A Quick Top 6 of 2012 So Far

A nod of the hat to Jared of Pornokitsch for reminding me that yes, we're halfway through the year. My answer to the question is always the same. It depends on what flavor you're after. These are my top six of the moment in no particular order:

Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway - A gonzo pulp cold war thriller fest with crazy contraptions.
The Croning by Laird Barron - As perfect of a Horror story that I've ever read.
Faith by John Love - Imagine the crew of the Enterprise only they're all a bit off their rocker while battling a mysterious ship.
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed - Sword and Sorcery done right. Great characters and action.
Prepare to Die by Paul Tobin - A superhero novel that reminded me of a cross between Nick Hornby and Alan Moore.
The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis - The perfect middle volume in a genre bending trilogy. He used what was setup in the first so well. The wait was worth it. Nazi Supermen versus Dark Elder Gods indeed.

And yes, I'm just now realizing 3 of the top 6 are Night Shade titles as well as 4 being debuts, but I do tend to be a debut heavy reader. Wells's The Serpent Sea was another top book in addition to Kiernan's The Drowning Girl. Also, I'm almost halfway through with Black Bottle by Anthony Huso, the sequel to one of my favorite books of 2010, The Last Page. As of this moment I'm not sure if it would have made this list as there are plenty of pieces left to fall into place.

In the camp of best books I've read this year published prior to 2012 I'm still blowing the horn for Watts's Blindsight and Andre Norton's Forerunner. In the short story camp Loory's Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day as well as Ligotti's Noctuary are the bee's knees.

Some of my most anticipated books left for the year include The Broken Isles by Mark Charan Newton (another series closer), The Prisoner of Heaven by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (already have a copy), A Red Country by Joe Abercrombie (on pre-order), The Fractal Prince by Hannu Rajaniemi, The Inexplicables by Cherie Priest, and The Siren Depths by Martha Wells. Still plenty of time for some surprises as well.

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INTERVIEW | Nick Harkaway author of Angelmaker
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REVIEW | Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway

Nick Harkaway burst on to the scene with The Gone Away World, in 2008 with what many considered one of the best debuts of year. We had to wait 4 years for his next book Angelmaker. People cry afoul when authors don't get a book out a year or even every two years, but many times those are the books worth remembering for the long term, which is the case here. Meet sensible Joseph Spork, careful Joseph. Then young and adventurous Joe. And finally crazy Joe along the way.

Angelmaker is part Spy novel, part family legacy, part end of the world, and just plain crazy. Well plain may not be right, but you get the idea. This is a melding that in most writers hands would fall apart, but Harkaway has the indelible skills to bring them together in a most satisfying way. Each and every character from the top down to those who only get a few pages are brought to life, right down to the little dog too.

"The dog's name is Bastion, and it is without shame or mercy. Any dog worth the name will sniff your crotch on arrival, but Bastion has buried his carbuncled nose in the angle of Joe's trousers and shows no inclination to retreat. Joe shifts slight, and the dog rewards him with a warning mutter, deep in the chest: I have my mouth in close proximity to your genitals, oh thou man who talks to my mistress over coffee. Do not irk or trifle with me! I possess but one tooth, oh, yes, for the rest were buried long ago in the flesh of sinners."

This could be considered Steampunk to a certain degree for those who don't think they like Steampunk. Yet it isn't exactly Steampunk, but it does take the most beautiful elements of the genre and incorporates them in a gorgeous fashion at the heart of a Spy/Adventure story.  The story flips between present in London following around Joe Spork, who fixes clockwork devices while lamenting his family's lurid past along with the adventures Edie, a female secret agent more than fifty years before in her glory days. And when the two stories collide things just start exploding.

There are many flashbacks, which at first seem a bit much, but you just have to go with. They almost always payoff. The language is quite endearing even when it goes off the rails a bit. Harkaway isn't one adverse to a bit of slapstick as evidenced by character names such as Rodney Titwhistle. But there is a lot of beauty is the story. Especially, the artisan devices that proliferate this world and the characters love for each other shines through amid all the hi-jinks and capering. This is very much a kitchen sink book with every back story told and every mystery explained even when you don't think there will be time.

If Opium Khans, horny secretaries, crazy cultists, mechanical doomsday devices, and shady underworld dealings sound at all intriguing then Angelmaker is a can't miss story. Just don't expect to be entirely sane at the end. The characters certainly aren't.  Angelmaker is definitely one to savor and not push through. As of right now it's my favorite new book this year and it will take a doozy of a story to knock it off that perch. I give Angelmaker 5 out of 5 hats. Despite some sluggishness at the start it turned out to be a rip-roaring adventure I'd have love to be stuck in the middle of.

