Ithaca presents a God's-eye-view of the story of Penelope. It's a fast, furious, and feminist story which plunges us straight into the middle of the Greek melodrama.

Kenamon takes his time to consider this. Penelope does not mind. The silence of men is a novel experience, and she is prepared to thoroughly enjoy it.

There are a lot of Greeks. It is sometimes a little confusing to keep straight Agamemnon, Andraemon, Aegyptius, and Aegisthus - but it is just about doable. The various twists of the story are well paced although, being an ancient tale, naturally a little clichéd.

Retelling the classics can be perilous - too radical an interpretation and it loses its timeless qualities, too conservative and you're just repeating work. Ithaca feels modern without being overly fashionable. A good tale, told well, with plenty of heart.

Ven was once a holy man, a keeper of ancient archives. It was his duty to interpret archaic texts, sorting useful knowledge from the heretical ideas of the Burning Age – a time of excess and climate disaster. For in Ven’s world, such material must be closely guarded, so that the ills that led to that cataclysmic era can never be repeated. But when the revolutionary Brotherhood approaches Ven, pressuring him to translate stolen writings that threaten everything he once held dear, his life will be turned upside down. Torn between friendship and faith, Ven must decide how far he’s willing to go to save this new world, and how much he is willing to lose.

Yet another barnstormer from Claire North. This is a first-rate post-apocalyptic novel. It's obviously Margaret-Atwood-inspired, and wears that proudly on its sleeve.

In part, it is a long and involved spy thriller. But it expertly weaves in a mixture of spiritual fantasy and eco-shock-horror. If you could reboot society - what knowledge would be too dangerous to let into the wild? Can man have mastery over nature without dramatic consequences?

Thankfully, it is less idiosyncratically written than some of her previous books. It occasionally lapses into first-person-present tense which helps keep things interesting.

I found it a little grim and bloody occasionally, but that's my squeamishness. There's a slightly unweildly cast of characters - some with multiple names. It isn't quite Lord of the Rings territory - but you might need to flip back a few pages occasionally to remember who is who.

Overall, it's a great novel. An expert blend of sci-fi and spycraft.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy - the book is released in July 2021 and is available via the following links:

Everyone has heard of the Gameshouse. But few know all its secrets.

It is the place where fortunes can be made and lost though chess, backgammon – every game under the sun.

But those whom fortune favours may be invited to compete in the higher league where the games played are of politics and nations, of economics and kings. It is a contest where Capture the Castle involves real castles and where hide and seek takes place on the scale of a continent.

Among those worthy of competing in the higher league, three unusually talented contestants play for the highest stakes of all...

This is a curious and fascinating book.

Originally it was released as three separate stories and is now available in a single volume. It is a vast, tangled, global conspiracy theory - where immortals toy with individuals and nations.

The first book is written in an idiosyncratic style which makes it a bit cumbersome to parse. Similar to her earlier work The End of The Day; its challenging prose masks an excellent story of betrayal and love.

The next two stories are far better. Action packed, glamorous, with a cinematic and emotionally complex finale.

The book lingers on in my thoughts. The shadowy players of The Gameshouse are clearly supernatural. But I don't think that stops them from being any less real. They are the helping hand behind the butterfly effect, a tool to manage chaos. Out in the real world, we rarely know when we are pawns in someone else's plan. Perhaps Shakespeare was wrong and all the world's a chessboard?

Theo Miller knows the value of human life to the very last penny. In the Criminal Audit Office, he assesses each crime that crosses his desk & makes sure the correct debt to society is paid. But when his ex-lover is killed, it's different. This is one death he can't let become merely an entry on a balance sheet. Because when the rich are getting away with murder, sometimes the numbers just don't add up.

I'm a tiny bit obsessed with Claire North's weird-fi writing and have hungrily devoured each of her previous works.

The premise for 84K is slightly... I don't know... juvenile? What if a big corporation ran the UK and the rich could just buy their way out of crimes. But it offers up a convincingly disturbing world to play around in.

If I'm being cynical, it's the first of her novels which feel like it was written to be a TV miniseries. That's no bad thing - the plot cracks along, and there's a cast of malicious and malnourished characters to admire.

The prose is not quite as fractured and idiosyncratic as in "The End of The Day", but still takes bold experiments with text in order to paint a picture of the pervasive percussion of unwanted interruptions.

It is (deliberately) confusing and morally ambiguous. Perhaps a few too many side-plots and a bit too experimental with narrative for my liking.

