Science Fiction & Fantasy

Film: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, and TV: Eternal Law

2012-01-27T00:57:00.001Z

The last of the eight films covering the seven Harry Potter books by J.K.Rowling, not so much a fantasy series as a global phenomenon. Just to recap, I only read the first of the books (I thought I would have loved it as a ten-year old, but it didn't do much for my ancient self) but have watched all of the films. I find I am rather more tolerant of films than of books, partly because visual spectacle can provide entertainment which may be lacking in print, and partly because films take far less time to watch than books do to read.

The first few films made for rather engaging light entertainment, but as time progressed and the children grew up, the mood (and the lighting effects) grew progressively darker. The first part of The Deathly Hallows was indeed rather deathly, so gloomy and dark in every sense that I found it barely watchable. Fortunately, the final film came to the rescue. While the mood is still grim until close to the end, there is more variety and interest in the plot than in the previous film, plus a satisfactory conclusion which wrapped up all of the loose ends and finished on a feel-good high. However, there were few stand-out moments; the one which sticks in my mind not being one of the more dramatic action scenes (all too common in modern films) but the surreal banking hall with the ranks of gnomes scribing away on either side.

At the end of it all, my main feeling was one of relief that it was all over. That is perhaps rather unkind, as history is almost certain to record that this series is one of the most outstanding achievements in fantasy film-making, along with The Lord of the Rings (I only hope that the forthcoming The Hobbit maintains that standard). Perhaps one day I'll feel like seeing all of the Harry Potter films again, only in relatively quick succession so that I literally don't keep losing the plot in the long gaps between releases. That isn't likely to happen for quite a long while, though.
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Eternal Law is a six-part ITV series by Ashley Pharoah and Matthew Graham, the creators of the marvellous Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. It features Samuel West and Ukweli Roach as angels who have been sent down to Earth (to be specific, the city of York) in human form to help people - as lawyers! They are assisted by the always-impressive Orla Brady, whose character had given up her angelic status to live as a human, and opposed by a fallen angel in the form of another lawyer, played by Tobias Menzies. To complicate matters, the fallen angel's human assistant (Hattie Morahan) had been the love of the Samuel West character's life in (literally) his former incarnation, but she doesn't recognise him.

The result is a strange mixture of fantasy, comedy, and sometimes emotional courtroom drama. Although I've now seen four of them I still can't decide how well this all gels, but it's intriguing enough to keep me watching. Compared with LoM and AtA, it suffers from the lack of a charismatic lead equivalent to Philip Glenister's Gene Hunt. Best summed up as rather whimsical light entertainment.

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

2012-01-20T08:44:00.002Z

Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) is acknowledged one of the "greats" of SF, a hugely productive multi-award-winning writer of novels and short stories as well as a science professor and non-fiction writer. His most productive fiction period was in the 1950s although new work was still being published into the 1990s. He is perhaps best known for the "Three Laws of Robotics" featured in his robot stories, but his most famous fictional work is probably the 1950s 'Foundation' trilogy: Foundation, Foundation & Empire, and Second Foundation (based on short stories from the early 1940s). I first read these in the 1960s but the last time I opened their pages was in the 1970s, so I was interested to see how these classic works stood up.

The time is the far future, with humanity spread over a vast galaxy-wide empire which had been ruled for thousands of years from the Imperial capitol at its heart, Trantor - a planet completely covered with buildings. But the huge spectacle of power presented by the Empire covers a gradual internal disintegration, with regional governors breaking free and creating their own kingdoms. Few people realise the inevitability of the decline, but among them is the famous psychohistorian, Hari Seldon. Psychohistory is the mathematical analysis of trends in society to predict the broad sweep of future social history. Seldon recognises that the disintegration is inevitable but aims to reduce the resulting "dark age" from a predicted 30,000 years to just 1,000 by setting up two Foundations, on planets at opposite ends of the galaxy, with the purpose of preserving human knowledge and skills.

Foundation

In the first volume, Seldon manages to obtain imperial permission to set up his Foundations, and the remainder of the book follows the fortunes of the First Foundation on the remote planet Terminus. The ostensible purpose is the creation of a vast Encyclopedia Galactica of all knowledge, and steady progress is made until the break-up of the Empire creates a crisis for the Foundation. A recorded image of the long-dead Seldon then appears, accurately predicting the crisis, and Salvor Hardin, the mayor, takes control from the academics and solves the problem, beginning a line of powerful mayors. They apply practical politics to managing their local area of the galactic fringe, controlling other planets by providing the high technology they have lost, wrapped up in the guise of an invented religion. These are in turn replaced by the traders, who ultimately develop into merchant princes, notably Hober Mallow, who are no less devious in their commitment to controlling their markets.

So far the first Foundation has been successful in following the path foreseen by Seldon, and confirmed by the occasional appearances of his recorded messages at moments of crisis. The Foundation has survived, maintaining its scientific knowledge and technology (and in some cases surpassing the achievements of the Empire, especially with miniature atomic power), and establishing a commercial empire in their small part of the galaxy. But the story is a long way from being over…

Foundation & Empire

The episodic nature of the first book, skipping generations at a time to focus on particular periods of crisis, is continued in the second but slows down somewhat, with only two parts this time. The first concerns the last attempt by a fading Empire to use its still powerful fleet, under the command of energetic Bel Riose, to crush the Foundation. The second and much longer part marks an intriguing side-step from the Seldon plan, when a mysterious new individual, never seen in public and known only as the Mule, seizes power in one system after another with astonishing ease, threatening the Foundation itself. This had not been foreseen by Seldon, and prompts a desperate journey to the heart of the old Empire in order to seek help from the legendary Second Foundation. Interestingly for the period in which it is written, this part features a heroine, Bayta, who is much more competent and impressive than her husband.

Second Foundation

The final part of the story continues with the search for the mysterious Second Foundation, concerning which there is only the briefest of references in the records, with no indication as to its nature or location. This is also in two parts, the first following on from the previous volume in covering the attempt by the Mule to locate and destroy the Second Foundation, the second a couple of generations later when growing tensions between the First and Second Foundations threaten to destroy Seldon's plan. This final part also features a strong female character, the precocious teenager Arcadia Darell (Arkady), Bayta's granddaughter.

To sum up, I greatly admire Asimov, not just for his landmark contributions to SF but also for his work in popularising science. The Foundation trilogy is a bold conception, a coherent and well-structured story covering four centuries and postulating a different kind of human civilisation based on developing mind skills rather than technological power. However, I have to say that despite his status in the genre, I find his fiction lacks something which keeps it out of the very front rank. While I enjoyed re-reading the Foundation trilogy it isn't as gripping as the very best fiction. There is a certain lack of excitement, of that "sense of wonder" which makes the best classic SF so compelling; instead, there's a flavour of didactic lesson about it. The episodic nature of the story, spread out over centuries with each episode featuring its own characters, also makes reader engagement more difficult to sustain.

Having said that, it's still an impressive achievement, especially for the 1940s. There are some nice touches: each part begins with an extract from the future Encyclopedia Galactica providing a brief introduction to the period (a neat way of inserting a useful little "info dump" to plug the gaps, copied by Herbert in Dune). The story also gets better as it goes along, as the longer episodes provide more time to focus on the key characters. In particular, Arkady is a marvellous creation, an observant and amusing portrayal of teenage dreams and angst. She gives the lie to the assumption that the early SF writers couldn't develop characters and must surely have been based on a girl or girls Asimov knew well.

In conclusion, the trilogy not only should be on the "must read" list of every SF fan who has any interest in the history of the genre, it is still worth reading in its own right.

Black Mirror (C4 TV series)

2012-01-13T10:58:00.001Z

A series of three TV dramas on UK Channel 4 "that taps into collective unease about our modern world". Each takes a look at some aspects of modern society by imagining what the future might hold if current trends continue.

The National Anthem

The nation's favourite princess has been captured and is being held to ransom. The kidnapper's demand? That the Prime Minister should have sex with a pig - live on TV - that day; otherwise she dies. This is the premise for an hilarious but very dark comedy as the PM struggles to find a way out of the situation, with spin doctors, special forces, TV reporters and his wife all getting involved, and many twists and turns before the final sting in the tail. Painfully real - the PM's agonised dilemma is all too convincing.

15 Million Merits

Some time in the future, the lot of most citizens is to spend their days on exercise bikes, generating power for some unknown purpose. The harder they pedal, the more Merits they earn to spend on food, consumer goods and popular entertainment. The only way out is to earn the 15 million Merits needed to get a ticket onto a talent show, where their performances are judged by a panel plus the reaction of a virtual audience. One man hears a new neighbour singing, an innocent girl only just old enough to have started pedalling, and is so moved that he sponsors her for the talent show. But the outcome is entirely unexpected, and drives him into making a dramatic intervention - with an equally unexpected consequence. No humour in this one apart from the satirical portrayal of the judging panel, but it's a bitter, thought-provoking take on some trends in modern society.

The Entire History of You

The time is the near future, when almost everyone is implanted with a Grain in their heads: a small memory chip which permanently records everything a person sees or hears. It can be played back in their heads or sent to a TV screen, as often as they want. This is remarkably convenient but the drama reveals the social and psychological dangers of a memory which is not only perfect, but can be replayed to anyone else. The plot follows the gradual disintegration of one man who obsessively replays his memories to look for clues about the relationship between his wife and an old flame of hers they'd recently met, zooming in on details, using lipreading programmes to decipher distant conversations, and so on. Not for those who prefer their entertainment to be light-hearted.

These programmes make compelling viewing and, unlike other TV dramas, have stuck firmly in my mind. The first is more of a political satire but the others are adult SF, and all of them were written to make people think rather than be passively entertained. They make the usual TV SFF hokum look ridiculously juvenile. If you missed them, try to see them. They are not always easy to watch but are exemplars of what modern adult SF programmes should really be like.

Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore

2012-01-07T00:24:00.001Z

I have previously reviewed two other alternative history novels concerning the American Civil War - Harrison's A Rebel in Time and Turtledove's The Guns of the South (see my review list in the left column) - so it was natural for me to pick up a copy of Moore's Bring the Jubilee which, since its first publication in 1953, has become regarded as a classic.

Moore's approach is very different from the later works mentioned above. The principal character, Hodgkins McCormick Backmaker (Hodge), is a young man born in 1921 into a very different America. The Confederate side had won the American Civil War (known as the War of Southron Independence) and had since flourished, absorbing Mexico and other central and south American states and becoming one of the world's great powers, along with the German Empire (following their victorious 1914-1916 European war) and the British Empire. The northern rump of the United States of America is a backward, weak and impoverished country of no account in world affairs, but this is where Hodge was born and brought up. The plot of the novel almost entirely focuses on Hodge's experiences over a period of several years, painting a usually bleak picture of life in this alternative pre-industrial USA. In approach it therefore has a lot in common with P K Dick's The Man in the High Castle (also reviewed here), which similarly focuses on the aftermath of a different outcome of a war - in that case, World War 2. Moore does not deal directly with the Civil War until the very last part of the book.

Hodge is an unlikely hero, too big and clumsy to be of much practical use and only really interested in reading. He is an observer of life and only occasionally a reluctant participant, and his dream is an academic career as an historian, but that is highly unlikely in the restricted opportunities available to him. He leaves the farm where his parents barely scrape a subsistence-level existence and walks the dirt tracks to New York, where he finds employment in a bookshop. However, the city is full of tensions with the radical Grand Army, a banned nationalist organisation, competing with Southern agents, and Hodge becomes unwittingly involved.

This is not an easy read and I gave up at one point, before returning to it a couple of weeks later. The gloomy situation and Hodge's knack of falling into trouble become somewhat depressing, and only my interest in seeing how it turned out led me to return to it. Fortunately, the mood changes to one of (relative) optimism half-way through as Hodge's circumstances change for the better.

Critics of SFF usually point to a lack of characterisation but have nothing to complain about here. Not only is Hodge a well-drawn individual but so are several other characters: Tyss, the bookshop owner who offers a haven to Hodge; Enfandin, the Consul for the Republic of Haiti, a fellow-spirit who becomes his friend; and the three women in his life, Tirzah, his first love, the intensely conflicted Barbara and the captivating Catalina. In fact, from the SFF viewpoint Moore devotes too much time to developing his characters and not enough on exploring and explaining the very different world he outlines.

I can't say more about the story without spoiling some surprises, so I will merely say that the book deserves its classic status, even if it isn't the most cheerful or exciting of stories.

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SPOILER WARNING - read no further if you want to read the book for yourself!
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Hodge applies to universities, more in desperate hope than expectation since he has no formal qualifications, but to his surprise he is invited to Haggershaven, a combination of commune and academic refuge, where researchers are free to pursue their interests as long as they contribute labour to the running of the farm and various associated industries. For Hodge, it seems like Paradise. He now has the leisure to focus his interests on the War of Southron Independence and becomes a noted scholar, publishing well-received papers. However, he remains most intrigued by one crucial episode in the Battle of Gettysburg when a small number of Confederate soldiers were able to hold onto an important position, turning the tide of the battle and starting a cascade of Confederate victories which won them the war.

Meanwhile, another member of the Haggershaven community, a brilliant physicist, is working on a time machine. Tests prove that it can send and retrieve people for up to 100 years into the past, and Hodge cannot resist the temptation to visit that crucial position at the Battle of Gettysburg and see for himself what actually happened. I leave the rest to your imagination (or to the Wiki plot summary if you're really desperate to know). I will only say that the ending is unusual in that it represents both a triumph and a tragedy, depending on the perspective.

Abarat by Clive Barker

2011-12-30T08:54:00.001Z

I recall Clive Barker first hitting the headlines in the late 1980s with his dark fantasy novel Weaveworld, which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award in 1988. I also read some other books by him over the next few years, although Weaveworld is the only one I've kept to read again sometime. Since then I've not kept up with his writing career (something which happens all too often, I find) but when I spotted Abarat (first published 2002) while browsing through one of those cheap multiple-buy bookshops, I added it to the pile after a cursory glance at the back cover. Which goes to show the hazards of such a casual approach as I found a couple of surprises when I came to read the book.

The heroine of Abarat is Candy Quakenbush, a girl from the depressingly boring Minnesota town of Chickentown. She runs away to escape her life there and finds herself in a strange alternative universe, the Islands of the Abarat, set in the Sea of Izabella. There is one island for every hour of the day and night; the island at Noon basks in continuous midday sun, while the one at Midnight, on the opposite side of the circular archipelago, never sees daylight. There is also a mysterious island at the Twenty-Fifth Hour, set in the centre. The islands vary greatly in their form (one consisting of a giant sculpture of a head) and in their inhabitants, many of whom are far from human. Magic works there but so does technology, and there is a growing tension between the two as a struggle develops for domination of the Islands.

As a rare visitor from the fabled Hereafter (the name given to our world), Candy is immediately of great interest to the competing powers and finds herself in a series of hazardous adventures as she tries to escape capture and find her own way in this strange world. On the way, she makes friends with an assorted collection of peculiar individuals and has to grow up in a hurry, aided by surreptitious assistance from some of the inhabitants.

I mentioned at the start that I had a couple of surprises when I read the book. The first you may already have guessed from the plot summary - Abarat is aimed at young adults. This makes it the third time recently that I have unexpectedly discovered this on reading a novel set in a parallel universe, the others being China Miéville's Un Lun Dun, and Polikarpus & King's Down Town (see my review index). Perhaps this kind of plot sells particularly well to young adults? The other surprise is that this novel is only the first of a series, with two sequels to date and another one reportedly planned.

Abarat was nominated for the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers, won second place in the 2003 Locus Poll for the Best Young Adult Novel and was picked as one of its Best Books for Young Adults by The American Library Association. My own feelings towards the story were rather more lukewarm. It was sufficiently entertaining and well-written to keep me reading to the end (something which can't be taken for granted these days) but it didn't strike me as especially notable. Perhaps I've just read too many good stories of this kind recently. If you enjoy this sort of story it's worth looking up, but I'm in no hurry to seek out the sequels. I should add that one of the major appeals of the original hardback was apparently a large number of colour illustrations by the author (who is also an artist) which maybe helped to account for its warm reception, but these were omitted from my paperback edition.

Film: Thor (2011)

2011-12-23T08:26:00.001Z

Yet another US superhero film, this time giving a contemporary science-fictional twist to the myths of the Norse gods and acquiring an upmarket gloss by being directed by Kenneth Branagh, the Shakespearean actor/director.

The plot is set on three of the nine Norse "realms" (effectively, planets): Asgard, the abode of the gods; Jotunheim, the home of their traditional enemies the Frost Giants; and Midgard, our very own Earth. Thor (played by Brad Pitt look-alike, the muscular Chris Hemsworth) is the heir to the throne of Asgard, currently occupied by his father Odin (Anthony Hopkins). However, his scheming brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) plots to get Thor into trouble by goading him to attack Jotunheim, for which act of disobedience Odin strips Thor of his magical powers and of his mighty hammer Mjolnir, casting both separately to Midgard.

On present-day Earth, the newly arrived Thor is promptly run over by the vehicle of a scientific research team led by astrophysicist Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), leading to some amusing scenes as he tries to work out what is going on and they try to understand who he is. Hearing that Mjolnir has landed not far away and is being researched by a secretive government organisation, Thor sets off to reclaim his hammer, only to find that it isn't quite as simple as that. Further adventures and battles follow (along with a predictable romantic entanglement) before Thor is able to return to Asgard to challenge his brother, who has been getting up to further mischief in his absence.

Thor is an entertaining film, briskly-paced, well-acted and with a good mix of adventure, supernatural battles, humour and romance. Unlike some reviewers, I much preferred the literally down-to-Earth part, when Thor was an ordinary human, over the stylised and over-dramatised scenes on Asgard and Jotunheim which always looked like, well, fantasy film sets. Despite that reservation I wouldn't have minded watching it all again soon afterwards, which is high praise as I rarely feel that way about a film. A couple of sequels are already planned and I can only hope (albeit without much optimism) that they maintain the standard of the first.

The Origin of Our Species by Chris Stringer

2011-12-15T12:40:00.003Z

This week, a pause for some real rather than fictional science. Chris Stringer has been researching human evolution throughout his professional life and currently works at the Department of Palaeontology at the National History Museum, London. He is regarded as the UK's foremost authority on the subject and his latest book, The Origin of Our Species, sets out to explain to interested observers the current state of knowledge in a field which has seen some rapid developments in recent years.

Not only have two additional hominims who lived at the same time as Homo sapiens been discovered - the Denisovans and Homo floresiensis (the "Hobbit"), both in Asia - but gene sequencing has hit the news with the revelation that the genome of modern humans contains some elements from both Neanderthals and Denisovans, indicating that they all interbred at some point. Genetic analysis and advanced dating methods have also provided far more information about the way in which the various species of the genus Homo are related to each other, plus how they spread and interacted.

I read with great interest what Stringer has to say about all this. His approach is thematic and discursive rather than chronological; it focuses on how we know what we do about human origins rather than on simply telling the evolutionary story. This makes for an interesting read but an awkward reference source since material on Neanderthals, for example, is scattered throughout the book, requiring much flipping between text and index to track down.

I liked the fact that Stringer is not didactic. He acknowledges where the data is shaky and where it is firm, and points to alternative interpretations in order to highlight the areas where there is disagreement between the researchers in this field. However, it is also clear from his narrative that most such disagreements tend to be temporary, caused by lack of adequate data, and that they usually go away as the data builds up sufficiently to make one interpretation clearly a better fit with the data than the others (although scientists are human too, so can be reluctant to give up a theory that they've adopted).

In the initial chapter the author outlines the history of the study of human evolution starting with Darwin's The Descent of Man. This is followed up by chapters on: the development of dating techniques (the long-established radiocarbon dating having been joined by several others with different strengths and weaknesses); new high-tech ways of analysing skulls and other bones; recent finds and their implications; the examination of the evidence for the development of thought and behaviour (tools, art, crafts, burials); genes and DNA; and finally two chapters on "The Making of a Modern Human" and "The Past and Future Evolution of Our Species". There is a huge amount of fascinating material in this book and in a review like this I can only pick out a few points which caught my attention.

An early problem, which still exists today, is how to categorise the various fossils which have been discovered to date. One view (particularly associated with the Multiregional theory described below) is that the genus "Homo" and species "sapiens" covers a wide range of hominims, leading to the use of sub-species terms such as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens sapiens (i.e., us). At the opposite extreme, another view has a different species name attached to almost every fossil. Stringer sits somewhere in the middle; he doesn't use sub-species terms but just the main species ones.

One of the hottest debates over the past few decades has been between the "Multiregional" and "Out of Africa" models of evolution. The former postulates an early spread of hominims from Africa across Eurasia, after which each group evolved in parallel into the variety of modern humans. The latter (which Stringer prefers to call RAO, for "Recent African Origin", since there is no dispute that all of humanity originated in Africa, as Darwin speculated) argues that there were several stages of dispersion from Africa, with modern humans primarily originating from the most recent one approximately 70,000 years ago (with the addition of a soupçon from older species by interbreeding before they died out). At one time the Multiregional theory was dominant but modern genetic analysis has swung the argument strongly in favour of RAO after the usual academic debate (polite term for a vicious cat-fight!), with some still refusing to be convinced.

The course and timeline of human evolution within Africa is another issue explored in the first chapter. Trying to sort out how the various fragmentary fossils relate to each other - specifically, which were in the ancestral chain leading directly to modern humans and which were dead-ends - is still very much a source of debate. Here, the development of more sophisticated technical dating systems has proved helpful. What has become clear is that the evolutionary history is very far from the tidy progression from an ape-like hominim to modern man as shown in the now notorious "ascent of man" illustration. Different types of hominim coexisted for a very long time in Africa - and probably interbred. The earliest skull fragment of modern human form has been dated to 250,000 years ago (although the first fully modern humans seem to be only half as old), but a primitive skull found in west Africa is only 20,000 years old.

In the light of all of this, any human family tree is tentative and subject to revision as more data are discovered. Keeping that caveat in mind, the author indicates a probable structure as follows: Homo erectus, for which there is fossil evidence in both Africa and Asia, emerged about 1.5 million years ago and survived in Africa into the Homo sapiens era. At some point, perhaps 1.2 million years ago, an offshoot of erectus appeared, designated Homo heidelbergensis. This hominim family subdivided around 400,000 years ago; one branch produced both the Neanderthals and Denisovans, the other became Homo sapiens; modern humans.

However, this definition of "modern human" concerns only a skeleton and skull like ours. Were the earliest sapiens like us in every other way? To determine this, we have to look beyond biological evidence and try to assess their behaviour from clues they left behind. It seems reasonably clear that up to about 100,000 years ago, sapiens stone tools were much like those of the Neanderthals. However, at some point human behaviour began to change: tools became more varied, specialised and sophisticated; cave art and stones engraved with geometric designs began to appear along with necklaces and musical instruments; there is evidence for more permanent occupation of caves; and also for a wider range of food sources including marine fish as well as shellfish (which implies special tools to catch them). These changes didn't all happen at the same time - the earliest burial evidence dates from around 100,000 years ago with the changes becoming comprehensive by about 40,000 years ago - but the evidence leads some scientists to believe that genetic changes rewired the human brain during this period. Certainly the Cro-Magnons of 35,000 years ago, the first modern humans in Europe, exhibited the full range of such behaviours.

For me, some of the most fascinating questions concern the Neanderthals; how different were they from contemporary Cro-Magnons and why did they die out less than 30,000 years ago, after living in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years? Physically, they were stockier and more massively built than humans; their children developed more rapidly and the adults only lived to about 35-40 at best, with the middle-aged and old comprising a much smaller proportion of the population than with humans. There is evidence that they lived hard and injury-prone lives - the women as much as the men. Their tool technology was simple but they showed some indications of culture in their burials and in decorative items such as beads. Whether or not they wore clothes is unknown, but there is no evidence for the sewing and weaving which the Cro-Magnons possessed. However, it seems likely that they did use fur wraps and ponchos in the cold conditions in Europe (they were physically better adapted to cold than humans, but not that much better). Their foot bones do not indicate that they wore shoes - unlike those of Cro-Magnons. Their diet seems to have been more restricted - they were far more carnivorous than the ominvore humans.

Could Neanderthals speak? The shape of the throat indicates that speech would have been physically possible, albeit at about the same level as a human two-year old. They also have the same variant of the FOX2P gene as humans - for whom it is necessary for speech. So while we can never be certain, there seems to be no reason why they could not have had some kind of speech, albeit without the range and sophistication of humans.

So why did Neanderthals die out? Were they killed off by the more advanced newcomers, the Cro-Magnons? As the author points out, there was probably no single reason for their extinction. They died out at a time of great climate stress, with rapid fluctuations in temperatures. Their more restricted diet would have counted against them. The high death rate - possibly the result of having to close with their animal prey rather than using throwing weapons like the humans - would have taken its toll. Poorer communications due to more restricted language skills could have handicapped them. More subtly, the relative lack of older people would have made it more difficult to pass on acquired knowledge or to help with child care while the younger adults were out hunting. The evidence of long-term decline indicates that the Neanderthals may have been on the way out anyway, although competition for resources from the Cro-Magnons might well have played a part in finishing them off.

This raises another interesting question discussed in the book - the importance of population density. Evidence suggests that at various times during human development in Africa, relatively advanced technologies were employed, only to be lost. They kept having to reinvent the wheel (metaphorically speaking). The reason for this was probably that the small groups who developed the new technologies may have died out without passing on their knowledge, or been put under such survival stress that they stopped having the time to use them - resulting in their being forgotten. Only with a sufficiently high population density, plus frequent communication between groups, could new ideas be disseminated, preserved and built upon. The Neanderthals never enjoyed such advantages.

Perhaps the most striking detail in the book concerns "the Hobbit"; the tiny hominim from the Indonesian island of Flores, providing the name Homo floresiensis. Although the heat and humidity has effectively destroyed the DNA, the morphology of the remains indicates that the Hobbit was unrelated not only to modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, but even to their precursor, Homo erectus. While there is still disagreement over its origins, Stringer suggests that it could be a dwarfed descendent of Homo habilis or even the australopithecines which dispersed from Africa over two million years ago (stone tools found on Flores are at least 800,000 years old). Yet the most recent remains of the Hobbit have been dated to about 18,000 years ago, only a few thousand years before modern humans colonised the island. In evolutionary terms, that's a blink of an eye. It sends a chill down my spine to think that we came that close to coexisting with such an early hominim.

Finally (in case you were wondering) yes, there is evidence that humanity is continuing to evolve - and at an accelerating rate. One surprise is that average human brain size has shrunk by about 10% over the last 20,000 years; whether this will continue is interesting to speculate, but brains are very energy-intensive to maintain and will shrink if they are used less. Perhaps our modern information and other technologies, which require us to do less memorising and even thinking, will accelerate this reduction? The profound changes in lifestyle over the last 10,000 years, with the spread of agriculture and urban population centres, have led to other changes, particularly the development of disease resistance and of adult lactose tolerance (among Africans and Europeans). Analysis of the human genome, and in particular the rate of mutations in DNA, have indicated that some 20% of our genes have come under selection pressure over this period. And this of course is without considering the potential of genetic engineering to alter humanity in the future.

As you may have gathered, I am highly impressed with this book and warmly recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. It does require a degree of concentration - although aiming for a popular audience the author thankfully hasn't dumbed down to the lowest common denominator - but it's well written and easy enough to follow.

The Steel of Raithskar by Randall Garrett and Vicki Ann Heydron

2011-12-10T11:27:00.002Z

The Gandalara Cycle is a set of seven novels published during 1981-86 which essentially contain one episodic story over 1,200 pages long. The series was conceived by Randall Garrett, famous for his 1960s Lord Darcy fantasy series, but he was taken ill so the work was completed by his wife, Vicki Ann Heydron. The Gandalara Cycle is commonly found in three paperback volumes: the first two containing three novels each (Gandalara Cycle I and II) the third just the final novel, The River Wall. If you manage to acquire these and are looking forward to immersing yourself in the tale, be warned that in the second volume, novels five and six are in the wrong order. I first read these books in the late 1980s and enjoyed them enough to keep on my shelves so I decided that it was time for another look. So far I have read only the first novel, The Steel of Raithskar.

Ricardo Carillo, former US Marine and now an elderly and terminally ill professor of languages, is on a farewell cruise around the Mediterranean when he sees a ball of fire heading straight for his ship at enormous speed. He recovers in the middle of a desert, parched and injured and with a dead man next to him, and begins a slow and painful journey to look for help before collapsing into unconsciousness. Recovering at an oasis, he discovers several things: he is not on our present-day Earth but in the land of Gandalara, which has a culture and technology similar to the Bronze-Age Mediterranean; he is not in his own body but is occupying the body of a young man called Markasset, of whose memories he retains only fragments apart from his understanding of the language which is like nothing he has heard before; the people are hominims but not quite Homo Sapiens; and he is a sha'um rider. The sha'um are giant fighting cats, the biggest animals in Gandalara, who form telepathic bonds with their riders, and he has only survived because Markasset's sha'um, Keeshah, carried him to safety.

Still very unsure of what is going on and how he should behave, Ricardo/Markasset and Keeshah travel to their home city of Raithskar where he discovers some uncomfortable facts: he owes a large sum of money in a gambling debt; he is engaged to be married; his estranged father, Thanasset, is suspected of complicity in the theft of a giant jewel, the Ra'ira, which is the symbol of the city; and Markasset is also suspected of having fled the city with the jewel. The rest of the novel is concerned with Ricardo's attempts to clear the names of Thanasset and himself while trying to recover more of Markasset's memories and determine his place in this strange, but increasingly appealing, land.

This is a fast, light and entertaining read which sets up the Ganadalara Cycle very well. There's more than an echo of Burroughs' Carter on Mars here, and references to other works including the giant telepathic cats in Schmitz's Novice, reviewed recently. It's an escapist adventure in the classic mould, made more immediate and involving by being told in the first person, and I'm looking forward to reading the the rest of the Cycle.

Interzone 237

2011-12-02T07:51:00.001Z

The November/December issue of the British SFF magazine emerged just too soon to cover the death of Ann McCaffrey, the prolific SFF writer who will always be remembered for her creation of the world of Pern and its huge, telepathic dragons. I still remember the delight with which I first read Dragonflight in 1970 and it remains one of my favourite SFF novels. It stood up very well to a recent reading, following which I reviewed it on this blog (see the review list on the left).

The cover art is by Richard Wagner, who is also the subject of the editorial and of an interview on the magazine's ttapress.com website. David Langford's Ansible Link includes mention of a Heinlein award to Connie Willis for "SF or technical non-fiction that inspires human exploration of space", which puzzled me because all of her work that I know about is very much set on Earth. There are the usual book, DVD and film reviews which I will, as usual, study carefully to see if there is anything I should be adding to my "to read" and "to watch" lists.

Just four stories this time:

The Last Osama by Lavie Tidha, illustrated by Steve Hambidge. Purportedly told by one of the soldiers who killed Osama bin Laden, it is set in a surreal future in which people become Osama as if it were an infectious disease. Decidedly bizarre.

Erasing the Concept of Sex from a Photobooth by Douglas Lain, illustrated by David Gentry. This one defeats my powers of summary description. Suffice to say that it features sex and a weird photobooth. Even more bizarre.

Insect Joy by Caspian Gray. A young woman is sensitive to all creatures, including insects, and has a very strange form of control over them. Yep, you guessed it, this one's bizarre.

Digital Rites by Jim Hawkins, illustrated by Richard Wagner. Famous actors begin to die in a competitive future in which they don't actually do any acting - they just pose for the news media - but are linked by quantum entanglement to their characters in virtual film productions in order to animate them more effectively. The chase to discover what's going on, to overcome the studio's crisis and to complete the film they're working on makes an intriguing story which seems remarkably mundane in this company.

I was getting worried by the time I reached the final story because the first three were not much to my taste, but Hawkins' tale (by far the longest of the four) I read with some relief as I found it much more engaging and enjoyable, even if I didn't entirely follow all of the plot threads and the ending seemed a bit too neat.

Films: The Ninth Gate (1999) and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)

2011-11-25T10:34:00.001Z

This time we have two Johnny Depp films for the price of one.

I hadn't previously seen The Ninth Gate. Depp plays Dean Corso, a mercenary book dealer who is hired by Boris Balkan (Frank Langella) to verify the authenticity of a rare book he owns, The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, of which only three copies are known. The book contains nine engravings which legend says were drawn by the Devil and will summon him if used in the correct way.

Corso searches for information about the book and visits the owners of the other two copies to make direct comparisons. Along the way he meets the previous owner of Balkan's copy (Lena Olin) who is desperate to recover it, and keeps seeing a mysterious unnamed girl (Emmanuelle Seigner) who has a knack of turning up at the right moment to save him from danger. Corso discovers that only three engravings in each copy are genuine - it is necessary to bring them all together to achieve the desired effect. The bodies begin to pile up as rivals compete to obtain the nine genuine engravings, culminating in occult ceremonies.

