Kim Miller

A madcap race through 1990s Boston as two private detectives get sucked into a political scandal that breeds a gang war, and all the while trying to stay alive. Lehane's debut novel and a racy easy to read action story.

Two politicians hire Patrick Kenzie to find a cleaning woman who has taken documents from their office and disappeared. They want the woman found and they want the documents back. By the end of the novel there must be fifty dead bodies (we lose count) in the city morgue and gallons of blood draining into the street.

The dialogue is the black humour of noir detective stories of the era, the sort where the detective looks out through the venetian blinds in high contrast black and white TV shows. There's a Porsche, a psycho guy who, luckily, is on their side, and a cast of coppers doing copper type things. All in all a fun read for a long wet afternoon.

This one has raised a storm of fake rage in the US states where book banning is the new normal. So I decided to check it out.

It's a graphic novel of a woman's memoir about growing up non-binary. She is three years old at the beginning when her family moves to a backwoodsy house with no electricity, water, etc. Her parents are kind of hippie but well educated. At the end of the book she is approaching thirty and considering top surgery.

Her life is one of continuing identity crises as she struggles to fit in but feels she is pushed into silence about herself. While I can see that the religious bigotry of the US would hate the book, it seems to me to fill a real need with young people trying to navigate their way through the minefield of opinions versus the emerging genetics and neuroscience of how bodies and brains are gendered in utero.

Vonnegut here is like a shaman who throws a bunch of knuckle bones in the air, sees how they land, and tells the client what they mean. The novel is a crazy ramble through whatever Vonnegut had tucked away in the absurdist corner of his mind. It's dark and dangerous, reaching past satire to the edges of savagery.

SciFi author Kilgore Trout appears again alongside other Vonnegut regulars. He's been invited to an arts festival where one of his books about a lone human on a planet of robots sparks a psychotic episode in a paticipant. The narrator has made many references to 'bad chemicals' effecting human behaviour, but the assumption has been drug references. As the story progresses we see that he means the chemicals our brain makes for itself. Humanity is little more than a bunch of robots being controlled by our own chemistry.

To add to his theme, the narrator becomes a character in the book towards the end, demonstrating how he can make any character in the story do whatever he wants them to do. It's a weird flex that adds to the feeling of insanity that threads its way through the whole story.

PKD does it again. In a far future where humans are colonising the planets they need to be 'chemically encouraged' with the drug Can-D to maintain their lives in the boredom of life on the bleakest places imaginable. The principle drug involves sitting around a playing board called a Layout - think of Monopoly in 3D - and engaging with each other as the drug blanks their minds and takes them into the game.

Palmer Eldritch is a mystical figure who enters the story with a new drug called Chew-Z that he says eclipses anything else. Of course he wants to sell it because of course he does. But Chew-Z does not require a Layout, and the Layout marketers don't like it.

It sounds like a silly plot but PKD works his magic and we enter the typical PKD world where we question the difference between human sentience and whatever other alternatives are presented.

Thousands of years ago a monastery was established on one of the tallest mountains on Earth. It was intended as the elevation of humankind into the heavens, and although fraught with internal factions, it lasted for centuries. And in the not so distant future a space engineer wanted to use the mountain to construct a space elevator that would link to a geostationary satellite 24,000 miles above the Earth. Humans have established colonies on the Moon and Mars and the elevator will reduce rocket transport.

Clarke blends the story of the monastery into the similarly themed story of the space elevator. The engineer has achieved 'top monk' status by building a bridge across the Strait of Gibraltar and is almost a prophet of engineering. But other political forces are against him. Into the political mix comes an ambassador from Mars who wants the project moved to his planet. There's nothing like a bit of FOMO to stir things along. And there's also an alien 'thing' like a mini Rendezvous with Rama that wanders past.

Clarke takes us through some of the hard science stuff of building the elevator and the story jumps along over much of the construction. The monastery has dissolved too easily in a paragraph or two to clear the way. Because we all know Clarke's repetition of 'religion will disappear' message.

It all goes along pretty well until there's a life and death crisis. At last there's something happening that gets my heart beating faster. Clarke is usually not so intent on making his characters really human but here we see him digging deeper.

The wrap up takes us into the far future. The elevator has been successfully completed. It's so successful that there are several around the planet and, guess what, they're linked together in a ring around the Earth. And the alien 'thing' returns for Clarke to tell us again the children are the future.

It's a great story and won awards but loses a star from me for some of the tropes that flow too easily onto the page.