Interzone 221

The April issue of this bimonthly British SFF magazine arrived recently, so immediately claimed a priority place on my reading list. The cover illustration, by Adam Tredowski, shows a section of what appears to be a vast and rusting Victorian machine (complete with small, top-hatted smoking figure), with a planet's surface far below – I like this kind of surreal juxtaposition!

As usual, there are six short stories:

A Clown Escapes from Circus Town by Will McIntosh, illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe: a bizarre tale of a world in which clowns and other circus characters are the sole occupants of a town. One escapes to find similar towns scattered around the countryside, each inhabited by a different occupation. What's the explanation, and why do the inhabitants keep disappearing? A story which is amusing but also rather sad; just like circus clowns.

Fishermen by Al Robertson, illustrated by Geoffrey Grisso: a talented artist is captured by medieval pirates who have a specific task for him. Beautifully written in an elegiac style which reminds me of Guy Gavriel Kay, but not obviously SFF.

Saving Diego by Matthew Kressel, illustrated by David Gentry: a man travels across the galaxy to rescue an old friend, only to find himself in a dangerous situation, both from the planet-destroying numens and from old temptations.

Far & Deep by Alaya Dawn Johnson, illustrated by Lisa Konrad: a young rebel follows in the footsteps of her murdered mother on a tropical island. Another tale which is intriguing and well-told but, apart from one detail, not obviously SFF.

Home Again by Paul M Berger: the pilot of a star-travelling thought-ship returns home in an apparently domestic tale – until the chilling ending.

Black Swan by Bruce Sterling, illustrated by Paul Drummond: the friend of a science journalist appears to be an industrial spy who feeds him secrets concerning advanced technology. But the source of the material turns out to be far more bizarre than the journalist could have imagined.

A varied mix of tales, as is usual for this magazine, from SF to those with only a trace of fantasy. My vote for the most original and entertaining story goes to Will McIntosh, but I would expect that other readers' preferences would be scattered across all of them.

Bruce Sterling also features in a review of his latest novel, The Caryatids, and in an interview, both by Ian Sales. The novel is set in a near future in which many of the worst-case global scenarios have come to pass. I intend to return to this theme in a later post; can any near-future SF now ignore the increasingly dire warnings of what's happening to the planet?

The rest of the magazine consists of the usual detailed and thoughtful book reviews, criticisms of recent DVDs and films, and a news and obituary page.

Passage by Connie Willis

I expect that most people will be familiar with the accounts from people who have temporarily "died" before recovering; impressions of travelling down a dark tunnel towards a bright light, of feeling that there are people at the other end. The theme of Passage is the exploration of such near death experiences – NDEs – to determine what causes them and what they mean. Two researchers in a hospital join forces. Joanna is interviewing everyone who experiences an NDE to find out exactly what they think they saw, while Richard is trying to induce artificial NDEs via drugs. Both are up against the influential Mandrake, an author who believes that NDEs are spiritual and indicate the entry to an afterlife from which messages can be sent back to the living. The story concerns the struggle of the researchers to collect and interpret their data.

This may sound rather mundane and not very science-fictional, and for much of the book there is some truth in that. In fact, it initially reads more like a medical drama (being heavy on medical processes and terminology), combined with incipient romance, until well into the second half when the plot takes an unexpected and dramatic turn. The remainder of the story is edge-of-the-seat stuff, in entirely new territory.

Connie Willis is a good writer who held my attention. However, this story is not without flaws. Chief among them is its inordinate length, at nearly 800 pages, which includes a lot of repetition. How many times do we need to read about Joanna and Richard's efforts to avoid Mandrake? How many stories from the ex-sailor Wojakowski must we hear? How many meetings with the young patient Maisie do we need? There were times when I was reminded of the film Groundhog Day. The plot proceeds with infinitesimal slowness for much of the book, and I did become rather frustrated with it. I think that it could have been drastically reduced in length without losing any of the plot or involvement with the characters, and it would have been better for it.

Furthermore, considering its length the characterisation is rather patchy. Joanna and Richard are rather sketchily drawn and Joanna in particular never really came alive for me. We are told very little about their private lives or why they are motivated to carry out this research. Conversely, some of the secondary characters are more clearly drawn, particularly Maisie, Wojakovsky and even the insufferable Mandrake.

Despite these complaints, Passage is a remarkable achievement. It is an original, daring, intensely atmospheric and powerfully imaginative work which is likely to remain with me for a long time.

Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny

Roadmarks was published in 1979, but I hadn't previously read it and in fact wasn't even aware of its existence until it was selected as the book of the month by the Classic Science Fiction forum. It is an intriguing read and makes quite a contrast with the more conventional and commercial Amber fantasy series for which Zelazny is now best known.

The early part of the book is confusing. Various apparently unconnected plot threads are set running, characters are introduced without explanation, and it is not at all obvious what is going on. It gradually becomes clear that the threads fall into two basic story lines, both concerned with travellers along the Road. This is no ordinary road, but a road through time; travelling along it moves you forwards or backwards in time, and there are occasional exits to enable the users of the Road to join or leave from particular points in history.

The main story line follows a man called Red, or Reyd, Dorakeen. He is a long-term traveller on the Road, on a permanent search for something even he is uncertain of. The other follows Randy Dorakeen, whose relationship to Red is at first unclear. The story keeps chopping between the two and the true situation gradually emerges, reaching a climax when the threads all come together at the end. I have to say that the instant I finished the book I immediately returned to the start and read the first fifty pages again so I could understand what they had been about!

Generally speaking I dislike books which leave the reader groping for understanding for much of their length, and was initially in some doubt as to whether I would even finish the story. However, Zelazny's writing was good enough to keep me engaged and there was plenty of entertainment en route, with exotic assassins, a planet-destroying robot, intelligent talking books, and even intelligent dragons (again!). Not one of Zelazny's best efforts, but it's interesting for its construction as well as its story, and at fewer than 200 pages is worth the brief reading time.

Fact vs Fantasy

This week I'm looking at a couple of items on the irrational beliefs front, concerning first creationism (again) and then the Mayan 2012 confection.

The good news is that the Texas State Board of Education has voted to get rid of wording which invites teachers and students to debate the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories. This wording had allowed evolution to be attacked in Texan science lessons for the last twenty years. The bad news is that a recent British poll (reported HERE appears to show that half of the British population doesn't believe in evolution. Only around 25% believe that evolution is "definitely true" and another 25% believe it's "probably true", with 22% preferring creationism or "intelligent design" and rest confused. I say "appears" because the exact wording of the question asked isn't given, and that is of course critical in affecting the responses. By comparison, it's only three or four years since a poll putting the question "human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false?" resulted in 75% of Britons saying, "true", with 18% "false" and 7% "not sure". It will be interesting to see the results of any polls taken later this year, after the deluge of publicity and TV programmes about the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species.

While on this subject, there was an amusing item by Amanda Gefter in New Scientist magazine (28/2/09) concerning how to spot attempts to disguise religiously-inspired (or other unscientific) work as science. Samples of some key phrases to look for:
"Darwinism": scientists rarely use the term – they use "evolution" instead
"irreducibly complex": implying that it couldn't have evolved from something simpler
"academic freedom": when appealed to, usually means the freedom to teach creationism
"common sense": when appealed to; science works on theories based on evidence and may reach conclusions entirely opposed to common sense.
"scientific materialism": implying that the immaterial exists
"quantum physics" in an article which is clearly not about physics ("quantum" being the latest mystical buzz-word to give apparent respectability to bonkers notions)
There's more, but this gives the general idea!
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I have only recently stumbled across the Mayan 2012 cataclysm belief, which I gather is very popular in some quarters. For those as yet unexposed to this wonder, it concerns the fact that the Mayan "long count" calendar (they were fond of grouping years into various different cycles) comes to an end on 21 December 2012, when some terrible event is predicted to happen. It is also claimed by one Terence McKenna, who invented something called "Timewave Zero" which "purports to calculate the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time", that "the novelty [is] progressing towards the infinity on 21st December 2012". (see THIS item). Wow! With modern mathematical theory backing up ancient Mayan beliefs, there must really be something in this, right?

Just a couple of problems with this: the Mayans did not predict catastrophe at the end of the long count – in fact, they had celebrations at the end of their year cycles to welcome in the next cycle, just as we did at the end of the Millennium. The predictions of doom were the recent invention of a New Age theorist, José Argüelles, whose ideas have been dismissed by all professional Mayan scholars. As for McKenna, it turns out that no serious mathematician has accepted his ideas: they are just numerology (which is in the same category of scientific validity as astrology). Even more damning, McKenna (an advocate of "magic mushrooms" as the key to understanding), deliberately changed his initial calculations to match up his critical date with the end of the Mayan long count, so it is hardly surprising that they are the same.

I must once more recommend, to anyone who might be tempted to believe such nonsense, Gilovich's book 'How We Know What Isn't So', which I reviewed earlier on this blog (see the review list on the left). It really should be essential reading. You might also pay a visit to the UK-Skeptics forum where all manner of irrational beliefs are viewed with a critical eye. As one contributor pointed out in a discussion on 2012, we needn't worry about it even if you believe such catastrophe theories because we're not going to last that long. The end of the world is supposed to happen in 2010 according to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, or 31st December 2011 (if we fail to rid ourselves of all evil) according to Solara Antara Amaa-ra, leader of the "11:11 Doorway Movement". The fact that countless "end of the world" predictions have come and gone doesn't seem to discourage such fantasists. I suppose it could be regarded as the triumph of pessimism over experience!

Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey

I first read this book when the UK paperback came out in 1970 and was blown away by it. I read it at least a couple more times over the next few years, but not since. Having recently reviewed Naomi Novik's Temeraire, which borrows heavily from Dragonflight in its concept of dragons, I thought it was time to give the original work a re-read.

I'm not sure who first invented the idea of intelligent dragons. There was of course Smaug, the wonderfully evil beast in Tolkien's The Hobbit, but he was hardly friendly. As far as I know (although I'll be happy to be corrected), McCaffrey was the first to come up with the idea of a life-long bond (in this case, telepathic) being formed between a newly hatched dragon and one particular human. It's a compelling idea which has been copied since, by others before Novik.

Dragonflight is ostensibly a science-fiction story which has far more of the feel of a fantasy. It is set on another planet, Pern, a long time in the future, where human settlers have for some reason been abandoned to their fate. A very long time later, they have reverted to a medieval level of existence with one difference – dragons. Smaller flying reptiles were native to the planet, but were genetically engineered into different and much larger forms when the original settlers discovered a major problem. A neighbouring planet had an irregular orbit which from time to time brought it very close to Pern. When that happened, masses of strings of spores, called threads, were ejected from it and fell onto Pern. Where they fell, they killed all living things. The best way of destroying them was by fire, preferably in mid-air before they reached the ground. The newly created dragons could breathe fire and were big enough to carry a human rider, so the dragonriders formed an aerial cavalry, flying to the rescue of places threatened by threadfall. They were helped in this by the dragons' ability to teleport instantly to anywhere on the planet. However, at the time of the story there had been no threadfall for centuries and the population was becoming tired of supporting the dragons and their riders, who lived apart in remote weyrs.

The tale follows the fortunes of Lessa, a girl who we first meet living a drudge's life, and F'lar, a male dragonrider. It would be unfair to reveal any of the plot and thereby deprive new readers of the pleasure of discovering this book, but suffice to say it is a beautifully-crafted gem of a story which, not surprisingly, won both Hugo and Nebula awards. It's packed with so many themes and incidents that it seems incredible that it's only 250 pages long; it would almost certainly be far longer if written today. Despite the brevity, the reader is far from short-changed. The characters (human and dragon) are clearly drawn and the reader comes to care about them. There is political intrigue, adventure, mystery, dramatic developments, romance, believable domestic details, terrible dangers to be faced, and lots and lots about dragons. The twist in the tail of the tale is well-conceived and brings the story to a satisfying conclusion.

By current fashions the structure and writing would probably be criticised by an editor. There is an introduction to set the scene (nowadays writers are supposed to plunge straight into the action) and there's lots of description – the short first chapter contains not a word of dialogue – whereas the modern mantra is "show don't tell". As far as this reviewer is concerned, that reflects badly on the current fashions rather than on this book. Dragonflight is one of those rare stories which is like a comforting duvet that you wrap around yourself and just love being inside – it's a wrench to leave. For this reason I am reluctant to nit-pick the few story details which prompted question marks in my mind.

Dragonflight is a stand-alone story, complete in itself (unlike Temeraire, which is obviously the first part of a longer tale). However, the world McCaffrey created became so popular that many other novels set in it eventually appeared. I read a few of them but I've kept only the first two for a possible re-read sometime (Dragonquest and The White Dragon). None of them has the freshness, originality and charm of the original and the quality declined steadily. This should not detract from Dragonflight, which is a true classic and one of the most enjoyable SFF novels ever written.

New Horizons and 2010

A new issue of this British Fantasy Society publication (included in the subscription). New Horizons is a biannual magazine "dedicated to promoting and showcasing the newer names in fantasy, horror and sci-fi". It includes seven short stories:

The Cloth of Heaven by Louise Morgan: a brief and rather strange account of the making of a magical dress, which reads as if it were an extract from a longer story.

The Silk Road by Allyson Bird: a visit to China to research a book on the Cherchen mummies leads to a nightmarish involvement with a local family. Travelogue meets horror story.

Gossamer by Ian Whates: the lure of a magical country cottage which inspires its residents to write fiction. An atmosphere of mystery, of things not quite seen.

The Siege by Nick Jackson: the claustrophobic atmosphere and terrors of a medieval siege. Not for the faint-hearted.

The Lost Tribe of Prague 6 by Cyril Simsa: old folk tales come alive in a wood in present-day Prague. It reminded me of Robert Holdstock's work.

A Town Called Exit by Paul Campbell: getting off the train at the wrong stop leads to a series of alternative worlds. Disorientating.

Under Her Skin by Eliza Chan: a selkie – a creature of the sea – is trapped on land in a marriage to a human man, in a story recounted by her daughter.

Of all of these my favourite was Cyril Simsa's, in part because the author (who lives in the Czech Republic) includes some intriguingly different mythology.

In addition, the magazine has illustrations by Anna Bird, Vanessa Walk and Dean Harkness, and two interviews. One is with Ekaterina Sedia, the Russian-born American author of The Secret History of Moscow, which places traditional Russian folklore figures in a modern setting. The other is with Adam Nevill, who is in charge of Virgin Books' new line in horror novels.
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I recently viewed 2010, the film made in 1984. I thought I hadn't seen it before, but I kept half-remembering scenes as they happened, so I must have done. Good, solid SF with credible human drama thrown in; Roy Scheider's performance was particularly strong. A worthy sequel to 2001.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

This Hugo and Nebula award-winning story of interstellar warfare was first published in book form in 1974, but in a different version from the one the author intended. It originally appeared in serialised form in Analog magazine but one of the sections was felt by the book publishers to be too downbeat, so was changed. Not until 1991 was the book published with the excised section reinstated, and this is the version being reviewed here.

The Forever War is set in an alternate world, apparently similar to our own up to the Vietnam War (experience of which prompted Haldeman to write this book) then diverging rather radically to include interstellar space travel by the 1990s. However, the early explorers found themselves fighting the Taurans, an alien race very loosely humanoid in form. William Mandella is a college graduate drafted to fight in the war, and this first-person story follows his perilous and brutal combat career from one star system to another.

Haldeman emphasises the relativistic effects, which mean that a journey lasting only a few months in subjective time can result in a return to Earth decades or even centuries later. This not only means that the soldiers become increasingly cut off from Earth, where conditions change radically on each visit, but that weapons and other technology evolve considerably while they are travelling. It also means that if two lovers are posted to different star systems, they will never meet again.

I first read this about a decade ago, and recall admiring it more than I liked it. That's still the case, simply because the hero's situation is so grim and gloomy throughout. The combat casualty rate is frighteningly high, and society on Earth changes to become as dystopian as you are likely to find. Almost all of this book is very good indeed, the author's war experience providing a gritty ring of truth, emphasised by the laconic and cynical writing style, but for me it was spoilt a little by a rather bizarre ending which drifts more towards fantasy. The author suggests that clones would not only have perfect communication but would effectively have only one shared mind; a moment's thought would have revealed that identical twins (who are effectively clones), while often very close, are separate individuals. Despite this, The Forever War merits its awards and its place on the SFF Shelf of Fame; it is a true classic. But I felt a strong need to read something light and upbeat after finishing it.

Kil'n People by David Brin

Back in the 1980s, before other priorities distracted me from reading much SFF for a decade or two, I read and enjoyed a few books by David Brin, The Practice Effect being a particular favourite. So when Kil'n People cropped up in the Modern SF reading list, I acquired a copy with some anticipation.

The novel is set about a century into the future, and is focused on the implications of some revolutionary scientific developments: that animated creatures – known as 'dittos' – can be made out of clay, and that the personality and memories of any individual can be copied into a ditto. The downside is that a ditto lasts for only one day before disintegrating, but in compensation the ditto's memories can be uploaded back into the human original. This enables each person to send out several dittos every day, greatly multiplying their workrate and also making dangerous or unpleasant tasks more acceptable. Not all dittos are the same – they vary in capabilities, indicated by different colourings – and they don't have to look like the original person; even animal forms can be used.

Al Morris is a private investigator engaged in tracking down the various new forms of crime which the existence of dittos permits, and the story follows him, and several of his dittos, as they try to unravel a huge conspiracy. There are many twists and turns until the unexpected and ambitious conclusion.

This book follows the current doorstop fashion, being over 600 pages long, which caused this reviewer to have to refresh his memory at the start of each reading session, in order to recall previous events. This task was considerably complicated by the fact that the plot keeps switching between the viewpoints of Morris and his various dittos, all of which are recounted in the first person. Trying to remember what each one had been doing, and in particular what each one had found out about what was going on, was something of a struggle.

Despite that, the book held my attention. It is well written, and I'm pleased to see that Brin hasn't lost the sense of humour which keeps bubbling up, for instance in puns based on clay and ditto (e.g. Morris' copies having the title of "ditective"). He also has a lot of fun in exploring some of the more bizarre implications of dittos and the effect their existence has on society. A solid chunk of quality, original, SF, well worth the somewhat protracted reading time.

The Mountains of Mourning and Cetaganda, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Two more in the Miles Vorkosigan saga, which I am gradually working my way through.