This is described as a horror film, which surprises me as there is nothing particularly horrific - or even occult - about it. It is quite low-key and slow-paced, and is best regarded as a mystery. The only supernatural elements are a couple of gravity-defying tricks by the unnamed girl, and the very last scene which frankly left me baffled as to what it all meant. However, the film is stylish, looks good and is moderately entertaining; and, if nothing else appeals, male viewers can enjoy the sight of Olin and Seigner!

****************************
The fourth of the Pirates of the Caribbean films has Depp once again reprising his role as the iconic Captain Sparrow, although the two secondary stars of the earlier films (Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom) disappear and Penélope Cruz joins the crew as Sparrow's love interest. The only other memorable characters are Ian McShane as Blackbeard and the young mermaid Syrena, played rather fetchingly by Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey.

I don't have a lot to say about this one. It's just more of the same, but not a lot more. I expected Cruz to pair very well with Depp but her performance never takes off and there is zero chemistry between them. In fact, the entire cast seems subdued, as if they're not having much fun. Even Depp's performance (as usual, the main reason to watch the film) is toned down, and the film lacks the joie de vivre which made the earlier ones (especially the first) so enjoyable. I note that this film had a different director from the first three, Rob Marshall replacing Gore Verbinski, and apparently the budget didn't allow for as many special effects, both of which presumably contributed to the malaise.

The film finished with lots of dangling loose ends and two more sequels are reportedly planned, which just goes to prove (once more) that Hollywood can't see a dead horse without giving it a thorough flogging.

Short Stories: Novice by James H Schmitz; The Eyes Have It by Randall Garrett

2011-11-18T08:49:00.001Z

The Classic Science Fiction discussion group selects one short story a week (from those available free online) to read and discuss, as well as the monthly pair of novels. I don't usually read them because I spend so much time on a computer anyway that I don't like to read fiction on it as well, and I don't have an e-reader because I have so many paper books stacked up awaiting my attention. However, I happened to have the two stories above in paper anthologies, so I re-read them. Both stories were written in the 1960s and both are the first of series: the Telzey Amberdon and Lord Darcy stories respectively.

In Novice, Schmitz's far-future Telzey Amberdon is a teenage girl with very high-status parents who happens to have a genius level intelligence, remarkable maturity and competence, and nascent psi powers. Oh, and she's good-looking too. If this all sounds like someone you would hate, prepare to be surprised - Schmitz makes us like her and you'd need a heart of stone not to be cheering her on by the end of the story. Sent away on holiday with her sweetly poisonous aunt to a strange planet with only her pet giant cat of unknown species, Tick-Tock, as a friendly face, Telzey soon discovers that her aunt has hatched a plot to deprive her of her pet. For Tick-Tock is a native of the planet - a species now believed to be almost extinct - and is therefore subject to confiscation. But Telzey also discovers that the giant cats are far from extinct, and she becomes involved in a dangerous scheme to outwit her aunt and survive the close attention of the ferocious felines.

In complete contrast, the Lord Darcy tales are set on an alternate Earth of vaguely Victorian technology and even earlier social development in which France and the UK are one country, North America is still a colony and the nobility are very much in charge. Oh, and magic works and is openly practiced - provided that it is sanctioned by the church. Lord Darcy is a criminal investigator who puzzles out seemingly impossible crimes with the aid of his assistant, a magician who has all kinds of useful abilities. So these stories are in effect a mixture of Sherlock Holmes, magical fantasy and steampunk. The most famous of them is the full-length novel, Too Many Magicians, but there are also nine short stories, of which The Eyes Have It was the introductory tale, concerning the mysterious murder of a lecherous nobleman. Those interested in these stories should look for the 2002 publication, Lord Darcy, which includes all of the stories as well as the novel.

These two stories may appear to have nothing in common, but that's not the case - they are both huge fun to read, light and entertaining, and were very popular in their day, resulting in several sequels. They date from an altogether more innocent age of SFF, which is an important aspect of their charm.

Climate Change News

2011-11-11T13:50:00.002Z

Those who urge taking action to avert climate change have had a bad couple of years. First, there was "Climategate" - the hacking of damaging emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, then the row over the use of a wildly inaccurate claim concerning the melting of Himalayan glaciers in a publication by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the body tasked with reviewing and assessing research - and finally the failure of the 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen to reach a meaningful international agreement on addressing global warming.

This triple blow seriously damaged the public perception of the seriousness of the threat from climate change. Even worse, the global financial crisis and resulting economic fallout have convinced many people that there are far more important and urgent problems to throw resources at. This has all combined to undermine political support, as most clearly demonstrated by the increasingly sceptical public statements of the Republican candidates for next year's US Presidential election.

However, there has been more encouraging news recently. Most notably, the conclusions of the Berkeley Earth Project, which was set up in the wake of Climategate to take a fresh look at the evidence. As reported by the BBC, the project was established by a noted climate change sceptic, University of California physics professor Richard Muller, with the help of funding from sources which included charitable foundations maintained by the Koch brothers, the billionaire US industrialists who have donated large sums to organisations lobbying against acceptance of man-made global warming.

Despite these unpromising circumstances, Professor Muller's team conducted an exhaustive analysis of all of the available data from the three major centres for climate research, whose work had been decried as unreliable and shoddy in climate sceptic circles: the collaboration between the UK Met Office and UEA's Climatic Research Unit; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Berkeley Earth Project finally concluded that the research and analyses carried out by these three groups was fundamentally correct.

"Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK," said Prof Muller.

"This confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions."

This is worth emphasising: a thorough scientific study, funded with the help of climate sceptics and headed by a scientist who was himself a climate change sceptic, has concluded that those scientists warning about climate change were right all along. This deserves all the publicity it can get.

Next came calls for tougher action on climate change from big business in the form of The Corporate Leaders Group, a network of nearly 200 major companies spread over 30 countries, as described here.

This stance was supported by the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, representing more than $20 trillion in assets including banking giants HSBC and BNP Paribas, who argued that the governments which were acting quickly to implement tough climate policies would reap the biggest investments and the biggest rewards.

What Do We Know?

So what is the current state of scientific research into climate change? What is known and, of equal importance, not known? The New Scientist magazine has helpfully put together a simple guide to exactly that, here. To summarise very briefly:

We know that greenhouse gases are warming the planet, but we don't know how far the levels of these gases will rise.

We know that other pollutants are cooling the planet, but we don't know by how much.

We know that the planet is going to get a lot hotter, but we don't know how much hotter, nor how the climate will change in specific regions.

We know that the sea level is going to rise by many metres, but we don't know how quickly this will happen.

We know that there will be more floods and droughts, but we don't know whether there will be more hurricanes and the like.

Finally, we don't know how serious a threat global warming is to life, nor if and when "tipping points" (causing sudden accelerations in warming) will be reached.

It is of course frustrating that scientists cannot be more specific about what is going to happen where and when, but the massive complexity of the processes involved preclude this. Probably as a result, the public acceptance of the need for action - more specifically, the need for action which is costly now in order to stave off disaster later - is still not strong enough for most political leaders to take the action required. At the moment, the warming trends are steadily upwards, with the very limited reductions in carbon emissions achieved by the developed world swamped by the increasing industrialisation of the developing world - especially China and India - and the ever-growing global population which has now (more or less) reached seven billion and is projected to reach 9 or 10 billion by the middle of the century.

It is becoming ever more certain that we will not act effectively enough, quickly enough, to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to the extent needed to prevent global temperatures from rising to dangerous levels by the end of this century. Can anything else be done? The obvious answer is geoengineering - technical fixes to counteract the rise in greenhouse gases - and it may be significant that public acceptance of such an approach seems to be growing as described here. However, as I have already discussed in this article, there are serious problems with this approach.

The path our generation takes now will decide what sort of future the next few generations will experience. At the moment, there appear to be few grounds for optimism. When faced with difficult and painful decisions, people are very prone to go through several stages (as governments have been doing over the current international financial crisis):
1. Denying there's a problem.
2. Hoping that it will go away if it's ignored for long enough.
3. Hoping that something will come up which will make hard decisions unnecessary.
4. Finally, reluctantly, taking the minimum action after waiting for as long as possible.

The problem with this tried-and-tested approach to muddling through is that the climate has enormous inertia. By the time the need for action has become obvious to all, the climate changes will have gathered such momentum that they will quite possibly be unstoppable. Humanity needs to fasten its metaphorical seat belt - we're in for a very rough ride.

Film: The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (2010)

2011-11-04T15:49:00.001Z

Something different in the way of cinematic pleasure this time. The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec is a French film (subtitled) based on a Franco-Belgian comic strip relating the varied fantastical adventures of Adèle (Louise Bourgoin) a resourceful young reporter and author.

The place is Paris, the time a hundred years ago. The plot concerns Adèle's attempts to find a way of curing her twin sister, who has been in a coma for five years following a freak accident. Her search involves an Indiana Jones-style escapade in Egypt to find and recover the mummy of a noted doctor to a pharaoh (whom she believes is the only person who might succeed in reviving her sister). She hopes that a scientist, Professeur Espérandieu, will be able to bring the mummy back to life - as the Professeur has developed a telepathic method for rousing the dead. Unfortunately, in Adèle's absence he has been practicing his skills and has managed to cause a pterodactyl to hatch from its egg in a museum and terrorise Paris, resulting in his arrest. So first Adèle has to spring him from prison, then get him to revive the mummy so it can treat her sister, but (needless to say) all does not go to plan. To make matters worse, a big-game hunter has been recruited to shoot the pterodactyl, but its fate is closely tied to that of the Professeur.

This film certainly dispels any notion that the French can't take a joke against themselves. Many of the characters are broad caricatures of French stereotypes, with only Adèle being played straight - if you can believe in a young woman who confidently overcomes all obstacles, including imminent execution, with remarkable style and sang-froid. This is a zany comedy (some might say bonkers) with a laugh in every scene, and is quite unlike anything else; The Mummy might be the closest I've seen, although in comparison that seems like a serious horror drama.

The film might best be summed up as "magnificently silly". It is intended to be the first of a trilogy, which I hope comes to pass: I'll be waiting in the queue to see the others.

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

2011-10-28T01:00:00.001+01:00

Poul Anderson was one of the most productive SFF writers of the second half of the last century, publishing about a hundred books and winning seven Hugo and three Nebula awards. His first book was published in 1953 and his last fifty years later, two years after his death. Tau Zero was published in 1970 and was nominated for a Hugo. When it was selected for the reading list of the Classic Science Fiction discussion group I was surprised to discover that I had never read it, so I obtained a new copy (published by Gollancz under the SF Masterworks label).

The plot is simple: a colonisation ship with fifty people on board leaves Earth for another solar system where a probe had reported a habitable planet. En route, the ship runs into trouble and cannot decelerate. The only chance of survival is to keep accelerating closer and closer to light speed in order to maximise the time dilation effect and travel as far as possible; initially to find space empty enough to shut off the drive and protective screen in order to carry out repairs, and secondly to find a zone where the conditions are right for them to stop and find a place to live.

There are two threads running through this story: the first is a very technical, hard-science description of the functioning of the Bussard ramjet, the implications of the ship's velocity getting ever closer to the speed of light, and the structure and evolution of the universe. The second is the human story of the effect of their situation on the crew and scientists on board the ship, as time outside passes at an ever-increasing rate compared with time inside.

Like nearly all SF of the period, this story is about ideas more than people. If the title had not already been pre-empted by the famous short story, the novel might accurately have been called The Cold Equations. Having said that, the main characters are drawn well enough to carry the plot, while time has not been kind to the science. The effectiveness of the Bussard ramjet concept (very popular in the 1960s and 70s) has since been questioned and the future of the universe is now believed to be somewhat different from that shown in the book.

This story makes an interesting contrast with Niven's A World Out of Time published a few years after Tau Zero and reviewed on this blog recently. This also features a Bussard ramjet making an enormous journey to gain the benefit of time dilation, but Niven's story concerns itself much more with the social, genetic and technical changes which take place on Earth over the aeons and, to me at least, is all the more interesting and enjoyable as a result.

Tau Zero may not be the most enjoyable of tales, but it is deservedly a classic for its exploration of the science of relativity and its potential consequences.

Replay by Ken Grimwood

2011-10-21T07:03:00.001+01:00

This book, first published in 1986, won the World Fantasy Award two years later. I read it over twenty years ago and was most impressed, but found myself strangely reluctant to read it again; I only did so because it was one of the books of the month in the Classic Science Fiction discussion group.

The plot concerns Jeff Winston, an American in his early forties, unsuccessful in his career and with a failing marriage, who dies apparently of a massive heart attack - and then regains consciousness twenty-five years in the past, in his own eighteen-year-old body, with all his memories intact.

This is the start of a fascinating "what would you do if…?" premise which is explored in detail throughout the story. What Jeff initially does is to use his memories to make a fortune and enjoy the good life, but does he really become happier as a result, and can he use his knowledge to forestall some of the disasters which have afflicted the world?

There are many twists and turns in the story but it is difficult to say more without spoilers. So I will just say that it is a great, thought-provoking read which I am happy to recommend to anyone, SFF fan or not. If you want to read the book and would rather discover its surprises for yourself (which I strongly recommend) then stop reading NOW!

******************SPOILER WARNING***********************

The first twist in the story comes when Jeff once again reaches the age at which he previously "died" - and the same thing happens again. Once more he is eighteen, back in the early 1960s, with all his memories from both previous lives intact. This time he takes a different tack, marries his childhood sweetheart and lives a moderate and happy life. Until he reaches his "death age" when, despite having checked himself into hospital and been pronounced in excellent health, it happens again. Now he swings to the opposite extreme in angry defiance about what is happening to him until, disgusted with the emptiness of his life, he withdraws into isolation.

The next twist then occurs - Jeff discovers he is not the only "replayer" and meets up with Pamela Phillips, whose experiences match his own, except that she is out of sequence; they die at about the same time, but she is younger and is "replayed" at a later date. They become lovers, but discover that each time they are revived, it is at a later age - and getting later at a rapidly increasing rate. The gap between their revivals also increases rapidly, causing havoc with their relationship. They finally decide to "go public" in an attempt to discover what is happening to them, with devastating consequences. Eventually Jaff and Pamela manage to find a kind of peace, if not happiness, which seems the best they can hope for.

I think I know why I was reluctant to read the book again - a reluctance which disappeared as soon as I became caught up in it. As it develops, the story becomes an emotional roller-coaster and is very moving by the end. The message initially seems somewhat depressing - no matter how hard you try, you can't make things better for any more than a handful of people - but there is a kind of redemption as well. In the end, it is concerned with the philosophy of living, and the characters are all too human in their hopes and failings. The final lesson is an old but true one: we only have one life, so we need to make the best of it that we can.

Replay is an original and well-written tale, which draws the reader into it ever more deeply as the plot develops: it deserves to be a classic.

Flatland by Edwin A Abbott

2011-10-14T10:55:00.001+01:00

Flatland, subtitled A Romance of Many Dimensions, was first published in 1884. It is difficult to describe or draw parallels with this book, since as far as I'm aware it is unique, and it has maintained an almost hidden cult status ever since.

The nameless narrator lives on a world of two dimensions - a flat surface - in which all the inhabitants are geometrical shapes. The simplest are the women, who are straight Lines, next come Isosceles Triangles (the wider the angle, the higher the status). Equilateral Triangles are next up the social scale, followed by Squares (like the narrator) then Pentagons and Hexagons and so on, until the highest status of all - the Circle. It is every inhabitant's wish to improve the prospects of his male offspring by carefully choosing his Wife to ensure that their shapes become more regular or many-sided with each generation. Our Square narrator, for instance, has a Pentagon son and a Hexagon grandson. This element of the story is a satirical reference to the rigid social structures of the contemporary Victorian society, in which a high priority was given to trying to climb that social ladder from one generation to the next.

Our narrator has an unusually imaginative mind and has visions of other worlds, including a one-dimensional Lineland and even a zero-dimensional Pointland, and has fun with satirising the rigid assumptions held by the inhabitants of these lands, each believing that there is no world with more dimensions than their own. That also applies to his Flatland homeland, where it is heretical to suggest that there could ever be more than two dimensions. So he is greatly disturbed to be visited by a being who appears to be a Circle but keeps changing in size, something which cannot happen in Flatland. He gradually realises that the visitor is a Sphere from a three-dimensional world (of whom he can only see a two-dimensional "slice") and is led to an understanding of what such a world would be like. Inevitably, his discoveries get him into trouble with the Flatland authorities.

Flatland can't really be assessed in any conventional way, in terms of plot, characterisation or drama. It is more of a thought experiment than anything else - an intriguing and rather appealing one. Since it is only a novella of some 80 pages, it is easy enough to read and worth the effort for a unique experience.

Interzone 236

2011-10-07T13:31:00.002+01:00

A slightly confusing start to the Sep-Oct issue of the Brit SFF magazine, with an editorial concerning the forthcoming arrival of a new film about The Avengers. I was intrigued but sceptical, since I couldn't imagine any actress matching up to my youthfully enthusiastic memories of Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, until it gradually dawned on me that this was a different kind of Avengers, based on yet another US superhero comic strip. I am rather puzzled by the apparently inexhaustible demand for such movies; no doubt PhD theses are being written linking this to a fall in national confidence or something.

I note that Connie Willis won the Hugo for her pair of novels Blackout/All Clear, but although I enjoy her writing (despite a tendency to repetition in her novels), the total page count of these two doorstops is enough to deter me from starting. At my normal rate of progress it would take me several weeks, at least, to read them.

The cover art is Beacon by Richard Wagner, a classic SF/mystery vision showing strange spaceships being drawn to a beacon rising from a bleak moorland landscape, with a robed figure in the foreground.

Now to the stories:

A Time for Raven by Stephen Kotowych, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A short, atmospheric fantasy combining native American mythology with present day concerns garnished with a helping of supernatural mystery.

The Ever-Dreaming Verdict of Plagues by Jason Sandford, illustrated by Jim Burns. A sequel to Plague Birds (see issue #228), set far into a future in which technological civilisation has collapsed, leaving behind Artificial Intelligences which assist scattered villages. AIs also inhabit the blood of the Plague Birds - peripatetic female judge/executioners who have the ability to determine right from wrong. This time, a village AI proves to be rather more than expected.

The Metaphor by Fiona Moore. A rather haunting short story from the viewpoint of a nameless narrator (whether male or female is never clear) living alone in a deserted world. From time to time, s/he feels compelled to visit a series of empty taverns in a ritual designed to keep some dread happening at bay. The story is interspersed with extracts from a report written in a different reality, which gradually build up a picture of what is really happening.

The Fall of the City of Silver by Jon Ingold, illustrated by Martin Hanford. A morality fantasy of the destruction of the semi-mythical city of Tartessos in southern Spain, told by a girl who did not survive the fall.

Tethered by Mercurio D. Rivera, illustrated by Ben Baldwin. Yet another of this author's stories concerning the relationship between humanity and the advanced alien Wergen race, who find humans irresistably attractive.

Not such an appealing bunch for my taste this time, but I admired Moore's cleverly-constructed story and Sandford is always worth reading.

Film: King Arthur (2004)

2011-09-30T08:36:00.001+01:00

This one falls loosely into the "fantasy" category. It is a very different take on the Arthurian legend, and is claimed to be far more realistic than the usual medieval mythology. The hero, Artorius Castus (Clive Owen), is depicted as a commander of the Sarmatian cavalry, an auxiliary force to the Roman Army, based in Britain by Hadrian’s Wall at the time of the Roman departure in the fifth century AD. He and his men have to cope with a Saxon invasion as well as incursions by the savage "Woads" (Picts, who allegedly adorned themselves with woad – blue dye – when preparing for battle).

Artorius's "knights" are a rough and shaggy lot of pagans (light years from the usual virginal Christian knights in shining armour) who have earned their impressive reputation the hard way, in savage hand-to-hand fighting. There's quite a lot of that in the film. They have come to the end of their fifteen-year contracts of service with Rome and are looking forward to returning home to the Middle East when they are ordered on one last, seemingly suicidal mission, over the wall and into Woad territory, right in the path of the invading Saxons. The end result is the climactic battle of Mount Badon.

About the only relationship to the traditional Arthurian characters is the names: not just Artorious/Arthur but Lancelot, Galahad, Bors, Tristan and Gawain all feature. Merlin is the leader of the Woads (with no suggestion of magical powers) and there's also Guinevere (Keira Knightley), a feisty Woad warrior whom the Sarmatians pick up on the way. A round table is slipped in (in a different context) but there's no mention of Camelot or the Holy Grail.

Is it realistic? Well, the setting is historically not far out; the first and only credible mention of Arthur (written centuries after he is believed to have lived) places him in approximately that time and place, although the timing is compressed somewhat - the Romans were long gone by the the late fifth/early sixth century, when he is historically supposed to have lived. The Battle of Mount Badon is believed to have some basis in fact, although no-one knows where it actually happened. And in the first tales he was no king, but a noted warrior who fought alongside the British kings. All of the medieval twaddle which has since accrued around the Arthurian myth was entirely invented from the twelfth century onwards.

Clive Owen makes a good fist of the Arthur role, and on the whole I enjoyed the film. For me, the least realistic element was Guinevere - or rather, Keira Knightley. She is a photogenic and popular young actress who is often cast for that reason - and quite frequently miscast, as in this film. My suspension of disbelief slipped badly the moment I heard her cut-glass voice emerged from a supposedly savage Woad. While she does a reasonably good bloodthirsty impression, I couldn't see the skinny arms of her size zero body pulling a war bow or wielding a sword in battle. And where did she get lipstick from? Oh well, I suppose that some cinematic conventions must be determinedly protected against the onset of too much reality.

The Barsoom Project by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes

2011-09-25T11:40:00.001+01:00

The Barsoom Project, published in 1989, is the sequel to Dream Park, which I reviewed a couple of years ago so I won't repeat the basic background - please read the Dream Park review for that (see the list of reviews in the left column). The Barsoom Project features the same principal character, Alex Griffin, the Head of Dream Park Security, and the plot follows a similar pattern in having two parallel threads. One thread features Griffin's attempts to unravel a murder within a game which happened eight years before, while simultaneously trying to uncover a plot against Dream Park itself. While ostensibly what the plot is all about, in practice this is only an minor distraction from the main thread, which follows the progress of several characters participating as players or actors in a new game: a version of the Fimbulwinter game which was the venue for the old murder, but this time recast as a "Fat Ripper Special", aimed at helping obese people lose weight.

An additional plot element is kept in the background until close to the end - the attempt by the Dream Park organisation to promote the real-life colonisation of Mars by means of a skyhook, or space elevator. This Barsoom Project provides the title to the book, although it's hard to see why since most of the story is concerned with the progress of the Fimbulwinter game, set in the Arctic and featuring Inuit (Eskimo to us oldies) mythology.

I had some issues with aspects of the story. I was not entirely convinced by the economics of the Dream Park games, nor by the logic of the "fat rippers"; even if their experiences encouraged the game-players to change their diets (although it wasn't obvious why it should), why would it have the same effect on overweight computer gamers? However, the biggest problem with this story for me is that it lacked much in the way of dramatic tension, simply because the reader knows from the start that the constant stream of bizarre dangers faced by the participants in the game is not real - if they are "killed" in the game, they simply retire uninjured. Now it could be argued that, by definition, fiction is "not real" anyway, but in a conventional story the author and reader conspire to pretend that what is going on is genuine so that tension can be built up to high levels - that simply doesn't happen here (in fact participants in the game have to be reminded that they need to lie still and be quiet when they're "dead"). As in Dream Park, the criminal in the story is unmasked at the end without any prior clues to allow readers to work out who it might be.

Despite this, the many who loved Dream Park will I expect enjoy The Barsoom Project. As I'm not interested in role playing games it took me some time to get into the story, although the pace picked up after the half-way point. I found it moderately entertaining, but it doesn't really add anything to Dream Park. On checking my previous review I was reminded that there is a third book in this series, The (California) Voodoo Game (which I have read, although I recall nothing about it) and I see a fourth has just been published, The Moon Maze. I think I might pass on that one - initial reviews are not encouraging.

Film: Source Code (2011)

2011-09-17T07:18:00.001+01:00

I have been looking forward to watching Source Code ever since I saw director Duncan Jones' highly impressive debut film Moon. I was not disappointed.

US Army helicopter pilot Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), on active service in Afghanistan, abruptly finds himself travelling on a train to Chicago, sitting opposite an attractive young woman who clearly knows him. To add to his confusion, when he sees himself in a mirror the face which looks back at him is not his, and he discovers that he is known as Sean Fentress. He is still trying to understand what is happening when a bomb explodes on board the train, killing him and everyone else on board.

He wakes up again in a strange cockpit-like capsule, in CCTV communication with Air Force Captain Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). She explains to him that he has been in the "Source Code", an experimental environment which enables him to experience the lives of people in an alternate reality for eight minutes after their deaths. The people in the train are already dead - he can't save them but he has been sent to identify the bomber since it is believed that a second and much larger "dirty" bomb is due to be detonated in Chicago by the same man. The film follows Stevens' efforts to find the bomber as he is repeatedly sent back to experience the same eight minutes before the explosion. Along the way, he learns more about his own circumstances and becomes convinced that the alternate world in the Source Code is not what it seems.

Like Moon this has an intelligent and intriguing script (by Ben Ripley), is crisply directed by Jones and very well acted, by Gyllenhall and the excellent Farmiga (who impresses me more every time I see her). By modern standards it is relatively low-key with no hype and few special effects; the concentration is on the characters and the story. There is no padding and its 93 minute running time is short, but perfectly judged. It has immediately jumped onto my shortlist of favourite SF films, and I eagerly await Jones' next film.
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A few domestic notices:

When I started this blog I expected to focus on reviewing novels but films have been increasingly featuring (with the occasional TV programme thrown in), so I decided to create an index to these reviews. You can find it in the left-hand column immediately below the book review list. Just click on any title that interests you and you'll be taken straight to it.

I have been pondering offering my novels in Kindle versions. I don't have an e-reader myself, simply because I have about a hundred unread paperbacks stacked on my floor and hundreds more on my shelves that I want to read again, which are likely to keep me going until Kindle has become obsolete. However, I gather that it is proving a successful medium for self-publishers like me, so I might try offering Scales on it, just to test the water. If that works it might motivate me to finish my third novel, which has been sitting untouched for a couple of years now.

Some gratifying reviews lately on amazon.co.uk for my alternative World War 2 novel, The Foresight War. Nice to see that it's still gathering fans and sales more than seven years after publication. Thank you to all those who have taken the trouble to post your thoughts about it.

Down Town by Viido Polikarpus and Tappan King

2011-09-09T15:42:00.001+01:00

Cary Newman, a boy brought up in the country, is appalled to find himself living in New York following the collapse of his parents' marriage. Swept away from his mother by flowing crowds in the subway, he loses consciousness and wakes to find himself in a different version of the subway in a different version of New York: Down Town.

Down Town is the place in which everything and everybody no longer wanted in Up Town New York ends up. It has many levels, with the most recent at the top and the most ancient at the bottom. The inhabitants are the dispossessed and rejected, and they vary in size, becoming steadily smaller the longer they are there. Cary falls in with a gang of street children led by the pugnacious Allie, a girl his own age. Allie takes pity on him and agrees to try to find a way to return Cary to Up Town, since he doesn't seem to belong in Down Town. Their journey through varied scenes is hindered by the attempts of the black-clad Badmashers, led by the sinister Commander Brand, to apprehend him, but aided by an network of colourful friends. It gradually becomes apparent that Cary has a special purpose for being there, to preserve Down Town - and even Up Town - from being taken over and ruined by a rapacious organisation.

This is the first time I have re-read this book since the late 1980s (it was first published in 1986) and I had forgotten that it was aimed at younger readers. Still, I have a fondness for such stories about parallel realities into which people can fall, and this one is rather good. It has some clear messages about balancing technological advances with concern for the environment, as well as developing loyalty and determination in its young protagonists.

Down Town reminded me of several other more recent stories on my shelves, two of which I have reviewed here (see the reviews list in the left column): particularly Un Lun Dun by China Miéville and to a lesser extent The Ragchild by Steve Lockley and Paul Lewis (the first review I ever posted on this blog). Another one which comes to mind is Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, and of course the prototype and inspiration for all such stories, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which I haven't read since I was a child and really must renew my acquaintance with!

Films: The Jacket (2005), and Alien Resurrection (1997)

2011-09-02T11:40:00.001+01:00

The Jacket is a time-travelling film with an unusual twist or two. WARNING: some spoilers.

Soldier Jack Starks (Adrien Brody), seriously wounded in the 1991 Gulf War, returns to the USA and begins to hitch his way across country. After helping a mother and her young daughter with a car breakdown, he becomes inadvertently caught in the crossfire of a gunfight between a police officer and a criminal in which the officer dies. Starks is found guilty of his murder and sent to a mental institution where he receives experimental treatment involving drugs, a straitjacket, and sensory deprivation. During these sessions, he travels in time to 2007 where he meets and begins a relationship with the girl, now a young woman (Keira Knightley). He discovers that not only is the girl's mother due to die in the early 1990s, but so is he. His efforts to discover what will happen to him and to change the future make up the rest of the film.

This is an engaging low-key drama with Brody (whom I can't recall seeing before) putting in a convincing and affecting performance. I do have a small logical niggle: I can accept for the purposes of fiction the concept of someone time-travelling in a mental, non-physical way, or even travelling physically from one time to another, but Starks travels physically to the future while still leaving a physical body in the past, which I found a bit confusing. I understand that the film wasn't a commercial success, but I liked it and think it's well worth seeing.

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I recently saw Alien Resurrection for the first time; I saw its three predecessors soon after they were released (Alien in 1979, Aliens in 1986 and Alien 3 in 1992). An 18 year spread from first to last with the same principal character in all of them (Sigourney Weaver as Lt Ellen Ripley) is quite an achievement.

Since Ripley died at the end of Alien 3, for Alien Resurrection she is reconstructed as a clone, 200 years later, from a blood sample she left shortly before her death. At that time she was a host to an alien queen and, in the cloning process, the two sets of DNA became mixed, resulting in Ripley having enhanced strength and speed plus corrosive blood, as well as a mental link to the aliens. The military scientists who clone her aboard a spaceship are primarily interested in extracting the alien queen from her in order to breed the species, but once the queen has grown it predictably escapes. The film then becomes the usual battle for survival aboard the spaceship with Ripley and a dwindling band of survivors trying not just to escape but also to prevent the aliens reaching Earth.

The original film rightly became one of the classics of SF, but this one adds little to it. There are no real surprises this time around, although Weaver dominates the film in a compelling performance as the part-alien Ripley. Worth watching if you enjoyed the others.

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

2011-08-26T12:15:00.001+01:00

Bujold is best known for her excellent Vorkosigan SF series (five of which I have already reviewed on this blog, with several more waiting to be read) but The Curse of Chalion is a classic medieval-with-magic fantasy.

The story is set on an unspecified planet with vague geography (no maps) which seems to be a kind of alternative Earth, judging by the plants and animals described. There are the usual small kingdoms in uneasy juxtaposition, fighting occasional wars in various combinations. Military technology consists of swords and crossbows. The religion has five gods with different roles (although one bunch of heretics only worships four), but while there is occasional evidence that the gods exist, they rarely get involved in human affairs. There isn't even any magic in the usual sense of practitioners casting spells, with one exception: Death Magic. Anyone can learn how to do this, with enough research and determination; it involves calling on one of the gods to send a demon to kill a hated enemy. The only catch is that the person working the magic invariably dies too.

The hero of the story, Cazaril, is a minor lord and former courtier and soldier who has fallen on hard times due to betrayal and subsequent slavery. Penniless, exhausted, and still half-crippled by injury, he makes his way to Valenda, a city in the land of Chalion in whose court he had worked as a young page some twenty years before, in search of some menial job and a place to live. There he meets Iselle, a royesse (princess) of Chalion, and finds himself reluctantly roped in to act as her secretary/tutor. He tries to impart some of his hard-won wisdom to the headstrong young royesse but when the action moves to the royal court in Cardegoss, Cazaril is tested to the limit in his determination to protect Iselle from the political and magical dangers surrounding her.

The setting sounds somewhat unoriginal as similar territory has been marched over countless times by other authors, but Bujold adds her own distinctive style. She is a natural and intelligent story-teller, injecting occasional flashes of wry humour (an element which tends to be sadly lacking in fantasy, in which authors often take their creations much too seriously). Her characterisation is as good as usual and the reader soon comes to care about her characters and what happens to them. There is something of the flavour of Guy Gavriel Kay in the writing, but Bujold is less dark and elegiac. After a slowish start the pace gradually accelerates and I read the last half of this substantial (500 page) tome in one sitting, late into the night: something which I rarely do.

