Archive of "reading" entries - book reviews and the like.

Pratchett, Terry - A Hat Full Of Sky (01:24 pm)

At the risk of too much bubbling enthusiasm (cf the "genius" comment re Paul McAuley below), I have to say it:
Terry Pratchett is a genius.

He really is, though. While McAuley's book might constitute "genius" of a sort, Pratchett transcends just about everything else, to be simultaneously hilarious, wise and very very entertaining. He's single-handedly invented a new genre, with its roots in comic fantasy, yet serious about the scientific understanding of the real world, as well as society and culture; seemingly (especially with the witch books) based in folk psychology, yet often commenting perspicaciously on very contemporary understandings of how the mind works...
I'm not even going to bother to go through and find choice quotes from this book. Suffice to say that, despite being one of the Discworld children's books, there's a lot to learn for adult readers here too, as well as a lot of fun to be had.
And there are some sideways pokes at the Harry Potter world (Tiffany Aching, our heroine, being a born-to-be-a-witch type), including a big witching competition where nothing quite goes as expected. This comes as highly recommended as any Pratchett from me - ie, it's essential.

McAuley, Paul - White Devils (02:13 am)

While I was reading White Devils (which I started as soon as it arrived, it being a new Paul McAuley and all), I was inspired to write very fannishly of it:
Paul McAuley's new novel White Devils is genius.
And it pretty much is. My excuse for that little outburst was that I was very behind in my book reviews, but clearly I couldn't hold myself back. Now that I'm here, let's see how I followed that blatantly silly (and not terribly grammatical) sentence:
Marketed as a thriller, it is that, and thus it's fast-paced, present-tense, and doesn't leave a lot of room for characters you grow to know and love, but it's also pure near-future hard-sf, with incisive scientific and political extrapolation, a very deep moral sensibility, and some fun ideas about cognitive science.

So. Hard science fiction can get blamed for caring too much about the ideas and not enough about creating believable characters, and some of it does do that. McAuley, however, is well and truly capable of insightful characterisation. So when he's doing the thriller thing, you can be sure that any superficiality of characterisation is deliberate.
White Devils is, very explicitly, a 21st-century Heart of Darkness. Conrad's harrowing book (I found it a harrowing read - hardly any paragraphs! Prose as dense as the jungle!) explores colonialism and industrialism in the early 20th century, and here we are taken on a similar journey into the heart of the "Green Congo", in an Africa torn apart by civil wars and biotech plagues, spawning huge numbers of refugees and atrocities.

Nicholas Hyde (yes, his surname, like the Conrad references, is a little too deliberately over-heavy with connotation) is a humanitarian worker investigating a recent massacre, when he's called off to another massacre site. While the crew investigate the site they get the feeling something sinister's going on - heads smashed open and brains devoured - and then they're suddenly attacked by some very weird creatures, looking like "shaved albino chimpanzees", with armour under their skins, fangs and claws, and a viciously carnivorous belligerence towards humans. Nick only just escapes, and in doing so rescues an African baby - the first of a number of naïvely and doggedly righteous acts that only get him into worse and worse trouble.
And immediately Nick is in trouble, because the authorities want to cover up the existence of these "white devils", insisting that they were white-painted child-soldiers, and Nick will have none of it. The plot gathers momentum as he searches for the truth, and we learn that his own secrets may be part of what motivates him...

While Nick can be counted as the main protagonist, he's by no means the only viewpoint character. McAuley excels at multi-threaded plots where the different point-of-view characters can put radically different slants on what we're shown. Matthew Faber is one of the many mad scientists in the novel; he's become unhinged due to some past experiments on mind, and lives on an island with a beloved tribe of genetically engineered proto-humans. Meanwhile his sassy daughter Elspeth is on a dig somewhere else in Africa, making an apparently revolutionary anthropological discovery... Christian eco-terrorist and mercenary-assassin Cody Corbin is out to kill anyone who tampers with God's DNA; and there are yet more mad scientists and other colourful characters.
McAuley - who is a biologist himself - has always painted a world where morality is far more than black & white, and here the number of factions and opinions is overflowing. Mixed in with this is some interesting commentary on the filters between our perceptions and the truth, whether it's guessing games in anthropological investigation, attempted reverse-engineering of human evolution (and the evolution of mind), or indeed spin-doctoring by corporate and poltiical interests.

If this all sounds over-the-top, it's remarkably believable in the book. It's set only 30 years in the future, carefully drawn out from the current world. McAuley fans will note some continuity with previous McAuley works, from the seminal and brilliant Fairyland (set in a future Europe of refugee camps and rogue biotech, and presumably taking place a little after this book) to The Secret of Life, to Red Mars and many short stories, both older and newer. And it's reassuring and fun to see the recurring McAuley character Darlajane B making a typically important-yet-fleeting appearance.

White Devils is a very fine work indeed, and hopefully will sneak past the radars of those who don't think they like hard sf.

Morgan, Richard - Altered Carbon (11:39 pm)

In a recent review in the NY Times, Gerald Jonas says of Neal Asher: "Like his fellow Brit Richard K. Morgan in his Takeshi Kovacs novels, Asher assumes that science's success in extending life will only multiply the opportunities for inflicting pain."
I was a little bit in two minds about reading Altered Carbon, the first of Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels, and it wasn't just the violence putting me off. After all, I know Morgan's politics are pretty sturdy (anti-globalisation etc) and I do enjoy a bit of rollicking cyberpunk. However, I'd read Paul di Filippo's review in Asimov's and, positive though it is, he does mention how unlikely it is that the world 500 years into the future would be as Morgan describes. I like my sf to be as believable as possible, but hey - I'd heard lots of good things about this book.

So anyway, it turns out that the time thing is a bit of a problem for me; not fatal to the book, but it's a bit disturbing. Altered Carbon's just far-future cyberpunk; where's the nanotech? The biotech is pretty much just "neurachem", conditioning of the "sleeve" to make it really good at martial arts, ya know. What are sleeves, you ask? Well one's mind in Morgan's future is saved on a cortical stack, rather like Greg Egan's Ndoli devices, only different. Stacks can be remotely backed up, and in certain circumstances can even be duplicated. When the stack is fitted into a new body it's known as "re-sleeving", and that body may well have been owned by somebody else previously. And indeed they may not have taken that good care of it...

The book is set five centuries in the future to facilitate the particular political climate, especially important because central to the plot are the ultra-rich who can afford to keep clones on ice, and in effect never grow old: the meths (after Methusalah of course). Takeshi Kovacs comes from off-world: the war-torn colony planet Harlan's World (sounds a bit like Sky's Edge in Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City), where he was trained in basically black ops... This history gives ample opportunity for harrowing back-story glimpses, a familiar technique in gritty cyberpunk (see the splendid Jon Courtenay Grimwood's works, for instance). Captured as a criminal doing something shady or other, his stack is put into storage for some extreme length of time (basically this is the ultimate punishment), but his particular abilities are requested for an interesting seeming-suicide case on Earth, so the contents of his stack are squirted to Earth using some seemingly-faster-than-light technology, and off we go with the rollicking plot.

