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Category Archives: science fiction


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Doing the Hugos, Part 3c

Here’s the third of the novellas on the Hugo shortlist, ‘The Political Prisoner’ by Charles Coleman Finlay, from F&SF‘s August 2008 issue. This is the second time Finlay has been nominated for the Hugo – he was also on the shortlist in 2003 for ‘The Political Officer’, which was set in the same universe and featured the same protagonist.

Maxim Nikomedes is an officer in the Department for Political Education on the world of Jesusalem, which was settled by Plain Christians (some sort of back-to-basics fundamentalist Christians). Nikomedes is also an undercover agent for the Department of Intelligence. The latter stages a coup, and there is a purge against Political Education. Because Nikomedes’ cover is a political officer, he gets caught up in the purge and carted off to a “reclamation camp”. Where he has to survive forced labour until he’s rescued when someone from Intelligence figures out where he is.

I don’t get this story; I don’t get why it’s science fiction. Finlay might as well have set it in Nazi Germany. Or Stalinist Russia. Or any totalitarian regime which slaughtered great swathes of its population in the name of something or other. ‘The Political Prisoner’ may be set on another planet, and the forced labour is supposedly part of the terraforming required to make the world more habitable, but that’s as close as it gets to sf. Setting a story on another planet does not make it science fiction.

And when the third paragraph of the story has the protagonist looking at their reflection so the writer can describe their appearance to the reader… well, that doesn’t bode well. ‘The Political Prisoner’ then dives into paragraph after paragraph of back-history, some of which I’m guessing is the plot of ‘The Political Officer’. I’m all for “not starting the story at the beginning”, but if you have to go back and describe that beginning in the narrative, then you’ve done something wrong.

In my comments on Nancy Kress’s ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ (see here), I mentioned the open mechanism which drives science fiction stories. That mechanism is absent in ‘The Political Prisoner’. Its workings do not need to be laid bare because everything is on the surface. Nikomedes is in the wrong place at the wrong time, Nikomedes can’t reveal his secret affiliation, Nikomedes gets sent to a reclamation camp and his past experiences help him survive, Nikomedes gets rescued. There is no idea which needs to be explicated, no idea upon which the plot is carried, no idea with consequences which can be explored.

I’ve not read Finlay’s ‘The Political Officer’, but I can only imagine that those who liked it voted for ‘The Political Prisoner’. Because on its own, there’s nothing in it that’s strikes me as award-worthy. There are enough examples of one group of people horribly treating another in recent human history, without having to go to all the trouble of writing a science fiction novella on the subject. Especially since ‘The Political Prisoner’ doesn’t actually say anything insightful or worthwhile. Nikomedes survives several months in the reclamation camp, then the head of Intelligence turns up and rescues him. Nikomedes asks that the prisoners he had been bunked with, the ones who had been doing the hardest labour, are released. Because, he says, “There’s been enough killing.” Oh dear.

‘The Political Prisoner’ is definitely the weakest of the three novellas I’ve read so far. And, like the Kress, I can’t quite understand why it was nominated in the first place.


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To Put Away Childish Things?

So Ursula K LeGuin’s Powers, a YA novel, has won the Nebula Award for Best Novel, and Patrick Ness’ The Knife of Never Letting Go, also a YA novel, has co-won the Tiptree Award. Not to mention the two YA novels on the Hugo shortlist – Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, and The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Seems a bit silly complaining that science fiction needs to grow up when YA novels are all over non-YA sf awards.

Or is it?

John Scalzi thinks this is cause for celebration – or rather, not cause for commiseration – because, he writes, “how horrible it is that some of what is being hailed as the best science fiction and fantasy written today is in a literary category designed to encourage millions of young people to read for the rest of their natural lives“.

Which doesn’t exactly address the “genre growing up argument”.

There are other sf awards, of course. And one book on the Arthur C Clarke Award short list is Ian R Macleod’s Song of Time. Of which, Helena Bowles wrote, “This is the point at which Science Fiction left adolescence behind and grew up”.

Perhaps science fiction is like a suspension bridge, a catenary between two poles. One pole is YA and the other is adult literary sf. The saggy bit in the middle, where the curve nearly touches dirt, would be those interminable and derivative military sf series churned out by publishers like Baen. Or the populist stuff.

Except… sf-as-a-bridge implies a journey from YA to literary sf… which does sort of fit. But it also means you’d have to pass through the middle, where Honor Harrington and her ilk lurk. Which is not necessarily true….

Or is it?

An example: a new reader to sf has devoured all the good YA stuff – Ness, Le Guin, Philip Pullman, Ann Halam, (the Arthur C Clarke Award nominated) The H-bomb Girl, etc. – and moves onto the populist adult sf. And then it’s a long hard uphill slog to the literary end of the genre, a slog that not everyone makes. After all, gravity alone means most will gather in the middle, where the curve is at its lowest.

Perhaps this metaphor isn’t so silly after all….


