This review also appears on Goodreads

We’re 300 years in the future, and a tiny patch of Northern Australia has become the world’s hottest real estate market. Or to be more precise, a tiny patch of Northern Australia – Darwin – has become the entire world in Jason Hough’s pacy and pleasantly complex science fiction thriller.

First, The Good – an alien space elevator spins mysteriously down from the heavens, linking Darwin with orbit and creating a technological renaissance. Then, The Bad – a plague is thrown down from space – Billions die – the lucky ones you might say – as perhaps one on 10 is left “alive” – primal, animalistic “SUBS”. Now, The Ugly – humanity reduced to a few square kilometres around the base of the elevator and mysteriously protected from the alien disease by The Aura – a brutal, cruel post-apocalyptic atoll – Darwin run by Darwinian logic if you like.

So, that’s the history. But history, famously, is written by the victors and such an account might not be the WHOLE story. It’s this missing narrative which Hough uses with great skill throughout, pushing this novel above the pulp. He doesn’t toy, and he doesn’t tease – instead, The Darwin Elevator plays out along a clever plot device with an (almost) half-life of unfolding significance. There are those characters who know about this decaying interval and its consequences, and there are those who do not…

Neil Platz knows. If you’re lucky enough to own water and power facilities next to where an alien superhighway lands, you’re going to get very powerful, very quickly, and Neil’s company and family now dominate the space-side of the elevator.

Skyler Luiken doesn’t know. That said, he and his ship’s crew have their own headstart – they’re “immunes” – the fraction of a fraction of humanity immune to SUBS and thus able to venture outside The Aura, scavenging the abandoned planet, filling the shopping lists of the rich and powerful back in Darwin.

Tania Sharma, the daughter of an astronaut colleague of Platz’s, nearly knows and her research at the distant “anchor” end of the elevator cord steadily worms its way to centre stage.

The Darwin Elevator is a plot-driven entity, but the characters in play here are, with one notable exception, well-drawn – Neil Platz in particular has more shades of gray than a battleship paint shop – utterly consumed by a desire to help humanity through what could so easily be an extinction event, but perhaps a little eager to take the darker fork in the road.

This is no cozy catastrophe people – Hough tends towards a George RR Martin-esque carelessness with his characters’ lives – an approach which creates some powerful impact points but also makes for a bruising reading experience.

The opening third of The Darwin Elevator is exciting stuff, with Luiken’s ship The Melville (am I missing a literary reference here?) voyaging out in the wasteland for some Serenity-like adventures, whilst the world above Darwin and along the elevator is revealed and explained with its space stations, habitats, research facilities and orbital farms.

But change is in the air from the outset – the elevator stops, then restarts and the assumed predictability of humanity’s lifeline starts to look very precarious. The terrestrial powerbase, headed by the brutal Russell Blackfield, decides now is the time to expand, just as those in orbit bring other plans to fruition. And we’re away…

Excited as I was with how much of how The Darwin Elevator “works” as a piece of popular science fiction, this success perversely seems to accentuate the odd niggle this reviewer stumbled over. So, as much as I liked Platz’s complexity, and Luiken’s self-doubt in his leadership skills, it was a real frustration to have to deal with an antagonist of as little subtlety as Russell Blackfield – he is VERY bad people – your mother would not like Mr Blackfield. He is pantomime bad – I kept imagining him with a Nazi-chic full-length leather trenchcoat.

And, some of the neat SCIENCE fiction within Hough’s debut is somewhat undermined when we’re led to believe that, three centuries into the future, on an immense space station in orbit tens of thousands of miles above Earth, that they still use clipboards. Yes – clipboards. Really?

Finally, there’s the cover. Granted, it’s a great piece of jacket art – man in clear “future paramilitary” garb holding a badass gun, space elevator in background. But, it’s arguably the WRONG cover for the book and I think it arguably undersells a novel which pushes quickly beyond its pulpy military sci-fi roots into something far more substantial.

The Darwin Elevator is the first of a trilogy, and I left it both satiated and hungry for more – the final act sets up part two nicely, without a cheap cliff-hanger to annnoy readers.

I’m excited that Jason Hough is going to publish all three parts of this trilogy in quick succession, and really hope that such a schedule doesn’t dilute his work’s quality. If he manages to convert the pace and promise of this opener into sustained depth and complexity, then I for one will be glad I hitched a ride on this particular alien space lift.

Copy supplied by Netgalley, all opinions are my own.

(Mis)judging this book by its cover the unwary reader might wander into Mr Snack and the Lady Water expecting a light, witty, post-Bryson travelogue, only to be somewhat surprised as they find themselves lotion-deep in a Jakarta massage parlour as the author retells his difficulty in declining the inevitable, ahem, “upsell”. Wrong turn maybe, but right book – Brendan Shanahan’s mildly uneven but compelling Travel Noir collection showcases an engaging writer happy to leave the rose-tinted glasses behind on his journeys.