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INTERVIEW | Nick Harkaway author of Angelmaker

INTERVIEW | Nick Harkaway author of Angelmaker

Nick Harkaway is a former screenwriter and the author of the very well lauded The Gone Away World. His second novel Angelmaker., was just released, which combines Spy Thrillers, mechanical wonders, and a gonzo sensibility. Harkaway is also a blogger for Futurebook.


MH: Thanks for joining us. Now your latest book Angelmaker seems to be a departure from The Gone Away World in terms of scope yet it still carries on with some themes such as coming of age and war, but is a much more focused story. What is your bar room description of Angelmaker?

HARKAWAY: Oh, wow - my writing is hell on précis... that was part of the point for me when I stopped doing movie script - I didn't have to do back-of-an-envelope pitches... Well, okay: guy switches on doomsday machine, has to break all the rules to save the world. But if there's table service I might get away with a few more lines about how it's about gangsters and spies and elephants, and patrimony and love and self-creation... But in the first place it's an adventure. I want people to have fun.

MH: Angelmaker is many different things. It is a spy thriller, a secret history of the world, and a story of multiple legacies. But what it most reminded me of were old school pulp adventures. What were you reading that led to Angelmaker?

HARKAWAY: Well, I do love the old pulp stories - and some of them are way better than people give them credit for. There's a massive discipline of plotting required if you're going to write at the speed those guys did and turn in a coherent story. And don't forget that Dickens and Conan Doyle both wrote episodically, too - their novels were written for magazines. But what was I reading... it's four years ago at least for me, so it's hard to remember. Rex Stout, I think. Robert Anton Wilson was in my mind, and DeLilo and Chabon, for sure. But it's a cinematic heritage, too - Little Caesar, Maltese Falcon, The Third Man... And obviously some of it is more James Bond. The Bond novies are great because - at least in the good ones - they understand the most important aspect of an adventure: the villain. A good villain makes the hero glorious. An insipid one makes him look weak - because how can it take so long to beat this dummy?

MH: One of the most beautiful aspects of Angelmaker were your descriptions of the devices created by the mechanical artisan group the Rushkinites. Where did your fascination with old mechanical objects begin? Was there one device that fascinated you as a child? Or was your own grandfather perhaps a tinkerer of some sort?

HARKAWAY: My mother's father had a clockwork music thing - there's a technical term but right now I've completely forgotten what it is - which is amazing. Metal punched discs played on a kind of grown-up music box, producing and absolutely beautiful tone. It's a magical object. But I've always loved strange and baroque objects. They have a humour and a joy about them. I fell in love with Jean Tanguely's machines and Rowland Emett's, with Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg. The Ruskinite notion is near to my heart as well: artisan objects, with a personal narrative, affirm humanity in a way machine made products do not. But I have no idea where it all starts - it's been with me as long as I can remember - like telling stories.

MH: Angelmaker does have a Steampunk appeal to it to a degree stemming from the stylized mechanics, but I wouldn't call it Steampunk. I heard one person refer to it as Beepunk. How do you feel about labels in fiction?

HARKAWAY: I think they're almost always going to be inadequate with interesting writing. They're a shelving convention from the days when bookshops were isolated and catalogues weren't online, yet they continue to govern how we talk about stories. There are noble exceptions, books which plot the dead centre of a given label and become iconic as examples of it, but most labels are shorthands within which there are huge and exciting differences. You can't really say that The Difference Engine and The Diamond Age are the same kind of book. Sure, they have some similar architecture, but they take place at far distant ends of the timeline and have completely different feels. In the same way, Goldeneye and Brighton Rock are both spy movies, but liking one really does not guarantee liking another. Or even understanding it.

Which is not to say I don't love BeePunk, or LitPop, or whatever else, as concepts. But seriously, even there you get drift. Why 'punk'? I mean, obviously to make the connection to steampunk, but actually the punk part is missing from the book. Body modding and youth counterculture - which you see in cyberpunk and to a limited extent in some steampunk - are just gone. Angelmaker is a thriller, but it's not a bad boy with a ripped jacket. It's more like Bruce Wayne: garrulous and tipsy and pretending to be kind of a jackass, but it knows Kung Fu.

MH: The US cover for Angelmaker has some sort of puzzle worked in. Was this of your own devising or was the designer Jason Booher the culprit? The cover is quite amazing to behold. Online certainly doesn't do the print version justice.

HARKAWAY: This was Jason's idea. I contributed, but he made it happen. It was weirdly like editorial, only backwards: my publisher had this crazy dream and I complained and advised until it was ready to go... I suppose the US edition, technically, is slightly longer than the UK one... Yeah, I love the design!

MH: You seem to have a bit of fun in naming characters. Billy Friend and Rodney Titwhistle for example. Are names something you struggle with or do they pop into being quickly?

