Talking Books

I didn't have much of an idea what to write about today until I happened to read Aywren's post on her Audible backlog. I started to leave a comment but three paragraphs in I realized it probably ought to be a post of its own.  I did say I was going to do more of that kind of thing so it seemed like a shame to waste an opportunity.

Of course, I don't have an Audible backlog of my own to bewail. Unlike Aywren, who finds Audible's one free book a month offer more generous than she needs, I've always thought it almost insultingly miserly. I mean, come on! One book? A month! And they have the nerve to charge money for that?

As outrage goes, that's rather overstated. If I'm honest, it's not likely I'd listen to even one audio book a month, free or not, and that's the main reason I've never seriously considered subscribing. It's not that I don't like audio books per se. Who doesn't enjoy being read to? It's more that  I find it a very different experience to reading, one that doesn't always feel either as deep or as satisfying. I'm not sure I find them directly comparable at all.

Listening largely negates the mysterious alchemy that transubstantiates marks on a page into sounds and images in the mind. Reading fiction is an almost supernatural process, lifting consciousness out of the material realm into a place at once both more and less substantial, transporting the reader into the inner world of another entity. It's almost like possession. 

It's not an experience unique to reading, of course. Something extremely similar can occur while listening to music, watching a movie, listening to a radio play or even at the theater. I imagine there must be people who feel it while listening to audio books but I'm not one of them. I find it a reasonable way to absorb the plot and it certainly works acceptably for non-fiction but with the novel or the short story, too much of the nuance, the hinterland, the ineffable interchange between text and self is lost.

It doesn't help that no single reader, no matter how superb an actor, can play every character in such a way as to make it sound as though different people are speaking. At best, I find myself thinking about how impressed I am with the range and skill they're displaying. 

More commonly, I find some of the voices they're putting on distracting, even annoying. It's hard to become immersed in the narrative when you're wishing the reader would just read the damn book straight and stop putting on a funny voice, which is why I sometimes feel I might actually prefer an automated machine-read to an over-enthusiastic human. 

The counterpoint comes when I find myself mesmerized by the voice itself. I've known some readings to stimulate an ASMR reaction. Unfortunately, rather than intensifying the experience, it just means that when I shake myself free of the influence, I find I can't remember anything the hypnotic voice was telling me. 

Usually, though, when I hear an interesting story being read out loud by a professional reader, be that an actor or an author, I find myself wishing I could read the book for myself.  Which is what I often do.

At this stage the more astute or possibly cynical reader might well find themselves wondering "If he doesn't like audio books and he doesn't listen to them, how come he thinks he knows enough about the damn things to bang on about what's wrong with them for half a dozen paragraphs like this?" The answer is, of course, Radio 4. And Radio 4 Extra. (And also that I'm a know-it-all with a blog. Someone who feels entitled to pontificate at length about anything that takes my fancy, regardless of whether I have any actual knowledge or understanding of the topic in question. But we'll skate over that part...)

I've been listening BBC Radio 4 since I was a child. It's been a persistent presence in every house, bedsit, or apartment where I've ever lived, as well as many trains, busses or cars I've traveled in, not to mention a surprising number of offices and back-rooms where I've worked. These days I've mostly traded Radio 4 for its low-rent cousin, Radio 4 Extra, the station formerly known as Radio 7, becaause that's where you can reliably expect to hear nothing but re-cycled comedy, drama and light entertainment shows from the last seventy-five years, with no danger of ever having your self-indulgence interrupted by a determinedly neutral news reader, telling you things you really didn't want to know.

Both those stations trade heavily in fiction, read aloud, some of it specially recorded for broadcast, some of it retailed from commercial productions. I could not begin to count the number of Books of the Week or Books at Bedtime I've heard in over sixty years of listening, let alone the innumerable non-strand readings woven through the schedules from repeats of ought-to-have-been-forgotten detective stories from the 1950s to the infamous eight-hour Stephen Fry/Harry Potter Boxing Day marathon of 2000.

In short, I feel I've done my due diligence. I must have heard thousands of hours of prose being read aloud by now. Which is a lot but still nowhere near as much as I've read for myself. And that's the other reason I prefer reading to listening: it's so much more efficient.

