Cheeky bastard!

Just had a knock on the door. "Hi buddy, I'm a scrap-man. Do you want to sell that little Toyota on your drive, it obviously hasn't been moved in a while."

I was out in it yesterday!

And while it admittedly is a little lichen-spotted, that's what happens to cars who spend most of their time in the open under the eaves of a house and whose owners can't wash them very often.

Ironically I was planning on giving it it's semi-annual wash this afternoon as it's booked in for its MOT on Friday.

Recent Reading - August 21

Halting State, Charles Stross

I wanted a light (re)read for my train trip and this suited my mood. In a semi-independent Scotland a company supplying in-game banking services is hit by an in-game bank raid that shouldn't have been possible and that could potentially tank their IPO, so an audit team is called in to find out what the hell just happened and so, accidentally, are the police. Which means everyone is trying to figure out not just whodunnit, but whether a crime has been committed (and in the case of the police WTF are these people talking about?). Major characters are a forensic auditor (and LARPer) and the conveniently out-of-work games programmer she hires as a native guide, plus a lesbian DS who really wishes her new DI wasn't quite such a high-flier, and the case so far out of her comfort zone nicking local neds. Things escalate quickly and by the end of the story they're rolling out a national state of emergency. This is Stross in a similar mode to The Laundry Files, managing a style that's simultaneously humorous and somewhat dark.

Rule 34, Charles Stross

This shares a character and the setting with Halting State, but about 5 years further down the Scottish Independence line (here framed as Westminster wanting an extra vote in Europe - if only!). Various people (primarily the no-longer high-flying DI from Halting State, a slightly hapless minor local criminal and a particularly nasty criminal facilitator), get caught up in an ongoing series of bizarre murders revolving around illegal fabricators and a breakaway bit of one of the post Soviet Asiatic states. There's quite an ingenious plot underlying things, but this is a darker book than Halting State (Rule 34 - if you can think of it, there's porn on the net for it). Content warning for technologically mediated paedophilia, it doesn't turn up much, but one of the instances is very early, and the later instance is pretty graphic.

The Great North Road, Peter F Hamilton

I've been wanting to re-read this for a while and took the chance while I was away. In a future Newcastle, a company executive turns up dead in the Tyne, his heart torn out by an unlikely five-fingered weapon. The problem is he's clearly one of the Norths, a clan of clones who run Northumberland Interstellar, the city's most prominent company and vital to the entire European economy for the oil it imports from St Libra, its company fiefdom on one of the planets of Sirius - gate technology meaning that importing oil from light-years away isn't a problem. What would be a problematically political case for the local plods rapidly escalates when it sets alarm bells ringing for the world's unified, and paranoid, military, because it matches the weapon used in the massacre of another batch of Norths out on St Libra 20 years ago. They convicted and jailed Angela Tramelo, the sole-survivor of the massacre, for life, despite her protestations that an alien monster did it, but if Angela's in jail, then is her monster real? And is it now on Earth? So it's decided that two investigations are needed, a criminal one in Newcastle, and an expedition into the jungles beyond the frontiers of St Libra (where animal life never evolved), to determine if there is a hidden enclave of alien monsters.

Which means we get an interleaved two-pronged narrative. On the one hand we have the Newcastle cops trying to pin down not just whodunnit, but whotheydunnitto (its a North, but which one?), which does a really nice job of extrapolating how crime and policing might evolve in a technologically advanced surveillance society. And on the other hand we have Angela Tramelo tagging along on the expedition into the wilds, as the one person ever to have fought the monster and won, despite it being led by Vance Elston, the military official who xtorturedx interrogated her before she was jailed, and who sees himself as a holy crusader for the defence of humankind. The Angela-Vance dynamic is a particularly interesting one, and that's true even before people on the expedition start to die.

('The Great North Road' gets multiple symbolic uses here -  it's the road from London to Newcastle, it's the road through Newcastle to the gate to St Libra, it's the road the expedition takes into the wilderness, and it's the diverse routes of the three branches of the North clan).

A Memory of Empire, Arkady Martine

Apparently I bought this and then completely forgot about it, fortunately I came across it while looking for books to read while away. OMG, it's so good!

Mahit Dzmare is the new ambassador from her home space-station to the vaguely Aztec meets vaguely Chinese (and poetry obsessed) empire of Teixcalaan, on whose avaricious borders it sits. Her instructions from home are basically "find out what happened to your predecessor, try not to get us annexed, don't let them know about our imago technology' - which technology means she's walking around with a 15 years out of date copy of her predecessor's memories at the back of her skull. Mahit's met at the spaceport by her liaison from the Ministry of Information Three Seagrass (Reed to her friends) and is quickly introduced to Three Seagrass's friend and colleague, Twelve Azalea (aka Petal), who has been poking around the previous ambassador's death. It rapidly becomes clear that Mahit has walked into a full-blown constitutional crisis, possibly of her predecessor's making. The aged Emperor is dying, there are at least four candidates to replace him, and an undetermined number of those may not be prepared to wait for him to finish the dying thing. And half the people she meets seem to have distinct expectations of Mahit, up to and including "I expect you to die".

But it's not the plot that shone out for me (though it's a good one), or even the worldbuilding (likewise good), it's the characterization. Mahit is thrown in at the deep end, but is determined to succeed, yet is also self-aware enough to realise that her lust for Teixcalaani culture might compromise her. Three Seagrass may only be Mahit's liaison, but she's a force of nature in bulling their way through the Teixcalitaani bureaucracy, Twelve Azalea is the usefully skilled but somewhat lackadaisical friend caught in her personal whirlwind and then there's the ezuazaucat Nineteen Edge, the edgeshine of a knife, one of the Emperor's personal advisors, who is the kind of force of nature Three Seagrass probably wants to grow up to be, and who apparently can't decide if she's trying to kill Mahit, or keep her alive.

Definitely recommended.