The Mercury Annual is one of the strangest stories I have read in a long while. It commences with a lengthy Prologue which describes the world of Razalia and its neighbouring planets, together with their peoples. To say that this system is bizarre would be an understatement; it is the purest fantasy of the most unrealistic kind, in that no account is taken of any laws of science. The system's sun wanders among its planets, the inhabitants of one planet likes to visit others by means of giant catapults, Razalia is covered with barriers of pure white, like cracks in reality, into which people vanish never to return, and its humanoid people have a rather flexible anatomy, immediately growing organs as and when they need them. Each town is ruled by a Tharle, who acquires other peculiar abilities.
This is not the easiest story to get into and I was beginning to feel dubious about continuing until I reached the first chapter, which is dramatically different. This and much of the rest of the novel are set on present-day Earth and focus on the entirely mundane lives of Keith, whose main passion in life is his massive collection of classic comics, his dominating and aggressive wife Donna, their daughter Imogen and Keith's strange friend George, who shares his enthusiasm for the odd collectables of life. Donna is determined to convert their attic into something useful and plots to clear the space by manipulating her husband into selling the comic collection which covers the floor (the book's title refers to one of these). There is much loving description of the stories in the comics as Keith sorts through them, trying to decide what to do. The characters are well-drawn, the scenario and relationships entirely convincing. Only at the end of this part of the book is there any hint of a connection between Earth and Razalia.
The final part of the story returns to Razalia and describes the efforts of the Tharles to discover why the white barriers have begun to expand. One of their number has invented a peculiar device which he claims enables him to see and hear the legendary Maker of Razalia, who lives in a world which sounds increasingly familiar.
This short novel (under 160 pages) is only Part 1 of Valiant Razalia, and the various story threads are all left hanging in the air at the end of it. I am still trying to make up my mind about this book. It isn't the stuff of best-sellers, and the series could either vanish without trace or attract a cult following. However, it managed to hook me to the extent that I will be looking to get hold of Part 2 when it comes out.
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I've just noticed that BBC Radio has been broadcasting some work by Charles Chilton. See: This link for details.
I remember the original versions of these stories, when Journey into Space was broadcast in the 1950s - it helped to get me interested in SF. I've still got one of his books from 1960 - The World in Peril. I must re-read it sometime!
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Thursday, 25 June 2009
Agent of Change, by Lee and Miller, plus Ashes to Ashes
Agent of Change, first published in 1988, kicked off the authors' extensive Liaden Universe series. I had heard good things of the stories but had never read them before, so I tackled this one with interest.
It is classic space opera, set in a distant future in which humanity has spread through the galaxy and interacts (sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes not) with various other equally advanced races. Most of the other races bear no resemblance to humans, the exception being the Liadens who are close enough related to be able to interbreed – although how this came to be is not explained in this story.
The two heroes of this story are Val Con, a male Liaden spy, and Miri, a female human ex-mercenary bodyguard, both more than capable of looking after themselves in dangerous situations. At the start of the story they accidentally meet on the world of Lufkit when both are being hunted; Val Con by the planetary authorities, Miri by a criminal organisation called the Juntavas. Their pair up out of necessity, and the rest of the story is largely concerned with their efforts to survive. A key role is played by a magnificently realised alien race known as the Clutch, who resemble giant turtles and have previously befriended Val Con. I hardly need add that the action is flavoured by a developing romance between the two heroes.
A fast-paced and entertaining read, if rather lightweight and not particularly memorable. I might chase up the sequels in due course, but I have a tall stack of books to read and a long list of others to buy, so it's likely to take a while.
--------------------------------
Ashes to Ashes
The TV detective series Life on Mars, about a present-day policeman who inexplicably finds himself a part of a 1970s detective squad, was deservedly a huge hit. Not surprisingly it was followed by a new series, Ashes to Ashes, following the same detective team into the 1980s with a new "throwback", Keeley Hawes replacing John Simm. The first series was rather disappointing by contrast with LoM, but the second series (which finished a couple of weeks ago) was a great improvement. The characters were much better developed, and the twin plot threads of Hawes' character desperately trying to get back to the present day and her growing relationship with Philip Glenister's crusty, misogynistic detective became increasingly intriguing. As well as the drama and mystery this was one of the funniest series on TV, with more laugh-out-loud moments than most comedies (and – blessed relief – no canned laughter). From being an "OK to watch" for the first series this became a "must watch", and the highlight of the week's viewing. I realised just how much I had come to like the characters when felt quite sad on discovering that one of them had betrayed the team (for all-too-human reasons). The finale was the best episode of the lot, with a commendably ambiguous and open ending.
There's no doubt that Glenister was the star of the show; he was given a string of often outrageously funny non-PC one-liners which he delivered in his characteristically gruff, deadpan, rapid-fire style. One which sticks in my mind; on seeing Hawes looking unusually happy: "What's up with you then? You look as if you've been sitting on the washing machine again!" And the gag in the last episode concerning the detective at a chip-shop crime scene who was happily munching on a battered and deep-fried sausage until he discovered that it was from a literally dis-membered murder victim brought tears to my eyes. I'm eagerly awaiting the third series, due next year.
It is classic space opera, set in a distant future in which humanity has spread through the galaxy and interacts (sometimes in a friendly way, sometimes not) with various other equally advanced races. Most of the other races bear no resemblance to humans, the exception being the Liadens who are close enough related to be able to interbreed – although how this came to be is not explained in this story.
The two heroes of this story are Val Con, a male Liaden spy, and Miri, a female human ex-mercenary bodyguard, both more than capable of looking after themselves in dangerous situations. At the start of the story they accidentally meet on the world of Lufkit when both are being hunted; Val Con by the planetary authorities, Miri by a criminal organisation called the Juntavas. Their pair up out of necessity, and the rest of the story is largely concerned with their efforts to survive. A key role is played by a magnificently realised alien race known as the Clutch, who resemble giant turtles and have previously befriended Val Con. I hardly need add that the action is flavoured by a developing romance between the two heroes.
A fast-paced and entertaining read, if rather lightweight and not particularly memorable. I might chase up the sequels in due course, but I have a tall stack of books to read and a long list of others to buy, so it's likely to take a while.
--------------------------------
Ashes to Ashes
The TV detective series Life on Mars, about a present-day policeman who inexplicably finds himself a part of a 1970s detective squad, was deservedly a huge hit. Not surprisingly it was followed by a new series, Ashes to Ashes, following the same detective team into the 1980s with a new "throwback", Keeley Hawes replacing John Simm. The first series was rather disappointing by contrast with LoM, but the second series (which finished a couple of weeks ago) was a great improvement. The characters were much better developed, and the twin plot threads of Hawes' character desperately trying to get back to the present day and her growing relationship with Philip Glenister's crusty, misogynistic detective became increasingly intriguing. As well as the drama and mystery this was one of the funniest series on TV, with more laugh-out-loud moments than most comedies (and – blessed relief – no canned laughter). From being an "OK to watch" for the first series this became a "must watch", and the highlight of the week's viewing. I realised just how much I had come to like the characters when felt quite sad on discovering that one of them had betrayed the team (for all-too-human reasons). The finale was the best episode of the lot, with a commendably ambiguous and open ending.
There's no doubt that Glenister was the star of the show; he was given a string of often outrageously funny non-PC one-liners which he delivered in his characteristically gruff, deadpan, rapid-fire style. One which sticks in my mind; on seeing Hawes looking unusually happy: "What's up with you then? You look as if you've been sitting on the washing machine again!" And the gag in the last episode concerning the detective at a chip-shop crime scene who was happily munching on a battered and deep-fried sausage until he discovered that it was from a literally dis-membered murder victim brought tears to my eyes. I'm eagerly awaiting the third series, due next year.
Friday, 19 June 2009
Starship Troopers, by Robert A Heinlein – book and film
I read a lot of Heinlein in the 1960s, when I absorbed all of the SFF I could get my hands on, but was never a great fan and didn't read any of his books more than once. I remember enjoying Starship Troopers, though, so looked forward to a re-read with the Classic Science Fiction discussion group. Coincidentally, the film of the book was on the TV just before I read it, so I recorded it to watch immediately after the read.
I remembered nothing about the plot except for what is obviously implied by the title, and those cool combat suits; part exoskeleton, part armour, part space-suit, part weapon carrier (probably what appealed to my teenage self!). I was at first impressed by the way in which the blunt, matter-of-fact style is well-suited to the subject of a personal memoir by a no-nonsense soldier, and followed his account of life on a future Earth and training in the "boot camp" with interest. I was not immediately put off by the right-wing moralising, since that seemed to go with the territory, but about half-way through this becomes the dominant theme.
An entire chapter is spent recalling a school lesson in which he learned the importance of corporal and capital punishment, and how stupid societies had been to abandon them in the late 20th century. Reading now from an adult perspective, I'd certainly agree that too many children are brought up badly today and lack a structured disciplinary environment, but the notion that if we always hit them immediately they did anything wrong they would grow up to be model citizens is simplistic, to put it mildly. So is Heinlein's notion that children are not born with any moral sense, it has to be beaten into them. Plenty of studies have shown how people, like other social animals, are hard-wired to have an understanding of working cooperatively with others and adhering to the behavioural codes which make that possible – the basis of morality.
Elsewhere in the book is another polemic about the evils of universal franchise, and why governments should be controlled only by those who have volunteered for military service and passed the rigorous training designed to weed out those without the "right stuff". In fact, the entire book is a paean to the virtues of the military life, the harsher the better, and also to unthinking obedience untroubled by any concerns about right or wrong – that's the responsibility of those who give the orders. And this so soon after Nuremburg?
The last part of the book returns to action rather than polemic and is all the better for it. The book is not without its merits, mainly the laconic and gritty account of future combat which presumably influenced Haldeman's vastly superior The Forever War. However, the plot gets swamped by the repellent philosophy. This is best regarded as a curiosity, mainly of value in providing an insight into the mind of right-wing America in the mid-20th century.
------------------------------
Watching the film, made in 1997 some 38 years after the book was first published, is a rather strange experience. It's as if the characters and plot elements of the book have been chopped up and rearranged, with some additions and subtractions, and the attributes of one character sometimes assigned to another. The script stays broadly true to the spirit of the book, with Heinlein's jingoism parodied in a series of simplistic, gung-ho news broadcasts. There are some major differences, however. One is (almost inevitably) a much stronger romance element, achieved partly by making the Mobile Infantry mixed rather than male-only. The other (sadly) is the absence of those impressive combat suits and the tactics associated with them. Apart from the grenade-sized tactical nukes, the infantry fight with equipment and tactics not dissimilar to those of World War 2, which makes the military aspect of the film rather a sad joke. And as usual, the director is keen to maximise the use of the CGI "Bugs" with lots of associated nastiness and slaughter. He also doesn't remotely care about basic credibility; the Bug homeworld is shown as being on the other side of the galaxy (at least 50,000 light years away) but their favourite mode of attack is to launch asteroids from the belt around their planet to score direct hits on specific Earth cities, despite the lack of evidence for any technology. Given that a human spaceship was able to take action to avoid a collision with an incoming asteroid, they clearly travel at a small fraction of lightspeed, so would be likely to take at least a million years to make the journey. No wonder today's youngsters are so ignorant of science.
------------------------------
A brief heads-up for those who followed my series of posts on Global Warming and SF. I have combined and updated them and put the result on my website as a handy reference (to be amended in the light of any further developments) HERE .
I remembered nothing about the plot except for what is obviously implied by the title, and those cool combat suits; part exoskeleton, part armour, part space-suit, part weapon carrier (probably what appealed to my teenage self!). I was at first impressed by the way in which the blunt, matter-of-fact style is well-suited to the subject of a personal memoir by a no-nonsense soldier, and followed his account of life on a future Earth and training in the "boot camp" with interest. I was not immediately put off by the right-wing moralising, since that seemed to go with the territory, but about half-way through this becomes the dominant theme.
An entire chapter is spent recalling a school lesson in which he learned the importance of corporal and capital punishment, and how stupid societies had been to abandon them in the late 20th century. Reading now from an adult perspective, I'd certainly agree that too many children are brought up badly today and lack a structured disciplinary environment, but the notion that if we always hit them immediately they did anything wrong they would grow up to be model citizens is simplistic, to put it mildly. So is Heinlein's notion that children are not born with any moral sense, it has to be beaten into them. Plenty of studies have shown how people, like other social animals, are hard-wired to have an understanding of working cooperatively with others and adhering to the behavioural codes which make that possible – the basis of morality.
Elsewhere in the book is another polemic about the evils of universal franchise, and why governments should be controlled only by those who have volunteered for military service and passed the rigorous training designed to weed out those without the "right stuff". In fact, the entire book is a paean to the virtues of the military life, the harsher the better, and also to unthinking obedience untroubled by any concerns about right or wrong – that's the responsibility of those who give the orders. And this so soon after Nuremburg?
The last part of the book returns to action rather than polemic and is all the better for it. The book is not without its merits, mainly the laconic and gritty account of future combat which presumably influenced Haldeman's vastly superior The Forever War. However, the plot gets swamped by the repellent philosophy. This is best regarded as a curiosity, mainly of value in providing an insight into the mind of right-wing America in the mid-20th century.
------------------------------
Watching the film, made in 1997 some 38 years after the book was first published, is a rather strange experience. It's as if the characters and plot elements of the book have been chopped up and rearranged, with some additions and subtractions, and the attributes of one character sometimes assigned to another. The script stays broadly true to the spirit of the book, with Heinlein's jingoism parodied in a series of simplistic, gung-ho news broadcasts. There are some major differences, however. One is (almost inevitably) a much stronger romance element, achieved partly by making the Mobile Infantry mixed rather than male-only. The other (sadly) is the absence of those impressive combat suits and the tactics associated with them. Apart from the grenade-sized tactical nukes, the infantry fight with equipment and tactics not dissimilar to those of World War 2, which makes the military aspect of the film rather a sad joke. And as usual, the director is keen to maximise the use of the CGI "Bugs" with lots of associated nastiness and slaughter. He also doesn't remotely care about basic credibility; the Bug homeworld is shown as being on the other side of the galaxy (at least 50,000 light years away) but their favourite mode of attack is to launch asteroids from the belt around their planet to score direct hits on specific Earth cities, despite the lack of evidence for any technology. Given that a human spaceship was able to take action to avoid a collision with an incoming asteroid, they clearly travel at a small fraction of lightspeed, so would be likely to take at least a million years to make the journey. No wonder today's youngsters are so ignorant of science.
------------------------------
A brief heads-up for those who followed my series of posts on Global Warming and SF. I have combined and updated them and put the result on my website as a handy reference (to be amended in the light of any further developments) HERE .
Friday, 12 June 2009
Dream Park, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
This novel was first published in 1981 and I read it not long after. I thoroughly enjoyed it then, and was pleased to return to it when it was selected for the Modern Science Fiction discussion group, particularly since I remembered nothing about the plot.
The story is set on Earth some time in the future; there are ultra-high-speed trains running in evacuated tunnels and life-like holograms, but not much else in the way of advanced technology. The location is the Dream Park of the title, a huge leisure park which, in addition to more familiar attractions, hosts role-playing games on vast sets, their actual topography enhanced by computer-generated holograms so they seem to stretch for miles. Keen role-players participate in these games, in which the Lore Master, the leader of the players, pits his wits against the Game Master who devises the game and supervises its progress. Games last for several days during which the players remain on the set and maintain their chosen roles – warrior, thief, cleric or magic user – the magic users being able to summon holographic "supernatural aid" at need. A lot of money rides on these games because, if deemed successful, they are turned into computer games and other merchandise.
The plot concerns the running of a new game, seen as a "blood match" between the Game Master and Lore Master, who have clashed before. Most of the action happens on set, but there is a parallel plot concerning the murder of a security guard at Dream Park, which seems to be associated with the game. The Park's Head of Security, Alex Griffin, becomes convinced that one of the players must have been responsible so he anonymously joins the game as a player in order to try to identify the criminal. However, he finds the game a lot more absorbing than he ever imagined.
I had better start by admitting that I have never participated in a role-playing game of any kind; I'm not sure if that's a benefit or a handicap in reviewing this story! The writing style is brisk and well suited to the teenage market. At first I was disappointed because I found the tale rather frustrating. Many characters are introduced in quick succession and I soon lost track of them. A list of characters is included at the front of the book but, while an essential reference, this only gives their names and roles. Not enough information is provided to round out the personalities or fix their descriptions in the reader's mind, so I kept flipping back though the text to find where they were first (albeit only briefly) described. This lasted until about half-way through the book, during which time I still felt that I didn't know the characters or much care what happened to them.
However, after that the story begins to take off. The surviving characters become more familiar and the story more gripping as the players battle their way through the obstacles and dangers set by the Game Master towards a still-unknown goal in the fantastical world of Melanesian mythology and the Cargo Cult. At the same time Griffin, who secretly keeps in daily contact with his security team, is trying to identify the criminal. The game is a lot more successful than the rather cursory solution of the crime; the eventual revelation of the killer was more of a "huh?" than an "of course!" moment, as not enough clues had been provided.
Despite these reservations, it's an unusual and exciting mix of adventure and crime story, worth the time to read if you can get past the initial problems with characterisation. I expect that RPG fans will enjoy it even more.
The story is set on Earth some time in the future; there are ultra-high-speed trains running in evacuated tunnels and life-like holograms, but not much else in the way of advanced technology. The location is the Dream Park of the title, a huge leisure park which, in addition to more familiar attractions, hosts role-playing games on vast sets, their actual topography enhanced by computer-generated holograms so they seem to stretch for miles. Keen role-players participate in these games, in which the Lore Master, the leader of the players, pits his wits against the Game Master who devises the game and supervises its progress. Games last for several days during which the players remain on the set and maintain their chosen roles – warrior, thief, cleric or magic user – the magic users being able to summon holographic "supernatural aid" at need. A lot of money rides on these games because, if deemed successful, they are turned into computer games and other merchandise.
The plot concerns the running of a new game, seen as a "blood match" between the Game Master and Lore Master, who have clashed before. Most of the action happens on set, but there is a parallel plot concerning the murder of a security guard at Dream Park, which seems to be associated with the game. The Park's Head of Security, Alex Griffin, becomes convinced that one of the players must have been responsible so he anonymously joins the game as a player in order to try to identify the criminal. However, he finds the game a lot more absorbing than he ever imagined.
I had better start by admitting that I have never participated in a role-playing game of any kind; I'm not sure if that's a benefit or a handicap in reviewing this story! The writing style is brisk and well suited to the teenage market. At first I was disappointed because I found the tale rather frustrating. Many characters are introduced in quick succession and I soon lost track of them. A list of characters is included at the front of the book but, while an essential reference, this only gives their names and roles. Not enough information is provided to round out the personalities or fix their descriptions in the reader's mind, so I kept flipping back though the text to find where they were first (albeit only briefly) described. This lasted until about half-way through the book, during which time I still felt that I didn't know the characters or much care what happened to them.
However, after that the story begins to take off. The surviving characters become more familiar and the story more gripping as the players battle their way through the obstacles and dangers set by the Game Master towards a still-unknown goal in the fantastical world of Melanesian mythology and the Cargo Cult. At the same time Griffin, who secretly keeps in daily contact with his security team, is trying to identify the criminal. The game is a lot more successful than the rather cursory solution of the crime; the eventual revelation of the killer was more of a "huh?" than an "of course!" moment, as not enough clues had been provided.
Despite these reservations, it's an unusual and exciting mix of adventure and crime story, worth the time to read if you can get past the initial problems with characterisation. I expect that RPG fans will enjoy it even more.
Friday, 5 June 2009
Interzone 222 and Dark Horizons
Yet more short stories, from the British SFF magazine Interzone and the British Fantasy Society's Dark Horizons. For someone who prefers novels, I've been reading a lot of the shorter works recently.
Interzone has the usual six stories as well as news and reviews. The cover illustration, by Adam Tredowski, shows a strange, rather abstract spaceship blasting off from a planet.
Johnny and Emmy-Lou Get Married by Kim Lakin-Smith (illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe): 1950s-style romance across the boundaries of futuristic US gangs, the Rocketeers and the Flies.
Unexpected Outcomes by Tim Pratt: is the Earth real – or just a simulation?
Lady of the White-Spired City by Sarah L Edwards (illustrated by Martin Bland): an imperial envoy revisits the backward planet from which she had fled centuries before.
Microcosmos by Nina Allen: a dystopian near-future Earth adapting to changed circumstances, and the personal costs of this.
Ys by Aliette De Bodard (illustrated by Mark Pexton): the magical drowned world of Ys emerges, figuratively and literally, into the life of a young woman.
Mother of Champions by Sean McMullen (illustrated by Anne Stone-Coyote): cheetahs are not at all what we think – they have evolved to perfection!
An entertaining and varied collection which I enjoyed. I'd have to award the medal to Sean McMullen for sheer originality, with a mention in dispatches for Tim Pratt's intriguing take on his theme.
Dark Horizons goes one better with seven stories, plus five poems and several articles including an interview with Robert Holdstock (ancient woodland magic) and summary reviews of the work of David Gemmell (I haven't yet read) plus the Elfin Fantasies of James P Blaylock (quirky tales which I recall enjoying).
Passing Through by Jim Steel: a brief episode set in a grim medieval world
For a Strong, Healthy Body by Andrew Knighton: the consequences of not properly disposing of factory waste.
Nanna Barrows by Jan Edwards: a sick boy is helped by the traditional healer who lives opposite – but there is more…
The Putrimaniac by Brendan Connell: a gruesome tale of tastes and sensibilities running out of control.
Telemura by Douglas Thompson: a horror-filled house and paint of a strange, magical colour.
Everything He Touched, Burned by Mathew F Riley: life in the tunnels under a city.
Beyond the Fifth Sky by Ross Gresham: navigating the underground seas of a strange planet.
Horror is not my favourite genre and I usually prefer SF to fantasy, so no surprise that Ross Gresham's tale appealed to me the most, although Matthew Riley's atmospheric story also sticks in the memory.
The poems are mostly short and elliptical but I have to mention the heroic Chronicle of a Conflagration by Skadi meic Beorh: a graphic three-page account of a battle between the followers of Odin and Lugh, written in triplets in an epic style.
Interzone has the usual six stories as well as news and reviews. The cover illustration, by Adam Tredowski, shows a strange, rather abstract spaceship blasting off from a planet.
Johnny and Emmy-Lou Get Married by Kim Lakin-Smith (illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe): 1950s-style romance across the boundaries of futuristic US gangs, the Rocketeers and the Flies.
Unexpected Outcomes by Tim Pratt: is the Earth real – or just a simulation?
Lady of the White-Spired City by Sarah L Edwards (illustrated by Martin Bland): an imperial envoy revisits the backward planet from which she had fled centuries before.
Microcosmos by Nina Allen: a dystopian near-future Earth adapting to changed circumstances, and the personal costs of this.
Ys by Aliette De Bodard (illustrated by Mark Pexton): the magical drowned world of Ys emerges, figuratively and literally, into the life of a young woman.
Mother of Champions by Sean McMullen (illustrated by Anne Stone-Coyote): cheetahs are not at all what we think – they have evolved to perfection!
An entertaining and varied collection which I enjoyed. I'd have to award the medal to Sean McMullen for sheer originality, with a mention in dispatches for Tim Pratt's intriguing take on his theme.
Dark Horizons goes one better with seven stories, plus five poems and several articles including an interview with Robert Holdstock (ancient woodland magic) and summary reviews of the work of David Gemmell (I haven't yet read) plus the Elfin Fantasies of James P Blaylock (quirky tales which I recall enjoying).
Passing Through by Jim Steel: a brief episode set in a grim medieval world
For a Strong, Healthy Body by Andrew Knighton: the consequences of not properly disposing of factory waste.
Nanna Barrows by Jan Edwards: a sick boy is helped by the traditional healer who lives opposite – but there is more…
The Putrimaniac by Brendan Connell: a gruesome tale of tastes and sensibilities running out of control.
Telemura by Douglas Thompson: a horror-filled house and paint of a strange, magical colour.
Everything He Touched, Burned by Mathew F Riley: life in the tunnels under a city.
Beyond the Fifth Sky by Ross Gresham: navigating the underground seas of a strange planet.
Horror is not my favourite genre and I usually prefer SF to fantasy, so no surprise that Ross Gresham's tale appealed to me the most, although Matthew Riley's atmospheric story also sticks in the memory.
The poems are mostly short and elliptical but I have to mention the heroic Chronicle of a Conflagration by Skadi meic Beorh: a graphic three-page account of a battle between the followers of Odin and Lugh, written in triplets in an epic style.
Friday, 29 May 2009
Global Warming and SF – Part 3
This is the third and last part of my tour around the global warming issues and what might be done about them, with a view to how these might feature in SF. Last time I identified four possible courses of action: to cut back CO2 production; to remove CO2 already in the atmosphere; to reduce insolation (heat received from the sun); and finally to adapt to the changes which are now inevitable. I have already dealt with the first one, now for the other three.
Remove CO2 already in the atmosphere
One of the major problems with churning out CO2 is that, once in the atmosphere, it persists for a very long time. This contrasts with other greenhouse gases such as methane, which disappear relatively quickly. Even if it were possible to stop all burning of fossil fuels immediately, the quantity of CO2 already in the atmosphere would remain higher than pre-industrial levels for centuries to come; which means that the Earth will continue warming up for centuries. As a result, there is increasing interest in "geoengineering" – physically removing CO2 from the atmosphere, or finding other ways to increase CO2 absorption or to prevent the greenhouse effect.
Geoengineering is highly controversial because of worries that it may have unwanted consequences; for instance, increasing oceanic absorption of CO2 will increase seawater's acidity (something which is already beginning to happen) with potentially dire consequences for the marine ecosystem. It is therefore only being considered as a last resort, because climate scientists now believe that there is no chance of cutting CO2 production by enough to make much difference; in fact, before the current recession hit, carbon emissions were still increasing by 3% a year.
Geoengineering techniques can be as simple as planting trees, but this only postpones the problem – at some point, the trees will die and their carbon will be released. More drastic measures are therefore being considered. These include seeding the oceans with iron filings to encourage the growth of organisms which would trap CO2. However, apart from the acidification problem, a recent experiment failed to achieve the desired effect.
A more high-tech approach is to manufacture huge quantities of "scrubbers" which will physically remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Three different techniques have been proposed.
One is a "spray hangar" in which air is sucked in one end and blown out of the other after being sprayed with sodium hydroxide solution; this reacts with CO2 to form droplets of sodium carbonate. This is known to work, but in its present form requires a huge amount of energy.
An alternative is the "solar scrubber", using sun-focusing mirrors to heat a transparent tube filled with pellets of calcium oxide. As the temperature rises to 400 degrees C, air is blown through the tube and its CO2 combines with the chemical to form calcium carbonate; virtually all of the CO2 is extracted. The process can be reversed by doubling the temperature in order to drive off pure CO2 which can easily be captured; but of course, a safe way of disposing of it then has to be found. One possibility is to pump it into adjacent greenhouses in order to promote crop growth (a technique which is already being used).
The third option is the "air collector", which pumps air over an ion exchange resin, a polymer impregnated with sodium hydroxide, to which the CO2 adheres. It can later be washed out for disposal using humid air at only 40 degree C.
The benefit of these technologies is that there appears to be minimal risk of unintended consequences since all they do is extract CO2, a process which can instantly be switched off when no longer needed. The main drawback of the CO2 scrubbers is that millions of the things would be needed, at huge cost.