Cetaganda follows on from The Vor Game in Miles' personal timeline. This time he is sent to the former enemy planet of Cetaganda to represent Barrayar at the funeral of a member of the ruling dynasty. Being Miles, he is immediately involved in a complex plot concerning a struggle for supremacy within Cetaganda's ruling clique, focused on their programme of selective breeding for the elite. Also being Miles, he resolves it all at the end.

The author's writing style, which I have praised before, is such that her books are very difficult to put down: I read Cetaganda in two sittings. I am now trying to analyse her technique to understand how she does it, in the hope that I might learn something which would benefit my own scratchings. I liked the fact that Cetaganda has rather more science-fictional ideas in it than the earlier ones I've reviewed, although I was slightly dissatisfied with the ending; it was just too pat, with Miles dominating the situation. It may seem silly to ask for more realism in a space opera which is by definition completely unrealistic, but I would have preferred it had he not had matters entirely his own way.

I was a bit annoyed about the other story. I was misled into buying a book called Young Miles, which turned out to consist of three separate stories. Two of them are The Warrior's Apprentice and The Vor Game, which I already have (I reviewed them previously on this blog – see the review list on the left). This left the novella The Mountings of Mourning as the only new material. Having said that, it's a good story concerning Miles' attempt to put a stop to the habit in back-country Barrayar of killing any new-born child which is not physically perfect (an issue of decidedly personal interest to him, given his disabilities).

Bujold's work seems particularly prone to being repackaged and sold under different titles, so beware. There are at least two other titles which contain existing books: Miles, Mystery and Mayhem consists of Cetaganda, Ethan of Athos and a short story, Labyrinth. Miles Errant consists of Borders of Infinity, Brothers in Arms and Mirror Dance, while Miles in Love includes Komarr, A Civil Campaign and the short story Winterfair Gifts. In between the last two compilations (in terms of Miles' chronology) comes Memory, which appears to be only available as a stand-alone novel, and at the end comes Diplomatic Immunity. At least, that's how I understand it! The compilations are good value in that they cost less than buying the books individually and you often get an extra novella or short story thrown in, but you do need to be wary of what you're buying.

Another writer to suffer from this problem is the excellent James H Schmitz, most famous for The Witches of Karres but who wrote lots of short stories (and even his full-length novels are short by modern standards). Many of his stories have been wrapped up in various anthologies in all manner of different combinations, so great care is called for when buying. I almost placed an order for a recently published stand-alone novel of his until I realised that I already had it in an anthology. Fortunately, some kind person has put together a comprehensive list of his published books together with the stories included in them; you can find it on Wikipedia under the author's name.
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I was a tad rude about Demons last week, so in all fairness I should say that Episode 4, in which Mina's vampiric past comes back to haunt her, was a great improvement. Actually enjoyable for the right reasons…but possibly I was only impressed because my expectations were so low!

Interzone 220 and Demons

The interview in the latest issue of Interzone is with Jeffrey Ford, author of the Well-Built City trilogy (The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond). I've not heard of him or his books before, but they sound very unusual (the books, that is) and worth a look. There's also an interesting article analysing the work of Christopher Priest, whose intriguing alternative World War 2 novel The Separation was reviewed on this blog a while back. And of course the usual news, chat, and book and screen reviews, plus a cover illustration by Adam Tredowski. Now to the six stories:

Monetized by Jason Stoddard (illustrated by Paul Drummond): a future in which everyone is constantly bombarded by exhortations to feature and promote particular products or services, thereby earning money. And the higher their Attention Index (= celebrity), the more money they can earn. A son rebels against the wealthy mother who thought up the whole idea.

Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast by Eugie Foster (illustrated by Geoffrey Grisso): a fantasy in which everyone wears a mask in public – a mask which determines their personalities and the events they are involved in. It is illegal to be seen in public without one, so every morning people have to choose which identity to adopt from their varied collections of masks. But there are some who reject the idea and try to develop their own independent personalities.

After Everything Woke Up by Rudy Rucker (illustrated by himself): in this world, everything has a personality and can be communicated with: each tree, stone, stretch of stream. This is an extract from a forthcoming novel, Hylozoic. Amusing enough in a short story, but I hope there's more to the novel than that.

Spy vs Spy by Neil Williamson: a future in which extreme paranoia is encouraged by companies selling security devices and worse…

Miles to Isengard by Leah Bobet (illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe): a small group hijack the last bomb and drive it to a volcanic crater for disposal, in this LOTR-inspired tale; lots of atmosphere, not much explanation.

Memory Dust by Gareth L Powell (illustrated by Daniel Bristow-Bailey): a strange alien, the last survivor of its race, and a planet which is covered with a black dust with bizarre properties.

A very varied bunch in content and style, but I wouldn't say that I had a particular favourite this time.
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I've been watching the ITV series Demons. Not my usual fare, but I was drawn to it because it features Philip Glenister, the star of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. I'm still watching it for reasons which I can't quite understand, but probably because it's so bad that it's become perversely irresistible. For those of you fortunate enough to have avoided the snare, it concerns a team of heroes in present-day London who spend their time hunting a varied collection of nasty supernatural beings. They are led by Glenister (with a dodgy American accent), and include a lad who is the last surviving member of the Van Helsing family, his would-be girlfriend, and a blind female seer.

In the last episode, the latest big bad demon managed to get into the team's hideout and set a time bomb next to the seer, who had been knocked unconscious. First "huh?" moment: he set the timer for a full 45 minutes, thereby helpfully setting up a long-drawn-out drama as the girlfriend arrives and wonders what to do. Does she carry the bomb away so it explodes somewhere harmless? Nope. Does she drag the seer out of harms's way and let the bomb destroy the hideout? Nope. Does she say "sod it" and get the hell out of there? Nope. She spends nearly all the time researching explosives in the library, then finally gives up and goes to sit by the bomb before, in the very last second, cutting through a wire at random and thereby stopping the clock. I was rather sorry that it didn't explode. Meanwhile, Glenister and the Van Helsing have been decoyed away in search of the demon, and find themselves trapped in a room in the sewers which has a sturdy grille in the ceiling with a trapdoor in it. Now these two heroes invariably carry a range of hardware including some fancy guns for disposing of demons. So when the demon duly appears above them, do they spring into action and start shooting? Nope. Not even when the demon helpfully opens the trapdoor to give them a clear shot plus a means of escape? Nope. They just stand there and trade insults, until the demon tires of the game and bolts down the trapdoor. Sadly, the girlfriend and the seer arrive in time to save them as the room floods, with only a fraction of a second to spare.

The next episode's on tonight. I can hardly wait…

Temeraire by Naomi Novik

An alternative Napoleonic War – with dragons! This is the premise of the author's first novel, published in 2006, which has since been followed by four sequels.

In almost all respects her world closely matches the historical one, with Napoleon threatening invasion and Nelson leading the British fleet. The author has clearly done some research into both the technicalities of sailing warfare and the stiflingly rigid nature of contemporary British society. The one difference is the existence of dragons occurring naturally around the world, albeit in small numbers and rarely seen. They are intelligent and have long been tamed, forming life-long bonds with particular humans as soon as they are out of their eggs. If this sounds familiar, it is; this particular concept is swiped wholesale from Anne McCaffrey's 1968 novel Dragonflight, one of my favourite SFF stories. Other similarities are that the dragons come in various breeds of different sizes and characteristics, but all of them are big enough to carry their riders on their backs. They can also communicate with humans, although in Temeraire they speak rather than using telepathy. Other differences are that Novik's dragons do not teleport, and the largest of them carry not only their handler but a whole crew of people including rifle squads for aerial combat: for the dragons are a vital weapon to both sides in the war.

The story's hero is Will Lawrence, a successful British frigate captain of aristocratic birth but no fortune, being a third son. He hopes to make his career in the Navy, but his plans are interrupted when he captures a French ship carrying a rare and precious cargo: a dragon's egg. This hatches before the ship can reach land and the male dragon attaches itself to Lawrence, to his great consternation as dragon handlers live apart from society with their dragons and are considered to be of low status. The rest of the story is primarily concerned with Lawrence's developing relationship with his dragon, called Temeraire, as they train to join the aerial forces defending Britain.

While the individual elements of the tale are hardly original, they haven't been put together in quite this way before and the result is a refreshing and entertaining read. It is written as an exciting and fairly light adventure story and is entirely suitable for younger readers as well as engaging enough to keep adults amused. The only aspect which jarred with me was the rather cloying sentimentality of the relationship which develops between Lawrence and Temeraire, which led me to keep thinking of the dragon as female. Still well worth the read, but I'm in no great hurry to get the next one.

A catch-up on films and TV

If I have achieved limited success in keeping up with the latest books, I am even worse at watching films. So while I'm not too far behind the curve in seeing Wall-E recently, I also viewed for the first time X-Men (the first one) and (wait for it) ET!

Wall-E is an animated movie which has two stories running in parallel. One is the tale of a lonely rubbish-disposing robot, left behind on Earth to clear up the mess created by humanity, and his romance with a sleek robot from a visiting spaceship. The other is a biting satire on the Western – and especially American – way of life, which surprised me given that this is a Disney film aimed at children. The satire begins with humanity's profligacy in covering the Earth with rubbish and so poisoning the environment that nothing could live there. The people all departed to live in luxurious spaceships in which they spend all day on trivial virtual activities, consuming vast quantities of junk food, instantly obeying the all-pervasive advertising about when and what to eat, drink and do, and travelling everywhere in mobile armchairs so that they became too fat and weak even to stand up without assistance. I wonder how many of the target audience, cooing over the cute robots, picked up the film's subversive message?

