It Doesn't Have To Be Right…

… it just has to sound plausible

Tag Archives: science fiction


by Leave a comment

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980, UK) is the direct sequel to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979, UK), although reading them this time they feel more like two parts of the same novel. There is of course a third part to follow this. And then a further two novels, which were not based on the original radio series.

Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the galaxy, is kidnapped from the Heart of Gold and finds himself on the home world of the company responsible for publishing the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Apparently, he deliberately became president for a reason but then removed the reason from his mind. When he attempts to meet a contact suggested by another part of his mind, the city is attacked by Frogstar fighters and the entire building in which Zaphod is waiting in an office is carried away to another planet. There, Zaphod meets the man who really rules the universe, and whose identity Zaphod became president to discover. He decides the universe is in good hands.

The others meanwhile find themselves at Milliways, the titular restaurant. They’re then joined by Zaphod. They steal a ship to leave Milliways, but it turns out to be the stunt ship which will dive into a sun at the climax of the next concert by Disaster Area (a very loud music group). They jury-rig the ship’s emergency teleport system, and escape…

Ford and Arthur find themselves aboard a generation starship carrying only hairdressers, middle managers, “telephone sanitisers”, and others from the service industries. It’s the second of three generation ships – the first contains the elite, and the last the professional classes. It’s not a joke that’s aged well. It’s all very well to mock “useless” professions, but they’d been better to send off the first generation ship instead. Telephone sanitisers, whatever they are, as a rule do not fuck over vast swathes of the population on a regular basis. The generation ship crashes on a habitable world, which proves to be Earth in its prehistory.

The jokes in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe have not weathered the decades as gracefully as those in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. At Milliways, the diners are introduced to the food they’re about to eat. Taking the piss out of vegetarians and vegans is not so funny these days. Disaster Area’s manager is spending a year dead “for tax purposes”. Also not a good topic for humour, when you have billionaire scumbags decamping to tax-free countries to avoid paying their contribution. Having said that, the revelation about who really rules the universe is probably more poignant now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.

Generally, more misses than hits in this volume. True, there’s a lot of nostalgia at play here – and for those of us who remember the 1970s, that even applies to the targets of Adams’s humour. The humour in the first book struck me as less tied to its time than here. Which is not to say The Restaurant at the End of the Universe isn’t a fun, quick and light read, but YMMV. You may be better off stopping after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That novel at least shows how to do science fiction humour successfully – and I admit it’s British humour, not American, which is an entirely different beast – but it’s something a few current genre authors should probably look into.


by 1 Comment

Slow Gods, Claire North

I’ve been following the career of Claire North, a pseudonym of Catherine Webb, since her debut under that name, The Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014, UK). I thought it good-ish, but things started picking up with The Sudden Appearance of Hope (2016, UK) – which, if I remember correctly, managed an impressively accurate description of Dubai – and by The Pursuit of William Abbey (2019, UK) she was on my must-buy list.

Which brings me to her latest, Slow Gods (2025, UK). Which is, well, a Banksian space opera. Iain M Banks’s space opera novels have been copied a lot over the past thirty five years, but Slow Gods comes closer than many. Which is not to say there’s nothing original in Slow Gods, because there’s plenty.

Interstellar travel in the universe of Slow Gods is accomplished via arcspace, but journeys through it are extremely unsettling to humans (there were definite vibes of the movie Event Horizon here). Ships require a human Pilot, who is plugged into the ship, but they can only Pilot for two or three trips before suffering a psychotic break. Or worse.

The Shine, properly the United Social Venture, is the complete antithesis of Banks’s Culture. A rich and powerful elite enjoy lives of untrammelled luxury supported by the labour of an indentured population kept permanently in debt. The Shine “Management” are cruel, sadistic and sociopathic. Any resemblance to twenty-first century USA is undoubtedly intended.

The Shine uses criminals and debtors as Pilots, and surgically destroys their higher brain functions so they last longer. It gives the Shine an advantage in interstellar travel. Mawukana na-Vdnaze was arrested during a Corpsec sweep, and promptly condemned to be a Pilot, but the surgery did not happen. Maw’s ship was then lost in arcspace, but somehow he managed to bring it home – but he was changed in the process. He is now effectively immortal, and he can Pilot through arcspace without being affected and with pinpoint accuracy.

The Slow, a huge and enigmatic AI with a very successful record of predicting the future, declares a binary star system will go nova, and the resulting wavefront will wipe out all worlds within an eighty light year radius. Which includes the Shine. But Management declares this “fake news” and does nothing to protect their worlds from the resulting wavefront.

