The Empire of Glass

Andy Lane The Empire of Glass (1995)
Simply, I was in the mood for more Hartnell and had no memory of having read this - although obviously I did - thus allowing for the possibility of pleasure taken in trying to work out what the fuck is going on. Going back to old Who things which I thought were amazing all those years ago has bitten me on the ass more than once, but thankfully this turned out to be one of the good ones.

By one of the good ones I mean it's a respectable science-fiction novel in its own right, albeit one which just happens to make use of characters and situations from a television show; and, as with Perry Rhodan, Doc Savage, Sexton Blake or any other star of the written serial, the author gets to play with an existing universe without feeling obliged to spend half the page count explaining it because if we're reading, we probably already know what we're dealing with.

Of course, it all falls apart when you get a writer with nothing to say, no ambition beyond adding to the ugh - franchise or brand or property or whatever the well-dressed product-sponge-cunt about town is calling it this year; but happily, that isn't what we have here, and I'd say that The Empire of Glass dates from a lost golden age when quality still had the edge over quantity most of the time.

Our man travels to Venice in the early sixteenth century, and we learn a lot about Venice because Lane does his research and additionally bothers to make it interesting, which is nice. The environment of our tale is solid and well grounded, evocatively described without any hint of box ticking, and so much so as to support an ambitiously ludicrous narrative juggling alien incursions, extraterrestrial espionage, Venetian politics, Galileo, William Shakespeare's career as a spy for the court of King James, and a flying island drawn indirectly from Jonathan Swift. There's one passage where Galileo's biography shows through with more fidelity than we really need…

As he watched, entranced, a small shape like a flattened egg that glinted like metal rose up rapidly from the far side of the island, moving upward as smoothly and inexorably as the ebony balls that he had dropped from the tower of Pisa to test Aristotle's theory had fallen.

All the same, in the context of a novel which gets so much right, it amuses rather than annoys. Credibility is stretched to such a point as to border on the sort of thing Moorcock used to write, and yet everything holds, amounting to a substantially satisfying read of the kind I wish more science-fiction authors could achieve, not least a few of the better known guys, Alastair Reynolds and others.

As with John Peel's rendition of The Chase, it's been nice - even oddly life affirming - to find myself reminded of Who as something weird and exciting and not entirely predictable.

How to Get to Apocalypse

Erica L. Satifka How to Get to Apocalypse (2021)
Keeping in mind that I make no claim as to having my finger on the pulse of contemporary science-fiction publishing, I'm nevertheless beginning to suspect that Satifka may actually be our greatest living science-fiction author. At least I don't recall having read anything vaguely of the moment which has been anything like so good, and even if we expand our definition of contemporary back by a decade or so to include a few of the allegedly heavy hitters - Reynolds, Stross or whoever - I stand by my statement.

Her writing has been compared to that of Philip K. Dick with some frequency, and some justification, although it also recalls the parables of Ursula LeGuin and, more than anything, the dynamic of all those cyberpunk writers warning against the corporate commodification of society; although personally I've only read William Gibson on that last count and I like Satifka more. Whilst I'm reluctant to analyse my own preferences, or possibly biases, there are certain things I look for in a piece of science-fiction writing.

• I like to be drawn in by something which doesn't make immediate sense, which needs figuring out, and which, once I've figured it out, will have something to say beyond simple statements of its own weirdness.
• I dislike the weird or brain-meltingly futuristic just for its own sake. I'm not keen on flashy or self-consciously edgy.
• I'm not actually adverse to adventures, except they're usually too predictable to allow for much wiggle room in terms of the first point. I'd prefer to avoid anything which reads like it would rather be on TV.

Satifka ticks all of these boxes while telling stories of survival, or of just about getting by, amongst people who work at fast food restaurants or have trouble making rent, the sort of people Dick wrote about - those of us who, if we ever make it into space, will still be cleaning the fucking toilets because they can't get a robot to do it. This means a lot to me, because I don't want to read another novel opening with anything like this ever again:

Space Security Agent Lucas Manning watched the red light winking across the screen of his operations monitor with a growing sense of alarm.

In case it's not obvious why I should regard the above as the worst sort of generic bollocks, State of Emergency, the first of the twenty-three short stories in this collection, kicks off like so:

In a no-tell motel just outside Billings, the psychotic cattle rancher known as Paranoid Jack freezes when he sees the baby-blue eyeball glowering at him from the mouthpiece of the Bakelite phone.

See! It only gets stranger from that point on, but stranger by terms which come to make perfect sense. All of the stories here inhabit variant versions of the end of the world, or of a world, none concluding with a bang but most with a sigh of such depressing resonance as to crack the foundations of whatever you're stood upon; and depressing because this is satire at its finest, a horrible mirror held up to our own increasingly desperate existence with home truths delivered before you've even noticed anyone was maybe trying to tell you something you needed to hear.

