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Category Archives: science fiction


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I’m As Surprised As Anyone That I’ve Been Keeping Up With This…

I’ve been a bit random as to which title I choose to read next from my list of favourites. I wonder if this has affected my response to the various novels? I mean, going straight from the grim and political near-future of Gwyneth Jones’s Kairos to the slight but fun space opera of Iain M Banks’s Against A Dark Background… Of course, I read other books between those two – I read seven books, in fact… including Jed Mercurio’s Ascent (expect a post on this soon), Paul Park’s The White Tyger (the third book in the series begun with A Princess of Roumania; superior fantasy), and Text:UR (a small press anthology; a mixed bag, but on the whole recommended).

So, Against A Dark Background… This was the first of Banks’s non-Culture space operas. It’s actually set within the Golter planetary system, located millions of light-years from its nearest neighbouring star. It could be a Culture novel – there’s no reason why its story might not take place in some unexplored reach of the Culture’s universe – but unlike Inversions, there are no clues in the narrative suggesting as much.

The Lady Sharrow is a noble fallen on hard times. When she was little, her mother was assassinated, and her grandfather’s vast commercial empire was broken up by the World Court. She served in the military during the Five Per Cent War, but is now a retired hunter of Antiquities (relics of Golter’s seven thousand years of technological civilisation). As the novel opens, a religious cult, the Huhsz, has received permission from the World Court to hunt and assassinate Sharrow… in revenge for an incident generations ago. An ancestor of Sharrow’s had stolen several artefacts from the Huhsz – including a Lazy Gun. Only one Lazy Gun, of eight manufactured, remains. The last-but-one was found several years earlier by Sharrow, and handed over to a university. Who promptly tried to study its interior… only to trigger an explosion which killed half a million people. The Huhsz want the last Lazy Gun and will kill her if she does not give it to them. Except, she doesn’t know where it is.

Sharrow puts together the survivors of her Five Per Cent War squadron, and follows a series of clues about Golter’s planetary system, before finally finding the last Lazy Gun. It’s plotting by coupons, of course. Sharrow is on a Quest – although unlike in high fantasies, the consequences of failure are purely personal. Sharrow will die if she fails, it’s not the fate of the world at stake. Each step of the quest is a set-piece – from the theft of the Crownstar Addendum in Log-Jam to the assassination attempt on the last of the Useless Kings in Pharpech to the final assault on the Lazy Gun’s hiding-place. It’s all typically Banksian – but you guessed that much from the term “Useless Kings”. If there’s one thing that distinguishes Banks’s novels from those of a similar ilk it’s his mordant wit.

And that wit is firing on all cylinders in Against A Dark Background. Especially since every plan put together by Sharrow and her team during their quest goes horribly wrong. In fact, by any definition of “hero”, Sharrow is a failure – she is out-manoeuvred at every turn, and only manages to reach the next stage of her quest more by accident than by design. Or by being rescued by saviours from out of the blue. Against A Dark Background could have been titled The Perils of Sharrow.

Sharrow, however, is anything but passive. She’s a strong character. In fact, there’s a bit of the Perfect Girlfriend to both her and team-mate Zefla – both women are gorgeous, intelligent, independent, strong-willed, and more than willing to dress for display. By contrast, the male characters are mostly under-written. But perhaps this is a hang-over from the book’s origin. It was apparently first written in 1975 (when Banks was 21), but heavily rewritten before publication in 1993. The character of Feril, an android, I suspect was added in the rewrite; or at least altered a great deal. Feril joins Sharrow’s team some two-thirds of the way through the novel. It is C3-PO in all but name and irritating mannerisms. Star Wars had yet to be released in 1975, of course.

Against A Dark Background is by no means Banks’s best sf novel. It’s a space opera quest, with plotting by coupons. However, it is slightly subversive in as much as Sharrow loses each coupon to other forces as soon as she has found it. And yet still the quest progresses towards its foreseen end. To have a character fail all the time would not make for an entertaining read, and so Banks livens up the story with wit and an approach to genre furniture and tropes that knows, or allows, no shame. He had fun writing Against A Dark Background, and he wants the reader to know it. Against A Dark Background is a fun book.

Against A Dark Background was one of the books on my list of favourites I’d read several times. And each time I’ve enjoyed it – perhaps because it’s hard to take seriously. That’s the book’s strength. Repeated rereads don’t spoil it, because there’s as much enjoyment in encountering remembered characters and events as there is in meeting new ones. Like AE van Vogt’s Undercover Aliens and John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline, familiarity is comfortable. It doesn’t breed contempt. Against A Dark Background is a favourite novel first and foremost because I enjoy it every time I revisit it. It will stay a favourite; it stays on the list.


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Why Television Sci-Fi Sucks

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been watching Battlestar Galactica seasons one and two on DVD. I missed most of the episodes when they were broadcast, so I bought the DVDs. Battlestar Galactica is one of those sf television programmes that is allegedly so good, people desperately try to find ways to describe it as not science fiction. The same has been said of the new Doctor Who. And yet, and yet… If television sf is good, then it seems to me it’s more by accident than design – after all, we’re talking about programmes created by people who are not sf fans, and aimed primarily at an audience that is not composed of sf fans. And so it should be – for a TV programme to succeed, it has to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. What this means is that sf programmes are often good drama but bad science fiction. Sometimes, they’re both bad drama and bad science fiction. But programmes that are bad drama generally don’t survive.

