It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Tag Archives: science fiction


by Leave a comment

Macroscope, Piers Anthony

As a general rule, I avoid anything written by Piers Anthony. I read a couple of his books back in the 1980s and thought them either not especially good or somewhat dodgy. But Macroscope (1969, USA) was shortlisted for the Hugo Award (it lost to Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969, USA), so I decided to give it a read.

The title of Macroscope refers to an orbital facility which contains a device which can use “macrons” to view any part of the visible universe, much like a space-based telescope, except to a level of detail and discrimination impossible to a telescope. It can, for example, focus on a world thousands of light-years away and show its alien inhabitants going about their daily business. But thousands of years ago, as macrons propagate at light speed. It can also view Earth, and act as an extremely powerful spy satellite.

Ivo is minding his own business in a city in Georgia (not the country, but the US state), when he is approached by a man who quotes an obscure line of poetry at him. This tells Ivo that his best friend Brad needs him. Brad, who has a genius-level IQ, works at the macroscope space station. Ivo and the man, Groton, drive south to Florida, and are launched in a rocket.

The macroscope scientists have discovered that someone somewhere in the galaxy is broadcasting a macron signal. Several of the scientists have tried to view it and it has wiped their minds. Brad wants Ivo to contact Schön, who is an actual super-genius, and whom only Ivo can contact, and ask him to help solve the “destroyer” signal. Ivo, Brad and Schön are all products of a project to breed and raise children in an environment that will result in high IQs. It was only partially successful.

Anthony drags out the revelation for more than half the book, but it’s pretty obvious from the first few pages that Schön doesn’t really exist: he is one of Ivo’s personalities. Or rather, Ivo is one of Schön’s. Apparently, Schön decided at the age of five he was bored with life, so he created Ivo and went dormant. Five seems an absurdly young age to do this.

A powerful senator visits the macroscope and falls victim to the destroyer. So Ivo, Brad, Groton and his wife, Beatryx, and Brad’s fiancée, Afra, steal the macroscope. They know there is useful scientific and technological information being broadcast using macrons, but they can’t reach it because of the destroyer signal. Brad tries and has his mind wiped. But Ivo is not affected, probably because the destroyer only affects IQs above a certain level. He manages to bypass it and begins downloading information. They use it to boost the macroscope to Neptune at 10 G, so they can escape the UN’s pursuing fleet. In order to survive the sustained high acceleration they must first convert themselves into protoplasmic liquid. Which they do. After converting themselves back into human bodies, they settle on Triton, and start using more high tech from the macron broadcasts. They decide they need to find the destroyer and, er, destroy it.

I think it’s pretty safe to say John Varley was aware of Macroscope when he began writing The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977, USA). He probably took the idea of the “hotline” from Anthony’s novel. He did, however, do something completely different with it, and The Ophiuchi Hotline is a much, much better novel than Macroscope.

Reading Macroscope, it comes as no surprise the author later wrote a novel titled The Color of Her Panties (1992, USA). Yes, really. And yet there are parts of Macroscope that display a sort of cosmological hard sf that didn’t really appear until the 1980s, and from the 1990s onwards has pretty much fuelled the careers of writers such as Stephen Baxter. For example, having decided on an objective, Ivo, Afra, Groton and Beatryx use knowledge learned from the macron broadcasts to bury their base deep in Triton, and then smash the moon into Neptune, causing the gas giant to collapse and form a black hole, which they use to transport themselves fifty light years from the Solar system. This is genuine sense of wonder stuff.

And then, like a black hole, the story slowly falls in on itself, until the only thing that’s left is the feeling you’ve just wasted however many hours reading a book that didn’t really deserve being read. Because once the four protagonists have left the galaxy, they manage to figure out the destroyer signal is being sent from a series of stations scattered about the Milky Way. They track one down, and board it. It’s empty, and seems to be some sort of museum. Which is handy, as it explains what the macron broadcasts are, what the destroyer signal is, and why it was necessary. The explanation is… not very interesting.

