Tag: post-apocalyptic

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book reading reviews

Ice Diaries – Lexi Revellian

When I read Revellian’s Remix last year I enjoyed it well enough but it was enough outside my personal tastes that I didn’t think I’d be picking up another of her books. However when I came across Ice Diaries as one of the February picks for the UK Amazon Kindle group on Goodreads I was intrigued by the concept and so I decided to give it a go.

The year is 2018 and shortly after a pandemic has wiped out most of the population a shift in the climate, what looks like a mini ice age, occurs and within a few weeks the UK is under 20 metres of snow. A small group of survivors are living in what were once luxury penthouse apartments. The have to forage for supplies by raiding the buildings that are still accessible i.e. the tall ones, or ones they can get to through them. How long this lifestyle is sustainable if the climate doesn’t change back is a question they ponder and the main character, Tori, would like to head south for warmer climes. Into this a stranger arrives bringing questions and violence in his wake.

The main thing that Ice Diaries has going for it is scenery. The idea of an almost empty London which consists of only the tallest buildings is quite a cool one. Unfortunately the book itself doesn’t do much with this idea. As post-apocalyptic novels go this definitely falls on the “cosy” side. The group have dinner parties, a book club, musical and poetry recitals – and this is the less well organised of the two communities in the book! Also although there’s talk of frostbite and of course mention of the depth of the snow, you get more of a sense of people surviving in what would be a normal, but on the very cold side of normal, British winter. I’m no expert but surely the kind of change that could deliver such a radical change in the landscape would mean the kind of climate where keeping warm, keeping fed and generally keeping on guard against the elements would be a constant struggle. However it seemed like so long as they wrapped up they could mostly move about outside ok and once inside it was sort of assumed that they could dress how they liked.

Of course this kind of thing normally doesn’t bother me and I wouldn’t be thinking about it if the writing was better. It was easy to read but the dialogue seemed obvious and on the nose and the plot was often predictable. Whereas Remix had some plot twists and turns and the pace quickened, Ice Diaries felt very sedate. There were whole sections where the action conveniently paused so that the main characters could spend time together, or explore a new venue. Never mind that they were being pursued by someone who potentially wanted to harm them. It felt very odd.

I see that I noted in my review of Remix that “some of the characterisation was lifted from a chick-lit novel and placed in a crime story“. Here I felt the same way and because of the setting it jarred more. One of the male characters literally was a tall, dark brooding character with a mysterious past who was potentially dangerous, and he was contrasted with a safe, sensible type. When Tori broke off from musings about how to escape to somewhere more sustainable, or where to get the next load of firewood from, to compare these to potential mates, or talk about how she went weak at the knees at his touch – it felt very odd indeed.

All of which makes it sound like I disliked this book. I didn’t really. In its favour it’s a quick read. I just didn’t find much to enjoy about it.

5/10 – a romantic scifi thriller in a snowy future London.

Current TBR count is 256 which is up from 253. I blame book groups and Amazon’s deal of the day!

Categories
book Read Every Day reading reviews

RED Book 23: Wool – Hugh Howey

I don’t want to bore you with apologies about how long it’s been since the last RED update (or blog post of any kind), however I will say, to be fair to Wool, that the long delay has been to do with events in my personal life making me not feel like reading very much. I stalled in the middle of this book but not because of the book itself.

Wool is set in a post-apocalyptic world where what’s left of humanity lives in an underground silo and the worst crimes are punishable by being sent outside for ‘cleaning’ which involves spending your last few minutes, while the poisonous atmosphere eats through your suit, wiping down the cameras so that the silo-dwellers can temporarily get a clear view of the outside. But, as ever, all is not what it seems. Is the silo really all there is?, is the outside really a poisonous uninhabitable wasteland?

First thing to say about Wool is that it was originally published in 5 parts and it shows. The first part – the original short story – is complete in itself. However it gives away some information as part of its climax that I think you’d want to keep back if writing the novel from scratch. Parts 2-5 are more connected but suffer from having being written individually and so characters and plot elements that seem central in part 3 may not be by the end of 5. Particularly with the characters it was harder to care when you realised they may not be around that much longer.

That said it was an intriguing world. (I was going to say “well-built” but you could pick holes in it all day long if you’d a mind to. I don’t usually.) And he certainly knows how to create tension. I can see exactly why Ridley Scott bought the film rights. The best bits read like set pieces from a good SciFi thriller movie. That said there were bits that felt like padding.

