Random Thoughts

Oops! I read another one of these novellas. I hadn’t really meant to, but…

Like the previous ones, I found this one to be really entertaining. But it would probably have been better to have a few months between reading these “chapters” — it reads like a serial, and you need some time between episodes.

However, the storyline comes to a kind of possible ending here — the four original Murderbot novellas were all published in 2017/2018, I see now, and then there was a couple years before the next one — which is a proper novel. So perhaps it made sense to gulp this one down, anyway…

Anyway — lots of fun.

Exit Strategy (2018) by Martha Wells (buy new, buy used, 4.37 on Goodreads)

A few months ago, I 86’d a whole bunch of books by Lawrence Block — so what am I doing with a new one now? Well, those books were from his really awful action/thriller series, but while perusing his bibliography, I saw that there was one final mystery series of his I hadn’t tried yet — the Chip Harrison books.

It’s so hard to find competently written trash, so I gave it a go, and here we are.

And this is a fun read. It’s explicitly a Rex Stout pastiche — the schtick is that Harrison’s boss is a detective who collects rare fish, and who believes that Nero Wolfe is a real person, and has (sort of) modelled his life after him.

The plot is satisfyingly loopy — up to a point. Block makes the rookie mistake of breezing past a bunch of different characters that could all be the killer, but the second we get to the culprit, he shifts mode and goes into more details. So I went “OK, that’s the murderer — I have no idea why, or how, but mystery solved”, and that turned out to be accurate. (And the why and how was probably the stupidest I’ve read in a mystery novel, and I’ve read a lot of stupid mysteries.)

But still — there’s repartee and amusing characters, and that helps a lot. It’s fun, and I think I’ll get the other two books in the series, and then I’ll be done with Lawrence Block.

Make Out With Murder (1974) by Lawrence Block (buy used, 3.46 on Goodreads)

“Creatives”? Eurgh!!!

Full disclosure: I bought this book by mistake. It’s published by Drawn & Quarterly, so I assumed it would be comics. But instead it’s a book about what it says on the tin, written by a graphical designer that’s unknown to me.

The writing’s OK, though — it’s pretty entertaining and it has drive. But the book makes some rather strange choices, mainly with the illustrations.

It’s about having your illustrations ripped off, so you’d think that it’d be interesting to see those illustrations, right? But I don’t think we even get a single one — instead we get illustrations like the above, that mostly are vaguely related to the text, but aren’t dated. And since the Biesinger talks a bit about his evolution as an artist, it sure would have been interesting to see some examples. Oh, and he also talks about his use of colour, so of course the book is totally in black and white.

I’m guessing all these illustrations are new(ish)? They seem very samey. I mean, “have a distinct graphic expression” or something.

Now, Biesinger doesn’t give the names of any of the people/organisations that have ripped him off — perhaps for good reasons. He doesn’t want to get sued, and he doesn’t want to put people in harm’s way. So that may be a good reason to not use the actual illustrations in dispute — but even when he’s describing his method (in general), it’s like above: He talks about a sketch, and… then he shows a completely different sketch? What? Why? Who? When? *voguing spontaneously*

And finally, the book doesn’t have nine times he was ripped off — he talks about other people being ripped off, too, and that’s just not as entertaining.

But I mean… it’s a kinda OK book?

9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off (2025) by Raymond Biesinger (buy new, buy used, 4.65 on Goodreads)

Novellas used to be a big thing in science fiction. Either published separately in small paperbacks or as “doubles”. But then they went out of fashion — in the 80s and particularly in the 90s, you couldn’t publish any science fiction book unless it was 300 pages, minimum.

That’s changed again over the past decade and a half — with ebooks, people somehow don’t seem to care that much about getting “value for money” like in the 90s… and perhaps shortening attention spans is also a factor? I tend not to think so, but it’s possible.

Perhaps the influence from science fiction fan fic is a thing, though.

Anyway, whenever I try to read an ebook novella, I’m disappointed: It seems like the ebookness of it all lessens the ambition and probably the work put into the novella — just write it, and publish it, and get some money in.

The Murderbot series doesn’t feel like that at all, which is probably why the book I have here is the 19th printing. Since 2018! It’s a runaway hit series of sf novellas (in print!), and that has to be pretty unique?

This is the third one, and I enjoyed this a lot. It feels like almost like very short novel (as opposed to a padded short story) — it’s satisfying in that way. And it’s just quite amusing, so it’s the perfect way to spend an evening.

It is a difficult trick to pull off, and since this is the third one, I guess I’ll keep reading. Oh, there’s eight of these books? Nice.

