Book Review: Autonomous by Annalee Newitz

 Set about 120 years in the future, Autonomous presents a world split into different economic zones, where sapient robots can have equal status to humans. Supposedly, at least.

The plot follows two threads. Paladin is a combat robot, indentured (for a period of ten years, to earn his autonomy) to IPC, which regulates pharmaceuticals and patent infringement.

Jack is a pirate - literally and legally; she makes knock-off versions of expensive drugs, such as the Viva life-extension drugs, and smuggles them to people who can’t afford the real thing.

The plot revolves around a productivity drug that Jack has reverse engineered, a compound that seems to allow people to get a buzz of achievement just for doing their normal, everyday jobs and therefore increasing their focus and output. When she starts hearing reports that some people have become dangerously obsessed with menial tasks to the point of harming - and killing - themselves and others, she initially thinks she’s made a mistake with her formulation but finds out it is something bigger.

However, as with the best books, the plot isn’t really what the story is about - although we do delve into the morality of patents, and of those who can afford it getting an edge over those who can’t. No, this novel is very much about identity, about what it is to be human - as, I suppose, all robot stories are. It is about relationships and gender - particularly about the way gender is something imposed by the expectations of others - and, of course, about autonomy and all that this means.

Newitz set up invites us to draw comparisons between the indentured ‘bots and the indentured humans, how one is assumed to be enslaved as a “natural” state whilst the other naturally free - but if both are sentient and sapient, is that reasonable? There are a couple of particularly lovely moments: it is mentioned that some humans resent ‘bots because they believe that allowed them to work toward autonomy has blurred the distinction and is what allows humans to be indentured - while, of course, it is actually capitalism that enables this. In another, Med - a ‘bot who has been raised entirely free, in effect as a human - is often treated as though she has faulty or compromised “programming” if she makes a contentious comment.

For about the first half of the bookI was enjoying it and admiring the ideas, but not really loving it - but then as the backstories began to fill in more and the layers built, I did love it. I loved the characters and relationships, that each had their own depths and frailties - even the bad guys. It is also very good science fiction - in that, while the ‘bots may not be a good prediction of how machine intelligence will pan out, that isn’t the point. Paladin is a person, for all their inbuilt weapon, armour and strange senses. As Ursula le Guin puts it in her introduction to the Left Hand of Darkness:

“Predictions are uttered by prophets (free of charge), by clairvoyants (who usually charge a fee, and are therefore mor honored in their day than prophets), and by futurologists (salaried). Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive”

And, of course, fiction is the lie that tells us the greatest truths about ourselves.

Book review: The Compelled by Adam Roberts: half-built things

 Adam Roberts is the king of High Concept Science Fiction. His novels tend to be based on a single odd concept which he uses as a jumping off point to explore society, attitudes and people; in On, a civilisation that lives in caves and on ledges on an apparently endless cliff, in The Snow a weird apocalypse caused by eternal snowfall that buries the entire surface of the Earth to hundreds of metres.

In The Compelled, the world has been gripped by "The Compulsion", where random individuals are overtaken by the irresistible urge to take seemingly arbitrary items and collect them in huge sculptures, illustrated at the beginning of each chapter with wonderfully geometric otherworldliness by Belgian graphic novelist François Schuiten.

There are as many theories as sculptures (or machines?) - that it is the work of demons or aliens or Gaia herself - but as we join the story the world has largely come to terms with the Compelled and their actions, albeit that the world economy is in recession due to the disruption caused. Police have learnt to deal with the not-theft and have procedures to differentiate from those who are simply crooks using it as an excuse, and some nations give licences to those who have demonstrated they are true victims of the Compulsion.

Chapters alternate through a disparate section of society, all Compelled or Compelled-adjacent, such as the social worker whose job it is to determine Compelled from Chancer (someone demanding all the cash from a bank or to have sex with a certain movie star because they say they are "compelled to do so" seems eye-rollingly common).

As so often with Roberts' work, what could be silly in other hands is turned, by the depth and deftness of his insights and quality of his writing, into something quite special and moving.

Roberts doesn't always nail the dismount, occasionally leaving things feeling unfinished. In this case that is literally situation as just as it seems we might be gaining some insight into what is really going on, he hits us with

"TO BE CONTINUED..."

Personally, I hope he doesn't leave us hanging too long, as I bloody loved this book.

Book review: Recursion by Blake Crouch, in which I somehow don't use the phrase "mind fuck"

 Time travel stories are tricky beasts. So often the author can be tied up in knots by trying to be too clever in their plotting, or simply by using the idea of changing the past as an excuse to propel the story at the expense of internal or character consistency.

But when done well, it can give us a doozy of a story, and Crouch manages this magnificently.

While he's been on my radar - and my TBR pile - for some time, this is my first of his books, and grabbed me from the get go. The idea of False Memory Syndrome dangled an intriguing thread, immediately making me want to know where this would lead, and the author's prose is as cinematic, fluid and immediate as any top-drawer thriller writer, the kind of writing that mostly disappears as the reader is simply immersed in the tale - but, thankfully, with a deftness of characterisation that is so often missing from these writers.