Reading a book versus listening to the audio version is analogous to something I see people complaining about on blogs quite regularly, namely written game guides compared to YouTube videos. The big difference is that, for a gamer, sometimes it does make a lot more sense to watch another player doing something in a game than it does to read about it - if you want to learn a boss fight, for example, or understand a specific mechanic. 

Even for any activities in an RPG or an MMORPG that rely heavily on narrative, though, watching someone doing it can be far less efficient than reading a well-written guide. I would almost never want to watch a YouTube video of someone doing a quest I was going to do myself, for example, whereas I frequently have a written walk-through queued up to follow. I can find and absorb the information I'm looking for so much faster that way.

Whether reading a book or listening to someone read it aloud is faster is clearly going to depend on the reading speed of both reader and listener. For most readers, however, I'm almost certain the written word will be quicker. I'm no speed-reader but it takes me a lot less time to read a page of a novel myself than it does to listen to someone else read it to me and I imagine that applies to most people who habitually read for pleasure.

Of course, there are many situations where reading isn't an option but listening is, like when driving or working, and it's always nice to get double use out of your time. As with most forms of multi-tasking,though, the end result is two things done not quite as well as they could have been if they'd each been been done separately. 

At least that's how it works for me. I'm sure other people can do several things simultaneously with equal success but I find that even just listening to a play on the radio while I'm doing something else means I miss quite a lot. And that brings me to the final reason I strongly prefer to read my books rather than listen to them - it's so much easier to re-read a sentence or a paragraph I haven't fully followed than to replay the tape or disk or file of someone else reading it out loud.

The day may come when the decision about whether to read or listen to stories may be taken away from me but until then I'm going to go on reading my books the old-fashioned way. And I have a lot of them to read. I started out intending to post about my book backlog, which grew enormously over Christmas and into the New Year. As so often happens, though, the preamble turned into the post so I'll save that for another day.

Towards A Supercute Future

Regular followers of the Inventory Full blog roll may recognize the name Martin Millar. I added his blog to the list a while back. He doesn't post often and when he does it's mostly just to let us all know he has a new book coming out, which is why I put the link there in the first place. I really want to know when Martin Millar has a new book coming out.

Martin Millar is an exemplar of something I've been pointing out to would-be authors for a quarter of a century or more. I tend to meet a lot of them, one way or another. As he explains in this short post, Millar's been a professional writer of fantasy and science fiction for thirty-five years and yet he's still, in his own words, "struggling". Despite much commerical and critical success over his long career, he is, as far as I can tell, without a publishing contract and back, once again, to publishing and publicizing his own work, a route to publication that is, thankfully, much more practical and productive than it used to be.

I first became aware of him and his work when I met him hawking copies of his comic around the bar at one of the UK Comic Arts Conventions I attended in the eighties and nineties. I didn't buy one of his comic books - I only wish I had. I can't even claim the meeting fixed his name in my mind but a year or two later, one of my friends who'd been sitting with me during the brief exchange in the UKCAC bar, gave me a copy of The Good Fairies of New York as a Christmas present.

I loved it. I went on to read just about everything else he'd written at the time and I've kept that up, on and off, ever since. I say "on and off" because for a long while I had no idea Millar also writes under another name - Martin Scott. 

As Scott he's written a dozen fantasy novels featuring the mercenary-turned-private-investigator, Thraxas. The series sold well, especially in the USA. It got off to a great start, with the first winning the World Fantasy Award. Despite commercial and critical success, after eight books his UK publisher had had enough and his American publisher fell out with Millar's agent over rights, leaving Millar to self-publish. Four more volumes have appeared since then, with more to come but you'd pretty much have to know about the series already to get your hands on one. You're unlikely to walk into a bookshop and find a copy.

Good though the Thraxas series is - and it's very good - Millar's best work has been published under his own name. I'd recommend pretty much anything with his name on, especially the aforementioned "Good Fairies of New York" and the absolutely wonderful Kalix the Werewolf trilogy but what I'm here to talk about today is his latest literary creation, the stunningly good Supercute Futures series.

I've just finished the second, Supercute Second Future, and it's possibly even better than the first. If I read a sharper, funnier, more thrilling extrapolation of the present into the near future this year I'll... well, I'll be delighted, obviously. But there won't be one. This is as good as it gets.

