Thanks
to Tom for his invitation to pen a blog here today. I should start with a quick
explanation of my preferred genre, Steampunk, which is often characterised as
retro-futurism, or a past that never was. In short, it imagines an alternative
history in which the (usually) Victorian era develops advanced technology while
retaining the aesthetic of the time.
Some
of you may ask why we should spend time on “alternative history”; what is the
point of dwelling on a time that never was? The answer, for me at least, is
political. History is largely in the hands of the privileged few. They write
it, distort it, and present it as fact. Jacob Rees-Mogg’s idiosyncratic, but
widely publicised, take on the Victorians is a particularly vivid example.
This
is hardly a radical new view. In 1984 Orwell wrote “Who controls the
past controls the future: who controls the present controls the
past.”
The
advantage of alternative history is that, while the way that actual history is
presented is easily subverted (for example by the airbrushing from Churchill’s
life accounts of his racist views), alternative history is not so easily
controlled. Under the guise of Steampunk, I can present a colourful, vibrant
alternative to reality which nonetheless reflects reality in many different
ways. I can talk about real (historical) people and real social situations
without the reflex objections of those who absorbed their history through GCSEs
distracting from the issues raised.
In short, Steampunk allows me the freedom to examine the way we are now, and in a manner which may not be possible with “realistic” fiction. In this way my two latest books,Full ThrottleandRise of the Petrol Queen, came into being, inspired by the era of 1920s motor racing, in which the wealthy and titled went racing in expensive cars while the poor didn’t, because they never had the opportunity. And I can do this without complaints that I am taking a political view on the inequality in society today. Because I’m not. I’m showing inequality in my fictional Steampunk society. Which (but don’t tell anyone) is a mirror to our society.
And that is the appeal of Steampunk for me.
Jon Hartless
Jon Hartless was born in the 1970s and has spent much of his life in the Midlands and Worcestershire. His latest novels, a steampunk motor racing adventure examining the gulf between the rich and the poor, the powerful and the dispossessed, started with Full Throttle in August 2017 and continued with Rise of the Petrol Queen in 2019, both published by Accent Press.
John’s Amazon author page is at https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jon-Hartless/e/B002DEQ8EI
I often post book reviews on a Tuesday, but there’s something a bit different this Tuesday. This post is an unashamed plug for When Stars Will Shine, an anthology of short stories which, as it happens, doesn’t feature anything by me.
When Stars Will Shine is a collection with a Christmas theme. It sold well at Christmas and Emma Mitchell, who put the whole thing together, is hoping to get a few more sales in January.
Why am I mentioning this? Because all the stories have a military theme and all the profits from sales of both e-book and paperback are going to Help for Heroes. The government is sometimes quick to put our armed forces in harm’s way but not always as quick to offer help and support to those who come back broken. That is often left to organisations like Help for Heroes.
My son serves in the British Army and I know that he and his comrades appreciate Help for Heroes (and raise a lot of money for it themselves). We ask a lot of our armed forces and this is our chance to give a bit back and get to read some excellent stories as well.
When Stars Will Shine is a collection of short stories from your favourite authors who have come together to deliver you a Christmas read with a twist.
With true war tales that will break your heart, gritty Christmas crimes that will shake you to your core, and heart-warming tales of love lost and found, this anthology has something for everyone. And, with every penny made being sent to support our troops, you can rest assured that you’re helping our heroes, one page at a time.From authors such as Louise Jensen, Graham Smith, Malcolm Hollingdrake, Lucy Cameron, Val Portelli, and Alex Kane, you are in for one heck of a ride!
This isn’t a book review site, but 2019 saw around two dozen books reviewed. It seems sensible to give a quick summary here, with links to the original reviews for anybody who wants to read more about them.
At the end I do ask if people have any thoughts on what they would like me to write about next year. Please take a quick look at that and use the ‘Comment’ boxes to give me some feedback. Thank you
Historical novels
Because this is primarily a history blog, most of the reviews are of historical novels. I’ll sort them by time period.
