Missing airliners

 

Two very different novels were recently drawn together in my mind, since both feature missing airliners. One is a straightforward thriller with no SFF elements, the other is….rather different. So naturally I read them in quick succession, to compare and contrast.

Without a Trace by Mari Hannah begins with a disaster; an airliner disappears off the radar as it nears the end of its journey from the UK to New York. The recovery of fragments from the sea confirm that the plane was violently destroyed and there is little doubt that sabotage was involved. The main mystery is why? None of the usual suspects claims “credit” for the crime. 

However, the main focus of the story is on whether one particular passenger actually boarded the plane as planned. This is of desperate importance to DCI Kate Daniels, as the particular passenger is Jo, her lover. Finding out exactly what happened to Jo takes up most of the story, providing a  roller-coaster ride as all manner of diversions and red herrings drive Kate close to breakdown. 

The pace of the story is frantic, the mood tense and emotional. The investigation is also a classic police procedural, reflecting the law enforcement backgrounds of both the author and her partner. Difficult to put down. 

The Anomaly by Herve Le Tellier is a contrast in every way. It begins by presenting a series of short chapters, each one focused on the life of a particular individual. One is a mathematician studying the probability of accidents to US passenger planes, another is a terminally ill cancer patient, one is an assassin, one an airline pilot, one a pop star, one a lawyer defending a medical malpractice case, and then there is a novelist working on a strange story called “The Anomaly”. At first there appears to be nothing linking them, until the Boeing  787 some of them are travelling in flies through a violent but unpredicted storm which damages the plane and nearly causes it to crash. The only other link is that several of the passengers are subsequently visited by the FBI.

At this point, the story moves up a gear. A hastily summoned high-level and very secret meeting was briefed by US security as follows:

The 787 on the tarmac is the reason we are all here: it opened communication with Kennedy Airport at exactly 19:03 hours today, 24 June. It identified itself as flight Air France 006 from Paris to New York. The plane reported significant damage. The captain states that he is David Markle. We are here because today’s Air France 006 flight already landed more than four hours ago, at the scheduled time of 16:35 hours. But it was a different aircraft with a different captain. On the other hand, an Air France Boeing 787, with the same reference Air France 006, with exactly the same damage as this one, piloted by the same Commander Markle, with exactly the same crew and passengers and identical in every way, landed at JFK Airport but at 17:17 hours on the 10 March. Precisely one hundred and six days ago. 

This causes some consternation, as might be imagined. Particularly when the "March" versions of the people meet with the "June" versions. Sometimes they get on well, sometimes they don't (only one of the assassins survives!) and there are various subtle changes....e.g. the June novelist is not working on a story called "The Anomaly".

It emerges that China has been the target of a similar incident, and the debates concerning possible causes are intense. The US panel of scientists and other experts draws up a list of possibilities, the simplest (albeit unpopular) being that our universe, and everything and everyone it, is merely a simulation running in some unimaginably vast and powerful computer, for what purpose is unknown.

Then another version of the 787 appears in the American skies...

Songs of Earth and Power by Greg Bear

 

Greg Bear (1951- 2022) was a well-known SF writer who concentrated mainly on classic science-focused SF. However, early on in his career, he wrote two novels in the fantasy genre which are very different: The Infinity Concerto (1984) and its sequel The Serpent Mage (1986). These form one continuous story and have since been published together as Songs of Earth and Power. 

 

The blurb for The Infinity Concerto reads: 

There is a song you dare not sing, a melody that you dare not play, a concerto that you dare not hear. It is called a Song of Power. It is a gateway to another world - a gate that will lock behind you as you pass, barring you from the Earth forever. When the Song calls to you, you must resist. For it is a world of great danger as well as great beauty - and it is not good to be human in the Realm of the Sidhe.

Michael Perrin is a teenage poet who befriends a composer, Arno Waltiri, who has written a concerto whose performance had some strange effects on the audience. Some of them disappeared not long afterwards, including David Clarkham, another friend of the composer who had bequeathed him a book and a key to Clarkham's house. Michael acquires the key and enters the house, only to discover that it is a gateway to another world - the Realm of the Sidhe - from which there is no escape.  

The Sidhe (think Tolkien's elves, hostile to humans) only permit those humans who have arrived in the Realm to live in one town: Euterpe. There is another town nearby where the Breeds live (the result of mating between humans and Sidhe); Halftown. These towns, and the Blasted Plain desert surrounding them, are known as the Pact Lands. Beyond the Pact Lands, where humans are not allowed to travel, is Sidhedark. 