The Curse of Chalion may appear somewhat formulaic but if you enjoy this kind of story this is about as good as it ever gets.

Films: Unbreakable (2000) , and X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

2011-08-20T07:09:00.003+01:00

A contrasting pair of superhero movies this week.

This was my first viewing of Unbreakable, which I knew nothing about except that it was a superhero movie. Indeed, this was my first complete viewing of any film by M. Night Shyamalan, so I wasn't sure what to expect. What I saw surprised me: it is indeed a superhero movie, but of a most unusual kind.

Bruce Willis plays David Dunn, a security guard, who survives uninjured a train wreck which kills everyone else on board. He is approached by Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) who has a genetic brittle bone disorder, and whose passion for superhero comics leads him to believe that Dunn is his opposite - someone who cannot be injured. Dunn refuses to believe this but as he thinks back through his life he realises that he cannot recall ever being injured or even sick. Furthermore, Price forces him to confront the fact that he appears to have an instinct in his work for spotting people who are carrying weapons or otherwise likely to make trouble.

Dunn's life is complicated by his crumbling relationship with his wife (Robin Wright Penn) and the passionate belief of his young son, who is aware of Price's theory. Eventually, he puts the theory to the test, leading to a climax with a dramatic and unexpected twist.

The film is slow-paced, reflective, and notably lacking in the usual chases, explosions, violence (except for one brief scene) and CGI spectaculars. The director's focus is on how an ordinary man copes with the notion of being a superhero, making it a far more adult and thoughtful production than the other superhero movies I've reviewed. The acting throughout is good; even the seemingly obligatory family-problems-with-appealing-kid fit in well and are not objectionable. The ending seemed tailor-made for a sequel, but none has emerged. Recommended.

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X-Men: The Last Stand is the third of the franchise. I reviewed its two predecessors here and here .

The new plot element this time is the discovery of a treatment for mutants which permanently suppresses their powers, and the conflicts this re-starts both within the mutant community (which seems to have multiplied dramatically) and between the mutants and humanity. Sadly, this one isn't up to the same standard as the others (I gather that the director changed) with the focus very much on the action rather than the more thoughtful aspects of the earlier films. The whole film basically leads up to the final climactic battle which seems to settle everything, but there was a teaser at the end to suggest that maybe, it might not…

Nemesis by Bill Napier

2011-08-12T09:19:00.001+01:00

Having read and enthusiastically reviewed Bill Napier's The Lure, I promptly ordered all of his earlier books, of which the first to be published was Nemesis.

The setting is the near future, and the basic plot element a familiar one: a giant asteroid is believed to be on a collision course with Earth. There is a twist here, though - there is intelligence that its course is not accidental but has been modified by a resurgent and strongly nationalist Russian leadership to strike the continental USA, "accidentally" destroying the country without incurring the immediate response of a nuclear counter-strike. The problem is that no-one in the USA knows which asteroid has been selected, where it is, or when it might strike.

Oliver Webb, a British astronomer and astrophysicist, is one of a small international team assembled by the US government to work in secrecy to identify and locate the asteroid and devise a plan for diverting it from its course. The secrecy is necessary because of a fear that if the Russians found out that their plan had been discovered, they might launch a nuclear first strike for fear that the USA would do the same. Strong voices on the US side, alarmed by the possibility that the asteroid could arrive with little or no warning, are indeed urging a first strike by the USA while it is still possible.

Against this tense background, Webb and the rest of the team are in a race against time, which involves locating a rare and ancient book by an early Italian astronomer which is believed to hold information vital to identifying the asteroid. Scenes of their struggle against increasing odds are interwoven with those of political infighting in the US government and also with some from the past, in which the Italian astronomer faces trial for his heretical beliefs about the nature of the Solar System. As in The Lure, the arguments debated in these scenes are well thought through and convincing.

Arthur C. Clarke is quoted on the cover as having described Nemesis as "The most exciting book I have ever read". I wouldn't go quite that far, but it is certainly a page-turner and I can understand Clarke's enthusiasm since Napier, a professional astronomer, share's Clarke's interest in including a lot of accurate and realistic astronomical science. He also shares Clarke's rather weak development of his characters. The book is a very good read and while the writing has some rough edges, it is a remarkable achievement for a first novel. Not surprisingly, it is not quite as good as The Lure, mainly because the plot elements (not the asteroid but the human shenanigans) are rather more far-fetched, but it can still be confidently recommended to anyone who enjoys this kind of near-future science thriller.
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I had heard good things about Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, published in 2009, so I bought a copy and settled down to enjoy the read. The story starts in a confusing future, when it is clear that something has gone drastically wrong with Earth; what is left of humanity survives in the Livable Zone. The first chapter concerns a team of people dealing with an unexpected emergency, but the reader is left dangling as to what this might be as the second chapter jumps back in time to the early childhood of two of the team members - the book's main protagonists - at a time when the world was much as it is now. Most of the rest of the book then works its way forwards to the events of the first chapter.

There’s some memorable writing but much of the book consists of digressive sub-plots rambling around all over the place. Some of them are amusing set-pieces but they turn the story into a patchwork quilt which only occasionally remembers that it's supposed to lead somewhere. I wanted to like this story and stuck with it for more than half the book, but finally admitted defeat and stopped reading when I realised that I was becoming more and more reluctant to pick it up and wasn't interested in discovering the ending.

I can see, in an objective sort of way, why the book attracted some enthusiastic reviews, but it simply failed to grip me. Which just demonstrates (if it needs demonstrating) that every book ever published has some readers who love it and some who don't.

Films: Tron (1982) and Tron Legacy (2010)

2011-08-05T07:38:00.000+01:00

I saw Tron once before, but so long ago that I had forgotten all but the basic premise of a man stuck in a computer game. So I decided that a second viewing was due before watching the long-delayed sequel.

It's hard to think back over the changes in the digital world since Tron was made. According to Wiki, 1982 was the year when "the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized and the concept of a world-wide network of fully interconnected TCP/IP networks called the Internet was introduced", although the impact of the internet on popular culture was still more than a decade away. This was the first film to be mostly based on computer-generated visuals, and it made quite an impact when it first appeared. It even predated Neuromancer, the innovative novel imagining what it might be like for a human mind in a computer network. So it has a secure place - indeed a cult status - in the history of SF films: but how does it stand up now?

The film focuses on four characters who are present in both the real and digital worlds: Jeff Bridges plays the computer games designer Kevin Flynn (and also his virtual equivalent, an independent programme called Clu), cheated out of his successful inventions by the head of software company ENCOM, (David Warner). The others are two ENCOM employees (Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan) who help Bridges to break into the company's mainframe to find evidence of Warner's guilt. However, the mainframe has literally developed a mind of its own, the MCP (Master Control Program) which is able to "capture" Bridges and trap him in a virtual game world. Most of the film consists of the three heroes battling their way through the game world to achieve their objective.

The plot is simplistic and the CGI is of course primitive, but I didn't mind that - it was appropriate for the purpose and impressive for the time. Ironically, what struck me more was that the initial part of the film, set in the real world, had a rather dated feel. Also, while the digital background music was fine, the inclusion of the more traditional orchestral elements jarred somewhat. Despite this, I enjoyed seeing it again - it is still entertaining and worth watching if you've never seen it.

Tron Legacy also features Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner, reprising their roles. Bridges again has two parts, as an enhanced CLU (who has not aged, thanks to some CGI trickery), and as Kevin Flynn, who has spent the last twenty years trapped in "The Grid", the name for the virtual game world he created. The focus now is on Flynn's adult son, Sam (Garrett Hedlund) who follows a trail in search of his long-lost father and also finds himself trapped in the Grid. Cue for many reprises of the virtual chases and combat scenes, as father and son try to escape. To reveal more of the plot would spoil a few surprises, so I'll restrict myself to generalities.

The CGI is of course vastly superior to the original film although the same general appearance of the virtual world is maintained, with some added touches reminiscent of the Matrix series. The artificially youthful Bridges is a clever idea but not entirely convincing - if you didn't know what had been done, you would think he was wearing really thick make-up. Some questions from the original film remain unanswered: what exactly is the nature of the humans trapped in the Grid? What happened to their physical bodies when they were "scanned" into the Grid, and how were they reconstituted when they came back out again? If they are virtual, why did Sam Flynn "bleed" when injured and why should Kevin Flynn age? These little niggles kept bothering me as I watched the film.

Overall, Tron Legacy doesn't really take the ideas of Tron much further, and it is of course nothing like as fresh and ground-breaking. It isn't in the same league as The Matrix. However, it's undemanding entertainment and anyone who liked the original and is able to park their critical faculties and enjoy the ride will probably like the sequel.

Interzone 235

2011-07-29T03:50:00.002+01:00

A blast from the past in David Langford's Ansible Link column in the July/August issue of this magazine: at the British Library's current Out of This World SF exhibition (note - it runs until 25 September) he met 93-year-old Charles Chilton. I well remember listening to his exciting Journey into Space radio drama series in the 1950s - probably my first introduction to SF - and I still have an ancient copy of his novel The World in Peril on my shelf. I see from Wiki (which has a very informative entry) that Journey into Space was the last radio programme in the UK to attract a bigger audience than television and was translated into seventeen languages. It is apparantly available on CD and internet download. It will have very little merit by modern SF standards but the sheer nostalgia value is huge!

There are the usual reviews of recent films, TV series and books, plus a classical SF cover by Richard Wagner, with flying saucers over a crop field, and shadowy figures in the foreground. Five stories this month, averaging longer than usual.

Insha'Allah by Matthew Cooke, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A female doctor-turned-body-washer on a fundamentalist Muslim world is faced with treating a crashed female spaceship pilot, fallen from a battle for the planet raging overhead. A most unusual story which sticks in the mind.

For Love's Delirium Haunts the Fractured Mind by Mercurio D. Rivera, illustrated by Ben Baldwin. Another story in the Wergen universe, in which aliens who are vastly more technologically advanced than humans find themselves irrestibly in love with humanity. A strange concept, and I'm not sure how far it's worth taking it.

The Walrus and the Icebreaker by Jon Wallace, illustrated by Mark Pexton. A desperate fight to discover oil in the Arctic while civilisation slowly collapses calls for desperate measures - including by a scientist with a walrus trained to carry a bomb.

Eleven Minutes by Gareth L. Powell. A brief, amusing tale of the surprise awaiting US scientists as the first pictures arrive from a rover newly landed on Mars.

Of Dawn by Al Robertson, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A young female violinist goes in search of what motivated her dead brother's bizarre poetry, following clues to a village abandoned since World War 2 when it was incorporated into an army training area. Strange visions and music feature in a story strongly reminiscent of Robert Holdstock.

Some high-quality stories this time, but my favourite has to be Al Robertson's. Although I am mainly an SF fan, there is something haunting about this story (and Holdstock's work) which appeals to me.

Bloody War by Terry Grimwood

2011-07-23T00:04:00.001+01:00

Peter Allman recovers after an illness to discover that he has lost all memory of the previous eighteen months, and that Britain has changed dramatically in that period. The country is now at war with unspecified Enemies of Democracy, who are systematically bombing cities. Civil liberties including freedom of speech and travel have been drastically curtailed, the news media are tightly controlled, the internet has been switched off, and the police are supplemented by the sinister SSU. All teenagers are conscripted on their eighteenth birthdays - a date his son is due to reach shortly.

Allman is angered and baffled by all of this, but his attempts to find out exactly what is going on are met by a wall of silence, prompted by fear. Those who speak out of turn are liable to disappear, never to be heard of again. He contacts a former friend, a wounded Veteran of the fighting, and is given some hints that the situation is not as portrayed. His struggles against authority and efforts to escape from a walled-in London to a promised safe haven form the plot of the novel.

The plot summary on the book's cover draws comparisons with Orwell's 1984 and there are certainly some echoes of this, although Bloody War is much more action-focused and brutal. As a worst-case warning of how trends in society might develop it is less convincing because of the plot structure. The author has set the story in the present day, which is a good way to enable the reader to relate easily to what is happening, but the changes in society he portrays are so sudden and extreme as to stretch the credulity of this reviewer much too far. Orwell avoided this problem by setting his novel thirty-six years into his future. On a point of detail, the closing scene didn't work for me as I found it incompatible with the first-person viewpoint.

Despite these criticisms the book makes compelling, if very grim, reading - I read the last three-quarters in one session.

Bloody War was published in 2011 by the Eibonvale Press

Kéthani by Eric Brown

2011-07-16T15:39:00.001+01:00

The time is the present day. Thousands of mysterious glass-like skyscrapers suddenly appear in rural locations all over the world, and a message is sent to world leaders by the aliens who planted them: an offer to fit implants to humans which permit them to be restored after death. Their bodies are delivered to the skyscrapers - Onward Stations - and transmitted in beams of light to an orbiting starship. This takes them to the aliens' home planet - Kéthan - from which, months later, they return in good health, without any previous disabilities; and quite a lot younger if they had been elderly when they died. They can then choose to stay on Earth as "returnees" or accept the aliens' invitation to travel to other worlds to help them with their great civilising mission.

Not surprisingly, this initially results in great suspicion and condemnation from some quarters, especially the world's religions. However, the first returnees prove to be not just as good as new but better; their restoration includes a form of education which turns them into more thoughtful and considerate people, with the usual human personality imperfections smoothed away. As a result, implant wearing becomes the norm, and those who reject it are increasingly regarded as strange.

Kéthani is all about the impact which these developments have on individuals and their attitude to life and death. The focus is on a small group of friends (who gradually change as some drop out and others are added) who regularly meet in a pub in a small Yorkshire village close to one of the Onward Stations. The narrator of the story, one of the group, explains at the start that, many years after the events, he has asked each of his friends to write down their recollections of how they perceived them at the time. The novel is made up of a series of interlinked accounts, with occasional explanatory sections by the narrator, stretching from the time of the aliens' arrival to many years later. They are therefore nearly all written in the first person, only with the viewpoint changing with each chapter (which occasionally requires a small degree of concentration to keep in mind whose viewpoint it is this time).

On the face of it this doesn't sound too promising; there is inevitably some loss of the kind of pace and tension which a good straight-line thriller can provide. However, this is more than compensated for by the way in which we get to know the characters, seeing them from different viewpoints as their lives gradually change over the years. We also see the a wide range of issues and events taking place within the group; couples parting and joining, some dying and some returning. It all adds up to an intriguing picture of the multifarious consequences of the alien intervention.

Much of the book previously appeared in short stories, and this does lead to some discontinuities. For instance, in one episode there is an intervention by a different alien race who are opposed to the Kéthani - but that is the last we hear of them. One obvious consequence of the resurrection process is also left unexplored: what happens to a relationship when one of an elderly couple dies, and returns much younger? A recurring theme later in the book is the gradual depopulation of the Earth as an increasing number of returnees opt to spend their lives on other worlds, but it isn't clear why this should be so. After all, in our pre-Kéthani world they would all have died anyway, yet the world's population continues to rise today since births outnumber deaths; logically, within the twenty-year span of the story, the resurrection process should actually lead to a further increase in population by whatever percentage of the returnees elects to stay on Earth, unless something drastic happens to the birth and/or death rates; but there is no indication of this (at least, not until the end of the book).

Despite these quibbles, this unusual story is an interestingly different take on the well-worn "the aliens have landed" plot.

Films: Mission to Mars (2000), and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (2010)

2011-07-09T03:03:00.004+01:00

Mission to Mars had somehow avoided appearing on my radar until I spotted it on the TV schedules recently, so I thought it might be worth a look. The plot is straightforward (spoiler warning!): a manned mission to Mars goes wrong when some mysterious power kills three of the four astronauts on the surface, and evidence of alien intelligence appears. A rescue mission is duly launched in order to recover the survivor and discover what happened, leading to a suitably dramatic and revelatory conclusion.

The start, at a party for those leaving on the first mission, is not too promising; it features the usual emotional scenes complete with cute kid (a standard Hollywood cliche) before skipping several months to when the mission is securely based on Mars. The interest level then begins to rise with the disaster to the first mission and the launch of the second, from which point it becomes sufficiently involving to hold the attention to the end. Having said that, there are no great surprises and it's generally possible to predict what's going to happen next. Worst of all is the really corny dialogue: on several occasions I was able to predict precisely what the next speaker was going to say, word for word.

It isn't a bad film and is just about worth watching, but Mission to Mars has a very old-fashioned air and (CGI apart) feels as if it could have been made several decades earlier.

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As regular readers of this blog may recall, I am not a particular fan of the Harry Potter series; I have only read the first of the books. However, I have seen all of the films so I naturally had to see the penultimate one.

I obviously don't know if this also applies to the books, but the nature of the films has evolved quite strikingly. The first ones were fun if rather silly. They improved in the middle of the series and became rather good, before becoming increasingly dark and grim. This trajectory is continued in this offering, which is very dark indeed in all respects; the picture on the TV screen was so dim that I had to draw the curtains to darken the room in order to see what was happening.

If you haven't seen any of the earlier films this is most definitely not the place to begin. As with the previous episode, the screenplay assumes that viewers know everything that has happened beforehand and plunges straight into the action without even the vaguest attempt at an explanatory backstory. That had me scratching my head to try to recall what had happened in the last film, which I saw well over a year ago. Also like the previous episode, there is no attempt at a conclusion; the film stops abruptly in mid-story. In between, what happens is basically a horror film; a series of grim setbacks and disasters affecting the usual trio of heroes, ameliorated only a little by an occasional success.

I concluded my review of the previous Potter film with these words: "Despite these criticisms this is a reasonably entertaining film, but it is perhaps the least successful of the series in dramatic terms." The Deathly Hallows Part 1 does not merit even such lukewarm praise in my judgment; it is not enjoyable, and is definitely the least successful to date. As far as I'm concerned, the final episode is going to have to up its game considerably to recover the reputation of the series. As it has just been released, no doubt I will discover that in due course.

A World Out Of Time by Larry Niven

2011-07-01T10:58:00.001+01:00

A treat for Niven fans - two helpings in consecutive weeks! It's a long time since I read this 1976 book and I had forgotten what it was about, so when several members of the Classic Science Fiction discussion group said they were reading it I decided to join in.

Set in a different and grimmer future from his famous Known Space milieu, A World Out Of Time starts with the reawakening after 200 years of a "corpsicle" - a terminally ill man who had voluntarily been frozen in 1970 in the hope that a cure for his cancer would be found later. Only he hasn't awakened in his own body - ironically, while his cancer was now curable, the cell damage caused by the freezing process was not - but has had his personality and memories reconstituted in the body of a young criminal whose own personality had been wiped from his brain as a punishment.

The man (called Jerome Branch Corbell - a reference to the cult fantasy writer James Branch Cabell?) soon discovers that his survival hangs by a thread. If he does not demonstrate his usefulness, he will also be wiped from his host body and replaced by another corpsicle: the planet-wide State is ruthlessly utilitarian. He tests favourably for the post of a rammer - a Bussard ramjet pilot - and is duly dispatched on a solo mission to seed promising planets with the elements of Earth-like life. He has his own agenda, however, and decides to visit the galactic core.

I can't say much more about the plot without spoilers, so at this stage I'll just say that the novel is vintage Niven and I really enjoyed reading it again. If you want to find out about it for yourself then stop reading NOW!

-----------------------------

Corbell's journey is plagued by a downloaded version of Peersa, his new "mentor", in his computer, constantly nagging him to do what the State wants. Corbell remains in control, however, and decides to circle the huge Black Hole in the galactic core before returning to earth. Due to a time-dilation effect three million years have passed for the Earth, but only a small fraction of that for Corbell. Nonetheless, even spending most of the time in cold-sleep, Corbell is an old man before his journey is over.

What he then discovers is a Solar System drastically changed. The Sun is bloated and very hot, and the Earth has been moved into orbit around Jupiter. On landing, Corbell discovers the remnants of a strange civilisation ruled by immortal Boys, whose immortality is achieved by freezing their physical development before puberty. There are also some adult humans kept as breeding stock, and one other traveller who captures Corbell - an old woman who is desperate to find the secret of an earlier form of immortality. The race is on to evade the Boys and find the ancient immortality secret.

This is a fast-paced thriller packed with interesting ideas, typical of the author in this period. Also typical is that the characterisation is not strong, but it's good enough to carry the story. I like the casual way in which Niven introduces unusual elements in the background, for example the way in which people paid little attention to hygiene in the crowded future world, washing and deodorants apparently having gone out of fashion. I remain dubious, however, that anything resembling humanity will still be around in three million years: I suspect that we will either have become extinct or evolved ourselves into something entirely different by then.

To sum up, a novel which all Niven fans will enjoy, and it can also be recommended to readers new to SF who want a fast, entertaining read, as it will painlessly stretch their imaginations .

Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

2011-06-24T09:00:00.001+01:00

I loved Larry Niven's Known Space series when I first encountered the stories in the late 1960s, and the jewel in that crown - Ringworld - remains one of my favourite SF novels. I thoroughly enjoyed a re-read a few years ago. It's been a long time since I read a new one, though, and I approached Fleet of Worlds with some trepidation. Not only because of the length of time since the concept was fresh but also because this one (first published 2007) was written in partnership with another author. In my experience, sequels of much-loved books written in these circumstances are generally not worth bothering with. Fortunately, this one proved to be better than I feared. However, prospective readers should read Ringworld and preferably some of the earlier Known Space stories first, otherwise they will miss a lot of the references.

The story is set 200 years before Ringworld but the prologue takes place 500 years earlier still, on a human sub-light speed starship with a cargo of thousands of embryos on its way to colonise a planet of a distant sun - a voyage which is abruptly interrupted. The setting then jumps forward 500 years to the Puppeteers' cluster of Home Worlds in their long flight from the supernova explosion in the galactic core (as described in Ringworld). But the Puppeteers are not the only inhabitants of their worlds - one of them contains a large colony of humans who work for them. It becomes apparent that the humans are the descendents of the colonists in the starship. The Puppeteers had taught them English but, anxious to keep the location of their Home Worlds a secret from any potential threat, had preventing them from discovering anything about their origins or the location of Earth.

The plot concerns the efforts of some of the humans to outwit the Puppeteers and discover their origins, mixed with internal politics of the Puppeteers (in which the character of Nessus, familiar from Ringworld, has a starring role). There is also some Puppeteer meddling with affairs on Earth, where they are already known for selling the invulnerable General Products spaceship hulls. The paranoid Puppeteers are desperate to prevent their tame humans and the Earth humans from finding out about each other, for fear of the reactions on both sides. They are prepared to go to any lengths to preserve their security, revealing a darker side to their engaging personalities.

Inevitably, the story lacks the freshness and originality - and the sheer sense of fun - of Ringworld and the other original Known Space books and it took me a while to get into it, but I became increasingly engaged as I read on. Not a ground-breaker, but worth the read. I note that there have been three sequels: Juggler of Worlds published in 2008, Destroyer of Worlds in 2009, and Betrayer of Worlds in 2010. I'm not going to be buying all of these in one go, but I think I'll try the next one to see how the series develops.

How to Write Science Fiction by Paul Di Philippo

2011-06-18T10:02:00.001+01:00

I have a small collection of "How to Write…" books and analyses of how novels work (two of the latter having been reviewed on this blog HERE ), of which my favourite is Bob Shaw's How to Write Science Fiction. This is a practical guide full of examples from Shaw's own work, and the value I place on it is enhanced by the fact that I have always enjoyed his writing (you'll find a couple of his novels reviewed here, too).

This essay by Paul Di Philippo (henceforth PDP) may share a title with Shaw's book, but the purpose and theme are very different. First, he considers the issue of the number of new ideas to include in one story. Some authors hold the view that these should be limited to just one novelty, everything else following logically from that. One reason given for this is to allow the writer to focus on all of the implications of this idea rather than produce a confusing mess which might overtax the reader's suspension of disbelief. (Another, less laudable reason is practical parsimony: to parcel out a finite stock of ideas over as many books as possible.) Other authors pack in as high a density of ideas as they can.

PDP gives many examples of the two approaches, but the two which struck me were Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama , in which the one novelty is a giant alien spaceship heading into the Solar System, and Niven's Ringworld : which includes several different alien species (one in the process of moving their entire system away from a galactic core explosion), immortality, indestructible space-ships, a vast artificial world in the shape of a ring around the sun, and lots more besides. I find this intriguing because both feature on my list of twenty favourite SFF novels, so clearly I believe that both can work very well - it's all in the execution!

It soon becomes clear that PDP is a firm supporter of the high density approach - and then some. He provides a history of high density SF, including Harness's Flight into Yesterday and the works of Rudy Rucker. It isn't just packing in lots of ideas that PDP favours but complexity in general: in the plot structure, the viewpoints, and in a wide range of characters. He also admires new styles of writing, and references Bester's The Stars My Destination (another favourite of mine) as well as the more recent cyberpunk, and he stresses the value of borrowing from other media - including poetry, pop music and paintings. A detailed analysis of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a complex, varied and high density novel which clearly had a dominant influence on PDP's writing career, is included as an annexe.

PDP then goes on to illustrate how to write such stories by analysing his own novel Ciphers (if prospective writers gain nothing else from this essay, they can at least be encouraged by the author's graphic description of Ciphers' painful, decade-long, rejection-filled gestation). He set out to construct a story of high complexity, with many bizarre characters, ideas, situations and subjects, the last including Information Theory, Gnosticism, Buddhism and serpent worship.

I was intrigued and informed by all this, but only convinced up to a point. I enjoy SF with a high density of ideas, as long as they are germane to the basic plot and not simply thrown in for the sake of it. Indeed, one of the reviewers of my own novel Scales complained that I had packed in too many, and that they could have been spread over a trilogy. However, adding complexity at every level is a different matter. There is undoubtedly a place for such fiction and our literary culture would be the poorer without it, but it is an approach to writing which I only enjoy in small doses and can rapidly lose patience with.

Perhaps the main issue I have with this essay is the title. Science Fiction is a very diverse field, I suspect more so than any other genre, ranging from near-future techno-thrillers to wild fantasies. Di Philippo's essay focuses on promoting and explaining one particular type of SF, very much on the outer fringes of the genre. It might be more accurately titled "How to Push the Boundaries of Science Fiction Until They (Almost) Burst".

The essay is published by the Italian digital publishing house, 40k .

Interzone 234

2011-06-07T14:42:00.002+01:00

An early post this time, since I'll be otherwise occupied later in week. So while you read this one, you have to imagine that it's next weekend....

Among the regular columnists in the British SFF magazine is David Langford, whose Ansible Link is a compilation of news items about SFF and authors, usually with an amusing twist. There's always something to raise a smile, but one item in the May/June issue of Interzone made me roar with laughter, so here it is, from Australia's Herald Sun:

A 'Sci-Fi and Fantasy Friendly Church Service' near Melbourne, encouraging fans to come in costume and hear moral lessons from The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Wars, was frowned on by a rival pastor: "I don't have a problem with people enjoying sci-fi, but church isn't the place to encourage escapism and fancy dress," Mentone Baptist minister Murray Campbell said.

The featured writer is David Wingrove, author of the Chung Kuo series, interviewed by Ian Sales who also reviews his book Son of Heaven. Another author who is new to me; the name Chung Kuo rings a distant bell but I've never read any of the books. Those who do recall the eight-volume series (published 1989-97), set in a future dominated by China, may be interested to know that Wingrove has revised and extended his world - to no fewer than twenty volumes. Son of Heaven is the first of two prequels which explain how the present Western civilisation ends, while the final four books will be added to the other end of the timescale. Since I am something of a completist and don't like starting a series I might not finish (although I must admit I do that a lot more than I used to), I regard such a massive work with some trepidation, but it sounds as if it might be worth a try.

Five short stories this time:

Sleepers by John Ingold, illustrated by Mark Pexton. An intermittent conversation between a monk and an elderly man, set in a future in which a lightgate established in the Solar System by a past alien civilisation had been discovered a century before and used to travel to Centauri. But the habitable planet they discovered offered such challenges as to destroy the attempted colonisation, leading to the shut-down of the lightgate. Now, as the protagonists discuss the past and the future prospects of such exploration, another attempt is to be made - but do the rumoured hostile Centaurons actually exist?

In the Season of the Mango Rains by Lavie Tidhar. A short, atmospheric piece about a doomed emotional relationship in a strange future world.

The Ceiling is Sky by Suzanne Palmer, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A far-future dystopia in a crowded and cheerless world, in which those who have not achieved the dizzy heights of a permanent job have to compete ferociously for short-term contracts which just might, if they are very good and very lucky, lead to a job offer. Such a contract worker is recruited onto a team to plan the technicalities of a project to strip-mine a beautiful world against the wishes of the residents. He is the best at his job, but is targeted for special attention by the residents.

Her Scientifiction, Far Future, Medieval Fantasy by Jason Sandford, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A long story, set in a generations-long part-virtual medieval world controlled by an AI. There are some human inhabitants who live their mock-medieval lives for the benefit of huge numbers of "expers" who experience their world through full-immersion virtual reality. Kris is a teenage princess and, a rarity, someone who was actually born in that world. She would also much rather be somewhere else. But there are complications with dragons, chivalric knights, and an AI which could turn nasty if enough of the expers decided that they didn't like you…

Incompatible by Will McIntosh, illustrated by Mark Pexton. A mysterious and terrifying affliction has ruined the lives of two people, but when they happen to discover each other they both have to face up to their fears.

An interesting variety of unusual stories, as Interzone often manages to deliver. Sandford's story is (as usual) outstanding, but I also liked Palmer's tale, despite my usual prejudice against dystopias.

Alien civilisations - less likely?

2011-06-03T06:55:00.002+01:00

A couple of years ago I posted a review of a non-fiction book by Stephen Webb: Where is Everybody? Fifty Solutions to the Fermi Paradox . In this book, the author considers the Fermi Paradox; that given the number of stars in this galaxy alone and the length of time it has existed, there should be swarms of high-technology Extra-Terrestrial Civilisations (ETCs) around, so why haven't we detected any? He examines a wide range of possible explanations before concluding that our planet is uniquely fortunate and may host the only technological civilisation in the galaxy.

My own conclusion was slightly different from the author's, in that I speculated that given the age of this galaxy, with the average age of its stars being some two billion years older than our sun, there have probably been plenty of ETCs around but that it could be rare for more than one to be in existence at any one time, since they may not last all that long.

One of the unknowns, until very recently, was how many stars have planets - particularly planets like ours, rocky and in the CHZ (continuously habitable zone): which is to say, at the right distance from its sun for the billions of years needed for not just life (or our understanding of it) but advanced intelligence to evolve. The habitable zone is popularly known as the "Goldilocks" zone: not too hot and not too cold for liquid water to exist on its surface (i.e. average surface temperatures within the 0-100 degrees centigrade range). However, this gap in our knowledge is rapidly being filled by astronomers who, by using highly sensitive instruments and sophisticated data processing techniques, have discovered over 1,200 exoplanets orbiting nearly 1,000 stars, with the numbers steadily growing. What they have discovered so far has been summarised in a couple of recent issues of the New Scientist magazine (Astrobiology supplement by Caleb Scharf, 7th May; and No Place Like Home by Lee Billings, 14th May) and is discouraging to those keen to find ETCs.

First, I had better summarise the three different indirect methods by which exoplanets are detected (even the biggest of them around the closest stars are far too small to observe directly).

The first method used is the Doppler or radial velocity technique. This relies on the fact that planets do not, strictly speaking, orbit their stars. The planets and their stars orbit a common axis whose position is determined by their relative masses; if a star and planet were both of the same mass, the axis would be half-way between them. Generally, stars are vastly more massive than any of their planets so the common axis is within the star, but not in its centre. The star therefore wobbles slightly as the planet moves around it, and this can be detected. The speed of the wobble indicates the period of the planet's orbit and therefore its distance from the star; the size of the wobble indicates the relative mass of the planet. Obviously, if a star has several planets, each exercising its influence on it, then its pattern of wobbles can be very complex and require lots of number-crunching to resolve. This method favours the discovery of large planets orbiting very closely around their stars, as these create the biggest wobbles. This may mask the existence of smaller planets further out.

The second method is known as transit photometry, which is based on measuring the slight dip in a star's brightness as a planet passes in front of it. The degree of the dip indicates the planet's size, the time period involved indicates its speed and therefore distance from the star. This method also has its disadvantages. An obvious one is that the planet's plane of orbit has to be side-on to us, otherwise it wouldn't pass between its star and our planet, so any planets with different orbital planes will fail to be detected. It is also necessary for three transits to be observed to be certain that this is a genuine effect, which in the case of a planet the same distance from its star as ours means that it will take two to three years to confirm. Jupiter's orbit takes twelve years, so confirming the observation of a similar planet would take 24 to 36 years. So once again, bigger planets close to their stars are the easiest to detect.

