It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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The Map and the Territory, Michel Houellebecq

I’m a fan of Houellebecq’s fiction, and have been ever since reading Atomised (1998, France) back in 2009. He’s a miserable writer, but I like his commitment to factuality, to the extent he often includes exposition as much as in any science fiction text. But Houellebecq is not above using other literary techniques, and in The Map and the Territory (2010, France) it’s metafiction. Of a sort – Houellebecq himself appears as a character in the novel.

Jed Martin is a struggling artist in Paris. He has the idea of taking tilt-shift photographs of Michelin maps, which brings him fame and a girlfriend, the beautiful Olga, who works for Michelin. When she is transferred to Russia (her homeland), Martin turns to painting portraits of professional people, including his father, most famously the painting ‘Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology’. Martin approaches Houellebecq and asks him to write an accompanying text for an exhibition of the paintings – a real thing which has led to published novels, Paul Park’s All Those Vanished Engines (2014, USA) and Olga Ravn’s The Employees (2018, Denmark), come to mind. This text is not the The Map and the Territory, even if the novel documents Martin’s career and works as reportage.

As payment for the text, Martin paints a portrait of Houellebecq. Martin’s career skyrockets, and his professional portraits all sell for six-figure sums. Some time later, Houellebecq is found murdered in his country cottage. More: his head has been removed and placed on a sofa, and his skin cut into strips and scattered around the living-room. The remaining parts of his body are never found. The police investigation founders. The detective in charge retires. The police learn Houellebecq’s portrait is missing, and is now worth nine million euros. The crime is eventually solved by accident.

The Map and the Territory is more than the above, of course. The plot is just an excuse for Houellebecq to pontificate on a number of different subjects. I actually read this immediately after finishing Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017, USA), and despite the differences in plot and setting, the two books are remarkably similar. They are both didactic, although Robinson discusses history and economics whereas Houellebecq writes about art and commerce. Robinson’s novel is annoyingly chatty, with overly excitable characters; The Map and the Territory’s characters are almost automatons, although extremely self-reflective ones, and Houellebecq has an irritating habit of randomly italicising phrases. Nonetheless, both are excellent books.

Houellebecq is one of those authors whose books I’ll happily read when I come across them, and while I keep up with his career, I don’t buy each new book as it appears – I’m reading The Map and the Territory 16 years after it was published, after all. He’s never less than thought-provoking, although often more in the sense of being deliberately provocative. But he’s always worth reading – whether you agree or not with the premise of the novel you’re reading.

(I should probably mention I welcome comments on my reviews. You don’t have to agree with me – in fact, I know many people don’t.)


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The People of the Wind, Poul Anderson

(Another review which originally appeared only on FB.)

Anderson was not one of those authors I read much back when I was a teenager. Perhaps half a dozen of his best-known works. There were other science fiction authors whose books and stories I much preferred. But he was a popular and well-regarded author in his day and, to be honest, his Terran Empire / Ensign Flandry / Nicholas van Rijn novels always struck me as featuring the sort of world-building I sort of liked… And yet I never made any effort to explore it.

Anyway, The People of the Wind (1973, USA) was nominated for the Hugo in 1974 (but lost out to Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973, Sri Lanka)). It’s set on a world called Avalon, shared by humans and Ythrians, who are winged bird-like humanoid aliens, and which is nominally part of the Ythrian Domain. The Terran Empire decides it wants a nice and less ragged border with the Domain, which makes no sense, and so decides to launch a full-scale attack on the Domain, which makes no sense, in order to take over those Ythrian worlds it feels will make the border look neat and tidy on a map, which makes no sense. Which makes no sense.

Anyway, Avalon is happy being a mixed human/Ythrian world, and has created a culture all its own. It has no intention of being subsumed into the Terran Empire. And it has a plan to defend itself. And when that works, but not enough, it has a last-ditch plan to defeat the forces of the Terran Empire. Which also works. Oops. Spoiler.