Maw escapes the Shine, and goes to work for the Accord, a loose alliance of other interstellar polities. He runs various errands, including helping rescue historical artefacts from a world among the first to be destroyed by the wavefront. The Shine continues to refuse to evacuate its worlds, and instead seems bent on conquering other planets for Management to rule. The Accord can do nothing because the Shine has blackships, stealth warships with planet-killing weaponry, hidden in the systems of the Shine’s enemies. It’s the ultimate deterrent.

All this takes place over decades. The Shine are really horrible – although, to be honest, they’re not much worse than some of the polities in other twenty-first century sf novels, although here the novelty is they’re the villains. Maw is a curiously passive protagonist, someone who is so afraid of his abilities he rarely uses them. The Accord keeps him on a small island, since other people find him just as unsettling as arcspace. There’s even a hint of Special Circumstances to Maw’s role and the missions he undertakes. The world-building is also especially good. 

I don’t think the comparison with Banks is unfair, although Slow Gods is very much a twenty-first century take on the material, with thoroughly modern sensibilities (something many writers forget to do when aping Banks). I’ll be disappointed if Slow Gods does not appear on a few award shortlists this year.


by Leave a comment

Metronome, Tom Watson

This was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2023, which is a science fiction literary award which generally aligns with my tastes in science fiction but does occasionally throw up baffling nominees. Metronome (2022, UK) is not as bad as some novels that have been nominated for the Clarke Award in the past, but I’m not convinced it deserved its place on the shortlist.

In a country which seems culturally and politically a mishmash of the UK and some random invented East European nation from literature, Whitney and Aina have been exiled to a croft on a windswept island for the crime of having a child without permission. No reason is given for the government licensing procreation, but it seems political. The two also have to take a pill three times a day – allegedly because of toxins released by the thawing of the permafrost.

None of this is convincing, nor does Watson seem to care. Metronome is a detailed account of the days before the couple’s twelve-year sentence is finally up, when the warden will come to return them home. And which of course never happens – because in these sorts of novels, it never does. Then a man and his young daughter appear – and the latter does not need to take the pills, so the permafrost toxins seem to be a political lie. Things come to a head because Whitney spends the entire novel wearing the Idiot Hat, and the revelation late in the story that he shopped the pair of them lands with a dull inevitability.

Watson can write a good sentence, but it’s all so ploddingly dull and banal and predictable. The setting never quite adds up – no surprise there, it’s a feature of the sub-sub-sub-genre, or whatever it is. Nothing is resolved – yet another feature of stories like this. East Europeans have been writing this sort of fiction for decades, and from lived experience. Metronome can never be more than a pale imitation, and so it proves. It comes as no surprise to discover it’s Watson’s first novel, and that he studied for a MA in Creative Writing. The press apparently loved it – I’ve said before I’m generally in favour of non-genre authors writing genre, but it’s depressing how literary reviewers enthuse so often about such books when no such enthusiasm is deserved.


by Leave a comment

Eclipse, John Shirley

I read Eclipse (1985, USA) some time back in the 1990s, I think, or it might have been the late 1980s. It was originally published in 1985, but the edition I read this year was the 1999 revised edition. It’s the first of a trilogy, A Song Called Youth, followed by Eclipse Penumbra (1988, USA) and Eclipse Corona (1990, USA). For some reason, I never got around to reading books two and three.

I’ve read a lot of fiction by John Shirley over the years. He was one of the authors I fastened onto during the late 1980s, for reasons I no longer remember. He’s had an… interesting career (there’s a good interview with him from February this year on Boing Boing: here). His output has been large, including quite a lot of work-for-hire novelisations, but the quality has been variable. His works are mostly science fiction or horror, with the odd fantasy. His good stuff is definitely worth reading, the rest not so much.

Fortunately, Eclipse is one of the good ones. It’s part-cyberpunk, part-WW3, and part-punk rock. It’s set some time around the middle of this century. After Putin’s death, Russia invaded Europe. Meanwhile, fascism is on the rise everywhere in the West. There’s a space habitat called the Colony in orbit, and a high-tech floating sovereign city in the Mediterranean called Freezone. A private security company called Second Alliance has been contracted to police the war-torn cities of western Europe. Second Alliance is run by a cabal of right-wing Christian fascists, and is deeply racist, homophobic, anti-semitic and anti-Islamic. There is a small resistance trying to prevent them. The novel follows a handful of characters from the resistance: in Paris, in the Colony, and infiltrated into Second Alliance’s leadership.

