Irredeemable rewards (In memorium of Borders)

Looking in an old drawer, I found this sad memento of a lost place. RIP Borders Cardiff. Fondly remembered. (It was the first home for our Book Group, which outlasted it by over a decade.) 

Also, look how close I came to getting £15 off a purchase! You never know which loyalty stamp might be your last.

Blog history - Borders closed ages ago. But I chronicled when it first opened, when it entered into administration, and the forlorn empty shop. 

Book(s) of the Month - concluding two trilogies

Two books to review this month, both by science-fiction author Adrian Tchaikovsky. Both books are the concluding novels in trilogies. <<<SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW>>>

The first book up for review is Children of Memory. This is the third 'Children of...' book and although based in the same universe and following on from other events therein, doesn't really feature the same characters as the preceding two books. It has versions of some characters, in that characters in this book  have inherited characteristics or are copies of original characters. 

This series began with Children of Time, set in the deep future. A human plan to 'terraform' a planet and seed it with intelligent life goes awry, just as human civilisation collapses. Centuries later, humans have got some way back towards their former pinnacle and set out to discover what happened to the planned colonies in a second terraforming expansion. They discover the terraformed planet and its new occupants - a race of giant, intelligent spiders. 

Children of Time  was followed by Children of Ruin, which set the same stage except this time on an ocean world with octopuses instead of spiders. There is also an alien life-form that starts out as an accidental antagonist that innocently kills everything it infects. The book concludes with humans and spiders, who are now allies, saving the octopuses and reaching common cause with the aliens.

In Children of Memory we meet a combined crew of human, spider, octopus and alien as they discover a human colony from the second age of human terraforming. They have also recruited members of a new race evolved from corvids on yet another abandoned first age terraforming project. 

The super-evolved birds turn out to be the most interesting characters in the book. There are two of them, Gethli and Gothel, who are incapable of acting individually, but combined are incredibly good at taking things apart and putting them back together again. That includes mechanical items and also computer code, psychoanalysis, and so on. They also open the door to a lot of conversations about what qualifies as sentience and whether intelligence and 'thought' is just a construct used to understand consciousness. That sounds dry, but I like conceptual discussions like that, and there was plenty of humour in the dialogue to keep it accessible. 

The overall story is mildly convoluted. The author is going for a twist, setting up the scene to be deliberately contradictory. The timeline is all off and it becomes apparent that the characters are experiencing events at different times in the colony's history, but don't know that. 

I can't really review this book properly without a big reveal. So skip the next paragraph if you don't want spoilers and scroll past it.

<<<SPOILER WARNING>>>

So it turns out the mixed up timeline is because there is an alien device of unknown origin that has recorded the lifecycle of the doomed colony and the exploration party are trapped in it. Except there is then another twist - the simulation is an entire fiction. The initial landing party were destroyed as they tried to land, but not before the alien device replicated the crew in exacting detail. The device then simulated what would have happened if they had landed. 

So, the first twist is basically "they woke up and it was all a dream recording" and the characters were interacting with it (and messing it up). And then the second twist was it wasn't a recording, it was just conjecture by a bored machine who wondered what would have happened. So the recording turned out to be a dream after all. I thought the second twist was unnecessary and the author was being too cute. There is no reason given why an alien machine would fabricate what a colony would look like. The recording being disrupted by the new incursion of beings made more sense to me. 

<<<END OF SPOILERS>>>

So, overall, I didn't think Children of Time was as good at the preceding two books in the series but it was still worth reading. I really liked the corvid characters and felt they added something to the story without being just another elevated version of a creature. Tchaikovsky is good at surveying the deep future and writing as if aeons have passed, and it's a credible vision. 

The second book I'm reviewing is Lords of Uncreation. This is the third series in a trilogy that I began reading last year after buying the first book in Browsers Bookshop in Porthmadog. On our recent trip to North Wales, we went back to Porthmadog and I bought the concluding volume. (The second book in the series was a Christmas present.) Books one and two have been books of the month previously. (Shards of Earth review; Eyes of the Void review.)

So, on to book 3... The big space-war against the terrifyingly destructive 'architects' is still going on. Idris, who is one of the few humans who can navigate 'unspace', has discovered that the architects are enslaved by other, even more mysterious entities. This book is basically about how Idris confronts those entities - the beings who are the self-appointed 'Lords of Uncreation'. 

