Readings — Behold the Man

Behold the Man

by Michael Moorcock

One of the stranger books I’ve read of late, the high concept of this book is simple: a London student in the 1970s takes part in a time travel experiment, and goes back to the days of Jesus — where he finds himself taking over the role of Christ. To Moorcock’s credit, he doesn’t rely on the concept alone to carry the book. It’s structured nicely, and spends much of its time taking apart the character of Karl Glogauer, its lead.

The result is one of Moorcock’s better books, I think. It’s short, focussed, and gets at a lot of material in a short space. It’s both experimental and highly disciplined. And it has to be said that Moorcock’s quite adept at using the Christ scenario to tap a kind of iconic energy. He does it with a light touch, setting up a properly inevitable climax. It’s a subversive take on the Christ story, of course, but Moorcock handles it well enough that, to me (and I’m not a Christian), it doesn’t feel exploitative. In fact, because it’s not exploitative, it is that much more powerful — compare, by contrast, something as witless as Garth Ennis’ Preacher graphic novels, and you’ll see what I mean. Overall, then, quite a success.

Readings — Lightning

Lightning

by Dean Koontz

I don’t have a lot to say about this book. It has a nice hook: a man appears at crucial moments to save of the life of a girl; she grows older, he stays the same age, eventually it becomes clear that he’s a time traveller. But is he from the future, or the past? In fact, it’s the latter, and the novel’s playing with the old idea of Nazis trying to get their hands on future technology.

Still, I didn’t care for it. I found the prose flat and unengaging. The attempt to make the story fit with history seemed a bit sloppy. And there’s a passage in the book where the main character equates genocide and pacifism, which is a little strange, especially as it seems to be meant literally. So, no, on the whole, not my cup of tea.

Readings — Star of Gypsies

Star of Gypsies

by Robert Silverberg

Stunningly well-written, this is a book about a King of the Gypsies in the far future, where humankind has spread among the stars and the Romani are the only people who can navigate the ships that travel from sun to sun. Yakoub, the King, abdicated some years ago; now his brutal son has taken the throne, and Yakoub must face the responsibilities he abandoned. Sentence for sentence, this is easily the finest book by Silverberg that I’ve read, and one of the finest sf books I know. There’s a wealth of invention here that recalls Lord Valentine’s Planet, but the scope is even larger, and Silverberg creates societies and planets and larger-than-life personalities in glorious profusion.

That being said, I did often feel myself a bit detached from the story. That’s due to two reasons, I think. The first is that among all the extravagant characters in the book, Yakoub never finds (or admits to) a peer. He stands head and shoulders above all the other characters in the book, if only in his account; but then, while he certainly has a self-aggrandizing streak in him, I don’t think that estimation is wrong. In the long run, this tends to make the main story of the book less than gripping — his estranged son never really seems to have a chance. Basically, Yakoub comes up with a plan to remove him, executes the plan, and the plan pretty much goes just as he figured it would. Yakoub has no real rivals, and nobody to balance him or challenge him.

The other reason I felt a bit removed from the book was Silverberg’s decision to tell much of it in flashback, unreeling Yakoub’s early life in detail. He comes up with very elegant ways to introduce the flashbacks, and they’re as well-written as the rest of the book — in fact, they probably make up the majority of the book’s text. Silverberg gives Yakoub the ability to blur past and present; he can ‘ghost’ into the past, to be present at any point in history (this strikes me as a bit under-thought, though; it’d be a great way to spy on your enemies, but neither Yakoub nor anyone else ever uses it as such). He spends much of his time, then, observing or recalling his past. Effectively, the present-day story is like the surface tension on a lake, while the main part of the book, those past years, is the depths below. The problem is that the exploration of the depths makes the surface feel a bit thin. Oddly, I wonder if the present was less developed if I might have had an easier time with the book. But then again, as I say, perhaps it’s the mix of past and present (both of them looking toward the future) that’s the real point here.

So I’m hesitant to say that the problems I had with the book are real problems. They may well be cases of assumptions I made as a reader that were wrong-headed. Certainly the writing’s gorgeous, and Yakoub’s a vivid character — warm and clever, but so arrogant he’s difficult to warm up to; accomplished and yet flawed (I don’t feel I know anywhere near enough to speak knowledgeably about how he fits into traditions of romanticised depiction of the Romani; all I can say is that on its own terms, it seems to work). The depiction of the Romani as effectively an alien race is odd (it seems to relate to events in another of Silverberg's novels, Letters From Atlantis, which I have not read), but the depiction of their history is heartfelt, if not particularly novel. Mainly, the great strength of the book is its wildness, its invention, its unpredictability, and the elegance of its writing. As such, it’s well worth reading.

Readings — An Evil Guest

An Evil Guest

by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe’s latest novel strikes me as a mixed bag, both in terms of contents and in overall effect. By ‘contents’, I mean that it includes time travel, stage musicals, musings on celebrity charisma, dread Cthulhu, and a host of other things up to and including time-travel and aliens. By ‘effect’, I mean that I’m not sure Wolfe builds an involving novel out of the whole.

The tone, for example, is engaging, but noncommittal. What seems like it should be in one spot a screwball romp out of The Sound of Music, and then in another a suspenseful edge-of-your-set noir thriller, becomes flattened into an oddly grey, rambling story which contains these things but seems to lack their flavour. The setting is ostensibly the future, practically seems more like the big city of a 1930s Hollywood film, and feels really like nothing in particular. Sure, Wolfe’s linguistic dexterity is on display, his tricks with showing only what characters see (including what they see wrongly) are there as well, and it’s a book which will reward the engaged reader more than the casual page-turner — but I don’t know whether the reward’s really that great.