Shanahan picks his targets well in this collection – you probably do not own short-sleeved casual wear from these locations. In “Babyland” he discovers the official Cabbage Patch doll theme park, housed in a former American hospital complete with uniformed “medical staff” and dolls as patients, including preemies in incubators.

Yes, really.

Granted, with that set-up an illiterate Martian could no doubt spec-pitch a New Yorker feature, but even so the author gets somewhere special here. On the gift shop checkout queue caused by the brand necessity of having to “adopt” your doll as you pay for it: “there are real live children in Russia you can buy with fewer formalities, and for less money.”

Shanahan wants more than laughs though and tries to unpick whether Babyland might be the pivot where pervasive consumerism creates an unhealthy reality distortion field. Encountering a heavily made-up “nurse” cradle-rocking a doll, his spacey, semi-communicative non-conversation with her becomes an uneasy, Lynchian tableau – both innocuous scene and something darker. It’s lovely, lovely anti-travel writing and a pleasure of a chapter.

“White and wrongs”, set in 1996 South Africa, is similarly rewarding – devoid of any travel journo press junket gloss. Shanahan’s Johannesberg is “LA after the apocalypse … an anti-city, a black hole metropolis where the bleakest predictions of the most pessimistic dystopians have come horribly true.” Well, that’s your retirement home sorted then Brendan.

He loathes the white suburbia his hosts live in and their attitudes to black staff – a country where “they lugged garbage while you sipped wine and did your White Mischief routine in the kitchen”; a country where public spaces are abandoned before sunset, afraid of the dark like peasants in a fairy tale; a country where home is a gated fortress hiding behind 12-foot walls and razor wire. These are barriers both physical and symbolic – the safe haven where you can complain about the difficulty of getting good servants, but also the damning Trumanesque ignorance-bubble that the rest of the world DOESN’T HAVE SERVANTS.

Shanahan is no disinterested observer though – desperate here that his host’s maid, Sunday, realises he’s better than the braying racists she works for – “a white emissary from a land of freedom and kindness”. Does he succeed? Buy the book people – and do so knowing that he always has the backbone to mirror that bright shining light of Truth to Power back on himself.

As good as this stuff is, it also reveals an arguable flaw in Lady Water. 1996 South Africa is way back when, well documented by the brilliance of Rian Malan and others. What I think I wanted here was a picture of South Africa in 2013. Have the 12 foot walls become 9? Does Sunday have a servant? The author is upfront and honest about the timeframe these pieces cover, but it still nags a touch.

Throughout, Shanahan is determined to engage with the people as much as the place. There’s a LOT of dialogue here, all minty-fresh-contemperaneous-transcription-dropbox-sync snappy. Hmm – the author either has a perfect memory or…

Well, let’s not go there. It’s impossible to pinpoint exactly where Shanahan sits on the spectrum between Hansard and James Frey, but it’s easy to imagine him slightly right of centre. A little literary license is OK of course, and expected, but the amount of dialogue here did surprise.

The final piece, Las Vegas as instagram-vivid literary postcards, is quality writing, but feels fragmentary – observations too “small” for a collection like this. To call it filler would be wrong – even here the author has no interest in the low-hanging fruit of The Strip or the casinos – but there’s less heft than there should be.

Overall, In Mr Snack and the Lady Water Shanahan’s blend of brutal observation and not a little cruelty is difficult to warm to, but comes with real conviction and provides genuine literary value. I’m glad I had the opportunity to read this, and hope to see more, up-to-date, travel writing from him – ideally a single journey on a single theme.

So – right places, arguably wrong times.

Update 24 March 2013: 

The author has correctly and reasonably pointed put an error I made in describing some time he spent sleeping in a house in Varanasi as “overnight” when in fact it was a shorter time period than this. I’m happy to correct this and the paragraph has had to be significantly rewritten.

Is how each part of John Scalzi’s experiment in Dickensian Science Fiction would end if the author had stuck to Chucky D’s well-established method of chopping what we now know as classics into weekly or monthly episodes – “please sir – can I have some more?” Next week, child, next week – assuming you can pony up another 99c for Audible.

But no – Scalzi wants to have his cake, eat it and still have the abs of a Men’s Health cover model. The Human Division consists of 13 weekly parts (the week now officially runs, Monday, Scalziday, Wednesday, etc) which the author is hoping will work both as an overall narrative arc when read in sequence, but also on their own as standalone shorts.