There are a couple of tangents in the book. The one featuring the mysterious race, the Essiel, was quite entertaining. I like how the race remains inscrutable and unfathomable, even as characters interact with it more. It feels properly alien. The other tangent - about the genetically engineered all-female human offshoot called the Parthenon - is less compelling. 

I felt the conclusion of the book was very satisfying, but if I had one criticism, it's that it took a bit long to get there. Some of the tangents slowed the main story down - particularly in my view the chapters about the political infighting in the Psrthenon - and there seemed to be a lot of back and forth over the exact nature of the threat to the universe. Eventually, though, everyone worked out what needed to be done and did it. 

They are chunky books (500-600 pages each), yet enjoyable and I'd recommend them to anyone with a taste for science-fiction. 

Rewriting church history to fit your worldview – why some books for kids annoyed me

A while back I was in a Christian bookshop and found a range of children’s books on Heroes of the Faith. Nothing new there, except these were books about the early Church Fathers, many of whom were martyred as the authorities reacted to the spread of Christianity.

What surprised me was the publisher, Banner of Truth, who are better known as a purveyor of ultra-Reformed doctrinal tomes and incredibly long Bible commentaries that torture the grammar of the Greek text until it confesses. I didn’t know they did kids’ books, or that they recognised any church existing before John Calvin published his Institutes.

Intrigued, I started reading the book about Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, who was burnt to death by a mob when he refused to recant his faith. It was reasonably well-written and told the story without glorifying Polycarp’s tragic death, but highlighting his courage in the face of persecution.

There was one thing that really galled though. Good as the book was, and I really wanted to like it because church history is very interesting and I have little people in my life now who I could have bought the book for, I couldn’t get past the way the book referred to Polycarp as the ‘Minister’ of Smyrna.

This is just plain factually wrong. Polycarp was the Bishop of Smyrna, with authority over all the churches in the district. That was how the early Church was set up. That was his title. That was why he was seized and put to death.

I wouldn’t have minded if the book had just called him the ‘leader of the churches in Smyrna’. That would have been right, and I understand that ‘bishop’ is a weird word for kids to relate to. It’s the specific use of the word ‘Minister’ that I’m complaining about here.

To call him a Minister is to impose very narrow ecclesiology, that was developed 1,300 years later, onto the historical situation. I would guess that to the Banner of Truth ultra-evangelicals, ‘bishop’ seems a bit Roman Catholic or Anglican. I know there is a general feeling among the hardline Reformed that those institutions are theologically tainted and irredeemably iffy. But still you can’t just take the title you have chosen as the one you are going to use in your brand of churchianity and then retroactively apply that to someone who was never appointed a ‘Minister’ in the way you appoint Ministers. That just feels dishonest.

At the end of the book there’s a whole bit about how the early heroes of the faith weren’t heroes because they were Ministers but because they courageously stood up for what they believed in. While I understand the point they are trying to make, this is wrong too. The early heroes of the faith weren’t heroes because they were Ministers, simply because they weren’t Ministers. 

A publisher that calls itself the Banner of Truth has chosen a title to live up to. The books it publishes should be true. In this case, relabelling things to fit the terminology you have chosen to describe your world diminishes its truth and presents something that is only partly true at best. 

I'm not sure why I find this so annoying, but I do.

In search of Salinger; and other books

Back in the summer I bought 'Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters' by JD Salinger. Cathy found it in a RNLI fundraising bookshed near the ferry crossing to Iona. Bit of an odd place to find it, but there you go.

This cover image is for illustration purposes only, as my copy has a blue cover. (I couldn't find it to scan it. I think I might have loaned it to somone in my book group.) It's two novellas, featuring the same characters. The first one was very funny.

Anyway I now want to read the two other books in print by him, 'Franny and Zooey' and 'For Esme, with Love and Squalour'. However, being a bit cheap I don't want to buy the recently re-packaged, fairly expensive Penguin paperbacks. But tracking them down second-hand is proving problematic.