The WolfeWiki suggests an alternative reading of the work which is logical, internally consistent, and yet weirdly unaffecting. Which I think is my ultimate problem with the book. It’s too detached. Much of the effect of Wolfe’s writing, one way or another, comes from keeping the reader at a certain distance. I think for this book to work, the lighter sequences would need to be more affecting, and that’d probably mean allowing the reader a bit closer in. Lacking that, I found myself uninvolved with the characters and the world.

Now, it doesn’t help that the central character is not, to my mind, terribly well-written. Cassie Casey really hearkens back to the women in those ’30s films I mentioned above, and not in a good way. It’s not that she’s flat or unintelligent, though she’s both, it’s that she’s not credible. She sounds like a movie character, which means what a bunch of men in a smoke-filled room think a spunky woman sounds like — or what they think she ought to sound like. Adam Roberts, in his thoughtful review of the book, seems to me to have it exactly right: “Casey is not a strong woman. She is a conservative’s notion of a strong woman: an "Of Queen's Gardens" woman, permitted to explore to the very edge of her pedestal but not to step down from it.”

A concern with old movies is hardly new in Wolfe’s fiction; consider There Are Doors. But while that novel was, to me, genuinely eerie and unpredictable, An Evil Guest seems to struggle more with the pulp formulas it plays with. Certain Wolfeisms seem oddly out of place. For example, his fondness for what I think of as “Thursday” figures, after G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Without giving anything away about that remarkable book, its central figure is a mysterious man, fat, cunning, and wise, who has a disturbing amount of both power and charisma, and who is perceived at the beginning of the book in a sinister light but who ends it being revealed to be something different and greater than was previously suspected. Wolfe frequently uses similar figures in his writing, some of them sinister and some of them not, some of them variations on the archetype; consider Benjamin Free in Free Live Free, or Rex von Madadh in Castleview. The point I’m getting around to is that you'd expect a figure like that — and there are two of them in this book, though they might actually be one and the same, depending on how you read it — to fit naturally with noir themes. But they don’t, really. They seem, to me, out of place; as though Wolfe hadn’t quite worked out how to make some of his recurrent imagery harmonise with the other images he was working with.

In the end, An Evil Guest seems to me more an interesting book than a good one. It’s intriguing, and worth thinking about, and moves at a relentless clip. Its language is spare and pared-down, but the dialogue is often jarringly improbable. What I suppose you can say is that for good or ill — for good and ill — it seems weirdly characteristic of Wolfe. It’s far from his best book, but it is still recognisably his.

Apparently, I'm In A Book

So I wanted to check if an article I wrote for a web site ten years ago was still online. The piece was a profile of Vancouver rock band 54-40, for The Rough Guide to Rock. Which was a sort of early crowd-sourced site, as I recall; fans were encouraged to write in about their favourite bands, with the possibility that accepted articles might see print if the site ever published a book version (there might have been a ten dollar payment or some such involved; at this point, I can't remember). The site doesn't seem to be around, but I guess the book did get published. And I do seem to be on the list of contributors, though Google Books won't let me preview the 54-40 entry.

On another note, I find I've also been cited as a source in Wikipedia for an article I wrote previewing the last Worldcon. Which is surreal in a way I can't quite define.

Readings — The Golden Helix

The Golden Helix

by Theodore Sturgeon

I want to start off by saying that this is a good book. That said, this collection of Sturgeon’s favourites among his short stories draws heavily on tales from the 1950s, and to me largely reads that way. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though it left me personally cold. I find there’s a specific style and sensibility to American writing in the 1950s, especially commercial writing; there’s an odd balance between a desire for directness of address on the one hand and a tendency to conventionalisation on the other. So, for example, you find attempts to write out of a street argot, but the language lacks obscenities and sounds — to my ears — stilted.

More significantly, there’s an attempt, particularly I think in SF of the era, to depict a humanistic world, in which people overcome their differences through communication and learn how practically to live together. It’s liberalism in a very genial, non-political, form; indeed, it’s a liberalism that tends to undermine politics and political viewpoints — if people end up in agreement the more they communicate, then clearly the differences in ideology were never that significant. I find this liberalism difficult to accept, even when it’s well-written (and Sturgeon does write well); I don’t think people are all fundamentally alike, I don’t think disputes can all be solved by communication, and I do think there are problems in the human psyche with the drive for power.

(To give a concrete example of what I mean: One of the stories, “The Skills of Xanadau”, has to do with a paradisiac society on an alien world. Except, to me, it’s an unconvincing paradise. People are unconcerned with privacy, and go around almost naked; so how does that work with the human sex drive? I dunno. The story’s curiously sexless. Or take “And Now the News”, which ends up being driven by a man’s exasperation with the news presenting a constant parade of “damn foolishness,” which includes “people all the time pushing people around” and “Everybody hungry for a fast buck”. To me, calling these things — examples of the will-to-power, if you like — foolish is simply evading them, dismissing them without understanding them. Without understanding why humans act this way, and considering whether they’re a major part of the human condition. It’s the limit of that liberal viewpoint I’m trying to identify.)

I’m painting here with a broad brush, and I don’t want to say that that’s the only thing going on in these stories. As I say, Sturgeon’s technically a good writer. He writes in a range of different styles; probably the best story in the book, “The Man Who Lost the Sea”, plays with point-of-view and creates a memorable, hard voice. His prose is always readable, and set with memorable images. Notably, Sturgeon most often seems a tale-teller in these stories; there aren’t any obvious oral story-telling tricks, but the sense of a narrator’s personality is very strong even in the third-person stories. They’re good pieces. They happen not to touch me. Your mileage may vary.

Readings — Reluctant Voyagers

Reluctant Voyagers

by Élisabeth Vonarburg

translated by Jane Brierley

This is the story of a woman in an alternate-universe Montréal who begins to have strange visions, and embarks on what turns out to be a quest into the north of Québec to uncover the truth behind her world. It’s a book dense with images and speculation, but at the same time presents a fast-paced narrative.