There was a point about a third of the way through this book when I almost stopped reading. Those familiar with the book will know immediately what I'm talking about: it's the virtual reality torture scene, and to be honest, I still wish I hadn't read it. Being an Amnesty International Human Rights Defender (ie supporter) I get to read more than enough about the extraordinary brutality with which humans can treat each other. What this passage brought home (and without wishing to disparage what is a great read, this is probably the one original aspect of the book) is how mind-uploading and VR gives a limitlessly-expanded scope for torture and cruelty.
Mind you, there's plenty of real-life violence and brutality here too. Basically Altered Carbon is far-future cyberpunk noir, hard-boiled as it comes, fast-paced and very well plotted. It really does all fall together by the end, the (really bad) baddies really are ultra-bad and the, well, particularly grotesquely bad ones get their come-uppance. Thing is, even our hero Takeshi is technically a baddie, although it's never clear what's that bad about him; we sortof have to take that on trust.

Nevertheless, despite the fairly low-brow high-action plotting, and despite my disbelief at the rate of technological change, and despite the fact that none of the ideas are really that new, Morgan does come up with some very nice philosophising about such things as the physiological basis for sexual attraction (and how that relates to love), the culture-shock (of sorts) of being downloaded into a new body (in a cute twist, Kovacs's host is a smoker, and he spends much of the book relieving the sleeve of that particular dependency), the amorality of the near-immortal ultra-rich (an oft-visited sf trope, mind you), and the way some things just never change.
So it is thought-provoking enough (despite being steadfastly derivative), its morals are in the right place (despite many stomach-churning moments, and that one sit-up-at-night-going-I-don't-want-to-have- dreams-based-on-that passage), and, well, it's not way-hard science fiction but it doesn't do too badly.

I'm still not sure whether I want to read more Morgan though. I've had a reading copy of his newie, Market Forces, for months & months (well before it came out) but I'm not sure. Jon Courtenay Grimwood slowly got over the penchant for ultra-violence, and maybe Richard Morgan will too. I've been staying away from the formerly-mentioned Mr Asher for similar reasons... Although I think I've read a good short story in Interzone and he's debuting in the June Asimov's (arriving soon I hope)...

Doctorow, Cory - Eastern Standard Tribe (09:36 pm)

I know, I'm out of order. I have two previously-read, and very good, books to review before I get up to this one. But who knew, except me? Who cares?¹
Well I can't resist. Eastern Standard Tribe deserves the following rather unprofessional review:

Fuck. Ing. Awe. Some.

Truly. It's really really good. I enjoyed the ubiquitous comms (which are mobile phone, handheld computer, net connection, bank card and everything else all rolled into one - Greg Egan had similar ones in everyone's hands way back when, and I've wanted one ever since)...
I like the way so much of the momentum is kept up through conversation, when most idea-driven sf can fall down on the dialogue...
I really enjoyed the dual-stranded plotting: there's a first-person present tense strand and a third-person past tense one. Even though the present tense narrative deliberately undercuts any suspense from the past tense one (we already know what's going to happen), the narrative never loses momentum, and the present tense plot moves forward in a satisfyingly odd and unpredictable manner.
Totally recommended for the filesharing/blog generation. An absolute delight.

And as a bonus: now go read a wonderful short story of Cory's at the Fortean Bureau ("A magazine of speculative fiction): Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar), which has both a musical and an Australian connection of sorts. Post-apocalyptic craziness as only Cory can do it...
(Speaking of short stories, 2/3 of the stories in his excellent A Place So Foreign and Eight More collection can be downloaded for free here. The Jewish superman story is particularly cool...

¹ The reason I'm so strict with myself is that I have a fear that if I just jump to the most recent book, vivid in my memory, then I will no longer have any motivation to review the previous ones, and some poor sod will be left unreviewed in Stumblings. A woeful fate indeed.

Reynolds, Alastair - Absolution Gap (12:45 am)

Alastair Reynolds, I have to admit right away, is one of those sf authors with whom I correspond (being a good fanboy), and indeed I recently received an email from Al enquiring about certain properties of the double bass, an instrument which seems to play a bit part in his next novel. He thought that as I was a string player I might have some idea; exciting - I shall be appearing the acknowledgements of said novel, Century Rain, which sounds like it'll be wonderful.

Absolution Gap closes, for now, the sequence of novels set in the Revelation Space universe. Readers of Interzone perhaps, or of Gardner Dozois' Best New SF collections, may be aware that this universe has a very definite cap to it via the novella "Galactic North", in which rogue self-replicating terraforming machines eventually dismantle and reconstruct the entire galaxy, in effect turning it all green (and uninhabitable, mind you)... Fun! This is rather slyly alluded to in Absolution Gap (When I mentioned my delight at this, Al wrote: "Thanks - I was very keen to keep consistency with GN, even if only about 3 people on the entire planet even realise.")

Absolution Gap exhibits all of Reynolds' favourite themes: way-out physics (Reynolds is an astrophysicist himself); cosmic battles; very warped characters attempting to find peace with their pasts (or not, as the case may be); cognitive science; nearly-incomprehensible alien artefacts; faith-inducing viruses; plot strands separated by time, converging in the end with slippages in personal identity... It's all here.
And mostly it works beautifully as always. There are some stunning creations, such as the glass-blower whose creations are so fragile that they can only survive in zero-gravity, and even transporting them from their place of origin can destroy them.

There are initially three strands: the first takes off from where Redemption Ark finished, with Clavain, Scorpio and co on the Pattern Juggler world with Captain Brannigan's transformed spaceship Nostalgia For Infinity (was ever a spaceship better named?) growing spookier by the second, while in the skies above various human factions fight an increasingly abstruse space battle. [Let me point out now that despite the delights of the two relatively-independent other strands, there's no point reading this book if you haven't read Revelation Space and Redemption Ark at least... So, apologies if all these references are arcane and unfamiliar - just go read his other stuff! Chasm City isn't so essential here, but it's a brilliant novel all the same...]
In the second, a man named Quaiche, infected with a virus that tries to force a religious impulse on him in times of stress, works for a group of very twisted Ultras who seem to be taking Goth culture to its natural cyborgised extreme. Quaiche has a traumatic experience on a mysterious world, which, followed by a seemingly miraculous event, pushes him (literally and metaphorically) into a chasm from which he can no longer escape his faith virus's hold.
Meanwhile, in the third strand an extremely resourceful teenage girl called Rashmika Els, living on a moon called Hela, finds herself drawn to run away from her parents' village (well, it's sort of a village) and make her way to the astounding procession of cathedrals that endlessly circles the world. She goes ostensibly to find out what happened to her brother, but it doesn't take long for us to figure out more is afoot, especially regarding Rashmika's obsession with the Scuttlers, a race long extinct (exterminated?) on Hela. Rashmika is a delightful creation, a bit like one of Terry Pratchett's little girl characters, and she is a great relief next to the almost infinite cruelty of Skade, who makes a final and enormously tramatic reappearance in the first storyline.