Then there’s everything else in the novel. Anthony tries to discuss misogyny and racism, but his racism and misogyny is so obvious the arguments have no force. In one chapter, for example, Beatryx is sent to a world where whites kill blacks on sight. Ivo spends much of the book lusting after Afra, and only occasionally considering what other qualities she might have. Then there’s this line:

“Even the subtle racism of the educated Southern white had its rules and restrictions; it was not inherently evil” (p 209)

Nope. It is. In all its forms.

And, finally, who can get forget the poetry? Ivo likes to pretend he is the reincarnation of a nineteenth-century American poet called Sidney Lanier. It serves no actual purpose in the plot, but it does allow Anthony to quote some of Lanier’s poetry. And… it’s fucking awful. Complete drivel. For example:

How still the plains of the waters be!
The tide is in his ecstasy.
The tide is at his highest height:
And it is night
(p244)

Macroscope is a book, to borrow a phrase from Monty Python, for laying down and avoiding. Sadly, it is perhaps one of Anthony’s better books.


by Leave a comment

Brain Twister, Mark Phillips

Although by Randall Garrett and Laurence M Janifer, Brain Twister (1962, USA) was originally published under the name Mark Phillips (the two authors’ middle names), and under the title ‘That Sweet Little Old Lady’, in Analog in 1959. Despite being a novella, it managed to be nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1960. Go figure. It lost to Heinlein’s Starship Trooper (1959, USA) and much as I hate that book, it was a better winner than Brain Twister would have been.

Kenneth Malone is a FBI agent, and has been tasked with discovering the identity of the telepathic spy at the secret Yucca Flats research facility, where the US is developing a new spaceship drive. The story is set in the 1970s, although everyone still wears hats, and the only piece of invented everyday tech mentioned is a videophone. JFK is also referred to as the “youngest living ex-president”, which was weird.

Malone surmises that any telepath is likely to be insane, and so scours asylums and sanatoriums across the US, eventually finding Miss Thompson, who seems perfectly lucid, other than insisting she is immortal and Queen Elizabeth I. She agrees to help the FBI identify the spy, which results in a car journey across the country, with a stopover in Las Vegas. Malone, fellow FBI agent Boyd, nurse Barbara and Miss Thompson all wear Elizabethan dress during the trip. For reasons. Malone eventually figures out who the spy is – Miss Thompson knew who it was all along, of course.

It’s hard to describe quite how bad this novel is. It’s meant to be comic but it’s not in the least bit funny. The world-building is non-existent – it might as well have been set in 1959. And the final reveal depends on two clues dropped earlier in the narrative that weren’t, well, clues at all. Avoid at all costs


by Leave a comment

The Deviates, Raymond F Smith

(A review posted on FB back in 2024)

Back in the 1950s, Galaxy Science Fiction began a series of reprint paperback novels which they gave away with issues of the magazine. After 35 issues, the novel series was sold to Beacon Books, who were known for publishing mildly pornographic romance paperbacks. As a result, the Galaxy novels issued by Beacon were “edited” to add sexual content. I actually wrote a blog post about these back in 2009; you can find it here.

The Deviates (1959, USA) was the second of this series – what’s the opposite of bowdlerised? there needs to be a word for this; maybe we should adopt “beaconised” – and was originally published by Avalon Books as The Secret People (1956, USA). Jones was best known for his novel This Island Earth (1952, USA), adapted into a film of the same name in 1955. He was last published in 1978, and died in 1994. He’s more or less forgotten now.

In a US recovering from a nuclear war, the genetic viability of all people is tracked and only those who won’t sire mutants are certified as “breeders”. It’s an old, and discredited, trope, but it was popular in the 1950s and produced some notable works, such as The Long Tomorrow (1955, USA) by Leigh Brackett, ‘Created He Them’, Alice Eleanor Jones, and ‘That Only a Mother’, Judith Merrill. The head of the Central Genetic Institute is Robert Wellton, who is secretly a “deviate”, but he has used his position to hide that fact.

Wellton’s deviation is beneficial – he is a telepath. So he has doctored the records such that his sperm has been used to father hundreds of children, all of whom exhibit telepathy. He has helped these “Children” to escape to a hidden village in forests in the north. (Wasn’t there an actual news story about a sperm bank doctor who used his own sperm to fertilise ova? There might have even been more than one.) Wellton comes under suspicion and so flees to the Children. But they’re no longer onboard with his mission to gradually improve humanity. They’ve built an atomic-powered spaceship – from knowing only first principles! – and want to go to Mars.

