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Subspace Explorers, EE ‘Doc’ Smith

There is a Brian Aldiss story, ‘Confluence’ – I’ve referenced it a number of times in reviews – which consists of amusing dictionary definitions of words from an alien language. Such as “SHAK ALE MAN: the struggle that takes place in the night between the urge to urinate and the urge to continue sleeping”. And, “YUP PA: a book in which everything is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it”. Sadly there’s no word that means “a book in which everything is understandable except a person’s reason for reading it”. Which is certainly true when it comes to the works of EE ‘Doc’ Smith, and most especially Subspace Explorers (1965, USA). It was a reread for me, but I last read it when I was twelve or thirteen, and I remembered pretty much nothing of it. Sadly, I cannot go back to that state of blissful ignorance.

Several centuries from now – exactly when is impossible to tell as the world-building is extremely poor – the Earth is split into a WestHem and EastHem: the first is a corrupt democracy controlled by corrupt unions, and the second is a tyranny masquerading as communism. In fact, the entire political set-up of the novel is cobbled together from US knee-jerk right-wing myths: communism evil! unions bad! politicians corrupt! big government bad! monopolistic corporations good! There are also colonies on a number of other worlds, all of which were settled, and are run, by corporations. Spaceships travel through subspace to journey between these worlds and “Tellus” (the Latin name for Earth, which Smith, bizarrely, used in all his fiction). 

A spaceship, the Procyon, suffers some sort of catastrophe in subspace. There are only five survivors – the first officer, the astrogator, the daughter of the owner of the biggest oil company in existence and wed to the first officer only hours earlier, her friend who is also the girlfriend of the astrogator, and a scientist who later turns out to be the giantest brain in all of human history. The oil magnate’s daughter is an oil dowser, and the subspace wreck has given her super mind powers, which she then teaches to the other four…

Meanwhile, the nasty old unions in WestHem are trying to break the corporations, who want to automate everything in order to keep down inflation (er, what?). The copper miners threaten to strike, because copper is apparently vital in the future. But the psionic five can dowse for metal, and they find a huge copper deposit on another planet for GalMet, the mining monopoly, also based offworld. The copper miners’ strike fails, so the milk truck drivers go on strike, because centuries in the future milk is once again delivered to people’s homes in bottles and this is so vital to life on Earth that a strike could cause society to collapse… The corporations break the strike using giant-sized battle tanks to deliver the milk (yes, really).

Anyway, the corporations defeat the nasty unions, inadvertently triggering a nuclear war, but never mind, the corporations’ “superdreanought” spaceships manage to destroy the missiles before they cause any important damage. The corporations trigger a WestHem election, but lose it to a coalition of all the political parties – which are all corrupt and evil, of course. But never mind. “Enlightened self-interest”, AKA unregulated corporate operations, will win out eventually. Then the corporations’ blockade of Earth Tellus is broken by a mysterious fleet of superdreadnoughts from an unknown planet.

Then it turns out one corporation, previously unmentioned in the novel, has for more than 200 years been running a secret world with a strictly-regimented “feudal” society (it’s not feudal, of course, because Smith clearly doesn’t know what feudalism is). That’s where the mysterious fleet came from. (The Company Agents are all electrically-charged, and they wear rubber-soled boots, so if anyone touches them – which is just, no, just too fucking stupid for words.) Our hardy heroes, the five from the shipwreck mentioned earlier, with the amazing mind powers, who by now have taught pretty much everyone on the corporation-run planets their amazing mind powers, free the Company serfs on The Company World. But the Company serfs had been infiltrated by agents from a secret world settled by the USSR! And with only five pages to go our hardy heroes defeat them too! 

I went into Subspace Explorers with low expectations. It not only failed to meet them, it dug a bottomless pit and then dived into it. Reading the infantile take on politics and economics used by Smith, his hatred of unions and valorisation of unregulated corporations, the implication inflation is more dangerous to a nation than nuclear war, I can only wonder how many of the techbros responsible for the shit state of the world today were influenced by it. We may mock sf and its “Torment Nexus”, but right-leaning politics as understood by a five-year-old such as that described in Smith’s novel, has probably caused more damage. Subspace Explorers is not just bad, it can cause brain damage. Techbros may well name-drop the Culture, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn Musk, Altman, Andressen, Thiel et al have read and assimilated this novel.

If you ever meet anyone who claims to like Subspace Explorers, back away slowly from them. Then turn around. 

And run.


