It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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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.

Version 1.0.0

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.


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The End of Eternity, Isaac Asimov

(Another review from Facebook, posted before I unshuttered this blog.)

I read The End of Eternity (1955, USA) because it was nominated for the Hugo Award in 1956, and I’ve been trying a few of the old Hugo nominees. It’s also one of the few Asimov novels I managed to miss reading back in my very early teens.

Normally, of course, I avoid his books like the plague – I think he was a terrible writer, who managed a couple of ideas per book but everything else was just 1950s USA with a thin wash of paint. He’s the exemplar of Men in Hats sf. Asimov was 35 when The End of Eternity was published, but much of it reads like it was written by a much younger man – even though he didn’t even start it until 1953.

The invention of time travel has led to the creation of Eternity, a series of stations outside of time, with access to every year from their creation to the distant future, which are staffed by an all-male (for reasons that probably were unexceptional in the 1950s) corps who make carefully calculated changes to history in order to prevent future rough patches.

One such staff member, a Technician, Andrew Harlan, born in the 95th Century, despite the resolutely 20th Century US name, falls in love with a young woman from the 575th Century, and jeopardises his career, and Eternity, in order to have a relationship with her. This also includes jeopardising the plan in which he is unwittingly instrumental – sending a technician back to the 24th Century to invent time travel. No time travel, no Eternity, no Andrew Harlan, no nookie.

Everything goes entirely as expected, even the plot twists. The prose is anodyne and the level of invention low – one mission involves sabotaging a clutch on a vehicle in the 223rd century because of course they would still have cars with gearboxes 20,000 years from now; although I was… bemused by “her long legs shimmered in faintly luminescent foamite”, which is a really tone-deaf neologism and likely doesn’t evoke the image Asimov intended.

The End of Eternity lost the Hugo to Heinlein’s Double Star (1955, USA), although Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955, USA) would have been a better winner.


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Mountolive, Lawrence Durrell

Back in the 1990s, I borrowed the omnibus edition of The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960, UK) by Lawrence Durrell from the Daly Community Library, the subscription library I’d joined within six months of arriving in Abu Dhabi. I was aware of the quartet, although I forget where I first came across mention of it. However, for some reason I never got around to starting it, and took it back unread. A few months later, I was in Dubai and I came across the Penguin US boxed paperback editions of all four books in, I think, a book shop in the Dubai Mall. I bought it. I read the books. And was so impressed, I began hunting down everything by Durrell I could find. I now have an extensive collection of first editions and limited edition chapbooks by Durrell, including first editions of his first two novels, Pied Piper of Lovers (1935, UK) and Panic Spring (1937, UK; as by Charles Norden).

I’ve been meaning to reread the Alexandria Quartet for years, but never got around to it until recently. I read Justine (1957, UK) and Balthazar (1958, UK) last year, but was not reviewing the books I read at the time. I was, however, just as taken with the two books as I had been all those years ago – more so, perhaps. It had not struck me before how cleverly plotted the Alexandria Quartet is. Everyone remembers the lush prose, the setting, the cast of expatriates, and the various relationships, especially that of the opening novel between Darley and Justine… but there’s much more to the quartet than initially seems, and it’s in Mountolive (1958, UK) that it comes into focus.

The title character is a member of the Foreign Office, assigned to Egypt, where he makes friends with the Hosnani family. He has an affair with Leila Hosnani, the mother of Nessim and Narouz (Nessim is the husband of Justine). Mountolive is moved on to other postings, gradually rising up the ranks, until he finally returns to Egypt as ambassador, shortly before the events described in Justine and annotated in Balthazar. In the years since, Leila has survived a bout of smallpox and is now disfigured and a complete recluse. 

Meanwhile, Pursewarden has had a disagreement with Maskelyne, the head of intelligence at the embassy, particularly over the role of the Hosnanis in Egyptian, and Middle Eastern, politics. Maskelyne is sent to Palestine. Later, Pursewarden discovers Maskelyne was right, and commits suicide.

Mountolive is the pivot around which the story of the Alexandria Quartet revolves. It is the actions of the Hosnani family, and their secret project, and the clues regarding it uncovered by Darley, Clea and others, which explains the actions of the characters in the preceding two books. It all slots together like a piece of precision engineering. The lush writing is still there, and there are some eye-opening sequences in Mountolive. The commentary on Egyptian politics is all you would expect of a Brit who lived in the country during WWII. There is an invented figure who reads like a parody of the venal, corrupt Middle Eastern politician.