I’ve read Jones before. I don’t remember him sermonising so much. I know early US sf writers had a tendency to do so – hello, RAH! – and some of the crap they spouted barely flew in the 1950s and is now thoroughly discredited or debunked, or just plain offensive in the 21st century. Jones’s plot is based on eugenics, and a poor understanding of genetics, which is bad – but his moral arguments are more misguided than offensive.

And yet, The Deviates is supposed to be the “spiced up” version of The Secret People, and I could find nothing in it which wouldn’t have seen print in a 1956 sf novel from a major imprint. A later novel in the Beacon series, The Mating Cry (1960, Canada) by AE van Vogt, was based on van Vogt’s The House That Stood Still (1950, Canada), AKA The Undercover Aliens (1950, Canada), which happens to be a favourite sf novel, and at least I spotted the content that had been added by Beacon (reader, it did not improve the book). I haven’t read The Secret People, but I couldn’t see anything in The Deviates that might have been added by Beacon.

Oh, and the cover is a complete – and unsurprising – misrepresentation. There are no ripped blouses in the novel, and Wellton’s only “power” over women is a result of his position at the Central Genetic Institute (he can legally prevent them from having babies – see?).

Maybe the cover is the spiced up bit of the story?


by Leave a comment

A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine

(Originally posted on FB two years ago)

A Desolation Called Peace (2021, USA) is the second book of a duology and, I think, more lauded than the first, with nominations for the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA Awards; and winning the Hugo, which the first book in the duology, A Memory Called Empire (2019, USA), also did. So you would expect high-quality science fiction from the two books, and more so from the second. But, of course, awards are not about quality, and never have been, despite the use of the word “best” in their names.

A Desolation Called Peace follows on directly from A Memory Called Empire. Mahit Dzmare has returned home to Lsel Station, but is unwilling to be debriefed as she knows it will destroy what she is: herself, and two corrupted imagos, or memory imprints, both of her predecessor in the ambassador’s role. (His murder kicked off the plot of the first book.) Meanwhile, the Teixcalaani empire has encountered an alien species and their failure to communicate with it has triggered a war. This was what Lsel Station wanted, of course – the ambassador before Dzmare had traded imago-technology for Lsel Station’s independence, but his superiors had always planned to keep the Teixcalaani empire at bay by embroiling them in a war with the mysterious aliens.

Dzmare’s lover, Three Seagrass, gets herself assigned as a language specialist to the fleet fighting the aliens, dragoons Dzmare into assisting her, and the two actually manage to open communications. Meanwhile, there are factions in the war ministry who think the only solution is ending the war by bombing the shit out of the (an?) alien home world. This does not sit well with the commander of the fleet sent to resolve the alien menace.

So, lots of politics, lots of gooey eyes between Three Seasick and Dzmare, lots of interiority and info dumps, but not, sadly, much description. There’s a lot here that reminds me of Susan R Matthews’s Jurisdiction novels, although given A Desolation Called Peace reads more like a love-letter to Three Seagrass than anything else that’s perhaps less than expected, given the set-up. The big reveal behind the aliens’ inability to communicate with humans, despite communication and language being a major feature of the two novels, and even numerous mentions of an earlier alien race contacted by the Teixcalaani empire, and several embarrassingly bad passages from the aliens’ POV… Despite all that, the big reveal is something that cropped up in a recent sf trilogy – and no doubt we’ll see it again over the next few years.

I thought A Memory Called Empire had its moments – some nice world-building, an interesting plot – but A Desolation Called Peace dials back on both. While it introduces a couple of interesting new characters, they’re not enough to overcome a dawning sense of familiarity, or the way Three Seasick begins to take over the narrative. The first book was an interesting spin on space opera, at a time when interesting spins on space opera were du jour. The second… well, either the moment has passed (it has), or it reads too much like the two books were a single novel padded out to a duology and the second book got the worst of the deal. Disappointing.


by Leave a comment

Chilling Effect, Valerie Valdes

Chilling Effect (2019, USA) is the first book of the Captain Eva Innocente series, followed by Prime Deceptions (2020, USA) and Fault Tolerance (2022, USA). It was nominated for the Clarke Award in 2020. Which is why I read it. I will not be reading the sequels. Chilling Effect is one of several baffling choices – a less polite way of putting it would be, actually shit books – the Clarke has shortlisted in the past decade. It reads like fan fiction, cobbled together from every space opera trope used in television or movies, and given a Latinx spin for added flavour.