This post was sparked off by BSG. On the whole, I like the series. It’s well written, well acted, and it presents its fictional universe convincingly. Well, okay: it presents its fictional universe mostly convincingly. The laws of physics are still frequently sacrificed to the rules of drama. And, if you think too hard about the Cylons, you realise they don’t actually make much sense. They’re supposed to be machine intelligences, a “race” of AIs created by the humans. Fair enough. That doesn’t mean the interiors of the raiders can’t be organic, or that there can’t be ones who resemble humans. Except… the latter are humans, by any meaningful definition of the term – biologically, and they’re sentient and aware. They just happen to have been created artificially. It strikes me that the makers of BSG haven’t actually worked out the full ramifications of “machine intelligence”. The Cylons are merely television villains – in other words, a blank canvas on which to paint a suitably-disguised version of Western society’s current enemies.

But I didn’t set out to pick apart the Cylons. I wanted to show that good science fiction and good drama are not only possible, but result in excellent television sf. And that doing either badly can spoil a programme. I recently found myself annoyed at the direction the story-arc took in BSG’s season 2. Beginning with the final episode of season 1, ‘Kobol’s Last Gleaming: Part 2’, in which Adama “terminates” Roslin’s presidency. The last time I looked, in a democratic state the military does not have the authority to unseat an elected ruler. It happens, yes – Musharref in Pakistan, for example. But that’s a coup, a military takeover. So, Adama doesn’t “terminate” Roslin’s presidency. He seizes power. And he does so in a fit of pique – because Roslin persuaded Starbuck to undertake a mission against orders. It gets worse… Several episodes later, in season 2, Adama hands power back to Roslin. There’s a clear inference that the democratic process only exists through his largesse. Which makes a mockery of earlier episodes in which various people – including terrorist Zarek – insisted that the fleet must maintain a democratic government. It seems that in BSG, a democratic government can only exist if the military allows it to. Which makes any political commentary the series might wish to make immediately invalid.

In season 2, a new battlestar appears, commanded by Admiral Cain. And the annoyance factor shoots sky-high. Cain, the superior officer, takes command of the fleet. The president is completely ignored. In the US, the president is also commander-in-chief. But not in BSG. (There’s no reason why she should be, of course.) Cain’s singlemindedness then results in her and Adama almost going to war, and actively plotting each other’s assassination. Why bother putting a government in place in the fleet, if the programme makers are going to ignore it every other episode? Especially when Cain’s past actions come to light, and are clearly those of a war criminal. Not only are these actions ignored, they are tacitly condoned. After attempted genocide by the Cylons, Cain deliberately left survivors to die – and no one thinks this is a terrible offence? There is an off-putting current of militaristic fascism running throughout BSG which has been steadily increasing as the series progresses.

It’s not just the laws of physics or politics which are blithely ignored in order to present “good drama”. There’s economics, too. In episode 11 of season 1, ‘Colonial Day’, Zarek makes a long speech about how people in the fleet no longer require money. Since supplies are provided, there is nothing to buy… and so no reason to pay people for the work they perform. This makes sense – the fleet is comprised of refugees, and whatever supplies they might carry are being managed by the military. But sometime when writing season 2, the makers chose to ignore this. In season 2’s episode 14, ‘Black Market’, Commander Fisk of Pegasus is murdered, and the Galactica officers learn he was running a black market. In fact, black market profiteering is rife in the fleet – and is controlled by a single gang lord. So much for not needing money. You can’t have a black market without money – not only so that people can buy from it, but if there were no profit in it then it wouldn’t exist. Not only does this directly contradict earlier world-building, but the episode’s situation was clearly created for drama’s sake. It’s implausible within the setting. Story-telling discipline is more important in science fiction than it is in other genres. Readers know what is and what isn’t possible or plausible in the real world. In sf, the creator determines what is possible or plausible. And if they chop and change that from episode to episode, they undermine their creation. It’s no different to Hercule Poirot pulling a clue out of thin air to solve the crime.

It’s not enough that science fiction should have a central conceit, but it should also follow its own internal rules. Television sf may be the intellectually-challenged brother of written sf, but if it wants to be “good” then it’s still bound by the same rules, it should still use the same techniques. It recently occurred to me that part of the problem is television sf’s lack of subtlety. Written sf is not just action-adventure in outer space – even some Star Wars tie-in novels aim higher than that – but whatever commentary it might present is often disguised. Television sf has much less room to manoeuvre – episode lengths of up to an hour; aimed at an audience chiefly ignorant of the language of science fiction; and must appeal to the least sophisticated members of its audience as much as it does to the most sophisticated. As a result, commentary in a television sf programme – where it exists, which is not often – frequently involves beating the viewer about the head. I don’t have a problem with this – except, when the desire to create such drama means the rules and techniques of good science fiction are abandoned. Throughout season 2, Battlestar Galactica has done this.

