It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

(Another review I originally posted on Facebook a couple of years ago.)

Flowers for Algernon (1966, USA) seems to be one of those science fiction novels most people know about, even if they haven’t actually read it. Perhaps because it was adapted into a movie in 1968, Charly. But I suspect it’s more because its central premise is one that resonates – although it hasn’t been used all that often, I think (another example that comes to mind is Thomas M Disch’s Camp Concentration (1968, USA)).

The Algernon of the title is a mouse whose intelligence has been artificially boosted through surgery and drugs. The experimenters get permission to use the same technique on a human being, a man called Charlie Gordon who has an IQ below 70. The experiment is a success and Charlie develops into a genius. Unfortunately, as Charlie soon discovers himself, the effect is not permanent.

The novel is told through Charlie’s journal entries, initially childish and misspelt and ungrammatical, but becoming analytical and introspective and dropping references to the genius-level things Charlie is now capable of doing. The novel is an expansion of a short story, initially published in 1959, but didn’t itself appear until 1966. It’s clearly set in the 1950s – lots of mentions of cafeterias, for example (thankfully no mention of hats) – and while it could at a stretch take place in the present day, at one point genius Charlie visits a home for the mentally impaired, where he also briefly lived before the experiment, and the home has thousands of patients, a number I found somewhat boggling.

I admit the basics of the story are affecting, but its setting, and its sensibilities, reminded me far too much of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951, USA), a book I studied at school and hated. I can see why Flowers for Algernon has such a high profile – it’s one of a handful of US science fiction novels to have been taught in US schools – but it’s still an historical document and I suspect it’s better regarded as that and not as a science fiction novel.


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Scarpetta 26: Livid, Patricia Cornwell

When I read the preceding novel in the Scarpetta series, Autopsy (2021, USA; my review), I hadn’t realised that Cornwell had actually ended the series with book 24, Chaos (2016, USA; my review). It’s not a great leap to imagine the greenlight for a TV series persuaded her to take up the series again, leading to a further four novels – after the one which provides half of the story for the first season of the TV adaptation.

While Livid (2022, USA) does not follow on storywise from Autopsy, there are definite commonalities, outside of the characters and their lives, that is, specifically Scarpetta’s credibility and career being under attack, and the use of speculative technology as a murder weapon. (One other thing that’s also cropped up in the last three books: a situation where Scarpetta ruins her tights and has to remove them, described in detail.)

Livid opens with Scarpetta giving expert testimony in a murder trial which has split the community where it occurred. Two households, both alike in dignity, and all that. Very much star-crossed lovers – but the young woman fell off a boat, the coroner bungled the autopsy (for reasons related to the plot), and the boyfriend was subsequently charged with murder. Scarpetta demonstrates the woman drowned and the injuries to her body were caused by propellers (it was several days before her body was found).

Then the sister of the judge presiding at the trial is found murdered. She was staying at the family home, was in the middle of a divorce from her billionaire partner, and worked in PR for the CIA. Meanwhile, an attack on the president, who was visiting the area, has been narrowly averted. The two incidents are, of course, connected; as is the murder-robbery of a local eatery/shop.

These novels have always been good at the forensics, at the science of determining cause of death, and from that building up a theory of the crime. Unfortunately, in other areas, they’ve gone from bad to worse. The main cast are well-drawn, although Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy, has always been too over-powered to be true. The fetishisation of scientific equipment has turned into one for antique furniture – when Scarpetta finally returns home from the crime scene, the reader is subjected to a piece-by-piece description of the fine art and furniture she and her husband have used to furnish their home.