Satifka delivers accounts of places which feel like the world outside our windows, at least thematically, combining the painfully and playfully familiar with wildly flamboyant flourishes of imagination that - just like the real world - defy our ability to predict just what the fuck is happening; and she writes clearly and beautifully without treading narrative water, while making it seem like the easiest thing in the world.

Honestly, this one makes all of those New York Times Bestseller guys clogging up the book store carousels with their eight-hundred page contributions to the Asimov revival look like wankers.

Heir to the Empire

Timothy Zahn Heir to the Empire (1991)
Excepting Marvel comics drawn by Carmine Infantino, I have no strong feelings regarding Star Wars. The films are sort of watchable, mostly, but I can usually take or leave them. The reason I ended up reading this, a novel representing the return of Star Wars at time of publication, is admittedly thin - mainly just curiosity about Grand Admiral Thrawn, as seen in fleeting images posted here and there on the internet.

'Read Timothy Zahn's novels,' I was told when asking about this character with blood red eyes and blue skin. 'They're really good.'

I was therefore prepared for something like Stephen Baxter writing Star Wars, or at least Alastair Reynolds. I've heard good things about Timothy Zahn, so hopefully Heir to the Empire isn't representative. It isn't terrible, and truthfully it's surprisingly breezy for a novel of four-hundred pages girth, but neither is it great, and what I take from having read it is that Star Wars doesn't work as the written word. Star Wars is supposed to be on a massive screen and is as such an exercise in scale and speed. Reduced to the written word it simply becomes four-hundred pages of stage directions, descriptions of fights - fights which sound a lot like something we've already seen - all strung together as a narrative which serves mainly to expose how little actual character is involved in this story. It's like novelising the paintings of Leonardo - page after page describing what we would see if we were to look at the things. Star Wars is essentially ridiculous, Flash Gordon with space wizards, a tale which harks back to those pre-Vietnam engagements wherein heroes remained heroes even after they came home and warfare still had a noble aspect. These details are easily lost in the cinematic spectacle, but as written word they're hard to miss and become intrusive.

It wasn't actually unenjoyable and was probably better than The Return of the Jedi, but then I doubt I'll bother with the other two parts of this particular trilogy. The person who described Heir to the Empire as amazing attends comic book conventions dressed as a Star Fleet officer. I should have trusted my instinct.

The Pendragon Protocol

Philip Purser-Hallard The Pendragon Protocol (2014)
I've always enjoyed Philip Purser-Hallard's writing, and to the point of believing his name deserves to be at least as ubiquitous as those of Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds and all those other top billing English science-fiction authors, not least because I would say that for the most part his is probably the greater talent. He's wrought some genuinely wonderful stuff within those little patches of universe left behind by the passing of the man in the blue box, and so the prospect of his first major steps away from the shallow pools of the more conspicuously licensed reaches of genre fiction has been a source of great anticipation for me. With this in mind, I must confess to some eyebrow-raising when I first read that The Pendragon Protocol would introduce us to the technologically sophisticated Knights of a twenty-first century Round Table sworn to protect us all from villainy. It made me think of Torchwood, or Primeval, or anyone who ever considered tales of secret government agencies full of superheroes with access to alien technology as being anything other than sheer arseache of the worst kind; but, I told myself, such fears will almost certainly be unfounded given the author's track record.

Happily I was right, and whilst I wouldn't quite describe this as having a startlingly original premise, as does Simon Morden on the back cover - at least not given how many times Arthur's lads have been coaxed back onto the field by everyone from Stephen King to Alan Moore to probably Pee-wee Herman - as a novel it has defied my narrative expectations, and is in all respects pretty bloody formidable. The key to this being that the author has remembered to write a book which is actually about something, as opposed to just a bunch of guys grunting and romping away with swords and cellphones for a few hundred pages.

To start with, the psychological mechanism of these Knights as the most recent expressions of an archetype is ingeniously told, precluding the need for anything so cock-obvious and hokey as reincarnated spirits, agencies of higher powers by traditional fantasy terms, or indeed anything requiring suspension of disbelief. In this sense The Pendragon Protocol does at least some of what C.S. Lewis tried to do with That Hideous Strength but without the sneering. Futhermore, reviewing That Hideous Strength, Orwell wrote:

[Lewis's beliefs] weaken his story, not only because they offend the average reader's sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance. When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict, one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid.

Philip Purser-Hallard avoids this problem by means of simple narrative realism in combination with lively and unflinching investigation of the nuts and bolts of belief as it may relate to an objective reality without ostentatious demonstrations of divine power getting in the way. This refusal to stoop to the flashily miraculous allows the underlying argument of the text to really breath, to expand and to examine the greater context of belief - belief in the collective understanding of what constitutes human society, and so on. In other words, The Pendragon Protocol, rather than simply being Highlander with 'O' levels, demonstrates that belief in a Deity, a noble cause, the laws by which we define civilisation, or even that a piece of paper can stand for monetary value, are essentially aspects of the same understanding and are therefore closely related.