X-Men surprised me. I had expected an undemanding comic-strip action hero blockbuster (and all the expected elements are certainly there) but the plot is rather more serious and thoughtful than that, starting with a grim scene in a World War 2 concentration camp. The presence of some heavyweight actors – Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan – reinforces the point. The idea of people developing mutant powers is nothing new, of course, but the themes of how the public would regard such mutants, and how the mutants themselves might become divided over their response to the public's hostility, form the main thrust of this movie. In parallel with this is the struggle of one of the mutants (played by Hugh Jackman) to understand what had been done to him – a story line which was left dangling in obvious preparation for the sequel. Clearly a cut above the average superhero film; and, if nothing else, male viewers can enjoy watching Famke Janssen, a disconcertingly blonde Halle Berry, and a disturbingly sexy mutant called Mystique (played by Rebecca Romijn).

I braced myself before watching ET, afraid that it would turn out to be a pile of schmaltz. Well, it was to some extent, but it was better than I had expected and quite amusing. Worth watching – once.

Finally, neither big-screen movies nor even fiction (in the usual sense): a couple of UK TV programmes.

Life After People, shown on C4 a few months ago (I've just got around to watching the tape!) concerning what might happen if humanity vanished overnight. An interesting analysis of the effect on human pets (cats are fine, dogs vary with breed), wildlife (pigeons do well, so does everything in the sea), plants (take over everything on land) and buildings (after a few centuries, only massive old stone buildings will still be here, with the pyramids lasting longest of all). There was some haunting real-life film of a town near Chernobyl, completely abandoned for twenty years – the extent of the decay was remarkable – together with lots of CGI of iconic bridges and buildings collapsing. Interesting if somewhat depressing, but dragged out too long with too many repetitions of dramatic collapses.

Ghosts of Glastonbury was another C4 programme featuring Tony Robinson (of Blackadder and Time Team fame) investigating a claim by an early 20th-century archaeologist that the remarkable success of his excavations of Glastonbury Abbey was due to advice from the spirit world achieved through automatic writing. While the claims made by the archaeologist were all pretty well disproved, Robinson got very excited by his own attempt (helped by a spiritualist) at automatic writing, in which he interpreted a squiggle as being a man's name (with a fair amount of imagination), and it turned out that a monk of that name had been associated at some time with Glastonbury Abbey. That reasoning had so many holes in it that I felt very disappointed - I expected better of Robinson after his comprehensive demolition of the "facts" in The Da Vinci Code. The programme would have left many viewers thinking that there could be something in this automatic writing after all.

Foreigner by C J Cherryh

A lost colony ship, a desperate landfall on an unknown planet, and an intelligent native humanoid race with very different mental processes. These are the key elements of Cherryh's 1994 novel, the start of a series running to nine volumes so far (with more to come). I read a lot of Cherryh's books in the 1970s and liked them enough to keep them to re-read sometime, but I have neglected her work since then so I turned to Foreigner with interest.

The scene is set in couple of introductory chapters centuries apart; the initial catastrophic journey which caused the starship to become lost, and the first contact after planetfall between the human settlers and the natives (the atevi). The rest of the story is set six generations later, after a human-atevi war which had led to an accommodation being reached; the humans were allowed sole occupancy of a large island in return for gradually introducing their advanced technology to the atevi. Only one human was allowed off the island, the paidhi, who lived with the atevi in order to monitor and understand them while relaying technical knowledge as they were ready for it. The story focuses on one paidhi, Bren Cameron, at a time of crisis between the races.

The atevi are bigger, stronger and faster than humans, and had already reached the steam age at the time of the landing. Now they have aircraft and computer networks. Their similarity to humans had led to dangerous misunderstandings in the past, because their thought processes are decidedly different. They have no concept of friendship; they are bound to leaders or associations by a loyalty code which determines their actions. They have no word for trust, but fourteen for betrayal, and their standard way of resolving disputes is by an officially-sanctioned assassination system. It is a minefield for a human to work in, and the paidhi has to be very good to succeed.

Bren Cameron thought he had established a good relationship with the atevi leader but finds himself apparently betrayed, the target of rival associations who are opposed to the human presence. He needs all of his diplomatic abilities to survive as the situation rapidly slides out of control.

Cherryh is good at portraying the alienness of other races. The atevi are more than funny-looking humans, although perhaps not a lot more different from ourselves than were, say, medieval Japanese. As a result, Bren Cameron struggles to understand the nature of the relationship he has with the two atevi bodyguards on whom he has to rely. The author's story-telling skills drew me in and held my attention throughout. She is rather indulgent in allowing her hero long periods of introspection, with pages at a time filled with nothing but his thoughts, but despite this I found Foreigner absorbing and was sorry when it finished – a rare feeling for me these days. Whether I want to invest the time to plough through another eight volumes (and counting) I'm not so sure, but I might well try the next one and see how it goes.
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I notice that a couple more reviews of my alternate World War 2 novel The Foresight War have appeared on Amazon: one each on the UK and USA sites. I was wryly amused to see that one reviewer awarded it 1/5 and the other 5/5. Some contrasting excerpts:

"Good idea, but characters are one dimensional, too much detail on weapons sizes/capability etc. not enough tension created."

"What I liked about this was it didn't get too focused on personalities, love interests, or that sort of thing. Also, it was almost non-stop action. If you like Tom Clancy's novels - the ones where the Russians invade the West, for example - you'd love this. It's really 'techy'."

Which just demonstrates, yet again, that book reviews are decidedly personal, and can say as much about the reviewer as they do about the story.

I have rewritten my introduction to the book as well as updating the list of reviews (good and bad) HERE, where you can also read the first two chapters on-line.

Professor A. M. Low and the 'Bunst' stories

I started reading SFF in the mid-1950s and, although I recollect very little of what – or who – I was reading at that time, one name has somehow stuck in my memory over all of those years through some quirk of memory; that of Professor A. M. Low. Recently I decided to track down this memory and was pleasantly surprised to find that he has a Wikipedia entry. Reading through it, it became clear that he was a lot more than a writer of children's SF stories; an engineer, inventor and research physicist, he was involved in experiments with radio-controlled aircraft and rockets during World War 1. He belonged to many different organisations in several fields and was a founder member and President of the British Interplanetary Society. He also wrote some forty books, many of them intended to explain scientific matters to the layman. This sounded like a man after my own heart, and another search pulled up a couple of his books for sale second-hand; Modern Armaments, published in 1939, and one of his four novels, Adrift in the Stratosphere (1937).

I read Modern Armaments with particular interest, especially because of its date of publication. It is an easy read, intended for the layman, and explains the principles of modern weaponry very clearly, although with little in the way of examples of actual equipment or hard data. Low took a broad view of his subject, with chapters on explosives, optics, parachutes, armour and the military uses of concrete, as well as the expected topics of army, navy and air force weapons. Some of his opinions reflected the mistaken and rather complacent views of the British military at the time: that submarines would pose little threat in a future war because of the advances made in detection systems; that contemporary anti-aircraft fire control systems would serve very well to protect warships against air attack; and that light tanks would predominate in any future conflict with little role for heavier vehicles other than in a direct assault.

He goes into some detail about locating aircraft by sound, although he doesn't mention the giant acoustic mirrors on the south-east coast for locating incoming bombers. He does not, of course, discuss radar, although there is a rather coy reference to experiments with devices which detect "the reflection of ether vibrations". He holds some interesting views on chemical warfare, pointing out that laws to restrict warfare would inevitably be broken in any major conflict and that the use of poison gas was far more humane than bullets or shell fragments, with casualties suffering a much lower death rate. On looking ahead, he discusses and dismisses the prospect of "death rays". Despite some flaws, this is a good book displaying a lot of sense as well as a clear understanding of armaments. However, I could have done without the long moral peroration on the nature of warfare which constitutes the entire first chapter.

Having absorbed that, I turned to Adrift in the Stratosphere with anticipation. I didn't expect it to be great literature, and I was aware that it was only intended for children, but given the author's interests I expected a tale which would be based on the scientific knowledge of the time. Sadly it was a major disappointment, being a barely readable fantasy in which hardly any of the "science" is correct or even remotely feasible. Three young men stumble across a stratospheric research vehicle being built in an inventor's barn (as one does) and accidentally launch it onto space, having various death-defying adventures before (inevitably) returning safely home to a hero's welcome. I didn't object to the hostile Martians who tried to kill them with various death rays (typical of SF of the period), but for the rest…There is no point in going through it in detail but it includes such matters as huge space-living dragons whose fiery breath almost overcomes the lads in their (sealed?) spaceship; Mars being approached in only a few hours while travelling at the ferocious speed of almost a thousand miles per hour (!); and "islands in the stratosphere" on which live humans with a perfect command of English. I'll leave it at that. It does make me appreciate the quality of modern fiction for young adults!