He’s written a prequel which I hear good things about and which was at least written as a complete novel from the word go. I will probably check it out eventually but it’s not next on my list.

6/10 – good plot, interesting world, characters and coherence needs work.




Categories
6000 pages book reading reviews

6000 Pages 2011, Y: The Last Man – Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra (pages 5535-5909)


Y: The Last Man is a comic book series. Note it’s not a graphic novel IMHO because although you can buy it in different collected forms it was written as a series of 60 comics over about 6 years and it definitely follows a episodic serial narrative.

It’s probably worth mentioning something about the comic book form here. It’s something I only really came to as an adult – yes I read the Beano and 2000AD but not beyond about 13-14 and both of those were weekly comics. I never had the experience of buying monthly comics under what I think of as the US model. Which are aimed more at adolescents and which come out less frequently. They feature on-going stories but also have ‘arcs’ that typically last 4-6 issues. So the “full” story of Y: The Last Man takes 60 issues and 6 years to play out but is comprised of maybe 10-12 story arcs within that. This feels like an odd, slow way to consume a story to me but I guess real comic book fans have several series on the go at once.

There’s another oddity (to me) which is the timing. It takes maybe 5-10mins to read an issue. So if like me you sit down after the fact and read them in long 1-2 hour stretches like you would a novel, then you get a lot of story, a lot of setup-conflict-resolution or whatever in that time. It’s also true that Although it may take 10mins to read there’s often a lot of visual information on the page that’s adding to the story so it sometimes feels like a much more ‘dense’ experience.

I guess for me it’s most similar to watching serialised TV like Buffy – on-going seasonal arc but with shorter episode–length stories. You get the same sense for example of building up to an ‘act break’ which on TV is an ad break and in comics the end of an issue. However the comic book form feels so much more condensed that these occur relatively more frequently.

Anyway, with that in mind, how was Y: The Last Man?

It’s the story of a man, Yorick, who appears to be the last male human left alive on earth after a mysterious plague wiped out all the other men. I’ve explained the premise to people and the usual reaction is “so it’s basically porn, then?”. Well it’s not, but fair comment I suppose. Actually, possibly in reaction to this there’s almost no sex in the first third of the story. This at first is ostensibly because Yorick is on his way to find his girlfriend who was in Australia just before the plague hit. A little later we find out he has “issues” relating to sex which may explain why he’s not taking advantage of his unique position.

In the mean time we get a sort of standard post-apocalyptic survival tale with a twist. Society hasn’t completely broken down but it has significantly changed. Because certain professions have a very high level of men in them (e.g. airline pilots) this has an effect in how the post-plague world operates. Even without a large gender disparity, all the male car drivers suddenly dying (the plague hits quickly and takes effect in minutes) makes a mess of the roads in a way that takes months to sort out.

The book tries to explore what a female only world would look like. What happens in politics, art, commerce, religion, warfare, law enforcement – all these are touched on. It’s quite interesting although at time it borders on preachy/exposition-dumpy to do this. It also tries to have its feminist cake and eat it. Whilst its heart appears to be in the right place it can’t quite avoid the wider comic book traditions of female depiction (ridiculously attractive with gravity-defying boobs). To be fair different artists[1] vary in this respect and the main comic is usually more balanced than the covers.

It’s not just the physical characteristics of the women either. I don’t think it’s entirely unproblematic that we get lots of violence in this book. It’s a very violent book and there is a certain section of the population that just enjoys seeing women laying into one another, whether with weapons or hand-to-hand. On the one hand in a world of only women, women are inevitably taking up all the positions of the moral compass, on the other it can feel at times fetishistic. Overall my feeling was: heart in the right place, occasional uneasiness in specific depictions.

That aside I will say that I enjoyed it. The story lines develop in interesting and unexpected ways. The dialogue had a wit and knowingness that reminded me of Buffy. The ending was not quite what I might have hoped for but not entirely unsatisfying. (I think I read that some were very disappointed. I wonder if I’d have felt more strongly about it after following the characters for 6 years.)

8/10 – Y? Y not? (sorry!)

[1]another comic-book-ism – when different directors shoot a particular episode of the TV show they rarely change the complete look of the show. You almost certainly won’t fail to recognise particular characters because of it.