All this makes for an interesting comparison with Doctor Who. BSG, of course, is American; Doctor Who is British. I was as excited as any other fan of sf when I learnt Doctor Who was returning to television. And, on the whole, I have to say the new series are a great improvement over the old ones. We might well remember past Doctor Who stories with fondness, but it’s often best to leave them as that – memories. Watching them anew on DVD only spoils the magic because, let’s face it, many of them weren’t very good. They were done on the cheap, and it showed. In Doctor Who – The Green Death, the UNIT air support proves to be a two-man helicopter, with the words “Twycroft Helicopter Rentals” (or something like that) painted on the side and a man leaning out and dropping hand-grenades!

Of course, nowadays it would all be done with CGI – and CGI has been used to great effect in the new Dr Who. This is both a blessing and a curse. The ability to realise alien worlds with such convincing verisimilitude often results in poor science fiction – just look at the Star Wars prequels (not that the original Star Wars trilogies were paragons of science fiction; far from it). Doctor Who series 3, for example, we had the sfx-heavy ’42’ (the title no doubt a reference to The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy), in which the Doctor and Martha find themselves aboard a starship falling into the sun. They have 42 minutes to save the ship. Not only did the episode seem like a rip-off of Sunshine, but a race against time to survive when you know the protagonists will be back hale and hearty next week is entirely pointless. And suspense-free. Yet the best episode broadcast so far – of all three series – was pretty much sfx-free. Steven Moffat’s ‘Blink’ was not only excellent drama, it was also excellent science fiction. It was gripping drama, peopled by engaging characters, and made clever use of the Doctor’s time-travelling abilities. ‘Blink’ deserves both a Hugo Award and a BAFTA.

The remainder of the series could only be a let-down after an episode like that. And so it was. The humans at the end of time in ‘Utopia’ were, well, too human. When Worlds Collide at the heat death of the universe strikes me as more like a heat death of the imagination. And then in the two-parter ‘The Sound of Drums’ and ‘The Last of the Time Lords’, we had the Master conquering Earth… and the Doctor putting it all back as it was before it happened through some sort of psychic deus ex machina… From the sublime to the ridiculous.

Interestingly, Doctor Who’s much freer set-up means it rarely drops into the trap into which BSG so often falls. The Doctor travels so far and so wide, that any rules as to what is possible and plausible attach only to him and his behaviour. There is no setting, as such, in which the series is, er, set. The world or universe need only be consistent within the episode itself (we’ll ignore the greater inconsistency of baseline humans and Goths inhabiting Earth at the end of time in ‘Utopia’). The only objects within the “Whoniverse” which require consistency are those which are common to many stories – such as the Daleks, the Cybermen, the various other alien races which have made more than one appearance. Admittedly, the Doctor’s time-travelling nature means any inconsistencies with these can be explained away as his encountering them at different points in their history. So, for instance, series 1 and series 2 can end with the destruction of the Daleks… only for them to pop up again halfway through series 3. As anti-narrative consistency devices go, time travel is both the perfect weapon and the perfect defence.

I set out with this post to discuss how internal consistency in television science fiction should not be sacrificed to drama, that good drama and good science fiction produce superior television. Instead, I’ve just pointed out why BSG is often bad science fiction. And that the best piece of television sf I have seen recently is Steven Moffat’s ‘Blink’ – an episode which clearly demonstrated the benefits of good sf as well as good drama. I probably need to think more on this subject. I shall endeavour to do so. Expect a continuation of this post sometime in the future…


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Rereading Favourites – June Update, Part 2

Kairos I did not expect to disappoint. If anything, I imagined I would get more from the book on this reread – it’s been over a decade since I read it last and I hope I’m a more discerning reader now than I was then. Which also means, I suppose, that I had higher expectations of this favourite novel than I’d had of the others I’ve reread so far…

And right from the first page, the prose was as good as I’d remembered it. By the end of the first chapter, something else about the novel had occurred to me – what had been near-future science fiction was now alternate history. Kairos was first published in 1988, and it posits a future extrapolated from Thatcher’s Britain. The ever-widening equity gap, the increasingly ham-fisted attempts to enforce law and order, the slow realisation that the decisions made by government were not for the benefit of the people it represented… It wasn’t hard to imagine a dystopic future back then. If anything, it seemed almost inevitable.

I was going to write that we’re better off now than we had expected to be – both politically and economically. But a couple of days after finishing Kairos, I happened to watch Red Road, a film set in a far-from-salubrious area of Glasgow (it’s a very good film, incidentally). If Red Road is a true reflection of life in the present day for some, then for them the future of Kairos has come true…

Jane “Otto” Murray is a lesbian ex-political activist, and the owner of a small secondhand book shop. One of her closest friends, James, a gay soap opera actor of Nigerian extraction, asks her to look after a small film container given to him by his sister. Both James’ sister and brother are involved with BREAKTHRU, a pharmaceutical company turned cult religion – there is, incidentally, no commentary here on cults or religions. BREAKTHRU have managed to obtain a sample of a drug, which they call Kairos. This drug allows users to directly affect the real world. There is mention of quantum theory, used to “scientifically explain” how the drug operates, but it is its effects not its mechanism which is important.