Reduce insolation
A different approach is to reduce the degree by which the sun heats up the Earth, by reflecting more of its rays back into space. As we have seen, ice fields reflect around 90% of the insolation (compared with 94% absorption in open water) and their melting is contributing to Arctic warming. One study calculated that reflecting an extra 1.8% of insolation would cancel out the effects of doubling the CO2 levels.
Various fanciful ideas have been proposed, such as dumping vast quantities of white polystyrene to float in the oceans (which could of course reduce their capacity to absorb CO2) or pumping sulphate particles high into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays (but this could cause catastrophic droughts in some regions, and would need constant renewal). A variation on the last one is to pump atomised seawater into stratocumulus clouds in order to increase their density and make them more reflective. This should work, but the processes of atomisation and of getting the water up to the clouds in such enormous quantities are obviously not trivial issues.
A more high-tech approach is to launch "sunshades" into space, in the form of discs of silicon about 60 cm across., just a few micrometers thick and weighting 1 gram. Each would be covered with holes calculated to act like a lens, causing dispersion and dimming of the sunlight. They would be "steerable" using solar energy to keep them in the correct position and orientation. The proposal involves launching containers, each carrying a million discs, from huge electromagnetic rail guns, towards the L1 Lagrange point where the Earth's and the sun's gravities cancel out. It has been estimated that twenty rail guns, each 3 km high and working around the clock to launch one container every five minutes for ten years, could achieve the 1.8% reduction, and it is hoped that the discs could last for up to 50 years.
The danger with all of these techniques would be if they were relied on to cancel out the effect of rising CO2 levels, thereby allowing CO2 to build up to high levels. Should the regular renewal of the sunshades then fail for any reason, the consequences to the climate of being suddenly exposed to high levels of atmospheric CO2 could be sudden and catastrophic.
A lower-tech approach would be to install reflective surfaces on the roofs of buildings or in the form of material covering desert areas, in those locations not required for solar heating or power systems.
Adapt to the changes
It is now accepted by climate scientists that any effective moves to reduce CO2 production will now be too late to avoid some unpleasant consequences – our politicians have already failed us by avoiding the potentially unpopular measures required. Even the 2007 IPCC report predicted a rise in global average temperature of between 2 and 6.4 degrees C this century and, as we have seen, a recent conference of climate scientists concluded that the outlook has worsened since that was written. An increase of 4 degrees by the end of the century now looks quite possible on present trends. So as well as continuing to try to minimise the warming effect, we are going to have to prepare for the consequences of a warmer world.
What this might mean is discussed in an article published in New Scientist on 28 February 2009 ("Surviving in a Warmer World"), which spells out the implications of a 4 degree warmer world. The picture painted is frankly horrifying. Much of the tropics would become uninhabitable due to drought, floods or extreme weather; the Amazon basin would become a desert, as would most of the USA, southern Europe, nearly all of Africa, southern Asia and Australia. Rising sea levels would mean that low-lying areas would vanish. On the bright side, there would be some potential for reforestation due to changing wind patterns, in west Africa and western Australia. However, the main areas suitable for habitation and farming would be Canada and Alaska, northern Europe and Asia, New Zealand, western Greenland and western Antarctica. These would become exceedingly crowded places, with the surviving population having to live in dense, high-rise accommodation to leave as much usable land as possible free for agriculture.
James Lovelock, who developed the "Gaia" theory, estimates that the devastation caused by climate change could result in the world's population reducing to 1 billion or less by the end of this century. Inevitably, there would be huge conflicts as displaced populations attempted to move to more favoured areas. Many observers think that the first climate change war has been underway for years, in the civil war in the Sudan. Christians and Muslims had lived peacefully side-by side in Sudan's Darfur province for centuries, but the trigger for their vicious war (in which 200,000 have already died and around two million been displaced) has been a dramatic reduction in rainfall over the past few decades, leading to increasing desertification and a conflict over the remaining usable land. If the regional climate projections are right, similar problems are likely to occur throughout the tropics during this century.
Other climate impact specialists consider that the worst consequences can be reduced, provided that we start planning and acting now, by determinedly adopting the kind of measures discussed in this survey. It's too late to prevent a lot of problems, but it's worth doing all we can to minimise the future scale of them, since that could prevent a bad situation from becoming utterly appalling. The political issues and pressures generated by all this are a potential source of material for near-future fiction.
Even if world leaders really begin to address this problem effectively, some changes will have to be made. The rising sea level, combined with more, and more violent, storms means that it would generally be futile to continue defending low-lying coastal areas. To give one well-known example, there is no point in the long term in trying to protect cities like New Orleans. This is already beginning to happen in a small way, with the evacuation of the 1,400 inhabitants of Papua New Guinea's Carteret Islands, and there are similar plans to abandon other low-lying oceanic islands. The prospect of millions of Bangladeshis moving into India as their land floods will raise problems on a very different scale.
Water shortages resulting from a combination of climate change and population growth will also require some changes to farming to get the maximum value out of agricultural land. One consequence is that meat-eating will have to diminish because, for the same food value, animal farms use farmland and water at several times the rate of crop farms. So the only farm animals likely to survive will be those which can live on rough mountain pasture unsuitable for agriculture. To make matters worse, fish stocks will continue to shrink, not just through overfishing but through the increasing acidification and deoxygenation of the oceans. The water shortages will almost certainly end the current squeamishness about genetically-modified crops; to produce enough food, it will be necessary to develop drought-resistant strains.
Even so, a switch to a largely vegetarian diet wouldn't provide a complete solution. Crops not only use up a lot of water, our commercial farms are also heavily dependent on oil, for farm machinery, transport and fertiliser. Reductions in the use of fossil fuels to cut back on CO2 production, combined with an increasing shortage of oil as cheap sources are used up, will make traditional crop-growing far more difficult and expensive. A recent UK TV programme on "farms of the future" predicted the decline of large-scale crop growing in favour of local "vertical farms", based on hedges and trees producing fruit, nuts and edible leaves, which can provide several times the food value of the same area of arable land. These require very little work or other resources to grow, but they are much more labour-intensive to collect.
That just about wraps up my survey. In a nutshell, climate change is accelerating, and if we wish to avoid some rather horrendous consequences, we need to put a far higher priority on taking the kind of preventative and precautionary measures I have been describing. I hope that all of this provides some useful material for the SF community; certainly there is scope for a wide range of backgrounds, from best-case to worst-case. My own novel, which I mentioned last time, was intended to represent a likely future but, in the light of the latest information, is now looking to be at the optimistic end of the spectrum!
Remove CO2 already in the atmosphere
One of the major problems with churning out CO2 is that, once in the atmosphere, it persists for a very long time. This contrasts with other greenhouse gases such as methane, which disappear relatively quickly. Even if it were possible to stop all burning of fossil fuels immediately, the quantity of CO2 already in the atmosphere would remain higher than pre-industrial levels for centuries to come; which means that the Earth will continue warming up for centuries. As a result, there is increasing interest in "geoengineering" – physically removing CO2 from the atmosphere, or finding other ways to increase CO2 absorption or to prevent the greenhouse effect.
Geoengineering is highly controversial because of worries that it may have unwanted consequences; for instance, increasing oceanic absorption of CO2 will increase seawater's acidity (something which is already beginning to happen) with potentially dire consequences for the marine ecosystem. It is therefore only being considered as a last resort, because climate scientists now believe that there is no chance of cutting CO2 production by enough to make much difference; in fact, before the current recession hit, carbon emissions were still increasing by 3% a year.
Geoengineering techniques can be as simple as planting trees, but this only postpones the problem – at some point, the trees will die and their carbon will be released. More drastic measures are therefore being considered. These include seeding the oceans with iron filings to encourage the growth of organisms which would trap CO2. However, apart from the acidification problem, a recent experiment failed to achieve the desired effect.
A more high-tech approach is to manufacture huge quantities of "scrubbers" which will physically remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Three different techniques have been proposed.
One is a "spray hangar" in which air is sucked in one end and blown out of the other after being sprayed with sodium hydroxide solution; this reacts with CO2 to form droplets of sodium carbonate. This is known to work, but in its present form requires a huge amount of energy.
An alternative is the "solar scrubber", using sun-focusing mirrors to heat a transparent tube filled with pellets of calcium oxide. As the temperature rises to 400 degrees C, air is blown through the tube and its CO2 combines with the chemical to form calcium carbonate; virtually all of the CO2 is extracted. The process can be reversed by doubling the temperature in order to drive off pure CO2 which can easily be captured; but of course, a safe way of disposing of it then has to be found. One possibility is to pump it into adjacent greenhouses in order to promote crop growth (a technique which is already being used).
The third option is the "air collector", which pumps air over an ion exchange resin, a polymer impregnated with sodium hydroxide, to which the CO2 adheres. It can later be washed out for disposal using humid air at only 40 degree C.
The benefit of these technologies is that there appears to be minimal risk of unintended consequences since all they do is extract CO2, a process which can instantly be switched off when no longer needed. The main drawback of the CO2 scrubbers is that millions of the things would be needed, at huge cost.
Reduce insolation
A different approach is to reduce the degree by which the sun heats up the Earth, by reflecting more of its rays back into space. As we have seen, ice fields reflect around 90% of the insolation (compared with 94% absorption in open water) and their melting is contributing to Arctic warming. One study calculated that reflecting an extra 1.8% of insolation would cancel out the effects of doubling the CO2 levels.
Various fanciful ideas have been proposed, such as dumping vast quantities of white polystyrene to float in the oceans (which could of course reduce their capacity to absorb CO2) or pumping sulphate particles high into the atmosphere to reflect the sun's rays (but this could cause catastrophic droughts in some regions, and would need constant renewal). A variation on the last one is to pump atomised seawater into stratocumulus clouds in order to increase their density and make them more reflective. This should work, but the processes of atomisation and of getting the water up to the clouds in such enormous quantities are obviously not trivial issues.
A more high-tech approach is to launch "sunshades" into space, in the form of discs of silicon about 60 cm across., just a few micrometers thick and weighting 1 gram. Each would be covered with holes calculated to act like a lens, causing dispersion and dimming of the sunlight. They would be "steerable" using solar energy to keep them in the correct position and orientation. The proposal involves launching containers, each carrying a million discs, from huge electromagnetic rail guns, towards the L1 Lagrange point where the Earth's and the sun's gravities cancel out. It has been estimated that twenty rail guns, each 3 km high and working around the clock to launch one container every five minutes for ten years, could achieve the 1.8% reduction, and it is hoped that the discs could last for up to 50 years.
The danger with all of these techniques would be if they were relied on to cancel out the effect of rising CO2 levels, thereby allowing CO2 to build up to high levels. Should the regular renewal of the sunshades then fail for any reason, the consequences to the climate of being suddenly exposed to high levels of atmospheric CO2 could be sudden and catastrophic.
A lower-tech approach would be to install reflective surfaces on the roofs of buildings or in the form of material covering desert areas, in those locations not required for solar heating or power systems.
Adapt to the changes
It is now accepted by climate scientists that any effective moves to reduce CO2 production will now be too late to avoid some unpleasant consequences – our politicians have already failed us by avoiding the potentially unpopular measures required. Even the 2007 IPCC report predicted a rise in global average temperature of between 2 and 6.4 degrees C this century and, as we have seen, a recent conference of climate scientists concluded that the outlook has worsened since that was written. An increase of 4 degrees by the end of the century now looks quite possible on present trends. So as well as continuing to try to minimise the warming effect, we are going to have to prepare for the consequences of a warmer world.
What this might mean is discussed in an article published in New Scientist on 28 February 2009 ("Surviving in a Warmer World"), which spells out the implications of a 4 degree warmer world. The picture painted is frankly horrifying. Much of the tropics would become uninhabitable due to drought, floods or extreme weather; the Amazon basin would become a desert, as would most of the USA, southern Europe, nearly all of Africa, southern Asia and Australia. Rising sea levels would mean that low-lying areas would vanish. On the bright side, there would be some potential for reforestation due to changing wind patterns, in west Africa and western Australia. However, the main areas suitable for habitation and farming would be Canada and Alaska, northern Europe and Asia, New Zealand, western Greenland and western Antarctica. These would become exceedingly crowded places, with the surviving population having to live in dense, high-rise accommodation to leave as much usable land as possible free for agriculture.
James Lovelock, who developed the "Gaia" theory, estimates that the devastation caused by climate change could result in the world's population reducing to 1 billion or less by the end of this century. Inevitably, there would be huge conflicts as displaced populations attempted to move to more favoured areas. Many observers think that the first climate change war has been underway for years, in the civil war in the Sudan. Christians and Muslims had lived peacefully side-by side in Sudan's Darfur province for centuries, but the trigger for their vicious war (in which 200,000 have already died and around two million been displaced) has been a dramatic reduction in rainfall over the past few decades, leading to increasing desertification and a conflict over the remaining usable land. If the regional climate projections are right, similar problems are likely to occur throughout the tropics during this century.
Other climate impact specialists consider that the worst consequences can be reduced, provided that we start planning and acting now, by determinedly adopting the kind of measures discussed in this survey. It's too late to prevent a lot of problems, but it's worth doing all we can to minimise the future scale of them, since that could prevent a bad situation from becoming utterly appalling. The political issues and pressures generated by all this are a potential source of material for near-future fiction.
Even if world leaders really begin to address this problem effectively, some changes will have to be made. The rising sea level, combined with more, and more violent, storms means that it would generally be futile to continue defending low-lying coastal areas. To give one well-known example, there is no point in the long term in trying to protect cities like New Orleans. This is already beginning to happen in a small way, with the evacuation of the 1,400 inhabitants of Papua New Guinea's Carteret Islands, and there are similar plans to abandon other low-lying oceanic islands. The prospect of millions of Bangladeshis moving into India as their land floods will raise problems on a very different scale.
Water shortages resulting from a combination of climate change and population growth will also require some changes to farming to get the maximum value out of agricultural land. One consequence is that meat-eating will have to diminish because, for the same food value, animal farms use farmland and water at several times the rate of crop farms. So the only farm animals likely to survive will be those which can live on rough mountain pasture unsuitable for agriculture. To make matters worse, fish stocks will continue to shrink, not just through overfishing but through the increasing acidification and deoxygenation of the oceans. The water shortages will almost certainly end the current squeamishness about genetically-modified crops; to produce enough food, it will be necessary to develop drought-resistant strains.
Even so, a switch to a largely vegetarian diet wouldn't provide a complete solution. Crops not only use up a lot of water, our commercial farms are also heavily dependent on oil, for farm machinery, transport and fertiliser. Reductions in the use of fossil fuels to cut back on CO2 production, combined with an increasing shortage of oil as cheap sources are used up, will make traditional crop-growing far more difficult and expensive. A recent UK TV programme on "farms of the future" predicted the decline of large-scale crop growing in favour of local "vertical farms", based on hedges and trees producing fruit, nuts and edible leaves, which can provide several times the food value of the same area of arable land. These require very little work or other resources to grow, but they are much more labour-intensive to collect.
That just about wraps up my survey. In a nutshell, climate change is accelerating, and if we wish to avoid some rather horrendous consequences, we need to put a far higher priority on taking the kind of preventative and precautionary measures I have been describing. I hope that all of this provides some useful material for the SF community; certainly there is scope for a wide range of backgrounds, from best-case to worst-case. My own novel, which I mentioned last time, was intended to represent a likely future but, in the light of the latest information, is now looking to be at the optimistic end of the spectrum!
Friday, 22 May 2009
The Time Machine by H G Wells
I surely must have read this at some point in my youth, but I can't recall it. All I can remember is watching the 1960 film version and that memory only involves Yvette Mimieux in a starring role, which gives a clear idea of adolescent priorities. So it was with some interest that I read this prior to discussing it with the Classic SF group.
H G Wells (1866-1946) was of course one of the pioneers of modern science fiction, writing such classic works as The War of the Worlds (invasion from Mars), The War in the Air (foreseeing aerial warfare – in 1908), The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon and The Shape of Things to Come. He also forecast – and named – the atomic bomb in 1914, in The World Set Free.
The Time Machine was Wells' first novel, published in 1895, and made his reputation. It is narrated by an unnamed guest at a Victorian dinner party given by a man identified only as the Time Traveller, and consists of the Time Traveller's account to his guests of a journey to the future from which he had just returned.
The story was controversial on publication because its principal theme was that mankind would evolve. Since resistance on the part of fundamentalist religious groups to the idea of evolution in general, and human evolution in particular, still exists even today, their condemnation is not surprising. What must have been even worse to many people is that Wells showed a humanity which had devolved into two degenerate races: the small and beautiful but unintelligent Eloi, who lived an apparently idyllic existence on the surface of a garden-like world, and the hideous and evil subterranean Morlocks. The novel, or more precisely novella since it is only 80 pages long, principally deals with the Time Traveller's stay with the Eloi and his encounters with the Morlocks.
A particularly interesting suggestion in the story, also obviously prompted by Darwin's theories, was that the decline of humanity had occurred because civilisation had become too successful; the upper classes lived such idyllic lives that the evolutionary pressures which had sparked the development of intelligence had disappeared. The lower classes, slaving away in the darkness, had similarly become adapted to their environment. In the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks, the ruins of an obviously glorious past (still in our future) were still scattered across the landscape.
Leaving the world of the Eloi behind, the Time Traveller rushes into the far future. He stops only when the sun has become a vast, dim and stationary red ball in the sky. All is silent, with just a few creatures scavenging a living in the thin air of a cold and almost dead world. For me, these brief images carry more evocative power than the rest of the story.
The themes of The Time Machine are as relevant today as they were then; the style of the story-telling has changed a lot, but the ideas still resonate. The impact which they had on a Victorian world largely unexposed to science fiction can be imagined. About the only anachronism is the short timescale, which only reflects the lack of knowledge when the story was written. The Eloi and the Morlocks are said to live just over 800,000 years in the future, the end of the world in only 30 million years. Compared with modern works there is also a total lack of characterisation, but that doesn't really matter here – this was a novel of ideas.
H G Wells is one of the few novelists whose work reached beyond its powerful influence on the genre, extending to a genuine impact on ideas in wider society. He also did more than write fiction; for the latter part of his life he became what would be known today as a futurist, concentrating on writing forward-looking works such as The New World Order and The Future of Man. Much of his later fiction also departed from SF, focusing more on society as in The History of Mr Polly, which I recall having to study in school.
The Everyman edition of The Time Machine which I have contains a lot of related material, including a chronology of Wells' life, a 23-page introduction to the story, comments on the text (plus an additional section which was omitted from the published novel) and the varied critical assessments of the work. Useful additions which add to the appreciation of one of the most famous SF novels ever written.
H G Wells (1866-1946) was of course one of the pioneers of modern science fiction, writing such classic works as The War of the Worlds (invasion from Mars), The War in the Air (foreseeing aerial warfare – in 1908), The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon and The Shape of Things to Come. He also forecast – and named – the atomic bomb in 1914, in The World Set Free.
The Time Machine was Wells' first novel, published in 1895, and made his reputation. It is narrated by an unnamed guest at a Victorian dinner party given by a man identified only as the Time Traveller, and consists of the Time Traveller's account to his guests of a journey to the future from which he had just returned.
The story was controversial on publication because its principal theme was that mankind would evolve. Since resistance on the part of fundamentalist religious groups to the idea of evolution in general, and human evolution in particular, still exists even today, their condemnation is not surprising. What must have been even worse to many people is that Wells showed a humanity which had devolved into two degenerate races: the small and beautiful but unintelligent Eloi, who lived an apparently idyllic existence on the surface of a garden-like world, and the hideous and evil subterranean Morlocks. The novel, or more precisely novella since it is only 80 pages long, principally deals with the Time Traveller's stay with the Eloi and his encounters with the Morlocks.
A particularly interesting suggestion in the story, also obviously prompted by Darwin's theories, was that the decline of humanity had occurred because civilisation had become too successful; the upper classes lived such idyllic lives that the evolutionary pressures which had sparked the development of intelligence had disappeared. The lower classes, slaving away in the darkness, had similarly become adapted to their environment. In the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks, the ruins of an obviously glorious past (still in our future) were still scattered across the landscape.
Leaving the world of the Eloi behind, the Time Traveller rushes into the far future. He stops only when the sun has become a vast, dim and stationary red ball in the sky. All is silent, with just a few creatures scavenging a living in the thin air of a cold and almost dead world. For me, these brief images carry more evocative power than the rest of the story.
The themes of The Time Machine are as relevant today as they were then; the style of the story-telling has changed a lot, but the ideas still resonate. The impact which they had on a Victorian world largely unexposed to science fiction can be imagined. About the only anachronism is the short timescale, which only reflects the lack of knowledge when the story was written. The Eloi and the Morlocks are said to live just over 800,000 years in the future, the end of the world in only 30 million years. Compared with modern works there is also a total lack of characterisation, but that doesn't really matter here – this was a novel of ideas.
H G Wells is one of the few novelists whose work reached beyond its powerful influence on the genre, extending to a genuine impact on ideas in wider society. He also did more than write fiction; for the latter part of his life he became what would be known today as a futurist, concentrating on writing forward-looking works such as The New World Order and The Future of Man. Much of his later fiction also departed from SF, focusing more on society as in The History of Mr Polly, which I recall having to study in school.
The Everyman edition of The Time Machine which I have contains a lot of related material, including a chronology of Wells' life, a 23-page introduction to the story, comments on the text (plus an additional section which was omitted from the published novel) and the varied critical assessments of the work. Useful additions which add to the appreciation of one of the most famous SF novels ever written.
Friday, 15 May 2009
Fiction bonanza from the BSFA!
The British Science Fiction Association doesn't usually publish fiction (unlike the other major UK SFF organisation, the British Fantasy Society); its periodicals contain reviews, analyses and other articles. So it was a surprise to find that their most recent postings contained three short-story collections. One consists of the four stories on the shortlist for the BSFA Short Fiction Award for 2008. The next is a special edition of their normally non-fiction "magazine for writers", Focus, which this time contains the six shortlisted stories specially written for a competition to mark the 50th anniversary of the BSFA. The third is a sampler edition of Postscripts, "The A to Z of Fantastic Fiction" (from www.pspublishing.co.uk), with stories from previous editions.
BSFA Awards 2008: short fiction shortlist
Two of the four stories I had already read and reviewed, since they originally appeared in Interzone magazine. These are Crystal Nights by Greg Egan (Interzone 215) and Little Lost Robot by Paul McAuley (Interzone 217). To save you from rummaging through the history of this blog, I'll reproduce what I said here:
Crystal Nights, by Greg Egan: One of the world's richest men is paying the best programmers to evolve artificial intelligence by developing initially simple virtual beings then applying a carefully controlled process of natural selection. With the aid of a new generation of superfast computers, the evolutionary process is extremely quick and soon the AIs are beginning to outstrip their human creators, with unexpected results.
Little Lost Robot, by Paul McAuley: A different take on Saberhagen's Berserker series, this time seen from the viewpoint of an ancient but still all-powerful robotic killer spaceship. Problems arise when the ship detects signs of life in a system which seems strangely familiar.
The other two stories are:
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang (first published in Eclipse 2): Set in an enclosed, robotic civilisation with no knowledge of other forms of life. The narrator, one of the robots, conducts experiments into his own nature and functioning, concluding (in an amusing take on creationist notions) that there must have been an "Intelligent Designer", and predicts the end of their existence.
Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter's Personal Account, by M. Rickert (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October/November 2008): A dystopian future set in a society governed by religious fundamentalism, where women found guilty of having abortions are publicly executed.
The pick of the bunch for me was Ted Chiang's story, very strong in the "sense of strange" gained from letting a denizen of an alien environment describe his life in a very matter-of-fact way.
----------------------------
Next, the stories in Focus, starting with the winner of the competition (the others are in alphabetical order).
Nestbuster by Roderick Gladwish
A doctor visits a man called Abraham and his family on a remote farm on a distant planet, to carry out some tests. It gradually emerges that Abraham is a former "nestbuster" – a soldier with highly enhanced capabilities to fight a war with aliens. These soldiers had been successful in winning the war but very few had survived, most committing suicide if they weren't killed in battle. The doctor wants to know why Abraham is still alive, but it turns out that he has another agenda altogether – and that Abraham has a secret.
Time's Chariot by Nina Allen
An intense relationship between a brother and sister living in a strange family, well described but not obviously SF.
Surf Town by James Bloomer
The Mesh Surf Pro Tour is arriving in town, using advanced technology to whip up the sea into waves to challenge any surfer. One resident, a former surfing champion who left the circuit when the artificial wave generators were introduced, is not pleased to see them. He has no intention of being drawn into the circus, but…
This is seemingly an alternative history story, since the champion surfer is called Bodie Miller, presumably a reference to the current US skier Bode Miller, one of the most successful competitors in recent winter sports championships.
The Mark by Nigel Envarli Crowe
The separate but intertwined stories of three women, related but of different generations, commencing with a Chernobyl nuclear accident and showing the long-term consequences for humanity.
Maria Via Lilly by Gary Spencer
A future world in which the dying can be scanned to generate a virtual copy (including the personality) which can be viewed on-screen, living in the environment created by the recorded memory. But what happens if the copy is stolen and duplicated for others to enjoy?
Rescue Stories by Andrew West
A space-ship crashes on a stone-age world, far from any chance of rescue. The crew can last for a long time in hibernation waiting for the natives to develop sufficiently advanced technology to help them, but only if the crew intervene to speed up the natives' development, which proves to have a drawback…. It brings to mind a similar story, although the ending is different.
-------------------------
On to Postscripts. This contains ten previously-published stories from Stephen Baxter (Eagle Song – the consequences of receiving a transmission from the stars), Ray Bradbury (Juggernaut – the hazards of moving house), Ramsay Campbell (Direct Line – a modern horror story), Peter F Hamilton (Footvote – the consequences of a wormhole providing access to another habitable world being opened in England), Joe Hill (Best New Horror), Stephen King (Graduation Afternoon – a horrifying image of what might happen), Paul MacAuley (The Thought War – zombies with a difference), Lisa Tuttle (Closet Dreams – more contemporary horror, without any fantastic elements), Gene Wolfe (Comber – life on a floating city), and Al Robertson (Sohoitis – a god lives in Soho). The emphasis is too much on horror for my taste, but an interesting read nonetheless.
BSFA Awards 2008: short fiction shortlist
Two of the four stories I had already read and reviewed, since they originally appeared in Interzone magazine. These are Crystal Nights by Greg Egan (Interzone 215) and Little Lost Robot by Paul McAuley (Interzone 217). To save you from rummaging through the history of this blog, I'll reproduce what I said here:
Crystal Nights, by Greg Egan: One of the world's richest men is paying the best programmers to evolve artificial intelligence by developing initially simple virtual beings then applying a carefully controlled process of natural selection. With the aid of a new generation of superfast computers, the evolutionary process is extremely quick and soon the AIs are beginning to outstrip their human creators, with unexpected results.
Little Lost Robot, by Paul McAuley: A different take on Saberhagen's Berserker series, this time seen from the viewpoint of an ancient but still all-powerful robotic killer spaceship. Problems arise when the ship detects signs of life in a system which seems strangely familiar.
The other two stories are:
Exhalation, by Ted Chiang (first published in Eclipse 2): Set in an enclosed, robotic civilisation with no knowledge of other forms of life. The narrator, one of the robots, conducts experiments into his own nature and functioning, concluding (in an amusing take on creationist notions) that there must have been an "Intelligent Designer", and predicts the end of their existence.
Evidence of Love in a Case of Abandonment: One Daughter's Personal Account, by M. Rickert (first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October/November 2008): A dystopian future set in a society governed by religious fundamentalism, where women found guilty of having abortions are publicly executed.
The pick of the bunch for me was Ted Chiang's story, very strong in the "sense of strange" gained from letting a denizen of an alien environment describe his life in a very matter-of-fact way.