Anyway, reading The People of the Wind I think I understand why Anderson’s novels never appealed to me. The descriptive prose is actually not bad, and its presence not all that common in sf novels of the time, but Anderson’s decision to make use of archaic, and often completely made-up English, works against him – “blent”? “fleered”? WTF? Has either been used since Chaucer’s day? It also doesn’t help that Anderson drops lumps of exposition, which read like encyclopaedia passages, into his narrative. There are many ways to deal with exposition, assuming you even believe it’s necessary, but this is surely the most inelegant. No, wait– “As you know…” dialogue is definitely less elegant.

Anyway, I think even the most cynical would agree that exposition, in whatever form, should at least advance the story. Anderson’s doesn’t. It’s thinly-disguised gazetteer information, and might possibly be of relevance should they ever produce a RPG of the universe (which was not a consideration back in 1973).

Anyway, The People of the Wind. The usual bullshit “underdog defeats vastly superior enemy” narrative – which is, when you think about it, somewhat ironic coming from a US author – written in a combination of clumsy infodumps and pseudo-archaic English, and which presents absolutely nothing interesting in terms of insight… was apparently considered notable enough to be shortlisted for the genre’s premier award in the US in 1974.

Anyway, not a reason, I would think, to start reading Poul Anderson. But perhaps a good reason not to read him.


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Who?, Algis Budrys

I think this was a reread but I couldn’t swear to it. I think I’ve seen the film adaptation (some stills from which are on the back cover of the paperback edition I read) but I couldn’t swear to it. I certainly know the basics of the story – and if I didn’t get them from the book or the film, then… who, er, knows?

The basics of Who? (1958, USA) are: an important US scientist is blown up in his laboratory in Europe, the Russians get there first and spirit away the heavily-injured scientist and rebuild him, so to speak – robotic arm, new head which is a featureless ovoid with electronic eyes and mechanical mouth. The US (or rather, the Allied Nations Government) demands him back, the Soviets oblige. But is the scientist they returned really the one who was nearly killed in the explosion? This is important because he was working on “K-Eighty-eight”, some sort of vitally important defence project which is never explained (but, to be honest, never really needs to be, and I suppose we should be grateful Budrys chose not to).

Is robot-head Martino the real Martino? The ANG needs to know before putting him back to work on K-Eighty-eight, which is annoyingly never written as K-88. They somewhat reluctantly decide they cannot confirm his identity, so they let him go home to New York and keep a careful eye on him to see if he behaves as the real Martino would have done.

It occurred to me as I read the novel that it would be relatively straightforward to confirm Martino’s identity, especially in a sf novel set in the 1990s (I think; Martino attends university in the late 1960s), even though written in the 1950s. After all, DNA had been discovered decades before Budrys wrote Who?. Surprisingly, it wasn’t known it could be used to uniquely identify an individual until 1984. It’s so ubiquitous now that feels wrong. But there you go.

So, no face. Fingerprints can be faked. (So can faces, for that matter.) Is metalhead Martino a ringer? Once loose in New York, he behaves exactly as the real Martino would do – which the reader knows thanks to alternating flashback chapters covering Martino’s life. Of course, a well-trained replacement would also behave exactly as the real Martino would do. A real puzzler.

Budrys dangles “he’s a fake!” before the reader, then sets up a plausible fake, but soon lets the cat out of the bag. According to my paperback copy, Who? is “one of the classic giants among science-fiction novels – and among spy thrillers too”, and it was nominated for the Hugo Award. But I think it fails as both. It’s no le Carré, and even when it tries for ambiguity, it bottles it. The world-building is perfunctory and unconvincing – the West has formed the Allied Nations Government (hello! the Treaty of Rome was 1957!); the Russians and Chinese and all those other countries in between are now Soviet. Technology has apparently stagnated, other than the tech required to rebuild Martino. The New York of is-it-really-Martino is pretty much the same as that of the real Martino in his twenties.

I think they call novels like this “high concept” – ie, a neat idea you can encapsulate in a handful of words, but everything else is either slapdash or badly done. Who? is neither good nor interesting- Its conceit is interesting, but nothing else between the covers of the book is.

(At one point, Martino takes his girlfriend to the cinema to see a film. They leave when they reach the point in the movie when they entered. That was how people used to go to the cinema: they’d enter the auditorium, no matter when the film had started, sit down and watch it through to the end, then stay to see the part they’d missed. It was Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960, USA) which changed that. He didn’t want to spoil the surprise of Janet Leigh’s murder, so he insisted people were only allowed to watch the film from the start, and cinemas would lock the auditorium doors to prevent people from entering after the movie had begun. It changed the way people visited the cinema.)


