BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - FICTION

Divine Endurance (1984) Spirit: or, The Princess of Bois Dormant (2008) Gwyneth Jones One of the themes of my reviews is the 'first novel' especially in genre fiction. Sometimes these show remarkable ability. Sometimes they demonstrate immaturity. Sometimes the immaturity lasts for several early novels (as in the case of Grahame Greene) before the genius breaks through with practice and experience. Gwyneth Jones is an interesting science fiction/fantasy cross-over writer (where what appears to be fantastic is grounded in future science). We can compare here an early with a mature work separated by a near quarter of century. In fact, Divine Endurance was something of a disappointment even allowing for it being a first attempt largely because it was self-indulgent experimentalism in high science fantasy by someone who was clearly intellectually way ahead of the bulk of genre writers but who missed the point about narrative - out there is a reader who must comprehend. In her

I came to this with great expectations because it is written by a 'literary figure', albeit that it is an early work (1987) and only the first in a series of 11 science fiction 'culture novels'. Those expectations were too high but it has to be said that Iain M. Banks (aka Iain Banks) writes infinitely better on a technical level than the vast majority of science fiction writers. There are moments where his talent for precise description make the novel almost filmic. There are also times where an intelligent writer's sensibility comes through. He makes you think about the types of psychological adaptations our species might make to the world of the space opera. His aliens are not so unbelievable in terms of thought processes either. And yet, and yet ... the sensibility is a hybrid between the intelligent and the adolescent. Long bone-crunching battle scenes might have come off Playstation 3 if it had been invented (one stifles the occasional yawn) while