----------------------------
Next, the stories in Focus, starting with the winner of the competition (the others are in alphabetical order).
Nestbuster by Roderick Gladwish
A doctor visits a man called Abraham and his family on a remote farm on a distant planet, to carry out some tests. It gradually emerges that Abraham is a former "nestbuster" – a soldier with highly enhanced capabilities to fight a war with aliens. These soldiers had been successful in winning the war but very few had survived, most committing suicide if they weren't killed in battle. The doctor wants to know why Abraham is still alive, but it turns out that he has another agenda altogether – and that Abraham has a secret.
Time's Chariot by Nina Allen
An intense relationship between a brother and sister living in a strange family, well described but not obviously SF.
Surf Town by James Bloomer
The Mesh Surf Pro Tour is arriving in town, using advanced technology to whip up the sea into waves to challenge any surfer. One resident, a former surfing champion who left the circuit when the artificial wave generators were introduced, is not pleased to see them. He has no intention of being drawn into the circus, but…
This is seemingly an alternative history story, since the champion surfer is called Bodie Miller, presumably a reference to the current US skier Bode Miller, one of the most successful competitors in recent winter sports championships.
The Mark by Nigel Envarli Crowe
The separate but intertwined stories of three women, related but of different generations, commencing with a Chernobyl nuclear accident and showing the long-term consequences for humanity.
Maria Via Lilly by Gary Spencer
A future world in which the dying can be scanned to generate a virtual copy (including the personality) which can be viewed on-screen, living in the environment created by the recorded memory. But what happens if the copy is stolen and duplicated for others to enjoy?
Rescue Stories by Andrew West
A space-ship crashes on a stone-age world, far from any chance of rescue. The crew can last for a long time in hibernation waiting for the natives to develop sufficiently advanced technology to help them, but only if the crew intervene to speed up the natives' development, which proves to have a drawback…. It brings to mind a similar story, although the ending is different.
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On to Postscripts. This contains ten previously-published stories from Stephen Baxter (Eagle Song – the consequences of receiving a transmission from the stars), Ray Bradbury (Juggernaut – the hazards of moving house), Ramsay Campbell (Direct Line – a modern horror story), Peter F Hamilton (Footvote – the consequences of a wormhole providing access to another habitable world being opened in England), Joe Hill (Best New Horror), Stephen King (Graduation Afternoon – a horrifying image of what might happen), Paul MacAuley (The Thought War – zombies with a difference), Lisa Tuttle (Closet Dreams – more contemporary horror, without any fantastic elements), Gene Wolfe (Comber – life on a floating city), and Al Robertson (Sohoitis – a god lives in Soho). The emphasis is too much on horror for my taste, but an interesting read nonetheless.
Friday, 8 May 2009
Where is Everybody? Fifty solutions to the Fermi Paradox, by Stephen Webb
The Fermi paradox is named after the mid-twentieth century physicist who posed a simple question: calculations based on reasonable estimates indicate that this galaxy should host a large number of extraterrestrial civilisations capable of interstellar communication or travel (which Webb shortens to ETCs), yet we have so far been unable to find any evidence for the existence of even one such civilisation. So where are they all?
The astronomer Drake later quantified the calculation like this: the number of ETCs in the galaxy (N) is determined by the rate at which stars form (R), the fraction of stars with planets (fp), the number of those planets with an environment suitable for life (ne), the fraction of those planets on which life actually develops (f1), the fraction of those which produce intelligent life (fi), the fraction of those which develop a civilisation capable of interstellar communications (fc), and finally the number of years that such a culture will devote to communication (L). The "Drake equation" therefore reads N=(R)x(fp)x(ne)x(f1)x(fi)x(fc)x(L). This looks impressively authoritative, but a moment's thought reveals that we have no means of knowing most of the factors, so figures which we enter for them are little better than guesswork. And the calculated number of ETCs will vary greatly depending on the particular guesses we make. Another point is that should any of the factors be zero, then the outcome will also be zero. Despite this, calculations of star formation rates for this galaxy result in N being a very large number even with pessimistic assumptions being made about the other factors. In other words, this galaxy should have been swarming with ETCs for millions of years, which we could hardly have failed to notice.
Having discussed this paradox, the author then briefly describes and evaluates a select fifty (there have been many more) explanations put forward to account for this interstellar silence, before revealing his own solution. As the reviewer, I will of course conclude by proposing a slightly different answer! Webb divides up the explanations into three broad categories: "They are here"; "They exist but have not yet communicated"; and "They do not exist". I'll take each of these in turn; I obviously can't do justice to a book full of ideas in a blog, so I'll just pick a few examples.
They Are Here
This group contains only eight explanations, ranging from the amusing (they exist and are meddling in human affairs), through the paranoid (we have been isolated by the galactic civilisation, or we live in a simulation), to the more serious (panspermia: we are all aliens, because life was kicked off by being seeded from outer space) and finally the religious (God created this universe only for us; any other ETCs have their own universes created for them).
Webb clearly doesn't rate any of these very highly. The most feasible, panspermia, doesn't actually solve the problem, since if our planet was seeded so presumably was every other suitable one – so where are they all?
They Exist But Have Not Yet Communicated
More than twenty explanations here, some of which argue that ETCs may for various reasons not be interested in travelling to, or even communicating with, other civilisations. Just because we are explorers doesn't mean that everyone else has to be. However, Webb points out that it only takes one with the same urges as we have to reach out to other worlds, and potentially spread throughout the galaxy.
Other explanations are therefore more practical, focusing on the difficulty of interstellar communication – let alone interstellar travel. The popular belief that ETCs in our neighbourhood would have detected us now via our routine radio and TV broadcasts is shot down; it appears that these would fade out before they could reach even the nearest star. Even a focused radio beam aimed at another star would be hard to detect; lasers are more promising, but a nearby ETC would have to exist now, and be beaming a signal directly at us, and we would have to be looking in the right place at the right time to notice it. Another idea is that they are signalling but we're not picking it up, for various reasons; or we have picked it up, but haven't properly analysed the data. Or possibly ETCs don't spend long in an active signalling phase before they upload themselves into computers or some higher non-material plane to enjoy the unlimited pleasures of virtual reality.
The difficulties of interstellar travel are well rehearsed, since there are no indications that Faster-Than-Light (FTL) spaceships will ever be possible and frozen sleep or generation ships have their own major problems. Bracewell-Von Neumann probes (which are sent to other star systems to mine their resources and then replicate themselves to send out to more systems) would be one way of spreading an inanimate presence throughout the galaxy quite quickly. The fact that we have not detected such probes is therefore a puzzle. Somebody should have got around to doing it.
They Do Not Exist
Webb lists almost as many ideas under this heading, which to me represents the most interesting part because it is more solidly based in science rather than speculations about alien psychologies or the like. These explanations look at the sequence of improbable events which has led to our civilisation and argue that this sequence may be unique.
There are several elements to this: first that the galaxy is a dangerous place, regularly blasted by intense bursts of gamma radiation from supernovae which would affect life for thirty light years around. The outer galactic zone in which the Solar System sits may be in the "Galactic Habitable Zone" (GHZ), a less vulnerable position than the more crowded central zone. The mysterious Gamma Ray Bursters (GRBs) are even more devastating; they could affect an entire galaxy and reset the evolution clock each time (for obvious reasons, they have so far only been observed in other galaxies). It is estimated that a GRB could happen in a galaxy like ours about every hundred million years, which would approximately match the frequency of mass extinction events on Earth. So maybe we are among the first to achieve a technological civilisation since the last GRB wiped out any previous ones.
The next point is that planetary systems are inherently dangerous. Catastrophic events such as asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes like Toba or other causes of wild fluctuations in the global climate may have led to many mass extinctions even without the help of GRBs or supernovae. Life may also require very particular circumstances in which to develop intelligence: obviously, any life like ours needs liquid water to be available for hundreds of millions of years, which means that the planet must be in exactly the right circular orbit (the continuously habitable zone, or CHZ) to achieve this even through various fluctuations in the sun's output. Finally, the tidal effects of one large moon plus the constant crustal renewal of plate tectonics may also be important elements in the conditions which led to us, although that is more speculative.
Then we come on to the biological improbabilities. A key one identified by Webb is the development of multi-cellular eukaryotic life, compared with much simpler prokaryotic life such as bacteria. This was a remarkable event which took billions of years to happen – possibly, it's uncommon. So might be the development of intelligence at our level. Perhaps most significantly, of all of Earth life, we are the only one to develop the sophisticated language without which our civilisation could never have arisen, so this may be a very rare feat. And we cannot assume that every intelligent civilisation will be a technological one.
The Author's Solution
Webb makes clear at the beginning that in assessing the probabilities of ETCs developing, he is looking only at life "as we know it, Jim": based on carbon and liquid water. He acknowledges that there may be other forms of life, but since we know nothing about this, there is no basis even for speculating what it might be capable of. Anyway, that doesn't affect the basic problem that we have detected no indications of any forms of life.
Webb's conclusion, based on the arguments raised in the last section, is that we can't detect any ETCs because there aren't any – at least in our galaxy. (There are estimated to be hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, but the difficulties of communication and travel escalate by orders of magnitude if we try to include them; our own galaxy is big enough to grapple with!)
His view is that our complete failure to identify any signs of life elsewhere, when all the logic of Fermi's paradox suggests that there should be countless ETCs out there, probably with successive waves of expansion affecting the Earth, has only one feasible explanation – that we are alone. He works through several steps to justify this. First, he estimates that star systems in the galactic habitable zone make up only about 20% of those in the galaxy. Next, stars like our sun are needed to develop life as we know it; they make up only about 5% of the total. So we are down to only 1% of stars being suitable. Thirdly, a terrestrial planet needs to remain in an orbit within the continuously habitable zone for billions of years. He guesstimates that applies to perhaps only 0.1% of all planets (assuming 10 planets per star, that's 1% of the suitable stars). We are now down to about ten million such planets in our galaxy.
Now we switch from the potential for life to its actuality. How many of these ten million will support life? Webb guesstimates maybe half a million, of which 20% might suffer catastrophic extinctions; now we have 400,000. Factor in the number on which life progresses to the complex multicellular eukaryotic stage – he suggests one in forty – and we're down to 10,000. Then apply factors for tool use, high-level intelligence and complex language – and Webb believes we're left with just one; us.
Your Reviewer's Conclusion
Webb puts forward a well-reasoned case to explain why we might have the only technological civilisation in the galaxy. However, I still find his conclusion improbable. Obviously, this is purely a matter of subjective opinion – emotional prejudice, if you wish – as there is no hard evidence one way or the other. It is just that faced with the early development of life on Earth and its tenacity in colonising every possible environmental niche and developing a myriad forms of increasing complexity, I find it impossible to accept that, among the billions of star systems, we might be in the only one to have produced a technological civilisation.
My conclusion goes part-way with Webb, in that I think that while life may be very common, complex animal life may be very much less so; beings intelligent enough to develop technology far less still; and the actual development of a technological civilisation extremely rare. Just look at the history of our planet; simple monocellular life seems to have occurred quite early, perhaps less than a billion years after Earth's formation. But the oldest evidence for complex animals comes almost three billion years later. These rapidly developed to dinosaur levels of complexity, but then stagnated for hundreds of millions of years. Finally, through sheer luck, humanity evolved, but the earliest hominims were around for several million years before modern humans arrived about 200,000 years ago; and for 95% of those 200,000 years, our ancestors did nothing but live in hunter-gatherer packs, like clever animals. Our technological civilisation is the result of a long series of improbable accidents.
As a result of studying Webb's arguments, I am more pessimistic than I used to be about the chances of other ETCs developing. However, given that there are calculated to be 100 billion stars in our galaxy (that's 100,000,000,000), even if our planet was literally "one in a million" in producing a technological civilisation, that still works out as 100,000 ETCs. So where are they? The answer I favour is "not here now". Two different timescales need to be borne in mind: the age of the galaxy, and the probable lifespan of an ETC. Our own star is around 4.5 billion years old, compared with the average for our galaxy of 6.5 billion years (the oldest star being over 13 billion). So if we assume that it takes 4.5 billion years after star formation to produce a technological civilisation (the only example we've got), that means that other stars average a two billion year advantage over us – lots of time to produce a huge range of ETCs. But how long can these ETCs be expected to last?
Just consider our situation again. We achieved the theoretical capability to communicate with other star systems only within the last century. Only half a century after that, we came dangerously close to wiping out our civilisation in a global thermonuclear war. Many scientists fear that over the next century or two we will have devastated our global environment to such a degree that our civilisation will collapse, giving us only a few centuries of possessing advanced technology. By definition, any civilisation with the technology capable of communicating with ETCs will develop the potential to destroy itself, one way or another. So perhaps ETCs just don't last very long. Suppose that the average is 1,000 years; multiply that by the nominal 100,000 ETCs mentioned above, and you get a total of 100 million "ETC years". Compare that with the 2 billion year average time advantage the galaxy's stars have over our sun, and you will see that an ETC will have been in existence for only about five percent of the last two billion years. So at any given moment there may be only a one-in-twenty chance of a single ETC existing anywhere in this galaxy. And no ETC would have the time to spread very far even if it wanted to; possibly none would ever manage to establish itself on another star system.
This is, of course, speculation built on speculation, but with a grand total to date of just one known example of a life-bearing planet to go on, that is bound to be the case. My vision is this: imagine if a camera could have been sited over our galaxy, filming continuously for the last few billion years, and recording each ETC as a bright flash. Then replay the film in quick time. I think we would see a huge number of ETCs sparkling all over the galaxy, from two billion years ago to the present. But slow the film down, and we may see only one flash at a time, with long pauses between them. Occasionally we might see two or more flashes occurring simultaneously, but on average they would be so far apart that communication between them would be highly improbable.
Webb didn't mention the Gamma Ray Burster problem in his conclusion, but if our galaxy is blasted by one every hundred million years or so, clearly many of the above calculations become rather academic. That could explain the silence all by itself.
And another thing…
A further point may limit the number of ETCs likely to be in existence at any one time. If an ETC is established on a planet and fails, for any of the reasons mentioned above, it may prove to be the one and only chance that planet ever has to establish an ETC. To understand why, just imagine the outcome if our present civilisation collapsed, leaving what would inevitably be a relatively small number of survivors existing at a subsistence level. Unless the environment had become irrevocably hostile to humanity, it is reasonable to suppose that some kind of recovery could be made, based on utilising organic resources such as wood to make carts, ploughs etc. The problem would arise with the switch to the mineral-based economy (metal processing and fuel) which, as far as we are aware, is needed to achieve an ETC – because the easily accessible mineral deposits have mostly been exhausted. Even if our unfortunate successors knew where the remaining oil or metal ore deposits could be found, they would be unable to reach them without the advanced technology we deploy. It would be a classic Catch-22; they couldn't develop a technological civilisation without advanced technology! Perhaps they would find a different, non-mineral, route to a more sophisticated level of civilisation, but it seems highly unlikely that this would result in the technology needed to communicate with ETCs, let alone travel to them.
SF is full of beautiful dreams about humanity spreading through the galaxy and meeting other technological civilisations (or nightmares if they turn out to be hostile). Sadly, these are looking increasingly like fantasy rather than SF. I hope this is wrong, and that SETI will discover proof of ETCs, but I'm more pessimistic than I used to be.
The astronomer Drake later quantified the calculation like this: the number of ETCs in the galaxy (N) is determined by the rate at which stars form (R), the fraction of stars with planets (fp), the number of those planets with an environment suitable for life (ne), the fraction of those planets on which life actually develops (f1), the fraction of those which produce intelligent life (fi), the fraction of those which develop a civilisation capable of interstellar communications (fc), and finally the number of years that such a culture will devote to communication (L). The "Drake equation" therefore reads N=(R)x(fp)x(ne)x(f1)x(fi)x(fc)x(L). This looks impressively authoritative, but a moment's thought reveals that we have no means of knowing most of the factors, so figures which we enter for them are little better than guesswork. And the calculated number of ETCs will vary greatly depending on the particular guesses we make. Another point is that should any of the factors be zero, then the outcome will also be zero. Despite this, calculations of star formation rates for this galaxy result in N being a very large number even with pessimistic assumptions being made about the other factors. In other words, this galaxy should have been swarming with ETCs for millions of years, which we could hardly have failed to notice.
Having discussed this paradox, the author then briefly describes and evaluates a select fifty (there have been many more) explanations put forward to account for this interstellar silence, before revealing his own solution. As the reviewer, I will of course conclude by proposing a slightly different answer! Webb divides up the explanations into three broad categories: "They are here"; "They exist but have not yet communicated"; and "They do not exist". I'll take each of these in turn; I obviously can't do justice to a book full of ideas in a blog, so I'll just pick a few examples.
They Are Here
This group contains only eight explanations, ranging from the amusing (they exist and are meddling in human affairs), through the paranoid (we have been isolated by the galactic civilisation, or we live in a simulation), to the more serious (panspermia: we are all aliens, because life was kicked off by being seeded from outer space) and finally the religious (God created this universe only for us; any other ETCs have their own universes created for them).
Webb clearly doesn't rate any of these very highly. The most feasible, panspermia, doesn't actually solve the problem, since if our planet was seeded so presumably was every other suitable one – so where are they all?
They Exist But Have Not Yet Communicated
More than twenty explanations here, some of which argue that ETCs may for various reasons not be interested in travelling to, or even communicating with, other civilisations. Just because we are explorers doesn't mean that everyone else has to be. However, Webb points out that it only takes one with the same urges as we have to reach out to other worlds, and potentially spread throughout the galaxy.
Other explanations are therefore more practical, focusing on the difficulty of interstellar communication – let alone interstellar travel. The popular belief that ETCs in our neighbourhood would have detected us now via our routine radio and TV broadcasts is shot down; it appears that these would fade out before they could reach even the nearest star. Even a focused radio beam aimed at another star would be hard to detect; lasers are more promising, but a nearby ETC would have to exist now, and be beaming a signal directly at us, and we would have to be looking in the right place at the right time to notice it. Another idea is that they are signalling but we're not picking it up, for various reasons; or we have picked it up, but haven't properly analysed the data. Or possibly ETCs don't spend long in an active signalling phase before they upload themselves into computers or some higher non-material plane to enjoy the unlimited pleasures of virtual reality.
The difficulties of interstellar travel are well rehearsed, since there are no indications that Faster-Than-Light (FTL) spaceships will ever be possible and frozen sleep or generation ships have their own major problems. Bracewell-Von Neumann probes (which are sent to other star systems to mine their resources and then replicate themselves to send out to more systems) would be one way of spreading an inanimate presence throughout the galaxy quite quickly. The fact that we have not detected such probes is therefore a puzzle. Somebody should have got around to doing it.
They Do Not Exist
Webb lists almost as many ideas under this heading, which to me represents the most interesting part because it is more solidly based in science rather than speculations about alien psychologies or the like. These explanations look at the sequence of improbable events which has led to our civilisation and argue that this sequence may be unique.
There are several elements to this: first that the galaxy is a dangerous place, regularly blasted by intense bursts of gamma radiation from supernovae which would affect life for thirty light years around. The outer galactic zone in which the Solar System sits may be in the "Galactic Habitable Zone" (GHZ), a less vulnerable position than the more crowded central zone. The mysterious Gamma Ray Bursters (GRBs) are even more devastating; they could affect an entire galaxy and reset the evolution clock each time (for obvious reasons, they have so far only been observed in other galaxies). It is estimated that a GRB could happen in a galaxy like ours about every hundred million years, which would approximately match the frequency of mass extinction events on Earth. So maybe we are among the first to achieve a technological civilisation since the last GRB wiped out any previous ones.
The next point is that planetary systems are inherently dangerous. Catastrophic events such as asteroid strikes, supervolcanoes like Toba or other causes of wild fluctuations in the global climate may have led to many mass extinctions even without the help of GRBs or supernovae. Life may also require very particular circumstances in which to develop intelligence: obviously, any life like ours needs liquid water to be available for hundreds of millions of years, which means that the planet must be in exactly the right circular orbit (the continuously habitable zone, or CHZ) to achieve this even through various fluctuations in the sun's output. Finally, the tidal effects of one large moon plus the constant crustal renewal of plate tectonics may also be important elements in the conditions which led to us, although that is more speculative.
Then we come on to the biological improbabilities. A key one identified by Webb is the development of multi-cellular eukaryotic life, compared with much simpler prokaryotic life such as bacteria. This was a remarkable event which took billions of years to happen – possibly, it's uncommon. So might be the development of intelligence at our level. Perhaps most significantly, of all of Earth life, we are the only one to develop the sophisticated language without which our civilisation could never have arisen, so this may be a very rare feat. And we cannot assume that every intelligent civilisation will be a technological one.
The Author's Solution
Webb makes clear at the beginning that in assessing the probabilities of ETCs developing, he is looking only at life "as we know it, Jim": based on carbon and liquid water. He acknowledges that there may be other forms of life, but since we know nothing about this, there is no basis even for speculating what it might be capable of. Anyway, that doesn't affect the basic problem that we have detected no indications of any forms of life.
Webb's conclusion, based on the arguments raised in the last section, is that we can't detect any ETCs because there aren't any – at least in our galaxy. (There are estimated to be hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, but the difficulties of communication and travel escalate by orders of magnitude if we try to include them; our own galaxy is big enough to grapple with!)
His view is that our complete failure to identify any signs of life elsewhere, when all the logic of Fermi's paradox suggests that there should be countless ETCs out there, probably with successive waves of expansion affecting the Earth, has only one feasible explanation – that we are alone. He works through several steps to justify this. First, he estimates that star systems in the galactic habitable zone make up only about 20% of those in the galaxy. Next, stars like our sun are needed to develop life as we know it; they make up only about 5% of the total. So we are down to only 1% of stars being suitable. Thirdly, a terrestrial planet needs to remain in an orbit within the continuously habitable zone for billions of years. He guesstimates that applies to perhaps only 0.1% of all planets (assuming 10 planets per star, that's 1% of the suitable stars). We are now down to about ten million such planets in our galaxy.
Now we switch from the potential for life to its actuality. How many of these ten million will support life? Webb guesstimates maybe half a million, of which 20% might suffer catastrophic extinctions; now we have 400,000. Factor in the number on which life progresses to the complex multicellular eukaryotic stage – he suggests one in forty – and we're down to 10,000. Then apply factors for tool use, high-level intelligence and complex language – and Webb believes we're left with just one; us.
Your Reviewer's Conclusion
Webb puts forward a well-reasoned case to explain why we might have the only technological civilisation in the galaxy. However, I still find his conclusion improbable. Obviously, this is purely a matter of subjective opinion – emotional prejudice, if you wish – as there is no hard evidence one way or the other. It is just that faced with the early development of life on Earth and its tenacity in colonising every possible environmental niche and developing a myriad forms of increasing complexity, I find it impossible to accept that, among the billions of star systems, we might be in the only one to have produced a technological civilisation.
My conclusion goes part-way with Webb, in that I think that while life may be very common, complex animal life may be very much less so; beings intelligent enough to develop technology far less still; and the actual development of a technological civilisation extremely rare. Just look at the history of our planet; simple monocellular life seems to have occurred quite early, perhaps less than a billion years after Earth's formation. But the oldest evidence for complex animals comes almost three billion years later. These rapidly developed to dinosaur levels of complexity, but then stagnated for hundreds of millions of years. Finally, through sheer luck, humanity evolved, but the earliest hominims were around for several million years before modern humans arrived about 200,000 years ago; and for 95% of those 200,000 years, our ancestors did nothing but live in hunter-gatherer packs, like clever animals. Our technological civilisation is the result of a long series of improbable accidents.
As a result of studying Webb's arguments, I am more pessimistic than I used to be about the chances of other ETCs developing. However, given that there are calculated to be 100 billion stars in our galaxy (that's 100,000,000,000), even if our planet was literally "one in a million" in producing a technological civilisation, that still works out as 100,000 ETCs. So where are they? The answer I favour is "not here now". Two different timescales need to be borne in mind: the age of the galaxy, and the probable lifespan of an ETC. Our own star is around 4.5 billion years old, compared with the average for our galaxy of 6.5 billion years (the oldest star being over 13 billion). So if we assume that it takes 4.5 billion years after star formation to produce a technological civilisation (the only example we've got), that means that other stars average a two billion year advantage over us – lots of time to produce a huge range of ETCs. But how long can these ETCs be expected to last?
Just consider our situation again. We achieved the theoretical capability to communicate with other star systems only within the last century. Only half a century after that, we came dangerously close to wiping out our civilisation in a global thermonuclear war. Many scientists fear that over the next century or two we will have devastated our global environment to such a degree that our civilisation will collapse, giving us only a few centuries of possessing advanced technology. By definition, any civilisation with the technology capable of communicating with ETCs will develop the potential to destroy itself, one way or another. So perhaps ETCs just don't last very long. Suppose that the average is 1,000 years; multiply that by the nominal 100,000 ETCs mentioned above, and you get a total of 100 million "ETC years". Compare that with the 2 billion year average time advantage the galaxy's stars have over our sun, and you will see that an ETC will have been in existence for only about five percent of the last two billion years. So at any given moment there may be only a one-in-twenty chance of a single ETC existing anywhere in this galaxy. And no ETC would have the time to spread very far even if it wanted to; possibly none would ever manage to establish itself on another star system.
This is, of course, speculation built on speculation, but with a grand total to date of just one known example of a life-bearing planet to go on, that is bound to be the case. My vision is this: imagine if a camera could have been sited over our galaxy, filming continuously for the last few billion years, and recording each ETC as a bright flash. Then replay the film in quick time. I think we would see a huge number of ETCs sparkling all over the galaxy, from two billion years ago to the present. But slow the film down, and we may see only one flash at a time, with long pauses between them. Occasionally we might see two or more flashes occurring simultaneously, but on average they would be so far apart that communication between them would be highly improbable.
Webb didn't mention the Gamma Ray Burster problem in his conclusion, but if our galaxy is blasted by one every hundred million years or so, clearly many of the above calculations become rather academic. That could explain the silence all by itself.
And another thing…
A further point may limit the number of ETCs likely to be in existence at any one time. If an ETC is established on a planet and fails, for any of the reasons mentioned above, it may prove to be the one and only chance that planet ever has to establish an ETC. To understand why, just imagine the outcome if our present civilisation collapsed, leaving what would inevitably be a relatively small number of survivors existing at a subsistence level. Unless the environment had become irrevocably hostile to humanity, it is reasonable to suppose that some kind of recovery could be made, based on utilising organic resources such as wood to make carts, ploughs etc. The problem would arise with the switch to the mineral-based economy (metal processing and fuel) which, as far as we are aware, is needed to achieve an ETC – because the easily accessible mineral deposits have mostly been exhausted. Even if our unfortunate successors knew where the remaining oil or metal ore deposits could be found, they would be unable to reach them without the advanced technology we deploy. It would be a classic Catch-22; they couldn't develop a technological civilisation without advanced technology! Perhaps they would find a different, non-mineral, route to a more sophisticated level of civilisation, but it seems highly unlikely that this would result in the technology needed to communicate with ETCs, let alone travel to them.
SF is full of beautiful dreams about humanity spreading through the galaxy and meeting other technological civilisations (or nightmares if they turn out to be hostile). Sadly, these are looking increasingly like fantasy rather than SF. I hope this is wrong, and that SETI will discover proof of ETCs, but I'm more pessimistic than I used to be.
Friday, 1 May 2009
Global Warming and SF – Part 2
A few weeks ago I summarised the current state of the developing understanding among climate scientists concerning the increasing rate of change in our climate. Even the 'most-likely' scenarios are now looking grim – the worst-case ones don't bear thinking about. So, what (if anything) can we do about it? What kind of measures might a realistic near-future SF story include?