By another quirk of memory, I had remembered really enjoying a series of stories about a lad called Bunst which I was sure were by Professor Low but which turned out to be by someone else: John Newton Chance, who also published as John Lymington and under various other names. He has a Wiki entry, too. He wrote six children's books in the "Bunst" series, and I managed to find a copy of the penultimate one: Bunst and the Secret Six, published in 1951. On reading it I recalled one detail of the plot so and must have previously read it, some time in the late 1950s. The books feature a boy of unstated age but probably early to mid teens, whose nickname is a shortened version of "bunstuffer" from his habit of constantly eating. He is intelligent, resourceful, phlegmatic and mechanically minded, and works as an assistant to a scatterbrained and excitable inventor, an elderly ex-military type called Audacious Cotterell. This particular novel involves radio-controlled model aircraft, a secret new high explosive, a gang of six spies who try to steal it, and much chasing and hiding. It rather reminded me of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps, only on a smaller scale, written for children and with a constant undercurrent of humour. The style is very much of its innocent time, but I still found it an enjoyable read. Good to know that my reading tastes as a young lad weren't all bad!

The Inheritance by George Timmons

John More, a man from the mid-21st century, recovers from a spacecraft crash to find himself two thousand years in the future. The world has been through a terrible time in the interim, with wars and Dark Times as bad as anything in human history. However, it has for centuries enjoyed a settled and civilised existence, based on small communities which are self-sufficient in food and which trade for their other needs. Despite this, technology is advanced, with a comprehensive information network and high-speed trains running in vacuum tunnels.

More has difficulty settling in to his new environment and in particular understanding how the utopian society works. Everything seems too good to be true; everyone does their share of all kinds of jobs to help the community and appears to have everything they need to live in comfort without any excessive consumption. Crime and immorality seem to be virtually non-existent and, most unbelievable of all, children are quiet, polite and well-behaved! He gradually discovers that the key to this is the strong Christian faith which forms the basis of the society. The story then focuses, for much of its length, on the religious and philosophical debates in which More engages as he gradually becomes converted to their faith while being increasingly attracted to a young widow and her son. Only at the end does the drama get moving again as More is faced with the opportunity to return to his own time. His decision, and the repercussions which follow, form the conclusion.

It soon becomes obvious to the reader that The Inheritance isn't really an SFF novel; it's an argument for religious faith within a fictional shell. As such, its principal appeal is to those who are, or are interested in becoming, Christians. And it promotes not just any Christianity, but an idealistic vision of a kind of religious communism (which is, I suspect, unlikely to gain it much support among US Christians). Since I am not religious, I did not find the tale particularly appealing and skimmed over much of the long tracts of debate.

From the SFF credibility viewpoint, I have some problems with the technical base of his ideal society. How such advanced technology was developed and maintained in such a fundamentally rural society was unexplained. Mass transport systems such as trains also don't make much sense with a low and dispersed population. And while I can believe that pencils would still exist in the fifth millennium, I find it harder to believe that word processors familiar to More would still be around.

It also has weaknesses as a work of fiction. The author is fond of the omniscient viewpoint and sometimes informs the reader what different people are thinking within the same conversation. I don't care for this, as it tends to remove dramatic tension. I also found More a rather unsympathetic character, which doesn't help in getting engaged with the story. Finally, the ending was something of a disappointment; I thought that the author was building up to a classic SF twist finale, but in fact there was a strange and (to me) rather unsatisfying conclusion.

It may seem unfair for me to review this, given my own position on religion, but the publishers did send the review copy to the British Fantasy Society (who passed it to me) so I have assessed it on its merits as an SFF novel rather than a religious work.

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And now for some welcome relief in these hard economic times. I have a seasonal gift for one and all: a complete e-book version of my SF novel Scales FREE!

You can find details of the book, plus reviews and zip files of two versions of the e-book (Acrobat and MS Reader) on my site HERE

I hope you enjoy it: if you do, spread the word, if you don't, please tell me what you didn't like about it!

Some publications from the British Science Fiction Association

A bit of catching up needed, plus an apology. The last time I mentioned the first publication described below, I attributed it to the British Fantasy Society: I'll try to keep my organisations in order in future! Anyway, I've finally got around to reading it, along with some more recent publications from the BSFA.

The earlier one is Fantasy & SF: The Roots of Genre, which consists of two long articles taken from two books on SFF criticism: Rhetorics of Fantasy by Farah Mendlesohn and What It Is We Do When We Read Science Fiction by Paul Kincaid. Both articles are concerned with analysing their respective genres. Mendelsohn identifies four different types of fantasy: Portal-Quest (e.g. 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'), Immersive (the Gormenghast trilogy), Intrusion (when the supernatural affects our own world), and Liminal (which regards fantastic intrusions as normal). Kincaid devotes his article to trying to define science fiction, concluding that the term includes such a broad range of works that one neat definition isn't possible.

I have to confess that I am rather sceptical about intense academic analyses of this type. My reaction tends to be along the lines of "well, that's mildly interesting, but it adds nothing to my appreciation of a story." However, coming up with definitions and arguing about them can be fun, so naturally I can't resist putting up a conceptual coconut for others to shy at. I should say that I've not read much about this, so my thoughts are no doubt treading a well-worn path.

Rather than start by trying to define SF or fantasy, I'll take a step back and consider both, plus other related genres, which can all be encompassed by a term like "fantastical fiction" (I have seen "fantasy" used to cover all of this, but I think that's confusing). The definition of fantastical fiction, or FF, could be something like this: "Fiction in which a principal plot element is not of this world." I think that's fairly comprehensive if somewhat loose, although it's obviously open to debate; I suspect that any definition would be disputed by the majority of SFF readers!

The different elements, or sub-genres, of FF can then be defined in terms of FF, for example: Science Fiction is FF in which an attempt is made to convince the reader that it might possibly happen. A further subset of SF is Mundane SF, which is limited to the science we know now. Alternative History is FF set in the past, in which a change at some point leads to a different history. Fantasy is, well, everything else within FF…but it includes its own subsets, in the form of fairy tales, horror, and vampire stories.

Obviously, not all stories fall neatly into one particular category. There are lots of grey areas, and also lots which contain elements of more than one type of FF – or from outside the FF genre altogether (e.g. crime fiction set in the future), as Kincaid observes. One genre which usually contains elements of SF is the techno-thriller, which involves technologies which are not yet available, although they might well be in the near future. I was thinking of this when watching the hair-raising (well, it would be if I had any) BBCTV spy thriller Spooks, which has just finished its latest series. Some of their technological tricks are not available, but most may be soon (although some look to be impossible for the foreseeable future). The James Bond movies have often included SF elements, with spacecraft and invisible cars, although the latest incarnation has been dragged firmly back into the mainstream thriller category. However, I would not describe Spooks or the earlier Bond movies as SF, because that is not their primary focus; the SF bits are peripheral, not "principal plot elements".

The issue of what is, or is not, SF is also raised in the latest issue of Vector, the BSFA's "Critical Journal". It includes an article by Adam Roberts on the works of Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, who has been writing FF for years without describing it as such, or being accepted by the SFF world as one of its own. Roberts' explanation for this is that her stories don't really fit comfortably into our concept of SFF, being more concerned with mysticism. There are several other articles. Jonathan McCalmont considers SF and the laws of physics, difficult to summarise as it provides a general tour of the environs, looking at how various authors have dealt with the laws of nature in their works. Frank Ludlow writes on the "art" of reviewing, discussing the responsibility of the reviewer to produce informative and constructive reviews but also, having done so, to ignore the occasional angry reactions. Saxon Bullock discusses the TV series Lost, while Andy Sawyer examines the contents of the very first edition of Vector from 1958 (and discovers some perennial topics, such as a guide to writing SF and a discussion on the importance of characterisation). Stephen Baxter considers our fear of apocalyptic doom and our constant tendency to assume that major threats are going to turn out to be worse than they actually prove (let's hope that continues to be the case, given some of the predictions about the consequences of climate change). Graham Sleight writes about the Interzone magazine film reviews by Nick Lowe, who has been beavering away at the task for 23 years. Finally, there are no fewer than 48 substantial book reviews, which I will be studying carefully with a view to drawing up a post-Christmas purchasing list.

The third publication is Elastic Press: a Sampler, a booklet about the work of a small press which focuses on publishing single-author mixed-genre short-story anthologies and favours new authors and writing. It starts with an interview by Ian Whates of Andrew Hook, originator and owner of the Elastic Press, and includes stories from three of their books: Love in the Time of Connectivity, from Binding Energy by Daniel Marcus (the strange nature of future relationships in virtual worlds); La Macchina from The Turing Test by Chris Beckett (a new take on the old trope of robots developing sentience); and A Necklace of Ivy from The Last Reef by Gareth L Powell (a rather surreal view of an alien invasion). The purpose of the Elastic Press is unusual and worthy of support and, judging by the quality of the stories included, the books are worth buying on their merits anyway.

Creationists launch new attacks on evolution

More blurring of the boundaries between fantasy, science and fiction this week!

The fundamentalist Christians are at it again, in their constant search to find some crack in the edifice of scientific knowledge into which they can force a wedge. Their strategy is to try to find any aspect of the natural world which scientists can't yet explain, so that they can argue that its purposeful creation by God is a valid possible explanation. In this way, they hope to get their religious beliefs accepted as worthy of being taught in schools alongside science, as a major step towards their goal of embedding religion within education. The focus of this activity is in the USA, in which religion is kept out of public education by law, but there is an increasing spill-over into other countries which are on the receiving end of lots of pro-creationist publicity and teaching materials.