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Doing the Hugos, Part 3b

Next up is ‘Truth’ by Robert Reed (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008). I think I might have read this before, but since I don’t subscribe to Asimov’s, or buy copies of the magazine, it must have been online. And yet, as I became more convinced I’d read it before, I still couldn’t remember the ending.

Ramiro is a terrorist kept in a super-secret Gitmo in a Kansas salt mine. He is from 140 years in the future, and he travelled back in time as part of an army of 200 bent on conquering the world. He was caught in 2002 – the car he was driving skidded on black ice and crashed, and the police discovered Uranium-235 hidden under the car’s spare tyre. For twelve years he has been interrogated and imprisoned. As a result of the intelligence gained from him, the US invaded Iraq. And then Iran. Terrorists then set off nukes in the US. Now billions are dead. Ramiro’s original interrogator has committed suicide, and a new one – the narrator – has been sent to make sense of the suicide, and to finally break Ramiro….

I really wanted to like ‘Truth’ but the fact that I’d read it before, and forgotten it, bothered me. Surely a good novella, a Hugo-nominated novella, should be more, well, memorable? And there is plenty to like in it. The central premise is good, and the final twist on that premise is satisfying.

Unfortunately, the narrator is unlikeable – admittedly, she’s a torturer, so it’s not really fair to expect her to be sympathetic – but she’s also too obtuse. It feels like she’s withholding information from the reader simply in order to extend the story. The novella seems longer than it needs to be. I suspect this is partly in order to ramp up the effects of the “temporal jihadists”. The earth has to suffer increasingly worse attacks in order to set up the final pay-off.

‘Truth’ does have something important to say and I consider that a point in its favour. It makes clever use of recent history, commenting on both the invasion of Iraq and the US’s criminal use of torture. It feels a tiny bit out-of-date now that Obama is president, but of course it was originally published before the presidential election so it’s hard to hold that against it.

There’s little doubt in my mind that ‘Truth’ is better than ‘The Erdmann Nexus’, but I still can’t quite love it. Possibly because it feels too long for its contents.


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Doing the Hugos, Part 3a

I had intended to write a single post covering all of the novellas on the Hugo shortlist but, well, a novella is pretty much a short novel. So I’m going to split it into a post on each.

First up is ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008).

I quite like that branch of science fiction which uses the quotidian to explore the extraordinary. But it has to be done right. Sf operates using an open mechanism: the workings of its plot are visible to the reader. Unlike in a crime novel, which must hide those workings so that the final reveal is satisfying to the reader. So for sf, the explanation for the extraordinary has to be presented up front, and then the story should show – or ramp up – the consequences.

In ‘The Erdmann Nexus’, a group of residents at an old folks’ home have been experiencing odd “events”, moments of what seems to be merged consciousness. The story hops between those involved, one of the helpers, a neurological researcher working on a project at the home, and a pair of detectives investigating the mysterious death of the helper’s legally-separated husband. The search for an explanation is led by Henry Erdmann, one of residents, a brilliant physicist who now teaches at a nearby university. It is not until the end of the novella that the reader learns what the events were and what caused them.

Unfortunately, hiding the extraordinary’s explanation, and only revealing it at the end, doesn’t work because it makes for an uninvolving narrative. And, for all its many viewpoints, ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ is pretty dull. (For an example on how to do it properly, see Ted Kosmatka’s ‘Divining Light’.)

Kress throws in a framing narrative, describing a sentient spaceship approaching Earth, but it seems entirely gratuitous. The plot certainly doesn’t require it. And the mentions of split photons, quantum entanglement and emergent complexity just obfuscate. When an author holds the explanation close to their chest, it has to be a damned impressive explanation to redeem the story. Kress’s isn’t. We’ve seen it before, in both science fiction and fantasy. In that respect, it’s not very different, truth be told, to Mike Resnick’s terrible ‘Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders’ on the novelette shortlist (see here); and not just because both feature OAP characters.

The single-note characterisation in ‘The Erdmann Nexus’ doesn’t help either – gossipy granny, bible-basher, ex-ballerina who pines for her past, blue-collar retiree out of his depth…. And detective Geraci – Kress might as well have named him Goren since he’s plainly based on Vince D’Onofrio’s character in Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Kress has appeared on Hugo ballots an impressive number of times – 11 nominations and one win, according to the Locus Index to SF Awards. This should not have been one of them. I have to wonder if it was another choice driven by nostalgia….


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Doing the Hugos – an update

Asimov’s have finally put their Hugo nominated story and novellas on their web site. So here’s my thoughts on:

‘From Babel’s Fallen Glory We Fled’, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Feb 2008)
An interesting story. I can’t decide if it’s taking the piss or a little bit lazy. The meta-fictional framing feels like an afterthought, and the typographical tricks for the alien’s speech feel like Swanwick is having a sly laugh at his readers. There are some nice ideas in the story, but it feels too thin a treatment, as if it should have been longer and more detailed. It’s a great deal better than Resnick’s story, and not as inconsequential as the Kowal, but the Chiang and Johnson still have it beat.

