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Books you must read: The Bender, Paul Scott

There are comic novels and there are novels of wit. Some novels evince humour by describing ridiculous characters in ridiculous situations; others prefer to amuse through their use of language. Paul Scott’s The Bender (1963) is a novel of wit and its characters, while amusingly drawn, are not comic caricatures. There is also much in the novel that points to Scott’s Raj Quartet, a use of language, voice and narrative that presages The Jewel In The Crown and its sequels.

George Lisle-Spruce is a wastrel. A relative left him a legacy of £10,000, which he cannot touch. But it does provide him with an annual income of £400. Initially, this was more than enough to live on, but by the beginning of the 1960s, George is finding it increasingly hard to make ends meet on his monthly allowance. And now his brother, a successful accountant, wants repaying the £200 he lent George years before. George spent the War in Cairo, and was never in combat. Since then he’s never held down a proper job. He has some charm, but never really made the most of it. And this is despite the best efforts of his Aunt Clara – who is not really his aunt, but whose husband it was who left George his legacy.

The Bender is told from the points of view of George, Aunt Clara, a real aunt who is on her death-bed, brother Tim, and youngest brother Guy (an Angry Young Man, with a play that has been broadcast on television to critical acclaim). The repayment of Tim’s loan precipitates a crisis in George’s life – though it is exacerbated by Clara’s renewed meddling, Tim’s impending change of career, and Guy’s success.

The writing in The Bender is a delight. It’s witty, the voices are handled superbly – though, one, Guy’s hippie chick girlfriend, feels somewhat forced – and a section two-thirds of the way through astonishes with its seamless post-modern blending of narratives and voices. The novel is also a pitch-perfect evocation of time and place, and feels throughout like a 1960s British black and white film starring Dirk Bogarde. Aunt Clara is perhaps the most amusing character – a forceful and opinionated dowager, with old school views about class and ability, views she has a habit of setting forth on tape:

…the Grundig’s microphone in one hand and, in the other, one of the Floris chocolates for which her lunchtime liquid slimming diet always gave her an appetite…

The Raj Quartet are novels of consequence. While The Bender may be somewhat inconsequential, it reaffirms my admiration of Scott’s writing. Fortunately, I have many more of his books to read. Recommended.


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Women in sf reading challenge #10: City of Pearl, Karen Traviss

To be honest, I had not really expected to enjoy City of Pearl by Karen Traviss. From what I’d heard about the novel, it seemed the sort of science fiction I don’t especially like. And Traviss is known as an especially mercenary writer. No matter how talented she may be, such an attitude is unlikely to create works I would find appealing. Nonetheless, I picked the book as one of my dozen for my 2011 reading challenge, and though I may have slipped a little towards the end of last year, I had every intention of reading and blogging about the twelve listed novels.

And so I came to City of Pearl with, I admit, a few preconceptions. Some of them were indeed met, but I was surprised to find myself enjoying the novel more than I had expected.

Shan Frankland is a hard-as-nails police officer in a near-future in which corporations dominate ineffectual governments. All crops are genetically-engineered and trademark, such that no foodstuff can be grown without paying a license fee to a company. When Frankland is offered command of a mission to Earth’s only interstellar colony on Cavanagh’s Star’s second planet, she accepts the mission. But she doesn’t know exactly why, because whatever was told to her to persuade her to accept was part of a Suppressed Briefing, which only releases information into her memory in response to certain triggers.

The mission arrives at Cavanagh’s Star 2 and finds a situation it had not expected: a small low-tech human colony with an extremely small environmental footprint living under the aegis of an alien race, the wess’har. The aliens are actually native to Cavanagh’s Star 2’s twin planet, and are on Cavanagh’s Star 2 to protect that planet’s native squid-like aquatic race, the bezeri. Who had been almost polluted to extinction by a third alien race, the isenj, who had colonised the world. The wess’har wiped out the isenj colony, but now allow the humans to stay on sufferance. Aras is the wess’har responsible for the planet and its ecosystem, and he has been given this role because he has been infected by a native parasite, the c’naatat, which has made him immortal and almost impossible to kill.

Though Frankland tries to keep a tight leash on the scientific team she has brought to Cavanagh’s Star 2, they cavil at her restrictions and continually seek to subvert them. This makes tensions high within Frankland’s mission, a situation not helped by her high-handed and take-no-prisoners attitude. When a second starship from Earth turns up, having departed fifty years after the first, it seems Earth has formed an alliance with the idenj, who determined to take back Cavanagh’s Star 2. During a skirmish with the isenj, Frankland is mortally wounded, but Aras, who has come to value her, infects her with c’naatat. Now she can never return to Earth.

I liked Frankland, and the best parts of City of Pearl were the parts which focused on her. Unfortunately, the aliens are all single-note: the wess’har are literal and unbending, the bezeri are enigmatic, and the isenj are numerous. The scientists are all characterised as venal and selfish, and only the military characters appear to possess any redeeming virtues. The human colonists on Cavanagh’s Star 2 are treated like simple back-to-the-land peasants, and the novel makes little or no judgment on them or their way of life. A lot of City of Pearl is in Aras’ point of view, and he’s neither convincingly alien nor especially interesting.

There’s a fixity of views throughout City of Pearl which I found a little off-putting. The wess’har are very literal and do not compromise. Frankland is very much convinced her own opinion is always correct. The entire cast – with the exception of those Traviss villanises – are straight from the US mode of science fiction, with its Rational Competent Men. Though many in City of Pearl are actually women. Or alien. There’s no subtlety or complexity in the novel. The scientists are wrong, the isenj are wrong. And that’s it. I can see how such binary views might appeal to some readers, especially genre readers, since populist genre fiction seems incapable of psychological depth.

There are apparently a further five Wess’har books, but I’ll not be bothering to read them. While City of Pearl managed an interesting meld of near-future sf and space opera, it was too much like military sf in tone to really appeal to me. Traviss’s prose is readable and well-paced, though to be honest I kept reading more because I liked the character of Frankland than anything else.

