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The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson

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

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

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

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

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


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Brightness Falls from the Air, James Tiptree Jr

The second of only two novels published by Tiptree, and opinions on it are somewhat divided, chiefly I suspect because of one element of the book that has aged very badly – and was questionable to begin with.

The world of Dameim is home to an alien race who were illegally tortured and maimed in order to harvest a chemical they exude, which was then distilled into an extremely expensive drink called Star Tears. (The drink is mentioned in an earlier story by Tiptree, and the later collection The Starry Rift (1986, USA) takes place in the same universe.) Dameim is now overseen by three guardians, who live in a sort of safari lodge (which Tiptree admitted was inspired by her childhood safaris with her parents). They’re visited by a group of ten tourists, there to witness the wave-front of the Murdered Star pass over the planet. But two other men also disembark, apparently through some error, as does the supercargo who looked after the passengers while they were in cold sleep.

There are two plots – the last survivor of an alien race has tracked down the person who fired the shot which destroyed their sun, ie the Murdered Star; and three of the visitors are planning to make themselves some Star Tears – by torturing and maiming Dameii, of course. The latter plays out pretty much as you’d expect – the villains reveal themselves, and seize control. The first plot presents more of a surprise. It wasn’t the genocide everyone believed, and the alien’s “vengeance” is… complicated.

So far, so not especially a science-fictional story. There are real-world analogues to the two plots. However, the novel’s resolution depends in part on “time flurries” caused by the Murdered Star’s wave-front, and that’s pretty much sf. Tiptree also hints the cause of the genocide has, through the wave-front, altered everyone’s perceptions of Damiem and the Dameii.

Unfortunately, there’s one misstep the novel can’t recover from – among the tourists are four actors ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen, and they’re porn actors. Even in 1985, readers struggled to accept this, and it’s even less acceptable now than ever before, post-Yew Tree, post Trump and Epstein and the Andrew formerly known as prince… The actors are engaging characters, but the teen pornography leaves a bad taste.

I’ve seen Brightness Falls from the Air (1985, USA) described as Tiptree best-known but least-liked novel. She only wrote two and is much better known for her short fiction, so it seems a dumb way to refer to the book. And yet, except for the under-age sex, there’s a lot to like about Brightness Fall from the Air. The main plot is perhaps not intrinsically sf, although Tiptree makes the setting entirely genre, and the many plots and subplots she handles with admirable deftness. It’s perhaps the most colourful and yet bleak novel I’ve read.

The Starmont Reader’s Guide to James Tiptree, Jr (1986, USA) by Mark Siegel, one of only two critical works on Tiptree’s fiction I’ve managed to find, suggests a common theme to much of her fiction: she believed mortality, or the acceptance of mortality, was necessary to create art; it is the shadow of death, oblivion, hanging over us that drives creativity. Brightness Falls from the Air certainly illustrates this theory.

I’ve read a lot of Tiptree this year, and the more I read the more I like it. I’ve always regarded a handful of her stories as stone cold classics of the genre. It’s also true many of her stories have not aged particularly well. I’ll happily recommend her works to people, but with the caveat they should probably stick to her short fiction.


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The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, Larry Niven

We make foolish decisions all the time, probably even several times a day. Mostly, they cause no harm, perhaps a little mild embarrassment, and often no one witnesses the embarrassment but we know about it ourselves all the same. I have no idea why I decided to complete my exploration of Larry Niven’s oeuvre. I last read books by him back in the early 1980s, and while I had fond, if incomplete, memories of some of them, I also knew they weren’t very good. But, for some reason, I decided to read the rest of his books. I don’t know; perhaps I saw a couple, with their pretty damn cool Peter Andrew Jones cover art, in my local secondhand sf bookshop, and thought, yeah, let’s give them a go, I liked them back when I was, er, fourteen or fifteen, what could possibly go wrong?

Everything, of course.

I’d remembered the ideas in Niven’s books over the decades, and I knew he was a proponent of “transparent prose”, which is what writers say when their prose is so bad it’s almost an anti-style, and yes, I’d remembered Niven’s politics were considerably to the right of mine (and not just because I’m British but because he’s a conservative loon)… but what I’d forgotten was how effortlessly offensive his fiction was. My sensibilities were still in flux back in my mid-teens, so perhaps I just skated over the worst bits and only took the good, if rare, bits on board.

