Here is the final part of the reviews. Please find part one here, and part two over here.
35. The House on the Borderland: The original
influence on Lovecraft and other weird fiction writers amongst many others,
William Hope Hodgson is a towering figure in horror, fantasy and science
fiction which he intertwined so effortlessly, especially in this book. He was a
poet, a bodybuilder, a stunt biker, a personal trainer, notably applied rough
restraints to Houdini before serving as a Lieutenant in World War I, during
which he was unfortunately killed.
36. Patternmaster and 37. Wild Seed: Octavia
E Butler’s Patternmaster series details a history involving magic/mind control
continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to a far future. The first book
published in this series, Patternmaster (though the last in the chronological
order), is set in the future where the human race is divided into mind
controlling “Patternists”, mutes (humans without powers) and Clayarks (sort of
a hybrid animal). It is a bildungsroman story of a patternist as he grows and
fights for his position in the social hierarchy. The story has a lot of interesting
ideas, but it is not too well presented, and definitely doesn’t show what
Butler is capable of, as a writer.
38. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever: This is a
collection of science fiction and fantasy stories by the remarkable James
Tiptree Jr. It touches upon issues such as the nature of perception, feminism,
psychology, and biology as Tiptree Jr goes about breaking down the boundaries
between inherently “masculine” or “feminine” writing. The stories are a
wistful, tragic commentary on humanity and are moving, harrowing, thought
provoking, sceptical, charming and sometimes miniatures of a more monumental
narrative.
39. Sleight: Kirsten
Kaschock’s Sleight is about a rigorous avant-garde theatre called “Sleight”
which combines elements of dance, architecture, acrobatics and voice. It is
very much an experimental prose novel that distances us from the exact nature
of the art form by using vaguely familiar words. I think this distancing is a
little overdone as one finds it difficult to care about the characters
described like they were almost absent. Although it is original, I felt it
could have been very impressive but for the somewhat sluggish nature of the
whole story.
40. Three Moments of an
Explosion: Stories: This short story collection of China Mieville’s has
got all the wonderful elements of what makes him such a fine writer. Monsters,
floating icebergs, walking oil rigs, fake trailers, commentary on society,
politics, academia, and his memorable prose.
41. Fallen Victors: Jonathan
Lenahan’s debut novel is gritty, violent and has got some interesting
characters. It is not without some touching moments, and the character driven
plot lends itself well to a mature audience as each of the characters meditate
on themes of trust, selfishness and politics.
42. The Street of
Crocodiles: Bruno Schulz’s dense and atmospheric language transcends translation
and that in itself is an incredible feat in a book that is infested with
metaphors, both uncommon and common. It swings in and out of irrealism,
providing us with glimpses of his multiple possible alternative worlds that are
as vivid as they are scary.
“From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the brightness of the day. The passers-by, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey. Upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat—as if the sun had forced his worshipers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other's pagan faces—the barbaric smiles of Bacchus.”
43. Lavinia: Lavinia is a
character from “The Aeneid” who has a significant say in Virgil’s epic but
barely appears in the poem save for one memorable occasion when her hair
catches fire. Ursula K Le Guin, in this odic and imaginative addition to
Virgil’s poem, gives Lavinia a voice that Virgil did not. The narrative is very
self-aware, almost as if Lavinia knows that she only exists textually and lives
through Virgil.
44. The Fifth Head of
Cerberus: Gene Wolfe is
one of the finest authors alive. Admittedly, he is not easy to read but The
Fifth Head of Cerberus is a good place to make yourself familiar with his
allusive prose. It is a collection of three different stories, so vastly
different that you will see the clever connection between the three perhaps
only at the end or in a re-read or even a further re-read. That is not to say
that he tries to be too clever. It is the incredible subtlety, that of telling
a story from the point of view of someone belonging the fantastical world (it’s
a bit surprising that not more fantasy is like this, rather than having
omniscient narrator. It seems like an obvious way to go about telling or
showing something that is alien and difficult to understand. An example of such
work is the Codex Seraphinianus) that makes us
try to figure out what’s going on, and we eventually do, when the whole story
is told.
45. Excession: The fifth book
in the Culture Series, Iain M Banks has definitely been given more freedom with
his prose here by his editors who found his early drafts of his previous books
too “purple”. The Culture is a post-scarcity, somewhat anarchist galactic
economy, where technology is so far advanced that human sciences and artificial
intelligence are treated at the same social level. Most of the administration
and planning is done by “Minds”, a high form of artificial intelligence.
46., 47. and 48. The
Borrible Trilogy: It’s a sad reflection of Thatcher’s Britain and the
atmosphere during the early 80s that this excellent heartfelt fulmination of
classes in society by Michael de Larrabeiti was pulled out of print. Borribles
are small children who’ve run away from home, are faced with a society that is
neurotic about them and are ultimately “Borribled”. They eventually wake up
with pointed ears and live for hundreds of years as children, wherever they
can, stealing whatever they need to survive and having nothing to do with money,
making their own rules and proverbs.
49. A Tale of Two Cities: I feel Charles
Dickens is often misrepresented as having written dusty old boring stories with
excessive morality. I think this is unfortunate. And it certainly isn’t the
case in “A Tale of Two Cities”, with the prose being very artistic, lush and
beautifully capturing a wide range of characters, their peculiarities, varied
social classes and politics. He portrays both sides of the French Revolution
and depicts the aristocrats and the poor in both a sympathetic and disdainful
fashion. It’s mostly up to the reader to make his mind up about the madness and
violence, and how much of a sacrifice is worth a change in the society. Dickens’
frequent motifs of resurrection perhaps betray what he felt about the slippery
slope of a revolt. It is a dark story and if certain characters appear to be
too virtuous, I believe the purpose of this was to show that the aspiration of
being better is itself a major step for humanity, rather than to drill morality
into our minds. That is an important point and this is an important book.