The last time I read the quartet, I seem to remember Mountolive being something of a disappointment after Justine and Balthazar. It’s written in the third-person, unlike the other two, and Mountolive is far more reserved than the rest of the cast. But this time I liked it more, more even than Justine and Balthazar, perhaps because its wider view made Egypt, and especially Alexandria, more of a character than in the earlier novels. They were filtered through Darley’s point-of-view, and here Durrell is writing about Egypt.

One more book to go, Clea (1960, UK), which is set six years after the events of the first three novels. I’m looking forward to rereading it.


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Carry On, Jeeves, PG Wodehouse

The collection Carry On, Jeeves (1925, UK) is the third book in the second volume of the Jeeves Omnibuses, and contains stories published between 1916 and 1925. Some of the plots were later used in novels. I say “plots”, but there’s pretty much just the one Wodehouse uses.

Interestingly, the opening story, ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’, describes Bertie hiring Jeeves. Around half of the stories take place in New York. They all follow the usual pattern: a friend approaches Bertie, or sometimes Jeeves directly, for help with a small problem, usually involving a fiancée or a relative, it all goes horribly wrong, but Jeeves has not only foreseen this, he has carefully engineered events to produce the desired ending. It’s all very clever, but it does wear a bit thin over the course of ten stories. There are some characters familiar from other stories, or novels, some here introduced for the first time.

The stories were mostly originally published in Strand in the UK and the Saturday Evening Post in the US. Some of the contents are rewritten versions of stories that appeared in an earlier collection, My Man Jeeves (1919, UK). So it’s not just plots Wodehouse re-uses, sometimes it’s the stories themselves. Still, they are amusing, and Wodehouse can throw a neat turn of phrase, even if it gets a little formulaic in places. The names here are not as absurd as in later stories, although I expect they would still seem absurd to any reader who is not, well, English. I should probably rephrase that: it’s not that the names do not seem absurd to English readers, they do; it’s just that they also seem entirely plausible for the upper classes.

Wodehouse’s depiction of the upper classes endures for the English. He’s not the only chronicler of the aristocracy’s inbred idiosyncrasies and depredations, and his stories only really hold true for a relatively short period in recent UK history; but then all the stories written about the English aristocracy only really hold true for the time during which the stories take place. In the twenty-first century, they’re an anachronism. Like, well, royalty.


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The Stars Undying, Emery Robin

(This is another review I posted to Facebook before I unshuttered this blog.)

The blurb and publicity for The Stars Undying (2022, USA) make a lot of the fact it’s Cleopatra in Spaaaace. Or rather, Julius Caesar and Cleopatra; followed by Mark Antony and Cleopatra. In a space opera setting. But subtly changed so it’s not obvious– No, of course it’s not subtle. The book makes a nine-course banquet of its inspiration. Which is no bad thing, and not uncommon in science fiction, from Asimov butchering Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1789, UK) and calling it Foundation (1951, USA), Blish doing the same to Spengler with his Cities in Flight (1955-1962, USA; see my review here) quartet, and, more recently and more pertinently, Kate Elliott space-operaficating Alexander the Great in Unconquerable Sun (2020, USA)…

In The Stars Undying, “Alexander the Great” dies but his memories are uploaded into an AI, and that becomes Alekso Undying, a god, and advisor to the rulers, of the people of Szayet, the latest queen of which is AltaGracia (Gracia). Gracia’s sister seized power after the death of their father, but Gracia won it back. With the help of Ceirran, the commander of the Ceiao military, and de facto ruler of the Ceiao empire. The two fall in love. Gracia follows Ceirran back to Ceiao (too many goddamn vowels), where she either charms or disgusts the locals. Because Ceiao is atheist, does not like the concept of Alekso Undying, and is a bit iffy with the idea of Ceirran, Gracia’s lover, controlling everything anyway. Gracia offers Ceirran immortality in the same form as Alekso – an AI running on uploaded memories in a “pearl” (a magical supercomputer substrate type thing), but this eventually proves Ceirran’s undoing. Et tu, Brute, and all that.