After dabbling with BREAKTHRU, Otto’s lover, Sandy Brize, leaves her. Shortly afterwards, Otto’s son, Candide, runs away. Someone has kidnapped his dog and demanded the film canister as ransom. But Candide runs to Sandy, taking the film canister with him, and enlists her help in rescuing the dog. Together, they head north, meet up with a posse of animal liberationists, and raid the BREAKTHRU laboratory where Candide believes the dog is being experimented upon. Throughout this period, the drug in the film canister has been affecting Sandy, who has in turn been affecting the real world…

There’s no denying that Kairos is a very good book, and rereading it I can understand why it became a favourite. I’ve admired Jones’ writing a great deal since first encountering it, and Kairos is neither the somewhat clumsy science fiction of her earlier Escape Plans nor the near-fantasy of her debut, Divine Endurance. It is a novel that feels important – less so now , of course, than it did when I first read it (which would be a couple of years after it was published). Even so, it’s nice to read a sf novel that actually had relevance, even though that relevance no longer holds true. Perhaps that’s one of the definitions of a favourite novel – it recaptures what you felt when you first read the book. And a definition of a well-written book must be one in which you sympathise with the protagonists no matter how little you have in common with them – and I certainly have very little in common with Otto.

I’m glad I reread Kairos. I will almost certainly reread it again. It’s by no means a cheerful or fun book, although it is liberating and hopeful in its resolution. I’m going to keep it on my favourites books list.

Incidentally, my copy of Kairos is inscribed by Gwyneth Jones, To Ian, In memory of the strange sausages. She never did tell me what that means…


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Rereading Favourites – June Update, Part 1

After Soldier, Ask Not, I decided to expand the challenge to include an “also-ran” each month… just in case the favourite failed to make the grade. For June, the favourite was Gwyneth Jones’ Kairos, and the also-ran was Time and Again by Clifford Simak.

Time and Again was first published in 1951 under the title First He Died. It’s also one of the earliest sf novels I ever read. I can distinctly remember reading it when I lived in Dubai – likely borrowed from Dubai Country Club‘s subscription library. That would be sometime between 1976 and 1979. Thirty years ago! And yet I could recall some of the details of the plot – there was a time war; and a man who landed a wrecked spaceship despite it having no drives, nor even being airtight. One image from the novel which had stayed with me was of a car that had crashed into a tree, and which contained a book from the future.

I suppose disappointment was inevitable – I certainly hope I’m a more discerning reader now than I was when I was eleven years old. The novel opens with a typically Simakian scene: a man is sitting on his porch, the crickets are chirping, the brook is burbling, night is falling… Another man walks up, tells the seated man he is from the future, and that Asher Sutton is returning to Earth tomorrow and must be killed. It’s a great set-up for a story. And it gets better. Twenty years ago, Sutton was sent to 61 Cygni in an attempt to break through the mysterious barrier guarding the system’s seventh planet. He is the first and only person to have done so. And now he is back – travelling in a spaceship that has no spacedrive and isn’t even airtight. Sutton will write a book about something he learned on 61 Cygni. This book will be used as a rallying cry for a movement to emancipate androids (vat-grown humans, slaves in all but name). Others, however, will interpret Sutton’s revelations to refer to humans only. And so there will be a war.

Time and Again is set some 6,000 years from now, in a future when humanity has a galactic empire – which appears to be ruled by a bureacracy. Time travel has only just been discovered when Sutton returns to Earth, but factions from the future representing both sides have travelled back in time in an effort to influence events.

The great ideas promised by the novel’s opening, however, never really appear. Simak is more concerned with the character of Sutton, and the nature of his revelation, than he is with the ramifications of the situation Sutton creates. The world-building is poor – the Earth of the 81st Century comes across as no different to 1950s America, but with silly clothes and a code duello. The time travel, and any paradoxes it might create, never really kicks into gear. Early in the story, Sutton finds a letter written by an ancestor in 1987, and which has remained unopened since then. Ignoring the fact that paper would never last 6,000 years, the letter itself is written in a style of English which seems more 1900s than 1980s. It all adds up to a novel which is a great deal less than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it’s for good reason it’s not as well-known as some of Simak’s other works, like Way Station or City.

So, cross off one also-ran. It drops off that list, never mind being promoted to the favourites list. And on we go with the rereads…

Incidentally, you’ll notice that my editions of Time and Again and the Dorsai trilogy – see here – all feature cover art by Tony Roberts (who was recently famous for being “sampled” by Glenn Brown in his Turner Prize nominee, The Love of Shepherds 2000). I wonder if it’s the art that made me believe the books were favourites – because I really do like those covers. Perhaps it’s because I began to identify myself as a sf fan around that time, but I find the cover art of the late 1970s more appealing than that of sf books today. Tony Roberts, Angus McKie, Tim White, Bruce Pennington and, of course, Chris Foss… Stewart Cowley’s Terran Trade Authority books: Spacecraft 2000 – 2100 AD and Starliners… Spaceships. Cool spaceships. Book covers then always seemed to exude an air of mystery – something sadly lacking from today’s cover art. It seems almost irrelevant that those wonderful covers rarely had any link to the contents of the book. But they made you pick it up.