The third method is called gravitational microlensing, which relies on the fact that massive objects bend the fabric of space. In practical terms, it means that a star exactly in between us and a far more distant star will act as a lens, focusing the light of the distant star. If the nearer star has planets, these can produce a subsidiary focusing effect which can be analysed to determine the planets' masses and orbital distances. However, the opportunities for such observations occur very rarely.

I find it amazing that no only can such miniscule observations result in confident estimates of the size and mass of planets orbiting distant stars but that the nature of the planets can also be deduced: whether they are rocky worlds or gas giants. Data from their stars also allows astronomers to deduce whether or not a particular planet is within the habitable zone.

At first only the largest planets were observed, but more recently (and especially with the use of the Kepler telescope launched into orbit in 2009) it has become possible in some cases to start building up a picture of entire solar systems, identifying the number, size and orbits of several planets orbiting the same star. The results are demolishing some long-held beliefs.

The theories of solar system formation which have developed over the centuries have of course all been based on a sample of one: ours. They tended to conclude that all of the planets will be more or less in the same orbital plane with close-to-spherical orbits, and that planets in close orbits will be small and rocky, with gas giants further out. All of these conclusions have turned out to be flawed.

What astronomers have observed so far might be summarised as follows: planets and panetary systems are the norm, but while some systems have an even more regular structure than ours, others can best be described as chaotic. Gas giants are found in close orbits, the most spectacular example being Upsilon Andromedae which has a planet 1.4 times the mass of Jupiter so close to the star that its orbital period is just 4.5 days! Furthermore, that same star has a super-massive gas giant, 14 times the mass of Jupiter, with its orbital plane at a 30 degree angle to the first one. And there is a third giant in that system, 10 times the mass of Jupiter, in an extremely elliptical orbit with a different orbital plane again. This kind of chaotic structure would have a huge effect on any smaller planets in the system, wildly disturbing their orbits and making it impossible for them to remain in the habitable zone for any length of time.

One possible consequence of such gravitational instability is that planets can end up being flung out of their solar systems altogether, presumably accounting for the recent discovery of many such homeless planets floating around our galaxy, only detectable via their gravitational lensing effect. In fact, a later New Scientist news item suggests that so many of these loose planets have now been discovered that they must be considerably more common than planets which are still orbiting stars.

This is really significant since in order for life to evolve to a human level of intelligence on any particular planet, that planet has to remain within the Goldilocks zone for billions of years. And that means above all that stability is required. Not only does the orbit of the planet have to be fairly circular and the star itself be stable, but other planets in that system have to be in stable, near-circular orbits in more or less the same orbital plane.

Of the 1,200 planets detected so far, only 366 are rocky and of Earth or super-Earth size (the initial requirement for supporting Life As We Know It). Of these, just six are in the habitable zone. While most seem to be in reasonably stable orbits at present, that does not mean that they have been, or will remain, in that zone for the length of time required to develop intelligent life.

Exploration continues and conclusions are sure to change as more data comes in, but initial indications are that our Earth's characteristics and history have been unusually favourable to the development of intelligent life. Which suggests that it is unlikely that other civilisations exist anywhere near us.

Primary Inversion by Catherine Asaro

2011-05-27T08:51:00.001+01:00

This is the first novel set in Asaro's award-winning and continuing Skolian Empire series. I posted a general review of the series on this blog in July 2007 and a review of another of the novels, The Ruby Dice, in May 2010. I went into some detail concerning the background to the series in my 2007 review, so I recommend that this be read now before continuing with this review (scroll down to a linked index to all of my novel reviews in the left hand column).

I have just re-read Primary Inversion for the first time since it was published in 1995 as it is one of the monthly reads for the Classic Science Fiction discussion group. It features a few critical months in the life of Sauscony (Soz) Valdoria, a formidable heroine who is one of the rare Rhon psions on which the Skol-Net (the Skolian Empire's unique instantaneous communications network) depends and is also a Jagernaut Primary - a surgically enhanced warrior with a rank equivalent to a fleet admiral. She is also the half-sister of the Skolian Imperator, Kurj, and his potential heir.

The author includes a lot of infodumps in the first few chapters to bring readers up to speed with the background setting, in the form of explanations by the main characters to others. This could be tedious but is handled well, being broken down into manageable chunks and interspersed with a lot of action, including a ferocious space battle.

The story begins with Soz on leave with her Jagernaut team on a neutral planet where they meet a group from the Eubian Concorde, the deadly enemies of the Skolian Empire. The man they are guarding (Jaibriol) is a Highton, the highest caste of the sadistic Eubian Aristos, and Soz discovers two things about him; he is the previously unknown heir to the Eubian Emporer, and his appearance is a sham - he has been selectively bred and genetically engineered to be a Rhon psion with the aim of defeating Skolia by taking over the Skol-Net. He has lived a protected life and is unaware of his intended role or of the true nature of the Aristos, and the mutual attraction between Jaibriol and Soz is immediate and powerful.

Soz has her own psychological problems dating back ten years to when she was briefly captured by the Eubians and used as a "provider"; someone who was tortured for an Aristo's pleasure. Her struggles to maintain her sanity, outwit the cold and calculating Kurj and resolve her relationship with Jaibriol - who by rights should be her deadliest enemy - take up most of the book.

Primary Inversion is an exciting thriller on its own and also acts as a scene-setter for the rest of the series. Many of the characters we meet here - including Kurj and Soz's parents - plus some who are only mentioned, feature much more strongly in subsequent novels. I will conclude my review with the same words I used at the end of my 2007 series review:

"This is a very good modern version of the traditional space-opera, and recommended to anyone who enjoys this sub-genre."

Restoree by Anne McCaffrey

2011-05-20T10:12:00.002+01:00

Anne McCaffrey is of course most famous for writing the award-winning Dragonflight (first published as a novel in 1968) and the long series of sequels which followed it, although she has also written or co-authored several other series. I reviewed Dragonflight on this blog in February 2009 and enjoyed it just as much then as I first had when reading it in 1970 - it is one of the great classics of SFF.

Restoree is that rare thing for this author, a stand-alone novel with no sequels. It appeared in 1967 and was her first complete novel to be published. I still have my 1970 copy on my shelf and recalled enjoying it so I proposed it as one of the monthly reads for the Classic Science Fiction discussion group.

The story focuses on Sara, a capable but physically unattractive young woman who is suddenly snatched from Central Park in New York after glimpsing a vast aircraft looming overhead. What follows is so traumatic that it causes her to go into deep shock, from which she slowly recovers with only a general memory of unimaginable agony and horror. She finds herself in an isolated medical clinic, acting as a sort of robotic nurse to a man who is being kept drugged. She gradually realises that she is on an alien planet called Lothar, inhabited by humans. She has been taught enough of the language to follow simple instructions but, like the rest of the nurses, is regarded as a moron. What shocks her more than anything is that her appearance has been transformed - she is now beautiful.

She conceals her recovery and discovers that the man she is looking after, Harlan, is the Regent of the planet. She becomes convinced that those running the clinic are evil, so she surreptitiously sabotages the administration of Harlan's drugs and helps him to escape. The rest of the novel is concerned with countering a political plot to seize control of the government and also with facing up to the deadly threat of the Mil - a spacefaring alien race with a taste for flesh who had hunted the people of Lothar for millennia and who were also responsible for abducting Sara from Earth. During the course of all this, Harlan and Sara fall in love but there are complications, since the Lotharians have a visceral loathing for any captive of the Mil who has been physically restored to health - and Sara is a restoree.

This is a generally straightforward, fast-paced adventure story but it has its darker aspects, especially the ambigious figure of Monsorlit, the surgeon who knows Sara's secret and keeps reappearing to threaten her. Some US readers may be put off by the fact that the novel seems to have been marketed in that country as a romance (with an appropriately embarrassing cover), but although the developing relationship between Sara and Harlan runs through the story, it is generally dealt with in an amusing way with few slushy moments. Sara is a resourceful and likeable heroine who proves well able to look after herself: in fact, the story was apparently motivated by the author's irritation about the subservient way in which women were usually portrayed in SF.

I enjoyed reading the story again after forty years but I have to admit that was in large part down to nostalgia as there are some issues with the background setting and general credibility by current standards; most obviously, how Lothar came to be populated by humans is blithely ignored. In mitigation, the story is told in the first person by Sara so we get her subjective viewpoint and, given the constant stress she was under, she had other things to think about. It is also worth recalling that this was written at much the same time as the original Star Trek TV series, in which many planets turned out to be inhabited by humans who thought and acted much as we do!

This is a lightweight tale not in the same league as Dragonflight, but it is still an enjoyable story if you can suspend disbelief sufficiently to overlook the flaws.

Film: Moon (2009)

2011-05-14T02:22:00.001+01:00

I had heard good things about this award-winning low-budget British SF film and also about the director and co-author Duncan Jones, whose debut film this was, so I sat down to watch it with some anticipation.

Moon has a claustrophic little plot, focusing on one man (Sam Bell, played by Sam Rockwell) who is nearing the end of a solitary three-year stint as maintenance man at a mining base on the far side of the Moon. A faulty satellite means that direct communications with Earth are impossible, with recorded messages sent via Jupiter being the only contact with his wife and young child. His only companion is GERTY the computer (voiced by Kevin Spacey). The beginning of the film, with Sam exercising on a machine and talking to GERTY, is reminiscent of 2001. At first it seems strange that one man should be left in isolation for so long, but the reason becomes apparent as the plot is gradually revealed.

After an accident while out on the surface trying to service one of the mining machines, Sam wakes up back in the Moon base, very weak, and spends some time recovering. He decides to ignore GERTY's instruction that he must not leave the base and goes outside to try to correct the problem with the mining machine. What he discovers there gives him a devastating shock which causes him to completely re-evaluate the nature of his life and precipitates a series of events which lead him to plan to return to Earth in secret.

I can't reveal more of the plot without spoiling the surprise for new viewers, which I would not want to do. If you haven't seen it yet, then arrange to do so and be careful to avoid reading the Wiki plot summary or any other spoilers, because this film is a little gem, albeit a rather dark one.

What I like most about the film is the intelligence of the script and the pared-down low-key nature of the plot. There is no showiness here, no hyped-up action, no spelled-out explanations for lazy viewers; we are left to observe and work out what is going on at the same time as Sam does.

Duncan Jones' style has been likened to that of another acclaimed writer/director, Christopher Nolan (Prestige, Memento, Inception and recent Batman movies) and I can see why. Jones has directed another film, Source Code, released this year, which is now at the top of my "must see" list. With two intelligent writer/directors producing such thoughtful and thought-provoking movies, the SF film scene is looking healthier than it has for some time.

The Winter Ghosts by Kate Mosse

2011-05-06T02:53:00.001+01:00

Kate Mosse came to fame in 2006 with the prize-winning international best-seller Labyrinth. I read that and enjoyed it; like so many doorstop novels of the time concerning complex historical mysteries involving religion and with a dash of added fantasy, it was compared with The Da Vinci Code, and as usual this did it no favours because Mosse's book was much better researched and written.

She has published a few other books but I hadn't read any of them until The Winter Ghosts, first published in 2009. She returns to the subject which she covered so intensively in Labyrinth: the persecution of the heretical Cathars in medieval Languedoc, in south-west France (where the author has a home). The structure is that of stories within stories. The first story begins in 1933 with an Englishman, Frederick Watson, visiting an antiques dealer in Toulouse in order to obtain a translation of an old document written in Occitan - the ancient language of that part of France. To explain his interest he tells the dealer how he came to possess the document, a story which occupies almost the entire novel.

Watson's story began five years earlier on his first visit to Languedoc, a time when he was travelling to try to recover from the long-term grief and depression resulting from the death of his beloved elder brother in the Great War. He crashed his car in a snowstorm in a remote rural area and walked to a small village, a grim and depressing place. He was invited to attend an annual fiesta in a large hall, and when he arrived was impressed by how authentically medieval it was, with the villagers all in costume. He strikes up a conversation with Fabrissa, an enchanting young woman who seems to understand and sympathise with all of his problems, and tells her the story of his childhood and the reasons for the deep grief he feels for his late brother, but she then disappears. The next morning, he tries to find her but no-one seems to have heard of her.

Fabrissa had recounted her own story of the persecution and destruction of her village, which Watson initially assumed had taken place during the Great War. However, by this time there are enough clues to allow the reader to understand that the situation was very different from the one he believed. Watson eventually discovered the truth for himself, in the process ending a centuries-old mystery and finding the document which he wants the dealer to translate.

This story is a quick read, the 240 pages being in well-spaced large font, and (in my 2010 Orion Books paperback edition) is accompanied by author's notes plus another short story in the same setting. The Winter Ghosts encompasses grief, romance, mystery and the supernatural, wrapped up in an engaging and memorable tale.

Golden Sunlands by Christopher Rowley

2011-04-29T12:22:00.001+01:00

I first read Golden Sunlands soon after it was first published in 1987 and enjoyed it enough to keep on my shelves, so I recently decided it was time to enjoy it again.

The time is the distant future, with humanity spread across many star systems. On the remote and rather primitive world of Calabel, the human inhabitants are going about their affairs when they are suddenly scooped up by robots emerging from a fleet of spaceships. These return to a huge mother ship which spirits the entire population of the planet to an artificial universe in which a vast number of red dwarf stars are arranged in a symmetrical pattern, each providing light and warmth to its own flat discworld with a surface area millions of times larger than a planet. These are the golden sunlands of the title.

The humans gradually discover that the humanoid Golden Iulliin, the ruling race who created the universe aeons ago, while still very much present have lost their knowledge of the technology and in some cases reverted to a medieval level of existence, with ancient ruins scattered about the sunlands. So far the setting is reminiscent of Niven's Ringworld but on a much larger scale, and indeed anyone who likes Ringworld would probably enjoy this. Events soon take a different course, however. The iulliin are still obeyed by their slave races; the ferocious yashi, reptilian dagbabi and the siffile - their name for humans. For the inhabitants of Calabel were not the first to be captured; another human world had been similarly emptied millennia before and their descendents were still around.

Almost all of the humans find themselves rapidly processed and brainwashed to become soldiers in an endless war between two of the sunlands. A handful manage to escape in one of the smaller spacecraft and land on a different sunland, where they are captured by primitive iulliin and threatened with ritual sacrifice. The two groups face a wide variety of adventures and problems in dealing with their equally threatening situations while trying to understand the nature of the universe they have arrived in.

Although I have to admit that I wasn't quite so impressed on this reading, it is still an enjoyable ride through a fascinating invented universe with some very varied and credible characters (human and iulliin). However, there is one major drawback which I had forgotten - it ends mid-flow, with most of the issues unresolved. As far as I can tell in a web search, no sequel was ever published. This is a pity, since I would love to see where the author was planning to take this story and would certainly buy a sequel. He is still writing, but appears to have switched to fantasy rather than SF.

Three Chapbooks from Nightjar Press

2011-04-22T09:36:00.000+01:00

I have to admit that before receiving these three publications I had only a vague idea of what a "chapbook" might be (and that was rather inaccurate). For those as much in the dark as I was, the summary from Wikipedia might be useful:

"The term chap-book was formalized by bibliophiles of the 19th century, as a variety of ephemera (disposable printed material), popular or folk literature. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales, children's literature and almanacs. Where there were illustrations, they would be popular prints. The term is derived from chapmen, a variety of peddler, who circulated such literature as part of their stock. The term is also in use for present-day publications, usually poetry, of up to about 40 pages, ranging from low-cost productions to expensive, finely produced editions."

Nightjar Press specialises in the publication of limited-edition modern chapbooks, each containing one short story from the fantasy or related genres. All three of the ones I received are very short (the text of the actual stories occupying between 7 and 15 pages) but are well produced on high quality paper with card covers adorned by purpose-designed colour images. They can be obtained direct from the publishers (details on their website).

A Revelation of Cormorants by Mark Valentine: a writer engaged in producing a book about the folklore associated with birds rents a cottage on a remote coast and becomes dangerously fascinated by the cormorants.

Field by Tom Fletcher: a Forestry Commission warden sets out to evict some illegal campers but finds that the situation is not what it seemed and is becoming steadily stranger.

Lexicon by Christopher Burns: related from the viewpoint of an enigmatic man who invites women to his remote house for a purpose with origins in Greek mythology.

All three are well-written, high-quality stories. I am not quite sure where they would fit into most people's book-buying patterns, though, since anthologies or magazines provide a wider choice at less cost. I suspect that given their limited publication run these are aimed at collectors as much as readers.

Film: I, Robot (2004)

2011-04-15T13:25:00.001+01:00

It's more than four decades since I read Asimov's robot stories and I have forgotten everything about them (except for the three laws of robotics, of course). So I approached this film with an open mind and no expectations; probably just as well, since I noted the comment afterwards that I, Robot was "inspired by" Asimov's stories, rather than directly based on them.

The film is set in Chicago in 2035, with large numbers of humanoid robots being used throughout society. They are all produced by U.S. Robotics (USR) which also maintains a supercomputer (VIKI: Virtual Interactive Kinetic Intelligence) which is able to communicate with, and change the programming of, the latest and most sophisticated generation of robots, designated NS-5. There is no public concern over the robots as their behaviour is governed by the three laws of robotics: that robots must not harm a human being; that robots must obey humans unless this conflicts with the first law; and that robots must preserve themselves unless this conflicts with the first two laws.

Del Spooner (Will Smith) is a detective with a deep mistrust of robots due to an accident which almost cost him his life. He is called to the apparent suicide of Alfred Lanning, the chief scientist of USR and the man who had restored Spooner using prosthetics. Lanning had left behind a trail of clues concerning his death in the form of appearances via a holographic projector. Spooner investigates his death with the reluctant assistance of Dr Susan Calvin, a "robopsychologist" working for USR (Bridget Moynahan), and he soon suspects one of the new NS-5 robots found at the scene. This robot, which calls itself Sonny, exhibits unexpectedly human characteristics, including emotions, and Calvin discovers that it has an additional brain making it possible for the robot to override the three laws.

Meanwhile, Spooner finds himself under threat from various types of USR robots, being attacked several times. His suspicions focus on the CEO of USR, who tries to thwart his investigations for fear that they would interfere with the planned major roll-out of NS-5 robots. The pace ramps up as Spooner and Calvin try to stop impending disaster.

This is principally an action movie but it also raises what will become genuine issues concerning the relationships between humanity and artificial intelligences as computers increase in sophistication. As such, it is more realistic than most SF films as the basic premise that such sophisticated AIs might exist by 2035 seems not impossible, given current progress. It isn't one of the great SF films (the plot is too routine for that) but is better than most, despite a rather puzzling and apparently inconsistent ending. Overall, a good thriller with Smith and Moynahan putting in effective performances.

Interzone 233

2011-04-08T11:36:00.001+01:00

The March-April 2011 issue of the British SFF magazine hit my doormat recently. The review section is as informative as ever, this time featuring an interview by Jim Steel of Paolo Bacigalupi, whose first novel The Windup Girl has been steadily collecting awards. The review of the novel which accompanied this left me somewhat unconvinced as to whether I would read it, though - I have no enthusiasm for future dystopias, they seem all too likely to happen. Among the other book reviews, The Hammer by K.J. Parker caught my eye. I've not read any of her books, but the description of her writing in general and this work in particular is enough to put it on my (long) shopping list.

The film and DVD releases section also had me reaching for my notepad. Too soon for the failed but intriguing BBC TV serial Outcasts to feature here (the reviewers wait until the DVDs are on sale), but the film Skyline sounds promising, as does a DVD release of a 2002 British film, The Gathering. The film Never Let Me Go has generated a lot of publicity but the plot summary doesn't appeal to me.

There are only four instead of the usual six short stories this time, since the first one is a novella by Nina Allen, accompanied by a column describing her impressively varied work.

The Silver Wind, by Nina Allen (illustrated by Ben Baldwin). A future in which Britain has elected a right-wing government, resulting in the formation of a police state and the ejection of all non-whites from the country. This is the kind of depressing scenario which doesn't appeal to me and usually sets up a "brave defiance by principled hero" plot, but this author handles it in a more subtle and intriguing fashion. She focuses on a conformist property agent who doesn't question the status quo (it all happened long ago) but who becomes fascinated by the history of a clock made by a talented dwarf, Owen Andrews. He manages to locate and visit Andrews in a remote part of London, separated by a new and dangerously inhabited forest from the main city, and learns of experiments concerning time which are taking place in an old hospital nearby, and their sometimes horrific results. He is captured after becoming lost in the forest and is taken to the hospital, where he finds that there is an alternative to the existing paradigm. An engaging story.

Tell Me Everything by Chris Butler. An alternative Earth in which everyone constantly emits clouds of spores which can be detected by other people nearby and allows them to assess each other's status and mood; effectively not unlike telepathy. A police detective trying to solve a difficult case finds a use for a man suffering from a rare affliction: he emits no spores at all.

Tethered to the Cold and Dying by Ray Cluley (illustrated by Paul Drummond). Two survivors on an almost deserted station on a frozen world are surprised by the arrival of a stranger with a story to tell. This prompts one of them to go on a cross-country hike to find the space elevator which is said to be still functioning, in an attempt to escape their isolation.

Crosstown Traffic by Tim Lees (illustrated by Russell Morgan). Various different alien races live alongside humans on Earth. The story features a young human employed by an alien to to take a valuable package across town; one which attracts a great deal of attention on the way, with a surprising outcome.

Nina Allen's story is certainly the stand-out one from this group, I enjoyed her fantastical take on an unpromising scenario.

The Lure by Bill Napier

2011-04-01T08:22:00.000+01:00

The Lure was first published in 2002, and is Bill Napier's fourth novel. The time is the present and the action starts in a vast underground lake beneath Slovakia's Tatra mountains. This has been comprehensively instrumented for an Anglo-Soviet research project aimed at detecting traces of the elusive Dark Matter particles passing through it. After several years of zero results, the three scientists who are monitoring the project are astonished when the lake is suddenly swamped by an intense storm of particles, then even more amazed when they detect what appears to be a coherent pattern in the storm. To help analyze this phenomenon they recruit two more specialists who confirm that the pattern is real, can only be the product of an advanced intelligence and contains hugely valuable scientific information: it is a message from the stars, aimed at humanity.

The scientists are ready to announce their momentous discovery to the world, but their national leaders are becoming anxious. What if the message is a lure by some malign intelligence, designed to prompt a response which would lead to the annihilation of any species which might be able to threaten the message-senders? The scientists slowly realise that not only is their announcement being blocked but their lives are in danger.

The US government discovers what is happening, and some of the most intriguing passages are the intense debates at the highest level concerning how to react: whether to make a public announcement of the event and respond to the message; or to make use of the information without responding; or to kill the whole story and everyone involved with it in order to prevent anyone responding. Being the USA, religion gets involved but so do some interesting arguments concerning the probability of an advanced civilisation being hostile or friendly. Interleaved with these chapters are gripping scenes of a relentless manhunt across a winter landscape as the scientists desperately try to survive and get their message out.

The book's cover draws a comparison with The Da Vinci Code but this does it a great disservice. The author is a professional astronomer, and it shows: the technical aspects of the plot are authoritative and the debates thoroughly convincing. The conclusion concerning the nature and purpose of the message is fascinating. At first I thought the writing style a little clunky but before long was thoroughly engrossed in the story. The tension ramps up steadily and I read the second half in one sitting - I really couldn't put it down.

Interestingly, the book is not marketed as SF but simply as a "thriller". Possibly this is because the emphasis of the story is not on the aliens and their message but on the human response to receiving it. Frankly, I don't care what they call it; it is one of the most thoughtful, realistic and exciting first contact novels I've ever read. I can't recommend it too highly, and my next task is to track down copies of the author's other books.

Brasyl by Ian McDonald

2011-03-25T11:29:00.001Z

This book was first published in 2007 and attracted glowing reviews plus several award nominations, being voted novel of the year by the British Science Fiction Association in 2008. My copy had been sitting on my bookshelf for a while, so I selected it as one of the reads for the Classic Science Fiction discussion group, which despite its title considers one new as well as one old book each month, plus a short story a week.

Brasyl has three plot threads which remain separate for much of its length, the only immediately obvious link being that they are all set in Brazil. The main thread is set in 2006 and follows the fortunes of Marcelina Hoffman, an unprincipled TV producer working on the next exploitative programme for her trashy TV channel. Another is set in 2032, a time of quantum computers and total surveillance, in which Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas, a small-time cross-dressing operator on the fringe between legitimate business and the criminal underworld, tries to make his fortune. The third goes back to 1732, when an Irish Jesuit admonitor, Father Quinn, is despatched up the Amazon to locate and bring back another Jesuit priest who has established his own empire there. The chapters rotate between the threads, carrying the stories along together.

The writing is of high quality with the Brazilian settings, old and new, obviously well researched and richly portrayed, but nevertheless I found this a difficult book to get into. One problem was that the multiplicity of secondary characters confused me - I kept losing track of who was who - as did the fact that the text is liberally sprinkled with Brazilian terms. There is a glossary at the back but I found that on most of the occasions when I referred to it, the word I wanted to clarify wasn't there. As a result I was never entirely on top of the action but was always struggling to keep up.

The first half of the book was therefore hard going, particularly since there is nothing particularly science-fictional about it except for the setting of the 2032 thread. If it hadn't been my selection for the discussion group, I might not have persevered. But I felt honour-bound to keep going, so I slogged on and was eventually rewarded as the action picks up in the second half. Links begin to appear between the threads, including "quantum knives" which can cut through anything, and an eternal battle between two shadowy organisations is gradually revealed in a way which will delight all conspiracy theorists. The climax, concerning the nature of our reality, is as ambitious as any SF reader could want.

In the end it was worth the read but, as with so many critically-acclaimed modern SF novels, I found that I admired it rather than really enjoyed it. The emphasis in the first half of the book on literary quality, on slowly developing the characters and their environments, robs it of the pace and tension which characterise the kind of stories I enjoy the most.

Outcasts (BBC TV)

2011-03-18T02:11:00.001Z

This eight-part serial has now finished, so as promised I'll sum up. To refresh your memories, I'll include some of what I said after the first two episodes.

The scenario is far enough into the future for humanity to have developed huge starships, one of which had managed to establish a colony on the distant planet of Carpathia (named after the ship which rescued survivors of the Titanic disaster) some fifteen years before. The name is significant as civilisation on Earth is collapsing, and the last starship is due to arrive.

Almost all of the 70,000 humans are concentrated in one walled settlement, Forthaven. The president (Liam Cunningham) aided by the head of security (Hermione Norris, who famously played a formidable MI5 agent in Spooks) try to hold the line while preparing for the arrival of the starship. All is not well, as the ship has suffered some damage which threatens disaster if it tries to land on the planet, so it launches an escape pod to ensure that some survive.

All is not well on Carpathia, either, as the team of explorers who spend most of their time away from the settlement are planning a rebellion. Just to complicate matters further, there is a band of renegade artificial humans (advanced cultivars, or ACs) in the wild, rejected by the settlement years before, with whom there is intermittent but bitter conflict.

The focus is very much on the human drama and the acting is initially variable (Norris being the stand-out performer) with some of the dialogue sounding stiff and awkward; a perennial screen-SF problem. This seemed to get better as the serial progressed, or perhaps I just got used to it. Also developing through the serial was the role and relationship of two of the internal security officers, played by Daniel Mays and Amy Manson.

I was amused to note that the one clear villain - the former head of the evacuation programme (played by Eric Mabius), who arrives on the escape pod and immediately starts to worm his sly and manipulative way up Carpathia's hierarchy - is constantly criticised for bringing religion to the secular colony and cynically using this as his vehicle for building a power base. I suspect this might not go down too well in some markets…

The SF elements are initially weak, and by the half-way stage I was ready to dismiss it as a soap opera with a few unusual plot elements in a mildly exotic setting. It is a puzzle to work out what everyone does or how they live, as the town is surrounded by wasteland and hardly anyone ever goes outside the walls. The discovery of natural diamonds lying around to be picked up is acceptable, but the fact that they are mysteriously gem-cut rather than in the rough is not. However, the background music is worth a mention as it is one of the strong points. It reaches elegaic heights, powerfully reinforcing moments of high drama. Intriguingly, the more stacatto music used to accompany action scenes is very reminiscent of similar music in Spooks.

The second half of the serial contains a lot more science-fictional mystery, although it frequently doesn't seem to make sense. First comes the discovery of fossils of early hominim remains, despite the fact that there is no other animal life on the planet - just plants and insects (I still don't understand that: hominims dying out, sure, but they would only have been the tip of an enormous pyramid of animal life - did that all die out? We are not told). This is accompanied by hints from one of the first men on the planet, who has been living rough in the wild, that the planet did not want humans there. Then people begin to report seeing loved ones they know to be dead, a convincing duplicate of one of the explorers appears (the fact that this duplicate is clearly solid, whereas others appear and disappear instantly, remains unexplained), a mysterious disease strikes and it becomes clear that the colony is facing a deadly but hidden threat. Meanwhile, a further and unsuspected starship secretly approaches Carpathia with malevolent intentions.

By the start of the final episode I was wondering how all of the plot threads, both human and alien, could possibly be resolved in just one hour. The answer is that they weren't; it ends on a huge multiple cliff-hanger, the point of maximum crisis for the whole story so far, evidently lining everything up for a second serial. This would be fine if a sequel was coming along soon, but the viewing figures were disappointing and the BBC announced immediately after the finale that the planned second serial had been cancelled. So, rather frustratingly, we will never know the answers to the many questions.

Why did it fail? I think it was too adult and slow-paced to appeal to the usual Doctor Who/Primeval band of TV SFF followers, while containing too many unexplained inconsistencies to satisfy more mature SF fans (a nit-picking lot, we are). And of course, few people who are not SF fans bother to watch any SF programmes unless they are so good that they transcend the usual genre prejudice barrier.

Outcasts is easy to poke holes in, but I found I had become strangely attached to it and will miss my weekly visits to Carpathia. Despite a slow start and the unexplained inconsistencies, it had managed to get its hooks into me.

Films: Iron Man (2008) and Iron Man 2 (2010)

2011-03-12T09:37:00.001Z

I seem to be working through superhero movies at the moment, even though I'm not a fan of the genre and scarcely looked at any comics even in my youth, let alone since. However, good ones do make for stress-free undemanding entertainment and there have been some critically acclaimed examples recently, among them the Iron Man films.

Robert Downey plays Tony Stark, the womanising engineer/genius inventor head of a major armaments firm, who is injured and captured by terrorists in Afghanistan and held for three months, supposedly working on a weapon for them. In fact, he is building a prototype powered armoured suit with which he escapes, but he has been changed by his ordeal and decides to stop making armaments. Back home, he is opposed by Obadiah Stane (Jeff Bridges), his deputy, but supported by his adoring assistant, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). He works on perfecting his powered, flying and fighting suit, using an "arc reactor" of his own invention to provide almost limitless power. With this, he returns to Afghanistan to take on the terrorists and is later faced with an even more grave threat at home, when he is challenged by a second "iron man" built using his original plans. The first film ends with his identity as "Iron Man" revealed.

Iron Man is as good as Nolan's Batman films - which is to say, very good indeed - with Downey being remarkably convincing as the conflicted inventor. His performance dominates the screen, with Patrow very good in the supporting role; the on-screen chemistry between them works well.

As a result, I looked forward to the sequel, Iron Man 2. Sadly, this is just a rehash of the first, with yet another "Iron Man" emerging to challenge him. The film tries to distract the audience from noticing the lack of original ideas by introducing Scarlett Johansson as an athletic secret agent and throwing in more fight scenes and bigger explosions, but it doesn't really work and I was relieved when it ended. It isn't a bad film by most standards, but was a major disappointment after Iron Man.

Blindsight by Peter Watts

2011-03-05T08:53:00.001Z

The time is the late 21st century, and the aliens have arrived. Sixty-five thousand unknown objects, in perfectly symmetrical formation, simultaneously burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. An unmanned probe, far out at the edge of the Solar System, detects the faint trace of communications from a large asteroid, aimed further out into space. High-velocity remote probes are sent from Earth, but the asteroid explodes. A manned ship, crewed by a handful of radically adapted specialists, follows the communication trace out towards the Oort Cloud. Their leader is a vampire.

Some time before, it had been discovered that vampires once existed before being killed off by humans at the dawn of civilisation. Their genome had been retrieved from ancient remains and they had been reconstructed. They are top predators (humanity being their favoured prey) who can paralyse people with fear just by looking into their eyes, and were only defeated because they suffer a massive seizure and become helpless at the sight of right-angles – such as a cross. To overcome this they are given a medicine which also tames their predatory instincts; they are valued because they are vastly more intelligent than humans. Their ability to hibernate in a near-death state for months or years has been transferred to the humans who form the rest of the crew, allowing them to make the long, slow journey.

