Kim Miller

Being a Monty Python fan and also a fan of Gilliam's movies, I came to this book with a positive mindset. Gilliam's work on Python meant that his animations held the screen but he didn't appear in person, so he was something of a mystery for a long time. This memoir fills out a certain amount of that mystery. From his childhood in the US to his work with Mad magazine to manipulating his excursion through the military to his adopting of England as his home, this is an overview of the story of the man.

He also traverses many of his movies with anecdotes of their making and reception. The difficulties of bringing his weird Pythonesque humour to the US market get a lot of air as he struggled to be taken seriously as a movie maker. The illustrations in the book increase through this portion of his story and his story board pics show something of his visual process.

He speaks of how his daughter was instrumental in keeping him on track when the US market wanted to trim down his more outrageous ideas, and to continue through a disaster such as when Heath Ledger died while filming Dr Parnassus. I think she was also the push for him to get this book completed. We owe her a beer next time we see her in the pub.

Afterthought. One of the funny things is how the book ends. He acknowledges 'all the people along the way who pushed me forward...' and he lists about a thousand actors over several pages. Yep, I counted them. Well, I copied them all into a word processor and halved the word count.

This was my first Tim Mead book and the third in a series of this detective and stage magician pair-up. Set in 1938 it was a bit Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than a Midsomer Murders episode. Lots of twists, lots of victims, lots of guilty parties. And a surprise ending that told us that we should have been asking more questions all the way through.

This was the review I put on another site after a bit more thought:

Set in 1938 and mostly in a grand English country house it's like Agatha Christie but with more dead bodies than Midsomer Murders. And also more over-contrived ways of killing people. And also more murderers than Christie ever needed. It's quietly funny, simply because of the way it pokes fun at the Christie world. The detective is partnered by a stage magician, one has the crime experience and the other knows how to understand misdirection and illusion. I took it kind of seriously at first but started to see the absurdity slowly building up by the halfway mark. And then he drops a very unexpected ending, and then he drops another even more unexpected ending, and then a third unexpected ending. He knows how to overkill.

I think this is the debut novel from Bauer. It's the first of a series in a 'destroyed world' type of story. Climate change is freezing the world into a new ice age, only some people escape. The book suffers from having everything explained in terms of numbers: how many people can fit in this spaceship, how large a volume needs to be to hold this forest, how much space needs to be given over to food manufacture, etc. He has a wide array of characters drawn from around the world who face orchestrating a rescue in the face of a rapidly advancing catastrophe.

It seems that Bauer is looking for hard scifi but his process gets in the way. I'll watch out for the second book as i would like him to succeed, the world needs more Aussie authors.

A short novelette about Hadrian in the years he spent on Jadd. A prince of another star system approaches the ruler of Jadd to seek an alliance. He's brought gifts, genetically engineered birds who can sing with human voices. Some of them have hidden talents, and the prince himself has a trick or two up his sleeve.

I didn't think this the best of Ruocchio's short fillers. There's a lot of description of beautiful plumage but his gift of telling stories of political intrigue is not having its best showing in this one.

This is my first Jasper Fforde and I think an early work of his. I took it up as I was looking for something comedic after a heavier read and this appeared popular. I had trouble for much of it. Fforde is trying so self-consciously hard to be clever and witty that the imaginative story suffers for it. I was prepared to cut him some slack and continued and it improved from about the half way point.

It's a time travel novel where somebody is going back into original manuscripts of classic novels and removing characters. Thursday Next is the agent who is tracking down the bad guy. Her weird name is only one of many such unfunny puns. Other people are Sturmey Archer and Bowden Cable, both items of bicycle engineering. Yep, painful, no?

There are two themes running through the story. One is an ongoing discussion between Next and other characters about who really wrote the plays of Shakespeare. It's an oft repeated discussion point. Second theme is the story of Jane Eyre, especially the ending that people did not like. I hadn't read Jane Eyre but it sounded false to me.