Jory Taylor, our main protagonist and current expression of the characteristics of the legendary Sir Gawain, here finds himself torn between two schools equating to mutually exclusive views of the moral environment he inhabits, specifically amounting to the establishment and to forces opposing the establishment, without either definitively revealed as either more corrupt or any less worthy than the other; and this seems to further translate into a dialogue between faith and belief as either a personal matter or something which comes from outside and which may be embodied in a collective institution.

Anyway, this is what I took from the novel, poorly expressed though my version may well be, which, if nothing else, is at least to say that this is a philosophically meaty read yielding some truly vertiginous revelations - at least to me - whilst rattling along at fair old pace without any sacrifice to the quality of language. To reduce that further into Daily Mail English, Philip Purser-Hallard has achieved that rare balance of a way above average intellectually stimulating novel you can read by the pool with a beer and a hot dog.  The Pendragon Protocol genuinely deserves to sell so well that we're all sick of hearing about it by this time next year, and I'm already looking forward to the second part of the trilogy.

The Brakespeare Voyage

It has occurred to me that there are people who may object to the following on the basis of its revealing certain details of a book they may not have read, or spoilers as is the generally accepted but nevertheless irritating term. Whilst I can appreciate that if one is a fan of detective fiction, a review praising and detailing the ingenuity of the means by which the butler did it might diminish one's reading pleasure, but there are limits - one of which was crossed when I recently found myself berated for revealing a specific plot detail of a television show first broadcast fifteen years ago. Seeing as I write these reviews principally for my own pleasure, as a means by which I compel myself to attend greater scrutiny upon a particular story than I might ordinarily have done, I feel no strong obligation to protect the fragile enjoyment valves of those whose reading pleasure is based principally on plot twists and revelations, who might be better served by a fucking jigsaw puzzle than a novel or comic book. So just to be absolutely clear, if you can't stand the thought of discovering something about a particular piece of fiction prior to actually reading it, please don't bother with my reviews.

Whilst we're here, I suppose I should also admit to a possible degree of bias on my part in respect to the following in that I wrote Against Nature, the previous Faction Paradox novel published by Obverse Books, and I painted the cover of this one, and will probably be painting the cover of the next one.

Jonathan Dennis & Simon Bucher-Jones The Brakespeare Voyage (2013)
I've been waiting for this a long time, at least since Mad Norwegian Press dropped the Faction Paradox ball and a seemingly wistful Simon Bucher-Jones posted the proposal and outline for a then abandoned novel called Nebaioth on his blog. Nebaioth sounded phenomenal - an author renowned for massive, wonderfully bizarre ideas extrapolated from the weirder realms of nosebleed physics really turning the volume up to eleven and letting it all hang out, if that isn't too gruesome a simile. Years later, I experienced a minor resurgence of squee upon discovering what all the banging noises coming from the cell next to mine had been, and then a fairly serious nerdgasm when our beloved Faction Paradox hitched its wagon to one of those publishers which likes to put out a book every once in a while just to see what happens mutter mumble don't get me started...

The Brakespeare of the title is a ship the size of a small universe, its decks, bridge, and rigging made up of stars, planets, and entire cultures. Its mission is the retrieval of an earlier ship from the outer darkness beyond our own spacetime, and ultimately a quest for the sort of extracosmic biodata which can only be found out there beyond the brane universes described by some of the stranger theories of contemporary physics, biodata which it is hoped will yield an advantage in the War of the Faction Paradox mythos.

You can pretend it's the Doctor Who Telly Zoo time war if you like, and whilst you're there you might also like to pretend that Busted were the Sex Pistols.

Simon Bucher-Jones - assuming The Brakespeare Voyage to have been his baby in its formative stage - is a master of this sort of fiction, specifically the novel which can be only a novel because it wouldn't work in any other medium, and does one hell of a lot more than simply describe a sequence of visual images. I'm less familiar with the writing of Jonathan Dennis, although what little I've read has been of a quality to suggest this collaboration being effected on very much equal terms; and the end result forms a beautifully woven whole with no suggestion of variant voices bolted together.

Nebaioth himself turns out to be a central figure, significantly named after the Biblical son of Ishmael who in turn gave a name to the narrator of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Further specific parallels are not overly pronounced beyond, I suppose, Captain Robert Scarratt's obsession representing a more measured version of that which drove Captain Ahab onwards, and Leviathan entities beyond the edge of our universe roughly equating to whales, although there's a reasonable chance I may not actually know what I'm talking about here. A more general comparison can be found in the strongly nautical thrust of the entire narrative which proves so dominant as to surely warrant The Brakespeare Voyage being termed nautical science-fiction despite the cosmic setting. Given the predominance of high-seas imagery coupled with a certain seventeenth century flavour, this novel puts me strongly in mind of the ur-science-fiction of Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe and others - voyages made beyond the limits of the world as was known at the time, and the investigation of terra incognita discussed as an imaginative rather than purely scientific endeavour. I'm inclined to suspect this may be significant given the purpose of the mission driving both the Brakespeare and its predecessor, ultimately the introduction of new data to a closed system, in this case our universe. This presents a broader restatement of a central theme of the War, as mapped out in The Book of the War and others, namely the forces of the inverted in conflict with those of the imaginative.