Unfortunately, Robin seems to have no sense of scale, and there’s no real sense the story is set in an interstellar empire. Cities are treated as if they’re worlds. Distances are farcical – 24,000 light years to fetch some cheese, as one memorable sentence mentions. Ceirran’s campaign, to conquer a distant world, doesn’t depart until the river that runs by the capital of the Ceiao, also called Ceiao, thaws. They’re going to another planet, what does the local weather matter?

It matters because this is a story told in a limited geographic area – southern Europe and North Africa – and all events and actions are predicated on that. It’s supposed to be a space opera, set in a galaxy, with thousands of planetary systems and worlds. And yet every place mentioned reads like it’s no further away from Rome than southern Spain or northern France.

It doesn’t help that Robin’s inspirations are so thinly-disguised, so it’s ridiculously easy to guess who is who, and what will happen. Admittedly, my knowledge of the period is limited to reading Robert Harris’s excellent trilogy about Cicero (yes, he’s there in The Stars Undying), but even so I had no problem identifying the people involved. From my reading, I also thought Robin’s characterisation of Caesar was far too kind. I know nothing about Cleopatra, and am more than willing to take her, er, take on Cleopatra. But, seriously, Caesar was not a nice guy, and Robin makes him into a romantic hero.

She also gender-flips Mark Antony, which arguably makes him more interesting than his inspiration. But does make her seem a little like, well, Starbuck from BSG (the reboot, of course).

The Stars Undying could have been an interesting space opera, but I think Robin made too many bad creative decisions. The sense of scale makes no sense, and actually detracts from the story. The worldbuilding is good in places, but poor in others (there’s no sense the book’s setting is interstellar). A big thing is made of Gracia lying about how she came to power, but when she reveals the truth it’s frankly hard to care.

An interesting idea, implemented in a way that undermines its source material and its purported setting. I won’t be reading the sequel.


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Time Out of Joint, Philip K Dick

I’ve never really understood why Dick’s novels are held in such high regard. He appears multiple times in the SF Masterworks series, more so than any other author. To me, his novels seem slapdash, written at speed and with very little idea of what they were supposed to be about. Some of his short fiction is excellent: ‘A Little Something for Us Tempunauts’ has been a favourite sf story for many years. But his novels – well, the only reason I’m reading them is because they’re in the SF Masterworks series, and once I’ve read those I’ll likely never go near a novel by him again.

Time Out of Joint (1959, USA) is a Wizard of Oz story, specifically the bit where Dorothy pulls away the curtain and reveals the truth about the Wizard. And, as in that situation, the truth behind the story of Time Out of Joint proves disappointing. Ragle Gumm is a WWII veteran in a small midwest town in the 1950s. Each day, he submits an answer to a newspaper competition, Where Will the Green Man Land Next. He spends the day researching, then fills in his answer on a map grid, and submits it by post. He always wins. He’s become something of a celebrity because of his winning streak.

But something weird is going on in the town. Gumm’s brother-in-law (he lives with his sister, her husband and their son) has a vivid memory of entering the bathroom and pulling a light-cord – but their bathroom has no light-cord. Gumm himself has memories of things that never happened. The son builds a crystal radio set, and they pick up weird conversations. In the Ruins, a derelict section of town, Gumm finds some magazines which feature celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe – they know she’s a film star, but on the other hand they’ve never heard of her.

Gumm’s world is beginning to unravel – a common Dickian trope. He plots an escape, but is brought back with his memory of his escape erased. So he tries a second time, this time with the help of his brother-in-law. They steal one of the trucks that delivers produce to the brother-in-law’s supermarket. And they make it out into the wider world…

It’s not the 1950s, it’s the 1990s. And Earth is at war with a small colony on the Moon. Gumm has a talent for predicting the targets of the nuclear missiles from the Moon. But he had a breakdown, so they created an artificial 1950s town, erased his memory, and use the competition as a cover for his predictions.

And, er, that’s it.

Gumm’s breakdown was triggered by a defection to the Moon’s side and a desire to emigrate. Once he uncovers the truth about himself and the competition, he contacts the “lunatics” in order to join them.