Oh, and the titular city is the wess’har capital on their world, and it makes perhaps a half dozen appearances in the novel. Frankland visits it toward the end in order to seek permission from the wess’har elders to stay with Aras. It’s a somewhat peripheral element of the story with which to title it.


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A fine fantasy

I remember reading Carolyn Ives Gilman’s Halfway Human back in 1998, thinking it very good, and then being somewhat disappointed when no further novels appeared from her. I later discovered she’d had a number of short stories published – chiefly in F&SF – and even a novella, ‘Arkfall’ (now available from Phoenix Pick here). There are also a pair of chapbooks from Aqueduct Press.

Last year, I learnt Gilman would have a new fantasy novel published by ChiZine Publications. I am not, it has to be said, a huge fan of fantasy. Too many strike me as too similar. Ripping off a different culture for the background, or implementing a new magic system, is not enough. But the description of Isles of the Forsaken seemed to me it might appeal. So I pre-ordered a copy.

I have now read it. And I was not disappointed.

The Inning Empire has just won a years-long war, and has decided to turn its attention to its colonial possessions, the Forsaken Isles. The empire is a lexarchy, which means it is ruled entirely by its Courts and legal system. Despite this, it’s not especially enlightened – in fact, the Innings as a race are arrogant and racist, and their colonial policies reflect this.

Harg Ismol is an Adaina, the lesser of the two races which inhabit the Forsaken Isles. The others, the Torna, are the dominant race and administer the islands in the name of the Innings. Also relevant are the Lashnura, or Grey Folk, semi-magical healers who can take away the pain and injuries of the islanders. The Innings do not understand this relationship, imagining the voluntary empathic bondage the Grey Folk undergo is little more than slavery. Harg had a good war, and rose to the rank of captain, the only Adaina to do so. Though he is offered the command of the Native Navy by Admiral Corbin Talley, head of the Inning Navy, he turns it down and returns home to Yora, an island in the South Chain of the Forsakens.

At which point, things start to go horribly wrong.

Isles of the Forsaken moves smoothly from a story about a disaffected hero returning home from war into a story about an archipelago-wide rebellion. This is driven by veterans having seen the rest of the empire, and by the Innings’ desire to finally “sort out” the islands. Harg is, of course, caught up in this, if not partly instrumental. Also important is Nathaway Talley, the youngest son of the Inning Chief Justice (and brother of Corbin), who is on Yora because he wants to introduce the Adaina to the benefits of Inning law. And there is also Spaeth, who was created as a companion by Yora’s lone Lashnura, but has yet to take on her healing responsibilites.

There are, however, one or two set-pieces in the book which feel a little contrived. Harg’s first run-in with the Tornan authorities, for example, seems a bit too well-designed to put him on the path the plot demands. Which is not to say Harg is not a well-rounded character. He’s a reluctant hero – while acknowledging that he’s best-placed, and has the necessary skills, to lead the islanders’ fight, he doesn’t want the responsibility of leading them into a war they would probably lose. And which would doubtless result in bloody reprisals. Further, there is an island myth about a leader, the Ison, who appears in times of need to lead the islanders to victory. Harg doesn’t believe he is the Ison, nor does he want to be him – part of the myth involves a “cleansing” by one of the Lashnura, which Harg refuses to undergo.

Nathaway’s transformation from idealistic naïf is better-handled, though it takes a while to get going. The Grey Folk, and the mythology which they represent, provide an interesting backdrop to the story, one which becomes increasingly important and relevant as the plot progresses. In parts, this mythology reminded me a little of Le Guin’s Earthsea books, particularly when Spaeth takes Nathaway to the “circles”, where the opposing balances which “rule” the islands manifest. The character of Tiarch, the Tornan governer of the Forsaken Islands, struck me as the sort of character Gwyneth Jones would write.

One section of the story which stands out takes place when Spaeth and Nathaway escape from Admiral Talley’s custody. They flee into the sewers beneath the city, but soon get lost and, somehow, cross over into another “circle”. This is one not even Spaeth recognises. It manifests as a series of mezzanine floors about a great well many many levels deep. Each level contains vast rooms in which are stored books and scrolls and other forms of document. The section is genuinely creepy, and the writing – which is good throughout the novel – is especially effective at getting this across.

Isles of the Forsaken is a post-colonial fantasy. Though the Inning Empire won its war, and is governed by what we would consider a fair and impartial system, the story’s sympathies plainly lie with the Forsaken Islanders. Of course, the Innings are far from the noble people their technology and political system would suggest. Nor are they the only ones who are racist – the Torna consider the Adaina to be nothing more than feckless and ignorant peasants. There are different ways of life on display in Isles of the Forsaken, and its ignorance about these among and between each group which is partly the fuel which drives the plot. The Innings’ lexarchy also comes under scrutiny. Theoretically an impartial and impersonal system with no real leadership, it is in practice dominated by the Talley family, and Corbin’s campaign in the Forsaken Islands is partly phrased as a launchpad for a bid for power by him back in the Inning homeland.

I read Isles of the Forsaken pretty much in two sittings. It may only be 312 pages long – definitely a point in its favour, given that it is a fantasy – but even so, I’ve not read many books in recent years which have dragged me into their story and kept me there quite so effectively. I’ve already pre-ordered the sequel, Ison of the Isles.


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British sf masterwork: The Uncensored Man, Arthur Sellings

When I put together my list of British SF Masterworks last year (see here), a number of eligible authors were suggested to me that I’d never heard of before. One such was Arthur Sellings who, I discovered, had written six novels and numerous short stories (many of which were collected in two collections) between 1953 and 1970. He died suddenly in 1968 of a heart attack, “just as he was gaining more and more notice” according to his entry in the SF Encyclopedia here.

Although I actually put Sellings’ 1970 novel, Junk Day, on my British SF Masterworks list, I have so far only managed to acquire The Silent Speakers (1962), his debut novel, and The Uncensored Man (1964), his second novel. It was the latter I read.

