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Text of the page (random words):
what on earth is gronts i reluctantly assume the latter is an anagram of strong and the character s name disentangles to steinbeck for a moment i wondered if there was a clue here a mad reference perhaps to the grapes of wrath the famous road novel a journey from one hellish landscape to another then i thought not your story begins kenstibec and starvie journey south through a hellish landscape fighting and killing reals as becomes necessary which is regularly and often they capture a real called fatty who eventually and grudgingly becomes an ally of kenstibec starvie who has been fashioned to resemble a sex goddess named jennifer e turns out to be an enemy of the ficial cause and is later revealed to be the queen of a local autocrat called the king in a scene like something out of mad max 2 she unleashes a deadly weapon against kenstibec and fatty who nevertheless make it in the end to london or at least to brixton although by then they are both in a bad physical state this main story is interleaved with a number of shorter passages printed in italics which appear to fill in some of kenstibec s background i hope i have this right or nearly right i found your narrative confusing and elliptical because it is repeatedly interested in distracting side issues the dialogue is often flippant the physical descriptions hasty however when you concentrate on telling the story things aren t too bad although your plainspeak tends to reveal a lack of genuinely imagined or fresh images much of the book reads like an inverse zombie novel the engineered ficials are the normals while the reals who appear to spend their days wandering around in groups and attacking the ficials are of course the substitute zombies i assume this was intended to be funny or paradoxical it is in fact neither the story is grim consisting of an apparently endless sequence of violent acts with a studied lack of interest in the consequences of violence the novel is full of bashings shootings bombings mutilations woundings in this violent age of ours in which films routinely depict many similar acts and of which there is much more and much worse in many console games we the readers the audiences are becoming fairly immune to such scenes either we take them for granted and are unmoved by them or in some cases we seek more and worse graphic action to satisfy appetites already numbed by lesser scenes writing plausibly and well about violence these days is difficult like all descriptive writing it requires skill discrimination and originality here s a typical piece of your writing about violence from pages 108 109 fatty threw himself on the nearest real jabbing the knife straight into his gut for a second the others froze i took the opportunity to grab the nearest guy s neck in my good right hand i squeezed hard meeting my thumb and fingers in his windpipe he looked me in the eye full of questions until i found his spine and twisted he dropped to the ground the third sentry levelled his gun at me and got off a shot which missed i grabbed the rifle pushed the muzzle up into his chin and forced his finger back on the trigger blowing his head almost clean off fatty pulled the knife out of his victim s belly and swung it across the fourth guy s ankles he shrieked in pain and tumbled onto fatty i stamped on the neck of the first guy who was still gurgling and reaching for his pistol then just as the fourth managed to jam the muzzle of his gun into fatty s face i kicked him sharp in the head and he fell down unconscious this is a tired pointless passage a dull description of an unbelievable fight it lacks story characters pain there is not even an impression of action or a sense of danger look at those verbs you have chosen threw froze grab squeezed looked twisted dropped levelled got they are the familiar first thought choices of a hack writer speedily typing words filling up a page surely you should be aiming higher than that this sort of passage raises the whole general question of the need to include descriptions of violence in fiction and if violence is included how that should be written since your entire novel is pitched at action damage destruction cruelty injuries don t you think you should be confronting the question in a serious way your writing is often inattentive and imprecise in a single paragraph on page 90 you tell us that some buildings were untouched but then contradict this by describing a roof shorn away a sign hanging at a dangerous angle a car park littered with wrecks a truck half melted into the tarmac there s a huge fire blazing away at the back eight pages later you do it again in a similar contradictory passage about contamination there s also a distinctly dodgy passage in the middle of the book when the unappealing fatty and the unemotional kenstibec plan to send a compliant starvie out as a sexual lure for a gang of randy reals listen fatty says to starvie after he has bound her wrists with plastic cuffs i know you re upset about having to go whoring but no more of your looks okay her response is to tilt her head and say sweetly you don t like the way i look at you soon the real sentries are predictably drooling over her as only men can do when a shackled sex goddess is dragged past the sequence goes on in the same lacklustre way for several inconsequential pages the whole of this scene seems likely to start an argument i don t want to get drawn into but i think when your book has been read by a few more people you might well be in case you are thinking otherwise i was not scouring the text for these solecisms setting out to set you up but like all people who are preparing a review i was keeping notes throughout the reading the protocols around a first novel by a young writer do matter i kept noting all the bad stuff much more than reported here but i was looking for good bits with which to try to encourage you i found none it gradually dawned on me that i was wasting my time barricade was unyielding in its awfulness it was a book i did not wish to write about you are spared the rest christopher priest also on the blog the three she s the new stephen king but you might not find her in airports joe vaz brings sarah lotz s eerie new blockbuster in to land 12 years ago 16 we re reading memory of water by emmi itäranta no amount of literary motley can save a bad premise says nina allan harper voyager hb 12 99 noria kaitio lives in a small village in the north of what has become known as the scandinavian union her story takes place several centuries in our future at a time where global warming has melted the polar ice caps and the world s political and environmental geography has been permanently and dramatically altered as a result fresh water is a precious commodity and strictly rationed noria s material security is based on her privileged social position as the daughter of the village tea master a venerated role that is passed down through generations usually from father to son although for particularly gifted daughters exceptions can be made noria has secrets to keep secrets that if revealed may jeopardise not only her own wellbeing but that of her entire village when her father dies noria finds herself torn between protecting herself and doing what she can to help the people of her community survive the increasing predations of war and the catastrophe of climate change i used to distrust the term literary sf as a coinage employed pejoratively by sf