Hello, fellow reader, and welcome to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with awesome industry people about books! This week I'm onto Wolfe's Sword Of The Lictor and, readers, I'm starting to think Severian is not such a nice guy. This week we're talking about Robert McLachlan, designer of Still Wakes the Deep, Little Orpheus and Robocraft (and many others) and currently lead technical level designer on Half Mermaid! Hi Robert! Would you mind if we took a look around your library?
What are you reading right now?
The Best of Gene Wolfe – a collection of short stories. The Death Of Dr Island was very familiar to me, a staple of sci-fi short story anthologies as it was written the year after I was born – I could happily read it every year for the rest of my life. It was also part of the collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories – perhaps the best title for a short story collection ever? Anyway, I finally read Emphyrio and his short story The Fifth Head Of Cerberus, which feels like the golden missing link that connects some of my favourite sci-fi works, like Jack Vance’s The Miracle Workers and the stories of Ursula Le Guin and Cordwainer Smith.
What was the last thing you read?
Rider by Tim Krabbé – A gripping and unforgettable account of Krabbé's attempt to win a bike race, a train of thought filled with anecdotes about cyclists, bike racing, and life in general, through exhaustion and struggle. I love cycling, but I think I'm too pathetic to actually race.
What's next?
I am thinking of rereading Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Set in Kent in the past/near/far future, it is a post-apocalyptic mix of horror (dark trees, dark woods, mud, dogs and death) and beauty (Punch and Judy, St Eustace, Rebirth) written in an English version as devastated as the nuclear landscape. It is bleak – but not as relentlessly resistant to rereading as The Road – and now that I have grown up with children in this modern world, the thrill of reading about the apocalypse is replaced by anxiety and fear, but what a wonderful piece of work. It seems Hoban was unable to write properly for the rest of his life after finishing the book.
Hoban was an American who had spent half his life in London, and this superficial fact struck a mental connection with another book I had read this year (in Riddley Walker's language). This was by a genius writer who also made England his home – WG Sebald. The Rings of Saturn is also set around the East of England and its border with the North Sea, but there is much more to the book than that. There is a real sense of desolation and liminality in the descriptions of the towns and landscapes along the restless North Sea coast… Who knows what secrets lie beneath those waves?
What quote or scene from a book has stuck with you?
“Everything is so hard! Everything is so hard!” is the perfect phrase for family members facing real-life challenges, as grotesque Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim puts it. I'm very helpful about that, what about Sam? My favourite scenes in the books tend towards the finale of Everything Happens At Once, for the thrills I enjoy every time… I'm thinking of the finale of Iain M. Banks' The Player Of Games and Fido the Rat Thing's finale in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.
Which book are you trying to get your friends to read?
I have to be careful when I lend books to people; my brother-in-law lent me Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, and he later told me with great pleasure that he had thrown it away – how’s that for literary criticism? My copies of Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson and The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin were hopefully not thrown away, but they still have them with people I lent them to years ago. So I’ll tell anyone who will listen that the single best fantasy novel is Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, but they can buy their own copy, not mine.
Which book would you like to see adapted into a game?
I'm not sure how you'd do it (or how you'd find the money to do it properly), but it would be Feersum Endjinn by Iain M. Banks. It features my favorite megastructure in fiction, and I love megastructures. I see indie games that take on the subject from time to time, like NaissanceE, Manifold Garden – and the upcoming Lorn's Lure, which I'm really looking forward to. BLAME! casts a long creative shadow on the genre, but there's something special about Bascule (another spelling-challenged hero!), the crypt, and the speed. If someone picks up the license, can I please do it with you?
I don’t want to alarm any of you, but I’m beginning to think I’m setting myself up for a regularly scheduled dose of disappointment by expecting our generous guests to name every book ever written. Should I give up hope? Of course, it’s a top-secret goal, so I doubt anyone will even notice. Oh well, you can’t have everything (that’s never been written). Unless, of course, next week’s guest breaks that trend. Book now!