All of this was the creation of one of the Sidhe gods - Adonna, or Tonn - in order to provide a land where the Sidhe could live in peace after a ferocious inter-species war many millions of years before. More recently, tensions had arisen over Clarkham's ambition to establish hiself in power as the Isomage, the most powerful of the handful of mages (magicians capable of "grand magic") in the Realm.

Michael is "adopted" by the Crane Women, a trio of Breed sisters of great age, who train him in some of the skills he will need to survive. This enables him to cross the Blasted Plain and enter Sidhedark, where he learns a great deal more about the nature of the Realm and its various inhabitants. He discovers that a Song of Power does not necessarily consist of music, but also of dance or other art forms. He experiences a sequence of strange adventures before being sent back to Earth, where five years have passed. He finds that Waltiri recently died and left all his assets to Michael. But that is not the end of the story...

The Serpent Mage blurb:

He'd been held captive in the land of the Sidhe, and when he returned home to Los Angeles all he wanted was to live like a normal, average man again. But there were hauntings on the city streets, and strange bodies in a crumbling old hotel, a Song of Power in the air, and an ancient creature summoning him from beneath the waters of a loch in Scotland. Michael had returned to California, but the Sidhe were following him home.

The rapidly increasing flow of hauntings on Earth prompts Michael to continue his Crane Women training, steadily increasing his own capabilities as he understands that he is likely to play a central role in developments. He discovers the only surviving score for Opus 45, the notorious Song of Power by Waltiri which had caused the initial disappearances. Together with Kristine Pendeers, a music student at UCLA, they plan another performance of Opus 45.

Meanwhile, Earth society is feeling the strain of the hauntings and Michael forms an assocation with Lt Harvey of LAPD, who believes his explanation. Michael learns that the Realm 

is an artificial offshoot of the Earth and is steadily degrading as the (almost, but not quite, immortal) gods who made it are dying; among them Manus, the Serpent Mage who was originally human.  As a result, the Sidhe are moving back to Earth. Also needing help are five thousand humans who had been kidnapped by the Sidhe because their cultural impact was felt to be too threatening for the sterile Sidhe culture. 

Clarkham spends much of this volume influencing events without participating in them, but the Isomage still has ambitions to become the dominant mage and kidnaps Kristine to put pressure on Michael. Another serious distraction is the appearance of Shiafa, a beautiful young Sidhe woman who is the daughter of another mage. The climax of the tale is positive and satisfyingly low-key. 

 Songs of Earth and Power is a difficult work to summarise. The setting and the plot are highly unusual, making it frequently difficult to imagine the next turn of events. The story cludes a great deal concerning music, especially film themes, mentioning various composers and arrangers. 

To sum up, Songs of Earth and Power is an extremely impressive achievement, one of the best contemporary fantasies I have read. Highly recommended.

One point which I noted - I read the books straight through first, meaning to skim-read them again in writing this review. However, I ended up reading most of the story twice over, and I was surprised to realise that I was even more impressed with it after the second reading. Clearly, I read too quickly and thereby risk losing of lot of detail on the first reading; something to watch out for!

The Professor Challenger Stories of Arthur Conan Doyle

 

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is of course most famous for inventing the private detective Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures are described in four novels and 56 short stories, published between 1891 and 1927. He also wrote a wide range of other fiction and non-fiction, of which the most relevant to this blog are the SFF / adventure stories featuring the scientist Professor Challenger. Three novels plus a couple of short stories emerged between 1912 and 1926, of which by far the most famous is the first; The Lost World. All of these were conveniently collected together in one volume, published by Wordsworth Classics in 1995, of which I have a copy: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World and Other Stories.

The Lost World is not just Doyle's best-known SFF novel, it is one of the great classics of science fiction. A scientist explorer, the cantankerous and belligerent Professor Challenger, returns from an expedition to the heart of the Amazon jungle with a claim that prehistoric animals still survive there. He is ridiculed, so organizes a follow-up expedition by a small team including the sceptical Proessor Summerlee, the big-game hunter and explorer Lord John Roxton, and a journalist, Edward Malone, who provides the first-person narrative of the journey and, apart from Challenger himself, is the only character who appears in all of these stories. 

After a difficult journey through the Amazon jungle the team arrive at the base of a plateau, with a circumference of more than 30 miles, which is entirely cut off from the surrounding land by steep cliffs. The team manages to find a way up but then become trapped there. They not only find dinosaurs and other long-extinct creatures, but people, including an earlier form of humanity. After many adventures (spoiler alert!) they manage to find a way off the plateau and return in triumph.