Dr Mark Anders is a physicist at Jarwood, a secret British weapons laboratory. He is married to Ruth, who also works there, but their marriage is faltering. Ruth is too perfect, and too much a perfectionist, and whatever spark their relationship had possessed has long since dissipated. In an effort to cheer himself up, Anders goes visits an old friend who is a doctor in a distant town. While there, he witnesses a teenage patient of the doctor’s have an epileptic fit, wake up and talk for a minute in German, and then fall into a light coma. But the boy has learning difficulties and has never been taught a foreign language. Intrigued, Anders investigates further, but draws a blank. Then his brand-new computer spits out a page of Greek writing instead of the expected experimental results. He gets this translated, and it proves to be a quote from the Book of Revelations.

Mystified, and suspecting he may be suffering from some psychological condition, Anders visits Dr Nowatski, A Polish psychiatrist he met briefly at a party years before. Nowatski gives Anders a shot of LSD – it was legal, in those days. Under the influence of the drug, Anders… visits a parallel world and meets its human inhabitants. The remainder of the novel describes Anders attempts to learn the truth of this alternate Earth, his run-ins with Jarwood’s security stemming from his association with Nowatski, and his subsequent development of mental powers.

The Uncensored Man is tosh, but it’s quite well-written tosh. The central premise – the origin and reason for existence of the alternate Earth – is neither plausible nor convincing. While Anders is a nuclear physicist working on neutron bombs, Sellings gives no information on his actual work. And though the reason why his computer spouts Greek is explained, how it actually does so is ignored. The book lacks authenticity.

However, Anders is a well-drawn character. Likewise Nowatski. The two women – Ruth, and Nowatski’s wife, Anna – are less rounded, though their treatment is sympathetic. In fact, they are repeatedly shown to be better persons than their menfolk. The prose is also good – in other words, it is typical of British sf of the 1960s, and so much better than US sf of the same period. US authors of the time may have had the ideas, but British sf authors had the writing chops.

The Uncensored Man is a very British novel, and very much a novel of its time. These days, it’s little more than a curiosity. It’s no masterwork, and it remains to be seen which of Sellings’ novels belongs on my list. It’s an interesting read, but not one, I think, that would have set the genre alight.

As mentioned earlier, I also have a copy of Selling’s debut, The Silent Speakers (published as Telepath in the US), and if I see other novels by him I’ll no doubt pick them up. But he was neither as good as Compton, nor as prolific as other British sf authors of the time, such as Tubb, Brunner or Cooper. Like Rex Gordon and Leonard Daventry, the fact he’s now forgotten does not seem entirely surprising. But it would not have done the genre a disservice to have had the likes of Sellings and his peers representing it rather than some of the sf novels we now consider to be classics.


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Bookjoy: more Compton

Synthajoy was DG Compton’s fourth science fiction novel. Previously, he had written half a dozen crime novels under the name Guy Compton. So it should come as no surprise that Synthajoy is as much a crime novel as it is a science fiction novel.

Thea Cadence has been incarcerated in the Kingston, a clinic designed to rehabilitate criminals using the Sensitape process. Thea’s husband, Dr Teddy Cadence invented Sensitape – or rather, he invented the concept. The device itself was invented by Tony Stech, his business partner. Sensitape is, as the name suggests, recorded emotional states which can be played into a person’s mind, and thus directly affect it. At the Kingston, Thea is undergoing Sensitape treatment in contrition as her sentence for a crime.

Cadence had been inspired to invent Sensitape while attempting to cure Stech’s father of an increasingly common condition called UDW, Uncompensated Death Wish. He failed to prevent the man’s death, but Sensitape did subsequently make UDW extremely rare. In fact, Sensitape was a great success. But the recording made of a couple making love, Sexitape, was an even bigger success. Cadence, however, always dreamed of artificially creating the emotions on a Sensitape, i.e., deliberately programming the effect required. He called this process Synthajoy.

Thea drifts in and out of her memories as she is being treated. Though she did not defend herself during her trial, she does not consider herself guilty of the crime. She resists her rehabilitation treatment. And in between periods of introspection and rebellion, she relives – or explains to her nurse – the history of Sensitape and her involvement with it. In this way, facts pertinent to the crime of which she has been charged are revealed.

Thea murdered her husband.

An early Sensitape session in which she was the guinea pig gave her a revulsion for her husband’s body. He found sexual companionship in the arms of another woman – the one from the Sexitape, in fact. Thea meanwhile had an affair with Tony. Who later committed suicide under suspicious circumstances. During her trial, the prosecution claimed it was jealousy that had led to the murder. They did not know of Thea’s relationship with Tony, nor did she tell anyone of it.

Synthajoy is a carefully-plotted ramble through Thea’s consciousness and history. She is hiding the truth from herself as much as she is from her prosecutors and rehabilitators. And it is only as she reveals her past that the truth about Tony’s suicide and the murder of Dr Cadence are uncovered. Unlike later novels, Synthajoy is a single-hander, and told entirely from Thea’s point of view. She is intelligent, educated, middle-class, and beautifully real. Unsurprisingly, the writing is a joy to read:

It is extraordinary to watch my hands. They smooth and fold, now so neat and expert, so accomplished now that they act without mind, without my volition … Hope is like a fever, a heat engendered by battle, and it leaves a deadly chill behind it. My arms ache. My hands tingle and creak. (p 50)

Also, unsurprisingly, the book is very firmly British, and very firmly a novel of the late 1960s / early 1970s. (It was first published in 1968). Those characteristics, as much as the writing, are the essence of Compton’s appeal. His novels are fiercely intelligent and beautifully crafted, but it is their finely-tuned sense of time and place, the way the central ideas are so well integrated into the real world, that makes them stand out.

There are ideas that Compton returns to again and again. The abuse of technology is an obvious marker – and one that demands a story set in as close an analogue of the real world as is possible. And yet… It seems odd that Compton should begin his writing career in crime, writing novels in which the purpose of the story is to explain a death. Yet his science fiction novels typically feature epidemics of unexplainable deaths – UDW in Synthajoy, Gordon’s Syndrome in The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (see here), and the Disappearances in Ascendancies (see here).