One of the crew is Siri Keeton, a synthesist with half his brain removed in childhood to cure his constant and violent seizures. The vacated space is now filled with technology used to enhance his autistic ability to dispassionately observe and analyse events - and especially the rest of the crew - in order to keep an objective record to send back to Earth.

They manage to track down the destination of the signal, a bizarre alien craft orbiting a brown dwarf star, too dim to have been detected from Earth. The craft appears to be growing but its nature, and that of what the crew assume to be the aliens inhabiting it, makes no sense. The crew struggle to understand what is happening, and suffer increasing stress as the situation deteriorates beyond their control.

Blindsight is an ambitious epic of first contact, in the best tradition of hard SF. It is packed full of original and sometimes startling ideas, and richly deserved the Hugo nomination it received when published a few years ago. However, I have to say that I did not find it an easy read. The very density of ideas slows the pace, while the reader is made to work hard to follow what is going on. I found that I could only read it in small doses so it took me over a week to complete. It was worth the effort, though the conclusion is not one that optimists will enjoy.

Film: From Time to Time (2010)

2011-02-24T14:00:00.001Z

This is a combination of time travel and ghost story based on Lucy Boston's Green Knowe series of children's books which were published between 1954 and 1976. The film, featuring several well-known British actors including Dame Maggie Smith, went on limited British cinematic release last year and was recently shown on UK TV.

The setting is an ancient English country house at the end of World War 2. A young teenage boy, whose father has been reported missing in action, has been sent to stay with his grandmother from whom his family had been estranged. The house had been in the family for centuries and the boy explores it, fascinated by its history. He soon begins seeing visions of people from two centuries before, a few of whom (children, not adults) can also see him. He finds with increasing frequency that in going from one room to another he may suddenly be back in the 18th century, watching and listening to the people and events there. These scenes are interleaved with ones in his present day, as his grandmother (who has no problem with believing in ghosts) fills in the details of who the people were and what happened to them.

The boy becomes friends with a girl in the 18th century, a distant relative who was blind in real life but can see him. As a result he learns things which even his grandmother does not know, which are of practical benefit to the family.

This is a charming film, well-scripted and acted, and I enjoyed it throughout - but for the odd logical niggle. Now you may say that logic has no place in a ghost story, but I do like to see internal consistency. For example, the scenes set in the 18th century clearly involve the boy experiencing a kind of spiritual time travelling. He sees the house, people and events as they actually were at that time; they are not ghosts (in fact he is a kind of ghost from their future - except that he is still alive). Yet later in the story, while he is in the 20th century, he is visited by the spirit of the girl who tells him things that she could not have known while she was alive. So she really was a ghost at that point, and not time-travelling forwards to see him.

That I could just about swallow, but there was a more glaring inconsistency in the 18th century scenes, in which the boy was there in spirit only; while hardly anyone could see him (and in fact most walked straight through him) he was nonetheless able to pick up and carry material objects from that time - and leave behind physical objects he had brought with him, to be discovered a couple of centuries later. That really won't do!

Sylvow by Douglas Thompson

2011-02-18T08:16:00.001Z

Having been intrigued by Ultrameta, a previous novel by this author (reviewed on this blog on 2 October 2009) I was looking forward to seeing how his new work, Sylvow, compared.

There are some parallels between the two. Both are written in the form of discrete chapters - seventeen in this case - some of which have appeared as short stories in various publications. Two of them, Veronika and Vivienne's Garden, I had previously read in two anthologies from the British Fantasy Society; New Horizons (see my 6 November 2009 blog post) and Dark Horizons (22 January 2010). Both novels also feature a series of letters to a loved one written by one of the characters who has disappeared from normal existence, although in Sylvow the expanation for the disappearance is rather more mundane; the writer has chosen to live a wild existence in a forest.

The theme of Sylvow is the revolt of nature against the activities of mankind. Sylvow is an imaginary northern European city/state in the present day, formerly of great power but now in decline. The novel follows the lives of half a dozen of the inhabitants over several years: two women friends, Vivienne and Claudia, and their husbands; Claudio's Franco is a psychotherapist who unwillingly becomes involved with Veronika, a ferocious young Goth, while Vivienne's Leo (who is also Claudia's brother) had gone off to live in the forest surrounding the city several years before the story begins. His letters to Claudia have been the only contact from him since. The final main character is Anton, who after treatment by Franco had chosen to become a forester and who befriends the two women.

Strange things begin to happen in Sylvow. Giant insects emerge from the surrounding forest, plants begin to grow with great speed throughout the city, disrupting the services and blocking the roads, and soldiers are seen conducting peculiar experiments in the forest. The city gradually suffers organisational and social collapse, until it is finally threatened by flooding.

This description may sound like a fashionable environmentalist catastrophe tale, but it is very different from a conventional story. Like all of Thompson's writing, this has a surreal, dreamlike quality, like a fairytale of the original Grimm sort, dark and mysterious and sometimes horrific. There is a haunting quality to his prose, but that doesn’t mean that it is entirely detached from reality as there are some penetrating observations about life and relationships scattered through it; for instance, Franco's ruthless analysis of his own infidelity and the state of mind which led inexorably to disaster in his personal life.

This book won't appeal to everyone. In fact, if I had only read this description it wouldn't have appealed to me, since it isn't the kind of book I normally read. However, the quality of the writing and the strangeness of the story compelled me to read it all the way through.

Film: Stranger Than Fiction (2006); Outcasts (BBC TV)

2011-02-11T16:18:00.002Z

I record any film on TV which I think looks as if it might be interesting, but when I watch them I reject most within a quarter of an hour of the start. I recently saw Stranger Than Fiction after deleting several films in a row, but this one hit the spot so I stayed with it to the end.

This comic fantasy, set in Chicago, has an unusual premise: the hero of the tale, IRS auditor Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) who lives a life of obsessive monotony , starts to hear a female voice in his head describing everything he is doing - or is about to do. He fears he is going mad, but is galvanised into action when the voice prophesies his imminent death. A psychiatrist can't help him so he turns to a literature professor (Dustin Hoffman) who is intrigued that the voice appears to belong to an author who is writing a novel featuring Howard, but he can't identify her. He advises Howard that there is nothing to be done and that he had better enjoy life while he can, so Howard starts to fulfil childhood dreams and also plucks up the courage to approach the feisty baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) he has been investigating for failure to pay her taxes.

Meanwhile, the author (Emma Thompson), who lives in the same city, is suffering from writer's block and can't work out how best to kill off Howard to conclude her new novel, Death and Taxes. Howard recognises her voice in a TV interview and manages to track her down, leading to some unexpected twists and turns before the end.

This film held my attention and amused me throughout. It is a life-affirming story, well-acted by a high-quality cast and told with intelligence and wry humour. Highly recommended.
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Outcasts is a new BBC TV SF eight-part drama, of which I have so far seen the first two parts. The scenario is far enough into the future for humanity to have developed huge starships, one of which had managed to establish a settlement on the distant planet of Carpathia (named after the ship which rescued survivors of the Titanic disaster) some years before. The name is significant, as civilisation on Earth appears to be in its final throes, and the last starship is due to arrive.

All is not well on Carpathia, however, as the team of explorers who spend most of their time away from the settlement are planning a rebellion. The president (Liam Cunningham) aided by the head of security (Hermione Norris, who famously played a formidable MI5 agent in Spooks) try to hold the line while preparing for the arrival of the starship. All is not well with that either, as it has suffered some damage which threatens disaster if it tries to land on the planet, so it launches an escape pod to ensure that some survive. Just to complicate matters further, there is a band of renegade humans in the wild, rejected by the settlement years before.

The focus is on the human drama and the acting is reasonably good (Norris being the stand-out performer) although some of the dialogue still sounds rather stiff and awkward to me - a perennial screen-SF problem. However, the SF elements are weak so far, and even the big CGI effort of the starship is hopelessly unconvincing, simply because the plot requires this vast structure, with living space in two huge counter-rotating artifical gravity wheels, to try to land on the planet. Now you don't have to be an SF geek to realise that such a vessel cannot possibly enter a planet's atmosphere let alone make a landing, a fleet of shuttles being required for that task, but the programme makers don't seem to realise that.

Overall it's moderately promising so far and I'll keep watching; I'll return to it to make some final comments once I've seen the lot.

Interzone 232

2011-02-05T13:34:00.001Z

A surreal picture by Richard Wagner is on the cover of the Jan-Feb issue of the British SFF magazine; I like this type of photo-realistic painting showing impossible things. The book reviews include Corvus by Paul Kearney, the sequel to The Ten Thousand, which I reviewed here in October 2008. The reviewer makes similar observations to mine about Kearney's writing, when I wrote: "The strength of the book is in its battle scenes, of which there are many. The author belongs to the gritty realism school of writing, and the fear, panic, confusion and brutality of battle are powerfully evoked, as are the campaigning problems of hunger, thirst, heat, cold, and body lice. The result is a gripping account which draws in the reader and had this reviewer shivering with the tension of the build-up to the final climactic battle."

There are also reviews of three books from the 1950s, made available again by Westholme Publishing in their "America Reads" series of classic works: The Flying Saucer by Bernard Newman, One by David Karp and Limbo by Bernard Wolfe. By and large, the reviewers feel these haven't worn too well, with One receiving the highest accolade - a rather tentative and qualified approval. Another of the new works reviewed which caught my eye, Buntline Special by Mike Resnick, is set in an alternative history in which the power of the native American medicine men has held the European invaders at the line of the Mississippi. Resnick's name is one I've been familiar with for a long time, but I can't recall ever reading anything by him. This one sounds entertaining, though.

The film and TV reviews include Tron Legacy (ho hum) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 (a stage-setter for the finale), both of which I hope to see before long; I rather liked the original Tron, which for some reason has been withdrawn from circulation by Disney. A DVD set of The Avengers Series Six revived fond memories of the bizarrely fantastic plots, but this series didn't have Diana Rigg in it (except to say farewell in the first episode) so where's the a-Peel?

On a sadder note, the obituaries record the death of John Steakley at the age of only 59. He was the author of Armor (1984) and Vampires (1990), the latter being made into a film. I still have a copy of Armor on my shelf for a re-read some day, an intriguingly different take on militaristic SF.

Now to the short stories, of which there are five:

Noam Chomsky and the Time Box by Douglas Lain, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A portable "time box" has been invented which allows owners to travel back in time and interact with people there, although no substantial changes are possible no matter how hard they try. The box also has a reset button to allow the traveller to cancel his interventions and go back to the start to try again. The main character has the obsessive notion that he could make subtle but important changes by going back to the 1960s and forcing an interaction between the linguist Noam Chomsky and the fantasist Terence McKenna (he of the 2012 catastrophe theory), and his account of his many efforts to achieve this is written in the form of a series of blog entries. Really strange, but earns points for originality.

Intellectual Property by Michael R Fletcher, illustrated by Mark Pexton. A time when people can have - quite literally - plug-in memories in form of a flash-drive like device which is inserted into the head. When the device is removed, they lose all memory of what happened or what they learned while it was in - until it is reinserted. The protagonist is an innocent young woman normally, but unknown to herself becomes a deadly secret agent when her plug is inserted by her employers. An intriguing plot device, but it takes some time to work out what is going on.

By Plucking Her Petals by Sarah L Edwards, illustrated by Mark Pexton. A medieval fantasy in which magic can be used to make permanent changes in people's appearance. One low-level practitioner of such magic becomes embroiled in affairs which are way above his head.

Healthy, Wealthy and Wise by Sue Burke, illustrated by Ben Baldwin. A clash of cultures in the near future between a Spanish woman who needs expensive medical treatment, and an American student doing field work who she has to host her in return for receiving the treatment. The action is seen from the viewpoint of the student's "Friend", a highly capable AI in her phone who observes everything that is going on, monitors her physical and mental health, translates when required, and generally advises and takes care of her. An upbeat and engaging tale - who wouldn't want a Friend like that? I can't help thinking that it would rapidly encourage a strong psychological dependency, though.

Flock, Shoal, Herd by James Bloomer. This won the James White Award (open to non-professional writers). A distant future in which government agents can conceal themselves to carry out their work by adopting other human or animal bodies, or even multiple bodies. One such agent goes in search of a former lover who has learned to transcend the limitations of this system and become something else entirely. Like the Fletcher story above, the tale skips across events like a flat stone across water, so the reader has to concentrate to keep up; but it's short enough to read again straight away.

Film: Inception (2010)

2011-01-28T08:28:00.001Z

Written, directed and produced by the brilliant Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Prestige, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight), this was one of the films of 2010 most eagerly awaited by SF fans.

It is set in the near future in a world the same as ours except that a combination of drugs and technology permits people to invade the dreams of others, imposing their own dream structures (designed by specialist "architects") in order to obtain secrets and even influence their target's subsequent actions (a process known as "inception"). The principal character, Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an expert at this, and is hired by a powerful industrial organisation to influence the heir to a rival energy corporation (Cillian Murphy) to break up the corporation on the imminent death of his father. Cobb assembles a team who succeed in drugging the heir on a long flight and proceed to take him on a dream journey, steadily downwards through dreams within dreams, each with its own distinct setting, until facing him with a modified recreation of his father's deathbed scene. During this process, Cobb is hounded by guilty memories of his wife (Marion Cotillard), who committed suicide as a result of his manipulations, and who appears in the dreams constantly trying to frustrate his actions.

This is an intelligent, convincing and exciting thriller which held my attention throughout, but it certainly requires concentration to keep up with the fast-moving events as the story keeps flipping between dream levels. I understand that a lot of viewers found it baffling, but as I was aware of the general plot in advance I had no problem in following it. However, there were some details I was uncertain about or unaware of, and I found the Wiki plot summary (which I read after seeing the film) useful in tidying up some loose ends.

I rarely watch films more than once, but if I've enjoyed one enough to want to see it again, I like to leave at least a couple of years between viewings so that the details have faded from my memory. However, Inception is one of those rare films that I immediately knew I would want to watch again before long, in order to obtain even more enjoyment through a deeper understanding the next time around.

Christopher Nolan has done it again - the man seems unable to make anything but excellent films. What I like most about his work is that it is exciting but also highly original and intelligent - a league above the usual by-the-numbers, predictable and sometimes downright moronic level of Hollywood action movies.

The Hidden Oasis by Paul Sussman

2011-01-22T00:33:00.001Z

The Hidden Oasis (2009) is the third novel by Paul Sussman, the others being The Lost Army of Cambyses (2002) and The Last Secret of the Temple (2005). All three are written to the same formula; present-day adventure thrillers in which the characters are struggling to solve mysteries linked to events in both the recent and the very distant past. The author's background as a field archaeologist who has spent much time in Egypt is made full use of, with rich descriptions of the country and of archaeology, and his understanding of the different cultures of the region comes through clearly.

There is one common character in all three novels - Inspector Khalifa of the Luxor Police - but he has only a cameo role in the latest story. The principals are a young American woman who visits Egypt for the first time for the funeral of her elder sister, and the British archaeologist who had worked with her sister in a search for the "hidden oasis", a legendary place sought for centuries which was supposed to contain a weapon of mysterious power. Added to this, an aircraft carrying an important cargo had vanished in the area some twenty years before, and various groups - including some exceedingly unsavoury characters - were taking an active interest. Inevitably, the principal characters become involved in the search and much skullduggery, chases and general excitement follow, before all is revealed.

Sussman's work has been compared with Dan Brown's but his plotting, characterisation and writing in general are vastly superior. In spirit, this story reminded me a little of a childhood favourite: Rider Haggard's King Soloman's Mines. The pacing of the story is steady to start with but gradually ramps up and I read the last third of this 620 page book in one go - I couldn't put it down.

On the face of it Sussman's books do not fit into the SFF category, but in all his stories there is an touch of fantasy at the end and this forms a major element in The Hidden Oasis. This may sound odd coming from an SFF fan, but I rather wish it didn't; this story works perfectly well as an exciting modern adventure mystery set against an authentically detailed background, and the magical happenings right at the end seem somehow out of place. I would have preferred an element of uncertainty as to whether or not there could have been a mundane explanation for events, but no such get-out in this story; the impossibility of the ending is literally earth-shaking. Despite this reservation, the novels are well worth reading if you enjoy burying yourself in a really good, well-researched yarn.

Film: The Truman Show (1998)

2011-01-15T08:53:00.000Z

Continuing with my efforts to catch up with worthwhile SFF films, I've finally seen The Truman Show. The plot must be well enough known by now, although I must confess I did wish whilst watching it that I hadn't had any advance notice of the basic premise, as it would have been fun discovering that for myself as the film developed. So if you really have no idea what it's about, my advice is: watch the film (it's terrific), but read no further.

The plot is mixture of a soap opera and reality TV show on the surface, but underneath is a paranoid conspiracy theory made real. Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) lives an apparently normal, happily married (to Laura Linney) life in an idyllic little American town set on a small island. The one quirk is that, following a childhood accident in which his father was drowned, Truman is so terrified of water that he can't even drive over it on a bridge; so he has never left the island. Despite this, he has a fantasy of travelling to Fiji to follow the girl he really fell in love with (Natascha McElhone) who had vanished abruptly from the island years before.

The problems begin when odd events cause Truman to start to question the nature of the world he lives in. Strange incidents keep occurring, starting with a piece of equipment falling out of a clear sky. I enjoyed the way in which the headline of the next day's local paper always had a logical explanation for the events (in this case, that an aircraft in trouble had shed some equipment over the island). Despite such cover-ups, Truman gradually becomes suspicious, and feels that he is being spied on and set up.

The truth is far worse than that; for the entire island is a movie set, and everyone on it except himself is an actor. Broadcast around the world from thousands of cameras concealed around the island, the real-time continuously-running story of Truman's life since birth has been the entire purpose of The Truman Show, and is followed by millions of devoted fans. The film gradually interleaves scenes of Truman's increasing paranoia and desperation to escape the island with those of fans watching the show, plus views of the control-room staff under the direction of Cristof (a chillingly controlling Ed Harris) who constantly choreographs the actors to keep the show on the rails. I was reminded of the old joke: just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you!

The climax of the film (and the Show) is dramatic and uplifting, a fitting end to an excellent, original and amusing production. Full marks!

Beholder's Eye by Julie E. Czerneda

2011-01-07T15:25:00.001Z

I haven't read anything by this author before but kept hearing favourable comments about her work, so I decided to try Beholder's Eye, the first of her Web Shifters trilogy, published in 1998.

The premise is unusual in that the heroine, Esen, is not only not human, she is an immortal being of pure energy who has the power to take the form of any race she knows. She and her small group of related Web Shifters spend most of their time in material form, spending years living within one culture after another and using their unique abilities to absorb and remember everything about them so that they will not be forgotten if they disappear. Their primary concern is not to be discovered, so they hide their true nature from everyone.

In this far-future universe, humanity has spread over a large number of worlds but is just one among many races in a mostly peaceable but occasionally turbulent galactic civilisation, divided into several rival blocs. Esen inadvertently becomes involved with a group of humans and is captured along with one of them, Ragem. In order to save his life she is forced to reveal something of her nature and he then becomes her intermittent companion in the adventures that follow.

I enjoyed the beginning of the tale but after a while began to find it somewhat uninvolving. This is partly because it's a bit difficult to empathise with an immortal alien energy being, partly because there is an inevitable lack of tension, despite a series of dramatic escapades, since the reader knows that Esen could escape from any threat if she chose. However, this changes in the last third of the book as a deadly danger, a more primitive Web Shifter predator, begins to hunt down and attack Esen's group. The story then becomes a tense battle for survival for the Web Shifters.

The story is told in the first person by Esen, who makes a likeable heroine although her attitudes are not at all alien; she thinks and behaves exactly as a human woman might if given her unusual ability. On the other hand she is influenced, sometimes amusingly, by the attitudes of the races she copies, because she becomes them in style of thought as well as appearance. Her developing and sometimes rocky relationship with Ragem, as he gradually discovers more about her circumstances, is another plus point. In the end I found it a good if not great read and worth the time spent on it, despite my reservations.

Film: Gattaca (1997)

2011-01-01T00:59:00.001Z

Yet another film which I finally got around to seeing after meaning to for many years.

For those unfamiliar with the plot, it is set in a not-too-far distant future in which children's genetic make-up can be adjusted at conception, a process routinely done by those who can afford it. This is not just to avoid any genetic disabilities but also to produce flawless people of superior all-round physical and mental ability. Such people, known as "valids", have huge advantages in life and are routinely appointed to the best jobs. But not everyone is born with such advantages - many are "in-valids". So what do you do if you have a burning desire to go on a mission to the outer planets, but lack the genetic superiority which is a basic requirement of being an astronaut? Particularly when instant genetic tests are carried out frequently at workplaces, as a matter of routine?

This is the problem facing the protagonist Vincent Freeman (Ethan Hawke). He finds a way of tricking the tests with the aid of a crippled valid whose identity he takes, and is duly selected for a forthcoming space mission. But he lives in constant fear of discovery; a situation exacerbated when he becomes involved with a colleague (Uma Thurman, so glossily perfect that she seems alien). Then a murder occurs at his workplace and an intense investigation follows in which he becomes the prime suspect. Will he be able to survive this and take his place on the mission?

Gattaca succeeds on three levels: it's a gripping thriller, relying on psychological tension rather than car chases or explosions; it foreshadows issues around human genetic manipulation which are likely to be with us in reality all too soon; and it is a human story of a fight for identity and achievement over and above that which is written in the genes. The direction is restrained and the film has a pared-down minimalist feel without an unnecessary scene or word; the score by Michael Nyman complements it perfectly. I am not a fan of dystopias, which is basically what this film portrays, but it is still one of the best SF movies I've ever seen.

Ex-Heroes by Peter Clines

2010-12-24T10:25:00.001Z

I can't quite recall how I came to choose this book for review, because it isn't my usual reading fare. It combines two fantasy sub-genres, superheroes (I sometimes watch these on film but don't read about them) and zombies (which I neither watch nor read). However, I decided to regard it as educational and pressed on.

The time is the near future, when two different events have completely changed the world. The first is when a few ordinary people began to acquire specific superhero powers. The principal character is known as St George, an invulnerable crime-fighter of immense strength who can leap over buildings and breathe fire, but others include Gorgon, who can drain people's life force with his eyes, Zzap, who turns into a being of pure energy, and Cerberus, a young female engineer who has no superpowers but has developed a huge, powered, armed and armoured fighting suit. And then there is the mysterious Stealth, a beautiful woman dressed head to toe in a skinsuit, who is formidably intelligent as well as superhumanly fast and strong, and becomes the superheroes' leader.

The second event is far more serious and follows shortly after the first; zombies begin to appear in increasing numbers. They are driven by a desire to bite healthy people, who sicken and die and become zombies themselves. The only way to kill them is to destroy their heads. An initial slowness to react and take the drastic measures necessary to contain the outbreak means that it has spread around the world. Even many of the superheroes fall victim to them, and return to fight their former comrades.

As Ex-Heroes begins, almost the entire human population has become zombies. A few thousand people survive in Los Angeles in two groups: one, supported by the surviving superheroes, is concentrated in the Paramount Studious complex, a walled area which can be defended against the surrounding hordes of zombies. The other, much larger, group is a criminal gang known as the Seventeens, who attack the other humans and superheroes when they can.

The chapters initially alternate between "now" and "then"; the ones set in the past each focusing on a specific superhero as the zombie plague begins, and thereby introducing the reader to the characters in more detail than the main narrative. Towards the end of the book, the attention is very much on "now"; the fight for survival against the zombies and the Seventeen, which reveals the limitations of even the most powerful superhero.

The plot is unusual, the story well written, the characters developed well enough to engage the reader, and it's a gripping tale from start to finish. I have only two reservations; it's a very grim dystopia (although with a glimmer of hope at the end), and there are an awful lot of gruesome fight scenes with the zombies. It made an interesting departure for me, but has not inspired me to want to read any more books about zombies!

Films: Dogma (1999), Highlander (1986)

2010-12-18T04:27:00.001Z

I was pointed towards Dogma in an SFF discussion forum, so I gave it a spin recently. The plot of this comic fantasy is novel: two fallen angels (Ben Affleck and Matt Damon), living as humans in present-day USA after having been banished by God long ago, conceive a plan to get back to Paradise. The problems are that if they succeeded this would prove that God is fallible, and thus cause the end of all creation; and that God, who could stop them easily enough, has gone missing while in disguise, somewhere on Earth. To help prevent disaster, God's spokesman (Alan Rickman) recruits a woman (Linda Fiorentino) who, unknown to herself, is the last scion of the family of Jesus of Nazareth. She is tasked with stopping the angels, with the aid of an assortment of dubious characters.

This is the excuse for a lot of rather heavy-handed and sometimes crude humour, mostly at the expense of religion in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular - I gather that it prompted protests from Catholics in the usual Pavlovian manner. Subtle it ain't, but it fires enough comic shots for a number of them to score hits. All in all, worth watching if you are in the mood for some broad humour, unless you are religious and of a sensitive disposition.

I've been meaning to watch Highlander for years, but have only just got around to it. The story of the accidental immortal Connor MacLeod (played by Christopher Lambert) who spends centuries battling the Kurgan, another immortal warrior, must be well-known by now. Two plot threads run in parallel with the scenes flipping between them; one in the sixteenth century, when Connor first discovers he is immortal and is trained by fellow-immortal Ramirez (played by Sean Connery) and one in 1985 when the climactic battle takes place.

I have to say that I was rather dissatisfied. There are yawning plot holes, with no attempt at any explanation for what is going on and why. Lambert makes a broodingly impressive hero but the Kurgan is a cardboard cut-out villain and the rest of the cast (except Connery) are unmemorable. I found the background pop music jarringly inappropriate, and the whole film rather pretentious and overblown. It compares badly with some of the more recent superhero movies. I gather it has cult status and is highly regarded compared with the sequels, so I won't be wasting time on them…

The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21, edited by Gardner Dozois (Part 4)

2010-12-10T08:07:00.001Z

The final batch of eight stories.

The Accord by Keith Brooke. A far-future story of people living pleasant, simple lives on a backward planet, all believing in a supernatural life-force called the Accord. Then an anomalous character appears to disturb the peace - and it becomes apparent that the world is not at all what it seems. An intriguing story concerning reality and identity. I recently reviewed Brooke's YA novel, The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie.

Laws of Survival by Nancy Kress. A dystopian future in which, following nuclear war, unseen and mysterious aliens arrive and establish impenetrable grey domes close to the sites of destruction. A woman, barely existing from hand to mouth by following her own rigid rules of survival in a collapsed world, finds herself inside one of the domes and learns that the aliens have their own bizarre priorities.

The Mists of Time by Tom Purdom. A fascinating tale of a future in which a kind of time travel is possible with great difficulty - but only to observe the past, invisible to the people then. Only one visit to any scene is permitted to avoid any risk of problems, and the time-travel rig takes only two people. A wealthy man funds a mission to film a crucial incident in the life of an ancestor, the young commander of a small Royal Navy vessel cruising on anti-slavery patrol off North Africa in the 19th century, but the film-maker who goes with him has her own ideas of what kind of film she wants to make. The viewpoint alternates between the young commander and his descendent, watching and listening in fascination. Combat at sea in the days of sail is richly and tensely evoked, and the difference in attitudes and priorities between the observed and the observers wryly portrayed. A gem of a story.

Craters by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Another dystopian future in which young children are turned into unwitting suicide bombers by having bombs undetectably inserted into them, timed to explode years later. A reporter visits a dangerous refugee camp to try to determine the truth behind the incidents.

The Prophet of Flores by Ted Kosmatka. A alternative present-day Earth in which the accepted scientific methods of dating the past appear to prove that nothing is more than 6,000 years old, so the Bible is regarded as literally and unchallengeably true. Hominim remains discovered by archaeologists are categorised as "human" (tool users deriving from Adam and Eve) or "not human", but these careful distinctions - along with the archaeologists - come under threat when the remains of the small humans of Flores are discovered.

Stray by Benjamin Rosenbaum and David Ackert. A bizarre little fantasy of an immortal, able to command anyone to adore and follow him, who falls to Earth in a segregated America, determined to try to live as a human.

Roxie by Robert Reed. A man's life with his old and ailing dog, told against the background of an impending major asteroid strike on Earth. Hugely sentimental, and for dog lovers only.

Dark Heaven by Gregory Benford. Aliens in the form of vaguely humanoid amphibians have arrived on Earth as peaceful visitors, and live in a few specially-made structures on the edge of the oceans, rarely seen by most people. But then bodies start being found with mysterious injuries, and a police detective in the southern USA begins to suspect that the presence of the nearby alien base may not be coincidental.

Something of a marathon effort, this; I don't think I've read so many short stories in such a brief period of time. The book provides a fascinating cross-section of the state of SF short fiction today, and reveals it to be at least as varied and interesting as it has ever been. The stories are all of a high standard, and the choice of favourites will be determined by the preferences of the reader. Of this group, I most enjoyed the tale by Purdom, and also liked the ones by Brooke, Kosmatka and Benford. My overall selection of ones I liked most from each batch (which also happen to be the ones I liked most overall) is:

Finisterra by David Moles (first batch - reviewed 18 September) - the overall winner.
Alien Archeology by Neal Asher (second batch - reviewed 8 October)
Hellfire at Twilight by Kage Baker (third batch - reviewed 6 November)
The Mists of Time by Tom Purdom (final batch)

The Weaving by Gerald Costlow

2010-12-03T23:46:00.000Z

This is a first novel by an author who has had numerous short stories published. The outline of the plot of The Weaving, featuring princes and kings, witches, wizards and shapeshifters, goddesses and an evil demon, all set against a medieval background , sounds very familiar and not all that promising. However, this one is a bit different.

The heroine of the story is the Witch of the Woods, a magically powerful young woman whose pining for romance results in a change to reality, delivering a loving husband to her but also freeing a long-incarcerated demon, in the form of an attractive woman, to begin to rebuild her evil empire. Two plot threads run in parallel; a supernatural one as the various magical powers prepare for the final confrontation, and a more mundane one of rivalries between small kingdoms preparing for war. There are twists, turns and unpredictable developments leading up to the unexpected conclusion.

This story turned out to be more enjoyable than I had anticipated. Gerald Costlow turns a mature and perceptive eye on the proceedings, successfully bringing his interesting characters to life and leavening his writing with a wry and sometimes saucy humour which prompted more than a few smiles.

(An extract from my SFF blog)

Interzone 231

2010-11-27T01:03:00.001Z

The November/December issue of the British SFF magazine is a Jason Sandford special, focusing on the work of this US writer. He has already had several highly-regarded short stories published in Interzone which I have reviewed in previous posts, and this issue features three new ones. There is also a long interview (with Andy Hedgecock) in which he explains his view that a new form of genre writing is developing, which he dubs SciFi Strange. He says this "sets high literary standards, experiments with style, is infused with a sense of wonder, takes the idea of diverse sexuality for granted, focuses on human values and needs, and explores the boundaries of reality and experience through philosophical speculation." Which all sounds very impressive, but for me bottom line is simply "is it a good read?"

Peacemaker, Peacemaker, Little Bo Peep (illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe) is the first of his stories. The population of the USA is gradually fragmenting into a patchwork of lynch mobs trilling "Peace!" as they slaughter not just criminals but anyone using violence - including police officers and soldiers. A policewoman escapes with the aid of a serial killer and discovers the chilling truth behind the frenzy.

Memoria (illustrated by Richard Wagner) is next up. Spacecraft travel between parallel worlds, but there is a price to be paid by some of the crew; possession by ghosts of the dead. Criminals escape jail by volunteering to be the "shields" to experience this, gradually losing their memories and minds from the impact of the series of imposed personalities. But it all goes wrong when a new sort of possession afflicts one crew, and they learn why civilisations on parallel Earths have destroyed themselves.

Millisent Ka Plays in Realtime (illustrated by David Senecal) completes the trio of Jason Sandford stories. A future in which the economy runs on time - people's life time. Whenever a citizen wants something - to be educated or to be healed, or just to shop - the price is paid in the form of a specified period of time, ranging from seconds to years, for which they are committed to serve the Lord who provides such services. Their accumulated debt is burned into their genes so it can never be lost. But what might happen if someone discovers that the system isn't infallible? A young musician finds out.

So, do Sandford's stories live up to the billing? The plots are complex and the reader only gradually discovers what is going on; they need careful reading - some passages more than once - which might absorb some readers and irritate others. His writing is to a high standard, the ideas are original, there is a strong "sense of strange" infusing each one (particularly Memoria), and, yes, they are good reads.