Innocente is the captain of an independent trader spaceship (check), with a crew of misfits (check), including a qualified medic (check), although with a crew of only five why would you waste a berth on a doctor?, an alien engineer (check), who is also a love-interest (check), a dim-witted ex-military general crewmember (check), and a pilot who plugs into the ship (check). Within the first three pages, we have slavery and indentured labour, a mysterious galactic criminal organisation, more alien races than you can count (check; very few of which are described), and an adventure on every planet the ship visits (check). The ship’s engineer later turns out to be a member of an alien elite combat unit, apparently AWOL (check). Innocente has a murky past (check), including some sort of atrocity which is mentioned frequently but never explained (check), and comes from a family that is one half criminal and one half naively innocent (check). 

The number of clichés, and they’re all TV and movie sf clichés, the book rolls out is relentless.

Nuvesta, the capital station of the BOFA (the interstellar good guy polity) is a straight rip-off of Alpha (ie, Point Central) from the movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The concert given by an alien opera singer on a cruise liner is from The Fifth Element. At one point, Innocente spends a year involuntarily “on ice”. The word “carbonite” is not used, but it’s there hovering over the text like a storm cloud. There’s also this:

“I didn’t realize I was a sweet young moisture farmer with dreams of space travel” (p 318)

It doesn’t help that the love interest, ship’s engineer Vakar, has mouth palps and claws and is basically, well, Dr Zoidberg. How can any reader take a book seriously that presents Dr Zoidberg as a romantic lead? One of the other crew-members, Sue, is accompanied by a swarm of small yellow bots. One carries a teddy bear, another wears goggles and a hat. Clearly, they’re Minions. Sue is obviously not Gru, but perhaps one of his daughters.

During the raid on the cruise liner mentioned above – and during which a pirate crew actually talk like comedy pirates – the ship “lists twenty degrees”, causing people to fall across the room (p 232). That’s straight from Attack of the Clones and made zero sense then. If the ship has gravity plates on its decks, then the actual attitude of the ship is completely fucking irrelevant to those inside.

And not to forget the short ugly alien who demands Innocente join his harem, and turns out to be a powerful alien emperor, who stalks her throughout the book with his alien armada, destroying worlds when they don’t hand her over to him. It’s not even remotely funny.

The thing with references, or Easter eggs, is that the satisfaction for the reader lies in spotting them. But when they’re so fucking obvious, there’s no thrill to be had in recognising them. It doesn’t help that Chilling Effect‘s universe is so thinly sketched-in, and so lacking in rigour, it’s hard to tell where the story is actually set. There’s a mention of the “tail-end” in Innocente’s ship, which is not a term often used in sf for spaceships. And the ship takes 47 minutes to travel from one world to another (p 323). 

The author is Cuban-American and her protagonist, Captain Eva Innocente, is Latina. So the text is littered with Spanish, none of which is translated. The use of Spanish is possibly the only thing in Chilling Effect’s favour, although it would have made sense to translate the Spanish, directly or indirectly, given the book is aimed at an English-language audience. We may not all be monoglots, but not all of us have Spanish as our second or third or fourth language.

2021 was not a good year for the Clarke Award. The award was won by The Animals in that Country (2019, Australia) by Laura Jean McKay, which I’ve not read. Also on the shortlist were Edge of Heaven, RB Kelly (2019, UK), The Infinite, Patience Agbabi (2019, UK), aimed at 9 to 11 year olds (the Clarke is not an award for children’s books), Vagabonds, Hao Jingfang (2019, China), and The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez (2019, USA), which I’ve read and thought very much over-rated. 

