It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible


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August and September Favourites

I’ve still been reading a favourite book each month. But I was a bit too busy in August to write up something on that month’s book, Metrophage by Richard Kadrey. So I decided to roll it into the write-up of September’s book, Paul Park’s Coelestis. And here they both are…

Richard Kadrey’s Metrophage has been described as “one of the quintessential 1980s cyberpunk novels”, and yet it seems to have slipped below the radar of most sf readers. It has neither the profile of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, nor Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and yet I believe it is better than both. Neuromancer was the seminal cyberpunk novel, and that can’t be taken away from it. But I’d argue that Metrophage did something just as important.

Jonny Qabbala is a drug pusher in Los Angeles. He is also an ex-member of the Committee for Public Safety. When Jonny’s connection, Raquin, is murdered, Jonny heads off to confront the killer, Easy Money… and promptly finds himself caught in the middle of a battle for Los Angeles – between the Committee for Public Safety, drug lord Conover, and the anarchist Croakers. In this future, the US went bankrupt and was bought up by the Japanese. Who are now at war with the New Palestine Federation (shades of The Centauri Device).

Jonny spends time with each of the three factions – not always by choice – but is entirely powerless to prevent events from unfolding. There are puzzles embedded in the plot – the mysterious leprosy-like disease raging through the city, the Alpha Rats on the Moon… Metrophage resolves these by putting Jonny in position to have the truth explained to him. It helps that he has contacts in each of the three factions – and even more so that he is seen as important to the plans of at least two of the factions. Kadrey takes the reader on a wild ride through his Los Angeles – alternately wasteland and near-future neon-soaked wonderland. Clues dropped here and there help explain the resolution. There are a couple of points I couldn’t quite figure out – the game Conover plays with Jonny using a copy (or original) of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy, for example. But plenty of other elements of the novel have been subsequently become well-known tropes in the language of science fiction.

Despite that, Metrophage reads as fresh today as it did twenty years ago. Few books – even cyberpunk ones – can claim to have avoided dating over two decades. But then, Metrophage is more than just a cyberpunk novel. If Neuromancer folded noir into science fiction, then Metrophage folded cyberpunk back into science fiction. I’ve always maintained that cyberpunk effectively ended with the publication of Metrophage, and after my recent reread I see no reason to change my mind. Metrophage is cyberpunk – although it features no cyberspace or hackers. Metrophage is science fiction.

I didn’t expect Metrophage to lose its place on my list of favourites, and my reread not only proved that but reminded me why it was a favourite. It’s a great book.

And after Kadrey, another book I didn’t expect to be dislodged from the list. However, its appeal is, perhaps, more personal. Paul Park first appeared with the Starbridge Chronicles – Soldiers of Paradise, Sugar Rain and The Cult of Loving Kindness – an ambitious science fiction trilogy set on a world with seasons which last centuries, much like Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia trilogy. From the first page of that trilogy, it was clear that Park was a distinctive voice. And his follow-up, Coelestis, more than proved it. In some respects, Coelestis remains unique in the genre. And that’s not an easy accomplishment.

Simon Mayaram is attached to the British Consulate on the only colony world on which an alien race was discovered, homo coelestis. These aliens were actually two races – Demons, and the Aboriginals, who the Demons had telepathically enslaved. The humans hunted the Demons to extinction, and freed the Aboriginals. Who now ape humanity – the rich members of the race undergo comprehensive surgery, and require a strict regimen of drugs, in order to appear and behave human. Katharine Styreme is one such Aboriginal. To all intents and appearances, she is a beautiful young human woman.

Simon is invited to a party given by a prominent member of the human community. Katharine – whom he has admired from afar – is also there, with her father Junius, a wealthy merchant. During the party, Aboriginal rebels attack, kill almost everyone and kidnap Simon and Katharine. Without her drugs, Katharine begins to revert to her alien nature – a process that is exacerbated by the presence among the rebels of the last surviving Demon. When human vigilantes attack the rebels, Simon and Katharine are forced to flee… and Katharine’s meagre grip on humanity begins to erode even further.