He sets up the parallel tales of cop Barry Sutton, drawn into the suicide of a woman assailed by a double set of memories, and Helena Smith, a neuroscientist driven to find a way to recover memories as a treatment for dementia, and weaves them together in a way I honestly didn't see coming. About a third of the way through threads seem about to wound up before Crouch hits us like a truck coming out of the darkness with the real concept, sending the book spiralling off in recursive loops and increasingly extreme outcomes that could quite easily have felt too much had they not been handled so well. 

(It's around this switch where I found the only sour note in the whole book; Barry's character reactions just seem completely off, given that he has just remembered is while previous life and both losing and regaining his daughter, his actions and interactions with Helena seem unaffected by this emotional maelstrom. However, as this is just prior to the Big Reveal, I'm happy to put it down to Crouch perhaps concentrating on what is to come.)

As well as the plotting and wonderful time travel premise (which is compelling enough for me to suspend my disbelief, even though I find it no more credible than magic or faster-than-light travel), the novel is fascinating due to the way the author writes character and uses the alternative timelines. That he shows Barry's marriage didn't fail because of his daughter's death, how characters are affected by their circumstances - even though Barry and Helena fit perfectly together and cherish the lifetimes they spend together, their is no clumsy hint of their being twin souls that are meant to be and will always find each other no matter what; having found each other, they need to make the effort to ensure they do so in each subsequent timeline, and this is reinforced by the ending that leaves open that, having now found each other so much later in life than previously, there is no guarantee that the people they now are will click in the same way.

Another bit of genius is the idea of the "dead timelines", where the alternatives cease to exist except as memories. There's a debate in science fiction that the many universes idea as it pertains to time travel can both be used as a lazy get out of jail free card and can also represent a callous indifference to the fate of others, as explored brilliantly in the TV show Rick and Morty, where realities are discarded with abandon when things go awry. In Recursion, Blake Crouch explicitly foregrounds how going back in time to change things for your own advantage - saving a daughter from a speeding driver, rescuing a failed relationship, focussing on a professional project that you'd allowed yourself to be distracted from - will have repercussions for other people that you cannot even begin to comprehend and, while he could have written a story in which these repercussions remain relatively small scale and personal, I quite like the Roland Emmerich-type extremes to which he takes it.

Blake Crouch has written a high-concept scifi thriller that drags you along and leaves you both open-mouthed and thinking. Perhaps it's not In Search of Lost Time or Solaris, but it is a damned-near perfect scifi thriller.

Five well deserved stars.

Review originally published on goodreads

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3585601013

Story review: The Destroyer by Tara Isabella Burton

This is a tough one for me to score and review. As with the previous tales in the collection, the quality of the writing and construction show that these stories are indeed Some of the best. Here we have have a story told from the POV of the daughter of a scientist - born from self-cloning, and then pressured into being constantly enhanced into something more than human. Her mother is clearly brilliant, driven and insane and this leads to my issue with the piece; I loathe mad-scientist stories. I grew up on pulp and b-movie narrative where the world was destroyed by over-reaching, over-ambitious, arrogant or just plain evil and see the erosion in expertise this, in part, has lead to. It is a theme that has become part of our culture, repeated endlessly in lazy articles and online arguments. In reality, it is not science and scientists that cause the problems, nor even war and generals, but politics and politicians misusing the tools provided to them.



Now, I know that many of the great "destruction by science" tales are not about arrogant scientists at all, or barely so - the progenitor of the genre, Frankenstein, is misread as such, and is a deeper story about a search for meaning and a creator - but just reading that trope tends to set my teeth on edge.



However, that is my reaction to that aspect of the story and is, perhaps, rather unfair. Because this is a fabulous piece of writing. Burton suggests the world as a backdrop - it is in Rome, including the great structures such as the Colosseum and the Senate on the Capitoline Hill, ruled over by Caesar. Is this scientist a witch or an alchemist? But we get reference to other cities that were not contemporaries of classical Rome, and dropped references to technology that is distinctly modern. That fact that this left as no more than hints and never explained makes the backdrop tantalising and somehow mythical.



The first-person narration from the daughter, in the past tense further enhances the mythic quality, and a sense of doom; the story opens "Long before my mother destroyed the world, her experiments were quieter, more contained." So we know where this is going. The backbone of this story, like The Art of Space Travel, the previous one in the collection, is this mother/daughter relationship, although this is obviously far darker and more negative than that of Emily and Moolie, as mother pressures daughter (neither is given a name) through the promise of a fake love to become what the mother wants, despite her own wishes, but ultimately is saved by this and becomes greater than her parent.



You know, I think I've talked myself around.

Book review: Gnomon by Nick Harkaway: Catabasis for Democracy, with Shark

I'll admit up front that Harkaway's debut, The Gone-Away World, is one of my favourite books and his subsequent novels aren't too shabby either, but his fourth is quite remarkable. It is set partially in a near-future Britain run by the System, a data network that both organises the citizenry into an active direct democracy and keeps their lives efficient and safe. Data privacy is a thing of the past; you can query someone's identity and life by direct access to the System and Harkaway skillfully shows how this affects social mores.




This set up, of course, immediately makes the hairs of discomfort prickle on the napes of our necks; whether liberal or conservative or whatever mix, such phrases as "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", "Those who give up liberty for safety, deserve neither" and "Panopticon" cannot help but spring to mind, thought the author does an excellent job of being even-handed in his presentation of the view.