The way Rashmika's and Quaiche's strands come together, and eventually the third one too, is as effective and satisfying as Chasm City's craftsmanship. Along the way acts of inhuman torture and savagery sit next to touching human stories, an intriguing perspective on the world of Hela is created for us, and the way rumour and news spreads in a huge but relativistic universe is explored. However, something just doesn't seem to sit right with the novel as a conclusion to the Inhibitors storyline. Humanity, it seems, is being judged, and the events on Hela that caused Quaiche's miracle are part of it. But perhaps due to the exigencies of the multi-stranded plot, too much of the mystery is kept in the shadows (so to speak) for too long, and not enough foreshadowing is made of the other agency apparently involved (via the Remontoire/Clavain/Scorpio/etc strand). Everything ends up being resolved, as this guy puts it, "in like literally the last 3 pages".
The blurb tells us that "...a dark and unsettling truth becomes apparent: to beat one enemy, it may be necessary to forge an alliance with something much, much worse..." But other than very vague hints at genocides on all parts, little is revealed about the various shadowy alien species involved in battling or hiding from the Inhibitor threat. It remains unclear by the end, it seems to me, why the particular choice that is made is the right one. Perhaps Reynolds' point is that our destiny is dependent, right down to the details, upon contingency. That seems to be the message of "Galactic North" too, and if so, then fair enough. I was left more than a little mystified though.

In the same email quoted above, Al acknowledged that I'm not the only one to be unconvinced by the ending, but people "differ as to whether the rest of the book is adequate compensation or not - some feel it is, some (unfortunately) feel it isn't." Well, I certainly feel that there is plenty in this book to justify the overarching storyline's discomfiting conclusion. There is a lot of beautiful metaphorical imagery that enriches the various plots points along the way, and Reynolds' skill with characterisation grows better with every book.
I have to recommend the two-novella collection Diamond Dogs and Turquoise Days though. I have both separately; "Diamond Dogs" describes the bizarre and very disturbing exploration of a mysterious alien artefact, and connects with the rest of the Revelation Space universe in surprising ways (there's a throwaway line about it in one of the last two novels - I wish I remember where!) "Turquoise Days" may be my favourite Reynolds work yet, an elegiac tale of a Pattern Juggler world where one of the minds dissolved in the sea may be too dangerous to be allowed to remain...
Al Reynolds remains one of the most exciting sf novelists around, and I for one can't wait for Century Rain (ostensibly coming out in October this year!)

Aylett, Steve - Slaughtermatic (11:13 pm)

Wow. Steve Aylett is an evil genius, and he's been here under my nose all along. How did I miss him until recently? The charming Thomas Marchbank @ Allen & Unwin told me I'd like him, and how right he was! I have a feeling nothing else will quite live up to Slaughtermatic, although I'm going to dive into the short stories of Toxicology soon, so we'll see! I've since read The Crime Studio and Atom as well, both of which were fun, but Slaughtermatic is something else again. The rapid-fire riffs on Borgesian themes, the insanely surreal weaponry, the warped English take on American crime fiction (Aylett's biography claims that "if he were any more English he'd be dead"), the cyberpunk aesthetic... it's all too much. Just about every page has some throwaway line that could have an entire comic sf novel made out of it; fascinating characters are created and then disposed of; Aylett creates a temporal paradox with charming disregard for logic, except that the characters have deep philosophical discussions about it (not to mention discussing the economics of robbing a bank while doing so... and on it goes).
It's postmodernism without the stupid bits. It's a cyberpunk Terry Pratchett with all dials turned up to 11 - indeed it revels in just that kind of mixed metaphor, which it takes so seriously that you're swept along in its upside-down and inside-out logic.

Oh. You want to know something about the book? Goodness, how demanding! Well, um, Beerlight is this city where basically all the residents are criminals (or want to be - it's sortof like a criminals' Hollywood). The worst crims are the cops, of course. (All the Ayletts I've read so far are Beerlight books.)
Dante Cubit stages a bank heist, using time travel to get out before the alarms go off. It turns out his real reason for robbing the bank is to get hold of a lost book by Eddie Gamete, and many of Slaughtermatic's joys revolve around the potted descriptions of Gamete's fiction: "Biff Barbanel is a diametric prankster who, chagrined at the microscopic impact created by even the grandest actions of the individual, sets upon a campaign of experimentation to determine the largest results attainable by the smallest personal effort..."
Of Gamete, we are told: "The thinking man's Camus, he achieved in his first draft what others attained by years of overwriting."
"In Trash Tango the human race has become so feeble that the alien invasion of Earth occurs by means of a memo". Whereas The Impossible Plot of Biff Barbanel (the book Dante seeks) is a kind of fractal novel which apparently no person can read and live. Gamete is surely the greatest fictional author since Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout, but Aylett is too clever not to play on Borges' fake fictions and Georges Perec's playful surreality while he's at it.

I should've known that Paul di Filippo was right when I read his review of this ages ago, but I just noted Aylett's name down and forgot about it. I'm so glad I finally picked this one up at Berkelows' big sale (whenever it was...) You just have to read this. You really have no choice.

Nagata, Linda - The Bohr Maker (10:09 pm)

It's really quite astounding how long it's taken me to get around to reading Linda Nagata. Simply the idea of what she wrote, and some hearty recommendation from Al Reynolds made me decide to go and find all her novels, and it was quite a job tracking down the early ones from Bantam Spectra (only released in the US, with those traditionally horrible US mass market paperback covers *sigh*).

I've just started her second novel, and so it's about time I got around to reviewing her first! I'm so far behind *sob*¹
I was completely bowled over by this novel. Nagata's vision of a not-that-near-but-not-far-future world is so detailed and confident that it's hard to believe it's a first novel. The combination of cyberpunk, bio- and nanotech with philosophical and political speculation is an absolute joy to read. The Bohr Maker of the title is a nanotech mod that gives its user the power to create more Makers, control the emotions of nearby humans, and rewrite their own genetic code: it is imbued with the biotechnological knowledge of its creator, Leander Bohr. Nikko Jiang-Tibayan is a man who has been modified (from birth) to survive in outer space, but he has a hard-coded life-span in his DNA. With only a few weeks to live, he is desparately seeking the Bohr Maker.
But this Maker is banned by the Commonwealth, and when it is smuggled out of containment by one of the beautifully flawed supporting characters, it ends up accidentally being injected into a poverty-stricken Indian prostitute named Phousita. The descriptions of the slums of her world are striking; Sunda exists out of the Commonwealth's strict control of biotech, and horrifically transformed victims of rogue nanotech beg on the streets, while the massed poor subsist (unaware) on the waste from cleaning nanotechnology.

The Bohr Maker is crammed full of delightful supporting characters (such as slum doctor Zeke Choy). The character of Kirstin Adair, Chief of the Commonwealth Police, is a little overdone - she's too much the manipulative ice queen, rabidly anti-biotech. But she's about the only flaw in this book (a couple of unconvincing plot points aside), and there's so much invention that it doesn't matter.
In every person's head is an atrium, a cyberspatial interface but also literally a virtual sitting-room where they can receive guests. One can also send out ghosts, virtual copies of oneself, to go data-mining or go on virtual errands, and these ghosts can ride in someone else's atrium, piggybacking off their sense-data. The ghosts can then be reintegrated on their return (a concept that turns up in the later Accelerando stories of Charlie Stross²). Indeed, some atria can be used to enslave the possessor, an experience that has left one of Phousita's companions terribly scarred.

There's much more to this book, and it's a major tragedy that it, along with the next two of Nagata's nanotech novels, is out of print and very hard to come by. I strongly recommend anyone who's interested in cutting-edge science fiction to check Nagata out. Greg Egan and Bruce Sterling are obvious points of comparison/influences, and she's easily up there with contemporaries like Charlie Stross and Alastair Reynolds - not to mention fellow Hawaiian nanotech visionary Kathleen Ann Goonan.

