It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


by Leave a comment

A Heritage of Stars, Clifford D Simak

Simak was one of my go-to sf authors in my early teens, and his Time and Again (1951, USA) was a very early favourite novel. But I reread it about twenty years ago, and was not impressed. A Heritage of Stars (1977, USA) I must also have read back in the late 1970s – I used to own a copy, but sold it when I moved north. I had no memory of its plot. I picked up a copy from my local secondhand sf bookshop, mistakenly thinking it was another Simak novel, one which had been nominated for the Hugo. It wasn’t. But I reread it anyway.

It’s 1 500 years after civilisation collapsed – in the US, at least, although like all American science fiction up until the late years of the twentieth century, the USA is assumed to be the whole of the world. Cushing is a young man who works at a university where knowledge is preserved in ancient books. But not knowledge about technology – all of that has been completely removed. He stumbles across some notes from the author of a “history” written some 1 000 earlier (although it’s not explained how the paper lasted so long). The notes mention a legend about the Place of Going to the Stars, so Cushing decides to go looking for it. Along the way, he picks up various strange companions: an old woman with telepathic powers, the last operating robot, an old man who can talk to plants and his weird granddaughter, some shadow-like creatures, and a pattern of lights called the Shivering Snake. They head west into Dakota, searching for Thunder Butte, which they believe is the location of the starport.

They find it, of course – but it is not a starport. They learn it’s the ground station, in effect, for centuries of robotic missions out into the galaxy. But somehow the sole remaining robot (one apparently fell “victim to a strange disease”!) in the facility, called the Ancient and Revered, can no longer access the data collected. Cushing and his companions come up with a plan to fix this – for reasons.

There’s a lot that doesn’t really add up in A Heritage of Stars. Some of it is Simak just churning out the stuff he was good at, but the plot is cobbled together from a handful of dated sf tropes thrown together with little thought. The same is true of the prose – some of the descriptive prose, especially of the landscape, is quite effective, but the rest is sloppy (to be fair, he was 73, when the book was published):

“… He talks obliquely about what he calls a phoenix rising from its ashes, an allusion that escapes us in its entirety.”

“There is no need to beat about the bushes,” said #2. (p167/168)

The aliens don’t understand the first expression but do the second? 

Simak was known for writing bucolic science fiction, and here he has his cake and eats it too: a central science-fictional idea, but he also gets to write about a USA slowly returning to nature. Except. The story is set fifteen centuries after a period when humanity had interstellar travel… yet the abandoned cities and towns Cushing travels through resemble towns and cities of the 1950s and 1970s. He mentions a collapsed water tower. If humanity can go to the stars, surely they’d have a better solution than sticking a tank of water on a high pole? Not to mention the wreckage of the water tower still being recognisable after 1 500 years of decay… by someone who had probably never come across the concept before…

Further, the tribes of barbarians which inhabit the plains and try to prevent Cushing and his companions from reaching Thunder Butte, and then refuse his plan to gain access to the data, are all based on racist depictions of Native Americans.

A Heritage of Stars is typical of a lot of science fiction produced in the US between the Second World War and the New Wave, almost exclusively by white males (although not always, and Arslan (1976, USA) by MJ Engh is a good female example). A handful of science-fictional tropes, mostly so well-known they require little scaffolding, and a complete absence of imagination in world-building. Mostly, the setting is just the US of the writers’ early adulthood with a handful of sf buzzwords, or, in this case, a few years of neglect. This is poor stuff.


by Leave a comment

Schismatrix Plus, Bruce Sterling

(Another review from Facebook.)

I’m pretty sure I read Schismatrix (1985, USA) back in the very early 1990s… but I also have a vague memory of borrowing the novel when staying with a friend on a trip to the UK a couple of years after I’d moved to the Middle East in the mid-1990s. Schismatrix Plus (1996, USA), published a decade after the original novel, includes it and five short stories set in the same universe. I suspect I’d read a couple of the short stories first, and then read the novel when staying with that friend. Whatever the truth of the matter, I’d pretty much no memory of the novel’s actual story when coming to this recent reread.

Certainly, the one big thing I’d forgotten about Schismatrix was that it featured aliens. In the future of the novel, a couple of centuries hence, humanity has colonised the Solar system and those based off Earth have split into two factions – the Shapers, who improve themselves through genetic engineering, and the Mechanists, who use technology and cybernetics. The two factions are in an almost constant state of political and commercial rivalry slash war.

Lindsay is born in an O’Neill cylinder orbiting the moon. Despite being a Mechanist, he’s sent to the Shapers for diplomatic training (and some genetic engineering). Later, he’s exiled from his cislunar republic, and embarks on a career bouncing around the outer Solar system, growing more and more politically powerful, although typically as an eminence grise. He has a rival, Constantine, and the two are at constant, if often hidden, loggerheads. Aliens, the Investors, large dinosaur-like interstellar merchants, arrive, and there is a peace of sorts between Shapers and Mechanists. But it doesn’t last.

Sterling’s future solar system is pretty neat, if a little dated in places, such as the frequent mentions of “tape”, but Lindsay’s and Constantine’s political genius, even the reasons they’re so admired, is never explained and never really convinces. They are what they are because Sterling tells us so. The most interesting character in the book, Kitsune, who later becomes an actual space station, doesn’t appear often enough.

The aliens are dull, and not very original. Although the Swarm in the story titled, er, ‘Swarm’, originally published in F&SF in 1982, is based around a neat idea – indeed, something similar to it was used by Paul McAuley in his debut novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars (1988, UK). Sterling went on to write much better novels than Schismatrix, although it remains popular to this day. It was ahead of its time back in 1985, but sf has moved on a great deal since then. Schismatrix Plus is worth a read, the original novel on its own not so much. 


by Leave a comment

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, and 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 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.)


by 4 Comments

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.


by 1 Comment

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.)


by Leave a comment

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.


by Leave a comment

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.


by Leave a comment

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…


by Leave a comment

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.


by Leave a comment

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.