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Reading:

So Charlie Stross’s first published novel is out! I’ve been lucky enough to read another two of his novels (well, one novella) in draft form already, and read the sequel to this one directly afterwards, thanks to the generosity of the man himself. I was half-expecting this to be, well, just ok but disappointing – after all, it’s pretty much impossible to beat the gonzo radical hard speculative pre-and-post-Singularity science fiction of his Accelerando series of short stories published in Asimovs, which cram trilogies’-worth of mind-expanding speculation into each paragraph. *
Fortunately, all worries can be thrown away within the first paragraph.

The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd. Some of them had half-melted in the heat of re-entry; others pinged and ticked, cooling rapidly in the postdawn chill. An inquisitive pigeon hopped close, head cocked to one side; it pecked at the shiny case of one such device, then fluttered away in alarm when it beeped. A tinny voice spoke: “Hello? Will you entertain us?”

And entertain us Stross does, for 313 pages.
This novel and its sequel Iron Sunrise are set in the same universe as the amazing short story “Bear Trap” (see Toast), a different one from Accelerando. The Singularity happened some centuries ago, and the resulting godlike Artificial Intelligence, dubbing itself the Eschaton, has made its mark immediately on the world. “In the far future,” says the cover copy, “information demands to be free.”
It would be giving too much away to talk closely about much of the plot at all, but it’s vintage Stross. Revolutionary libertarian socialism (hello Ken MacLeod) mixes with Extropianism in a wilfully backwards monarchic planetary system ironically called The New Republic. Spies for the UN (a trade convention of sorts, post-singularity), the Eschaton itself and the New Republic get involved in time-like loops and pre-emptive strikes (Charlie’s always one step ahead of the political satire game), with a rather sweet love story, a bizarre fairy tale parody and much more on the sidelines, while the mysteriously-motived Festival (a collection of AIs and uploaded humans) and its hangers-on cause havoc.

All in all, lots of fun and strongly recommended for all interested in cutting-edge political science fiction, the New Space Opera those Brits are pumping out, spy fiction, futurism, or, frankly, anything else. Well, maybe. It might be a bit way if you’re not used to this sort of thing.
Singularity Sky and the three other sf books that will follow it in the next few years are published by Ace in the US. They’ve now been picked up by Orbit in the UK, with Singularity Sky due out about when Iron Sunrise comes out in the US. The schedule’s being pushed forward after that I believe, so hopefully at some point in the future we’ll be able to get editions with the proper spellings around the same time the US editions come out ;)

*Exciting news is that Accelerando will be published in novel form by Ace in 2005. Still quite a wait though! But if you’re new to Stross, there’s lots to keep you busy in the meantime…

Nearly a year ago I wrote a rave review of Adam Roberts‘ previous novel, Stone.

The lovely Mr Thomas Marchbank Allen & Unwin (Australia’s largest independent publisher – true! They bought themselves out when Penguin bought the rest of the world’s A&U, which became Allen Lane), who distribute Gollancz, asked me what I thought of Polystom in a recent email, so I told him… Seeing how stressful it was writing the previous Justina review months after reading the book, I thought it’d be easier here just to edit my musings to Thom into something workable as a review. Here goes!

I did enjoy Polystom. I thought Stone was absolutely remarkable (see review link above). Fascinating concept with the narrator, and the sfnal aspects weren’t too far gone for my hard sf temperament. Polystom has a similarly unsympathetic set of characters, and a similarly arch tone to Stone. Some of the literary conceits (in both books) are amusing but slightly annoying; in Polystom, bits of the “leaves” of manuscript are missing from the story, to no apparent narrative purpose. Mind you at the end there’s a quite cute fake lit crit bit, with exerpts from scholarly articles speculating on which world is real…

Which world is real? What am I talking about here? Well this is the interesting conceit of Polystom: in the world of the eponymous protagonist (and a rather mollycoddled and stuck-up aristocrat he is) the physical laws are such that a breathable atmosphere stretches between the planets and moons of the system that humanity inhabits. A stratified class system exists, and we gradually become aware of a war being fought on one planet (the “Mudworld”) that has its roots in a servants’ rebellion.

The book is therefore, at least initially, an alternate history, albeit on quite a scale. The society is in most respects no further advanced than, say, Edwardian England. There are petrol-powered aeroplanes – and at the beginning of the book Polystom takes a trip in his plane from the planet of which he is Lord to the moon on which his uncle Cleonicles resides, during which trip we learn not only about Polystom’s character (he’s plagued by boredom and self-doubt, and not least by the deep and poetic self-obsession of his class) but also about the strange fauna that inhabit interplanetary space.
But other than such mechanical devices, there’s no advanced telecommunications, or, seemingly, computing in this world. However, Cleonicles is a famous scientist (indeed, one of his weird ideas is that of an interstellar “vacuum”) and he’s been working on a secret military computer, which becomes central to the very strange events later in the book.