We can’t accuse the man of thinking small…

Oh, just one small detail. Fair’s fair John – if you get to deliver the story in multiple parts, then we get to slice up our take on your novel. Go with throttle up people – here’s part one of my review.

Episode 1, The B-Team, cold opens in space with a Colonial Union diplomatic ship arriving early for an inter-galactic meet ‘n’ greet which plays out as a far less pleasant rendevous than expected and thus our titular B-Team are dispatched to find out more.

Chronologically, the Human Division sits after the Old-Man’s-War-trilogy-plus-spin-offs, starting with a double-length opener as Scalzi’s got some serious backstory heavy lifting to do.

In line with the “standalone” ethos, those who haven’t read Old Man’s War et al get the basics explained to them – a BrainPal definitely isn’t the back-office system for an online payment empire. And, while Earth and the Colonial Union aren’t quite in couples counselling, Earth is considering lessons with that handsome Conclave tennis coach, whilst the Colonial Union sort-of realises his life will be over if he lets Earth slip away, but still can’t stop being emotionally manipulative and secretive. This all works just fine – it feels more like the repeat listen of a greatest hits CD than a full-on, cold-cocked InfoDump.

As the story unfolds we get a tense race against the clock to figure out who wants who dead – if not the why, then certainly the how is key here and The B-Team delivers a quality B-Movie sci-fi matinee experience as well as kicking-off the longer plotlines.

From this opener, the episodes go far and wide – from a very non-spacey Earth-based radio show, through the fear and pain of a pointless death on a wildcat colony, to a nice, played partly for laughs “she’s a wreck but we can get her going” episode.

We get a lot of Scalzi’s trademark one-liners and arched eyebrows delivered by a couple of old-hands from the past, as well as the expected set of new cast members. This reviewer didn’t quite stick with the rules though, saving up six episodes from Audible before going straight through them netflix-gluttony style. 

So, almost half-way through, are there any parts where Scalzi’s structural integrity is failing?

Well, not really – I only got to call BS once – a delegation from Earth voyages out into space to accept what is probably the most important technology transfer in human history, and guess what – they’re all from the United States or Canada. I get why we need to accidentally lose France’s invite in the post, but are those galaxies far, far away really NAFTA-only in ScalziLand? Minor fail John, minor fail.

However, this is a relatively minor quibble and neither am I going to judge if The Human Division succeeds on its “all things to all men” mission statement until the end of episode 13. So far this is a well put together piece of modern scifi which, though laced with Scalzi humour, can handle the straight-faced stuff as well with a surprising degree of emotional power, particularly in the second piece, Walk the Plank.

I’ll stick to the rules from now and find out if one episode a week delivers the same satisfaction as the “all-at-once” approach. So that’s part one of the review, what can I say except:

 Dun Dun DUNNNNNNNNN… 

The movie of One step too far should open with a 10 second zoom shot. Planet Earth from space – camera accelerating towards, through atmosphere, clouds part, reveal Western Europe. Focus on England, North West, landscape, trainline, train. Through window, woman, alone, tight focus on hands, one worrying a wedding ring off the other.

Tina Seskis slams us straight in to the heart of her debut novel – no warm-up, no fictional foreplay – a woman, seemingly abandoning happiness, a husband and a child. Is she serious? Six paragraphs in and you have your answer. Emily Coleman stands at Crewe station, wedding ring in hand – sacred, public symbol of her marriage – and the cruelty of what happens next removes all doubt. Deadly serious.

I’m no spoiler slut – pretty much all this and more is on the back cover and One step too far is a solid genre piece – everyone reading the jacket knows that, if we open on a character hard-erasing her past with all the subtlety of sledgehammer vs memory stick, the author has effectively just set a big shiny red LED straight-outta-Hollywood countdown timer towards the point where they have to explain themselves. Call it a twist, call it a reveal – whatever. Somewhere in the next 300 or so pages and it may or may not be the absolute crux of the story, is the WHY Emily’s doing this.

Well, I’m out the other side people. Things I know after reading this.

• The last book I read before this took me a fortnight. This one took me a day.
• I’ll be buying Tina’s next one
• The “reveal” is a dangerous game for an author to play.

One step too far is the story of Emily Coleman, her twin sister, her family and her life. It’s compartmentalised into chunks, shifting between third and first person narratives which, far from being annoying, ease the reader’s transition into where and with who we are.

As Emily moves away from her past in the opening pages, Seskis paints a compelling picture of a new beginning. Granted, she gives her lead a little money, but not too much, and the author is a little naughty with how she sidesteps the difficulty of getting a new identity for whom Emily will become, but the reader’s natural generosity towards a novel’s opening act isn’t abused.

