Mentions of Tau Zero, reminded me of the existence of Aniara - an epic Swedish poem penned in the 50s, and detailing the fate of the occupants of the eponymous spaceship, which fatally drifts off course with no hope of ever turning back.  In places it's as difficult as you might imagine a translated Swedish epic SciFi poem (with neologisms of its own) might be.  I'm told it's vastly superior in Swedish, but I'm not sure it's worth learning a new language for.

Despite all that, I'd recommend it. It's strange, lyrical, bleak and still worryingly timely.  You may bounce off it, but it's worth a look.

There's a (not perfect) version of the English translation online here.

For a depressing footnote, the author won a Nobel Prize for Literature. However, he was a member of the Swedish Academy (that gives the awards) at the time, resulting in significant controversy. Unable to deal with this criticism he took his own life a few years later.

Hell's Angels : A Strange and Terrible Saga by Hunter S. Thompson doesn't have the distinct and growling style of his later book Fear and Loathing. It's a very much more straightforward journalistic piece but there are a few signs of his later style showing.

As a kid in the 70s, Hell's Angels were another piece of Americana - like the Harlem Globetrotters , Hamburgers, Evil Kinevel, Marvel , Bazooka Joe gum and cop shows. T-shirt adverts in US superhero comics or MAD magazine featured many of the insignia and imagery from bike gangs. It's easy to forget how big a deal they were in the West Coast of the US (and even nationally in Life magazine articles).  Thompson rode with a gang for a year or so and reports as he sees it - challenging the mostly (not always) overhyped reported violence and gang rapes; the latter being rare occurrences he claims to know about were consensual - but now - several decades on - some of those descriptions make for difficult reading.

The poor quality of reporting at the time seems to have built up an image and the mystique but Thompson at the end really didn't know what to make of the over analysis of what made them tick or what their motivations where at that time. It isn't quite as simple as just guys letting loose and getting carried away but it isn't as sophisticated as some made out to be either.

Still a really good read.

Like all good books it has me off down a rabbit hole. There's a reference to Joe Hill : an early 20thC labour rights activist / poet / songwriter who got executed by firing squad in the US. So I've got a book about him on my list now.

Britsoft: an oral history

This enormous (really, it’s a chunky beast of a hardback) look back at the roots of the UK games industry is absolutely brilliant. It’s all straight from the horse’s mouth - interviews with the developers and journalists of the time. And … it’s a lot. I’ve been dipping in and out of this book for well over a year. It’s good for that approach - pick it up, read a few pages, a few chats about the next step in gaming’s history, then put it back down again. Come back later.

Britsoft takes things from just before the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum right through to the launch of the ST and Amiga, and then the PlayStation. It’s about the period where a programmer could self-teach in their bedroom and end up buying a Ferrari and a house. When the UK was uniquely placed, because of the ZX Spectrum’s success, to cultivate a culture of making games and not just playing them. Before games got so big that you needed a team to make them.

It’s thorough, exhaustive even, and it’s a handsome book too. The authors conducted all these interviews to make a film - Bedrooms to Billions - and then put the book together as a way of sharing the interviews in full.

Highly recommended.

It’s a lovely thing, but it’s also just bulky and heavy enough to be awkward to hold. Hence me reading it in short bursts over a long time.

Lancelot finished, Camelot ordered. More shieldwalls, ambiguous magic and swords thrust into gaping mouths pls. (Prince Herbert voice) I am ready. Thanks Raiziel.

Moot_Geeza wrote:

Lancelot finished, Camelot ordered. More shieldwalls, ambiguous magic and swords thrust into gaping mouths pls. (Prince Herbert voice) I am ready. Thanks Raiziel.

You’re welcome. Glad you enjoyed it. As I’ve already said, Camelot fell short for me after the goodness of Lancelot, so I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts.

Matt Smith’s not in the book, unfortunately. He declined to be interviewed. So while plenty of other faces from back in the day reference him and his games, his own voice is missing.