¹Of course I am beholden of nobody except myself to review everything I read, but I still feel a strange obligation...
²Cue obligatory gloat: I've read 'em all now, thanks to Charlie's generosity. The rest of you rabble will have to wait for the final two in Asimov's later this year, or for the highly-anticipated and updated Accelerando fix-up novel in 2005 - which will blow everything else out of the water for years to come. You heard it here (not that I am alone in hyping the guy)!

Harrison, M John - Light (12:21 am)

I finished this complex and compelling book a couple of weeks ago, and it's taken me a while to ingest its contents in order to write a concise enough review that does it justice. Yesterday the December issue of Locus ("The [excellent, essential] Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field") arrived in the mail and who should be on the cover but M John Harrison himself! His interview (try excerpts here) is fascinating, and gave me enough impetus to get this review out there now.
From its very title, Light's multiplicitous complexity is revealed; the word contains so many connotations it must have been irresistible, and Light is indubitably both dark and heavy. Meanwhile, MJH is able to refer to his "let there be light" moment, conceiving of Light after a conversation with another genre-crossing sf iconoclast, Iain M Banks, who accused him of not having enough fun. And fun Harrison does have, not least with genre tropes a-plenty. Light comprises three (initially) separate story-lines, one set in the turn-of-the-millennium present, two set in 2400 AD.
The contemporary storyline could almost pass for mainstream fiction, with a decidedly gothic horror twist underlying it. Its protagonist is the deeply confused Michael Kearney, apparently a brilliant physicist (although he does no physics at all in the book, leaving that to his increasingly harried partner Brian Tate). It's revealed in the first chapter that he is also a dispassionate serial killer, driven by his deep terror of a being called the Shrander.
The first of the future storylines features Seria Mau Genlicher, another insane sometime-killer who is a K-captain - that is, she's been so removed from her physical being (she floats grotesquely in a tank in the middle of her K-ship) that she practically is the ship some of the time. I was absolutely delighted to read in the Locus interview that she represents MJH's "long-delayed response to Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, a book I hated because I felt it was so inauthentic". Seria Mau is a bizarre character, and no less bizarre are the accompanying "characters" in her world: the "mathematics", which is an independent (and probably conscious? - more on that later) entity with its source in the K-tech (more on that later too) that the ship is based on, and the wonderful "shadow operators", which flit around the ship, taking care of myriad smaller tasks, exhibiting characteristics that may imply full personhood or may simply be algorithmic faux-personhood. Harrison is, of course, far too intelligent an author to introduce such ambiguity for no reason.
But before we get into the deep philosophy, we'll leave the most explicitly space opera segment of the book for the third strand, that of Chinese Ed, or Ed Chianese, who lives on a planet under the constant light of the Kefahuchi Tract, the mysterious, huge and fecund naked singularity that drives and unites the book's narrative. Ed is a twink - that is, he spends most of his time in a tank, inhabiting a virtual reality; in this case a ridiculously clichéd hardboiled detective setup. That setting in itself is a snide swipe (or is it a gentle homage?) at the cyberpunk trappings of this particular storyline. Harrison is alarmingly proficient stylistically, and pulls off the cyberpunk language just as perfectly as the mainstream-meets-horror and the space opera. The cast of characters in Ed's story are also engaging, from Tig Vesicle (one of the New Men, as Vonneguttian an alien species as you could ask for) to the sinister Cray Sisters (who for some reason call to my mind the horrifying creations of Al Columbia).

The thing is, Harrison manages to take the tropes from all these genres and more, and create something updated and new all the same. As yet mostly unmentioned is the idea of the alien; the New Men are an almost throwaway concept: aliens who take over the Earth and then blend in, adapting Earth customs in a way reminiscent of Japan's weird love of English... On the other hand, the Kefahuchi Tract provides a seemingly limitless source of puzzling (and puzzlingly useful) alien artifacts, and the K-tech used to create the K-ships, for instance, results in a weird hybridisation of human and alien in the form of Seria Mau and her mathematics... There are at least two other examples of aliens, not to mention the weirdly transformed rickshaw-operator Annie Glyph. In the midst of this, all the human characters are deeply flawed, out of touch with their humanity, refusing to grow up. Harrison claims in the Locus interview to be deliberately illustrating human values "by describing their absence". On reflection, I think I probably did notice that, although I was still troubled by the characterisation. It's safe to assume, though, that not one word of this book is there by accident, nor any higher-level features. And there is a pervading humour which I was surprised to find; it's at once unrelentingly dark and also frequently delightful. (Indeed the New Men aren't the only Vonneguttian characteristics of this book: it's wide-screen yet intensely personal, emotionally detached, playful yet dark, all representative of Vonnegut too.)

By the end of the book, the connections between the three strands (which rotate throughout) have been teased out (I picked up on some of the salient connections a few chapters before they were explicitly revealed, which was kinda fun), and a sort of narrative closure is reached. I was reminded of Alan Moore, who is a master of the art of Story (indeed I'm surprised I can't find a review of this book by John Clute, Story-obsessive in extremis...) Such concepts as complexity & chaos theory, the underlying quantum nature of reality, quantum computing and the idea of all reality as information, all jostle around in a book that is steeped in metaphor: American beaches are juxtaposed with the Beach (the huge extent of space where wanders wash up from the K-tract), for instance. Parallels across strands which seem to be metaphorical turn out to be more literally connected, while higher-level ironies are revealed (Ed the twink's world turns out to be almost entirely artifice...)
Consciousness, artificial intelligence and free will, abiding tropes of sf, also feature. The shadow operators, strange creations of nanotech (perhaps) are described as mere algorithms, but I suspect that Harrison wants us to think about what differentiates a "real person" from an algorithmic, feigned one; by the end we see that none of the human protagonists really had much free will at all within the narrative (and what freedom they had probably resulted in their fucking up of their lives - ah, joy)...
There are so many layers to this book that it's almost impossible to do it justice in a review (especially a blog review - ha!) and I'd better stop, in case I reveal any more than the last sentence of the previous paragraph but one threatens to. Suffice to say, Light is literature of the highest order. Anyone tempted to dismiss it as "just" science fiction, or "just" anything else (not to mention "too cold/cruel/dark/complex/obscure") should try a little harder, as the rewards are many. Whether it succeeds in everything it's trying to do, I'm not sure, but any misgivings I have are probably because I want it to be something it's not: I'd like it to be a little more hard science fiction, so I found the sketchy science, only just hinted at in the contemporary sequences, a little frustrating. Similarly, Kearney's seemingly-gratuitous murders end up being... gratuitous murders; perhaps this is just the point though.
This is a book to be re-read and studied and written about. It will give more to those already acquainted genre fiction & its various subgenres, but by immersing itself in genre it transcends it, in a way that a mainstream/literary author could never manage.

Stross, Charles - Singularity Sky (04:21 pm)

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...

Roberts, Adam - Polystom (12:45 am)

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.

Robson, Justina - Natural History (02:51 pm)

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...

Pratchett, Terry - Monstrous Regiment (12:01 am)

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.]

Apologies (10:19 pm)

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.