The story is a compelling one, just as gripping now as it was when first published. Of course, our modern knowledge of ecosystems allows us to poke various holes in the plot; but that does not reduce the drama of the story. I don't know if Doyle was aware of the fact that plateaus surrounded by high cliffs (known as Tepui) do actually exist in northern parts of South America, but they are much smaller and have no dinosaurs!

Doyle's next book in the series is The Poison Belt, set three years later. Astronomers begin to discover odd distortions affecting the visibility through their telescopes, and Challenger deduces that the Earth is about to pass through a belt of ether, with unknown consequences. (Ether, a term now used to describe certain chemicals, used to have a much more mystical meaning, as Wiktionary lists: a substance once thought to fill all unoccupied space that allowed electromagnetic waves to pass through it and interact with matter, without exerting any resistance to matter or energy). Challenger invites the same three characters to gather at his hilltop country home where they seal themselves into a room with a supply of oxygen cylinders. As the Earth sweeps into the ether belt, the team look on in horror as people and animals outside immediately collapse, apparently dead. 

Their oxygen supply lasts for long enough for the Earth to pass through the ether belt, and the team are able to emerge from their bunker and travel around. However, this is not an action adventure; for most of the story the characters engage in discussions, often of a philosophical nature. This is not a criticism - Doyle was a good writer who is still able to hold the attention of his readers.

The final Challenger novel was The Land of Mist. This is set several years later and Challenger is an old man - but still just as cantankerous. The subject of this tale is spiritualism. Malone is writing for his newspaper a series of articles about different religions, in collaboration with Enid, Challenger's daughter (and Malone's romantic interest). The focus of the story is on the spiritualist church so Malone and Enid attend various seances as well as church services. At first very sceptical, they soon become convinced by what they are witnessing. Interestingly, Malone is excused narrating duties this time - there is no viewpoint character.

At this point, I should mention a couple of background issues. The first is that spiritualism was very popular in the English-speaking world from the 1840s to the 1920s. The belief that the spirit survived death and could communicate with the living via seances moderated by mediums had a strong appeal (and indeed, still does in some quarters).  The second is that Doyle was himself a prominent spiritualist. 

Knowing this, The Land of Mist is clearly autobiographical; the author takes the reader "on a journey" (in modern parlance), through the stages by which he became a spiritualist (supported by detailed notes at the end of the story). I have to say that I found this unconvincing; the characters were too ready to accept the validity of what they witnessed without question. So was Doyle in real life; for example, he was convinced that a photo of "fairies" was genuine when it was actually a simple piece of fakery carried out by young children. 

This leads us to the final pair of Challenger stories included in this book (there don't seem to have been any others). Both stories are short, in fact The Disintegration Machine is very brief; it concerns a visit by Challenger and Malone to an inventor who claims to have developed a machine which disintegrates matter - everything from a person to a battleship reduced to particles - and can then reintegrate it with no harm done. This device clearly had immense potential in warfare. Unfortunately, by the time our heroes get to see it, they are too late - the inventor has agreed to sell it to an Eastern European power. Challenger finds an appropriate solution to the problem.

In the second story - When the World Screamed - we find that Challenger, having come into a considerable fortune, is spending it on testing a theory of his; that the Earth is actually one huge, living organism. A massive shaft has been driven eight miles deep, until it reaches a point at which the material of the Earth changes to something softer - which appears to have some of the characteristics of life. Challenger intends to punch a large hole in this material to see if there is any reaction (what could possibly go wrong?). Malone features in this story as usual, but narrating duties are passed on to a new character, an engineer called Peerless Jones.

Obviously these tales are somewhat dated and some of the language (unexpurgated in this edition) as well as attitudes are almost as prehistoric as the dinosaurs, but The Lost World in particular is just great fun, and I was reminded of why this was a favourite story when I was a child.

Star King and The Blue World by Jack Vance

 

Jack Vance (1916-2013) hardly needs any introduction to fans of classic SF, having produced a substantial body of work between about 1950 and 2004. While some of Vance's  work is famous (The Hugo Award-winning The Dragon Masters and The Languages of Pao being my personal favourites - both previously reviewed on this blog) others are a lot more obscure. When I picked them off my shelf, I recalled nothing about either of the two I'm examining this time - an increasing tendency as I've noted before. I will soon reach the stage of being satisfied with reading nothing but old books, which will save me a lot of money on new ones.  

First, Star King (published 1964). To begin with the blurb: 

Star Kings are a race of non-humans who disguise themselves as humans with a difference. Power alone is their goal, a goal they seek regardless of the price in human life. Kireth Gersen was not a Star King but he was looking for one - a very special Star King who had murdered his parents many years before. 