The writing is definitely much worse than it was before Cornwell took a break from the series – so much so, I thought Autopsy might have been written by a LLM. And the same weird turns of phrase and poorly-constructed sentences are here in Livid; although not, thankfully, the bizarre bowdlerisation. For example,

When possible, we hang out with Mollie, her last name Gunner. (p135)

“We’re not bothering with the garage,” Benton decides, and the former carriage house has wooden doors that have to be swung open manually. (p221)

As Benton and I climb out, Dorothy opens the front door, and she has a fondness for onesies. (p222)

As for the tech… While her current facilities are poorly-equipped – the lab was run down by the previous chief medical examiner, her enemy Elvin Reddy, who is now the health commissioner and her boss – in other areas, Cornwell moves from present-day to science fiction, mostly in relation to the tech used by governments agencies, FBA, CIA Secret Service, and so on. And the murderer. The plot of Autopsy revolved around a commercial space station which was 3D-printing human tissue. No such space station exists, of course. In Livid, the murder weapon is quickly identified as a microwave emitter (which effectively cooks the victim’s brain). Somewhat implausibly, it was designed and built by a group of redneck domestic terrorists, and used by a rogue psychopathic member.

I’ve no idea why Cornwell decided to end the series with book 24, Chaos. But judging by the two novels released since it that I’ve read, Autopsy and now Livid, it was the right decision. There are currently a further three books in the series: Unnatural Death (2023, USA), Identity Unknown (2024, USA) and Sharp Force (2025, USA). I suspect we’ve not seen the last of Scarpetta – although I don’t believe a second season of the TV adaptation has been greenlit yet – but the novels are long past the point of diminishing returns, and are now aggressively tarnishing the reputation of the earlier books in the series.


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Exhalation, Ted Chiang

Chiang is the science fiction short story writer non-genre readers all praise (one of his stories was a question in this week’s University Challenge, for example). Which is not to say lots of genre readers don’t praise him too. And he’s won plenty of genre awards: eleven Hugo nominations, four of them wins; six Nebula nominations, four of them wins; and two BSFA Award wins. If he wrote novels, he’d probably have been nominated for the Clarke Award several times too. The only thing is… I find his fiction a bit, well, boring.

It’s not so obvious when you read his stories in isolation. They’re clearly well-crafted, and that’s what mostly comes across. But in a collection like Exhalation (2019, USA), read one after the other, it soon becomes clear that the way he constructs stories leads to a uniformity of approach which, in spite of the story’s plot or setting or trappings, quickly palls. Take the opening novella, ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’, which I’d previously read as a standalone book published by Subterranean Press. (Technically, it’s a “novelette”, but that’s a fake story-length, invented by genre publishers to justify paying less to writers, and only kept alive by genre awards because it means they can hand out yet more prizes.)

But, ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’. It’s explicitly a told story, narrated by the, er, narrator to the caliph of Baghdad, a story format famously used in 1001 Nights. The narrator explains how he met a man who had built a time-gate, which allows him to step into the future or the past, as long as it’s within the operating lifetime of the gate. The man explains this by telling stories – about other men who have used the gate. The narrator determines to use it himself in order to spend additional time with his wife, who died years before. The story’s time paradoxes are all carefully constructed, but it goes nowhere.

The title story is another case in point. In a world populated by mechanical beings whose metabolisms are powered by gas pressure, the gas being argon, a scientist investigates why clocks seem to be running fast. He more or less dissects his own brain – which is mechanical and pneumatic – and discovers the ambient pressure of argon is dropping, spelling the slow death of his race. The story is a blow-by-blow description of the narrator’s investigation, and completely lacking in drama.

‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’, an actual novella, I also originally read as a standalone book published by Subterranean Press. It also takes a straightforward idea – the creation of artificial life in virtual environments – and then takes the idea past the point where there is anything interesting to say about it. The story follows a pair of “digient” creators who keep their creations “alive” long after the environment in which they existed has been shut down and the company which ran it has folded. There’s something quaint from today’s perspective – the story was originally published in 2010 – in hanging onto old version of software, and of course the tsunami of LLMs sold to the public as AI, has changed the nature of the debate around actual AI, leaving the novella even further behind.

‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Fiction’ is far too long for the story it tells. “Lifeblogging” allows people to record every instant of their day, and then later access those instants. It is the perfect defence against confabulation and misremembering. In the “novelette”, a journalist realises accurate instant access to moments in the past changes human dynamics, which feels somewhat banal given that LLMs now have achieved something similar. This narrative is interspersed with a story from a native village which finds life more difficult after moving from an oral tradition to a written one after a western nation occupies their country.

The novella ‘Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom’ was nominated for both the Nebula and the Hugo in 2019 and 2020. It has a simple premise: a company markets a device which forces the creation of a new reality according to the many worlds hypothesis, people can then message or speak to or video-call themselves in that other reality. Chiang then walks through a couple of scenarios showing where people’s lives are different in each reality. The overall plot is based around a scam run by a buyer and seller of the devices.

I’ll grant ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’ and ‘Exhalation’ are memorable – the premises if not the actual plots. The rest of the collection’s contents are forgettable. Even now, a fortnight after reading the collection, I can’t remember the stories. Chiang’s fiction reads like… code. They’re meticulous workings-out of some elements of a premise, to the point where all possible permutations and ramifications have been documented, by which point the reader no longer cares what the story is actually about.

I bought the signed limited editions of both The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (2007, USA) and The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010, USA) from Subterranean Press when they were published. They’re attractive books. (And it’s a shame Subterranean Press is closing down; it’s an excellent small press.) But the shine rubbed off Chiang’s fiction for me soon after, and there’s nothing in Exhalation which persuades me I was wrong to feel that way.


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Venomous Lumpsucker, Ned Beauman

(A Facebook review)

This won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2023, and throughout much of the award’s history that would be reason enough to read the book. But the shortlists in recent years have been… variable. Some of the judges’ choices have been absolutely baffling. The Last Astronaut (2019, USA)? Sea of Rust (2017, USA)? Never mind. Venomous Lumpsucker (2022, UK) sounded quite good – although having now read it, the marketing around the book didn’t sell it very well.

It’s set later this century, when nations and corporations trade “extinction credits” much as nations and corporations now trade carbon credits. Now, it’s to offset climate change (it’s not working); in the novel, thousands of species are being made extinct as corporations mine further afield for necessary elements and ores. The title refers to a fish which lives in the Baltic. It’s a cleaner fish, and cleaner fish are supposed to be the most intelligent types of fish. The venomous lumpsucker is even more intelligent than other species. It is also endangered.

An Indian corporation is mining the Baltic sea-floor, and has hired Resaint to assess the intelligence of the lumpsuckers, as that affects how many extinction credits they will have to pay for destroying their habitat and wiping them out. Unfortunately, Halyard, an executive with the firm, saw a way to make a quick buck, and sold the credits on the open market, expecting their value to drop so he could short them. The opposite happens: hackers wipe out all the digitised DNA of already-extinct species, which drives the price of credits sky-high. And then it turns out the company has already accidentally obliterated the lumpsuckers.

The novel is Resaint and Halyard chasing about the Baltic, trying to find a living colony of lumpsuckers, and being given a rude awakening into how the “extinction industry” works. Meanwhile, the UK has turned into a western North Korea, an isolated island nation ruled by a kleptocracy, but a powerful billionaire has bought up Cornwall and Devon and is seeding it with extinct species for his own reasons…

The targets of Beauman’s satire are pretty clear: not just the corporations putting profits above climate change, but also Brexit and Elon Musk. The novel is surprisingly funny, and the near-future stuff is inventive. Not everything works – the billionaire’s motives don’t add up, and the super AI reads more like a deus ex machina than actual near-future technology. But a good winner of the Clarke Award, nonetheless.


