I Am Number Four, Pittacus Lore. Book 18

This is a very new release and is about to to be released as a film. I am keen to see it after reading this, I'm hoping they can jazz it up a bit more.
Pittacus Lore is a collaboration between Jobie Hughes and James Frey. There isn't much out there on Jobie. He is 30 years old, he lives in New York city, attended University and has an MFA in creative writing. He's got his own website with a rather smoochy-looking picture on it. Maybe I should start putting up studio shots of me looking all cleavage and saucy... come on, call yourself a writer? The interesting facts section about him includes as a highlight that he did wrestling in high school - yup that's pretty much the apex right there.
But I think Mr Frey might be a little more well-known to the tv-watching world. The man of 'A Million Little Pieces' fame. Personally I don't give a damn that he made some of it up. Nothing in this world is literal truth and if you enjoyed the story, then you enjoyed the story. People don't start screaming at the Coen brothers over their liberality with 'True Stories'. Did anyone pull up W when it was clear his version of weapons of mass destruction was a fabrication in order to get public attention??? Hmmm.
So James is still writing other titles and has is doing quite well out of all that publicity, thank you very much. He has signed a deal with HarperCollins for three books and a tidy sum - the world goes on.

So, the much-hyped I am Number Four.
(I am currently writing this while listening to one of the worst freakin comedy shows I have ever EVER heard on Triple R - I've never heard anything so crap. They're called 'Lime Champions'. I seriously have never heard anything so unfunny and talentless: WTF, Triple R? It may be affecting my opinion of the book as I progress - interesting phenomenon...)
This is the first title in the Lorien Legacies series.
Number Four is one of a number of aliens who have escaped their homeworld of Lorien (hmmm, really. I just don't think that's a coincidence and for goodness' sake, find your own names) to Earth. Lorien was under siege by the evil Mogadorians (and for some reason, this is reminiscent of something else) and the only way to save the race was for the nine Garde (guards of Lorien) and their Keepers (called Cepans) to flee. The Mogadorians hail from Mogadore and attacked Lorien, causing a genocide of catastrophic proportions. The nine dispersed without throughout Earth, each accompanied by their personal Cepan. They carry a chest that is locked to each Garde until their powers begin to develop. It is only when they begin to hit their 'teens' that their powers, or legacies, develop.
The natives of Lorien to all purposes look human. But they all possess super strength and tattoos that denote their number in the 'chain'. Each time another Garde is murdered by the Mogadorians, another tattoo appears on each of the remaining Gardes to let them know. The Nine can only be killed in numerical order due to certain spells that have been cast. Three are dead. Number Four's number is now up.
Number Four has spent the last ten years travelling from town to town, adopting new personas with his Cepan in order to avoid identification. He is beginning to get very fed up with the impermanence of it. But at this latest stop, where he has taken on the identity John Smith, he begins to settle into High School and finds a friend and a rather tasty girl. There are the usual bullies who don't like new kids and he has to figure out how to deal with them without revealing what he is.
It is during this stint that his first power develops - he can emit heat or light. So he now gets to learn about his legacy, what other powers he might develop and he begins to remember what happened on Lorien.
He soon becomes identified and the dark forces from Mogadore track him. So begins a battle of humungous proportions and another refugee Garde turns up to help John and his gang. Also composed of a dog who John has named Bernie Kosar. Turns out (and this is a no brainer to figure out) Bernie also hails from Lorien and is a Chimaera. The Chimaera were secretly shipped out, only John had a memory of them leaving - hmmm. Bit convenient.
So the battle rages in and out of the high school. I found this section to be badly written. It was dark, messy, and most of the time the spacial logistics were impenetrable. People are moving everywhere, in and out of the school and the nearby woods. And strangely enough, no one else in this SMALL TOWN notices a thing. I've lived in one of those towns: everyone notices everything. That's how it works. So the gang are spewing light, bullets and crap everywhere in an effort to stop the seeming hordes and hordes of Mogadorians and their gigantic creatures. John develops another legacy during the fight and uses that to quell the anger of the creatures.
They don't necessarily win, but they survive and live to fight another sequel.
I'm not keen to read this again unless it's to try and make my way into what can be very dense scenes at times so as to understand it better.
I will go see the film as it had better have some damn good effects.
I give it 6/10 for YA sci fi.