If parts of this sound familiar, it’s worth remembering the novel was originally published in 1985. And even the revised edition is twenty-seven years old. Of course, there’s nothing new about fascism, and the US has been a bin fire since it was founded… In the real world, the Russian invasion was limited to Ukraine, and Israel has proven to be a rogue nation rather than a settling influence on the Middle East. And, of course, there was 9/11 and the War on Terror. True, a lot of Shirley’s world-building in Eclipse is fairly typical of cyberpunk post-war fiction of the 1980s, and it’s scary how close to present-day reality some of it is. 

Of course, back then, cyberpunk was about the tech – the capitalism run wild, or World War 3, were just setting – and here Eclipse is a little wider of the mark. It’s probably the only thing in the book that dates it – well, that and the punk rock aesthetic, which didn’t last much past the 1990s. Nonetheless, it still reads pretty well.


by Leave a comment

Short, Michael Blumlein

I’ve been a big fan of Blumlein’s fiction for years, ever since coming across one of his stories in an Interzone anthology back in the late 1980s – it was either his debut story, ‘Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report’, in Interzone: the 1st Anthology (1985, UK), or ‘The Brains of Rats’, his second published story, in Interzone: the 2nd Anthology (1987, UK). Whichever it was, it inspired me to track down everything else he had written.

Which was not easy at the time. I found a copy of his first collection, The Brains of Rats (1990, USA), which had been published by US small press Scream Press and was not readily available in the UK (I forget where I bought it; it might have been at a convention). His debut novel, The Movement of Mountains (1987, USA), which was science fiction, appeared in the UK in 1989. His second novel, X, Y (1993, USA), which was horror, was only available as a US massmarket paperback.

Then there was a gap – a story every year or two, a handful of novellas, but nothing at novel-length until The Healer (2005, USA). And a decade later, a handful of collections of his fiction. Of which Short (2023, USA), and its companion volume, Long (2023, USA), are the latest. Sadly, we lost Blumlein in 2019, so when these two volumes claim to be complete, they will stay that way. He was a singular talent, and almost sui generis. His stories were carefully crafted, and always thought-provoking. Some, obviously, worked better than others, and reading Short, which contains all twenty-nine of his published short stories, the differences can be stark.

Blumlein’s debut story, ‘Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report’, first published in Interzone in 1984, is remarkable. It’s also emblematic of Blumlein’s career – somewhere on the borderline between science fiction and horror, with occasional steps entirely into one genre or the other, often based around something medical, and always with very analytical prose. ‘Bestseller’, one of his more popular stories, is a case in point: a struggling writer answers a mysterious advert, and agrees to donate bone marrow for a large sum of money to an ailing billionaire. Then other parts of the billionaire’s body begin to fail, and the writer finds himself donating more and more…

Other stories read as though they were written to a specific market – ‘Snow in Dirt’, for example, was written for an anthology inspired by fairy tales. Even the stories originally published in F&SF feel like F&SF stories, and are lighter in tone than Blumlein’s other works.

Having said that, twenty-nine Blumlein stories in succession is a little overwhelming. His prose is intense and his stories are subtle. Short is a collection to be dipped into and savoured, I think. On the other hand, I now want to reread Blumlein’s novels. Fortunately, I recently purchased a copy of The Movement of Mountains (my copies of his books are in storage). 

And, of course, I have Long still to read.


by 1 Comment

The Employees, Olga Ravn

Back in 2014, Paul Park published the novel All Those Vanished Engines (2014, USA), which comprised three linked novellas. One of these, which shared the book’s title, was originally commissioned to accompany a sound installation by Stephen Vitiello at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011. The Employees (2020, Denmark) by Olga Ravn was inspired by the art of Lea Gulditte Hestelund, a Danish visual artist, after Ravn was asked to provide accompanying text for her exhibition, Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present. Knowing this in no way affects reading The Employees, although it does in part explain some parts of a novel which takes pains to obscure its story.

The novel is told in one- or two-page chapters, each of which is the testimony of a member of the crew of the Six-Thousand Ship, so called because that’s the number of people aboard it. Just like the Three Ship that went to the Moon, and indeed the One Ship that put the first human being in space. Not all of the six thousand are human, some of them are androids – the novel is vague to their exact status, only that they are human in all ways except actually being considered human. Science fiction is normally quite happy to feature chattel slavery without commentary, so why it bothered to invent a metaphor for it will forever be a mystery.

The opening testimonies describe members of the crew, or “employees”, visiting rooms containing “objects” from Hestelund’s installation. There are also visits outside the ship to a valley, although its unclear if the ship has landed on a planet or is in space. At some point, the non-human humans object to not being treated as humans, and mutiny. This is supposed to comment meaningfully on the human, or indeed non-human, condition.