I find it hard to believe anyone thought Chilling Effect was one of the best half-dozen books published in the UK that year. It’s a string of sf movie tropes set in a universe which is so light on detail and rigour it might as well not exist. A book to avoid.


by 1 Comment

Brothers of Earth, CJ Cherryh

(A review first posted only on Facebook in 2024)

Brothers of Earth (1976, USA) was Cherryh’s first novel (published a few months after Gates of Ivrel (1976, USA), but actually submitted and accepted first). It’s based on a premise Cherryh has used many times throughout her career – a human man crashlands on an alien, but humanoid, world and tries to integrate, inadvertently kicking off a war between various nations/factions (cf the Compact Space books, Cuckoo’s Egg (1985, USA), Faded Sun trilogy, Foreigner series, etc). The story takes place over a thousand years after Cherryh’s Alliance/Union history, although the Alliance still exists. But it’s at war with another human polity, the Hanan.

Kurt Morgan, sole survivor of an Alliance warship, crashes and is discovered by a party of locals, the nemet. They take him aboard their sailing ship to the city of Nephane, where he meets the methi, the ruler of the city, who is Hanan, and the sole survivor of an earlier Hanan mission. She allows him to enter the household of Kta, the captain of the ship. Kta’s family is the Elas, and they’re descended from the Indras, inhabitants of a powerful theocratic state across the sea. Nephane is split between Indras-descended and the original locals, the Sufaki, with the former forming a wealthy and powerful elite. The Sufaki rebel, Morgan and Kta are caught up in it, and flee because the methi supports the Sufaki…

The world is at a roughly late Bronze Age level – Cherryh used to teach ancient history – so it’s all swords and sandals and triremes, with the theocratic Indras versus the more liberal Indras-descended of Nephane versus the pantheistic Sufaki. This is stuff Cherryh has done many times since, and better. For a first novel, in the 1970s, it’s sort of impressive, and it’s interesting seeing how much of Cherryh’s style was pretty much there from the beginning. But the story does drag in places, and while there are plenty of strong female characters, the main protagonists are male – and there’s also an instance of fridging.

One for Cherryh fans.


by Leave a comment

Halcyon Years, Alastair Reynolds

I’ve been buying Reynolds’s books in first edition as soon as they appear since first coming across one of his stories in Interzone. He occasionally disappoints – but he’s also one of those authors whose works you tend to compare against others in his oeuvre. A novel can be good, but disappointing given what else Reynolds has published. And that’s the case with Halcyon Years (2025, UK).

Halcyon Years is set aboard a generation ship called Halcyon, en route to Vandervecken’s Star. The journey has so far taken around 350 years, but is due to arrive in perhaps a generation. Eight million people live aboard Halcyon, in a society that owes a lot to noir fiction. There is television, telephones, mobsters, corrupt cops, cars… but also a few robots, advanced medical technology… and two families in control of everything. People who die, and can afford it, are frozen, and will be awoken once the destination has been reached. None of it is in the slightest bit convincing – but there’s a reason for that, as the book’s protagonist discovers.

Yuri Gagarin – yes, that Yuri Gagarin – is a private detective. He’s also a “Jack”, a random figure thawed out from the hundreds of thousands in deep freeze. Gagarin, of course, died in 1968, when the jet he was flying crashed, but his presence aboard Halcyon is later explained. He is asked by a mysterious woman to investigate the deaths of the youngest members of the two families which control Halcyon, the DelRossos and the Urrys. One was injured in an accident in a spacesuit while outside the ship, and later died of her injuries; the other died when a “zap-gun” blew up in his face.

It’s in the nature of these types of stories – noir, or California noir – that neither death was as presented, and they are in fact just the tip of a conspiracy, which explains the set-up aboard Halcyon, the faux 1940s milieu, Gagarin’s existence, and various other “clues” which seem to jar. Unfortunately, all this information comes in a long explanation toward the end of the book, when Gagarin and his two confederates have kidnapped three senior members of the DelRosso family and are holding them hostage while they explore what’s outside Halcyon.

I can understand the appeal of wanting to write a noir story in a science-fictional setting, such as aboard a generation ship. And I’m fairly sure noir has been appropriated by science fiction before, although no titles leap to mind. Unfortunately, none of it seems plausible, and if the big reveal makes sense of it all, it’s too late, and too crudely revealed. I’m not sure if totally committing to the mis-en-scène would have made Halcyon Days a better read, but a more elegant way of delivering the big reveal certainly would have done.