Coelestis is one of those science fiction novels which follows a logic all its own. It is, in a sense, post-rational. Although the story is set an indeterminate time in the future, the community to which Simon belongs bears an uncanny, and deliberate, resemblance to early Twentieth Century colonial British and American. Even the Aboriginals themselves – particularly the Styremes, who are made to appear human, and show no alien side – are hardly convincing in any scientific sense. Earth is described as a dying planet, and the colony planet has been cut off from its nearest neighbour. If there is an interstellar federation or empire, then it bears no resemblance to any other in the genre.

John Clute described Coelestis as a “Third World SF novel”. It’s sheer hubris on my part, but I think this is wrong. Coelestis is a post-colonial sf novel. It is clearly inspired by Park’s own years in India. And to call India a member of the Third World is to ignore its long and deep cultural heritage – and the Aboriginals (or rather, the Demons) are implied to have an equally long cultural heritage in Coelestis. The novel is not about living in a Third World analogue, it is about the gentle wind-down from colonialism and its often bloody consequences. Park makes as much clear in events described in the book. Mayaram is of Indian extraction (although born in the UK), and during his abduction by the Aboriginals, he rapes Katharine. It’s perhaps a somewhat  blunt metaphor for John Company and the Raj, but it makes the point. Even the Aboriginals’ attempt to ape human ways is a reflection of the Indian adoption of some elements of British culture – and especially the English language. The Aboriginals’ ersatz humanity is little more than surface – Katharine may resemble a young human woman, but whatever gender she possesses is what’s attached to her mimicry (the Aboriginals are actually one-sexed). She is not a viewpoint on the alien – Coelestis is a description of her fall from humanity, not of her imitation of it.

Having grown up in the Middle East, I find a particular appeal in novels such as Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet and Park’s Coelestis. To some extent, they remind me of my childhood. Both also have the added advantage of being novels which can be read many times – and there is always something new to find, or to think about, in them. I certainly plan to reread Coelestis again some time. Its place on my list of favourites is secure.


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The "Beep" heard ’round the World

Today – October 4 – is the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, this planet’s first artificial satellite. And it seems all the promise of the early years of the “Space Age” hasn’t, well, hasn’t really been met. The last man on the Moon, Gene Cernan, climbed back into his Apollo 17 LM almost 35 years ago (on December 14, 1972). What happened? Why didn’t we go to Mars? We’re going to have to wait until 2020 before the US returns to the Moon. And it’s likely to get a little crowded up there – the Chinese, Japanese and Indians have all said they plan to send someone to the Moon around that time.


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Getting There

Last year, I had every intention of spending a day at Fantasycon. It was only when a friend emailed me on (what I thought was) the Monday before, and asked me how it had gone… I’d got the weekend wrong, and missed the con. This year, I made certain I had the right date. And so, early on the morning of 22 September, I made my way to the railway station to catch a train to Nottingham…

The last time I caught the train to spend the day in a Midlands city was alt.fiction in Derby. My bank ruined that day for me by cancelling my debit card for no good reason (see here). This time it was Central Trains. My train was supposed to arrive in Nottingham at 10:45. It didn’t get in until 12:15. Signals apparently failed just outside Chesterfield, necessitating a wait of 90 minutes until the problem “resolved itself”.

So I wasn’t in too good a mood when I eventually entered the Britannia Hotel. This was the first time I’d attended Fantasycon, but not the first time I’d attended a convention in the Britannia Hotel. That had been nearly 20 years earlier – in 1989, when the hotel was called the Albany. Mexicon 3, my first ever convention. I was living near Nottingham at the time, and so I drove in each day to see what a sf convention was like. I enjoyed it enough that I kept on going to them.

The journey to Nottingham pretty much set the tone for the day. I rarely attend programme items at cons, and hadn’t planned to do so at Fantasycon. I was there to meet up with friends. Unfortunately, none of them were in evidence when I arrived. I had a wander round the dealers’ room, but it was on the small side and consisted almost entirely of small presses. So my book haul was a bit light – Eric Brown’s new novella from PS Publishing, Starship Summer; The Lost Art by Simon Morden; Postscripts issue 10, a thick hardback-book special issue of the magazine; and The Human Abstract by George Mann, published by Telos. Both Simon Morden and George Mann were at the con, so I got them to sign their books for me – well, George’s was already signed, so he just dedicated it.