The book starts with a death of a subject in interrogation by the Witness, the security arm of the System. This is presented as a unique occurrence, and immediately taken seriously and handed to the talented and driven Inspector Mielikki Neith. The manner of the interrogation is disturbing and reinforces fears about the ubiquitously invasive arm of the state, but this is leavened over time by the seriousness with which this event is treated and, well, by the fact that the System seems to work, and seems to be benevolent and effective.




I had said the book is set partially here. We soon are introduced to narratives which seem entirely unrelated - centred around a brilliant Greek mathematician who, following personal tragedy, has turned his skills to the stock market; the former lover of the 4th/5th century Bishop Augustine of Hippo, herself a philosopher and alchemist; and a talented Ethiopian artist who (barely) escaped his country for England in the political chaos following the fall of Haile Selassie.




Each thread is superbly written, capturing the differing voices and setting and moods. The writing contains a density of allusion and meaning and texture - yet with a lightness of touch - that immediately brought to mind Umberto Eco or Neal Stephenson at his more focused, and Paul Auster. It seems clear that these stories cannot be divergent and Harkaway indeed begins to weaves threads between them, though some of the clues turn out to be fish that, at the least, seem to be scarlet in certain light.




In weaving the threads together we are treated to an exploration of liberty versus safety and convenience, public transparency and the dangers of the malicious hacking of the democratic process (I cannot possibly imagine where that last idea came from...) but, as well as the clues to the central mystery, the nested narratives also show real human stories of tragedy and love and loss and betrayal and reconciliation and hope. There are also some beautiful metaphors about books, and the power of good ideas and arguments to succeed by literally changing the person who hears them.




This novel is a tour-de-force, brilliant and important and a bloody fantastic read. It could be argued that, toward the end, Harkaway explains things a little too clearly and leaves less ambiguity than Eco or Auster would, but this is, I think, due to the wider audience for whom he is writing; frankly, this book already asks a great deal of the reader and such ambiguities on top of that are not to the taste of a lot of people. However, this book deserves plaudits and huge sales and awards scifi and literary alike. It will stay with me for a long time and I am sure that, when i re-read it, I will find layers I missed this time around.




A word on format. I read this on my Kindle, partly as the 700 page paperback appears to be printed in 8-point font (yes, the info page says 11.5-point, but I suspect that to be the System gaslighting me) and found this all the more useful as I could immediately check unfamiliar words and references. If you are reading a hard copy and don't have a thorough knowledge of Greek mythology, I suggest keeping close to wikipedia.



( originally published on goodreads https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2059658585?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1 )

Book Review: Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson: Eco-punk, time-travel, business & politics

A wonderfully fresh, inventive, lively and thoughtful read.




We are at some point in the future where humanity seems to be rebuilding itself following various disasters, largely ecological one of our on making. I say "seem to be" because Robson never states this, just has the characters allude to things in their history - or, rather, things in their present that hint at the history. This naturalism is one of the things I loves about the writing, the way the ordinary interplay of the characters builds a vision of the world for us. Which works, at least in part, as the characters are so well drawn.




The two main characters are Minh, an old-guard ecological systems designer who moves around on six tentacled prostheses instead of her 'natural' legs and is of the generation who have gone through the hardships of trying to recolonise the surface after decades of subterranean life and Kiki, a young, ambitious engineer who initially idolises the older woman.




One of the conflicts of the book is that the banks, who had made money through investing in recolonisation and the surface habitats (and seem to hold everyone in massive debt; an ongoing theme is how all the characters just seem to accept crippling levels of ongoing debt as part of existence, a comment on student debt in the US and elsewhere I assume) are turning their focus to the lucrative business of time travel.




Minh and Kiki are part of a team hired to travel back to the Tigris basin, around 2000 BC, to take environmental samples to bring back to the present. There is conversation that this real work of time travel is being minimised due to pressure to take tourists (critique of the distorting effect of commerce on pure science), but i was never quite sure what the end-game of the mission was. I had thought it was to find hardy specimens to help restore the ravaged planet, but there was later reference to changing history.




I loved the layout of the book, each chapter beginning with a short segment from the viewpoint of the king and priestess of the small civilisation of the Tigris as they begin to see changes brought on by the technology of the visitors - the new stars of communications satellites, for example - followed by the building of the main tale.




Very much worth a read, and I look forward to more from Kelly Robson

Book Review - Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, edited by Bill Campbell

In recent years I've been making an effort to read more broadly, and my encounters with Octavia E. Butler, Nnedi Okorafor and N.K. Jemisin have brought me into the sphere of Afrofuturism. I'd been yearning to delve deeper so this seemed the perfect find



I'm aware there is much debate about what exactly Afrofuturism is, and the "and Beyond" of this title should have suggested to me that editor Bill Campbell trawls his net widely; there are the kind of thing that I might have expected (although somehow I expected nothing in particular, and thought myself wide open, clearly I carry the cultural baggage of of a certain age and ethnicity and gender and geography and class and experience, so the stories that showed a standard SF future but with a Afrocentric slant, or some variant from a past less dominated by European colonialism - or simply from a point of view not rooted in that history.