Grimwood, Jon Courtenay - Felaheen (10:39 pm)

Jon Courtenay Grimwood does a good job of qualifying as a sort of British William Gibson. In fact, his earlier books in particular were more violent than Gibson (he got lumped with the "Quentin Tarantino of science fiction" tag for a while there), and the suggestion of Gibson is perhaps more in how he paints his worlds than in any cyberpunk trappings. Mind you, see here for an essay of Grimwood's on "punk fiction" - as comprehensive as you can get. Of course he's not the only Brit doing cutting-edge sf. In fact, I have rather laboured the point on these pages that most of the exciting new (radical, hard, whatever) science fiction these days is coming from Britain, with Australia and Canada up there too.
I had a little rant back here about JCG's first two Arabesks. It was well worth skimming over those two books before I plunged into Felaheen - the third Arabesk, and plunge I did. Grimwood is a genius at page-turning plotting, and at the same time his worlds are remarkably well-drawn. The Arabesks are set in a world in which somehow World War I was headed off before it got going (it's suggested at one point that the US brokered a peace), leading to various interesting differences in the balance of power in this relatively near-future setting. The books are set in a Middle East rather different from our own, predominantly in the Mediterranean city-state of El Iskandria (Alexandria); each is broadly a crime thriller, the reluctant investigator-protagonist being Raf/Ashraf al Mansur, who may or may not be the son of the Emir of Tunis. Grimwood makes great use of italicised flashback segments in each novel, and the revelations in that parallel plot are essential to the main narrative.
The alternate history engenders one of my problems with the novels: uncomfortably, Grimwood insists on using familiar brand-names, from Nokia to Starbucks to Linux; and does it really make sense that there's a Sony making electronics in a world where the entire course of events that brought Japan into world politics didn't happen?
My other main problem actually rests with the editing. Someone at Earthlight (a Simon & Shuster company) either has a real liking of sentence fragments, or hasn't bothered to reign in Grimwood's own penchant for them. A judicious use of sentence fragments (see Terry Pratchett's work, for instance) can make for exciting, edge of the seat action. But the result, particularly in Felaheen, of their overuse is in fact to slow down the reader, as one tries to make sense out of the mangled grammar. Grimwood is apparently dyslexic, which may or may not contribute; I read the first Arabesk, Pashazade, as an uncorrected proof - and it's testament to how brilliant it was that I made it through! Felaheen is certainly several strata above an uncorrected proof, but I think it could still have had a couple of extra rounds of editing before it hit the shelves.
These things said, everything else about Felaheen is first-rate. The continuity of plotting and style between the three Arabesks is excellent, and I was completely engrossed by this world once again. Grimwood's understanding of and affinity with the Middle East is superb (so far as I can see!) and his characterisation is expert, and frequently touching.
These books are at the forefront of contemporary genre fiction. I plan to push them onto those friends who think they don't like science fiction. A definite thumbs up!

Gibson, William - Pattern Recognition (09:34 pm)

I suck. I am so far behind in my listening list that it's actually impossible to catch up. At least with the reading there's only a couple of main things, so here goes.

I'm actually someone who has continued to enjoy every William Gibson book since discovering Neuromancer in late school days. I do acknowledge, though, that he seemed to run out of anything particularly new to say in the last couple, enjoyable though it was to be immersed in his singular world-view each time round.
So it comes as a bit of a surprise to be quite so bowled over by his new novel. First of all, it's not (technically) science fiction! Set in the present, it nevertheless exhibits the slightly sceptical fetishisation of technology we're familiar with in Gibson, and indeed the parallels with his previous work are striking.
To point out just a few: how cool is it that the protagonist is (almost) named after the protagonist of Neuromancer? Case was the fucked-up anti-hero of that iconoclastic cyberpunk novel. As Charlie Stross has mentioned to me, this new novel is cyberpunk, in the end. And the rather fucked-up but highly sympathetic female heroine is called... Cayce!
We've got a mysterious man on a motorcycle, with a reflective helmet obscuring his face (can anyone say "mirrorshades"?), and fuck it, the plot centres around tantalising pieces of art appearing anonymously on the scene (in this case, fragments of movie "Footage", rather than boxes of beautifully arranged flotsam)...
Clearly Gibson is engaging in a sly revisionism of his themes, packaged for the non-genre audience. And those of us in the know savour every moment. It's a stunning read. I was delighted that he makes some jabs at post-modernist lit crit whilst engaging in an intertextual exercise of his own. And knowing that the artist in Neuromancer turns out to be a nascent AI, the poignancy of the damaged, solipsistic Russian woman at the source of the Footage is only heightened.
I can't recommend this enough.

Oh, and I keep forgetting to read his blog, which is invariably highly illuminating.

Daniel, Tony - Metaplanetary (05:06 pm)

Tony Daniel is an American science fiction author who I discovered a couple of years ago in one of Gardner Dozios' huge Best New SF anthologies. The stories combine an immersive use of nanotech and much other speculative science with beautifully poetic prose.
Metaplanetary begins with an adaptation of the story "Grist" (grist is the word for nanotech in this particular universe), and I'm pleased to say the rest is just as involving and uniquely imaginative. The world is full of interesting political and moral questions - Daniel's libertarian/existentialist leanings are clear, but whether he's more left or right libertarian isn't clear, and he's interestingly (and deliberately) vague in regard to spiritualism/atheism. The book features a priest (of a futuristic religion that melds Western and Eastern religious influences) who's lost his faith (and also is something of a scientist/philosopher), an artificial intelligence who is the greatest composer of the age, a poet who is a LAP (Large Array of Personalities - you'll have to read the book to find out what that means!) and upon whom everything apparently hinges... and so on. Webs of relationships, convincing and colourful human and not-so-human characters, and plenty of action in later parts. There's plenty of speculation about different types of artificial intelligences and post-humans, with a strong moral sense that in effect anything that seems to be conscious is.
This novel comes highly recommended. If you're interested in boundary-pushing space opera, beautiful imagery/writing, insanely extreme scientific extrapolation, political/moral speculation [note: it's very obviously American, but then I prefer the British/Australian brand of (hard) sf and I still loved it...] [mind you, my fave politically-minded sf writers of late are Iain M Banks (Scottish socialist), Ken MacLeod (Scottish Libertarian Socialist) and Charlie Stross (Scottish left-libertarian I suppose, and socialist?)] *ahem*, or only some of the above, you'll probably find it rewarding. WARNING: It's part one, and will be concluded in a second book, Superluminal, that doesn't yet have a publication date. I've emailed him to ask when ;)

Here is an excellent interview with Daniel, and here is his website for Metaplanetary, with some exerpts from the inventive and often amusing faux-academic papers that appear in episodes through the book. At his own website, in the Novels section, there's an interesting "conception web" for Metaplanetary too...

