Down Town by Viido Polikarpus and Tappan King

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)

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

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)

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

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)

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

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

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

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)

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

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!

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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

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

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

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?

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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)

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)

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

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)

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!