You can look at the book from a number of different angles. As being about identity, for example. Or about the mediation of differing realities. Or about views of deity. Or about gender. Or how these things interrelate. Published in 1995, it’s tempting to view it as a creative response to the political tensions of Québec at the time. You have Separatists (in the English translation; I don’t know what term was used in the original French) who have nothing to do with Québec sovereignty as we know it; you have suspicion of a Canadian government nothing like our Canada’s; you have a tense language situation nothing like our own. The ending of the book has largely to do with the peaceful resolution of a longstanding quarrel between a couple who have certain differences but nevertheless have more in common with each other than with anyone or anything else. So ... there are certain resonances, one might say.

I thought the book was exceptional and rewarding. Vonarburg’s writing is tight, direct, and yet also resonant. If science-fiction can be understood as visionary literature for the modern world, then Reluctant Voyagers is one of the more successful visions I’ve read.

Readings — In Conquest Born

In Conquest Born

by C.S. Friedman

A melodrama, this, a soaring, galactic melodrama that resembles nothing so much as a distillation of the 80s oeuvre of Chris Claremont transposed into a space-opera setting. You’ve got your angry super-competent female lead; your brutal yet not unsympathetic male counterpart; a seemingly-destined love that goes nowhere you’d expect; forced-sounding dialogue; complex pseudo-espionage sub-plots ... even issues with dominance and control. Above all, it’s written in prose that, while effective, recalls the emotionally-overwrought tone of Claremont in his prime; so imagine Claremont writing a Star Trek novel, and you’re halfway there.

It’s not unfun, if you like that sort of thing, but it is a bit wearying. It moves like a shot, and there’s a decent level of invention in it. But it gets a bit wrapped up in the details of its own universe and there I go talking about Claremont again. Well ... for better or worse, it’s unlike X-Men in that the book doesn’t focus on a group, but stays pretty tightly on its two main opposing characters. And having two super-competent characters in opposition to each other, alternately doing each other down, makes for an intriguing twist on standard adventure fare where it’s one hero and perhaps an almost-as-competent villain. So it keeps the attention. What more is there to say? People who like this sort of thing will like it a lot.

Readings — Footfall

Footfall

by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

This is not by any honest reckoning a good book. But that’s almost okay; I’ve never read anything more cheerfully disinterested in being a good book. This is a book that wants to tell a story about humanoid elephants invading the Earth, and by God that’s what you’re going to get, complete with heroic Americans, rugged survivalists, group-thinking commies, and at least one plucky military heroine struggling with her own sexuality. So, you know, it is what it is, and it burbles along with unflagging narrative drive, and it ends when the bad guys are defeated, and not one moment past that.

The characters are bland and undistinguishable. There’s an attempt at providing a cross-section of (American) society reacting to the invasion; now that we’re in the twenty-first century, and all, it’s striking how thoroughly white (and Northern-European white) that cross-section is. The prose isn’t engaging enough to really keep your interest on its own, but Niven and Pournelle are experienced and professional enough that it never really becomes bad enough to drive you away. The plot is sharp, but there’s something of a lack of real science-fictional sense of wonder. Overall, though, the book does what it does. If you’re looking for a pleasant, undemanding tale of alien invasion, and don’t care if you’re reading a good book or not, this is the one for you.

Readings — Objects of Worship

Objects of Worship

by Claude Lalumière

Claude’s a colleague and friend, so of course this review isn’t going to be impartial by any rational standard. I mean, I do think this is an overall excellent collection of stories. I tend to prefer the super-hero stories to the zombie stories, but then that’s my attitude toward stories in general. So make of that what you will.

That being said, there are a couple of observations that occurred to me. One is that the title of the collection is very well-chosen; the stories tend to revolve around beliefs and Gods. If not Gods, then Heroes, super or otherwise. Literally, objects of worship. The point I want to make about that is this: usually, in writing about these subjects, writers tend to delve into myth. Obviously, there’s some of that here — but the stories here are at least as much about ritual. Rituals of worship, of eating, of hunting and loving and death. The myth that provides the text for the ritual act may or may not be present, characters may or may not take on mythic roles (the son succeeding the father, the child who renovates — makes new — the world), but the rite itself seems to me to provide the focus for most of these stories. Which in turn means a concentration on the physical, the visceral, the body, in a way that much myth-centred fiction, especially fantasy fiction, seems to me to avoid.

The second thing, linked to the above, is that most of these stories derive power from a deliberate incompleteness in their form. Of course a story is defined as much by what it leaves out, or leaves for the imagination of the readers, as what it gives explicitly; but I find a recurring structural principle here to be the sense of partial understanding of a text. The stories give us a glimpse of meaning, a hint of a world, a suggestion of background. We have the rite, but maybe not the myth; or we can deduce the myth from the rite, instead (as is more usual in fantasy, I think) of the reverse. This limited-information technique lends itself to horror — the lack of total understanding, the suspension of normative physical laws, the sense of being caught in something, indeed the inchoate sense of something greater than the quotidian which has overwritten reality, a something which defies expression in words and therefore is not put into words. But, crucially, all those things also may apply to the experience of the divine.

So that is what we have here, I think; stories aiming at unmediated connection with the source of myth. ‘Unmediated’ not only because the myth itself is not present, being for us to construct (so the stories force us or elevate us into the position of mythographers, being therefore mythopoeic in the purest sense), but also because of the absence of any personified sense of deity. There’s no actual God or Gods at the core of the fiction; only what you might call the sense of the divine, but what you could also call (if you are of a materialist bent) a perception of the scope of the universe. One could view this as a transcendence of the human; or one could view it as the culmination of the human. Either way, to return to my first point: that sense is the opposite of what is traditionally considered mystical, because it is of the body. It is, literally, sensuous. Overall, then, there’s a sensibility here unlike any others I can think of.