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It’s in the Memes, er, Genes

When I resolved to read one of my favourite science fiction novels during each month of this year, I hadn’t realised quite how prevalent in the blogosphere was the idea of a themed year-long reading list. Admittedly, I saw it as more of a “resolution” than a “challenge”. After all, where’s the challenge in rereading your favourite books? Having said that, part of my intention was to determine if my list of favourites actually needed updating…

And the first update I made was to expand the list to twelve – so I could read a book for each month of the year. One of the two titles I added was Gordon R Dickson’s Soldier, Ask Not, the second book of the Dorsai trilogy. I remember the trilogy being a favourite during my teens, and I vaguely recalled that Soldier, Ask Not was the most interesting of the three. However, in a spirit of fairness, I decided to reread the entire trilogy…

Tactics of Mistake was the clearest of the three books in memory. Why this should be the case, I don’t know. It’s not as if I’d read the book more often than the other two in the trilogy. Perhaps it’s because it’s the most straightforward of the three; or perhaps it’s because, like Dune (another favourite), it features an ordinary young man who subsequently proves to be anything but. This young man is Cletus Grahame, a military officer and scholar. In the future of Tactics of Mistake, the Earth has settled into two mutually antagonistic blocs, the Western Alliance and the Eastern Coalition. These blocs manoeuvre for position and power, and occasionally fight, on the fourteen worlds so far settled by humanity. One such world is Kultis, where the settlement of Neuland is waging a guerrilla war against Bakhalla. The Western Alliance is supporting Bakhalla – a colony of Exotics, sort of Buddhist-like philosophers with arcane psychological skills; while the Eastern Coalition supports Neuland. (It’s odd how so many US sf novels of the mid-twentieth century attributed almost superhuman powers to psychologists – e.g., Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Frank Herbert’s The Dragon in the Sea, or Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon.) Grahame has had himself posted to Bakhalla in order to try out his tactical theories against the Neuland guerillas. He also makes an enemy of Dow deCastries, a rising star in the Eastern Coalition’s upper echelons. DeCastries intends to have the Eastern Coalition rule both Earth and the off-world colonies. Under himself, of course. Grahame plans to prevent him. And he does this, in part, by turning the Dorsai, a world of interstellar mercenaries, into the most effective fighting force ever seen.

Sadly, Tactics of Mistake did not match up to memory. Grahame is a little too competent to be entirely plausible – and his dodgy knee has a touch of characterisation-by-quirks to it. His love-interest, Melissa, acts like a teenager throughout the novel. And the chief hook on which the narrative hangs – Grahame’s genius at tactics – is, well, is unconvincing. His battle plans seem to rely on the enemy screwing up – in fact, they succeed because the enemy screws up exactly as Grahame had predicted. So much for “no battle plan survives contact with the enemy”… Ah well. Fond though my memories of the Dorsai trilogy may be, Tactics of Mistake is definitely not a contender for the favourites list…

But then it was Soldier, Ask Not that I actually added to the list. This is the second book in the trilogy. Unlike the other two, I’d actually reread it back in 1995 – after I’d found a copy in a remaindered book shop in Abu Dhabi I used to visit often when I lived in the UAE (the trilogy itself was in storage in the UK at the time). This may be why I remembered the book as the most interesting of the three – although the fact that it focused on the Friendlies, a pair of worlds settled by Christian fundamentalists, also contributed. What I’d forgotten, however, was that the novel is a first-person narrative. And that the narrator, Tam Olyn, is an Earth-born newsman (and we can tell this is science fiction: newsmen such as Olyn are renowned for their objectivity). He proves to be one of the very few people able to influence historical forces (Cletus Grahame, of course, was another). Olyn is a far from sympathetic character: selfishness and arrogant. When his one selfless act results in the death of his brother-in-law in a massacre of prisoners by a Friendly mercenary, Olyn sets out to destroy the Friendlies and their way of life.

Dickson appears to have tried for a more literary tone in Soldier, Ask Not than he had used in Tactics of Mistake. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. I suppose in some respects this is the book showing its age – many of the various turns of phrase have become cliched, or are used with a clumsiness modern readers will no longer accept. Dickson also appears to confuse himself with his astrography – if not flatly contradicting his earlier self. The uninhabited world of Oriente, for example, is described as orbiting both Procyon and Sirius. There is something curiously one-dimensional about Dickson’s future setting too. There are few, if any, mentions of cultures other than West European/American; and the Friendlies are, of course, Christian fundamentalists. Yet Dickson takes great care to describe his characters as having mixed ethnicity (Jamethon Black in Soldier, Ask Not, for instance, is partly of Berber ancestry). The novel’s resolution is entirely expected – in fact, Olyn’s rehabilitation is pretty much obvious from the first page. Given that it was the presence of the Friendlies that I remembered as most interesting about this book, I was disappointed to see how they were treated. At times there’s a clear envy of their faith in the prose; and yet they’re completely monstered when required by the plot. The aforementioned massacre, for example, doesn’t seem plausible for a culture with a rigorously-defined moral framework.

