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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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On the Calculation of Volume II, Solvej Balle

Tara Selter woke up one day, and it was the previous day. In fact, for reasons unexplained, she is reliving 18 November over and over again, much like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. In the first book – seven are planned – Tara explored the limits of her condition, spending time in Paris in a hotel, where she had slept the night before, repeatedly visiting the same friends – antiquarian booksellers like herself – again and again, even attempting to explain to them what was happening to her. She returned home, and tried the same with her husband. But she discovered the resources she used, food particularly, vanished from 18 November if she used them, and objects would disappear into 19 November if she did not keep them close to her.

In this second book, Tara decides to try and live a year on the same day. She does this by moving around Europe so that the climate matches what it would be, approximately, on each day of the year had she stayed home in her village outside Paris. It’s a neat conceit, but for it to work Balle needs to get her details absolutely spot-on and, unfortunately, in a few places they didn’t ring true.

But that’s a minor quibble. Balle commits hard to her structure, and is rigorous in working out the details of living the same day again and again, even when it comes to travelling about Europe in search of the right climate for each calendar day of the year. The travel stretches Tara’s resources and ingenuity, as she has no knowledge of the previous day wherever she ends up, and Balle considers all the pitfalls and ramifications that might result.

There is something deeply satisfying in Balle’s careful working out of her central premise, and even after only two books in of a planned seven, the series promises interesting explorations of Tara’s situation. 


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The Soft Machine, William S Burroughs

I read the recently-published “restored text” – and the history of the novel and its manuscripts is as barking mad as its story. Burroughs submitted the original novel to Olympia Press in Paris, which promptly published it. But he decided to rewrite chunks for the US edition a couple of years later, but not all of the changes were delivered in time. But they were in time for the UK publication a couple of years after that. So there are three major, and different, editions of The Soft Machine (1966, USA) – and this version is based on the second, with variations from both the first and third versions. All of which are documented in several appendices.

Story-wise… The Soft Machine is the first book of the Cut-Up Trilogy… because Burroughs took the text of many chapters, cut it into pieces and re-arranged it. You would think this would make it almost impossible to read, but it’s surprisingly easier than you’d expect. The plot is part science fiction, part autobiography, part thriller. There’s a secret agent, and time travel, and Mayans, and bits and pieces from the earlier Naked Lunch (1959, USA). It reads mostly like episodes from Burroughs’s life, with science fiction interludes. While the cut-up narrative is not as difficult to parse as I’d expected, the plot of the novel is less easy to follow. To be fair, it doesn’t really matter – the narrative jumps all over the place, and seems to end up somewhere that follows more or less from where it began. 

The Soft Machine is surprisingly funny in places. It’s also very graphic. Burroughs was gay and promiscuous, and so too are his characters. Most of the encounters are fleeting and rough. There’s also lots of science-fictional ideas – some of which are mentioned in passing, but with pay-offs that appear later in the narrative. The cut-up chapters make them a little harder to track, however.

I’ve been a fan of William S Burroughs as, well, as a concept for several years, and I’ve dipped a couple of times into his fiction. I’d read bits of The Soft Machine before, but not the full novel – and I have to admit the “restored text” improved the reading experience, since the footnotes and appendices add a fascinating dimension to the novel.

Restored text editions of The Ticket That Exploded (1967, USA) and Nova Express (1964, USA) are also available.


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Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi

Very little science fiction has been translated from Arabic into English – in fact, I knew of only one other author, Emirati Noura Al Noman, and she hasn’t been published since 2014. Ahmed Khaled Tawfik wrote several sf novels, most notably Utopia (2008, Egypt), and a little hunting revealed it had been translated into English – but with his name spelt Towfik. There’s been plenty of fantasy translated from Arabic, however, from Alf Laylat wa Layla to Naguib Mahfouz, and a number of contemporary writers. Having said that, Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, Iraq) was not published as category sf, and likely only deserves the label because its central conceit references Mary Shelley’s novel, a proto-sf novel. (The English title, incidentally, is a direct translation of the original Arabic title.) It was nominated for both the Arthur C Clarke Award and the International Booker Prize.