The action starts on Smade's World, which is uninhabited apart from Smade and his family, who run a tavern with a lurid reputation. Gersen has just arrived, on the hunt for the evil Star King called Malagate the Woe (great name for a villain!). Gersen is pretending to be a "locator", basically an explorer who hunts for planets with useful resources or other marketable qualities. One of the other guests is Teehalt, a genuine locator working for Malagate, who has discovered a planet which is of great value as it resembles a pristine Earth. Teehalt regards his find as too beautiful to hand over to Malagate and tries to conceal its location, which is encoded in a memory filament. Gersen is focused on acquiring the filament to act as bait to catch Malagate, involving a journey to the planet (which proves to have some distinctive wildlife) before the real Malagate is revealed.

The book has an interesting structure, with a copious use of inserts such as quotations from books, articles and interviews, a convenient way of providing a lot of background information. Vance has a lot of fun with descriptions of a variety of inhabited planets, how humanity has evolved on them and their political and social structures. The overall mood of the story is rather dark, but leavened with dry humour. I read the book without making notes, so skimmed it again before writing this review and found myself drawn in to reading most of it again - it repays a careful reading as it is rather better than I first realised.

I see from Wiki that this was the first of five volumes in The Demon Princes series, but I have never come across any of the others.

Next up: The Blue World (published 1966).

Sklar Hast lives in the Blue World. A water paradise of floating islands big enough to support houses and sea gardens and communication towers so the People of the Floats can wink messages to each other. All is harmony and perfection. Except for the sea monsters.

King Kragen is the ruler of the deep, a great beast who subdues others of his kind in exchange for certain things. Like food. And reverence. The submissive People of the Floats pay up, they know King Kragen is indestructible. Sklar Hast knows it too but he doesn't care - he's going to to try and kill him anyway.

As with Star King, there is a lot more going on in this story than the blurb suggests. In particlar, the intricacies of the social structure which has developed on the Floats are fascinating and, I suspect, provided Vance with much enjoyment to devise. The battle of the generations is played out against an exotic background.

The "floating islands" setting for this book seemed familiar to me - can anyone think of any other novels with a similar feature? Two which occur to me are James Schmitz's Nandy-Cline stories, Trouble Tide and The Demon Breed; but while Nandy-Cline has floating islands it is not an entirely water world. 

Anyway, these two novels make for agreeable light entertainment, being only around 200 pages each, with just enough meat to provide worthwhile sustenance.

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The Jupiter Theft by Donald Moffitt

 

Yet another book I had forgotten (along with its author, whose name rang no bells), this being published in 1977. Moffitt (1931-2014), wrote only a handful of SF novels, but a larger body of shorter fiction as well as adult spy thrillers. 

To start with the blurb: 

Within hours after the Lunar Observatory picked up a strange new X-ray source in Cygnus, the disastrous picture was clear. An immense object was hurtling towards the Solar System at nearly the speed of light. And its intense radiation would surely wipe out all life on Earth within six months. There was nothing anyone could do. Then, incredibly, the rogue presence that had appeared out of nowhere suddenly changed its trajectory - and stopped in the region of Jupiter. But that was flatly impossible...

The story is set in a future in which humanity is recovering from devastating wars which had left American and China as the two major powers in uneasy co-existence. The inner planets had been explored and, in the case of Mars, settled, and a major expedition with a mixed Chinese/American crew of 100 had been organised to visit Jupiter and potentially establish a base on one of the moons.  However, the arrival of the Cygnus Object results in a rapid change of plan, with the mission repurposed to focus on examining the Object.

During the journey to Jupiter, the author provides lots of background information and introduces several key staff members who remain prominent for most of the story, in a variety of shifting relationships. The central character is Commander Tod Jameson and the events which unroll are largely seen from his viewpoint. 

The human crew are astonished when they arrive at Jupiter, since the Cygnus Object is not one but five spacecraft, each thirty miles long and with three folding arms in a configuration which can be adjusted to suit the different requirements of acceleration up to near-lightspeed, cruising at that speed for years, and then decelerating when approach the target system. The alien spacecraft are powered by gas stripped from giant gas planets, and are already stripping Jupiter's atmosphere to fuel their next journey. 

The Cygnans soon become aware of the arrival of the human Jupiter ship and swarm over it, capturing most of the crew. Many of them end up in a super zoo, where the tensions between the Americans and Chinese are intensified, and also between the democratic and dictatorial elements of the crews. To make matters even more unstable, the humans have nuclear weapons on board.

