Sunday, 29th of December, 2002

The current edition of Spectrum SF doesn’t just contain the end to the excellent new Charles Stross novel. The short fiction is also excellent, and I just want to mention two of the other pieces. First of all we have the most recently published story by Melbourne-based doctor and science fiction author Chris Lawson. Called Faster, Higher, Stronger, it focuses on performance enhancers in Olympic sports, and is therefore hardly even science fiction at all. Even though I have (really, literally!) no interest whatsoever in sport, I found the story compelling, gripping and moving. Lawson has a talent for making stories out of esoteric bits of science, and weaving beautiful personal journeys around them. He has a number of admirers in the science fiction field, and is working on a first novel, so I hope that simultaneously with being a fine doctor Chris is going to become a rising star in the field soon.
I should mention that Chris is a lovely email correspondent, and early this year I got to meet him. I stuck his name on the door at a FourPlay gig while we were on the george tour. He was a genuine and great guy, and I’ll have to remember to invite him along again next time we’re in Melbourne ;)

Note: Chris has recently (well July actually) started a weblog dedicated to science fiction called the Frankenstein Journal, and very good it is too. The closest analogy would probably be Charlie’s Diary. It’s not updated that regularly, but is definitely always worth a read.

The second story I want to mention is a novella, I guess, and is by the author of the extraordinary novel I’ve just finished (Stone - see next post), Adam Roberts. Despite the “.com” he is in fact one of the young (and not so young) British science fiction authors who have been at the forefront of the genre for the past 10 or so years at least. Roberts has written two novels previous to Stone, neither of which I’ve read, and various short stories and novellas, some of which I have read.
The current Spectrum SF contains his most recent novella, Imperial Army. Roberts is engaged in a fascinating programme “to write a short story for every sub-genre and premise that SF has made famous; to assemble a collection in which I can try my hand at all the hackneyed old conventions.” Imperial Army is presumably either or both of the military sf story and the first-contact-with-aliens story. It is, it seems to me, high parody of the sortof gung-ho militarism in Heinlein and other US authors of the mid-20th century. It begins with a young man, Sid, masturbating; he discovers that the corporation taking his semen is using it to create an army, and that most of his children, so produced, perish in the huge interstellar war currently being waged by the human Empire. As we follow him through his life, he becomes involved in the conflict himself, and in a sense brainwashed into becoming a loyal soldier in an empire that comes under martial law and suffers a coup… We see that militarism becomes its own end, consuming all other purposes. In the end, as Sid’s commanding general plans the total annihilation of human culture (the populations of entire worlds to be replaced by force-grown brainwashed near-clones), Sid (surreally) experiences a sea change in his sense of loyalty and his morality.
I loved reading this story, and was amused by the dour matter-of-factness in its narration. I must say, though, that I found the style got in the way of the characterisation just a little; I couldn’t quite grasp the why of Sid’s personal changes because his internal life wasn’t really explicated. Nevertheless, the exploration of morality, as seen through the dispassionate description of various cultures (one in particular), makes for high irony and no doubt points to an explanation. A very good, if flawed, story.

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