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The Last Song of Penelope, Claire North

The Last Song of Penelope (2024, UK) is the final book in the Songs of Penelope, preceded by Ithaca (2022) and House of Odysseus (2023). This is the story of Penelope, who was left behind to rule Ithaca – for twenty years! – after Odysseus left to fight in the Trojan War. Each book is narrated by a goddess. In The Last Song of Penelope, it is Athena.

Odysseus has finally returned, but in the guise of an old beggar. Penelope is not fooled, although she pretends to be because she understands why he is in disguise. It’s the one hundred suitors – for twenty years, they have feasted in the palace, each one hoping to marry Penelope and so become king of Ithaca. Odysseus cannot defeat them all alone, and even with his son Telemachus he still has too few warriors surviving from his long voyage home. So he murders them in the night, catching them unaware and slaughtering them. What he does not realise is that Penelope and her maids have drugged all the suitors to make it easier.

Then Odysseus, believing the lies of his old nursemaid, executes some of the maids for consorting with the suitors. (They didn’t.) There’s nothing Penelope can do. She’s aware of the importance of the story – that Odysseus is the hero, and she’s merely an adjunct to his tale.

The fathers of two of the dead suitors raise an army and attack the palace. Odysseus, his men, Penelope and her surviving maids, flee, and take up refuge in Odysseus’s father’s farm, which they fortify. The fathers’ army, bolstered by mercenaries, besieges the farm. Penelope is forced to call on her army of women.

Throughout all this, Athena is watching, and influencing events where she can. She muses on her own life, her treatment by her father and siblings, by the fact she is female but has more in common with her brothers. Like Penelope, she knows this is Odysseus’s story, and she wants that story to survive because she is part of it, and that means knowledge of her will also survive.

Retelling Greek myths seems to have been bizarrely popular these last few years. I’ve no idea why – and I don’t recall any similar novels about Roman mythology. I read North’s Song of Penelope because it was by North, not because of its story or setting. Similarly, I’m reading Pat Barker’s Women of Troy trilogy because it’s by Barker. North’s is the more fantastical of the two, but one of the things I like about these stories is how embedded in daily lives are their gods. It impacts everything the Greeks do and think. North adds an extra layer by making her cast aware of story, that their lives are merely part of what will become The Odyssey, centred on Odysseus, a man, and in which the women are merely part of the background – but knowing that, they still impact, and even direct, the narrative.

Read Ithaca, House of Odysseus and The Last Song of Penelope because they are a smart genre-adjacent trilogy about an untold part of The Odyssey, the part about the women who are mentioned only in passing. But also read it because it is by Claire North, who is currently one of the best genre writers currently writing in the UK.


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Bluebeard’s Castle, Anna Biller

(Another review originally posted on Facebook.)

I’m a fan of Biller’s films, so getting hold of her first novel, Bluebeard’s Castle (2023, USA) was a no-brainer. And it’s pretty much everything I would have expected from her, although with some strange narrative choices. It’s also the book that features the word “chiffon” more times than any other book I’ve read.

Judith Moore is a successful writer of pseudonymous Gothic romances. At her sister’s birthday party at a hotel in Cornwall, Judith is approached by a man who claims to be a fan of her fiction. He’s handsome and charismatic, and sweeps Judith off her feet. They marry quickly. He tells her he is the son of the Baron of Hastings, and buys a castle in Sussex. But his business ventures seem to repeatedly fail, so he relies on his wife for money. She, meanwhile, finds herself in thrall to him – entirely changing her wardrobe and appearance to please him, and obeying his every whim in bed…

The plot is a straight re-working of the Bluebeard story, as Judith is gaslit and abused by her husband, attempts several times to break free, but is always drawn back to him. She begins to fear for her sanity, and then for her life. There are lots of references to 1940s and 1950s movies, especially their female stars. The story is set in the UK in the present-day, which I thought an odd choice, given how focused the story is on the aesthetics of the middle of last century. Biller handles her English setting reasonably well, although it does feel at times it owes more to Hollywood movies set in the South of England than it does to present-day Britain. There’s a lot of interiority, and awareness on Judith’s part of her situation and what her husband is doing to her…

It’s a knowing take on the story, rather than a dark post-modern version of it, as perhaps Angela Carter would have written (did she write one? Yes, she did: the title story in her collection The Bloody Chamber (1979, UK)), but seen through a soft-focus lens and tinted by Golden Age Hollywood. Not entirely successful, but an interesting read.