In contrast with their enormous ships, the Cygnans' standard method of inter-ship transport is by something like a rocket broomstick which the Cygnans sit astride and manoeuvre by shifting their body-weight around and judging direction by eye. Even more remarkably, they use spray-on space-suits which are almost invisible. This allows the humans to observe the truly weird Cygnans who (among other oddities) communicate by musical sounds;  a characteristic which gives Jameson (who has perfect pitch) a major advantage.

The Cygnans rely on a network of transparent tubes to move around at high speed within each ship. To avoid collisions, the tubes are directional and wrap around each other, forming a double spiral. To digress for a moment, this reminds me of a Victorian fort at Dover, Kent, in which the designers wanted to achieve rapid transport of large numbers of troops between the accommodation at the top of a cliff and the defended shore at the bottom. They built an ingenious 140-foot staircase with a triple spiral, known as the Grand Shaft - it still exists. The Grand Shaft was never used in anger, but the story goes that in order to maintain social differences in peacetime, the use of the three staircases was separated into "Officers and their Ladies", "Sergeants and their Wives", and "Soldiers and their Women".

Anyway, to cut a fairly long story short, most of the humans try to break out of the zoo and return to their ship, with some of them being aided by another zoo species who are highly intelligent and possess a unique inherent weapon system. 

The blurb credits the author with having the "world-juggling sweep of Larry Niven" and the  "scientific expertise of Arthur C. Clarke", and for once I would not disagree with this praise. I might add that Moffitt's handling of his characters is superior to both.

TV - First Contact: an Alien Encounter (2022)

 

This is an unusual 'dramatised documentary' with a rather misleading title (spoiler - no aliens encountered!), exploring what could happen if a very large object travelled through the Solar System. It was presumably inspired by the 2017 incident in which such an object, dubbed ʻOumuamua', made just such a fly-by. The one envisaged by BBC2 TV for their 90 minute prime-time programme has a similarly elongated shape but is very much larger and travelling at huge velocity. More to the point, it is first observed as a result of an apparently artificial signal received by the Voyager spacecraft in the 1420 megaherz channel for hydrogen, considered the most likely wavelength for interstellar communications. As a result of this and other characteristics it is determined that the object, dubbed 'Artefact' is artificial, but its trajectory poses no threat to Earth - nor is there any speculation concerning aliens (they are a serious and sober lot in BBC2!). 

The programme contains a mixture of interviews with actual scientists, 'repurposed' news feeds and fictional podcasts 'to explore the scientific, social and philosophical implications of this occurence, as well as pondering the responses that such a meeting could evoke in communities across the globe'.

As the Artefact departs, attention focuses on where it came from. The trajectory reveals that it probably originated in 21 Sagittarius, at a location some 400 light years away, an area which is nearly twice as old as our system at 8 billion years. Given its velocity, the Artefact is probably about a billion years old, and may be just a fragment of a larger object.

Kudos to BBC2 for making such a worthy effort to explain serious issues to a popular audience. It is definitely worth watching, if you get the chance.

One detail - I was intrigued to discover that the United Nations has an "Office for Outer Space Affairs". Is there something that they are not telling us?

Science Museum SF exhibition and book

Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination Edited by Glyn Morgan

The Science Museum in Kensington, London is currently hosting an exhibition likely to intrigue any SF fan. Titled Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination, it "uncovers fascinating connections between significant scientific innovations and celebrated science fiction works through over 70 objects, brought together in the UK for the first time. On display in the exhibition is classic literature that has imagined and inspired new understandings of the world around us, set-pieces and props from iconic films and TV that envisioned new forms of life and other worlds – from a screen-used Lieutenant Uhura costume from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, to the Dalek from Doctor Who and a Darth Vader helmet created for Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back – and contemporary artworks from across the globe that explore alternative futures for humanity."

The exhibition includes "an immersive experience on board an alien spaceship" (I always wanted to know what one of those was like!) plus a series of live events including the Arthur C. Clarke Award (on 26 October). It sounds like a lot of fun, and priority has clearly been given to appealing to fans of all ages.

I have not (yet) visited the exhibition but I was sent a copy of the book, the back cover of which lays out the contents: 

"The exhibition does not attempt to contain this vast field, but rather to explore avenues through its terrain. Across five parts, contributors consider cyborgs and humans, space travel, alien communication, distant galaxies and earthbound futures shaped by nuclear warfare and climate crisis. The science of science fiction is traced through developments both scientific and speculative, from the influence of scientific advisers on mid-century classics to the new ways of living posited by contemporary climate fiction. These chapters are accompanied by interviews with five of the genre's most excting writers: Charlie Jane Anders, Chen Qiufan, Vandana Singh, Tade Thompson and Kim Stanley Robinson."