Banks, Iain M - The State of the Art (01:10 pm)

I've had this book of Iain (M) Banks short stories on the shelf for quite a while now, but since my shelves are (almost literally) bulging with as-yet-unread books, it's taken a while to get there. I was partially inspired to read it now because I've relatively recently been reading Ken MacLeod, who is both a close friend of Banks', and represents a similar Scottish socialism and interest both in far-future extrapolation and present/near-past fictionalising.
The State of the Art comprises a number of shorter stories (some very snappy) and one long novelette (the eponymous "The State of the Art"). Some are set in and around The Culture, Banks' far-future socialist Utopia, and some are not. One of the most affecting is a story set in the then present ('80s UK), and purports to be a fragment of a letter, in which the narrator describes some related recent events in his life. These events relate to his atheistic arguments with a couple of religious acquaintances, and the abrupt ending comes as quite a shock.
There's a couple of humorous vignettes about alien lifeforms, and a beautiful story about someone who's decided in his (previous her) youth to leave the Culture, and now regrets it as he's blackmailed into committing a terrible act...

The title story is perhaps the best in the volume, although it's all good. In that story, a Culture special contact unit has come to planet Earth, in the 1970's, to decide whether to make contact and, I suppose, invite Earth into the Galaxy-wide Culture... It contains some extremely astute political observations, as well as great characterisation and social commentary. Vintage Banks, in other words, and I love it.
I'm just about to start Use of Weapons, widely regarded as the best of the science fiction books (although perhaps not by much). I also bought The Crow Road in Perth, one of the "Iain Banks" non-science-fiction ones, which sounds super too. In the meantime, a review follows of another superb far-future science fiction book...

Miéville in The Register (03:09 pm)

I recently discussed Chine Miéville; in these pages; English author of dark fantasy that's closer to science fiction in tone and approach (he apparently uses the term "weird fiction" himself). I mentioned that he's also a political activist. The other day I found a short story of his at The Register, a UK-based internet & technology news portal. An End To Hunger is an internet thriller, maybe, and is probably not science fiction, and certainly not fantasy or horror. It's an interesting twist on the hacker-versus-evil-corporation story, and wears its left-wing activist credentials on its sleeve.

Here is a fantastic interview with Miéville.

Current reading - Stableford, Crews (01:44 pm)

Once again, here's a placeholder entry until these books are finished.

Reading three new books at the moment, as usual. One fiction and two non-fiction as it happens.
First of all, I got for "Christmas" (or whatever) from Ange & her Mum Michael Moore's Stupid White Men, in which we are told, in great detail, the true story of the Republican coup that placed the most evil and stupid despot in the world in charge of the United States... among other things. It's passionately written (you can really hear and see Moore speaking as you read it) and hilarious as well as deeply disturbing reading.

Also hilarious and rather disturbing is a little hardcover, recently released, called Postmodern Pooh, in which Frederick Crews follows on from his 1963 volume of lit-crit parody The Pooh Perplex with yet more parody articles, purporting to be from a colloquium at the Modern Language Association in Washington DC. Every sort of literary theorist gets lampooned here, and Crews is absolutely spot on most of the time. Some of the "authors" are obviously meant to be specific people (even I can tell that "Orpheus Bruno" is Harold Bloom) but others are brilliant archetypes of certain areas, such as militant feminism, post-colonialism, radical Marxism or post-colonialism (among many others). Crews parodies often by going just that tiny bit further over the edge - or often not even that. Except for certain tell-tale bits of arch irony from Crews, many of these papers could easily pass for the real thing.
Of course, I am a feminist, and am left-aligned politically; but what's being attacked here is not what these critics/theorists claim to stand for so much as the way that it's presented, and the way in which the real world doesn't enter into the equation at all (indeed is forbidden much of the time). The myriad interpretations of poor old Milne's Winnie the Pooh are astounding, and weirdly convincing despite their lunacy. I'm still in the middle of the book.
While we're on the topic of challenging current orthodox left-wing thought, I used one of my birthday gift vouchers the other day to purchase Steven Pinker's new book, The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature. I haven't read much at all of it yet, but looked at the chapter on Politics. Here he draws attention, among other things, to Peter Singer's book A Darwinian Left (which I have written about on these pages before - see bottom of Reviews Archive), to point out that the left need not deny science-fact about human nature. I hope the book is a well-argued, non-inflammatory exploration of what we now know about the science and evolution of mind. Unfortunately the Left will probably see it as horrendously reactionary and totalitarian, without actually reading any of the arguments. *sigh* Progress is slow.

And finally: The last (sixth) book in Brian Stableford's Emortality sequence is finally out, and I got it about a month ago. So I have FINALLY started reading the first one, Inherit the Earth, and am extremely pleased to announce that it surpasses all expectations of greatness. This is absolutely wondrous stuff, and no surprise, since Stableford has been writing since the early '70s and yet keeping up with the absolute cutting edge, and is a highly respected critic with a background in both sociology and biology. I'll have to leave any big accolades until I've finished all six books, but it's going to be one of the greatest achievements in hard science fiction yet produced, I can tell.

Broderick, Damien; China Miéville (01:36 am)

It was my 29th birthday on the 2nd of January. Among other things, I got a Dymocks book voucher, so I took myself off to the George St store yesterday. Having found his latest book, The Scar at Gleebooks' New Year's Day 20%-off sale, I purchased China Miéville's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning second novel, Perdido Street Station, as part of the voucher. I'm very much looking forward to reading these books; Miéville has single-handedly reinvented fantasy - basically, as science fiction! These are weird steampunk books which have been given the highest accolades everywhere. In addition, Miéville is a dedicated and active socialist.
More on Miéville when I've read more of him than just interviews. I've had his first novel, King Rat, for a while, and it's an interesting one in that it combines dark fantasy/horror with another love of his and mine, drum'n'bass music :)

Dymocks on George St has a quite remarkable science fiction section; its Australian collection is probably better than Galaxy's. And thus I also found there a chapbook by Russell Blackford (a critic familiar to readers of Australian science fiction periodical Eidolon) called Hyperdreams: Damien Broderick's Space/Time Fiction which is a fascinating monograph. I've just discovered that it can be read in its entirety on the web, link here. I'm a long-time fan of Broderick's. He's one of the most important Australian science fiction authors, as well as a world-renowned critic; his book Theory and its discontents (QUP, now out of print I believe), is a well-deserved (and well-argued and researched) attack on postmodern critical/cultural theory's flight from reason - Broderick argues passionately (and resonantly for me) for scientific realism, in the face of Theory's more absurd claims. McKenzie Wark was deeply offended by the book, and I'm desparate to find both his review and Broderick's response, in Australian Book Review... Broderick is also famous for his popular science writing, especially the book The Spike, about the acceleration of technological and scientific advances towards a possible Singularity in the not-so-distant future, where we possibly become transhuman and AIs become a reality, among other things...
Stumblings readers may wish to see a double review I did for Macquarie Uni's student mag Passing Show (which my girlfriend Ange happened to be editing last year) of Broderick's latest novel, Transcension and Greg Egan's latest, Schild's Ladder. It's a little simplified for non-hard science fiction readers; I may extend it later, but for now it's available here in HTML form at least.

I actually wanted to write this blog entry just because I wanted to link to a delightful article by Broderick in Australian science fiction magazine Ibn Qirtaiba called Living Here In the Future. Available here, it's a sweet story about how he came to be a science fiction author, and it reminded me of just how amazingly ahead of his time he's always managed to be.

Roberts, Adam - Stone (02:10 am)

I just finished this latest novel by Adam Roberts. See the previous entry for a little info on the Roberts. As well as a science fiction author, Roberts is an academic, specialising in science fiction and 19th century literature. I haven't read his previous two novels, which were well received but didn't grab me content-wise (and I have sooo much to read, dahhling!) This one, however, sounded fascinating, and that is, indeed!