In his three decades of writing science fiction, Compton never won an award, despite being published regularly in both the UK and the US. The Steel Crocodile was shortlisted for the Nebula in 1971, but lost out to Ringworld (an extremely popular book, but nowhere near as well-written). He appeared on the Locus Award shortlist three times, and in 2007 the SFWA made him an Author Emeritus. Yet he was possibly the best British sf writer of the 1970s. At a time when US authors of the 1950s dominated the field on both sides of the Atlantic – Asimov, Smith, Herbert, Heinlein – Compton was one of a handful of British sf writers writing sf novels so much more intelligent and well-crafted than those of their contemporaries. It’s a shame they appear to be mostly forgotten, and it’s the likes of Foundation and Stranger in a Strange Land which dominate lists of so-called genre classics. Perhaps the re-issue of Compton’s back-catalogue as ebooks through the SF Gateway (Compton’s entry is here), and The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe‘s appearance in the SF Masterwork series in October 2012, will see Compton receive the recognition he deserves.

The following novels by Compton are currently available on Kindle via the SF Gateway. If you own such a device, you should buy them immediately: Farewell, Earth’s Bliss (1966), The Silent Multitude (1966), The Quality of Mercy (1967), Synthajoy (1968), The Steel Crocodile (1968), Chronocules (1970), A Usual Lunacy (1978), Windows (1979), Ascendancies (1980), Scudder’s Game (1988), Nomansland (1993), Justice City (1995) and Back of Town Blues (1997).


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Women in sf reading challenge #9: Shadow Man, Melissa Scott

If I’ve had trouble reading the books for my challenge in their proper months, it’s not because reading them is proving a, er, challenge. On the contrary, it’s because I’ve made a change in my reading patterns which makes the books I chose for the challenge less of a conscious or deliberate act of selection of reading material. I now read more books by women writers, and so the dozen books of my reading challenge are just twelve among many. In that respect, the challenge can be counted a success – and only nine months in, too. Nor have any of those nine books been bad books, though a couple I didn’t enjoy as much as the others.

Which brings me to Shadow Man by Melissa Scott, September’s book for the challenge. I was aware of the book’s reputation before choosing it – in fact, it was that which likely led to its selection. However, that reputation had not really prepared for what I found when I started reading it. Because what Shadow Man is, is Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness through a funhouse mirror. It is also a more political novel than the political The Left Hand of Darkness. Comparisons are inevitable, even though LeGuin’s novel takes place on a world with one gender and Shadow Man takes place in a universe with five genders. Both novels have placed the treatment of gender – culturally and legally – front and centre.

In the universe of Shadow Man, the use of a drug to offset “FTL shock” has resulted in a far greater than normal incidence of intersex and hermaphrodite births (miscarriages are also correspondingly higher). The Concord Worlds now recognise five genders – woman, man, fem, mem and herm; respectively, she, he, ðe, þe and 3e. (Unfortunately, I kept on reading the pronouns referring to herms as if they used the Arabic ﻉ (‘ayn) rather than the numeral 3.) These five genders have led, in turn, to nine sexual preferences, and this has bearing on the plot of the novel.

On the world of Hara, a colony planet re-contacted 100 years previously after several centuries of independent development, the law and society only recognise two genders – man and woman. So the herms, mems and fems must take on the role of one or the other – though there is apparently a facility for herms at least to legally change gender. The Traditionalist Harans feel that true humans have only two genders, and they do not want to join the Concord. The Modernists want the other three genders to be recognised in Haran law. It is the battle between these two groups which drives the plot of Shadow Man.

Warreven is a herm, but legally male, and works as an advocate in the Haran legal system. Years before, 3e almost married the son of the Most Important Man – the de facto ruler of Hara – but 3e refused to change legal gender. Now, 3e fights for gender rights in the courts. Mhyre Tatian is the manager of a middle-sized Concord pharmaceutical company’s operations on Hara. The world’s biggest export is its drugs, all derived from the local flora. Also important is “trade”, which is prostitution, mostly involving the three genders not recognised on Hara.

Warreven is involved in a court case which looks set to play a major role in the fight for gender equality. But the Most Important Man doesn’t want that to happen, because as long as things muddle along as they presently are doing, a delicate balance between the Traditionalists and the Modernists is maintained. But his son, Tendlathe, is a staunch Traditionalist – a blinkered, chauvinist and conservative Traditionalist of the worst kind. In an effort to keep Warreven from the courts, the Most Important Man has him elected as his clan’s seeraliste, the person responsible for selling off the clan’s surplus crops. Meanwhile, the Interstellar Disease Control Agency, the organisation responsible for preventing the spread of diseases – a variety of HIVs were also created by the FTL drug – also wants to prevent that case from going to court for their own reasons. Tatian is caught in the middle as one of his employees is a key witness. When Warreven offers Tatian the entire clan surplus in return for the employee’s testimony, it kicks off a series of Traditonalist attacks on the Modernists and the “odd-bodied”.

Scott makes no concessions when introducing the world of Shadow Man. It’s straight in at the deep end. There are one or two info-dumps streamlined into the narrative, but they provide little more than local colour. The story is told from the points of view – alternating – of Warreven and Tatian. From Warreven, we see what it’s like to be a herm in a society that does not recognise it as a gender, and we get the politics which affects that. Tatian provides an outsider’s view of Hara and its culture. Though both mention at various points some physical attraction between them, it never amounts to anything.

As a sf novel set in a strange and interesting world, with a pair of likeable protagonists, Shadow Man succeeds. There’s an air of exploration to the story, as it spends a great deal of time savouring the culture of Hara before the somewhat abrupt final confrontation. Yet the action never moves outside the capital city, though places elsewhere on the world are often mentioned. It makes for a languid read, a story in which the politics of the climax seems to page by page subsume the story of Warreven and Tatian – in fact, for at least half of the book, they’re barely acquaintances.