The book is lavishly illustrated, its 280 pages consisting more of images than text, and is worth having whether or not you are visiting the exhibition. It is available from amazon and other bookselling sites.

 

The exhibition opened on 6th October and is scheduled to close on 4th May 2023. Tickets are available from sciencemuseum.org.uk/science-fiction A trailer can be seen at: 

youtu.be/b5YpW2fAV-4 and images at: https://we.tl/t-l129ZmGsyj .

 

Odds & Sods

 

An assortment of offerings this time, varying in age and theme. 

The Deep Range by Arthur C. Clarke

This was first published in 1957, so was  relatively early novel by this prolific author. It is set in a future in which mankind was established throughout the solar system, but no further. The principal character is Walter Franklin, a spaceman who has had to give up his career as a result of the psychological effects of an accident in space. He joins the Bureau of Whales, an organisation which looks after great herds of whales in much the same way as ranchers used to manage cattle. The book follows Franklin’s story as he works his way up through the organisation, eventually becoming its head. 

Two points struck me about the story. The first is that the SF element is very restrained: the advanced technology included is either in existence now or entirely feasible. Even the sea monsters are believable. The second is that the attitudes towards animal welfare which develop later in the story are very modern. Taken together, this makes The Deep Range a serious and thoughtful read.

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Brisingamen by Diana Paxson

Published in 1984 and set in contemporary San Francisco, this features Karen Ingold, a young woman who discovers an ancient necklace which seems to change her when she wears it. She eventually discovers that this is Brisingamen, the legendary necklace of Freyja, the Norse goddess of love - and war - who effectively takes over Karen's body when needed. The emergence of Freyja also triggers the manifestation of other former Norse gods, including Odin, Thor - and the evil Loki. This results in a ferocious battle over Ragnarok, the end of the world.

This is more serious than most such epic fantasies. The author clearly knows her subject, and the book is punctuated by snippets of Norse poetry. It is definitely aimed at adults, with frank descriptions of the activities Freyja is best known for. One of the better efforts in this genre. 

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A Catalogue of Catastrophe by Jodi Taylor

This is volume 13 of the author's Chronicles of St Mary's, and continues to follow the life of Max the heroine of the epic, now separated from St Mary's and working as a kind of freelance bounty-hunter, tracking down those who break the laws of time travel and handing them over to the Time Police. 

The main problem in this adventure turns out to be a ruthless and well-organised gang from the future on a mission to change British history by intervening at critical moments - for instance, in the Gunpowder Plot. Much confusion is caused by people time-hopping in different directions, and to add to this, Max is beginning to suffer the serious effects of too much time-travel so needs to minimise her use of it.

There seems to be no end to Ms Taylor's ability to wring yet more mileage from her basic setting and this book will clearly not be the last, as it has a cliffhanger ending. I for one am not complaining! 

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Fatal Islands by Maria Adolfsson

I have come across a rather curious novel: Fatal Isles, by Swedish author Maria Adolfsson. It is  set in the present day on Doggerland, an imaginary group of large islands in the middle of the North Sea, half-way between Britain and Denmark. The islands, three of which are inhabited, appear to be politically fairly independent, perhaps the closest real-life parallel being the Faroe Islands. The culture is a mixture of British and Scandinavian. The book is otherwise a fairly conventional - if very good - detective story, the heroine being a senior detective with the now customary hang-ups and mysterious past. 

Quite how this novel is categorised I'm not sure; it seems to have created a rather mixed sub-genre all of its own. This prompted me to consider the pros and cons of this approach. An invented country gives the author's imagination freedom to roam unconstrained by any need to adhere to the hard facts of real-life geography, history, politics and policing. On the other hand, Adolfsson doesn't do anything very different with this freedom.

I should add that in recent years there has been an increase in interest in the real Doggerland, which used to exist before being drowned by rising sea levels as the last Ice Age ended a few thousand years ago. The North Sea is still relatively shallow in this area (known as the Dogger Bank) and diving archaeologists have discovered the remains of human settlements. There is even talk of creating a new island in that location, funded by a forest of wind turbines. 

More stories in the Doggerland series are on the way from the translator, and they are apparently best sellers in Sweden. Worth a look at if you enjoy Scandi Noir with a fantasy twist.

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TV - Missions Season 3 (2022)

The French SF series continues, mainly back on Earth, or rather Earths: two alternative timelines have become intermixed, leading to two different versions of the principal characters existing in the same place and time. If this sounds confusing, it is… There is the usual ambiguous conclusion to this season - is it the end of the world, or not?