If that possibly verbose summary casts The Brakespeare Voyage as one of those novels about which people on bulletin boards make observations along the lines of I couldn't get my head around it, what with all the words and stuff before dashing off elsewhere to praise the stratospheric brilliance of a slightly Shakespearey episode of Charmed, then it probably shouldn't. Even the most ludicrous concepts found here are beautifully communicated with the atmosphere and sobriety of Ursula LeGuin at her finest, and whilst the narrative is sometimes information dense, it flows like a good wine. I occasionally had difficulty recalling quite who was working for what, but not so much as to present problems, and I've a feeling certain allegiances may have been purposefully ambiguous in a few cases.

In all honesty I haven't read anything this good in a long, long time, and nor have I read anything quite like it. It really has been worth the wait.

Purchase your copy here, then purchase additional copies for all of your friends, and just keep buying until it outsells Alastair Reynolds and accrues the recognition it most certainly deserves.

A Red Sun Also Rises

Mark Hodder A Red Sun Also Rises (2012)
I'm afraid it takes a lot to get me reading anything popularly and presently identified as steampunk, and whilst it may be absolutely unfair to suggest that Mark Hodder is the only author of the entire bunch worth bothering with, most of the rest are still to do anything which draws my attention. The problem here is that I can't help but feel sceptical towards a phenomenon that so strongly identifies itself as a brand, a franchise, even a lifestyle - collect the set, now wear the brass goggles and join in with the cosplay fun - cosplay being a word I tend to associate with hopeless wankers on the grounds of my being a fully grown man.

It's not even that I'm necessarily opposed to a wilfully superficial romp, and I certainly have no problem with Victoriana, but I tend to prefer my fiction to do something I'm not expecting, to take chances, to make random swerves off in occasionally ludicrous directions; just anything but recycle something that's already been written, to which end all those top hatted adventurers twiddling moustaches at some generically feisty female acquaintance as the dirigible sails overhead might as well be Pokémon cards so far as I can tell, although from what I gather there's generally a bit more imagination evident in Pokémon.

The most profoundly gormless facebook comment I ever saw was in response to a status message submitted by Mark Hodder, specifically a status message which had expanded to a leisurely conversation about beer and weather. Amongst various remarks and replies, some person had left a one word comment, just steampunk on its own for no obvious reason other than this being the genre with which Mark has become associated; sort of like walking up to Stewart Lee as he's in the middle of a conversation with friends, wiping the drool from your chin and saying 'funny jokes' out loud in the expectation of chuckling recognition and pats on the back because yes, we do all indeed love those funny jokes.

I really don't know how he puts up with it.

Anyway, science-fiction often serves to pass comment on the era in which it is written by allegorical means, and this is particularly true of Mark Hodder's science-fiction. The Victoriana seems to be not only his native mythology - for want of a better term - but, for this author, a significant key to understanding the present given that, it could be argued, our society came together during the nineteenth century and by a bolder, more transparent design than it has been at any time since. In other words, whilst Mark Hodder may well write for chuckles, there is more going on with this author than, I would dare to suggest, at least a few of his brass-plated contemporaries.

A Red Sun Also Rises roughly mashes up Mark's usual themes with an Edgar Rice Burroughs style extraterrestrial excursion yielding a fiction more redolent of the era in which it is set than any of your Reynolds or Baxters, thus neatly avoiding the problem of present concerns imposed upon another age, effectively addressing that age in its own language - so there's no talk to the hand or I'll be there for you, nor any deeper incongruity. Being essentially the tale of a missionary, it examines colonialism, cultural relativism, and the dynamics of colonial interference, the ways in which the colonised are changed by the colonisers; much of which amounts to a basic and quite insightful examination of class effected most vividly when the natives of Hodder's alien world are themselves transformed into a comic echo of Victorian society; so it's philosophically meaty without once coming across as a lecture.

What additionally distinguishes A Red Sun Also Rises is the explosive imagination at work in a narrative that flies off in all sorts of peculiar and unexpected directions without once worrying about whether the aviator-goggled reader on the Clapham omnibus is getting his proper quota of dirigibles and steam-powered computing engines. Ever since all those historical characters of The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack were warped into ludicrous shapes, Mark Hodder has shown a consummate skill in forcing even the most absurd narrative twists into a working story - lunatic ideas to match even the edible dinosaurs of Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series, things you just shouldn't do in a novel, which he does regardless and passes off without a hiccup.

Genuinely wonderful stuff.

