Milestones | 1000 and Counting

Way back when, in January 2010, I launched The Speculative Scotsman. Why? In large part because I wanted to talk to the world about Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay: a book that moved me hugely.

I wasn't sure what I'd do with a blog about genre fiction in all its multifarious forms afterwards, but I figured I'd cross that bridge when I came to it, and I did, I think. I had a tower of books to be read even then, and The Speculative Scotsman, in the beginning, gave me a great excuse to dig into it a little.

It wasn't long before review copies of new novels started arriving, lending the site some small sense of acceptance, but the icing on the great cake came when, to my surprise and delight, a few of my favourite bloggers blogged about this new blogger they'd noticed.

Me, I realised. Me! :)

It'd be a fib to say I haven't looked back since. I have, from time to time. I've struggled to keep up the pace; I've come close to burning out on books; I've lost my faith in fiction only to find it again, and again, and again. For a blogger, this is par for the course, of course. These questions come with the territory.

And what with the superblogs out there — the Tor.coms and the IO9s — the landscape looks a lot different today than it did then: one of the many ways I've been feeling my age of late. Between that and suddenly turning 30, I just don't have the energy I used to. I can't compete: that's clear.

But this was never about winning; this was about sharing something. Something special. Something I crave as much today as I did in the beginning.

Today, in any case, marks a very special blogaversary for me. One I wasn't sure I'd ever see, because sometimes it has been hard. But never mind my more maudlin moments: the vast majority of the time it's been absolute magic. Blogging is in my blood now. I don't know what I'd do without it. Without you, in truth.

This is the thousandth post I've published on The Speculative Scotsman. I can't imagine I have another thousand in me, but together... together we'll see, won't we?

Now, because it seems so fitting I can't resist, I'm off to celebrate with some Guy Gavriel Kay...

Book Review | The Madonna on the Moon by Rolf Bauerdick

November 1957: As Communism spreads across Eastern Europe, strange events are beginning to upend daily life in Baia Luna, a tiny village nestled at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. As the Soviets race to reach the moon and Sputnik soars overhead, fifteen-year-old Pavel Botev attends the small village school with the other children. Their sole teacher, the mysterious and once beautiful Angela Barbulescu, was sent by the Ministry of Education, and while it is suspected that she has lived a highly cultured life, much of her past remains hidden. But one day, after asking Pavel to help hang a photo of the new party secretary, she whispers a startling directive in his ear: “Send this man straight to hell! Exterminate him!” By the next morning, she has disappeared.

With little more to go on than the gossip and rumors swirling through his grandfather Ilja’s tavern, Pavel finds curiosity overcoming his fear when suddenly the village’s sacred Madonna statue is stolen and the priest Johannes Baptiste is found brutally murdered in the rectory. Aided by the Gypsy girl Buba and her eccentric uncle, Dimitru Gabor, Pavel’s search for answers leads him far from the innocent concerns of childhood and into the frontiers of a new world, changing his life forever.

***

In Baia Luna, a small village of some 250 self-sufficient souls hidden away at the base of the Carpathian Mountains, "today was like what yesterday was and tomorrow would be." (p.50)

But not for long. On the contrary, a time of great change awaits. It's November 1957, and the fictitious nation of Transmontania is about to be sucked whole-hog into the socialist bloc. Communism is of course on the cards, and whomsoever stands in the way of the Conjucator shall surely be squashed.

"About to turn sixteen [and] stuck in a swamp halfway between a boy and a man," (p.78) Pavel Botev has more immediate problems to attend to at the outset of The Madonna on the Moon, the first novel by Rolf Bauerdick, an award-winning German photojournalist. Raised by his aunt and his grandfather, a "formerly commonsensical" (p.325) sort convinced that the body of the Virgin Mary is on the moon, Pavel becomes caught up in a bizarre conspiracy which will dog him to the end of an era that has hardly started.

