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Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter – The Long Mars | Review

August 18, 2019 danecobain

Authors A-E (By Surname)Authors P-T (By Surname)Fiction

Title: The Long Mars

Author: Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

Type: Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 448

Rating 3.5/5

By now, we’re up to book three of five in this series, and while I do think that the first book was incredible, it’s struggled to live up to the same high standard as the series has continued. We’re helped by the fact that the basic idea behind the story is pretty good and so it’s fun to watch the authors investigate.

In the first of these books, we follow what happens when stepping, a sort of new technology, is unleashed on the unsuspecting population of the world that we live in. With stepper boxes, people can hop from our world to a sort of adjacent parallel world, and that opens up whole new horizons when it comes to exploration.

The last two books have focused mainly on what’s been happening on our world, but in this one we see what happens when some explorers from a version of the earth near the Gap decide to head for Mars. Once there, they discover that you can hop between worlds on Mars too, and that opens up an entirely new type of exploration.

These books tend to take it pretty easy when it comes to the plot, and so sometimes it can feel as though the plot is dragging as you’re waiting for things to happen. In the first one, I quite liked that because I was having a lot of fun looking at all of the underlying science and the other ideas that it had in it. The problem is that the more time goes on, the more I kind of want the plot to accelerate.

Still, there’s plenty of good stuff here, and I’ll be continuing on with the last two books in the series and maybe even finishing the series by the end of the month. I just think that the series set itself up for a fall because the first book was so good, and the vibe that I’m getting so far is that pretty much everyone should give The Long Earth a go and then only the people who really enjoy that should keep going.

All in all then, I am of course glad that I read this, but at the same time I can appreciate that it’s not for everyone. Still, if you’ve read the first two books and you were thinking about continuing, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t. And it didn’t even end on a crazy cliffhanger like the first two did, so it has that going for it too. And that’s it.

Click here to buy The Long Mars.

Sean Pemberton – White | Review

November 9, 2015 danecobain

Authors P-T (By Surname)Fiction Poetry

Title: White

Author: Sean Pemberton

Type: Poetry/Fiction

Page Count/Review Word Count: 500

Rating: 7/10

Sean Pemberton – White

It’s hard to explain why I enjoyed reading White – I just did. It’s certainly what you might call experimental – in fact, according to the blurb on the back cover, “White is an immense feat of close description of an unnamed city during a single day in summer”, an aspect which “inevitably recalls Ulysses“. It goes on to say that “The narrative technique has affinities with nouveau roman, but actually it’s like neither, and like nothing else.”

It’s like nothing else alright, but I’m not sure I’d agree with the rest of it, mainly because I don’t really know what it means. From my point of view, it was a haunting combination of prose and poetry, which obsessed on tiny details and numbers and colours in particular. The poetry is plentiful but sparse at the same time, maybe fifty words at most on a page and scattered across it with big white gaps in the middle of it. The prose, meanwhile, has a simplicity all of its own.

Here’s a quote from a random section of the book, which I found by flicking through it until a page fell open: “The boxes are in the corridor. The boxes are stacked. The boxes are six. He walks the corridor. The boxes are six. The boxes are stacked. The boxes are stacked against the wall. There are three stacks. There are two boxes in each stack.”

Sean Pemberton

As you can see, it’s an acquired taste, but once you realise that Pemberton is doing it for the effect that it creates rather than because it’s aesthetically pleasing (which it is, in its own special way), it’s easy to get in to it. Besides, because of the poetry that accompanies it, you fly through the book because half of the pages are virtually blank.

But it’s not too easy to explain the effect that it actually creates in the reader, so I hope it’s enough just to say that it did affect me – I’ve been struggling to describe it ever since I started reading it. A drunk guy sat next to me on the bus on the way home from work once and asked me what it was about – I just said I didn’t know, because that seemed like the safest option. He didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d appreciate literary innovation.

And that’s precisely what this is – at the end of the day, Pemberton is playing with the English language, and you can see the fun that he’s having reflected in his final creation. Perhaps that’s the effect that it creates – White is lots of fun, you get to share in the joy of its creator. Isn’t that what reading is all about?

I feel like Sean Pemberton has proved a point here, although what that point actually is is anyone’s guess. Still, if you’re serious about literature and want some independent prose poetry, start here.