The central conceit of Frankenstein in Baghdad is actually not at all rigorous as science fiction. It’s a neat twist on the original – the monster (because of course Frankenstein is the doctor) in Saadawi’s novel is made from the body parts of victims of IEDs in post-invasion Iraq, and the monster’s mission is to avenge those deaths. But Saadawi seems more interested in telling a more general story about life in present-day Baghdad, as seen through the eyes of a handful of characters. Chief among these are the junk dealer Hadi, who originally creates the monster in some sort of fever dream; Mahmud, a young journalist, who takes Hadi’s tales of a monster semi-seriously, but is more interested in becoming like his rich and powerful editor; Elishva, an old Armenian woman who mistakes the monster for her long-dead son; and General Majid, who runs a secret police bureau of astrologers and magicians who predict bomb attacks in the city.

The novel bounces around between these characters, and a handful of others, mostly centred around the area of Bataween, and occasionally focusing on the monster. Who has discovered that once it avenges the death of one of the people whose parts make up its body, that body part rots and falls off. So the monster needs new parts – and it reaches the point where, with its own small army of followers, it too begins murdering people to keep itself together (so to speak).

The monster is a great invention, and there’s so much commentary that could be attached to the concept, but Frankenstein in Baghdad doesn’t seem all that interested in it. It’s more like an introduction, or a framing narrative, to the personal stories of the book’s cast. Which is a shame. It’s a good novel, don’t get me wrong, and its descriptions of life in post-invasion Baghdad are both heart-breaking and enraging.

A good novel, but one that feels like it failed to capitalise on its central idea.


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Creation Node, Stephen Baxter

Back in the late 1990s, a friend complained that deciding to collect books by Stephen Baxter was proving more expensive than expected because he was so prolific. Baxter is still going. I’m not sure my friend’s collection is. But never mind. I later made the same mistake – and I’m still going: I buy Baxter’s books in hardback on publication. I have rather a lot of them. But I have also read rather a lot of them.

Creation Node (2023, UK) is, if I’ve counted correctly, Baxter’s forty-eighth novel (including three YA novels, one co-written with Alastair Reynolds, four with Arthur C Clarke, and five with Terry Pratchett). And then there are the collections and novellas. Creation Node is much like his other more recent novels – an exploration of some cosmological puzzle by people not far removed from ourselves, and a tendency to feel a little juvenile in places.

After a climate crash, Earth has partially colonised the solar system. There are three political blocs – Earth, the most powerful and mostly conservationist; the Lunar Consortium, which believes in exploiting whatever natural resources are available in the solar system; and the Conservers, who are hardline conservationists and refuse to use any resource that is not immediately renewable, such as sunlight. The Conservers sent a spacecraft, propelled by a solar sail, to the ninth planet, a journey which took 35 years. And they discovered the planet was actually a black hole. And it was emitting Hawking radiation that was… structured.

So they sent a message into the black hole. Which promptly expanded. Until its outer shell had a surface gravity of 1G and a 15C surface temperature. And a weird sarcophagus containing a living teenage birdlike alien…

Earth sends a ship out to Planet Nine – with a brief stopover, and much excitement, at a station orbiting Saturn, where the ship converts from a slow fission drive to a fast fusion drive. Over a decade has passed by the time representatives from Earth – and one from the Lunar Consortium, plus the Conserver’s chief legal counsel – reach Planet Nine. Which prompts the discoverers to attempt sending another message…

This triggers the appearance of an enigmatic black globe, which calls itself Terminus. It proves to be a Boltzmann Brain from the quantum substrate in which all universes are created. It gives the human ambassadors a brief lesson in speculative cosmology, and then offers the human race eternity, ie, continued existence after the heat death of our universe. For a price. It’s how Baxter’s novels tend to work – a story based around a big idea, a plot with a payload, if you will. Which often prompts a momentous decision on the part of the cast.

Baxter does his homework, and the ideas he bases his novels on are fascinating. If Creation Node’s extended timescale results in a number of longeurs, there’s still plenty to like here. Creation Node may suffer from Baxter’s typical weaknesses – that tendency to use teenage protagonists, which often drops the narrative into YA territory – but it also displays his strengths: making huge mind-expanding ideas easily palatable. Lots of sense of wonder, but the human dimension may be a little flat. On the other hand, Baxter is nothing if not consistent – which is why I probably keep on buying his books…

Incidentally, I should point out my takes on the books I review on this blog (and my other blog) are not always typical. My views may be individual, but that doesn’t mean they’re not open to question. So I welcome conversation about what I write. Feel free to leave a comment, or start a discussion.