Rogue Protocol (2018) by Martha Wells (buy new, buy used, 4.24 on Goodreads)

I only discovered Helen DeWitt this year, but I hugely enjoyed The English Understand Wool and The Last Samurai, so when I read that this book was being published — and that it was going to be a bit of a brick — I was very excited. And so were people on Twitter.

I try to avoid reading reviews of things I’m going to read, but that hasn’t been difficult in this case: After publication, I don’t think I’ve seen this book mentioned more than twice? And both times, it seemed like they weren’t very enthusiastic about it… And I’ve registered somehow that this book was written a decade and a half ago, allegedly? But they couldn’t find anybody willing to publish it now (and it’s published by Deep Vellum, a quite small publisher).

Anyway. Here goes:

This is fantastic! It’s so much fun.

I started reading this on Monday at around nine at night, thinking I was just going to get started since I was going to bed early, but then I ended up reading until 3am. And then I read all day yesterday, and then a couple hours today, and now I’m done. It’s so rare to find a book that you absolutely have to gulp down as fast as humanly possible — but this is that kind of book. It’s exciting, it’s very funny, and it totally keeps you on your toes the entire time.

I can also see why people would be put off by it. It’s pretty chaotic — it’s frequently not quite clear who’s “talking” or who any section is about, but once you get into the rhythm, it becomes pretty obvious. But if you’re not in the swing of things, I can see how parts of it might be head-scratchers. Reading it fast is probably a good thing, because there’s multiple bits to juggle in your head — not really that many characters (for this sort of thing), but lots of different identities, and a lot of playing around.

I see Schattenfroh mentioned on Twitter several times a day, and it was released around the same time. Now, I’m never going to read that book — from what I understand, it’s a very serious book about spirituality and stuff — which is just the stuff a literary hit is made of these days. (Especially in the US.) Ka-ching!

Well, actually… looking at how much it’s sold on Amazon, it’s not a lot more than Your Name Here. I guess it’s just that people like to tweet about it more?

Even so, I still can’t quite believe that nobody wanted to publish Your Name Here for a decade and a half.

So, spoilers below. Don’t read more if you’re gonna read this book!

I laughed out loud when I came to this bit.

This is a 600 page book, but it’s not extremely dense — a goodly portion of it consists of emails, so the word count is probably closer to a traditional 450 page book. And it’s written in a very straightforward way, so reading it is a breeze.

The main plot of the book is about Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff writing a book called Your Name Here in 2006. But that book is about two characters writing a book called Your Name Here in 2006, so you get a lot of the correspondence between those two characters, and it’s impressively period-correct.

Like… Hotmail ad signatures… and what’s that? Mojibake!??! It is! But for what character? It seems to be “ý” substituted for “I”, but that makes no sense:

See? It’s “ý”… hmmm…

Oh me of little faith! It is “ý”!!! But then my only quibble is that “ý” and “Ý” shouldn’t have the same mojibake. Shame! Shame!

Upper case “Ý” doesn’t really have a nice mojibake…

I mentioned this on irc, of course, and:

(Translation: “It’s dotless ı in iso-8859-9! So it’s double charset nerding!”)

Because he’s typing on a Turkish keyboard!!!

Man, this is a gag not a lot of people would decipher…

And there’s a reference to http://hitlercats.motime.com/, which doesn’t exist…

But it did:

All of this makes me wonder whether Ilya Gridneff exists, of course. And whether the book really was written in 2006, or whether it’s just a clever recreation.

So since I’ve now read the book, I can finally do some googling.

Well, there’s a web page, but that proves nothing. This New York Times article seems to indicate that it’s all on the up and up?

Unless DeWitt is just making things up, since this is the plot of the book, basically the book is true:

At the time, the publishing world was waiting breathlessly for a new novel from DeWitt, who had dazzled critics and readers with her inventive 2000 debut, “The Last Samurai.” But years had passed without a follow-up, and DeWitt had all but disappeared from the literary scene. After a deal with her publisher fell apart, she had a breakdown and attempted suicide, then went missing. When police found her in upstate New York, she was admitted to a psychiatric ward.

I mean, except for the made-up parts. Huh. I guess I wasn’t really expecting that…

Anyway, it’s fantastic. So I wonder what people on Goodreads think.

It has a pretty decent overall score, but it only has 143 ratings — so I guess it didn’t really sell many copies. I guess the publishers had reason to be sceptical all those years.

Heh, that’s the most-liked review. Excellent.

That’s the next-most-liked review. So it’s a very polarising book, like I expected.

Heh heh. True!

The book’s publishers are very funny. Alternate covers:

Your Name Here (2025) by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff (buy new, buy used, 3.74 on Goodreads)