The book has three sections, dubbed “A Love Story” (primarily about Polystom’s bizarre and doomed courting of and marriage to the caged-free-spirit Beeswing), “A Murder Story” (about the events of Cleonicles’ death) and “A Ghost Story” (in which Polystom decides he has to participate more directly in the war effort, and finds some really weird stuff going on when he gets to the Mudworld).
I wasn’t 100% convinced by the book – Roberts seemed to be trying to do a few different things all at once, and the themes of
a) Polystom’s character and relationships,
b) the social aspects of this world (with respect to women, servants and so on, not to mention the vividly depicted, pointless war and the grotesque institutionalised torture shown at one point),
c) the weird physics of his world re vacuum/gravity, and the fun interplanetary fauna,
d) the computational stuff (of course, a computer simulation of (almost) an entire universe is a pretty absurd prospect, but we ignore that within the context of the book…) and finally
e) the “ghosts in the machine”
didn’t quite gel into a cohesive whole.

Still, having read on Roberts’ website about his plan to write stories based around every one of science fiction’s tropes, I like the way he mixes and matches them here. Some “para-material” can be found here, and it’s as archly postmodernist as Roberts gets – I don’t think you need worry too much about spoilers, but at the same time you shouldn’t expect to get any kind of feel for the book itself from this material.
I’m not sure that I could immediately convert someone to sf with this book (interesting fact: purely from reading my review of Stone, one blog-reader went and bought the book and loved it… so there! Oh, the power!) – I think this is one rather for sf cognoscenti, or perhaps for literary readers interested in a very bizarre concept.

Here’s one I should’ve reviewed months ago.

UK author Justina Robson came to prominence rather suddenly with her first novel, Silver Screen. She’s still pretty much unknown in the US, but has been nominated for the Arthur C Clarke award in Britain. Silver Screen managed to cover in one novel just about every variant of AI (artificial intelligence) imagined and unimagined, and dramatised many of the philosophical debates on the subject. The protagonist, a depressive self-doubting girl who possesses an eidetic memory (that is, her memory records everything in complete detail), questions whether she herself is really intelligent, or whether she’s just some sort of total recall machine… She has a delightfully close relationship with a military AI, her boyfriend is becoming a cyborg, and by the end we’ve met distributed intelligences and nanotech constructs as well.

Her second novel, Mappa Mundi, took the nanotech elements further. Philosophy of mind was the focus again, with ideas of perception, self-awareness and nanotech mind-mapping bumping up against X-Files-like FBi agencies, personal politics, and world politics (from post-communist Eastern Europe to American Indians…) – and indeed weird physics. Again the protagonist was a brilliant but emotionally troubled young woman.

The protagonist of Natural History is superficially similar, although from the first novel each has been less fatally plagued by self-doubt. Natural History is a far-future space opera, and not surprisingly the obsessions of the previous novels have been transferred, fascinatingly, into this setting. Humanity has split into two. The Forged, designed by humans, are genetically engineered for particular purposes – they are spaceships (of all sorts – some with space for humans inside them), winged mail couriers, huge terraforming beings, and even a hive mind… The Forged, purpose-built as they are, have a slogan that “Form Follows Function”, a principle which they simultaneously uphold and fight against. Their internal politics, mostly centred around the desire for freedom and a world of their own, is an important undercurrent in the novel.
Humanity as we know it now is called the Unevolved, although unaugmented it isn’t. PDAs have become mini-AIs, with personalities based upon their users. Some Unevolved, such as Strategos MekTek Anthony, have multiple AIs running concurrently with their meat-brain.
Particularly interesting are the Degenerates, failed creations who don’t get Forged status. Gritter, a Degenerate who works as a kind of underground gopher (no pun intended; he flies, recalling a character in China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station) gives a lot of humour to the sections he appears in.

The book starts with flashes from the POV of Isol, a Voyager class Forged who’s designed to explore distant space (thus she is antisocial to the point of pathology). She has an interstellar collision with what turns out to be the remains of an alien, and in her state of near-destruction disovers an artefact with remarkable properties. Thus immediately the alien-seeming Forged, “descended” from Humanity, are contrasted with something truly alien.

This alien artefact is a substance that seems to grant wishes in concrete embodiment of Clarke’s dictum that any sufficiently advanced technolgy is indistinguishable from magic. It leads to some erudite speculative phyics, and the various characters’ interaction with it gradually piece together one of the most compelling and nuanced pictures of transcendence I’ve read.