The final book in the trilogy, Dorsai!, was the first book published (as The Genetic General), but was then heavily rewritten. It’s set at the same time as Soldier, Ask Not – in fact, the events of Dorsai! are mentioned in Soldier, Ask Not. Like Tactics of Mistake, its protagonist is a tactical genius, Donal Graeme, although he is not recognised as such by his peers. At least not initially. They just think he’s “strange”. Also like Cletus Grahame, Graeme sets himself in opposition to a powerful politician, William of Ceta, who also intends to control all the colonised worlds. In fact, the plot of Dorsai! bears many resemblances to that of Tactics of Mistake (or vice versa, given that Dorsai! was written and published first). In a nutshell, Graeme, a Dorsai, heads out among the colonised worlds to make a name for himself. He proposes unorthodox battle plans to his masters, which subsequently prove to be exactly what’s needed for victory, and so is promoted to ever higher positions. All of which is necessary for him to effectively block William’s plans. There’s not much in the way of jeopardy in Dorsai! – at no point do we doubt Graeme’s eventual success. But then the novel, and by extension the trilogy, always seemed more of a platform for Dickson’s theories regarding the sweep of history and splintering of humanity into specialised cultures than it was a serious attempt at well-plotted fiction.

Sadly, Dorsai! is on a par with the preceding two books in the trilogy. There are some interesting ideas in there but the books read as little more than adventure stories with a side-helping of pie-in-the-sky historical and psychological theorising. But even that doesn’t work plausibly. We have historical forces at work… and yet they can be controlled by Great Men. I always thought the two concepts were mutually exclusive. The setting of the Dorsai trilogy, contradictions aside, is lightly sketched in, which sometimes works against it. The structure of the books, however, are heavily dependent on military tactics and strategy, and their use on the battlefield, and these are not at all convincing.

So, after all that, Soldier, Ask Not becomes the first book to be dropped from the favourites list. I can see why I liked the books in my teens but, well, I’m older now and they no longer hold the same appeal. Dickson’s central premise is mildly interesting, but the implementation is disappointing. Ah well. I suppose I’ll have to turn to the almost-rans list to find a novel to take Soldier, Ask Not‘s place. Um, I seem to recall really liking Time And Again by Clifford Simak when I was younger. I suppose I’ll have to reread it…

Incidentally, here’s something Dorsai-related that is really scary…


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Favourites

Whenever people asked me what were my favorite science fiction novels, I always had a list of ten titles ready to trot out. Some of the books are novels I’ve returned to again and again; others I’ve read only once – but that was enough to deem it a “favourite”. It occurred to me several months ago that this list hasn’t changed in over a decade. It seemed odd that there hasn’t been one novel published in the last ten years I didn’t think good enough to be on the list. So, among the health- and finance-related New Year’s Resolutions for 2007, I decided to reread one of those favourite books each month. And, wonder of wonders, so far I’ve managed to stick to it…

Here’s the list (in order of year of publication):

(Annoyingly, most of these titles are currently out of print. Oh, and the more observant among you will have noticed that there are twelve titles in the list above – that’s so I can read one a month for the entire year.)

So far, I have read…
The Undercover Aliens – I actually read The Mating Cry (see here) – remains a favourite. It’s by no means van Vogt’s best-written novel. Nor does it have the most coherent plot of any of his books. But the mix and match of Otto Preminger-style California noir and Planet Stories-type science fiction appeals immensely. The protagonist is a classic hero; the female lead is an archetypal femme fatale. It has immortals, an alien robot spaceship, Mexican cultists, and masks in it. It is a great deal of fun.

John Varley’s debut novel, The Ophiuchi Hotline, is also fun. In a Solar System in which humanity has been booted off the Earth by gas-giant-dwelling Invaders in order to save the dolphins and whales, Lilo has been sentenced to death for illegal genetic experiments. She is rescued by Boss Tweed, mayor of Luna and head of a secret organisation dedicated to wrestling Earth from the Invaders. Lilo isn’t happy about being indentured to Boss Tweed – she’s a prisoner at a facility aboard an asteroid in the Saturn system – so she decides to escape. Well, a clone of Lilo is. And she’s not the only clone of Lilo loose in the plot. Oh, and she’s also figured out that the eponymous, er, “hotline”, a radio signal narrowcasting scientific and technological knowledge used by humanity to survive off-Earth… Well, the unknown senders have just presented their “bill”…

The plot is little more than an excuse to travel about the Eight Worlds, marvelling at its many strangenesses. And in later novels Varley flatly contradicts some of the background given here. But that’s minor. On this reread, I found the book a much lighter read than I’d remembered – Varley throws out ideas every other sentence, but there’s not much meat to the prose on which he hangs them. Lilo is a bit flat as a character (er, characters); but so are the rest of the cast. The ending had slipped from memory – which was odd, given that it involves probably the most interesting idea of the whole novel. The rest of The Ophiuchi Hotline is mere window-dressing compared to it. Despite all that, the book will remain on the list.