The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton (1976, USA) was not a Niven book I’d read back in the day. It’s a collection of three novellas set in Niven’s Known Space universe and featuring a single protagonist, Gil Hamilton. Who is an officer in the UN police, which is called ARM, Amalgamated Regional Militias (an unconvincing backronym, which Niven himself admits). Hamilton lost an arm in an accident in the Asteroid Belt, and developed a telekinetic arm as replacement – he has ESP, it works like an arm, only not as strong, but it can reach through solid objects. Even though he had the lost arm replaced with a transplant, he still has his psionic arm. See, the “long arm” in the title, it’s a pun: Hamilton works for ARM and he has a psionic arm too. Hoho.

Hamilton chiefly investigates organleggers… and this is where I have to wonder how I didn’t immediately recoil at Niven’s politics back in the day. Earth in the Known Space series has a population of eighteen billion, which, according to Niven, means it’s massively overpopulated and covered almost entirely by cities. (Earth currently has a population of over 8 billion but there are still vast swathes of unpopulated wilderness. I can bore you with population density by country, but you can look it up on Wikipedia yourself.) For some reason, these 18 billion people have an insatiable demand for new organs. So insatiable, in fact, that pretty much breaking any law results in a death sentence so the criminal’s organs can be harvested. Having one more kid than licensed, for example. Or drunk driving. Which first supposes the death penalty is normal – it’s not, the US is an aberration (one of around 15% of nations). And second, that all medical conditions are solved by transplanting a new organ. It’s complete nonsense, complete right-wing nonsense.

The plots of the three novellas are almost incidental. Hamilton is, to be fair, a mostly engaging narrator. In the first story, Hamilton is confronted with the seeming suicide of a Belter friend by direct simulation of the pleasure centres of the brain. Except it goes against everything Hamilton knows about his friend. It’s murder, of course. And Hamilton tracks down the killer. In the second, an attempt on Hamilton’s life leads him to suspect an organlegger who retired when the world government made it legal to use cryogenically frozen bodies for organs harvesting. The third story is one Niven freely admits he had the most trouble completing – it’s a locked-room murder mystery, of a sort, but also a sf story, which, according to the essay which ends the collection, took Niven several goes to get right… and even then it’s confusing, muddled and neither a good murder-mystery nor a good sf story. 

Everything in The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton, although it mentions other nations, is Americocentric. Everything operates according to US laws and sensibilities. This is hardly surprising – it’s a US sf collection written by a US sf author for the US sf market. And that was not only common, it was the actual state of the genre for much of the twentieth century. So it seems churlish to point this out, except to say it makes these books – not just Niven’s, but other sf authors of his generation – irrelevant to a twenty-first century sf audience.


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Not This August, Cyril M Kornbluth

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

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

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

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

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


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Earth Made of Glass, John Barnes

A sequel to A Million Open Doors (1992, USA), which I did not like much, also set in Barnes’s Thousand Cultures universe and featuring the same characters, Girault and Margaret Leones. Earth Made of Glass (1998, USA) was shortlisted for the Clarke Award in 1999.

This second Thousand Cultures novel is, I think, a better book – at least, I liked it slightly more – but not for the right reasons. Like the novel preceding it, the story could easily take place in the present-day. It doesn’t need to be science fiction. In A Million Open Doors it was toxic masculine society versus repressed puritanical society. Here, it’s racist society versus enclosed society. In the first novel, the two cultures were invented, openly so, but invented based on a set of principles. In Earth Made of Glass, the two cultures, which share the limited habitable area of the world of Briand, are appropriated. The Tamil Mandalam are an attempt to create the culture of southern India in the first few centuries CE, specifically that which generated the Cankam, a huge body of epic poetry often considered to be the historical highlight of Tamil literary culture. The Maya of Kintulum, on the other hand, are a best-guess at how the Maya actually lived. None of those involved in setting up the two cultures had any connection, cultural, racial or geographic, to them.

By the time the springer arrives at Briand, the Tamil and the Maya hate each other, and consider each other to be less than human. A past disaster has resulted in a Maya shanty town outside the Tamil capital of Tanjavur. Ethnic violence is commonplace. The main Maya city of Yaxkintulum is completely off-limits to the Tamil. Girault and Margaret are sent in undercover to find some way to stop the ethnic violence and bring both cultures peacefully into the Council of Humanity fold.

Barnes does a good job of describing Tanjavur and its culture, but the endless racism towards the Maya gets tiresome very quickly. (As does the joke about people trying to pronounce Girault correctly.) And when the action shifts to Yaxkintulum, it proves just as fascinating a place (and, ironically, the Maya relied heavily on AI to invent the stories and myths which are carved into every available surface in the city). The Maya want to improve relations, and embark on a risky plan. They send a Mayan prophet to Tanjavur, with a message to not let their lives be defined by their literary corpus or mythology. Things began to look up, but then rapidly go downhill.