HARKAWAY: Usually they just show up along with the character. Occasionally they have to change, either because I was wrong about who that person is, or because they're out of whack with the tone. I tend to let names be a statement of some sort, which of course in real life they're not. And I try not to look back. Calling Billy "Friend" is an insane thing to do. Because that is his role. He's the friend. I could have called him McGuffin, too, because he's the guy who issues the Hero's Call, albeit sort of without meaning to. So then I thought about changing that, but it worked. It worked for me on the don't mess level of writing, the bit which runs the show and for which writers are pretty much passengers. So I ended up hanging a lantern on it, making jokes about how "he's a friend" is a gag they've done over the years. The Coen brothers say you have to write yourself into a corner so that you can write yourself out again, because that's when you do your best stuff. Names can be corners. Or they can just work.

MH: Just like how Rodney Titwhistle is a bit of tit. Your characters are incredibly rich, and it's usually the small details that make them seem less creations and more translations. How much do you draw from people you know or have met when you're developing characters, and how much is fabricated?

HARKAWAY: It's almost all fabricated. The shape of the story dictates the kind of person needed, and then the characters and their nature strengthens my grip on the world and what goes on. (Rodney, incidentally, got his funny name in part because he's very, very not funny, and I suppose to some extent because it sounds like one of those regretable English names which kick around until someone can't stand it any more and just changes it to something else.)

MH: In the same vein your fiction has such a fractured style and many seemingly loose ends that come into play late in the game. Do you ever lose yourself in the story structure? Also, one thing you're style has been known for are digressions. What do you see as the purpose of digression in a story?

HARKAWAY: Almost all my digressions fill a function, and usually it's to give you information you need without appearing to do so. Exposition is boring, and it can flag what's happening. But if you bury a piece of information in a flood of random detail - and somehow manage to make it stand out just enough - people get to your surprises and go " Oh, of course!" rather than "What the hell?" I don't generally get lost because I know why I'm there - my problem is not holding onto whatever secret it is I'm passing to you, it's burying it deep enough that you don't know you know it.

MH: I wanted to turn a bit of attention on to The Gone Away World while I have you. The narrative in The Gone Away World is essentially circular, mimicking the world-encircling pipe. Is structure a conscious decision when you're writing or do you let it develop naturally?

HARKAWAY: I wasn't deliberately mimicking the pipe, or the snake which eats its own tail  I was basically using the classic bookend style. TGAW is a hero story, a straightforward hero's journey dressed up in complexity. Take out the backstory and it's remarkably linear - you just have to know a bunch of things all the characters would already know in order to understand what's going on, so I have to show you those things and yet not let you know you're being told the answers. Hence, indeed, all the digressions.

MH: Who would win in a street fight: Ike Thermite or Bruce Lee?

HARKAWAY: It's like that sequence in Seven Samurai: neither of them would have any interest in a fight. They might well get drunk, though.

MH: Scotch or beer?

HARKAWAY: Scotch in its time and place, but beer with my club sandwich.

MH: You've been surrounded by writerly-types your whole life. What's the best piece of advice you've received?

HARKAWAY: When you're a pro, you work. You work when you're sick or hung over, when you want to sleep in. You keep going when you're heartbroken or scared, when everyone else goes to the pub. You don't give yourself a free pass. And sooner or later, you finish. And go back to the start. It's a stamina game.

MH: Okay, you've pretty much destroyed the world with The Gone Away World and almost destroyed the existence with Angelmaker. What's next? I've heard rumblings of your first non-fiction book.

HARKAWAY: Yeah, I've written a book about digitisation and the individual - The Blind Giant. It comes out in May... Wow, non-fiction is hard! What I hope is that there's enough interesting stuff to make up for whatever mistakes there are. It's about concepts, though I've tried to tie it to real world examples and studies.

But I've also done a draft of a third novel, which I'm itching to get back to. Novels are my thing.

MH: Now on to the important issues. What is your favorite hat?

HARKAWAY: I wear a Swaine Adeney & Brigg "Poet". It is genuinely the best hat I have ever owned, the Indiana Jones heritage being a bonus.

MH: Very swank. What books are you reading at the moment?

HARKAWAY: Planet Ponzi, The Teleportation Accident, and The English Monster. I also have Isaac Marion's new collection waiting for me.

MH: Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Is there anything you'd like to say to close us out?

HARKAWAY: Just that for me it's about telling stories and enjoying them. As long as you're having as much fun as I am, I'm good. Oh, and come and say hello on Twitter - @Harkaway. And thanks for having me :)

*******

Special thanks go out to Adam Callaway for helping out with questions. Watch out for him. He's going to be huge one day.

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