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Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

This was the debut novel of Kingsley Amis, father of Martin Amis, author of science fiction study New Maps of Hell (1960, UK) and the sf-adjacent The Alteration (1976, UK), and a writer I don’t normally read, even though I do read several post-war British writers… And it turns out I’ve actually read a few novels by Amis previously, including the aforementioned The Alteration, plus The Old Devils (1986, UK) and Jake’s Thing (1978, UK). Lucky Jim (1954, UK) is a novel that has been on my radar for a long time, although I’ve never actively sought it out to read – although I did watch the movie adaptation once.

Anyway, it popped up for 99p on a certain near-monopolistic seller of ebooks, so I clicked on the buy button, and here we are. It is, like many debut novels by British authors from the first half of last century, partly inspired by the author’s own life. And that of Philip Larkin, a friend and mentor, who I always think wrote The Darling Buds of May (1958, UK), turned into an execrable TV series in the early 1990s, but that was by HE Bates, and the name of the family in it was Larkin. Philip Larkin is perhaps best-known these days for the poem ‘This Be the Verse’, which memorably opens with the line, “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”… 

Jim Dixon has just started as a junior lecturer in history at a provincial university. He is fairly sure his department head, Professor Welch, doesn’t like him; and he’s worried his job is not secure. He’s been seeing a fellow lecturer, Margaret, who is a sort of 1950s male-stereotype “neurotic” woman. Things go from bad to worse when Welch’s artist son turns up for a weekend stay, with nubile girlfriend Christine in tow. Dixon is attracted to Christine; Betrand is unhappy about this. Betrand is also an ass (and even an arse). Christine, incidentally, is only eighteen (or perhaps nineteen), and Dixon in his mid-twenties; but her youth is more or less ignored.

There are several comic set-pieces, most of which are amusing. Dixon manages to poison his own prospects, but in the process becomes closer to Christine. The final showdown, so to speak, is a lecture on “Merrie England” given by Dixon to the university and town’s great and good. Unfortunately, for various reasons, Dixon is very drunk. Unfortunately, because Amis put a lot of effort into the run-up to this lecture, it’s not a very funny piece of writing. Amis tries to avoid the specific, but that’s where humour lies.

Happily, Dixon lives up to the book’s title, and gets both a new career and the girl. Neither feel deserved, but that may be the point. After painting academia as populated chiefly by incompetents and martinets, Dixon, who is allegedly neither, eventually has his escape handed to him. There’s a hint of criticism of the snobbery against “provincial” universities – in my day, there was Oxbridge, the red brick universities, and way way down the pecking order, the polytechnics (I went to a polytechnic, although it was a university when I graduated). But expecting a British novel (especially of the first half of the twentieth century) not to feature class and snobbery is like expecting an American novel not to feature chattel slavery.

Lucky Jim was a fun read and, yes, better than the film adaptation. I will not be dashing out to buy more novels by Kingsley Amis, however. I know which post-war British writers I like, and he is not on that list.


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The Nano Flower, Peter F Hamilton

As I was reading The Nano Flower (1995, UK), I kept on thinking it would have been better titled The Gammon Flower (to be honest, I couldn’t understand what “nano” had to do with it, anyway). In the early 1990s, Hamilton was known for being right-wing, back when “right-wing” meant he read the Daily Telegraph or the Daily Express or, like Neal Asher, who was even worse, the Daily Mail, voted Conservative, and revered Margaret Thatcher. And all of that is evident in this novel, the third book of the Mindstar trilogy.

England is recovering from a decade or more of misrule by the “Marxist-Maoist” People’s Socialist Party, but the “New Conservatives” are back in power, and the country is booming. The irony here is that in the real world fourteen years of Conservative governments, and the Conservative-instigated Brexit, completely fucked over the UK. To be fair, even by 1995 it was clear to most people Thatcher had done irreparable damage to the country, although many refused to see it. On the other hand, Hamilton features climate change in The Nano Flower, which for a 1995 novel is a plus in its favour. Sadly, it is perhaps its only plus.