If the inner turmoil of Emily’s re-invention is hidden and traumatic, its outer manifestation is unbounded simplicity – writ large in a smart vignette of a Tuesday morning visit to IKEA – was there ever a store more suited to fresh starts? – you’ll never look at a single person walking around there in the same way again. It’s a compelling opening showing how, with care and and a little luck, you could erase yourself and start again, complete with matching throw rugs.

Along the way, Emily picks up new friends and relationships and Seskis layers them and their backstories into the overall narrative, with varying degrees of success, just as in a couple of decades of a real life people will enter and leave with varying degrees of impact. And then we have her past, given to us piece by piece in what seems at first to be a separate, parallel narrative, until it gradually arcs inward towards the reinvented Emily…

For this reviewer, the novel only makes one genuine wrong turn – there’s a point at which Seskis chooses to intersect Emily with the UK’s pathetic obsession with “celebrities”. I clearly have a personal aversion to such vacuous nonentities, but it also felt unnecessary within the novel – we already had enough going on.

OK, the indoor elephant. We have to talk about it, but with some care. This is a genre piece, and there will be a point or points where what we know and what we think we know will be, ahem, “changed” by the author. Do it well, (think Kevin Spacey’s final, morphing walk in The Usual Suspects) and you get the holy grail of an audible gasp from your reader. Do it badly and, well, let’s not go there…

Consenting Adults people – We KNEW this would happen going in, but when an author takes this route, they are making a bond of trust with the reader. Manipulate yes, but don’t marionette – those strings have to be invisible, or you at least need to persuade us to look away from them. I still cannot decide if Seskis played by the rules here. And, if we’re going to convict, she’s a recidivist as well – once the forbidden fruit of the plot twist was eaten, there was no going back. Reader be warned – in the second half of this novel we are not on steady ground.

So, in One step too far we have a neat, intertwining story of interesting characters, told mainly through flashback episodes – some dark, but enough which are funny, entertaining, warm and human to make this a rewarding journey. Worth picking up…

My copy was supplied by Netgalley, all opinions are my own (I’m not short of them).

Which just leaves Planet Earth as the dark scary wood. That we are far from some perfect Gaian equilibrium is made clear from the (literally) cold open, with the detail of how we got there retold in episodic flashback throughout. Earth has been rebooted here through a satisfyingly complex almost-but-not-quite-end-of-days chain of natural and human disasters. Instead of a Hollywood style single-serving armageddon, we have a complex, cascading breakdown of the global economy both after and during a series of mega storms, earthquakes, eruptions and tsunamis. As this catastrophe peaks the two ships become separated and the story begins.

This is, of course, a hugely ironic start point – what does one do with a boat full of tree-huggers AFTER the last baby seal has been comprehensively clubbed? The crew’s attempts to answer that question is perhaps the most satisfying part of this graphic novel.

The Massive does have a “Season 1, Episode 1, feature length opener” feel, with lead players explicitly origin-storied one by one, but this enhances and layers the core narrative rather than disrupting it. Through a series of big-canvas, James Bond style locations – Kamchatka, Mogadishu, Antarctica, an evocatively flooded Hong Kong – the Kapital’s struggles are neatly told.

As a reader COMPLETELY new to graphic novels, picking up the form’s syntax, tropes and cadences took some time (balloon equals dialogue, rectangle omniscient narration). At first, I was desperate for MORE dialogue on every page, but, steadily, as the episodes unfold within the collection, the “reader” in me receded and I started to appreciate the storytelling subtleties, colour-coding and layered meanings in each art panel. The crash of a huge Red Cross Iluyshin IL-76 is perfectly rendered – every detail of its pointless demise communicated in just 3 widescreen panels over a single spread, without a single word of dialogue. Or, hiding from marauders in a fog bank, the chapter’s visual palette is rendered down to a minimalist, oppressive blue-grey – a single red flash permitted just for a key narrative marker.

And, for a medium whose prime demographic is first world teens soporifically suckled on mainstream media, its politics are surprisingly progressive – Mogadishu 1993 is referenced not as a Pentagon wet-dream “leave no man behind” deluded military fantasy, but instead in almost Chomsky-esque terms – the misguided actions of an post-imperial bully. Or, the incredibly depressing global trade in shark fins gets explicitly woven into the plot without the reader feeling they’ve just taken one to the temple from a Greenpeace-branded piece of rebar.

Occasionally, The Massive doesn’t convince. In an otherwise nicely handled “do we arm ourselves?” scene, it’s arguably a misstep to hand the “we need to respect these places, not bring more violence to them” POV to the vest and hot-pants wearing, pert-breasted woman, whilst the black t-shirt, buzz cut special forces cliche gets gets to rock a 2nd Amendment riff..