There are two other stories in this issue:

The Shoe Factory by Matthew Cook, illustrated by Ben Baldwin. A man keeps being distracted from his solitary mission on a doomed spacecaft by spells of reliving a past life with a former girlfriend. Can he escape by recreating his former existence? A strange story with a complex structure; I wasn't sure what was going on until the end (and I wasn't entirely certain even then).

The Shipmaker by Aliette de Bodard, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A story set in this author's "Xuya continuity", an alternative Earth in which the Chinese discovered America before Columbus. A Grand Master of Design Harmony, responsible for integrating all of the aspects of a spaceship project ready for the new Mind which will be uniquely capable of transforming the ship into a viable entity, is thrown into a crisis when the Mind is born too soon. There is an appealingly lyrical flavour to this author's writing.

In addition, the usual book, film and DVD reviews are present and correct, and I notice that a favourite TV series from my young adulthood, The Avengers Series Five (the first series in colour) is now available on DVD, featuring the wonderful Diana Rigg as the action woman Emma Peel. That should brighten up a lot of lives.

Lost SF Classics in the New Scientist

2010-11-19T14:55:00.002Z

The New Scientist magazine is a serious journal aimed at keeping the scientific community (plus interested bystanders like me) up to date with current developments across the whole field of science. However, the editor obviously has a soft spot for science fiction, as occasional pieces about it appear. The most recent example was in the 23 October issue, in which ten prominent scientists and writers were asked to nominate a lost SF classic. Their choices, with their comments, were as follows:

Dark Universe by Daniel F Galouye, nominated by the biologist (and atheist flag-bearer for Darwin's theory of evolution) Richard Dawkins. "…hauntingly imaginative, and uses the medium of science fiction to let the reader reconstruct how myths can start."

Journey of Joenes by Robert Sheckley, nominated by James Lovelock (who invented the Gaia concept). "...a mid 20th century version of Voltaire's Candide. I like it because I am often asked to predict the future state of the world and authors like Voltaire, Wells, Orwell and others of their kind appeal more than purely technical prophets."

The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem, nominated by cosmologist Sean Carroll. "...a wide-ranging exploration of robotics, technology, computation and social structures."

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack, nominated by cyberpunk novelist William Gibson. "It's a book you really have to read to see why."

New Maps of Hell by Kingsley Amis, nominated by Robert May (former UK Chief Scientific Adviser). "…a scholarly review which takes science fiction seriously."

We by Eugene Zamiatin, nominated by novelist Margaret Atwood (winner of the 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award for the novel The Handmaid's Tale). "…contains the rootstock of two later themes - the creepy, too-smiley utopia, as in Brave New World, and the Big Brother dystopia, as in 1984."

Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon, nominated by SF author Stephen Baxter. "…a kind of god's-eye-view survey of the human far future, as bracing and original today as it was when first published…"

Floating Worlds by Celia Holland, nominated by SF author Kim Stanley Robinson. "…Holland's immense power as a novelist, and her new take on old science fiction themes, turn everything to gold."

The Listeners by James Gunn, nominated by SETI astronomer Seth Shostak. "I read this book two decades ago when I was first becoming involved with the search for cosmic company…"

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, nominated by physicist Freeman Dyson. "It's a sensitive human drama, with California providing the enduring natural environment as background."

An interestingly varied selection. Of the ten, I have only one on my shelves (New Maps of Hell) although I recall reading (and being impressed by) Floating Worlds, and assume (simply because they are so well known - not exactly "lost" classics) that I probably read Last and First Men plus Earth Abides a long time ago when I absorbed large quantities of SF every week, although I don't remember them. I have certainly read books by Galouye, Sheckley, Lem and Gunn, although I don't recall the specific titles mentioned. I fear that when it comes to SFF, I have forgotten rather more than I remember!

The First Men in the Moon (BBC TV)

2010-11-13T09:14:00.001Z

This is a new adaptation of the famous 1901 novel by H.G.Wells, made for British television in 2010. It is remarkably faithful to the original (judging by the book's Wiki plot summary - I read it too long ago to recall anything about it), with few changes. One of them is evident from the start, which is set in 1968 at a fête to celebrate the imminent Moon landing. A boy wanders into a tent in which a very old man is showing an early film, purporting to be of the Wellsian story; for the old man is Bedford, who really was the first man in the Moon.

The scene then switches to Edwardian England and follows the plot of the novel very closely. We see Bedford, then a young, failed businessman, meet the brilliant and eccentric Professor Cavour and learn of his invention of cavorite - a liquid which, when it cools and dries, shields the force of gravity. They construct a space capsule which can be steered by rolling and unrolling blinds coated with cavorite, and arrive at the Moon. There they find that a local atmosphere, frozen in the long nights, forms in the heat of the lunar day, and they leave the capsule only to be captured by Selenites, large intelligent insects. One change from the book, necessary for even minimal acceptability, is that the fast-growing surface plants described by Wells are missing: the Selenites live entirely underground in a huge system of deep caverns with a permanent breathable atmosphere. In their attempt to escape, Bedford and Cavor split up. Bedford manages to reach the capsule and return to Earth but Cavour remains behind, working with the Selenites who learn his language and are very curious about the Earth - and cavorite. The ending differs from the original, in that the film neatly explains why the Moon is lifeless and airless today (although the very last scene rather spoils that).

There are some technically shaky aspects - BBC4 doesn't exactly have a Hollywood budget to work with, after all. While the initial action on the Moon's surface features the obligatory low-gravity slow-motion antics we are familiar with (plus an amusing Edwardian version of Armstrong's first words), this gets forgotten underground, with some vague hand-waving about gravity being stronger there. Despite this, it's an entertaining production, rich in period flavour, and well worth seeing.

The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21, edited by Gardner Dozois (Part 3)

2010-11-06T00:05:00.002Z

Into the third batch of eight stories (one more batch to go):

Sanjeev and Robotwallah by Ian McDonald. A youth in a future India is entranced by the remotely-controlled battle robots he sees in action and becomes determined to get involved. But reality proves less glamorous than he expected.

The Skysailor's Tale by Michael Swanwick. Another dissatisfied youth, this time in an alternative America in the Revolutionary War period. A vast British flying craft with a crew of a thousand, held up by a huge number of hydrogen-filled balloons, appears in the sky over his home town and of course proves irresistable to the youth. A story strong in atmosphere and convincing detail, as I have come to expect from this writer.

Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh. Yet another youth, in India again, who has the ability to weave minds together. He slowly finds out more about his origins as he constantly tries to escape the attentions of a man like himself - only far more powerful. An original and intriguing tale.

Steve Fever by Greg Egan. Dissatisfied youth number four (am I detecting a theme here?) in a future USA feels powerfully drawn to escape his farm and head for the city. But his impulse is not self-generated, and he is being called to the city for a bizarre purpose. A strange tale of nanobots out of control.

Hellfire at Twilight by Kage Baker. A time-travelling cyborg tasked with retrieving historical documents is sent back to the notorious Hellfire Club, a group of British aristocrats devoted to excess in depravity. He is after a Greek scroll describing the ceremony of the Eleusinian Mysteries , but find himself involved more closely than he expected. This one reminds me of Connie Willis's novel To Say Nothing of the Dog.

The Immortals of Atlantis by Brian Stableford. The destruction of fabled Atlantis, a biotechnologically advanced civilisation when the rest of humanity was still in the Stone Age, led the inhabitants to ensure their survival via latent mitochondrial DNA, which could be awakened in the unsuspecting carriers by the application of a sequence of drugs. An interesting notion given an unexpected twist in this short story, in which a woman in a present-day housing estate receives a peculiar visitor. I particularly enjoyed the wry description of the crime-ridden slum estate: "The Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses had stopped coming to the estate years ago, because there were far easier places in the world to do missionary work - Somalia, for instance, or Iraq".

Nothing Personal by Pat Cadigan. A present-day US police detective is assailed by a growing feeling of dread, which seems to be associated with the natural deaths of two identical young girls. But much more than this is going on. Not time-travelling in this tale, but shifting between alternate realities.

Tideline by Elizabeth Bear. An crippled battle robot tries to use its last energy to create a suitable memorial for its dead human comrades on the beach of a distant shore, and strikes up an unlikely relationship with a young boy.

A varied mix of stories this time (except for the dissatisfied youths) with some original ideas and unpredictable plots, although the Bear story struck me as rather familiar. My favourites from this group are the ones by Swanwick and Baker.

The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie by Keith Brooke

2010-10-31T10:36:00.001Z

This recently published book, which has an introduction by Adam Roberts, is the tale of an overweight teenager, the butt of cruel humour at school, who escapes into vivid daydreams of the way he would like his world to be. He is shaken when he discovers that the real world is gradually changing to match his dreams - his broken family is reunited and even his twin sister, killed in an accident two years before, reappears as if nothing had happened. He finds that he is able, with an effort of will, to change events to suit himself. But no sooner does he master this than he realises that his control is being challenged and is beginning to slip; for there is a rival power in the town, the mysterious, never-seen Owner, who seems to know exactly what Frankie is up to.

The Unlikely World of Faraway Frankie has a clearly-written style which will appeal to young and old alike, with an engaging combination of closely observed reality against a surreal, dream-like background. The story of Frankie's forced growth to maturity holds the attention to the unexpected but satisfying conclusion. I suspect that this is one which will stay in my mind for a long time, and will remain on my shelf for a future re-read.
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A rare sighting recently - a new review of my novel Scales. It has appeared in THIS blog. An extract from the introduction to the review:

Most likely you haven’t read this book because you didn’t know it existed. The novel was published through Authors Online LTD a British company formed in 1997 which publishes novels online and can also now print novels on demand.

Before I say anymore, I have to be honest here, I know the author of this novel through cyberspace. Tony and I have both been active posters at Yahoo’s Classic Science Fiction Message Board for many years. So, I will admit that I might have some bias. But those who know me and/or those who have read some of my reviews, know that I’m not one that minces words or lets authors off easy.

So you know I am being completely honest when I say that Scales is such a great Science Fiction novel it deserved a Hugo Award nomination.

I’m sure those who haven’t read the book are sort of checking out mentally or thinking to themselves, “this guy is a really good friend.” But those who have read the novel understand why it is worthy of such high praise.

A reminder: you can read my thoughts on writing the novel, plus all published reviews, on my website HERE , where you can also download the entire novel as an e-book free of charge - and you're not likely to get a better offer than that all week!

A Plague of Demons by Keith Laumer

2010-10-22T03:55:00.001+01:00

This novel, first published in 1965, was one of my favourites from the period and I still have my well-worn 1967 paperback. It's several decades since I last read it so I thought I'd see how it stood up today.

I've already posted one review of a novel by this author (A Trace of Memory, reviewed 15 December 2007) which I started as follows:

"Keith Laumer (1925-1993) was a prolific American SF author who specialised in fast-paced adventure stories (of which the Bolo series, concerning intelligent tanks, is best known) and comic satire, notably in the Retief books about an interstellar diplomat. A Trace of Memory, published in 1963, is a stand-alone novel in the former category."

A Plague of Demons falls into the same category, being a short (170 page) and exciting adventure thriller. It is set on a near-future Earth and features a government agent, John Bravais, who is tasked with investigating the mysterious disappearance of large numbers of soldiers involved in the formalised battles then being used to settle disputes. He observes a dog-like alien - one of the demons of the title - decoying soldiers away from a battle and attacking them. He is able to kill one of these extremely tough creatures and take back evidence of its alien origin. His task then becomes the investigation of what is going on, and to assist him he is given a new programme of internal biomechanical enhancements which greatly increase his strength, endurance and survivability. The demons are quickly on his trail, assisted by their ability to manipulate people's minds so they can appear to be ordinary humans, and what follows is a running battle which ends up off the Earth as Bravais desperately tries to fulfil his mission against heavy odds. I can't say more without spoiling the surprises for any new readers, but I will say that this is the book whose popularity inspired the Bolo series.

The story is told in the first person with the laconic hard-boiled style of a Mickey Spillane thriller, including one-liner gems such as: "I was as weak as a diplomatic protest". There is also something of the flavour of Eric Frank Russell's novel Wasp, reviewed here on 26 August 2007. The introduction in particular reminded me of the start of a James Bond movie - I could visualise the film scenes as I read. In fact, the whole book would make a good film, with little need to change anything. Inevitably, the complex plotting and character development which feature in most modern novels are notable for their absence, but in this kind of story they would only slow the pace.

I was intrigued by a couple of scenes for a personal reason. In one of them Bravais, having just received his enhancements, breaks the machine used to test his strength. In another, he is able to use his mind (in this case aided by radio) to analyse and overcome electronic locks. As I read these I realised that I had included similar elements in my novel Scales, without being aware that I might be borrowing them from somewhere else. This isn't the first time this has happened to me and does make me think about the process of imaginative writing. Clearly, our imaginations are developed from and informed by our own experiences and previous reading, and it can be difficult to determine which are our own original ideas and which are those we might subconciously have recalled from a consciously long-forgotten story.

Anyway, to return to Laumer: I can well understand why I liked this book so much and can warmly recommend it to readers who enjoy the style and pace of these 1960s SF thrillers. It's such great fun, with an added dash of nostalgia!

Film - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

2010-10-15T13:56:00.000+01:00

I quite enjoy popcorn movies when I'm in the mood for some mindless amusement, and I was encouraged by the fact that Prince of Persia was produced by the same man responsible for the entertaining Pirates of the Carribean trilogy, so I thought I'd give a spin.

Like PotC, PoP is an adaptation of a video game, but as I've never felt motivated to dabble in that field I can't comment on the relationship. The plot is the usual hokum, with the hero Prince, on the run after being wrongly accused of the murder of his father, having to prove his innocence while preventing bad guy Nizam from using the Dagger of Time to change the past to put himself on the throne. The CGI city looks impressive, the fireworks when the Dagger is used are spectacular, and the Prince (Jake Gyllenhaal - or at least his stunt double) puts on a suitably athletic display of parkour, free-running around the rooftops.

That's most of the good bits. Unfortunately Ben Kingsley's talents are wasted on a rather cardboard Nizam and Gemma Arterton is woefully miscast as the princess who is supposed to guard the Dagger of Time. This role calls for grace, gravitas and mystery, but I was constantly aware that Ms Arterton is a modern miss in dark makeup. In dramatic moments I kept expecting her to squeal "Oh My God!" and whip out her mobile phone to text to her friends. That's a pity considering that Bollywood is awash with beautiful Indian actresses who could do a more convincing job in their sleep, but I suppose Hollywood has its own parochial priorities.

On the other hand, perhaps they should have given Ms Arterton a mobile phone and played it for laughs, since the best bit of the film - and the only element which made the whole farrago enjoyable - was the comic performance by Alfred Molina as the bandit chief who cultivates a ferocious reputation in order to keep the tax collectors at bay, while he gets on with his favourite pastime of ostrich racing. I laughed out loud on several occasions when he was on screen, uttering decidedly modern-sounding opinions and reacting with Pavlovian fervour to the enticement: "It's tax free!".

Overall, the film lacks the panache of the PotC series, and sorely needs a strong central love/hate character like Johnny Depp's Captain Sparrow. Judging by the presence of the subtitle more films in this franchise could be on the way, but I doubt that I'll bother to watch them unless the fun quotient goes up markedly.

The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21, edited by Gardner Dozois (Part 2)

2010-10-08T15:39:00.001+01:00

More stories from the anthology, following on from the first instalment posted on 18th September.

Glory by Greg Egan. Set in a far galactic future. Embodied virtual facsimilies of two explorers are sent to a newly discovered planet to find out what a previous alien civilisation had learned about advanced mathematics. But the current inhabitants have a war to fight.

Against the Current by Robert Silverberg. A man from the present day suffers a sudden reversal and watches in dismay as history rapidly rewinds before his eyes. More of a psychological mood piece than a story with a clear plot or purpose.

Alien Archeology by Neal Asher. A retired secret agent discovers an artifact of great value from an extinct alien race, only to have it violently taken from him. The star-hopping chase for restitution and revenge involves murky dealings in the galactic underworld, rogue AIs and the uneasy threat of what exactly it was that destroyed all previous galactic civilisations. A modern version of traditional SF by a rising star in the genre, densely-packed and fast-moving; the kind of writing that you have to read twice to make sure you've grasped it all. An unusual aspect is that the story is at first told from the villain's viewpoint (in the third person) before switching to the hero's (in the first person). One of the highlights of the anthology so far.

The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate by Ted Chiang. A merchant in long-ago Baghdad tells a fantastic tale to the Caliph, concerning a gate through which people can travel twenty years into the future - or into the past. He recounts the varied fortunes of those who have used the gate, including himself. More of an Arabian Nights tale than conventional SF but a fascinating read. An intriguing contrast with the author's award-winning Exhalation, reviewed in this blog on 15 May 2009, which demonstrates the remarkable versatility of this master story-teller.

Beyond the Wall by Justin Stanchfield. Another complete contrast, as if to illustrate the vast range of modern SF. An enormous alien structure has been discovered on Titan and is promptly put out of bounds while countries try to decide what to do about it. A group of wardens tasked with protecting it from illegal explorers are compelled to enter it and find their hold on reality slipping as they experience alternate futures. An unsettling tale.

Kiosk by Bruce Sterling. A real oddity this one; a man living in eastern Europe after yet another major economic crisis makes use of a "fabrikator" - a machine which spins 3D models of anything it can scan - to start an economic revolution.

Last Contact by Stephen Baxter. I've commented before about the fundamental optimism of many of the stories in this collection, but here's a tale from the opposite end of the spectrum. Near-future astrophysicists discover that the Universe is unravelling, right down to the atomic level - and the Earth has just few months of existence left. This poignant story follows a middle-aged woman, the mother of one of the scientists who made the discovery, as she copes in mundane ways with the inescapable fact of impending annihilation.

The Sledge-Maker's Daughter by Alastair Reynolds. I'd read this one before and was sure I'd blogged about it, but I can find no reference so my memory must be at fault (again). Another one on the pessimistic side as far as human civilisation is concerned. A girl lives in a post-industrial Tyneside with a medieval level of technology, but discovers that the folk tales of winged men falling from the sky have substance, and that there is a lot going on behind the scenes. An intriguing tale, with a setting which would justify a full-length novel - which I would buy.

Half-way through the anthology - more later.

Interzone 230

2010-10-01T11:55:00.001+01:00

The September/October edition of the SFF magazine celebrates 25 years of Nick Lowe's analytical and well-informed film reviews under the "Mutant Popcorn" banner, with a long article by Jonathan McCalmont, reviews of several current films (including an ambivalent one of Inception, which is on my must-see list), and a reprint of his first column from 1985 in which he reviewed Brazil, Night of the Comet, Trancers and Ghoulies. An interesting point is made that despite the fact that SFF novels are regarded as specialist reading for geeks (Harry Potter excepted), the genre has nonetheless produced seven of the ten biggest grossing films of all time. Discuss, as the exam paper says.

The usual book and DVD review columns include The Stainless Steel Rat Returns by Harry Harrison, the twelfth in his comic SF series which started in 1961 with the last addition being in 1999. I'll have to get this book, if only for pure nostalgia. There's also a welcome return of an old master with the publication of Fritz Leiber Selected Stories.

Five short stories this time:

Love and War by Tim Lees, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A dystopian near-future in which a war against vaguely humanoid jumblies from Earth X, a version of Earth in a parallel universe which is beginning to emerge in random patches on the Earth's surface, has led to the imposition of a dictatorship of "the Party" to defeat the threat. The eventual ending of these incursions does not, of course, lead to any more liberal government but instead the emergence (or invention) of yet another threat to maintain the Party in power. A parable for our security-obsessed times, in which our civil liberties are being steadily eroded to meet the terrorist threat. But how likely is it that all those laws extending government power will ever be repealed?

Age of Miracles, Age of Wonders by Aliette de Bodard, illustrated by Darren Winter. A surreal fantasy in which a robotic being parades a former god around the country, putting him to an agonising death (from which he returns) time and again to demonstrate to the people that the old gods are no longer in power. This author focuses on limited but intense scenes from fantastic futures, steeped in atmosphere and mystery.

The Insurance Agent by Lavie Tidhar, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A near-future thriller with a fantastical twist. A security consultant who specialises in bodyguarding celebrities is assigned to protect a Significant Entity (SE), a young woman who has achieved a god-like status as a result of the popularity of the Alien Theory of Spiritual Beings; a rather sardonic send-up of the tendency to elevate the status of the leaders of religious cults. He finds himself with more trouble than he expected when his SE meets a rival.

Camelot by Patrick Samphire, illustrated by Ben Baldwin. A tale of immortals cast out from Camelot, who have lost the memories of their past existence. An ageless man searches endlessly for his brother who went missing in World War 2, aided by a beautiful woman who knows about his past and has her own reason for finding his brother. However, success in his quest does not bring the expected result.

The Upstairs Window by Nina Allen, illustrated by Ben Baldwin. Another dystopian future in which the return of religious authority leads to censorship of the arts. A war correspondent is caught up in the fate of a controversial artist friend whom he tries to help.

A rather depressing batch of stories this time, distinctly lacking in optimism both in terms of their settings and their events. These stories make a stark contrast with the ones I reviewed a couple of weeks ago in The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21, which are far more to my taste. I hope the mood improves in the next issue.

The Pride of Chanur by C J Cherryh

2010-09-25T00:15:00.002+01:00

I have earlier reviewed a couple of Cherryh's books and during the discussion of one of them was advised to read her Chanur series, so I have made a start with the first of them, The Pride of Chanur. One of her earlier works (it was first published in 1981), it is short and fast-paced. This review contains some spoilers.

The story is told entirely from the point of view of Pyanfar Chanur, a member of a humanoid if rather feline race (the hani) which still retains a tribal and hereditary social structure despite being space-faring traders. They trade with a few other alien species, both oxygen and methane breathing, one of which originally provided the hani with the technology to get into space.

Pyanfar is a spaceship captain and a senior member of the Chanur tribe; her small crew are all female relatives as is customary (male hani being considered too violent and uncontrollable to be allowed off-planet - an wry feminist dig). The trouble begins when a strange, ugly, almost hairless alien seeks refuge on Pyanfar's ship while it is berthed at a space station. At first it is thought to be non-sentient until it demonstrates otherwise, and the reader comes to realise that it is, in fact, a human man called Tully. He was escaping from a particularly nasty alien race, the kif, who had captured his spaceship and were using torture to try to get him to reveal the location of Earth, since the discovery of a new civilisation was a rare and great prize. Pyanfar refuses to hand Tully back to the kif and the rest of the story is essentially a running battle as the hani try to make it back to their home planet with their unexpected passenger.

The most unusual aspect of the story is that while humanity is represented by Tully, we only see him through alien eyes. In Pyanfar's judgment he is inadequate in various ways, apart from being fundamentally untrustworthy as a male, but he redeems himself by the end of the tale. The depiction of the alien races, especially the hani, is as well done as I have come to expect from this author, since this is one of Cherryh's strong points. The principal alien characters, Pyanfar and her enthusiastic young niece Hilfy, are convincingly drawn and likeable. It's a good read, and I can understand why it is regarded as something of a modern classic; I must seek out the sequels.

The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 21, edited by Gardner Dozois (Part 1)

2010-09-18T01:30:00.001+01:00

I don't normally buy anthologies but read a very good review of this one so I added it to my "to read" pile. It took a couple of years before I pulled it out, though; the occasion being a travelling-light holiday abroad for which I needed one book which would keep me entertained for the entire period. At over 700 pages of small print this proved to be more than adequate, and I only managed to get part way through it. So this is just the first instalment, covering eight of the thirty-two stories in the book; the rest will follow in due course.

I'm new to this series, so I was pleasantly surprised by the Summation which occupies the first fifty pages of the book. In this, the editor gives a detailed analysis of the SFF fiction market of the previous year (2007), discussing among other things the varying fortunes of short-story outlets, both paper and electronic. A fascinating insight into contemporary trends. Now for the stories:

Finisterra by David Moles. A far future in which humanity shares the galaxy with other intelligent races. A woman trained secretly as an engineer in a male-dominated society accepts an illegal but high-paying task on a strange world. It is a gas giant with a narrow zone within its atmosphere capable of supporting human life. In this float vast living islands up to 100 kilometres long, on which remanents of humanity have settled. But the islands have a greater value to some off-planet species. An original and memorable setting, complex and interesting characters and a gripping plot: what more could one ask for?

Lighting Out by Ken MacLeod. Another optimistic future in which humanity has spread to the stars, primarily threatened by artificial intelligences getting out of hand. A young woman is haunted by her mother who constantly sends virtual versions of herself to inveigle her into worthwhile activities. A grand plan for marketing some of the huge variety of new developments flooding back from the stars produces unexpected results.

An Ocean is a Snowflake, Four Billion Miles Away by John Barnes. Two rival documentary makers combine to produce a story on a Mars whose terraforming is about to be completed by breaking up a huge comet in such a way that the ice falls to the surface and creates oceans. But they have different priorities and not everything goes to plan.

Saving Tiamaat by Gwynth Jones. Human diplomats try to intervene in a devastating civil war between the humanoid masters and slaves of a distant planet. But the situation is more complex than had been imagined, and some unorthodox methods are required.

Of Late I Dreamt of Venus by James Van Pelt. The world's richest woman decides to sponsor the terraforming of Venus, but this will take so long that she decides to sleep for a thousand years, waking only occasionally to review progress. Society does not, however, stay unchanged.

Verthandi's Ring by Ian McDonald. A galactic war to the finish between humanity and an impenetrable alien race. Three warriors, used to being constantly switched between different virtual and actual bodies, win a significant victory but discover an alarming threat to humanity's survival.

Sea Change by Una McCormack. A near-future story on a smaller scale concerning two upper-class girls whose perfection was assured by genetic modifications, and how they relate to each other and to the rest of society.

The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small by Chris Roberson. Another change of pace and scene in an alternative history story which barely qualifies as SFF. A young functionary in a Chinese Empire is given the task of researching the distant land of Mexica in preparation for a planned invasion. He discovers that the best source of information is a political prisoner who has for decades resisted every attempt to make him cooperate; but his future is on the line.

In summary, a promising start. I was pleasantly surprised at the traditional and optimistic setting of so many of the stories, featuring a galaxy-spanning (or at least system-spanning) humanity. It will be interesting to see how many of the rest have similar themes.

UFOs: The Secret Evidence

2010-09-10T09:40:00.000+01:00

This is a two-hour UK TV programme by aerospace journalist Nick Cook, who decided to step outside his comfort zone and take a critical look at the case for unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and the possible explanations for the phenomenon.

The story begins in WW2 with the frequent reporting by RAF bomber crews on night raids over Germany of "foo fighters"; bright lights appearing to move around them. These have never been clearly explained, beyond the fact that very tired and frightened men in a state of permanent stress may be prone to hallucinations which may be "infectious"; if one says he saw something, others may too. Another possible explanation lies in secret Nazi projects such as those conducted in the Wenceslas Mine in the Sudeten Mountains, as reported after the war by a German officer who was based there. As well as vague reports of a "bell" reputedly connected with antigravity research, there is the massive above-ground structure of the "flytrap" which still exists today; a large reinforced-concrete circular framework, apparently with provision for a massive electric power input, for which there is still no explanation.

The focus then switches to Roswell in New Mexico in 1947, with perhaps the most famous UFO story of all; the wreckage of some artificial object of which there are various conflicting reports, ranging from a weather balloon to an alien spacecraft complete with aliens. However, this was only one of many UFO reports from this area, most of which can probably be attributed to the unusual atmospheric conditions which create illusions such as lenticular clouds. Cook interviews several witnesses with conflicting points of view and examines what was going on at the time at the nearby White Sands airbase. Here some 200 German scientists had been based in the years after WW2 as a result of Operation Paperclip, the effort to recruit as many scientists involved in advanced research as possible. At that time the USA was engaged in developing a wide variety of experimental aircraft (including the saucer-shaped Vought XF5U "Flying Flapjack") but the most likely explanation for the Roswell incident was the secret Skyhook project to send huge unmanned photographic reconnaissance balloons over the USSR, which regularly drifted over the Roswell area. Most significantly, Cook obtained evidence that the UFO stories were deliberately encouraged by the CIA as a disinformation scheme to distract Soviet attention from such recce projects (involving planes as well as balloons). This may account for the fact that the USAAF/USAF kept changing its story over the wreckage, and for the existence of one official report which stated that the UFOs may well be alien spacecraft.

One series of sightings for which there is still no adequate explanation, however, concerns the moving formations of lights in the sky widely observed over Washington in 1952. Such was the public concern that astronomer J Allen Hynek was tasked with looking into the question (I recall reading his book on Project Blue Book decades ago). He was able to dismiss the vast majority of sightings as misperceptions but acknowledged that there was no adequate explanation for a small percentage of them. Furthermore, he was only able to examine civilian reports: the potentially much more valuable ones from military pilots were excluded.

The 1960s saw a new development: the growth of "close encounters of the third kind", in which figures were reported walking next to a landed UFO. The most striking report came in 1964 from a police officer called Zamora, who was patrolling in the area of the White Sands base. After considering alternative ideas, Cook identifies the most likely explanation as a secret USAF project based on a development of the unsuccessful Canadian Avro Avrocar "flying saucer", to which the USAF had bought the rights.

There was a great increase in UFO sightings in the UK in the late 1960s, possibly related to a secret US deployment of the SR-71 strategic reconnaissance plane (which may also have been responsible for many UFO sightings around the Nellis USAF base; the notorious "Area 51"). Cook then looks at the series of cases of animal mutilation in the area of Los Alamos in 1976-86 which have been attributed to alien experiments, but he considers more likely to have been a covert US testing and monitoring programme.

The Soviet Union also carried out an investigation into military UFO reports from 1977 to 1990, attributing many of them to missile launches, but concluded that the evidence was inconclusive and that some were unexplained.

Finally comes the period of "alien abductions", which goes back to the 1950s but became an epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s with no fewer than two million Americans claiming to have been abducted. Cook attributes this to a "need to believe", with many of the characteristics of a religion.

In conclusion, UFO sightings can be grouped into various categories. As Hynek identified in the 1950s, the vast majority are a result of misperception of ordinary phenomena: clouds, astronomical objects or routine man-made ones such as aircraft, spacecraft and balloons (the recent craze for flying illuminated "Chinese lanterns" has caused another surge in UFO reports). For nearly all of those which cannot be accounted for in this way, the most likely explanation is that of military "black projects"; it is significant that the CIA encouraged the UFO hypothesis as a way of covering up such activities. The epidemic of alien abduction reports seems most likely to have been the result of a kind of mass hysteria, strongly emotional and quasi-religious.

This still leaves a very small percentage of reports which cannot be explained in any of these ways and remain genuine mysteries. However, it is worth bearing in mind that the U of UFO stands for "unidentified" - which simply means that at the moment we do not have enough information to identify the cause of the sightings. It is a pity that the "alien spacecraft hypothesis" enthusiasts have adopted UFOs since this makes scientists - and even serious journalists - reluctant to consider the issue for fear of losing professional credibility. All credit to Cook for analysing this intriguing subject objectively.

Films: Solaris (2002), Spiderman (2002) and Evolution (2001)

2010-08-29T01:58:00.002+01:00

I have only a dim recollection of reading Solaris by Stanislaw Lem decades ago and have never seen the 1972 Russian film, so watched the 2002 film without preconceptions.

Psychologist Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) answers a call for help from an old friend, Gibarian, currently based on a space station studying the planet Solaris. On arrival, Kelvin discovers that Gibarian has committed suicide and two surviving scientists are the only people on board. However, he catches a glimpse of a young boy who appears to be Gibarian's son and then meets a reincarnation of his own wife, Rheya (a compelling performance by Natascha McElhone) who had previously died on Earth. He realises that a powerful intelligence on the planet was examining the thoughts and dreams of the humans and bringing to life that which they most yearned for or felt guilty about. Eventually, he is left with a series of difficult choices.