There are basically four different approaches, most if not all of which may be needed in order to have a significant moderating effect on climate change. These are: to cut back CO2 production; to remove CO2 already in the atmosphere; to reduce insolation (heat received from the sun); and finally to adapt to the changes which are now inevitable, it being already too late to prevent some of the consequences of warming. I'll take each of these in turn.
Cut back CO2 production
This is the best known approach, or rather a whole cluster of different approaches under the same general heading. The techniques available range from the simple and obvious to the complex and difficult. The former are being applied already, to a greater or lesser extent in different places, but the latter will need strong political will on an international basis; i.e. they're not likely to happen until the consequences of climate change have become so obvious – and obviously bad – that not even short-termist politicians can ignore them.
Save energy - buildings: The relatively easy measures include changing building designs to minimise the need for heating in cold countries and for air-conditioning in hot ones. The former is well understood and already widely practiced; it requires good insulation standards, preferably including heat-recovery ventilation systems. The beauty of this is that most such measures can be retrofitted to most existing buildings, an important point given that complete replacement of our building stock will take a very long time. Measures to reduce air conditioning (likely to become increasingly important as the globe warms up) are less common and may be more difficult to apply to existing buildings. Some techniques are similar to the cold-climate ones – better insulation, smaller windows – but could also include installing an oversized 'floating' roof canopy, detached from the main structure, to provide shade without transmitting heat to the building. Some buildings are cleverly designed to have a ventilation system driven by natural convection, while 'green' roofs and walls – covered with plants – have been found to have a significant effect, not only in providing shade but in evaporative cooling. You do need a good water supply for these, though, which will be an increasing problem in many hot areas. Cooling systems using water circulating through underground pipes (a kind of reversal of the usual heat-pump heating system) may be more efficient than electrical air-conditioning.
Save energy – equipment and processes: Another well-known and much-practiced technique is the use of low-energy lights and appliances. Industrial processes are major users of power, an area which has probably received less attention so far than the domestic side.
Save energy – power generation: This is the major source of human-caused CO2 production, so non-polluting power generation has received a lot of attention in recent years, as demonstrated by the huge wind turbine farms sprouting up on land and in coastal areas. However, as is often pointed out, these aren't much good unless the wind blows. In fact, except for geothermal power, other sustainable power sources – hydro-electricity, tidal, wave and solar power – suffer from related problems in that the sources of power (even if reliable) are not constant, and may be a long way away from where they are needed. There is a potential solution to this, however; while AC current (in almost universal use) loses a lot of power when transmitted long distances, DC current does not. Until recently, converting DC to AC for domestic use was difficult, but solutions have been found. Some high voltage DC lines are already in use, and an international DC 'supergrid' has been proposed to link up Europe and North Africa. This will not only even out the supply from erratic sources such as wind power, but also provide access to solar power. Its proponents claim that a Europe-wide supergrid in conjunction with the full development of sources of sustainable power (mostly in the form of offshore wind farms) could reliably replace all of Western Europe's coal and gas power stations within thirty years.
Other alternatives being much discussed are the use of 'carbon capture' systems with fossil fuel power stations, by which the CO2 produced is trapped and pumped underground, and a revival in the use of nuclear power. The problems are that the carbon capture system is unproven (and some experts are dubious that it will work as advertised) and the supply of nuclear fuel is finite. Of course, if an economical source of fusion power could be developed that would solve most problems, but it's been 'coming soon' for about half a century and still seems a long way off, so it would be unwise to rely on that.
Interestingly, sustainable power is causing major divisions in the environmental lobby (a potentially fruitful source of SF plots). While all environmentalists are in favour of reducing CO2 production, some are also appalled by the alternatives, especially nuclear power, the visual blight of massive wind farms, and the potential effect on wildlife of huge engineering schemes such as the proposed tidal-power Severn Barrage in the UK. No doubt plans to cover vast areas of desert with solar collectors will result in similar protests.
These environmental protectionists argue that power generation systems do not need to be grand schemes. They believe that we should be thinking small-scale, with local generation of heat and power. Solar panels for water heating are commonplace now, and photo-voltaic solar cells are predicted to get a lot cheaper. These don't just work in hot and sunny climes; astonishingly, the world's major user of domestic PV cells is Germany, as a result of a scheme which provides significant financial rewards to people who sell their surplus power to the grid. However, while such schemes are well worthwhile and can reduce the demands on the power grid, the problem of the erratic supply of power from such sources can only be met by massive, interlinked, engineering projects.
Save energy – transport: This brings us onto another big polluter – transport. Much attention is being paid to road vehicles, with electric and hybrid (petrol/electric) vehicles in use and fuel cells being tested experimentally. Each of these systems, as presently conceived, has problems. Pure electric vehicles are limited to short-range use because of battery limitations. Furthermore, recharging batteries by plugging them into the grid isn't going to help much unless the electricity is generated from sustainable sources, so that would need to be in place to gain the full benefit from electric cars. Assuming that eventually happens, a battery swap system is proposed to allow drivers to change battery packs at service stations in the same way that they now fuel up, although there are indications that very fast-charging batteries may be on the way somewhat later.
Hydrogen cells, which develop electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen in a kind of reverse electrolysis (the only by-product being water) are at a much earlier stage of development. Hydrogen has to be manufactured (not currently a very clean activity) and special transporting, storing and dispensing arrangements would need to be put in place. This seems unlikely to be adopted on a large scale without major government start-up funding, because manufacturers won't develop and make fuel-cell cars unless they are confident that people will buy them in large quantities, people won't buy fuel-cell cars unless there is a comprehensive network of hydrogen filling stations, and companies won't manufacture and distribute hydrogen, or equip the filling stations to dispense it, unless there is a proven demand (or someone else provides the start-up funding).
Taking all of this into account, the best approach for the near future is to have an electric car with plug-in recharging and an internal-combustion on-board generator to top up the batteries on a long run. This generator could be very small, as it would only need to supply cruising rather than full power. It could also run at a fixed speed, further improving efficiency. The next stage will probably be all-electric, using high-capacity fast-charging batteries, with fuel cells possibly coming along later.
Of course, mass transport tends to be the most efficient way of moving people, at least in areas of high population density. Tram and other light-rail systems are proliferating and will probably continue to do so. Unfortunately, there is a major problem with aviation. The growth in this is very bad news for the environment, not only because of the large quantities of CO2 and other pollutants produced, but also because they get ejected high in the atmosphere where they are far more damaging than at ground level. It is very difficult to see what can be done to ameliorate this, apart from taxing air travel so highly that it once again becomes the privilege of the rich few, but this would be politically virtually impossible. Hydrogen fuel would help, but planes designed to use this are so far off that they don't even seem to be being considered at the moment.
A different approach to reducing vehicle pollution is to make fewer journeys. Modern communications technology makes it feasible for increasing numbers of employees to spend at least part of their time working from home instead of commuting into cities. There is also growing criticism of our exploitation of cheap fuel in amassing "food miles" (the distance food travels before it reaches local shops), one example being fish originating in Scotland being sent to Poland for preparation and packaging before being sent back to the UK for sale. This has led to a growth in the UK in "farmers' markets", which are limited to selling local produce, bypassing the big commercial distribution networks. This is another aspect of the "think small, think local" movement already identified in the section on power generation. This issue, combined with a likely increase in international instability caused by climate change, may well see traditional food importing countries like the UK reverting to more domestic local production. Our gardens of the future may well consist of vegetable plots, as in the Second World War.
Making it happen – incentives: Clearly, the speed at which all of the above measures can be implemented (at least in free-market economies) depends on financial incentives, as demonstrated by the German PV cell experience. It has been suggested that the simplest and most fool-proof method of encouraging the most efficient and sustainable use of energy for all purposes would be to tax all fossil fuels at source, when they are removed from the ground. This would not only discourage the use of fossil fuels, it would make sustainable energy sources more competitive on price. The major problem is that this would require global agreement, and that is inconceivable in present circumstances (when countries can't even agree to tax all aviation fuel). Maybe much later, if the environment is sliding into chaos, by which time it would probably be far too late.
The population problem: As mentioned in Part 1, an underlying problem which is going to undermine all of the attempts to minimise CO2 production is the projected huge rise in the world's population, from about 6.4 billion now to around 9 billion by the middle of this century. Although population forecasting is notoriously unreliable, anything remotely like this will cause enormous problems even without climate change. Unless, of course, there were to be devastating famines, epidemics or wars, with death rates orders of magnitude greater than anything seen to date, which is hardly an attractive option. Add in the predicted effects of climate change in drying out continental interiors, and such appalling outcomes become more likely as starving, desperate populations try to move to more fertile lands. It is hard to see a way to avoid this without drastic limits on childbirth, which even a dictatorship like China has struggled to enforce.
A different style of living: Can anything be done about coping with the population increase? The major problem is of course producing enough food, but the extra living space required will also be an issue, particularly since conventional housing developments use up a lot of land which might otherwise be growing crops. This suggests that different forms of living may be developed, possibly in the form of arcologies; huge buildings in which city-sized populations can live, work and play while occupying only a small fraction of the ground area of a conventional city – and also using up only a small fraction of the energy per person. By a not-so-strange coincidence, the novel on which I am (very intermittently) working, set a century into the future, takes place in such an arcology.
This subject is taking more space to cover than I expected, so the other possible measures to tackle global warming will have to wait until Part 3…
There are basically four different approaches, most if not all of which may be needed in order to have a significant moderating effect on climate change. These are: to cut back CO2 production; to remove CO2 already in the atmosphere; to reduce insolation (heat received from the sun); and finally to adapt to the changes which are now inevitable, it being already too late to prevent some of the consequences of warming. I'll take each of these in turn.
Cut back CO2 production
This is the best known approach, or rather a whole cluster of different approaches under the same general heading. The techniques available range from the simple and obvious to the complex and difficult. The former are being applied already, to a greater or lesser extent in different places, but the latter will need strong political will on an international basis; i.e. they're not likely to happen until the consequences of climate change have become so obvious – and obviously bad – that not even short-termist politicians can ignore them.
Save energy - buildings: The relatively easy measures include changing building designs to minimise the need for heating in cold countries and for air-conditioning in hot ones. The former is well understood and already widely practiced; it requires good insulation standards, preferably including heat-recovery ventilation systems. The beauty of this is that most such measures can be retrofitted to most existing buildings, an important point given that complete replacement of our building stock will take a very long time. Measures to reduce air conditioning (likely to become increasingly important as the globe warms up) are less common and may be more difficult to apply to existing buildings. Some techniques are similar to the cold-climate ones – better insulation, smaller windows – but could also include installing an oversized 'floating' roof canopy, detached from the main structure, to provide shade without transmitting heat to the building. Some buildings are cleverly designed to have a ventilation system driven by natural convection, while 'green' roofs and walls – covered with plants – have been found to have a significant effect, not only in providing shade but in evaporative cooling. You do need a good water supply for these, though, which will be an increasing problem in many hot areas. Cooling systems using water circulating through underground pipes (a kind of reversal of the usual heat-pump heating system) may be more efficient than electrical air-conditioning.
Save energy – equipment and processes: Another well-known and much-practiced technique is the use of low-energy lights and appliances. Industrial processes are major users of power, an area which has probably received less attention so far than the domestic side.
Save energy – power generation: This is the major source of human-caused CO2 production, so non-polluting power generation has received a lot of attention in recent years, as demonstrated by the huge wind turbine farms sprouting up on land and in coastal areas. However, as is often pointed out, these aren't much good unless the wind blows. In fact, except for geothermal power, other sustainable power sources – hydro-electricity, tidal, wave and solar power – suffer from related problems in that the sources of power (even if reliable) are not constant, and may be a long way away from where they are needed. There is a potential solution to this, however; while AC current (in almost universal use) loses a lot of power when transmitted long distances, DC current does not. Until recently, converting DC to AC for domestic use was difficult, but solutions have been found. Some high voltage DC lines are already in use, and an international DC 'supergrid' has been proposed to link up Europe and North Africa. This will not only even out the supply from erratic sources such as wind power, but also provide access to solar power. Its proponents claim that a Europe-wide supergrid in conjunction with the full development of sources of sustainable power (mostly in the form of offshore wind farms) could reliably replace all of Western Europe's coal and gas power stations within thirty years.
Other alternatives being much discussed are the use of 'carbon capture' systems with fossil fuel power stations, by which the CO2 produced is trapped and pumped underground, and a revival in the use of nuclear power. The problems are that the carbon capture system is unproven (and some experts are dubious that it will work as advertised) and the supply of nuclear fuel is finite. Of course, if an economical source of fusion power could be developed that would solve most problems, but it's been 'coming soon' for about half a century and still seems a long way off, so it would be unwise to rely on that.
Interestingly, sustainable power is causing major divisions in the environmental lobby (a potentially fruitful source of SF plots). While all environmentalists are in favour of reducing CO2 production, some are also appalled by the alternatives, especially nuclear power, the visual blight of massive wind farms, and the potential effect on wildlife of huge engineering schemes such as the proposed tidal-power Severn Barrage in the UK. No doubt plans to cover vast areas of desert with solar collectors will result in similar protests.
These environmental protectionists argue that power generation systems do not need to be grand schemes. They believe that we should be thinking small-scale, with local generation of heat and power. Solar panels for water heating are commonplace now, and photo-voltaic solar cells are predicted to get a lot cheaper. These don't just work in hot and sunny climes; astonishingly, the world's major user of domestic PV cells is Germany, as a result of a scheme which provides significant financial rewards to people who sell their surplus power to the grid. However, while such schemes are well worthwhile and can reduce the demands on the power grid, the problem of the erratic supply of power from such sources can only be met by massive, interlinked, engineering projects.
Save energy – transport: This brings us onto another big polluter – transport. Much attention is being paid to road vehicles, with electric and hybrid (petrol/electric) vehicles in use and fuel cells being tested experimentally. Each of these systems, as presently conceived, has problems. Pure electric vehicles are limited to short-range use because of battery limitations. Furthermore, recharging batteries by plugging them into the grid isn't going to help much unless the electricity is generated from sustainable sources, so that would need to be in place to gain the full benefit from electric cars. Assuming that eventually happens, a battery swap system is proposed to allow drivers to change battery packs at service stations in the same way that they now fuel up, although there are indications that very fast-charging batteries may be on the way somewhat later.
Hydrogen cells, which develop electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen in a kind of reverse electrolysis (the only by-product being water) are at a much earlier stage of development. Hydrogen has to be manufactured (not currently a very clean activity) and special transporting, storing and dispensing arrangements would need to be put in place. This seems unlikely to be adopted on a large scale without major government start-up funding, because manufacturers won't develop and make fuel-cell cars unless they are confident that people will buy them in large quantities, people won't buy fuel-cell cars unless there is a comprehensive network of hydrogen filling stations, and companies won't manufacture and distribute hydrogen, or equip the filling stations to dispense it, unless there is a proven demand (or someone else provides the start-up funding).
Taking all of this into account, the best approach for the near future is to have an electric car with plug-in recharging and an internal-combustion on-board generator to top up the batteries on a long run. This generator could be very small, as it would only need to supply cruising rather than full power. It could also run at a fixed speed, further improving efficiency. The next stage will probably be all-electric, using high-capacity fast-charging batteries, with fuel cells possibly coming along later.
Of course, mass transport tends to be the most efficient way of moving people, at least in areas of high population density. Tram and other light-rail systems are proliferating and will probably continue to do so. Unfortunately, there is a major problem with aviation. The growth in this is very bad news for the environment, not only because of the large quantities of CO2 and other pollutants produced, but also because they get ejected high in the atmosphere where they are far more damaging than at ground level. It is very difficult to see what can be done to ameliorate this, apart from taxing air travel so highly that it once again becomes the privilege of the rich few, but this would be politically virtually impossible. Hydrogen fuel would help, but planes designed to use this are so far off that they don't even seem to be being considered at the moment.
A different approach to reducing vehicle pollution is to make fewer journeys. Modern communications technology makes it feasible for increasing numbers of employees to spend at least part of their time working from home instead of commuting into cities. There is also growing criticism of our exploitation of cheap fuel in amassing "food miles" (the distance food travels before it reaches local shops), one example being fish originating in Scotland being sent to Poland for preparation and packaging before being sent back to the UK for sale. This has led to a growth in the UK in "farmers' markets", which are limited to selling local produce, bypassing the big commercial distribution networks. This is another aspect of the "think small, think local" movement already identified in the section on power generation. This issue, combined with a likely increase in international instability caused by climate change, may well see traditional food importing countries like the UK reverting to more domestic local production. Our gardens of the future may well consist of vegetable plots, as in the Second World War.
Making it happen – incentives: Clearly, the speed at which all of the above measures can be implemented (at least in free-market economies) depends on financial incentives, as demonstrated by the German PV cell experience. It has been suggested that the simplest and most fool-proof method of encouraging the most efficient and sustainable use of energy for all purposes would be to tax all fossil fuels at source, when they are removed from the ground. This would not only discourage the use of fossil fuels, it would make sustainable energy sources more competitive on price. The major problem is that this would require global agreement, and that is inconceivable in present circumstances (when countries can't even agree to tax all aviation fuel). Maybe much later, if the environment is sliding into chaos, by which time it would probably be far too late.
The population problem: As mentioned in Part 1, an underlying problem which is going to undermine all of the attempts to minimise CO2 production is the projected huge rise in the world's population, from about 6.4 billion now to around 9 billion by the middle of this century. Although population forecasting is notoriously unreliable, anything remotely like this will cause enormous problems even without climate change. Unless, of course, there were to be devastating famines, epidemics or wars, with death rates orders of magnitude greater than anything seen to date, which is hardly an attractive option. Add in the predicted effects of climate change in drying out continental interiors, and such appalling outcomes become more likely as starving, desperate populations try to move to more fertile lands. It is hard to see a way to avoid this without drastic limits on childbirth, which even a dictatorship like China has struggled to enforce.
A different style of living: Can anything be done about coping with the population increase? The major problem is of course producing enough food, but the extra living space required will also be an issue, particularly since conventional housing developments use up a lot of land which might otherwise be growing crops. This suggests that different forms of living may be developed, possibly in the form of arcologies; huge buildings in which city-sized populations can live, work and play while occupying only a small fraction of the ground area of a conventional city – and also using up only a small fraction of the energy per person. By a not-so-strange coincidence, the novel on which I am (very intermittently) working, set a century into the future, takes place in such an arcology.
This subject is taking more space to cover than I expected, so the other possible measures to tackle global warming will have to wait until Part 3…
Friday, 24 April 2009
Dune by Frank Herbert
Dune was first published in 1965 to immediate acclaim, and it remains one of the most popular SF novels ever written. I read it several times in the late 1960s and early 1970s but not since, so when it was chosen as "book of the month" for the Classic SF discussion group, I returned to it with great interest to see how it stands up today.
At around 500 pages it is a massive tome by the standards of the time (when less than 200 pages was a typical SF novel length), space which Herbert put to good use in making his world rich and complex. Unlike so many long novels, there is no padding here. The story is set in the distant future when humanity has colonised thousands of star systems, ruled by hereditary nobles with an Emperor reigning over all. The civilisation is held together by a spaceship service monopolised by the Guild of Navigators whose pilots rely on a drug called spice or melange, which enables them to see the future and thereby guide their ships safely. Melange is highly addictive, cannot be synthesised and is only found on the desert world of Arrakis. As a result of political machinations, the House of Atreides, led by Duke Leto, is awarded custody of Arrakis and its fabulous wealth. But the previous owners, the Harkonnens, have no intention of surrendering quietly and a bitter conflict results.
This would appear to provide all of the elements of a classic space opera but, unusually, almost all of the action takes place on the surface of one planet – Arrakis. The author thoroughly worked out the details of this world. The ecology is explained, backed up by an appendix devoted to it, with the interrelationships between giant desert sandworms and melange being a key issue. So also is the long-term attempt by the independent and ferocious desert-living natives, the Fremen, to alter the climate. The psychological, cultural and technical implications of living in such a harsh environment are a major theme, including details such as the design of the "stillsuits" which enable people to survive in the desert.
The rest of the story is also filled with fascinating and original ideas. The human reliance on computers had been destroyed in a revolt thousands of years before, prompting the developed of advanced mental powers through intensive training. The most direct computer replacements are the Mentats, who are able to analyse vast reams of data and compute probable outcomes of any course of action. Most advanced of all are the Bene Gesserit, a manipulative guild of women highly trained in both physical and mental skills to achieve astonishing feats; perhaps above all the ability to analyse personalities through their speech patterns and to influence their actions via the use of "Voice", a tailored manner of speaking.
The story is full of quasi-religious issues. Although not themselves religious, the Bene Gesserit encourage the development of religions which feature their own members as revered – and feared – leaders. They are also trying to create by selective breeding over millennia the "Kwisatz Haderach"; a man who will have all of their abilities plus be capable of far more. The Fremen are religious (influenced long ago by the Bene Gesserit) and are waiting for their own "redeemer" figure; Lisan al-Gaib. These concepts combine to form a key plot element.
More conventional space-opera elements are present, particularly the existence of shields which block any high-velocity projectiles, leading to the re-establishment of knife fighting as a key battle tactic. There is much exotic communication, with battle languages, code words, hand signals and even a private humming language used by two of the characters.
Despite this richness of invention, the writing is not loaded with infodumps, the author slips in just enough information in passing (with a glossary of the terms used at the back as an aide memoire). The first two-thirds of the book consists of one almost continuous sequence, but there is then a break with the remainder of the book being more episodic as the various plot threads develop towards a climax over several years. Some unconventional approaches are taken; for instance, one person is identified as a future traitor before even making an appearance, the author deliberately sacrificing conventional surprise to achieve a sense of impending doom. There is something of the flavour of an epic classical tragedy, emphasised by a "chorus" in the form of extracts from historical accounts at the start of each chapter, looking back on the events being recounted. This deliberate myth-making reminds me somewhat of Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality series.
Very unusually for SF of the time, the characterisation is good. Space is allowed for exploring personalities, for instance a formal dinner which takes up some twenty pages of fascinating multi-level exchanges, and six pages on the slow death of one character in the desert, giving us his final hopes and fears. Such is the skill of the author that such scenes as these are just as gripping as the action sequences. The hero of the tale fights against his destiny, regretting the way in which former friends have come to regard him but knowing he has to use their devotion in the right way. The conclusion is unexpected and satisfying.
Reading the book now with an author's as well as an SF fan's eye, I am more deeply impressed than ever. Dune is a superb achievement, one of the finest SF stories ever written, not just in plot originality but in the style of its writing. As so often happens, its success prompted a production line of ever-declining sequels. I read a few but kept only the first one, Dune Messiah, for a re-read someday. I won't comment on the 1984 movie, except to say that's what you get if you try to compress a densely-plotted book, which takes me around seven hours to read, into just over two hours.
At around 500 pages it is a massive tome by the standards of the time (when less than 200 pages was a typical SF novel length), space which Herbert put to good use in making his world rich and complex. Unlike so many long novels, there is no padding here. The story is set in the distant future when humanity has colonised thousands of star systems, ruled by hereditary nobles with an Emperor reigning over all. The civilisation is held together by a spaceship service monopolised by the Guild of Navigators whose pilots rely on a drug called spice or melange, which enables them to see the future and thereby guide their ships safely. Melange is highly addictive, cannot be synthesised and is only found on the desert world of Arrakis. As a result of political machinations, the House of Atreides, led by Duke Leto, is awarded custody of Arrakis and its fabulous wealth. But the previous owners, the Harkonnens, have no intention of surrendering quietly and a bitter conflict results.
This would appear to provide all of the elements of a classic space opera but, unusually, almost all of the action takes place on the surface of one planet – Arrakis. The author thoroughly worked out the details of this world. The ecology is explained, backed up by an appendix devoted to it, with the interrelationships between giant desert sandworms and melange being a key issue. So also is the long-term attempt by the independent and ferocious desert-living natives, the Fremen, to alter the climate. The psychological, cultural and technical implications of living in such a harsh environment are a major theme, including details such as the design of the "stillsuits" which enable people to survive in the desert.
The rest of the story is also filled with fascinating and original ideas. The human reliance on computers had been destroyed in a revolt thousands of years before, prompting the developed of advanced mental powers through intensive training. The most direct computer replacements are the Mentats, who are able to analyse vast reams of data and compute probable outcomes of any course of action. Most advanced of all are the Bene Gesserit, a manipulative guild of women highly trained in both physical and mental skills to achieve astonishing feats; perhaps above all the ability to analyse personalities through their speech patterns and to influence their actions via the use of "Voice", a tailored manner of speaking.
The story is full of quasi-religious issues. Although not themselves religious, the Bene Gesserit encourage the development of religions which feature their own members as revered – and feared – leaders. They are also trying to create by selective breeding over millennia the "Kwisatz Haderach"; a man who will have all of their abilities plus be capable of far more. The Fremen are religious (influenced long ago by the Bene Gesserit) and are waiting for their own "redeemer" figure; Lisan al-Gaib. These concepts combine to form a key plot element.
More conventional space-opera elements are present, particularly the existence of shields which block any high-velocity projectiles, leading to the re-establishment of knife fighting as a key battle tactic. There is much exotic communication, with battle languages, code words, hand signals and even a private humming language used by two of the characters.
Despite this richness of invention, the writing is not loaded with infodumps, the author slips in just enough information in passing (with a glossary of the terms used at the back as an aide memoire). The first two-thirds of the book consists of one almost continuous sequence, but there is then a break with the remainder of the book being more episodic as the various plot threads develop towards a climax over several years. Some unconventional approaches are taken; for instance, one person is identified as a future traitor before even making an appearance, the author deliberately sacrificing conventional surprise to achieve a sense of impending doom. There is something of the flavour of an epic classical tragedy, emphasised by a "chorus" in the form of extracts from historical accounts at the start of each chapter, looking back on the events being recounted. This deliberate myth-making reminds me somewhat of Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality series.
Very unusually for SF of the time, the characterisation is good. Space is allowed for exploring personalities, for instance a formal dinner which takes up some twenty pages of fascinating multi-level exchanges, and six pages on the slow death of one character in the desert, giving us his final hopes and fears. Such is the skill of the author that such scenes as these are just as gripping as the action sequences. The hero of the tale fights against his destiny, regretting the way in which former friends have come to regard him but knowing he has to use their devotion in the right way. The conclusion is unexpected and satisfying.
Reading the book now with an author's as well as an SF fan's eye, I am more deeply impressed than ever. Dune is a superb achievement, one of the finest SF stories ever written, not just in plot originality but in the style of its writing. As so often happens, its success prompted a production line of ever-declining sequels. I read a few but kept only the first one, Dune Messiah, for a re-read someday. I won't comment on the 1984 movie, except to say that's what you get if you try to compress a densely-plotted book, which takes me around seven hours to read, into just over two hours.
Friday, 17 April 2009
The Uplift War by David Brin
This story was first published over twenty years ago, but it's taken me this long to catch up with it. It is set something like half a millennium into the future, in Brin's 'Uplift' universe (the setting for a total of six novels so far). The Five Galaxies of civilisation are swarming with intelligent life, almost all of which was developed and genetically engineered ("uplifted") towards intelligence and a technological society by older star-faring "patron" races. This pattern was established three billion years before by the legendary and long-lost Progenitors, who laid down the law that all intelligent species had a moral duty to encourage the development of life in order to maximise the diversity of intelligence. Races earn their galactic status by the number of "client" races they are able to develop towards uplift.
