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Category Archives: science fiction


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A literature of ideas

They say science fiction is the literature of ideas. They say every science fiction text is about two dates: the date it is set, and the date it was written.

Yet when discussing a science fiction text, it is generally the “big themes” which are addressed: identity, the survival of the human race, the invasiveness or pervasiveness of technology in society, the nature of the physical universe, etc… While it’s true that the concerns and issues of “the date it was written” are typically present, as major themes of a work those concerns are usually sadly lacking. Tackling those issues head-on might well date a novel, although, to be honest, it seems many of the problems affecting modern-day society are, if not perennial, at least recurring. In the relatively short term, that is – say, a few centuries.

So where are the science fiction stories and novels which deal directly with the problems affecting readers today? Why must space operas be based on centuries-old political structures? Why must they refight wars long since lost or won? Why must cyberpunk novels wallow in the economics and geopolitics of the 1980s? Why must hard sf pretend the 1960s has lasted for fifty years? Why must sf ignore existing difficulties and challenges and invent entirely new and irrelevant ones?

I look around and I see that we are failing as a species. We are rendering our planet uninhabitable, and yet are making only token efforts to find solutions. We’re not even looking seriously at off-planet as a possible escape route. Thousands of years of civilisation and we have yet to eradicate wars, hunger, poverty, disease, inequality, slavery… Solutions to all these lie within our grasp, but we refuse to do anything about them. Do these not count as “ideas”? Are they not fit subjects for genre fiction?

True, science fiction is neither predictive nor didactic. It has not been since the 1920s, but I sometimes wonder if it needs to be once again. Back then, it was a marketing gimmick, a way of selling the newly-formed genre to readers of electronics and popular science magazines. Now, the genre has grown far too sophisticated for the simplistic agendas of Gernsback and his contemporaries. As a literary mode of fiction, it has evolved a vast repertoire of tropes, an extensive toolkit, and a lexicon that is in many ways peculiar to it. And along with this increase in sophistication has come a shift in viewpoint from the immediate to the abstract.

Abstract commentaries, however, often yield abstract results. Neither prediction nor didactism are useful tools in today’s fiction market, but that doesn’t mean sf should ignore the immediate. At a time when science itself is coming under attack, perhaps the genre which includes “science” in its name should take up arms once again. I see labels such as “speculative fiction” and “strange fiction”, and all I see is a move to define the genre by its aesthetics.

Science fiction is not fiction which incorporates a defined catalogue of tropes. It is not fiction which features science, or which is about science. It is fiction that once battled for science, which was once a soldier in science’s army. Science fiction is every mode of fiction, every trope, every writing tool, which was invented in order to win that struggle. And, once upon a time, it fought the good fight, inspiring generations to take up careers in science and engineering – including those who made the Apollo lunar landings a reality. Sadly, it could not sustain the offensive, and the war has long since been lost.

This is not to say the genre is as uniform as the above might suggest. Like any movement which has evolved, which has been in existence for more than eighty years, it is varied and disparate. It is a house of many rooms. And a great many people live in that house.

Not everyone is a spectator. I like to think I’ve done my bit, that I’ve contributed something. My story ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ was a direct attack on climate-change deniers (see here). My Euripidean Space stories are based on the latest data on the moons of Saturn (see here). My story ‘Human Resources’ comments on capitalist economics (see here). I wrote a story to celebrate the achievement in 1960 of Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh (see here) – although the story has yet to find a home.

I plan to contribute much more.


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woof!

Des Lewis has started a “Real Time Review” of the Winter 2010 BFS Journal (see my photos of it here). So far, he’s read the first eight stories from New Horizon. Which includes mine, ‘Barker’ – about which he writes:

“A claustrophobic vision, this time in a punch-drunk comic-strip rocket. Real history and real names in retrocausality. To my hindsight surprise, I enjoyed it thoroughly as a lighter part of these movements in a dark symphony.”

I’m not entirely sure what the “dark symphony” is in reference to, but I’ll take my compliments where I find them.