It's really late (check the timestamp on the blog entry... I'm writing this before the entry gets stamped, but still...) so I don't want to write a whole essay. Suffice to say, though, that this is a very very fine hard science fiction novel, one which manages to impart a huge amount of science fact, and speculate convincingly in the areas of quantum physics, relativity and gravity. At the same time it is a disturbingly compelling piece of characterisation.
Written in the first person, Stone is the tale of a psychopath in a society where crime is unheard of. He or she (for the inhabitants of this particular galactic society can change the gender at will) narrates his or her story to a stone in the prison within which s/he is held - it's easier than interpersonal communication...
Stone is set in a far-future society called the t'T, where all humans are imbued with dotTech (nanotechnology) which makes it almost impossible for them to die, and nearly impossible even to feel pain... Roberts expores the implications of this for his society in great detail. Faster-than-light travel is possible within certain limits, and for most of the humans life involves "Zhip"-ing around the galaxy having adventures, recreational sex, and so on. Ae, our very much flawed protagonist, is a murderer who has been incarcerated inside a star, and she (her default gender is female) is approached, at the start of the novel, by a mysterious voice that offers her freedom if she performs a particular task. That task, horrifyingly, is to murder the inhabitants of an entire planet.
Ae is a wonderful character. She is exceedingly complex in her moral and emotional makeup, and the writing style beautifully reflects this. The increasingly horrific acts of murder are described by her in an often detached fashion, and when describing her childhood she comments explicitly on the feeling that she's not intentionally guiding her actions at some points... Part of her punishment is to have the dotTech inhabiting her body removed, and her trials and tribulations trying to live without the near-magical nanotech are described in detail. She becomes manic-depressive and, if it were possible, even more insane... Yet the narrative is always gripping and clear. Ae becomes more obsessed with who her "employers" are, and becomes the detective as well as the criminal. Of course she never solves that conundrum, but all is revealed, rather spectacularly, by the end. I found that increasingly, as Ae interrogates her own morals or lack thereof (and she experiences a huge amount of what might by considered remorse), I was particularly disturbed by how much empathy I felt towards the character. Clearly Ae is a sociopath and indeed a psychopath, yet she is also a highly sympathetic and compelling character.

In this novel, Roberts has created a future utopia as full of wonder and contradiction as Iain M Banks' Culture, as well as one of the most memorably characters one will have the simultaneous pleasure and horror of reading... And it's radical hard science fiction to the core. Strongly recommended.

Note: "radical" hard science fiction? That's a term originating, I believe, from Britain's great science fiction magazine Interzone in the (maybe) late '80s, in which various science fiction authors including Paul McAuley resolved to try to write a form of hard science fiction which, rather than focus on one world-changing advance or one scientific conundrum, would try to depict a realistic future world where all predictable technologies have an impact (whether communications technology, virtual reality, biotechnology, climate change, nanotech, etc etc)... Radical hard sf is where it's at. Read Greg Egan, Paul McAuley, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, and more recently add Alastair Reynolds, Charlie Stross, etc etc... The list goes on. I imagine I could include Brian Stableford in that list. These people (a couple of generations there, and Stableford comes from an even earlier generation, but is still writing cutting edge stuff right now) happen to all be British or Australian, and this form of sf seems to be something of a British tendency. There is a strong sense of morality, but it's a realistic morality with all the shades of grey and contradictions that real life offers up; there's a strong understanding of politics; and there's a dedication to a scientific epistemology/ontology of the world... Hurrah, I say.

Spectrum SF #9 (12:53 am)

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.

Stross, Charles - The Atrocity Archive (11:52 pm)

Charlie Stross doesn't just write an excellent weblog. He is of course a fantastic hard science fiction author - at the absolute vanguard of the genre, in my opinion.
I finally got issue #9 of British sf magazine Spectrum SF, which had the concluding segment of Charlie's new novel, The Atrocity Archive. It was being serialised since issue #7, so finally I could read the whole thing (having held off until I had it all).
The Atrocity Archive could perhaps be best described as "hard science fantasy". It combines Stross's love of Lovecraftiana with his (yes, geeky) love of computers and outlandish cutting-edge science. "Lovecraftiana"? For the uninitiated, H.P. Lovecraft created a kind of dark fantasy all his own, complete with Elder Gods and eldritch horrors which have inspired successions of writers to extend his world. Neil Gaiman (another author who keeps a journal) has done some amusing homages, and Stross also enjoys drawing out the high camp lunacy of it all. There are nevertheless some horrifying atrocities described in the novel...

I must admit I was expecting not to enjoy this as much as his action-packed gonzo futurism in the Accelerando sequence that Asimov's is currently publishing. However, it had me rapt from the start. Lovecraft's summonings are bizarrely morphed into an extension of computer science and number theory; the Elder Gods, ice giants and whatnot are entities existing in parallel worlds (the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics being assumed true)... It's all far too silly to be considered hard science fiction, but it's delightfully rigorous, in high detail. The "Laundry", where our protagonist works, is a highly secret branch of British Intelligence in charge of keeping knowledge of higher algorithm theory from spreading (which could result in malevolent intrusions from other dimensions) - and it's described as your standard bureaucratic nightmare, with squabbling office politics and all. The obligatory love story that fuels the plot is both sensitively described and played for laughs, as are the gender politics - and not to mention the real politics, amazingly up-to-date, with mad Islamic terrorists almost setting off Armaggedon...
The funniest bit, in my opinion, is the way that the descriptive language in the first few chapters is full of evil portents and allusions to horror, but continually lets you down as it describes a pager going off in the protagonist's pocket and so on...

Somehow Stross (I'm trying to call him "Stross" when in review mode, but "Charlie" when in discursive/personal mode, if that makes any sense) has here created something which is both a hugely entertaining diversion and at the same time a complex piece of political and scientific extrapolation - admittedly somewhat more implausible than really hard science fiction.

According to Charlie, Golden Gryphon will be publishing the complete The Atrocity Archive together with a sequel (The Concrete Jungle) in early 2004. Hurrah!

the Current reading that was... (01:00 pm)

I said I'd replace this "current reading" entry with proper reviews as I finished the various books I've been reading. But I've decided that, in order to keep a certain sense of continuity, I'll leave this post here and just add posts for the various books. I wrote:

I finally got The Omega Expedition by Brian Stableford, the final book in his six book future history... I can't wait to begin them all now, but before then I have a few free-standing books to read.
At the moment I'm reading Adam Roberts' new novel Stone. Although I haven't read the previous two novels by this new British author, I know he is an exciting writer... I'm half-way through Stone, and it's very good indeed. The protagonist is a psychopath of sorts, a one-in-a-million in a rather homogenised galactic society infused with and transformed by nanotech. The far-future science here is very convincing, and the characterisation is very detailed indeed. Great stuff!

However, I had to take a break from reading Stone, because issue #9 of Spectrum SF finally arrived, and within it, the final section of Charlie Stross's new short novel The Atrocity Archive. Readers of this blog will know how much I respect Charlie and love his writing. This novel is an insane and hilarious mix of his obsession with Lovecraftiana and computer programming. I am, of course, loving it.