The challenge going forward for The Massive franchise is if the over-arching narrative will attempt to keep the quested mothership ALWAYS just out of reach, which could be problematic. But, if the creators CAN pull off a “How I Met Your Mother, seasons 1-7″ sleight of hand where readers happily live in the moment – backgrounding rather than forgetting the big picture, then this will be a satisfying series to dip into.

I don’t think I’ll ever become an episodic graphic novel fan, but I’ll seek out and buy the second anthology when it arrives (hopefully in a better quality reading experience than a lo-res Netgalley PDF).

Politically aware and unafraid to run towards complexity, for a first read of a graphic novel, it seems that in The Massive: Black Pacific I picked a thoughtful and idea-rich starting point.

Bechdel Test – PASS

Copy supplied by Netgalley, opinions are my own.

See this and my other reviews on Goodreads

Although the meat of the book is, as the title suggests, in the form of a “handbook”, it is the bite-sized chunks of our guide’s personal food memories which are the highlights here – reflective vignettes on the joys of being a global food citizen. Kicking off with “Laos Tapas” on the pavements of Luang Prabang, by the end we’ve eaten our way around the world from Moroccan spices in France to cheesy Corn bread in Columbia and food and fashion in Burma.

Jodi’s skill – the literary spice which lifts this above standard food porn – is her expression of how the street food experience, its rituals and the human interactions they demand allow each serendipitous snack to become a pathway into a better understanding of where you are and the locals you’re meeting. Plus, she’s recruited fellow travel writers to add more great tales and tips from Zambia, India and Mexico.

These are great pieces which ring true – having collected a few passport stamps myself, I’m on the same page of the menu as Jodi as to the importance of diving into local food for the deepest, most satisfying of travel experiences. There IS nothing like the culinary alchemy of how a Singaporean hawker can turn shredded turnip of all things into the vegetarian apex predator that is Popiah; or nothing to compare with wolfing down a heaped plate of spicy dhal bhat and rice halfway up a Himalayan mountain – cooked over an open fire in a stone shack but served with real pride by the dhaba lady.

Jodi Ettenberg, Image courtesy Full Flight Press

For me, her insights were where I got most out of my reading, but this is a “handbook” after all and our author’s lawyerly discipline eventually comes to the fore, with informative sections on every possible food-related issue. Whatever travel experience a reader might be considering – from one-week vacay to global epic, there’s a ton of info here – savvy suggestions on making smart food choices to avoid illness as well as a personal take on why allergies and food intolerances didn’t stop the author in her tracks and won’t stop you. Jodi even flags some important ethical choices readers might need to consider. Me? I’d be fine with dog, and am still annoyed that bad timing meant I missed out on a monitor lizard curry in Borneo once, but I’m with the author all the way when it comes to shark fins – that’s a big NO.

The Food traveler’s handbook is a very modern tome – a paperback is available for the dead tree fetishists, but I imagine most of target audience will pick this up via Amazon Kindle and with colour photos and info panels throughout, it’s made for the modern tablet audience. Lengthwise, we’re way past a longform article but not quite in sight of a coffee table book – there’s a lot of stuff here people, and it’s well worth the price of admission.

As to the downsides? Well, like a typical street-food addict, I’m greedy, I’m a glutton, and would have liked to have had even more of the author’s personal travel food stories. Plus, the resources section has a lot of links in it, some of which will date quickly, so this is a book “of its moment” to grab hold of, although I’m sure there will be updated editions in the future.

But, these are trifles. If you’re lucky enough to be visiting a new and foreign culture anytime soon, or know someone who is, then get this book – it’s keenly priced and worth every cent. Buy the book, get outside your culinary comfort zone and expand your mind as well as your waistline…

Take yourself over to Jodi’s blog, Legal Nomads for more info on how to buy and a video trailer / sample links.

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Remarkably, the island still has something for everyone, with both extremes of Pattaya Beach bookended by two very different resorts – one 300 baht a night, the other almost 6000 – same beach, same view. I didn’t get a chance to visit Lipe when I passed by in 2009, so this time I wasn’t going to miss out…

Want to know how I arrived on Koh Lipe? – go here.

Go HERE to see the full 360º panorama of this amazing Koh Lipe pic (sadly not mine!)- worth a look.

Walking Street

Walking Street is Lipe’s Sunset Boulevard, its La Rambla, its Khao San Road. A scruffy, 2 metre-wide, under-a-kilometre-long strip of badly laid concrete links the Southern end of Pattaya Beach to the centre of Sunrise Beach. No more than a five minute walk at a brisk pace from end to end, but hot and humid here and we’re all on holiday, so let’s leave the brisk pace for back home please shall we?