Full review here. You’ll need to scroll down to see Des’s comments on ‘Barker’.


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Cor. Swag.

Today, postie brought me the amalgamated British Fantasy Society Journal. The three magazines – Prism, Dark Horizons and New Horizons – are now a single hardback book. And very smart it looks too. See:

And what’s this on page 22? Why, it’s a story by Yours Truly: ‘Barker’, an alt history about the Space Race.

And while I’m at it: M-Brane SF Quarterly #1 is also now available in the UK:

With two of my stories in it: ‘Through the Eye of a Needle’ and ‘Human Resources’.

Go on, you know you want a copy…


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Women in sf reading challenge #1: The Steerswoman, Rosemary Kirstein

I forget where I first came across mention of The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein. It was in the last year or so, although the book was originally published in 1989. I do know that it’s not well known in the UK. But whenever, and whatever, I read about it, I decided it might appeal, and so determined to keep my eyes open for a copy. Which I found several months later in a local charity shop.

It is not a book , if I had known nothing of it, that I think I would have looked at twice. Had I not known of it when I found it in that charity shop, I would not have bought it. I’d heard it was quite good – but how often do you hear that about books, which promptly disappoint? I’d heard it read as fantasy but was really science fiction – but there’s so much room for manoeuvre in that statement, it’s hard to take it as any kind of useful description. Something brought The Steerswoman to my notice, something persuaded me it was worth reading…

And I’m glad I did. The Steerswoman is a gem. It’s by no means great literature, but it is most definitely appealing.

Rowan is the steerswoman of the title. Quite what these are, or how they came about, is never fully explained. They travel the land, observing, gathering facts, drawing and redrawing maps. Any one can ask them questions, and they must answer to the best of their ability. Should, however, they ask a question and are refused, then they can ban that person from ever being answered by a steerswoman again. There are, incidentally, steersmen, but they are greatly outnumbered. (In fact, The Steerswoman states there are three during the period the story takes place, and that it’s the largest number they’ve had in the organisation’s history.)

While investigating the origin of a strange blue jewel she has found, Rowan comes to the notice of the wizards. She is attacked by one of their soldiers but, with the help of new-found companion, Bel, a barbarian warrior woman from the Outskirts, she fights off the attacker. This only makes her more determined to solve the puzzle presented by the jewel. She returns to the steerswomen’s Archive to discuss her problem with her colleagues.

Bel has told her of a large bed of such jewels in the Outskirts. Rowan and Bel head for that bed, in disguise since the wizards are still after Rowan. En route, they are joined by William, a fourteen-year-old boy who has run away from home with the intention of being taken on as an apprentice by a wizard. He has magic of his own – charms which can do everything from crack stone to make things disappear noisily. En route, they are attacked by more soldiers, but win the fight. They trail the surviving soldier to the wizards’ keep and infiltrate it. But Rowan is captured, and subsequently learns some of the secrets behind the wizards’ powers…

The world The Steerswoman presents is a standard Dark Ages fantasy. People fight with swords, use candles to light their homes, and ride on horses when travelling great distances. There’s nothing especially original or distinctive about it. The wizards are not the rulers of the world, but they are an elite who appear to control everything. They are also split into two factions, Red and Blue, who periodically fight each other.

The Steerswoman is cleverly revealed as science fiction as the story progresses (unlike the cover art to the US paperback). There is nothing overt about this. William’s “charms”, for example, from their description are clearly chemical explosives. The magic lighting in the towns is plainly powered by electricity. The wizards, then, are a technological elite, presenting their science and technology as magic (rather than as, say, divine powers, as in Roger Zelazny’s Lord Of Light).

This slow evolution to science fiction is more subtle and immediate than in Jim Grimsley’s Kirith Kirin, which opens up its story’s universe in a series of appendices and so becomes almost a space opera; or even the hints dropped regarding the Age of Legends in Robert Jordan’s bloated Wheel of Time series.