Many of the fundamentalists believe that the universe and everything in it was created by God exactly as described in the Bible, over a period of six days a few thousand years ago. There is the slight problem that Genesis 1 has the creation of plants, animals, man and woman in a different order to that listed in Genesis 2 – they can't both be right – but that doesn't seem to faze the creationists. The big problem they have in selling this idea to non-fundies is the vast and ever-growing body of evidence from many different fields of research (astrophysics, astronomy, geology, geomorphology, palaeontology and biology, to name the obvious ones) which clearly point to the enormous age and slow development of life, the Universe and all that. Clearly, the creationists' beliefs are pure religious dogma and stand no chance of being allowed into US state schools, as emphasised by various legal rulings.

So they switched tactics to low cunning, and during the late 1980s and 1990s developed the concept of "Intelligent Design", or ID. Here we need to mention the Discovery Institute, based in Seattle, which is a major sponsor of the "wedge" strategy for getting religious beliefs accepted within mainstream education, and is closely associated with ID and other recent attempts to subvert the ban on teaching creationism. The tactic this time was a lot more subtle. Darwin once observed that it would only take one example of a feature of a living thing which could not have evolved from some earlier feature to disprove evolution. The aim of the creationists is to identify any such feature they can, and argue that this is evidence that this must have been the act of an "intelligent designer". They carefully avoid mentioning God as the likely designer, or using the forbidden words "creation" or "religion". However, this strategy suffered a major setback in 2005 when the proposal of a school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, to teach ID was challenged in court. After a high-profile six-week trial, the verdict went against the creationists. “The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the board who voted for the ID policy,” the judge wrote. “It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would, time and again, lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID policy.” To make matters worse for the ID proponents, their prize exhibit – a complex flagellum which they claimed could not have evolved – has since been found in a simpler form, indicating an earlier stage of evolution.

So the fundies switched tactics again, to an even more subtle approach; the defence of academic freedom! They are promoting the argument that teachers have the right to hold "open discussions of scientific theories" – such as evolution – with their students, and can introduce books and other materials from outside the standard curriculum to help the students "critique" the science they are taught. This has been supported by a "teach the controversy" public campaign (ignoring the fact that as far as science is concerned, there is no controversy over the theory of evolution). This is a clever move, since who could be against academic freedom? But what it really does is open the door to an attack on evidence-based logical reasoning (the basis of the scientific method) by a belief system which rejects objective evidence and reason in favour of a dogmatic adherence to the exact words in an ancient book. Despite this, in mid-2008 Louisiana approved a state law which defends such academic freedom, and other states have been considering similar measures.

No doubt buoyed by this success, the fundamentalists have recently found what they perceive to be another point of weakness: our understanding of human consciousness (reported in the New Scientist on 25 October). In particular, they attempt to draw a distinction between the human mind and the material brain, with aim of arguing that a non-material mind is something entirely separate. It must therefore have had a separate origin, which leads into the existence of a "soul"; another angle to get a religious belief accepted as having a valid place in science. It is once again a clever move, because the nature of consciousness is an area of genuine debate among scientists working in the field, with different views being held. However, the New Scientist article points out that the arguments in favour of the mind being separate are flawed. Its proponents argue that brain scans reveal that when people use their minds to consciously change what they are thinking, this can be shown to affect brain functioning. Therefore, they say, the mind must be separate from the material brain. Their opponents point out that this is a logical non-sequitur; there is no reason why the brain cannot change itself. Furthermore, the fact that something is not yet understood by science does not mean that it will never be understood; in fact, the scientific method has a staggeringly consistent record of success in pushing back the boundaries of ignorance. If it weren't for evidence-based logical thinking we would still be living in caves and killing animals for food by throwing stones at them.

In case some readers feel that this blog is an attack on religion, I must point out that most Christians are not creationists, despite the attempt of the fundies to imply that true Christianity equals creationism; to put the debate (in the words of a car bumper sticker) in the form of "Jesus v Darwin". In most of the Christian world, creationists are in a small minority. Neither the Roman Catholic nor the Anglican churches oppose the theory of evolution. Even in the USA, which is at least 75% Christian, only 39% of the population rejects the proposition that human beings evolved from earlier species of animals (compared with 40% which accepts it, and 21% "don't knows").

Is any of this important? Does it really matter if children are taught religious beliefs as if they were on a par with science? Yes, I believe that it is and it does, very much so. What the fundamentalists are doing is attacking the basis of the knowledge which humanity has accumulated over many centuries. Knowledge acquired through patient observation of phenomena, the gathering of evidence, the development of hypotheses to account for the observations, the testing of these hypotheses (by experimentation wherever possible), and their validation by other scientists, leading to the establishment of theories which remain our best explanation for the phenomena – until contrary evidence or a theory which better fits the evidence comes along. The agenda of the fundamentalists is to sow doubt about this entire process, to encourage children to believe that rational and non-rational modes of thinking are entirely comparable and equally valid as a means of explaining the material world in which we live, rather than occupying separate aspects of human life. If they had their way, children would grow up in a world of medieval superstition, ignorant of the importance of evidence-based logical thinking, and thereby completely unequipped to deal with the increasingly complex and technical problems which we are facing, including resource depletion and climate change. From my perspective, that would be a crime against humanity.

Interzone 219

The welcome arrival of the December issue of the British news, reviews and short-story SFF mag. To cut to the chase – the short stories:

Everything That Matters by Jeff Spock (illustrated by Kenn Brown, who also did the cover): a traditional SF thriller about hunting for alien treasure in the oceans of another planet, humans adapted by surgery to breathe underwater, murderous 25 metre long sharks, and revenge. Great stuff!

When Thorns are the Tips of Trees by Jason Sanford (illustrated by Vincent Chong): a much stranger tale about a highly contagious virus which causes people to turn into trees which are still capable of communication. This one, like his earlier surreal story The Ships Like Clouds, Risen by Their Rain (Interzone 217) is likely to stick in the memory.

The Shenu by Alexander Marsh Freed: people surviving in a world full of superstition – or is it magic?

The Fifth Zhi by Mercurio D. Rivera (illustrated by Paul Drummond): disposable clones sent to rid the world of a vast alien growth which penetrates the planet.

The Country of the Young by Gord Sellar (illustrated by Daniel Bristow-Bailey): explores some of the problems of eternal life – and of not having it when you are surrounded by the forever young.

Butterfly, Falling at Dawn by Aliette De Bodard (illustrated by Paul Drummond): another story in the author's alternative world in which North America is shared with Chinese and Mexica (Aztec) nations, following The Lost Xuyan Bride in Interzone 213. Detective work amid clashes between strange cultures. I'm looking forward to future stories in this world, and eventually an anthology, please!

One of the films reviewed in the magazine is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The first of the series, Raiders of the Lost Ark (which has become fixed in my mind as Riders of the Last Auk – I really should stop playing with words!) is one of my all-time favourite films. The series has inevitably become repetitive, since the plots are all about the resourceful archaeologist's trips to strange places to make exotic discoveries (with equally exotic dangers involving deadly creatures, lots of chases and fighting thrown in), and the sequels are not as good as the original. I recently got around to watching Crystal Skull, in which the plot is stretched to include the Area 51/Roswell/alien fantasy world, which does it no favours as it adds a further level of disbelief. However, it is still an entertaining couple of hours with some laugh-out-loud moments.

It seems that I liked the new Indiana Jones movie more than Interzone's reviewer did, but we changed places in our opinions of Lost in Austen, the ITV serial about a modern girl – a Jane Austen fan – who finds herself transported to the world of Austen's 'Pride & Prejudice'. I gave up part way through the second episode, for two reasons: first, the humour – in fact, the plot in general – was based around a series of embarrassing situations, the kind which make me cringe rather than laugh. Secondly, I simply didn't like the heroine. I do need to be able to empathise to at least some degree with the principal character if I am to enjoy any story (on screen or in print) and I just couldn't do it. Maybe it's a generational thing.

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny

I first (and last) read this some 35 years ago, and recently dug out my dusty old paperback to refresh my memory in order to participate in the discussion of it held in the Classic SF forum. Zelazny was one of my favourite authors then, and I was curious to see how this unusual tale stood up to the test of time.

Lord of Light is set in the far future on another planet, with Earth an almost forgotten memory. The planet has been settled by the crew and passengers of a colony ship from Earth, but society has developed in a strange way. The crew have commandeered all of the technical resources and keep the descendents of the passengers at a medieval level of existence. To reinforce this, the crew have adopted the identities of Hindu gods, and live in "Heaven"; a perfect city situated at one of the poles, with a vast transparent dome protecting the area.

There are two other unusual features. The more powerful of the "gods" have developed mutant powers, reinforced by technology, which match the attributes of the mythical gods. And technology has made the transmigration of souls from one body to another a routine matter. Some of the original crew members have survived in this way, transferring as they age to new bodies specially grown for the purpose. This is also on offer to the general population, but they have to earn it, or risk being reborn as an animal – a powerful coercive tool.

Not all of the original crew are happy about this situation, and the story is all about the rebellion led by one of them, the 'Lord of Light' of the title, who wishes to destroy Heaven and bring the benefits of advanced technology to all. As a part of his campaign, he reintroduces Buddhism, and becomes regarded as a great religious teacher.

The structure of the story is rather disconcerting, as only the first and last chapters are set in the "present day", the majority of the book reverting to an account of the Lord of Light's previous, failed, attempt at rebellion. As the characters are gradually fleshed out in later chapters, I found myself flipping back to the first chapter to remind myself of who was who.

