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Glory Season, David Brin

I remember reading Brin’s Uplift novels many years ago and quite enjoying them, although something about them never sat quite well with me. I no longer remember what that was, although I’ve never made an effort to seek out his novels since. But Glory Season (1993, USA) was nominated for the Hugo Award, and is set on a world of cloned women, so it sounded like it might be worth a go.

So I was surprised to discover Brin is actually a pretty bad writer – sloppy, a tendency to stretch his story long past what the narrative can bear, with a handful of good ideas buried under a mass of banal detail. Characters change hair colour between paragraphs, a woman described as Chuychin (one of the cloned women clans) becomes half-Chuchyin a couple of sentences later. The writing is mostly clumsy, but occasionally manages an easy readability.

The world of Stratos was settled millennia before by a group who wanted to create a society that was safe for women. They needed men to “spark” their parthagenetic clones, but they limited the male libido to a single season of each year, and allowed them to also produce non-clone children (needed to replace the men, of course, but also daughters). The clones live in clans, each of which fulfils some sort of “niche”, or specialisation, in Stratoin society. Non-clone daughters, known as vars, hope to find niches and so get permission to start their own clans of clones.

Maia and Leie are twin vars, who leave their clan on their majority to seek their fortune. They sign aboard a pair of coal hauliers travelling down the coast. Maia stumbles across a conspiracy to supply a drug to men which triggers their libido out of season. From there, it spirals into a plot between two hardline factions, at the centre of which is a recently-arrived scout from the interstellar society the founders of Stratos left millennia before. Maia learns more about her world’s history, about the Game of Life, which is important to the men of the world, and about humanity on worlds other than Stratos.

In the best of hands, that’s a lot to cover, but Brin still manages to make it drag over 600 pages. At one point, Maia and her companions are trapped in a room with a hidden exit, and Brin spends over twenty pages explaining how they eventually discover the exit. For huge chunks of the book, Maia has no agency, and is little more than a witness to elements of the world-building Brin wants to show off. It makes for an aggravating read.

There are also many similarities between Glory Season and Mary Gentle’s Golden Witchbreed (1983, UK). The plots are vaguely similar, although Brin’s novel is told from the perspective of a native of the world, not a visitor – but the same lost past, a high tech war fought thousands of years earlier, and an ancient high tech citadel… Coincidence, or did Glory Season simply “borrow” elements of Golden Witchbreed‘s plot? Glory Season may have been nominated for the Hugo, but Golden Witchbreed is greatly superior (it was nominated for the BSFA, but lost to Tik-Tok (1983, UK)).

Discovering Brin was a worse writer than I’d remember was not a surprise. Spotting the resemblances between Glory Season and Golden Witchbreed was. I’ve no idea if Brin had knowledge of Gentle’s novel. I would like to think not, but it was definitely published in the US. Even so, on its own merits alone, Glory Season is not very good: overly long, and its poor writing works against its few good ideas.


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The White Dragon, Anne McCaffrey

The White Dragon (1978, Ireland) is the concluding volume to the original Dragonrider of Pern trilogy, but having now read the book it doesn’t much feel like the conclusion to anything. So I suppose it’s fortunate McCaffrey continued to churn out Pern novels for a few more decades…

The White Dragon follows directly on from Dragonquest (1971, Ireland). It focuses on Jaxom and Ruth, the teenage heir to Ruatha Hold and his undersized dragon, which is white if you hadn’t guessed. Ruth, the dragon, proves to be better at some things than the other dragons, despite being undersized and not sexually developed. He is faster and more manoeuvrable in the air, he has an excellent memory which is useful when travelling between (which is always italicised), and fire-lizards love him. Fire-lizards were introduced in the previous book and are sort of ferret-sized (I think) pocket dragons, about as smart as cats, and have been adopted by many on Pern as pets. They also seem to remember events that happened in the distant past.

The dragonriders, hold lords and master craftsmen have determined that humans first settled Pern on the southern continent, but they can find no record of why they fled north. The oldtimers – dragonriders from 400 years previously who helped save the day in the first book of the trilogy, Dragonflight (1968, Ireland) – were given land on the southern continent because they were causing problems with the present-day dragonriders and holds. But it looks like there’s lots more, and more desirable, land available on the continent.