The Steerswoman is not a novel whose prose shines; but neither does it put a foot wrong. It may resembled some sort of McCaffery sf lite/romance, but it is not in the slightest bit mushy – it features several graphically-described swordfights and a torture scene, for one thing. The protagonists are engaging and the mystery is enticing. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Kirstein went on to write three sequels to The Steerswoman: The Outskirter’s Secret, The Lost Steersman and The Language of Power. All four are available in an omnibus volume, The Steerswoman’s Road. I shall have get me that omnibus volume. (Edit: apparently the omnibus only contains the first two books. Ah well. I shall try to find all three books, then…)

A good start to 2011’s reading challenge.


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A new vocabulary for the critically-challenged

Over the last few days Lavie Tidhar, ubiquitous sf writer, has been putting together a tongue-in-cheek dictionary of new critical terms for science fiction. He calls it The Science Fiction Dictionary of New Criticism and you can find it here. A couple of days ago, this resulted in a few people providing him with suggested terms and definitions on Twitter. I came up with several, but they were a bit too silly to use. As you can see below…

Blogposer n, a writer who hopes to boost their book sales by regularly posting contentious articles to their blog.

Disstopia n, a pessimistic science fiction novel in which the characters show no respect to each other.

Lard sf n, a sub-genre of science fiction set in the near-future and in which the population of the earth is morbidly obese.

Slipsteam n, interstitial fiction on the border between the mainstream and steampunk genres.

Smearp v, the practice of a writer basing alien races/fauna in their book on unflattering portraits of enemies or rivals. Term derived from “calling a rabbit a smeerp”.

Spockalypse n, a type of science fiction in which the survivors of a global or galactic disaster are entirely unemotional and logical; or any global or galactic disaster brought about by people who are entirely unemotional and logical.

Fuckerization n, the practice of a writer inserting the names of enemies or rivals into a novel and having said characters meet gruesome ends. Term derived from “tuckerization“.

Pingularity n, a science fiction trope in which humans have themselves uploaded into microwave ovens.

Peckulative fiction n, a sub-genre of science fiction in which birds have taken over the earth.

Yurtual reality n, a science fiction trope describing any invented artificial environment which simulates the steppes of Central Asia.


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The comfort of strangeness

I’m currently bogged down somewhere in the middle of Justin Cronin’s The Passage. This was one of the major genre novels of last year, with a marketing budget normally reserved only for the witless bios of A-list celebs, and subsequently praised everywhere. In The Passage, an attempt to “weaponise” human beings by infecting them with a virus from the Amazon goes horribly wrong. The twelve experimental subjects – all prisoners from various prisons’ death rows – escape, and so infect the population of the US. The virus effectively turns its victims into “vampires” – super-strong, averse to light, immortal, animalistic, and continually craving blood. That’s the victims, of course, which it does not kill. Within the space of a few decades, the US (and, by typical jingoistic extension, the world) has been reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, in which “virals” run amok, and small pockets of humanity barely survive in armed camps.

The Passage is a fat book of almost 800 pages. It is also the first of a trilogy, which apparently earned a $3.75 million advance. The movie rights were also bought for $1.75 million three years before the book was published. It is also nowhere near as good as the hype would have it.

Cronin’s two previous novels were literary fiction, and The Passage certainly opens in a similar vein (no pun intended). This is the best part of the book. But the rest of the novel is a mish-mash of movie tropes. It owes almost nothing to the literary traditions of vampire fiction or apocalyptic fiction. Its aesthetic is pure Hollywood. And that, I think, explains both its success and the reason why it is not as good a novel as all that money and marketing would have you believe.

I’m all for cinematic prose. It works well in science fiction, which, in many cases, relies on visuals for its sense of wonder. But written science fiction also requires a central premise, and often privileges that at the expense of other elements of the writing. At the very least this means that the idea has to be good – it has to be thought-provoking, it has to generate wonder; it might even be unique. Some sf novels are based around a single premise; others throw out ideas on every page.