The problem is, there is nothing new here. And couching everything in terms so vague, despite the manifold viewpoints, does not render the story profound or deep. I am in general in favour of science fiction written by non-genre writers. Their unfamiliarity with the tropes and conventions of science fiction can result in something interesting to say about common sf concerns – although that “common” often means their treatment is old-fashioned or adds little to the genre conversation. 

And so it is here: The Employees, while poetically written, contains no new insights into the human condition, or even human resources. Some nice prose, an interesting structure, and a link to an art installation of a real-life artist are married to a story that tries hard to hide the fact it is thuddingly obvious from start to finish.


by Leave a comment

There is No Antimemetics Division, qntm

Novels originally published on blogs which went on to become bestsellers when picked up by a traditional imprint are not new – The Martian (2011, USA), Wool (2011, USA), Fifty Shades of Gray (2011, UK), for example. Novels which originally appeared on AO3 have also picked up contracts from traditional publishers. To these routes we can now add the SCP Foundation, a collective writing project in which contributors post stories based within the SCP Foundation’s universe. Think X-Files meets Lovecraft meets Copypasta meets Resident Evil. Sort of.

There is No Antimemetics Division (2025, UK) is a reformatted collection of stories originally published on the SCP Foundation website by Sam Hughes, given a story arc as a loose framing narrative, and expanded to novel-length with an original novella. It works. Sort of. It’s a fix-up and the joins are not difficult to spot. The universe is a collaborative project, although I believe the “antimemetic” aspect is original to qntm.

In the universe of the SCP Foundation, the world is under constant threat by paranormal and supernatural phenomena. A secret organisation exists in order to combat these threats. It’s called the Unknown Organisation, UO. (While the UO is international, the novel is set entirely within the UK.) The idea has been around for years. There was a RPG called Delta Green based on the same premise back in the 1990s. The X-Files covered similar ground in some episodes.

Where There is No Antimemetics Division differs is that the threats the titular division combats are entirely idea-based. They’re memes. Even then, we’ve been there before – I remember similar ideas in some of the New Who series. It’s a neat central premise. It’s partly presented as case-files, which is a somewhat obvious spin on the material, but is also a quick and effective way to world-build. Unfortunately, there’s not much drama or jeopardy in, well, bad ideas. So There is No Antimemetics Division turns the various memetic “unknowns” into mechanisms to generate horror tropes. Especially in the final section of the novel, in which a much-feared Unknown has escaped from idea-space and is turning the real world into some sort of post-apocalyptic zombified wasteland.

To add verisimilitude to the narrative parts of it are redacted. But it’s often easy to figure out the redacted words and they’re… banal. “And”. “Was”. Words that would not normally be redacted because they’re not informative or revealing. If it’s a gimmick, it didn’t work for me.

There’s probably something ironic in the fact some of the ideas in There is No Antimemetic Division just bounced off me, while others were a little too familiar. I also felt some of the ideas lacked rigour, and the UO and its capabilities, and the technology behind it, appeared to change from page to page. Eventually, the whole edifice slowly collapsed under the weight of its own premise. A neat idea, perhaps, that overstayed its welcome at novel-length and probably worked best in its original incarnation, a wiki of short stories. For me, the novel never really recovered from asking me to swallow an invisible cryptozoic creature that was 1000 metres tall and able to walk on water using its wide padded feet…


by Leave a comment

Atlas Alone, Emma Newman

Atlas Alone (2019, UK) is the fourth and final book of the quartet which began with Planetfall (2015, UK). It was followed by After Atlas (2016, UK), Before Mars (2018, UK), and then Atlas Alone. The first book is set at a colony on an exoplanet, founded next to an enigmatic and seemingly deserted alien city. The mission was led by the Pathfinder, who invented FTL and then promptly went looking for God – and found it in the alien city.

After Atlas is set on Earth after the Pathfinder had left. It starts out as a murder-mystery, but becomes a conspiracy thriller in which a technocratic cult based in a theocratic USA secretly builds a second ship based on the Pathfinder’s. Before Mars takes place at a base on Mars. The narrator spots clues which suggest all is not as it seems and she has been there before but cannot remember it.

And so to Atlas Alone. Which takes place immediately after the events of After Atlas, but onboard Atlas 2, which is the second FTL ship. The ship is heading for the exoplanet where Planetfall takes place. It is staffed mostly by fundamentalist Christian Americans. And, as they left Earth, they killed everyone left behind with nuclear bombs. The narrator, Dee, is a last-minute addition to the thousands aboard, as is her friend Carl, the detective from After Atlas.