And The White Dragon is more or less about that – exploring the southern continent, uncovering the ruins of the first human settlement on Pern, some political wrangling between an ambitious hold lord on the southern continent and the established holds on the northern continent, and Jaxom’s romance with the sister of said ambitious hold lord… There’s no plot per se, just a series of events which develop the characters and the background, and hint at the actual history of the planet.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not an entertaining read. Jaxom is an engaging character, as are the immediate supporting cast, more so at least than in the earlier two books, and Ruth can be amusing at times. Things happen… but there’s no real plot, no climax, no closure, no suggestion the story has concluded. Looking at the Pern books, it doesn’t seem so much a series as a collection of linked trilogies, and I’ve no idea which novel actually continues the story from The White Dragon.

I’ve enjoyed reading the trilogy, far more than I expected to, but I’ve no plans to read any more. If there is a book that follows on directly from The White Dragon, perhaps I might give it a go. But Wikipedia is no help, and I don’t intend to read umpteen books on the off-chance I find it… So, for now, I shall bail – but I will no longer malign the Dragonriders of Pern series as it’s actually not that bad.


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The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson

I’m a big fan of KSR’s fiction, because of the subjects he tackles and his treatment of them just as much as the stories he tells. He doesn’t just make use of common sf tropes, he interrogates them. A lot more sf authors should do that.

The Years of Rice and Salt (2002, USA) may be an alternate history, but it’s not a story set in a world which differs from ours due to some change in the past; it is in fact several stories – ten of them. Nor is it the book promised by its back-cover blurb, which posits a story set in a present-day world in which the Black Death in the fourteenth century killed 99% of the population of Europe instead of one-third. As a result, other civilisations flourished. Obviously, they flourished in real history – but in KSR’s novel they ended up dominating the world. The Years of Rice and Salt is not that either. It’s not a history of the world following on from the jonbar point. Which I suppose would be almost impossible – and huge! – to write. Like Laurent Binet’s Civilizations (2019, France), it is a series of vignettes which skip forward through the centuries, and around the world, from the Black Death to the present day. 

The linking conceit is that there is a group of people, connected eternally as a “jati”, who are repeatedly reincarnated. They die, spend time in the bardo, and are then reincarnated – as humans, or as animals. Allowing KSR to provide a focus point from which to hang to ten different stories taking place over the centuries in his alternate history. Sometimes the members of the jati remember their earlier lives, but usually they don’t.

The Black Death wipes out Europe. The Islamic Empire is never dislodged from the Iberian Peninsula. The Chinese continue to war on their western border, but also explore east and eventually settle the western coast of North America. A progressive empire develops in southern India. A league of Native American nations in central North America form a federation and keep their independence. There is a decades-long war which involves all three of the major world powers – the Indian empire, the Islamic empire, and the Chinese empire. Once the dust has settled, a new world order prevails. The various members of the jati are present, or pivotal, in some of the more important events in this 700 year history. Which also take place all over the world – Samarkand, Beijing, the Great Lakes, an Islamic city in western France, a Chinese San Francisco, and so on…

It’s fascinating stuff. The linking text is, to be honest, a not especially interesting mechanism to give the novel structure, and the ten “books” in The Years of Rice and Salt would be equally engrossing without them. KSR’s research is impressive – but not perfect: at one point, he states the Islamic punishment of cutting off the right hand of criminals is worsened because it forces criminals to use their left “unclean” hand when eating. That’s the whole point of the punishment. But the invented history KSR has created is astonishing. It feels all too real, which I guess is the point of the novel. Recommended.


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Not This August, Cyril M Kornbluth

Nominated for the Hugo in 1956, which was won that year by Robert Heinlein’s Double Star (1955, USA). Not This August (1955, USA) takes place in 1965 in a US that has been fighting USSR and Chinese forces for three years. The war has not been going well, and life in the US is grim, deprived and increasingly restrictive.

Billy Justin is a veteran and a small milk farmer barely scraping by. He hires a local itinerant who doesn’t appear to have all his marbles, only for the man to reveal he headed a secret project to build a crewed orbital bomb platform to end the war. The project was in danger of being discovered so he sealed the secret bunker and fatally gassed everyone inside.

The Soviets conquer the US and a political troop take over the county where Justin lives. He hooks up with a US resistance, and they restart the orbital bomb platform project, which was nearly finished anyway. Then the Soviet occupying troops are replaced with more hardline troops, but the Americans manage to stage an uprising, which serves as a successful ploy to prevent the Soviets from stopping the launch of the bomb platform.

