What I'm reading now (amended)

As always I have several things on the go, and despite not working, don't give myself a lot of time to read. There's always stuff going on! OK, ok, mainly flight simming, which can suck up hours from your day, and watching films I've recorded.

For the moment, I don’t have any history books on the go, but I have a few unread volumes in the bookcase that I’m looking forward to reading. Mostly gloomy stuff, so that’s quite appropriate right now. To cheer myself up, I’m also slowly working my way through Pete McCarthy’s McCarthy’s Bar, about trying to recapture the atmosphere of family visits to Ireland as a young lad growing up in Warrington, Cheshire. Claims of “I’m Irish, you know” are met with scepticism: “well, you don’t sound Irish.” Another Englishman, ashamed of his heritage, trying to claim a more acceptable Celtic one, methinks. The book’s about 10 years old, now, and I don’t know if it’s still available, but I think Denise bought it, and I never got round to reading it until I was rooting around for something to read and spotted it in the bookcase. I’m finding it very enjoyable, but I maybe should have read it a while ago, when I could remember what it was like in 1999 …

The other thing I’m reading is My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse. Not read any Wodehouse before, but it was a free download on one of the electronic book websites, so I thought I’d have a go. Quite amusing collection of short stories, but they do get a bit repetitive. Not all the stories feature Jeeves and Wooster, but that doesn’t seem to bother the TV companies. I read one of the non-Jeeves and Wooster stories in the book, and remembered seeing it on TV with Jeeves and Wooster (played by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie) replacing the characters as written.

I've always read science fiction. As a kid I got bored with children's fiction, and ironically, couldn't stretch my credulity enough to believe that four kids and a dog could outwit a gang of international art thieves, etc. etc. My first introduction to 'speculative fiction' was The Hobbit dramatised on the radio, and from there went on to reading the book, and The Lord of the Rings. Although I enjoyed LOTR, and still do (I re-read it every couple of years or so), I pretty soon realised that I wasn’t all that interested in the Fantasy end of the genre, and moved on to‘hard’ science fiction, having discovered two very different masters in Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Current favourite authors are Iain M. Banks (still going strong!) and Charles Stross. I've just realised that both these guys are  Scots! Well, well!

Bookshops like WH Smith, and Waterstone always lump science fiction and fantasy together in a single section, and sometimes throw horror in for good (or bad) measure. This is annoying to me, not only because they are very different genres (and you might as well throw detective fiction in there as well, as another form of speculative fiction), but also because I have to wade through all the stuff I’m not interested in to find something to read. It’s not as if any of the fantasy stuff is any good. As a rule it is formulaic sword and sorcery, which, at best, passes the time. As a result, I long ago took to reading the short form for preference, through periodicals such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (which at least tended to steer clear of Sword & Sorcery in the favour of some much more thoughtful and thought provoking work), Analog and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. As these became very difficult to get hold of on the magazine stall, even through a regular order, I started downloading them in electronic book form to read on my pocket PC. It seemed appropriate to read science fiction on a pocket PC – a bit Star Trekky (not that Star Trek is science fiction).

Which brings me back to the topic of this piece: what I am reading now. I had been subscribing to the electronic version of Asimov’s, but there are a couple of issues around reading from an electronic device: the screen is all but unreadable in full sunlight (usually OK on a typical overcast day, but not in the sun), and the problem of battery life. Of course, the printed page also has problems around lighting: you can’t read in the dark! Because of the nature of my eyesight (keratoconus, if you want to know), I find it hard to read unless the page is lit with just the right intensity of light: I just can’t focus in low light levels, and in full sunlight, reading from the printed page is just as difficult for me as reading from an electronic screen.

The titles I referred to above are all American publications, and are difficult to obtain in their print editions in this country without taking out a subscription, which includes a hideously expensive postage fee from the country of origin. So I had a look around for something better. Years ago I had read and enjoyed an anthology of stories published in a British magazine called Interzone; so remembering this, last year I tried to see if it was still going, and if I could get hold of it. Following an internet search, I tracked it down and subscribed to it for a year’s issues.

I was surprised to see, when it arrived, that it was in a standard magazine format (albeit rather slim). Most of the magazines I’ve had were about the format of a hardback or trade paperback book, with about half the number of pages. The exception was the New English Library’s Science Fiction Monthly from the mid 1970s, which was about the format of a tabloid newspaper and had as much emphasis on the artwork as the fiction. The pages were large enough to be put on the wall as posters. I remember having one from Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers showing a huge starship trailing hundreds of marines in their drop-suits (half space-suit, half landing-ship!) as they dropped to the ground to fight the aliens. The story was loosely adapted to make the blockbuster movie of the same name in 1997.

Looking at the stories in Interzone, I thought they must be very short: but not a bit of it. The word count is the same as in the other magazines, with just as many stories. Although there are a few overseas writers, the majority of them are British, which is good, because the science fiction scene here is very strong indeed at the moment, and a lot of British writers are getting published by the big American mags. I was worried that the American money might limit which writers Interzone could attract, but I needn’t have been worried: the writing is of the very highest standard. Interzone also publishes reviews of book, TV, film and Blu-ray / DVD releases, and the good thing about this is that they are all relevant to the UK market, which is a breath of fresh air after reading reviews in the American mags for items that I couldn’t get hold of. I really enjoy the stories published in Interzone, and it's nice to have a printed page in my hand after all that digital stuff for years. Not that I've changed my mind about digital publishing. I still think that it's a tremendous way to access literature, but sometimes, for relaxation, it's nice to turn a for-real page. Asimov's was going downhill since Sheila Williams took over as editor anyway: only one issue in three was any good all the way through. Change is good, anyway.