That would have been plenty to both sate and whet my appetite, but there is more here. It is almost misleading to call this anthology Afrofuturism (if that is the use of a fashionable term for attention, it is forgivable); this is a collection of fictions of inclusion, of voices of groups marginalised in art and culture, their voices and viewpoints. This collection is a shining example of the joy of exploration beyond one's usual boundaries. The standard of the stories is superb (not every single one to my taste, for instance the few ultra-shorts, but I am not really a fan of flash-fiction) and there are a handful of tales that took my breath away - those by Victor LaValle, N.K. Jemisin, Ernest Hogan, S.P. Somtow, Junot Díaz - and I'm sure others I'm leaving off- were the highlights.



One of the joys of anthologies is finding writers I may not have otherwise come across, and this has certainly opened my horizons. It is a perfect illustration of two of my favourite quotes:


"Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while." Malorie Blackman

“Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” Neil Gaiman



So read widely. Read people who are not like you. Read people who have different experiences, different histories, different outlooks. Read colour, read gender, read sexuality.



Read difference.





( originally posted at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2396430194 )

Book Review: Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This novel starts in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and advances to the present day - or, more probably, to the very near future, although this isn’t completely clear. Along with this interesting and - for me - unfamiliar setting, it is a novel of big ideas, science, culture and society (all the things science fiction does best), so I should have loved it.


And it isn’t that is is badly written. There are, indeed, moments of sheer beauty, and I would call the novel a success, but it does fall short. In some ways the book feels like a patchwork from different eras of SF; there are parts reminiscent of ‘Doc’ Smith, Asimov, Silverberg, Stephenson. I particularly thought of this last a few times with Liu’s tendency to elaborate on a scientific idea (such as the titular Three Body Problem) or a technology, and also to expostulate at length.


Much of the novel centres around one of the characters investigating a virtual reality game called Three Body, wherein the players are attempting to define a scientific model for a reality where the days and seasons seem utterly chaotic (although it might seem that the name of the game is a rather obvious clue, given the scientific background of so many of the players). It transpires that this game is actually a recruiting tool by a group of people who are preparing to welcome to Earth an alien civilisation from just such a world. And this is where the book really falls apart; the aliens just aren’t believable. While many of the other shortcomings of the book can be excused - there is a lack of good characterisation, the scientific ideas may break the flow of the story on occasion but are interesting in themselves, the idea that intelligent life could evolve on such a chaotic world are far fetched but no more so than, say, Dragon’s Egg, The aliens themselves entirely lack personality. Worse, their communications are often nothing but the worst sort of exposition and full of metaphors that are so human and 20th century it is entirely jarring.


This is a great shame, as there is so much about the book to admire and enjoy. The details of the Cultural Revolution, and the inviting of the potentially destructive outside force to solve the problems of a humanity that may be considered to be beyond redemption as a mirror for that terrible era. I am very much undecided whether to pick up the next volume.

Book review: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

In many ways, this is a straight-forward, old-fashioned space adventure. A deep space vessel - in this case, a tunneling ship, used to cut stable wormholes for interstellar travel - takes a job that turns out to be less straightforward than anticipated, and we see how the crew deal with that, and how it affects their relationships. (And I'm not trying to belittle the story or the genre; I know any story, when broken down into its basic elements, seems simplistic).



The difference here from the vast majority of these sorts of stories is the focus. While they usually put the adventure itself in the spotlight and character tension rises from that, Becky Chambers concentrate on the characters and their relationships from the start. We begin by being introduced with a new crew member - Rosemary, who seems very much a surrogate for both the reader and Chambers herself - although the third-person viewpoint quickly diversifies among the multi-species crew so we see events from different perspectives. There is a great deal of introduction to this universe, the GC (Galactic Community? Galactic Council? Something like that) to which humanity is a a fairly recent entrant after leaving a polluted Earth to repair itself and splitting into two factions - those settled on Mars and the Exodans, who live almost entirely in their ships and space stations.



The relationship-focus and the grimy, real-feeling level of the tech - along with a sharpness of wit and dialogue in the writing - are certainly why this book has attracted so many comparisons to Joss Whedon's Firefly although, if anything, here the story takes even more of a back seat to the personalities. The events are largely low-key (about which I am not complaining as I am thoroughly sick of save-the-universe stories) and the 'small, angry planet' of the title, and the main mission, does not even figure until the last fifth of the book - although, I guess, it is a long way there. It is, however, these relationships and the characters that carry the story and set it apart. The characters are fairly well realised and it is these relationships - both with each other, and outside of the family of the crew - that give us the bulk of the interest and peril. And they are very much a family, something to which focus is brought by the mention of the family structure of the reptilian Aandrisk, of whom Sissix, the ship's pilot, is a member. They are born into and raised by a hatch family (of probably unrelated individuals to their parents), choose a feather family - or, rather, a succession of feather families - of like-minded individuals throughout their adult lives, before settling into a more (but not entirely) stable house family to raise young given into their care when they are older. As well as an intriguing social structure that holds echoes of many ancient human tribes, it is a clear metaphor for the friendship groups we build and which are - often and for many people - more important than the families into which we are born.



Along with the very 'liberal' political (both small 'L' and small 'P') - there is no distinction made between binary or same-sex relationships, indeed interspecies relationships are touched upon, and gender issues are foregrounded - I imagine this is the sort of SF that makes the Sad Puppies rabid. So, kudos to chambers for that.