But it is the gender politics for which Shadow Man is known, and I found them a little problematical in places. For a start, the thing driving the gender politics in the story is “trade”. It’s almost as if the odd-bodied genders are defined by the roles they play in prostitution. There’s a level of prurience implicit in the Traditionalist response to herms, mems and fems, and given the focus on trade it’s not hard to understand why they might hold such an opinion. Perhaps Shadow Man needed to show a Concord world’s society as contrast, because all the reader has with which to compare it is the situation in the real world. It’s also worth noting that the genders in Shadow Man are defined by biology – it’s the secondary sexual characteristics and equipment which determine which gender a person is. And while the book’s glossaries helpfully explain the nine sexual preferences – there is a glossary of Concord terms and one of Haran words – those sexual preferences make only a few appearances in the story. Haran society is dual-sexed, and the story treats all interactions as such, acknowledging the existence of sexual preferences beyond woman-man but not really exploring them. And this is in a novel whose story describes the start of a sexual revolution comparable to the fight for gay rights in the real world. In fact, Shadow Man‘s penultimate chapter is very much an analogue of Stonewall.

Literalising a metaphor is not uncommon in fiction, and is an excellent tool for commentary. I’m not entirely convinced that literalising sexual preferences as biological gender necessarily helps discussion, though in Shadow Man it has resulted in an interesting universe. It’s a pity Shadow Man doesn’t explore more of it. Which is not to say it’s a bad novel by any means. I enjoyed it and thought it good. I’d happily recommend it. I am somewhat surprised it has never been published in the UK. It seems to me it would fit in quite happily with a number of sf novels which have been available here over the years – not just the aforementioned LeGuin, but also books by Storm Constantine, Samantha Lee, Mary Gentle, or even Gwyneth Jones’ Aleutian trilogy…


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Women in sf reading challenge #8: Spin State, Chris Moriarty

There are those who believe science fiction is a predominantly pessimistic genre, and certainly many of the futures that sf novels posit can hardly be called utopias. Of course, much of this depends upon your personal politics – a neoliberal fantasy, for instance, would likely appeal to a plutocrat, or to someone so deluded they think they actually stand a chance of becoming one. Yet such futures are common in science fiction, and often the protagonist – ie, the character with whom the reader is asked to identify – is a victim of this society, a person whose agency does not stretch much beyond what they can actually grasp with two hands. Frequently too they are fighting on two fronts: both against the enemy, and against those for whom they are ostensibly fighting.

Personally, I don’t think such futures are either desirable or inevitable, nor do I think they’re especially necessary for dramatic purposes. Perhaps it’s a peculiarly US perspective, that general antipathy towards anything smacking of state or state apparatus, whereby, by definition, a protagonist must battle their own government as much as they fight the enemies of their nation.

Spin State by Chris Moriarty is a case in point. It was my August read for this year’s reading challenge (see here), and, above caveats aside, I found it an intriguing blend of hard sf, cyberpunk, coal mining and quantum physics.

Catherine Li is a soldier for the UN; she is also a genetic construct. She has hidden the latter fact, claiming only descent from a genetic construct grandmother, otherwise she would not be able to serve in the UN military. After a raid on a secret Syndicates laboratory goes slightly wrong, Li is assigned to Compson’s World to look into the death of genius physicist Hannah Sharifi. Shortly after her death, an encrypted file was sent by Sharifi to UNSec, the UN’s military. Li’s commanding officer wants her to find the private key to the file – Sharifi was working on a way to artificially culture Bose-Einstein condensate, and if she discovered a means of doing so it would have profound effects on the balance of power between the UN and the Syndicates.

In the future of Spin State, Earth has spread out to a number of exoplanets, mostly using STL transport. However, by the use of quantum entanglement, information can be sent FTL. As can some people – most typically UNSec soldiers. But this process requires Bose-Einstein condensate, a mineral with pre-entangled qubits. There is also a side effect to such FTL travel: decoherence. Memories must be backed up or they disappear. And for soldiers, those memories are often edited to remove sensitive or classified information.

There is one source of naturally-occurring condensate: Compson’s World. Where Sharifi was running her experiment. And, incidentally, Li’s home world. But more than that: like Li, Sharifi is a genetic construct – in fact, they are clones from the same template. On arrival at the station in orbit about Compson’s world, Li immediately finds herself thrown into the middle of what appears to be a corrupt satrapy. The importance of the condensate means Compson’s World is entirely corporate-owned, and its workers are treated like the meanest of slaves. Because harvesting the condensate is a dangerous and dirty job: it has to be dug out of coal seams in deep underground mines.

It was in a chamber in one of the mines that Sharifi had been performing her mysterious experiment. She also died nearby. Though her death has been ruled an accident, Li soon learns it was murder. But what exactly was the physicist doing in the chamber in the mine, why would that lead to her murder, and what is in the encrypted file sent to UNSec?

Spin State is an unholy mixture of cyberspace, military sf, murder-mystery and coal-mining. And I use the term “unholy” approvingly. That mix shouldn’t work, but it does. Extremely well, in fact. Perhaps the big secret driving the mystery element of the plot is not difficult to guess, but Moriarty loads up her story with more than enough in the other areas. At one point, there is a covert infiltration by Li of Alba, UNSec’s headquarters in orbit about Earth. There is the jockeying for power and control ofthe mines amongst the various factions on Compson’s World. There’s the Cold War between the UN and the Syndicates. There’s Li’s relationship with the AI, Cohen. And there’s Li’s own somewhat corrupted identity, built upon redacted and lost and rewritten memories. Also many of the population of Compson’s World are ex-IRA and have fought in the (re-ignited?) Troubles.

There is as much going on in the universe of Spin State as there is in the story. The novel opens shortly after the UN defeated its enemies, the Syndicates. Li was instrumental in this victory during fighting on the Syndicate world of Gilead. But those memories have been redacted, so she’s not entirely sure what she did to become a decorated hero. The Syndicates, worlds populated entirely by genetic constructs, each of whom are treated as little more than components in a vast system, sounds like a place worth exploring, but in
Spin State they are little more than ersatz Commies in the Cold War of the novel’s universe.