Ghost Devices

Simon Bucher-Jones Ghost Devices (1997)
It's been some time since I read Ghost Devices, but it left an impression of being something which would reward the occasional return visit, and happily this has very much turned out to be the case. This particular re-read may have been brought to you through subconscious anticipation of The Brakespeare Voyage by Simon Bucher-Jones and Jonathan Dennis, soon to be published and over which I've been salivating at least since I first read the proposal as it briefly appeared online back in 2006 or thereabouts; the first sitting, way back whenever, was as I recall inspired by The Brakespeare Voyage - or Nebaioth as it was then known - seemingly vanishing into limbo when Mad Norwegian Press dropping the Faction Paradox imprint. I'd never really warmed to Virgin's Bernice Summerfield, a wisecracking archaeologist sprung from their New Adventures line of Doctor Who novels, but Nebaioth wasn't happening, so Ghost Devices was probably picked up as the literary equivalent of a consolation shag, if you'll pardon the simile.

Bernice Summerfield always struck me as a supermarket's own brand Douglas Adams knock off - twee references to bonking, recycled Black Adder gags, and the mistaken assumption that any surreal juxtaposition of concepts is inherently hilarious when described in the language of a politely bewildered 1930s clergyman. Excuse me, old bean - I couldn't help but notice that you appear to have landed your interstellar battlecruiser on top of Mrs. Bixby's tombola...

Oh just fuck off.

Of course, established characters are only ever as interesting as their authors are able to write them, and Simon Bucher-Jones is exceptional in this respect, in that he could turn out an Insane Clown Posse tie-in novel and still leave readers struggling to recall the last time they read anything so thoroughly convincing; and he kicks off in particularly fine form here with a passage that I would suggest rates easily amongst the all-time great opening lines, as striking as anything Lovecraft ever said about how it's good to have a small brain because that way it's much harder to think about space monsters:

In the evenings when the star Sadr was the colour of burnt umber, the Factories crawled down the continental shelf to drink. Hoses with diameters measurable in kilometres rose and fell into fluorescent waters. Bodies of water the volume of the Great Lakes were sieved for deutronium and rare earths.

Drones hissed steam from their fierce metallic grilles and banged a few detaching metal plates back on to the decrepit moorings of their various home Factories, but the servicing was increasingly slipshod and careless.

Around the shoreline, a semicircle of towering machinery grumbled in hushed voices. The younger Factories hooted to each other mainly in brief ultrasonic bursts - high frequency stutterings of supply and demand, the interchange of mission statements and the gossip of office machinery.

Furthermore, the novel maintains the same standard in the pages that follow - breathtaking, surreal, poetic, and genuinely comic in all the right places. There's an element of Douglas Adams, mind-bending scientific whimsy mixed with moments of utter absurdity, but the blend is smoother, less laboured, and is built on firmer narrative ground. Massive ideas come thick and fast, all knitted seamlessly into the story without a hint of showboating or the suggestion of plastered over cracks. It takes real art to combine such elements as these, skipping from genuine tension to the truly ludicrous without missing a beat or conspicuously swapping hats. In this respect, I particularly enjoyed the Ninjucoids, once deadly robotic assassins whose errant programming has left a yawning gap between the perception of their own aspirationally violent deeds and what actually happens:

'Excellent.' The Ninjucoid reabsorbed its flaying knives and its acid-sprayers. It was quite surprised that the human was still alive, let alone giggling like that. The base-line data stored in its systems on humanoid vulnerability to painful stimuli were clearly out of whack. Still, it could rely on its instructions: find the Vo'lach traders responsible for the sale of the useless weapons and make an example of them. A big radioactive spreading example.

Sanok Vawn watched it go, its sinister walking gait spoilt by the still visible juggling dumbbells that were flowing back into its skin. He took a deep breath, and tried to stop his hyperventilation.

When the rebels broke down the door of the storeroom an hour later after their unopposed attack on the Citadel, and found him with perfect nails, surrounded by exquisite and dainty salad, even the hardest-hearted of the revolutionaries realised that he had suffered enough.

Ghost Devices is at least equal to anything I've read by better publicised names like Alastair Reynolds, Charles Stross, Ian M. Banks, and Stephen Baxter whilst inhabiting similar territory. The nosebleed physics and grand scale of adventure are all there and entirely convincing, with the only obvious differences being sales figures and a more developed sense of humour.

I was not particularly well-read when I first picked up Ghost Devices, but I've made serious efforts since, and this still stands out as a landmark novel for me; at least as one of very few titles that made me want to write my own science-fiction. Never mind more widely read, this guy should be winning Hugo awards.

The Triumph of Time

James Blish The Triumph of Time (1958)
James Blish impressed me on previous occasions, specifically with The Night Shapes and the Galactic Cluster collection, both of which delivered a lot more than I'd expected from an author whose name I had once associated with Star Trek adaptations. The Triumph of Time, plucked from the shelf of a second-hand book store without need of deliberation, seems typical of his style in many respects - hard science-fiction besides which even the usual big names of the genre seem soft in comparison. Blish was juggling concepts like stripped antimatter and electromagnetic flux back when even his most fiercely bespectacled contemporaries were sticking to safer subjects like rocket trajectory and escape velocity; in fact Blish now reads like Charles Stross or Alastair Reynolds or one of those guys, which is impressive when you consider his vintage.