17th and 18th century
Some authors made repeat appearances in 2019. Two of Deborah Swift’s books featured: The Gilded Lily, and A Plague on Mr Pepys, both set during the Restoration and both excellent reads. The Gilded Lily will appeal more to Young Adults, but both can, in my opinion, be enjoyed by all age groups.
There were also two books by M J Logue, also set in the Restoration: Abiding Fire and A Deceitful Subtlety. Both are enormous fun and I do recommend them.
Also sort of in the Restoration is Jemahl Evans’ Of Blood Exhausted. The action of the book takes place during the Civil War, but the narrator is telling his story from the time of the Restoration. It’s the third of a series that starts with The Last Roundhead and you do need to read them in order to have any idea of what is going on, but if you’ve enjoyed the first wo, you will enjoy this one.
Moving towards the present day, we have The Wolf and the Watchman set in Sweden in 1793. This is a truly remarkable book, though not a pleasant read. Definitely one of the best things I read last year.
19th and early 20th century
Only one of the books I reviewed this year was set in the Napoleonic era: Lynn Bryant’s An Unwilling Alliance. It centres on the British attack on Copenhagen in 1807. It works well as historical military fiction, but it is also an excellent love story. For once, love story and adventure yarn manage to complement each other in a way that seems to give many authors a lot of difficulty. (There’s a reason why there’s not a lot of romance in my Burke series.) Lynn knows her history and she can write. Recommended.
Burial Rites is one of those books where very little happens but which is absolutely gripping. It’s set in Iceland in 1828 and apparently based very closely on an actual event. I can’t sum it up in a couple of sentences – read the review and then I hope you will go on to read the book. Another serious contender for my book of the year.
I reviewed a couple of books that described themselves as Victorian mysteries. Both were competently written. Jean Stubbs’ The Painted Face is more an exploration of the mind of one of the protagonists than it is a conventional detective story and I’m not sure it quite comes off, but it’s provides pleasant enough descriptions of Parisian life in 1902.
Marilyn Todd’s Snap Shot is set at pretty much the same time. The plot bowls along with plenty of gruesome deaths and a little bit of sex to keep the pages turning. Finding out whodunnit came as a surprise, but not so much of a surprise as to make me feel cheated. It’s frothy and it’s fun and it has a convincing historical background.
In a world outside of history as we know it
The Castle of Otranto isn’t your regular historical fiction, but I reviewed it after a visit to Strawberry Hill House, Walpole’s fantasy Gothic castle which was designed to reflect the setting of the story. Published in 1764, it’s widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. It’s a curiosity piece rather than a book you would read for its literary merit but it is fun and worth a look. (It’s very short, so it’s not going to take long to read.)
Historical non-fiction
I reviewed three works of historical non-fiction in 2019: Rees-Mogg’s book on the Victorians, Tony Gould’s Imperial Warriors and Weirder War Two, a collection of weird facts or nearly-facts or might-have-been facts about the Second World War.
Gould’s history of the Ghurkas and their role in the British Army is easily the best of the three. Rees-Mogg’s book got a lot of critical attention, but you can make a decent argument that Weirder War Two is the better piece of historical writing. It’s certainly more fun to read.
Other fiction
Thrillers
It’s all very well reading the odd literary masterpiece, but, like a lot of people, what I really like to do at the end of a day of reading serious stuff about old generals and suchlike is sit down with a good thriller.
Lots of people are quite snooty about thrillers. In fact, it’s really difficult to write a good “bad” book. Scandinavians seem pretty good at it (too many long nights with not enough to do?) and I had a couple of Scandi-noirs on my list this year: The Cabinand The Island.
Away from Scandinavia, the British writer, Sally Spencer (who does some nice historical mysteries as well) has taken to setting stories in the USA. Violation is an enjoyable read, though the subject matter (assaults on very young girls) is a bit disturbing for what is essentially a lightweight work.
The last book that fits more or less in this category this year was Tannis Laidlaw’s Half-truths and Whole Lies. It’s a bit different from the usual thriller, being a story of Machiavellian professors lying and twisting their way up the academic greasy pole. It’s a lot of fun. albeit with the required melodramatic conclusion. (If you’ve never worked in academe, you may think it’s an improbable tale but it really isn’t.)