Readings — The Silent City

The Silent City

by Élisabeth Vonarburg

translated by Jane Brierley

A complex and resonant story, the most notable thing, perhaps, about this novel is way it shifts and reinvents itself, becoming a different kind of tale every few chapters. It’s set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic setting, with most of the world regressed to savagery and a few mechanised cities still holding secrets of high technology. The story follows a girl (later woman), Elisa, who may hold the secret for the rejuvenation or re-creation of the human race. Gender and reality dissolve and reconstitute themselves as we follow Elisa over the course of decades.

It’s thought-provoking, and almost too rich to hold in the mind. The translation seems solid to me, though I haven’t seen the French original; at any rate, there weren’t too many Francicisms that I noticed (am I wrong to think that Gallicism would be an inaccurate word when speaking of a Québecois text?). It’s thoughtful, unpredictable, and satisfying. Intriguingly, to me it has the feel of a European sf novel — which I suppose I would identify as a kind of allegorical sense, a story that is conscious of itself as a vehicle for ideas more than as a tale driven by genre or indeed narrative conventions. Which is to say that it’s not plot-driven, even though it contains a complex plot, a rich world, and elements of adventure and exploration. It’s almost too full of matter; and that is always worth reading.

Readings — 26th Annual World's Best SF

26th Annual World’s Best SF

edited by Gardner Dozois

This is a thick book, and a good one. It almost goes without saying that enough science fiction is published each year that any year’s-best collection ought to be at least a solid read, Sturgeon’s Law be damned; Dozois has assembled a book that’s a lot better than solid. He’s also, as per his usual practice, included an extremely comprehensive and useful introdfuction, looking back on the sf/f field as a whole for the year previous, investigating trends and presenting all kinds of solid data — number of magazines, number of books published, you name it.

So, what is there that we can gather trend-wise from this collection of over 30 stories? Where’s the cutting edge of science fiction? In general, the prose is very strong, contrary to general prejudices, and covers a lot of different styles. Characters are front and centre. In terms of content, there seems to be a strong tendency toward multiculturalism, towards sf explorations of different cultures. Or, putting new cultures in new contexts. Space opera of one sort or another is surprisingly common, but not space opera per se — large-scale events, but viewed from other, more marginal perspectives. It’s a strong collection, and one of the best sf anthologies I’ve seen.

Readings — Icarus Descending

Icarus Descending

by Elizabeth Hand

This book is the third in a trilogy, following Winterlong and Aestival Tide. This fact was not mentioned at all in the back cover copy of the edition I bought. As it happened, I’d read Winterlong, but not Aestival Tide; so it’s maybe not surprising as I read it that it seemed to me that I was missing something.

That said, the book struck me as a fair example of Hand’s work, with characteristic virtues and defects. The prose is very strong, and the character work is effective, though the science-fictional aspects of the tale tends to put them so far beyond the real that they become somewhat difficult to identify with. The plot is not terribly well-machined, but moves with a relentless momentum nevertheless. There’s a bleakness and a decadence, lush imagery and a web of references.

It’s a strong book, but does seem to me to depend upon its predecessors. There’s a lot of plot, and the book takes a bit of a while to get its legs under it and the backstory is presented. Not having read the second book — and, frankly, with a fair amount of time having passed since I read the first one — it’s difficult for me to judge how this book caps off the story. I think it’s very strong, but does have the feel of ending a larger tale than is actually bound between its own two covers.

Readings — Quarantine

Quarantine

by Greg Egan

I remember, when I was very young, reading an anthology of Isaac Asimov’s science fictional mysteries; that is, mysteries with a science fictional component. He noted in the introduction that editors used to tell him that it was impossible to write mysteries that were also SF. I found it difficult to believe at the time, but after reading Greg Egan’s Quarantine I have to wonder a bit.

It’s not that Quarantine is a bad book. Far from it. It’s well-written, imaginative, challenging thematically and intellectually — Egan works some solid science and math into the story, and keeps things moving along briskly enough that it never bogs down or comes to feel like a digression. His first-person narrator has enough life to carry the story, and enough cleverness and competence to make an acceptable genre hero.

So: This is a good book, and I recommend it. But. At the start of the novel, a private eye, our main character, is hired for a new and seemingly-mundane case. That’s all right. Only the setting is the late twenty-first century, when forces unknown have isolated human beings from the rest of the universe; a kind of bubble appeared around the solar system some years before. Now ... reading the book, I found myself waiting to see how that bubble would play into the unfolding mystery. As indeed it did; because it had to. Because it was part of the world. Because it was part of the SF given. Because why was it there, if not to be in the story? So the apparent triviality of the mystery was obviously a red herring. You knew, all genre conventions aside, that the private eye was going to stumble on something bigger than he could have imagined; because the story had to be structured in that way, just to accommodate its own setting.

It’s not a critical problem, by any means. But it does point up the difficulties that long-ago editor expressed to Asimov. It's not that your suspension of disbelief is challenged, but your suspension of awareness of conventions; your suspension of foreknowledge, if you like. When two sets of conventions mix, sometimes they do get in each others' way.

Readings — Cities

Cities

edited by Peter Crowther

This is something of an odd collection. The idea seems sound; four fantasy and SF novellas, by four well-known writers (Paul Di Filippo, China Miéville, Michael Moorcock, and Geoff Ryman), on the theme of cities. And certainly the results are never less than interesting. It’s just that the stories don’t really stick to the promised theme.