militants implying that as science fiction writers we should concentrate on turning out gristly tech based novels packed with abstruse conceits since questions of character language or formal aesthetics were irrelevant side issues best left to the namby pambies of the literary mainstream recently though i ve found this epithet creeping into my discourse more and more if there is a better shorthand for describing a novel that uses the trappings of science fiction as fashionable upholstery rather than as an engine then i wish someone would enlighten me i for one would have hoped that the increasingly widespread adoption of science fictional concepts into the mainstream lexicon might have led to an integration of all the talents a proliferation of novels in which literary excellence and speculative curiosity performed equal roles thus opening the genre up to wider recognition and more broadly informed debate what we seem to have instead is a steep rise in the number of hand wavy novels that attempt to hide their literary blandness behind the woo factor of commercially commodified tropes and in terms of their science fiction do absolutely nothing emmi itäranta s debut memory of water is a clear example of this unfortunate trend worldbuilding is another science fictional term i have previously shied away from as representing a tolkeinian ideal i would naturally react against yet the fact remains that if as a writer you are intent on constructing a literary polemic about an imagined future or past or alternate reality then without a convincingly realised backdrop your argument is likely to flounder the worldbuilding in memory of water is unconvincing in every way noria lives in a world where advanced use of solar power a 3g type pod communications network and an integrated public transport system are all everyday realities there are universities cities complex bureaucracies plenty of books survive from the past world as repositories of information about it and yet we are asked to believe that in this technologically developed society both our protagonist and her more tech savvy best friend sanja would accord the status of buried treasure to the cds videos and other remnants of past they excavate from the waste dumps why because this is what people in post catastrophe novels do similarly the first thing we learn about noria s world is that fresh water is scarce enough for it to be strictly rationed and yet casual references to characters taking a bath washing their clothes even watering the garden are scattered liberally throughout the text on a more macro level we are asked to take it on trust that the whole of europe and the rest of the world too we never find out now exists under military rule by a far eastern super state soldiers of the occupying army are everywhere and summary executions for water crime may be brutally carried out at a moment s notice i tried not to imagine the scene but my mind leapt ahead of me the glistening metal pressing into the fragile skin and reflecting the colour of the earth the movement of a blue clad arm the pool of blood spreading on the pale sand of the yard and the sunlight shattering in it p163 the languor of this description felt strange to me at odds with and therefore diminishing of the brutal act it is intended to describe and of course no post catastrophe novel would be complete without a brutal foreign occupying army even when the geographical isolation of the villagers the novel centers upon would most likely preclude the regular presence of footsoldiers perhaps the most unlikely imaginative leap itäranta demands we perform relates to the central role of the tea ceremony within her narrative i found it unlikely that this custom would have become so thoroughly integrated into the cultural ethos of the scandinavian union within such a relatively short time frame i also found myself unable to believe in a system where extreme water scarcity and the privileging of an inherited hierarchy in the world itäranta imagines tea masters and their families live in better houses receive greatly enhanced water rations and are allowed to tend their gardens without restriction could exist so peacefully few of the other villagers seem to question much less resent noria s family s privileged position at least not until the latter stages of the novel and by then for me at least it was too little too late the tradition and underlying philosophy involved in the tea ceremony are fascinating subjects providing a richness of metaphor and imagery that had this particular strand been more realistically attuned to the broader sweep of the narrative might well have provided an interesting and original approach to a science fiction story as things are we get diversions like this the greenness of the third tea was silver brushed and its leaves were twisted into the shape of drops what determined it however was the scent the scent of the third tea flowed that is the only way i can describe it it was the scent of freshly picked tea but it was also the scent of humid earth and of wind sweeping shrubs and it wavered like light waves on water or shadow one moment it was strong in my nostrils the next it fled nearly out of reach only to return again p83 passages like these provide a contrast between the intense spiritual life of the novel s protagonist and the harsh daily realities of the society she is born into they are also and in the same moment infuriatingly off kilter in a world where rain seldom falls noria s casual reference to humid earth is jarring i could also not help wondering how easy it would be to cultivate so many different varieties of tea a luxury commodity surely so easily where water supplies are so limited there is no rationale for any of this no argument i felt so frustrated by this illogic i found myself positing that tired old science fictional interrogative how the hell did we get there from here the only excuse that might reasonably be put forward for such sketchy and unfocused worldbuilding would be that the writer had other ambitions for her novel that the plot was acting merely an armature on which to build a more elaborate aesthetic philosophical or formal construction but in memory of water the basic story is all there is a story i found almost entirely uninvolving because of the half baked rationale that underpinned it by the same logic it s hard to care much about the people that inhabit itäranta s world their characterisation is thin in any case no one falls in love or nurtures an enmity even previously established relationships between noria s mother and father for example are barely described all we really ever know about noria is that she s going to be a tea master meanwhile those parts of the story that did grab me noria s attempts to discover the fate of the lost jansson expedition for example are left woefully underexploited what it this book for it s a pleasant enough read it passes the time yet as a confrontation of our possible fate as a planet and as human beings it is a pallid failure itäranta s vision of a world in crisis should threaten and challenge us instead it meanders along non invasive static poorly imagined as literature memory of water is competent but unremarkable as science fiction this novel does nothing that has not been done before and done better john wyndham s the chrysalids almost sixty years old now and treading similar territory still feels more frightening and more rigorous nina allan also on the 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