Incidentally, I’ve no idea if Reynolds ever read a story called ‘Killing the Dead’, which was published in Postscripts 20/21: Edison’s Frankenstein (2009, UK), but that also featured a generation ship in which dead people were frozen with the intent of waking them once the ship had reached its destination. Yes, I wrote that story.


by Leave a comment

Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

(Another review I originally posted on Facebook a couple of years ago.)

Flowers for Algernon (1966, USA) seems to be one of those science fiction novels most people know about, even if they haven’t actually read it. Perhaps because it was adapted into a movie in 1968, Charly. But I suspect it’s more because its central premise is one that resonates – although it hasn’t been used all that often, I think (another example that comes to mind is Thomas M Disch’s Camp Concentration (1968, USA)).

The Algernon of the title is a mouse whose intelligence has been artificially boosted through surgery and drugs. The experimenters get permission to use the same technique on a human being, a man called Charlie Gordon who has an IQ below 70. The experiment is a success and Charlie develops into a genius. Unfortunately, as Charlie soon discovers himself, the effect is not permanent.

The novel is told through Charlie’s journal entries, initially childish and misspelt and ungrammatical, but becoming analytical and introspective and dropping references to the genius-level things Charlie is now capable of doing. The novel is an expansion of a short story, initially published in 1959, but didn’t itself appear until 1966. It’s clearly set in the 1950s – lots of mentions of cafeterias, for example (thankfully no mention of hats) – and while it could at a stretch take place in the present day, at one point genius Charlie visits a home for the mentally impaired, where he also briefly lived before the experiment, and the home has thousands of patients, a number I found somewhat boggling.

I admit the basics of the story are affecting, but its setting, and its sensibilities, reminded me far too much of JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951, USA), a book I studied at school and hated. I can see why Flowers for Algernon has such a high profile – it’s one of a handful of US science fiction novels to have been taught in US schools – but it’s still an historical document and I suspect it’s better regarded as that and not as a science fiction novel.


by Leave a comment

Exhalation, Ted Chiang

Chiang is the science fiction short story writer non-genre readers all praise (one of his stories was a question in this week’s University Challenge, for example). Which is not to say lots of genre readers don’t praise him too. And he’s won plenty of genre awards: eleven Hugo nominations, four of them wins; six Nebula nominations, four of them wins; and two BSFA Award wins. If he wrote novels, he’d probably have been nominated for the Clarke Award several times too. The only thing is… I find his fiction a bit, well, boring.

It’s not so obvious when you read his stories in isolation. They’re clearly well-crafted, and that’s what mostly comes across. But in a collection like Exhalation (2019, USA), read one after the other, it soon becomes clear that the way he constructs stories leads to a uniformity of approach which, in spite of the story’s plot or setting or trappings, quickly palls. Take the opening novella, ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’, which I’d previously read as a standalone book published by Subterranean Press. (Technically, it’s a “novelette”, but that’s a fake story-length, invented by genre publishers to justify paying less to writers, and only kept alive by genre awards because it means they can hand out yet more prizes.)

But, ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’. It’s explicitly a told story, narrated by the, er, narrator to the caliph of Baghdad, a story format famously used in 1001 Nights. The narrator explains how he met a man who had built a time-gate, which allows him to step into the future or the past, as long as it’s within the operating lifetime of the gate. The man explains this by telling stories – about other men who have used the gate. The narrator determines to use it himself in order to spend additional time with his wife, who died years before. The story’s time paradoxes are all carefully constructed, but it goes nowhere.

The title story is another case in point. In a world populated by mechanical beings whose metabolisms are powered by gas pressure, the gas being argon, a scientist investigates why clocks seem to be running fast. He more or less dissects his own brain – which is mechanical and pneumatic – and discovers the ambient pressure of argon is dropping, spelling the slow death of his race. The story is a blow-by-blow description of the narrator’s investigation, and completely lacking in drama.