Such a Strange Lady: a biography of Dorothy L Sayers, Janet Hitchman. Book 17

 I’m gonna be very clear from the beginning of this review. This is one of the sloppiest, badly written, biased, unintelligent biographies and books I have ever read. And I’m not alone in this judgement. I now know why I was able to get this second-hand when it’s so hard to get hold of anything else either by or about Sayers.

Janet Hitchman is an elusive lass and it is very difficult to get any details about her off the internet. There is no bio on Janet in the book and there are many spare pages that could easily have been used for this purpose in the book. (An aside: I’ve recently become a production controller for a publisher and I now look at books in a very different way. I was twenty minutes late to meet a friend because I got distracted in a bookstore, just looking at the finishes on covers. How shame-making! But I know that if you've got blank pages in the end of a book, it costs you no more to whack something in them - like. an. author. bio.) I honestly have no idea how she got this book deal – she was apparently asked to do it by the publishers. The publishers, in turn, put out the Wimsey books. I’m going to put up a picture of the cover because every time I glance at it from more than one metre away, the illustration of Wimsey with the car behind him reminds me of a giant penis sticking out of Wimsey’s crotch. I’m not a usually dirty-minded person – but I think you’ll agree with me that it does evoke that image.

Janet has written a couple of other books, King of the Barbareens, They Carried the Sword, and Meeting for Burial. It is to her credit that these are all now completely unknown in the wider world, especially as one is her autobiography. I wouldn't mind reading it just to discover how she became so mediocre. I’ve spent at least half an hour on the net, searching for some sort of definite bio on Janet. I can’t find a thing.

Janet did not have access to any of Dorothy’s letters and did not interview any of Dorothy’s close friends. (whether that was their wishes or hers, I don’t know). So much of this bio is simply conjecture. And Janet is capable of that. She speculates on Dorothy’s childhood, her relationship (or lack of) with her illegitimate son, her sexuality (and Janet’s writing on lesbianism is naïve and almost homophobic), pretty much on every aspect of Dorothy’s life, Janet simply speculates. The blurb on the back states that she has employed almost Wimseyan methods to discover Dorothy’s lifestory. Well, Janet ain’t no Wimsey and is definitely no Dorothy L Sayers.  

Ms Sayers was a secretive woman and apparently loathe for anyone to put out a bio on her. This one was published in 1975, seventeen years after Dorothy’s death. Janet just don’t seem to have cared and despite having no access to definite facts or documents, thought she would have a go. As a result, this is a bland bio. I constantly found myself doubting what she gave as Dorothy’s motives for doing this or that. I couldn’t figure out if I was just cynical or being very precious about one of my favourite authors. Turns out there are other people who agree with me on her credibility.

Dorothy was indeed considered a strange lady. But was she that strange for her generation? She was no more peculiar than any of the Mitfords, or Agatha Christie (disappearing for a week with no explanation ever forthcoming), or Vita Sackville-West. I mean, she was an intelligent woman who knew her own mind, her formative years were spent at a time when frivolity and eccentricity was encouraged in those who could afford it. Janet treats her as a curiosity and I get the feel of a point of view of knowing adulthood condescending to a truculent child. As someone else has commented, she dishes the dirt in a gossipy manner. This bio is not worthy of Sayers. I am disappointed that I read it. Her response to Dorothy’s treatment of her son is that she considers it an enigma. Come on, it’s 1923, you are a famous female author and you’ve gotten laid and you’re pregnant. Well, let’s just announce it to the world. Dorothy’s own writing well illustrates her awareness and thoughts on the weight of society’s opinions of the time and she acted accordingly. She is perfectly justified in thinking she needed to keep it secret. Why adopt out (which is what Janet thinks she should have done) when you have a cousin whom you know will look after your child? In fact your cousin takes on foster children, she is a perfect option for you. You can visit and keep in touch, it won’t be remarked upon that the woman has another child in her house. Dorothy was also worried about money for a large portion of her life. Why would you risk poverty and ostracism when you know you can have your child well-provided for? It appears to me quite the logical thing for Dorothy to do.