You can buy directly from the publisher, ROM. It’s in stock.

https://readonlymemory.vg/shop/book/britsoft-an-oral-history/

(I bought a copy for a Badger in one of the secret Santas, my wife saw how lovely it was and bought me a copy for the same Christmas.)

Just watch your spending on their site - you might be tempted by things like their similar Japansoft book …

Just looked.

Oh my God, what have I done?

That Sega popup book! Tears.

The Dreamcast one looks nice too, as does the JPNsoft and the other Britsoft book - Archer Maclean, Minter et al. Sigh.

And that arcade font book. Good Lord.

18. The Ruins (Scott Smith)
Really liked this, it's so relentless and single minded. Six friends on a Mexican beach holiday venture into the jungle interior to catch up with someone who has gone to visit some Mayan ruins. Very well written and full of suspense and some brutal survival horror.

5. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu

A bit of a stilted read at times (mostly due to translation I think) but thankfully got used to that style after the first few chapters and it didn't affect my enjoyment overall.

It's fairly slow paced throughout but interspersed with well timed revelations, coupled with a few of my own realisations of just how absorbed I was. About a third of the way through I was totally hooked and found it hard to put down. Read most of it in a week which is unusually fast but helped by being on holiday. The scope of it is incredible and still processing it so not a huge amount more to add but the second book is on the way so will be diving straight into that soon!

Yeah, it's definitely got its hooks in.

You reminded me I was going to recommend Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 if you haven't read that. It's a great view of that year's presidential campaign and machinations of the various teams behind the candidates.

50. The Scarlet Gospels by Clive Barker

This is a sequel to The Hellbound Heart, written close to thirty years after that original novella. I read this one with some trepidation. The story goes that when Barker handed this one in to his publishers it was a two hundred and forty thousand word monster, and was regarded by them at the time as being unpublishable. The gulf between its original size and the form of the thing that was published lead many fans to believe it was mostly ghost written. As someone who finds Barker’s later works to be a shadow of the things he was writing in the eighties and nineties, I found this theory all too easy to believe.

Well now I’ve read it, and I’m very certain the ghost writer thing is nonsense. Barker’s fingerprints are all over this story, both in the quality of the prose and in its style. If a ghost writer was ever involved, it was to take a hatchet to the original corpulent body of text, lopping off extraneous limbs and maybe an organ or two, sewing up what was left and writing over the stitches. But this is a Barker book for sure.

So that’s good news. Unfortunately the story is…well…pants. Barker removes the mystique of the Cenobites by having the Hell Priest (that’s Pinhead for those who’ve seen the films) too front and centre. He’s just in it far too much and says too much. Also, Barker has Christianised his Hell, which suddenly makes it (to me at least) a lot less interesting. I could bang on about this for a good while longer, but I think I’ve said enough. Overall it was a disappointing read; it’s a dull boy in a fabulous suit. Where Barker once matched his fantastic prose with an incredible imagination, these too talents are no longer in balance.

When the Dust Settles is a book by Lucy Easthorpe. A lady most of us haven't heard of. She is a disaster planner who trains advises and actually works on disaster recovery. She is one of the army of specialists who move in after the emergency services leave the site.

She covers the big events of recent times and ends with a brief coverage of COVID. She is quite a person with strengths we would all be the better for having. Working in a primarily male dominated business (imagine the testosterone abound in emergency services) she holds her own but of course she shouldn't gave to work as hard as she does nor make adjustments for misogyny. But she does. 

Some of this is hair raising - but not always because of the work - but sometimes because of what happened to her personally. 

What is alarming is the recent loss of budget for this invisible function with politicians caring what the optics are. Disaster recovery is a complex and her particular specialism, the identification of victims and the recovery of personal effects leaves its mark on individuals and communities long after the event.

This lady needs to be listened to and hopefully this book's success will help with that.

Children of time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

What a book. Proper sci-fi, made me think, and utterly compelling to read.

More of this please.