One Word Kill, by Mark Lawrence

A couple of months ago, this book arrived in the post. That was something of a surprise, as I had not ordered it, had in fact never heard of it, but as it is labelled "Advance Reader's Copy: Not for Resale" I assume that the publisher's marketing people had spotted this blog and sent it on the off-chance of a favourable review. I must stress that I do not encourage this and usually decline any such offers (the British Library's Classic SF reprints being a worthy exception). So I put it to one side and forgot about it, until I decided to trawl though my unread pile for something different, and found this one. It had the immediate attraction of being very short by modern standards (less than 200 pages) so at least it wouldn't waste much of my time.

On the face of it, the plot sounds unpromising. It is set in 1986 and starts with the narrator, a 15 year old boy called Nick Hayes, receiving the news that he has leukaemia, with about a 50% chance of surviving the next five years. His illness forms the backdrop to the tale, with unsparing details of the chemotherapy and its effect on him, while he is trying to live a normal life (which outside school largely consists of playing Dungeons and Dragons with a small group of friends). The author's depiction of adolescent life is good enough to make me wince in recognition every now and then (although I have to admit that Nick is a more admirable person that I recollect being at that age). He meets a girl who seems to like him, although as he attends a boys' school he hasn't a clue what to do about her (been there, done that!). He also falls foul of some nasty drug pushers and has other worries about a mysterious man who seems to be taking a close interest in him – a man who becomes the key to the rest of the tale, the focus of the SF element of the story, and the reason why the very law-abiding group of friends find themselves involved in breaking and entering while trying to avoid a homicidal nutcase. The friends discover the hard way that, just as in D&D, there are some real-life situations which cannot be escaped without a sacrifice.

The plot might not sound compelling, but I really enjoyed the writing. There are many authors whose writing and/or story-telling ability (not at all the same thing) impress me, but only very occasionally do I find an author who writes in a way which I would love to be able to emulate. Mark Lawrence has just joined that select group, and this story dragged me in, pinned me down and wouldn't let go until I had finished.

The writing style has the kind of dry, dark humour that I enjoy. A couple of examples, the first on chemotherapy:

They used to poison you if you got syphilis. I have my mother to thank for this little nugget of information. There aren't many boys of fifteen who can say that. Not so long before my blood turned sour, but a sufficient number of decades to take you back before World War II and the use of penicillin, the only effective treatment for syphilis was to dose the victim with arsenic. The logic being that although arsenic is a deadly poison it is more deadly to the bacteria that cause the disease and, with careful judgement, the doctor can kill one of you without killing the other. Chemotherapy is much the same. The chemicals used may not be such well-known favourites of celebrated poisoners, but the idea remained unchanged. The aim was to make my blood into a soup toxic enough to kill the cancer cells while allowing the rest of me to struggle on.

And the second, somewhat lighter, quote concerns the best way of buying alcoholic drinks when you are obviously too young:

The place for a teenager to buy beer was the supermarket. But you had to pad your basket out sufficiently to prove you were there on parents' orders. For best results, take a shopping list on which the beers are written, and sandwich them between a bag of frozen peas and some fish fingers. The true artist invests in some female sanitary products, too.

I see that the author has previously written three trilogies: The Broken Empire, Red Queen's War, and Book of the Ancestor. I will definitely be investigating these.

The Songs of Distant Earth, by Arthur C. Clarke

My reading of Clarke has been somewhat patchy, as I absorbed all I could find in the 1960s and into the 1970s, but not a lot thereafter. So while Rendezvous with Rama remains one of my all-time favourites (and the book I would recommend to anyone interested in discovering what classic SF is all about) I did not read The Songs of Distant Earth when it emerged in 1986.

The setting is a little complicated: astrophysicists discover early in the 21^st century that the sun will go nova in only 1,500 years time, wiping out all life on Earth. This prompts a vast seeding project starting 500 years later, in which seedships, travelling at sub-light speeds, are sent to promising planets discovered around various other stars. They have no crew but contain everything necessary to regenerate plant and animal life and to rear and educate people. It was assumed that this would be the only method of survival available, and Earth's population was steadily wound down in preparation for the end. However, only a couple of centuries before the nova, a quantum drive was developed which made manned starships feasible. Just before the nova, the starship Magellan duly takes off with hundreds of thousands of frozen people, aiming for a planet with the potential to support life, but needing some drastic terraforming. On the way it stops off at another planet, named Thalassa, seeded seven centuries earlier, in order to take on board enough material to continue its journey. A hundred or so members of the crew are thawed out in order to deal with this – a process expected to take two years. The story is all about the relationship between the starship crew and the Thalassans.

There is very little land on this ocean world, just a couple of islands, so the population is carefully controlled and, given the very favourable climate, has evolved a relaxed and appealing lifestyle, without a lot of use for technology. Romantic relationships develop between some of the locals and the crew members, as might be expected, and some crew members decide they would rather remain on Thalassa than continue to their goal. There is also a sub-plot concerning giant crustaceans which show signs of organisation. As far as the plot goes, that's about it.

What stands out are the author's views on politics and religion, which are expressed with some force. The president of Thalassa (a largely ceremonial post) is chosen by lot from almost the entire adult population, apart from a few obvious exclusions, plus a less obvious one – anyone who tries to be selected is automatically barred as inherently unsuitable! Although some seedships had been sent out by followers of the few surviving faiths, religion was largely regarded as obsolete by the time the seedships were dispatched. Religious belief had been  assessed long ago as being not worth the trouble it caused, so all mention of it had been carefully excluded from the educational programmes and library resources available to the Thalassans. As Clarke puts it: "they could not be allowed to reinfect virgin planets with the ancient poisons of religious hatred, belief in the supernatural, and the pious gibberish with which countless billions of men and women had once comforted themselves at the cost of addling their minds". Not just religion, but histories, art and literature were ruthlessly purged of "everything that concerned war, crime, violence and the destructive passions" (probably not a very big library remained!). The Thalassans are accordingly portrayed as a tolerant and friendly people without any hang-ups. Whether or not this approach would have the desired effect is questionable, as is the concept of the first generation of settlers being cared for and educated by AI systems.

By the time I reached the end, I found myself rather confused. Somehow, the story doesn't seem to hang together as a coherent narrative; it has the feel of of something cobbled together from various different elements which do not sit that comfortably together. Even the title doesn't seem to fit the story, giving the impression the author used it just because he liked the sound of it. In a note at the beginning of the book, Clarke comments that the novel was based on a short story written thirty years previously, with the plot modified to make the science more realistic. I haven't read the short story, but I suspect that a degree of dramatic focus was lost in the expanded tale.