Well worth reading her previous novels. "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" is sublime. "The Sudden Appearance of Hope" is excellent. And "The End of The Day" is magical.

84K is merely very, very good.

Sooner or later, death visits everyone. Before that, they meet Charlie. Charlie meets everyone - but only once. Sometimes he is sent as a courtesy, sometimes as a warning. Either way, this is going to be the most important meeting of your life.

This reads almost like poetry. I absolutely adored Claire North's debut novel "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" so I was keen to get cracking on this one.

A superb and surreal tale of the Harbinger of Death who, naturally, works out of Milton Keynes. Death, in this novel, is less ponderous than Terry Pratchett's Death - but no less caring. We get to see the world through their eyes while, hopefully, beginning to understand what motivates us in the face of oblivion.

Grim and compelling. I found the ending shocking in its brutality. Hauntingly beautiful and moving.

A light-ish week - which allowed me to concentrate on my backlog. If you're getting a reply from an email you sent last year, sorry! Actually, that's not true - since switching to Google's Inbox I've found it much easier to keep on top of things. Being able to snooze mails and mark them as done is so helpful to my workflow. My only wish is that I could organise mails by folder.

Sad news that David Pearson died.

Civil Service Choir

@CSChoir

We are very shocked and saddened by the untimely death of David Pearson @davidthep. A highly respected @DefraGovUK colleague; he was a strong supporter of this choir and of our MD. He was very generous with his time in filming concerts for us. R.I.P. David. We shall miss you. pic.x.com/jg0alrru2l

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A constant presence at GovCamps - always remembered for his beautiful photos and his forthright conversations. A bitter loss to the community.

I finally got someone from MOD to open an issue on GitHub! This is perhaps more of a symbolic point. We could accept issues via email - but that's not very open. It also means that we waste time passing emails back and forth then copying them to GitHub. Bleh! Working though the Department of No is quite an important part of this job.

W3C stuff still rumbles on - syncing up with WHATWG version. I have thoughts about this which are probably best expressed over a beer. I wrote a work blog about living standards which is now going through the editing and publishing process.

Writing apps for Alexa, Bixby, Google, Cortana, etc is a pain in the arse. So I've started up a W3C Community Group to discuss if there's any way to standardise development.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

As: a developer.
I want: to write separate apps for Alexa, Cortana, Google Home, Siri, and Bixby.
So that: I can duplicate effort & get annoyed.

Nonsense, right?

If you're interested in discussing potential ways to standardise Voice Assistants look at w3.org/community/grou…

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This is important for Government. Our users say they want to access services via Voice Assistants - but it is expensive to build them repeatedly. And we can't easily discriminate between devices.

NHS. Heading into London when Westminster is on a security lock-down is always an odd experience. Weird seeing the capital so quiet. Relatively glad that I don't usually work in this area of the city.

Google AMP. I'm not a fan - understatement of the year - but I had a great conversation with Tobie Langel about it. Tobie is one of those people who deeply gets why communities are important, and why standards matter. Lots to think about.

I got through to the next round of the Future Leaders Scheme. Last year I flunked the aptitude tests massively. Well, not that massively, but it showed me where my weaknesses were, and I've been trying to improve. So, wish me and Sam Villis luck!

And, finally, I didn't get the job I went for. I'm happy where I am, and the work I'm doing is meaningful to me. The new role would have been massively disruptive to my personal life and might have been too much for me to do. So I'm mildly relieved. At least, that's what I keep telling myself. It's important to fail. Partly it's about building up emotional scar tissue, toughening yourself up so you're less fearful of rejection. But it is also a great way to clarify exactly what you want out of life. The humility also helps, I guess!

Reading List

What I've read this week. Affiliate links ahead.

Fiction

• The Sudden Appearance of Hope - Claire North
  • I loved Claire's "First 15 Lives" book - and this is more in the same vein. A (possibly autistic, definitely poetic) woman is utterly forgettable. Crimes and high-jinks ensue. The techno-thriller, Facebook-is-evil plot is laid on a bit thick, but it's a cracking read.

Non-Fiction

• Pleasure of Finding Things Out - Richard Feynman
  • Another set of collected works. Naturally a bit repetitive. Some of these are transcripts of talks which really don't work well when written down.
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
  • Incredible and disturbing. What rights do you have over your body. Does consent matter if your body can save the world? Yes, yes it does. I found the emotional content hard to deal with. I found the intense actions and reactions of some of the people involved more frightening than the bioethical concerns.