No on in Baia Luna had the slightest doubt that the source of Ilja Botev's visions was not some luminous gift of prophetic insight, but the delusions of a wandering mind — least of all me, Pavel, his grandson. When I was a little boy, I shrugged off my grandfather's imaginings as foolish fancies, the result of the influence of the Gypsy Dimitru Gabor. Dimitru never gave much of a hoot about the laws of reason and logic. But later, as the solid ground of good common sense grew progressively thin and crumbly beneath Grandfather's feet, I myself played no small part in the old man's getting more and more hopelessly tangled up in the net of his fantasies. It was certainly not my intent to have Grandfather make himself the town idiot, the butt of everyone's jokes, but what could you say about a tavern owner who sets off in a horse and cart on a secret mission to warn the president of the United States about the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a mysterious Fourth Power, and an impending international catastrophe? Armed, by the way, with a laughable top secret dossier, a treatise on the mystery of the corporeal Assumption of the Virgin Mary, handwritten and triple-sewn into the lining of his wool jacket. (p.3)

More than half of The Madonna on the Moon has passed before this actually occurs, but it's a smart move to pave the way for this peculiar plot in the prologue. Without it, the beginning of Bauerdick's exuberant book would be that much more mundane, whereas with it, we wonder what the seeming suicide of Pavel's distressingly drunk teacher could have to do with the Catholic Church, whilst considering the deeper meaning of the disappearance of parish priest Johannes Baptiste. Narrative addicts that we are, we attempt to link this fact to that, imbuing everyday events with a sort of supernatural significance.

As it happens, there are two discrete mysteries in play in this distinctive debut, and though there's some small crossover between the pair, the prologue suggests a greater sense of connection. This is misdirection, make no mistake, but I enjoyed The Madonna on the Moon all the more because of it. And Bauerdick's playful way of misleading and indeed deceiving his readers — for much of what we think we know, we don't — goes further. Perhaps too far, in fact...

In the early going The Madonna on the Moon rather resembles a novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafon: in its protagonist's fascination with enigmatic matters and its impeccable sense of setting. The colour and culture of Baia Luna is simply brilliant, and Transmontania too rings at times tragically true. Last but not least, the larger than life characters populating the tale are an absolute riot, particularly Dimitru and the late parish priest.

Sadly, the less successful second half tends too often towards the tedious, though the ambition of the entire is to be admired:

Today, as I look back over my life, the Age of Gold seems like the rise and fall of a distant star, a sun that gives light and warmth for a while, expands into a huge red giant, and finally collapses under the weight of its own mass. In the end, all that remained of the New Nation was a greedy black hole that had devoured years of my life and turned the ardent dreams of my youth to ice. (p.334)

In short, what was charming about the book in the beginning becomes increasingly cloying as The Madonna and the Moon goes on, and the resolution, when it arrives, is rushed, rendering much of the foundational fun redundant. I'll grant that there's a certain circularity to it, but the conclusion is contrived, and far too tidy, finally.

Books like The Madonna on the Moon — books that pivot on mysteries — are made or broken by the promise that they'll come together wonderfully. Bauerdick's debut doesn't, leaving me in two minds about it, in truth. It's pretty much magnificent initially — winningly whimsical, witty and wise, such that I loved half of this book wholeheartedly — but the laborious last act left me feeling disheartened rather than outsmarted. 

***

The Madonna on the Moon
by Rolf Bauerdick

UK Publication: November 2013, Atlantic
US Publication: July 2013, Knopf

Buy this book from
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IndieBound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle Edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Season's Greetings | The Fun of the Future

Four years to the day my time with Tigana compelled me to launch this blog, 2014 is here, and though I'm still very much in holiday mode, and of course, horribly hungover, I wanted to take a second to say: welcome to the future, folks!

I can only hope it's as bright as Orange promised.

So what's to come in 2014? Well, one wonders. For me at least, not knowing is perhaps half the fun of the future — and I don't, in any great detail — but plenty, I expect, including a few fairly major changes. 

Before all that, though, stay tuned for Top of the Scots. I already have my lists locked. All that remains is for me to explain, because I imagine my choices might surprise some of you. Expect more on that momentarily. And in the meantime?

Sincerely, readers dear: I hope you all have a happy New Year. :)

Book Review | End of the Road, ed. Jonathan Oliver

Each step leads you closer to your destination, but who, or what, can you expect to meet along the way? 

Here are stories of misfits, spectral hitch-hikers, nightmare travel tales and the rogues, freaks and monsters to be found on the road. The critically acclaimed editor of Magic, The End of The Line and House of Fear has brought together the contemporary masters and mistresses of the weird from around the globe in an anthology of travel tales like no other. Strap on your seatbelt, or shoulder your backpack, and wait for that next ride... into darkness.

An incredible anthology of original short stories from an exciting list of writers including the bestselling Philip Reeve, the World Fantasy Award-winning Lavie Tidhar and the incredible talents of S. L. Grey, Ian Whates, Jay Caselberg, Banjanun Sriduangkaew, Zen Cho, Sophia McDougall, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Anil Menon, Rio Youers, Vandana Singh, Paul Meloy, Adam Nevill and Helen Marshall.