As the book came to an end Fforde's finest humour came to the fore. The real author of Shakespeare's plays becomes known, although only to Next. And the ending of Jane Eyre is resolved to everybody's satisfaction in a great plot twist.

This novella follows on from Ashes of Man and is the best of the novellas in the series. It tells the story of Lorien Aristedes after he engineered the rescue of Hadrian.

It begins with Lorien already having been tried and entered into his sentence. The book starts out dark and gets progressively darker as Ruocchio strips Lorien of his dignity and ultimately his humanity. As Lorien is ground into the dust by his circumstances and the people around him the inner surety that has carried him in previous episodes also retreats from him. He is thrown into suffering and forced into performing actions that he would never have countenanced in his former life.

Next to Kingdoms of Darkness, this is the darkest story of the series so far and totally compelling. It was a two session read for me, and had I started it early in the day it would have been a single session to complete. It confirms to me that Ruocchio is at his best in longer form stories rather than shorts.

This is the best so far of the short story fill-ins of Sun Eater. The stories are sharper and add more into the overall drama of the main novels. Each story builds into some aspect of the whole.

Whether the story of a main character who was left behind, the story of a soldier who is confronted and transformed by an age-old god of the Cielcin, the story of a knight of the Empire who confronts the extrasollarians who build clones so that they can later use their body parts, or the story of a young woman who is growing into the true daughter of her exiled father, these stories merge into the Sun Eater series more perfectly than the stories in the other collections.

This is my first DNF for longer than I can remember. I bought what I thought was SciFi but was what started out a Victorian London era horror story. Very soon the protagonist was heading towards taking the life of a newborn baby so he could reanimate his recently deceased wife. That was enough for me to stop.

Young Kathreen has been captured in an interplanetary invasion and taken to another planet by her captors. Here, with other victims, she will work in the mines, digging out a dangerous and mysterious substance. Suddenly a chance opens up for her to assume the identity of the child of a noble. She takes it. Thus starts her journey of revenge.

The book suffers, in my estimation, from several graphic depictions of child abuse and torture. It is part of the plot structure in that we need to know what drives Kathreen's thirst for revenge and justice, but graphic violence towards children is a tricky subject to navigate.

The story arc of Kathreen is well thought out and developed and we see her rise in power to the point where she faces for herself the difficulty of maintaining power without becoming the next tyrant.

I went looking for something funny to read and this popped up. It started out wacky crazy insanity with lots of laughs. Then it turned to blood and guts everywhere comedic horror, although it felt like the author was trying for something higher. It hit a bit of a turning point at the 75% mark with a remembered tale of high school violence and I was close to DNF at that point. However, it improved in style and became a bit more cohesive as the protagonists realised they were about to save the universe. The closing sequence was very clever - the bit on the basketball court - where they (and us) realise that somebody else could have done a much better job.

Book 5 of Sun Eater. What a wild ride. #4 was a heavy hitter with Hadrian being captured by the Cielcin and tortured for years. In this book we see him trying to come to grips with what happened to him while still maintaining focus on the war.

If #3 showed him in shining glory and #4 shows him being crushed to nothing, #5 starts out like lush velvet depression before raising the stakes as he is sent headlong into another confrontation with the Cielcin prophet.

His 'gift' from The Quiet is apparently gone until one event sparks an intensity of rage in him and he reaches deeper into himself for an extraordinary outcome.

I'm continually impressed with Ruoccio's ability to weave a complex story over such a wide ranging galaxy. Each new novel reaches back into previous parts of the story, and in this one we find conversations and characters in the first book come home.

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.

Following on from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet where the Wayfarer has been almost destroyed in an alien attack. The AI that runs the ship has been blitzed and when it was rebooted it reverted to a brand new install, having lost all it's memories and relationships with the crew.

In this book the AI has been transferred to a body kit and the story from here explores the difficulty of the transfer from ship to body. Running parallel is the story of Jane, a ten year old girl who was artificially bred to be a factory worker. Chapters alternate between the cloned human working out her life and the AI in an artificial body working out her life. Their respective struggles are intermingled with the strange relationships between various aliens that populate the planet.

