Richard (K) Morgan

Magic for Beginners – Kelly Link

Ever since I read Stranger Things Happen, I knew there was something special about Kelly Link. When I saw this second collection in a bookstore in San Francisco, knowing it wasn’t available in the UK, I didn’t even open it, I just bought it. Later, on the plane coming home, I fought my wife for possession – she’d just read the first three pages and wanted to keep it. Those first three pages (from the Hugo award winning story ‘The Faery Handbag’) are like holding black silk in your hands. Here is the main character’s aunt in her coffin: “she looked like she was going to be a news anchor for Fox television, instead of dead.” Okay? If you’re an American, just go right out and buy Magic for Beginners. If you’re British, just grit your teeth and pay the Amazon.com postage. It’ll be worth it.

The Truth About Markets – John Kay

I wish I’d read this one before I wrote Market Forces – it wouldn’t have changed the outlook of the book, but it would have given me a whole stack of incisive economic analysis to draw on. Kay, like most intelligent and uncorrupted economists still sticking their heads above the parapet, is intensely critical of the American Business Model and the damage it has done. Better yet, he brings massive analytical and factual weaponry to the fray. You get the impression that if Adam Smith was still alive and writing, this is what he’d sound like. A humane but unsentimental look at what has gone wrong over the last two and a half decades, and better yet how the damage can be constructively repaired. Will make your head hurt in places, but the overview’s well worth it once you’ve struggled to the top.

River of Gods – Ian Macdonald

The book I thought would win this year’s Clarke award – and the book I would have been delighted to lose to. I was already a fan of Macdonald’s Chaga stories, and had very high expectations going in. I wasn’t disappointed. River of Gods is huge in scope and hallucinatory in vision – there are cinematic fragments here of Bladerunner, Robocop, Ghandi, 2001, Salaam Bombay, What Lies Beneath, City of God, The Beach and more. The plot takes in upper echelon political intrigue, street level cyberpunk crime, cutting edge quantum science, love and betrayal, prejudice and hate and just about every other aspect of the human condition you can easily imagine. Brilliant and brawling, River of Gods is an SF juggernaut smashing through every critical fence and careering on deep into it the territory of mainstream fiction. The shape of things to come, I hope.

Islam’s Black Slaves – Ronald Segal

A fascinating account of something you just don’t ever give that much thought to – the fact that Africa was devastated no less by slavers from the Islamic east than by the more commonly acknowledged depredations of the western nations. Segal lays out painstakingly researched detail on how and why slaves were taken east in their millions and how Islam was twisted and selectively read to justify the fact in much the same way as Christianity. The cultural parallels are intriguing, but so equally are the differences – the very high extent of manumission in Islam and the very high levels of society to which slaves could rise. Oh yeah, and the castration. Segal has no interest in playing cultural relativist or revisionist – instead, he presents an even handed but utterly uncompromising portrait of an evil that continues to this day.

Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami

It was perhaps inevitable that this would be in here – Murakami’s latest intricately fashioned outing, and for my money his best book since Dance Dance Dance. Once again, we’re faced with a world that seems to exist only in glimpses caught out of the corner of the eye – supernatural entities, affable ghosts, and humans that are just fucking weird. Although the story doesn’t quite live up to the tragic power of Murakami’s masterpiece, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World, it moves along with the effortless grace of one of the cats it features as major, speaking characters (I know, I know – how many serious authors do you know who can get away with that?). You think you’re not getting anywhere, and then suddenly you realise you’ve been living minutely and delightedly inside Murakami’s world for hours at a time. Reads like the Japanese TV series Monkey crossed with the finest Graham Greene.

Jarhead – Anthony Swofford

Remarkable piece of military autobiography, charting the time the author spent in the US marine corps and the part he played in the first Gulf War. It blends gritty realism with poetic human reflection and the occasional burst of laugh-out-loud humour. Swofford is utterly unsentimental about his time in the marines, and totally clued in about the political machinations and corruption which lie behind the US’s role in the Middle East. He manages somehow to make you wish you’d been there and at one and the same time thank whatever gods you have that you weren’t. In a little over two hundred and fifty pages, Jarhead takes the lid off the whole problematic psychology of males and soldiering, and ends on a note of the purest compassion. It’s vital reading for our times.

Snow – Orhan Pamuk

Something of a guarded recommendation here – I lived in Turkey for a year back in the late eighties and I spent time in the town of Kars where Snow is set, so I was keen to read this. I’m also of the opinion that Pamuk is one of those voices in literature which jar you out of your comfort zone and make you actually think about what you read and why. Having said that, Snow ends up being quite hard work – I’d pegged it (and Pamuk) as being somewhat like Mikhail Bulgakov, and certainly the start of the book, intensely cinematic and poetic at the same time, was promising. But by halfway through I was beginning to feel that the tone was much more like some of the more traditional Russian authors, which is to say quite turgid at times. A constant almost post modern tendency to step away from the characters and re-address them at differing levels of narrative intimacy didn’t help much either. Still, Snow does give a unique insight into the psyche of modern Turkey and its struggle to reconcile Islam with a secular western society. For that reason alone, it’s well worth a look.

The Suffering – Midway Games

You what?

Yes, this is a game, and a horror survival RPG at that. And yes, it still merits inclusion here. I think one of the duties of a good speculative fiction author is to keep an open mind and an eye on the future as it advances in all its scary glory. The Suffering is proof that all the values of literature can be quite successfully imported into the gaming medium (though of course they almost always aren’t). This game offers a painstakingly realised landscape, carefully rounded characterisation, deeply disturbing symbology and a strong undercurrent of social commentary. It’s also full of violent action and terrifying monsters. Playing it is in fact a lot like reading a good Stephen King novel. Most pleasing of all, though there is without question a clear moral topography at work in the game, this is provided peripherally through hints and comments – the characters themselves do not fit neatly and childishly into the slots of good and evil. They are both and neither at one and the same time – in short, they are human (even when they’re not, if you see what I mean) and this is what really engages the player at a level comparable with good literature. If you only ever play one platform game in your life – make it this one.