And yet.

There are two typographic decisions I’m complaining about:²

Supra-chapter divisions (call them “parts”) are introduced by double-page illustrated spreads with a “part title” and an apposite quotation. The spreads are uniformly striking, in a positive sense (here’s where the illustrations come in). The typography of the quote is equally striking, but less positively: a narrow column, fully justified, in a particularly wide typeface, leaving just six words or so to each line. A particularly egregious example occurs on pg 12: “Chroniclers are privileged to enter” (34 characters) and “soarings up and down, all” (24 characters) occupy the same line width, and the latter must of course be unpleasantly spaced out (inter- but also intra-word) to make the distance. Obvious solutions: (1) hyphenate; (2) ragged right; (3) both; (4) and maybe (if absolutely necessary) consider a smaller point size or italics.

My other irritation is with the decision not to indent paragraphs, but also not to indicate them with extra linespacing. This means the only signal that a new paragraph is beginning is the early termination of the line before.

I planned not to complain about this. (Let me be very clear: I much prefer a book such as this, with an ideosyncratic design that I disagree with and can complain about, to one with a perfectly readable but utterly unimaginative design that I have no complaints about whatsoever.) It’s a minor point, and it doesn’t interfere with readability, right?

But then it did.

On page 71 we have a dialogue between Brother Filippo and Diamante. A line of dialogue by the latter (“I was remembering…”) happens to almost completely fill two lines. The following line must be understood to be spoken by Brother Filippo, if the dialogue is to make any sense, but only the reader alert to the significance of an en-space will realise this on first reading. (The misreading caused by a wrong interpretation is so obvious that one goes looking for its source.) If paragraphs were only indented, there would be no possibility of confusion: new paragraph, new speaker, clear and obvious.

Lest my typographic complaints give the wrong impression, let me say that I am enjoyed the book very much (so far: page 71 of 311). It’s not cheerful, and its protagonist is not particularly likeable, but there’s plenty else to like besides himself. (Does it sound Scottish to you? Not a clue, me…) And if I’ve put you off, Small Beer has plenty with less adventurous (of course less individual) typography.³

Notes:

1. Somewhat visible, although not in the glory that it attains in other chapters, at the end of the excerpt on scribd.
2. How wonderful to have one’s own soapbox, without even having to witness the effects of one’s spittle-flecked ravings on the public-at-large.
3. Of their catalogue, I particularly recommend Kalpa Imperial, and any and all of Kelly Link’s writing. I haven’t read their more recent stuff, but I’m working on it…

Packed into the half-page review are several moments of quality comedy. We learn of George Montagu, “who brought his sense of military discipline, keen observational eye and shotgun to bear on Britain’s birds.” Also of the elusive List of the Birds that have been Observed to Breed in the Island of Arran Scotland, since the year 1835 — elusive because it was never printed, being invented “by an unscrupulous egg dealer” who claimed to be able to supply eggs from the author’s collection.

But these days I hardly bother to post unless there’s something to get annoyed by. And there is.

Sadly, it lacks footnotes, which is a loss to real nerds but in keeping with the New Naturalist goal of accessibility.

Now really. What on earth is inaccessible about the footnote?² I am speaking, yes, as a “real nerd”, but what possible reason can there be to deny me the pleasure (and an educational pleasure, at that) of my footnotes?

I can only presume that the publishers believe that some might be put off by the humble footnote; might be (heavens forbid) even discouraged from reading, overawed by the sheer weight of academic seriousness it implies.

Against this view, in the generous hope of educating the public (and drawing on my many years of academic experience and the still-raw memories of completing a PhD) I’m going to tell you an important, but not often admitted-to, secret about footnotes.

You don’t have to read them.

Notes:

1. Seriously, Books and Naturalists reads like someone in the PR department decided, “We are marketing this book to Tikitu.” Why oh why would you change something so perfect?
2. The endnote, I’ll grant you, is inaccessible — although only in comparison to the footnote, not to the absence of any referencing whatsoever, which seems to be what the review implies. My spine comes out in shivers at the very thought.

I got a sense of this quite early on: on page 23 a line of dialogue doesn’t quite make sense, and I wasn’t sure at first whether I was missing something or whether it was simply an error. This might not seem too big a deal, but I think that because of the kind of book this is, it is important.

Samuel Delaney apparently noted how science fiction can take “She turned on her side” and make it describe a cyborg powering up. This is, for me, part of the joy of well-written sf or weird fiction: figuring out what the world being described is like, and how it differs from our own. Anything that doesn’t quite fit tells us something about these differences. So when our protagonist is being interviewed by the police, and he asks, “What were those names you said?” of a man who has not said any names, my ears naturally prick up. Telepathy? Time travel? Memory erasure? Two pages later he gets the names, and I get a strong suspicion that our hero has a complicated relationship with the normal passage of time.

Ironically, this turns out in some sense to be true. But that’s nothing to do with the names: the line of dialogue is simply misplaced by two pages. But it took me quite a long way into the book to be confident that this was the problem: because it’s weird fiction, there is always the lurking possibility that he might still turn out to have future-dreams or have been memory-wiped during the interrogation or whatever. (He does have weird dreams. There was something funny about those cops.) In that sense weird fiction is a bit like a mystery novel: meaningless accidents can look like clues.

If this was an isolated incident, I would be grumpy but probably wouldn’t feel the need to tell the world about it. But there are more of these little slips. The most egregious occurs at the end of chapter 53, in one of those quick end-of-chapter perspective switches that remind you of the ongoing existence of some character who has been out of focus for some time, to tell you what they’ll be doing while the following chapter continues to ignore them. This one is introduced (I swear I am not making this up): “So what was up with Marge?”