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Witch World, Andre Norton

I remember reading some novels by Norton back in the 1970s, but I don’t remember if Witch World (1963, USA) was one of them. Probably not. Nothing in it seemed remotely familiar. Or particularly good. Although it was on the Hugo Award shortlist in 1964. The only memory I have of the novels by Norton I read back then is that they were science fiction adventure stories, on a par with something like the Hardy Boys. And with, I seem to recall, mostly teenage or young adult protagonists. Enjoyable, but not memorable. To a teenager, at least.

And I think you’d have to be a teenager to put up with the awful cod-mediaeval dialogue Norton uses in Witch World. The plot is simple: Simon Tregarth – who is not a teenage or young adult protagonist – is on the run after a life of adventure post-war, not always on the right side of the law. He meets a man who promises him a new life, where he will never be caught. Tregarth goes with him, and learns the man is the guardian of the Siege Perilous, a magical stone which can send people to other worlds. Tregarth gets sent to one. Cue adventure.

The world is vaguely mediaeval, with the odd bit of high tech, which even Tregarth thinks is weird in inconsistent. There’s also magic, but he doesn’t blink an eye at that. Nor the fact it’s only women who can perform magic, and they lose the ability if they’ve had sex (which is a bit annoying for Tregarth, as he fancies one of the witches big time). But then it turns out he has magical abilities – a man! inconceivable! – and he’s definitely not a virgin.

Anyway, Tregarth joins the Guards of Estcarp, and plays a pivotal role in a war against the Kolder, human invaders from another world – Norton comes within an inch of describing them as “Yellow Peril” – who turn those they capture into robot zombies. Despite proving unstoppable for much of the novel, Tregarth manages to stop them. There are, of course, a few diversions along the way – failing to defend the trader city of Sulcarkeep, meeting the misogynist Falconers of the mountains, a pogrom against those of the “old blood” in Karsten, a forced marriage in Verlaine, and even discovering the tomb of one of the ancient race who occupied the planet before the humans arrived. It’s all very thrilling…

Witch World went on to spawn a series of more than twenty books over four decades, not all by Norton alone. I have the second book of the series, Web of the Witch World (1964, USA), but I very much doubt I’ll be reading any further.


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The Affirmation, Christopher Priest

I’ve read a number of Priest’s novels over the years – I think the first was The Glamour (1984, UK) back in the late 1980s. And there was a period in the late 1990s when I read each new novel by him as it hit paperback. That ended with The Separation (2002, UK), which I seem to recall had a troubled publishing history. It was nearly a decade before his next book appeared, by which point he’d sort of dropped off my radar, before slowly creeping back intermittently over the next couple of decades.

Which is not to say I didn’t like what I’d read, and I’d always admired his writing, and sort of planned to catch up with the works I’d missed. Hence, The Affirmation (1981, UK), which was originally published 44 years ago, and joined the SF Masterworks series in 2011. It’s also the first novel to feature the Dream Archipelago, which Priest returned to several times, in a collection and a further three novels.

In 1976, twenty-nine year old Peter Sinclair suffers a breakdown after a string of appalling luck over a few weeks – his father dies, he’s made redundant, his landlord evicts him, and his girlfriend dumps him. He decides to write his autobiography as a form of recovery. But as he writes, he searches for a “greater truth” by disguising its setting. So the UK becomes Faiandland, London is Jethra, and everyone in Sinclair’s life is given another name.

In this “autobiography”, Sinclair has won a lottery for immortality treatment, and travels south by ship to Collago, an island in the Dream Archipelago. There is a side-effect to the treatment: amnesia. So Sinclar must document his life in order to help the clinic’s therapists restore his memories. But this version of Sinclair has written an “autobiography” too, about his life in London…

The narrative drifts back and forth between Sinclair in the UK and Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago, each one muddying the other. UK Sinclair is clearly in a bad state. He’s rescued by his sister, and then his girlfriend turns up and the two reconcile and move in together. It does not go well. Faiandland Sinclair is not sure he wants to be immortal, even after entering into a relationship with the Dream Archipelago avatar of his girlfriend.

The Dream Archipelago is first presented as an invention of Sinclair, which explains its inconsistencies and the somewhat unharmonious names. It’s equatorial, the northern continent is inhabited, the southern continent is uninhabited, but there’s a war and the islands form a neutral zone. The point being Sinclair’s invented world is not very convincing. But Sinclair is so invested in it – intellectually and emotionally – that he has trouble determining which is which. Details slip and slide between the two, especially after Sinclair has taken the treatment and is trying to regain his memory.

The Affirmation is… unsettling, and cleverly done. Priest covered similar ground in later novels, and in a manner that was more sophisticated. Which is hardly surprising. He had a singular oeuvre, which is definitely worth exploring, and I clearly have more catching up to do.


