Dark times in Wales

Thanks to Philip Roth's the Plot Against America, the alternative history novel gained a bit more cachet and interest than it once had. This wasn't the first literary alternative history novel, you could certainly point to the Man in the High Castle or Pavane as literary works, but it is much more rare to see a non-genre writer working in alternate history. In his debut novel, Resistance, Owen Sheers approaches this genre subject from the literary viewpoint.

In the book, the female residents of an isolated Welsh valley wake to find their husbands gone. They soon realize they have taken to the hills to resist a German invasion. In his timeline, the war has gone the Germans way and now the French experience of occupation, including the murky choices of resistance and collaboration, is foisted upon the British.

As in the underappreciated A Midnight Clear, Sheers looks at people, German and British, who try to opt out of the war. As you might expect, this is more difficult that it seems and people on both sides make it more difficult for them to make their choice. Eventually the nastiness rolls into the valley and tragedy ensues.

I quite liked the lyrical approach to the writing and I read it quickly. Late in the book, one character experiences put the valley goings on in much different light that strongly highlights the challenges of resistance. This element is a bit underplayed and could have been made stronger. Hard core alternate history fans looking for all the points of divergence or plenty of military action will need to look elsewhere as that is not Sheers' focus.

Gridlinked

If you are looking for creative, colorful, violent, and frightening science fiction novels, then pick up a Neal Asher. In the past few years I read Cowl and the Skinner, and I just read his first, Gridlinked. His books are set in the shared Polity universe, generally set a few hundred years from today where human society is ruled by AIs, connected via instantaneous travel and beset by enemies like the crablike Prador and the human Separatists. Holding back these terrors is Earth Central Security and, in Gridlinked, the James Bond-esque Ian Cormac.

Cormac begins the book by nearly blowing a mission to uncover Separatist activity. His AI minders decide to delink him from the AI grid, telling him that his connection to the AIs has reduced his humanity and, by extension, his usefulness. He is then sent to investigate a act of terror on another planet.

Asher's creativity is immense. Even is his asides he spins up bizarre biologies and technologies. Weapons fetishists will love his many ideas and the rest will appreciate that many of his ideas are tied back into the story.

Some readers will note similarities to Ian Banks and Richard Morgan (whose novels were published after Gridlinked.) The Polity is somewhat similar to the Culture and the AI led ECS is certainly similar to Special Circumstances. The Polity's world is generally grimmer than that of the Culture and the ECS agents tend to be more happy in their roles compared to those of the often self-doubting Special Circumstance agents.

Asher and Morgan make for an interesting comparison as Asher leans right and Morgan leans left. For the most part this does not impact their narratives although it does impact their emphases. Both authors, for example, deal with the possibility of bodies having new psyches implanted within them. For Morgan this is a story of the powerful crushing the weak. For Asher, it is a case of justice, those who are removed are hardened criminals that society doesn't want to pay to house.

Don't take the political orientation as a guide to whether you should read either author, you should read both if you read science fiction at all.

Anathem

My early take on Neal Stephenson's Anathem holds. This is top top-notch ideas driven science fiction that will appeal to fans of literary adventure and speculative fiction. The book's main characters are monks who study math and science without the benefit of much in the way of technology. The plot, which moves from medieval drama to adventure to classic science fiction, involves the interaction between the secular world and the cloistered world of math and science.

Stephenson balances his story between debates over the nature of reality, consciousness and the cosmos with political intrigues, coming of age tales and adventure stories. By lacing his most rarefied debates with humor and by walking people through the ideas, he makes it easier for those who need a bit more hand holding to enjoy them. As one of his major themes is the decline of thinking in the face of distracting infotainment, he is no doubt encouraging to use faculties that many readers have not touched since their college philosophy or math courses.

His story is driven by dialogues involving topics as dense quantum mechanics, so it is all the better that his prose is as light as it is. Despite the book's length (900+ pages) this is a brisk read, with many humorous interludes. There is an amusing joke for Star Trek fans tucked around the middle of the book and there is plenty for others as well.