However, this is 'just' about gender politics (in fact, i'd say it isn't about gender politics at all, but I guess, unfortunately, taking the position that who you love is no big thing is a political stand). The theme of the book is about identity - those relationship identities, yes, but also about what it is to be a person. As well as the personhood of each of the alien races, the status of AIs is one of the big questions that this society has yet to address.



Even if you are perfectly happy with the type of SF that this - which I absolutely am - there are problems with the book itself, on its own terms. The crew of the Wayfarer are a bit too nice to each other - with the exception of Corbin, the stand-offish, persnickety algae tech (one of the power sources for the ship) who nobody else really likes, they all get on far too well with none of the annoyances that you would expect of people living in close confines for long stretches of time. I would have liked to see more interpersonal tension, if only in small ways.



However, Chambers does generally write the characters and relationships well, but this can't be said for some of the physical threats. There is a big action scene near the end that you can almost miss if you're not paying attention - yes, partly there is confusion as it is from the view of the crew who aren't expecting it, but even so the whole thing needed rewriting. But, hey, it's her first novel.



There is a far more important flaw, though. In showing us that all the five species who make up the crew are people, with the possible exception of the wonderful Dr Chef, we lose any sense of their alien-ness, except when it's explicitly stated as with the Aandrisk family structure. Okay, the fact of their personhood, that "we're all the same under the skin", is kind of the point but, for all the diversity in the liberal outlook, this has a homogenising effect that slightly undermines the message. The only species that did seem at all alien were those that were threatening - the Toremi, the civilisation to whom the Wayfarer is travelling, and the militaristic Quelin, who seem to have it humans generally (and who I pictured as the being like the Vogon guard tasked with throwing Arthur and Ford out of the airlock in the TV version of Hitch Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy...) This does seem to leave us with the lazy idea that explicable and similar means friendly whilst different and confusing means an enemy, which I doubt very much is what Chambers intended and, I'm sure, something she'll address in the further volumes. And, again, it's a very hard thing to write, but here it is very, very important.



Oh, and just one more thing. This isn't a complaint about the book at all, but about many of the reviews. Stop calling it space opera, it isn't. Space opera is the grand guignol of the spaceways - it is big storylines, overblown, huge events painted on a massive canvas in broad strokes. Often with fat ladies singing. It is Peter Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds and the sorely missed Iain M. Banks.

Book Review: Lexicon by Max Barry - the Power of the Word

Words have power. We all know this, especially as readers we are aware of the magic of words. And if we have seen any applied neurolinguistics - the magician Derren Brown, for instance, using his training and the force of his personality to either guide people’s choices or, more disturbingly, seemingly bend them to his will, both with the careful hidden placement of trigger words - we see the shared route of the two meanings of the word ‘spell’.



Max Barry posits that something even more powerful and immediate can be achieved than that which we see in the edited Derren Brown TV shows, that there are words and phrases that can control us all, different ones depending on our ‘personality segment’, and that an organisation exists of people who train in and wield this power.



Emily Ruff, a vagrant getting by on small con-jobs and sleight-of-hand tricks is recruited for training and becomes embroiled in a something even darker, their idea that there are ‘barewords’, ur-words in some primal proto-language that bypass the cortex and can control anybody, instantly and completely.



Barry presents what is both a superb, engaging, white-knuckle thriller and also an exploration of language and control. Through fragments from media stories and message board discussions between chapters he draws parallels between the blunt-force over-riding control of these ‘magic’ words and the more subtle and pervasive and more real - and hence more frightening - power of media manipulation. The book also touches on the philosophical idea of how much language creates reality by affecting our perception of it, as well as motifs of trust and loyalty and power.



This is a dark book - I haven’t given it the horror tag for nothing - but, as always with Max Barry, it is also deeply humanistic and is threaded through with real humour. Read it and, if you haven’t already, read Jennifer government too, for good measure.

Review: The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks

It’s taken some time to get around to this book. Knowing it is the last from my favourite author, knowing that once I’ve read this there’ll be no new tomes to look forward to, to get excited about, no further exploration of the Culture and the universe that it inhabits. Fortunately he has left us with many fine and several (IMHO) great books, in both the ‘M’ (scifi) and ‘M-less’ personae. The short interview the appends this paperback edition is particularly poignant, as he refers to the many ideas he has for future tales.


As are the majority of Banks’ SF novels, this is set in the vast, ancient, post-scarcity society of The Culture - or, rather, almost entirely outside of The Culture, where it interacts with the civilisations which it encounters and with which it interacts (this is a necessity; as Banks himself has pointed out, an entirely peaceful utopia makes for very dull storytelling, and he was a self-professed fan of big explosions). In this case, the main focus is the Gzilt, a humanoid society as venerable as the Culture and, in fact, one that was instrumental in forming the latter and was very nearly one of the founding members civilisations.


Ten thousand years on, the Gzilt have decided to Sublime - to move, en masse, to a higher dimension of consciousness and physicality, as have many elder civilisations before. This is something that Banks has referenced occasionally, usually in respect of long-gone peoples who have left behind vast, mysterious artefacts, but here he address the idea, the politics and the logistics of this event head-on.