The basic background to this universe is therefore quite utopian, but all is not perfect. The one exception to the pattern is humanity, who appear to have reached intelligence without external aid (although there are suspicions). Having avoided the 100,000 year period of client status (during which the uplifted species is supposed to serve their patrons) humans are regarded as uncivilised "wolflings". Even more galling to the old-established races is that by the time they were discovered by the Galactics, humanity has already uplifted two client races by themselves – dolphins and chimpanzees – and have therefore acquired status as patrons. Despite the noble sentiments which drive the Galactic civilisation the races are by no means all benign, and some become humanity's implacable enemies.
The Uplift War takes place on the planet of Garth, assigned to humanity by the Galactics in order to restore an ecosystem devastated by a failed uplifted race some fifty millennia before. The population of humans and their uplifted neo-chimpanzees is small and mainly involved in scientific work. Political disturbances among the Galactics lead to war, during which Garth is invaded by the avian Gubru. The plot is built around the resistance to this occupation, mostly by neo-chimps led by a few humans and helped by the ambassador of one of the few races allied to humanity, the Tymbrimi, and his daughter. The Tymbrimi are an interesting humanoid race with remarkable physical adaptability, unusual psychic sensitivity and a reputation as the Galactic jokers.
The theme of brave and clever resistance to an overpowering military occupation is an old one in SF, although more commonly set on Earth. The prime role of the neo-chimpanzees and the existence of alien allies also mark this one out as different. What really distinguishes The Uplift War, however, is the quality of the story-telling. This is a hugely enjoyable book from start to finish, hard to put down despite its daunting 630-page length. The neo-chimps are marvellously brought to life in a convincing mix of human and chimpanzee characteristics, and also with some pathos. Their uplift is far from over, and a selective breeding programme ensures that only the most advanced neo-chimps are able to pass their genes on to the next generation. In one scene, a "probationer" – a neo-chimp considered a failure and banned from breeding – bitterly points out that he would have been considered a great success only a few generations ago, and that in time the successful neo-chimps would themselves be looked down on by their more advanced successors. The Gubru and the likeable Tymbrimi are also convincingly brought to life and their alien thought-patterns well described.
A characteristic of Brin is his sense of humour and this is very evident throughout the book, with many laugh-out-loud moments. The mischievousness of the Tymbrimi provides plenty of jokes, but even more are focused on the hero of the story, the neo-chimp Fiben Bolger, whose wry and self-deprecating personality is a joy. Another characteristic is Brin's use of language; he introduces many colourful words which were new to me. Just about the only unconvincing moment for me was the unexpected climax of the book (which I can't explain without giving too much of the story away) which did come rather out of the blue. Overall, though, this is a wonderful story which can be unreservedly recommended.
The basic background to this universe is therefore quite utopian, but all is not perfect. The one exception to the pattern is humanity, who appear to have reached intelligence without external aid (although there are suspicions). Having avoided the 100,000 year period of client status (during which the uplifted species is supposed to serve their patrons) humans are regarded as uncivilised "wolflings". Even more galling to the old-established races is that by the time they were discovered by the Galactics, humanity has already uplifted two client races by themselves – dolphins and chimpanzees – and have therefore acquired status as patrons. Despite the noble sentiments which drive the Galactic civilisation the races are by no means all benign, and some become humanity's implacable enemies.
The Uplift War takes place on the planet of Garth, assigned to humanity by the Galactics in order to restore an ecosystem devastated by a failed uplifted race some fifty millennia before. The population of humans and their uplifted neo-chimpanzees is small and mainly involved in scientific work. Political disturbances among the Galactics lead to war, during which Garth is invaded by the avian Gubru. The plot is built around the resistance to this occupation, mostly by neo-chimps led by a few humans and helped by the ambassador of one of the few races allied to humanity, the Tymbrimi, and his daughter. The Tymbrimi are an interesting humanoid race with remarkable physical adaptability, unusual psychic sensitivity and a reputation as the Galactic jokers.
The theme of brave and clever resistance to an overpowering military occupation is an old one in SF, although more commonly set on Earth. The prime role of the neo-chimpanzees and the existence of alien allies also mark this one out as different. What really distinguishes The Uplift War, however, is the quality of the story-telling. This is a hugely enjoyable book from start to finish, hard to put down despite its daunting 630-page length. The neo-chimps are marvellously brought to life in a convincing mix of human and chimpanzee characteristics, and also with some pathos. Their uplift is far from over, and a selective breeding programme ensures that only the most advanced neo-chimps are able to pass their genes on to the next generation. In one scene, a "probationer" – a neo-chimp considered a failure and banned from breeding – bitterly points out that he would have been considered a great success only a few generations ago, and that in time the successful neo-chimps would themselves be looked down on by their more advanced successors. The Gubru and the likeable Tymbrimi are also convincingly brought to life and their alien thought-patterns well described.
A characteristic of Brin is his sense of humour and this is very evident throughout the book, with many laugh-out-loud moments. The mischievousness of the Tymbrimi provides plenty of jokes, but even more are focused on the hero of the story, the neo-chimp Fiben Bolger, whose wry and self-deprecating personality is a joy. Another characteristic is Brin's use of language; he introduces many colourful words which were new to me. Just about the only unconvincing moment for me was the unexpected climax of the book (which I can't explain without giving too much of the story away) which did come rather out of the blue. Overall, though, this is a wonderful story which can be unreservedly recommended.
Friday, 10 April 2009
Houses on the Borderland
This is an anthology of new "tales of the macabre" by six British writers, provided free to members of the British Fantasy Society. As the title indicates, the theme of this collection is inspired by William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland. There are seven novellas, all very different in their settings and plots, but linked by the central place of a building which is (in all except one tale) rather more than it seems.
Today We Are Astronauts by Allen Ashley. This story is the exception, in that there are no supernatural elements to the building; a remote lighthouse in a future in which humanity is being wiped out by a strange disease. A family is sent to the lighthouse together with the Mind Blocks, a virtual recreation of the minds of the great and the good, in the hope of preserving them for use once the crisis is over. However, the circumstances do strange things to the minds of the inhabitants.
The Listeners by Samantha Lee. The one traditional fairy story (of the Grimm sort) in the collection: a mercenary, travelling on horseback through a sparsely populated land, spends a night at an inn where an old man warns him about a strange house he will encounter on his journey, a house which locals in the inn say does not exist. Late the next evening, looking for shelter for the night, the horseman does indeed come across the house, and it is not what it seems. The tension is rather dissipated by the fact that the conclusion is clearly signalled part-way through the story.
The School House by Simon Bestwick. A present-day horror story about a malevolent old school and what it does to the minds of the pupils, both at the time and in their adult lives. Unsettling.
The House on the Western Border by Gary Fry. A divorcee escapes with her daughter to a remote house on the coast of Anglesey. A house which has stood empty for years and, she discovers (too late), is rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of the original inhabitant. A traditional ghost story combined with a modern concern about the exploitation of the Third World.
The Retreat by Paul Finch. A late-World War 2 setting here as a small group of German soldiers, survivors of Stalingrad, try to make it home through a bleak Russian winter. Frozen, exhausted and starving they are lost in a huge wood when they stumble across a wooden hut. One which is suspiciously warm and welcoming, and is much bigger on the inside than the outside suggests. A grim and gritty tale.
The Worst of All Possible Places by David A Riley. Back to present-day Britain and the horrors of a condemned tower block of council flats in which a reluctant resident is forced to accept a place. Only to find that it is even worse than he could have imagined. Far worse…
I'm not a fan of horror fiction – I recall reading some classic tales in my teenage years some four decades ago (names such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dennis Wheatley and the anthologist August Derleth come to mind), but none since – and I can't honestly say that this collection prompts me to seek out more. Not that there is anything wrong with the stories, they just don’t reflect my taste in reading material. Still, it made in interesting change from my usual fare, with each tale being short enough to read in less than an hour, the longest being just over 60 pages. I'm due for another exposure to more classic horror soon: for reasons of nostalgia as much as anything, I couldn't resist buying the recently-published Necronomicon: the Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft. I've quite a few other books to get through first, so don't hold your breath.
Today We Are Astronauts by Allen Ashley. This story is the exception, in that there are no supernatural elements to the building; a remote lighthouse in a future in which humanity is being wiped out by a strange disease. A family is sent to the lighthouse together with the Mind Blocks, a virtual recreation of the minds of the great and the good, in the hope of preserving them for use once the crisis is over. However, the circumstances do strange things to the minds of the inhabitants.
The Listeners by Samantha Lee. The one traditional fairy story (of the Grimm sort) in the collection: a mercenary, travelling on horseback through a sparsely populated land, spends a night at an inn where an old man warns him about a strange house he will encounter on his journey, a house which locals in the inn say does not exist. Late the next evening, looking for shelter for the night, the horseman does indeed come across the house, and it is not what it seems. The tension is rather dissipated by the fact that the conclusion is clearly signalled part-way through the story.
The School House by Simon Bestwick. A present-day horror story about a malevolent old school and what it does to the minds of the pupils, both at the time and in their adult lives. Unsettling.
The House on the Western Border by Gary Fry. A divorcee escapes with her daughter to a remote house on the coast of Anglesey. A house which has stood empty for years and, she discovers (too late), is rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of the original inhabitant. A traditional ghost story combined with a modern concern about the exploitation of the Third World.
The Retreat by Paul Finch. A late-World War 2 setting here as a small group of German soldiers, survivors of Stalingrad, try to make it home through a bleak Russian winter. Frozen, exhausted and starving they are lost in a huge wood when they stumble across a wooden hut. One which is suspiciously warm and welcoming, and is much bigger on the inside than the outside suggests. A grim and gritty tale.
The Worst of All Possible Places by David A Riley. Back to present-day Britain and the horrors of a condemned tower block of council flats in which a reluctant resident is forced to accept a place. Only to find that it is even worse than he could have imagined. Far worse…
I'm not a fan of horror fiction – I recall reading some classic tales in my teenage years some four decades ago (names such as Edgar Allan Poe, Dennis Wheatley and the anthologist August Derleth come to mind), but none since – and I can't honestly say that this collection prompts me to seek out more. Not that there is anything wrong with the stories, they just don’t reflect my taste in reading material. Still, it made in interesting change from my usual fare, with each tale being short enough to read in less than an hour, the longest being just over 60 pages. I'm due for another exposure to more classic horror soon: for reasons of nostalgia as much as anything, I couldn't resist buying the recently-published Necronomicon: the Best Weird Tales of H P Lovecraft. I've quite a few other books to get through first, so don't hold your breath.
Friday, 3 April 2009
Global Warming and SF
Global warming is an issue which is not going to go away, and that has implications for anyone writing fiction set in the foreseeable future. Any SF novel set within the next century or few which ignores this issue and its probable consequences will be likely to have a very short shelf-life before being seen as increasingly irrelevant. That doesn't mean that every such story should be about global warming, but that it should be set against a background which includes it – or the measures which were used to overcome it.
I don't, in this brief blog, want to rehearse the well-known basic arguments around global warming. Anyone who isn't yet convinced that this is happening as a result of human activities can read a wide variety of authoritative material on the web, such as the report of the US National Academies: Understanding and Responding to Climate Change; the Royal Society's Facts & Fictions about Climate Change; or, if you want the official 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change (the largest and most authoritative body studying this subject) go to the IPCC website. A more user-friendly summary can be found on Wikipedia, while I particularly recommend the New Scientist magazine's Climate Change: a guide for the Perplexed, since that also discusses the usual objections raised.
Instead, I want to focus on what might happen, and (in a later post) what might be done about it – subjects which provide very wide scope for science-fictional speculation. A recent conference of climate scientists in Copenhagen attracted some 2,500 delegates and heard 600 presentations over the three days. In the words of the New Scientist, "the majority [of these] showed the impacts of climate change would happen faster and be worse than previously thought". In other words, the predictions of the 2007 IPCC report are already being overtaken by events. This has been dramatically illustrated by the rapid shrinkage in summer Arctic ice cover.
This should be no great surprise. The rapid industrialisation of China (with a new coal-fired power station reportedly being built every week over the past few years) combined with the fact that very few countries have slowed down the increase in their CO2 output, was until recently boosting the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 levels over that predicted by the IPCC. For all of its other unhappy consequences, the current economic recession should at least slow down the rate of change and provide a bit of a breathing space to get our environmental act together.
Despite this general view that conditions are changing quickly and that this will result in serious consequences for the global environment and for humanity, there is still much uncertainty over what precisely is going to happen. This is partly because no-one is certain of the exact link between the rate of increase in CO2 production and the rate and ultimate level of the global temperature increase; and similarly no-one knows the exact implications, for climate patterns across the world, of any specific increase in average temperature. This leaves scope for some imagination on the part of SF writers.
Perhaps the greatest uncertainty – and cause for worry – is over the issues of feedback and tipping points. Feedback concerns the threat that some consequences of increased temperature will themselves increase the rate of increase. One obvious example concerns the accelerating shrinkage in polar sea ice. The ice reflects 90 percent of the sun's rays and thus keeps temperatures down. As this disappears, more of the sea is exposed and this absorbs over 90 percent of the solar heat, which helps to explain why the Arctic is warming up faster than the rest of the world. Another example is the existence of large quantities of frozen methane in the ground within arctic regions. As the ground warms up large quantities are already being released into the atmosphere – and methane is itself a greenhouse gas. This could all result in a tipping point, when the self-reinforcing changes gather such momentum that they rapidly accelerate beyond recovery. Nothing like as rapidly as shown in the ludicrous film The Day After Tomorrow, in which temperatures plummet drastically in a matter of minutes, but significant change could happen over a period of decades rather than centuries.
The expected consequences of climate change can be grouped under several broad headings: weather fluctuations; temperature and rainfall patterns; sea level changes; and ocean acidification.
The weather fluctuations we can already see happening are the result of increased atmospheric instability as the temperature rises. That means we are likely to see more, and more violent, storms. It also means that we are likely to see annual temperature and rainfall records continuing to be broken (in both directions). This is, however, by far the least serious of the likely consequences.
Changes in regional temperature and rainfall patterns, and their consequences for agriculture, will be far more significant. These are extremely complex and cannot be predicted with any great confidence, but some general trends are becoming evident. One is that some currently fertile areas, mainly in continental interiors, will become a lot drier. We are already seeing a pattern of increased droughts, in Africa, Australia, China and the USA, where water sources are being used up faster than they are being replenished. This is likely to have a significant effect on agricultural production, since this is one of the major users of fresh water. In part compensation, certain other regions of the world which are now too cold for agriculture will become available. However, it takes a very long time to develop fertile soils suitable for agriculture, and the total area of agricultural land is likely to diminish significantly. Meanwhile, it is virtually certain (for demographic structural reasons – lots of young people in many parts of the world) that barring devastating epidemics, warfare or famine, the world's population will continue to rise until the middle of this century, up from the current 6.4 billion to around 9 billion, with obvious implications for the demand for food and living space – and CO2 production.
It has been suggested that some areas may paradoxically become cooler, at least for a while before the general increase in temperatures pulls them back up again. The best-known possible cause is the stopping of the Gulf Stream (also known as the North Atlantic Drift or the North Atlantic Current, which is part of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation - AMOC) as a result of a surge of fresh water from melting polar ice. This currently keeps North-West Europe (including the UK) several degrees warmer than it would otherwise be, so the short-term impact of stopping it could be considerable. This was the trigger used for the sudden cooling so exaggerated in The Day after Tomorrow. Some studies have shown that the volume of flow of the Gulf Stream has already reduced by about 30% between 1957 and 2004, but the current view appears to be that a complete stoppage of the Gulf Stream is a less serious risk than previously thought.
The melting of ice brings me on to the third major concern, which is the changes in sea level. These are already happening, partly because the oceanic water expands as it warms up, but that effect is relatively small. It is also worth pointing out that the melting of ice already floating on the ocean (such as the Arctic Ocean ice cap centred on the North Pole, or floating ice sheets around Antarctica) has no direct effect on sea levels because the ice is already displacing water. The threat comes from the melting of ice which is currently on land. Some 90% of such ice covers Antarctica, another 9% is on Greenland, and the remaining 1% is in the form of glaciers and smaller ice caps scattered around the world.
To give an idea of the potential scale of the problem: if the West Antarctic Ice Shelf – WAIS – were to melt or slide into the ocean, global sea levels would rise by an average of about 5 metres. The disappearance of the Greenland ice would add 7 metres. If all ice went, the total rise in sea level would be around 70 metres (220-240 feet) but we don't need to worry about that – according to our current understanding, it would take many millennia, and in such extreme circumstances it is unlikely that humanity would be around to see it. For a more realistic threat, it is worth bearing in mind that sea levels were 3-6 metres higher during the last interglacial period although the global mean temperature was then only 1-2 degrees warmer than now. Current expectations are for an increase in temperature of at least 2 degrees by the end of this century, and it could be a couple of degrees more.
The conventional models of ice melting show that even the WAIS and Greenland ice would take millennia to melt. However, that assumes the ice would melt while still on land; a very slow process. It is now recognised that this isn't necessary, all it has to do is transfer to the ocean to provide the rise in sea level. There are signs that this is already happening, with the rate of movement of many glaciers showing a marked increase as they are lubricated by meltwater flowing underneath them. This could result in a much faster rate of increase of sea level, with an average rise of more than one metre by 2100 now being projected (about double that forecast in the IPCC report). Such a rise would have all sorts of unwelcome consequences for port cities and low-lying areas in which large numbers of people live and farm. There is, of course, a considerable lag between an increase in atmospheric temperatures and the melting of massively thick ice caps. What that means is that even if the average rise in temperature is held to just 2 degrees, the ice will continue to melt, and the sea level to rise, for centuries.
The most recent concern is ocean acidification, which is already happening. As temperatures increase, and the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise, more CO2 is absorbed by the ocean. This causes an increase in the acidity of the water, which potentially will have a serious effect on oceanic ecology as some creatures at the bottom of the food chain may find it impossible to cope. Coupled with world-wide over-fishing, this could result in fish disappearing from the human diet.
In conclusion: as the science firms up, the news concerning climate change keeps on getting worse in almost every respect. However, all is not (necessarily) lost. I will consider what might be done about this, which includes lots of SFnal ideas, in a future post.
I don't, in this brief blog, want to rehearse the well-known basic arguments around global warming. Anyone who isn't yet convinced that this is happening as a result of human activities can read a wide variety of authoritative material on the web, such as the report of the US National Academies: Understanding and Responding to Climate Change; the Royal Society's Facts & Fictions about Climate Change; or, if you want the official 2007 report of the International Panel on Climate Change (the largest and most authoritative body studying this subject) go to the IPCC website. A more user-friendly summary can be found on Wikipedia, while I particularly recommend the New Scientist magazine's Climate Change: a guide for the Perplexed, since that also discusses the usual objections raised.
Instead, I want to focus on what might happen, and (in a later post) what might be done about it – subjects which provide very wide scope for science-fictional speculation. A recent conference of climate scientists in Copenhagen attracted some 2,500 delegates and heard 600 presentations over the three days. In the words of the New Scientist, "the majority [of these] showed the impacts of climate change would happen faster and be worse than previously thought". In other words, the predictions of the 2007 IPCC report are already being overtaken by events. This has been dramatically illustrated by the rapid shrinkage in summer Arctic ice cover.
This should be no great surprise. The rapid industrialisation of China (with a new coal-fired power station reportedly being built every week over the past few years) combined with the fact that very few countries have slowed down the increase in their CO2 output, was until recently boosting the rate of increase in atmospheric CO2 levels over that predicted by the IPCC. For all of its other unhappy consequences, the current economic recession should at least slow down the rate of change and provide a bit of a breathing space to get our environmental act together.
Despite this general view that conditions are changing quickly and that this will result in serious consequences for the global environment and for humanity, there is still much uncertainty over what precisely is going to happen. This is partly because no-one is certain of the exact link between the rate of increase in CO2 production and the rate and ultimate level of the global temperature increase; and similarly no-one knows the exact implications, for climate patterns across the world, of any specific increase in average temperature. This leaves scope for some imagination on the part of SF writers.
Perhaps the greatest uncertainty – and cause for worry – is over the issues of feedback and tipping points. Feedback concerns the threat that some consequences of increased temperature will themselves increase the rate of increase. One obvious example concerns the accelerating shrinkage in polar sea ice. The ice reflects 90 percent of the sun's rays and thus keeps temperatures down. As this disappears, more of the sea is exposed and this absorbs over 90 percent of the solar heat, which helps to explain why the Arctic is warming up faster than the rest of the world. Another example is the existence of large quantities of frozen methane in the ground within arctic regions. As the ground warms up large quantities are already being released into the atmosphere – and methane is itself a greenhouse gas. This could all result in a tipping point, when the self-reinforcing changes gather such momentum that they rapidly accelerate beyond recovery. Nothing like as rapidly as shown in the ludicrous film The Day After Tomorrow, in which temperatures plummet drastically in a matter of minutes, but significant change could happen over a period of decades rather than centuries.
The expected consequences of climate change can be grouped under several broad headings: weather fluctuations; temperature and rainfall patterns; sea level changes; and ocean acidification.
The weather fluctuations we can already see happening are the result of increased atmospheric instability as the temperature rises. That means we are likely to see more, and more violent, storms. It also means that we are likely to see annual temperature and rainfall records continuing to be broken (in both directions). This is, however, by far the least serious of the likely consequences.
Changes in regional temperature and rainfall patterns, and their consequences for agriculture, will be far more significant. These are extremely complex and cannot be predicted with any great confidence, but some general trends are becoming evident. One is that some currently fertile areas, mainly in continental interiors, will become a lot drier. We are already seeing a pattern of increased droughts, in Africa, Australia, China and the USA, where water sources are being used up faster than they are being replenished. This is likely to have a significant effect on agricultural production, since this is one of the major users of fresh water. In part compensation, certain other regions of the world which are now too cold for agriculture will become available. However, it takes a very long time to develop fertile soils suitable for agriculture, and the total area of agricultural land is likely to diminish significantly. Meanwhile, it is virtually certain (for demographic structural reasons – lots of young people in many parts of the world) that barring devastating epidemics, warfare or famine, the world's population will continue to rise until the middle of this century, up from the current 6.4 billion to around 9 billion, with obvious implications for the demand for food and living space – and CO2 production.
It has been suggested that some areas may paradoxically become cooler, at least for a while before the general increase in temperatures pulls them back up again. The best-known possible cause is the stopping of the Gulf Stream (also known as the North Atlantic Drift or the North Atlantic Current, which is part of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation - AMOC) as a result of a surge of fresh water from melting polar ice. This currently keeps North-West Europe (including the UK) several degrees warmer than it would otherwise be, so the short-term impact of stopping it could be considerable. This was the trigger used for the sudden cooling so exaggerated in The Day after Tomorrow. Some studies have shown that the volume of flow of the Gulf Stream has already reduced by about 30% between 1957 and 2004, but the current view appears to be that a complete stoppage of the Gulf Stream is a less serious risk than previously thought.
The melting of ice brings me on to the third major concern, which is the changes in sea level. These are already happening, partly because the oceanic water expands as it warms up, but that effect is relatively small. It is also worth pointing out that the melting of ice already floating on the ocean (such as the Arctic Ocean ice cap centred on the North Pole, or floating ice sheets around Antarctica) has no direct effect on sea levels because the ice is already displacing water. The threat comes from the melting of ice which is currently on land. Some 90% of such ice covers Antarctica, another 9% is on Greenland, and the remaining 1% is in the form of glaciers and smaller ice caps scattered around the world.
To give an idea of the potential scale of the problem: if the West Antarctic Ice Shelf – WAIS – were to melt or slide into the ocean, global sea levels would rise by an average of about 5 metres. The disappearance of the Greenland ice would add 7 metres. If all ice went, the total rise in sea level would be around 70 metres (220-240 feet) but we don't need to worry about that – according to our current understanding, it would take many millennia, and in such extreme circumstances it is unlikely that humanity would be around to see it. For a more realistic threat, it is worth bearing in mind that sea levels were 3-6 metres higher during the last interglacial period although the global mean temperature was then only 1-2 degrees warmer than now. Current expectations are for an increase in temperature of at least 2 degrees by the end of this century, and it could be a couple of degrees more.
The conventional models of ice melting show that even the WAIS and Greenland ice would take millennia to melt. However, that assumes the ice would melt while still on land; a very slow process. It is now recognised that this isn't necessary, all it has to do is transfer to the ocean to provide the rise in sea level. There are signs that this is already happening, with the rate of movement of many glaciers showing a marked increase as they are lubricated by meltwater flowing underneath them. This could result in a much faster rate of increase of sea level, with an average rise of more than one metre by 2100 now being projected (about double that forecast in the IPCC report). Such a rise would have all sorts of unwelcome consequences for port cities and low-lying areas in which large numbers of people live and farm. There is, of course, a considerable lag between an increase in atmospheric temperatures and the melting of massively thick ice caps. What that means is that even if the average rise in temperature is held to just 2 degrees, the ice will continue to melt, and the sea level to rise, for centuries.
The most recent concern is ocean acidification, which is already happening. As temperatures increase, and the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere continues to rise, more CO2 is absorbed by the ocean. This causes an increase in the acidity of the water, which potentially will have a serious effect on oceanic ecology as some creatures at the bottom of the food chain may find it impossible to cope. Coupled with world-wide over-fishing, this could result in fish disappearing from the human diet.
In conclusion: as the science firms up, the news concerning climate change keeps on getting worse in almost every respect. However, all is not (necessarily) lost. I will consider what might be done about this, which includes lots of SFnal ideas, in a future post.
Friday, 27 March 2009
Interzone 221
The April issue of this bimonthly British SFF magazine arrived recently, so immediately claimed a priority place on my reading list. The cover illustration, by Adam Tredowski, shows a section of what appears to be a vast and rusting Victorian machine (complete with small, top-hatted smoking figure), with a planet's surface far below – I like this kind of surreal juxtaposition!
As usual, there are six short stories:
A Clown Escapes from Circus Town by Will McIntosh, illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe: a bizarre tale of a world in which clowns and other circus characters are the sole occupants of a town. One escapes to find similar towns scattered around the countryside, each inhabited by a different occupation. What's the explanation, and why do the inhabitants keep disappearing? A story which is amusing but also rather sad; just like circus clowns.
Fishermen by Al Robertson, illustrated by Geoffrey Grisso: a talented artist is captured by medieval pirates who have a specific task for him. Beautifully written in an elegiac style which reminds me of Guy Gavriel Kay, but not obviously SFF.
Saving Diego by Matthew Kressel, illustrated by David Gentry: a man travels across the galaxy to rescue an old friend, only to find himself in a dangerous situation, both from the planet-destroying numens and from old temptations.
Far & Deep by Alaya Dawn Johnson, illustrated by Lisa Konrad: a young rebel follows in the footsteps of her murdered mother on a tropical island. Another tale which is intriguing and well-told but, apart from one detail, not obviously SFF.
Home Again by Paul M Berger: the pilot of a star-travelling thought-ship returns home in an apparently domestic tale – until the chilling ending.
Black Swan by Bruce Sterling, illustrated by Paul Drummond: the friend of a science journalist appears to be an industrial spy who feeds him secrets concerning advanced technology. But the source of the material turns out to be far more bizarre than the journalist could have imagined.
A varied mix of tales, as is usual for this magazine, from SF to those with only a trace of fantasy. My vote for the most original and entertaining story goes to Will McIntosh, but I would expect that other readers' preferences would be scattered across all of them.
Bruce Sterling also features in a review of his latest novel, The Caryatids, and in an interview, both by Ian Sales. The novel is set in a near future in which many of the worst-case global scenarios have come to pass. I intend to return to this theme in a later post; can any near-future SF now ignore the increasingly dire warnings of what's happening to the planet?