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Private Rites, Julia Armfield

Private Rites (2024, UK) was nominated for the Clarke Award last year, which is why I read it. I generally follow the Clarke, although recent shortlists have been mixed at best: some nominations have been actually quite bad, and this year the award has nominated a book first published six years ago. Armfield was not a name with which I was familiar, but when I looked her up, her previous novel, Our Wives Under the Sea (2022, UK), rang a dim and distant bell. Perhaps someone recommended it or something. Having now read Private Rites, I’m unlikely to seek it out.

Private Rites is, Armfield has said, basically King Lear’s three daughters in a post climate-crash UK. And, er, that’s it. There’s no plot, as such. Irene, Isla and Agnes have as little to with each other as they can, and when they do meet, they bicker. Then their father, a renowned architect dies, and they bicker some more. And argue.

Meanwhile, it rains all the time, and the unnamed English city in which the three live is completely flooded. That’s the extent of the science fiction in Private Rites. It is neither explained, nor solved – the ending might be interpreted as a solution, but if so, it’s pure fantasy, not science fiction.

Readers are going to come to this book because of the writing, not the lack of plot, poorly-grounded setting or well-drawn characters. I value good writing. But I also think less is more, when it comes to literary fiction writing. Armfield shows some nice insights and turns of phrases, but all too often it veers into creative writing degree prose. She’s not a genre writer, but I feel it’s a problem in both literary and genre fiction. Creative writing degrees and MFAs on the one hand, genre residential writers’ workshops on the other – neither claim to be prescriptive, but they’re slowly imposing a prose style on authors. It’s the singular voices which are often the most memorable, and are certainly the most innovative. That may be why translated non-Anglophone fiction is becoming increasingly popular in both mainstream and genre circles – it doesn’t follow the same “rules” as graduates of MFAs and writing workshops.

Private Rites was a slog in places, and the ending was not really worth the investment in reading it. The Clarke that year was won by Annie Bot (2024, USA), which I felt laboured its point to the extent it undercut its argument. The Ministry of Time (2024, UK; my review here) and Extremophile (2024, UK; my review here) were enjoyable enough, but I wasn’t blown away (Service Model (2024, UK) and Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock (2024, UK) I have yet to read). It felt like there were better books they could have chosen. So too this year (mostly). No Slow Gods (2025, UK; my review here)? One of the best UK writers currently writing in genre, and she’s ignored by both the BSFA and Clarke Awards. The Clarke, a juried award, is supposed to be an antidote to the popular vote BSFA, which is like all other genre awards of its type, increasingly dominated by tribalism. In recent years, however, it sometimes seems like the Clarke is nominating books based on how many copies it’s sold, and not its science-fictional or literary credentials…


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Scarpetta 25: Autopsy, Patricia Cornwell

I’ve been reading the Scarpetta books for a number of years. I read the first seven back in the 1990s, but started the series again a few years ago – and have been working my way through them ever since. I was looking forward to the television adaptation, which had been promised for many years, and when it was finally made, and broadcast this year, I watched it… Despite the stellar cast, there were changes I’d not expected. It was also based on the plot of this book, Autopsy (2021, USA), the series’ twenty-fifth novel, which I hadn’t read at the time.

Now I have. The most obvious changes in the TV series were: Pete Marino is married to Scarpetta’s sister, Dorothy, and niece Lucy’s wife and adopted son are both dead. None of which was the case in the preceding book, Chaos (2016, USA; see my review here).

However, Marino is indeed married to Dorothy in Autopsy, which appeared five years after Chaos and, more pertinently, after the pandemic. Lucy’s family apparently died of covid while living in London (Cornwell outright lies here and implies the UK fatalities were much greater than those of the US; in fact, far more people, and more people per capita, died in the US). The romance between Marino and Dorothy was hinted at in Chaos, and before that in Flesh and Blood (2014, USA) and Depraved Heart (2015, USA), but there is no good reason I could discern why Janet and Desi should be killed off. (Or for Janet’s change of nationality to British, when in the books she is ex-FBI and first met Lucy at Quantico.)

