Non-Stop
By Brian Aldiss

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive ...
R. L. Stevenson

Aldiss has this Stevenson quote front and center at the start of his first science-fiction novel: a short and pacy adventure published in 1958. By the end, you might also understand why.

The US title was "Starship", which gives some of the game away unfortunately.

Right: The cover of the old US hardback I have. Surprisingly, using the British "Non-Stop" title. The graphic design and artwork is, let us say, of its time. Publisher: Carroll & Graf 1989.

I enjoyed this book a lot: Aldiss has obviously thought through the sort of things that might happen if humans have to live on an interstellar spaceship for a very long time. Think of features of speech, custom, culture, religion and all manner of human relationships. We are a fractious people. Space travel is hard on us and our bodies.

The ship in use here would be called a "generation" ship today: a well used trope of science-fiction since this was written (Aldiss might have been the first to write about it properly). The galaxy is so big that the human brain cannot fully grasp the numbers involved; they are just so large. I am not sure we would survive such a journey, but if we did, it might end up something like this. I made some assumptions here and thought I had a good idea what the end would bring, but I was surprised and wrong. A good book, and shows you can pack a lot into less than two-hundred pages.

We are all dying, just at different speeds.
-- Thomas Crowwell in The Mirror and the Light.

The Mirror and the Light
By Hilary Mantel

We know how the story ends. Boleyn dies by the sword. Cromwell, the axe. Others die in very much worse ways as the authorities cut a swathe through the country. After some initial success, the Pilgrimage of Grace is bloodily suppressed by a vengeful King. Robert Aske, one of the leaders, was killed in a very cruel way. This episode features in H.F.M. Prescott's Man on a Donkey (a book I read a few years ago and thought good).

Cromwell keeps his own secret book about Henry where he writes down his thoughts and observations about the King in an attempt to understand him. In this final novel, Cromwell is much more introspective.

This last book did not disappoint me in any way. As a series, they are perhaps the best books I've read and have left a lasting legacy to me. I will return to them I'm sure.

The Mirror and the Light is the final volume in Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. I savoured the text all the more as I approached the final pages, waiting for the axe to fall and wondering how such an ending would be treated in the first person she uses. There has been some criticism (see wikipedia), mostly regarding the historical accuracy, but she's mostly had high praise. This is "fiction" we must remember but it is very hard not to find the world she creates entirely believable: the food, the smell, the weather and the people. I will almost certainly re-read the whole lot sometime, once again.

Mantel died in 2022. Thank goodness she lived to complete this.

And to finish :

Below: The original axe and block used during the execution of high-profile prisoners.
Photograph : By mwanasimba from La Réunion - Tower of London, CC BY-SA 2.0, link

From atlasobscura : This particular ax was last recorded as being used in 1747 for the execution of the Scottish Baron and Jacobite Lord Simon Fraser of Lovat, who, as a Highlander, fought against the Hanoverian forces during the battle of Culloden.

I came across a Publishing Weekly article about book sales recently. It appears that the types of books doing well, and keeping the sales numbers more respectable, are the so-called "Romantasy" books, a neologism that compresses "Romance" and "Fantasy". The cliché would be: romance books with magic included. I also see that Amazon have Romantasy colouring books but I hesitate to draw any conclusions from this.

Authors Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yarros are mentioned as being the current big sellers. I think I first heard the term "romantasy" from Stephen E Andrews on his YouTube channel Outlaw Bookseller and now can't help but see these books. His point was that the "Science Fiction" genre is shrinking and the "Fantasy" one grows, and it is all a matter of basic economics. Publishers go where the money is and their budgets are spent there. It's a shame that "science fiction" and "fantasy" are both dumped into the same bucket.

Maas certainly has a lot of momentum behind her, as you can see on the huge list of "midnight release parties" planned for her next book.

On the right: a photograph from her Instagram page of one of her book signings.

According to the article Boys Need Books by Myke Bartlett in The Critic, the publishing industry is majority female now: readers, authors, agents, editors, marketers. No doubt there are many factors at play here: possibly some over-correction of the previous male domination in years gone by. It's not a bad thing per se except how it might result in a different allocation of resources to the detriment of some market segments. A lot of the marketing is social media now of course: we have things like BookTube and BookTok (and I admit to liking a few YouTube "BookTube" channels). Maas has two million Instagram followers. Whatever she and other "Romantasy" authors are doing, it's working. But looking at the photo from her meetup above: where are the boys?

If boys don't read when young it might be difficult to start later. Maybe video games and screen time are an aspect of this but it's also possible that fewer books appeal to a boy nowadays. I'm sure publishers can do better.

On the left: Rebekah Greenway ("Booknuts") shows off her Midjourney and Photoshop skills in the service of Romantasy book characters. This is a picture from her Instagram page.

Midjouney? From their docs page :

Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species. We are a small self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure, and AI.

So, there you are. You prompt the computer on what sort of picture you want and the "AI" will generate it and you then iterate on this (I assume). This is called generative AI. I wonder how many of these books are also written by an AI now? That seems a bit of a scary thought to me.