I chatted with the Solaris gang, who admitted that British cons were now spoiled for them since they’d recently returned from Dragon*Con in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Attendance 40,000! Around mid-afternoon, Neil Williamson and Hal Duncan appeared. I spoke to Jetse de Vries of Interzone, although mostly about music – I recommended he give Blind Ego a listen, a band I’d see play live several weekends before and thought he might like. I also had an interesting conversation with Stephane of French publishers Bragelonne.

And that was about it – a couple of wanders about the dealers’ room, a series of conversations in the bar. For lunch, I went into the city centre. There was a farmer’s market on, so I bought something to eat from a stall.

I left the con just after seven o’clock. When I reached the railway station, I discovered there were no trains running back home. A coach was laid on instead. So I spent a couple of hours on a coach, which of course avoided the most direct route, as far as Chesterfield. There, I changed to a double-decker bus because it was leaving twenty minutes before the coach. Oh, and I learnt that it’s difficult to use the toilets on those coaches. Perhaps it’s easier when on a motorway, but on B roads you get thrown about a bit.

Arriving back home, I rang friends who were out in town. They were in a new pub called The Old House. I jumped in a taxi and met them there. The bouncer stopped me as I was entering the pub, and asked me what was in the bag I was carrying. Books, I told him. He gave me a strange look, but let me in.

I didn’t go home until about midnight. It had been a long, and not entirely happy, day. Fantasycon had been a bust for me – not worth the hassle of getting to Nottingham. Perhaps it would have been if Central Trains hadn’t so thoroughly screwed up a simple journey there and back. But there were also less people I knew at the con than I’d expected, and the dealers’ room had been disappointing. I doubt I’ll bother going next year.


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Hook, Line and Snicker…

Spoof and phishing emails are a fact of life in the Twenty-first Century. And most of us are savvy enough to spot them. Most of us, in fact, it seems are savvier than the people who actually create such emails – at least given their often poor command of English.

Sensible people delete these emails as soon as they spot them in their inbox. And normally, I do too. But when I saw the following phishing email, I had to share it:

Good day dear clients,

We are sorry to inform that the fraudulents with the accounts of our bank have recently increased. That is why our bank changes the security system, which will provide maximum security to our clients if the accounts are used by frauds. You will receive a special program to your e-mail this week, as well as the instruction how to use it. With its help you will have an opportunity to make payments. Without this program no one will be able to transfer money from your account. If you lose the program, you will have to pay $4,99 and we will send you the copy of it.

To confirm the registration of this anti-fraud program visit this web-site and complete the necessary forms:

We appreciate your business and hope to keep you as a customer for life. Citizens Bank Money Manager GPS Online is so easy, no wonder it’s number 1 !

I don’t know which is most amusing: the honesty of the email – “Without this program no one will be able to transfer money from your account”; or the concept of a phishing program you have to pay to replace should you “lose” it…


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Metalheads

In the last two years I have seen more bands live than I did in the preceding two decades. Not all of those gigs were local – I travelled up to Glasgow to see Anathema and down to London to see Opeth. Almost all of the bands I’ve seen perform live were metal – it is, after all, the genre of music I like most. It’s not just bands whose output I know and like that I’ll go see, either. If any metal group which looks even remotely interesting is playing in town, I’ll go and watch them perform.

But I’d never been to a metal festival.

When I learnt that both Dark Tranquillity and Arch Enemy were on the bill of this year’s Bloodstock Open Air, I was determined to attend. Bloodstock Open Air (BOA) is a three-day metal festival, which takes place at Catton Hall in Derbyshire each year. And has done since 2005. It’s a relatively small festival – twenty-five signed bands, the same number of unsigned bands, and around 10,000 people attending. There’s also an indoor Bloodstock festival, which has been running since 2001. (Normally, BOA is in July, but this year it’d been postponed until August. Which resulted in the cancellation of the indoor Bloodstock.)

Anyway, Calin, a colleague from work, was also keen to attend. He even had camping gear. We made our plans – bought tickets, booked the days off work. Three of us were going: Calin, his girlfriend Angela, and myself. A few others were interested but, for one reason or another, decided they couldn’t make it. In the weeks leading up to BOA, I was both dreading it and looking forward to it. Seeing favourite bands perform live… but three days of chemical toilets and no showers. When the organisers announced that Scar Symmetry had joined the line-up, I was even more chuffed.

