R. L. Stedman

Writer

Great Writers

Enjoyed Ready Player One? Here’s Four Retro Books You’ll Love

By

Have you seen Ready Player One?

In case you’ve not watched it, nor read the book, here’s a quick summary: 16-year-old poverty-stricken Wade Watts is searching for a prize hidden inside the Oasis, the world’s online forum/trading place/gaming place/school venue. It’s where most people spend their days, hidden behind virtual headsets.

The year is 2040; the Oasis’s reclusive developer, James Halliday, has just died, leaving his fortune and control of the Oasis to the person who can find the three keys that unlock the prize, or ‘easter egg’, hidden within the Oasis. But an evil corporation is also seeking the egg. Can Wade save the Oasis (and the world) before it’s too late?

Ready Player One

The story takes place in both the virtual and the real, and through the story Wade meets the fetching Art3mis (pronounced Artemis, how clever), faces his fears, learns about friendship and loyalty.

Watching the movie felt weirdly familiar, partly because the story references the 80s like they were the coolest time ever, and partly because I’ve read a heck of a lot of books similar to RP1.

There ain’t nothing like Spielberg for storytelling, plus you gotta love the meta-ness of Spielberg making a nostalgia-fest of the 80s when he was responsible for much of its pop-culture. And of course, the special effects are great. There’s a few logistical/plot hole questions but hey, it’s a movie, right?

However, the book troubles me. Ready Player One was a best seller, but I have no idea why. I thought it was slow, badly written and full of formulaic tropes. But the thing that annoyed me the most was that there are way, way better books around, but they’re not as famous, and so have gradually dwindled into undeserved obscurity.

If you loved Ready Player One – great! I’m glad it worked for you. Not every book speaks to every reader; that’s cool.

But if you enjoyed RP1, then you’re in luck, because the world is full of books that are EVEN BETTER. Try these stories below. They’re all science fiction, dealing with the intersection between the virtual the real (also known as cyberpunk) but I think they’re more innovative, creative and way more entertaining.

Are you ready?

Only You Can Save Mankind – Terry Pratchett

Only You Can Save Mankind

Johnny Maxwell has a new video game – defeat the alien ScreeWee. But if the ScreeWee refuse to fight? Worse, what if they surrender? Then the aliens disappear from the game, only to begin invading his dreams. With the help of another player (handle “Sigourney”), Johnny must save the world, save the ScreeWee and work out what is real, and what is not.

The story is hilarious; my personal favourite is Johnny’s friend Wobbler, who creates a game called “Journey to Alpha Centauri” which has to be played in real time, thus taking 3000 years to complete.

Johnny and his friends star in two later novels: Johnny and the Dead and Johnny and the Bomb. In all three stories, Pratchett deals with real-life issues, but always with his trademark humor.

The Johnny stories were some of Pratchett’s favourite works, but they never sold as well as his Disc World series.

I’ve really enjoyed exploring them again with my kids; although the tech references are dated, the ideas are still interesting, and Pratchett’s characters are vivid and exciting. Tip: get the audiobooks. They’re a lot of fun for car journeys, especially the voices of the ScreeWee. Appropriate for ages 9 and up.

Find Only You Can Save Mankind on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2rx1GF9

Body of Glass – Marge Piercy. (Also published as He, She and It).

He, She and It

Published in 1991, Body of Glass was one of the first novels to explore characters shifting between the physical to the virtual worlds, and was awarded the Arthur C Clarke Award in 1993.

Shira, an expert in cyber socialization, works for Y-S, a multi. She lives under a glass dome, safe from the environmental pollution that’s killed much of North America. But when her ex-husband wins custody of her son, she decides its time to return to her home town Tikva, and begins working on a new project: the cyborg Yod. As she learns to live without her son, she realises that Tikva is under attack, and Yod is to be its defender.

The book cuts between the past and the present, and deals with gender identity, sexualisation and race. It’s scarily prescient, with topics like: what is a cyborg? Where does humanity begin and end?

The sex scenes are reasonably descriptive, so I wouldn’t recommend this for early YAs but it’s suitable for late teens, and definitely recommended for girls – its unusual to see women cast in starring roles in sci-fi. It’s set in a Jewish community, and I totally enjoyed the opportunity to read and learn about this culture.

Piercy also wrote Woman on the Edge of Time, an unnervingly accurate novel about the future.

Find He, She and It on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2rx1shh

Neuromancer – William Gibson

Neuromancer

Neuromancer won the Nebula Award, the Philip K Dick Award and the Hugo Award in 1984. Case, a washed up computer hacker, is hired to conduct a hit on a powerful artificial intelligence. He’s assisted by razor girl Molly Millions, an augmented street samurai with mirror-eyes. Together they discover why Case has been hired, and the identity of who it was who hired him. The story ends with the world changing, as a new AI is born.

