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.

The Greks Bring Gifts

Murray Leinster The Greks Bring Gifts (1964)
The more Leinster I read - although I should probably point out that this is only my third - the more I suspect his legend should loom at least a little larger than is presently the case. I'm not sure if he quite qualifies as a great lost master, but he's seriously fucking readable for someone you've probably never heard of, and I've yet to encounter a Murray quite so disappointing as certain crimes against fiction committed by numerous better established authors - Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson and the rest.

The Greks Bring Gifts is, as you may have guessed from the title, the story of the alien Greks arriving on earth to share the bounty of their advanced technology with us humans, but the gifts come with a price and it turns out that the Greks are complete cunts. It's almost an allegory for everything ever done by white people when arriving in foreign lands populated by persons without television, although I'm not sure the parallels are deliberate so much as that this is a tale hung from the same basic lesson - something it shares with the more recent Singularity Sky by Charles Stross from what I can recall. The story is related in the comfortable tones of an elderly neighbour spinning tales from his stoop on a warm evening, following its protagonists along a detective trail of alien technology, archaeology, and the ethics of slavery. The FBI turn up to lend a helping hand from time to time, contributing to a feeling that The Greks Bring Gifts could quite easily have been an episode of The Outer Limits, I suppose deriving from an era in which government agency was held to be something you could trust at least some of the time.

I may have made the book sound unambitious or even a little dull, but the appeal is in the telling, and Leinster had a wonderful voice. By some terms he might be regarded as a hack or simply a pulp author, churning out genre fiction across the board under a variety of different pseudonyms, one after the other; but then it can hardly be denied that he'd put in the man hours and was very, very good at his craft. His conversational narrative draws you in immediately, and keeps hold for...

Well, I have to admit, this one seemed to slacken off at about the half way mark. It isn't that it lost the plot so much as that I had a feeling of characters trying to keep themselves busy until the big pay off at the end of the book. I wonder if this might be a clue as to Leinster no longer being quite the name he once was, namely that he was simply better at the short form and was less able to sustain momentum at novel length. My previous Murrays have been a short story collection and a novel which turned out to be three short stories utilising the same character. It isn't that The Greks Bring Gifts is in any sense bad, just that it feels a little like the author would have been happier writing something with less of a page count. I'm still going to be keeping an eye out for more from this guy.

The Locksley Exploit

Philip Purser-Hallard The Locksley Exploit (2015)
Philip Purser-Hallard is the best kept secret in British genre writing, runs a claim from the British Fantasy Society on the cover, further qualified by a quote from Andrew Hickey identifying the lad as one of the two or three best science-fiction and fantasy writers in the world today. Regardless of Andrew being a possibly less than impartial source on the grounds that he sort of knows the author, I would say he makes a fair assessment; although it should be kept in mind that my own word probably isn't worth tuppence either, as I sort of know both of them, at least as internet presences and people with whom I have had occasion to work in a creative capacity.

Anyway, yes much as I love yer Charles Stross and yer Neal Stephenson and all those other more financially conspicuous chaps, not a one of them has written anything which I would rate quite so highly as certain works by Philip Purser-Hallard or - seeing as we're here - Simon Bucher-Jones, in the event of anyone being interested; and here's more reason as to why.

The Locksley Exploit is the second part of the Devices trilogy and sequel to The Pendragon Protocol which came out last year. The Devices trilogy seems a fairly simple idea on the surface of it, but the more the narrative progresses, the more it becomes apparent just how much work has gone into this thing - as characterised by the fact of it all unfolding at an entirely natural and seemingly effortless pace - the mark of a true master of his art, namely that he makes it look easy. The story takes place in a very familiar contemporary England policed from way behind the scenes by the Round Table, the Knights of Arthurian legend expressed in the words and deeds of their modern day hosts. Except the whole premise is much closer to a believable, modern and even realist narrative than its constituent parts might suggest. This isn't about possession, reincarnation, or the contemporary puppets of mysterious, ancient forces so much as it is about contemporary western society and the schism by which it appears to be slowly destroying itself. Even the major players in The Locksley Exploit appear to understand exactly what is going on here.

'The myth of the Round Table has shaped so many of the ways we think about being British,' he says. 'The awe we hold our monarch in, as if she'd been appointed by God himself. The way we defer to the royal family, the bishops, the lords, even so-called captains of industry, as if they were the heroic figures Arthur surrounded himself with. The way we as a nation trust to authority, prefer not to stick our necks out, refuse to rock the boat. Even our national anthem isn't about the p-people, but about the person reigning over us. And that makes a kind of sense if your King was once a paragon among men, and might be again one day. But the Circle aren't paragons. Men is all they are.'