The future Supercute presents is one I find extraordinarily easy to accept. If you want to know what the future of gaming is going to look like, I think this is a good place to start. Also the future of the planet, although that's a far less appealing prospect.

Millar's vision of online gaming in the late 21st or early 22nd century (Dates are hazy.) shares some similarities with Tad Williams' Otherland, another convincing glimpse into our hobby's possible future, but where that series now seems dated, Supercute World feels like it's just about to happen. Millar completely sidesteps all the current vibey tripe about the crypto-driven metaverse (Words he never even mentions.) to jump straight into a scenario that seems far more likely - huge, intricate, AI-driven virtual universes that act as global social networks, while retaining all the functionality of massively multiple online role-playing games; vast, bright, busy, vibrant spaces that provide a refuge from reality for millions trapped in miserable conditions as the world falls apart.

All of which would be highly depressing if it wasn't for the characters and their incredibly upbeat, optimistic, can-do attitudes. From the creators of the ever-growing Supercute empire themselves, Mox and Mitsu, the world's self-acknowledged cutest super-geniuses, two lifelong friends now so bio-technically enhanced and adapted even the most sophisticated security systems can't recognize them since they ceased to register as either human or machine, to Supercute SuperSuperFan Amowie and her teen pals Raquel, Brigit and Meihui, collectively known as Keoma Bishojo, to WELCAT (An acronym for We Especially Love Clothes and Toys.) a quantum supercomputer who represents as a cat, to the irritable Dr. Ishikawa and her paramour, Supercute security chief Ben Castle, former enemies now allies of Mox and Mitsu, converted to their cause, if very much not to their cult of personality...

I could go on. And on. There are dozens of characters and every one of them crackles with individual charm or menace,
even though they may only get a line or two, like Ammo Baby, ferocious leader of the Ultra Waifs, one of Supercute Space Warriors' most famous player teams (Guilds, if you prefer.) 

If this all seems overwhelming then so it should. The books are a non-stop torrent of action, adventure and fashion advice. And yet, to any mmorpg player, much will feel familiar. Supercute Space Warriors, the crowning glory of Supercute's portfolio of games, offers a vast galaxy of adventure that's immediately recognizeable as an mmorpg. In it, Keoma Bishojo go on missions, earn experience, level up and engage in PvP. The Ultra Waifs raid there. The myriad NPCs, AI-controlled, behave in very much the way so many developers have told us they would like to achieve, with something that looks almost like and yet is not free will. Yet...

Underpinning all of this is a positively insane amount of world-building and a rock-solid adventure plot, all tied together by Millar's deceptively simple prose. He's as adept at action sequences as he is at nuanced characterisation and he's a master at building tension. Even though Mox and Mitsu are incomparably competent and always stronger, faster and smarter than anyone else, there's never a moment when you don't feel that this could be the time they over-reach. 

There's pretty much nothing about the Supercute Future series that I don't love, except that there are only two books in it so far and I've read them both. I only wish I was in the happy position I imagine most people reading this will be and still had that pleasure to come.

On the other hand, if the prospect of seeing the words "Super" and "Cute" collapsed together in myriad combinations like "Extra Super Always Happy Bundle", "Super Space Unicorn", "Supercute Super Colour Super Plastic Beads Set, Deluxe Edition", "Supercute 100 Different Kitten Earrings Funpack", over and over again to the point of madness doesn't appeal, or your heart doesn't race at the thought of yet another Super-Kitty Rampage overturning the Stonehenge Cuddly Super Set, sending Presenter Bear and Plumpy Panda scurrying for safety, maybe this is not the book for you, after all. 

It'll be your loss.

Buffy By The Book

For Christmas, among many other things, I got half a dozen Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels. Before the end of January I'd read them all. I enjoyed myself so much, I bought another three and last week I finished those, too. They took just as long to read because they were each twice the length of most of the first batch.

Having now read nine Buffy novels, an uncommitted observer might assume I'd have read most of them. They would be very wrong. According to the Buffyverse wiki, there are well over a hundred, including the short story anthologies and the titles focusing on individual characters like Angel, Willow, Xander, Cordelia and even Spike and Drusilla.