Of course, there has to be a complication, here in the form of a potential secret involving the strange fact that the Gzilt seem to be the only civilisation in the history of the universe in possession of a holy book that actually seems to be factually accurate, held in the brain of a possibly mythical Culture individual who has been around since the formation ten millennia before. This leads to a long and involved galaxy-arm-spanning hunt-and-chase involving several Culture Ships (each possessed of a Mind, the AIs that are the backbone of the Culture and of whom it has been said are so much more powerful than biologicals that biologicals can’t even imagine how powerful they are), facets of the soon-to-Sublime Gzilt and two lesser ‘scavenger’ civilisation intent on using the discarded knowledge and tech to boost their own progress.


We have all the usual parts you would expect from an Iain M. Banks novel - the superb writing, the wit and humour, the insane action pieces (often using technologies such as anti-matter missiles, field manipulators and hyperspace), the superb characterisation (including several strong, rounded female characters, of course) and the humanistic examination of different cultures, outlooks and political viewpoints. There are many interesting and intriguing parts - other than the ten thousand year old human, the Culture is almost entirely represented here by the Ship Minds (itself an fascinating idea of how a vast, powerful and entirely non-hierarchical utopia gets things done), the continuation of politics despite the hard deadline for when the society will cease to be, including deciding on a ‘preferred’ scavenger species to allow to take all your best stuff.


I would have loved the Hydrogen Sonata to be Banksie bowing out with one of his great novels - but, with the run of the last four or five being so very good, this was perhaps a big ask. It is very good, but falls short of great, I think because it doesn’t hold together as a piece in quite the way that his finest novels (I think particularly of Look to Windward and Surface Detail) do.


I am not quite finished with Mr Banks yet. I still have The Quarry. While I don’t think there has been a really good non-M book in some time (a sharp decline after Whit, with only The Business really coming up to muster), perhaps this will be a fitting farewell. And, in any case, he has left us with more wonder and humanity and compassion and excitement from his thirty year career than we have any right to expect.

Book Review: Children of God, by Mary Doria Russell

Mary Doria Russell’s sequel to her astonishing debut, The Sparrow, finds Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz still struggling with the trauma of the events that left him the only survivor of the mission to the planet Rakhat. He is beginning to be able to accept love and friendship and meaning in life to replace the hole left by his loss of faith, when the church tries to convince him to return - as the foremost expert on Rakhati languages and the only human being with any experience of the complex social structures of the two sentient species. Sandoz’ resignation from the society of Jesus and the priesthood leaves the leadership with a dilemma; if Emilio’s return to Rakhat is vital to God’s plan, does this end justify the means?

This is another terrific book, with superbly drawn main characters and startlingly beautiful prose, that explores some deep philosophical questions - although mostly the personal, universal ones of belief, doubt and purpose. What drives us and how we come to terms with tragedy and failure and loss and injury. It is about forgiveness, of others and of ourselves.

There is one Big Issue touched upon; should contact with a pristine culture respect their social structures and allow harm to some of its members to continue, or try not to intervene at the risk (perhaps certainty) of destroying it? Leaving aside the fact that change from contact may be inevitable, this book makes no easy answers; Rakhati society is turned upside down - quite literally, with the ‘oppressed’ becoming the new rulers and the previously dominant species possibly facing total extinction and, in any case, a decades-long war with millions of casualties.

The book is not without fault. The space travel took me out of suspension of disbelief somewhat; while the idea of relativity is well used, there is only the merest attempt to make the travel realistic (gravity approximated by the acceleration of the ship), while the ‘crew’ (who seem more like passengers) cook meals on a stove and drink wine from glasses.

There also seems to be an odd gap, perhaps an omission due to editing. The storyline featuring Sofia Mendez, thought killed with the the rest of the mission in the first book is riveting as she teaches Runa a different way of life than subservience and her son Isaac - a severely autistic savant - explores the music of Rakhat and of Earth. They disappear from the story for several decades (if not many pages, due to the way the book is structured) and this feels like a loss. More could be made of Sofia’s transformation into the stateswoman she becomes and, in Isaac’s final brief appearance, he seems reduced from the fascinatingly focussed person we knew to some sort of holy fool happy to impart his message.

More importantly, some of the conclusions are, perhaps, a little pat. While in The Sparrow the question of whether the events were simply a combination of chance and human agency or part of God’s plan is left satisfyingly unclear and open to interpretation, here there is a rather blatant authorial shove in the direction of the divine.

Despite these flaws, The Sparrow and Children of God (which are very much as a single work) are wonderful reads and explorations of belief and morality. I am someone to whom the concept of a higher power is quite alien, but the struggles and motivations of those characters with such a thing at their core was made real to me.

On Being Human; review of 'Diaspora' by Greg Egan

My memories of when I used to subscribe to the science fiction magazine Interzone in the 80s and 90s are largely of two types of stories. The magazine had a penchant for a brand of rather gloomy anti-cyberpunk futurism (especially in the 80s, with Britain under Thatcher's iron heel when everything looked bleak, and era which also gave rise to such wonderfully dark comics as V for Vendetta and Crisis) of a sort that made Jeff Noon's books look positively utopian (I'm sure Noon must have had stories in IZ, come to think of it, but I can't remember any). The second sort were dazzlingly high-concept explorations of the interface between technology and society, and where ever hastening scientific and technological progress might be taking us as a species.