So, it seems the TV adaptation is mostly quite faithful (and yes, an AI Janet does feature in the novel). In terms of plot… Autopsy opens with Scarpetta back in Virginia and once again the Commonwealth Chief Medical Examiner, taking over from the incompetent and manipulative Elvin Reddy, who is apparently an old adversary of Scarpetta’s, although he wasn’t mentioned in earlier novels (as far as I remember). She is called to the house of a young woman who has disappeared, and who might be the victim in an ongoing murder investigation. A body was discovered beside some railway tracks in a park, and its hands had been removed. They quickly confirm the missing woman is the murder victim. She worked for a laboratory researching 3D-printed organs, and they discover she was a spy – corporate espionage, or for the Russians, they don’t know. She has an accomplice, who is aboard an orbiting laboratory operated by the same company. Except he’s gone rogue, murdered the other two astronauts, and fled in the Soyuz spacecraft.

Scarpetta is asked to help understand what happened in the orbital laboratory (it doesn’t crash on Earth, as it does in the TV series, because, well, things falling from orbit rarely reach the ground). She doesn’t think the woman’s murder is related to the spying, but she does think an earlier death in the same park, ruled accidental by Reddy, was murder – and by the same killer. Meanwhile, she has to contend with Reddy’s cronies making her job difficult, her sister and Marino staying with her (although they don’t bicker as much as they do in the TV adaptation), and Lucy’s grief. 

Then Reddy fires her. And a man tries to break into her house…

Everything is wrapped up in a couple of pages of epilogue. Scarpetta gets her job back. Lucy kills the intruder, who turns out to be an odd-job man Scarpetta had used several times. He also murdered the two women, and had been a serial rapist for years. WTF. “By the way, here’s how the story ended” is a piss-poor way to finish a novel.

Given the changes to Scarpetta’s situation, I have to wonder if the novel was written with the TV series in mind – ie, Marino’s marriage, Lucy’s loss, were added to the book because the TV adaptation needed them to create home drama. Scarpetta’s move back to her old job as Chief Medical Examiner in Virginia was because in the narrative set in the past, and based on the first Scarpetta novel, Postmortem (1990, USA), she held that position – and so was dictated by the structure of the TV series. The book was published in 2021, and the series was greenlit that same year, so it’s certainly possible.

Despite all of the above, the strangest thing about the book is that it appears to have been written by AI. Things were different back in 2021, but GPT-3 had been around for a year, and while less sophisticated than current LLMs, it’s not inconceivable Cornwell could have used it. It would certainly explain the bizarre writing. Cornwell is hardly a prose stylist, but in Autopsy the writing is actually terrible. Sentences have weird hanging adverbial clauses. Dependent clauses lack verbs. The relative pronoun “which” is conspicuous by its absence, especially in sentences which would be grammatically correct if it had been used. The same bizarre syntax also appears occasionally in dialogue, in actual speech spoken by characters. And, most bafflingly, the swearwords have all been bowdlerised – eg, “effing”, “cluster-eff”, “flipping”. The bowdlerisation is even annotated:

“They can screw themselves.” Only Marino doesn’t say screw. (p 272)

WTAF. 

The last few Scarpetta novels have been frustrating reads, chiefly because plot reasons require Scarpetta, and hence the reader, be kept in dark for much of the book. But I quite liked the microscopic focus on the lead character in Chaos. Autopsy, on the other hand, is easily one of the worst books in the series so far, if not the actual worst. Appallingly written, poorly plotted, and with changes to Scarpetta’s family life that make no sense, unless introduced with the TV series in mind (and even then baffling). I hope the remaining four novels in the series are not the same.


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Tales of Known Space, Larry Niven

(This is another review first posted on Facebook.)