Calin had wanted to arrive early, insisting we needed to do so in order to get a good spot for the tent. I didn’t think we needed to get there until after lunch. The actual festival didn’t start until 4 o’clock, anyway. In the event, we left later than planned, stopped off en route at Morrison’s for beer, water and baby wipes, and arrived on-site around noon. Calin had been right. The field was already full of tents. Fortunately, we managed to find a good spot against the fence. As soon as we had the tent up, we went and checked out the “arena”. This was the site of the main stage, the unsigned bands tent, the beer tents, and various food and merchandising stalls. My first purchase was a Bloodstock cap to keep the sun off my head. Perhaps it wasn’t the best souvenir I could have chosen – several times over the weekend I was mistaken for festival staff because of it. The Metal Market stalls were mostly clothing – and mostly Goth clothing – but one or two did sell band T-shirts. But for me, it’s the music not the fashion. The stalls that sold CDs mostly had prog rock and classic metal. Even among metal fans, it seems my tastes are fringe. I didn’t see anyone sporting the same band T-shirts as myself the entire weekend. In fact, I was asked where I’d bought my Akercocke T-shirt by one of the blokes in the Earache Records stall, as he’d not seen it before. As for my Dark Tranquillity hoodie – referred to by my friends as my “death metal cardigan” – since Dark Tranquillity were on the bill, there were plenty of examples of the garment to be seen throughout the festival.

After a quick wander through the Metal Market, we hit the bar to try out the Bloodstock Ale. It wasn’t bad. And we weren’t the only ones to think that, since it ran out before the evening was finished. Bizarrely, all the paper cups in the bar were emblazoned with the Tuborg logo, and some of the bar staff also wore Tuborg T-shirts… but there was no Tuborg being served. Only Carlsberg.

The acts on the main stage were audible from pretty much anywhere in the arena. Some of the bands we went to watch perform, some we didn’t. Dark Tranquillity and Arch Enemy both put on excellent shows, although the sound could have been better. Lacuna Coil and In Flames gave slick polished performances. Scar Symmetry were… disappointing. Their set was ruined by bad sound, and it was only on the last song that they really shone. Several bands were afflicted by sound problems throughout the festival. The secret heroes of BOA, however, had to be Rise to Addiction, who played a solid set, sounded great, and got the crowd going. I bought their CD, A New Shade of Black for the Soul, afterwards.

Of all the genres of music, you’d have thought metal was well-suited to live performance. It’s aggressive and loud, both qualities more effective live than on a studio album. But a lot of the metal bands I listen to write songs with intricate guitar parts, and the subtlety and sophistication of those can be lost in a bad live mix. But when they riff, when the guitars start to chug, backed by the drummer’s inhumanly fast blastbeats… then it’s an intensely visceral experience, and has a presence no other musical genre can match.

Music festivals are ostensibly about, well, music. That’s what people attend for. But it’s also a three-day party. Getting drunk each day, crashing out in a tent… and, of course, having to steel yourself to use a chemical toilet. The toilets were particularly bad at BOA. I can’t understand why people would vandalise toilets they themselves have to use. It’s an almost literal example of the expression, “you don’t shit in your own backyard”. Several times during the event I was reminded of the Apollo astronaut who dosed himself with Imodium before his mission. He claims he currently holds the world record for distance travelled without going to the toilet – half a million miles. More than once, I wished I’d had the foresight to do the same…

No one expects to eat gourmet food during a music festival. While BOA was well served by food vendors, they sold pretty basic fare. I tried most of them. The fish and chips weren’t bad. The Mexican wrap, well, wasn’t – they left the tortilla open on a paper plate. Most of its contents ended up on the grass. The rice in the Chinese curry was like eating cavity wall insulation. The burgers… For an extra 50p, you could have a cheeseburger, the same as an ordinary burger but with a slice of processed cheese added. One food vendor, fortunately, did sell real food. It was just a small trailer, but it sold fresh-baked baguette and panini sandwiches. I did try their giant chocolate muffin for breakfast on the Saturday morning, but it was too much to eat in one go. There was also a coffee and doughnuts trailer. Calin bought Angela some doughnuts, and tried to wangle an extra one, on the perfectly reasonably assumption that those not sold would be thrown away. But the bloke behind the counter was having none of it. We Brits still haven’t got this customer service thing sussed, and it’s about time we did.