But The Passage seems to have used the cinema as a source for its genre tropes. And in that medium ideas and conceits have been so watered down by the demands of film-making, by over-exposure, by aggressive marketing, that whatever sense of wonder they may have once possessed has long since been eroded. There is nothing that is new in The Passage. True, the ideas are slickly executed. But familiarity does indeed breed contempt.

Good science fiction thrives on the new and original, on the unique angle of attack. It needs strangeness. And, by extension, so do sf readers. True, there are degrees of originality, degrees of strangeness. And readers’ thresholds for each do vary…

It occurred to me recently that genre fiction – and The Passage is perhaps a harbinger of this – is increasingly shedding strangeness. Some tropes are getting little ragged around the edges, the chrome is beginning to look a bit tarnished. For a genre which formalises conceptual inventiveness, much of it seems to prefer using recycled tropes and familiar settings – and more so now that it did in the genre’s past. Perhaps this is a consequence of science fiction colonising other media, of the genre now belonging to everyone and not just a minority community.

I’m not convinced this has resulted in a positive feedback loop. Much recent sf feels bland, and the product of a system of thought rather than of individual artists. Not all science fiction, of course. Many excellent, and very individual, novels are published each year. But maybe the genre as a whole needs more strangeness injecting into it.

As science fiction changes to be more approachable for those who consume it in other media, so it becomes less satisfying for those of us who sup direct from the well.


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British sf masterwork: 98.4, Christopher Hodder-Williams

For a writer of whom Radio 2 once said, “One of those writers on whom critics have already lavished almost every word of praise possible”, it’s somewhat surprising that today Christopher Hodder-Williams is pretty much forgotten. He published eleven sf novels between 1959 and 1984, and most of them are difficult to find these days.

The above Radio 2 puff comes from the back of 98.4, probably Hodder-Williams’ best-known work. It was first published in 1969, and I included it in my British SF Masterworks list here. Having said that, the book also features a quote from The Sun: “Read and be scared”…

Nigel Yenn, the narrator of 98.4, handled the security at an unnamed company’s “Group Two” laboratories in Elstree. As the novel opens, he’s been fired, and dumped by his girlfriend. He is subsequently recruited by a UN agent who is suspicious of the research taking place in the company’s “Group Three”. Yenn tries quizzing his ex-colleagues at Group Two – fired employees wouldn’t be allowed back in a building these days, but apparently they were much more lax back in the 1960s – but they know nothing. Various people pop up and hand Yenn clues, including Louise, who has some connection to Group Three and its resident genius, Dr Stergen. It’s all to do with nuclear missiles guided by human brain tissue. Somehow Stergen has built an underground base near Taunton, where he can perform his vile experiments on unwilling subjects. And he has also managed to put together a small fleet of submarines to carry his “Nerve Controlled Ballistic Missiles”. Yenn does the 007-thing: first to uncover more about Stergen’s activities, and second to foil his dastardly plot to launch his NCBMs and trigger a nuclear war. The former includes boarding one of Stergen’s subs, where he discovers exactly what “Nerve Controlled” means:

Near at hand was the smallest box of all. It measured about six inches across by two inches down by four inches deep. I thought I saw something flickering on the front… the first sign of activity.

Through the rapidly thickening smoke I now saw that this box was linked by plastic strip to the other units mounted at intervals below. These were already flooded with water.

Then the fumes cleared for a second and I saw what it was that had moved on the little box.

It was a pair of human eyes. (p118)

Hodder-Williams’ prose is actually quite good. 98.4 has a breezy man-of-action tone throughout, like Ian Fleming’s but without the horrible racism and sexism. He characterises Louise, the doomed love-interest, well, although the gay villain, Michael, who helps Yenn, reads like a dated caricature. But the plot is all a bit, well, silly. It starts off plausibly enough, but then it all turns as daft as a Cubby Broccoli movie, with a secret high-tech base buried under Somerset which Yenn manages to destroy in an explosive climax. Admittedly, the central premise is quite chilling and, as the above excerpt shows, Hodder-Williams writes well enough to get that across. Unfortunately, in order to maintain suspense throughout the story, Hodder-Williams only allows Yenn to be given cryptic clues. Yenn, and hence the reader, has little idea what’s going on for much of the book, even though other characters, such as Louise and Michael, plainly do. It makes for a frustrating read in places. Still, action-man characters often require idiot plots because otherwise they’d have no deadly missions to undertake and cunning puzzles to solve…