Not This August reminded me a little of MJ Engh’s Arslan (1976, USA), a novel I didn’t like. One of the problems I had with that novel was the US at the time of writing, 1976, threw off fifty years of progress seemingly overnight, going from cars to carts and horses in a matter of days. In Not This August, the US has at least been at war for three years, and while it has taken most of the nation’s resources, it has not at the start of the novel managed to take US territory. Except the life lived by Justin is not the 1965 we remember, but closer to 1935. True, there were still farms and rural communities in the US without electricity until the mid-1960s in the real world, but even so… 

There’s a lot of American sf written and set in the early latter half of last century that feels like it’s set between the wars. Because that’s when the writers were teenagers, or young men (they’re almost always men; except for, well, Engh), and their imagination doesn’t stretch much further than that. Either that, or the US was a lot more backward, and perhaps still is, than it liked, or likes, to insist. Not This August is an entertaining if dated and not especially plausible sf novel. I remember living under the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction, and Kornbluth obviously was when he wrote this novel, but there’s nothing here to evoke that – or, I suspect, to remind those who lived during rationing what it was like (the US had rationing during WWII, but it was nowhere near as severe as in the UK). Nice try, but no Blue Peter badge, I’m afraid.


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Venus Plus X, Theodore Sturgeon

This was a reread, although I couldn’t tell you when I last read the book. The late seventies or early eighties, at a guess. I’d remembered the novel’s basic set-up, but nothing else. Venus Plus X (1960, USA) is set in the distant future, in a utopian community of hermaphroditic humans (not really an acceptable term these days, but these have the organs of both sexes and can procreate). 

A man from the mid-twentieth-century is pulled forward in time to the community of Ledom. Yes, it’s “model” backwards, but Sturgeon admits in a postscript he reversed the name of a can of his favourite tobacco. The time-traveller, Charlie Johns, is asked to give his opinion on Ledom and its society. Various guides show him around and explain things. Everything in Ledom is a consequence of the “A-field”, a sort of force-field, and the “cerebrostyle”, which can write knowledge directly onto people’s brains. There is also a chapter on biology – the Ledoms have both sex organs, and two uteruses, and always give birth to twins.

Alternating with this guidebook-style narrative is some sort of sitcom featuring two families who live next door to each other. These sections are almost entirely dialogue.

(The cover shown above, which I think is the edition I have in storage, badly misrepresents the actual story)

There are long sections on gender, which I suspect only gammons and terfs will disagree with, and religions, which manages to erase almost all of them except Christianity and misrepresents those it does mention. Sturgeon’s thesis is that both of these – the elimination of gender through the creation of hermaphroditic humans, and a charitic religion – were necessary to create the utopian Ledom. Except, while Sturgeon rightly points out gender roles are social constructs, he still defines them using biological sex; and, as others have pointed out, the gender politics Sturgeon presents were not universal even back in 1960 – and his model society only exists more because of its two magical inventions than anything else.

Charlie learns Ledom exists inside an A-field bubble on an Earth devastated by nuclear war. He also discovers – against the wishes of the Ledom senior members – that the Ledoms give birth to normal humans, which are then (surgically?) altered to be Ledoms. For some reason, this sends Charlie completely off the rails and he tells them he, and all humans, would kill them if they could. When Charlie tries to escape to the past, he discovers the truth about the time-travel machine. Meanwhile, nuclear bombs explode outside Ledom’s A-field – is this implying humans still live? Or that Ledom is actually in the present? It’s unclear.

Sturgeon writes that he wanted to write a novel about sex. The novel credited with introducing the topic of sex into science fiction is Philip José Farmer’s novella, ‘The Lovers’ (1952, USA). The earliest sf novel I can find centred around a hermaphroditic character is Katherine Burdekin’s Proud Man (1934, UK), but in that novel the hermaphrodite travels back in time from the future to 1930. Burdekin’s novel, according to Wikipedia, criticises gender roles. Venus Plus X doesn’t do that – it posits a near-utopia, which despite its arguments only survives because it hides a horrible secret, which, to be fair, is a common science fiction trope, sort of like soylent green. I wasn’t convinced.

The title, incidentally, comes from the phrase “men are from Mars, women are from Venus”, and Charlie speculates the hermaphroditic Ledoms are women with a bit extra, “x”. Ugh.