The Triumph of Time deals with the nature of the cosmos - antimatter, m-branes, the big bang, the big bounce and all that good stuff before many of these ideas were even formally consolidated behind any ratified term - the big bang here being referred to as the monobloc, for example; and it does pretty well for a novel dated to an era prior to any strong consensus of opinion on whether the big bang was necessarily a more credible idea than the steady state model.

The only problem, at least for me, is this being the fourth novel in the Cities in Flight sequence - the Blish equivalent of Asimov's Foundation it might be argued - which, if hugely exciting in conception, I've found thus far impenetrable. I followed what was going on well enough, but much of The Triumph of Time seems unengaging, even mystifying in places - not exactly a chore, but neither is it especially rewarding beyond those few grand ideas. I know it's the fourth book of a quadrilogy, but I'm pretty sure I read a novella length version of the first part in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame collection edited by Ben Bova, and that was similarly bewildering.

The Mary-Sue Extrusion

Dave Stone The Mary-Sue Extrusion (1999)
Some may recall how when Doctor Who collapsed under the strain of its own increasingly desperate attempts to remain relevant back in 1989, Virgin publishing took it upon themselves to keep the wheels turning as a series of original novels. The New Adventures, as they were called, were for the most part decent, doing for Sylvester McCoy's version of the Doctor that which the screen version had never quite pulled off; and whilst there were a few duds, the range was as a whole pretty successful with books written as science-fiction novels that just happened to borrow from an existing mythos rather than simply trying to recreate a kid's telly show. The ambition, even if it wasn't always realised, was at least a bit more far reaching than what would happen if the Monoids teamed up with the Voord.

The BBC in their finite wisdom saw fit to take back all the licensing rights in 1996 when the advent of the Paul McGann film hinted at there being a previously untapped udder swinging somewhere beneath that big old Doctor Who cash cow; but only slightly daunted, the New Adventures continued minus the Doctor or Time Lords, shifting the focus to Bernice Summerfield, a companion introduced in one of the earlier Virgin novels and thus impervious to the machinations of the BBC legal department.

Bernice Summerfield was a character I never quite warmed to - a sort of archaeological Emma Thompson serving as conduit for wearisome jokes about hangovers and bonking, and actually using the word bonking just like in all those supposedly edgy 1980s sitcoms; but, with the emphasis still on a decent novel rather than a franchise, the better authors usually got away with it.

Of the eighty-four New Adventures that were published before Virgin decided they'd tried their best but it just wasn't happening - Doctor Who fans tending to judge quality in terms of whether or not it features a Doctor Who logo and is thus brilliantly brilliant and brilliant and stuff - Lawrence Miles' Dead Romance and Dave Stone's The Mary-Sue Extrusion were, I would argue, probably the best; and it's interesting that Bernice Summerfield doesn't feature at all in one, and is peripheral in the other.

The Mary-Sue Extrusion casually tosses out big ideas in quick succession, contains not one single clichéd or otherwise prosaic sentence, and even manages to examine itself without coming over all Grant Morrison. The term Mary-Sue refers to a semi-autobiographical stand-in, usually wish-fulfilment on the part of an author who wants to shag the main character of the novel. I sort of wonder if this story was an attempt to examine this aspect of a range with at least a few contributing Emmathompsonophiles and to get beyond the routine spacefaring archaeologist schtick. Whatever the case, it certainly made for better reading than some of the previous titles. The Mary-Sue turns out to be a personality transplant taken on by Bernice Summerfield after deciding she wants to be someone else for a while, thus becoming Rebecca. This in itself, particularly in diary extracts where Bernice discusses her relationship with Rebecca - still misleadingly identified as an individual in her own right - hints at a further level of introspection given how the range was faring under the editorial direction of Rebecca Levene. That post-modern stuff is rarely so understated as here, and The Mary-Sue Extrusion operates on more levels than most writers can juggle without looking like tits, and it does so with effortless grace.

Dave Stone has been described as a Marmite author - you either love his writing or you hate it - which I can't help but read as shorthand for you either love books trying something a bit more ambitious than pretending to be a 1970s TV show or you hate them; but different strokes and all that...

I tend to think a story stands on the strength of its telling over and above details of plot or whether there's a Doctor Who logo on the cover - yeah, I know that seems a wild and radical notion - and Dave Stone's writing is rich and expressive, a joy to read which elevates a very simple story - the private investigator on the trail of a missing person - to something greater than one might expect of a book published as part of a range and committed to furthering a continuing story.

The New Adventures range began with the intention of getting new authors in print, and I always imagined this implied a hope of one or two going onto bigger and better things. Miserably, this doesn't quite seem to have happened as it might have done, and it's a real shame because The Mary-Sue Extrusion is at least as good as Iain M. Banks' better novels, and it pisses all over what I've read of Charles Stross, Alastair Reynolds, Eric Brown and the like.

