John Robert Lewis was born in Alabama in 1940. His parents owned a farm, yet still struggled to make ends meet. Young Lewis grew up in a South still fully governed by Jim Crow laws; the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education did nothing to change the impoverished and segregated school he attended. Much, much more needed to be done.

And this is what Lewis did. While attending the American Baptist Theological Seminary he participated in the Nashville Student Movement, taking part in their sit-ins at local businesses to pressure them to desegregate their facilities. In 1961, Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders, and he and the others were attacked repeatedly for engaging in perfectly lawful activity. He was also arrested numerous times, and was even imprisoned at Parchman Farm for a month. Yet his sacrifice and the sacrifice of his fellow protestors had an effect. People everywhere were paying attention.

In 1963, as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lewis was one of the “Big Six” who organized the famous March on Washington. He spoke that day, though he toned down his speech under pressure from the others. The following year, he organized as well the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and in 1965 participated in the march at Selma, where he and hundreds of other protestors were attacked by state troopers. He carried the scars he received on his head from their beatings for the rest of his life.

When I consider everything he went through, I cannot helped but be moved by the enormous moral strength and personal courage that he demonstrated. It was a fight that he never gave up on waging personally, even after he won a seat in Congress. Just this year he shared his lessons with the BLM protestors, who have experienced much the same treatment he did six decades ago. Instead of despairing about the slow pace of change, he expressed his optimism for how others were exercising their moral power, saying to one interviewer, “It was so moving and so gratifying to see people from all over America and all over the world saying through their action, ‘I can do something. I can say something’. And they said something by marching and by speaking up and speaking out.” His words reminded me of the lesson contained in Dr. King’s famous quote about the the long arc of the moral universe bending towards justice. Fighting for change is a lifelong struggle and we may not enjoy its fruits, but we will leave our world a better place than it was when we were born into it. That is certainly what John Lewis showed us.

Gareth Powell's first novel punches above its (159 page) weight on ideas, plot and credible people

I came to Gareth Powell via his "Ragged Alice" stand-alone novel and his "Embers Of War" galaxy-spanning epic Science Fiction trilogy. He's on my 'read whatever he writes' list, so when I saw that his first short novel had been given a makeover and was on available as an ebook for $0.99, I had to get a copy.

"Sileersands" is only 159 pages long but it punches above its weight. 

The universe it's set in has enough scope for at least a trilogy - an Earth diaspora through wormhole gates built by an unknown race and which we know so little about that ships can't select a destination, they just have to roll the dice. 

The plot is paced like a thriller, with action almost from the first page, murky relationships, betrayals, power plays and everyone trying to kill or capture our heroine.

There are big themes in common with Gareth Powell's other books: the relationships between AIs and humans, the impact of living long lives and what it means to be human once you can be cybernetically augmented, genetically modified or cloned.

While I love all this stuff, the things that keep me coming back to Gareth Powell are that, in his books, actions have consequences and even key characters may not make it to the end of the book and that the people are real, relatable and central to the story. Powell's talent for making me believe in his characters is what makes his books special for me.

Here's an example of the kind of writing he uses to do this. This is a description of one of the characters meeting with his ex-wife:¨¨

'She smiled. The corners of her lips crinkled up in a way that had once been irresistible but was now only comfortably familiar. The passion in their relationship had been one of the first things to go, second only to trust. In its place, however, there was a stubborn fondness.'

'stubborn fondness' - there's a phrase to conjure with.

This was Gareth Powell's first book and you can already see the focus on people that makes his Science Fiction work so well.

This is a description of one of the characters meeting with his ex-wife:¨¨

'She smiled. The corners of her lips crinkled up in a way that had once been irresistible but was now only comfortably familiar. The passion in their relationship had been one of the first things to go, second only to trust. In its place, however, there was a stubborn fondness.'

 

I like the idea of 'stubborn fondness'. It sounds real to me.

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Lockdown is an odd thing. It gives me a huge amount of time to read but it also makes it hard to concentrate. My solution is to read books in parallel so that, when I lose focus on one, I can move to another, and to use a mix of ebook and audiobook so that I don't have headphones welded to my ears all day.

Here's what I'm reading just now:

I'm having a lot of fun with 'The Southern Book Club's Guide To Killing Vampires'. It's scarier than I expected

Actually, it's mostly menacing rather than terrifying. It feels plausible and real with the attendant sense of powerlessness and despair.

I'm hoping to finish it today.

I'm reading 'The Invisible Guardian' for Snakes & Ladders.

It's translated from Spanish and is the first book in a trilogy set in the Basque country.

It's been on my TBR for a while and I have high hopes of it.

'Silversands' is a novella from Gareth Powell, who wrote the 'Embers of War' SF trilogy. This is one of his early pieces.

He put it on Kindle with a new cover and a 99p price tag that I couldn't resist.

'True Grit' isn't technically a Friday read because I can't start it until tomorrow but it's downloaded and ready to go as this weekend's Pandemic Buddy Read.

I've seen both of the movie versions. I bought the book because, even from the opening paragraph, I could see that the book was likely to be more powerful.

"Light of Impossible Stars" is a deeply satisfying read that does something very rare: it ends a trilogy in a way that not only doesn't disappoint but excites and surprises.

I loved the first two books in this trilogy, "Embers Of War" and "Fleet of Knives" so I'd pre-ordered the final book and dived into it as soon as it arrived.

Like it's predecessors, it was a fast-paced, page-turning, epic science fiction story, crammed with original ideas and strong world-building, yet what kept me reading were the characters in the book and the empathy and humour of the writing.

All of the books have followed multiple storylines that slowly reveal the big picture. The strength of the characterisation, especially in this final book, keeps those storylines intimate and relevant.

I'd say it kept the book human but some of the main characters are not human and part of the strength of the book comes from how clearly their thoughts and hopes are articulated,

Gareth Powell is very good at letting his characters be themselves, without judgement or apology, where the character is a genocidal psychopathic poet, a warship who has grown a conscience and resigned her commission, a non-human engineer who believes in work and rest and the world tree, a young woman trying to discover who or what she is or an ex-military officer looking for redemption through service.

I like the fact that, in this world, actions have consequences: not everyone survives, those that do survive are often damaged and neither the pain nor the occasional love is glossed over. I like that some characters fail to learn and are doomed to repeat their mistakes while others grow, develop and find new mistakes to make and some just get by day to day as best they can.

I admire the truly epic scale of the plot and the depth of the world-building and that, despite how strong the plot and SF ideas are, they never push the characters out of the way.

Now that I've read all three books, I want to go back and read them again, so that I can take in the grandeur of the big picture and spend more time with characters I've grown to know well.

Finally, I have to say that I am, as I'm sure I'm supposed to be, deeply attached to Trouble Dog and I hope to hear more of what happens to her now the trilogy is over.

"Light Of Impossible Stars" works very well as an audiobook with different narrators presenting chapters written from the point of view of the main characters. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.