98.4 is more like a daft techno-thriller than it is a science fiction novel. It’s a quick, fun read, and well-crafted, even if elements of the story stretch credulity somewhat. For the time-being, it’ll stay on the British SF Masterworks list… at least until I’ve read more by Hodder-Williams.


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The devil is in the surface detail

Iain Banks’ latest Culture novel, Surface Detail, may be about a War in Heaven, but it is definitely not an eschatological novel.

In the universe of the Culture, there are races which have transcended to a higher plane of existence, the Sublimed – via, it is assumed, technology, or great intelligence / knowledge of the secret physics of reality. There is no mention of individuals achieving a similar transformation on their deaths. In other words, there is no Heaven. And conversely, no Hell. But what doesn’t exist, or can’t be proven to exist, people will invent. And in the universe of the Culture, they invented Afterlives. These are VR worlds populated by those who have, willingly or unwillingly, ended their corporeal existence. They are heavens created by technology. And conversely, there are hells. Because not everyone deserves a reward for a life well-lived.

The War in Heaven which makes up the plot of Surface Detail is a decades-long conflict between those who believe hells are immoral and should not exist, and those who believe they are necessary. The war is being fought entirely in simulation, so there is no damage or loss of life, and both sides have agreed to abide by the result. But the anti-Hell side is losing…

Lededje Y’breq is the property of Veppers, the richest and most powerful man in the Sichultian Enablement. She is an Intagliate, which means she has been genetically engineered to display tattoos from crown to toe, and on all her internal organs, eyeballs, teeth, bones, etc. These tattoos, which indicate her status, are punishment for a family debt. Her father died owing Veppers huge amounts of money, and in Suchultian law descendants can “pay off” these debts by entering into slavery. In the first chapter, Ledeje tries to escape, but is killed in the process by Veppers. To her great surprise, she finds herself reincarnated – “revented” – on a Culture GSV. This is not a technology the Sichultians possess. Lededje determines to return to her home world to kill Veppers. She travels there aboard a Culture Picket Ship, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints.

Yime Nsokyi is a member of the Culture’s Quietus, the service which deals with those inhabiting Afterlives. She is tasked with preventing Lededje. En route she detours to the Tsungarial Disk, an ancient alien artefact comprising millions of asteroid-sized factories orbiting in a ring about a gas giant. There has been a “smatter” outbreak on the Disk, a swarm of von neumann machines, and the GCU Bodhisattva aboard which she is travelling has been diverted to help meet the threat.

Vateuil is a soldier in the War in Heaven. He plays a number of parts in a number of different types of simulated wars, working his way up the chain of command. He is also a member of a conspiracy of senior officers who are intending to take the battle into the real world. A conspiracy involving Veppers and a couple of alien races plans to build millions of ships with the intention of destroying the hardware on which the hells run.

Prin is a Pavulean, an alien, who has infiltrated his race’s hell in order to blow the whistle on it. He was sent there with his fellow researcher and mate, Chay, but she failed to make it back. He presents his findings to the Pavulean government, but meets with resistance – not only are there those who don’t believe the hell exists, but there are also those who know of its existence and believe it is necessary. This last faction attempt to discredit or silence Prin.

These plot-threads all contribute to the novel’s resolution. Except… some of them don’t quite convince. Ledeje’s narrative is relatively straightforward and offers, perhaps, the most direct route from beginning to the story’s climax. Prin and Chay are there to show just how reprehensible the hells are. Vatueil is the reader’s eye on the war, and its final desperate gamble. Yime is part of the solution to preventing the attempt to bring the War in Heaven into the Real. And Veppers… Veppers knows the location of the hardware on which the hells run. But why does he wait thirty years before putting into place the plot to destroy that hardware?