Robson is clearly at the vanguard of the British reinvention of space opera (and indeed science fiction per se). There’s so much to say about this book, but it’s hard to do so without giving much away, so go read the excellent M John Harrison’s review in the Guardian. I’ll be reviewing MJH’s Light shortly…

I’ve just finished Monstrous Regiment, and I know I say it after most of his books (although I’ve discovered upon use of the search function that lamentably I seem to not to have said so here) but I’m once again forced to declare that Terry Pratchett is the greatest living author in the world.

Big words, eh? And I admit there’s an element of hyperbolae there, but not much. Pratchett is, as the blurb on the back helpfully points out, the Jonathan Swift of our times, but he’s much more. He does indeed use the Discworld to hold up a distorted (but not that distorted!) mirror to the real world, whereby he can tell us a lot of Truths while telling a rollicking good story with plenty of laugh-aloud jokes. But, as evidenced by the two Science of the Discworld books (co-written with Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, both very fine writers in their own right), he knows his science too. Small Gods was a great critique of organised religion, and Jingo was an entertaining and pointed anti-war novel. Indeed, way way back (and I’ve been reading Pratchett since The Colour of Magic was the only Discworld novel), Equal Rites was a cute and fun feminist fantasy.

But somehow in the intervening time, Pratchett’s intelligence, his love of his characters and his erudition have evolved (and been honed) into true Wisdom (with a capital “W”). And whether or not it’s due to a growing dismay at a world run by (and accepting of) George W (not for “Wisdom”) Bushes, he seems to have grown more passionate too. The feminism in Monstrous Regiment, and the anti-war/anti-religion sentiments, are angrier than I’ve seen them before… And there is certainly a political subtext, although not as explicit as that of Night Watch [note to self: what am I talking about, "explicit subtexts"? Bah!]
*ahem* There’s some very amusing Trotskyite parody in Night Watch, the previous “adult” Discworld novel, but all the while it is a kind of revolutionary novel. I’d peg Pratchett as a kind of middle class libertarian-lefty-feminist-atheist. Sounds good to me. [Aside: I wonder where he'd be located on the Political Compass?]
Night Watch was his best yet. I’m not sure, but I think Monstrous Regiment is also the best yet. Maybe it’s equal, but who’s counting?

So while I blather on, I’ve managed as yet to say practically nothing of substance about the new novel. But do I need to? I’ll say this: Anyone not as yet acquainted with Pterry’s charms won’t find much to disorient them in this book. There are some familiar faces (Sam Vimes in particular, probably one of Pratchett’s most popular characters) and locales, but they don’t matter that much. Pratchett’s style is in full force, and there are any number of laugh-aloud funny moments. But there are also some moments of true pathos, put there pointedly by Pratchett to make us angry at the misogynist, fundamentalist society under scrutiny here.

And I don’t think I’ll say much about the plot or characters… Perhaps the women-disguising-themselves-as-men thing is taken a little too far, but then that’s kind of the point of Pratchett. And of course everything is “all right” in the end, but then we wouldn’t expect tragedy of Pratchett. There are some lovable characters here, and it’s worth remembering that it’s all set on the Discworld, which (as The Science of the Discworld II has brilliantly pointed out) differs from this world in that our world is bereft of narrativium. Things in the Discworld happen explicitly because of Story, and it’s astounding how much Pratchett can say about our own narrative-free world through that particular filter.

Highly, highly recommended.

[Narrativium is such a wonderful concept... In it is wrapped up, clearly and concisely, everything that the scientific materialist position (which I subscribe to) doesn't believe in. There is no fate, no higher-level meaning or guiding hand. Everything happens because of the sum of what happens before (and perhaps some miniscule randomising element). Higher level organisation comes out of the pandemonium of disorganised stuff, but is not the root of it all, as Dan Dennett so brilliantly pointed out in Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.]

To all my faithful readers, and I know there are, well dozens of you out there in the woodworks somewhere, I hereby apologise profusely for my lack of reading updation lately. This will be resolved at the earliest opportunity.
I am currently finishing Terry Pratchett’s latest, Monstrous Regiment, which is quite possibly the best yet. The man is insanely brilliant. I might review that one first, then jump back to the three excellent novels I read before this – Justina Robson’s Natural History, Adam Roberts‘ Polystom and Charlie Stross’s Singularity Sky. In addition, I may furnish you – nay, bless you – with a review of the anthology Live Without A Net. I’m also in the middle Cory Doctorow’s short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, which is damn fine too.

Postscript: Pratchett review up now! See sidebar.

Listening:

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