Then there are the AIs, which are not just hugely-sophisticated and sentient computer programs but networks of AIs, some of which are only semi-sentient and some of which have been added in what were effectively hostile take-overs. These AIs live in the novel’s version of cyberspace, streamspace (also referred to as the spinstream), an interstellar FTL network. I’ve never been convinced by cyberspace as a sf trope – it was built upon a computing metaphor, and the link between it and its operations and implementation has never struck me as especially plausible. In Spin State, Moriarty uses a full-on VR-style cyberspace and, Matrix-like, Li often “dives into the numbers” beneath the actual metaphor.

But these are minor quibbles. Spin State is a novel dense with ideas, dense with plot. Li is an engagingly cynical heroine, although perhaps a little too often she is blown hither and thither by the machinations of more powerful players. Not to mention she is sometimes a little too slow on the uptake. Compson’s World is a nasty place, and the coal-mining aspect is handled extremely well (although the industry as described is surprisingly crude, given that the novel is set more than a century hence). I really liked the idea of the Syndicates, and thought they were worth exploring more. The AIs I found less convincing, and the concpet of “shunts”, by which AIs “borrow” the bodies of humans, felt a little 1980s to me. I also was very much intrigued by the UNSec practice of redacting the memories of its soldiers. There is, I think, more than one novel there in that concept alone. It’s certainly to Moriarty’s credit that she’s filled a single novel with several novels-worth of ideas.

And speaking of Moriarty… There are no clues to the writer’s gender anywhere on the Bantam trade paperback I read. Even the “About the Author” at the end is careful not to use any pronouns in reference to the writer. But was disguising the author’s gender enough? The main character in the novel is female, and there are anecdotes a-plenty about editors telling writers that female protagonists do not sell (the classic example being Stephen Donaldson’s Mordant’s Need). Certainly Spin State was never published in the UK, and yet the recent success of Gavin Smith’s Veteran proves there is a market in this country for this particular type of science fiction. True, this is now, and Spin State was originally published in 2003, when things might very well have been different. And, of course, there are those references in the book to the IRA…

While Spin State is a type of science fiction I find it hard to truly enjoy, it’s plainly a skilfully put-together novel. I’m tempted to have a go at the sequels, Spin Control (2006) or Ghost Spin (due next year), and I’m very much surprised these books are not better-known.


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Women in sf reading challenge #7: Zoo City, Lauren Beukes

I had originally picked Beukes’ Moxyland as one of my twelve books for this year’s reading challenge, but then I met the author at the Eastercon back in April, and Zoo City won the Arthur C Clarke Award… So I swapped one out for the other, even though the latter says on the back, “File Under URBAN FANTASY”. Although, of course, there was that Clarke Award win, which meant the jury at least felt Zoo City could be read as science fiction. Besides, last month’s book for my reading challenge was Steph Swainston’s The Year of Our War (see here), and I failed to find a way to read that as sf…

Which is all pretty much beside the point, as I’ve now read Zoo City, and I’m happy to count it as one of the twelve books of my reading challenge – and also one of the twelve books by women writers I read during July, my women-only month.

While Zoo City may display the trappings of urban fantasy, it reads chiefly like a cyberpunk novel, a near-future dystopia told from the point of view of a have-not. Who, in this case, is Zinzi December, a recovering addict and ex-journalist who caused her brother’s death, served her sentence, and was “animalled”. In the world of Zoo City, those who have committed crimes find themselves lumbered with animal familiars as manifestations of their guilt. For Zinzi, it is a sloth. In the world of Zoo City, magic also exists – though it’s not the magic of Dungeons & Dragons or your standard identi-kit heroic fantasy. Mashavi feels more like some sort of extra-sensory talent than it does spell-casting or thaumaturgy (although African styles of magic do make several appearances in the book). Zinzi’s mashavi is finding lost things, and it’s what she now does for a living – because the animalled are the dregs of society, and forced to live in derelict buildings in slum areas of the city. The city in this instance is Johannesburg, and there is a very obvious South African flavour to the novel (Beukes is South African).

After her last client is murdered, Zinzi is forced into accepting a type of job she normally avoids: finding a lost person. The missing person is teenager Songweza Radebe, one half, with her brother S’busiso, of pop twins iJusi . The Spector/Cowley-like figure who controls iJusi, Odi Huron, wants Song back without anyone learning of her disappearance. Zinzi may be reluctant to take on the case, but it soon proves to be even more complicated and darker than she had imagined. The climax of the novel, however, is not Song’s re-appearance but the discovery of a heinous plot to which the disappearance was peripherally linked. While the clues were there, that final twist does come as a bit of a surprise. The plot which drives the story for much of its length ends on a positive note, only to kick off another related, and darker, end-game. This, or its reverse,  is a technique I’ve noticed in other crime novels of recent years.

Zoo City reads like noir. It’s a crime novel which happens to be set in an alternate South Africa in which felons have animal familiars and magical talents. Beukes does throw in the odd “found document” which attempts to put a science-fictional gloss on these aspects of her world, but their success is immaterial. The book doesn’t need to be read as sf, and can enjoyed for exactly what it is. Zinzi’s voice dominates the story and, despite Zinzi’s background and some of her more unsavoury activities, Beukes does an excellent job of making her sympathetic. Zoo City is a fast read, but it’s by no means fluffy. I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to (I would normally run a mile, very quickly, from anything labelled “urban fantasy”).