Terry Tyler
Terry Tyler is one of those self-published authors who give the lie to those who say that everything worth reading has come through a conventional publisher. In fact, Terry encouraged me to move into self-publication myself with Dark Magic and I have been pleasantly surprised by how much freedom this gives a writer.
Terry has written a range of different kinds of book, from short stories and light romantic fiction to dark post-apocalyptic fantasies. The common thread to all of them is that Terry is just a very good writer. She doesn’t produce high blown literary fol-de-rols but solid light prose which makes her books easy to read and keeps you turning the pages. It’s a hugely underrated skill.
Book of hers I have reviewed this year are Round and Round(fantasy/romance), Hope (dystopian fiction, which reminds me a bit of 1984) and Blackthorn (post-apocalyptic)
Poetry
I don’t usually review poetry, but I took up an invitation from Australian poet Frank Prem to read his “blank verse memoir” Small Town Kid and, rather to my surprise, I loved it. I went on to read two more of his poetry collections, Devil in the Wind and The New Asylum. All three are astonishing. Devil in the Wind, about the Australian bush fires of 2009 has a particular resonance right now. I do strongly recommend it.
My final mention is for a book of non-fiction about how we respond to messengers rather than messages. In the decade that brought us Trump and Johnson, this should have been a fascinating book but, sadly, I found it irritating – neither an easily read series of anecdotes nor a serious academic study, it repeatedly overpromised and underdelivered. It’s a subject close to my heart, though, so I’m afraid I wrote quite a long discussion of it. If you read that, you can probably skip the actual book.
My books of the Year
It’s impossible to pick out one book. Even amongst those I have reviewed, there are so many different kinds of writing . Three, though, did stand out as particularly worth reading. They were (in no particular order):
What do you want to see in 2020? I started out just reviewing historical novels, but occasionally I get sent books for free (especially through the rather wonderful NetGalley, which I do recommend) and these come with a sort of implicit expectation that they will be reviewed. That means that they find their way onto my blog where they are not necessarily a natural fit. But people do read them and I imagine some writers (although not all) appreciate the additional exposure. But, honestly, my views on a thriller like The Cabin are no more valid than yours and what I enjoy reading won’t necessarily appeal to you and vice versa. Do you read the reviews? Do you enjoy them? Would you like to see more? Or fewer? I’m thinking I might focus more closely (though far from exclusively ) on historical novels next year. What do you all think?
Every New Year I like to start by looking back at the blog posts that have been most popular in the previous year. It’s always interesting for me, because it usually throws up something unexpected and at least some readers like it because it highlights things that they may have missed. (Links take you to the original post.)
First off, though, a huge thank you to all of you who have made this the best year yet for this blog. It’s lovely to know that so many of you read it and (presumably at least some of you) enjoy it. I’m getting more comments on posts, too, which is always nice. Do please drop a line in the ‘Comments’ box if anything you see has particularly interested, entertained or even annoyed you.
Dark Magic
Like a lot of bloggers, I often suspect that blogging does very little to sell my books. Not many of my posts are straightforward plugs for my work so I was surprised (and very pleased) that the most read of my posts last year was the announcement of my latest book, Dark Magic. Over a thousand of you read that post and some of you even went on to buy the book. Thank you all so much. (http://tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk/exciting-news-well-exciting-for-me-anyway/)
The second most widely read post this year was my review of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s book, The Victorians, which I think by now must have been read by almost as many people as read the book. (It was not a best-seller.) There were a lot of reviews of this book in the newspapers, but most just made fun of it or mocked Rees-Mogg because he wasn’t a real historian. I agree that it’s not a good book, but I think it is a book that deserves to be taken seriously and I have tried to do so. Rees-Mogg and his friends just won a huge election victory. Perhaps it’s time to stop pointing and laughing and start trying to discover what drives them. If you don’t have time to read the book (and I honestly don’t blame you) then it might be worth having a quick look at my review.