The film focuses on the relationship between Kelvin and Rheya - or rather the version of Rheya created from his memories - and is a strong on atmosphere and psychology. Those who expect an SF film to be packed with action and special effects will be very disappointed with Solaris. Furthermore, I gather from the Wiki summary that Lem wasn't much impressed with either film (the 2002 version being quite similar in theme to the 1972 one), as his focus was not on the relationships between the couple but rather on the sheer alienness of the intelligence on the planet and the impossibility of achieving any meaningful communication with it. However, I was gripped by the film from start to finish and really enjoyed it. One of the better SF films I've seen.
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In complete contrast was the first of the current Spiderman series, featuring Tobey Maguire. While this has its darker moments, it lacks the grim, adult feel of the most recent Batman films. However, it makes for painless and undemanding entertainment - if you can swallow the preposterous proposition that someone infected by the bite of a genetically-modified spider can acquire superpowers. The transformation of a weakling nerd student into a powerful hero has huge adolescent wish-fulfilment appeal, while the moral message that "with great power comes great responsibility" is hammered home in word and deed. A worthy effort, with some spectacular swooping flights over the cityscape.
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Evolution is yet another contrast, being a cheerful comedy. It follows the fortunes of a disgraced scientist (played by David Duchovny) who discovers alien life on a meteorite; life which proceeds to evolve at a phenomenal rate, from single-celled to large animals in a matter of weeks. It becomes clear that the future of humanity is at risk, and it is down to the hero and his sidekicks to prevent catastrophe. It rather reminded me of the brilliant Tremors (1990) and, while not quite up to that, is nonetheless a good popcorn movie.
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The next post on this blog will be in a couple of weeks.

Hothouse by Brian Aldiss

2010-08-20T09:46:00.001+01:00

Brian Aldiss was one of the "New Wave" of British SF authors in the 1960s, signalling a break from traditional SF themes towards more experimental fiction. Aldiss himself alternated between mainstream and genre fiction and is regarded as a "literary" author, with a high critical reputation. Hothouse (initially published in the USA in abridged form as The Long Afternoon of Earth) is an early and more conventional work, fitting within the SFF mainstream. Despite being described as SF, this story is more of a fantasy in my view, as I will explain.

The setting is the very far future, close to the end of the Sun's life, when Earth has settled into an orbit which keeps one side turned permanently to the Sun, and the Moon has become a twin planet, also remaining in the same place relative to the Earth and now supporting life. The habitable part of the Earth is entirely covered by one vast, interconnected banyan tree, and inhabited by various (and usually ferocious) vegetables and insects. Humans - in a considerably shrunken form - are almost the only animals left, and exist in small groups at pre-stone age survival level in the middle layers of the forest, constantly threatened by predators.

I should warn you that the rest of this review contains spoilers, as it's difficult to comment on the story without them, so I will just sum this up as an interesting period piece, highly regarded when it first appeared, but not standing up too well today.

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The protagonist is Gren, a rebellious near-mature male child in a society run by women. He and the other children are abandoned by the adults of their group who head off into the sky in a strange ritual, eventually arriving (much changed) on the Moon.

Gren and the other children are almost immediately in one set of trouble after another, and Gren's disruptive behaviour eventually causes him to be exiled. He falls prey to a morel, an intelligent fungus which invades and takes over his nervous system and is able to ransack his race memories to learn the history of humanity. With the morel's somewhat unreliable guidance Gren is able to survive, meeting various people and weird life forms and experiencing one adventure after another. He meets Sodal Ye, an intelligent dolphin who is aware of the history of the world and of its imminent destruction as the Sun goes nova. Finally, the transformed adults of Gren's group return from the Moon, and Gren is faced with a choice of futures.

I said at the start that I regarded this story as a fantasy despite an attempt by the author to establish it as set in a possible future. This is because some of the aspects of it - especially the space-travelling traversers and the bizarre tummy-belly men - are just too fantastic to be credible, at least as far as I'm concerned. Which does, of course, open the door to the age-old debate about where the boundaries between the two genres lie, but I'll save that for another time.

I enjoyed this re-read rather less than I expected. Partly this is because the principal character is so unsympathetic - the kind of brash and self-centred youth I would dislike in real life - partly because the procession of one fantastic creature after another becomes a bit wearing. The story reads as if the author was packing in as many bizarre ideas as he could, just for the sake of it.

I was also not entirely comfortable with one aspect of the writing; the narrator, who kept throwing in additional pieces of information to explain the background. Some of it made no sense: for example, the entertainingly-named killerwillow, bellyelm and sand octopus, which only lived in Nomansland where no human ever went - so how did they acquire such names, if no-one knew they existed?

A few more general comments:

There are various possible ways of making the reader understand unusual settings. One (popular these days) is to explain nothing, leaving the reader to piece together what the story is all about from scraps of information scattered through it, and possibly even remain a bit puzzled at the end. A second is to build in occasional infodumps in the form of the notorious "As you know, Bob" type of conversations; however, this isn't possible in a story like Hothouse, in which none of the characters understands the background until the morel and Sodal Ye appear. Another might be for the characters to stumble upon some ancient document which explains it all (also not applicable to Hothouse, where no-one can read). Or there could be a prologue which gives a summary of the back-history, but that could spoil the surprise element. A further approach is explicitly to establish the narrator as being in the future, looking back and describing what happened; a variation on this is to supplement the narrator's role with extracts from a history written in some future time, inserted before the start of each chapter (a technique used effectively by Frank Herbert in Dune); but again, neither is applicable to Hothouse, where there is no prospect of any future historian.

As a general rule I prefer the narrator to be unobtrusive, simply describing what is happening and what the main viewpoint character is thinking. Aldiss' approach left me uncertain about who the narrator was meant to be; seemingly, some all-knowing commentator rather than an observer of current events. On balance, I would have preferred a brief prologue for this novel, probably only a paragraph, explaining about the changes in the orbital behaviour of the Earth and the Moon and their consequences for life, because these are explained by the narrator early on anyway. The rest of the explanations could have been handled by the morel and Sodal Ye.

Grass by Sheri S. Tepper

2010-08-14T04:12:00.001+01:00

Sheri Tepper is an author to give hope to all aspiring writers of mature years, because her first published novel didn't appear until she was in her mid-fifties. However, she hit the ground running and has since authored some thirty SFF novels under her own name plus more than a dozen thrillers under pseudonyms, not to mention shorter works. Nine of her novels have been nominated for awards, one of them (Beauty) winning the Locus Award in 1992. She has become associated with ecological and feminist themes, although this is only obvious in some of her work. She wins my award as the author of my favourite contemporary fantasy series, The Marianne Trilogy (reviewed on this blog on 4 July 2007), a unique and surreal vision of parallel fantastical worlds.

Grass is the first of her Arbai trilogy (somehow I've missed the other two and must get hold of them) and I first read it when it was published in the 1980s. I remember being very impressed at the time, but since I had forgotten the plot I was able to enjoy it all over again.

The story displays her ability to create strange but compelling worlds. It is set in a distant future in which humanity has spread across a large number of star systems, so far finding no signs of other intelligent life except the widespread ruins of the Arbai civilisation, created by an extinct race of humanoid reptiles. The controlling force across human civilisation is a religion, Sanctity, whose unique selling point is to collect genetic data from its followers ready for machines to restore them to a purer life after the expected death of humanity. At the start of the story this appears to be imminent as humanity is suffering a deadly and incurable plague, to which the inhabitants of only one of the settled planets seem to be immune; the world of Grass.

Grass is unique for several reasons. The first is what gave the planet its name; the land surface is almost entirely covered by grasses, in a vast range of different types varying greatly in colour and size depending on the soils and microclimate. The only exceptions are marshy areas, where giant trees grow. Another is that the controlling settlers, a group of aristocrats, have divided the land into vast estancias and forbidden any settlement other than their own mansions and the villages of their servants, with the principal exception of the Commons, a hundred-square-mile upland area cut off from the grasslands by marshy forest. In this crowded space is the interstellar port and all commercial and scientific activities, a culture quite separate from that of the aristocrats. Elsewhere there is also a small settlement of recalcitrant monks despatched to the planet as a punishment, who spend their time excavating the most complete Arbai city ever found.

The story is first seen through the eyes of the aristocrats, collectively called the "bons" because of their practice of indicating their aristocracy by adding this to their names, as in Rowena bon Damfels. They are obsessed with hunting and do little else during the hunting season, which takes place during the summer; winters are so harsh that they are spent in underground warrens. The hunting style is modelled after the ancient British sport of fox hunting, with the hunters on mounts and accompanied by hounds as they ride in pursuit of their prey, which are even known as "foxen". However, their mounts - Hippae - are not horses, their hounds are not dogs and the foxen are not remotely like foxes, and there is something very strange about the entire custom.

Into this world comes the Yrarier family, Rodrigo together with his long-suffering wife Marjorie and reluctant teenage children, covertly sent by Sanctity to discover why the inhabitants seem to be immune to the plague. They have great difficulty in being accepted by the suspicious and xenophobic bons, and find that they need to participate in the hunting to be taken seriously; but this hunting is, literally, like nothing on Earth. Another plot thread concerns some of the monks on Grass, who are making interesting discoveries about the Arbai and why they died out. The various threads are gradually woven together into the climatic conclusion, in which the true nature and history of the native Hippae, hounds and foxen are central.

The author is a great story-teller and has a marvellous ability to take the reader inside the worlds of her imagination. The culture of the bons, the rope-climbing sub-culture of the younger monks (which reminded me of Peake's Gormenghast), and the intense internal struggles within the Yrarier family, are all memorable.

Un Lun Dun by China Miéville

2010-08-06T07:29:00.001+01:00

China Miéville is a highly regarded new British SFF author but I'd never read any of his work, so I decided to pick up a copy of Un Lun Dun, which has received good reviews. I was initially somewhat disconcerted to read in the introduction that it was his first novel for "younger readers"; something I hadn't been aware of when I bought it. However, I am aware that this category includes some of the best fiction past and present, so after a few mental and physical warm-up exercises (the book has over 500 pages) I got stuck in.

The location is London, the time is the present, the focus on a pair of schoolgirl friends to whom unusual things seem to be happening. There are signs and portents that one of them - Zanna - is the subject of intense interest not just from strangers but from animals too. Together with her friend, the reluctant Deeba, she follows her instincts and the pair find themselves in a strange, distorted and magical version of the city: Un Lun Dun. It is filled with all of the rubbish which has been discarded by London, with houses built of old washing machines or gramophone records, and populated by an extraordinary mixture of fantastic individuals including ghosts and ferocious carnivorous giraffes. Red double-decker buses drift across the sky supported by balloons, while the London Eye (the UnLondon-I) is a giant water-wheel generating electricity.

This fantastical world is under threat - from the deadly Smog, which has grown so thick that it has developed a malign intelligence and aims to take over all of Un Lun Dun. Zanna turns out to be the Chosen One, long prophesied in a revered and rather talkative Book to be the agent of the Smog's destruction. She collects a disparate group of allies and begins to fulfil the prophecies.

So far, just a different take on a predictable plot. But the story doesn't stay predictable for long, with twist after twist throughout the novel, right to the end. To say any more would spoil the surprises, but suffice it to say that I read the book in only three sessions and finished with a smile on my face. It has likeable heroes and is packed full of original ideas; I particularly enjoyed the UnGun!

Stories like this make a stark contrast with most modern fantasy, which has become very derivative if not hackneyed. I will be reading more from this author.

More on immortality, and The Dark Knight film

2010-07-30T13:11:00.001+01:00

I posted on the subject of the potential problems with the enthusiasm for immortality some months ago, and have stored this as an article on my website HERE. I was reminded of this when reading reviews in the New Scientist (10 July) of a couple of US-published books on this subject: Long For This World: The strange science of immortality by Jonathan Weiner, and The Youth Pill: Scientists at the brink of an anti-aging revolution by David Stipp.

The reviewer of both books, S. Jay Olshansky, says of Weiner's book that it is "a brilliant exposé of the fascinating science that has emerged in the search for everlasting life, and the quacks, drunks and geniuses participating in one of the greatest shows on Earth". Weiner focuses on the more extreme wing of the anti-aging enthusiasts, the ones who wish to extend the lives of individual humans indefinitely. I had quite a lot to say about this in my article, and it is telling that Olshansky says of one of its most prominent proponents that "having no children himself, he sees no need for future immortals to have them either". As if…

Stipp's book concentrates on the less ambitious goal of producing a longevity pill which will extend the human lifespan by a limited but measurable amount. This is the realm of serious scientists conducting careful, evidence-based research. Success would still not be without problems, though, as I have mentioned; the impact on employment and retirement being among the obvious ones.

Other recent articles in the New Scientist (one in the same 10 July issue) have discussed progress with identifying genetic differences between those who live to be 100 and those who don't. Scientists at Boston University have identified 150 elements in the genome which are far more common in centenarians than in those who die earlier, but their work only looked at people of white European descent and needs corroborating anyway. Even if this results in a useful outcome, such genetic indicators would clearly be only part of the story, since lifespan is also affected by environmental factors such as accident, disease, poverty and the abuse of drugs, alcohol and food.

All considered, it seems likely that science will begin to come up with some answers to life extension in the foreseeable future. All the more reason for society to start debating the kind of issues which I raise in my article, rather than be taken by surprise by them.
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I recently saw The Dark Knight, the second of Christopher Nolan's reinventions of Batman, once more featuring Christian Bale as the millionaire crime-fighter. This time his enemy is The Joker; an unnervingly convincing depiction of insanity by the late Heath Ledger. The plotting is dense and it's necessary to concentrate to keep up with all of the developments - this is one film which merits a second watching.

I am more and more impressed by this director's output, he really is good. He has taken Batman from a simplistic comic-strip to a grim adult morality tale which is gripping from start to finish. These two Batman films highlight just how weak and pointless Superman Returns (reviewed a few weeks ago) is in comparison. I have read good reviews of Nolan's latest film, Inception, which has an SF plot which sounds fascinating. That's one I must see.

The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove

2010-07-23T09:23:00.002+01:00

Four weeks ago I reviewed A Rebel in Time by Harry Harrison, concerning an attempt by a racist American to travel back in time to give the plans for the Sten sub-machine gun to the Confederate side of the American Civil War in the hope of changing the outcome. The Guns of the South has the same basic idea but the way it is handled is entirely different.

The first half of Harrison's book is a mystery story set in the present day, with almost all of the rest in the 1850s before the war starts; only the final wrapping-up chapter is set late in the war. In contrast, Turtledove starts his story in 1864 when the war is going badly for the Confederates and the timeline continues from that point. There are other important differences, the most obvious being that Turtledove's time-travellers are an organised group of Afrikaner racial supremacists, and that they do not bother with 1860s production of modern guns and ammunition (with the attendant difficulties I pointed out in my review of Harrison's book) but simply transport large quantities of both back in time.

The action commences with the arrival in the weary Confederate camp of a mysterious soldier carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle, which he proceeds to demonstrate to the considerable astonishment of the soldiers. He promises delivery of a hundred thousand such weapons and ammunition to match, and begins to supply them. The effect on the next few battles is predictably dramatic, and the Confederates storm Washington and capture Abraham Lincoln, winning the war. This happens well before the half-way point of the novel; the rest of the story is concerned with the aftermath, particularly the political debates over the nature of the Confederacy and the influence of the Afrikaners.

Throughout the story, the viewpoint alternates between two principal characters; a sergeant in the Confederate Army, Nate Caudell, and the Confederate General Robert E Lee. This works well, as it enables the author to portray the grand strategy and political infighting plus the effects of this on the lives of ordinary people. However, the Afrikaners are little more than caricatures and we are told nothing about the circumstances which led to their intervention, other than that they stole a time machine in 2014.

The depth of the research into the Civil War period is impressive, with a lot of detail not just about the war but about the way people lived. The institution of slavery and its effects are thoroughly portrayed. I understand that many Civil War enthusiasts love this book, and I can see why. However, I sometimes had the impression that the author was more concerned with displaying his knowledge than with getting on with the story. There are frequent long conversations which do nothing to advance the plot, but just round out the characters and fill in more and more details about life in that period. With the exception of the battle scenes this is a slow read, although it does speed up towards the end.

Turtledove is much more of a military history and technology buff than Harrison and it shows. He goes into great detail about the handling and maintenance of the AK rifle and also discusses in depth the problem of manufacturing ammunition for it in the 1860s, specifically the formation of the cartridge cases and the chemistry of the propellant. I do have one small quibble in that he refers to the "proper name" of the time-travelling gun being the AK-47. It should actually be AK or AKM, depending on the model, but for some reason the West commonly refers to both by the designation which the Russians only used for the prototypes.

I have previously read only one Turtledove work, the Worldwar tetrology, about WW2 being interrupted by invading aliens. I thought this was OK but not good enough for me to keep the books for a re-read, probably because the story became bogged down in detail and was too repetitive; it dragged on for far too long. I can see some of the same characteristics in The Guns of the South, although to a lesser extent.

The contrast with Harrison's A Rebel in Time could hardly be more striking considering how similar are the basic premises. Harrison's story is a fast-moving adventure mystery, focused primarily on one present-day individual, with only a brief account of the beginning of the war and virtually nothing about the rest. It's a much faster read, in both senses (it's only about half the length), and much more likely to appeal to the average, non-specialist reader.

To sum up, The Guns of the South is an interestingly different book, very thoroughly researched and worth reading, but probably not worth re-reading unless you're a student of the period.

Interzone 229, and Colleen Morse

2010-07-16T09:48:00.001+01:00

Featured author in the July-August issue of this British SFF magazine is Jeff VanderMeer, with both an interview and a review of his book Finch. I've only read one of his books - Veniss Underground, reviewed on this blog in December 2007 - and was quite impressed by it, but I did skip over the more gruesome bits. I probably won't read Finch, since it seems to be a similar blend of horror set in a dystopian future and therefore not really to my taste, but VanderMeer's story-telling skills are such that I suspect I would enjoy it if I read it. However, I have too many books to read already, and not enough time.

The usual book, film, TV and DVD reviews included the final series of BBC TV's Ashes to Ashes. I was pleased to see that the reviewer liked it too. There are five short stories this time:

Mannikin by Paul Evanby, illustrated by Ben Baldwin. During an alternative American War of Independence, a scientist on the Dutch West Indian island of Saint Eustatius works to replace slaves by developing artificial humanoids. A bizarre plot and a story strong on atmosphere.

Candy Moments by Antony Mann, illustrated by Richard Wagner. Some time in the future, a mysterious organisation begins offering a unique service to unhappy people; a process which removes the pain of such memories. The after-care treatment consists of a particularly enticing brand of chocolate. One man is tempted to participate because of the guilt and grief he feels over his wife's death, but is there more to this than meets the eye?

The Melancholy by Toby Litt, illustrated by Paul Drummond. Even an intelligent computer programme, switched from machine to machine as different tasks require, feels a need for a home.

Alternate Girl's Expatriate Life by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, illustrated by David Senecal. An artificially constructed girl from a land of robots tries to settle in a human area. A surreal take on identity and belonging.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark Matter by Jim Hawkins, illustrated by Richard Wagner. A more conventional SF tale of an orchestra of expert killers which tours rebellious worlds, wooing them with music; but if that doesn't work….

Being something of a traditionalist I enjoyed Hawkins' story the most, although Mannikin was also memorable.
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Sad news this week, of the death of Colleen Morse at the age of 60. Often using the name Ms TigerHawk, she was the founder of both the Classic Science Fiction and Modern Science Fiction Yahoo discussion groups, plus several others. Despite her poor health in recent years, she seemed to have boundless energy, reading a phenomenal number of books, writing a couple of novels of which one has been published to date (using the name April Knight) and also taking part in a variety of social and political activities. She will be missed.

Proxies of Fate by Matthew Moses

2010-07-09T09:01:00.001+01:00

A warlord of a predatory race, the reptilian Krush, leads his fleet towards his next juicy, undefended target: the Earth of the 1930s. In his way stands a representative of an ancient race of legendary powers, the Theria. To resolve the stalemate, they agree that they should each select one member of the human race to act as a proxy to decide the fate of the planet in single combat. The two proxies would each receive the essence of their alien sponsors, giving them different ranges of special abilities.

The proxies are selected and transformed on opposite sides of the world. The Krush select Li Chen, a Chinese teenager in a Manchuria under the iron grip of Japanese occupation. The Therian chooses Chris Donner, a penniless farmer in the dustbowl of the central USA during the Great Depression. Both develop their strange abilities; Li Chen becomes a huge being with almost invulnerable skin, great speed and appalling strength, who can defeat entire armies single-handedly. Donner becomes a slight, ghostly figure with a range of paranormal powers, including healing, telekinesis and levitation. Both focus on their tragic local circumstances, trying to help their fellow men, with mixed results. Only at the end of the book do they discover each other's existence and come together in a climactic battle.

This novel is a rather puzzling mixture of comic-strip plot and action with what is clearly a great deal of background research into the two different environments. I don't claim to be knowledgeable about either historical setting, but what I do have some knowledge of (the weapons of the Japanese army) appears accurate and the settings are carefully drawn, detailed and convincing. This is the major strength of the book. The time taken over the stories of the two proxies also helps to develop their characters and enlist the sympathy of the reader for both of them. These two plus points were enough to keep me reading to the end, despite some flaws in the writing.

The first problem to become obvious is the florid and overwritten style of many descriptive passages, sometimes using words which had me reaching for a dictionary. For example (page 166):

"Crimson dawn colored the heavens over Hsinking. Across the horizon, purple clouds obscured the stirring sun while the stars of twilight sank into the empyrean sea. The cool breath of Pangu blew from the scarlet east, setting myriad wind chimes ringing throughout the capital, signalling approaching morn."

And (page 319 - describing a bombing raid);

"Like fatalistic einherjar returned from Valhalla on that final drive to Vigrior, umbral craft sailed through the ether, laden with weapons callously loosed upon the district."

The other issue I have with the writing is the author's weak grasp of sentence construction. A couple of examples, the first from page 318:

"Unable to contain the beast, permission was granted to firebomb the ward."

This makes no sense. Who was unable to contain the beast? Who asked for permission? What the author meant was "Unable to contain the beast, the Army commander obtained permission to firebomb the ward." Yet this key individual was never mentioned. Another example, on page 343:

"Corrupted by the laelap, twisted into the beast, Donner witnessed Li Chen take up the mantle of champion…"

This reads as if Donner had been corrupted and twisted, but the author actually meant Li Chen. This kind of error frequently occurs.

My final gripe is a lack of consistency in the characteristics of the two proxies, especially Donner. In their final battle he engages in fisticuffs with Li Chen, which seems absurd in the context of their respective abilities.

The author's writing shows some promise, but he would benefit from a much stricter editor.

The Dragon Masters by Jack Vance

2010-07-03T10:27:00.002+01:00

Jack Vance was one of the giants of my early SFF reading and is still around today. His last novel (to date) was published in 2004, some 54 years after the first. In between came some forty SFF novels, plus novellas and some mystery stories. He won several major awards, one of them - the Hugo in 1963 - for The Dragon Masters. This was one of my recommendations for the Classic Science Fiction discussion group, as I felt that such an influential author needed an airing and I was looking forward to re-reading his work after a long absence.

The most obvious feature of the book is its length: at just over 120 pages it is barely a novella in modern terms. Even by the standards of the 1960s this is a bit short (something nearer 200 pages being more typical then) , but that doesn't mean it is lacking in ideas. In fact, novels from this period tended to be all about ideas, with characterisation and detailed world-building receiving sketchy treatment. That doesn't make them worse than modern doorstops, just different, with the added benefit that they can be polished off in a session or two so even if they're not much good, you haven't wasted a lot of time on them. In contrast, I need to wind myself up to grappling with a huge modern tome, and have to feel mentally fit and fresh before I start. Also, I frequently don't finish them; if they're going to monopolise so much of my time, they'd better be good. I wrote about book length in more detail in this web article.

No problems of this sort with The Dragon Masters. The reader is plunged straight into the action, in the form of a strange intruder breaking in to the private apartment of Joaz Banbeck, hereditary leader of the small community of Banbeck Vale on the sparsely populated planet of Aerlith. The intruder is a sacerdote, one of a secretive group of contemplative humans who live a separate existence in deep caverns in the mountains which border the Vale. Joaz investigates the sacerdotes to find out what is going on, and learns that they have developed a mysterious but powerful weapon. He is interested in this because not only is he facing a challenge from his territorially expansive neighbours in Happy Valley, he is worried that the gradual brightening of star Coralyne may indicate the possible return of the grephs (the "dragons" of the title); a lizard-like race with technology - including spaceships - far more advanced than the humans, and whose previous destructive visits have been to capture humans for slaves and breeding stock.

Vance then jumps back to the past with a chapter set in the time of the last greph attack. The grephs subjected their human stock to selective breeding, producing a variety of specialised types differing considerably in size and characteristics (much as we do with dogs). The humans of Aerlith were able to capture some of the grephs and over the intervening years also bred them - for internecine warfare, producing breeds with names such as Termagants, Fiends, Murderers, Juggers and Blue Horrors.

The plot follows the fortunes of Joaz as he juggles the problems of invasion from his neighbour, greph attack, and the enigmatic sacerdotes.

How does this award-winner stand up today? Not too well in terms of literary quality, but the fresh and imaginative plot, the selective breeding of humans and dragons, and the strange culture which results on Aerlith, all have their appeal. Definitely worth the couple of hours needed to read.

A Rebel in Time by Harry Harrison

2010-06-25T02:19:00.001+01:00

In the late 1960s when, as a somewhat lazy student, I read more fiction (nearly all SF) than ever before or since, Harry Harrison was one of my favourite authors. He wrote short, fast-paced and often hilarious page-turners, and I still have a few of his classic novels on my shelf: Bill the Galactic Hero (a spoof of Heinlein's Starship Troopers) and the Deathworld trilogy. Probably his best-known comic character was Slippery Jim DiGriz of The Stainless Steel Rat series, but he also wrote more serious fiction, most famously Make Room! Make Room! about overpopulation. Although he was still publishing novels in the 1990s (and has a new Stainless Steel Rat one due out this year) I last read his work in the early 1970s, with A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (also published as A Tunnel Through the Deeps), a very tongue-in-cheek take on an alternative Victorian world which would nowadays automatically be classified as "steampunk". I'm not quite sure why I bought A Rebel in Time (published 1983) but it's been sitting on my shelf for a while and I felt like some light reading (Iain M. Banks tends to do that to me) so I picked it up. It was not quite what I expected.

A Rebel in Time deals with two familiar SF themes; time travel and alternate histories. A present-day soldier, Troy Harmon, is recruited into an obscure government organisation whose job is to "watch the watchers"; to keep an eye on people with high security clearance. He starts to look into the puzzle of Colonel McCulloch, head of security at a top-secret research establishment, who has been behaving strangely - in particular, he's been converting most of his assets into gold. Almost half of the novel is concerned with Harmon's investigation, always one step behind McCulloch, while he tries to understand what's happening - until McCulloch suddenly disappears, leaving a trail of crimes behind him. Harmon gradually pieces together what has happened, and realises that McCulloch has used the time-travel experiments of the research establishment to send himself into the past, just before the American Civil War, together with a fortune in gold and with plans for making the very simple Sten sub-machine gun. Harmon realises that McCulloch, a pathological racist, is going to try to help the Confederacy win the war. He decides that he must follow him on a one-way trip into the past to try to prevent this from happening, since he has a powerful motive: Harmon is black.

This is a serious novel a lot longer and more deliberately-paced than his typical 1960s work (although at just over 300 pages, still not long by current standards), but the Harrison story-telling skills are as strong as ever and it is a gripping page-turner. Harmon's experiences in the slave culture of the southern USA in the late 1850s ring true, and the ending, while certainly not of the "happily ever after, all tied up" type is exactly right.

I did have one technical issue over the Sten gun. I have no doubt that the gun itself - possibly the simplest and crudest 20th century firearm to have seen general service - could have been manufactured in the 1850s, but I have serious doubts about the ammunition. Possibly the drawn brass cases might have been, although I'm not sure (coiled brass sheets were used when cartridges were first developed) but the propellant is another matter. The Sten's 9x19 Parabellum ammunition was designed for smokeless powder, much cleaner burning and more efficient (requiring less volume) than the gunpowder in use in the 1850s; the advances in chemistry which made this possible didn't happen until the 1880s. Loaded with gunpowder, the ammunition would have been much less powerful, and even if it could be made to work it is likely that the gun would have become quickly fouled by gunpowder residues, causing it to jam.

Despite this nerdish niggle A Rebel in Time is a very impressive and enjoyable story.

If this plot sounds vaguely familiar you might be thinking of Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, which also features people from the present day taking modern automatic guns back to the American Civil War to help the Confederacy win. This was published nine years after A Rebel in Time and has also been sitting unread on my shelf for a very long time, so I'll tackle that soon to compare and contrast.

Film: 2012

2010-06-19T02:48:00.002+01:00

I suppose it had to happen. There's been a huge amount of nonsense posted on the internet, by those whose grasp of reality is somewhat tenuous, concerning the claim that the Mayans predicted the end of the world on 21 December 2012. As it happens the Mayans did no such thing, although the degree of nonsense involved would be no less if they had; I discussed this on this blog on 6 March 2009. Anyway, someone in Hollywood got to hear of this and spotted a money-making opportunity, so we now have a dramatic film about it. Naturally, I just had to watch it…

I'll pass quickly over the the gibberish which the film-makers used to provide a pseudo-scientific explanation for the mechanism which would bring about global disaster. I'll give them one credit for the fact that the Mayan believer in the film was portrayed as a raving nutcase, but since it all came to pass as the Mayans "predicted" that isn't worth much.

Let's move on to the film - how did it work as a drama? The start was not at all promising, with the same tired old Hollywood cliches trotted out; the hero coping with a broken marriage, his wife's new partner, and sharing custody of their young kids (who are frequently in danger, of course, but survive, of course). This reminded me of the recent War of the Worlds film which focused on such family relationship issues to such an extent that I gave up watching out of sheer boredom. 2012 isn't quite that bad, so I stuck with it and we soon get into the strength (actually, the only point) of the film, which is the CGI vision of the end of the world. And I have to admit it's pretty dramatic, with huge earthquakes and tsunamis, canyons suddenly opening up and cities disappearing into them, followed by floods across the world.

The problem is that the film-makers seemed to be so bewitched by all this that they didn't bother overmuch with a plot, providing instead one relentless chase scene as the hero and his family struggle to get to China where several arks (vast armoured ships, each housing tens of thousands) designed to ride out the disaster are waiting (they get there, of course). The last part of the film is an anti-climax, with the hero struggling to solve a technical problem with their ark (work which he delays, despite its urgency, in order to have a passionate heart-to-heart with his ex), which seems very minor-league stuff after the colossal disasters we've witnessed.

It doesn't help that the hero (played by John Cusack) and his family are not particularly engaging or likeable. There's a much more interesting and appealing combination of Chiwetel Ejiofor as a scientific adviser and Thandie Newton as the US President's daughter, but they have only secondary roles. Ejiofor gets to make the big moral speech about how they should open up their ark to let in thousands of people left stranded, an action which very nearly results in the destruction of the ark. All very noble, but no-one mentions the surely important issue of how much food they have on board to last whatever time it will take before the land stabilises again and they can start growing crops; did they all have to go on a starvation diet to cope with the extra numbers?

As an aside, this moral dilemma reminded me of one of those table-top disaster management exercises which took place in the UK some years ago. The scenario was that an outbreak of a highly infections and highly lethal disease had occurred in a hospital, and the task was to decide what to do to stop it spreading. The winners (in terms of minimising casualties) were the team who opted for stationing snipers all round the building and shooting dead anyone who tried to leave. This was regarded as abhorrent by the more moralistic participants, but their "humane" approaches resulted in predicted death-tolls in the tens of thousands. Me, I'm with the snipers…

A couple of unnecessary details jarred with me. One was a news flash that the 2012 London Olympics had had to be abandoned because of the rapid onset of world-wide geological disaster. Anyone with the vaguest interest would know that they are to take place in the summer, not December. The other was the sight of an elderly lady with some corgis entering one of the arks - obviously intended to suggest the Queen. This is the duty-driven daughter of the King who, in the darkest days of World War 2 when London was being bombed daily and a German invasion believed to be imminent, refused to leave Buckingham Palace and was observed in the grounds practising with his revolver, preparing to make a last stand against the invaders. I can imagine the Queen ordering Prince William to flee the country and take refuge in order to continue the line, but herself? Never.

So is 2012 worth watching? If you like disaster movies with spectacular CGI, then yes it is. But you'd better set aside whatever critical faculties you possess if you hope to enjoy it as a drama: I suspect that the internal application of a moderate quantity of alcohol might help!

Interzone 228

2010-06-11T11:30:00.001+01:00

There's an interview with Gene Wolfe along with a review of The Sorcerer's House among other books, plus the usual round-up of films, DVDs and TV programmes - or to be precise, a TV programme, the focus being on the remake of The Prisoner. I'm still not sure what to make of it myself, but it was an interesting experience. I'm inclined to sympathise with the reviewer, who found it a bit of a mess, but it was an intriguing mess so I'd probably watch a second series.

Just five stories this time:

Untied States of America by Mario Milosevic, illustrated by David Senecal. The United States have become physically separated from each other and now drift individually around the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, occasionally spotting each other in passing. A watcher on the coast of Washington keeps a daily look-out, and is surprised to see a small boat approaching the shore, rowed by a man escaping from another state.