Julia Evans is CEO of Event Horizon, an extremely rich and powerful English – but never British – company, which has helped the country invigorate itself economically and geopolitically. Her husband, Royan, a gifted hacker, has disappeared, and all she has is a bizarre flower, which reached her by a roundabout route, and appears to contain alien DNA. This DNA is linked to a new technology, called “atomic structuring”, which promises to be a real game-changer.

One of Julia’s close friends is Greg Mandel, the protagonist of the earlier two books in the trilogy, an ex-member of the Mindstar Brigade, elite soldiers with mind powers, since turned fruit farmer. The hunt is on: first, for the escort who gave the flower to Julia (referred to throughout the novel as a “whore”, until that becomes too embarrassing for a major character, but the word “escort” is never used); then for missing hubby Royan, who seems to have been behind it all; and finally for the actual alien, which possesses the secret of atomic structuring. Julia is not the only one looking, and one of the others is leaving a trail of dead bodies behind them. In fact, this is a very violent novel, with a plot that’s little more than a string of brutal combat encounters.

I was amused that Peterborough, a town known for precisely nothing, is pretty much the economic centre of England. And that England includes Wales, but not Scotland or Northern Ireland – which would explain the use of England rather than Britain or United Kingdom, except Wales is not English, it’s, er, Welsh. Hamilton also seems to think Greenland is uninhabited, and parts of it are colonised by various nations, although not the US (perhaps that’s explained in earlier novels).

Time has not been kind to the novel’s technology. Everyone carries a “cybofax”, which appears to be pretty much a mobile phone. In fact, much of the tech, while not actually dated, uses out-of-date terms to describe itself. Plus brand names that have not survived, such as Amstrad and Lotus. It makes for a weird disconnect.

Hamilton, of course, went onto much greater success with a fat space opera trilogy, the Night’s Dawn trilogy, which certainly impressed by virtue of its girth if not its contents. Subsequent novels and series have all been space opera in a similar vein. Space opera is, of course, a genre well-suited to right-wing thought, and while I’ve no idea what Hamilton’s politics are these days I suspect they’re not the same as they were in 1995. I read The Nano Flower because it was nominated for the BSFA Award in 1996, but I’m unlikely to explore his oeuvre any further.


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The Change, Kirsten Miller

This was a book that didn’t read as advertised. I’d been expecting something similar to Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016, UK), which I hadn’t much liked (although I did like the TV adaptation). Instead, The Change (2022, USA) proved to be a murder-mystery with a somewhat offbeat team of protagonists, and a serious, if not entirely original, point to make. More urban fantasy vs Epstein than the feminist empowerment fantasy the marketing had suggested.

To be fair, its three protagonists are all in their forties and post-menopausal, and the menopause has, if not gifted them their abilities, at least given them the freedom to use them. Harriet is an ex-ad executive who was shafted by the boys club once too often and develops an affinity for flora. Jo was the manager of a prestigious hotel but was fired after attacking a VIP guest who attempted to rape a member of her staff. She is extremely strong, can generate heat, and is an excellent fighter. Nessa was a nurse, and since her teens has been able to see ghosts.

When the three of them stumble across the body of a murdered young woman, they soon discover she is only one of many disappeared young women with links to a close-by millionaires’ gated community. Using their powers and their contacts – the local police are not interested – they identify the killer, but he dies in a helicopter crash. The disappearances, however, do not stop…

The truth behind the gated community, and the identity of the actual villain, were not hard to figure out, but I did like the central trio. A fun and very feminist urban fantasy/mystery.