It's the cozy scifi of Becky Chambers with the same sense of optimism of the Angry Planet story. This time she deals with themes of identity and acceptance in a deeper way. It got a bit bogged down in the expository stuff in the middle but suddenly sparked up again once we got back to characters instead of concepts.

This volume 4 of Sun Eater is such a heavy hitter. Ruocchio has a great talent as a story teller but this book takes that talent further than the first three in the series. Hadrian has been through some 'stuff' in those books, but this time Ruocchio throws him to the wall. At the 40% point Ruocchio stomps on Hadrian, and then does it again and again and again. This is not merely a crisis moment, for hundreds of pages Hadrian is pounded deeper and deeper into suffering. I found it a painful thing to keep reading, but the writing is so good and the story is so imaginative that it kept me glued to the page.

We know that Hadrian is writing this way into the future so he has to survive, but I could not fathom how Ruocchio was going to get him out of the fire this time.

There is a long denouement in this story and it's the first time for as long as I can remember that a book has brought me to tears.

Rod Moss is an Alice Springs (Australia) artist and author. His work mostly features life in the red centre. In this book he travels to the coast.

Blue Moon Bay is a coastal town filled with comedic but weird characters living out their weird lives. Some of the characters are people, some are animals, some are puppets, all are grotesque. The book is a celebration of absurdist comedy with Moss's artworks peppering the text.

If this ever found its way to Florida they would ban it.

This is #1 in a Steampunk series that the author started as a NaNoWriMo project - National Novel Writing Month. This is an international endeavour where people undertake to spend November writing as much as they can of a novel. When I was writing a few years ago I participated in NaNoWriMo so it has a natural attraction for me.

Nita is a general duties mechanic, a Free Wrench, in the boiler room of a power plant built into the side of a volcano. Yep, steam powers everything. In a fit of impulsiveness she finds herself trying to fit in with the crew of smugglers of a steam powered airship. And so the adventures begin.

This is a free-wheeling story that reads as a YA novel. It's a bit swashbuckling pirate, a bit "find the mole in the crew", a bit "how do these people even get along?, and a bit "I know this will all turn out OK because the author is too nice to his characters".

Not much needs to be said about one of the iconic works of American fiction. I first read this not too long after it came out as one of those university students who thought they were so cool for being abreast of modern literature. Or, as Vonnegut once said about his writing, "It's all just horseshit." Or something close to that.

Vonnegut gathers all his chaotic black humour into one place for this book. Billy Pilgrim's time jumps scatter his story back and forth, from childhood to the day he will die, from being abducted to another planet to watching his interplanetary lover in a porn film in a New York adult book shop, from running scared through a German forest before his capture to being a wealthy optometrist in the US.

It's an insight into Vonnegut's state of mind following his return from war and surviving the Dresden bombing, well before the term PTSD was coined or the condition even understood.

The second collection of short stories that fits between the Sun Eater novels. This is a mix of Marlowe stuff and minor characters who don't appear in the novels. The final story concerns Crispin, the follow up from The Lesser Devil novella. Getting a bit more family info bumps this book up a half star.

Arguable PKD's most iconic work, and definitely one of his strangest. In a far future humans are colonising the Moon and developing strong psychic abilities. Companies are employing psychics to sit in a room and do industrial espionage from a distance. One company sends a team of them to the Moon for such purpose but there is an explosion and not everyone survives.

Second story strand: People who are almost dead can be put into cryo-sleep and kept alive. They can be temporarily brought out of sleep for conversations through a psychic medium. But these sessions shorten the ultimate storage time possible for the person.

Put these two strands together. Some of those sent to the moon have died and are in cryo-sleep.

Everyone tries to get on with their lives, but strange things keep happening. It seems time is running backwards and everything is inexplicably old. And then Ubik appears in advertising. It's the universal fixit. One spray and everything is good again. But what is in the can and where do you get it?