Even though the TV show ended its seven season run with a genuine and satisfying conclusion twenty years ago, novels have continued to appear ever since. The next, The Bewitching Hour, featuring Willow's ill-fated girlfriend Tara, is scheduled for publication in August.

The never-ending stream of Buffy novels may be exceptional but movie and TV novelizations that set out to retell the plots in prose form are a long-established, if little respected commercial phenomenon; one that mostly flies under the radar. It would be an exaggeration to say the sub-genre has a poor reputation in literary circles; I don't believe it has any reputation at all. 

I haven't read all that many but based on the few I have, I'd say that was shortsighted. William Kotzwinkle's adaptation of E.T., for example, is about as demented as any of his other novels. He appears to have taken the money and then written whatever he felt like and no-one cared enough to stop him. Indeed, the publishers liked either his approach or his sales well enough to commission a sequel, E.T. and the Green Planet.

Even when the writing is barely more than functional, it's often fun to replay the storylines in your mind. I read the novelization of Pretty in Pink a couple of years ago and while it certainly didn't qualify as great literature, it not only brought the characters to life but showed them from a sufficiently different angle as to make me re-examine some of my feelings about them.

Spin-off novels from successful TV series that go on to develop original storylines are marginally more respectable than those that just follow someone else's script but even then they sit at the very foot of the genre table, itself generally positioned somewhere close to the literary establishment's back door. The low reputation is scarcely surprising, given the way quality tends to vary wildly as the IP moves from publisher to publisher and writer to writer across the years.

Bearing all of that in mind, and for no better reason than I felt like it, I thought I'd post some very short reviews of the nine Buffy books I've read so far. I'll be reading plenty more, as soon as I get my hands on some, but I don't propose to make a habit of reviewing them here. Then again...

 

Halloween Rain - 1997 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

The second-ever novel based on the TV show. There was a novelization of the original movie published five years earlier and an adaptation of the first season's storyline, entitled The Harvest, came out a couple of months before this original story but no-one gave me either of those.

Halloween Rain was the first of the Buffy novels I received that I read, naturally, since I wanted to read them in chronological order. In this, I was not following my own advice. At work, I sometimes suggest new readers not start with the first book in a long-running series because there's a significant risk the writer won't have gotten to grips with the characters or the setting right at the start. It can be off-putting. Better to begin with one of the good ones and then, if sufficient interest develops, fill in the gaps later.

Halloween Rain isn't bad enough to put you off reading any more Buffy books but I suspect that someone who hadn't already bought in to the Buffyverse wouldn't be converted on this evidence. It definitely feels like a book aimed at young readers - significantly younger than the audience the TV show attracted later in its run but probably around the age the producers expected to get when it began. The main characters don't really sound like the TV versions and the plot, featuring an evil scarecrow, is a bit labored. I got through it but not comfortably.

Coyote Moon - 1998 - John Vornholt

A significant improvement. By no means a good novel but it lopes along nicely enough. The plot revolves around a bunch of were-coyotes (It's a thing, apparently.) and a Ray Bradburyesque carnival. Characterisation is a little better but still feels off, somehow. I enjoyed it considerably more than the last one, though.

Night of the Living Rerun - 1998 - Arthur Byron Cover

The author's name was very familiar to me so I looked him up. He did the novelization of the Flash Gordon movie but I think I remember him from his association with with Harlan Ellison. The two of them even co-wrote an issue of Daredevil, although I don't believe I've read it.

The trend in quality continues upwards. This feels more like an actual novel. The non-core characters feel more solid, better defined; the plot has more nuance; the language is richer. It's still a genre potboiler but it's a decent one. 

The problem for me remains the characterization of the familiar characters from the show itself, none of whom sound quite right still. Buffy (Both the character and the show.) does rely very heavily on wisecracks and quick-fire repartee, not the easiest of styles to replicate in prose. 

Blooded - 1998 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

This is where things really begin to pick up. The authors, who seemed a little adrift in Halloween Rain, appear to have come firmly to grips with both the Scooby Gang and Sunnydale. Everything seems a lot more convincing although the dialog still struggles somewhat with the cut and thrust of teenage banter. 

The plot, which involves an ancient Chinese vampire trapped in a sword, who manages to possess Willow on a school trip to a museum, holds together very well. There's a notable shift into genre horror that will sustain and increase through the rest of the novels on this list. and the sixth Buffy novel is also consideraby longer than the rest, marking a willingness to expect more of the readership and a desire to go deeper.