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Occupy Me, Tricia Sullivan

Sullivan has long been a writer I wanted to read. I tried one of her novels, Maul (2003, UK), which was shortlisted for the Clarke, BSFA and Tiptree Awards, several years ago, but I remember finding it hard-going. In fact, I’d chosen it as one of twelve books for a reading challenge that year. I reviewed ten of the books, failed to review Maul, and never even read the final book, Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979, USA). (For the record, the other books in the challenge were: Winterstrike (2008, UK), Liz Williams; Zoo City (2010, South Africa), Lauren Beukes; Dark Space (2007, Australia), Marianne de Pierres; City of Pearl (2004, UK), Karen Traviss; The Year of Our War (2004, UK), Steph Swainston; Spin State (2003, USA), Chris Moriarty; Shadow Man (1996, USA), Melissa Scott; China Mountain Zhang (1992, USA), Maureen F McHugh; The Steerswoman (1989, USA), Rosemary Kirstein; and Winterlong (1988, USA), Elizabeth Hand.)

Which brings me to Occupy Me (2016, UK), which was nominated for both the Clarke and BSFA Awards. In it, Sullivan pulls no punches. For the first third of the novel, you’re struggling to figure out what’s going on. The narrator is called Pearl, she is not entirely human, if human at all. She arrived on Earth in an abandoned fridge in a junkyard in New York. She is sort of an angel – at least, she has wings, but they are usually kept hidden in Higher Dimensions (HD). There are other things hidden in HD, including parts of Pearl’s organism? metabolism?, her powers, and her origin. 

She is tricked into flying past a helicopter carrying a billionaire called Austen Stevens, who was responsible for a series of atrocities in an invented African nation while controlling an oil company. He then left the oil company, having embezzled millions, and set up an investment company. Now, he is dying. He has hired a native of that invented nation, the sole survivor of a family who died in the atrocities, who was then educated in the US and qualified as a doctor, to manage his palliative care in his last few months. Because Stevens believes the doctor has a briefcase which contains a spaceship or time-machine or some other science-fictional device which can make the billionaire immortal.

In fact, the briefcase is part of Pearl’s body, stolen from HD. And she wants it back.

To be honest, that plot summary doesn’t do Occupy Me much justice. There are three narratives: Pearl’s, told in the first person; the doctor’s, told in the second person; and one told in the third person, which describes the events leading up to all the main characters meeting on an oil platform in the North Sea, where certain truths about Pearl, the briefcase, the billionaire and the doctor are revealed. The novel is relentless – the narrative’s sheer momentum carries you through passages that you simply don’t have enough information to parse (but those explanations do come later), and sentences that tip from sense to a sort of nonsense that seems entirely in keeping with the narrative voice.

I didn’t think I’d like Occupy Me when I started reading it – to paraphrase a remark I made to a friend a few months ago, I may have a catholic taste in fiction, but I have a protestant ethic to reading. I will finish a book, even if I think I don’t like it or think it’s shit (and yes, that probably explains a lot of the reviews on this blog). But the further I got into Occupy Me, the more fascinating I found it, the more the shape of it became apparent, and the more its arguments began to make a strange kind of sense.

There are novels you’re not sure you like, but you can’t stop thinking about them. Tiptree’s Brightness Falls from the Air (1985, USA; my review here) is one such novel I read in the last twelve months. Occupy Me is another. I’ve come to the conclusion both novels are much much better than I initially thought, but I’m not sure why and I’ve not really convinced myself I’m right. But now I want to read more of Tricia Sullivan’s novels, and perhaps even revisit her Maul. 

Who knows, perhaps I’ll think it’s really good on my second read…


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Deep Black, Miles Cameron

Deep Black (2024, Canada) is the second book in the Arcana Imperii trilogy, following directly on from Artifact Space (2021, Canada; see my review here). In the first book, Marca Nbaro, orphaned daughter of a patrician family, faked her credentials to get a position as a “midder” on the Great Ship Athens. Great Ships are the main trading fleet of the DHC, Directorate of Human Corporations, which rules twenty or thirty worlds, and is instrumental in the trade for “xenoglass” with the Starfish, the only alien race so far encountered by humanity. Living alien race, that is, as there’s evidence of a long-dead alien race on some of the worlds colonised by humans. Nbaro foils an attempt to sabotage Athens, proves to be talented at pretty much everything ship-related, catches the eye of the Master of the ship, and is deemed “lucky” and so a good person to have onboard. The book ends with Athens in a space battle, defending the Starfish against a mysterious alien race in “bubble” ships. Nbaro, natch, manages to capture one of the aliens.