Iron Monk by Melissa Yuan-Innes, illustrated by Jim Burns. The near future: an assorted group of strangers is despatched on a mission to meet aliens who have arrived in the outer Solar System. Damage to their ship's radiation shield threatens their survival.

A Passion for Art by David D. Levine, illustrated by Mark Pexton. Artworks in a museum are being damaged, with figures in them disappearing. A security consultant sets out to trap the vandal, but finds a lot more than he bargained for.

Plague Birds by Jason Sandford, illustrated by Darren Winter. A remote-future population is scattered thinly over a rural landscape, living in self-contained villages. Their main threat is the arrival of a Plague Bird; a woman with strange and lethal powers to punish any wrong-doers who have not been properly dealt with by their communities.

Over Water by John Ingold, illustrated by Richard Wagner. The inhabitants of an island in a scattered archipelago are pestered by occasional raids from their savage neighbours, until they decide to resist.

An interesting and varied batch of stories with some original ideas. Two of them (Plague Birds and Over Water) have deceptive fantasy elements but turn out to be more like science fiction. Plague Birds is perhaps the story with the most potential for development, and indeed the author plans more tales about the principal character. However, my prize for the most bizarre and memorable concept goes to Untied States of America.

********************************

To return to the subject of TV programmes, I was a bit disappointed that there was no coverage of the final series of Ashes to Ashes, which ended a few weeks ago. It turned out that everyone was dead, and had been existing in a kind of waiting area while their characters developed sufficiently to pass on to the afterlife, joyously represented by a really good, convivial pub (well, can you think of anything better?). I found the final episode rather touching, even elegaic, and it (more or less) wrapped up the disparate threads more effectively than anything else I could imagine.

The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks

2010-06-05T01:13:00.002+01:00

Iain M. Banks has established himself as one of the most highly regarded SF authors of the current generation. Unusually, he switches between genre and mainstream fiction (the latter under the name Iain Banks - without the M) and is equally successful at both. His SF books focus on a far distant future when mankind has spread across the galaxy. Most of them are set in the "Culture", a time of enormous wealth for all, managed by immensely powerful artificial intelligences.

The Algebraist is not a part of the Culture series, but it is still set in a galaxy-spanning future. Humanity and various alien races co-exist, using huge artificial wormholes to connect star systems. There has been a long history of inter-human conflict in which AIs have been banned. The action is set in one distant system which has been cut off from the rest of civilisation by the destruction of its wormhole in such a conflict, and can only be reconnected after a sub-light-speed fleet has spent centuries travelling from the nearest high-technology system. To add to their problems, the system is vulnerable to attack by dissident human cultures who are planning an invasion. A Jovian-type gas giant within the system is a home to the Dwellers, a galaxy-wide race which have been around for some ten billion years and who can individually live for up to two billion. They have no great interest in other races but permit occasional visits by human scholars.

One of these scholars is Fassin Taak, the hero of the novel. He is summarily recruited into the military/religious order which rules the system and sent to the gas giant to investigate an ancient rumour that the Dwellers know of other wormholes which could end their isolation. The action focuses mainly on Taak's adventures among the Dwellers, switching occasionally to other characters in the system, in the rescue fleet and in a dissident invasion fleet which are both racing towards the system.

Like all of Banks' books, The Algebraist is not really a page-turner. The pace is slow and deliberate and at over 500 pages of a rather small font, the book requires some dedication to read. I must confess that it took me quite a while to get into, but I stuck with it and eventually became so engrossed that I read the last third in one sitting.

The main point of interest in the story is the Dweller race, which lives in the atmosphere of gas giants. They are famously disorganised, appear to have no government, and normally use a relatively low level of technology. Banks makes them intriguing but perhaps too human-like in their attitudes and conversation; despite their vast age, strange habitat and decidedly non-human physical form I didn't find them as alien as I would have expected.

I found this book to be well worth reading, but while I admire Banks' works (with the exception of Feersum Endjinn, which I abandoned in irritation at the extensive use of an invented dialect) they never quite hit the bullseye with me. I'll still keep reading them, though.

Film: Superman Returns

2010-05-29T08:47:00.001+01:00

Superman Returns was one of my Christmas collection of recorded movies. It was, I suppose, a competent enough production but it left me pondering the whole question of realism and credibility in such present-day fantasies.

With any fantasy, the reader has to be capable of suspending disbelief in order to enjoy the story since at least one key aspect of it (e.g. a superhuman ability) is usually scientifically impossible. However, for it to be acceptable (to me, at any rate) it is important that the plot woven around this aspect should be internally consistent and reasonably logical.

To give some examples from my recent reviews: Batman Begins, while highly improbable, is not actually impossible. There are no magical powers, just a well-trained man using moderately advanced technology. With such limitations, tackling crime in his home city seems a reasonable target. There is a different approach in Gould's Jumper (the book not the film) in that the hero's ability to teleport is indeed impossible (as least as far as present-day science can conceive) but apart from that, what happens as a result is intensely realistic and credible. The X-Men films push the boundaries a bit further, since there are various different super abilities distributed among the characters. However, the plots built on this make acceptable sense.

So where does Superman fit into this? Not just one super ability, but a whole batch of them in one man; in fact, there's not a lot he can't do. He is so all-powerful that he would achieve an easy victory every time, so the debilitating effect of Kryptonite had to be added to provide any trace of dramatic tension. However, if you are able to take a really big swallow and suspend your disbelief about this, you then get to what Superman does with these abilities. Think about it for a moment; what would you do?

Well, recent earthquakes provide some obvious opportunities; rescuing people trapped in fallen buildings, rushing them to hospital, carrying in vast quantities of supplies and other necessities. Part of the world suffering a drought? Dump an iceberg into the nearest lake-bed. Famine in a war zone? Get the food through regardless of attempts to stop this. Worried about nuclear war or terrorism? Scrap North Korea's nuclear facility and haul Osama bin Laden out of whatever hole he's in. Then you come to the fun bits: want to encourage space exploration? Lots could be done; for example: deposit research satellites around the Solar System; launch probes at extremely high velocities towards all the most likely nearby stars; lift complete, self-contained, permanent habitats onto the Moon and Mars (although I'd insist that humanity develops and maintains the ability to transfer people and supplies between planets, otherwise they'd just rely on me and the whole endeavour would collapse when I wasn't there any more).

These kinds of plot elements could provide some interesting material. For instance, Superman was supposed to have been sent to Earth to benefit mankind, not just the USA, which (incredible as it may seem in the comic-strip world) may not always be in the right. If you're removing nuclear weapons, where do you stop, and why? Who would be in charge of your Mars (or wherever) base? How could you get the nations to work together? Lots of moral and political issues to tackle here.

So what does Superman do: any of this? Err no, actually, he just fights a criminal nutcase while rescuing people from small-scale disasters and dealing with routine crime. In other words, the film is entirely unbelievable in all respects from start to finish. This is fantasy for kiddies who, one would hope, would grow out of stuff like this before they're ten. It makes Batman Begins and the X-Men films look like epics of Shakespearean quality and grandeur. The film-makers try to distract attention from this by focusing on the romantic relationship between Superman and his former girlfriend, but to try to make a decent film about Superman is, to borrow a memorable phrase, like putting lipstick on a pig; it simply isn't worth the bother.

The Ruby Dice, by Catherine Asaro

2010-05-22T16:57:00.001+01:00

I previously reviewed Catherine Asaro's Skolian Empire space-opera series in July 2007 (see the review list in the panel on the left) so I won't repeat the background to the stories here. Suffice to say that The Ruby Dice is the twelfth novel in the series, with a thirteenth (Diamond Star) already published and due out in paperback shortly.

The Ruby Dice focuses on two individuals: Kelric, the Rhon psion Skolian Imperator, and Jaibriol III, the Eubian Emperor. As leaders of the two great and fundamentally opposed interstellar empires, they personify the constant struggle between the slave-owning Eubians and the Skolians. All is not as it seems, however; unknown to the Eubians, Jaibriol is the son not just of the previous Emperor but also of the former Skolian Imperator, and he is a powerful psion - a fact which would lead to his instant deposition and death or slavery if it became known. Kelric also has a major secret; that in a previous period of his life (recounted in The Last Hawk, the seventh book of the series) he had been held as a prisoner on the restricted planet Coba, where he had not only learned to play the culture-dominating dice game of Quis to its highest level, he had also fathered two children.

The plot of The Ruby Dice starts a decade after both Kelric and Jaibriol had inherited their respective titles. Both men are separately determined to try to agree a peace treaty despite powerful internal opposition, and the viewpoint alternates between them as they scheme and take major risks to achieve this. The story makes a rather slow start, as it contains numerous infodumps to apprise new or forgetful readers of the background to the series and the events so far. Personally, I would much rather have this contained within a prologue which could be skipped if not needed, allowing the story to plunge straight into the plot. As it happens there is a prologue, but this has a different function, recounting some events a year before the plot starts. Once underway, however, Asaro's story-telling skills drew me in as usual.

For me, the scenes set in the Eubian court are far more fascinating than the Skolian episodes. Jaibriol is under intense pressure, not just from the normal deadly intrigues but also in trying to maintain the mental defences which prevent the Eubians from realising that he is one of the despised Rhon psions. A marvellous major character is his wife Tarquine, vastly older than himself and a ruthless and brilliant manipulator of the court on his behalf. The author has a lot of fun with the oblique and coded use of court language, direct speech being considered acceptable only among lovers - or to slaves. For instance, the comment "Paris is a decadent city, I have no desire to tour France again" actually means "the incomplete Treaty of Paris with the Skolians was a bad idea and not worth pursuing". Similarly, "Corbal values the dawn. He would never let its radiance dim" means "Corbal will stand by his slave mistress (named Sunrise) and would never abandon her".

I mentioned in my previous review that the later novels were beginning to show signs of the fatigue which almost always afflicts such a long series of novels set in the same universe. Certainly the pace has slowed somewhat as the author selects different facets of her creation to examine in more detail. However, the variety which her approach permits is ably used to maintain interest and prevent the setting becoming stale. The Skolian Empire series is a major achievement, and each new book remains on my "must buy" list.

TV series: FlashForward, Ashes to Ashes, and The Prisoner

2010-05-14T03:23:00.001+01:00

Three series currently showing on UK TV have varied SFF elements, and make for some interesting contrasts.

FlashForward is a US series, based on a 1999 novel of the same name by Canadian author Robert J Sawyer. It is set on a present-day Earth in which (almost) everyone blacked out for two minutes and seventeen seconds, during which they appeared to see visions of what would happen to them six months into the future. I haven't read the book and was unable to watch the first series (the channel it was shown on not then being available in my area) but came in on the two-part "special" and the start of series two. Sadly I didn't get much further since, although I was aware of the basic premise, the second series is packed so full of references to events and people in the first series that I found watching it an exercise in frustration. I gather from other commentators, however, that the series suffers from being far too drawn out (with 22 hour-long episodes in the first series alone) which means that the concept becomes seriously diluted.

This raises an interesting question concerning the optimum length of such series and whether or not it is important to try to keep the pacing and structure of the novel. Generally speaking, feature films don't have enough time to do justice to most novels, since they try to pack a story which typically takes over five hours to read (assuming 350+ pages) into a couple of hours. Long series like FlashForward go to the opposite extreme, stretching the plot to several times its original length. One consequence is that the focus may shift from the science-fictional premise to the activities and interrelationships of the characters. This might be acceptable if the characters are strong and their relationships develop in an interesting way, but that doesn't seem to be the case with FlashForward, judging both by my own brief exposure to it and the comments of others.

Ashes to Ashes is now in its third and last series. I reviewed the first two on this blog on 25 June 2009, so I won't go into the background again. This time the mood is darker, with the threatening figure of Jim Keats, a police officer tasked with reviewing Gene Hunt's (Philip Glenister) department, on a mission to discredit Hunt. Alex Drake (Keeley Hawes), thrown back from the present to 1983, becomes obsessed with the death of Sam Tyler, the former throwback in Life on Mars, and discovers evidence that Hunt was involved. However, the focus for much of the series has been on 1983 policing, with little evidence of the desperation to return to her young daughter Drake showed in the first two series; the only mysterious element being her repeated visions of a wounded policeman. Flashes of brilliant comedy are still there, however, one being the incorporation of a real-life incident, the vandalism of the garden developed for the children's TV show Blue Peter. This is "revealed" as being the consequence of a messy arrest by Gene Hunt and his team, who afterwards are shown glumly watching the actual 1983 TV programme which described the vandalism by persons unknown! Viewers are promised that the series will end by explaining what has been happening and wrapping up all the loose ends. It will be fascinating to see how they do this, but also a sad day - however, all good things must come to an end.

The Prisoner was a late-1960s British TV series concerning a former secret agent (played by Patrick McGoohan, who also devised the story and wrote several episodes) who wakes up in a mysterious village (the actual picture-postcard folly village of Portmerion in North Wales) from which he is prevented from leaving while those in charge try to find out why he resigned. The residents all have numbers rather than names and live a surreal existence which, along with the bizarre attempts to break the hero's resistance, provide a substantial fantasy element to what is ostensibly a spy thriller. (In this respect it is not dissimilar to another famous but lighter and more comedic series from the same period, The Avengers, in its definitive third series starring Diana Rigg). I saw the The Prisoner when it first appeared and saw it all again when it was broadcast a few years ago; it deservedly has cult status now.

A new version of The Prisoner is now showing. This is a joint US/UK production featuring an American hero (played by John Caviezel) and is set in a model village among the deserts of southern Africa. So far it looks promising, with a similar basic premise but enough differences to make it interesting, and lots of confusing blurring between the hero's past and present lives. One to keep watching, for now at least.

2009 BSFA Short Fiction award

2010-05-07T08:56:00.002+01:00

The British Science Fiction Association presents annual awards to the best in four categories (Novel, Short Fiction, Artwork and Non-Fiction) as determined by the votes of the members. The six stories in the Short Fiction category were included in a booklet sent out to members. By the time I worked my way to it through my ever-growing pile of reading material I was (as usual) too late to vote, but this is my take on them anyway. Two of them had previously been published in Interzone magazine so have already been mentioned in this blog, but I'll paste my comments in here to save you searching for them:

Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast by Eugie Foster (first published in Interzone 220): 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.

Johnny and Emmy-Lou Get Married by Kim Lakin-Smith (first published in Interzone 222): 1950s-style romance across the boundaries of futuristic US gangs, the Rocketeers and the Flies.

The Push by Dave Hutchinson (first published in The Push, Newcon Press): a long short story about planetary colonisation. One of the original founders of a colony on a distant planet returns several centuries later (although only a few years for him as the result of the temporal effects of the FTL space travel technology) to discover that a previously non-sentient native race had suddenly acquired intelligence - and that meant trouble.

Vishnu at the Cat Circus (extract) by Ian McDonald (first published in Cyberabad Days, Gollancz): set in a future fragmented India, the ancient genetically-enhanced owner of a circus of performing cats tells the story of his early life.

The Beloved Time of their Lives by Ian Watson & Roberto Quaglia (first published in The Beloved Of My Beloved, Newcon Press): Two lovers keep meeting, the man growing steadily older as he works his way back though time to keep meeting his ever-younger lover.

The Assistant by Ian Whates (first published in The Solaris Book of Science Fiction, Volume 3): the cleaning squad enters the office building for their night job, but it involves a lot more than just physical cleaning; there are cyber attacks and infiltration by mini robots to deal with too.

I couldn't really evaluate Ian MacDonald's extract as it is abruptly cut short before it gets anywhere, and makes no sense by itself with a complete disconnect between the protagonist's early and late lives. For inventive and original fantasy I would choose Eugie Foster's story, but being a sucker for traditional SF my personal favourite was Dave Hutchinson's tale; it could have been written at any time in the past few decades but is none the worse for that.

PS Having written the above, I checked the BSFA site and found that the Watson/Quaglia story had won the award. I found that one a bit irritating because of the way in which the meetings were curtailed because the couple kept making the same mistake.

Films: The Time Machine, and Timeline

2010-04-30T09:17:00.000+01:00

Two films with a central theme in common - time travel.

I re-read H G Wells' novel The Time Machine only last year (see review list on the left) and vaguely recall watching the 1960 film version, so when the 2002 film appeared on TV I naturally had to watch it. My first reaction was one of puzzlement; not only was the setting changed from London to New York (par for the course for Hollywood, which seems to find it hard to imagine that anything of interest could ever happen outside the USA) but the first quarter of an hour or so is entirely new, concerning a doomed love affair. It transpires that this is what drives the central character (a physics professor) to develop a time machine, and after some more diversions the story duly arrives 800,000 years in the future, into the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks. Sadly, the devolution of humanity is glossed over, the Eloi shown as normally intelligent rather than stupid, with the cause of humanity's lost civilisation being put down to a man-made physical disaster (the break-up of the Moon) rather than natural evolutionary forces. Also the evocative final section of the book, in which the time traveller visits a dying Earth from which humanity has disappeared, is omitted, to be replaced by a tacked-on and totally nonsensical destroy-the-bad-guys-and-live-happily-ever-after ending. A dumbed-down sketch of a classic novel; Hollywood doing its worst.

I had never heard of Michael Crichton's 1999 novel Timeline and didn't realise that the 2003 film I had just watched was based on this until the credits rolled. So I can't comment on how faithful (or otherwise) the film was to the book. This is probably just as well, otherwise I might have found far more fault with it. As it was, I enjoyed the tale of the team of modern archaeologists using a time-travel machine to visit medieval France at a crucial point in history, in order to rescue one of their colleagues. Much scheming and fighting result as the archaeologists desperately try to return to the present day. Far from serious, but enjoyably entertaining.

If there's one lesson to learn from these two films, it's this: if at all possible, try to see the film before you read the book. You are then more likely to enjoy the film.

Slan, and Slan Hunter, by A.E. van Vogt & Kevin J Anderson

2010-04-23T07:35:00.001+01:00

It is a very long time since I read Slan, one of the classic novels of the "golden age" of the 1940s which had a huge impact at the time, so when I learned that a sequel had been written I decided to read both.

Slan is a far-future story set on Earth (with scenes on Mars towards the end) in which enhanced humans called slans, featuring extended lifespans, inhuman strength, speed and intelligence, plus the ability to read minds with the aid of fine "tendrils" in their hair, are being persecuted close to extinction by the rest of humanity. The hero of the story is Jommy Cross, a young slan whose mother is killed in the first scene of the tale. Captured by an old woman who uses him as a thief, he grows up and discovers the secrets of advanced science left to him by his father, which enable him to construct formidable technological devices. He also discovers that there is a secret race of tendrilless slans who cannot read minds but whose abilities have allowed them to monopolise air travel - and to clandestinely develop space travel as well. His long search to discover other true slans and to understand why humans and the tendrilless slans hate them so much fills the rest of the novel.

The story is very much of its time and is dated in style as well as scientific understanding - Mars is portrayed as having a breathable atmosphere, for example. The ending is also rather rushed, consisting of a long infodump in which Jommy is told the answers to many of the questions which have troubled him. Despite these flaws the relentless pace and unrestrained imagination drag the reader along, as usual with a van Vogt tale.

In the 1980s the author began to write a sequel, but only got as far as the story outline and a hundred or so pages before he stopped. Kevin J Anderson was eventually given the job of completing the tale and the result, Slan Hunter, was published in 2007. This picks up when Slan left off, concluding the tale of Jommy's search to discover the truth about the slans of both varieties, with all loose ends neatly tied up. I was amused to notice a couple of retrospective explanations for peculiarities in the original. Mars has a breathable atmosphere, we are told, because a thousand years earlier humanity had bombarded the planet with ice comets, algae and bacteria in a massive terraforming exercise, resulting in the return of surface water, a thick atmosphere and warmer temperatures. Also, the remarkable similarity of human culture and technology to 1940s USA is explained by the devastating effect of the slan wars, so that "even now our society has returned only to the equivalent of the United States of America back in the 1940s…some of the cultural similarities to that period are quite striking." Indeed they are!

The new book remains very faithful in style to the original. This also applies to the ending, including as it does some sudden and unexpected revelations. I have to say that this is not necessarily a good thing, unless you think that van Vogt's style can't be improved on. I found that I am much more inclined to be tolerant of technical and stylistic shortcomings in a 1940s book than I am in a 21st century one. This is very unfair of me since Anderson evidently worked hard to match the original, but from my perspective he can't really win: his deliberate pastiche of 1940s style doesn't particularly appeal to me, but a more modern approach would probably have infuriated van Vogt's more devoted fans. So it goes…

Politics, climate change and fiction

2010-04-16T11:36:00.001+01:00

It's been a bad year for politicians, climate change and my novel-writing efforts (yes, there is an admittedly rather tenuous link between all of these).

Here in the Land of Uk, our politicians have been neatly hoist with their own petard in that the Freedom of Information (FoI) act which they passed a few years ago has been used to expose all kinds of shenanigans with their expenses. A few of the more extreme cases are now subject to criminal proceedings, but the lesser offenders fell foul of a kind of cultural groupthink; they fell in with a prevailing official culture which allowed all kinds of secret abuses of the system on the grounds that their basic pay was being artificially restricted for political reasons. When the news broke, howls of rage and derision were heard throughout the land. The fall-out is due to land soon with the forthcoming General Election which will see the biggest clear-out of politicians since 1945 - plus a popular wish for a "none of the above!" option to be provided on the voting form.

Politicians also failed to shine in a different way at the Copenhagen conference on climate change. Here they could really have done with some groupthink to get their act together and come up with some constructive results, but they failed. Part of the problem is that most politicians are more concerned with being re-elected than anything else, which makes them very sensitive to public opinion, which means they are strongly inclined to follow public opinion rather than lead it - even when that opinion is badly informed. The inevitable conclusion is that democracy, for all of its other merits, is a very poor system for persuading people that they really do need to face up to something which they would really rather not - especially if the problem is very complex and isn't due to hit home for decades (i.e. many elections away). Ironically one country which is unconcerned about elections - China - had its own reasons for not wanting to know about any potential restrictions on economic growth.

Most of the reason for the Copenhagen failure was probably the feeling that recovering from the economic recession took priority, but it wasn't helped by the publicity about the now notorious emails within the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. These revealed another kind of groupthink among the researchers, who felt themselves beleaguered by the constant attempts to discredit their work, including the bombardment of demands for information under that same FoI act which did for the MPs. They seem to have adopted a bunker mentality, trying to block and frustrate the activities of their critics. As is now obvious, this was a very bad idea. So was the inclusion by the IPCC of an unsupported remark concerning the rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers in what was supposed to be a peer-reviewed and thoroughly checked report.

All of this has no doubt contributed to the sharp increase in the number of those in the UK who do not believe that climate change is a problem, although I suspect that a much bigger reason was the severe winter we've just endured. I had to laugh at the cartoon which showed a traffic jam of cars partly buried in snow with, coming from all of them, a version of that well-known question-and-response chant familiar from demonstrations and protest marches:

"What do we want?"
"Global warming!"
"When do we want it?"
"NOW!!!"

The fact that the Meteorological Office had predicted a milder than usual winter, coupled with their springtime prediction of a "barbeque summer" which turned out to be thoroughly wet and cold, only added to the public feeling that the so-called experts had no idea what they were talking about.

The problem basically comes back to the fact that climate change is a complex subject with long-term consequences. Unfortunately, amendments to our behaviour to deal with this are also long-term in their effect, and therefore need to be put in place well in advance. In order to try to wake the public up to the potential severity of the situation, there is no doubt that many people involved with climate change research have been guilty of over-simplifying and over-dramatising the issues. Sadly they have thereby supplied free ammunition to those who do not want to believe that there is a problem, or if there is one that it is anything to do with human activities, or that if it is to do with human activities, that there is anything that we can realistically do about it.

As an interested bystander , I offer my own small contribution to correcting these perception problems by going back to basics. The first essential is to clarify the distinctions between global warming, climate change and weather; something which a lot of people are evidently still confused about.

Global warming describes the gradual increase in average planetary temperatures over the past century or so. It's important to stress the "average" bit: on a year-by-year temperature graph, the line zig-zags up and down, making it difficult to see what is happening. So statisticians calculate a rolling average over several years; this smooths out the annual variations and shows the underlying trend. And what this trend shows is that the planet is indubitably warming up: see THIS. Various explanations have been put forward for this and (as is usually the case) the truth is likely to be a complex blend of interacting reasons: but the informed opinion of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists is that the substantial increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide resulting from human industrial activities (which is also well evidenced) bears a very large share of the blame.

Climate change affects us much more directly than global warming: it concerns what happens to regional temperature, wind and rainfall patterns as a result of the overall warming trend. This has been the subject of many of the more alarming predictions about the consequences for humanity. However, it is a very complex and difficult area to predict, so any statements about the consequences need to be expressed as probabilities rather than certainties - and even the probabilities need to be regarded with caution as they will certainly change as we learn more over time. Having said that, there are already considerable differences from one part of the world to another. For instance, the Arctic is warming up faster than anywhere else, probably because the much reduced summer ice cover is allowing the ocean to absorb more of the suns rays and thereby warm up, instead of the rays being reflected back to space by the ice cover. At the other extreme, the Antarctic is hardly warming at all. Perhaps even more significant than temperature changes are the consequences for wind and ocean current patterns and how they will affect rainfall. All we can say at the moment is that there will be a wide range of climate changes in different parts of the world, and that while some may be beneficial to specific areas, the overall consequences are likely to be negative. Why is this? Simply because our current patterns of population distribution and agriculture are based on and adapted to the existing regional climates, so if these change for the worse (e.g. less rainfall in an agricultural area) the effects are likely to be serious. These comments only apply to moderate levels of climate change. If the global average temperature increases by several degrees, then the resulting climate changes are likely to be catastrophic almost everywhere.

Finally, Weather. This of course describes the temperatures, winds and rainfalls which we experience hour by hour, day by day, month by month. The graphs for these zig-zag around wildly, giving us considerable short-term variations (hence the wet summer and cold winter). These can be very inconvenient but are not of any long-term significance. It is only if the weather changes consistently and over a long period of time that this becomes important - and then it becomes climate change.

From my perspective, the whole question of climate change is one of risk assessment: how likely is it to happen, and if it does happen, how bad might the consequences be? Finally, what would be the costs of taking remedial action? As you will have gathered, there are no certainties in any of this, nor are any simple answers possible. However, the best judgment which I can make from studying the published evidence and the professional opinions of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists is that global warming is very likely to continue unless we take some strenous actions to prevent it; that this will drive ever-increasing climate change; and that the long-term consequences for our civilisation are likely to be serious.

So what should or could we be doing about all of this? I have gone into this in some detail HERE. The main point is that adapting our activities to reduce global warming as far as possible is not all bad news, because it brings opportunities as well as costs: as old industries wind down, new ones will spring up. This is already happening in many areas of life (to give a simple example: as production of low-efficiency light bulbs declines, that of high-efficiency ones accelerates), and these changes will continue anyway.

So what on earth has all this to do with my novel-writing problems? Well, a year or two ago I had an idea for a new novel. I was intrigued by the kind of existence people would have living in arcologies - basically huge buildings containing homes, shops, workplaces, leisure facilities, even food-producing areas - but considered that these are only likely to become economically worthwhile if temperatures fall considerably while energy costs rise, because of the huge energy savings they would permit. At that time there was considerable concern that the melting Arctic ice might stop the flow of the warm current from the Caribbean which keeps NW Europe much warmer than it otherwise would be, so this region could experience a fairly short-term but severe cooling effect, until global warming gradually restored the situation. Great! I had the background I needed and could get on with devising a suitably science-fictional murder-mystery set in my arcology. I had it all planned out - right down to the dramatic final twist - and was happily ploughing through it when disaster struck. I discovered that the original concerns had been caused by oceanic measurements which indicated that the current had already slowed by 30% over a few decades; but more recent research had showed that this was merely a short-term variation, and that particular threat was no longer regarded as very likely. Collapse of one SF author, torpedoed below the water line. Oh well, I suppose that novel was just an early casualty of climate change!

Films - Eagle Eye, and District 13: Ultimatum

2010-04-10T02:52:00.001+01:00

Two very different near-future thrillers with SF elements.

Eagle Eye is a 2008 mystery thriller set in the USA. It concerns a young man and a young mother who are coerced into assisting a mysterious and apparently all-powerful organisation which is able to monitor them by tapping into nearby CCTV, communicate with them by ringing any phone in their vicinity plus altering electronic message boards and video displays they pass, and can also assist their progress (or threaten them) by switching traffic lights and taking over remote-controlled machinery.

The pair are soon on the run from the authorities while desperately following a string of instructions with no obvious purpose, until the threads gradually come together to reveal a deadly threat to the US government. It is the nature of this threat which puts the film into the SF bracket (although it may also be described as a "techno-thriller"). Lightweight entertainment, but not bad.

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I enjoyed the original District 13 - a 2004 French film set in Paris. The social problems caused by an undesirable banlieue, or district, had been "solved" by walling it off, creating a lawless environment within it. An action-man supercop joined forces with an athletic resident to resolve the threat of a nuclear bomb being exploded in the District. Much entertaining action followed, focusing on the parkour (free-running) exploits of the heroes racing around the rooftops.

The sequel, District 13: Ultimatum, features the same pair of heroes trying to stop a dastardly plan to demolish much of the District so that a major construction company can make a vast fortune redeveloping it for the middle classes. We first see the supercop passing as a (female) prostitute in order to infiltrate a drug-dealing nightclub. At the same time, a secret arm of the government security forces is setting up an incident designed to provoke riots within the District, giving its corrupt leaders, bribed by the construction company, the excuse to clear the area ready for demolition. Only the heroes can stop this from happening, but one of them is soon in prison and the other is on the run.

The action is just as entertaining as before, the combat scenes just as improbable. The violence is tongue-in-cheek; there is hardly any visible blood and very few deaths despite the constant mayhem. What lifts this above the usual is its mischievous sense of humour, providing lots of laugh-out-loud moments. I particularly enjoyed the attempt to escape from a building by car, which resulted in it being driven up into, around and down out of, the first floor (don't ask) before being driven off. And the name of the corrupt construction company? Harriburton!

Apart from the humour there is a very French sense of nonchalant style about these films. Very much not Hollywood, and very enjoyable in a light-hearted way. The film is subtitled which may put off some viewers, but I found that once the action got underway I barely noticed.

Interzone 227

2010-04-02T09:04:00.002+01:00

The featured author in the March/April issue of Interzone is Connie Willis. There's an interview with Paul F. Cockburn in which she talks about her work in general and her latest duology set in the London Blitz, Blackout and All Clear (really one novel split into two volumes). There's also a review of Blackout. The author is best known for short stories, although I can't recall having read any by her (my short-story reading being largely confined to Interzone and British Fantasy Society publications). I have read a couple of her novels, however; To Say Nothing of the Dog and Passage, both of which I reviewed on this blog (see review list on the left). Two things struck me about her novel writing: it is very good, but it goes on at inordinate length. As the reviewer of the 500-page Blackout puts it, she has a "relaxed pacing". Still, I expect I might well tackle these two sometime, despite the vast allocation of time I'd need to set aside for them.

The rest of the review section is notable for discussing the film Avatar at some length, providing a lot of background information concerning the making of the film.

Finally, the usual half-dozen short stories:

The History of Poly-V by Jon Ingold, illustrated by Robert Dunn.
A small team of research scientists discovers a drug which enables memories to be retrieved precisely and in great detail, as if they were being experienced afresh. It's a great commercial success, but further development work begins to reveal that memories are not what they used to be.

Dance of the Kawkawroons by Mercurio D. Rivera, illustrated by Jim Burns.
A couple of fortune hunters manage to bypass the quarantine patrols around a planet populated by some exotic intelligent flying creatures living among the ruins of an ancient alien civilisation. They steal some eggs which have characteristics which are incredibly valuable to humanity; but who is exploiting whom?

Chimbwi by Jim Hawkins, illustrated by Ben Baldwin.
Western civilisation is collapsing into chaos, but in Africa scientific breakthroughs have provided limitless free power. A British physicist makes the hazardous journey to start a new life there, and discovers that to be accepted he needs to demonstrate a lot more than just scientific knowledge.

Flying in the Face of God by Nina Allan, illustrated by Robert Dunn.
An astronaut makes her goodbyes as she is irrevocably changed by a treatment to make long space journeys possible.

Johnny's New Job by Chris Beckett.
The ultimate expression of the blame culture visitied upon social workers who make the wrong judgments.

The Glare and the Glow by Steve Rasnic Tem, illustrated by Dave Senecal.
Strange new light bulbs reveal far more than is comfortable.

I was particularly impressed by the first three stories which, while very different in style and content, are good enough to be published anywhere.