This story
served as a departure from the Gothic fiction of his time, and creates a more
realistic, personal experience and even appreciation of the sublime in the
pastures of horror and absurdity. The
framing device of a lost manuscript/diary is very well done. Of this book, Terry
Pratchett said, “the Big Bang in
my private universe as a science fiction and fantasy reader and, later,
writer.”

Wild Seed,
on the other hand, was probably written at her peak. Her portrayal of slavery
is unfeigned and not scattered with mawkish sentimentality. It discusses the
ethics of bio-engineering, power, racial and gender based animosity, along with
the idea of what it is to be human when you have so much power. Doro is perhaps
one of the scariest people you will meet in fiction, and I only wish there was
more of his internal monologue.

“Houston,
Houston, Do You Read?” is one among them that starts off as a tale of the most
absorbing, terrifying feeling of the smallness of humans (for they are lost in
time and space) and our ineptitude when faced with the universe, which itself
would make a fascinating movie. But, the story then proceeds in an unexpected
direction, despite us knowing that Tiptree Jr is bound to make a commentary on
gender roles.
The very
alien narrative voice of the spider Moggadeet in “Love is the Plan the Plan is
Death”, gives us a melancholic, almost submissive account of the mindlessness
of humans as we follow the path of endless reproduction, without
anthropomorphizing the alien too much, thus preserving the terrifying sad outlook
but giving us a sympathetic character.
The prose is
brilliant, challenging, compelling and imaginative.
“...The living, dying tumult mounts,
fountains into culminant light. Its billion tormented fragments take on
intenser being; it leaps as a great beast above the ravenings of its Adversary.
But it cannot shake free, for the force of its life is Death, and its
strength is as the strength of the deaths that consume it, its every particle
is propelled by the potency of the dark Assailant. In the measure of its
dying, Life towers, triumphs, and rolls resistless across the planet that bore
it...”