In the review copy of the book, Stephenson provides a timeline of this world as well as some background for those less well read in science fiction. My advice is to skip it. Stephenson has taken great care in slowly revealing his world's details which makes for lots of fun guesswork and theorizing while reading. His use of dictionary excerpts is a particularly nice technique. Every 20 or so pages, Stephenson provides an entry from the world's encyclopedia. These entries provide context for earlier conversations as well foreshadow upcoming events. This avoids the often stilted explanatory text found in novels that devise an imaginary world.

The new Stephenson

Neal Stephenson writes learned, lengthy novels, featuring great technical detail and set in eras other than our own. Cryptonomicon, a very large book, explores cryptography in World War 2. His Baroque Cycle, set in 17th and 18th century Britain continues to daunt me with its 3000 pages. If anything can get you to attempt these mighty books, John Derbyshire's review is the thing for it. Thanks mostly to length I haven't read these books, I read and loved Snow Crash and the Diamond Age, books that I suspect Stephenson considers learning projects as both are listed under "other works" on his books page. These books are also more explicitly speculative fiction as they are set in the future and feature all sorts of technical toys

His upcoming book, Anathem, takes the speculative element from his earlier books and the philosophical exploration elements of his more recent works. It is set on a planet much like Earth where a group of monks are starting to interact with the secular world. These monks are a little peculiar as they seem to be math monks, dedicated to the study of math rather than the glory of God.

So far ( I am about a third of the way through) it is an excellent read. The philosophical debates and political conflict among the cloister's various factions are fun to read, the characters are interesting (the main character's story is a classic bildungsroman) and Stephenson's humor is well used. He pokes fun at IT, modern culture, and modern politics in a way that fits in well with the story. One of his themes is similar to that of Susan Jacoby's Age of American Unreason, which argues that modern culture is anti-learning. The learning centric monks looks quite different than the entertainment addicted proles who dominate the secular world.

As one of the principal themes of the book is math, I suspect many will be leery of starting it. Don't be. He approaches the subject almost entirely from a non-quantitative way (although for the curious he provides some narrative proofs in the appendix) and the debates are understandable and interesting to a non-specialist (note: my math grades were my lowest in school).

Hey, you got your AI in my dogma . . .

Should you wish to grapple with the interplay between science and religion, in the words of Tony Soprano, "you got options." You could TiVo "Faith and Reason" on PBS, ponder some Betrand Russell and G.K. Chesterton (which – like duct tape and a universal remote – no home should be without), or crack open Dan Ronco's Unholy Domain. I've gone with door number three, and I've gotta say, it ain't half bad.

Unholy Domain opens in a dystopian, not-so-distant future, in which the world's political and economic systems are gimping along in the wake of the PeaceMaker, a mess-you-up-like-bad-chicken computer virus. It appears that this piece of sunshine was unleashed, for reasons unknown, by the ubertalented and correspondingly erratic programmer Ray Brown, essentially taking down Teh Interweb. As a result of the devastation wrought by PeaceMaker, the federal government has banned all but the most miniscule advances in technology and devolved into corruption and incompetence. *cough, cough *

Against this backdrop we find the Church of the Natural Humans, a sect of anti-technology nuts whose vestments include shoulder-holstered gats and whose theology puts the Luddites to shame, locked in a clandestine war with The Domain, a cabal of black market tech peddlers (imagine the Illuminati recruiting at MIT and bringing on some temps from Blackwater) to be Lords of All We Survey.

Cut to college student David Brown, whom we accompany on his quest to discover the truth about his father Ray and the PeaceMaker virus. What follows is a fast paced techno-thriller that would fit well between a beach chair and cooler of Red Stripe. Some of the prose is somewhat clunky, but Ronco does a great job of drawing out relationships between his characters that seem more fully developed than most genre authors tend to produce. Moreover, the fundamental questions raised by Ronco about the roles of science and religion in the arc of human development are ones worth considering, even if it's while sitting on the beach with a bronson. Perhaps especially then.

If Dan Simmons' Endymion got you all freaky and hot in the ass, what with its time travellin' spikey robot, the AI TechnoCore and the Galactic Catholics, then Unholy Domain will be right up your alley. On the other hand, if you like your discourse to be more elevated, then go get a Mother Jones. And put the beer away.