Tales of the City

Philip Purser-Hallard (editor) Tales of the City (2012)
Leaving aside David Louis Edelman's Infoquake and Stephen Baxter's Coalescent, Philip Purser-Hallard's Of the City of the Saved... has thus far turned out to be my favourite science-fiction novel of the twenty-first century, roughly speaking. For anyone who might be unaware, the premise of the novel is a city the size of the Milky Way existing after death of the universe and inhabited by the reincarnated and immortal forms of every human who ever lived. It's Heaven built up with just the right blend of soft science to allow plausibility without so much as a whiff of heavy handed allegory; and Stross, Reynolds, and all the usual award winning suspects read like clunkers in comparison.

Tales of the City comprises short stories set in the same environment, six authors drawn together by Philip Purser-Hallard for a themed collection that reads like a novel in its own right. The theme would appear to be change and the consequences of change unimpeded by mortality, something which, rather oddly, was not explored in such depth in Of the City of the Saved..., at least not so far as I recall. Highlights for me would be Elizabeth Evershed's tale of a reincarnated and undeniably Neanderthal Socrates causing unwitting havoc in the philosophical institution he has inspired, and Dale Smith's About a Girl in which Kurt Cobain forms a relationship with Philip K. Dick's deceased twin sister, reincarnated here as a six-week old baby - which by all rights should have been an unreadable post-modern dog's dinner considering the ingredients, but is probably one of the most poignant shorts I've read in a long time: truly a phenomenal achievement.

For the sake of balance, there are a few fumbled balls here and there, but nothing too bothersome: the Jane Austen homage Highbury is absorbing and beautifully written, let down slightly by its presenting a species nourished by fear and related emotions - seemed a bit too bog standard Doctor Who for an otherwise decent story; Lost Ships and Lost Lands didn't quite seem to go anywhere; and whilst Happily Ever After Is a High Risk Strategy provides a terrific start to the book - all tingly ideas in sharp colours - the Ravey Davey stuff didn't really work for me, interrupting a great story like some glowstick waving stranger plonking himself down at your pub table to dribble on about the amaaaaaaazing time he had in Ibiza. Cool doesn't always communicate well beyond those already well disposed towards whatever is on offer, which is possibly why Dale Smith's story works so well in that he presents Kurt Cobain as a bit of a knob rather than the tortured poster boy to whom we are unfortunately accustomed.

Whilst a chain is generally as strong as its weakest link, Tales of the City is conversely of such quality as to negate those minor niggles  mentioned above. We need more of these authors and more of the City of the Saved.

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man

Mark Hodder The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man (2011)
As I may have mentioned in preamble to an earlier review, I find it difficult to stir up much enthusiasm for steampunk due to its being a trend populated, so far as I am able to tell, principally by arseholes besides which 1970s Bay City Rollers fandom seems contemplative and dignified. I'm all for getting out the dressing up box from under the bed every once in a while, but it's all becoming a bit generic: brass goggles do not necessarily render one either interesting or a paragon of original thought, and the tone of a children's TV presenter imploring viewers to be lions adopted by websites helpfully explaining that steampunk is Victorian science-fiction so that even morons can join in the fun causes all right-thinking people to frown.

Sure, I could turn the other way; but I dislike stuff that is shite clogging up the cultural bandwidth and making it that much more difficult to get through to the stuff which isn't shite.

The novels of Mark Hodder, Michael Moorcock and perhaps one or two others number amongst the stuff which definitively isn't shite (and there's a book jacket blurb if ever there was), science-fiction with a nineteenth century emphasis which actually bothers to do something besides ticking boxes on the standard issue steampunk inventory.

The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, like its predecessor, The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack is an alternate historical novel reading like a ripping yarn which achieves a degree of intimacy with its subject far beyond what seems to be found in more generic efforts, dissecting class, imperialism and the ethics of society to depths one might not immediately expect from something which appears to pay homage to both Spike Milligan and The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town - unless that was just me. Rather than simply turning its historical characters into action figures, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man gets into a serious degree of biographical detail, yielding a genuinely meaty and provocative read without sacrificing either lightness of touch or the occasional pleasure of a tooth-grinding pun.

Regarding authors of this century who've done so well as to have book covers blessed with the quoted testimonials, I'm finding myself increasingly disappointed by those beautifully written inflated word counts wherein Neal Stephenson, Eric Brown, Charles Stross, or Alastair Reynolds deliver none of the wonders described by the bloke from the New York Times. Novels seem to promise so much more in 2012, a literary experience, something which won't use the wrong soup spoon or moon you from the back window of the coach with tackily airbrushed pictures of spaceships and the like. Mark Hodder establishes himself as not only leaving a paper cut some degrees above the subgenre with which he is dubiously associated, but as a damn sight more readable than most of his contemporaries in the wider field of science-fiction. The Philip K. Dick award is entirely deserved.