The two cultures are fascinating, but it feels like a guilty pleasure. Occitan and Caledony in A Million Open Doors were entirely invented; Tamil Mandalam and the Maya are not. They’re very deliberately skewed takes on real cultures. It feels like misuse, or perhaps even abuse, even though they make for a more interesting read than the dull Occitan and Caledon cultures. There is also a major female player in the plot – she’s not a character because Barnes’s characterisation of her is basically “slut”, but she has more impact on the story than anyone else. Every mention of her leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Even more so, when the narrative seems to expect the reader to admire the most racist of the Tamils.

There were two more novels after Earth Made of Glass, The Merchants of Souls (2001, USA) and The Armies of Memory (2006, USA). There’s mention in both A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass of an alien race whose artefacts have been discovered in numerous places, and that sort of makes me want to read the rest of the quartet, even though I may find lots in them I don’t like…


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Venus Plus X, Theodore Sturgeon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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The Paradise Mission, Phillip Man

I’ve been a fan of Mann’s science fiction for many years, but I was disappointed by his last sf novel (he died in 2022), The Disestablishment of Paradise (2013, New Zealand), which was shortlisted for the Clarke Award. He had one more novel published, Chevalier & Gawayn (2022, New Zealand), only in New Zealand. I have a copy, bought online a couple of years ago.

The Paradise Mission (2014, New Zealand) is a novella aimed at teenagers and set on the same planet as The Disestablishment of Paradise, called, er, Paradise. One of the areas where The Disestablishment of Paradise scored highly was in its world-building. And that’s what The Paradise Mission sort of is. It’s a quick run-through of the more notable lifeforms on Paradise, as encountered and experienced by a somewhat breathless narrator.

Hetty is an Explorer, an interstellar scout sent on solo missions to survey planets. Previously, she had been on two-person missions with Crispin, but now Crispin is missing. He landed on Paradise, and no one has heard from him since. Except for a puzzling message saying he has found gold.

Hetty makes her own way to Paradise to hunt for Crispin. She finds his ship and lands beside it, but there’s no sign of him. Notes in his cabin point to three locations around the planet, which she then visits in her air-sled, finding him at the third. The bulk of the story is Hetty making sense of the flora on Paradise, which includes: the Dendron, 220 metre tall three-legged ambulatory tree-like creatures; Monkey Jokers, which are a sort of plant spider; the Michelangelo, a pitcher plant with psychic abilities; and a plant that creates vast tubes in the mountains, which act like organ-pipes and leads to Crisping labelling the range the Windsong Mountains.

Hetty has adventures. She finds Crispin, who is trying to help a Dendron which is ready to reproduce but can’t without help from another Dendron. Hetty uses her earlier encounter with a Michelangelo to call for a Dendron. Afterwards, Hetty and Crispin decide Paradise should remain untouched, and so falsify their reports to the Space Council.

Given The Disestablishment of Paradise is about the closing down of a colony on Paradise, it seems Hetty and Crispin were unsuccessful in protecting the planet. Having said that, there’s no indication how much earlier to the novel The Paradise Mission takes place. As for the novella being aimed at teenagers… other than Hetty being quite, well, excitable, as a narrator, and the frequent mentions of the young age of Explorers – and their capacity for risk-taking, and curiosity, etc, which justifies this… Well, there’s not much that makes it a YA novella – although the two characters are not explicitly described as teenagers, they’re at minimum not far from it.

Mann’s oeuvre, while small, packed a punch. The Story of the Gardner – Master of Paxwax (1986, New Zealand) and The Fall of the Families (1987, New Zealand) – is a superior space opera, and very much unlike most space operas. The A Land Fit for Heroes quartet (1993-1996, New Zealand), an alternative history in which Rome did not fall, presents a fascinating portrait of an alternate Britain. His other sf novels were high-quality literary sf of a type you rarely see these days. But The Paradise Mission is one for completists, I suspect. It’s hardly a good introduction to his work… 

Although it is a good introduction to the setting of The Disestablishment of Paradise.


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Memory of Water, Emmi Itäranta

Shortlisted for the Clarke Award in 2015 – and it’s not often a translated work makes it onto the award shortlist. In fact, the only one prior to Memory of Water (2012, Finland) was Stanisław Lem’s Fiasco (1988, Poland), although there have been four since Itäranta (Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013, Iraq), The Electric State (2017, Sweden), Vagabonds (2011/2012, China) and The Anomaly (2020, France)).