Prestige

Last night, I was rather disturbed when I watched the Prestige. Not because of the movie's content, but because I could not recall any of the basic plot developments of the story. This upset me because I read the book in the mid-90s and quite liked it. I liked it enough to send it to a few friends. But as I watched the movie, it was as if I had never read it! This is no slight against the book, thinking of other favorite books that I read back then, like the novels of Robertson Davies, I suspect I would hard pressed to describe the goings on.

The movie is great, with excellent acting all around, but particularly from the two leads, Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. A number of reviews have complained that the movie doesn't play by the rules it establishes, which I think isn't quite right. While the movie appears to be about stage magic, I think it is more about art and obsession, although the technique of misdirection clearly plays a role.

Having watched the movie, I now want to turn back to the books of Christopher Priest. He is a writer of speculative fiction, which is to say books both literary and geeky. This is a tough spot to be in, as any whiff of genre can send the literary types running, while the limited use of technology and action curtails the science fiction side of things.

Having read the Prestige, I went on to the Extremes, a book I found decent, but not worth recommending. From what I can tell, that book is not considered his best, so now I am going to look for his better regarded books, including Inverted World which is about to be re-issued by the New York Review of Books Classics line. I've also ordered the Separation, a book that plays on some of the same themes of dualism that the Prestige does.

One I wish I had missed

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle wrote a number of science fiction novels which I fondly remember. The Legacy of Heorot tells the story of colonization and the perils of misunderstanding xenobiology. Footfall is an exciting update on the War of the Worlds. Lucifer's Hammer concerns the collapse of society in the face of a comet impact on Earth. My major issue with Lucifer's Hammer, bloat, is a much bigger issue in highly regarded Mote in God's Eye.

The bloat issue is gigantic here. The first 150 pages are boring exposition filled where we meet the stock characters (engineer with Scots accent, plucky female aristo along for the ride, young dashing military commander) and learn about the painfully uninteresting world of the future. Once we meet the aliens, known as Moties, it takes many more pages before we learn anything about the society. There are many portentous allusions to things the Moties don't want the humans to learn. It takes so long to get to the revelations, that I really didn't care once I read about them.

All this padding would be fine if Niven and Pournelle had provided a rich world to explore. No such luck. While the initial concept is interesting ( US and USSR unite, colonize space, have a civil war, new empire tries to pick up the pieces) it quickly devolves into cutting and pasting from 19th century Britain. The navy is straight from Horatio Hornblower, with officers named sailing master and teenage midshipman running crew sections.

The Church (which is Catholic, a bit odd given the leading space powers were largely Protestant and Orthodox) is clearly more powerful, without serving any narrative purpose. Has the Church followed its social justice wing or become a rival power center to create challenges for the elite? Has the theology created cultural restraints on the development of technology or society? No and No. All the more galling the Church apparently hasn't changed much at all in a millennium.

There is a decent story about alien contact amongst all its problems, but it is such a short part of the book, it is probably not worth working your way through to find it. As the humans encounter the Moties, they learn that the society could threaten human society. The debate concerns the means by which they must deal with it. The viewpoints expressed nicely describe the classical realist view of politics. Alien first contact follows similar rules and problems as seen in foreign relations. What makes a country a threat? How do you manage threats? What is the purpose of interacting with other societies at all? The book has some interesting, if one-sided, things to say about this, but you have to wade through hundreds of pages of crap to get there. If you are looking for a classic to discover, beware this one.

Reading older science fiction

I started reading The Mote in God's Eye, one of the best regarded space operas I have yet read. I have yet to get to the meat of the story (first contact) but there are a few distracting elements. For one, the book was written in 1974 and postulates a US-USSR union that eventually falls apart. Not a big deal, we can just pretend it is a US-Chinese union like in Serenity.