Yesterday's Tomorrows: The Story of Classic British Science Fiction in 100 Books by Mike Ashley

 

This is another publication in the British Library's Science Fiction Classics series (for which thanks are due for sending the review copy). Unlike most of the others in the series, this is not an anthology of short stories on a particular topic, nor a reprint of selected, largely forgotten, novels. Instead, the author identifies themes in British SF published between 1895 and 1966 and provides two-page summaries of the plots of 100 selected stories (plus mention given to many more). The fourteen themes are arranged more or less in chronological order, with some overlaps. I have limited myself to mentioning just a couple of stories in each theme with emphasis on authors who are better known (althought not necessarily for SF).

1. Wells, Wells and Wells Again No doubting the father of British SF! The Time Machine (1895) and The War of the Worlds (1898) would have to feature on anyone's list of classics.

2. Wars to End All Wars  I have discussed some of these on this blog before, a whole sub-genre prompted by anxiety concerning the threat posed by the growing power of the German Empire, and in particular the usually predicted disaster should an invasion take place. Two of the best-known examples mentioned here are The Invasion of 1910 by William Le Queux (1906) and When William Came by Saki (1913).

3. Doom and Disaster  This time the disasters are from causes other than warfare; plagues, floods, drought, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and other catastrophes. Two of the examples listed here are the prescient The Machine Stops by the famous non-SF novelist E.M. Forster (1909), previously reviewed here, and The Violet Flame by Fred T. Jane (1899). The latter is of particular interest to me as it is the only novel written by this author, who is far better known as the originator of Jane’s Fighting Ships, the annual survey of the world’s navies and warships. This is still published today, along with parallel volumes concerned with aircraft and various categories of military and transport equipment, including Jane’s Infantry Weapons: Ammunition, which was edited by yours truly for about a dozen years.

4. Futures Near and Far  Famous non-genre authors imagining the future: The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton (1904), and With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling (1909).

5. The Old and the New  One of my favourite childhood novels was The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (1912), a story which needs no introduction as it has inspired the Jurassic Park series of feature films. 

6. Escape or Reality?  When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard (1919), and  A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920).

7. Brave New Worlds  Ten examples here, but I wasn't familiar with any of the authors except for Marie Corelli, one of the few women to have made an impact in the genre in this period. She is included here for The Secret Power (1921).

8. Super, Sub or Non-Human?  Even more to choose from, with thirteen authors listed.  One who may be surprising is George Bernard Shaw, for Back to Methuselah (1921), but Aldous Huxley's inclusion, for Brave New World, is much more predictable.

9. Philosophical Speculations Only a couple of stories included here: The World, The Flesh and the Devil by J. D. Bernal (1929) and If it Had Happened Otherwise by J. C. Squire (1931).

10. Into the Cosmic. Now we are beginning to move into more recognisable territory with Olaf Stapledon, (Star Maker - 1937), C. S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet - 1938) and Eric Frank Russell (Sinister Barrier - 1939). I was rather surprised to see A. M. Low's Adrift in the Stratosphere (1937) which I had summed up as folllows when I reviewed it some years ago: 

Sadly it was a major disappointment, being a barely readable fantasy in which hardly any of the "science" is correct or even remotely feasible.  

Fortunately the editor includes an explanation: 

The book is dreadful...I have included it because it is representative of the boys' adventure fiction of the day and unfortunately of how appalling much of that was.

11. Preparing for War.  Seven stories listed, imbued with the uneasiness of the increasingly inevitable second major war of the first half of the century. Lost Horizon by James Hilton (1933) and The Peacemaker by C. S. Forester (1934) date from the early years of this period, but Murray Constantine's Swastika Night (1937) is obviously later, and looks centuries ahead to the nature of the world resulting from a Nazi victory (short version - not pretty!).

12. Our Darkest Hours. Into World War 2, and a relatively quiet period for publishing fiction in the UK due to strict paper rationing. That didn't stop people writing, of course, and Arthur C. Clarke was one who was developing his skills at this time. 

13. Post-Atomic Doom. This is where things really become grim, with the threat of nuclear devastation generally considered to be a matter of when, not if. As a teenager in the 1960s I can well recall deciding that if war did come, I would much prefer the first bomb to explode directly overhead so I would know nothing about it. People in the UK, at least, had no illusions about surviving such a war for any longer than it would take to die horribly of radiation poisoning and/or starvation as the food supply chain was destroyed. Famous books listed include Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham (1951). 