Despite three trips to the town of books, Hay-on-Wye, and a tour of all the second-hand bookshops in Cardiff city centre, I can't find good reading copies anywhere. In fact, the only version of either title I have found was an early Penguin of 'Franny and Zooey'. It had the classic orange cover, and the classic Penguin affliction of hardened binding gum meaning the book would soon self-destruct if you started reading it. And, being on a 'classic Penguin' shelf in a bookshiop in Hay-on-Wye it was priced at a ludicrous £6.95 anyway.

eBay isn't much help either. I think generally the bargains have dried up on there, compared to when it first started out back in the day. Most of the books on there are being sold by professional dealers, for the kind of money that makes you think 'Well, I'll just buy it brand new, at that price.' I've been outbid on a couple of auctions with a reasonable starting price, but I will get one eventually, I'm sure.

Books by JD Salinger may be hard to come by, but I did find two reasonable books about him on eBay that looked worth a punt. They should be arriving through the post any day now.

It's not all doom and gloom. In Hay I found the most recent Culture novel by Iain M Banks, 'Surface Detail' for less than half cover price in hardback.

I've felt Banks has drifted off form for the last couple of Culure novels. 'Matter' wasn't very good at all. But even so this was a 'must purchase' and I'm very pleased to say I thought it was very good, with a 'twist' in the epilogue that I had been hoping for and wondering about since halfway through the book. You probably do have to be a fanboy or girl for the twist to mean anything to you. But if you are a fanboy or girl, then I think you'll like it.

The story is essentially about 'saved souls' in a virtual afterlife and a war in reality to liberate those who have died from hell. It sounds crazy, but the future is going to be a far weirder place than any of us can imagine. And if the future has a Culture (and I dearly hope it does), than that plot premise is not going to be too far-fetched. My favourite character was an Abominator-class starship. That really tells you all you need to know about what kind of book it was (and possibly a bit too much about me!)

New Year's Eve sadness at the sight of Borders standing empty

A trip into town on New Year's Eve (picking up contact lenses). In the Hayes, the fire sale is over and Borders has shut its doors for good. Sigh.

Borders Bookshops have gone into administration, and that makes me sad

Went into town today, mainly to buy a new phone (more on that later), and popped into Borders, having heard they are in serious financial trouble. As I walked in there was evidence everywhere I looked that all was not well.

To the right: completely empty magazine racks. No credit means no new mags.
Straight ahead: Yellow 20% off signs plastered everywhere.
To the left: "Closing down - everything must go" posters indiscreetly stacked up next to the entrace in readiness for the fire sale*.

I like Borders. I like the ambience. I like the fact you can sit and read comic books and no one hassles you (although I can see that my selfish comic book reading won't have helped their profit margins at all). They often have books I don't see anywhere else. They have a Starbucks inside the shop. It was the first home for our Book Group. For geeky bibliophiles, there is always something else to make you go 'ooh'.

Although they shouldn't have tried to sell DVDs. They were very expensive. Maybe they should have only stocked literary ones - book adaptations for example. But even then, DVDs are not money-spinners. They are so cheap now in supermarkets I think the day is coming when they won't be available on the high street at all. So, that was perhaps one mistake they made.

One sad thing is that I have already started talking about Borders in the past tense. (I went back and changed 'was' to 'is' in the last paragraph but one.) I have a nagging fear that they are going to be this year's big name to disappear. A victim of the credit crunch. A mundane tragedy, but tragic none the less. In some ways my visit today was a preliminary requiem.

*They looked exactly like the ones that appeared in Woolworths last year as that shopping chain tanked. Somewhere a signwriter is rubbing his hands with glee.

Borders has arrived

Last night we went to the brand new Borders in town. Plus points include very comfy chairs in the comic book section, a decent religion section (I used my 20% off voucher on a theological tome which everyone else thought looked completely dull - a sure sign it'll be good), and a Starbucks. As I said, while sipping my black Tazo tea and flicking through a 25,000-word etymological dictionary, it's like a library where they actually have books you want to read. Cathy added 'And here the books are clean...'

But the highlight of the night was Elaine asking why anyone would want to go clubbing when there's such a nice bookshop to go and sit in. It's one of life's imponderables. We're toying with the idea of setting up a book group to meet there as then we'd always get discount!

And next time Dad comes down I'll know where to send him for a few hours to keep him occupied. The map section alone could probably keep him quiet and happy for a good three hours.