The first half of the book is the sort of stuff Dick does really well. All is not as it seems, but is it the protagonist or the world that is wrong? Dick keeps the details light, and focuses on a handful of characters and locales – which makes you wonder what’s happening in the rest of the town. His 1998 is less convincing. There is a world state called One Happy World, and people talk a particularly tin-eared creole. Time Out of Joint then jumps straight into exposition, and ends on a hopeful note.

Time Out of Joint was No 55 in the original SF Masterworks series, the tenth book of fourteen by Dick in the 73 books of the series. No other author appears as often. Personally, I’d keep No 20 A Scanner Darkly (1977, USA) and No 73 The Man in the High Castle (1962, USA), but ditch the rest. 

But then there are plenty of other books in the original SF Masterworks series I don’t think belong in it.


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A World Out of Time, Larry Niven

I’m still not entirely sure why I’m continuing to read, or reread, Niven’s novels. He was never a favourite of mine when I was reading science fiction back in the early 1980s, although Ringworld (1970, USA) does continue to hold some fascination. A World Out of Time (1976, USA), which is not part of Niven’s Known Space universe, was a reread – at least, I used to own a copy of the book (the 1982 Futura edition with the Peter Andrew Jones cover art) and I’m pretty sure I read it… But reading the book this year, none of it was familiar. And I’m usually pretty good at remembering books I’ve read, no matter how long ago.

Anyway, A World Out of Time is a Larry Niven novel. Corbell is dying of cancer, so he has himself frozen. And wakes in 2190, in the body of another man. Criminals in the worldwide State of 2190 have their personalities wiped. And the personalities of people who had themselves frozen in earlier centuries are then decanted into the criminals’ bodies (the process destroys the frozen body). The State which runs the world is mostly fascist, although Niven wants to present it as near-utopian. But people such as Corbell are considered less than human, and are employed in the sort of professions that would otherwise be occupied by slaves and, well, inmates in present-day US corporate-run prisons.

Corbell seems best-suited to become the pilot of a “rammer”, which is a single-person Bussard ramjet-powered spaceship which carries “biological package probes” used to terraform planets that are almost Earth-like. He is trained in his new role by being injected with RNA (not how it works, but never mind). Eventually, he is launched in his ship on a mission planned to take some 200 years at near lightspeed, returning him to Earth 300 years later. He’d spend most of the trip in cold sleep. But Corbell rebels, and aims his spaceship at the galactic core, intending to return to Earth 70,000 years later (not how it works, but never mind).

He judges it likely the State will still exist 70,000 years in the future, because it is a “water empire” but has no external enemies to bring it down (not how it works, but never mind; in fact, the concept of water empires has long since been debunked). Unfortunately, his watchdog back on Earth manages to upload his personality into the spaceship’s computer and it sabotages Corbell’s plan. So Corbell actually returns to Earth three millions years after he left.

Unsurprisingly, a lot has changed since 2190. Not least of which is that the Sun is now a red giant (which it won’t be three million years from now), and Earth has been moved into orbit about Jupiter. The State has long since vanished – eventually brought low by its own colonies. The secret of immortality was discovered, but only a select few, the Dictator class, were privy to it. But then an alternative process arrested development at the age of eleven, resulting in warring civilisations of immortal Boys and Girls.

On landing on Earth, which is now mostly inhospitable desert, Corbell is taken prisoner by the pilot of a Bussard ramjet spaceship who left centuries after him, and returned millennia before him. She had been kept in a “zero-time prison”, but later escaped. She is now old, but repeatedly mentions how beautiful she used to be (you can probably guess where that leads). She wants the secret of immortality for herself. Corbell escapes, and flees to Antarctica, which is temperate, and where some surviving Boys live in the ruins of one of their cities.

Nothing in A World Out of Time is even remotely believable, even for a science fiction novel. The trip through the galactic core manages to make a hash of everything from cosmology to physics. The Earth of three million years hence is just far too familiar – cars might fly, but cities have subways (and matter transmission booths, huh) and hospitals and police stations. The characterisation of the female antagonist is mostly offensive; Niven struggles to show the Boys are as super-intelligent as he tells us they are. The politics are everything you would expect of a white American male author who lives a life of unearned wealth and privilege.

A World Out of Time is actually a fix-up of three earlier stories, and the State apparently makes an appearance in two later novels, The Integral Trees (1984, USA) and The Smoke Ring (1987, USA).