
I'm also looking forward to the Semiprozine category for much the same reason.
The rest...
As you can probably tell, the big-ticket fiction categories are mainly what interest me, but here's what's grabbed me from the others.
- Any Best Related Work category that manages to include Kameron Hurley, Carrie Fisher,
Robert Silverberg, Neil Gaiman and Ursula Le Guin is alright with me.
- I thought Arrival was great and would probably award it first place in Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form without hesitation.
- [prays silently for anything in Best Professional Artist or Best Fan Artist to be truly great]
- A little sad to see File 770 decline its nomination for Best Fanzine as it's continued to play a vital role in reporting fandom over the past year. But it has won seven times in the past, so I'm sure the hat-tip of a nomination plus another for proprietor Mike Glyer in Best Fan Writer will suffice.
- I remain to be convinced by the need for a Best Series category, here for now as a one-off, but it's fab to see Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers Of London series up there with the other nominees. Simultaneously very British in its approach and very contemporary in its execution, this is actually a good example of a serial work where the whole exceeds the sum of their parts, fun though all of them are.
Can you tell I nominated it? :)
- Am unable to decide if I'm more surprised by a nomination for Chuck Tingle in Best Fan Writer or Laurie Penny in Best New Writer, but a hearty welcome to both.
Voting will open shortly - in the meantime let the reading commence!
Currently enjoying Europe In Winter by Dave Hutchinson (write-up of his entire Fractured Europe trilogy possibly forthcoming), not least for writing like this.
"Juhan was wearing skinny black jeans, a black T-shirt and a massive black leather jacket with jangly silver zippers, which hung from his shoulders like the wings of a pteroactyl. In appearance, it was as if Somerset Maugham had, in the final years of his life, decided to take up death metal."
Douglas Adams would be proud.
I'm not surprised I liked Eric Flint's 1632. I am surprised how much I took from it.
The basic concept is a real doozy, for starters, stranding a turn-of-the-second-millenium West Virginian mining town in seventeenth century Germany in the middle of the Thirty Years War. Our intrepid time-travellers then (of course) attempt to start the American Revolution a hundred and forty years or so earlier than scheduled.
We Brits tend, I think, not to know a great deal about the Thirty Years War; our ancestors were mostly distracted by domestic quarrels. But we missed out on an unholy mess of rebellion, foreign intervention and religious strife that makes our own Civil War look like a barroom brawl. A worse indictment of monarchy, aristocracy and church could scarce be found in early modern Europe.
Against this backdrop, Flint is able to juxtapose the values of the Founding Fathers and the civic virtues of America (tolerance, inclusion, democracy, practicality, informality) to their full advantage, without the need to include a corresponding critique. His own background as a union organiser also brings the American tradition of equality into full focus alongside the more familiar call to liberty.
Effectively, the story itself is a pulp exercise in nation-building. As much consideration is given to generating power, to trade, logistics and constitutional theory as to the lives of its protagonists, or the battles that interrupt a narrative that would otherwise resemble a game of Sid Meier's Civilisation.
Not that I'd complain about a novel that was pure Civ fan-fic. Just saying.
I call 1632 pulp fiction because it is - the good characters are uncomplicatedly so, the villains mostly likewise, and Flint creates ample opportunities for the reader to cheer at one cliche and jeer the other. That doesn't mean it isn't clever at the same time: he uses the road-map of American civics to make some interesting points about religious and racial tolerance and women serving in the reconstituted US army.
It being modern US pulp SF, there's a truckload - heck, several truckloads - of guns: how else are displaced West Virginians going to achieve military superiority? On the plus side, Flint doesn't turn combat into a video game; on the debit side, he lingers rather too much on the brutal impact of modern firearms to my British taste.
As to why I got more from 1632 than expected - well, wherever you come from politically, it's quite refreshing to find a book that doesn't just suggest that the status quo can be changed, but is quite clear than no change is not an option.We don't live in the midst of the Thirty Years War, but at the present time the thought of working together to build a new and better polity - a better world, even - sounds like an ever more attractive idea.
My favourite reading from 2016. Thanks due in particular to family, friends, Mr B's Emporium in Bath with its book spa service and the Hugo Awards for passing many of these my way.
Links are to reviews on the blog.
Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Underground, Broken Homes, Foxglove Summer and this year's The Hanging Tree
Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys
Charlie Jane Anders - All The Birds In The Sky
Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
H G Bissinger, Friday Night Lights
Lois McMaster Bujold, Penric's Demon
Becky Chambers, The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet
Samuel R Delany, Dhalgren
Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, The Man In The High Castle and Valis
William Goldman, The Princess Bride
Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln
Frances Hardinge, The Lie Tree
Barbara Harford, Greenham Common: Women At The Wire
Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic
Dave Hutchinson, Europe After Midnight
N K Jemisin, The Fifth Season
Ursula Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters
Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest
R K Narayan, The Bachelor Of Arts
Naomi Novik, Uprooted
Nnedi, Okorafor, Binti
Sydney Padua, The Thrilling Adventures Of Babbage And Lovelace
Joanna Russ, Extraordinary People
Philip Sandifer, Guided By The Beauty Of Their Weapons
Neil Stephenson, Seveneves
Charles Stross, The Annihilation Score
Koushun Takami, Battle Royale
James Tiptree Jr, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Catherynne M Valente, Deathless
Jo Walton, The Just City
Alyssa Wong, Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers and The Fisher Queen
Last month we caught writer Mike Carey in conversation as part of the Birmingham Literature Festival.
Until recently, Mike was best known for his comic and graphic novel work, most notably Lucifer. However, that may now be superceded by his post-apocalyptic zombie-esque novel and film The Girl With All The Gifts, where Mike did double duty, not only writing the original text but the screenplay in parallel.
He gave us a sneak preview reading of the opening to the follow-up to Girl..., a prequel which may or may not end up being called The Boy On The Bridge and then fielded questions from the audience.
Of particular interest to me was the discovery that working in comics had transformed him as a writer - it had given him a prescribed form to work within in terms of structure, length and pacing and that had helped a great deal when using the ostensibly freer form of the novel.
Mike had been fortunate with his venture into the film industry - not only writing the screenplay for Girl... but having a sympathetic producer and director who were very much open to collaboration. As he put it, 'making movies is great if everyone's making the same movie.'
So the film got made with a shared vision of how best to adapt the original material, what would translate between media and what needed to change. For example, the book's interior lives and multiple viewpoints - the very things that novels excel at - got largely sidelined in favour of focussing on Melanie, the girl of the title.
This isn't a film review, but as an aside it's worth reiterating what you may have heard elsewhere: Seenia Nenua who plays Melanie is outstanding and the narrowing of perspective certainly pays off.
Similarly, casting knowledge also helps to shape the script. As Mike pointed out, if you know you have someone of the calibre of Glenn Close attached to a role you'll darn well find yourself writing for her.
However, he also identified the temptation in screenplay-writing both to over-write and over-prescribe what was happening on screen; not only do you have to leave room for the director to cut extraneous dialogue and even scenes as they go through the film-making process, you have to give them the space to decide how they want to shoot the film. And of course for the cast to play it in their own way too.
Much like the distinction between the text of a play and its perfomance, I suppose, but I hadn't really thought about it that way before.
A most interesting evening, and worth mentioning that Mike was a lovely guy who stuck around with his wife Linda (also a writer) to sign books and chat to attendees.
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes describes the condition of man before laws, before government, as a war of all against all. Life in this state of nature was 'nasty, brutish and short.'
This is also a pretty good summary of Koushun Takami's Battle Royale, except for the short part: the novel (in a new translation) is over 600 pages along.
Actually, the world of Battle Royale is a Leviathan simulating a state of nature, as the book sees an authoritarian Japan's ruling elite get its kicks by letting armed high school students loose on an island and ordering them to kill each other or be killed by explosive collars around their necks.
Whether this is also a safety valve for the regime or just an arbitrary exercise of power is never entirely resolved. Takami's characters try both ideas on for size, but what do they know - they're just kids, right? The contrast here with Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games trilogy is striking, where the role of the Games as a tool of social control is very apparent.
Battle Royale also lacks its literary descendent's concerns with performance, ethics and identity. Instead, it's sex and death nearly all the way (and mostly death at that). Altruism, friendship, trust and mercy are values that the class struggle to hold onto when life becomes survival of the fittest; pretty much the only motivation that survives alongside is love or adolescent lust.
How does it read? Like a bracing jolt of nihilism as we meet each student and hear their story, often shortly before the body count increases. And viewed in those terms it's an thrilling action-driven text that allows you to overlook the functional writing (at least in translation) and stereotypical characterisation.
But Battle Royale is not just pulp teensploitation. Its rather Freudian fixation on eros and thanatos, life, death and rebirth - has something of the ritual about it. As does its repetitive nature and obsession with counting - the number of classmates remaining, the numerical ID each one has, the division of the island into grid squares, even the time of day.
Something in the concept and the delivery then, somewhere at the heart of what Takami has done here, makes for a dark energy that transcends the material itself. You might not like it what it has to say, but it's powerful nonetheless.
Big thanks to book club friends, whose discussions informed this review.