The rest of the magazine consists of the usual detailed and thoughtful book reviews, criticisms of recent DVDs and films, and a news and obituary page.
As usual, there are six short stories:
A Clown Escapes from Circus Town by Will McIntosh, illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe: a bizarre tale of a world in which clowns and other circus characters are the sole occupants of a town. One escapes to find similar towns scattered around the countryside, each inhabited by a different occupation. What's the explanation, and why do the inhabitants keep disappearing? A story which is amusing but also rather sad; just like circus clowns.
Fishermen by Al Robertson, illustrated by Geoffrey Grisso: a talented artist is captured by medieval pirates who have a specific task for him. Beautifully written in an elegiac style which reminds me of Guy Gavriel Kay, but not obviously SFF.
Saving Diego by Matthew Kressel, illustrated by David Gentry: a man travels across the galaxy to rescue an old friend, only to find himself in a dangerous situation, both from the planet-destroying numens and from old temptations.
Far & Deep by Alaya Dawn Johnson, illustrated by Lisa Konrad: a young rebel follows in the footsteps of her murdered mother on a tropical island. Another tale which is intriguing and well-told but, apart from one detail, not obviously SFF.
Home Again by Paul M Berger: the pilot of a star-travelling thought-ship returns home in an apparently domestic tale – until the chilling ending.
Black Swan by Bruce Sterling, illustrated by Paul Drummond: the friend of a science journalist appears to be an industrial spy who feeds him secrets concerning advanced technology. But the source of the material turns out to be far more bizarre than the journalist could have imagined.
A varied mix of tales, as is usual for this magazine, from SF to those with only a trace of fantasy. My vote for the most original and entertaining story goes to Will McIntosh, but I would expect that other readers' preferences would be scattered across all of them.
Bruce Sterling also features in a review of his latest novel, The Caryatids, and in an interview, both by Ian Sales. The novel is set in a near future in which many of the worst-case global scenarios have come to pass. I intend to return to this theme in a later post; can any near-future SF now ignore the increasingly dire warnings of what's happening to the planet?
The rest of the magazine consists of the usual detailed and thoughtful book reviews, criticisms of recent DVDs and films, and a news and obituary page.
Friday, 20 March 2009
Passage by Connie Willis
I expect that most people will be familiar with the accounts from people who have temporarily "died" before recovering; impressions of travelling down a dark tunnel towards a bright light, of feeling that there are people at the other end. The theme of Passage is the exploration of such near death experiences – NDEs – to determine what causes them and what they mean. Two researchers in a hospital join forces. Joanna is interviewing everyone who experiences an NDE to find out exactly what they think they saw, while Richard is trying to induce artificial NDEs via drugs. Both are up against the influential Mandrake, an author who believes that NDEs are spiritual and indicate the entry to an afterlife from which messages can be sent back to the living. The story concerns the struggle of the researchers to collect and interpret their data.
This may sound rather mundane and not very science-fictional, and for much of the book there is some truth in that. In fact, it initially reads more like a medical drama (being heavy on medical processes and terminology), combined with incipient romance, until well into the second half when the plot takes an unexpected and dramatic turn. The remainder of the story is edge-of-the-seat stuff, in entirely new territory.
Connie Willis is a good writer who held my attention. However, this story is not without flaws. Chief among them is its inordinate length, at nearly 800 pages, which includes a lot of repetition. How many times do we need to read about Joanna and Richard's efforts to avoid Mandrake? How many stories from the ex-sailor Wojakowski must we hear? How many meetings with the young patient Maisie do we need? There were times when I was reminded of the film Groundhog Day. The plot proceeds with infinitesimal slowness for much of the book, and I did become rather frustrated with it. I think that it could have been drastically reduced in length without losing any of the plot or involvement with the characters, and it would have been better for it.
Furthermore, considering its length the characterisation is rather patchy. Joanna and Richard are rather sketchily drawn and Joanna in particular never really came alive for me. We are told very little about their private lives or why they are motivated to carry out this research. Conversely, some of the secondary characters are more clearly drawn, particularly Maisie, Wojakovsky and even the insufferable Mandrake.
Despite these complaints, Passage is a remarkable achievement. It is an original, daring, intensely atmospheric and powerfully imaginative work which is likely to remain with me for a long time.
This may sound rather mundane and not very science-fictional, and for much of the book there is some truth in that. In fact, it initially reads more like a medical drama (being heavy on medical processes and terminology), combined with incipient romance, until well into the second half when the plot takes an unexpected and dramatic turn. The remainder of the story is edge-of-the-seat stuff, in entirely new territory.
Connie Willis is a good writer who held my attention. However, this story is not without flaws. Chief among them is its inordinate length, at nearly 800 pages, which includes a lot of repetition. How many times do we need to read about Joanna and Richard's efforts to avoid Mandrake? How many stories from the ex-sailor Wojakowski must we hear? How many meetings with the young patient Maisie do we need? There were times when I was reminded of the film Groundhog Day. The plot proceeds with infinitesimal slowness for much of the book, and I did become rather frustrated with it. I think that it could have been drastically reduced in length without losing any of the plot or involvement with the characters, and it would have been better for it.
Furthermore, considering its length the characterisation is rather patchy. Joanna and Richard are rather sketchily drawn and Joanna in particular never really came alive for me. We are told very little about their private lives or why they are motivated to carry out this research. Conversely, some of the secondary characters are more clearly drawn, particularly Maisie, Wojakovsky and even the insufferable Mandrake.
Despite these complaints, Passage is a remarkable achievement. It is an original, daring, intensely atmospheric and powerfully imaginative work which is likely to remain with me for a long time.
Friday, 13 March 2009
Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny
Roadmarks was published in 1979, but I hadn't previously read it and in fact wasn't even aware of its existence until it was selected as the book of the month by the Classic Science Fiction forum. It is an intriguing read and makes quite a contrast with the more conventional and commercial Amber fantasy series for which Zelazny is now best known.
The early part of the book is confusing. Various apparently unconnected plot threads are set running, characters are introduced without explanation, and it is not at all obvious what is going on. It gradually becomes clear that the threads fall into two basic story lines, both concerned with travellers along the Road. This is no ordinary road, but a road through time; travelling along it moves you forwards or backwards in time, and there are occasional exits to enable the users of the Road to join or leave from particular points in history.
The main story line follows a man called Red, or Reyd, Dorakeen. He is a long-term traveller on the Road, on a permanent search for something even he is uncertain of. The other follows Randy Dorakeen, whose relationship to Red is at first unclear. The story keeps chopping between the two and the true situation gradually emerges, reaching a climax when the threads all come together at the end. I have to say that the instant I finished the book I immediately returned to the start and read the first fifty pages again so I could understand what they had been about!
Generally speaking I dislike books which leave the reader groping for understanding for much of their length, and was initially in some doubt as to whether I would even finish the story. However, Zelazny's writing was good enough to keep me engaged and there was plenty of entertainment en route, with exotic assassins, a planet-destroying robot, intelligent talking books, and even intelligent dragons (again!). Not one of Zelazny's best efforts, but it's interesting for its construction as well as its story, and at fewer than 200 pages is worth the brief reading time.
The early part of the book is confusing. Various apparently unconnected plot threads are set running, characters are introduced without explanation, and it is not at all obvious what is going on. It gradually becomes clear that the threads fall into two basic story lines, both concerned with travellers along the Road. This is no ordinary road, but a road through time; travelling along it moves you forwards or backwards in time, and there are occasional exits to enable the users of the Road to join or leave from particular points in history.
The main story line follows a man called Red, or Reyd, Dorakeen. He is a long-term traveller on the Road, on a permanent search for something even he is uncertain of. The other follows Randy Dorakeen, whose relationship to Red is at first unclear. The story keeps chopping between the two and the true situation gradually emerges, reaching a climax when the threads all come together at the end. I have to say that the instant I finished the book I immediately returned to the start and read the first fifty pages again so I could understand what they had been about!
Generally speaking I dislike books which leave the reader groping for understanding for much of their length, and was initially in some doubt as to whether I would even finish the story. However, Zelazny's writing was good enough to keep me engaged and there was plenty of entertainment en route, with exotic assassins, a planet-destroying robot, intelligent talking books, and even intelligent dragons (again!). Not one of Zelazny's best efforts, but it's interesting for its construction as well as its story, and at fewer than 200 pages is worth the brief reading time.
Friday, 6 March 2009
Fact vs Fantasy
This week I'm looking at a couple of items on the irrational beliefs front, concerning first creationism (again) and then the Mayan 2012 confection.
The good news is that the Texas State Board of Education has voted to get rid of wording which invites teachers and students to debate the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories. This wording had allowed evolution to be attacked in Texan science lessons for the last twenty years. The bad news is that a recent British poll (reported HERE appears to show that half of the British population doesn't believe in evolution. Only around 25% believe that evolution is "definitely true" and another 25% believe it's "probably true", with 22% preferring creationism or "intelligent design" and rest confused. I say "appears" because the exact wording of the question asked isn't given, and that is of course critical in affecting the responses. By comparison, it's only three or four years since a poll putting the question "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false?" resulted in 75% of Britons saying, "true", with 18% "false" and 7% "not sure". It will be interesting to see the results of any polls taken later this year, after the deluge of publicity and TV programmes about the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species.
While on this subject, there was an amusing item by Amanda Gefter in New Scientist magazine (28/2/09) concerning how to spot attempts to disguise religiously-inspired (or other unscientific) work as science. Samples of some key phrases to look for:
"Darwinism": scientists rarely use the term – they use "evolution" instead
"irreducibly complex": implying that it couldn't have evolved from something simpler
"academic freedom": when appealed to, usually means the freedom to teach creationism
"common sense": when appealed to; science works on theories based on evidence and may reach conclusions entirely opposed to common sense.
"scientific materialism": implying that the immaterial exists
"quantum physics" in an article which is clearly not about physics ("quantum" being the latest mystical buzz-word to give apparent respectability to bonkers notions)
There's more, but this gives the general idea!
-----------------------------------------------------
I have only recently stumbled across the Mayan 2012 cataclysm belief, which I gather is very popular in some quarters. For those as yet unexposed to this wonder, it concerns the fact that the Mayan "long count" calendar (they were fond of grouping years into various different cycles) comes to an end on 21 December 2012, when some terrible event is predicted to happen. It is also claimed by one Terence McKenna, who invented something called "Timewave Zero" which "purports to calculate the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time", that "the novelty [is] progressing towards the infinity on 21st December 2012". (see THIS item). Wow! With modern mathematical theory backing up ancient Mayan beliefs, there must really be something in this, right?
Just a couple of problems with this: the Mayans did not predict catastrophe at the end of the long count – in fact, they had celebrations at the end of their year cycles to welcome in the next cycle, just as we did at the end of the Millennium. The predictions of doom were the recent invention of a New Age theorist, José Argüelles, whose ideas have been dismissed by all professional Mayan scholars. As for McKenna, it turns out that no serious mathematician has accepted his ideas: they are just numerology (which is in the same category of scientific validity as astrology). Even more damning, McKenna (an advocate of "magic mushrooms" as the key to understanding), deliberately changed his initial calculations to match up his critical date with the end of the Mayan long count, so it is hardly surprising that they are the same.
I must once more recommend, to anyone who might be tempted to believe such nonsense, Gilovich's book 'How We Know What Isn't So', which I reviewed earlier on this blog (see the review list on the left). It really should be essential reading. You might also pay a visit to the UK-Skeptics forum where all manner of irrational beliefs are viewed with a critical eye. As one contributor pointed out in a discussion on 2012, we needn't worry about it even if you believe such catastrophe theories because we're not going to last that long. The end of the world is supposed to happen in 2010 according to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, or 31st December 2011 (if we fail to rid ourselves of all evil) according to Solara Antara Amaa-ra, leader of the "11:11 Doorway Movement". The fact that countless "end of the world" predictions have come and gone doesn't seem to discourage such fantasists. I suppose it could be regarded as the triumph of pessimism over experience!
The good news is that the Texas State Board of Education has voted to get rid of wording which invites teachers and students to debate the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories. This wording had allowed evolution to be attacked in Texan science lessons for the last twenty years. The bad news is that a recent British poll (reported HERE appears to show that half of the British population doesn't believe in evolution. Only around 25% believe that evolution is "definitely true" and another 25% believe it's "probably true", with 22% preferring creationism or "intelligent design" and rest confused. I say "appears" because the exact wording of the question asked isn't given, and that is of course critical in affecting the responses. By comparison, it's only three or four years since a poll putting the question "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false?" resulted in 75% of Britons saying, "true", with 18% "false" and 7% "not sure". It will be interesting to see the results of any polls taken later this year, after the deluge of publicity and TV programmes about the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species.
While on this subject, there was an amusing item by Amanda Gefter in New Scientist magazine (28/2/09) concerning how to spot attempts to disguise religiously-inspired (or other unscientific) work as science. Samples of some key phrases to look for:
"Darwinism": scientists rarely use the term – they use "evolution" instead
"irreducibly complex": implying that it couldn't have evolved from something simpler
"academic freedom": when appealed to, usually means the freedom to teach creationism
"common sense": when appealed to; science works on theories based on evidence and may reach conclusions entirely opposed to common sense.
"scientific materialism": implying that the immaterial exists
"quantum physics" in an article which is clearly not about physics ("quantum" being the latest mystical buzz-word to give apparent respectability to bonkers notions)
There's more, but this gives the general idea!
-----------------------------------------------------
I have only recently stumbled across the Mayan 2012 cataclysm belief, which I gather is very popular in some quarters. For those as yet unexposed to this wonder, it concerns the fact that the Mayan "long count" calendar (they were fond of grouping years into various different cycles) comes to an end on 21 December 2012, when some terrible event is predicted to happen. It is also claimed by one Terence McKenna, who invented something called "Timewave Zero" which "purports to calculate the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time", that "the novelty [is] progressing towards the infinity on 21st December 2012". (see THIS item). Wow! With modern mathematical theory backing up ancient Mayan beliefs, there must really be something in this, right?
Just a couple of problems with this: the Mayans did not predict catastrophe at the end of the long count – in fact, they had celebrations at the end of their year cycles to welcome in the next cycle, just as we did at the end of the Millennium. The predictions of doom were the recent invention of a New Age theorist, José Argüelles, whose ideas have been dismissed by all professional Mayan scholars. As for McKenna, it turns out that no serious mathematician has accepted his ideas: they are just numerology (which is in the same category of scientific validity as astrology). Even more damning, McKenna (an advocate of "magic mushrooms" as the key to understanding), deliberately changed his initial calculations to match up his critical date with the end of the Mayan long count, so it is hardly surprising that they are the same.
I must once more recommend, to anyone who might be tempted to believe such nonsense, Gilovich's book 'How We Know What Isn't So', which I reviewed earlier on this blog (see the review list on the left). It really should be essential reading. You might also pay a visit to the UK-Skeptics forum where all manner of irrational beliefs are viewed with a critical eye. As one contributor pointed out in a discussion on 2012, we needn't worry about it even if you believe such catastrophe theories because we're not going to last that long. The end of the world is supposed to happen in 2010 according to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, or 31st December 2011 (if we fail to rid ourselves of all evil) according to Solara Antara Amaa-ra, leader of the "11:11 Doorway Movement". The fact that countless "end of the world" predictions have come and gone doesn't seem to discourage such fantasists. I suppose it could be regarded as the triumph of pessimism over experience!
Friday, 27 February 2009
Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
I first read this book when the UK paperback came out in 1970 and was blown away by it. I read it at least a couple more times over the next few years, but not since. Having recently reviewed Naomi Novik's Temeraire, which borrows heavily from Dragonflight in its concept of dragons, I thought it was time to give the original work a re-read.
I'm not sure who first invented the idea of intelligent dragons. There was of course Smaug, the wonderfully evil beast in Tolkien's The Hobbit, but he was hardly friendly. As far as I know (although I'll be happy to be corrected), McCaffrey was the first to come up with the idea of a life-long bond (in this case, telepathic) being formed between a newly hatched dragon and one particular human. It's a compelling idea which has been copied since, by others before Novik.
Dragonflight is ostensibly a science-fiction story which has far more of the feel of a fantasy. It is set on another planet, Pern, a long time in the future, where human settlers have for some reason been abandoned to their fate. A very long time later, they have reverted to a medieval level of existence with one difference – dragons. Smaller flying reptiles were native to the planet, but were genetically engineered into different and much larger forms when the original settlers discovered a major problem. A neighbouring planet had an irregular orbit which from time to time brought it very close to Pern. When that happened, masses of strings of spores, called threads, were ejected from it and fell onto Pern. Where they fell, they killed all living things. The best way of destroying them was by fire, preferably in mid-air before they reached the ground. The newly created dragons could breathe fire and were big enough to carry a human rider, so the dragonriders formed an aerial cavalry, flying to the rescue of places threatened by threadfall. They were helped in this by the dragons' ability to teleport instantly to anywhere on the planet. However, at the time of the story there had been no threadfall for centuries and the population was becoming tired of supporting the dragons and their riders, who lived apart in remote weyrs.
The tale follows the fortunes of Lessa, a girl who we first meet living a drudge's life, and F'lar, a male dragonrider. It would be unfair to reveal any of the plot and thereby deprive new readers of the pleasure of discovering this book, but suffice to say it is a beautifully-crafted gem of a story which, not surprisingly, won both Hugo and Nebula awards. It's packed with so many themes and incidents that it seems incredible that it's only 250 pages long; it would almost certainly be far longer if written today. Despite the brevity, the reader is far from short-changed. The characters (human and dragon) are clearly drawn and the reader comes to care about them. There is political intrigue, adventure, mystery, dramatic developments, romance, believable domestic details, terrible dangers to be faced, and lots and lots about dragons. The twist in the tail of the tale is well-conceived and brings the story to a satisfying conclusion.
By current fashions the structure and writing would probably be criticised by an editor. There is an introduction to set the scene (nowadays writers are supposed to plunge straight into the action) and there's lots of description – the short first chapter contains not a word of dialogue – whereas the modern mantra is "show don't tell". As far as this reviewer is concerned, that reflects badly on the current fashions rather than on this book. Dragonflight is one of those rare stories which is like a comforting duvet that you wrap around yourself and just love being inside – it's a wrench to leave. For this reason I am reluctant to nit-pick the few story details which prompted question marks in my mind.
Dragonflight is a stand-alone story, complete in itself (unlike Temeraire, which is obviously the first part of a longer tale). However, the world McCaffrey created became so popular that many other novels set in it eventually appeared. I read a few of them but I've kept only the first two for a possible re-read sometime (Dragonquest and The White Dragon). None of them has the freshness, originality and charm of the original and the quality declined steadily. This should not detract from Dragonflight, which is a true classic and one of the most enjoyable SFF novels ever written.
I'm not sure who first invented the idea of intelligent dragons. There was of course Smaug, the wonderfully evil beast in Tolkien's The Hobbit, but he was hardly friendly. As far as I know (although I'll be happy to be corrected), McCaffrey was the first to come up with the idea of a life-long bond (in this case, telepathic) being formed between a newly hatched dragon and one particular human. It's a compelling idea which has been copied since, by others before Novik.
Dragonflight is ostensibly a science-fiction story which has far more of the feel of a fantasy. It is set on another planet, Pern, a long time in the future, where human settlers have for some reason been abandoned to their fate. A very long time later, they have reverted to a medieval level of existence with one difference – dragons. Smaller flying reptiles were native to the planet, but were genetically engineered into different and much larger forms when the original settlers discovered a major problem. A neighbouring planet had an irregular orbit which from time to time brought it very close to Pern. When that happened, masses of strings of spores, called threads, were ejected from it and fell onto Pern. Where they fell, they killed all living things. The best way of destroying them was by fire, preferably in mid-air before they reached the ground. The newly created dragons could breathe fire and were big enough to carry a human rider, so the dragonriders formed an aerial cavalry, flying to the rescue of places threatened by threadfall. They were helped in this by the dragons' ability to teleport instantly to anywhere on the planet. However, at the time of the story there had been no threadfall for centuries and the population was becoming tired of supporting the dragons and their riders, who lived apart in remote weyrs.
The tale follows the fortunes of Lessa, a girl who we first meet living a drudge's life, and F'lar, a male dragonrider. It would be unfair to reveal any of the plot and thereby deprive new readers of the pleasure of discovering this book, but suffice to say it is a beautifully-crafted gem of a story which, not surprisingly, won both Hugo and Nebula awards. It's packed with so many themes and incidents that it seems incredible that it's only 250 pages long; it would almost certainly be far longer if written today. Despite the brevity, the reader is far from short-changed. The characters (human and dragon) are clearly drawn and the reader comes to care about them. There is political intrigue, adventure, mystery, dramatic developments, romance, believable domestic details, terrible dangers to be faced, and lots and lots about dragons. The twist in the tail of the tale is well-conceived and brings the story to a satisfying conclusion.
By current fashions the structure and writing would probably be criticised by an editor. There is an introduction to set the scene (nowadays writers are supposed to plunge straight into the action) and there's lots of description – the short first chapter contains not a word of dialogue – whereas the modern mantra is "show don't tell". As far as this reviewer is concerned, that reflects badly on the current fashions rather than on this book. Dragonflight is one of those rare stories which is like a comforting duvet that you wrap around yourself and just love being inside – it's a wrench to leave. For this reason I am reluctant to nit-pick the few story details which prompted question marks in my mind.
Dragonflight is a stand-alone story, complete in itself (unlike Temeraire, which is obviously the first part of a longer tale). However, the world McCaffrey created became so popular that many other novels set in it eventually appeared. I read a few of them but I've kept only the first two for a possible re-read sometime (Dragonquest and The White Dragon). None of them has the freshness, originality and charm of the original and the quality declined steadily. This should not detract from Dragonflight, which is a true classic and one of the most enjoyable SFF novels ever written.
Friday, 20 February 2009
New Horizons and 2010
A new issue of this British Fantasy Society publication (included in the subscription). New Horizons is a biannual magazine "dedicated to promoting and showcasing the newer names in fantasy, horror and sci-fi". It includes seven short stories:
The Cloth of Heaven by Louise Morgan: a brief and rather strange account of the making of a magical dress, which reads as if it were an extract from a longer story.
The Silk Road by Allyson Bird: a visit to China to research a book on the Cherchen mummies leads to a nightmarish involvement with a local family. Travelogue meets horror story.
Gossamer by Ian Whates: the lure of a magical country cottage which inspires its residents to write fiction. An atmosphere of mystery, of things not quite seen.
The Siege by Nick Jackson: the claustrophobic atmosphere and terrors of a medieval siege. Not for the faint-hearted.
The Lost Tribe of Prague 6 by Cyril Simsa: old folk tales come alive in a wood in present-day Prague. It reminded me of Robert Holdstock's work.
A Town Called Exit by Paul Campbell: getting off the train at the wrong stop leads to a series of alternative worlds. Disorientating.
Under Her Skin by Eliza Chan: a selkie – a creature of the sea – is trapped on land in a marriage to a human man, in a story recounted by her daughter.
Of all of these my favourite was Cyril Simsa's, in part because the author (who lives in the Czech Republic) includes some intriguingly different mythology.
In addition, the magazine has illustrations by Anna Bird, Vanessa Walk and Dean Harkness, and two interviews. One is with Ekaterina Sedia, the Russian-born American author of The Secret History of Moscow, which places traditional Russian folklore figures in a modern setting. The other is with Adam Nevill, who is in charge of Virgin Books' new line in horror novels.
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I recently viewed 2010, the film made in 1984. I thought I hadn't seen it before, but I kept half-remembering scenes as they happened, so I must have done. Good, solid SF with credible human drama thrown in; Roy Scheider's performance was particularly strong. A worthy sequel to 2001.
The Cloth of Heaven by Louise Morgan: a brief and rather strange account of the making of a magical dress, which reads as if it were an extract from a longer story.
The Silk Road by Allyson Bird: a visit to China to research a book on the Cherchen mummies leads to a nightmarish involvement with a local family. Travelogue meets horror story.
Gossamer by Ian Whates: the lure of a magical country cottage which inspires its residents to write fiction. An atmosphere of mystery, of things not quite seen.
The Siege by Nick Jackson: the claustrophobic atmosphere and terrors of a medieval siege. Not for the faint-hearted.
The Lost Tribe of Prague 6 by Cyril Simsa: old folk tales come alive in a wood in present-day Prague. It reminded me of Robert Holdstock's work.
A Town Called Exit by Paul Campbell: getting off the train at the wrong stop leads to a series of alternative worlds. Disorientating.
Under Her Skin by Eliza Chan: a selkie – a creature of the sea – is trapped on land in a marriage to a human man, in a story recounted by her daughter.
Of all of these my favourite was Cyril Simsa's, in part because the author (who lives in the Czech Republic) includes some intriguingly different mythology.
In addition, the magazine has illustrations by Anna Bird, Vanessa Walk and Dean Harkness, and two interviews. One is with Ekaterina Sedia, the Russian-born American author of The Secret History of Moscow, which places traditional Russian folklore figures in a modern setting. The other is with Adam Nevill, who is in charge of Virgin Books' new line in horror novels.
----------------------------------
I recently viewed 2010, the film made in 1984. I thought I hadn't seen it before, but I kept half-remembering scenes as they happened, so I must have done. Good, solid SF with credible human drama thrown in; Roy Scheider's performance was particularly strong. A worthy sequel to 2001.
Friday, 13 February 2009
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
This Hugo and Nebula award-winning story of interstellar warfare was first published in book form in 1974, but in a different version from the one the author intended. It originally appeared in serialised form in Analog magazine but one of the sections was felt by the book publishers to be too downbeat, so was changed. Not until 1991 was the book published with the excised section reinstated, and this is the version being reviewed here.
The Forever War is set in an alternate world, apparently similar to our own up to the Vietnam War (experience of which prompted Haldeman to write this book) then diverging rather radically to include interstellar space travel by the 1990s. However, the early explorers found themselves fighting the Taurans, an alien race very loosely humanoid in form. William Mandella is a college graduate drafted to fight in the war, and this first-person story follows his perilous and brutal combat career from one star system to another.
Haldeman emphasises the relativistic effects, which mean that a journey lasting only a few months in subjective time can result in a return to Earth decades or even centuries later. This not only means that the soldiers become increasingly cut off from Earth, where conditions change radically on each visit, but that weapons and other technology evolve considerably while they are travelling. It also means that if two lovers are posted to different star systems, they will never meet again.
I first read this about a decade ago, and recall admiring it more than I liked it. That's still the case, simply because the hero's situation is so grim and gloomy throughout. The combat casualty rate is frighteningly high, and society on Earth changes to become as dystopian as you are likely to find. Almost all of this book is very good indeed, the author's war experience providing a gritty ring of truth, emphasised by the laconic and cynical writing style, but for me it was spoilt a little by a rather bizarre ending which drifts more towards fantasy. The author suggests that clones would not only have perfect communication but would effectively have only one shared mind; a moment's thought would have revealed that identical twins (who are effectively clones), while often very close, are separate individuals. Despite this, The Forever War merits its awards and its place on the SFF Shelf of Fame; it is a true classic. But I felt a strong need to read something light and upbeat after finishing it.
The Forever War is set in an alternate world, apparently similar to our own up to the Vietnam War (experience of which prompted Haldeman to write this book) then diverging rather radically to include interstellar space travel by the 1990s. However, the early explorers found themselves fighting the Taurans, an alien race very loosely humanoid in form. William Mandella is a college graduate drafted to fight in the war, and this first-person story follows his perilous and brutal combat career from one star system to another.
Haldeman emphasises the relativistic effects, which mean that a journey lasting only a few months in subjective time can result in a return to Earth decades or even centuries later. This not only means that the soldiers become increasingly cut off from Earth, where conditions change radically on each visit, but that weapons and other technology evolve considerably while they are travelling. It also means that if two lovers are posted to different star systems, they will never meet again.
