Week in review: Week to 10 May
May. 11th, 2025 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedanther. I cleaned the bathroom, an event that doesn't occur as often as I might like. Part of it is that cleaning the basin-countertop means finding somewhere to temporarily put all the stuff that usually sits on there, a problem for which I've yet to find a convenient solution. I also have a suspicion that my brain deliberately delays until there's enough dust and whatever that cleaning it off will produce a satisfyingly dramatic visual change; wiping a slightly dusty surface to achieve a slightly less dusty surface just isn't the same.
. At board game club, we played Betrayal at House on the Hill, using my copy of the game; I specifically suggested it because I wanted to test something out. My copy is the Betrayal Legacy edition, which is designed so you can play out the developing history of the House on the Hill over many decades, with game components being added and removed along the way, until you end up with what I've got, a more-or-less standard copy of Betrayal with a few custom features that vary depending on how the history played out. And, in my experience, a plastic box liner that's supposed to hold the components in place but bears no observable relationship to the components needing to be held; I assume it was designed to hold the original starting components, but it's useless for the final components and they kept getting jumbled up. A couple of weeks ago, I had some spare time and enough of this annoyance, so I acquired a set of craft storage containers that were the right size to fit in the box, turfed out the box liner, and set up my own storage system. It's worked out very well: when I opened the box to start setting up the game, everything was where it was meant to be, and when we were packing up afterward, everything went back into place easily. (The game itself went well, too, and we defeated a mad scientist and saved the day.)
. At work, it's been another week dominated by One of Those Clients. I got to vent about it at the end of the week to my siblings, which helped.
. Separately from the book chain, this week I also read Things Unborn by Eugene Byrne. I got it on special years ago, having read and enjoyed some of his short stories, and then proceeded to not read it on account of the front cover suggesting a book I wasn't in the mood for. (It didn't occur to me to look at the back cover, which might or might not have helped; once I've decided to read a book, I never do look at the back cover or blurb.) It's been lurking nearer the top of the TBR for the last couple of months, after I made it one of my picks for the themed reading challenge (March's theme was "Things"), but the cover continued to put me off.
It turns out that the cover is a complete tonal mismatch for the actual contents of the book: the cover says 'dense, serious science fiction probably involving cloning', but the actual book is a readable police procedural mystery-thriller set in an alternate history where, for several decades as of the start of the story, people from past centuries have been mysteriously reappearing out of thin air in the present, with all their memories up to the time of their death but none of whatever killed them the first time around. Society's adapted to the phenomenon, and there are procedures in place to help the revivals find new places for themselves. As witness our lead characters: He's a former slave who died in his teens in the 18th century! He's a former RAF pilot who got shot down in the Battle of Britain! They fight crime!
I'm not sure how I feel about it. I never quite got a clear grip on what the tone was supposed to be, or how seriously I was supposed to be taking it all. It's not a rigorous exploration of the premise, either in the history and society of the alternate world or in the backstories of the characters; there are occasional gestures toward questions like "What effect does it have on religion to have people returning from the dead?", but the answers aren't allowed to get in the way of the story the author wants to tell. The setting is a bit too weird, and some of the plot beats a bit too familiar, to take entirely seriously - I could picture it being a back-up strip in 2000 AD - but they mostly didn't seem to be played for laughs either. (Though it could be that the humour was just so dry it passed unrecognised. I'm certain there must have been satirical bits that I was insufficiently English to spot.) Still, it was a reasonable way to pass the time, and the bits where the author did take some space to explore the characters' reactions to the world they found themselves in were often interesting.
One fun detail I noticed was that, amidst all the differences in this alternate version of 2008, despite significant changes in society and government, the Prime Minister of the UK is still Gordon Brown. Which is particularly interesting because the book was published several years before Brown ascended to the post in real life. (I don't know enough about Byrne to speculate whether he intended it as a silly "that could never happen in our timeline" moment or meant to suggest that it was a foregone conclusion.)
Thing Unborn was apparently not a commercial success; that might have been down to bad word of mouth from people who had read and been confused by it, but I have to wonder how many people never picked it up in the first place because of that cover.