Toilets aside, the camping was fun. I’d bought a sleeping bag with a built-in air mattress from Argos the week before, and it was very comfortable. If there was a lot of noise at night – and there was always someone playing metal on a stereo somewhere – I never noticed it. One large boisterous group blocked one of the routes to the arena throughout the Saturday, and prevented people with cans of beer passing until they’d taken a swig. But it was all harmless fun.

On the Friday morning, the three of us tried walking to the nearest village, Walton-on-Trent. After a mile and a half, we decided to turn back. My ankles were killing me. Stupidly, I’d bought new boots for the festival only a couple of days before. I’ll know better next time. Calin took Angela to the village in the car, while I stayed to watch Scar Symmetry. Angela was not enjoying the camping as much as Calin and myself, although she’s a big fan of fellow countrymen Lacuna Coil. Since they were the last act on the Friday night, it was agreed she’d leave the next day, while Calin and I would stay to the end.

Early afternoon on the Saturday, we drove Angela to Tamworth railway station. The plan was to find somewhere in town to get a decent lunch – definitely needed after two days of bad burgers and hot dogs. But I was wearing wellies as they were more comfortable than my boots, and we both probably smelled a bit ripe… So we decided to go to the White Swan, the pub in Walton-on-Trent, which Calin and Angela had eaten at the day before. On the way back, we didn’t both with the GPS… and subseuqently got lost, and ended up driving down some narrow pot-holed roads that probably last saw traffic in the 1930s. The White Swan proved a surprise – excellent food and some nice beer. And full of people from BOA. So we didn’t feel, or smell, out of place.

By the time we got back to the festival, it was chucking it down. I no longer felt a bit daft walking around in wellies. We sat out some of the worst of the weather in the tent, finishing off the tinned lager we’d brought with us. Occasionally, we made forays into the arena to see what was happening. At one point, during Dream Evil’s set, I heard the singer say his band didn’t play “Swedish peasant metal; our songs have meaning”. And this from the band who wrote ‘The Book of Heavy Metal’, featuring such classic lines as “In life – I have no religion / Besides the heavy metal gods / Wear nothing but black skin tight leather / My skin’s clad with metal studs”…

Several times during the afternoon, Calin and I considered leaving because of the weather. But I was keen to see Arch Enemy, and Calin to see In Flames. So we stuck it out. It was the right decision. The rain stopped shortly before Arch Enemy took to the stage, and both bands’ performances were worth the wait.

The next morning, we were up early, took down the tent, piled everything into the car, and left. I was home by 9:30. The first thing I did was spend half an hour on the toilet. Then I had a shower. Afterwards, I felt human again.

Several times during BOA, I found myself wanting it to be over. The festival was occasionally uncomfortable – and three days without a shower or access to a decent toilet is not much fun. The music, however, more than made up for it. I’m glad it’s over, but I’m also very glad I went. It was certainly an experience, and I learnt some valuable lessons:

  • don’t wear new boots at a music festival
  • buy a hat – it keeps off the sun and the rain, and also hides your manky hair
  • baby wipes are genius
  • a giant chocolate muffin is not the breakfast of champions
  • trying to carry three large coffees in thin paper cups is foolish, dangerous and futile
  • even if it’s the middle of a heat-wave, take wellies anyway
  • there’s a 1000% markup on slices of processed cheese


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Words on Fire

A couple of nights ago, I sat down to watch François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. I was fairly sure I’d seen it before – I may even have read the book. Knowing the story is no guarantee I had done either, however. The central conceit – firemen who burn books rather than put out fires – is pretty much known by everyone. In the event, it turned out I hadn’t seen the film before – whatever images I knew from it must have come from stills or clips I’d seen. Nor had I read the book – a featurette on the DVD mentions the novel’s Mechanical Hounds, which I have no memory of at all.

I’m not a fan of Ray Bradbury’s fiction, and when I watched Truffaut’s Jules et Jim I couldn’t see why it was considered a classic – so my expectations for the film of Fahrenheit 451 weren’t exactly high. It was released in 1966 (a good year, for many reasons), so I fully expected it to look somewhat dated. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered why I’d bought the DVD – even if it had been in the sale…

But then I only had to remember Divine Intervention – a film I took several months to get around to watching since I didn’t expect to enjoy it. And I was so impressed, the film became a favourite. So no matter what my expectations, there was always the chance that Fahrenheit 451 would confound them.