On the front of the paperback edition of Zoo City I bought is a quote from William Gibson: “it feels effortless, utterly accomplished”. He’s right. Zoo City is a polished piece of fiction. For a second novel, it is astonishingly good. I can’t say whether it is better than the books it beat for the Clarke Award, as I’ve not read any of the others. (They were: Monsters of Men, Patrick Ness; The Dervish House, Ian McDonald; Generosity, Richard Powers; Declare, Tim Powers; and Lightborn, Tricia Sullivan.) But certainly Zoo City is a very good book, and not at all an embarrassing winner – which is more than the Nebula Award can say this year…


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Boxing, bugs, bounty hunters and bismillah: God’s War

When Kameron Hurley’s God’s War was published earlier this year, I took note of it, as I generally do of sf novels which feature Arabs or Arab-inspired backgrounds. I checked out the book’s website, and even read the first chapter, which was posted online. But I didn’t see anything there that made me want to buy and read the book immediately. At some point, yes, I’d probably pick up a copy, but nothing I saw encouraged me to do so there and then.

A few weeks later, Niall Harrison tweeted that God’s War was one of the best books published this year he’d read so far. He described it as “Gwyneth Jones meets Richard Morgan” – or words to that effect. And so, after a bit more conversation on Twitter, a group of people all bought copies at his urging. I was one of them.

I have now read God’s War.

Nyxnissa is a “bel dame” on the world of Umayma, which means she is a government assassin charged with killing deserters from the army. Because Nasheen has been at war with neighbouring state Chenja for generations – so long, in fact, that no one is really sure what they are fighting over. All Nasheenian men must fight at the front, and many women also volunteer. The end result of this is a female-dominated society at home, much like Britain during World War II.

But Nasheen is also an Islamic state – or rather, its state religion is one which appears to be descended from Islam. The Nasheenians have mosques and a holy book called the Kitab (which is Arabic for “book”; and, in Islam, members of the Abrahamic religions are known as “People of the Book”). There are further clues in the names of people and places – although a reference to the Kitab being written in a “the ancient language of prayer” (p 91) suggests that the Nasheenian language is not true Arabic. This may explain why some of the female characters have male names, such as Bashir, Husayn or Zubair. Or indeed why some of the place-names don’t entirely convince as Arabic – Chenja, for example: Arabic has no “ch” phoneme. And also Ras Tieg, another nation on Umayma: Arabic has a “j”, though it is pronounced as “g” in Egypt. (None of the nations’ name are entirely parsable either – ﻧﺶﺀ (nash) means “youth”, and -een could be the dual ending; Ras Tieg – ﺭﺍﺱ (ras) is “head” or “headland” but I can’t find anything close to “tieg”. But perhaps the names are not intended to mean anything.)

As muslims, the Nasheenians are moderates – possibly unsurprising, given that the society is matriarchal. Many of the teachings seem to be ignored, if not flouted – such as those prohibiting the consumption alcohol (Nyx drinks a lot of whisky during the story). Chenja, however, is far more orthodox. It practices polygamy, and its women wear the veil. One of the other characters, Rhys, is Chenjan, and while Nyx may be lapsed he certainly is not. He speaks a translation of bismillah ar-rahman ar-raheem (p 91), and also recites the ninety-nine names of God (p 80). Nyx further mocks him for “pounding [his] head on the pavement six times a day” (p 78). It is also implied that the Chenjans venerate saints, suggesting perhaps they are Shi’ites to the Nasheenian Sunni muslims. Though, according to Rhys, this cannot be the case as the two nations comprise “… believers from different moons, united in their belief of God and the Prophet and the promise of Umayma. For a thousand years, they had carved out some kind of tentative peace, maneuvered around a hundred holy wars … Chenjans would submit only to God, not his Prophet, let alone any monarch who wanted to sever God and government.” (p 78)

There are other nations on Umayma. The Mhorians, for example, are racially different to the Nasheenians, and are descended from refugees who were given permission to settle on the world hundreds of years earlier. Clues in the text – a reference to Saint Mhari, for example – suggest they may be Christian.

Hurley does an excellent job with her society-building, painting a picture of two nations with different approaches to a shared religion. The way she integrates the religion and its practice into the daily lives of the characters certainly resembles Islam in a way that Christianity does not. It is not, happily, just the mention of mullahs, burqas or the other trappings of Islam or the Arabic world. Having said that, the easy prevalence of acts and attitudes considered haram does render the end result a little less convincing.

Then there’s the technology in God’s War, which is almost entirely insect-based. Vehicles, called bakkies, are powered by a fuel generated by a sealed hive of cockroaches. People called magicians have some sort of unexplainable power over these insects – pheromonal, perhaps? – which allows them to control them. They even use them as, er, bugs – i.e., surveillance devices. Magicians are masters of biotechnology (I think they are all male), and so of advanced medicine too. Not everyone returns from the front in one piece – but the magicians patch them up, often using body parts from those who didn’t make it. Umayma’s sun is also stronger than ours – or the world’s atmosphere is thinner – and skin cancers are prevalent. Biological and chemical weaponry is used extensively in the war between Chenja and Nasheen, which in turn has its effect on the world’s population.

But perhaps the strangest element of God’s War‘s world, and the least convincing to me, is the presence of “shifters”. These are people who can “shift” into other forms – an animal, and each person is, I think, limited to one other form. One character can transform into a dog, another into a dove, and yet another into a raven. How? Where does all that mass go? There’s a hand-wavey mention of “quantum effects”, and it is stated that shifters didn’t start to appear until the various peoples had colonised Umaymi… But. It just feels a bit unnecessary, a bit over-the-top.

Likewise the magicians’ gyms. For reasons not entirely clear, the magicians are fans of boxing. The sport may be a signifier for emancipation in God’s War, given that it is acceptable in Nasheen but underground in Chenja, and popular in both. The gyms are all interconnected, irrespective of the distance between them – as if the magicians had a secret, and instantaneous, travel network. I couldn’t quite work out the reason for this – it only seemed to impact the story peripherally.