***

For his fourth anthology for Solaris, a sister of sorts to 2010's very fine The End of the Line, editor Jonathan Oliver has turned to the road story: a genre, as he explains in his insightful introduction, widely mined in film and literature alike — in epic fantasy, for instance, insofar as the road represents the length of the hero's quest — though the fifteen short fictions which follow show that the form has much more to offer.

Thanks in part to Lavie Tidhar, whose guidance Oliver acknowledges, End of the Road is composed of stories from an expansive assortment of authors; some familiar, some fresh. The former camp includes Adam Nevill, S. L. Grey, Rio Youers, Philip Reeve, Ian Whates and, indubitably, Tidhar too; in the latter, a goodly number of newcomers hailing from here, there and everywhere. To wit, tales from Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines, India, South Africa, Thailand and the like lend End of the Road a welcome and indeed defining sense of diversity.

The score and more of stories to be told can be divided down the middle, into those that revolve around the road, and those that are more interested in where the road goes. As the aforementioned editor asserts, "destination (expected or otherwise) is a theme running throughout this anthology, but often it is the journey itself that is key to the tales. And that needn't be a physical journey (though, naturally, the majority of these stories do feature one); the journey into the self is also explored in various ways." (p.7)



The journey begins with one of the very best of the bunch by way of Philip Reeve's wonderful 'We Know Where We're Goin.' It's true, to be sure, that "there are shades of Russel Hoban's Riddley Walker here, in the fragmented language" (p.11) of the narrative, but Reeve's expression of the anthology's twin interests put me in mind of China Mieville's final Bas-Lag book, Iron Council, at the same time. Two high watermarks to match, but the Mortal Engines author is up to that vast task:

"The sun was going down behind them girt moors. I'd driven over, and the line o the Road was stretchin out towards it, an all I could think on was how many generations o my kin had lived an died a-buildin o that Road, and how I hope Where We're Going would turn out ter be worth it when we got there." (p.23)

It is.

Oliver admits to some surprise that he only received one hitchhiker story for End of the Road, namely Ian Whates' tellingly titled 'Without a Hitch': an unsurprising short about a mature man who picks up a pretty girl who isn't half as lost as she looks. Positioned between Benjanun Sriduangkaew's fantastic, folklorish 'Fade to Gold' and Zen Cho's striking, if less successful tale of a hungry ghost's homecoming, Whates' tale is done no favours, I fear.

'Driver Error' by Paul Meloy — in which a father going to pick up his daughter from a party that's taken a turn for the worse finds the road obstructed by the broken bodies of three boys — fares better by the same relative measure, but sandwiched as it by 'Balik Kampung (Going Back)' and 'Locusts' by Lavie Tidhar, it seems the least of the lot.

'Locusts,' however, is another of End of the Road's strongest stories. Based on the botanist Aaron Aaronsohn's bona fide battle against the insects' invasion in 1915, this impeccably put together piece boasts a stunning setting brought to life by moments of genuine terror, especially when the locusts come; "migrating in great big apocalyptic clouds like black angels of death but they are alive, hungry and alive, and all Palestine lies before them, its wheat and orange trees and olives." (pp.88-89)

I dare say your mileage may vary as regards several of the stories in End of the Road, but I for one found 'The Cure' by Anil Menon — in which a car full of strangers travel to the same temple for different reasons — curiously inconclusive, and though the author does a fine job of capturing the feeling of being (almost) alone in the middle of nowhere, 'The Track' by Jay Caselberg lacks impact. Nevertheless, the best is yet ahead.

Rochita Loenen-Ruiz's remarkable 'Dagiti Timayap Garda (of the Flying Guardians)' is fully-formed secondary world weird. It's also notable for its thoughtful portrayal of gender, as is the subsequent story by Sophia McDougall, who returns in 'Through Wylmere Woods' to the characters she established in Oliver's Magic anthology — Morgane and her droll demon Levander-Sleet — to truly tremendous effect.

Between times, rising star Helen Marshall applies beat poetry principles to the tale of a cheat coming to terms with his infidelity whilst his brother in law drives him to his death. 'I'm the Lady of Good Times, She Said' is the sort of story that really needs to be read aloud, up to and including to an empty room, whilst 'The Widow' by Rio Youers — which depicts a grieving widow who becomes obsessed by a ghastly sideways man she believes represents the road responsible for taking her loving husband from her — is certainly End of the Road's most insidious story:

Thornbury Road had claimed eleven lives in the last ten years. An interesting choice of words that gave the seven-mile stretch of asphalt a certain character. She imagined it breathing, elongated lungs pounding beneath its surface, occasionally whipping snake-like to send some luckless vehicle spinning out of control. 