I first read this about a decade ago, and recall admiring it more than I liked it. That's still the case, simply because the hero's situation is so grim and gloomy throughout. The combat casualty rate is frighteningly high, and society on Earth changes to become as dystopian as you are likely to find. Almost all of this book is very good indeed, the author's war experience providing a gritty ring of truth, emphasised by the laconic and cynical writing style, but for me it was spoilt a little by a rather bizarre ending which drifts more towards fantasy. The author suggests that clones would not only have perfect communication but would effectively have only one shared mind; a moment's thought would have revealed that identical twins (who are effectively clones), while often very close, are separate individuals. Despite this, The Forever War merits its awards and its place on the SFF Shelf of Fame; it is a true classic. But I felt a strong need to read something light and upbeat after finishing it.
Friday, 6 February 2009
Kil'n People by David Brin
Back in the 1980s, before other priorities distracted me from reading much SFF for a decade or two, I read and enjoyed a few books by David Brin, The Practice Effect being a particular favourite. So when Kil'n People cropped up in the Modern SF reading list, I acquired a copy with some anticipation.
The novel is set about a century into the future, and is focused on the implications of some revolutionary scientific developments: that animated creatures – known as 'dittos' – can be made out of clay, and that the personality and memories of any individual can be copied into a ditto. The downside is that a ditto lasts for only one day before disintegrating, but in compensation the ditto's memories can be uploaded back into the human original. This enables each person to send out several dittos every day, greatly multiplying their workrate and also making dangerous or unpleasant tasks more acceptable. Not all dittos are the same – they vary in capabilities, indicated by different colourings – and they don't have to look like the original person; even animal forms can be used.
Al Morris is a private investigator engaged in tracking down the various new forms of crime which the existence of dittos permits, and the story follows him, and several of his dittos, as they try to unravel a huge conspiracy. There are many twists and turns until the unexpected and ambitious conclusion.
This book follows the current doorstop fashion, being over 600 pages long, which caused this reviewer to have to refresh his memory at the start of each reading session, in order to recall previous events. This task was considerably complicated by the fact that the plot keeps switching between the viewpoints of Morris and his various dittos, all of which are recounted in the first person. Trying to remember what each one had been doing, and in particular what each one had found out about what was going on, was something of a struggle.
Despite that, the book held my attention. It is well written, and I'm pleased to see that Brin hasn't lost the sense of humour which keeps bubbling up, for instance in puns based on clay and ditto (e.g. Morris' copies having the title of "ditective"). He also has a lot of fun in exploring some of the more bizarre implications of dittos and the effect their existence has on society. A solid chunk of quality, original, SF, well worth the somewhat protracted reading time.
The novel is set about a century into the future, and is focused on the implications of some revolutionary scientific developments: that animated creatures – known as 'dittos' – can be made out of clay, and that the personality and memories of any individual can be copied into a ditto. The downside is that a ditto lasts for only one day before disintegrating, but in compensation the ditto's memories can be uploaded back into the human original. This enables each person to send out several dittos every day, greatly multiplying their workrate and also making dangerous or unpleasant tasks more acceptable. Not all dittos are the same – they vary in capabilities, indicated by different colourings – and they don't have to look like the original person; even animal forms can be used.
Al Morris is a private investigator engaged in tracking down the various new forms of crime which the existence of dittos permits, and the story follows him, and several of his dittos, as they try to unravel a huge conspiracy. There are many twists and turns until the unexpected and ambitious conclusion.
This book follows the current doorstop fashion, being over 600 pages long, which caused this reviewer to have to refresh his memory at the start of each reading session, in order to recall previous events. This task was considerably complicated by the fact that the plot keeps switching between the viewpoints of Morris and his various dittos, all of which are recounted in the first person. Trying to remember what each one had been doing, and in particular what each one had found out about what was going on, was something of a struggle.
Despite that, the book held my attention. It is well written, and I'm pleased to see that Brin hasn't lost the sense of humour which keeps bubbling up, for instance in puns based on clay and ditto (e.g. Morris' copies having the title of "ditective"). He also has a lot of fun in exploring some of the more bizarre implications of dittos and the effect their existence has on society. A solid chunk of quality, original, SF, well worth the somewhat protracted reading time.
Friday, 30 January 2009
The Mountains of Mourning and Cetaganda, by Lois McMaster Bujold
Two more in the Miles Vorkosigan saga, which I am gradually working my way through.
Cetaganda follows on from The Vor Game in Miles' personal timeline. This time he is sent to the former enemy planet of Cetaganda to represent Barrayar at the funeral of a member of the ruling dynasty. Being Miles, he is immediately involved in a complex plot concerning a struggle for supremacy within Cetaganda's ruling clique, focused on their programme of selective breeding for the elite. Also being Miles, he resolves it all at the end.
The author's writing style, which I have praised before, is such that her books are very difficult to put down: I read Cetaganda in two sittings. I am now trying to analyse her technique to understand how she does it, in the hope that I might learn something which would benefit my own scratchings. I liked the fact that Cetaganda has rather more science-fictional ideas in it than the earlier ones I've reviewed, although I was slightly dissatisfied with the ending; it was just too pat, with Miles dominating the situation. It may seem silly to ask for more realism in a space opera which is by definition completely unrealistic, but I would have preferred it had he not had matters entirely his own way.
I was a bit annoyed about the other story. I was misled into buying a book called Young Miles, which turned out to consist of three separate stories. Two of them are The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game, which I already have (I reviewed them previously on this blog – see the review list on the left). This left the novella The Mountings of Mourning as the only new material. Having said that, it's a good story concerning Miles' attempt to put a stop to the habit in back-country Barrayar of killing any new-born child which is not physically perfect (an issue of decidedly personal interest to him, given his disabilities).
Bujold's work seems particularly prone to being repackaged and sold under different titles, so beware. There are at least two other titles which contain existing books: Miles, Mystery and Mayhem consists of Cetaganda, Ethan of Athos and a short story, Labyrinth. Miles Errant consists of Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance, while Miles in Love includes Komarr, A Civil Campaign and the short story Winterfair Gifts. In between the last two compilations (in terms of Miles' chronology) comes Memory, which appears to be only available as a stand-alone novel, and at the end comes Diplomatic Immunity. At least, that's how I understand it! The compilations are good value in that they cost less than buying the books individually and you often get an extra novella or short story thrown in, but you do need to be wary of what you're buying.
Another writer to suffer from this problem is the excellent James H Schmitz, most famous for The Witches of Karres but who wrote lots of short stories (and even his full-length novels are short by modern standards). Many of his stories have been wrapped up in various anthologies in all manner of different combinations, so great care is called for when buying. I almost placed an order for a recently published stand-alone novel of his until I realised that I already had it in an anthology. Fortunately, some kind person has put together a comprehensive list of his published books together with the stories included in them; you can find it on Wikipedia under the author's name.
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I was a tad rude about Demons last week, so in all fairness I should say that Episode 4, in which Mina's vampiric past comes back to haunt her, was a great improvement. Actually enjoyable for the right reasons…but possibly I was only impressed because my expectations were so low!
Cetaganda follows on from The Vor Game in Miles' personal timeline. This time he is sent to the former enemy planet of Cetaganda to represent Barrayar at the funeral of a member of the ruling dynasty. Being Miles, he is immediately involved in a complex plot concerning a struggle for supremacy within Cetaganda's ruling clique, focused on their programme of selective breeding for the elite. Also being Miles, he resolves it all at the end.
The author's writing style, which I have praised before, is such that her books are very difficult to put down: I read Cetaganda in two sittings. I am now trying to analyse her technique to understand how she does it, in the hope that I might learn something which would benefit my own scratchings. I liked the fact that Cetaganda has rather more science-fictional ideas in it than the earlier ones I've reviewed, although I was slightly dissatisfied with the ending; it was just too pat, with Miles dominating the situation. It may seem silly to ask for more realism in a space opera which is by definition completely unrealistic, but I would have preferred it had he not had matters entirely his own way.
I was a bit annoyed about the other story. I was misled into buying a book called Young Miles, which turned out to consist of three separate stories. Two of them are The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game, which I already have (I reviewed them previously on this blog – see the review list on the left). This left the novella The Mountings of Mourning as the only new material. Having said that, it's a good story concerning Miles' attempt to put a stop to the habit in back-country Barrayar of killing any new-born child which is not physically perfect (an issue of decidedly personal interest to him, given his disabilities).
Bujold's work seems particularly prone to being repackaged and sold under different titles, so beware. There are at least two other titles which contain existing books: Miles, Mystery and Mayhem consists of Cetaganda, Ethan of Athos and a short story, Labyrinth. Miles Errant consists of Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance, while Miles in Love includes Komarr, A Civil Campaign and the short story Winterfair Gifts. In between the last two compilations (in terms of Miles' chronology) comes Memory, which appears to be only available as a stand-alone novel, and at the end comes Diplomatic Immunity. At least, that's how I understand it! The compilations are good value in that they cost less than buying the books individually and you often get an extra novella or short story thrown in, but you do need to be wary of what you're buying.
Another writer to suffer from this problem is the excellent James H Schmitz, most famous for The Witches of Karres but who wrote lots of short stories (and even his full-length novels are short by modern standards). Many of his stories have been wrapped up in various anthologies in all manner of different combinations, so great care is called for when buying. I almost placed an order for a recently published stand-alone novel of his until I realised that I already had it in an anthology. Fortunately, some kind person has put together a comprehensive list of his published books together with the stories included in them; you can find it on Wikipedia under the author's name.
-------------------------------
I was a tad rude about Demons last week, so in all fairness I should say that Episode 4, in which Mina's vampiric past comes back to haunt her, was a great improvement. Actually enjoyable for the right reasons…but possibly I was only impressed because my expectations were so low!
Saturday, 24 January 2009
Interzone 220 and Demons
The interview in the latest issue of Interzone is with Jeffrey Ford, author of the Well-Built City trilogy (The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond). I've not heard of him or his books before, but they sound very unusual (the books, that is) and worth a look. There's also an interesting article analysing the work of Christopher Priest, whose intriguing alternative World War 2 novel The Separation was reviewed on this blog a while back. And of course the usual news, chat, and book and screen reviews, plus a cover illustration by Adam Tredowski. Now to the six stories:
Monetized by Jason Stoddard (illustrated by Paul Drummond): a future in which everyone is constantly bombarded by exhortations to feature and promote particular products or services, thereby earning money. And the higher their Attention Index (= celebrity), the more money they can earn. A son rebels against the wealthy mother who thought up the whole idea.
Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast by Eugie Foster (illustrated by Geoffrey Grisso): a fantasy in which everyone wears a mask in public – a mask which determines their personalities and the events they are involved in. It is illegal to be seen in public without one, so every morning people have to choose which identity to adopt from their varied collections of masks. But there are some who reject the idea and try to develop their own independent personalities.
After Everything Woke Up by Rudy Rucker (illustrated by himself): in this world, everything has a personality and can be communicated with: each tree, stone, stretch of stream. This is an extract from a forthcoming novel, Hylozoic. Amusing enough in a short story, but I hope there's more to the novel than that.
Spy vs Spy by Neil Williamson: a future in which extreme paranoia is encouraged by companies selling security devices and worse…
Miles to Isengard by Leah Bobet (illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe): a small group hijack the last bomb and drive it to a volcanic crater for disposal, in this LOTR-inspired tale; lots of atmosphere, not much explanation.
Memory Dust by Gareth L Powell (illustrated by Daniel Bristow-Bailey): a strange alien, the last survivor of its race, and a planet which is covered with a black dust with bizarre properties.
A very varied bunch in content and style, but I wouldn't say that I had a particular favourite this time.
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I've been watching the ITV series Demons. Not my usual fare, but I was drawn to it because it features Philip Glenister, the star of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. I'm still watching it for reasons which I can't quite understand, but probably because it's so bad that it's become perversely irresistible. For those of you fortunate enough to have avoided the snare, it concerns a team of heroes in present-day London who spend their time hunting a varied collection of nasty supernatural beings. They are led by Glenister (with a dodgy American accent), and include a lad who is the last surviving member of the Van Helsing family, his would-be girlfriend, and a blind female seer.
In the last episode, the latest big bad demon managed to get into the team's hideout and set a time bomb next to the seer, who had been knocked unconscious. First "huh?" moment: he set the timer for a full 45 minutes, thereby helpfully setting up a long-drawn-out drama as the girlfriend arrives and wonders what to do. Does she carry the bomb away so it explodes somewhere harmless? Nope. Does she drag the seer out of harms's way and let the bomb destroy the hideout? Nope. Does she say "sod it" and get the hell out of there? Nope. She spends nearly all the time researching explosives in the library, then finally gives up and goes to sit by the bomb before, in the very last second, cutting through a wire at random and thereby stopping the clock. I was rather sorry that it didn't explode. Meanwhile, Glenister and the Van Helsing have been decoyed away in search of the demon, and find themselves trapped in a room in the sewers which has a sturdy grille in the ceiling with a trapdoor in it. Now these two heroes invariably carry a range of hardware including some fancy guns for disposing of demons. So when the demon duly appears above them, do they spring into action and start shooting? Nope. Not even when the demon helpfully opens the trapdoor to give them a clear shot plus a means of escape? Nope. They just stand there and trade insults, until the demon tires of the game and bolts down the trapdoor. Sadly, the girlfriend and the seer arrive in time to save them as the room floods, with only a fraction of a second to spare.
The next episode's on tonight. I can hardly wait…
Monetized by Jason Stoddard (illustrated by Paul Drummond): a future in which everyone is constantly bombarded by exhortations to feature and promote particular products or services, thereby earning money. And the higher their Attention Index (= celebrity), the more money they can earn. A son rebels against the wealthy mother who thought up the whole idea.
Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast by Eugie Foster (illustrated by Geoffrey Grisso): a fantasy in which everyone wears a mask in public – a mask which determines their personalities and the events they are involved in. It is illegal to be seen in public without one, so every morning people have to choose which identity to adopt from their varied collections of masks. But there are some who reject the idea and try to develop their own independent personalities.
After Everything Woke Up by Rudy Rucker (illustrated by himself): in this world, everything has a personality and can be communicated with: each tree, stone, stretch of stream. This is an extract from a forthcoming novel, Hylozoic. Amusing enough in a short story, but I hope there's more to the novel than that.
Spy vs Spy by Neil Williamson: a future in which extreme paranoia is encouraged by companies selling security devices and worse…
Miles to Isengard by Leah Bobet (illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe): a small group hijack the last bomb and drive it to a volcanic crater for disposal, in this LOTR-inspired tale; lots of atmosphere, not much explanation.
Memory Dust by Gareth L Powell (illustrated by Daniel Bristow-Bailey): a strange alien, the last survivor of its race, and a planet which is covered with a black dust with bizarre properties.
A very varied bunch in content and style, but I wouldn't say that I had a particular favourite this time.
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I've been watching the ITV series Demons. Not my usual fare, but I was drawn to it because it features Philip Glenister, the star of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. I'm still watching it for reasons which I can't quite understand, but probably because it's so bad that it's become perversely irresistible. For those of you fortunate enough to have avoided the snare, it concerns a team of heroes in present-day London who spend their time hunting a varied collection of nasty supernatural beings. They are led by Glenister (with a dodgy American accent), and include a lad who is the last surviving member of the Van Helsing family, his would-be girlfriend, and a blind female seer.
In the last episode, the latest big bad demon managed to get into the team's hideout and set a time bomb next to the seer, who had been knocked unconscious. First "huh?" moment: he set the timer for a full 45 minutes, thereby helpfully setting up a long-drawn-out drama as the girlfriend arrives and wonders what to do. Does she carry the bomb away so it explodes somewhere harmless? Nope. Does she drag the seer out of harms's way and let the bomb destroy the hideout? Nope. Does she say "sod it" and get the hell out of there? Nope. She spends nearly all the time researching explosives in the library, then finally gives up and goes to sit by the bomb before, in the very last second, cutting through a wire at random and thereby stopping the clock. I was rather sorry that it didn't explode. Meanwhile, Glenister and the Van Helsing have been decoyed away in search of the demon, and find themselves trapped in a room in the sewers which has a sturdy grille in the ceiling with a trapdoor in it. Now these two heroes invariably carry a range of hardware including some fancy guns for disposing of demons. So when the demon duly appears above them, do they spring into action and start shooting? Nope. Not even when the demon helpfully opens the trapdoor to give them a clear shot plus a means of escape? Nope. They just stand there and trade insults, until the demon tires of the game and bolts down the trapdoor. Sadly, the girlfriend and the seer arrive in time to save them as the room floods, with only a fraction of a second to spare.
The next episode's on tonight. I can hardly wait…
Friday, 16 January 2009
Temeraire by Naomi Novik
An alternative Napoleonic War – with dragons! This is the premise of the author's first novel, published in 2006, which has since been followed by four sequels.
In almost all respects her world closely matches the historical one, with Napoleon threatening invasion and Nelson leading the British fleet. The author has clearly done some research into both the technicalities of sailing warfare and the stiflingly rigid nature of contemporary British society. The one difference is the existence of dragons occurring naturally around the world, albeit in small numbers and rarely seen. They are intelligent and have long been tamed, forming life-long bonds with particular humans as soon as they are out of their eggs. If this sounds familiar, it is; this particular concept is swiped wholesale from Anne McCaffrey's 1968 novel Dragonflight, one of my favourite SFF stories. Other similarities are that the dragons come in various breeds of different sizes and characteristics, but all of them are big enough to carry their riders on their backs. They can also communicate with humans, although in Temeraire they speak rather than using telepathy. Other differences are that Novik's dragons do not teleport, and the largest of them carry not only their handler but a whole crew of people including rifle squads for aerial combat: for the dragons are a vital weapon to both sides in the war.
The story's hero is Will Lawrence, a successful British frigate captain of aristocratic birth but no fortune, being a third son. He hopes to make his career in the Navy, but his plans are interrupted when he captures a French ship carrying a rare and precious cargo: a dragon's egg. This hatches before the ship can reach land and the male dragon attaches itself to Lawrence, to his great consternation as dragon handlers live apart from society with their dragons and are considered to be of low status. The rest of the story is primarily concerned with Lawrence's developing relationship with his dragon, called Temeraire, as they train to join the aerial forces defending Britain.
While the individual elements of the tale are hardly original, they haven't been put together in quite this way before and the result is a refreshing and entertaining read. It is written as an exciting and fairly light adventure story and is entirely suitable for younger readers as well as engaging enough to keep adults amused. The only aspect which jarred with me was the rather cloying sentimentality of the relationship which develops between Lawrence and Temeraire, which led me to keep thinking of the dragon as female. Still well worth the read, but I'm in no great hurry to get the next one.
In almost all respects her world closely matches the historical one, with Napoleon threatening invasion and Nelson leading the British fleet. The author has clearly done some research into both the technicalities of sailing warfare and the stiflingly rigid nature of contemporary British society. The one difference is the existence of dragons occurring naturally around the world, albeit in small numbers and rarely seen. They are intelligent and have long been tamed, forming life-long bonds with particular humans as soon as they are out of their eggs. If this sounds familiar, it is; this particular concept is swiped wholesale from Anne McCaffrey's 1968 novel Dragonflight, one of my favourite SFF stories. Other similarities are that the dragons come in various breeds of different sizes and characteristics, but all of them are big enough to carry their riders on their backs. They can also communicate with humans, although in Temeraire they speak rather than using telepathy. Other differences are that Novik's dragons do not teleport, and the largest of them carry not only their handler but a whole crew of people including rifle squads for aerial combat: for the dragons are a vital weapon to both sides in the war.
The story's hero is Will Lawrence, a successful British frigate captain of aristocratic birth but no fortune, being a third son. He hopes to make his career in the Navy, but his plans are interrupted when he captures a French ship carrying a rare and precious cargo: a dragon's egg. This hatches before the ship can reach land and the male dragon attaches itself to Lawrence, to his great consternation as dragon handlers live apart from society with their dragons and are considered to be of low status. The rest of the story is primarily concerned with Lawrence's developing relationship with his dragon, called Temeraire, as they train to join the aerial forces defending Britain.
While the individual elements of the tale are hardly original, they haven't been put together in quite this way before and the result is a refreshing and entertaining read. It is written as an exciting and fairly light adventure story and is entirely suitable for younger readers as well as engaging enough to keep adults amused. The only aspect which jarred with me was the rather cloying sentimentality of the relationship which develops between Lawrence and Temeraire, which led me to keep thinking of the dragon as female. Still well worth the read, but I'm in no great hurry to get the next one.
Friday, 9 January 2009
A catch-up on films and TV
If I have achieved limited success in keeping up with the latest books, I am even worse at watching films. So while I'm not too far behind the curve in seeing Wall-E recently, I also viewed for the first time X-Men (the first one) and (wait for it) ET!
Wall-E is an animated movie which has two stories running in parallel. One is the tale of a lonely rubbish-disposing robot, left behind on Earth to clear up the mess created by humanity, and his romance with a sleek robot from a visiting spaceship. The other is a biting satire on the Western – and especially American – way of life, which surprised me given that this is a Disney film aimed at children. The satire begins with humanity's profligacy in covering the Earth with rubbish and so poisoning the environment that nothing could live there. The people all departed to live in luxurious spaceships in which they spend all day on trivial virtual activities, consuming vast quantities of junk food, instantly obeying the all-pervasive advertising about when and what to eat, drink and do, and travelling everywhere in mobile armchairs so that they became too fat and weak even to stand up without assistance. I wonder how many of the target audience, cooing over the cute robots, picked up the film's subversive message?
X-Men surprised me. I had expected an undemanding comic-strip action hero blockbuster (and all the expected elements are certainly there) but the plot is rather more serious and thoughtful than that, starting with a grim scene in a World War 2 concentration camp. The presence of some heavyweight actors – Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan – reinforces the point. The idea of people developing mutant powers is nothing new, of course, but the themes of how the public would regard such mutants, and how the mutants themselves might become divided over their response to the public's hostility, form the main thrust of this movie. In parallel with this is the struggle of one of the mutants (played by Hugh Jackman) to understand what had been done to him – a story line which was left dangling in obvious preparation for the sequel. Clearly a cut above the average superhero film; and, if nothing else, male viewers can enjoy watching Famke Janssen, a disconcertingly blonde Halle Berry, and a disturbingly sexy mutant called Mystique (played by Rebecca Romijn).
I braced myself before watching ET, afraid that it would turn out to be a pile of schmaltz. Well, it was to some extent, but it was better than I had expected and quite amusing. Worth watching – once.
Finally, neither big-screen movies nor even fiction (in the usual sense): a couple of UK TV programmes.
Life After People, shown on C4 a few months ago (I've just got around to watching the tape!) concerning what might happen if humanity vanished overnight. An interesting analysis of the effect on human pets (cats are fine, dogs vary with breed), wildlife (pigeons do well, so does everything in the sea), plants (take over everything on land) and buildings (after a few centuries, only massive old stone buildings will still be here, with the pyramids lasting longest of all). There was some haunting real-life film of a town near Chernobyl, completely abandoned for twenty years – the extent of the decay was remarkable – together with lots of CGI of iconic bridges and buildings collapsing. Interesting if somewhat depressing, but dragged out too long with too many repetitions of dramatic collapses.
Ghosts of Glastonbury was another C4 programme featuring Tony Robinson (of Blackadder and Time Team fame) investigating a claim by an early 20th-century archaeologist that the remarkable success of his excavations of Glastonbury Abbey was due to advice from the spirit world achieved through automatic writing. While the claims made by the archaeologist were all pretty well disproved, Robinson got very excited by his own attempt (helped by a spiritualist) at automatic writing, in which he interpreted a squiggle as being a man's name (with a fair amount of imagination), and it turned out that a monk of that name had been associated at some time with Glastonbury Abbey. That reasoning had so many holes in it that I felt very disappointed - I expected better of Robinson after his comprehensive demolition of the "facts" in The Da Vinci Code. The programme would have left many viewers thinking that there could be something in this automatic writing after all.
Wall-E is an animated movie which has two stories running in parallel. One is the tale of a lonely rubbish-disposing robot, left behind on Earth to clear up the mess created by humanity, and his romance with a sleek robot from a visiting spaceship. The other is a biting satire on the Western – and especially American – way of life, which surprised me given that this is a Disney film aimed at children. The satire begins with humanity's profligacy in covering the Earth with rubbish and so poisoning the environment that nothing could live there. The people all departed to live in luxurious spaceships in which they spend all day on trivial virtual activities, consuming vast quantities of junk food, instantly obeying the all-pervasive advertising about when and what to eat, drink and do, and travelling everywhere in mobile armchairs so that they became too fat and weak even to stand up without assistance. I wonder how many of the target audience, cooing over the cute robots, picked up the film's subversive message?
X-Men surprised me. I had expected an undemanding comic-strip action hero blockbuster (and all the expected elements are certainly there) but the plot is rather more serious and thoughtful than that, starting with a grim scene in a World War 2 concentration camp. The presence of some heavyweight actors – Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan – reinforces the point. The idea of people developing mutant powers is nothing new, of course, but the themes of how the public would regard such mutants, and how the mutants themselves might become divided over their response to the public's hostility, form the main thrust of this movie. In parallel with this is the struggle of one of the mutants (played by Hugh Jackman) to understand what had been done to him – a story line which was left dangling in obvious preparation for the sequel. Clearly a cut above the average superhero film; and, if nothing else, male viewers can enjoy watching Famke Janssen, a disconcertingly blonde Halle Berry, and a disturbingly sexy mutant called Mystique (played by Rebecca Romijn).
I braced myself before watching ET, afraid that it would turn out to be a pile of schmaltz. Well, it was to some extent, but it was better than I had expected and quite amusing. Worth watching – once.
Finally, neither big-screen movies nor even fiction (in the usual sense): a couple of UK TV programmes.
Life After People, shown on C4 a few months ago (I've just got around to watching the tape!) concerning what might happen if humanity vanished overnight. An interesting analysis of the effect on human pets (cats are fine, dogs vary with breed), wildlife (pigeons do well, so does everything in the sea), plants (take over everything on land) and buildings (after a few centuries, only massive old stone buildings will still be here, with the pyramids lasting longest of all). There was some haunting real-life film of a town near Chernobyl, completely abandoned for twenty years – the extent of the decay was remarkable – together with lots of CGI of iconic bridges and buildings collapsing. Interesting if somewhat depressing, but dragged out too long with too many repetitions of dramatic collapses.
Ghosts of Glastonbury was another C4 programme featuring Tony Robinson (of Blackadder and Time Team fame) investigating a claim by an early 20th-century archaeologist that the remarkable success of his excavations of Glastonbury Abbey was due to advice from the spirit world achieved through automatic writing. While the claims made by the archaeologist were all pretty well disproved, Robinson got very excited by his own attempt (helped by a spiritualist) at automatic writing, in which he interpreted a squiggle as being a man's name (with a fair amount of imagination), and it turned out that a monk of that name had been associated at some time with Glastonbury Abbey. That reasoning had so many holes in it that I felt very disappointed - I expected better of Robinson after his comprehensive demolition of the "facts" in The Da Vinci Code. The programme would have left many viewers thinking that there could be something in this automatic writing after all.
Friday, 2 January 2009
Foreigner by C J Cherryh
A lost colony ship, a desperate landfall on an unknown planet, and an intelligent native humanoid race with very different mental processes. These are the key elements of Cherryh's 1994 novel, the start of a series running to nine volumes so far (with more to come). I read a lot of Cherryh's books in the 1970s and liked them enough to keep them to re-read sometime, but I have neglected her work since then so I turned to Foreigner with interest.