This is where I first came into contact with Australian author Greg Egan, an Interzone regular and prime purveyor of this latter type of story. Egan's 1997 novel Diaspora is a superb example of his work. It starts toward the end of the 30^th century when humanity has split into different strains – as software entities living rapid yet immortal lives in virtual reality, or interacting with the physical world inhabiting robotic bodies, or a few 'fleshers', humans who doggedly remain attached to their biological reality. An unforeseen astrophysical disaster causes some of the digital personalities to send out copies of themselves to explore the universe in search of somewhere safe from potential annihilation from cosmic accidents.

This is not just an updating of Stapledon's Last and First Men or Wells' The Time Machine to the information age, where biological evolution continues seamlessly into electronic, but an exploration of what it means to be human, to be conscious, to be intelligent. Is the only way to be human to remain in direct contact with the physical world and live a life measured in decades, or can a piece of software that is at least as complex and possessed of its own drives and personality and autonomy, that wants to survive and learn and has morals and ethics be also considered human? As the environments in which humans live are artificial anyway, is living in an entirely virtual world any less valid?

Along with a story that presents these issues, Egan takes us into areas of multi-dimensional maths and wormhole physics that stretch the readers' minds just as much, all told with a clarity and skill that makes Egan one of the finest and most important writers working in SF today.

Read this if you like Neal Stephenson and Charles Stross. Other books on a similar theme include Stross' Saturn's Children and the wonderful Natural History by Justina Robson (both of whom are from Leeds, which is an interesting coincidence).

Hyperion, an ode on an epic scale

Dan Simmons is an author I had not read before, although I've been aware of his thick SF novels. I had expected space opera – possibly due, in part, to the shiny black covers similar to Alastair Reynolds, on whom it turns out Simmons is obviously a big influence. There is much of the space opera about the writing in Hyperion; the universe in which it is set is one of the human Hegemony which, having fled Earth when our home planet is fatally damaged in what is referred to with sublime understatement as The Big Mistake, and spread out over the following seven centuries by use of faster-than-light space flight and thence a network of 'farcasters', instantaneous transmission wormholes, that are based on all core planets and form the WorldWeb.

Most of the action in this book, however, is told in the form of six tales by a diverse group of travellers on pilgrimage to a mysterious alien artefact known as the Time Tombs. This deliberate mirror of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is not the only literary reference; the planet Hyperion on which the Time Tombs stand is named for the poem by Keats, and the Romantic poet's work and presence form threads that bind all the stories together.

The travellers' tales achieve several things simultaneously. The different perspectives of Simmons' universe allow us to build a thorough view of the background, the history and societies that form it. It also becomes apparent that these are no random selection of individuals, but each of them has an intimate connection to the planet Hyperion, the mysterious and deadly being known as the Shrike, and is intertwined with the others in a ways that are central to the plot without ever being heavy handed.

The tales also, of course, allow for a nice variety in tone and for Simmons to be playful in his writing. The Soldier's Tale allows for some full-scale space opera warfare. In the Detective's Tale the author uses a properly noir-ish tone to tell a cyberpunk tale with a tough female lead. The Poet's Tale is quite Heinleinian – the foul-mouthed, drunken Martin Silenius, son of a wealthy family from Old Earth who had always striven for poetry but never achieved it until a brain injury left him only capable of uttering half a dozen obscenities. The Priest's Tale, about cultural superiority and arrogance as much as about religion (with shades of Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles as well as Sheri S. Tepper and Orson Scott Card because of the themes). The Scholar's Tale is perhaps the most intense and personal, about the ties of family and god and memory. While it is the penultimate Detective's Tale which provides the 'big reveals' for the plot, it is left to the Consul's Tale at the end to do the same for the themes. The final fifth of the book pulls together threads that had only been noticed peripherally, the threads of plot and theme converging as the pilgrims finally approach their goal.

At which point I realised the pages of the thick volume were dwindling fast. Surely this build up, this complex, inventive, fascinating, profound epic wouldn't be tied up in less than forty pages? Of course not. As the travellers approach their destination a final reference is thrown in, along with the Keats and the Chaucer, the Bradbury and the Heinlein, the Gibson and the Chandler. Another book awaited, beckoned, and I can't wait to see where it leads.

Review: The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross: Squamous Horros and paper clips

The third novel in Stross' Laundry series, The Fuller Memorandum continues the adventures of computer geek Bob Howard working for the eponymous Laundry, a shadowy department of the British secret service tasked with protecting the UK from threats occult and other-dimensional – in practice, HP Lovecraft's Old Gods, which turn out to be all too real. Of course, as the Horrors from Beyond Space and Time rarely recognise national boundaries, this usually comes down to saving the world as a side effect of protecting Her Britannic Majesty's domains. As other countries also possess ultra-top secret agencies with a similar remit but differing national objectives – The Black Chamber in the US, for example – Bob and his colleagues as often find themselves fighting against fellow humans as slimy, squamous terrors.