The schism is represented by conflicting legends, the Arthurian in contrast with the more egalitarian avatars of Robin Hood and his pals. The Locksley Exploit draws upon a formidable body of mythology in providing support for its peculiarly familiar world, English myth going way back, the kind which once scared the life out of me as a child, seeming to be all scowling wooden faces and rural witch trials. As such the novel reads almost like a textbook in places; which works well, I hasten to add, and makes for a satisfying and stimulating read. What this all adds up to is a reflection of a society pulling itself apart through the conflicting tides of its own disunity, and a disunity wrought largely by abstract ideas, much as the Devices are themselves abstractions.

We - the Circle and the Chapel and the British Beasts; the Gormund Boys and Sons of Gore and Paladins and Frontiersmen; all our equivalents in every culture and all our predecessors back through the millennia, since, perhaps, the dawn of human consciousness - are suffering, he'd say, from a massive and pandemic mental illness. We've convinced first ourselves and one another, then our children and descendants, and now at last our entire civilisation, that the voices we hear in our heads are those of the heroes of old, when in fact they're just that; voices in our heads.

It's interesting that such words should be written by an author of - unless I'm getting my wires crossed here, and apologies if this is so - formerly Christian faith. For some it may read as a variation on Dawkins' somewhat overstated calls for reason, or specifically that which he and his followers define as reason - eschewing all which might be deemed a byproduct of the imagination. Without getting into an entire side issue, the main problem with most versions of the Dawkins argument is the presupposing of there being a single answer for each question, and a single answer working equally well for all people under all possible circumstances: either you agree with me or you're wrong. Whilst this sort of reasoning keeps everything nice and simple, particularly for those seeking some flag under which to march, it isn't very helpful in achieving any sort of understanding of human society as a whole, because that understanding will almost inevitably be a variation on fuck 'em because they're too stupid to live, which is neither helpful nor interesting.

So, to finally swing around in the general direction of the point, it seems significant that a writer with a fairly profound understanding of the mechanism of faith should produce a novel conveying such an astute understanding of where we've been going wrong all this time; and considering where we appear to be heading, we really do need astute understandings, as opposed to people who think pissing off Muslims in the name of free speech represents some sort of blow struck in the name of their beloved reason.

So in answer to a question I didn't actually ask, namely what The Locksley Exploit is about, it's sort of about everything.

Getting back down to earth, or at least to the level of me sat in bed reading this thing for most of the last week, my only criticism would be that I found myself beginning to lose track of certain characters amongst the cast of thousands, who they were, and what had happened to them in The Pendragon Protocol. However, I've a feeling this may just have been me, and it didn't really impinge upon my general enjoyment. The first person present tense narrative of Alan a'Dale, dipping occasionally into archaeological, mythological, or psychogeographical asides, remains lively and engaging for the duration, never really descending into anything you could describe as routine or workmanlike; and it works so well as to carry the reader along regardless of the occasional lost strand, confident of it all making sense and adding up at the end, as indeed it does. The Locksley Exploit seems maybe not so startling as was The Pendragon Protocol, but it maintains the standard, and I'll be sure to re-read both before tackling the final part of the Devices trilogy, because I'm fairly sure that it will be worth the effort on the strength of the first two.

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.

Of the City of the Saved...

Philip Purser-Hallard Of the City of the Saved... (2004)
For anybody unfamiliar with this one, the setting of the title is a city the size of a spiral galaxy existing beyond the end of time wherein all the human beings who ever lived - and even some of the fictional ones who didn't - find themselves resurrected to eternal life. Neanderthals coexist with cybernetic posthumans, ancestors with distant descendants, and death is only a memory because everyone is both immortal and immune to injury whilst they remain within the city limits. It's heaven allegorised as science-fiction, an idea already tackled in Philip José Farmer's Riverworld books, apparently, although not having read them I couldn't really say how well they compare. On the other hand, I think I've read this three or four times now, and it's frankly fucking brilliant, as acknowledged by Lawrence Miles, editor of the Faction Paradox novels and never one to heap praise upon the undeserving, when interviewed by Andrew Hickey on Resonance FM's Reality Check podcast:

I am going to blow my own trumpet here, because I think I was quite a good writer of the Doctor Who books, but as an editor, I really, really came into my own. Phil Purser-Hallard wrote what was basically an eight out of ten book, and I said no, do that bit different, do that bit different, and turn it into a nine out of ten book. I am possibly more proud of the fact that I edited Of the City of the Saved... than I am of any of the books I actually wrote myself, because although I wrote a lot of books that I think, looking back, are quite good - that was the book which was already good, and I can't say that about any of my own books, that any of them were really good, because I look at them now and go yeah, I could do that better. [Of the City of the Saved...] was my proudest achievement.