I find it a little more distracting that the space navy is clearly modeled on Horatio Hornblower stories. Crews are swapped higgeldy piggeldy, the most valuable crewmember is known as the "sailing master," midshipman start aboard ship in their early teens, captains can be 25, and the Captain goes around saying things like "Damn your eyes!." David Weber's Honor Harrington books must owe some debt here, although Webers books are even more Hornblower/ Aubrey-Matruin in space than Mote in God's Eye, which uses the material more as background.

Like some other authors from the period (e.g. Chester Himes) Niven and Pournelle want to use some swears, but apparently the eff bomb wasn't kosher. The frak solution was yet to be developed, so instead of saying "Fuck em," characters say "Rape em." This isn't a case of future speak since aside from technology, everyone talks like 19th century people, which makes me think they should have said "bugger them!" Fuck em, while clearly hostile is non-specific in its outcome. Rape em has a much more menacing connotation even than, say, go to hell, which is also fairly hostile.

Fortunately, all of this is background. The story itself remains excellent and worth reading, so far at least. Unlike mysteries, which are (usually) set in a current or historical setting, science fiction creates futures, and those futures can seem silly to later generations. I recall a Norman Spinrad novel, written in the hippie days, where one future rebel type goes around saying "Come the revolution!" I prefer the current manner of making future humans in many ways alien, as our society would appear to our ancestors.

One about which to be hopeful

Charles Pellegrino, author of Dust, one of my favorite disaster novels may have one in the works. His website makes mention of a book called draculae(sic) an eco-thriller co-written by Bill Schutt. Schutt has a creepy looking book on the horizon called Dark Banquet - Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood Feeding Creatures. So, I take it he likes interesting subjects.

Dust is out of print, but is available for a penny (plus shipping of course) at Amazon. There are lots of haters amongst the reviewers, but I quite liked it. It is a story of the global ecosystem collapsing, and as you might guess, this can't be stopped, only survived. It's not a happy book, but it left me wanting more.

Pellegrino has a history of books filled with nastiness. His collaboration with George Zebrowski, the Killing Star, is a tale of first contact gone really, really bad. It also presents a theory as to why no alien broadcasts have been found.

Making nerd boys sad

Given that science fiction novels nearly always make silly movies, a neophyte is at the helm and they plan to squeeze two novels into a single movie, I have little hope that the upcoming Hyperion movie will be any good. I will watch of course, and maybe weep. Seriously, is there anyway the Shrike is going to look cool at all? And yes, LA Confidential proves you can reduce a book to its philosophical essence, but TWO of them? I doubt it.

Spin State

Spin State is proof that you don't have to be British to write great science fiction today. Chris Moriarty's book is set a few hundred years hence with Earth largely abandoned due to environmental collapse and humans being joined by genetically engineered humans and AIs on the various colonies and stations. The book initially appears to be similar to Altered Carbon, with a bio-engineered soldier attempting to solve a mystery.

While Altered Carbon became a California hardboiled mystery, Spin State is more Le Carre in space. The main character, Catherine Li, is sent by the commander of the UN military to investigate the death of the UN's leading scientist. Li is worried because the scientist died on her homeworld, a world where her secrets might cost her job. What's more, she finds the planet a hotbed of intrigue with an AI, the communitarian Syndicates, space Wobblies and mining companies all trying to win her allegiance. Much of the story involves Li going on clandestine missions or trying to negotiate with parties that may be trying to kill her. It makes for engaging reading.

While readers can probably guess the various alliances at play and who Catherine's ultimate allies will be, the final revelation of the dead scientist's plan is a surprise and it neatly ties into what we know about the world that Moriarty created. One downside to the novel is that she leaves some interesting questions unanswered. For example, the lingua franca in this future is Spanish. Ok, why? The U.S. took a shellacking in the environmental crisis, but why not Mandarin? A number of details are introduced but I suppose answers will come in future volumes.

My heart is human, my blood is boiling, my brain I.B.M.

Jeanette Winterson's latest novel, the Stone Gods, is a dark mix of 1984, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and the Cloud Atlas. Despite the fact that her characters state they don't like science fiction and she herself says she hates it in this interview, the book is very much a science fiction novel. It is fixed on ideas, but would be comfortably shelved in either the literature or the science fiction sections of the bookstore.