Each of the novels has been modelled after a different example of the spy genre. The Atrocity Archives was in the mould of Len Deighton (described by Stross in the afterword as the best horror writer of the twentieth century, who just happened to write spy stories) full of paranoia and with the overhanging threat of nuclear annihilation replaced by the menace of unstoppable monsters from another dimension. The Jennifer Morgue was a Bond pastiche, a rich mogul trying to advance his own ends and in the process threatening world security – in this case threatening to wake the things that lurk in the deeps. In The Fuller Memorandum, we move into classier territory with a le Carre inspired post-Cold War tale. Bob is now married to another Laundry operative, is enjoying his work (there has been far more of the fixing computer networks in the office and less of the facing unspeakable horrors, which makes him happy). Inevitably, things begin to go wrong and when Bob's boss goes missing, it might just be the end of the world.

Stross has a deft hand with the horror, which is perhaps starker in this book than previously. There is some excellent characterisation, although in this case the author concentrates on Bob and his wife leaving the supporting characters more in the periphery than previously, which allows him to realistic reactions to the unreal situations; not heroically setting the jaw to face things, or shlock-horror movie running around screaming. This is also leavened by a low key dry humour, often geek-culture references (the main character is a computer nerd who fights Cthuloid monstrosities, for crissakes) and some Dilbert-esque office jokes. Pointedly, while the horrors from other dimonsions are always in the background as the great threat, the evil acts in the books are always perpetrated by human beings of their own free will. By the nature of the background, secret societies proliferate and conspiracy theories abound, but the reality is close enough to ours that things are far too complex for any over-arching hand to be in control and cock-up rules more than conspiracy, individual passions vices and morality make fate redundant.

In The Laundry books, Charles Stross has used some well established tropes to create fun reads that are also thought-provoking and, at times, horrific. The next is due for publication late this year or early next, and I can't wait to see what terrors Bob Howard will be protecting the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and associated Dominions (and the rest of the world) from next.

Triplanetary by EE 'Doc' Smith - a review through the haze of nostalgia

I have to give the Lensman books at least four stars for their nostalgia value, and that they began me on a life of love for science fiction. I'll have read them first in my very early teens, probably around the time of the original Star Wars trilogy, on which they are no doubt a huge influence. I think these are probably the finest of 'Doc' Smith's ripping space adventures - powered by derring do and the fight for justice, with square jawed heroes and their beautiful women, a World's Fair-type optimism of technology and a complete lack of regard for the laws of physics.

The good guys practically wear white hats, perfect physical and mental specimens that could adorn a recruitment poster for the US Army or the Wehrmacht. The women are strong and intelligent, too - strong enough to tell the men off for being overly macho (with a glint in their eyes that says how much they love it really) and smart enough to know that they should let the menfolk go off to do their duty while they stay behind to make sure the home is looked after.

Smith told the stories with a vibrancy that left the reader breathless at the adventure and heroism, with enough scientific gobbledygook to instill a sense of wonder - silvery teardrop shaped spacecraft powered by and 'intertia-less' drive that could fling them out of the solar system in a matter of seconds, ray guns that dealt death to the bad guys (but only after refusing the chance to change their ways, of course) and the mighty Lenses - weapon, communication device and symbol of the Galactic Patrol's righteous power, handed to humanity by the ancient peace-loving alien civilisation the Arisians to fight the evil Eddorians.

I've been meaning to re-read them all for some time, but perhaps they should be left in the past, infused with the fond glow of childhood discovery, remnant of a mythical time without cynicism and postmodernism, when we could ignore the complexities of the real world and pretend that all problems could be solved if people would just accept that granite jawed white men were always right. So I'll just remember watching a couple of episodes of Flash Gordon on Saturday morning TV (with Larry 'Buster' Crabbe, of course), maybe see Errol Flynn best the Sheriff of Nottingham, then ride my bike to the top of the hill and sit reading about the noble Lensmen.

Book review: Air, of Have Not Have by Geoff Ryman

Air takes place in the near future, in a poor village high in the remote mountains of a fictional central Asian republic. Just as the village gets its first joint TV and internet connection, a global test takes place for a new technology that allows every human being on the planet to access the web directly without the interface of a computer or machinery or any kind. Publicity for the test – only heard in the village at second hand from the nearest town – says that this technology, Air, will change the way everybody lives. In the few minutes that the test is active life is changed forever for Mae, fashion guru to the women of the village.

This allows Ryman to examine the impact of technologies that are often talked about as having the potential to level the playing field, to more easily bring information to those that have not had it in a world where information is the basis of power and wealth. One one level he uses this to do the classic science fiction job of using the future as a mirror for the present – the Air technology representing the effect of the World Wide Web – and how claims of empowerment are often made false by the forces of established commerce and unthinking cultural imperialism.

Ryman, however, goes much further than this. He uses the events to create a conversation between past, present and future, and explore the complex relationship they have in all of us, ultimately suggesting that if in our headlong rush into the future the we lose sight of our past it will leave us as impoverished as as if we dig in our heels and refuse to accept progress at all.

For me, this book reinforced just how good a writer Geoff Ryman is. The sense of place and culture he evokes is superb, quite alien no doubt to most readers and yet rendered utterly real and personal by the well drawn characters and their social interactions. He makes huge themes approachable by exploring them on a personal level, as they affect small, everyday lives. This is also excellent science fiction, although it does not necessarily fit with Ryman's recently stated aim of making a science fiction that was meticulously realistic “hard SF”; there is something archetypal about it, something mythic. In this collision of past, present and future, of East and West, of Have and Have-nots, Ryman has given us a fable for the cyber age.