The first piece, Paul Di Filippo’s “A Year in the Linear City”, is certainly metropolitan enough. It follows a group of bohemians and drug addicts in a vast, perhaps endless, city. Filippo’s satirical, pulpy voice fits well with a story that is, well, pulpy and satiric.

China Miéville’s “The Tain” also works with the theme of cities. More or less. It takes place in a London devastated by a magical apocalypse. But its troubled hero and small group of survivors don’t seem really to have a lot to say to actual urban life. The setting is something that once was a city, in other words, but the environment doesn’t have the cohesive social structure of a real city.

Similarly, Michael Moorcock’s “Firing the Cathedral” is — well, it’s a Jerry Cornelius story. So it works through a kind of dream-logic, with coherence of setting minimal. Nominally it takes place in (a version of) London, but practically, as with Miéville’s piece, it has no real feel for a city’s life.

Geoff Ryman’s “V.A.O.” is a charmingly hard-boiled tale set in a futuristic retirement home. It’s clever, well-written, and seems to have nothing to do with cities at all. It does create the sense of a solidly-constructed world and community, and one based around a science-fictional conceit; but it’s the community of the retirement home, not the community (or communities) of a city.

So the book succeeds in presenting solid, quality fiction; it’s just that the stories don’t have a lot to do with the nominal theme. One wonders what the point was; it feels like something of a missed opportunity. Di Filippo’s story is the only one here that really conveys an urban feel, the only tale to create a living city, with its own personalities and controversies and economies. As I said, odd. Worth reading, though.

Readings — The Adventures of Alyx

The Adventures of Alyx

by Joanna Russ

There’s something understated in this collection of short stories about an adventuring swordswoman and thief. Understated; also thoughtful. Superficially, there’s not much similarity to something like Fritz Leiber’s swashbuckling Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, though Alyx apparently cameos in two of those and vaguely recalls Fafhrd in one of the stories here. The stories are nominally adventure fiction in content, but aren’t structured much like it — the high points seem to come at other points than the action scenes.

In fact, each of the five stories here has its own feel, almost as though each were in its own genre, ranging over both fantasy and science fiction. It’s actually a confutation of genre, changing approach and tone each time out, rather than riffing on a standard concept. The last story, in particular, “The Second Inquisition”, almost entirely discards adventure trappings to tell an affecting SF tale.

The world-building is haphazard, but that’s fine; that’s usually the case in picaresque adventure fantasy, I think. At least, writers like Leiber and Moorcock seem to make up their worlds from story to story, as the individual piece requires; and so it is here. But Russ has a consistent and politicised world-view, with stories shaped by issues of class and gender and power. This seems to make up for a relative lack of imaginative detail, substituting ugly human truths for invention quite effectively.

Russ is known as an early feminist sf writer, and certainly one can see that in these stories. One could argue that there’s a greater interest in these tales with what might be called women’s concerns, and specifically with women relating to other women; the first and last stories both show Alyx in a sort of mentoring role with a younger girl. On the other hand, there’s also strong irony in the handling of domesticity and relationships, which matches the dry tone of the writing overall.

In the end, it’s that laconic style that makes the stories work. Russ is capable of writing lush fantasy scene-setting when she wants, particularly in the first story, but mostly aims for a spare, tight style. It works quite well, and emphasises the untraditional aspects of the stories as a whole.

Readings — The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars

The Forge of God

Anvil of Stars

by Greg Bear

Individually and collectively, I found these books to be quite odd. Superficially, they seem not unusual for science fiction; the first book is about a devastating atack on the Earth by a mysterious alien force, and the second book is about humanity’s revenge. But neither of them quite does what you’d expect them to do.

The reality is, the first book is primarily about the death of the Earth. That’s not really a spoiler; it becomes fairly clear about two-thirds of the way through the novel that the Earth is effectively doomed. The rest of the way Bear follows the characters he’s introduced as they prepare for doomsday, and as a very few lucky souls are saved from planetary disaster. I first read the book as a teenager, around the time it came out twenty years ago. I remember thinking that it was interesting, but didn’t quite work; that it needed to be deeper to be really effective. Coming back to the book, I wondered if that reaction was in part influenced by disappointment that the story didn’t have the usual easy solutions of much genre work. In the end, though, I think my teen self was right on.

I fel bad saying so; there’s considerable ambition in The Forge of God, and Bear tries very hard to give life to a diverse cast of characters. I don’t think it quite comes off, though. The inner life of the characters never really reaches the reader, they don't become quite varied enough as individuals, the internal contradictions of human existence ultimately never quite makes their way free of straight-ahead genre logic. Still, even if the book’s a failed experience, it’s worth reading. There’s a nice parallel, for example, between the death of the planet and the death of a single individual. And Bear’s hard-SF imagination is quite fine. The touch of human life is all that’s lacking, and even that is present enough for most books; except that Bear’s project here seems to me to require exactly what it doesn't have.

Anvil of Stars, the nominal sequel, is intriguing because it’s a completely different book in tone and approach. Here the last children of Earth are guided by one alien species on a kind of search-and-destroy mission against the species that destroyed their old home planet. This turns into a meditation on vengeance, justice, and the passage of time. Also on evolution; travel between the stars means relativistic speeds means that vast amounts of time have passed when the humans catch up with the race that destroyed the Earth (among many other planets). And the humans themselves have been changed by their experiences, by growing up in a radically new environment. That hard-SF imagination is fully on display here, with one fantastic wonder following another.

The second book in some ways is less ambitious than the first, in the sense that Bear’s more fully in his element. One might say that it partially redeems the flaws of the first book, but then one might also say that it’s so far distant from mundane concerns that the first book is at least an attempt at a necessary corrective. Different as the two novels are, they complement each other perfectly. Not only are their subjects different, not only are their approaches different, but the flaws and successes and why those things are flaws and successes are different. They’re two books that are better together than apart, and, in the end, well worth reading.