But if the conspiracy which drives the plot of Surface Detail doesn’t quite convince, a more pressing problem is that the moral argument at the heart of the book is fixed. The hells in the novel are made places, and so most certainly exist. The argument then becomes over whether they should exist. But through Prin’s eyes we see just how reprehensible those hells really are. There is absolutely no ethical or moral argument which can be used to justify their existence. But Banks has a pro-Hell Pavulean senator attempt to do just that to Prin; but it’s empty blustering. Either Banks is spoofing the empty rhetoric of the right-wing when they attempt to rationalise military adventures like the invasion of Iraq. Or he is showing that there is no acceptable argument for morally repugnant acts – the pro-Hell side, in other words, comprises only lies and evasions. They have taken the moral high ground on an empty argument, and are about to win the war to cement their position. And so the anti-Hell side has to cheat, has to break a solemn agreement, because – as the Culture so often does in other novels – the right outcome justifies any means. Even, apparently, in an argument over moral and immoral activities.

If there’s one thing Banks does well in his sf novels, that’s “blow shit up”, and Surface Detail is as satisfying in that regard as the best of the Culture novels.There are also some excellent set-pieces: the Tsungarial Disk, the cavern city, and the elevator-diving spring to mind. But there also appears to be more exposition than in Surface Detail than I remember from other Culture novels.

On reflection, I think I liked Matter better. It had a more interesting structure, it had a cooler BDO, it had more interesting characters. Which is not to say that Lededje is not – she’s a typical Banksian heroine, just like the Lady Sharrow from Against a Dark Background. Veppers, unfortunately, is another pantomime villain – cf the Archimandrite Luseferous – and reads as little more than a caricature of an evil plutocrat. As for Demeisen, the avatar of Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints… About halfway through Surface Detail, he started to come across as Matt Smith’s Dr Who. And that just spoiled it for me.

Nor was I entirely convinced by the resolution. The treaties between the principles didn’t quite add up when scrutinised, the sudden reveal of the hells’ hardware’s location made a bit of a mockery of the decades-long conspiracy of the story, not to mention feeling like a bit of a cop-out.

And then there’s that final line… Yes, it’s a hoot. Yes, it’s going to please fans of the Culture novels. But it also feels a bit, well, unnecessary. It’s an Easter Egg, but nowhere near as substantial as the one in Matter‘s epilogue.

For a story so concerned with detail, so much so that the title uses that very word, Surface Detail seems to perversely only really succeed when focused on the big picture. Like a Mandelbrot, it makes a pretty picture; but get too close and those fractal edges start to blur and appear indistinct. It is a Banksian space opera, with all that description entails. It is a fun read. But its story also pretends to a weight it does not actually possess, and that I found disappointing.


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A challenge found, possibly

I received lots of suggestions to my request for a reading challenge for 2011 – both here on my blog, on LibraryThing, and on Twitter. So, ta very much all those who commented. But I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do…

Torque Control’s Women in SF Week has inspired me to read twelve science fiction novels by women writers during 2011 as my reading challenge. I’ve tentatively identified the dozen novels I’m going to read. I didn’t want to pick only those published since 2001, although many are from the last decade. Nor would I limit myself to books published in the UK. But I did want my list to be comprise only authors I’ve not read before (bar one or two slight cheats).

The twelve books go like this:

I already own some of the books on this list – Winterlong, Winterstrike, The Steerswoman, and Dark Space – and so it gives me the perfect excuse to read them. It’s also a nicely varied list, covering several different types of sf. One or two authors I might have read other works by them before. I have a vague memory of reading an Octavia Butler novel when I was at school, and I think I’ve read one by Melissa Scott many years ago too. I’ve certainly read short fiction by one or two of those on the list, but that doesn’t matter.

If anyone has any must read suggestions for the list, I’m prepared to bump one or two of my choices.