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The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor, Bryan Talbot

I’ve been a fan of Talbot’s The Adventures of Luther Arkwright (1989, UK) for years. When I was at college in Nottingham in 1985, I often visited a comics shop on Mansfield Road before catching the bus home. I forget the name of the shop – and I can’t find it on Google. (I also visited a games shop, a grubby place in a courtyard, around the same time, and bought copies of the Laserburn RPG rules – Tabletop Games, possibly?) Anyway, I recall buying an issue or two of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright from that comics shop on Mansfield Road, although I didn’t read the completed series until buying the omnibus trade paperback many years later.

Not long after I read Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland (2007, UK), and thought it very good. I also kept up with the sequels to Luther Arkwright. So yes, I’d say I’m a fan of Talbot’s independent work, even if I’ve not been obsessive about keeping up with his oeuvre (it’s difficult with comics anyway; I much prefer to wait for the omnibus edition). Which is all slightly irrelevant as I’d missed Talbot’s Grandville series, five graphic novels set in the late 1800s in a UK that has been ruled from France since the Napoleonic Wars and in which all the characters are anthropomorphic animals.

The Casebook of Stamford Hawksmoor (2025, UK) is set in the same universe. It’s a clear homage to Sherlock Holmes – his deerstalker is something of a joke in the book. Hawksmoor, named for the architect – and the novel by Peter Ackroyd is also name-checked – is a detective at Scotland Yard. He recognises that not all of his colleagues are honest. But even he is shocked when he discovers links between some of them and the terrorists responsible for some of the most heinous crimes of recent years.

When Hawksmoor’s brother, a man he hasn’t spoken to in years, commits suicide in an open field near his house, Hawksmoor reluctantly investigates his brother’s life in an effort to understand why he killed himself. Hawksmoor is also investigating a series of murders linked to the Angry Brigade, the terrorist wing of the Resistance Movement, and which seems to have gone rogue now the French are pulling out of Britain and allowing home rule.

It’s all linked, of course, and the result of corruption in high places in the British establishment – plus ça change, and all that. Although framed as a Victorian whodunnit, much like its inspiration, Talbot has a put a lot of effort into working out his world. Not just the politics within a Britain that has been ruled by the French for over a century, but also the way the characters’ animal species impacts their behaviour, and the relations between the various species.

It’s excellent stuff. Recommended. But now I have to go and buy all the Grandville graphic novels. Oh look, there’s an omnibus edition available…


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The Underpeople, Cordwainer Smith

The Underpeople (1968, USA) follows directly on from The Planet Buyer (1964, USA), although four years separates their publication. In fact, both were published in magazines in 1964, but the second wasn’t published as a paperback until 1968, two years after Smith’s death. The two books were later merged and published as a single novel, Norstrilia (1975, USA) – and it is that version which has been reprinted a number of times since, including in the SF Masterworks series in 2016.

The Planet Buyer left Rod McBan, of Norstrilia, the wealthiest man in the universe, and the new owner of Earth, newly arrived on Earth, where he is met by C’Mell, a catwoman and girlygirl and one of the underpeople. McBan, incidentally, is disguised as a catman.

There’s no real plot to The Underpeople, just a series of incidents which sort of lead to a conclusion and an implied resolution. The latter is the freeing of the underpeople, who are little more than slaves (the callousness with which they are disposed of is quite disturbing). The former sees McBan back home on Norstrilia, happily married, and Earth no longer in his ownership.

There are things to like about Cordwainer Smith’s oeuvre. He certainly built a unique universe, and had a distinctive voice. And it worked well in his short fiction. But both The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople read like badly-welded together collections of short stories, and in that format they’re not so impressive. Also, I really hate poetry and songs in narrative unless they’re part of the plot.

I am… undecided about Smith’s fiction. Some of his short stories are very good, even if the language is a little cringeworthy at times. Norstrilia, ie, The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople, has some good ideas. But it’s all too haphazard and never really quite links together. I wanted to like The Underpeople more than I did. There is a book out there somewhere, possibly even The Instrumentality of Mankind (1979, USA), which is in the SF Masterworks series, which presents the best of Smith’s fiction in a way that displays what’s good about it. The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople do not. 

Which may well be why they’re no longer in print (although perhaps the corridor of naked bottoms played a part).