Next up was Stations of the Tide. The previous two novels I’d read and reread many times. This one I’d last read over ten years ago. However, I’d forgotten very little of the plot – so the twist ending wasn’t much of a twist. A bureacrat visits the world of Miranda, shortly before its sole continent is inundated by the Jubilee Tides. He’s hunting Gregorian, allegedly a magician, who has smuggled something proscribed, something apparently given to him by the avatar of post-human Earth, onto the planet’s surface. The quest plot is interspersed with sections set in the Puzzle Palace, a Palace-of-Memory-like virtual reality in which the administrators of a galactic federation live and work. Swanwick never quite categorically presents Gregorian as a “magician” – it’s not plausible in the universe Miranda inhabits; and various characters try and explain Gregorian’s tricks, albeit never entirely convincingly.

One of the remarkable things about Stations of the Tide – and a great deal moreso when it was published – is its referentiality. Its narrative riffs off a host of science fiction works – not all of the references I claim to have spotted. In 1992, this was fresh and exciting. Fifteen years later, it’s been done so often it’s almost humdrum. One thing I hadn’t noticed on previous reads was that the novel is a thinly-disguised Southern Gothic. Even down to the fat bed-ridden matriarch. The sections set in the Puzzle Palace also didn’t work as well as I’d remembered them – I seem to recall the Palace of Memory idea was popular at the time, but Swanwick’s use of it as a metaphor for a VR sensorium is mostly just confusing. For the time-being, the jury’s still out on this book. I have a handful of “also-rans”, and I suspect one of them may take Stations of the Tide place in the top ten.

Where Time Winds Blow was, like Stations of the Tide, a favourite I’d not read for many years. Something about its central premise had struck me powerfully when I’d first read it all those years ago. This one was going to be an interesting reread… And so it proved. It is, like many British science fiction novels of its time, literate, slightly mannered, and very considered in its treatment of its characters. Its central idea is the framework on which the entire plot is hung (compare this with Stations of the Tide above). On the world of Kamelios, winds blow in and out of time, picking up and depositing artefacts, and people, in different eras. Leo Faulcon is a member of team which investigates artefacts left by the time winds. When Kris Dojaan joins the team, it provokes a crisis in Faulcon. Dojaan is hoping to find his brother, who was picked up by a time wind several months before. Faulcon and Dojaan’s brother were close, but he doesn’t admit it to Kris. Faulcon is also in a relationship with the team’s leader, Lena Tanoway.

Where Time Winds Blow is a great novel… for about three-quarters of its length. The central premise is a superb idea – the time winds are strongest along along Kriakta Rift, where mysterious and unfathomable artefacts magically appear and disappear. Holdstock imbues his characters with a depth and breadth not often seen these days in science fiction (or indeed, throughout much of the genre’s history). He also carefully dissects his central cast – with an almost Graham-Greene-like callousness. The writing, however, is occasionally clumsy. And I noticed when reading Eye Among the Blind last year that his characters tend to flip between emotional states with implausible speed. But this is forgivable. What isn’t is… Prior to setting up the novel’s climax, Holdstock explains the mystery of the time winds. It’s a concept he explores in greater depth in Mythago Wood and its sequels. It’s also a disappointment, given what’s been before. Right up to the point where Faulcon discovers the “truth” about Kamelios, Where Time Winds Blow was secure in its position on the top ten. Now, I’m not so sure. It’ll need another read, I think. Perhaps next year.

To be continued when I’ve finished the next four books…


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Super Sexed Up Sci-Fi

One of my favourite science fiction novels is AE van Vogt’s The Undercover Aliens, first published in 1950. There’s something about its mix of Californian noir and Thrilling Wonder Stories science fiction I find strangely appealing. The writing is no better and no worse than much of van Vogt’s output – and this is a writer who built his career on the advice given by a how-to-write book. The plot is much the same.

Allison Stephens, ex-GI, is the lawyer managing the Tannahill estate in Almirante, California, sometime shortly after World War II. The Tannahills are the richest and most powerful family in the town, but their family home, the Grand House, is currently empty. The previous occupant has just died, and Almirante is waiting for nephew Arthur Tannahill to arrive. He had apparently been in an accident back east, and is now suffering from amnesia. The story begins when Stephens rescues a woman from a group of Mexican cultists. She gives her name as Mistra Lanett, tells Stephens not to get involved, and disappears. Later that night, she appears at his house, having been shot by a “needle-beam”…

The Grand House is apparently thousands of years old and, as Stephens later learns, was built atop a crashed alien spaceship by early inhabitants of the region. They subsequently became immortal – and have controlled Almirante ever since, while hiding their true nature. Mistra Lanett is one of this group; as is Arthur Tannahill. A nuclear war is brewing between the US and Lorillia. Some of the immortals, led by Lanett, want to secretly attack Lorillia and scare it into backing down – the immortals have the technology to do this (where they get it from is never explained). The rest of the group want to move the Grand House to Mars, and sit out the holocaust. Lanett had caused Tannahill’s amnesia as a delaying tactic, and she uses Stephens to force a compromise solution.

There are clearly no aliens in The Undercover Aliens, undercover or otherwise. The novel was first published under the title The House That Stood Still, which may not be as catchy but is at least relevant to the plot. Recently, however, I discovered a third title for this book – The Mating Cry. Not only a different title, but apparently a “revised” version.