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More longer

I mentioned my other blog a few months ago. I post longer, less-frequent reviews there. I also promised to post links here to those reviews. I forgot. Here are the last three:

From the 2024 Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist, The Ten Percent Thief by Lanya Lakshminarayan (see here).

And from this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (see here).

And, sadly, a book that didn’t make any award shortlists, The Mars House, Natasha Pully (see here).


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Scarpetta 19: Red Mist, Patricia Cornwell

The nineteenth book in the Kay Scarpetta series, and following straight on from the previous one, Port Mortuary (2010, USA). Scarpetta has been invited to the Georgia Prison for Women to speak to the woman who sexually abused Jack Fielding (Scarpetta’s deputy, who was murdered in Port Mortuary) when he was twelve, and whose daughter is the psycho genius responsible for his death (and several others). Scarpetta is then contacted by Jaime Berger, no longer DA responsible for sex crimes in New York, but now based in Savannah – and it turns out she manipulated Scarpetta into visiting Georgia. Because she thinks a young woman on death row who brutally murdered a respected doctor and his family ten years prior is innocent.

Scarpetta resents being manipulated, but then Berger is murdered… and the hunt is on for a poisoner, who may be linked to the prison and responsible for the deaths of several inmates who died of “natural causes” just hours before they were due to be executed. The whole gang is in Savannah – Marino, Lucy, Benton – and it seems the poisoner was actually responsible for the doctor’s murder ten years ago.

The plot is, to be honest, a bit weak. Once again, Scarpetta’s reputation is attacked (the murderer from the previous book is claiming Scarpetta tried to kill her). There’s another psycho genius hiding in the background, and whose identity is pretty easy to guess. Everyone seems particularly slow to spot things, including Scarpetta, and the killer is found more or less by accident. But there’s some good autopsy scenes and some good deductive science in identifying the poison.

Red Mist (2011, USA) seems to close off a two-book story arc, so I expect the next one, The Bone Bed (2012), will introduce yet another psycho genius who will murder a few people, then twist the facts of the case to make Scarpetta look like the villain, before being shot and killed while trying to murder Scarpetta… But we shall see.


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Wish I Was Here, M John Harrison

Subtitled “an anti-memoir”, Wish I was Here (2023, UK) is actually, well, a memoir. It’s M John Harrison writing about certain periods of his life, and how he thought about it then, or at least how he imagined he thought about it then, and how he thinks about it now. It’s not about his writing per se, although his writing career is often mentioned. Nor is it his life, although that does provide the book’s narrative arc.

Harrison was born in the Midlands – Rugby, to be exact – to a middle-class family but struggled to find a career. He moved to London, he became a writer, he fell in with the New Worlds crowd. He moved north, he became a climber. He moved back to London, his writing career benefited. He moved to his current address, where he can now look back in relative comfort to a life that had few periods of relative comfort.

None of this is especially surprising, or offers any real insight to what he writes and why. But Harrison here is writing about his life much as he writes about the peripheral characters and events in his novels, and it’s plain how the two are related. There’s little doubt now Harrison is one of the finest writers UK genre has produced, and if his position in the wider UK literary scene is less certain it’s only because of anti-genre snobbery. But they’re gradually coming round and, as Harrison celebrates his 80th birthday, the quality of his fiction is becoming more widely recognised.

Myself, I’ve always admired his writing, although I’d like to reread all those novels I read back in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, as I think I’d appreciate them more. (Happily, I have copies of all of them, although many are in storage.) I was surprised on reading The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020, UK) last year, and Wish I Was Here, how readable his prose is. I mean, I’ve always felt he had a superb ear for dialogue – it’s so effortlessly realistic – but I’d formed the impression he was a difficult read. He’s not. Wish I Was Here demonstrates this in abundance. It’s so straightforward that it actually suggests it’s anything but. If that makes sense.

Every time I read a novel by M John Harrison, I want to go back and reread all his previous novels. Wish I Was Here is not a novel, but it has the same effect. Much as Harrison revisited his memories to write this “anti-memoir”, I want to revisit my memories of his books, the ones I read ten, twenty, thirty, forty years ago. And explore them afresh, admire them all over again, perhaps for different reasons. Which is the whole point.


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Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett

Cited by many as their favourite of the Discworld novels, Men at Arms (1993, UK), the fifteenth book in the Discworld series, is certainly one of the more quotable books of the series, at least in the sense it has more quotable lines of commentary than the sort of bad jokes people like to quote (but really shouldn’t). The one about Vimes and his boots – a serious point, not a joke – has had a lot of airplay on social media over the years.

