Over on this website I discovered a while back called “Face Book” I was nominated to post my favourite seven books, a book a day. I’ve enjoyed it so much I’ve decided to IMMORTALISE IT here on THIS, my WORLD FAMOUS BLOG.

So my favourite seven books, one book a day. I’ll start with the most predictable: Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Douglas Adams’ perspective on the universe was that reality is absurd and mostly inconceivable, random circumstance holds more sway over the course of events than grand planning and that sapience does not equate to importance. He isn’t, however, inhumane, and gives a great deal of affectionate attention to the perspective of individuals and the human condition. We are all Arthur Dent; far more likely at any one point to be saying, “oh what the hell now?” than, “ah yes this all makes sense”, and Hitchhikers went a long way toward helping me come to peace with the pervasive perplexity of living in a universe far too vast and complex to ever comprehend.

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Trilogy in Five Parts – Douglas Adams

 

Seveneves – Neal Stephenson

Well here’s a fascinating book. Two thirds of it is edge of the seat, highest stakes possible, edge of annihilation brilliance, and the last third is much slower and really pretty weird but I still kind of loved it. Before I spoil the hell out of it, I’ll just say that my 4/5 score is really an average; I felt the first two thirds were absolutely brilliant, confident top marks in a lot of areas. The last part, however, is kind of really imaginative and interesting but just rather slow and waffly, especially compared to the unstoppable ballistic trajectory of the rest of the book. There was still a lot of charm there, and the world building was interesting. It was just a big tonal shift. All worth it though. 
SO MANY SPOILERS BELOW, DON’T READ FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT SPOILERS
So to literally spoil everything and summarise the whole book very quickly: something punches through the moon, shattering it, which everyone briefly enjoys as a great spectacle before they realise Planet Earth is amazingly doomed due to the broken moon raining down on Earth resulting in the atmosphere being boiled away and the surface being reduced to magmatic porridge. As this is set around about now, there’s not a heck of a lot going on, Escape From Earth-wise until this point, but luckily everyone kind of agrees the survival of the species is worth piling all our resources into, so we manage to chuck a couple of thousand people into space in a swarm of spacecraft existing with the ISS as its core unit (the ISS has also been attached to a very large rock at this point, which has an effect on the story). 
This opening section of the novel is hypnotic like fire and absolutely thrilling. The realisation that everything is about to go really amazingly wrong for everyone is handled in such a way that you pivot from “ooh wow” to “oh bollocks” at the same time as the characters (particularly Dr Harris) and it works so well. 
Over the course of my favourite chapters in the whole book, the world comes to realise its doom and starts to adjust. This section really got my heart racing in a very organic way. Almost everyone in the world is going to be obliterated and it really feels that way. Refreshingly, this doesn’t lead to juvenile apocalyptic bollocks like mass raping and murdering because people generally aren’t The Worst when they can avoid it, but there is a fair bit of “well the world is about to end…” such as the use of nuclear weapons as effectively a terminal slap on the wrist for Venezuela. Pro-tip: if you want to be part of the ark of the future, don’t be huge idiots about it and demand ridiculous things. Definitely don’t try to blockade supplies to said ark. America will break your molecules.
After the world dies horribly, everyone’s up in space and predictably some people are dreadful and everything goes intensely wrong and while they do end up finding stability in space, it takes several years and the death of almost everyone left in humanity. This was utterly galling and I just wanted to step into the novel and give several people a very cross talking to. But it’s effective and a sensible narrative reason for everything going quite as wrong as it does. 
All that is left to do is to artificially re-create humanity, using genetic engineering to introduce enough heterozygosity to the new population. It’s all quite Biblical and raises several of the same rather gross questions as Genesis, but I guess when you’ve got no other options…
Anyway this part is quite maudlin but extremely well played and after the tricksy dickery of competing factions in the Swarm Ark, it was nice for people to pull their heads out of their arses and act like they had a working brain.
Part 3: SKIP FORWARD FIVE THOUSAND FRIGGIN YEARS, FRIENDS
This part seems to divide people. I admit, I liked it, but compared to the previous parts of the novel, it was a very jarring change of pace and I think it’s basically http://www.infodump.org: The Slideshow in places. The various remnants of humanity left after the end of the world and The Great, Unnecessary Societal Cock Up In Space all created their own race based on qualities they thought were worthwhile and because humanity is basically dead and ethics isn’t a workable concept anymore, nobody really stands in the way. So five thousand years later, humanity has recovered and lives in a huge orbiting ring (all three billion of them), and a third of the ring is at war with the other third and they’re very culturally different etc etc. There’s suggestion that there are people on Earth who survived the Moon collapsing all over them too. 
This is clearly the point in the book where Stephenson just let his imagination take the wheel. After the first two thirds of the book being meticulously detailed, well researched and internally consistent, the last two thirds is concept-album crazy in places and after getting the vibe, I just left any anxiety about realism behind and strapped in for the ride. It is mad though. The sheer distinctiveness of the various different, incredibly idiosyncratic, races does stretch plausibility a bit, especially when you get the Sea People. Now. Genetic engineering does have a lot to do with all this; this is explicitly stated. But yes, all very crazy. Entertaining, definitely. Interesting, thought provoking, but all a bit gonzo. Equally gonzo, but weirdly easier to believe, was all the awesome space technology, which I would love to see in the flesh. Huge brackets around the Earth, massive rings of space habitats, robots, giant, floating rocks. It’s all great. Stephenson is very good at describing visual elements. The only thing I had trouble with was the Gnomon, but it has since been described to me as basically a real life version of the stand for a globe, i.e. a huge arc around one side of the planet. Seems dangerous but… fine. Anyway having enjoyed it myself, despite its oddity, I can understand the third act being very much a Marmite element.
Seveneves is an amazing and tightly written novel wrestling with a giant and unwieldy one. The tightly written novel wins out, and leaves the lasting impression. The aspects that drive that side of things such as tension, atmosphere, visual description, even characterisation, are handled so adeptly that it seems mean spirited to focus on the later issues of plausibility or narrative drive. So I won’t; I’ll just stick with having mentioned them, not as a reason to stay away, but as a heads up to tell you that despite occasional frustrations, Seveneves is absolutely worth reading.

