SL Days 38-42

[faustus]

It all feels like I'm not achieving enough - which is a familiar OCD complaint, so I'm not sure if it's valid. I have finished a novel and watched a film today though, so the tiptoeing continues. I am worried about three trips to London and one to York before the end of the month, but at least these offer several hours' reading time if I can focus on the train.

On Saturday, I needed to get out of the post code, so I went to Faversham with a friend in the morning. I had checked in advance to discover the book fair, but took that as omen rather than an invitation. It's a very familiar set of stock, and is dullsville. This it proved. We had a quick look in the bookshop on Preston St, Books of Faversham, which keeps erratic hours, and nothing jumped out as a purchase, then looked round the market, and shot down to Past Sentence, where I picked up half a dozen items which I needed, and failed to buy Andromeda, one of those books I seem to wrongly assume I have. I got two follow-ups though, and a new copy of The Atrocity Exhibition to replace a lent one. If it hadn't have been so hot I might have hung round to do tourist stuff, but instead I bought cheese (a Kentish brie and a goat's cheese) and a pork shoulder to slow roast, before hitting the train back to the pub.


LXXXVII: William S. Burroughs, Blade Runner (A Movie) (1979)
Trademark baffling: Burroughs's treatment of Alan E. Nourse's novel, about a medicare crisis in the States, and an out of control virus. Blade Runners deliver illegal medical equipment, scapels, rather than track down androids. Burroughs's ironic racism doesn't date well.


LXXXVIII: Michael Moorcock, Breakfast in the Ruins (1972)
Another Karl Glogauer novel - although to say this is the same character as Behold the Man is stretching it. Various versions of Glogauer do things to other people or have things done to them whilst he has sex in the present day with a Nigerian. Doom, gloom and a side order of sex.


LXXXIX: D.G. Compton, The Electric Crocodile (1970)
No British sf novel of the 1970s is complete without its secret scientific research centre, here in Colindale. In a dystopian near future, a scientist debates whether he should go to Colindale, along with his wife, as a series of murders suggest a secret is being hidden. This is intriguing for its use of overlapping viewpoints between main characters, but this gets a little bewildering in later chapters as the shift occurs midpage not between chapters.


XL: D.G. Compton, The Missionaries (1972)
I don't think I've read this before - odd alien invasion story in which the aliens disguise themselves as bikerboys and their girlfriends and act as missionaries.One of the more unsettling invasions of Earth.



Word count:

50100 / 120000 words. 42% done!

I notice many of my sections begin "[subject] is also explored in [title of text]." I must edit these down.

Comments

[oursin]

Larfing liek drayne at sekkrit research centres in Colindale. Though, do admit, Colindale is pretty dystopian though probably not in the way of most dystopias. Way out at the far end of the Northern Line, the horrors of the BL Newspaper Library, and for many years nowhere to eat, just the really sinister sandwiches and snacks in a machine in the readers' lounge area of the Library. In fact no there there at all, just street after street of outer suburbia. I also had to visit the Blood Doning place next to the station once to talk about archives, and that was perhaps more typically dystopian - confusing buildings and corridors and restricted access areas.

[faustus]

Mind you, you may miss Colindale if the plans to close it and move parts to Boston Spa go through. It's be ironic if everything was digitised aside from the Murdochs' gutters and thus it was lost to history. Supposedly James M is embracing the Queen Anne era copyright laws, but presumably not the fourteen year span.