Memory of Water was originally published in Finnish. There’s no mention of a translator, and Itäranta lives in the UK according to the bio, so I’m guessing she translated the novel herself. That might explain a couple of word misuses, such as “the hidden core of the profession pertains that tea masters were once…”, and “woolgathering” when context suggests it should be “digressing”. Less understandable is the use of Scandinavian Union as the name of the novel’s setting, when it seems to be set in Finland, which is not a Scandinavian country, and both Sweden and Norway are described as polluted and uninhabitable.

Several centuries from now, climate crash, and war, has drastically changed the face of the Earth. Many former nations are now underwater, and the Chinese rule pretty much everywhere. Water is so scarce it is controlled by the military. Noria is the daughter of a tea master, and his apprentice. He shows her the family secret: a hidden spring.

After Noria’s father dies, she becomes tea master, and her mother moves to the capital, Xinjing. In a nearby garbage dump, Noria and her friend find a series of CD-ROMs which contain the log of an expedition to the Lost Lands (ie, Sweden and Norway) several centuries previously. The expedition was presumed lost and the Lost Lands uninhabitable. The novel never actually reveals what’s in the logs, only that it contradicts what everyone has been told. Noria, and her best friend, to whom Noria revealed the secret of the spring, decide to retrace the route of the lost expedition. Before they can set off, the military arrest Noria.

Memory of Water is not the first sf novel to feature a Chinese-controlled future. Two examples which spring (ahem) to mind are Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love quintet (2001-2006, UK) and David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series (1989-1997 and 2010-2014 and 2017-2024, UK). Nor is it the first sf novel set in a Europe mostly underwater. Despite that, Memory of Water’s setting never quite convinces. The writing is lovely, and the surroundings are described in poetic and leisurely detail (sometimes somewhat over-leisurely). But the scarcity of water doesn’t – I’m tempted to say “hold water”, but that would be cruel. Anyway, it doesn’t seem entirely credible, and if it were indeed true then I doubt the tea ceremony would still exist centuries later. The fact Sanja can fix “past-technology”, including a CD-player, is not really feasible either, but it breaks suspension of disbelief less than the water thing.

Which is a shame, as the “water thing” is what the novel is actually about.


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Shards of Honor, Lois McMaster Bujold

Bujold was pretty much ubiquitous on the Hugo Award shortlist throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. True, the Hugo has its favourites, and they have their moments, and then the favourites change. At the time, I couldn’t see the appeal of Bujold’s Vorkosigan series – I read a couple of them, but they seemed somewhat bland and derivative, and not what I would have expected of award-winning science fiction novels. They’re not, of course – not what you’d expect of award-winning sf novels, that is, just instalments in a well-liked, comfortable sf series, and it was the series which kept on winning awards, not the novels.

And yet, reading Shards of Honor (1986, USA) now – a reread as I’d read it once before back in the 1990s – the one thing that stands out is how… polished it all is. It was Bujold’s debut novel, but by internal chronology it’s the second book in the Vorkosigan series. The main hero of the series, Miles Vorkosigan, isn’t even born when the novel takes place – it is, in fact, about his parents.

Cordelia Naismith is an officer of the Beta Colony Survey, when her team on an uninhabited Earth-like planet is attacked by Barrayaran soldiers. She is left behind when her team-mates escape, only to be captured by Aral Vorkosigan, the captain of the Vorkosigan ship in orbit, who has himself been marooned after a mutiny by his ship’s political officer. Barrayar is a militarist empire, with an old-style aristocracy and a Soviet-like “Political Education” apparatus. Vorkosigan is completely old school, a man of honour, a stiff-necked aristocrat, and known as the Butcher of Komarr.

Naismith and Vorkosigan have to trek some 200 kilometres to reach a Barrayaran supply cache, with a brain-damaged Beta Colony officer. Unfortunately, they’re met by the mutinous political officer and his cronies, who take them prisoner. But Vorkosigan turns the tables, only for the political officer to mutiny again. Which this time is foiled by Naismith, shortly before she escapes.

Oh, and the two fell in love during the trek and Vorkosigan proposed marriage to Naismith. Despite her feelings for him, she refused.

And that’s what the novel is about: Beta Colony Survey officer and Barrayaran military aristocrat, a romance. There’s an invasion, a space battle, a gratuitous rape/torture scene, a military defeat, lots of fatuous Betan politics (including a running joke about the Betan president, “I didn’t vote for him”), and brutal Barrayaran court intrigue.