The Wimsey books too are dealt with in an objective and discursive manner. How can ANYONE be objective about Wimsey. He demands subjectiveness and adoration! He is one of the world’s most memorable literary characters and Janet does not do him justice. She goes into a lot of detail on Dorothy’s subsequent religious work – I suspect Hitchman is a devout Christian – her detail on this later work and her thoughts on many of Sayers’ life decisions appear to be informed by a religious sentiment. Her criticisms of the work and of Sayers are about as meticulous as mine are of her. She calls Harriet ‘tiresome’ and berates Dorothy for many silly mistakes. I don’t think I will go into the actual details of Sayers’ life as depicted by Hitchens for the reason that the motives attributed to Sayers’ every action and thought are just rubbish.

The only use this bio really had for me was to find out the basic facts of Sayers’ life and what else she wrote – I was much interested to discover she did a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy. I was also fascinated that she ended up married to someone whom she later discovered to be a complete dilettante and idiot. Much like a parallel author of her time, Nancy Mitford (forgive the repetition of this family twice in one post). I also knew nothing of her later passion for writing on religion. But I don’t feel that I know her anymore than from reading the Wimsey books. So, in my humble opinion, don’t get this book unless you want an unresearched and uninformed biography of one of the greatest ever detective novelists.

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C Clarke. Book 16

How does one human condense Mr Clarke's life? Looks like Wikipedia has done it again: 'Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FRAS (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, most famous for the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, written in parallel with the script for the eponymous film, co-written with film-director Stanley Kubrick;[2] and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World.[3][4] For many years, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the "Big Three" of science fiction.[5]'

And that is only the tip of the tip of the iceberg. He was born in England and due to lack of funds, became an auditor in the pensions section of the Board of Education instead of going to University. He then served in the RAF in WWII and it looks like this allowed him to earn a first-class degree in mathematics and physics at Kings College London. (I’m planning on doing that next year…)

NASA owes Clarke a huge debt as does Western Civilisation. He proposed the idea that satellites might possibly be of some us as telecommunication relays… Who woulda thunk it? Mr Clarke, of course.

I would also like to point out that he moved to Sri Lanka to lead a more ‘comfortable and open lifestyle’ that in the 1950s just wasn’t possible if you preferred the same sex. It has been claimed that it was to indulge an unhealthy appetite for the younger generation, this was found baseless by the Colombo authorities, so let’s just get it straight, shall we?

Plus, warm weather is always a pleasant thing isn’t it, she writes while sitting under a sun umbrella on the balcony under a cerulean sky.

He was named a grandmaster in 1986 (bit late on the uptake, world). He has won countless writing awards and is known as one of the Big Three is Sci Fi (the other two being Heinlein and Asimov).

I’m going to end here as there are a heap more Clarke books in my collection and I could go on. So I won’t.

Apparently the movie rights to this were optioned a while ago, but it is still in limbo-land - much like Rama (boom boom). It was written in 1972 and won the following awards: BSFA, Nebula, Hugo, Campbell and Locus. Clearly it’s a crappy book.

What makes Rendezvous With Rama so interesting and engrossing for me is the physics of Rama. It took me a while to get my head around the logistics of how the gravity plays out in a spinning cylinder. But once you get it, it's wonderful. The concept of a sea that lies in a band around the centre of the cylinder, held in place by gravity with its own movement and tidal waves is marvellous. The mental effort of visualizing the cylinder world is well worth it.

