lonemagpie

It's so long since I read the previous two books that I'd forgotten about Better Than Life, and this picks up directly from the end of that. Fortunately it's a good standalone take on some of the classic situations for our characters – who are all spot-on, as you'd expect from the co-creator of the show, and more so than they were in the books (well, the first one, anyway) written by both creators...
This is good fun, with amusing and effective use of some suitable SF ideas, plenty of well-paced hooks and exciting cliffhangers to keep the reader interested, and both familiar enough to be comfortable for fans of the show, and fresh enough to be fun for others, and to keep fans surprised even if they know the episodes. Grant mixes the situational ingredients nicely, providing a solid and satisfying arc, and suitable conclusion (it didn't help production of the book, I suppose, that it was started by both creators, but they split and Doug Naylor wrote a rival third-book-of-the-trilogy, The Last Human, which thoroughly contradicts this one and doesn't follow on from the previous books)
On the downside, there are plenty of proofing errors, and an annoying tendency for the writer to swtich POVs and even writing styles within paragraphs, but never quite enough to work as a flowing range of pastiches; rather the prose in the latter half (especially the wandering Westernisms in the Gunmen of the Apocalypse finale) feels more like lazy standup transcription. Also, it feels a little padded in places- some of the gags that worked best by inference, letting the audience draw the inevitable conclusion in their own time, are laboured here to no real purpose, especially in the Backwards reality. They neither make the gags any funnier, (nor really less so), or even really any more gross, just longer and slower.
There are some incorrect spellings too, and a vast overuse of “span” instead of “spun”, which I found personally annoying; you can use both for a lot of things, but they're not 100% interchangeable, and “Lister span the top off the flask” doesn't work. In fact it's so prevalent that when, at one point, the Cat “spun his guns” back into their holsters, it stands out glaringly – and then a few pages later he “span” thm back. Argh.
But overall, it felt like good Red Dwarf, it flowed, it made sense, the characters were good, and I did enjoy it a lot.

by Stephen Talty
I'd been looking forward to this nonfiction book about Henry Morgan and the pirates and his governorship of Jamaica. It has its moments, and lots of asides to folks and events before and after and tangentially related, and it's fairly conversational, but... There are a lot of big buts, and, contrary to how that sounds, I do not like big buts, and I cannot lie.
The first hit came on page 36, when I stumbled into “Privateering [as opposed to piracy] was invented by Henry VIII” - Bzzzt! Wrong answer. The earliest surviving letter of Marque and Reprisal/Commission to a privateer issued in England was issued by John in 1205. Henry IV issued four surviving ones, in 1400, 1404, 1405, and 1411. Henry V issued a surviving one against Genoa in 1413, and *then* Henry VIII finally put one out against France and Scotland in 1543. It doesn’t survive, but we know Edward III issued at least one set somewhere around 1344-5-ish as well.
This means I can't trust the rest of the book to be any more accurate, since I'm not familiar with this writer and thus don't know if it's just a rare slip. Then he decides to introduce a fictional exemplar of an everyday pirate of the sort who'd be in Morgan's crew – I can see why, but he doesn't integrate this character (called Roderick) into the style well at all, so instead of saying “an everyday pirate would...” he goes “Roderick now does...” at random, which just makes you wonder who the fuck is this Roderick guy again?
For extra shits and giggles, where a primary source (if we're willing to trust any of them) writes something that disagrees with his view of how the lives of the people in the area were – for example Mary Carleton's memoirs that the pirates were all gents to her – he contradicts it with a lecture. Which is fine where there's another contradictory record from the time, but not when it's just how a person felt and there's no evidence otherwise. Then rather than foreshadowing or laying groundwork for stuff that will happen later, he just squeezes bits in at random, without integrating them in a coherent or at least apparently planned manner. (E.g. suddenly diverting to the geology at the end of a chapter on how and why they blew their money the way did, and that financial correlation to social status. It just doesn't work as flow or setup.)
And then there are the footnotes. There is a section of footnotes at the back, for each chapter, all nicely numbered. There are, however, no indications of the footnotes, or numbers to link them, in the actual fucking text. (OK, I've edited history books, this one's probably the fault of the copyeditors not getting the correct documents when the manuscript was delivered, or a fuckup with the formatting, but it's still a major pain in what's
supposed to be educational, and I've been particularly looking forward to.)
And that's a damn shame, cos most of the individual bits are chatty and interesting enough, but really I'm now just so desperate to read something with fewer problems.

MANHATTAN IS MY BEAT by Jeffery Deaver.
A nice little thriller with an engaging central character, set in 1988 NYC, about a murder related to an old movie based on a real (within the context of the story) robbery. It's nicely done, fairly typical early Deaver, but has an interesting air 30 years later, as the lead character is a dreamer who works in a video rental shop – something that hasn't existed for a few years. There's a weird sort of nostalgia to that, which is appropriate considering the character's nostalgia for vitnage 1930s/40s film. So there's kind of a nostalgia within nostalgia thing going there that now is unintentionally meta.
I know there are a couple of sequels, which I have, so I'll look forward to them....

#11 – FASHION BEAST by Alan Moore & Facundo Percio
This is a comics version of an unmade script that Moore wrote from a story by Malcolm McLaren in 1985, basically their take on Beauty And The Beast. It's set in a city where the fashion houses rule the impoverished populace, there's a mysterious designer, a girl needing a job, a pair of Ugly Sisters of sorts.... I know bugger all about the fashion biz, but it definitely strikes a chord with the way people follow designer labels and the cult of celebrity. It's definitely good, and the art by Percio is great. I suspect that, if made as a movie in 1985, it would have been really, really shit, and if made as a movie now it would probably be pretty damn good (albeit condemned by Moore as propaganda of the evil Military/Entertainment Complex.) Definitely worth seeking out this graphic novel collection from Avatar Press (collecting the 10-issue series).

ANITA BLAKE, VAMPIRE HUNTER: THE LAUGHING CORPSE – ANIMATOR by Laurell K Hamilton and Ron Lim. This is a hardback graphic novel adaptation of the second Anita Blake novel, which I'd got free as a handout at a convention a couple of years ago. I know nothing about the series – thought it was one of thse cliched things for teenage girls, but actually this isn't bad at all (well, there's the appearance of vampire master Jean-Claude, but I suspect he's meant to take the piss out of the whole Anne Rice subgenre), and jumping on without knowing the first book wasn't a problem – it was pretty much self contained, with any necessary background exposition slotted in. It's a sort of police procedural mystery thing with zombies and vampires, and felt tonally very like the Harry Dresden books, which is a good thing. The art is nice too. What's not nice is that it collects five issues of comic and ends on “to be continued in The Laughing Corpse- Necromancer” which I haven't got. Still, it does actually make me wonder if the novels are of of a similar Dresden-ish tone, and so I may have to try one if I see one...