There was only one way to find out…

Fahrenheit 451‘s opening credits were… interesting. No text appears on the screen – the film’s title, cast and crew are spoken, while the camera zooms in and focuses on one television aerial after another. A bright red fire engine then appears, speeding along a country road. It’s not a serious-looking fire engine, but more like one patterned on a child’s toy from the 1930s. Its destination proves to be one of those horrible 1960s concrete housing blocks – although the building looks disconcertingly new. Later, we see the fire station, a bright red building on a street that looks vaguely futuristic and yet still manages to seem somewhat grim and British and 1960s.

Something curious began to happen as I watched Fahrenheit 451. Yes, it does look dated. It makes no real effort to present a future world with any conviction, but instead seems to take place in a 1960s of the imagination. The central premise doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. The satire is so slight, it’s no more than a gentle poke in the ribs (although the cheap and nasty “interactive” television is amusing). Cyril Cusack’s avuncular Captain is disconcertingly, well, avuncular. And yet… I found myself drawn into the film. The mise-en-scène began to work for the film, rather than against it. Casting Julie Christie as Montag’s wife and as rebel Clarisse was a stroke of genius. The story seemed to forget its origins as a commentary on censorship (or apparently not), and instead turned into a paean to books and literature. By the time it had finished, I was a fan, and I’d decided that Fahrenheit 451 was a greatly under-rated film.

According to a documentary on the DVD, Fahrenheit 451 was a difficult project. It was Truffaut’s first English-language film, and he spoke the language poorly. It was filmed in colour and in England. The relationship between Truffaut and male star Oskar Werner also deteriorated as filming progressed – so much so that in the last few minutes of the film, Werner sports an entirely different haircut, which he’d had done to spite the director.

A remake of Fahrenheit 451 is apparently in production. According to IMDB, Frank Darabont (of The Green Mile) is directing and Tom Hanks is rumoured to have been cast as Montag. I think I’ll stick with the original…


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What I’m Pointing To…

Science fiction was born in 1926, when Hugo Gernsback published the first issue of Amazing Stories. The first attempt at defining science fiction occurred several days later. In more than eighty years, no one has satisfactorily defined the genre – the most often quoted “definition” is Damon Knight’s, science fiction “means what we point to when we say it”, from 1956. However, it often seems people chiefly define science fiction by its readers. So PD James, Maggie Gee, Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy – for example – can all write novels that are not science fiction, despite featuring tropes common to the genre. Or so they would have you believe…

I’ve yet to see anyone claim Jed Mercurio’s Ascent as science fiction. And yet… It’s set in the past, true: the book ends in 1969. It is also chiefly a fictionalisation of real events. But the final third of the novel certainly never took place. Which arguably makes Ascent alternate history, which is often considered a sub-genre of science fiction – sf author Stephen Baxter did something similar with NASA and a trip to Mars in Voyage. But there’s more to Ascent‘s science-fictional credentials than just that.

Yefgenii Yeremin is orphaned during the Siege of Stalingrad. Each year, a boy from the orphanage to which he is sent is awarded a cadetship in the air force. Yeremin wins that cadetship – by partially blinding his chief rival. During the Korean War, he becomes Ace of Aces. Known as “Ivan the Terrible”, he kills more enemy pilots than anyone else – despite not “officially” being in Korea. Unfortunately, his masters back in Moscow are not happy with his final escapade, and he is assigned to an air base in Franz Josef Land (an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, north of Novaya Zemlya). Most Soviet pilots spend a year or two in Franz Josef Land, but Yeremin and his family spend nearly a decade there. Yeremin is then recruited for the Soviet space programme… and the last third of Ascent describes his one-man mission to beat the Americans to the Moon in 1969.

The technology that Mercurio describes for this fictional mission is real. There really was a LK Lunar landing module and a LOK Lunar orbital craft. The project, however, was abandoned following the death of Chief Designer Korolev and a series of catastrophic failures of the N1 booster. As is clear from the attention to detail (and the bilbiography at the end of the novel), Mercurio has not stinted on his research.