I used to own a copy of this, so I know I must have read it sometime in the 1980s, probably the first half of the decade, and no doubt prompted by having read Niven’s Protector (1973, USA) and Ringworld (1970, USA), both of which I remembered reasonably fondly until rereading them this century. Which doesn’t exactly explain why I bothered to reread Tales of Known Space (1975, USA), given I’ve known for a long time what Niven, er, and his fiction, is like.

On the other hand, I like future histories, and Niven’s is a good example. It wasn’t until he was a few years into his career that he decided to fit his stories into a single timeline, from 1975 through to 3100 (at the time of Tales of Known Space’s publication in 1975). As a result, there are inconsistencies, such as the planet Mount Lookitthat, the setting of the novel A Gift from Earth (1968, USA), being occasionally referred to as Plateau.

Tales of Known Space is a collection of stories, set during the centuries covered by Niven’s future history (and also handily shown in a timeline chart after the table of contents). And speaking of contents… I must have purged some of these stories from my memory because, well, wow… One is the most homophobic genre story it has ever been my misfortune to read: first settlement on Mars is all male, some of the men “turn queer”, one is beaten to death when he flirts with a homophobe, homophobe flees in a Mars buggy, but does not survive, leader of mission writes report explaining why all-male colonies are a Bad Thing.

It doesn’t help that Niven’s early stories get the planets of the Solar System entirely wrong – Mercury does not rotate, Mars does not have a nitrous oxide atmosphere (the secretive Martians are forgivable, but not the noxious atmosphere). Later stories are set after humanity has encountered several alien races, but even then relations between the races are implausibly easy. The Kzin, Niven’s most popular creation – giant alien warrior cats!, go figure – may have been hostile from the start, but they’re so easily defeated, despite their advanced technology, it makes them a joke.

The stories generally make a lot of their scientific credibility, throwing out terms and concepts that would not look out of place in a hard sf story, but even back in the 1960s and 1970s Niven would have got more right if he’d actually bothered to do any real research. I think he tried, I think he didn’t understand everything he researched, and I think he didn’t let his imperfect understanding of his research get in the way of drama – and today, in the 21st century, we would hold writers to a much high standard because research has become so much easier (right-wing misinformation and lies notwithstanding).

I quite like the idea of Niven’s future history, even if the individual instalments are actually pretty bad. Niven has never been a great writer – he’s a fan of “transparent prose”, he may even have originated the phrase – and the stories in this collection vary from bad to mediocre. It includes a single Beowulf Shaeffer story, and yet hints at many much more interesting ones. The whole organ bank concept is offensive, and ‘Intent to Deceive’ reads like a right-wing wank fantasy. ‘Cloak of Anarchy’ at least reads like a sensible commentary on libertarianism, but calls it anarchy…

Even as an historical document, this collection is best avoided. Reading it will add nothing to a reader’s appreciation of the history of the genre. It should certainly never be read for enjoyment in 2024. I believe Larry Niven is still in print. I have no idea why.


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Up the Line, Robert Silverberg

I’ve never been a fan of Silverberg’s work. I liked the original Majipoor trilogy but, to be honest, it felt like he was ripping off something else. His other books I’ve read – perhaps twenty or so in total, out of over one hundred – I thought mostly unremarkable. Up the Line (1969, USA), however, is not unremarkable: it was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and it is remarkably horrible.

Jud Elliott is a disaffected young man in 2059. On the recommendation of a friend, he joins the Time Service as a Time Courier. Historians and tourists routinely visit the past, and are accompanied by a tour guide, or courier. Elliott specialises in Byzantium, from the ninth to fifteenth centuries. He takes people on tours, he learns his trade… and the reader learns all about the history of Byzantium..

There are no women in this novel, there are only objects of varying degrees of beauty and/or desire. Silverberg tries desperately hard to be hip, a beatnik, but it’s too studied, and repeated mentions of gay men, or coloured men, does not make this novel either liberal or progressive. What truly makes the book nasty, however, is the tacit approval given to paedophilia. Not only does Elliott at one point lust over a prepubescent girl – or rather, prepubescent girls in general – but the actual plot centres on an unapologetic paedophile who absconds from his time tour, rapes a twelve-year-old girl, subsequently marries her, and so causes Elliott never to have existed.

As a bonus, Elliott meets one of his ancestors and has an affair with her. She’s seventeen.