You’ll have to make up your own mind about Walking Street. For the purists, it symbolises everything wrong with the “New Lipe”, though the street is nothing more than a simple product of supply and demand. On a typical night, hanging out with Sophie, a snorkelling tour buddy from Germany, and her impossibly-cute son Diego, the street delivers everything a visitor needs. First, a pre-dinner snack for Diego at the mad Roti place run by a gang of smiling Malaysian girls – they’ve just printed 30 or so of the most insane pancake combos on a big sheet of PVC outside, and waited for the happy (and hungry) tourists to turn up. Moving on, head East up to Raklay Seafood for 150-baht-fresh-off-the-boat barracuda steak, veg pad thai and mango shakes, before a stroll down to Lekka Lipe for a couple of scoops of imported gelato served by a chic Italian woman and finally that all-important Big Chang over ice on the beach at Pattaya Song.

Ultimately, I LIKED Walking Street, particularly the Eastern end where it merges with the outskirts of the Chao Ley village and gets a bit scruffier and a little more “local”. Keep an eye open and you’ll catch some neat insights into island life. The alley between the back end of my resort and the village passed a small, open-fronted Thai massage shop, shoulder season empty most of the time with the staff short on customers but long on friendly greetings whenever I wandered by. One morning though, rather than lounging around, texting or chatting, the masseurs were all kneeling respectfully in a semi-circle. In front of them on one of the platforms were two monks surrounded by a multitude of food dishes and incense sticks – an evocative tableau and one I can’t imagine being played out in a hairdressers back home. Or, when was the last time you were passed by a moped driven by a smiling 10 year-old girl, baby brother and two equally young friends piled on behind? So yes, Koh Lipe is busy, expensive and over-developed, but also charming, atmospheric and friendly.

Pattaya Beach

It’s the island’s signature sand strip, but daytime on Pattaya was a little busy for my tastes. As the day ends though, its charms unfold. The rigours of the day’s swimming and lounging over, half the island happily perambulates the water’s edge, enjoying the sunset. With a not-entirely-awful “Italian” pizza joint hawking 100 baht double slices from late afternoon, sitting in the sand with a cheeky can of Chang from the minimart and a slice of margherita is the perfect “I-would-never-do-this at-home-naughty-but-oh-so-nice” culinary intermezzo – just to tide me over until dinner, you understand?

Then, as the last of the light fades, Pattaya shifts gear again – from the island’s largest open-air tanning salon into the island’s largest open-air seafood restaurant. Neat rows of tables appear in the sand, each block sectioned off with burning torches and menus stands under little pyramids of LED light, flanking trays of local seafood on mountains of ice ready for the choosing. Dinner, a few beers and then plan tomorrow’s snorkelling trip – perfect.

Bits and pieces

• The all-important beer price index – A Big Chang at the Sunrise end of Walking Street is 100 (Check out Nee Papaya for cold cheap beer and bargain seafood), whilst Up West on Pattaya 170 might be your unpleasant surprise for the day. Get out of town to the remoter, shack-like operations though and things drop down to 80. For those who prefer not be hammered on a single bottle (Chang tastes like 5%, says it’s 6.4% and feels like 8%), Singha is everywhere for 20-30 baht more a bottle.
• For those who want to keep the cost of a meal well South of 100 baht, a great Thai option is the stall with the red sign about 20m from the Pattaya end of Walking Street on the right (South).
• I had a great 5 day visit, but it’s not hard to see that tourism and uncontrolled development is uncomfortably close to destroying the reason so many people fix their compasses on the island as a destination. Do what you can – refuse plastic bags at the mini marts and support places like Pooh Bar which offer water refills.

Sunrise, Sunrise Beach Koh Lipe

For an established resort island, Snorkelling is also surprisingly good on Sunrise. I’d expected the combination of longtail diesel leaks, pollution and anchor damage to have turned the bay into a marine desert, so it was great to see that almost every boulder had something of interest in residence – those with kids will be happy to learn that locating camera-tart “Nemo” anemonefish is super easy – just look for anything soft and wavy on a rock and they won’t be far away.

Look just a little deeper and the snorkelling gets even better – just a hundred metres or so off the Southern end of Sunrise sits the islet of Koh Usen, with a bunch of cool stuff to see – lobster and small boxfish, plus a bunch of pretty bannerfish swimming over healthy mountain coral, anenomes and spiky urchins. My swim across to Koh Usen was current-free, but keep a lookout for the longtail taxis continually crossing the channel, even though their awareness of swimmers in the water was excellent – I put my head up each time one approached and the boatmen all indicated they’d seen me.

Gipsy Resort, Sunrise Beach

 Accommodation on Koh Lipe – my choice

Arriving in mid-November as Koh Lipe resort owners start to catch the first scent of high season, 750 baht a night gets you a smart concrete bungalow at Travelfish standout Gipsy Resort, one of 10 or so in two facing rows set back from Sunrise Beach. Bucket flush only, but spotlessly clean with airy bathrooms and bright LED lighting available 24hrs (remember that not everywhere on Lipe does round-the-clock power). Gipsy also has a phalanx of classic bamboo budget beds if you don’t mind a slightly murkier maison.

