Author: 5t4n5
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — Ian Fleming
One of my favourite films, so favourite that i never bothered to read the book before. I know, putting the cart before the horse is so unlike me.
Anyways, i’ve finally put things right and read the book, and guess what? I totally enjoyed it.
Like the film, it’s aimed directly for young children, i’d say around 7 or 8 years old, but it’s also good for us Boomers who loved the film.
How do they compare? Well the book only has some glimpses of the James Bond theme coming through, whereas the film, which was made well after Ian’s death, has all the Bond tropes shoehorned into it somewhere and is much more the James Bond for children thing. Example would be that in the book Caractacus is married to Mimsie, but in the film they needed to work in the Bond girl trope somehow, so they killed off Mimsie and created Truly Scrumptious. They also made the arch villain much more Bond like with the big castle, and all that, and gave him the Bond henchman in the Kiddy Catcher.
But the book is still good and well worth getting if you have young children to give them a good reading to before you make them sit and watch the film: i’m sure they’ll love it because Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is, without a doubt, the best James Bond film ever.
Enjoy.
Ian’s Page
#ianflemming
Galactic North — Alastair Reynolds
This is bizarre. After three trilogy length novels — two spanning decades and one a few centuries — going into glorious detail and getting the reader really involved with the characters and their situations, we now have a story spanning tens of millennia that’s only a short: WTF? 
It all feels extremely rushed, utterly lacking in depth and just seems like Alastair threw it together before breakfast to meet some publisher’s needs before he went on holiday.
Ho hum, we can’t really expect all of Alastair’s books to be excellent. This one’s very disappointing.
Anyways, this is the last story in the whole series for now. Just a bit of a wait until Inhibitor Phase is released on 26th August 2021.
It’s certainly been a blast reading the whole series in one go, it was just under 3 months ago when i began Great Wall of Mars. And no inbetweenies due to boredom: this is one of those series that you just want to keep on reading without any other books getting involved.
Available in the collection, Galactic North.
Alastair’s Page
#scifi #alastairreynolds
Absolution Gap — Alastair Reynolds
If you’re not into reading a whole trilogy crammed into one book then i’d suggest staying away: this book is huge. But if you’ve got this far you’ve just read two books of similar length so you’re used to it by now — dive right in.
My thoughts are that this book just doesn’t come up to the same level as the previous two. I think it’s because everything in this universe that we’ve come to know is all getting torn apart into molecules by the Inhibitors and there’s not much left of life as we once knew it. It’s all quite depressing really, as are some of the characters. And while i like a writer who isn’t afraid to kill off a main character or several, i was a bit put out by one of them as i really wanted to hear more from them: i won’t say which one because it would spoil the whole book.
But, this is war, this is the threatened annihilation of the human race, so we can’t expect it to be all upbeat and fun — can we?
So yeah, straight into Galactic North now and then it’s a bit of a wait for Inhibitor Phase to be published on 26th August 2021.