Reviews of the book in the national press made much of its heavy use of unglossed aeronautical jargon and the near-obsessive attention to detail. This, some critics decided, was a reflection of the protagonist’s own self-absorption and aloofness. Yeremin was so driven, they argued, that he was defined by his immersion in the technology he used and the ways in which he used it. The fact that Yeremin’s wife is referred to throughout as “the widow”, they saw as indicative of a protagonist who was so focused on his own ambitions that he could not relate to people – especially those closest to him. But Yeremin’s fellow pilots in Korea are all named, as are the cosmonauts he joins in Star City (Yuri Gagarin, Alexei Leonov, Vladimir Komarov). The only US pilots named during the Korean War dogfights, however, are those who later become astronauts – Neil Armstrong, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, Wally Schirra…

To my mind, Mercurio’s jargon-heavy prose, and lack of a glossary, has much in common with a science fiction narrative. To aeronautical and astronautical buffs, Mercurio’s prose is detailed and accurate… but not baffling. To a science fiction reader, a story which references androids, FTL, Dyson Spheres, AIs, etc., is not impenetrable. In fiction, settings are defined by what they contain – in mainstream fiction, those objects are shared with the real world. We all know what a television set is, a mobile phone (or cell phone), Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle, turnip, casserole, marmoset, etc… In science fiction, the objects within the setting are either unique to the story or to the genre. In the latter case, no glossing is usually necessary (and is, incidentally, where mainstream authors writing sf usually fall flat on their faces). In the former, the better writers allow meaning to come from context, and so avoid the dreaded info-dump. True, some sf novels do use glossaries – Frank Herbert’s Dune is perhaps the premier example. Mercurio does not gloss (the amount of jargon understood depends on the reader’s familiarity with the technology described), but he also makes terms comprehensible through context and through info-dumps.

Reviewers unfamiliar with the language of science fiction found the privileging of technology in Ascent worthy of comment. They interpreted this as an aspect of Mercurio’s characterisation of Yeremin. Narrow, or flat, characterisation is often perceived as a defining characteristic of science fiction. In a literature where the idea, often in the form of technology or science, is foregrounded, then characterisation is often going to appear subservient. Because Mercurio does this in Ascent, I started thinking about what it was that made the novel science fiction, and what it is that makes any sf novel science fiction…

Let’s say that science fiction can be distinguished by its settings, or by its readers. To many, if a story is set in the future or in outer space, then it is science fiction. But Apollo 13 is not considered to be sf. Any book labelled by the publisher as science fiction is sf. But not all sf books are marketed as sf – William Gibson’s Spook Country or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, for instance. Any book written by an author who identifies themselves as a sf writer, or identifies themselves as a member of the community of sf writers and readers, is science fiction. Again, not all sf books are written by sf writers – Orwell’s 1984, or Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange. So neither of these characteristics are distinguishing or useful.

Science fiction, unlike fantasy, is a modernist form of literature because it takes as axiomatic that the human condition and/or the human environment can be controlled – from cybernetic implants to genetic engineering, from colonies on Mars to re-engineering whole galaxies. Even the “unknown” can be subjected to reasoning and control, although it may not produce answers. Science fiction differs from mainstream modernist literature in that the tools used for control of the human condition and/or environment are figments. They either do not exist, do not operate in the real world as described in the text, or rely on science and/or technology which does not exist. Or their use presupposes, or leads to, a condition or situation which cannot or does not currently exist – such as a landing on Mars, or the Germans winning World War II. Or, in the case of Ascent, the Soviets sending a cosmonaut to the Moon.

So science fiction is more than just an invented setting. It is more than just squids in space. It is the process by which the figments are used, and it is the intent of that process. Not the intent of the author – we can’t know that from the text alone. But if the figments are instrumental in the control of the human condition and/or environment, and that is the intent of the figments in the text, then the text must be science fiction.

It’s a theory, anyway…

After all that, I should probably point out that I did enjoy Ascent. I’ve been fascinated by the Space Race since I was a child – The Right Stuff is both a favourite book and a favourite film – and I’m enough of a geek to find the technology fascinating. However, I do think Mercurio missed one trick in his book. One of the Apollo missions allegedly reported strange lights on the Moon’s surface during one of their orbits. Perhaps Mercurio should have tied this in – so Yeremin’s landing becomes a UFO myth of the Apollo programme. It would have provided an amusing link to the real world.


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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…