Like Jack McDevitt’s novels, there’s not much here that’s actually science fiction. Set in the future, yes. Lots of different interstellar polities, yes. But it’s all very, well, American (even the aristocratic Barrayarans, who resemble Hollywood depictions of European royalty more than anything else). There’s a few sf bells and whistles – plasma mirrors, stunners, disruptors, plasma arcs (all weapons), plus spaceships and stargates and so on. Several years ago, I invented the term “Ruritanian sf” to describe this sort of genre fiction – see here.

It’s all very entertaining and smooth, with a pair of likeable leads (important for romance, of course), and a background that seems both familiar to sf readers and yet also a tiny bit different – no doubt helped by the sympathetic treatment of what would normally be the bad guys. I can understand the appeal – well-defined universe, good buys to root for, bad guys to boo and hiss, and a fixity of worldview common to US sf.

Shards of Honor is one of the few Vorkosigan novels which didn’t get nominated for an award, although, to be fair, it was Bujold’s debut novel. I enjoyed it, and I’ll continue reading the series – but this is science fiction that doesn’t challenge, and I usually expect more of the sf I read.


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A Million Open Doors, John Barnes

Nominated for both the Nebula and the Clarke Awards. Barnes seemed to have a moment in the mid-to late-1990s, with a Hugo nomination, three Nebula nominations and three Clarke nominations. But no wins. And nothing since then except appearances on the Locus Award/readers’ poll pretty much every year until a decade ago (for his last published novel, in fact). A Million Open Doors (1992, USA) is only the second book by Barnes I’ve read – I read Mother of Storms (1994, USA) back in 1999.

A Million Open Doors is the first of four novels set in the Thousand Cultures. Taking place several centuries from now, Earth has colonised a number of worlds, each of which is home to one or more “cultures”, groups of people – ethnic, national, religious, some even completely invented. Like Nou Occitan, which is supposed to be some sort of Iberian Romantic culture of troubadours and duellists, but is really just massively sexist. The worlds were colonised by slower than light ships, but now “springers”, instantaneous transport, even across interstellar distances, connect them together.

When Giraut catches his paramour in flagrante delicto with a gang of “Interstellars” (youths aping what they think is an Earth culture by “beating up and degrading young girls”), he accompanies a friend to Caledony, which has just received its first springer. Caledony is a religious culture, which uses Christianity to justify some garbled economic philosophy. Giraut opens a school to teach Occitan culture – music, duelling, poetry, dancing, painting, etc – to the joyless Caledons. Unfortunately, the success of the Centre for Occitan Arts prompts a coup by hardliners, house arrest for the previous government, martial law and armed mobs on the streets.

To build support, Giraut and his liberal Caledon friends stage a camping trip across the continent, but there’s an accident in the mountains, resulting in several fatalities. While dashing back to get into communications range, Giraut discovers the ruin of an alien city. Meanwhile, while he was away, Council of Humanity troops have overthrown the hardliners…

Reading A Million Open Doors, I had trouble working out why it was science fiction. Yes, other planets, springers, spaceships, etc, but you could set the story on Earth. Some community full of rapists, another full of nutball religious types – I’m pretty sure you could find two towns that qualify in the US. Even the alien ruins could be the ruins of some prehistoric American culture. All the rest is just bells and whistles.

And when a science fiction novel is not science fiction, then what’s the point of it? And you also have to wonder why the novel appeared on two science fiction award shortlists. In other respects, it’s all just a little too textbook. Giraut is a male chauvinist, but he comes to value and respect women – and even falls in love with one who isn’t even attractive and whose physical flaws he mentions repeatedly. Two characters are killed irretrievably – the technology exists to bring people back using personality recordings, and there’s even an example to illustrate it, the victim of a brutal sexual assault, torture and murder. (This is not just everyday sexism, this is everyday sexual assault.) The bad guys get their just desserts – except, well, not really, a friend who insulted Giraut is humiliated (with a spanking), and the villainous pastor who seized power on Caledony is imprisoned off-world.

A Million Open Doors lost the Clarke to Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993, UK), and the Nebula to Doomsday Book (1992, USA) by Connie Willis (Sarah Canary (1991, USA), Karen Joy Fowler, or China Mountain Zhang (1992, USA), Maureen McHugh, would have been better winners). Even so, it didn’t belong on those shortlists. It’s mediocre, its one idea is in service to a story that doesn’t even need to be science fiction, and it’s offensive in parts.