Readings — A Song For Lya

A Song For Lya

by George R.R. Martin

A collection of Martin’s early short fiction, including the Hugo-winning title novella, the ten stories here range from solid genre work to strong thought-provoking material. None of them seems to me to be at the level of his Song of Ice and Fire series, or of his fiction in the Wild Cards series, but they’re generally entertaining pieces. It’s intriguing to see Martin working in genre-standard forms — short-shorts with twist endings, humans cautiously coming to understand alien worlds, even a ghost story.

In some ways, in fact, the book reads like it could be a collection from the 1950s. That’s not a bad thing; what I mean is that it’s vaguely reminiscent tonally and to some extent structurally of work by writers like Theodore Sturgeon or Alfred Bester. You see some of the heritage of Campbell-era sf mixed with a more humanistic tone; you have square-jawed space heroes, but most often they’re undercut in some way, viewed more cynically. You see plotting that isn’t cliched, but does hew to well-worn traditions and points of view; little sign here of the New Wave of SF.

I don’t know that there really needs to be. In his book Engines of the Night, Barry Malzberg argues passionately that the 50s SF that I’m talking about is an often-overlooked treasure-trove of fiction. If Martin, at the start of his career, was writing out of that tradition, then this book goes some way to support Malzberg’s point. So perhaps it hints at an alternate history for SF, in which the genre didn’t go through the contortions of the New Wave, but evolved at a statelier pace. Consider Martin’s own career in the years since; Wild Cards wasn’t so much later than this book, about ten years or so, but there’s a huge leap in sensibility, more audacious and more radical in its dialogue with the traditional idea of the hero. These stories don’t really suggest that audacity, or the multilayered storytelling of A Song of Ice and Fire, but they’re a solid start for what has turned out to be an excellent career.

Readings — Zoe's Tale

Zoe’s Tale

by John Scalzi

This book, I should note off the top, is an installment in an ongoing series. I haven’t read any of the others. Although not strictly speaking necessary, I can’t help but think familiarity with the preceding books would help a reader immensely. As it is, the book suffers from the odd sense, common in novels in the middle of a series, of excessive backstory — characters begin with too much having happened to them. Zoe, the main character, isn’t only the daughter of retired military officers become the leaders of a new human colony on a far planet; she also has a pair of aliens tagging along with her as part of her extended family, her parents having taught the aliens to be conscious. There’s not much you can do about this sort of thing, I imagine; this is where previous books have left the character, and that’s all there is to that.

Still, there are things that might have been clearer if I understood the background of the world. For some reason, humans are opposed to an alien group called the Conclave; it’s not clear why humans aren’t a part of the Conclave. More gravely, in this universe, sixteen and seventeen-year-olds apparently do not have, think about, or talk about sex. So I have to presume that the book’s aimed at a very young audience. Even so, the character work seems to me extremely shoddy.

Zoe’s too intelligent, too articulate, too self-possessed, above all too self-aware, to be interesting. Or particularly believable. At sixteen, to say “Five is a bad age to lose a mother, and to hope to remember her for who she was” is unlikely; to follow it with “I think it could be a good age to lose yourself, if you’re not careful” isn’t making things better. Sure, there’s the right dollop of melodrama, but there’s also a bit too much awareness of the aging process and how it works. It’s not the right kind of way for a teenager to enunciate melodrama.

Looking at Scalzi’s blog, there’s far too much of a similarity between Zoe’s voice and Scalzi’s own voice. Not only in tone, but in pacing — in the rhythm of sentences and paragraphs. So it’s not surprising that Zoe’s voice doesn’t sound real. I can’t help but compare her to the narrator of Miriam Toews’ A Complicated Kindness, which was a book I didn’t care for at all — but which had exactly the opposite set of problems and virtues. It captured something believable in the voice of its main character, a teen girl from a rural community. The problem there was that no story could be found under the voice, meaning that character could not be built because there were no choices to be made, not even the choice not to make a choice. Here we have the opposite; character work fails because the language is flat and the plot overly-determined. Zoe tells us “I am a daughter and goddess and girl who sometimes just doesn’t know who she is or what she wants,” but we don’t believe her.

I’ve spoken so far about issues of voice, but the actions of both Zoe and her best friend Gretchen are just about as unnaturally self-possessed as their voices. About two-thirds of the way through the book, they set off after some unknown aliens who’ve stabbed Zoe’s mom; the scene that develops turns out to be an opportunity for Zoe to show off her enlightenment, communicating with the hostile natives of the planet. You’d think that would involve overcoming her hatred of the aliens for hurting her mother; actually, she seems to to forget all about her mom, and the several colonists the aliens have killed by that point.

Now, in fairness, I should say that it’s not as though those characters are the only two clever, sarcastic, wise, funny people in the book. In fact, so are Zoe’s parents. And her boyfriend. And her parents’ assistant. And every sympathetic character in the book. The not-sympathetic characters? Not clever, sarcastic, etcetera, etcetera. In fact, they tend to be violent and aggressive. Basically, there are two voices in the book, and each character gets one voice or another. Or is an alien lacking consciousness.

(In at least one case, Magdy, a character starts out aggressive and stupid, and then later becomes clever and sarcastic when he becomes friends with Zoe. But then the plot needs him to be stupid, and he is, and he is no longer clever or sarcastic. You remember those Saturday morning cartoons where one of the gang of plucky kids has to be an ass for no real reason other than to show the audience what not to do? That’s who Magdy is: Eric from Dungeons & Dragons. I suppose you could say Zoe’s telling of her tale naturally places her at the centre of the universe, and that she only allows other characters to be clever insofar as she likes them; but I can’t find anything in the text that supports this idea, and the writing is generally so clunky that this self-aware use of an unreliable narrator seems unlikely. I tend to think in this case that bad writing is just bad writing.)