In my home-for-120-hours several classy details sealed the satisfaction deal – foot-level tap at the front of your porch to wash the sand off; brush to keep the tiles clean; comfy hammock; solid mosquito net sans bug invasion routes; entirely redundant toilet tissue (what with there being a perfectly serviceable bum gun) and surprisingly non-threadbare towels.

There’s Higgs-Boson WiFi in the beachfront restaurant – the signal has been proven to exist on a theoretical level, even if practical applications are limited – you’ll be able to taunt your friends back home with the odd status update, but forget 1080p HD Skype fun.

Gipsy is Italian-owned, with Nespresso on tap for the caffeine cognoscenti, plus excellent 30 baht filter coffee served in funky mid-90s chic Friends-style shallow earthenware. The restaurant is beachside at the front of the resort and all the basics are on the menu – from pad thai through tuna on wholewheat to the ubiquitous traveller favourite – banana pancake, Euro-blinged here with the classy touch of both vanilla creme and honey on the side. Roberto, the owner, is friendly and helpful, as are his staff. Just normal chairs and tables in front of the restaurant sadly – a couple of lounging platforms with cushions on the beach and the place would be pushing perfect.

Full Flickr collection for this trip

Laundry is on site as well – sameday service if you drop it off after breakfast – ready at 5pm, rain permitting. Primo priced at 70 baht per kilo though, so the time-rich/cash-poor crew will be able to find 50 baht elsewhere without too much hassle. That said, the in-house people always rounded weights down – no complaints from this happy customer.

On my third day on Lipe I did the decent thing, crawling out of my bed at stupid o’clock, before wandering down to the shore in the darkness with just a hangover and a camera – if you’re going to stay somewhere called “Sunrise Beach” then you have to pay your respects at least once. A surprisingly large number of fellow tourists had the same plan and we were treated to a B+ display – low clouds reflecting the sun’s light as it rose above the moored longtails – a peaceful way to start another peaceful day on a cracking little holiday island…

Lipe notes

• Pick your budget people – in November Lipe has something for everyone.
  • Look right as you walk up to immigration on Pattaya Beach and there’s a sign offering beachfront at 5750 baht a night if your perfect Crusoe-esque desert island experience isn’t complete without the reassuring whisper of a Samsung A/C unit.
  • Look left instead and you’ll just see a glimmer of Daya Resort at the far end of the bay. Local owned and run – second row bamboo darkness comes in at 300 baht per sleep, with part-time power and bathrooms which, I was reliably informed, might aspire to one-star standard if they had just been cleaned, an occurrence which is apparently rarer than a quiet longtail.
• For a full overview of Koh Lipe snorkelling, take a look at the superb “what’s the snorkelling like” blog.

If you’re heading towards Koh Lipe from Langkawi in Malaysia, two choices await – the “slow” ferry from Kuah, or one of a handful of speedboat services, the newest of which, complete with slick online booking, is based at Telaga Harbour on Langkawi’s Northwestern coast.

There’s nothing even remotely “Exotic Asia” about Telaga Harbour – expensive yachts and Sunseekers abound, with the Panorama Langkawi cable car just visible in the misty hills above – everything here is very First World and very “New Malaysia”. Telaga’s “International Departure Terminal” is just a simple open seating area with a friendly guy to talk you through the check-in process, a flat screen showing the History Channel, plus a little snack bar. With a Petronas gas station mini-mart around the corner for stocking up on dried mango (the Malay stuff is far nicer than the Thai brands, trust me) what more do you need? If the answer to that question is a KFC and a restaurant, then just look next door.

On time at 9.30am, we wandered down the jetty ramp and were away within minutes, sliding slowly out of the narrow harbour neck before our captain pointed the bow Northwest and pushed the throttles forward.

The journey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BMt7mCqlUY

Your Langkawi to Koh Lipe journey will be quick, but limited fun. Even with a flat calm sea there’s no point in attempting to talk or read with four roaring outboards 10 feet behind you. Stylish (pink, lemon, acid green!) disposable ponchos were handed out but not really necessary as very little spray made its way into the cabin. Not much to see apart from the odd fishing trawler but, less than an hour for the whole trip and, since Thailand is an hour behind Malaysia, you arrive on Lipe pretty much when you depart – 9.30am for the morning departure…

As Lipe grew larger over the bow, the skies began to clear until, almost as the speedboat throttled down and rounded the headland into Pattaya Beach, the sun finally put in an appearance for those all-important desert island arrival shots. Surprisingly, the Telaga speedboat fare includes the transfer from mid-bay moored pontoon to the beach, so no 50 baht longtail tax this time and that’s it – you’re standing on a beautiful beach in the Land of Smiles – physically if not officially.