The book's principal idea is that human society is pre-disposed to destroy itself and the resources at its disposal. Given a chance, it wouldn't learn from the mistakes, but simply repeat them. While the focus is on the Western, globalized society, Winterson doesn't let the rest of the world off the book either. The book suffers a bit in the end by too directly criticizing the Bush Administration. As Ross Douthot notes in this post about the paranoid movie style, making too close a criticism of the real world diminishes a work of art and Stone Gods falls a bit flat in places because of it.

Despite a Tolkeinesque longing for the pastoral and hatred for the mechanistic that pervades the book, one of the most interesting characters is Spike, a robot that is very nearly human, but designed to be purely rational. Spike's designers hoped that her lack of emotions would make her better able to make crucial decisions, but she quickly evolves into an emotional being.

The relationship of Spike and Billie, the main character is the only element of hope in an otherwise bleak story about human self-destruction. As the relationship moves from teacher-pupil to something more intimate, there is a sense that there are things for which it is worth living, despite the hell that might surround you.

Banks is being re-published

Orion Books is republishing Consider Phlebas, my favorite of the Iain M Banks Culture novels. All of the Culture books are excellent reads and should be on the reading list of every sci-fi fan, but I think Consider Phlebas is Banks at his most interesting. Banks is one of the greatest of the world creators and his creativity goes to 11 in this book.

The Culture is Banks' liberal socialist paradise. It is an economy without scarcity and a political system with near total freedom. This makes for a rather boring place for stories, so most of his stories take place on the fringes of the Culture. Despite his admiration for the Culture, Banks is skeptical of power and the powerful Culture is happy to meddle in other societies in hopes of making them more like the Culture. Consider Phlebas is told from the side of the religious Idrians which finds the Culture anathema and fights it in a titanic struggle.

You can read the book as an great story or you can read it as meditation on politics. Either way, this is a must read and it is wonderful that is will be widely available again.

RIP

The last of the science fiction elders, Sir Arthur C Clarke has died. Here is an essay Gregory Benford, another science fiction writer wrote about Clarke. As Benford notes, Clarke was in many ways the father of hard science fiction, the science fiction that, as much as possible adheres to our understanding of the laws of the universe. He also occasionally displayed a wry take on humanity, as evidenced by his first short story Rescue Party, which has one of the best final lines of all of science fiction (or fiction for that matter.) Read the story here.

A substantial gap in my science fiction reading is Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, the book against which all first contact stories are compared. I better read it soon, as David Fincher has a film in the works.

There is a future in Scalzi's dreaming

One thing fantasy writers need to pick up from science fiction writers is universe creation. Fantasy writers are great world creators, but they tend to focus on a single over-arching story line before moving to an entirely different world.

Science fiction writers have a long tradition, an early example of which is Heinlein's Future History, of creating a universe in which to set many sometimes related, sometimes unrelated stories. Iain M Banks has been writing Culture novels for decades, and just published a new one, called Matter. The insanely prolific CJ Cherryh developed a fascinating future history in her Alliance- Union books. Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher and others continue to develop interesting future universes in their books.

At the end of the Last Colony, John Scalzi appeared to be putting aside his fascinating Colonial Union universe. In this universe, the galactic arm is jam packed with species competing for a handful of planets. Humanity has a number of tricks up its sleeve including taking bored retired people and turning them into bad-asses, hence the first book's title, Old Man's War. Like its two predecessors, Last Colony is excellent Heinleinesque fun that leaves you wanting to learn more about this universe.

In an afterword to Last Colony, Scalzi said he was putting the universe aside. Apparently he changed his mind, as he has another book called Zoe's tale coming this summer. He writes extensively about the book here. I hope he writes more.

Best of Booker

The Man Booker Prize is approaching year 40 and to celebrate, the Man Booker judges are picking the best of the prize winners so far. One of the oddsmakers have an interesting take with Life of Pi with the greatest chances, followed by Midnight's Children and The English Patient. This is a mixed bag, with one of the easiest to read followed by two of the densest. Ladbrokes says no way, its Midnight's Children, Sacred Hunger and the Blind Assassin. I am rooting for Margaret Atwood, partly for loving the books and partly because I like to see science fiction win. You can read Atwood's defense of science fiction here.