Ridiculous, but it picked at her. Then it gnawed at her. Then it started to tear. She lay awake, night after night, grinding her teeth and imagining the road moving slickly beneath the stars. (p.141)

'Bingo' by S. L. Grey is absolutely brutal: a truly depraved tale about a self-interested businessman who has been working his way through a list of women in an attempt to impress the Powers That Be at the brokerage where he works. When he witnesses a terrible car crash on the N2 on the night our tale takes place, however, his objectification proves a problem — if not for him then the victim, who desperately needs his help.

Rounding out End of the Road are stories by Vandana Singh and Adam Nevill about aliens faffing with the firmament and the dangers of driving which make the case that though this anthology is almost over, the road, and the road story, goes ever on. Would that we could go with it, for though it has its horrors, it's replete with untold wonders as well.

But enough of my burbling about this book. Instead, let me leave you with the wise words of anthologist Jonathan Oliver, who advises at the outset that "it's time to buckle up, sit back and prepare yourself for the ride." (p.9) Just remember to thank your driver afterwards!

***

End of the Road
edited by Jonathan Oliver

UK & US Publication: December 2013, Solaris

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
Indiebound / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | The Silence of Ghosts by Jonathan Aycliffe

When the Blitz starts in London, Dominic Lancaster, injured out of service at the battle of Narvik, accompanies his 10 year old sister Octavia to the family house on the shores of Ullswater in the Lake District. Octavia is profoundly deaf but at night she can hear disturbing noises in the house. When questioned by Dominic as to what she can hear, she replies: "voices."

Two nights later she comes into his bedroom to tell him that the dead children in the house want them to leave. And then Octavia falls mysteriously ill... during her sickness she tells Dominic he must go to the attic. There, he releases an older, darker evil that threatens the lives of Olivia and himself.

***

When Dominic Lancaster goes to war as a gunner about the HMS Hotspur, it's a chance for him to show his family — who have dismissed him to date as a dreadful disappointment — that he may well be worthy of their legacy: a successful port importing business which Dominic stands to inherit after his father's passing.

Instead, he becomes one of the first casualties of the conflict when he loses his leg at the Battle of Narvik. His subsequent recovery is tough; tough enough that Dominic's parents dispatch him to Hallinhag House in the little village of Ullswater... ostensibly to give him a peaceful place to recuperate, but in truth, as Dominic determines, so that he isn't underfoot when the Blitz begins.

He's not alone in the Lancasters' holiday home. For one thing, his ten-year-old sister Octavia is with him. Profoundly deaf for the larger part of her little life, she's another distraction to be disdained at every stage by a pair of appalling parents, but somehow Hallinhag House seems to be improving her hearing. The sounds she starts to hear, however, are of nothing natural.

The house seems more than quiet. Downcast. Full of memories. No, that's wrong. It's full of forgettings. All the years that have gone, and I know so little of the men and women who spent time here, even though they were my ancestors. When I have been here before, the house has seemed filled with light; but that was always the summer and it is winter now. Perhaps the house has picked up on my mood, sensed by new vulnerability, and knows how useless I am. Can houses sense what we feel? Do they feed off all the emotions that have been experienced between their walls? Octavia says there are ghosts here. I admonish her, and I watch her when she comes to this room. She might be serious, but I doubt it. She has no names for these ghosts. Maybe they are silent, like her. (p.29)

Initially, Dominic has little time for such frivolousness, because he too has his sights set on getting better; on learning to walk once more, first and foremost. Assisting him in this is the district nurse, Rose, a beautiful young woman who treats him with care and kindness. It isn't long before Dominic falls for her, though there will be no flings in the future he foresees.

This is, God knows, as lonely a place as I have known. I have Octavia for company, of course, but she is ten years old, and I often want to speak with an adult, a man or even a woman. Of course, with a woman I can never expect any more than intelligent conversation. All I can hope for it to have some women for my friends. The loss of my leg has diminished me so completely, I scarcely think of myself as a man now, a proper man, well formed, active, not the partial thing I have become. (p.32)

To make matters worse, Dominic is haunted. Not by memories of the war — so far removed from it is he that the war hardly figures into his thinking — but by dreams. Deeply creepy dreams in which he repeatedly sees "shapes moving in semi-darkness, shapes that were neither human nor something else, shapes with veils across their eyes, dressed in black or grey, swaying, watching me from a short distance and always coming closer." (p.45) Harrowing as they are, he can hardly conceive that his dreams could be real, or that the whispering children Octavia hears have called Hallinhag House their own home for hundreds of years.