Compiling a bibliography for van Vogt is not an easy task. Many of his novels were fix-ups of short stories, some were republished under different titles, and revised versions of stories sometimes ended up as entirely new novels. Nevertheless, I did a little research on van Vogt and discovered that…

From 1950 to 1959, Galaxy magazine published a series of digest-sized reprint science fiction novels, offered as companions to the magazine. In 1959, they sold the series to Beacon Books, a company known for publishing novels with “mild sexual content”. Beacon subsequently published eleven sf novels, each accordingly “sexed up” and retitled. The Mating Cry is Beacon Book’s revised version of The Undercover Aliens.

I chanced across a copy of The Mating Cry on eBay a few months ago, and bought it. I wanted to see how it differed from the original. And, having read it, it’s… an odd experience. You wouldn’t have thought the addition of a couple of sex scenes could change a novel so much. And yet the character of Mistra Lanett changes completely. In The Undercover Aliens, she comes across as a maiden-in-distress, despite being clearly manipulative and determined to have her own way. But in The Mating Cry… The incident mentioned earlier where she turns up at Stephens’ house: after having her wound treated, she climbs into bed with the lawyer. In fact, every time they meet after that, they have sex. Yet she remains the Hitchcockian blonde of The Undercover Aliens. There’s nothing overly shocking about her behaviour in today’s climate, but the fact that these sex scenes have been slotted into the narrative makes Lanett appear callous and quick to use her body to twist Stephens into doing her bidding.

I’ve always thought The Undercover Aliens would make an excellent film. Perhaps you’d have to drop some of the sillier science-fictional aspects (the move to Mars, for example), but the house-of-immortals central premise would work really well. Allison Stephens is a good solid hero. And Mistra Lanett makes a classic femme fatale. You’d have to keep the story set in the years immediately following World War II, of course. That’s a big part of the story’s charm. But…

In The Undercover Aliens, you want the hero to get the girl. In The Mating Cry, you don’t.


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100 Must-Argue Science Fiction Novels

100 Must-Read Science Fiction Novels by Stephen E Andrews and Nick Rennison is a new reading guide to the genre. It is not, the authors write, a list of the best of science fiction. Their intent was to provide “100 books to read in order to gain an overview of the rich and diverse writing to be found in SF”.

By its very nature, the contents of such a book are going to be contentious. Why that book, and not that one? Christopher Priest says as much in his foreword, and even names some of the novels he would himself have included. Likewise, I could argue the inclusion or exclusion of many of the titles given in the guide. But what’s the point?

However, what is interesting is that of 100 books named, more than half are from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s (and near half of those are from the Sixties). There are two novels from the 21st Century. It is the least-represented decade since the 1930s – and while the decade is not yet over, it has surely seen more sf novels published than the first three decades of the 20th Century. But then that’s science fiction’s single biggest problem – for a genre that frequently uses the future as its setting, it spends an inordinate amount of time looking backwards. I have seen people recommend fifty-year-old novels to readers new to the genre. Fifty years old. Why? Would they recommend Dennis Wheatley to someone looking for an introduction to contemporary fiction?

It could be argued that the language of sf requires readers to work their way through its history in order to gain fluency. But that’s complete rubbish. Current day narrative techniques and styles of story-telling – not to mention the attitudes and sensibilites embedded in the text – bear little resemblance to those of, say, the 1950s. Modern readers expect modern texts. So why foist old ones on them?

An example: last year, nostalgia drove me to re-read EE ‘Doc’ Smith’s Masters of Space. Unusually, I remember exactly when and where I originally purchased and read the book: it was Easter 1978. My father had picked me up from school, and we spent a couple of days in London before flying out to the Middle East. I’m not sure in which book shop I bought Masters of Space – probably Foyles. But I remember the occasion, because it was the first time I saw Star Wars. So. Almost thirty years ago. The book itself was first published in 1961, although in style and content it harkens back to Smith’s works of the 1930s. When I read it in 1978, I remember enjoying it. When I read it in 2006… oh dear. I don’t know which was worse: the rampant wish-fulfillment, the cheesy 1930s dialogue, the neanderthal sexual stereotypes… Halfway though Masters of Space, the characters are given the opportunity of replacing their bodies with ageless, super-strong android bodies. The women are all for it – because it means their tits will never sag. While spung! may not have actually appeared in the pages of Masters of Space, it was very much there in spirit.

I would never willingly force someone new to sf to undergo the same experience. Not if I want them to continue to read science fiction. There is an unrealistic expectation among fans of science fiction that non-sf readers will appreciate classic works as much as they themselves do. Not as classics of the genre, but as straight genre works. No one reads Jane Austen without recognising that she lived 200 years ago. You, a science fiction fan since the age of eleven, may have fond memories of Asimov’s Foundation – but does that really make it an appropriate example of science fiction to give to someone new to the genre?

I argued a couple of posts ago that science fiction stories should contain a science-fictional conceit. As fans of the genre, have we become so hung up on the “idea” that it has become the only criteria by which we can judge genre works? Is that why we think of a fifty-year-old novel on the same terms as we think of one from last year? Is that why the genre won’t recognise that it has an historical dimension, and insists on categorising all its works as if it belonged to an eternal present?

They say the Golden Age of science fiction is thirteen. It’s certainly true that sf fans grow older. Perhaps it’s time they grew up too.