14. Science Fiction Boom.  Despite the spectre of nuclear war haunting the 1960s, this was also a period of cheerful optimism in SF, perhaps in reaction to the threat. This was also a time of expansion in SF readership, assisted by the success of some magazines (it should be noted that British SF mags tended to be aimed at an older audience than the popular US comics). Another factor was the development of broadcast SF series, at first on the radio; my family would sit in front of the wireless to listen to each episode of Charles Chilton's Journey into Space. This was quickly followed by TV series  such as The Quatermass Experiment  (Nigel Kneale, 1953) and A for Andromeda (Fred Hoyle and John Elliot, 1961). Anyone with an interest in classic SF will be familiar with most of the names of the authors mentioned in this section: Arthur C. Clarke, E. C. Tubb, Kenneth Bulmer, Brian W. Aldiss, Edmund Cooper, James White, and Charles Eric Maine. 

15. Old Worlds for New. An interesting development towards the end of this period concerned the appearance of links between SFF and "literature", by which is meant "serious" non-genre mainstream fiction. The mainstream authors dabbling in SF themes have sometimes denied they are writing "SF", whose reputation suffered from the comic-strip era of rocket-ships and scantily-clad young women whose virtue was under threat by hideous monsters. Literary SF tales featured in this book are by Naomi Mitchison and L. P. Hartley. Simultaneously, many established SF writers became more "literary" in their approach, e.g. Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, and John Brunner: the result was known as "New Wave" SF.

That really marks the end of this period of development of British SF. The result has been a spectrum of approaches to SF writing rather than a series of ghettoes. One further development since that time has been the growth of fantasy at the expense of SF, kick-started by the huge success of Tolkien. But that is a whole 'nother story!

War Stories

 

Three very different SF novels concerning warfare in the past, present and future.

No Retreat by John Bowen (published 1994) is a story of the aftermath of an alternative World War 2. The exact point of departure is never quite spelled out, but something goes wrong in 1942 leaving Britain defeated. The story begins in a very different 1990, with Britain thoroughly integrated into a German Empire which spreads across Europe. A community of die-hard “Free British”, preserving their traditions in exile in the USA, decide it is time to stir up a rebellion prior to liberating their homeland. 

The problem is that entry to Britain is forbidden, so the exiles don’t know quite what to expect. A small group of agents is landed by submarine and does manage to locate a local resistance group to work with, but are disconcerted to discover that the great majority of the British people are quite content with the status quo and regard their “liberators” as an embarrassing nuisance. It transpires that the initial horrors of strict Nazi rule have long ago been replaced by a tolerant regime of self-governance. The result has been well described as a wry narrative treading a fine line between thriller and black farce.

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Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P.W. Singer and August Cole

I've re-read Ghost Fleet, published in 2015. It is set a few years into the future, and commences with a brief, devastating (but non-nuclear) assault on the USA by China and Russia, focusing on massive cyber attacks as well as physical destruction of US communication and monitoring satellites. Advanced technology proves to be a weakness for the US, with equipment like the F-35 fighter planes dependant on vast numbers of complex electronic chips - many of which turn out to have been made in China. The US loses, with China seizing the Western Pacific, including the Hawaiian Islands. A few years later, the US is planning its revenge…

The viewpoints include USN, Chinese and Russian officers, plus the leader of an accidentally left-behind US resistance group on Hawaii, and many other individuals. 

The authors are professionally involved in defence planning, and it shows. This story is very tech-heavy and realistic. A rather unusual touch is a 24-page Endnotes section which provides references for many of the ideas and proposed weapon systems. However, there are hazards in being too specific about such matters: much is made of the Metal Storm close-in defence gun, but in fact that proved unsuccessful and was dropped some years ago.

Novels with a plot like this are rare, and this one is a very good effort. 

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The Misfit Soldier by Michael Mammay

Mammay provided a lot of fun (and obviously enjoyed himself) with his trilogy Planetside, Spaceside, and Colonyside. His new stand-alone novel is written in a similar laconic military style but instead of being a pensionable veteran,  the principal character - Sergeant Gastovsky - is an unwilling young space soldier with criminal tendencies whose main aim in life is to acquire enough money to buy himself out of his service contract. This requires far more money than he could possibly accumulate legally, but he regards this as a manageable problem and starts planning. 

Those who enjoyed Planetside are likely to enjoy this one as well, but perhaps not quite as much. The hero is not as sympathetic, the plot is more straightforward (with no aliens to add another dimension) and is rather more forgettable. Let’s hope that future stories return to displaying more inventiveness.

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