Miéville is a better writer than that. It has to be a relic, a note-to-self that never got swapped out for the real sentence that was supposed to replace it.¹ And “What were those names?” is a relic of a previous version of the scene in which more hints came earlier. The substitution of a “why” for a “how” and the occurance of the word “strived” are even more minor slips. (Although surprising to me, given that Miéville is by now a pretty big name in sf / fantasy / weird fiction. Surely the book was proofread, but apparently still rather badly.)

These are all symptoms of a rather slapdash composition process, though, and not the only such. Some significant figures and events are clumsily telegraphed: one character’s absence is remarked upon repeatedly in the last third of the novel, so that the reader knows to look out for him although the characters do not; another character is named so often in the first half of the novel that it is a relief when he finally appears in person. Others arrive completely unheralded, so that we have to go through some mental gyrations to fit them into the world we have imagined so far. (Two quite important characters die quite late in the piece. Following all conventions of schlock heroism, one of them turns out not to have died after all. More as we would expect from Miéville, the other remains dead. But that one miraculous survival calls into question the kind of story he is telling. Should we now hope for revivals of all our heroes?)

In a similar vein, foreshadowing seems to be only partially successful. A paragraph describes a nasty piece of work: he “might stretch his mouth to do one person, stories said, might punch a hole in another, might find himself spitting flames to burn up a third.” At this point we’ve already seen him swallow one victim, so I wasn’t very surprised when (ho-hum) a body turned up with “four huge bludgeoning wounds” on the chest, looking “a bit like a single punch from an impossibly large fist”. But I was surprised, on finishing the book, to realise that nobody got flames spat on them.

All this makes me think that the original composition was rushed, and that there wasn’t enough editorial input. That might explain my general feeling (although here I can’t be as specific as I ought to, so take this with a grain of salt) that the pacing and plotting is off. The final third of the book is a succession of running battles, on the general schema “We think this will help; it’s pretty difficult but we will try; we managed at some cost, but it turns out it didn’t help at all; but we think maybe this will help…” (I think I’m not spoiling too much if I say that “help” here means “avert the Apocalypse” — it’s on the back cover, after all.) Somehow this doesn’t (or didn’t for me) translate to escalating momentum: instead, it ran up too early to high speed, then stayed fast for too long, so that the end when it came was actually rather a relief, I was getting quite tired of all that high blood pressure.

I ought to say something good about the book, which is not hard to do — even sub-par Miéville is worth a read. He is best, unsurprisingly, on the intersection of The Weird and The City: the Londonmancers are a fine creation (one reads the future in the entrails of the city, another moulds city-stuff — bricks and pavement into a hedge, rusted iron into litter and fast food), as is the Tattoo. There is a genuinely creepy museum guardian, and a great twist on Trek-style “beam-me-up” matter transmission. That is, there are plenty of exciting elements in this book. I just wish that they came together into an exciting whole.

And for the second edition: copyeditor.

Notes:

1. See Douglas Adams on “La, a note to follow Soh”.

Still, it couldn’t hurt to pop in to Waterstones and make sure, right?¹ And, score one for British punctuality, there it was.

Now I need to cancel all engagements for 72 hours or so (it’s quite chunky, 481 pages) so I can read it.

Notes:

1. Amsterdam is fantastic: the same square, Spui, houses both the ABC and Waterstones, as well as the Athenaeum, and just around the corner is a Scheltema, plus on Fridays Spui hosts an open-air second-hand book market.

It turns out that Wheatland Press are struggling, and I mean really struggling. To the tune of setting a three-month deadline to get 225 preorders on the next Polyphony (volume 7), and getting just over half that.

There’s a heartbreaking LJ post about the numbers: four times as many submissions as preorders. That’s quite a gap.

Given the publicity this last gasp is getting (I found out via tor.com), I’m hoping they may still fill the quota before Deborah Layne gives up in total disgust. I’ve ordered one Polyphony 7; maybe you feel moved to do the same.

• Not one but two James Tiptree, Jr collections, both from before Alice B. Sheldon was revealed as the woman behind the pseudonym. One has the famous Robert Silverberg introduction: “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” (He later wrote that she had given his head “a great needed wrenching”.) The other has two pages by Harry Harrison: “There is a temptation in an introduction of this kind to be very biographical and spend a good deal of time on the author’s lovely dark hair or firm waistline despite his advancing years.” A bit thick for 1973 (she was outed in late 1976), but he uses the word “obviosity” so I’m prepared to forgive him much. (Update: even better than I thought, it seems these are the first two Tiptree anthologies ever published, although not in their first printings. Joy!)
• A couple of M. John Harrisons; this is a dark addiction, I finish each of his books tasting ash and bone and immediately start reading the next.
• An early Samuel R. Delany. I have an almost-complete run of his sf novels (missing two, according to wikipedia), but still none of his short stories.
• A mathematics education book for Olga, Out of the Labyrinth, which looks interesting enough that I might have to steal it from her before she’s finished reading it.

That last one came from Het Martyrium, which seems to be criminally underappreciated in Amsterdam (possibly because it isn’t on or around Spui, and therefore cannot be a “real” bookstore). Their only drawback, as far as I’m concerned (apart from the lack of sf section) is that they have a nasty habit of stocking remaindered copies of titles I want at extremely low prices… in Dutch.¹ Which probably is actually good for me, in the long run. But occasionally leads to double-ups, if the English edition also turns up second-hand at some later date.

Notes:

1. That said, this is where I found The Naming of Names, in softcover and in English. So I shouldn’t complain I suppose.

Pretty neat. More details plus legalities plus why-they-did-it-that-way at the book site.

Notes:

1. The same John Holbo who writes Squid and Owl. Multi-talented, that man.