As four of the five novellas are now available, I’ll work my way through those. It might take a while – they’re the longest of the “short” lengths, as long as an old-style novel in fact. Sadly, the missing novella is the one I really wanted to read. For the record, the shortlist is as follows:

The Erdmann Nexus’, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)
‘The Political Prisoner’, Charles Coleman Finlay (F&SF Aug 2008)
‘The Tear’, Ian McDonald (Galactic Empires)
‘True Names’, Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow (Fast Forward 2)
‘Truth’, Robert Reed (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)

Incidentally, a point of order. Mike Resnick’s ‘Article of Faith’ was first published in Postscripts #15 in September 2008. According to the Hugo shortlist, it was published in Jim Baen’s Universe in October 2008. But that would be a reprint. At the very least, the Hugo committee should correctly attribute the magazine in which the story was first published.


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Reading Challenge #4 – The Tar-Aiym Krang, Alan Dean Foster

The Tar-Aiym Krang is hardly classic sf by anyone’s definition. But I vaguely recall enjoying it and its three sequels when I read them back in my late teens. And it was unlikely I’d ever get around to trying them again unless I bunged the first book on a reading challenge list. The same, of course, was also true for Vance’s Star King… and that pretty much cured me of wanting to reread the rest of the series (see here).

So, The Tar-Aiym Krang. First published in 1972, this was Foster’s first novel as well as the first book in his popular Flinx & Pip series of, at present, fourteen novels. Flinx is an orphaned young man of (mostly) good character, but dubious morals and profession, in the city of Drallar on the world of Moth; Pip is his minidrag, a flying poisonous reptile. Flinx is also a little bit telepathic, and Pip is empathic.

Flinx stumbles across a mugging and is forced to intervene when Pip attacks one of the muggers. Both the victim and the two muggers end up dead, and Flinx finds a map clutched in the victim’s fist. He takes it. Shortly afterwards he agrees to guide a human and a thranx, Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex, around Drallar, and is present when they visit the home of wealthy merchant, Malaika. Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex want Malaika to finance an expedition to recover a legendary alien artefact. The Tar-Aiym had once ruled part of the galaxy some 500,000 years earlier. And then abruptly disappeared. Legend had it they’d met a race who blocked their expansion, and the biological weapon they developed to destroy this race backfired and wiped out themselves as well. However, the Tar-Aiym were also working on another project, the Krang, which is either a weapon or a musical instrument. No one knows. It could be both, like a bagpipe….

The Tar-Aiym Krang is a straightforward quest. Flinx joins Tse-Mallory, Truzenzuzex, Malaika and assorted spear-carriers on their hunt for the Krang. They have adventures. Unfortunately, it’s crude stuff. The writing tries for flavour but fails. The characters in Draller talk in some sort of cod-historical accent which just looks silly. When Flinx is onboard Malaika’s ship, he helpfully asks questions on everything from space travel to galactic history, resulting in great info-dumps of background. The characterisation relies on stereotype – Flinx is every artful dodger who has ever appeared in fiction, and a little bit too good to be plausible. The other characters are… roles. To be fair, this was a first novel and it’s thirty-seven years old, but it certainly compares unfavourably with first sf novels of the twenty-first century.

I said earlier that I had vague memories of enjoying The Tar-Aiym Krang and its three sequels – Orphan Star, The End of the Matter and Bloodhype. I also have on my book-shelves Flinx in Flux, a later sequel written when Foster returned to Flinx & Pip eleven years after The End of the Matter. (Bloodhype was actually written second, although its story is chronologically last of the four.) I seem to recall not being very impressed with it. Certainly I never bothered trying the nine other books in the series….

Ah well, another book I fondly remember proves not to be not very good without the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia. Looks like I’ll be taking The Tar-Aiym Krang and its sequels off my books-shelves.


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Doing the Hugos – an interlude

I was planning to read and write about the novellas on this year’s Hugo shortlist. But only two of the five are currently available online, so there isn’t much point at this time. Asimov’s are being a bit crap for some reason – the Swanwick is still unavailable, as are two of the novellas. Of the novelettes which were originally published in Asimov’s, one has been posted online because it’s on the Nebula shortlist, another is on the author’s web site, and the third only appears to be up as a sample of the magazine’s 2009 contents….

I suppose I could have a go at the other Hugo categories. But I’ve not read any of the Best Related Books, nor the Best Graphic Story.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form…. I have seen The Dark Knight, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Iron Man and WALL-E, but not listened to METAtropolis. I’d sooner the Hugo went to something that was, well, you know, science fiction or fantasy. Not a superhero film. So that means WALL-E, I suppose; which I thought quite good, if a little inconsequential. Were there no good genre films in 2008? Apparently yes – see Jonathan McAlmont’s “Alternative Hugos for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form” on Blasphemous Geometries.

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form…. Don’t watch Lost, not seen season 4 of Battlestar Galactica (I’ll wait for the DVD), not much of a Whedon fan so I gave the Dr Horrible thingymabob a miss… and then there are the two Dr Who episodes. I remember the two-parter ‘Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead’ having some good bits but being somewhat over-egged. ‘Turn Left’ was, I thought, better. Both were probably the best stories of series 4.