Child of the Hunt - 1998 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

The first Buffy novel I can say I unequivocally enjoyed throughout. There's a major step-change at this point, although it was heralded in the previous novel. Everything now feels directed at the upper end of the YA range, rather than the lower and the focus is squarely on actual horror, not the fairground ride version. 

This book also marks what seems to be the beginning of a consistent drive by these two writers to stake out (Oh dear...) their own interpretation of the Buffyverse. Characters are introduced who will reappear in later titles and there's the beginning of an integration into the milieu of myths and legends that have little or nothing to do with vampires and demons , something that will escalate in subsequent novels by the same writing team. 

I liked this one a lot. Enough to make me want to read more by Golden and Holder. But first I had to finish the next, penned by another familiar name.

Return to Chaos - 1998 - Craig Shaw Gardner

According to Wikipedia "Craig Shaw Gardner is an American author, best known for producing fantasy parodies similar to those of Terry Pratchett". I wouldn't normally take that as a recommendation and although I've seen his name on many a public library bookshelf, until I read this, I'd never even picked up a book he'd written.

On the basis of this, I definitely wouldn't shy away from his name on a spine in future. Return to Chaos is a fast-paced, funny horror novel that comes closest so far in capturing the spirit of the early Buffy seasons. I particularly appreciated Gardner's take on Cordelia, the popular-girl frenemy just now integrating - not entirely willingly - into the gang. There's a moment late on in the book when Cordelia appears at precisely the right moment, doing precisely the right thing, when I did actually cheer out loud.

The main thing I didn't like about this one was the shoehorned-in romance between Buffy and a new character, which felt both awkward and unconvincing. Then again, the same thing happened a few times in the show, so I can hardly single out Gardner for blame there.

The Gatekeeper Trilogy - 1999 - Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder

Although these three titles were published separately, I'm taking them together for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I bought them as a slipcased set and secondly it's very much a single, thousand-page story chopped up into three volumes.

This is the point at which, for me, all the main characters really begin to sound and act like their TV originals. Except for Cordelia, perhaps, who I thought Craig Shaw Gardner gave a fairer shout, everyone has sharper, funnier things to say and interaction between the gang feels organic and natural. Several members of the extended cast make welcome appearances in cameo or supporting roles and Sunnydale feels better represented than at any time in the preceding half dozen books.

Perhaps the most important thing to say about the trilogy, though, is that all vestiges of any genre other than horror have been jettisoned. This isn't a high school novel in any meaningful sense, even though there's possibly more talk about being in high school than ever before. The action moves from back and forth from California to Boston to Europe to alternate planes of existence, leading the cast to spend much time discussing ways to avoid being expelled for continued absence from school but the upshot is always that the world needs saving so school can just damn well wait. Added to that, at least half the main characters now seem to be adults.

As well as being the most focused and coherent storyline so far, I also found parts of it to be the most challenging. As the geographical and social landscape shifts, so to does the moral ground beneath the Scoobies' philosophical feet. There are some very uncomfortable and morally repugnant scenes involving torture and murder, during which characters make choices I was and am not comfortable with them having made. It's just as well these novels are considered non-canonical. I'm not sure there's anything comparably amoral in the show itself.

The plot of the trilogy is absolutely relentless. There's a lot of action, a lot of fighting, a lot of puzzling and detective work and endless death, dismemberment and destruction. It feels like a war novel in places and gets so dark that Spike and Drusilla's scenes feel like light relief, which is disturbing as hell when you stop to think about who they are and what they're doing.

Even though it's by the same authorial team, The Gatekeeper Triology feels like Helter Skelter compared to Halloween Rain's Yellow Submarine. Where things go after this I can't begin to guess but then the show went places surely no-one could have predicted when it began. I'm keen to find out if the novels follow.

Time To Read

Before Beryl the Dog moved in there were more than a few ways I thought adding a puppy to the household might affect day to day life. It never occured to me one of them would be that I'd start reading more.