Alto’s Odyssey

Today I’m going to mostly wax lyrical about Alto’s Odyssey and its predecessor, Alto’s Adventure because, despite being “only” mobile games, they are two of my all time favourite games. And I’m a guy who loves games. They are to mobile gaming what Command & Conquer was for me discovering PC gaming back in the 90s. They are the first experience of a game in the medium where I forget what I’m playing on and enter a state of blissful flow.

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Alto’s Adventure

At first glance, the Alto games are just what you’d call an “infinite runner”; a game in which your character continually travels through an endless procedurally generated world, navigating puzzles and traps, picking up new abilities and seeing some interesting stuff. Even with that reductive impression, they’re still a particularly beautiful example of the genre. The visuals are stylised, simple but vibrant, and very pretty. Vistas roll past with smooth confidence and your character’s animation always feels satisfying and intuitively linked to your input. In addition to that beauty, however, these games are just something else. Alto’s Adventure has had me playing compulsively for a couple of years, and the only thing which put a stop to that was the release of Alto’s Odyssey. Your progression feels reasonably paced, your uptake of new tricks is logical and organic to the rest of the gameplay. New world elements are a continual genuine delight and the whole thing is sprinkled with a friendly whimsy which routinely makes me smile. And the sound is just perfect. The music behind the whole game is Brian Eno level ambient genius. Listened to through headphones, it’s spectacularly great at luring you into a happy meditative state. And there are llamas, and old men who chase after you with sticks, and you can smash rocks and you get a wingsuit and one of the characters has rockets on their skis and you get to disturb birds. Alto’s Adventure is a 10/10 mobile game, and a 10/10 game in general.

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Alto’s Odyssey

At least it was, because somehow Alto’s Odyssey is better. 11/10? The team have taken everything which was wonderful about Alto’s Adventure and furthered it. They’re resisted the urge to amp everything up and make it an extreme version of the original game. They’ve simply created more world, which feels naturally connected to the first game while being different enough to have you spellbound all over again. There’s a familiarity, in that the core gameplay is based on the exact same principles and the contours of the world follow the same logic, but now you’re in a sandy environment with temples and vines and balloons (hot air balloons! Guaranteed to make any environment more amazing). There are lemurs and birds of paradise too. Oh and you can get a wall-riding snowboard (fun doesn’t have to make sense) which allows you to grind along the side of giant rocks. It’s just magical. The musical brilliance is back too. Visually, the team have really achieved something very special. The visual language of the first game remains intact but the things they’ve done with it are enough to make you emotional. The first time you’re in a sandstorm or a thunderstorm and seeing your character in silhouette against the sky is way more scintillating than you could ever reasonably expect from a mobile game. It’s stunning on a phone screen but I’ve been absolutely loving playing on my iPad. It’s a work of genuine art.

What wonderful games.

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