Viva La Book!

I’m currently re-reading one of my favourite series - The Dark Tower, by Stephen King. If it seems I’m a bit of a crazy King fan, I’m actually not. I like some of his books, but TDT are the only ones I really love. There is just something about Roland - the gunslinger - and the world he inhabits. It draws you in and makes you feel that same mad passion that he does for his Tower - and also the love he feels for his companions.

I fell in love with these books as a teenager, and waited eagerly as each new book was released. After King had his accident, I, like many others, was distraught - ‘we’ll never learn if Roland reaches the Tower now!!’

But, thankfully, King survived, and so did Roland. To meet an end, such an end… I do believe I cried when I read the final pages of the final book and the conclusion was reached - the only way it could have ended, as King said himself.

Books like these, where the characters come to live in your head, are the most memorable. When a story spans decades, and is full of growing life experience, as these are, they seem to exude a certain truth. Some people bemoan the fact that King wrote himself into these stories - but I personally enjoyed it. To him, these people are real, and he makes them live for us, his readers, too.

One of my favourite SF authors is a fellow Australian - Greg Egan. I think his books are becoming more well known over time, though when I first discovered him over a decade ago, I had a hard time finding his work in regular bookstores. I still do, to some extent, but finding them online and in the Brisbane city council library has been easy, thank goodness.

The first Egan I read was Axiomatic. I first read this book as a teenager, when I bought it with a gift voucher. I have re-read it many times since, as I love all of the stories in this collection. If you like science fiction that has a definite focus on the human element - who are we, what makes us our unique self, how could this be tampered with in the future… you’ll definitely enjoy this book.

His novels include Teranesia, Quarantine, Diaspora, Permutation City and Schild’s Ladder. I have read all of these, and really enjoyed them all. Egan is a very clever guy, and so some of these might fall into the category of “hard” SF; but I personally enjoy the genre.

Egan, like many SF authors, cross-pollinates his stories. Asimov did it with the Multivac, and his Rules of Robotics, and it’s a device that I love, as it helps to build a universe in my head. What I call cross-pollination is the process of taking some thing - a person, new technology, idea, culture (like THE Culture in Iain M. Banks stories) - and using it across multiple stories/novels.

The cross-pollination of Egan’s that sticks in my mind is the ‘dual’, or ‘jewel’ - a device that quietly sits inside your head copying all your brain activity, so that one day you can dispense with your old, worn out biological brain and replace it with the eternal jewel. Egan has used this technology successfully in a number of his stories to really examine what really makes us who we are - and what makes us human.

Australia - Axiomatic is my favourite Egan book - follow the link to check them all out.

International

You can visit Greg’s web site here.

While Rollerblading with my friend Liz along the Brisbane River yesterday (well, alongside it on the path, you know what I mean), I had an almost-literal brush with fame.

That is, who jogged past me with inches to spare? Perhaps our most famous Brisbane author - Nick Earls! I almost fell over as I turned my head to look over my shoulder as he went past, just to make sure - then called out to Liz - but too late. He was already a receding figure in black.

Part of me would have loved to say hello, but the greater part of me didn’t want to bother the guy - he was, after all, just out for a jog on a Saturday morning - no time for a fan to hassle him. I’m a big believer in giving people their space - just because someone is famous doesn’t mean they want people noticing them all the time!

So, anyway, it was a bit of a treat.

The thing I think I loved most about his books - Bachelor Kisses, ZigZag Street, and Perfect Skin in particular, was that they were set right here, in Brisbane. You can read novels set in London or New York till the cows come home, but it’s a rare thing to find good, entertaining books set right here in my home city.

Not to mention they are all funny, irreverent, and fantastic studies of the human condition. A good read, all.

Australia

International