Thai immigration, Koh Lipe style

Rewind a couple of hours to the speedboat terminal in Langkawi and you might remember that the nice check-in lady kept your passport. Why? Well, since the formalities of entering Thailand take place on an open beach, with bars and restaurants beckoning in every direction, a “positive inducement” is obviously needed to keep everyone focused on the paperwork and away from the cheap Chang. So, since there’s nothing that makes a traveller sweat more than being separated from their passport, the system works VERY well.

With the sand between your toes on a blindingly white beach, just answer your name when called, say where you’re staying (prob best to have a resort name in mind, even if, as me, no actual booking existed) and then wait. My passport emerges freshly-stamped within 5 minutes and that’s it – you’re free to go – welcome to Koh Lipe people…

See full flickr collection for this trip

Notes

• Getting to Telaga harbour: Langkawi taxis are expensive by Asian standards, but are at least fixed price – my trip from Kuala Melaka Inn cost 24 MYR – the same price quoted by both my airport taxi guy and the motel desk.
• Like most, I received just a 15-day entry pass since I entered Thailand overland.

Picture: Apollo 16′s LM ascent stage Orion approaches command module Casper, 23 April 1972

Look. Really – LOOK. Here is the literal apogee of human endeavour – a spacecraft, just lifted from a foreign celestial body, journeying home to that blue smudge hanging in the blackness beyond. Have you ever seen anything so achingly analogue? No, forget analogue – this is borderline steampunk - crumpled paper-thin skin, a guidance system with less computing power than your labradoodle’s pacemaker and the perfect beauty of shape and finish dictated by function not aesthetics – move along Jonathan Ive, move along, nothing for you to see or do here…

Growing up with the space race meant that Apollo was and is my porn, my heroin – a flawed and perfect endeavour – either the greatest single act of our species, or the most pointlessly expensive piece of Cold War dick-waving possible, or both, or neither.

Apollo-themed fiction though is relatively rare – at first glance it seems a narrow, limited palette for an author, with little potential for teasing out new narrative journeys. This then is the challenge that Ian Sales has taken on and met with Adrift on the Sea of Rains, an intriguing little curate’s egg balanced somewhere between a short story and a novella.

There’s a lot packed into very few pages here – deft flashbacks reveal how we got to the novel’s opening page – abandoned astronauts on the lunar surface with a lifeless, post-armageddon Earth hanging above their bleak horizon.

Front and centre is Colonel Vance Peterson – an unreliable and, as the novel unfolds, increasingly unlikeable character whose extreme, jihadic anti-communism and total belief in his causes’s righteousness may just have led him, and our race, to this point. Peterson and his crew are simply existing in a primitive lunar habitat, watching their food and air dwindle – still technically alive, but really – in essence – dead.

Oh goody, I do like the total abandonment of all hope and joy in a novel – it’s The Road, in a vacuum, without even a shopping cart for comic relief. But curses, that’s not where Sales is taking us. There’s a MacGuffin – the astronauts’ only hope is a Nazi wonder weapon that might or might not be able to open alternate timelines and histories.

Mid-read, this didn’t work for me – it all seemed too easy – feckless, lazy, welfare-scrounger writing. Wrong Christian, sooo wrong. Y’see, the thing about alternate timelines is that mileage may vary – not every timeline is, how can I put this? divergent… This reader was happily fooled by the Twilight Zone sleight-of-hand Sales deploys to deliver his ending – not quite sucker-punched, but pleased I hadn’t smart-arsed-it-out - Adrift is almost fable-like in places – you need to just go with it and not Poirot too much at the decisions and actions of the characters.

The story stops dead at 71% on the Kindle, denouement delivered. That’s cheeky I thought, but this is no scam - Adrift is a little acronym-heavy in places, so an abbreviations list is a necessity for those poor souls who don’t know the difference between a TEI and a TLI (you really don’t want to get them confused). The genius here though is how this simple appendix then arcs into a brilliant reworking of the Apollo timeline we know, extending it out and onwards towards the one which Colonel Peterson and his crew stand at the end of. Keep reading people – it’s a lovely structural conceit.

Sales describes this as part one of an “Apollo Quartet”. More of the same will do just fine, thank you Ian.

This review first appeared on Goodreads

The Apollo Image Archive

The picture that opens this review is taken from the Apollo Image Archive, which is definitely worth a good clickaround. Oh, and btw – that’s not a batch-processed Instagram retro filter you can see applied to the whole collection – it’s history.