My true hope is that JG Farrell's the Siege of Krishnapur. Set in the Great Mutiny (or if you prefer the First War of Indian Independence,) the book is at once a thrilling story and an exploration of the colonial mindset.

I think a much more fun Prize would be the making up for past errors prize. That is to say, which book should have won the Booker, but didn't. I would say that Oryx and Crake was robbed in 2003, but Atwood had won two years previously, so that might be overlooked. Despite quite liking the Line of Beauty, I think the Cloud Atlas is the better book.

Where are the green apocalypse novels?

Reading Doomsday Men with its analysis of the predictive power of science fiction in regards to the possibility of nuclear doom, I got to thinking about the relative lack of environmental apocalyptic fiction. Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy starting with Forty Signs of Rain has been successful. Frank Schatzing had great success in Europe with the Swarm in which a Gaia like force decides to rid Earth of the polluting humanity. Aside from that, science fiction doesn't appear to have caught up with the latest fear.

No future for you

In an interview with Powells (to which I cannot link as the Chinese censors are apparently not down with Powells), George R R Martin identified five novels which should have won the Nebula (or maybe it was the Hugo, I can't remember.) One of them was Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun from 1970. While I expect it made for a riveting read back in the Nixon days, today it reads as a dated tale of the apocalypse. Its quite good but is really meant for those whose reading tastes lean to the eschatological.

The book starts in 1978 where the Vietnam war continues at the ferocious level of the 68-70 period with China becoming directly involved. Crime has escalated to the point where trains are armored and the President is a tad wacky.

Super-smart, Bartlett's quoting Brian Chaney (who reads like a stand in for the author) is known for his Biblical writings about Revelation. The government asks him to recommend changes for the nation and he produces a creepily statist report (another 70s peculiarity) that calls for all kinds of paternalist stuff like banning emigration to California. Chaney is recruited into a time machine project along with a two military men. Unlike nearly every other time travel tale ever, they decide to go to the future rather than the past.

The crappy present of the book is just a teaser for a really crappy future. I won't spoil the surprises, as there are some bleak twists and a nasty little ending. The main problem is that the scenario created feels so far from today's world, that it will really only appeal to those who like to see different versions of how our world might end.

Sunshine

The thoughtful science fiction film is all too rare. While science fiction books are evenly split between action-oriented books and more cerebral fare, the movies slant heavily to the flashy lights and explosives. If you look at the top 20 IMDB sci-fi films, only one or two isn't action-oriented. Even the Guardian's list is mostly action. It's understandable as even the slow paced science fiction films require special effects and are therefore expensive. The sci-fi equivalent of You Can Count on Me would probably lose a lot of money. This isn't to disparage space opera, but only to wish for more movies like the books of Hal Clement or the Speed of Dark.

So it is nice to see that a movie like Sunshine was made. The movie centers on Icarus II (Icarus I didn't make it), a ship carrying a bomb meant to re-start a dying sun. The first two thirds of the film focuses on the psychological, social and technical problems facing a eight person crew on a lengthy and possibly suicidal mission. The ship's psych officer is fascinated by the sun and goes right up to the edge of safe exposure to its light. The engineer is the hard nosed realist who would do well in the Cold Equations. The crew's captain reminded me of Dallas, which bodes poorly for him. The principal character is the physicist who designed the bomb. He is given to indecision and doubt.

As you can imagine thing begin to go wrong on the Icarus II, and as Apollo 13 showed us, errors in a environment like space lead to more errors, often worse than the initial ones. The film switches to danger/action mode at the end, but I think it does so without sacrificing the general tone of the film. I really liked this movie and hope it leads to more like it.

A few sci-fi items

Here is Peter Suderman on the sad decline of Orson Scott Card.

Here is the entire first episode of the late lamented Firefly. This comes from Hulu, NBC's upcoming TV content site.

Here are the covers for the new Iain M Banks, Peter Hamilton and some other guy.