Neuromancer birthed the terms ‘Matrix’, ‘hacker’, ‘cyberspace’, and is at least partially credited with having spawned the internet as we know it. Gibson himself says this isn’t true; that he saw the trends emerging and ran with them. Whatever the truth to the tale, there’s no doubt that Neuromancer both reflected and shaped reality.

Although the book isn’t as good as, I think, Gibson’s more recent works, it’s still an amazing, sometimes puzzling read. It’s suitable for older readers, especially teens who love tech. The language is dense and sometimes hard to follow, so better for competent readers.

Incidentally, if you like the concept of Neuromancer but find the actual story too complex, try Burning Chrome, Gibson’s first story collection, published in 1981. It’s a little easier to read, but still has Molly Millions, dancing in black leather with her silver-mirror eyes.

Find Neuromancer on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2rzx7ym

Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson

Snow Crash

Stephenson works part-time for Amazon-owner Jeff Bezos, as his ‘chief futurist’, so he’s uniquely placed to both dream and implement the future.

Snow Crash, released in 1992, is one of his earlier works. It’s a racy, exciting ride with a page-turning, complex plot and intriguing characters.

Our hero is Hiro Protagonist, a part-time pizza delivery boy for the Mafia, part-time builder of the Metaverse, an emerging cyberspace landscape. Hiro is rescued from pizza-delivery death by Y. T.,  a young skateboard Kourier. Y.T. (“don’t call me ‘Whitey’, I’m Y.T.”) and Hiro embark on a quest to find the creator of Snow Death, a computer virus that threatens to destroy the Metaverse, before it infects the real world.

Snow Crash does contain some info dumps, in the form of the Librarian (oh, how Ready Player One), but the actual story is so exciting that its easy to forgive this small sin. It’s a great read for smart older teens and adults.

I heard that Snow Crash is being made into a TV series by Amazon (of course)! If so, it will be amazing. Oh, and if you enjoyed Snow Crash, you’re in luck, because Stephenson is a prolific writer of very fat books, so you’ll be happily occupied for weeks!

Find Snow Crash on Amazon: https://amzn.to/2rzYLvd

5 Books to love forever

By

5 Books I’ve Loved —

fairytale book
Image source

Falling in love with a book feels both wonderful and awful. Wonderful, because for a moment you’ve totally forgotten everything else. You’re lost in an imaginary world, where only the characters and their struggles exist. But it’s awful too, because a book always ends. At some point, you’ll have to close the pages and step away.

Sometimes it feels as though a book has ripped your heart out – which is totally crazy, because it’s only words on a page, right?

Here’s my top 5 books of the last 12 months.

I fell deeply in love with each of these books. Each felt different to anything else I’d read before; each was fast-paced and exciting, and dragged me into a different world. Some are part of a series and some are standalone. If you do read any of these I can promise: you will not be bored.

  1. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August – Claire North
  2. Touch – Claire North
  3. Station Eleven – Hilary St John Mandel
  4. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children – Ransom Riggs
  5. The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stievfater (The Raven Cycle, #2)

Why I Fell in Love: Book Reviews

Touch

Touch, by Claire North

Everyone raves about Gone Girl, and it’s a wonderful book; exciting and suspenseful (plus, it made a great movie). But if you like suspense and seat-of-your pants reading, you must read Claire North.

Claire North is a pseudonym of Catherine Webb, a British writer who wrote her first book at the age of just fourteen. Yes, you read that correctly.

Touch is about Kepler, a being who can slide inside other people’s bodies, just by touching them. Kepler has no sex; he/she is the person he inhabits. He’s also a broker, finding bodies for other beings like him. But someone, or something, is after him, and now he’s on the run. In Touch, Kepler moves from body to body, on a quest to find a nightmare. Do you suddenly wake up, with no recollection of where you’ve been, or how you’ve got there? Have you been losing time? Perhaps Kepler’s been using you.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

The first 15 lives of Harry August by Claire North

Harry August lives his life over and over again. Each time he dies he finds himself reborn in a restroom in 1919. He is an Ouroboran, destined to repeat his life. He is not alone; there’s a club of members who pass messages throughout time, from one Ouroboran to another. Don’t let the sci-fi premise put you off, because at its heart, Harry August is both a thriller and an intriguing tale about one man’s struggle with loneliness.

Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Hilary St John Mandel

Hilary St John Mandel is a Canadian writer; this is her fourth novel. It’s a powerhouse of a story, and has one of the most complex narratives I’ve  read. The story weaves back in forward through time, beginning with the death of Arthur Leander in London. Leander, playing the role of Lear, collapses on stage of a heart attack, just before the beginning of a pandemic that spreads rapidly through the world, annihilating civilisation and grounding planes. Station Eleven moves through multiple points of view: Arthur, his ex-wife, a child actor, an audience paramedic. Each character has their own story to tell. The pace is extraordinary; for such a complex novel, it’s never boring, and at sometimes so mind-blowing I couldn’t bear to put it down. This was my must-read novel of 2015, and I’ve already read it again since.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

Jacob  always thought his grandfather couldn’t distinguish truth from fiction; his tales of growing up in an orphanage filled with children of peculiar gifts seemed a fantasy to obscure the truth – that his family was murdered by the Nazis in WW2. But when his grandfather is murdered, Jacob realizes that perhaps the truth is stranger than he’d thought. I’m in awe of this book. Not only because of its wonderful story, but because of the craft behind it. Riggs does a wonderful job of scenes with multiple characters (it’s really hard to do this and not get the reader confused) and his prose is both economical and powerful, a trait only the best writers display. Miss Peregrine is illustrated by the most awesomely bizarre photos. It was these photos that were the genesis of the story, and its worth getting the hard copy of the book rather than a download, simply because of these images.

Miss Peregrine’s being made into a movie, due for release shortly, and since I read this book there have been two more books in the series published. Miss Peregrine’s is one of those stories that’s so perfect in itself that it makes me reluctant to read the rest of the series, in case it can’t live up to the promise of the first!

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stievfater (The Raven Cycle)

The Dream Thieves

Oh my god, this series is fantastic! (see my earlier blog post on this book). The Dream Thieves is Book #2 in the Raven Cycle and I’ve listed The Dream Thieves here – rather than the other books in the Cycle – because The Dream Thieves a) was the first book I read in the Cycle and b) it totally blew me away.

Compared to the other 4 books listed in this post, The Dream Thieves isn’t that complex. Set in Aglionby Academy, it tells the story of the extraordinary Ronan, a psychic called Blue and their mad friends. The Dream Thieves contains a sometimes bizarre, always exciting mix of drag racing, ghosts and dead Welsh kings. If you enjoy fantasy, adventure and historical references this is a must-read.

Confession time: I haven’t read the last book in The Raven Cycle yet! Like Miss Peregrine I’m almost scared to, because the rest of the series was just so great that I don’t want to be disappointed at the end.

In Conclusion

I read a lot of books. Some of them I put on my shelf at Goodreads.com , although recently I’ve been slack and haven’t been as religious at filing them as I should. (I might update it shortly, so keep an eye out). But even though I read a LOT, I rarely fall in love.

3 Inspirational Podcast Interviews With Great Writers

By

Inspirational Podcast Interviews

I have a confession: I listen to podcasts. Actually, I love podcasts.

writer's notebook

When I was a kid, we had no television in our house. Makes me sound as though I’m from the forties, but hey, no – this was the eighties! My brother and I raided the televisions of friends and relations. And we listened to the radio. A lot.

We had our favourite radio shows – Just a Minute (and yes, folks, this is still playing in the UK) and a narration of the entire Sherlock Holmes books. Perhaps that is why I enjoy podcasts just so much – they bring back the memories of sitting around the radio, just listening.

That’s enough reminiscing.

One of the main reasons I listen to podcasts is to follow famous authors; to see what drives them, how they write and why they write. Here’s the three best interviews I’ve found.

The 3 best interviews (so far).

Frederick Forsyth. (The Guardian Books Podcast, 23 Jan 2016) Remember The Day of The Jackel? Forsyth, a fluent speaker of French and German, was a reporter in Paris in the 60s. In those days the French reporters socialised with the President’s security detail (hey, this is France, and a different era). Forsyth, being a french-speaker, hung out with them. Seems like de Gaulle’s security team weren’t as close-mouthed as they could have been, because Forsyth pieced together a plot that might conceivably work. Later, when flat broke, he wrote this idea up as The Day of the Jackel. Listen to the interview. It’s amazing.

Marian Keyes. (BBC World Book Club, May 2015) Have you read Rachel’s Holiday, a bittersweet story of recovery from addiction? Turns out Keyes went through a similar experience to her heroine and drew upon this experience when writing the book. In this lovely interview Keyes discusses addiction, why she likes happy endings and what you need to do to be a writer.

Paulo Coelho. (Four Hour Work Week, 23 April 2016). Writer of The Alchemist, Coelho lives in Brazil. This is more a running commentary on the art of writing than an interview, but to a writer it’s absolutely fascinating. Coelho doesn’t write in a notebook. “Just live your life, and when you come to write, whatever is important will remain. What isn’t just falls away.” I found this interview incredibly liberating. “A book,” says Coelho, “is a connection between the writer and the world. It must be written with love.” (I think I’ve got that right. You’ll have to listen to the interview to be sure!)

 

fairytale book
Image source