To return to the comparison to the Miriam Toews book: I thought A Complicated Kindness was just the right sort of terrible to win literary awards; it in fact won the Governor General’s Award and the 2006 Canada Reads contest. Zoe’s Tale, by contrast, is evidently the right sort of terrible to get nominated for a major science-fiction award, last year’s Hugo. Now, Scalzi had a blog post, which appears to not be online but which was reprinted in his collection Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, about his dislike for The Catcher in the Rye and Alienated Teen Literature (his caps) in general. As a contrast, he praises the active characters of Robert Heinlein’s juvenile novels. Personally, I mildly enjoyed Catcher, probably because I didn’t read it in high school, and can’t stand Heinlein’s writing. But granted Scalzi’s book is certainly more in the spirit of Heinlein, it’s still a tremendous failure. Specifically: If you’re going to write a plot-oriented novel, the plot should make sense.

The further the book goes on, the more incoherent it becomes. Zoe’s told that several attacks on her life were made on her old planet, of which she knew nothing; she reacts to this information not at all. Discovering that potentially dangerous animals lurk in the forests of Roanoke, Zoe and her friends decide not to tell anyone (even after somebody gets killed). Zoe’s alien companions tell her that she needs to know how to fight because she’s a very important girl to their whole civilization and enemies would like nothing more to kill her; but a) this was true before she went off to a new planet (you know, when those six assassination attempts were being made), and b) maybe somebody should have thought of this before allowing her to be brought along to a defenceless colony world (seriously, did the Earth diplomats really think having Zoe turn colonist was a great idea?).

Oh, and the aliens are going to teach Zoe to fight despite not actually being remotely humanoid in form. Oh, and also human spies can locate and plant bombs on hundreds of different spaceships and none of them get discovered. Oh, and at the climax of the book the hundreds-of-planets-strong alien commonwealth tries to take the human colony with a hundred soldiers led personally by the chief of a major political faction. Oh, and also at the end a super-evolved alien race decides to make a point by staging a combat of a hundred members of their race in barehanded combat with a hundred members of another alien race, as an ‘entertainment’ (because although they’re highly evolved, apparently they still have a thing for mixed martial arts). Which last sets up an extremely convenient ending to the book, in which a hundred aliens one by one tell Zoe how special she is. Which is, you know, nice for her.

(It’s at this point that the ‘unreliable narrator’ theory is almost irresistable. One imagines Zoe’s Tale as a complete fabrication, a book written by an unremarkable girl so frightened of sex she can’t even mention it, so lacking in allies she must invent a perfect best friend. She lives a life so terrible and dull she must invent a saga that takes her to faraway planets, with parents much more interesting than her own. And the aliens who line up to compliment her in this reading would be a heartbreaking touch — brutalised by abuse or neglect, Zoe compenstates by imagining herself a messiah to a species that only exists in her own imagination, who testify to her own innate greatness; she is a hero in her own mind. From this point of view, the book might actually be touching. The idea’s been done before, but at least it’d explain some of the incoherencies in the novel as it stands. Sadly, I can find no actual textual support for it. All I can say is that Scalzi’s written a book that would actually be better if it were the sort of book he doesn’t like.)

Structurally, the book’s very slow for a plot-oriented adventure. Scalzi opens the book with the colony ship in trouble, then flashes back to give us Zoe’s early life and the backstory of the colony mission. I’ve grown to dislike this sort of thing, which seems to me increasingly common in TV, movies, and (especially) mainstream comics; it seems to me like a cheat, dropping into the story in medias res just to establish some cheap suspense, before then giving the real beginning of the story which happens to be less dramatic and intriguing. Specifically, it seems like a cheat because the uininteresting bits still end up being told; the audience is just given the bait of the really cool bits. That’s a problem here, in that once the faux-beginning is out of the way, nothing particularly intriguing happens for a good long while — over a third of the book. For over a hundred pages we get nothing but Zoe and her friends being clever and sarcastic and ... well, you know. It’s stunningly dull. It could have been dropped very easily, and would not have been missed.

Conversely, the ending makes so sense at all, lurching through a series of anticlimaxes and under-reported battles in which Zoe has no personal interest and risks nothing. The day is saved because one politically important character says so (as opposed to, say, the signing of a treaty binding people to future behaviour). Zoe’s parents, threatened by the possibility of being arrested by authorities, set off for Earth to avoid them (?), to do what I don’t know.

For a story set in the far future, it’s pretty casual about its use of modern culture. It’s nice that Babar survives into the future, but I found it unlikely (... and was the name of sports team, the Slime Molds, a reference to the old computer game Rogue?). More annoying, the teens all have PDAs, which act almost exactly like iPhones. Sometimes Scalzi brings in references from earlier cultures, safely American (the colonists grow maize, of course). Zoe begins the book living on a planet named Huckleberry, later explicitly connected to the eponymous Mr. Finn, despite the fact that it’s largely populated by East Indians. The reference is almost exactly wrong; Tom Sawyer, maybe, with its adventurous kids exploring the place they live, but there’s nothing in this book to compare (in quality or any other way) with Huckleberry Finn, and its long river journey.

Or take another example (some spoilerish stuff follows): the name of the colony world is Roanoke, after the first colony in what is now the USA. The colony famously failed; as we find out, the people who named the book’s colony chose the name as a deliberate reference, since they were setting the colony up for failure. Which means that they sent Zoe, so important to that alien species, to be a part of a colony marked for death. And the authorities who came up with this plan chose a name for the project that would be a red flag for anybody who knew Earth history (do they not have Google in the future?). This is the worst kind of reference to make; it’s a smugly self-aware tip-off meant for clever readers, but which characters in the story should also pick up on. In other words, it erodes one’s suspension of disbelief.

