Slow Lightning by Jack McDevitt

 

To quote the blurb:

We are alone in the universe. After 1,000 years of searching humankind simply believes that there is nothing out there. Space is a magificent, but sterile, wilderness. That's the received wisdom, anyway. But a new expedition investigating a mysteriously aborted mission 27 years earlier is about to turn that wisdom on its head.

I don't normally quote other reviewers in my reviews but given the enthusiasm and identity of this one, I'm making an exception:

Jack McDevitt is that splendid rarity, a story-teller first and a science fiction writer second. In his ability to absolutely rivet the reader it seems to me that he is the logical heir to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke. If you've never read McDevitt before you couldn't find a better book to start with than Slow Lightning - a nail-biting neo-Gothic tale that blends mystery, horror, and a fascinating look at how first contact with an utterly alien species might happen.

Stephen King.

I have in fact read and reviewed half-a-dozen of McDevitt's other books here, namely the Priscilla Hutchins series (Slow Lightning is a stand-alone, published in 2000). While the author certainly has an inventive imagination, I am not quite as enthusiastic as King, since I find his writing style not entirely to my liking. If you are curious I suggest you look at my earlier McDevitt reviews. 

A couple of detailed points: I was intrigued by the author's suggestion that the reaction of humanity to the apparent lack of any other civilisation would be to lose interest in further exploration, with colonies gradually shutting down and being abandoned. It seems reasonable - if there is nothing there to see, why bother to go looking?

The other point concerns the book's title, as explained in the text:

The nearby nebula NGC2024, stretching for light years across the restless sky, was a kaleidoscope of bright and dark lanes, of exquisite geometry, of glowing surfaces and internal fires. Enormous lightning bolts moved through it, but it was so far that they seemed frozen in space. 

"Slow lightning," said Solly, "Like the mission."

Kim looked at the nebula. "How do you mean?"

"We've known for a long time that contact might eventually happen, maybe would have to happen, and that when it did it would change everything. Our technology, our sense of who we are, our notions of what the universe is. We've seen this particular lightning strike coming  and we've played with the idea of what it might mean for at least twelve hundred years. We've imagined that other intelligences exist, we've imagined them as fearsome and gentle, as impossibly strange and remarkably familiar, as godlike, as incapable, as indifferent. Well, I wonder whether the bolt is about to arrive. With you and me at the impact point."

The Good, the Bad and the History by Jodi Taylor

 

Yet another volume in Jodi Taylor's Chronicles of St Mary's, The Good, The Bad and the History continues the story of Max the former historian and now bounty hunter, tracking down time-travellers who are trying to alter the past. The seriousness of the opposition steps up a gear with the growing strength of Insight, a mysterious organisation from the future with sinister aims, so Max arranges to be recruited in order to discover what they are up to. 

This is fully up to the standard of Jodi Taylor's other St Mary's books, with its unique blend of action, humour, and fascinating insights into the less explored corners of history. I enjoy the way that gags are scatter-gunned through the book (I particularly liked a new character, introduced as the Head of the Provisional Wing of the British Museum). The series is also educational; for every mission into the past the Historians research the culture and current affairs in detail.  I commented in my previous review on the quality of the descriptive writing. The author is skilled at bringing other times and settings to vivid life; smells, dirt, sewage, disease, brutal violence and all.

A word of warning - if you haven't read any of these books DO NOT start with this one. In fact, it is much better to start with the first volume and take it from there. The author doesn't usually bother with trying to keep her readers up to date. There is allegedly an extensive character list for each book but in practice I find that to be rather more frustrating than helpful (and managed an almost perfect failure rate this time - only one of the characters I looked up was actually listed)  However, do not be put off from getting stuck into these books. There are now 14 books in the St Mary's series (not including the Time Police spin-offs) and that represents a huge mountain of wonderful enjoyment. 