The writing style is quite leisurely, the author being happy to let his characters enjoy long conversations and intellectual debates, resulting in a certain lack of tension. He also plays with words, setting up some good jokes (one of the few things I remembered from my first reading of the book was the way in which he managed to work up to the punch-line: "then the fit hit the Shan"!). While the hero is a likeable character, there are few insights into his background or the motivation for his determined resistance. Despite these reservations, the intelligence and quality of the writing held my attention to the end. Unusual indeed, but well worth the time to re-read.
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A recent special edition of the New Scientist magazine focusing on science fiction is online, HERE

The Folly of Growth

OK, not fiction again, but surely relevant to anyone interesting in reading or writing near-future SF. This concerns the 18th October issue of New Scientist magazine, which has several linked articles under the general heading "The Folly of Growth". These explore the contention that the world's economic system, based on endless growth, is fundamentally unsustainable. Authors of the articles include a Professor of Sustainable Development, the founder of the David Suzuki Foundation which investigates how society can live in balance with the natural world, a former senior economist at the World Bank (now a Professor of Ecological Economics), the Policy Director of the New Economics Foundation, the author of 'The Bridge at the End of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability', and the chair of the board of the Transnational Institute which addresses global problems.

Collectively, these make the point that our economic system needs constant growth to be successful, but there are finite limits on fertile agricultural land, cheap fresh water and other natural resources. With the world's population constantly growing, and everyone trying to improve their standard of living, this can't go on forever (or even for much longer). Let's look at the problems in more detail.

Underlying everything is the continuing increase in the world's population. Yes, I know that this is likely to level off and may even begin to decline when (if?) the poorer countries become richer. But by the time that happens, it will be a lot higher than it is now, and it is already far too high to enable everyone to enjoy a comfortable standard of living. One of the authors points out that if everyone on the planet enjoyed the same level of per-capita resource use as the EU, the resources of five Earths would be needed to supply that. If the global resource use were raised to the level of US citizens, fifteen Earths would be needed.

This links to the second problem, which is the entirely legitimate aspiration of the poorer parts of the world to achieve the same standard of living as the richer part. As they work towards achieving that, there will inevitably be a massive impact on resource demands.

The third problem, also linked to the others, is that increasing industrialisation is having a significant impact on our atmosphere, which is in turn beginning to affect our climate. No-one knows what this will lead to and where it will end, but given that our current pattern of agriculture, settlement and infrastructure is based on existing patterns of climate and sea levels, any change from these will be likely to cause serious problems.

Coincidentally, many related points were made in the recent "Living Planet Report" by the WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network, which argues that the planet is headed for an ecological "credit crunch", with our current demands on natural resources overreaching what the Earth can sustain by almost a third.

Economists may argue that there is no necessary link between growth and resource use, and point to the experience of Western European countries to prove this. But the use of resources in these countries has been kept down by exporting much of the production of consumer goods to cheap-labour economies elsewhere in the world, so those resources are still being used up somewhere to satisfy western demands.

Also, the EU situation of a relatively static use of resources does not apply in those less-developed countries which are now aiming for a dramatic improvement in their standard of living. This means motorbikes instead of bicycles, cars instead of motorbikes, flying off on foreign holidays, eating a lot more meat, buying lots of fridges, freezers, washing machines, TVs, DVDs and other nice-to-haves, plus the associated huge increase in the demand for power. The classic case is China (with a population three times that of the EU 15) whose use of all kinds of resources has been accelerating rapidly; partly, of course, to satisfy western demand for consumer goods.

The ultimate consequences of current economic trends will be ever-increasing prices for natural resources (and everything using them) as a result of the combination of growing demand and increasing scarcity. We see this in miniature with the rise in the price of oil over the past few years. This has recently dipped due to nervousness over the international recession, but no-one can reasonably doubt that this is anything other than a short-term respite. The underlying trend is for a continuing increase in demand, but the quantity of oil in the ground is finite and it becomes ever more expensive to extract.

The articles suggest ways in which we can ameliorate the problems and achieve long-term sustainability, but they involve major changes to our current economic system. Of course, no politician wants to hear that, because we (the short-sighted public) don't want any restrictions on our ability to burn up resources as we please, and politicians only look as far ahead as the next election. Business doesn't want to know either, as it would hit their profits. So in dealing with the present economic crisis, we charge on towards the iceberg while arguing about rearranging the deckchairs.

The New Scientist articles make the point that some growth is still sustainable, as long as it is based on genuine improvements in the efficiency with which resources are used. Advanced technologies can help here, but they are most likely to be used in the richer countries which can afford them. What should we be doing? Trying to convert to a steady-state economy, basically by using two measures: a cap-and-trade system under which companies can buy and sell emissions permits, and a change in the basis of taxation, to tax heavily resources at the point at which they are removed from the biosphere: for example oil as it is pumped from the ground, or fish as they are removed from the sea. This will stimulate the development of renewable energy sources and the search for sustainable alternatives to current practices. The tax effect will be regressive (hitting poorer people the hardest) so some of the income will need to be used to fund benefits programmes for them: the rest could be used to cut direct taxation. Other economic measures will aim to reduce interest rates to a very low level and force banks to keep large reserves, limiting their scope for risky lending.

Like it or not, we will eventually be forced to do things in a different way, and that will mean a significant reduction in the use of resources by the wealthy countries. Our choice is between gradually altering our economic system to introduce these changes in a planned way, or to do our very best to ignore the issue for as long as possible. No prizes for guessing which is more likely.

Nothing could better illustrate the schizophrenic attitude of our politicians than the coincidence in mid-October this year of the UK's Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change committing the country to meet much tougher CO2 reduction targets (an 80% cut by 2050), on the same day that the Prime Minister was putting pressure on oil companies to reduce the price of fuel so we can all afford to burn more of the stuff. It reminds me of the old prayer of the sinner, which went something like: "Lord, let me be virtuous – but not yet!"

Orion by Ben Bova, plus some films

I haven't read much by this author, but have previously thought of him as concentrating on hard SF. I was therefore surprised by the fact that Orion (in my opinion, at any rate, despite later plot twists) falls into the fantasy camp.

The story begins in the present day and is told in the first person, by a man called Orion. He has some unusual abilities (for reasons which he doesn't understand) and finds himself involved in a titanic struggle between two apparently all-powerful men, Ormazd and Ahriman (the names of two gods in Zoroastrianism who represent good and evil respectively). He is also strongly drawn to Anya, a woman who is connected in some way with Ormazd. Orion is told that Ahriman intends to destroy humanity and that his role is to prevent this. In the attempt to carry out his task, Orion seems to die – only to find himself transported back in time, facing the same enemy yet again. This pattern is repeated, Orion going steadily further back in time towards the prehistoric war which caused Ahriman's hatred of humanity. There he discovers that all was not what it seemed and he has a difficult choice to make.

The cover of my edition has glowing references from Isaac Asimov and Spider Robinson, but I have to say I was rather less impressed. The writing style reminded me far more of a typical 1950s or even pre-WW2 SF novel, rather than a product of the 1980s. It doesn't get off to a good start, the first page being an infodump in which Orion baldly spells out his unusual abilities (clearly Bova doesn't have much time for the "show don't tell" orthodoxy). It does get better as the story develops, and the plot was intriguing enough for me to read through to the end, but I found it difficult to empathise with Orion. His character remains underdeveloped, and it's hard to care much about what happens to people who keep dying and being reborn (all of the "how will they survive this?" tension gets dissipated) unless they are much more strongly written than this.
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I had heard that Hellboy (the original, not the recent sequel) was a cut above the average comic-based superhero movie so I gave it a spin. Well, it was watchable, like an episode of Die Hard featuring supernatural beings, and it did have some wry humour, so it gets an "OK".
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I've also seen Galaxy Quest, about the jaded cast of a long-running TV space opera who are whisked off by aliens who think that their broadcasts are genuine and need help in fighting a war. The film takes an entertaining swipe at the cliches of space opera and the devotion of its fans. It is an amusing, light-hearted contrast from most movies these days, and is a lot more enjoyable than most "serious" SFF films. A must for all Star Trek fans – or at least, the ones who can take a joke!

The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

Kornbluth and especially Pohl were formidable "golden age" SF authors in their own right (Pohl, who is now 90, carrying on into recent times; Kornbluth died young in 1958), but are still remembered for their collaborations. One of these, Wolfbane, was reviewed on this blog on 21 October 2007, but the best known is probably The Space Merchants, first published in 1953.

The title is rather misleading because space travel doesn't feature at all until right at the end of the book. The story is set a century in the future, at a time when humanity, still confined to the Earth, has expanded to many times its present population. The teeming billions are crowded into cramped apartments, fed on artificially-created food and sold addictive coffee to drink, use pedal-powered machines rather than cars, wash in salt water because fresh water is too precious, and are ruthlessly manipulated by all-powerful marketing organisations, with the lowest levels of society trapped in commercial slavery. Governments have become almost powerless in the face of the might of the big marketing corporations, whose only goal is to increase sales, and the US President is a figurehead.

Living in this dystopia is a successful marketing executive, Mitchell Courtney, who is given the task of securing control for his organisation of the forthcoming colonisation and terraforming of Venus (little was known about conditions on Venus when the book was written and they are portrayed as being less hostile than they are now known to be, but still with an unbreathable atmosphere, high temperatures and no water).