The pandemic had an odd effect on my reading habits. You'd think that two years of enforced leisure, often with restrictions amounting to something like house arrest, would lead to an uptick in pages turned but things didn't always go that way. I did read and re-read quite a lot, in fits and starts, but mostly I spent my bonus time on much-needed redecoration and renovation around the house, on gardening and on playing and writing about video games.

It's not that I read any less at home than I normally would have done. I probably did read more. What I didn't do was read on my commute to work, even when I had work to go to. 

Before the pandemic I was working four short days a week, which meant eight short bus journeys totalling something like two hours. Breaks, in which I mostly read as well as eat, added another hour so when I stopped doing all of those it took three hours a week out of my reading program.

When things finally got back to what we're now calling normal I'd changed the four short days to two full-time and stopped taking the bus altogether. My new schedule now dovetails nicely with Mrs Bhagpuss's, so she drives me into work and back, something we started doing to avoid using public transport during the pandemic and now just both prefer.

That puts me back exactly where I was, with two hour and two half-hour breaks making up the same three hours I had before. Add in the time I read during breakfast and in the bath and once in a while in the evening and I probably spend something like seven or eight hours with a book in my hand on the average week.

In the two weeks since we got Beryl that reading time has almost doubled. Beryl has three main modes: asleep, awake and awake and crazy. In the mornings, as soon as I come down to breakfast, she's decided that the best place to sleep is on my lap. That's meant me sitting in the kitchen for two or three times longer than I would have before. 

It's another week before she gets her second round of vaccinations so we can't yet take her out for walks. When she's awake and active and the weather's good I often sit in the garden with Beryl on a long lead. She wanders about, pulling up grass, digging holes and generally indulging in all the behaviors that would drive a real gardener to canicide. I am not a real gardener. I read my book. 

When she's awake and crazy, no-one gets anything done.

I have no idea how long this is likely to last but while it does I'm very much enjoying the extra reading time. The only problem is going to be finding enough to read.

Enough, that is, that I want to read. Obviously there's no shortage of material. A lunatic number of books are written every year and these days an even more lunatic number of them are published in some form or other, a situation currently being highlighted by IndieApril as reported by Tessa at Narratess.

I did take a look at some of those but they're mostly eBooks and I don't get on all that well with the
format. Not because it isn't an excellent way to read - I find reading on my Kindle Fire every bit as natural and immersive as reading ink on paper. The problem is the barrier to entry that comes with having to switch the reader on, sign in and wait for it to finish doing all the little updates it always seems to have queued, even though I use it every single day.

That barrier is tiny but it's bigger than you'd get with an actual book. The difference between deciding to read and reading in each case is probably no more than half a minute but thirty seconds is a lifetime in whims and fancies. I have literally given up waiting for the Kindle and picked up a book instead more times than I care to admit.

The other factor mitigating against eBooks, in my case, relates to my employment. I work in a bookshop. I get a 50% discount on almost everything we sell, including all books. What's more, I recently qualified for a twenty-year long service reward and I chose a £300 gift card. With the discount, that's a lot of paperbacks.

And of course I get books for free. Not so many as I used to, it's true, what with publishers moving to Netgalley as their preferred means of promotion within the trade, but plenty of hard copy proofs still pile up, along with stacks of books my co-workers have done with and bring in to leave lying around for anyone interested to take.

One way or another, I'm never short of new books. The problem, if you want to call it that, is that I'm very fussy about what I read. Not fussy as in I only read certain things, although we all do that to a degree, more fussy as in, like most things in my life, any choice I make is likely to be based on emotion rather than logic.

I have to be in the right mood to read a book. It doesn't matter that I have forty or fifty stacked up waiting, I'll still stand there for ten minutes looking through the bookshelves to see if I can find something more suited to my mood. 

And then there are the books I just can't wait to read. Often that means the next in a series, because let's be honest, continuous narratives that stretch across multiple volumes are really one gigantic single book, annoyingly interrupted by the time it takes to the author to write the damn things.

Sometimes, though, it's a new book by a writer I absolutely love. There aren't that many of them and quite a few of those died a while ago. They aren't going to be putting out anything new ever again, more's the pity.

Right at the very top of my must-read list right now is Emily St. John Mandel, about whom I've posted before. She has a new novel coming out at the end of this month, on the 28th. It's called Sea of Tranquility and I just finished it yesterday. 