. I'm also still working through A Choice of Catastrophes. As the focus narrows from the end of the universe down to merely the end of life on Earth, I'm increasingly recognising signs of the book's age; it's slightly older than me, and there's been a lot of scientific discovery in my lifetime. One of the chapters I read this week was about the risk of a large asteroid impact, and there's not a word about the dinosaur-killer asteroid, which was only just starting to be floated as a hypothesis when the book was published and didn't become widely accepted until years after.
. At board game club, we played Betrayal at House on the Hill, using my copy of the game; I specifically suggested it because I wanted to test something out. My copy is the Betrayal Legacy edition, which is designed so you can play out the developing history of the House on the Hill over many decades, with game components being added and removed along the way, until you end up with what I've got, a more-or-less standard copy of Betrayal with a few custom features that vary depending on how the history played out. And, in my experience, a plastic box liner that's supposed to hold the components in place but bears no observable relationship to the components needing to be held; I assume it was designed to hold the original starting components, but it's useless for the final components and they kept getting jumbled up. A couple of weeks ago, I had some spare time and enough of this annoyance, so I acquired a set of craft storage containers that were the right size to fit in the box, turfed out the box liner, and set up my own storage system. It's worked out very well: when I opened the box to start setting up the game, everything was where it was meant to be, and when we were packing up afterward, everything went back into place easily. (The game itself went well, too, and we defeated a mad scientist and saved the day.)
. At work, it's been another week dominated by One of Those Clients. I got to vent about it at the end of the week to my siblings, which helped.
. Separately from the book chain, this week I also read Things Unborn by Eugene Byrne. I got it on special years ago, having read and enjoyed some of his short stories, and then proceeded to not read it on account of the front cover suggesting a book I wasn't in the mood for. (It didn't occur to me to look at the back cover, which might or might not have helped; once I've decided to read a book, I never do look at the back cover or blurb.) It's been lurking nearer the top of the TBR for the last couple of months, after I made it one of my picks for the themed reading challenge (March's theme was "Things"), but the cover continued to put me off.
It turns out that the cover is a complete tonal mismatch for the actual contents of the book: the cover says 'dense, serious science fiction probably involving cloning', but the actual book is a readable police procedural mystery-thriller set in an alternate history where, for several decades as of the start of the story, people from past centuries have been mysteriously reappearing out of thin air in the present, with all their memories up to the time of their death but none of whatever killed them the first time around. Society's adapted to the phenomenon, and there are procedures in place to help the revivals find new places for themselves. As witness our lead characters: He's a former slave who died in his teens in the 18th century! He's a former RAF pilot who got shot down in the Battle of Britain! They fight crime!
I'm not sure how I feel about it. I never quite got a clear grip on what the tone was supposed to be, or how seriously I was supposed to be taking it all. It's not a rigorous exploration of the premise, either in the history and society of the alternate world or in the backstories of the characters; there are occasional gestures toward questions like "What effect does it have on religion to have people returning from the dead?", but the answers aren't allowed to get in the way of the story the author wants to tell. The setting is a bit too weird, and some of the plot beats a bit too familiar, to take entirely seriously - I could picture it being a back-up strip in 2000 AD - but they mostly didn't seem to be played for laughs either. (Though it could be that the humour was just so dry it passed unrecognised. I'm certain there must have been satirical bits that I was insufficiently English to spot.) Still, it was a reasonable way to pass the time, and the bits where the author did take some space to explore the characters' reactions to the world they found themselves in were often interesting.
One fun detail I noticed was that, amidst all the differences in this alternate version of 2008, despite significant changes in society and government, the Prime Minister of the UK is still Gordon Brown. Which is particularly interesting because the book was published several years before Brown ascended to the post in real life. (I don't know enough about Byrne to speculate whether he intended it as a silly "that could never happen in our timeline" moment or meant to suggest that it was a foregone conclusion.)
Thing Unborn was apparently not a commercial success; that might have been down to bad word of mouth from people who had read and been confused by it, but I have to wonder how many people never picked it up in the first place because of that cover.
. I'm also still working through A Choice of Catastrophes. As the focus narrows from the end of the universe down to merely the end of life on Earth, I'm increasingly recognising signs of the book's age; it's slightly older than me, and there's been a lot of scientific discovery in my lifetime. One of the chapters I read this week was about the risk of a large asteroid impact, and there's not a word about the dinosaur-killer asteroid, which was only just starting to be floated as a hypothesis when the book was published and didn't become widely accepted until years after.