Flatlander by Larry Niven

 I doubt very much that anyone reading this blog is unfamiliar with the name Larry Niven. Starting in the mid-1960s, he wrote or co-authored scores of novels, mostly "hard" SF, and mostly fitting into one or more of several universes which he developed (many of the series being interlinked). His stories are always very readable, full of intriguing ideas and leavened with a sardonic sense of humour. His most famous novel must be Ringworld which emerged in 1970 and won several awards (including an informal one from me, as being one of my top three SF novels - for the record, the other two are Bester's Tiger Tiger and Herbert's Dune). As far as I can recall (I have about twenty of his books, but there are many I haven't read) all of Niven's stories are set in the future, but some are much closer to our own times than others, with the adventures limited to the Solar System. The "near future" ones are often collectively known as Tales of Known Space. Flatlander is a subset of these, with the subtitle The Collected Tales of Gil "The ARM" Hamilton. It should be noted that this collection first emerged in 1976 under the title The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton but was modified and added to in 1995, being reissued as Flatlander. This is the one I am reviewing here, with five stories which are effectively episodes in the life of Gil. For the sake of completeness I should add that, according to Wiki, another story in this series (Sacred Cow) was co-authored by Steven Barnes and published in 2022, but there seems to be some query about it. To add to the confusion, one of the stories in Flatlander - The Patchwork Girl (see below) - is also the title of another anthology which includes this story.

The world of Flatlander is one in which humanity has spread throughout the solar system, but with very different cultures: the "Belters" who normally live in the asteroid belt and make a living from mining the asteroids, the "lunies" who live on the Moon, and the "Flatlanders" who live on Earth.

Gil Hamilton was born a Flatlander but moved to the Belt to make his fortune. He loses an arm in an accident and after some months returns to Earth where replacement body parts are much cheaper. In the meantime Gil discovers that he has acquired a psi power: he retains a connection with his lost arm and can manipulate light weights with it, an ability which remains with his "ghost" arm even after he has aquired a replacement  genuine item. He decides to join the United Nations Police, known as the Amalgamation of Regional Militias or ARM, which in conjunction with his psi power inevitably gave him the nickname of "Gil the ARM". It also provides the framework for these stories, which are all murder mysteries which Gil has to solve.

There is one quirk which runs through all of the societies in these stories - medical science has advanced to the point that body parts damaged by injury or disease can be replaced without risk of rejection. In fact, the demand for replacement parts is much greater than the supply. As a result, an illegal trade in body parts develops (known as "organ legging"), and in due course the legal system is changed to permit disassembling criminals for their body parts, with the offences carrying the death penalty becoming ever more trivial.

The five mysteries which Gil has to resolve are:

Death by Ecstasy in which a former mining partner of Gil's dies through "current addiction" in which an electric charge is delivered directly to the pleasure centre of the brain, so powerful that the victim starved to death - but was it suicide or murder?

The Defenseless Dead in which organ-legging and its implications are explored in depth;

ARM, in which the invention of a kind of time machine facilitates new ways of committing murder;

Patchwork Girl, in which Gil gets involved in an international conference on the moon and is faced with solving a murder which seems to have only one simple solution - but one which would result in a beautiful woman being reduced to a collection of body parts;

The Woman in Del Ray Crater, in which a long-lost body is discovered in a crater of the moon; the problems here include intense radiation from fusion power plants and the shielding technology being developed.

In an interesting Afterword, Niven comments on the problems of combining SF with a murder mystery, and how the stories came to be written.

These are all very good stories, and as a collection make a great introduction to Niven's work.

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The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd

 

An interesting contemporary fantasy published in 2022.  To quote the blurb:

"Some places you won't find on any maps, others, only on maps.

Nell Young has lived her life in and around maps. Her father, Dr. David Young, was one of the most respected cartographers in the world. But this morning he was found - or murdered? - in his office at the New York Public Library.

Nell hadn't  spoken to her father in years, ever since he fired her over an argument over a seemingly worthless highway roadside map. A map which was mass-produced - and every copy of which is now being found and destroyed.

But why?

To answer that question, Nell will embark on a dangerous journey into the heart of a conspiracy beyond belief, the secrets behind her family, and the true power that lies in maps."