Events begin to slide out of control for Courtney as he becomes embroiled in the savage in-fighting of office politics and the open warfare of inter-corporate battles, is kidnapped, dumped at the lowest level of society and approached by the Consies; an underground conservationist organisation arguing against the ruthless exploitation of Earth's resources. His experiences shape his actions as he tries to battle his way back to his star-grade executive position.

At one level The Space Merchants is an amusing satire on increasing commercialisation, but there are clear echoes of the political times in which it was written. Pohl had been a member of the Young Communist League until he resigned as a result of the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939, and much of his idealism showed through in this and other works. The period when this book was written coincided with Senator McCarthy's notorious anti-communist witch-hunt, and there is an obvious parallel between the contemporary public attitude to the "Commies" and the hated and despised Consies in the story.

I have to admit that I generally dislike dystopian SF but this is an easy read, especially since it is only 170 pages long. This is a landmark novel in raising issues about the uncontrolled population expansion and the associated exhaustion of resources, coupled with the ever-increasing power of commercial organisations in general and marketing in particular. Many novels on similar themes subsequently emerged, but this is one of the key works which every SF fan should read.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre

A bit off-topic this week in that the book I want to talk about isn't, by most definitions, science fiction or fantasy. However, my excuse is that it includes elements of science, fiction and fantasy – even though it is a non-fiction book about health care!

The author of Bad Science is a doctor working in the National Health Service who also writes a column for a national newspaper (The Guardian) and maintains a website on the same subject. His topic is the way in which the public is misled by claims made about medications and medical treatments; not just by practitioners of alternative and complementary medicine (including nutritionists) but also by pharmaceutical companies and, most of all, the news media. His writing style is journalistic rather than academic and is often hilariously trenchant as he names and shames some very well-known individuals, companies and newspapers. He must have some hard-working lawyers!

Bad Science is not just an entertaining read, it is highly informative. Goldacre not only provides lots of evidence to back up his denunciations, he constantly drives home the essential message concerning medical trials: that many of them do not achieve the quality "gold standard", for which there must be a placebo-taking control group; there must be a completely randomised selection of those in the trial and control groups; and the trials must be conducted under double-blind conditions (that is, neither the participants, nor those doling out the pills to them, know who is getting the trial medicine and who is getting the placebo). Failure to follow these precepts has been shown to have a major distorting effect on the outcome, and the author gives many examples of this.

In the first part of the book, Goldacre's critical eye is turned onto alternative medicine in general and homeopathy in particular. He shows that there is a direct relationship between the results of the trials in this field and the rigorousness of the way in which the trials were conducted. Put simply, trials which are conducted in accordance with the "gold standard" precepts listed above show that homeopathic pills work no better than placebos. As he points out, the link between the mind and the body is powerful and complex, and still not entirely understood (sometimes patients report feeling better even when they have been told that they are being given sugar pills instead of medicine!). Any benefits from alternative medicine appear to be in the ritual associated with them, as with shamanistic magic, which convinces customers that this must be doing them some good.

Next in his firing line come the nutritionists and peddlers of vitamin pills. The author's message is this: to give yourself the best chance of enjoying good health, eat a variety of fresh fruit and vegetables; drink alcohol only in moderation; don't smoke; and take regular exercise. He says that's basically all there is to it; there is no valid evidence that "superfoods" work any better than other fruits and vegetables, or that you can further improve your health by taking vitamin pills or dietary supplements. Amazingly, despite the almost universal acceptance of the idea that taking fish-oil pills for omega-3 fatty acids is good for brain development, there is no trial evidence which supports this for the general population.

Goldacre also takes a swipe at the illogicality of the "detoxing" and "antioxidant" fads, for which he argues that there is no clear case (in fact, the most exhaustive trials of antioxidant vitamin pills show a slightly increased chance of death compared with control groups taking placebos). He points out the tendency of all purveyors of quackery to "cherry-pick" the results of trials, quoting only the few (usually less rigorous) ones which appear to support their claims while ignoring the vast quantity of much larger and more reliable trials which demonstrate no effect beyond placebo.

In the light of the above, one of the intriguing aspects of this subject is the very high profile in the news media (including quality newspapers and the BBC) of alternative medicines, superfoods and vitamin pills, when there is no valid evidence that they work, and plenty that they don't. Goldacre explores this issue too, pointing out the money spent on promotion, the relentless efforts of the practitioners in getting their message across, and their immediate and often aggressive responses to any criticism. What he finds more shameful is that some universities have fallen into the trap and are offering courses in these fields, possibly blinded to the lack of any valid scientific basis by the popularity of the subjects and the universities' need to put on courses which will attract students and earn money.

So why are these "remedies" so popular? Partly, it seems, because we like the idea of a pill which will make our problems go away. The author quotes a recent large-scale trial of whether better parenting techniques could improve the behaviour of problem children, which resulted in dramatic benefits. Yet this was ignored by the news media, which constantly focus on pills and diet instead. I suspect that this may be because parents don't like to consider that it may be their failings which have caused the problems, nor that correcting them will involve a considerable effort over a long period of time. How much easier it is to be able to blame something else, and to dish out a magic pill for it.

The major pharmaceutical companies ("big pharma") are next up for attack. First, the introduction of new medicines to solve real diseases is slowing considerably, so the companies are inventing new medical conditions which their existing medicines are claimed to treat. He quotes "social anxiety disorder", "female sexual dysfunction" and "night eating syndrome" as three examples of problems for which big pharma are peddling their wares, even though they are probably not best treated by taking a pill. Much of the effort in developing new drugs is on devising variations of existing drugs which are sufficiently different to establish a new ten-year period during which the companies have sole rights to make them. And of course, big pharma has no interest in developing cures for the killer diseases which only affect the Third World (no money in them) nor in promoting effective and cheap remedies which use common ingredients which can't be patented (no money in those, either). To be fair, I don't blame the companies for these last two issues – as Goldacre points out, they are profit-making businesses, not charities – but they do highlight the need for some method of funding the companies (or somebody) to carry out such unprofitable but important work.

The author describes in detail the way in which big pharma can distort the results of trials of their new products. For a start, such trials are funded by the companies themselves, and he quotes strong statistical evidence that the source of funding biases the results in favour of the funder. He then describes in considerable detail the different techniques which big pharma uses in order to present trial results in the best possible light (including burying negative outcomes) to get approval for their products and to persuade doctors to prescribe them. Even without such deliberate manipulation, negative outcomes of trials are less well-reported than positive ones anyway, an effect known as "publication bias". All of this results in medicines being presented as far more beneficial than they really are (in fact, it was recently reported in New Scientist that some well-known medicines don't work at all, or work far less well, when patients are not told what they are being given and what they are supposed to do).

Despite all of the above, Goldacre's major criticisms are focused on the news media for the way in which they report science in general and medical science in particular. He takes as examples two recent high-profile issues in the UK; the prevalence of MRSA in hospitals, and the alleged association between MMR vaccinations and autism. The first story was fuelled by positive MRSA readings from hospital swabs taken by undercover journalists, but it transpired that these were processed by a man unqualified to do such work, in an amateur lab in his garden shed. Those samples which were double-checked by proper labs produced different results. Yet the newspapers continued to use the amateur lab because they knew that this would provide positive results, which made for a better scare story (which is not to say that there isn't a problem with MRSA in British hospitals – but its scale was exaggerated).

The attitude of many newspapers to the MMR scare was even more shameful; they accepted the word of one doctor that there was a link with autism, on the basis of one very small-scale study which didn't even meet the minimum standards for a trial. They gave this at least equal weight to the assurances given by the medical profession that there was no link, and ignored huge and properly conducted large-scale studies which demonstrated this. In fact, one newspaper waged a vicious campaign against MMR for several years, until many people were left feeling that there must be something in the story, and that the government and the medical establishment were just trying to cover it up. As a result, take-up of the MMR jab has declined to the point that measles, mumps and rubella, which had been on the way out, are making a comeback.

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of the news media reporting is not that some lower-quality papers uncritically report bad science as if it were fact, but that even the best newspapers – and the BBC, heaven help us – are all guilty of bad science reporting. Most of them have science correspondents who know better, but once a major and exciting (i.e. controversial) science story breaks, the job of covering it is often given to higher-status mainstream reporters who are ignorant of science and proper trial protocols, dumb down the issues, and sometimes ignore the conclusions of scientific studies in order to dig into the data to find nuggets which they can take out of context to fuel the conspiracy fires. While it can be argued that the news media are not entirely to blame for all of this (after all, they only do it because lots of people want to read about such things – we get the news media that we deserve) it is highly irresponsible for them to whip up unfounded panic, resulting in serious medical consequences, in the interest of sales.

One result of all of this "bad science" is an appalling lack of understanding of science, including basic statistics, throughout society. The author quotes a couple of criminal trials which resulted in the defendants being imprisoned for murder on the basis of highly questionable statistical evidence (one of them was later released).

The only criticism I have of the book is that the characteristic which makes it such an entertaining read – the author's unbridled attacks on what he considers to be bad science – also mean that it is more of a polemical work than a balanced account. However, the evidence and analysis which Goldacre provides is compelling, and this is a book which everyone should read. It is similar in its theme (although most of the content is different) to Gilovich's equally important book How We Know What Isn't So, reviewed in this blog on 1 August this year.