Review: Mrs Darcy vs the Aliens

Mrs Darcy vs the Aliens, by Jonathan Pinnock (Proxima, 2011)

This book will make people look at you. It will make you make a fool of yourself in public places. Your life-partner will ban you from reading this book at bedtime. You will be glared at on public transport.

This is one of the funniest books I have ever read. It is a book that makes you laugh out loud, uncontrollably. Consistently.

Unusually for outright comedic novels, there is actually a storyline rather than just a skeleton on which to hang the jokes. There are aliens, they are trying to take over the world, and Mrs Elizabeth Darcy is at the middle the effort to prevent this happening. That the aliens are shape shifters serves to throw confusion into the bona fides of some of the rest of the cast, and to top it off there are strong hints of temporal anomalies.

The greatest appeal of the book, though, is undoubtedly the humour; at times delicate, at others brutish, Pinnock even makes use of the delayed punchline; dropping an amusing seed, then slapping you with a guffaw when you had almost forgotten it. To me, this was a blend of Douglas Adams and Jasper Fforde.

Thoroughly recommend it if you don't mind standing out in a crowd, or disturbing the bucolic paper rustlers on the 8.15 into work.

FantasyCon Rocks

Oh Wow!
This was the best weekend I can remember in an awfully long time. Better than my last two overseas holidays! I met so many of may facebook friends I've built up over the last year, and they all turned out to be even nicer 'in the flesh' than they are online. Special mentions to Simon Marshall, Raven Dane, Terry Martin (of Murky Depths) and the incredible Sam Stone, Queen of Vampire Fiction, and deserved winner of this year's awards for Best Novel and Best Short Story.
On a personal note, we launched Proxima books and each of us did a short reading from our books - great fun, and the first time we have all met. Also, because I have a short story in the BFS anthology, I got to sit on my first signing. I must of signed twenty of thirty books.
There were some horror stories about hotel rooms, but I have to say ours was fine. Brighton was nice too, with great places to eat.
I could rant on for hours. Probably enough to say I signed up for next year while I was there :) Corby, brace yourselves. FantasyCon is coming to town

FantasyCon Update

More information about the Proxima launch at FantasyCon. Its still on Saturday 1st, and still at 10 am in the Rogue's Bar. All the attending authors and our esteemed editor will be giving short readings from our various books, and I'm up right behind the introduction and the first reading by Steve Haynes, our editor, from 'Aly's Luck'. After me, Charles Christian, Niall Boyce, and Jonathan Pinnock.

Hope everybody is gentle with me. This will be the first time I have publicly read any of my work :). What an awesome experience, though. Whoda thunked it?

 

Fantasy Con Looms Ever Closer

I cant wait for Fcon. I really cant. Just the book launch schedule already has me all of a flutter. On the Friday afternoon at 5pm I get 1/40th of the glory of Full Fathom Forty being launched. Then on Saturday at 10 my publisher, Proxima, launches not just the imprint, but two of their hottest authors, and then at 11 Sam Stone lainches her 4th book int he vampire gene trilogy. All, I believe, in the Bar Rogue. Who needs the rest of the program? :)

Cool Animation

My editor at Proxima seems to have been spending his vacation time scourinfg the net for cool animations and imagery. He found one by Fragomatix that looks a lot like how I imagined Aphrodite would look, and an amazing short cartoon by a guy called Jonathan Harris that sort of fits in with another Proxima book coming out this year, 'Hikikomori'. Go take a look here on Proxima's website

#amwriting

And away I go. I have 22 typed pages of backstory, background material, story outlines, and a dozen reference web pages.

It's time to start writing. Under:The Novel is officially started.

Now what would be really nice is if someone decides they like the short and publishes it, and then you can all get a hint of what the novel will be like. I like to have my cake and eat it :)

Kids dont read books, sez BBC

How was that for a newspaper style headline. Not so good, I know.

I just saw a disturbing report on the BBC's website. This is the link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14621621

Apparently, less than 50% of children (8-17) read at least one novel a month. Superficially, I suppose, this makes for a good 'shock/horror' headline in the best tradition of British media.

But when you dig down into the article, you pull out little snippets like "just under half said they enjoyed reading a lot". This sort of thing - deliberately misrepresenting statistics to bolster an otherwise 'meh' headline - really annoys me. Its up there with 'taking [insert benign medication] doubles risk of [insert horrible disease]'. No real information, just the sensationalism.

I take some comfort for this report. Half of kids still like to read. That's a good thing. Boys read more comics and girls read more books and magazines. Also not unsurprising.

The only thing that does make me raise my eyebrows is the news that ebooks come bottom of the list for 8-17 year old readers. I would have expected a bigger pickup in the tech. After all, even girls like smartphones and laptops.

So I think I'm happy to go with glass slightly less than half full on this one.