The collection
is quite varied, so you’re bound to find more than one story that you will
remember for a long time. For me, it was the final story in the collection
called “The Design” which is period piece set in Glasgow and involves scrimshawing. Not only is it weird and
absorbing but it concludes in an unlikely, tear-jerking manner.
Also worthy of
note is “Four Final Orpheuses”, where Mieville offers four possible answers to
the question often asked by academia and readers of Greek myths, “Why did
Orpheus turn around to look?”
Quite a few of
the stories are experimental, and some don’t work so well, but most of them do.
It felt as though China Mieville was using the medium of short story to see how
far and wide he could push himself in style and his already striking
imagination.


Somewhat
semi-autobiographical, The Street of Crocodiles is a post-facto reflection of
Schulz on his childhood in Poland and, more so, on his time with his father. He
brings inanimate objects to life through his eccentric metaphors and baroque
language. It is a delightful collection of surreal, dreamlike short stories.
“From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the brightness of the day. The passers-by, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half closed against the glare, as if they were drenched with honey. Upper lips were drawn back, exposing the teeth. Everyone in this golden day wore that grimace of heat—as if the sun had forced his worshipers to wear identical masks of gold. The old and the young, women and children, greeted each other with these masks, painted on their faces with thick gold paint; they smiled at each other's pagan faces—the barbaric smiles of Bacchus.”
It is
compelling, original, insightful and a seamless fabric woven into Virgil’s
world.

The book is
named after the first novella in it, “The Fifth Head of Cerberus”, which is a
coming of age story of a narrator called “Number Five”, as he looks back on his
life and the person he murdered. Much of the world is introduced slowly to us.
For instance, rather than saying, “Hey, here is a mechanical man!”, Gene Wolfe
would introduce the said mechanical man by making allusive references to his
heavy footfall, or the metallic creak of his knees, or the inability of the
mechanical man to sit, and the portrait of the mechanical man is thus slowly
revealed.
The second
novella, “‘A Story’ by John V Marsch” shifts to an ancient past and to a sister
planet. It is a western and gives vague hints of the predecessors of the people
in the first and the last novella. There’s a more obvious commentary on
colonization here.
“V.R.T”, the
third novella, is probably my favourite as it tells the story of an
anthropologist in the form of his diary which is read by a disinterested police
officer.
There are other
symbolisms and meditations on identity and oppression, which Wolfe in his
typically tragic-Catholic perspective examines deeply.

This book is more
about those Minds than the other books in the series, and the conversations
between them in the form of signals is absolutely enthralling, funny and
engaging. As a perfect black-body sphere appears
out of nowhere in the Culture, the Minds are faced with moral and ethical
dilemmas on how to best make use of that.
Amidst this
huge galactic crisis is also a tragic love story which, despite being
absolutely insignificant in the simple fact that human affairs are so
unimportant and quaint when compared to the grand scale of dilemmas faced by
centuries-old Minds, is nevertheless moving because Banks weaves it so
effortless into the greater fabric, with intelligent exegesis on gender, love,
individuality and companionship.
I would
recommend reading Consider Phlebas, the first of the series, before you get to
this excellent work.

Thus, both in
the structure of the books and in the nature of the protagonists, de Larrabeiti
derides materialism. Across the three books, there are ruthless bloody
adventures that offer no comfortable escapes for the reader. It takes a little
while for the commentary to get going, but you eventually get to appreciate the
dirty, ragged, brave and confrontational little adventurers.
Each and every
Borrible needs to earn his or her name, which has something to do with the
adventure he or she undertakes. This is a wonderful, mongrel London, with its
counterculture and subversive dwellers. Michael de Larrabeiti provides a stage
for great camaraderie and a heart-wrenching, throat-tightening narrative of the
endearing Borribles who refuse to be the sheep in society. These books are as
relevant now as they were back then.

50. The City and The City: The final book
in this list is actually a re-read of China Mieville’s The City and The City in
preparation for a radio book interview where I had the pleasure of briefly
talking to him. I have already spoken this book a few years ago. To add to
that, I can now say that I see the influence of Bruno Schulz’s surrealism on
the prose, having read the Polish writer’s work recently.
It was odd that
James Naughtie kept referring to this book as an allegory in the interview,
even when China Mieville insisted that it wasn’t!