It's all, if I'm honest, abominably ominous, and the atmosphere of the entire comes complete with a sense of threat so desperate that when we catch our first glimpse of the ghosts, it's a relief, really: an outlet, finally, for our increasing fears. Few authors can inspire these feelings in readers as easily as Jonathan Aycliffe, the author of eight other full-length ghost stories — most notably Naomi's Room, which is being reissued to coincide with the release of The Silence of Ghosts: a fine, if ill-fitting title in light of the clamour of the titular spirits.

Aycliffe has the fiction of fear down to a fine art, to be frank, and his latest is bolstered by a tremendous setting in terms of place and time too. Hallinhag House is an isolated old building set apart from a close-knit community that the cast-off Lancasters have no choice but to call upon when events take a turn for the terrible, and the fact that the war is going on all the while, albeit in the background, adds a sense of insignificance to their troubles. With bombs being dropped daily and the awful cost of the ongoing conflict felt far and wide, why should anyone give a fig about a two newcomers tormented by night terrors?

That we do is a testament to the author's unsentimental yet sympathetic rendering of The Silence of Ghosts' central characters, and Aycliffe's development of Dominic, Rose and Octavia is deft, particularly considering the book's brevity. It has a beginning and an ending, but no meandering middle section to drag the narrative down. Alas, its limited length leads to certain less welcome consequences as well. Dominic's inevitable romance with Rose feels rather rushed, and an array of supporting characters in both London and the Lakes lead to Aycliffe's latest seeming somewhat overstuffed.

I would, too, question the utility of the framing tale with which Aycliffe bookends Dominic's diaries. Precious little is achieved in these that could not have come to pass, perhaps to greater impact, over the course of the core story; in fact its primary purpose is to pointlessly preempt the unfortunate fate of Octavia.

It may be no Naomi's Room, but by and large, The Silence of Ghosts is a bloody good ghost story, cannily crafted in the classical fashion. Jonathan Aycliffe has been called a modern day M. R. James, and if that's the case, then this book about life after death and the abuse of youth is very likely his Lost Hearts.

***

The Silence of Ghosts
by Jonathan Aycliffe

UK Publication: October 2013, Corsair

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Book Review | Snowblind by Christopher Golden

Twelve years ago, the small town of Coventry, Massachusetts was in the grasp of a particularly brutal winter. And then came the Great Storm.

It hit hard. Not everyone saw the spring. Today the families, friends and lovers of the victims are still haunted by the ghosts of those they lost so suddenly. If only they could see them one more time, hold them close, tell them they love them.

It was the deadliest winter in living memory... until now.

When a new storm strikes, it doesn't just bring snow and ice, it brings the people of Coventry exactly what they've been wishing for. And the realisation their nightmare is only beginning.

***

Winter is upon us, and with it, inklings of Christmas.

There is no finer time, I find, for families and friends to get together, to share warmth and wine — mulled or otherwise — over stories of sleds and snowmen... all while a blanket of white settles softly upon the trees and streets outside.

But we all know that winter can be wicked as well; a season as cruel as it is cold. At its worst, winter, and the nightmarish things it brings, can kill. And in Snowblind by Christopher Golden, it does... or indeed they do.

"They were like wraiths, jagged, frozen bogeymen, and they whirled about on crushing gusts of wind." (pp.280-281) In the promising prologue of Golden's new novel — a prolonged piece set some years before the bulk of the book — these obscene creatures take eighteen souls young and old: a tragedy that tears apart the small Massachusetts community of Coventry.

A decade and change later, the survivors still struggle. And not just because they are haunted by hellish memories of that dark and stormy night:

Everything in Coventry — hell, the whole country — had gone downhill. The talking heads on TV said the economy was improving, but most of the guys he knew were still scared shitless that their jobs might evaporate out from underneath them. Either that or they were already unemployed. 

Doug himself was just barely hanging on. (p.55)

Doug's girlfriend died that devastating day, and only recently has he found his feet... which is to say he's started stealing. "As crazy as it sounded, even to him, stealing from people was the first thing he had ever done that made him feel as if he was in control of his life." (p.130) To his credit, however, he's well aware that his winning streak won't end well, so when the weather channels warn that a snowstorm to rival the one that once crushed Coventry is coming, he masterminds a final night of crime. A single spree to set him up for the foreseeable.

