Reading Geek: The Murders of Molly Southbourne.

 

My 2019 resolution reading schedule was temporarily derailed today by the arrival of The Murders of Molly Southbourne, by English author Tade Thompson.  At 117 pages, it's a surprisingly thin text in the current monumental science fiction marketplace, not to mention a bit pricey at $13.75 CAD. 

Regardless, I was intrigued by the concept for the novel*:  imagine if any time you cut yourself, your spilled blood created a perfect duplicate of you that wanted to kill you.

Because I'm a quick reader, 117 pages is nothing - I was able to split the book between my bus ride home and some time on the couch after dinner while Karli watched The Bachelor, and finish it off the day it was received,

The story starts out well, and has a suitably karmic ending, but there were a few spots in the middle that didn't quite add up, and a couple of dead ends in the body of the narrative that I would like to have seen explored further.

I was also a bit disappointed to learn that Molly Southbourne's unusual condition may be caused by an experimental drug taken (in both senses of the word) by her mother - I might have been more satisfied if there had never been an explanation for the problem, just have it be a fact of her life like breathing or sleeping.

Summary:  a quick, entertaining read, with a unique and original concept, well written, with some excellent descriptive passages.  On the down side, it lacks a certain amount of internal consistency, and it might have helped the story out if Mr. Thompson had written a few more pages.  Overall, I enjoyed it for what it was, an unusual short conceptual piece, and plan to hunt down some of Mr. Thompson's other work based on my initial introduction to his style.

- Sid

* Technically speaking, it's probably a novella - according to the internet, a novella is "between 17,500 and 40,000 words", but Mr. Thompson doesn't provide a word count.

Resolution.

 

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the futuristic year of 2019 - yes, I'm fully aware of all the science fiction movies set in 2019 that don't particularly match what is now the present:  Blade Runner, Daybreakers, Akira, The Island, The Running Man, and apparently The Road, although I have no recollection of the date being mentioned in either the book or the movie.*

And Dark, was Dark not set in 2019?

Regardless, with the new year upon us, I feel obliged to look at the results of last year's resolution to make a dent in my backlog of paper novels, to the tune of one a week.  As is so often the case, I didn't manage to keep up with my initial burst of enthusiasm, but if nothing else, I think that I at least managed to break even between reducing the backlog and new acquisitions.

In my defense, I did do some re-reading as well, but overall I wish that I had managed to do better than I did, the books that I did read made for entertaining additions to my repertoire. (Although, to be honest, part of the reason for my non-compliance can be blamed on a couple of books that simply did not hold my interest for a variety of reasons.)

However, it's a new year, and with that, I can make a fresh start with the same goal. I've kicked things off with The Fifth Season, the first book in N. K. Jemisin's award-winning The Broken Earth trilogy - my apologies to all of the nay-sayers who claimed that Jemisin's Best Novel Hugo wins were the result of political correctness, but as it turns out, she's actually just quite a good writer. The Fifth Season was a very good book -  imaginative, unique, clever, and well-written - and I'm looking forward to the next two in the trilogy.

Sadly, I'm retrenching in terms of visual media.  I'd love to be watching everything that's out there in the marketplace, but I feel that I'm just too far in the hole to catch up.  As such, I'm going to concentrate on core programming like Star Trek: Discovery - I never thought I'd say this, but I'm actually a bit relieved that Doctor Who is taking a hiatus for 2019, I can use the break for something else.  To be honest, I haven't even watched the New Year's special yet, hopefully I can get that out of the way before the 2020 season starts.

Right - 2020:  that will be Edge of Tomorrow, Mission to Mars, Pacific Rim, A Quiet Place and Reign of Fire.

Happy New Year to all!

- Sid

* And, really, when you look at that list, I have no regrets that the future has proven inadequate to those visions of it from the past.  I think that Blade Runner is the best of a bad lot in terms of possible futures from that particular collection of options.

Geekmas 2018: Epilogue.

Christmas having come and gone, I can only say that I was overwhelmed by the generosity displayed by the gifts that I received - my heartfelt thanks to everyone involved.

However, to my mild surprise, I received only a single geek-oriented gift - a mug from my friend Chris that commemorates the ill-fated Pabodie Expedition of 1930, sent forth by Maine's Miskatonic University in order to secure deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various points of the antarctic continent (as detailed in H.P. Lovecraft's The Mountains of Madness).  Thanks for keepin' the faith, Chris!

Well, as the saying goes, if you want something done, do it yourself.  I received a good range of Amazon™ gift cards - which I can certainly see as a sensible alternative to trying to coordinate selections from my gift list - and as such, I decided to pick out a few things from that list on behalf of those people.

As a result, currently en route from various locations in Amazon™'s far-flung mercantile empire are: a box set of N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy; Seed of Destruction, the first Hellboy omnibus collection; The Murders of Molly Southbourne by Tade Thompson, a novel which has been sitting on the wish list for a couple of years; and a DVD copy of The Sword and the Sorcerer from an Amazon™ affiliate located in Germany - hopefully I correctly ordered the NTSC version.  To describe this 1982 epic fantasy as a classic really doesn't do it justice on a multitude of levels, and I'm quite looking forward to revisiting this trashy 80s TV-star vehicle.

As a spontaneous selection that was NOT on the list (prompted by Boxing Day pricing) I ordered Season One of The Expanse, the Syfy series* based on the novels and novelettes by James S. A. Corey, AKA Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.  The books are a remarkable combination of creativity and realism, and although I had some minor issues with casting, I'm hopeful that the positive fan responses that I've seen indicate that the series has managed to redeem Syfy's somewhat unfortunate record for adaptation.

Once again, my thanks to the various friends and relatives who made these purchases possible.  I hope everyone reading this had a merry Christmas, and my best wishes to all for the New Year.  Here we are again, half way out of the dark...

- Sid

* To be accurate, Syfy for the first two seasons, now an Amazon Prime™ property.