Deep Black opens as Athens cleans up after the battle and sets about trading gold and heavy metals for xenoglass with the Starfish. Nbaro’s boyfriend, the super-brainy dork Dorcas, tries to translate the Starfish language. Meanwhile, from the alien Nbaro captured, they learn the Bubble-ship aliens are called the Hin, are sort of furry octopuses, and are much more like humanity than the Starfish. They have also been enemies for millennia of the Starfish, who they accuse of genocide.

Meanwhile, there is a conspiracy within the DHC which needs to be dealt with. Athens’s AI, Morosini, has determined a cabal, possibly led by an AI, is determined to turn the DHC into a tyranny in order to enrich themselves. They have allied with some independent worlds, and even some Hin. Athens jumps to the next planetary system. There is a big space battle. A missing-presumed-destroyed Great Ship, Dubai, reveals itself – it had been hiding in order to team up with Athens. There’s another big space battle.

And so on…

Deep Black is basically about an aircraft carrier in space. It’s all about living on the Great Ship, launching and flying fighters and pinnaces, training to defend the ship from boarders. And because Nbaro is such an over-powered protagonist, she gets to do everything – and thanks to the handy “neural lace” installed in her head by Morosini, she gets to know everything too.

The level of invention in these two books is amazingly low for a space-based science fiction. Worlds are called New London and New Texas and New India. All the fancy futuristic tech is straight off the shelves at Tropes R Us. Nbaro is every mil sf hero rolled into one, with added extra special self-annotating humility and a mild dose of impostor syndrome. I wrote in my review of the first book that its only redeeming feature was its plotting. Not its plot, which is pretty straightforward and has been much used. Cameron keeps his story flowing by revealing new worldbuilding insights and dramatic scenes at regular intervals. The same is true of Deep Black – but where Artifact Space did some heavy lifting to outline the universe, Deep Black spends all its time on the routine and minutiae of life aboard a Great Ship. And space battles. Lots of space battles.

There’s a third book, which is odd as Deep Black seems to wrap up its story: conspiracy defeated, Nbaro married, Nbaro and husband voted onto the DHC council, friendly relations with both the Hin and the Starfish… I have Whalesong (2025, Canada), so I guess at some point I’ll find out where the story goes next. Can’t say I have especially high hopes, however.


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The Simulacra, Philip K Dick

(Another Facebook review)

I am not, I will happily admit, a fan of Dick’s books, and the only reason I read this one is because it’s in the SF Masterworks series (and the series has way too many books by Dick in it, as well). I find his novels slapdash, the good ideas wasted on haphazard plots and inconsistent settings.

In The Simulacra (1964, USA), The US and Germany have formed the USEA, the president is a simulacrum (although only those in the know, er, know it), and the country is effectively ruled by the First Lady. There are also colonists on Mars, spaceship dealers who sell craft capable of reaching the Red Planet to those wishing to emigrate. The dealers are apparently mobile and unregulated.

The novel opens with all psychotherapists, except one, being banned from practising. And that one is needed to treat a psychokinetic pianist who is a favourite of the First Lady. Meanwhile, the current president, or the der Alte (“the” and “der” are tautologous), is about to be retired and a new one built – but this time by a small firm and not a large German cartel.

There’s also the Sons of Job, which seems to be a neo-nazi popular movement which no one finds offensive, whose leader has access to a time-travel device. As indeed do the upper echelons of the USEA. A handful of ordinary people sort of bounce around the US – well, California and Washington, DC – stumbling into various plans and conspiracies, and so bringing everything crashing down to a somewhat abrupt end.

And that’s it. A pretty fast read, and mildly amusing, but certainly not a Masterwork and not even one of Dick’s better books.