The other survivors who hear the news don't see the silver lining Doug does. Jake Schapiro, who lost his baby brother in the Great Storm, remembers more than most. These days, he's a crime scene photographer, because "the camera gave him comfort. [...] The flash chased the shadows away and left only the tangible world. If the camera couldn't see something, it wasn't real." (p.70) Meanwhile his mother Allie lost the love of her life that night, namely Niko, the father of Jake's forever friend Miri.

Then there's TJ and Ella, who found comfort and companionship in one another's arms in the middle of all that suffering so long ago. Alas, their relationship has been on the rocks recently, and when their dear daughter starts acting strangely they can't help but worry that their frequent fights have hurt her.

And it wouldn't do to forget Detective Joe Keenan, who is haunted by the memory of the boy he couldn't save that day. When a pair of parents die in a car crash — neither the first nor the last of Coventry's casualties — and no-one can find the body of their boy, Keenan fixates on finding the missing child. The very same missing child that comes straight to Jake after the accident, claiming to be his dead baby brother...

Snowblind boasts a fair array of characters, precious few of whom, I fear, are developed to any extent. It says a bunch about the book that Doug, a two-bit criminal, is one of its most fascinating figures. How he rationalises his bad behaviour, and how the difficult times we face today have come to define him, lends perceptible pathos to his perspective. Unfortunately he's not very well served by Golden's meandering narrative, which eventually simply dispenses with the pretense that it gives a good goddamn about any of Snowblind's other characters excepting our heroes: the Schapiros.

To make matters worse, the town Snowblind takes place in is disappointingly ill-defined. In lieu of a more distinct or interesting description, I found myself imagining a sort of snowy Bon Temps: a picture which played perfectly well with the concept of monsters taking pleasure in terrorising Coventry's cast of maudlin mortals.

They live in the storm, but it's not just any storm. They exist in a kind of endless blizzard that is somehow its own place, a kind of frozen limbo. When it snows anywhere, this other, unnatural storm overlaps with out world. (p.243)

Snowblind is not the "ethereal and nightmarish contemporary fairy tale" that David S. Goyer promises, nor is it one dark and stormy night novel to rule them all, as Stephen King insists, but though the book's diffuse focus is damning, and it suffers from a lacklustre cast of characters and an at best suggestive setting, in truth these drawbacks do not dramatically detract from Snowblind's easy appeal as a chilling wintry thriller. Artless but not heartless, fans of 30 Days of Night will find a lot to like.

***

Snowblind
by Christopher Golden

UK Publication: January 2014, Headline
US Publication: January 2014, St. Martin's Press

Buy this book from
Amazon.co.uk / Amazon.com
The Book Depository

Or get the Kindle edition

Recommended and Related Reading

Status Update | A Lion King Christmas

I don't know about you, but with Christmas day just a week away, I'm finally feeling festive.

Not least because last night I realised a dream more than a decade in the making, when the entirety of my family got together to attend a performance of The Lion King live. Simba's spotty performance did not ultimately undermine what was a wonderful show overall; a real visual feast that I'm so pleased to have seen.

I've been humming 'Be Prepared' ever since leaving the theatre, and this morning it occurred to me that I could do worse things in life than take Scar's advice.

Which is my way of saying that though I'm usually one of the very first folks to bang on about the year's best books — Top of the Scots has in the past happened in early December — in 2013 my other obligations have regrettably had to take precedence. I've had to stockpile columns, including this morning's edition of the British Genre Fiction Focus, and ready a fair few reviews to run on Tor.com over the holidays. Truth be told, I've been so busy in November and December to date that it only just hit me that Christmas is coming.

And you know what? I want to enjoy it, so instead of spending the few days remaining to me this year putting together Top of the Scots, I'm going to give myself over to the Christmas spirit. To wit, I warrant you won't be hearing a whole lot from me over the holidays, but when I do get back to blogging, it will be worth the wait. Scots honour!

For a sneak peek at a few of my favourites, check out the Tor.com Reviewers' Choice, in which I count down the three best British books I've read in 2013. I've contributed to another end of year feature as well: Strange Horizons has a few hundred words from me about the books I've gotten most lost in this year.

Now to lose myself in festive merriment...

You all have a brilliant Christmas, and a happy New Year, you hear?