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The Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven

This was a reread, although I don’t recall when I previously read the book. Some time in the 1980s, I suspect. Everyone knows Ringworld (1970, USA), it was even No. 60 in the SF Masterworks series. Niven admits he had never intended to write a sequel, but he’d received so much correspondence about the novel – a lot of it pointing out where he’d got things wrong. Earth famously rotates the wrong way in the opening chapter of the novel (updated in later editions), but the chief complaint was that the ringworld was unstable. It needed attitude jets to keep it in orbit. So Niven decided to write The Ringworld Engineers (1979, USA), which is all about the attitude jets. Mostly.

Twenty-three years after the events of Ringworld, Louis Wu is a wirehead. He and his kzinti companion on that trip, Speaker-to-Animals, now called Chmeee, are kidnapped by a Pierson’s Puppeteer. Who is actually the mate of the Pierson’s Puppeteer from Ringworld, and was the leader of the race, the Hindmost. He was ousted and now plans to win back his position by fetching a “treasure” from the ringworld, a transmutation device.

Which doesn’t exist and never existed. But that proves irrelevant because the ringworld has been knocked from its orbit and will impact the sun in a year or so. The City Builders, the most powerful race on the ringworld, had removed the attitude jets from the ringworld’s rim, the jets that kept it in orbit, in order to power their spaceships. Hence the current situation.

Wu decides there must be a Repair Centre, a sort of central control complex for the ringworld. If he can find it, then he can prevent the ringworld from being destroyed. But first he has to find it.

The humanoid races on the ringworld have created, and maintained, treaties and coalitions through “rishathra”, which is sex between people of different hominid races. Niven obviously likes writing about sex, or rather the easy availability of it to males, but this is commercial science fiction so it’s either alluded to or entirely off the page. Nevertheless, it leaves a bad taste.

The other problem is the distances – the ringworld is huge. Absolutely fucking enormous. With a surface area equivalent to three million Earths. Most of the action in The Ringworld Engineers takes place around the Great Ocean, an ocean so large it features archipelagos which are full-size maps of various planets in Known Space (including Earth, Mars and Kzin), and which are hundreds of thousands of miles apart. After a while, the distance gets wearying, it’s almost like some sort of scale fatigue sets in. It becomes meaningless, just words. Niven uses the right words, but there’s no sense of wonder attached to the vast scale of it all.

The Ringworld Engineers fixes the issue with the ringworld’s unstable orbit, and even identifies its builders – linking back to an earlier novel by Niven. He returned to the ringworld seventeen years later with The Ringworld Throne (1996, USA), and then again eight years after that with Ringworld’s Children (2004, USA). Five prequel novels, the Fleet of Worlds series, then followed.

The ringworld is a great creation, one of science fiction’s most memorable. The plot of the novel which introduced it doesn’t really matter. Same for its sequels. Dune (1965, USA) had great world-building, but its plot helped bring it to life. The plot of Ringworld is irrelevant, the Big Dumb Object exists in spite of it. And so it is for The Ringworld Engineers. Which presents a disappointing, and unconvincing, explanation as the answer to the question of who built it, and never really manages to really evoke the scale of it all.


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Gráinne, Keith Roberts

Winner of the BSFA Award in 1988. There doesn’t appear to have been any shortlist that year, so I’ve no idea how it was chosen. The Eastercon in 1988 took place in Liverpool and was three years before my first Eastercon.

Gráinne (1988, UK) is the name of a princess from Irish mythology, who at their betrothal party dumped the man she had been promised to and ran off with Diarmuid instead. In Roberts’s novel, it’s the name of a young woman the narrator, Alistair Bevan, meets, has a mostly platonic relationship with, and who then leaves him… and several years later appears on television as the presenter of a documentary series on the brand new Channel 5. By this point, Bevan works for an advertising agency, which Gráinne hires to promote a series of “clinics” to empower women.

This narrative is framed by, and interspersed with, short scenes of an old man in a hospital bed, explicitly telling the story of his life to a doctor and nurse. I’ve no idea if the resemblance was intentional, but there’s a lot in these sections that reminded me of John Fowles’s Mantissa (1982, UK)

Most descriptions of the novel classify it as semi-autobiographical, and while I’ve read a lot of Roberts’s fiction, I know little of his life – but perhaps enough to for the classification to ring true. (His careers in illustration and advertising, for example.) Other aspects, especially the gender politics and attitude to women evidenced in the novel, are definitely the same as in Roberts’s other writings (cf ‘The Natural History of the P.H.’).