Meanwhile, I found the latest issue (also #9 as it happens) of Grooves mag, an idm-focused mag which began asa zine and has become progressively more professional in both presentation and content. Also received the latest Wire mag in the mail yesterday (the January 2003 issue) and the latest New Scientist, which is always a Christmas/New Year Special Issue at this time of year... Lots of extra reading!
And we shouldn't forget some great comics, including the Flaming Carrot/Reid Fleming (World's Toughest Milkman) crossover issue... and at Phantom Zone Bondi Junction's pre-Christmas sale I found a cheap copy of Jason's Shhhh (not sure how many "h"s there - published by Fantagraphics) and Dan Clowes' Twentieth Century Eightball collection. Woohoo! The book by Jason, who is I believe a French comic writer (unless he's Canadian) has no dialogue at all, but the stories therein are very affecting and delightfully drawn. The Clowes volume collects a whole lot of funny stuff from his Eightball comic, and is amazingly varied in style but consistently hilarious.

Meaney, John - Context (12:37 pm)

In the middle of reading the Ken MacLeod books, I received the latest novel by John Meaney, called Context. I'm sure I reviewed Paradox (of which this is a sequel) when it came out, but it must've disappeared because of the disorganised way I used to keep my reviews. Damn!

Anyway, Paradox was set on a world called Nullapeiron, which has a literally stratified society: There are nobles and lower classes, but the world is also divided into many levels, with not even the noble classes living on the surface pretty much. The protagonist, Tom Corcorigan, is a highly intelligent young boy from the (very much) lower classes, and is a very sympathetic character. It's not exactly hard science fiction, being set in the very far future with a mysterious "mu-space" (a space with fractal geometry) underlying a lot of the "science"... But the world is very complex and beautifully drawn, and the characters interact with it in very interesting ways.

Context follows on from Paradox pretty much directly. As with the previous novel, there is a short story intertwined with the main narrative. In Paradox Tom received a strange storage device from one of the "Pilots", people who are specially adapted to be able to remain conscious and navigate in mu-space... They are, for some reason, reviled and feared on Nullapeiron. He gradually ingests (reads? experiences?) modules from a story about one of the original Pilots, and learns information vital to his own life. I felt that in Context, although it made some sense to continue it, this device seemed somewhat more artificial. Perhaps this is because the story in the previous novel was adapted from an already-existent story, whereas here it's clearly written as part of the novel. This might seem contradictory, but the point is that the flash-back narrative (now about the daughter of the first story's protagonist) reflects Tom's experience in a too-convenient manner...
Apart from that, there is again a lot of fully-immersive world-building, and I enjoyed the experience of both Nullapeiron and (relatively) near-future Earth... Meaney is a great writer, and nothing's ever dull or unconvincing... However, somehow the "Blight", which is the main motivating factor for the characters in this book, is a bit too much of an Evil Overlord kind of villain, and the way it's linked with the villain in Meaney's first novel is a bit too convenient again. I got a strange feeling, near the end, that I was reading some epic fantasy novel rather than science fiction... and I don't really like epic fantasy.
Still, I did like this book, and look forward to the next in the series, which should complete the story of Tom Corcorigan. Meaney tries hard to make his exotic future science seem plausible, and most succeeds. Indeed, it was more the narrative aspects that didn't quite convince in this novel. Hopefully Resolution will be more convinving.

MacLeod, Ken - the Fall Revolution tetralogy (12:05 pm)

I've just finished the loosely-connected first four novels by Ken MacLeod, referred to collectively as the Fall Revolution. He's a Scottish author, socialist and libertarian (but not in the American sense of conservative free-marketeers), and there's a huge amount of politics in his books; there are generally two time-streams, one being near-past/future political stuff, and the other being far-future space-opera in the style of Iain M Banks (of whom he is a long-time friend). There's a certain seeming virulent anti-Green sentiment in the first novel, The Star Fraction, but it's partially an expression of the attitude of both left and libertarian sources, and partially one can understand it as not exactly an anti-green sentiment so much as being against those who are against technology, against humanity, etc. There's plenty I'm not sure I agree with in the first book, but I think that's the sign of good writing. In any case, it's stimulating to read such vociferously left-wing and political stuff in hard science-fiction. The fourth book has, in a sense, a "green utopia" as its future setting - MacLeod likes to play with all sorts of points of view within the revolutionary/left/liberal axis, which is part of why he's such a fantastic author...

Apologies if this extended review reads a bit oddly - I read the four books over some length of time, and I put up little review-lets as I went, so I'm pieceing it all together now...
The second novel, The Stone Canal, is fantastic. FANTASTIC. Still my favourite. Two time-lines, one starting in the late '70s with socialist and libertarian Uni students having arguments in pubs (and suchlike), the other set in the far-future and involving artificial intelligences (robots and cloned humans and all sorts of bizarreness) in an anarchist society. The political ruminations are fascinating (the central character John Wilde is a very sympathetic character despite claiming to be a purely selfishly-motivated libertarian...), as are the philosophical and scientific speculations. What's most fascinating is how MacLeod explores different political and philosophical viewpoints in each novel. This one, to me, had the most engaging characters, as well as being the most favourably inclined towards artificial intelligence...

The third one, The Cassini Division, is set in a kind of anarcho-socialist utopia (of sorts), and presents a completely different attitude to technology and artificial intelligence from the previous one, one which I found somewhat troubling, as well as a rather twisted attitude to morality (whereby "good" means "good to us" - whoever "us" might be). But there's always a sense of the ambiguity of it all, and usually one can enjoy it and be swept along without too much stress from one's own opinions - especially because MacLeod is thoroughly exploring all sorts of concepts and positions without resolutely coming down on any particular side... I know a lot of people like this novel, but I found it very much the least satisfying. There were some fun technological marvels and plenty of adventure, but the protagonist was such a completely unsympathetic character, I found it difficult going.

The final novel, The Sky Road, competes well with The Stone Canal for best of the lot. This time it's set in a kind of far-future Green utopia about to make its first steps into space, in which the "tinkers" (computer programmers and theoreticians) are a somewhat outcast minority group, and most people believe in a strange quasi-religion of "Reason" (in which the events of the early 21st century are mythologised). There's a linked near-future time-line which involves many of the characters from previous books. The morality and politics is nicely muddled up, making for very realistic characterisation and a very realistic near-Armageddon for the near-future world... I enjoyed it very much.

I've learnt a huge amount about both socialist and libertarian politics through reading these books, and not a small amount about human nature too. The fact that MacLeod can bounce between different viewpoints so convincingly, and can often make the reader disagree vehemently, is proof that he's an extraordinary talent. Equal thanks go to acb and Charles Stross for putting me on to MacLeod.

Grimwood, Jon Courtenay - ReMix and RedRobe (01:38 pm)

Just finished two of Jon Courtenay Grimwood's novels previous to the current series: ReMix and RedRobe. I loved his last two (see reviews here) and these were pretty fun if somewhat more slight. The mysterious psi abilities which show up in both books on the sidelines seem somewhat out of place in what are otherwise pretty much hard science fiction, and the violence is sometimes too much - but I'm pretty much with him politically, and I think there's a moral centre to the works. His characterisation and the moral/political aspect to his work improves greatly in the current series, which I think is fantastic.