Dee is a gamer. An anonymous superhacker invites her to play a “mersive”, which proves to use details from her own life. The game ends with her finding a man about to destroy London. She suspects he is one of those responsible for the nuclear bombs on Earth, so she kills him. In the game.

Except he dies in real-life, and Carl is tasked with discovering how he died and who killed him. Meanwhile, Dee is offered a data analysis job by one of the senior crew, and then invited to team up with her new boss in another mersive, which again uses details from Dee’s background – thanks to the anonymous superhacker.

It’s not hard to figure out the identity of the anonymous superhacker, and it’s easy to sympathise with Dee’s mission to kill off the leadership of Atlas 2 once she discovers their plan to set up a God-fearing colony on the Pathfinder’s planet, with themselves as the gods and everyone else fearing them. 

Perhaps back in 2019 when Atlas Alone was published, it might have felt a little implausible and OTT, but not now in 2026, with a cabal of apocalyptic Christian fundamentalists and paedophiles in charge of the US, secret police taking people off the streets and putting them in concentration camps, a president funnelling billions from the US Treasury into his own pockets, and a government that has long since lost touch with anything resembling truth.

Atlas Alone pulls a final bait and switch before ending, which, in hindsight, is probably the least satisfying part of the novel. But the book is a fitting end to the quartet, and if I thought its corporatised indentured slavery future Earth was a bit tired and banal these days, other parts of the world-building were much more interesting. But, on the whole, four books worth reading, although the first and third were the best.


by Leave a comment

Alliance Unbound, CJ Cherryh & Jane S Fancher

Alliance Unbound (2024, USA) is the second book of the latest Union-Alliance series, the Hinder Stars trilogy, co-written with Cherryh’s long-term partner Fancher. Cherryh has a whole timeline worked out for her novels, which even includes the stuff that doesn’t, at first glance, seem to fit into her Union-Alliance universe, like the Faded Sun trilogy. But this new trilogy definitely does fit in.

There’s Earth, and Earth Company (EC), and it set up a series of stations orbiting nearby stars. Initially kept supplied by near-speed-of-light pusher ships, but then one station discovers FTL, and two breakaway polities form, one based around Cyteen and the other around Pell. The EC was unhappy with this, and this kicked off the Company Wars. All of this is covered in earlier novels by Cherryh.

The Hinder Stars are those stations closest to Sol. In the book preceding this one, Alliance Rising, the EC wants to reassert control, takes over Alpha (Barnard’s Star) and builds its own massive FTL troop carrier. Meanwhile, a FTL route was discovered between Alpha and Sol, meaning pusher ships will no longer be the sole link between Earth and the expanding number of stations, which by now are carrying on very happily by themselves.

Alliance Unbound is set after those events. While visiting Pell Station, the crew of Finity’s End, a FTL megaship, which is on a mission to sign up all the merchant ships and stations to its Alliance, becomes suspicious of some luxury items it finds on the station. Which leads them to a supposedly mothballed station. And it turns out the EC is secretly supplying it with pusher ships, in the hope of… taking over the stations in the name of the EC.

At times, the prose felt almost like distilled Cherryh. It’s always been brusque and direct, but here more so; and yet there’s a lot of interiority, a lot of guessing and second-guessing. But the plot rolls on relentlessly, which makes for a fast read. I’ve read a lot of Cherryh’s novels, some of them so long ago the details are a little hazy… But even so, it felt like there was some retconning going on here. It’s intriguing stuff, and gives more of an insight into Cherryh’s universe, even if some of the details didn’t quite line up with what I remembered from other Union-Alliance novels.

It’s not like this has never happened before in fictional universes – cf John Varley’s Eight Worlds and Steel Beach (1992, USA) – and it’s more or less inevitable as authors dig deeper into previously unexplored areas of their own universes. Having said that, the pusher ships as described in Alliance Unbound struck me as a fascinating concept to explore – cut off for years, while in the outside universe decades pass. And yet I don’t believe Cherryh has written a novel about the pushers. The first explicitly Union-Alliance novel she wrote was Downbelow Station (1981 USA), which won the Hugo, and that’s set during the Company Wars.

I think I’ve said before that I enjoy exploring science fictional universes, and will often forgive most, but not egregious, deficiencies in the writing while doing that. Happily, there’s nothing here by Cherryh to forgive. She’s an excellent writer, and still going strong, if Alliance Unbound is any indication. She has a huge back-catalogue to explore, and that’s not including the 20+ Foreigner novels, and it’s definitely worth doing so.


by Leave a comment

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.