I must admit that I enjoy this kind of modern mystery, in which fantasy gradually intrudes into normal life. At nearly 400 pages this is a substantial book, and the author uses the space well to develop her characters and plot, leading the reader to follow the trail to its conclusion. Exra variety is provided by occasional changes in the narrator, giving different viewpoints. There is a lot of information about maps, ancient, recent and mysterious. Hints and sub-plots are scattered along the way, for example an infamous "junk box incident" which is frequently referred to without actually being explained for some time.

Peng Shepherd is an American fantasy author whose first book, The Book of M, was awarded various prizes; The Cartographers is her second novel and has deservedly collected even more awards. This is one book I'll be keeping, since the plot is sufficiently intricate and intriguing to merit a second reading.

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A brief note on feminist SF - sort of...

 

I started to read Joanna Russ's The Female Man (I found it on a shelf where it had been sitting for decades, and I was in the mood for something short and interesting). It was published in 1975, and is regarded as a classic of feminist SF. The story involves four young women, basically four versions of the same woman each from a different parallel world. The worlds vary - one is just like ours but without World War 2 - but the one which obviously interests the author is the one in which all of the male humans were killed off by a plague several centuries before. Fortunately that world possessed a very advanced medical science so they were able to keep human reproduction going - female only, of course. 

The story is difficult to read because the author doesn't make life easy for the reader. Many chapters are very short and it is often unclear who the narrator is (possibly the narrator varied, but that isn't clear either) or which of the four worlds that section is set in. The social arrangements are explored in some detail, using the plot device of having the four women switch between worlds to feature the reaction of the characters to the different environments. 

I managed to get about a third of the way through the book before I gave up. There is only so much I will put up with in the way of confusion and this one is over-endowed with that. Basically, the author lost my attention. A pity, really, there were some good points in the story, but some of the author's contemporaries, such as Ursula Le Guin and Sheri Tepper, demonstrate how a book can pursue a feminist agenda while still being an excellent read. 

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Slow Lightning by Jack McDevitt

Published in the USA as Infinity Beach.

Jack McDevitt (born 1935) has published a couple of dozen SF novels and many short stories, his novel Seeker winning the 2006 Nebula Award. Until now my reading has been confined to the Academy Series and I have posted reviews of most of them here. Slow Lightning, published in 2000, is a stand-alone novel. 

Slow Lightning is set several centuries into the future, when humanity has developed a hyperspace drive enabling the colonisation and gradual terraforming of eight other planets. Other changes include an expected lifepan of up to 200 healthy years,  Artificial Intelligence at people's beck and call, and enough wealth to be able to support (in moderate comfort) those who not wish to work at a job. A golden era for humanity, in other words, save for an unexpected problem: huge efforts had been made to search for other forms of life, without any result. Apart from the life spreading from the Earth, the universe seemed to be completely dead. 

This had a depressing effect on humanity, with many people feeling that there was no point in continuing with their efforts. Organisations began to close down, buildings and other facilities were abandoned, and the only major research effort being made was the Beacon project: using anti-matter bombs to cause a group of stars to go nova, thereby signally the existence of humanity to any other civilisations able to pick up the signals.

The story is largely set on one of the colonised planets, Greenway, and focuses on a young female scientist, Dr. Kimberly Brandywine (Kim). She learns of rumours of strange events taking place in a remote forest location and begins to investigate, spurred on by the fact that the focus of these events seemed to be the nearby fatal crash three decades before of a starship, the Hunter, returning from a research mission to search for life. Among its small crew was Kim's cloned elder sister, Emily. The plot thickens as Kim discovers that the official log of the Hunter had been tampered with, and goes on a hunt for her holy grail -  the original log. 

This pace of the story gradually increases as Kim battles to discover the truth and there is a series of shocks and revelations at the end.

I was intrigued by this book, because I had formed a rather different impression of the author when reading the Academy series (written in the same time period). As you will see if you look at my reviews in this blog, I enjoyed the spectacular breadth of his imagination but was lukewarm about the characterisation, and felt that he was over-fond of inserting events which added nothing to the story. Slow Lightning is quite different; it is more evenly paced, with good characterisation and is very well-written. Well worth reading. 

The link to feminism?  As with the Academy series, the principal character is a woman. This kind of setting might be regarded as a kind of post-feminism, in which the gender of the characters is no longer an issue.

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.