Silverberg has clearly put a lot of effort into his Byzantium research – I seem to recall him using the city in other works; in fact, I think it’s an interest of his. But I’m not sure why he’s trying to be so hip – and failing, this is no Delany – given sf fans were hardly counterculture. I’m tempted to think he was influenced by John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968, UK) or The Jagged Orbit (1969, UK), but while Silverberg was notoriously prolific, even he wasn’t that fast.

On the other hand, it’s not worth putting too much effort into untangling all of Elliott’s back-and-forths in time. Silverberg introduces a series of Paradoxes in order to make sense of it, but it doesn’t really add up, and I suspect it isn’t really supposed to – Silverberg was clearly more interested in Byzantium than in plot logic.

Up the Line really should not have made the Hugo or Nebula shortlists. The Breendoggle was five years earlier, so you’d think paedophilia might be a sensitive subject in US science fiction fandom. Apparently not. Although given Operation Yew Tree in the UK, and now the Epstein Files in the US, perhaps there’s nothing unusual about that after all…


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Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold

I’m reading this series in order of internal chronology rather than publication order, which no doubt affects my responses to the books. Although the seventh book published in the Vorkosigan series, Barryar (1991, USA) follows on directly from Bujold’s debut novel, Shards of Honor (1986, USA). I read both in the omnibus Cordelia’s Honor (1996, USA; it also includes a short story, ‘Aftermath’). I was impressed Bujold had picked up a narrative from five years previously and continued it so seamlessly… until I read the afterword in Cordelia’s Honor and learnt Shards of Honor and Barrayar were originally written as a single novel, and then split. And now I wonder why it took five years for the second part to appear…

In Shards of Honor, Cordelia Naismith, a Survey captain from Beta Colony, encounters Aral Vorkosigan, a military officer and aristocrat from the Russian-derived martial world of Barrayar. His reputation is not good but, of course, (mostly) undeserved. After various ups and downs – war, invasion, torture, that sort of thing – they marry. Barrayar opens with Cordelia trying to adjust to life on the titular planet with her new husband.

Vorkosigan retired from his military career but is asked to become regent for the five-year-old grandson of the emperor when the mortally-ill emperor dies. He accepts. He is not a popular choice. To make matters worse, Cordelia is pregnant but the foetus is damaged by an assassination attempt using a poisonous gas grenade. She persuades the Barrayans to implant the foetus into a Betan “uterine replicator” in order to better manage its development, but this causes a rift with her father-in-law.

Civil war kicks off, one faction supporting Vorkosigan, the other supposedly acting in the interests of the dead emperor’s daughter. The latter get hold of the uterine replicator, and Cordelia sets off on a rescue mission, without her husband’s knowledge. She succeeds, partly through luck, but mostly because she does not behave as Barrayarans expect women to behave – something she demonstrates throughout the novel. Which brings to mind, yes, the shopping scene…

I’m almost one hundred percent sure I’ve never read Barrayar before, but the shopping scene felt like I was rereading it. Perhaps an excerpt appeared in an anthology or magazine. All the same, it was fun.

There’s a big difference between Shards of Honor and Barrayar, even if there’s almost none in story terms. The latter is so much more polished: the backgrounds, especially Barrayar, are better grounded, and while you have to wonder why it took an additional five years for Barrayar to see print, it was clearly worth the wait. The story focus in Barrayar is also much clearer. While it’s effectively an origin story for Miles Vorkosigan, chief protagonist of much of the series, the novel is about Barrayar, about a woman who not only does not fit the mould when it comes to women on Barrayar but also breaks it wide open, and about her response to her new life and the trials it throws at her. It’s about women in Bujold’s space opera universe.

Of course, both books were originally published in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and space opera – US space opera – has changed a lot since then. At that time, New British Space Opera was still, well, British, and had not been appropriated and distorted by US science fiction. The Vorkosigan series, for much of its length, was in a mode of US science fiction that was often identified as either space opera or military sf, as the two subgenres were often indistinguishable in US science fictions. Barrayar does in fact read like military sf – much of the plot is set during a civil war, after all – but it’s only one instalment in a series containing over twenty books. And an early instalment, too. Certainly, Barrayar strengthens my resolve to read the full series, when the two books preceding it did not.