Men at Arms is the second of the City Watch novels, featuring many of the cast from Guards! Guards! (1989, UK). A new recruit, human but brought up by dwarfs, is unknowingly the heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork (which has not had a king or queen for centuries), and a prominent member of the Assassins’ Guild has decided restoring the monarchy would be good for the city and his own much-reduced fortunes.

Meanwhile, the Night Watch has taken on some other recruits under a new hiring initiative, including a dwarf, a troll and a woman. They are, of course, completely inept, except the woman, who’s actually a werewolf. They investigate a series of random murders, and begin bonding as a squad. Sergeant Vimes is due to marry a duchess, the richest woman in the city (although, to be honest, the eccentric animal (dragons, in this case) sanctuary-obsessed aristocrat is a bit of a tired cliché). And the aforementioned assassin has stolen the “gonne”, Discworld’s only firearm, and is using it to murder people to discredit the Lord Patrician, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork.

It can hardly be a surprise the new recruits foil the plot, more by accident than by design, but that’s how these sorts of stories work. Pratchett has fun with his characters, using them to mock various institutions and attitudes, both Ankh-Morporkian and real world. There are several laugh out loud lines, and a number of bitter-sweet moments. II’s easy to understand why so many pick Men at Arms as a favourite.


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Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie

I still think Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013, USA) was a much-needed shot in the arm for space opera. It had been taking on more and more characteristics of military sf, after New British Space Opera was co-opted by US authors and editors and became New Space Opera. But that’s an argument for another day. There was lots to like in the two sequels to Leckie’s debut, as well. Also the two pendant novels published since, Provenance (2017, USA) and Translation State (2023, USA) (although less so for the latter, I thought). I’ve yet to read Leckie’s fantasy novel, The Raven Tower (2019, USA).

Lake of Souls (2024, USA) is Leckie’s first collection, containing stories originally published between 2006 and 2019, and including a story original to the collection. The contents are organised in three sections: stories from the Imperial Radch universe, stories from the universe of The Raven Tower, and, opening the collection, stories unconnected to either.

Collections are by definition mixed bags. It probably comes as no surprise the stories set in the universes of Leckie’s novels are (mostly) better than the unconnected ones. Having said that, of the three Imperial Radch stories, only one reads like the same universe as the novels, one could possibly be in that universe, but the third appears to have no connection at all (it’s some sort of fable). 

The unconnected stories… the title story is a first contact that goes wrong, and reminded me of several similar pieces from the 1990s, two stories are based on premises that are definitely creaking at the seams these days, but ‘The Justified’, which is a very modern type of sf, and the Le Guin-ish ‘Another Word for World’ (big clue in the title there) are better.

The seven stories set in the world of The Raven Tower are more consistent, although the longest one, ‘The God of Au’, makes a jump two-thirds of the way in and nothing after that makes sense. I quite liked ‘The Unknown God’ and ‘Beloved of the Sun’, but the others are not especially memorable. Having said that, I suspect a collection of only fantasy stories might have been a better collection than Lake of Souls.

I was not really surprised on reading Lake of Souls to discover Leckie’s short fiction wasn’t up to the standard of her novels. While the world-building was generally done well, even if some of the premises were badly shop-worn, in several stories she failed to stick the ending. There are authors whose short fiction is much better than their novels, James Tiptree Jr, for example. It seems Leckie is the opposite.


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Seeker, Jack McDevitt

Seeker (2005, USA) is the final volume in the Alex Benedict omnibus I bought while it was on offer, and I still haven’t decided yet if I’m going to read further in the series. Because… they’re really bad, they’re terrible science fiction, but… they’re easy reads, you can polish one off in an afternoon, and there’s a certain fascination in seeing how poorly McDevitt builds his future federation. How the fuck this novel won the Nebula Award in 2006 is a mystery up there with, well, the commercial success of Oasis.

These stories are set nearly 10,000 years in the future, but you would never guess it. Houses have AIs, people travel between planets, cars fly, and, er, there’s probably a few other gizmos mentioned. But in terms of culture and society, McDevitt’s future resembles early twenty-first century USA – there are no characters, for example, with names that might seem out of place in present-day Los Angeles or New York. Having said that, there’s a single mention of “dark skin”, and even a paragraph on that old white sf bullshit by old white sf writers where all the races have interbred until everyone has “olive skin”. Homo sapiens has been around for over 100,000 years and we still have races. That’s not going to change in 10,000 years, even if McDevitt doesn’t like putting non-white people in his novels.

McDevitt mentions the Bataan Death March (I’ve met a survivor of this, by the way), and I still find it really bad craft where things that would be known to a late twentieth-century person are known to a twelfth-millennium person, but they know very little of the one hundred centuries in between, or even of events that happened a decade or so earlier. 