The scene is set in couple of introductory chapters centuries apart; the initial catastrophic journey which caused the starship to become lost, and the first contact after planetfall between the human settlers and the natives (the atevi). The rest of the story is set six generations later, after a human-atevi war which had led to an accommodation being reached; the humans were allowed sole occupancy of a large island in return for gradually introducing their advanced technology to the atevi. Only one human was allowed off the island, the paidhi, who lived with the atevi in order to monitor and understand them while relaying technical knowledge as they were ready for it. The story focuses on one paidhi, Bren Cameron, at a time of crisis between the races.
The atevi are bigger, stronger and faster than humans, and had already reached the steam age at the time of the landing. Now they have aircraft and computer networks. Their similarity to humans had led to dangerous misunderstandings in the past, because their thought processes are decidedly different. They have no concept of friendship; they are bound to leaders or associations by a loyalty code which determines their actions. They have no word for trust, but fourteen for betrayal, and their standard way of resolving disputes is by an officially-sanctioned assassination system. It is a minefield for a human to work in, and the paidhi has to be very good to succeed.
Bren Cameron thought he had established a good relationship with the atevi leader but finds himself apparently betrayed, the target of rival associations who are opposed to the human presence. He needs all of his diplomatic abilities to survive as the situation rapidly slides out of control.
Cherryh is good at portraying the alienness of other races. The atevi are more than funny-looking humans, although perhaps not a lot more different from ourselves than were, say, medieval Japanese. As a result, Bren Cameron struggles to understand the nature of the relationship he has with the two atevi bodyguards on whom he has to rely. The author's story-telling skills drew me in and held my attention throughout. She is rather indulgent in allowing her hero long periods of introspection, with pages at a time filled with nothing but his thoughts, but despite this I found Foreigner absorbing and was sorry when it finished – a rare feeling for me these days. Whether I want to invest the time to plough through another eight volumes (and counting) I'm not so sure, but I might well try the next one and see how it goes.
--------------------------------------
I notice that a couple more reviews of my alternate World War 2 novel The Foresight War have appeared on Amazon: one each on the UK and USA sites. I was wryly amused to see that one reviewer awarded it 1/5 and the other 5/5. Some contrasting excerpts:
"Good idea, but characters are one dimensional, too much detail on weapons sizes/capability etc. not enough tension created."
"What I liked about this was it didn't get too focused on personalities, love interests, or that sort of thing. Also, it was almost non-stop action. If you like Tom Clancy's novels - the ones where the Russians invade the West, for example - you'd love this. It's really 'techy'."
Which just demonstrates, yet again, that book reviews are decidedly personal, and can say as much about the reviewer as they do about the story.
I have rewritten my introduction to the book as well as updating the list of reviews (good and bad) HERE, where you can also read the first two chapters on-line.
The scene is set in couple of introductory chapters centuries apart; the initial catastrophic journey which caused the starship to become lost, and the first contact after planetfall between the human settlers and the natives (the atevi). The rest of the story is set six generations later, after a human-atevi war which had led to an accommodation being reached; the humans were allowed sole occupancy of a large island in return for gradually introducing their advanced technology to the atevi. Only one human was allowed off the island, the paidhi, who lived with the atevi in order to monitor and understand them while relaying technical knowledge as they were ready for it. The story focuses on one paidhi, Bren Cameron, at a time of crisis between the races.
The atevi are bigger, stronger and faster than humans, and had already reached the steam age at the time of the landing. Now they have aircraft and computer networks. Their similarity to humans had led to dangerous misunderstandings in the past, because their thought processes are decidedly different. They have no concept of friendship; they are bound to leaders or associations by a loyalty code which determines their actions. They have no word for trust, but fourteen for betrayal, and their standard way of resolving disputes is by an officially-sanctioned assassination system. It is a minefield for a human to work in, and the paidhi has to be very good to succeed.
Bren Cameron thought he had established a good relationship with the atevi leader but finds himself apparently betrayed, the target of rival associations who are opposed to the human presence. He needs all of his diplomatic abilities to survive as the situation rapidly slides out of control.
Cherryh is good at portraying the alienness of other races. The atevi are more than funny-looking humans, although perhaps not a lot more different from ourselves than were, say, medieval Japanese. As a result, Bren Cameron struggles to understand the nature of the relationship he has with the two atevi bodyguards on whom he has to rely. The author's story-telling skills drew me in and held my attention throughout. She is rather indulgent in allowing her hero long periods of introspection, with pages at a time filled with nothing but his thoughts, but despite this I found Foreigner absorbing and was sorry when it finished – a rare feeling for me these days. Whether I want to invest the time to plough through another eight volumes (and counting) I'm not so sure, but I might well try the next one and see how it goes.
--------------------------------------
I notice that a couple more reviews of my alternate World War 2 novel The Foresight War have appeared on Amazon: one each on the UK and USA sites. I was wryly amused to see that one reviewer awarded it 1/5 and the other 5/5. Some contrasting excerpts:
"Good idea, but characters are one dimensional, too much detail on weapons sizes/capability etc. not enough tension created."
"What I liked about this was it didn't get too focused on personalities, love interests, or that sort of thing. Also, it was almost non-stop action. If you like Tom Clancy's novels - the ones where the Russians invade the West, for example - you'd love this. It's really 'techy'."
Which just demonstrates, yet again, that book reviews are decidedly personal, and can say as much about the reviewer as they do about the story.
I have rewritten my introduction to the book as well as updating the list of reviews (good and bad) HERE, where you can also read the first two chapters on-line.
Friday, 26 December 2008
Professor A. M. Low and the 'Bunst' stories
I started reading SFF in the mid-1950s and, although I recollect very little of what – or who – I was reading at that time, one name has somehow stuck in my memory over all of those years through some quirk of memory; that of Professor A. M. Low. Recently I decided to track down this memory and was pleasantly surprised to find that he has a Wikipedia entry. Reading through it, it became clear that he was a lot more than a writer of children's SF stories; an engineer, inventor and research physicist, he was involved in experiments with radio-controlled aircraft and rockets during World War 1. He belonged to many different organisations in several fields and was a founder member and President of the British Interplanetary Society. He also wrote some forty books, many of them intended to explain scientific matters to the layman. This sounded like a man after my own heart, and another search pulled up a couple of his books for sale second-hand; Modern Armaments, published in 1939, and one of his four novels, Adrift in the Stratosphere (1937).
I read Modern Armaments with particular interest, especially because of its date of publication. It is an easy read, intended for the layman, and explains the principles of modern weaponry very clearly, although with little in the way of examples of actual equipment or hard data. Low took a broad view of his subject, with chapters on explosives, optics, parachutes, armour and the military uses of concrete, as well as the expected topics of army, navy and air force weapons. Some of his opinions reflected the mistaken and rather complacent views of the British military at the time: that submarines would pose little threat in a future war because of the advances made in detection systems; that contemporary anti-aircraft fire control systems would serve very well to protect warships against air attack; and that light tanks would predominate in any future conflict with little role for heavier vehicles other than in a direct assault.
He goes into some detail about locating aircraft by sound, although he doesn't mention the giant acoustic mirrors on the south-east coast for locating incoming bombers. He does not, of course, discuss radar, although there is a rather coy reference to experiments with devices which detect "the reflection of ether vibrations". He holds some interesting views on chemical warfare, pointing out that laws to restrict warfare would inevitably be broken in any major conflict and that the use of poison gas was far more humane than bullets or shell fragments, with casualties suffering a much lower death rate. On looking ahead, he discusses and dismisses the prospect of "death rays". Despite some flaws, this is a good book displaying a lot of sense as well as a clear understanding of armaments. However, I could have done without the long moral peroration on the nature of warfare which constitutes the entire first chapter.
Having absorbed that, I turned to Adrift in the Stratosphere with anticipation. I didn't expect it to be great literature, and I was aware that it was only intended for children, but given the author's interests I expected a tale which would be based on the scientific knowledge of the time. Sadly it was a major disappointment, being a barely readable fantasy in which hardly any of the "science" is correct or even remotely feasible. Three young men stumble across a stratospheric research vehicle being built in an inventor's barn (as one does) and accidentally launch it onto space, having various death-defying adventures before (inevitably) returning safely home to a hero's welcome. I didn't object to the hostile Martians who tried to kill them with various death rays (typical of SF of the period), but for the rest…There is no point in going through it in detail but it includes such matters as huge space-living dragons whose fiery breath almost overcomes the lads in their (sealed?) spaceship; Mars being approached in only a few hours while travelling at the ferocious speed of almost a thousand miles per hour (!); and "islands in the stratosphere" on which live humans with a perfect command of English. I'll leave it at that. It does make me appreciate the quality of modern fiction for young adults!
By another quirk of memory, I had remembered really enjoying a series of stories about a lad called Bunst which I was sure were by Professor Low but which turned out to be by someone else: John Newton Chance, who also published as John Lymington and under various other names. He has a Wiki entry, too. He wrote six children's books in the "Bunst" series, and I managed to find a copy of the penultimate one: Bunst and the Secret Six, published in 1951. On reading it I recalled one detail of the plot so and must have previously read it, some time in the late 1950s. The books feature a boy of unstated age but probably early to mid teens, whose nickname is a shortened version of "bunstuffer" from his habit of constantly eating. He is intelligent, resourceful, phlegmatic and mechanically minded, and works as an assistant to a scatterbrained and excitable inventor, an elderly ex-military type called Audacious Cotterell. This particular novel involves radio-controlled model aircraft, a secret new high explosive, a gang of six spies who try to steal it, and much chasing and hiding. It rather reminded me of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, only on a smaller scale, written for children and with a constant undercurrent of humour. The style is very much of its innocent time, but I still found it an enjoyable read. Good to know that my reading tastes as a young lad weren't all bad!
I read Modern Armaments with particular interest, especially because of its date of publication. It is an easy read, intended for the layman, and explains the principles of modern weaponry very clearly, although with little in the way of examples of actual equipment or hard data. Low took a broad view of his subject, with chapters on explosives, optics, parachutes, armour and the military uses of concrete, as well as the expected topics of army, navy and air force weapons. Some of his opinions reflected the mistaken and rather complacent views of the British military at the time: that submarines would pose little threat in a future war because of the advances made in detection systems; that contemporary anti-aircraft fire control systems would serve very well to protect warships against air attack; and that light tanks would predominate in any future conflict with little role for heavier vehicles other than in a direct assault.
He goes into some detail about locating aircraft by sound, although he doesn't mention the giant acoustic mirrors on the south-east coast for locating incoming bombers. He does not, of course, discuss radar, although there is a rather coy reference to experiments with devices which detect "the reflection of ether vibrations". He holds some interesting views on chemical warfare, pointing out that laws to restrict warfare would inevitably be broken in any major conflict and that the use of poison gas was far more humane than bullets or shell fragments, with casualties suffering a much lower death rate. On looking ahead, he discusses and dismisses the prospect of "death rays". Despite some flaws, this is a good book displaying a lot of sense as well as a clear understanding of armaments. However, I could have done without the long moral peroration on the nature of warfare which constitutes the entire first chapter.
Having absorbed that, I turned to Adrift in the Stratosphere with anticipation. I didn't expect it to be great literature, and I was aware that it was only intended for children, but given the author's interests I expected a tale which would be based on the scientific knowledge of the time. Sadly it was a major disappointment, being a barely readable fantasy in which hardly any of the "science" is correct or even remotely feasible. Three young men stumble across a stratospheric research vehicle being built in an inventor's barn (as one does) and accidentally launch it onto space, having various death-defying adventures before (inevitably) returning safely home to a hero's welcome. I didn't object to the hostile Martians who tried to kill them with various death rays (typical of SF of the period), but for the rest…There is no point in going through it in detail but it includes such matters as huge space-living dragons whose fiery breath almost overcomes the lads in their (sealed?) spaceship; Mars being approached in only a few hours while travelling at the ferocious speed of almost a thousand miles per hour (!); and "islands in the stratosphere" on which live humans with a perfect command of English. I'll leave it at that. It does make me appreciate the quality of modern fiction for young adults!
By another quirk of memory, I had remembered really enjoying a series of stories about a lad called Bunst which I was sure were by Professor Low but which turned out to be by someone else: John Newton Chance, who also published as John Lymington and under various other names. He has a Wiki entry, too. He wrote six children's books in the "Bunst" series, and I managed to find a copy of the penultimate one: Bunst and the Secret Six, published in 1951. On reading it I recalled one detail of the plot so and must have previously read it, some time in the late 1950s. The books feature a boy of unstated age but probably early to mid teens, whose nickname is a shortened version of "bunstuffer" from his habit of constantly eating. He is intelligent, resourceful, phlegmatic and mechanically minded, and works as an assistant to a scatterbrained and excitable inventor, an elderly ex-military type called Audacious Cotterell. This particular novel involves radio-controlled model aircraft, a secret new high explosive, a gang of six spies who try to steal it, and much chasing and hiding. It rather reminded me of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, only on a smaller scale, written for children and with a constant undercurrent of humour. The style is very much of its innocent time, but I still found it an enjoyable read. Good to know that my reading tastes as a young lad weren't all bad!
Friday, 19 December 2008
The Inheritance by George Timmons
John More, a man from the mid-21st century, recovers from a spacecraft crash to find himself two thousand years in the future. The world has been through a terrible time in the interim, with wars and Dark Times as bad as anything in human history. However, it has for centuries enjoyed a settled and civilised existence, based on small communities which are self-sufficient in food and which trade for their other needs. Despite this, technology is advanced, with a comprehensive information network and high-speed trains running in vacuum tunnels.
More has difficulty settling in to his new environment and in particular understanding how the utopian society works. Everything seems too good to be true; everyone does their share of all kinds of jobs to help the community and appears to have everything they need to live in comfort without any excessive consumption. Crime and immorality seem to be virtually non-existent and, most unbelievable of all, children are quiet, polite and well-behaved! He gradually discovers that the key to this is the strong Christian faith which forms the basis of the society. The story then focuses, for much of its length, on the religious and philosophical debates in which More engages as he gradually becomes converted to their faith while being increasingly attracted to a young widow and her son. Only at the end does the drama get moving again as More is faced with the opportunity to return to his own time. His decision, and the repercussions which follow, form the conclusion.
It soon becomes obvious to the reader that The Inheritance isn't really an SFF novel; it's an argument for religious faith within a fictional shell. As such, its principal appeal is to those who are, or are interested in becoming, Christians. And it promotes not just any Christianity, but an idealistic vision of a kind of religious communism (which is, I suspect, unlikely to gain it much support among US Christians). Since I am not religious, I did not find the tale particularly appealing and skimmed over much of the long tracts of debate.
From the SFF credibility viewpoint, I have some problems with the technical base of his ideal society. How such advanced technology was developed and maintained in such a fundamentally rural society was unexplained. Mass transport systems such as trains also don't make much sense with a low and dispersed population. And while I can believe that pencils would still exist in the fifth millennium, I find it harder to believe that word processors familiar to More would still be around.
It also has weaknesses as a work of fiction. The author is fond of the omniscient viewpoint and sometimes informs the reader what different people are thinking within the same conversation. I don't care for this, as it tends to remove dramatic tension. I also found More a rather unsympathetic character, which doesn't help in getting engaged with the story. Finally, the ending was something of a disappointment; I thought that the author was building up to a classic SF twist finale, but in fact there was a strange and (to me) rather unsatisfying conclusion.
It may seem unfair for me to review this, given my own position on religion, but the publishers did send the review copy to the British Fantasy Society (who passed it to me) so I have assessed it on its merits as an SFF novel rather than a religious work.
*****************************************************
And now for some welcome relief in these hard economic times. I have a seasonal gift for one and all: a complete e-book version of my SF novel Scales FREE!
You can find details of the book, plus reviews and zip files of two versions of the e-book (Acrobat and MS Reader) on my site HERE
I hope you enjoy it: if you do, spread the word, if you don't, please tell me what you didn't like about it!
More has difficulty settling in to his new environment and in particular understanding how the utopian society works. Everything seems too good to be true; everyone does their share of all kinds of jobs to help the community and appears to have everything they need to live in comfort without any excessive consumption. Crime and immorality seem to be virtually non-existent and, most unbelievable of all, children are quiet, polite and well-behaved! He gradually discovers that the key to this is the strong Christian faith which forms the basis of the society. The story then focuses, for much of its length, on the religious and philosophical debates in which More engages as he gradually becomes converted to their faith while being increasingly attracted to a young widow and her son. Only at the end does the drama get moving again as More is faced with the opportunity to return to his own time. His decision, and the repercussions which follow, form the conclusion.
It soon becomes obvious to the reader that The Inheritance isn't really an SFF novel; it's an argument for religious faith within a fictional shell. As such, its principal appeal is to those who are, or are interested in becoming, Christians. And it promotes not just any Christianity, but an idealistic vision of a kind of religious communism (which is, I suspect, unlikely to gain it much support among US Christians). Since I am not religious, I did not find the tale particularly appealing and skimmed over much of the long tracts of debate.
From the SFF credibility viewpoint, I have some problems with the technical base of his ideal society. How such advanced technology was developed and maintained in such a fundamentally rural society was unexplained. Mass transport systems such as trains also don't make much sense with a low and dispersed population. And while I can believe that pencils would still exist in the fifth millennium, I find it harder to believe that word processors familiar to More would still be around.
It also has weaknesses as a work of fiction. The author is fond of the omniscient viewpoint and sometimes informs the reader what different people are thinking within the same conversation. I don't care for this, as it tends to remove dramatic tension. I also found More a rather unsympathetic character, which doesn't help in getting engaged with the story. Finally, the ending was something of a disappointment; I thought that the author was building up to a classic SF twist finale, but in fact there was a strange and (to me) rather unsatisfying conclusion.
It may seem unfair for me to review this, given my own position on religion, but the publishers did send the review copy to the British Fantasy Society (who passed it to me) so I have assessed it on its merits as an SFF novel rather than a religious work.
*****************************************************
And now for some welcome relief in these hard economic times. I have a seasonal gift for one and all: a complete e-book version of my SF novel Scales FREE!
You can find details of the book, plus reviews and zip files of two versions of the e-book (Acrobat and MS Reader) on my site HERE
I hope you enjoy it: if you do, spread the word, if you don't, please tell me what you didn't like about it!
Saturday, 13 December 2008
Some publications from the British Science Fiction Association
A bit of catching up needed, plus an apology. The last time I mentioned the first publication described below, I attributed it to the British Fantasy Society: I'll try to keep my organisations in order in future! Anyway, I've finally got around to reading it, along with some more recent publications from the BSFA.
The earlier one is Fantasy & SF: The Roots of Genre, which consists of two long articles taken from two books on SFF criticism: Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn and What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid. Both articles are concerned with analysing their respective genres. Mendelsohn identifies four different types of fantasy: Portal-Quest (e.g. 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'), Immersive (the Gormenghast trilogy), Intrusion (when the supernatural affects our own world), and Liminal (which regards fantastic intrusions as normal). Kincaid devotes his article to trying to define science fiction, concluding that the term includes such a broad range of works that one neat definition isn't possible.
I have to confess that I am rather sceptical about intense academic analyses of this type. My reaction tends to be along the lines of "well, that's mildly interesting, but it adds nothing to my appreciation of a story." However, coming up with definitions and arguing about them can be fun, so naturally I can't resist putting up a conceptual coconut for others to shy at. I should say that I've not read much about this, so my thoughts are no doubt treading a well-worn path.
Rather than start by trying to define SF or fantasy, I'll take a step back and consider both, plus other related genres, which can all be encompassed by a term like "fantastical fiction" (I have seen "fantasy" used to cover all of this, but I think that's confusing). The definition of fantastical fiction, or FF, could be something like this: "Fiction in which a principal plot element is not of this world." I think that's fairly comprehensive if somewhat loose, although it's obviously open to debate; I suspect that any definition would be disputed by the majority of SFF readers!
The different elements, or sub-genres, of FF can then be defined in terms of FF, for example: Science Fiction is FF in which an attempt is made to convince the reader that it might possibly happen. A further subset of SF is Mundane SF, which is limited to the science we know now. Alternative History is FF set in the past, in which a change at some point leads to a different history. Fantasy is, well, everything else within FF…but it includes its own subsets, in the form of fairy tales, horror, and vampire stories.
Obviously, not all stories fall neatly into one particular category. There are lots of grey areas, and also lots which contain elements of more than one type of FF – or from outside the FF genre altogether (e.g. crime fiction set in the future), as Kincaid observes. One genre which usually contains elements of SF is the techno-thriller, which involves technologies which are not yet available, although they might well be in the near future. I was thinking of this when watching the hair-raising (well, it would be if I had any) BBCTV spy thriller Spooks, which has just finished its latest series. Some of their technological tricks are not available, but most may be soon (although some look to be impossible for the foreseeable future). The James Bond movies have often included SF elements, with spacecraft and invisible cars, although the latest incarnation has been dragged firmly back into the mainstream thriller category. However, I would not describe Spooks or the earlier Bond movies as SF, because that is not their primary focus; the SF bits are peripheral, not "principal plot elements".
The issue of what is, or is not, SF is also raised in the latest issue of Vector, the BSFA's "Critical Journal". It includes an article by Adam Roberts on the works of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, who has been writing FF for years without describing it as such, or being accepted by the SFF world as one of its own. Roberts' explanation for this is that her stories don't really fit comfortably into our concept of SFF, being more concerned with mysticism. There are several other articles. Jonathan McCalmont considers SF and the laws of physics, difficult to summarise as it provides a general tour of the environs, looking at how various authors have dealt with the laws of nature in their works. Frank Ludlow writes on the "art" of reviewing, discussing the responsibility of the reviewer to produce informative and constructive reviews but also, having done so, to ignore the occasional angry reactions. Saxon Bullock discusses the TV series Lost, while Andy Sawyer examines the contents of the very first edition of Vector from 1958 (and discovers some perennial topics, such as a guide to writing SF and a discussion on the importance of characterisation). Stephen Baxter considers our fear of apocalyptic doom and our constant tendency to assume that major threats are going to turn out to be worse than they actually prove (let's hope that continues to be the case, given some of the predictions about the consequences of climate change). Graham Sleight writes about the Interzone magazine film reviews by Nick Lowe, who has been beavering away at the task for 23 years. Finally, there are no fewer than 48 substantial book reviews, which I will be studying carefully with a view to drawing up a post-Christmas purchasing list.
The third publication is Elastic Press: a Sampler, a booklet about the work of a small press which focuses on publishing single-author mixed-genre short-story anthologies and favours new authors and writing. It starts with an interview by Ian Whates of Andrew Hook, originator and owner of the Elastic Press, and includes stories from three of their books: Love in the Time of Connectivity, from Binding Energy by Daniel Marcus (the strange nature of future relationships in virtual worlds); La Macchina from The Turing Test by Chris Beckett (a new take on the old trope of robots developing sentience); and A Necklace of Ivy from The Last Reef by Gareth L Powell (a rather surreal view of an alien invasion). The purpose of the Elastic Press is unusual and worthy of support and, judging by the quality of the stories included, the books are worth buying on their merits anyway.
The earlier one is Fantasy & SF: The Roots of Genre, which consists of two long articles taken from two books on SFF criticism: Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn and What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid. Both articles are concerned with analysing their respective genres. Mendelsohn identifies four different types of fantasy: Portal-Quest (e.g. 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'), Immersive (the Gormenghast trilogy), Intrusion (when the supernatural affects our own world), and Liminal (which regards fantastic intrusions as normal). Kincaid devotes his article to trying to define science fiction, concluding that the term includes such a broad range of works that one neat definition isn't possible.
I have to confess that I am rather sceptical about intense academic analyses of this type. My reaction tends to be along the lines of "well, that's mildly interesting, but it adds nothing to my appreciation of a story." However, coming up with definitions and arguing about them can be fun, so naturally I can't resist putting up a conceptual coconut for others to shy at. I should say that I've not read much about this, so my thoughts are no doubt treading a well-worn path.
Rather than start by trying to define SF or fantasy, I'll take a step back and consider both, plus other related genres, which can all be encompassed by a term like "fantastical fiction" (I have seen "fantasy" used to cover all of this, but I think that's confusing). The definition of fantastical fiction, or FF, could be something like this: "Fiction in which a principal plot element is not of this world." I think that's fairly comprehensive if somewhat loose, although it's obviously open to debate; I suspect that any definition would be disputed by the majority of SFF readers!
The different elements, or sub-genres, of FF can then be defined in terms of FF, for example: Science Fiction is FF in which an attempt is made to convince the reader that it might possibly happen. A further subset of SF is Mundane SF, which is limited to the science we know now. Alternative History is FF set in the past, in which a change at some point leads to a different history. Fantasy is, well, everything else within FF…but it includes its own subsets, in the form of fairy tales, horror, and vampire stories.
Obviously, not all stories fall neatly into one particular category. There are lots of grey areas, and also lots which contain elements of more than one type of FF – or from outside the FF genre altogether (e.g. crime fiction set in the future), as Kincaid observes. One genre which usually contains elements of SF is the techno-thriller, which involves technologies which are not yet available, although they might well be in the near future. I was thinking of this when watching the hair-raising (well, it would be if I had any) BBCTV spy thriller Spooks, which has just finished its latest series. Some of their technological tricks are not available, but most may be soon (although some look to be impossible for the foreseeable future). The James Bond movies have often included SF elements, with spacecraft and invisible cars, although the latest incarnation has been dragged firmly back into the mainstream thriller category. However, I would not describe Spooks or the earlier Bond movies as SF, because that is not their primary focus; the SF bits are peripheral, not "principal plot elements".
The issue of what is, or is not, SF is also raised in the latest issue of Vector, the BSFA's "Critical Journal". It includes an article by Adam Roberts on the works of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, who has been writing FF for years without describing it as such, or being accepted by the SFF world as one of its own. Roberts' explanation for this is that her stories don't really fit comfortably into our concept of SFF, being more concerned with mysticism. There are several other articles. Jonathan McCalmont considers SF and the laws of physics, difficult to summarise as it provides a general tour of the environs, looking at how various authors have dealt with the laws of nature in their works. Frank Ludlow writes on the "art" of reviewing, discussing the responsibility of the reviewer to produce informative and constructive reviews but also, having done so, to ignore the occasional angry reactions. Saxon Bullock discusses the TV series Lost, while Andy Sawyer examines the contents of the very first edition of Vector from 1958 (and discovers some perennial topics, such as a guide to writing SF and a discussion on the importance of characterisation). Stephen Baxter considers our fear of apocalyptic doom and our constant tendency to assume that major threats are going to turn out to be worse than they actually prove (let's hope that continues to be the case, given some of the predictions about the consequences of climate change). Graham Sleight writes about the Interzone magazine film reviews by Nick Lowe, who has been beavering away at the task for 23 years. Finally, there are no fewer than 48 substantial book reviews, which I will be studying carefully with a view to drawing up a post-Christmas purchasing list.
The third publication is Elastic Press: a Sampler, a booklet about the work of a small press which focuses on publishing single-author mixed-genre short-story anthologies and favours new authors and writing. It starts with an interview by Ian Whates of Andrew Hook, originator and owner of the Elastic Press, and includes stories from three of their books: Love in the Time of Connectivity, from Binding Energy by Daniel Marcus (the strange nature of future relationships in virtual worlds); La Macchina from The Turing Test by Chris Beckett (a new take on the old trope of robots developing sentience); and A Necklace of Ivy from The Last Reef by Gareth L Powell (a rather surreal view of an alien invasion). The purpose of the Elastic Press is unusual and worthy of support and, judging by the quality of the stories included, the books are worth buying on their merits anyway.
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