‘The Lifecycle of Software Objects’, an actual novella, I also originally read as a standalone book published by Subterranean Press. It also takes a straightforward idea – the creation of artificial life in virtual environments – and then takes the idea past the point where there is anything interesting to say about it. The story follows a pair of “digient” creators who keep their creations “alive” long after the environment in which they existed has been shut down and the company which ran it has folded. There’s something quaint from today’s perspective – the story was originally published in 2010 – in hanging onto old version of software, and of course the tsunami of LLMs sold to the public as AI, has changed the nature of the debate around actual AI, leaving the novella even further behind.

‘The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Fiction’ is far too long for the story it tells. “Lifeblogging” allows people to record every instant of their day, and then later access those instants. It is the perfect defence against confabulation and misremembering. In the “novelette”, a journalist realises accurate instant access to moments in the past changes human dynamics, which feels somewhat banal given that LLMs now have achieved something similar. This narrative is interspersed with a story from a native village which finds life more difficult after moving from an oral tradition to a written one after a western nation occupies their country.

The novella ‘Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom’ was nominated for both the Nebula and the Hugo in 2019 and 2020. It has a simple premise: a company markets a device which forces the creation of a new reality according to the many worlds hypothesis, people can then message or speak to or video-call themselves in that other reality. Chiang then walks through a couple of scenarios showing where people’s lives are different in each reality. The overall plot is based around a scam run by a buyer and seller of the devices.

I’ll grant ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’ and ‘Exhalation’ are memorable – the premises if not the actual plots. The rest of the collection’s contents are forgettable. Even now, a fortnight after reading the collection, I can’t remember the stories. Chiang’s fiction reads like… code. They’re meticulous workings-out of some elements of a premise, to the point where all possible permutations and ramifications have been documented, by which point the reader no longer cares what the story is actually about.

I bought the signed limited editions of both The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate (2007, USA) and The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010, USA) from Subterranean Press when they were published. They’re attractive books. (And it’s a shame Subterranean Press is closing down; it’s an excellent small press.) But the shine rubbed off Chiang’s fiction for me soon after, and there’s nothing in Exhalation which persuades me I was wrong to feel that way.


by Leave a comment

Venomous Lumpsucker, Ned Beauman

(A Facebook review)

This won the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2023, and throughout much of the award’s history that would be reason enough to read the book. But the shortlists in recent years have been… variable. Some of the judges’ choices have been absolutely baffling. The Last Astronaut (2019, USA)? Sea of Rust (2017, USA)? Never mind. Venomous Lumpsucker (2022, UK) sounded quite good – although having now read it, the marketing around the book didn’t sell it very well.

It’s set later this century, when nations and corporations trade “extinction credits” much as nations and corporations now trade carbon credits. Now, it’s to offset climate change (it’s not working); in the novel, thousands of species are being made extinct as corporations mine further afield for necessary elements and ores. The title refers to a fish which lives in the Baltic. It’s a cleaner fish, and cleaner fish are supposed to be the most intelligent types of fish. The venomous lumpsucker is even more intelligent than other species. It is also endangered.

An Indian corporation is mining the Baltic sea-floor, and has hired Resaint to assess the intelligence of the lumpsuckers, as that affects how many extinction credits they will have to pay for destroying their habitat and wiping them out. Unfortunately, Halyard, an executive with the firm, saw a way to make a quick buck, and sold the credits on the open market, expecting their value to drop so he could short them. The opposite happens: hackers wipe out all the digitised DNA of already-extinct species, which drives the price of credits sky-high. And then it turns out the company has already accidentally obliterated the lumpsuckers.

The novel is Resaint and Halyard chasing about the Baltic, trying to find a living colony of lumpsuckers, and being given a rude awakening into how the “extinction industry” works. Meanwhile, the UK has turned into a western North Korea, an isolated island nation ruled by a kleptocracy, but a powerful billionaire has bought up Cornwall and Devon and is seeding it with extinct species for his own reasons…

The targets of Beauman’s satire are pretty clear: not just the corporations putting profits above climate change, but also Brexit and Elon Musk. The novel is surprisingly funny, and the near-future stuff is inventive. Not everything works – the billionaire’s motives don’t add up, and the super AI reads more like a deus ex machina than actual near-future technology. But a good winner of the Clarke Award, nonetheless.