The plot of Seeker – and I’m wondering if McDevitt borrowed the structure of his novels from Clive Cussler; certainly the conceit that they’re written by narrator Chase Kolpath, Alex Benedict’s pilot and assistant, is taken from Sherlock Holmes… An opening prologue describes a man trapped in a hotel after an avalanche – something else not solved after 10,000 years – and lamenting he never got to reveal the shocking discovery he and his wife had made.

Cut to the novel’s present, thirty-some years later. A woman – apparently they also have trailer trash 10,000 years in the future – offers Benedict an antique cup for sale. It proves to have come from the Seeker, a ship which disappeared in the 26th century after delivering a group of political dissidents to a colony world. The location of the world was never revealed, and the colony has been lost ever since. And become legend.

Of course, Benedict finds the ship. And the colony. As he and Kolpath investigate, Kolpath is assaulted by a man with a history of violent assaults on women – apparently not solved after 10,000 years – and then Benedict and Kolpath narrowly escape death when a shuttle they had planned to fly on is blown up by a bomb, killing all the passengers – something else not solved 10,000 years in the future.

I’m pretty sure you could rewrite Seeker and set it at the turn of the millennium. A lost historical colony somewhere in the Pacific, perhaps. A lost ship. Abandoned ships like the Marie Celeste were pretty common during the Age of Sail. Cussler has probably already written such a novel (his Iceberg (1975, USA) involves a lost ship mysteriously re-appearing, for example). It would be difficult to hide in the opening years of the twenty-first century the survival of a colony lost for hundreds of years, but I’m sure a creative author could figure something out. Such an author would not be Jack McDevitt.


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The Whole Man, John Brunner

I have a distinct memory of reading this in 1986 while I was studying at People’s College in Nottingham. Weirdly, the only thing I remember is actually reading the book, not the plot nor any of the details of the story.

The Whole Man (1964, UK) was nominated for the Hugo in 1965 – not an especially good year. It lost to Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer (1964, USA), which I thought poor, and shared a shortlist with Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964, USA), which I hated, and Cordwainer’s Smith’s The Planet Buyer (1964, USA), which would have been an acceptable winner had it been a complete novel…

Gerald Howson was born the son of a terrorist leader in a UK where UN troops were brought in to stabilise the country. He is disabled, but also proves, after puberty, to be an enormously powerful telepath. In a world in which telepaths are routinely used by the UN to telepathically impose peace in areas where violence is about to erupt. And for psychiatric therapy.

The novel is fixed up from three stories, ‘City of the Tiger’, ‘The Whole Man’ and ‘Curative Telepath’, although the novel is split into sections called ‘Molem’, ‘Agitat’ and ‘Mens’, which is Latin for “mind over matter”. The first section is Gerald’s childhood living rough in a UK occupied by UN Peacekeepers. In the second, Gerald is at the WHO clinic in Ulaanbaatar, where he learns about telepathic therapy and catapathic groupings, which is when a powerful telepath retreats into a dreamworld and takes several people with them. Gerald is called into “cure” one such group, but it all proves to be a waste of time as the telepath had merely “taken a holiday” – not the phrase the book uses, but near enough. Gerald then returns to his hometown for a vacation, meets a group of students, helps save the life of one who commits suicide at a house party, and so discovers a path to his own happiness.

I’ve long thought debut novels should not appear on award shortlists, chiefly because the effort invested in debut novels by publishers is so much more than that put into novels by established authors – and with good reason, the publisher wants the debut novelist to have a career, it’s good for them, good for the novelist, good for readers. But does set expectations the debut novelist is unlikely to ever meet. Likewise, I can think of no reason why fix-up novels should appear on award shortlists. True, 1965 was in the early days of the Hugo Awards, but surely there were enough novels qua novels that year not to have to nominate a novel fixed up from stories published between 1958 and 1959, more than 6 years earlier?

The fix-up nature of The Whole Man is obvious – it has no actual plot, just three situations with self-contained story arcs. The world-building is a bit crap, the telepathy is not thought (ha!) through completely, and despite being set in some indefinable near-future everything reads like 1950s UK. Brunner’s treatment of a disabled protagonist in a 1965 novel is all that you would expect of a disabled protagonist in a 1958 short story.

At the time I remembered originally reading this novel, I also recall reading a novel which claimed spiders were so generally found repulsive there was a theory they were extraterrestrial. Absolute nonsense, of course, I’d always thought I’d read that in The Whole Man. Apparently not. No mention of spiders at all. Ah well. It seems likely I’ll remember The Whole Man as the one without the spiders as there’s little else to make it memorable.