A Choice of Gods

Clifford D. Simak A Choice of Gods (1972)
After Revelation Space, I felt the pressing need to self-medicate with Simak, probably not so much for his being the literary equivalent of comfort food as for his reliability. Even leaving aside novellas and short stories, of nineteen Simak novels I've read, only Why Call Them Back From Heaven? has been not entirely to my taste. His writing rarely fails to engage, never seems to sacrifice quality to quantity despite a prolific output, always throws up a few surprises, moments one would never have anticipated: in short, he can usually be trusted to come up with the goods.

I should probably qualify the comfort food metaphor (or simile, or whatever the hell it is) as a lazy comparison deriving from Simak's customary pastoral themes reminding me of The Waltons - in a good way I should stress - for said pastoral themes, on close inspection, tend towards an underlying pessimism that is anything but soothing. A Choice of Gods is no exception in this respect.

The novel is set many thousands of years after the depopulation of Earth by an unknown cosmic power with a handful of humans and robots left behind in the rural idyll as nature reclaims the planet. It's a familiar Simakian setting explored in other novels - notably City - yet  here remains very much its own story. Whilst falling short of full allegorical status by the terms of, for example, David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, A Choice of Gods certainly wanders some way in that direction, its rhetorical gait more pronounced than I've noticed in other works by the same author. However, his message remains open to interpretation. Simak tended to ask pointed questions and let the readers argue it out amongst themselves. Like his contemporary, A.E. van Vogt, he would leave things open or unexplained, an oddly refreshing habit given that it so closely reproduces a subjective experience resembling real life.

A Choice of Gods is about humanity and nature and the place of the former within the latter as understood by different means. Simak's robots tend to be innocents, and here they form a religious order which recognises that its own understanding of God will never transcend the limitations of their collective ignorance, and from this ignorance is born their fanaticism - although mild by the terms one might ordinarily associate with fanaticism. Anyway, in order to achieve a better understanding, the robots embark upon the Project, the creation of a machine more intelligent than themselves which they hope will communicate with the Principle, the cosmic power responsible for depopulating the planet - interestingly enough representing a prediction of technological singularity a full decade before Vernor Vinge popularised the idea.

The Principle, a force seemingly residing at the centre of the galaxy, is probably not God; the humans have moved some way beyond religious belief in conventional terms, and the Native Americans comprising a sizeable proportion of their numbers never really held with such ideas in the first place - a pleasantly authentic variation on the usual stuff you might expect about the Great Spirit and chanting around a campfire. The Principle seems to be nature itself, a force which, whilst not necessarily evil, is certainly amoral or indifferent. For reasons we probably wouldn't understand despite both humans and robots having their own ideas, the Principle depopulated the Earth by moving most of the people to three very distant planets, and after five centuries, they've decided they're coming back.

Simak draws no conclusions, preferring to ask questions and leave you to it. A Choice of Gods might therefore be deemed an unsatisfactory novel in terms of ripping yarns with neat solutions, but that was never its purpose. As 175 pages of a very literate writer  thinking aloud and seeing what happens, it probably has no right to be quite so enjoyable, but that's Simak for you.

Revelation Space

Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space (2000)
Dan Silveste is a copy of his own father's consciousness inhabiting a cloned body of the same, and having had some sort of religious experience during a visit to the alien Shroud whilst psychologically augmented by the similarly alien Pattern Jugglers, he's digging up stuff left behind by an extinct race of bird-like creatures. Meanwhile some woman is hired to assassinate him by some other woman in a massive spaceship, just as Dan is kidnapped by someone else following his marriage to some woman who was something to do with security on the colony world where he's digging up all this stuff; and whilst this is all fine and liberally seasoned with vivid descriptions of mind-bending technological developments, half-way through these six-hundred pages, I noticed that I still had no fucking clue as to why any of these people were doing what they were doing or why I was expected to care. I even read the first couple of chapters twice but it still made no difference.

The science is mind-bendingly wonderful; the prose is deliciously literate - if that isn't just a bit too Jilly Goolden; the story is imaginative and happily lacking in cliché; and yet Revelation Space taken as a whole is without doubt one of the dullest things I've  read, and on the grounds of resenting an entire week of my life wasted on trudging through page after page of discussions about  nothing, I'd actually go so far as to say I hated it more than anything else I've ever managed to finish out of protest, possibly excepting Heinlein's irredeemably dreadful Stranger in a Strange Land. Not one character seems to possess anything approaching a personality, and the dialogue is Blake's 7 strength levels of bad, and after a while one begins to tire of reading something for hours at a time without experiencing any discernible advancement of plot, ideas, or general comprehension.

Alastair Reynolds, like Stephen Baxter and Peter F. Hamilton, writes epic scale space opera but, unlike Stephen Baxter and Peter F. Hamilton, misses the point that space opera works best at a certain pace. Revelation Space would have been an amazing novella, but six-hundred pages is taking the piss. I know he has his fans and he's not without talent, but I'd say avoid at all costs.