Book Reviews – Page 3 – Interesting Literature

John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar: The Novel That Predicted Our World

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates one of the great science-fiction achievements of the 1960s

What’s the most prophetic book you can name? Nostradamus’ notebooks? In my book The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History, which gave its name to this Friday books column, I proffered Jules Verne’s little-known 1863 book Paris in the Twentieth Century, which is set in the French capital in 1960, and describes a future world in which people drive motorcars powered by internal combustion and travel to work in driverless trains.

His Short Materials: Philip Pullman’s Serpentine

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a slim but beautifully illustrated short from the world(s) of His Dark Materials

Philip Pullman’s new book, Serpentine, is not a novel, nor even a novella. Nor is it technically new: it dates from 2004, although it is only being published now. The action of this very short book (it’s barely 70 pages, with numerous illustrations) takes place just after the events of the original trilogy, His Dark Materials, and before the events of The Secret Commonwealth, the second novel in Pullman’s new trilogy, The Book of Dust.

Ecstasy in Literature: Reading Arthur Machen’s Hieroglyphics

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys a beautifully produced new edition of Arthur Machen’s study of literature

The Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863-1947) wrote some truly unsettling horror fiction, some notable novels about the Holy Grail, some subtle pioneering weird fiction (which I’ve previously reviewed here), and what many (including myself) consider his masterpiece, the 1907 novel The Hill of Dreams, in which the struggling author Lucian Taylor has a series of visions of ancient Roman Britain while living in the Welsh hills. Yet Machen remains unknown to many people, even avid fans of writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and H. P. Lovecraft (on whom Machen was a considerable influence). Even those who’ve heard of him often mispronounce his name (it’s MACK-un, in case you were wondering).

Disaster Novel: John Christopher’s The World in Winter

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores a forgotten work of post-apocalyptic fiction

March opened on a comparatively milder note, but there was still no thaw. Food prices, which had been rising for some time, began to rocket, and there was a wave of strikes throughout the country. … The Government, which had proclaimed a State of Emergency and taken necessary powers, showed no sign of yielding them again. There was strict censorship, and the police were armed. Rationing and price controls were introduced for a wide range of foods; patient queues lengthened in the grubby snow outside provision shops. Press and television called on the people to endure, to show their ancient phlegm. ‘If winter comes,’ quoted the Prime Minister in his clipped and confident voice, ‘can spring be far behind?’

This passage comes near the beginning of Chapter 7 of The World in Winter, a novel, now thankfully back in print as The World in Winter (Penguin Worlds), by a forgotten author who I was switched onto by Christopher Fowler in his brilliant and revelatory The Book of Forgotten Authors (which I reviewed here).

The First Dark Doorstop Epic: J. V. Jones’s The Baker’s Boy

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews an early example of ‘gritty’ epic fantasy

It was the late, great Terry Pratchett who observed that most modern fantasy is just rearranging the furniture in Tolkien’s attic. And many innovations within the genre have tended to use the same tropes, character types, or plot structures, and either rewrite them from within or poke fun at them (as Pratchett himself did in the early Discworld books). So the quest gets subverted, the avenging hero never gets the chance to achieve his revenge, the handsome prince turns out to be a nasty piece of work and the deformed magician is the good guy, and so on.