I’m always uncertain about putting in stuff that’s just about me. There is no reason at all why anyone should want to see my holiday photographs – yet posts like this are sometimes surprisingly popular (except when they aren’t). My trip to Spain and Portugal near the beginning of the year was ostensibly historical research and I wrote several blogs posts about the Lines of Torres Vedras, which are full of solidly good information for anyone interested in this aspect of the Peninsular War. It was my first post about this trip, though, which attracted the most readers and this is basically just very pretty pictures of some beautiful Spanish towns.
Book reviews
I posted quite a lot of book reviews last year. (I’ll post a list next week if you’re interested.) My blog isn’t really a book blog and reviews can pass by without much notice. The number of readers seems to depend at least in part on how much effort authors who are reviewed poured into spreading the word. So hats off to Rebecca Jenkins, whose book The Duke’s Agent drew most interest of all my 2019 reviews, except Mr Rees-Mogg, who is really a special case. (The review was actually published at the very end of 2018, but I’m letting it sneak in as I doubt it got a lot of readers in December.)
Next up was the first straightforwardly historical blog post. I always think of these posts as being the backbone of the blog, so I’m surprised that we’ve had to wait to #5 (I hope you’re keeping count) for this. Published in June, on the anniversary of the start of the siege, this is a brief summary of the events during the Indian Mutiny that are the background to my book, Cawnpore.
#6 was a guest post by Penny Hampson, writing about how Jane Austen’s ideas of what constitutes a Regency Romance differ quite sharply from what readers expect of a Regency Romance nowadays. It’s an interesting essay by someone who clearly understands the subject. (As she writes Regency Romance herself, that’s probably a good thing.)
Posts about Waterloo are always popular and this year was no exception. On Waterloo weekend I posted a short discussion of why we get so excited about this battle more than 200 years later. And the number of readers showed that we do, indeed, still get excited about it.
Still on the subject of Waterloo, I wrote a piece about Apsley House, the home of the Duke of Wellington. The house was built as a ‘Waterloo Palace’ commemorating and celebrating British victory at the battle. I like to think of the essay as being a piece on the semiotics of architecture, but I’m happy if you just enjoy the pictures.
#9 is another guest post. I do like hosting visiting authors who bring a touch of variety to the blog and, in Karen King’s case, a lot of readers attracted by her account of her writing career. Karen’s approach is nothing if not professional and her account of her career is inspirational.
The Year Ahead
So there we are: another year with a variety of blog posts and me with no idea (until now) which ones were going to be the most successful. I’ll try to keep up the same mix. I have my first guest post of 2020 already lined up and, given how popular travelogues seem to be I’ll maybe post my photos from a trip to York and Leeds. (Leeds now hosts the National Armouries, so look out for lots of pictures of swords. Really. Lots.)
If there is anything you would particularly like me to write about, please mention it in the ‘Comments’ below, or use the ‘Contact‘ form.
Thank you for your company in 2019 and I look forward to the blogging year ahead.
I hope you are all enjoying your Christmas. We had a guest for dinner on Christmas Eve because he comes from a country where Christmas Eve is a bigger thing than for most people in England, so that got the festival off to a good start. Christmas Day was just two of us, but it was a very happy bit interval of peace in a frantic few days, so that was nice. I have been given Jacqueline Reiter’s biography of Lord Chatham to read, so that’s the start of 2020 taken care of. (And chocolate.)
Boxing Day was the by-now-traditional Boxing Day milonga on the South Bank and that was, as ever, a wonderful afternoon of dancing tango with so many friends. Tammy and I felt blessed.
Today and tomorrow my son and his wife will be here with their dog, so that will be a frantic couple of days. I see long walks in the park and far too much eating.
I hope that you are all having a wonderful time (maybe even reading Dark Magic?). It’s not really the time of year for reading (or writing) blog posts, so I’ll leave you to enjoy the holidays. Keep warm, have fun, and, in an increasingly fractious time, count your blessings (and your Christmas presents).