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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 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.


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The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber

Winner of the Hugo Award in 1965, in a shortlist which included Cordwainer Smith, Edgar Pangborn and John Brunner. The Smith read like half a novel, I really didn’t like the Pangborn, and I have the Brunner on the TBR. Even so, I’m not convinced The Wanderer (1964, USA) was the best of the four.

A strange planet appears suddenly – from hyperspace, it’s theorised – in the Solar System, just outside the orbit of the Moon. Its presence causes earthquakes and tidal waves, and rips the Moon apart. The planet, named the Wanderer, proves to be actually destroying the Moon for fuel. Because it’s populated by thousands of alien races (including sexy alien cat women), and they’re on the run. The universe is packed with life – none of it visible from Earth, for, er, reasons – and it’s ruled by a government which resists change and adventurism, and the Wanderer’s dwellers are free spirits, gallivanting about the universe in search of, well, adventure.

The story is told through short sections from a wide cast of characters, all American except for a handful of non-US ones. There’s a German scientist, who appears twice and comes across like a cartoon Nazi; and a pair of drunken British writers (one Welsh, one English), who are caricatures, not characters. They also live in a UK that doesn’t exist, where people eat “sausage-and-mashed” rather than sausages and mash. 

All the time I was reading the book, I was trying to figure out when it was set. The US has a base on the Moon, and the USSR a mission on Mars… But the KKK is running around openly in Florida (there are several uses of the n-word and some really offensive racism), the English character remembers a bombing raid as a child, a man in the US claims to be the perpetrator of the Black Dahlia murder (from 1947), and South Africa still has apartheid. So, probably early Sixties, then. (Despite the moonbase and Mars.)

I’m told Leiber’s technique of using multiple viewpoints was something new in science fiction. Certainly it’s a technique more associated with techno-thrillers and the like, but they didn’t begin to appear until later. To be honest, most of the viewpoints don’t actually add anything – there’s a group of UFO nuts in California who explain what’s happening in the first half of the novel, and two Americans independently kidnapped by the aliens who have the second half of the novel explained to them. The rest are, well, not even local colour. 

Hard to believe The Wanderer was the best science fiction novel published in 1964.


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Longer reviews

For the past few years, I’ve been writing longish reviews of books on Medium. I plan to keep that going, but I should probably post a link here when a new review goes up there. As happened last night, a review of John Scalzi’s Redshirts (2012, USA). You can find it here.

I’ve been posting reviews on Medium since May 2021, so there are quite a few. Feel free to check them out.


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Little Fuzzy, H Beam Piper

Another allegedly classic sf novel, which was nominated for the Hugo in 1963. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962, USA) won that year, and was easily the best of the shortlisted novels. Little Fuzzy (1962, USA), on the other hand, is slight, not in the least bit plausible, and opens from a position of such comprehensive US hegemony its story is pretty much unrecoverable.

The title refers to the indigenous race on Zarathustra, waist-high cute-looking furry creatures with an average intelligence comparable to that of small children. Humans have been on the world for several decades before the first “Fuzzy” appears, and the corporation which owns the planet quickly realises that a native race invalidates their ownership of the world and all its resources. So they play dirty in an effort to prove the Fuzzies either non-existent or not intelligent. A situation which comes to a head when a company bigwig stamps on a Fuzzy, killing it, and a company bodyguard is shot and killed in self-defence.

Like a lot of American sf of the period, this is resolved by people coming together, homespun legal wizardry, a general distrust of the government (and governing corporation), and a handful of native backwoods cunning from several of the cast. While the local governor is corrupt, the local Navy base is packed to the gills with upright honest officers and personnel. The corrupt mayor is a cliché, but so too is the valorisation of military probity – at least in 1962, before the Vietnam War. There are entire Hollywood movies from the 1930s through to the 1950s which use any one of those tropes on which to hang a plot. And each one is as hokey as the next. 

If anything, Little Fuzzy multiplies the hokiness. It’s a novel with far more mouthpiece characters than it needs or the reader deserves. The Fuzzies may be intelligent enough to determine their own destiny, but the humans on their side seem to treat them chiefly as precocious pets. There are many arguments to be made about the European invasion of continental North America, but this novel doesn’t even come within spitting distance of them. It’s the colonisers defending the colonised against the colonisers’ own kind, for reasons that are best not examined too deeply.