PKD puts together a narrative that has the reader questioning 'who is alive and who is in cryo-sleep?' And does it even matter? After all, PKD's ability to blend the reality of human consciousness with weird alternatives is never ending.

Book 3 of The Bromeliad.

Remember the few Nomes who set out to find a new place to live? They have come across somebody named Arnold, yep the guy from the old store. He's been given an award and is off for the presentation. It's in some place called Florida. They hide in his stuff and accompany him all the way.

Right from the first book the leader of the clan has had a black box that they've called The Thing. Nobody knows what it's for but it's an heirloom to be preserved for some reason. Once in Florida it starts flashing lights and humming. in the distance they can see a tall cylindrical tower with some flying machine attached to it. There is lots of activity and steam or smoke around the tower. The Thing wants to get closer.

As they approach the shuttle The Thing really starts to go off, as if its talking to the shuttle, or through the shuttle to something else. And as a black shadow descends over them they realise it's a communication device that has called a space ship down to itself.

And that's enough spoilers.

Book 2 of The Bromeliad. The Nomes have driven the truck until they crash it and are forced to run into the wilderness again. They come across an abandoned quarry and take refuge in the manager's hut. Once again, disaster as the quarry is about to reopen.

Some of them take off to explore and find a permanent place for the community to live.

The men arrive to get the quarry into action again and the Nome need a quick escape plan. Having once driven a truck they decide to take a digger from the quarry and to an old barn up the hill behind the quarry. Everyone gets loaded into the front scoop and the 'drivers' get coordinated again and they drive the digger out of the yard with the workers running after them in the muddy field.

This is book #1 of The Bromeliad Trilogy. It's really a kid's series but worth it as a lighthearted adult read. The story is about a group of Nomes (no G) who live in a hedgerow outside an English city. They face being trodden on by humans or eaten by foxes, In a severe winter and with too many of them eaten they sneak on board a truck at the motorway service centre. It takes them to a department store in the city.

And there they find other Nomes living in the store. Neither community knew the other existed. City Nomes and Country Nomes have to find some way to get along.

Disaster strikes when they find out the store is to be shut down and they all have to find somewhere else to live. So they engineer some planks and ropes and teach themselves how to drive the truck and escape the store, which they accidentally set alight as they leave.

It was an extra delight for me when the truck dropped the Nomes at Arnold Bros department store. Pratchett names a street alongside the store. Arnold's department store in Great Yarmouth was started by my ancestors and that same street runs past it. So the Nomes were sheltering in my families old business. Arnolds was later bought and renamed by Debenhams.

Remember The Artful Dodger from Dickens' Oliver Twist? Here he is in Pratchett's delightful story of a teenage boy living in the back streets and underground sewer tunnels of Elizabethan London. After an eventful day where be becomes a hero he meets a journalist named Charles Dickens. And the plot thickens.

This book has Pratchett's characteristic sense of fun and the absurd but far from Discworld.

Imagine a man living a lonely life on the family farm. Nobody knows how old he is, it's as if he's always been there. In reality, he's been there since the American Civil War.

When he got back from the war and became the last one of his family an alien visitor arrived. The alien asked if he'd like to host a way station for interplanetary travelers. As long as the way station was underneath his house he would hardly age, but they didn't want the surrounding people to know about it.

One day something happened that brought people to his door.

The story maintains a sense of the deep humanity of Enoch, the farmer. When everything might easily collapse around him he manages to hold fast to some quality that his neighbours lack.

This is the final book in Baxter's Zelee Sequence but was recommended to me as a worthwhile stand alone book.

As the sun approaches heat death Earth's scientists work out that it's happening much too soon and something must be happening to it. The Zelee series deals with alien wars etc and space travelers also work out that other stars are also degenerating too quickly.

By sending a probe into the sun they find the problem and realise that it's non-repairable and it looks like the whole galaxy is threatened by the same thing.

As the book approaches the end they work out that the aliens with whom they were at war for so long are really the solution to a galaxy wide problem.