Roberts’s main thesis seems to be feminism and women’s lib are a waste of time because women should not be trying to fight for equality with men but simply fighting for their own variety of rights. Which sort of ignores the fact of the patriarchy, a concept Robert never appears to have taken onboard. And it does render the central element of Gráinne’s plot, the empowerment centres, somewhat moot. On the other hand, they do make Gráinne something of a messianic, or a Valentine Michael Smith-type, figure.

Of course, it all ends badly. It always does for such figures. The narrative hints at unsavoury backers who helped Gráinne financially, perhaps hoping for the social and economic disruption she eventually causes in the UK, but it doesn’t go any further. The final section also implies a post-apocalyptic Earth, perhaps after a nuclear war, but it’s only a single sentence and ambiguous.

The reviews of Gráinne I’ve read online seem mostly to have missed the point of the story. It’s not a fantasy about a Celtic goddess who has a love affair with a human man. Gráinne may be more than human, but that’s from Bevan’s point of view. Her later influence is a mixture of clever television (much cleverer than Channel 5 ever proved to be, or indeed the bulk of British tv in the mid-1980s), deep pockets and a mishmash of Eastern religions. Even then, her empowerment centres proved more disruptive than intended.

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961, USA) follows a similar story although, given it’s American, it reads like a carnival novel, and its central protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, is a thinly-disguised carnival freak. Roberts’s novel, however, uses Irish mythology rather than US carnival folklore, and focuses on female empowerment and not free love. Heinlein wrote prose that was extremely readable and smooth, but Roberts’s style is more literary. British sf produced a number of excellent prose stylists in the 1970s, not part of the New Wave but almost certainly adjacent to it, such as Coney, Cowper, Compton, Lee, Saxton, Watson…

I’ve no idea why Gráinne, published by small press Kerosina Books, was given the BSFA Award. Other notable sf novels published in the UK in 1987 include Banks’s Consider Phlebas (1987, UK), Mann’s The Fall of the Families (1987, UK), Wolfe’s The Urth of the New Sun (1987, USA), and even Haldeman’s Tool of the Trade (1987, USA). Certainly, a shortlist could have been drawn up. Perhaps it was.


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Oka Rel 1: The Courtesan Prince, Lynda Williams

I bought a copy of this book back in 2009 but never got around to reading it. I don’t even remember why I bought it. I’ve a vague memory of corresponding with the author, but that may be confabulation. I was interested in writing space opera, and had been for a number of years, and The Courtesan Prince (2005, Canada) is the first in a ten-book space opera series, so it may have been no more than that.

It could be argued that space opera, more so than any other branch of science fiction, succeeds or fails more on its world-building than its story. They all pretty much use the same story, anyway. Oka Rel starts from a future history and a, mostly, hard-ish sf universe, but by the time this first novel opens, Earth is lost and there are two mostly antagonistic human polities, which lost touch 200 years earlier. The Oka Rel universe plays off on the difference between the two polities – the Reetions are technological and progressive, the Gelacks are a semi-feudal empire ruled by the descendants of genetically-engineered humans.

After two centuries of separation, and all the two groups know of each other is legend and rumour, they finally meet up at a neutral space station. Von is a courtesan and dancer ordered to impersonate a member of the aristocracy during the first Gelack meeting with the Reetions. Ann is a hot-headed Reetion pilot who falls for Von, and then becomes involved in Gelack politics. Because Von is really a long-lost son of the emperor, although he doesn’t know it.

The Courtesan Prince tries hard with its world-building, but doesn’t quite make the grade. Possibly because the two groups are too much the opposite of each other. It’s all a bit too binary. It doesn’t help that Von is simply far too good a character to be entirely credible, despite the violence inflicted on him. Some of the sensibilities haven’t aged particularly well in the last twenty years but, to be fair, there is worse being published even now. It all feels, in many respects, a bit like Cherryh, but the details seem harder to visualise. In fact, now I think about it, there’s a lot of Cherryh in there. Which is no bad thing, of course. I’m a big fan of Cherryh’s fiction.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue with the series, although I’m a sucker for a series. I’ll read anything if it comes in three or more books with a single over-arching story. But, as I said earlier, space operas succeed or fail on their world-building more than their story, and I’m not all that taken with the Oka Rel universe, to be honest.