Maybe you’re thinking: so, if these people are colonists ... and there are natives who’re at least semi-intelligent ... hell, they even named themselves after a European colony in North America ... clearly the book deals with issues of colonialism, right? Maybe that’d be why Zoe’s family, the leaders of the expeditions, are the Perrys, as some kind of reference to American exploitation of Japan? Well ... no. No, no thinking of that sort of icky political stuff. Humans plant colonies, humans are right to plant colonies, multi-racial alien commonwealths are evil insofar as they tamper with human Manifest Destiny. It’s the lack of awareness about colonialism that moves the book from “unintelligent” to “distasteful”.

Still, for all the many flaws in the book, what really sinks it is the main character. Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, also nominated for last year’s Hugo, begins with an annoying, unsympathetic teen lead; then subjects him to real hardship, which changes him and makes him into an interesting, motivated character that genuinely compels a reader’s sympathy. Zoe never suffers in any significant way, never grows, and never becomes interesting. Instead, all her tale offers is bad writing. A series of quips and the occasional homily, dialogue like “It’s a small chance. But right now it’s the only one we’ve got,” and an extended turgid eulogy of considerable triteness.

This book is quite, quite terrible.

Readings — Saturn's Children

Saturn’s Children

by Charles Stross

Although not actually formulaic, this book caused me an odd sense of deja vu. Or perhaps meme-temps vu; I could see why and what was happening in each part of the book as I read it, but felt curiously untouched even when abstractly I found myself appreciating the thematic concepts or plot structure. The main character, Freya, is a female robot in a future where humans are extinct and humaniform androids run the solar system; designed for human use, the robots have built their own society in our absence. Freya was originally designed as a sex toy. So were her sisters, derivatives from the same design; some of them, though, upgraded to become secret agents. When Freya finds herself in a threatening situation at the start of the book, she makes a series of choices leading her along the same path, ultimately finding a threat to the whole solar system.

The book’s aware of the gender issues it’s playing with. One of Freya’s first missions is to carry a secret cargo from one planet to another; said cargo is an egg, and the best way for her to transport it is inside her, in a hollow where a human woman would have a womb. It’s a clever notion, but somehow unconvincing; you feel that Stross doesn’t hit the mark he’s aiming for, that his ideas about gender and ideas of life and so on don’t reach the pitch of sophistication he needed in order to make them work (and the occasional Shakespearean reference doesn’t really help).

That absence of maturity is critical: lacking profundity, the gender theme becomes not merely ineffective, but actively troubling. Freya travels by spaceship early on, for example, which buffers her against the rigours of the journey in a very invasive way. Stross is consciously trying to use a quasi-rape scene; but I found his manipulation of this material to lack a real human connection, and thus to be unconvincing — troubling, as I said, in that it took me out of the story, and said very little.

There are a lot of nifty ideas in the book, a lot of imagination, and some clever sense-of-wonder-evoking uses of science. Stross plays about with sf adventure plots easily; but, again, to make the book work on the levels he seems to want it to requires a level of sophistication that just isn’t there. I’d say, for example, that in the use of language the book falls down — the writing’s not bad, but not consistently interesting. I’d also say that there’s a sense that his robots act too much like the humans who built them; their society seems entirely too human.

That’s not to say that Stross hasn’t thought about the robot society. In fact, one of the more engaging aspects of the book is its satire of corporatism. But, as with its take on gender, that satire isn’t sharp enough to really stand out. And the little details of how a society would function on its day-to-day levels given the ability of robots to swap out consciousness, to have bodies not even remotely close to human, is ultimately lacking.

Conversely, his gendered robots are oddly unconvincing in their sexuality. The book is full of weirdly adolescent sentences like: “Jeeves has a small pot-belly, and below that . . . hmm.” This ends a paragraph, and the next goes on to talk about something else entirely; the ‘hmm’ hangs there, a coyness that falls with a clunk. If Stross wanted to bring sex in as a major theme, I can’t help but think being prepared to write about it explicitly would have been an asset. But the problems are really deeper than that. It’s impossible to really work out how the robots are reacting in terms of their sexual emotions. Consistently through the book, one has the feeling that the hardware is in place to mimic human functionality, but the software still has a few bugs in it. The problem is that it’s not clear at all that this is deliberate. It reads too much like a traditional sf flaw — the subordination of human character to big ideas.

Robots are programmed to feel sexual desire, are manipulated by sex and rape; but these things start to seem self-contradictory or under-thought: how does rape affect a being programmed to feel sexual desire? And how does one make the question relevant to human experience? And how is it that robots can be so reliably shaped in certain ways by these things, when humans tend to exhibit a range of responses?

Further, while sex is a major element in the make-up of the robots, gender seems curiously irrelevant. On the one hand, that’s logical; if you have robots built in the shape of a hotel, for example (or, if you prefer, an AI that inhabits a hotel-shaped shell), then the physical differentiation of male and female bodies is essentially insignificant. But then, when that hotel self-identifies as male, the issue of gender re-enters the picture. In theory. In practice, there’s no discussion of the meaning of robot gender — no sexism, no societal roles, no transsexuality, no investigation of what gender does to identity.

So, while Stross has big thematic ideas based on sexuality, identity, and control, the application of them in the story comes off as the application of sf tropes, starting with the sexbot protagonist and moving on up to a plan to conquer the solar system. The book tries to use its sf conceits to explore themes of sex and power, but doesn’t manage the depth it would need to really do something new. And, in the end, the android nature of its protagonist, a key part of its attempt at building a metaphor, causes the enterprise to collapse. You can imagine Saturn’s Children being a good book, if you try. Unfortunately, the reality doesn’t quite pull it off.