I got a proof copy. I emailed and asked for one, something I almost never do. Her publisher, Picador in the U.K., sent it to me along with a copy of her best-known book, Station 11, which I already had.

I read Station 11 in proof back in 2014, when no-one had ever heard of it or its author. It won the Arthur C Clarke award the following year and was made into a critically-acclaimed HBOMax series a few months ago. 

Station 11 impressed me so much back then I immediately bought all three of her earlier novels, none of which had made a dent in the public consciousness but all of which turned out to be excellent. Last year I caught up with her fifth, The Glass Hotel. It came out in 2020 and I was dithering over whether to buy in hardback or in paperback on import. As usual, when I delay, I ended up not buying it at all. I finally picked up a copy last month. Just as well I did, too, for reasons that will become plain.

Station 11 was marketed mainly as a science fiction novel although it's really more in the specific SF sub-genre of post-disaster novels like The Death of Grass or Day of the Triffids. The book it most reminds me of is Earth Abides. 

It's a very significantly better-written novel than any of those. She's a wonderful prose writer, incredibly clear and precise without ever feeling brittle. I'd label Station 11 literary fiction rather than any kind of genre, if I was into labels, which I both am and am not.

The Glass Hotel is more difficult to classify. It has some science-fictional or fantastical elements but nothing that wouldn't have been called "magic realism" a while ago. I found it compelling, disturbing and strange in all the best ways. I kept thinking about long after I'd finished reading.

Sea of Tranquility is without question a Science Fiction novel. It features both time and space travel, domed cities, space colonies, robots, all the trappings. It even has a proper SF plot. 

It's also the most metatextual novel I have ever read. I was thinking about reviewing it here but it would be such a huge undertaking I decided against even trying. I realised we were in for something extraordinary when the novel's opening line  began with the name of a character unmistakeably both like and not like that of the author.

From there it's a wild ride that takes in Station 11, itself a novel about a global pandemic, the actual
global pandemic we've all just experienced and the way writing a novel about a global pandemic immediately prior to an actual global pandemic affects the way an author's work is received and perceived. 

There's a character in the novel whose written a book that did just that but it's not the author of the book I read and author of the book in the book I did read didn't write Station 11. I'm pretty sure even the name of the fictional book about a pandemic is a metatextual reference outside the text but within the cultural milieu that supports it.

Several of the main characters from The Glass Hotel appear in Sea of Tranquility. Most of the same things seem to have happened to them as happened in that book but there's one very significant difference. If some of what we learn in Sea of Tranquility is true, some of what we thought we learned in The Glass Hotel is probably not.

I wondered as I read how much someone who hadn't read The Glass Hotel would be missing when they read Sea of Tranquility and I decided it would be a lot. Then I wondered how much they'd be missing if they hadn't read Station 11 and I decided that would be a lot, too. Even having read the three early novels, about which no-one speaks, made me feel I was squeezing a little more out of the story. They are not mentioned but they are not not mentioned either.

And yet you could absolutely read Sea of Tranqulity, never having read any of these other works, not even knowing they exist, and you'd still be reading a superb novel that would feel perfectly complete in itself. It's a work of genius to have knitted all of these threads together and left no seams showing at all.

I'd love to quote a couple of passages to give some idea of excatly how good the writing is but one thing you must never do with proofs is quote from them. It's strictly forbidden and for good reason. The less important but still important reason is that there may be changes to the text before the book goes to print and no author wants their dry run to be presented as the finished item.

The more important reason is that proofs haven't necessarily passed through the fine toothed comb of the legal department. If you were to quote something from the proof that later had to be revised before publication so as to avoid some potential legal challenge, you, as the promulgator of the libel or defamation or whatever it might be, would be liable. Not likely but not worth the risk.

I'll settle for giving Sea of Tranquility my strongest recommendation although I also suggest, almost as strongly, that if you follow it up you read Glass Hotel first and maybe Station 11, too. You should read them both anyway. They're amazing.

And I think I will have to take up my seven-day free trial to Starz, the streaming platform currently showing the Station 11 series in the U.K. It's eight and a half hours long. I should be able to fit that into a week. 

Maybe I'll watch it in the garden with Beryl on my lap. That'd be a better use of my Kindle Fire than reading eBooks.