Rightly so, I would suggest; but before we lose sight of the fact that this novel is already built upon one of the most ludicrous premises imaginable in terms of how improbably distant its setting is removed from any familiar, definitively experienced environment, it should also be remembered that here we have cameos from resurrected fictional characters, and a story the size of a galaxy told from fifteen or sixteen very different viewpoints, and Philip K. Dick himself shows up thinly disguised as a character named Rick Kithred.

By rights, this should have been the biggest, most disastrous soufflé in literary history, a deck of cards Eiffel Tower erected in the path of a hurricane, a 250 page kick me sticker, and yet not only does it hold together beautifully, the sheer scale of such an unlikely triumph accounts in part for why it works. There's a saying about the common problem of debut novels being authors who try to do far too much, and this is of course a prime example, except the basic ideas are so beautifully worked as to yield a story which seems simply tightly packed with wonders as diverse as its setting - possible evidence for the quality of the material being the continuation of the story in more recent Obverse anthologies edited by the author.

Ridiculous ambition is rarely in itself the problem so much as writers whose ideas are much bigger than the scope of their ability to communicate the same cough cough Stephen Moffat blowing up the fucking universe every five bleeding minutes which happily isn't a problem because Philip Purser-Hallard writes with the confidence and ability of someone who clearly loves his medium and greatly enjoys his art.

Thus far, I've seen only one review attempt to identify problems with this book - namely that appreciation is too greatly reliant on foreknowledge of the characters involved, and so it becomes a bit tiresome spotting all the cameos by resurrected celebrities. Even aside from the fact of Of The City of the Saved... being published as one of a series of loosely interconnected titles - which you would have to be an idiot to miss - I don't really buy the first point at all, or find the novel lacking any vital piece of information which may aid in either the reader's understanding or pleasure; and secondly I think I missed almost all of the star guests anyway, so that aspect made very little difference to me.

Having read Philip K. Dick until he was coming out of my arse - if you'll pardon the repulsive simile - or at least coming out of a sort of notional second century arse that's since been eclipsed by the iron rectums of imperial Rome - Purser-Hallard's depiction of said author is a joy, immediately familiar and entirely justified. Also, I'm fairly certain the possibly underused Dedalus character is a homage to James Joyce given the form taken by his narrative. There were other characters whom I suspect may have been borrowed from elsewhere, but nothing that impacted on the wonderfully florid momentum of the narrative, at least not for me. The conclusion, as Daphne Lawless has pointed out, echoes that of Robert Graves' Claudius novels, which I assume was entirely deliberate given the novel being, amongst other things, a discussion of free will and security as mutually exclusive in an environment which may as well be heaven; but otherwise you'll have to argue that one amongst yourselves.

It does a whole lot of fascinating and different ontological things, and I'm not going to sit here listing all of them when it would be easier for you just to read the book; but I will say that it does them with a smile on its face - and a smile quite unlike that slightly off-putting smirk of Douglas Adams congratulating himself - and it does them with the conviction of an author who knows what he's talking about, as opposed to just throwing in a few pseudo-religious allusions for the sake of texture. Even on top of everything else, I've a feeling this novel may also offer some form of commentary on our contemporary culture in which nothing is ever quite lost, and the past remains forever with us - a variation on William Gibson's idea of there no longer being any such thing as the future, which in turn feeds into Lawrence Miles' This Town Will Never Let Us Go. This may equally well be simply a pattern I've read into the text, perhaps the inevitable crosstalk thrown up by so many rhythms all running consecutively.

This is the sort of environmentally bizarre novel I always hoped Larry Niven would write, but sadly he never quite got there; and whilst we're making free with the comparisons, we might also consider the very best of Iain M. Banks, the previously mentioned Douglas Adams, and even a touch of Alastair Reynolds or maybe Charles Stross, but in each case without whatever qualities have kept their books from creeping up into my own personal top ten. Of the City of the Saved... remains among my favourite science-fiction novels of the last few decades, and Lordy I wish there were more of such calibre.

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.