The plot of God’s War is complex but also relatively straightforward. Nyx does something she shouldn’t have done, is booted out of the Sisterhood of bel dames and sentenced to prison. When she is released seven years later, she becomes a licenced bounty hunter. She hires a team – magician Rhys (who is a Chenjan deserter), Mhorian shifter Khos, gun-nut Anneke and comms expert Taite. When Queen Zainab hires Nyx and her team to recover an offworlder, Nikodem, who has gone missing, things get complicated very fast. The Sisterhood don’t want her to succeed. She tracks Nikodem to Chenja, which means infiltrating an enemy country. Meanwhile, Nyx’s sister, a biotech scientist, is murdered, and her work somehow seems linked to Nikodem’s disappearance…

God’s War is a brutal book. Nyx is a brutal protagonist. A lot of people are killed or maimed in the story. A lot of people who have been maimed appear in the story. The magicians’ medicine is sufficiently advanced that even the most severe injuries are survivable, although why this should result in such a low value being put on life is beyond me. There is a lot of violence, and it is graphically described. Umayma is dirty, primitive in many respects, and populated by physically and psychologically broken people. God’s War is a bleak novel, with a cast that are not far from being monsters. I think it was this, more than anything else, that made it hard for me to love God’s War. The world-building is superb, Nyx is a well-drawn protagonist, and the plot is pleasingly complex, but I still found it a little too bloodthirsty for my tastes.

I couldn’t quite see the Gwyneth Jones in God’s War, although there are some small similarities with Richard Morgan’s Black Man. I don’t think it’s the best book I’ve read so far this year, though it may prove to be the best book published in 2011 I read this year. I would not be unhappy if it appeared on a few shortlists next year. I will certainly be buying the sequel, Infidel, due to be published in October.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the mention of Deep Blue Something – is Hurley a fan of the group, perhaps? “Nyx pulled her burnous up and followed the dimly lit signs to room tres-bleu-chose.” (p 224)


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Women in sf reading challenge #6: The Year of Our War, Steph Swainston

This post is a bit late because I had to reschedule my reading. I decided several weeks ago to make July a month of reading only women writers. But then I was sent three novels by men for review, with a deadline of the end of July. So I moved them to the top of the reading pile so I could finish them in June and not break my promise for July. Anyway, I managed to finish them in time, and so the first book of July was…

When I picked The Year of Our War for my reading challenge at the beginning of this year, I’d heard it argued that the book could be read as sf even though it was marketed as fantasy. I’d also heard it described as “New Weird”, although quite what that means no one seems really sure. But never mind: I wanted to read it, so I bent the rules a little. And, now that I have read it, I have to be honest and say that to me The Year of Our War seems very much a fantasy novel.

Jant Shira is half-Rhydanne and half-Awian. The Rhydanne live high in the mountainous region of Fourlands, are very much used to the cold, and are extremely quick. Awians are very much like normal humans except they possess small wings on their back. Because Jant has the Rhydanne speed and build, and the Awian wings, he can fly. He is the only person who can do this.

He is also immortal.

Two thousand years before, god left Fourlands. He put San, the Emperor, in charge and made him immortal. And in the years since then San has gifted fifty exceptional people with immortality. They form the Circle, and all have superhero-like names – Jant, for example, is Comet. Another member of the Circle is Lightning, a superlative archer, and one of the first people to be made immortal.

Around the same time god left, the Insects invaded Fourlands. These are pony-size ant-like creatures, and they have overwhelmed the northern quarter of the continent. But, after centuries of stalemate, more and more of them are now appearing and encroaching on human-inhabited lands.

The Year of Our War is, I believe, the first book in a series. Certainly, the novel does not resolve the bigger questions its plot asks. A possible source for the Insects is mooted, but not confirmed – and no explanation of that source is offered. Why god left is certainly never revealed. In fact, much of the story of The Year of Our War revolves around a fight for supremacy between a pair of immortals: Mist, the Sailor, and his wife.

There’s much to like in The Year of Our War. The story is narrated by Jant, who is a junkie, and he gives an interesting perspective on the plot. In fact, the entire cast are extremely well-handled. The prose is polished and very readable, although there’s a tendency in the first half of the book to describe everything everyone is wearing, often using unfamiliar and archaic terms. There’s a feeling of depth to the world of the story, as if the author has spent a great many years building it.

But.

Swainston names M John Harrison as an inspiration, and there’s certainly a little of Viriconium in Fourlands. There’s also that same refusal to be ruled by the “clomping foot of nerdism”. Which unfortunately manifests as gaps in rigour. Towards the end of the novel, for example, a famous sword appears and is described as a “katana”. But there’s a lot of cultural baggage that goes with such a weapon, and none of that is present in The Year of Our War. There’s a sense that Fourlands is built from magpie-like borrowings from the real world, but without the history and culture which underpins those borrowings.

The Year of Our War is a not a novel which makes immersion easy – there are too many details which throw the reader out of the world. Sometimes the characters respond in ways which rely on knowledge of the real world, not on knowledge of the world of Fourlands – in other words, they don’t always react like characters in a fantasy novel.The names of people and places seem… odd, as if there are no languages behind them, they’re just random conglomerations of letters. Also not helping is the story’s refusal to provide neat answers – or indeed, provide neat puzzles requiring answers. The concept of god leaving Fourlands, for example, and putting an immortal in charge is extremely cool – there’s an entire novel series just in that – but here it’s merely background. The presentation of the immortals as a sort of superhero team also feels slightly out-of-place in a fantasy world.

As I read The Year of Our War, I concluded I’d be unlikely to ever try its sequels. But as I drew nearer to the end I started to change my mind. And not simply because I wanted to find out what happens. The lack of rigour which had annoyed me no longer seemed to matter. Thing is, I’m not a big fan of fantasy. I’ve read my fair share, but I’ve found little to admire in much of that I’ve read. When reading KJ Parker’s Colours in the Steel last year (see here), I had a similar response to that I was having with Swainston’s novel. That book was a great shambolic monster of a story, which seemed to spend more time on world-building than it did plot. But the engine of its story was driven by such an innovative power-source (and I’m mixing metaphors here, but never mind) that I found myself liking the book more and more as I drew closer to the end. The Year of Our War is less inventive plot-wise than Colours in the Steel, but it does present an interesting – and perhaps even opposed – approach to its world-building. And that, I think, is enough to warrant further exploration.