Humanity has moved beyond Earth and occupies parts of the Solar System. Bodies that come through the system from the galaxy and beyond are named in the manner of cyclones and hurricanes today. The naming system has moved onto religious deities and the Indian pantheon was the latest system. Hence, when an unknown object is spotted heading towards our system, the name allocated is Rama. Once it gets closer, it is found to be heading towards our sun and is, curiously, an enormous, long black cylinder. Where the hell it came from and who created it is anyone’s guess. It is the first evidence of life beyond the Solar System.  It has a diametre of forty kilometres. The mystery surrounding Rama is an ever-present threat in this novel. Not knowing its purpose or where the occupants are lends a creepy urgency to the story – the threat of the unknown. A nearby spaceship is sent by Earth to get to it before Mars can send a delegation or destroy it (they have become an aptly named aggressive race).

Commander Norton reaches Rama and they enter the cylinder through three airlocks. Everything to do with the cylinder or spaceship is now couched in terms of Rama. The Ramans like to do things in threes. Three airlocks, three spiral stairways leading from the centre of their end of Rama to the outer edge. The gradual changes that Rama undergoes are creepy and alien. His team slowly edge down one of the staircases, from zero gravity to the artificial gravity created by the spinning cylinder. Rama is dark, cold, and silent. There is a ‘belt’ of water that ‘splits’ the cylinder in half. On their side of the sea, there are low square buildings, no windows, no doors. All silent. On the other side of the sea are what looks like cities but again, they look to have no windows or doors. Rama has no occupants that they can discern. Are they all dead? Waiting to appear? On the other side of the Galaxy?

The crew begin to make their way towards the sea. As they do, Rama begins to wake up. Giant rods that are anchored at the other circular end of Rama glow with light and warmth. The sea, which is originally ice, melts and tidal patterns are observed. As the crew moves further into the city on their side of Rama, what look like mechanical creatures appear, scurrying to and fro, repairing and doing Rama-only-knows-what. They leave the crew alone but dismantle their equipment if they’re not around to keep an eye on it. These creatures all tend to be put together in threes. Three legs, three mid sections, etc.

Still, nothing ostensibly sentient appears. The sea is discovered to be a chemical soup, that is not hospital to homosapiens. The mechanoids dispose of all broken parts into the sea and it is clear that there are ‘creatures’ of some sort, whether organic or mechanical, in there. They try to traverse to the sea to reach the ‘cities’ but the wall on the other side of the sea is too high to scale.

Still the ‘real’ occupants do not show themselves. Theories are expounded: are the occupants long dead; the place is too clean to have ever been occupied, so are they in hibernation somewhere; are the Ramans waiting somewhere on the other side of the galaxy or universe for their ride?

The Solar System is in political turmoil regarding Rama and Commander Norton has to deal with transmissions telling him what to do and when. This is possibly the weaker part of the book. Rama is just too fascinating for me to want to be bothered with the political maneuverings. I just wanted to know about Rama.

Norton and the crew only have a limited time period in which to explore Rama. They can’t occupy it once it gets too close to the Sun. Mars also tries to send a device to blow up Rama that they have to defuse.

The characters, apart from Norton are very minor and not fleshed out. The book is too small for really getting into characters, plus Rama as a character dwarfs everyone else. It is the ultimate dark, mysterious stranger, full of unknown potential dangers.

In the end, they have to leave. We never get to find out if Rama has occupants other than the mechanoids. I’m still trying to decide if that’s a good or bad thing. Possibly a good thing – would they live up to my imagination? Maybe not, although I wouldn’t want to test mine against Mr Clarke’s. I’m sure whatever he thought of as a potential candidate would be far beyond what I could conjure.

This book deserves every award it has received. It forced me to think very hard about the logistics of Rama and I was rewarded for the effort tenfold. That is so rare in a book nowadays. IN FACT, it’s a rare thing for any sort of popular medium. More, I say!