I only had 7 days, and did quite a lot of sight-seeing, so there's only 6 entries here. Will try for a more relaxing holiday next year!

First up, "Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel.

A cracking "end of the world" novel, neatly tied together via Shakespeare's King Lear. As we were staying in a villa in the middle of nowhere, the haunting descriptions of isolation really resonated with me.

It isn't markedly different from most other apocalyptic fiction novels - and the "twist" is pretty obvious - but it doesn't suffer unduly for it. It cracks along at a fair pace and is generous with its humour, despair, and flashbacks.

The only real criticism is that electricity is seen as an almost mythical element. In reality, small solar chargers and hand cranks are readily available and quite sufficient to power, say, walkie-talkies, torches, music players etc.

Still, a great yarn.

On to "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell.

I've decidedly mixed feelings on this one. Without a doubt it is an epic and thoroughly disturbing tale of "First Contact". In terms of "hard" sci-fi it pretty much has it all - and the science is impeccable.

And yet, the theology… This is a tale of "Jesuits in Spaaaaaaace" so it is understandable that their morally dubious superstitions would be at the forefront of the plot. But it is laid on with such a heavy trowel that I honestly thought that it might be a Scientology-esque tale designed to convert and conscript the unwary.

Because all the characters are motivated by religious fervour, I found it rather hard to relate to them. By the end, however, I found myself wondering if this book - almost revelling in its torture-porn - was a warning against organised religion.

Sublime sci-fi, but not for the faint-of-heart.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Have a book reading holiday coming up.
What are your favourite female-authored Sci-fi novels?

Go!

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Stefan Czerniawski

@pubstrat

Replying to @edent@edent The Just City, Radiant, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Infidel

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After the bleakness of "The Sparrow" it was a blessed relief to read "The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August" by Claire North. The plot is simple - Groundhog Day but for your entire life. When you die, you're immediately reborn - with memories intact - as yourself.

I didn't want the book to end! It was joyful in its mastery of time-travel story telling. Although dealing with some weighty topics, it had a delightful lightness of touch that made the whole book skip along. At times, it felt like I was reading the extended adaptation of a BBC mini-series, so clearly could I see all the characters.

It's rare to find a book seemingly without flaws - but this simply sparkles with delight and ingenuity. It is spy-thriller, cold-war noir, boys-own adventure, and desperately sad love story rolled into one.

Chris Mcr

@chrismcr101

@edent Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid's Tale, Lauren Beukes - The Shining Girls

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The only real dud of the recommendations was "The Shining Girls" by Lauren Beukes.

This was a real disappointment. It's sort-of sci-fi - in that the murder can travel through time - but there's no explanation of why the murders are being committed. No reason given as to why the girls are "shining". No insight into the mind of the killer nor the powers which are driving him.

Perhaps it is that I don't read many thrillers but I found the whole book unsatisfying. The protagonists will never be able to solve the mystery because no-one suspects time-travel as an MO - so it feels like the whole story is a waste of time. Ah well.

Finally, I hit a gold mine!

Mark O'Neill

@marxculture

Replying to @edent@edent Ancillary Justice, The Dispossessed, Brightness Falls From the Air

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James Tiptree Jr is the pen-name of Alice Sheldon - an Air Force Major, CIA operative, and Doctor of Experimental Psychology. Although she wrote many short stories, James only wrote two novels - now gathered in one eBook collection.

Up the Walls of the World is, frankly, a belter! Telepaths, flying aliens, military experiments, doomsday devices! What more could you want from a sci-fi novel? The way she writes about the alien experience is perfect, never getting bogged down in exposition, never giving in to the temptation to make their world more relateable.

Bonus points for what must be a very early mention of the Internet - dialling up to connect to super-computers FTW!

The final book was "Brightness Falls From the Air." What starts off as a charming backwater sci-fi tale quickly descends (or ascends) into a Agatha Christie-style whodunnit. There's scheming, sex, drugs, intrigue, unrequited love, and murders.

Towards the end, it does rather begin to resemble a 1970s Doctor Who serial - a double-cross at every turn and a cliffhanger at the end of every chapter. A little over-wrought, perhaps, but wrapped in such a great story that it is easy to forgive.

…And that's a wrap! Now eagerly awaiting my next holiday - do let me know your recommendations.