Liberating Earth

Kate Orman (editor) Liberating Earth (2015)
Here's another one for which I painted the cover, thus once again potentially presenting a question of how impartial my review is likely to be, the answer to which is - I would hope - business as usual. The only difference would be that if I hated it, I wouldn't bother posting the review online because it's uncomfortable when someone you vaguely know produces tripe, and we all have to sit around saying well done, old bean, and nobody quite knows where to look.

Thankfully Liberating Earth is a long, long way from being tripe, as roughly anticipated on the grounds of having been edited by Kate Orman who can generally be relied upon to pull a half-decent story together with the words in the right places and everything. A few emails ago as we were discussing what was to be on the cover, I  recall references to the more metaphysical designs which so often graced the jackets of science-fiction anthologies of the fifties and sixties - the Yves Tanguy with space rockets school of illustration, roughly speaking. Such is the tendency I was hoping to channel here - and pedants with too much time on their hands may like to play spot the difference with a copy of the Consul edition of The Outer Reaches collection as edited by August Derleth - and now, having read the thing, I see the sense in this.

Liberating Earth is a collection of short stories with alternate and often genuinely weird versions of terrestrial reality as the unifying theme, all chained together as part of a larger narrative by Playing for Time, Kate Orman's own sequential contribution; so you could probably read it as either a novel or individual stories depending on your preference. I actually found it a little difficult to follow the precise details of the larger story, Playing for Time, as a consequence of it being divided into nine parts, which wasn't a problem. It seems to hold together in so much as it feels like it all adds up and is nevertheless enjoyable. Playing for Time is also more or less the token Faction Paradox element of the recipe, with the remainder relating to the mythology by slim terms, or at least at a bit of an angle and often in spirit rather than furnishings. Hopefully this shouldn't be a problem for anyone requiring a certain quota of grandfathercidal teenagers in skull masks; and it certainly wasn't for me because - to swing back around to the point begun in the previous paragraph - the collection as a whole goes a long way towards invoking the spirit of some of the great science-fiction anthologies of the fifties and sixties, less in terms of any nostalgic tendency as the sheer range of mood and theme, and the thrill of having no idea of what you're going to get. Everyone will doubtless have their favourites, and there were a couple I personally found a little chewy - which is probably more to do with my own preferences than the quality of the stories. Those which stood out as possibly exceptional for me were E.H. Timms' Dreamer in the Dark, Red Rover Red Rover by someone identifying herself only as Q, and Kelly Hale's wonderful Project Thunderbird, another presentation of evidence in the mystery of why publishers aren't simply throwing massive wads of cash at her. Similarly noteworthy is Annie's Arms by Xanna Chown presenting a sort of surreal, suburban horror which put me in mind of the stark contrasts of the first Siouxsie & the Banshees album - all very John Heartfield. Also we have the highly entertaining The Vikingr Mystique by Dorothy Ail, a sort of Thelma & Louise with space Vikings. The last thing I read involving space Vikings was a short story called Indifference by Brian Aldiss, which intrigues me slightly given that Ail's Nordic seeker of pillage is named Aldis with one s. For what it's worth, The Vikingr Mystique pisses all over the Aldiss story, in the event of there being any conscious homage involved.

Finally and possibly my favourite is Rachel Redhead's Judy's War, partially because it demonstrates the great range of the collection, and partially because it's a genuine pleasure to see her work in fancy-pants print at last. I read her self-published The Raithaduine Saga and concluded that once you're past the occasionally loose sense of grammar and the fact of it being so bloody long, it has a lot in its favour. Redhead's prose disregards established science-fiction or literary conventions, weaving a bewildering path strewn with weapons-grade jokes, huge, crazy ideas, and sudden narrative swerves which seem entirely her own. At times it reads like A.E. van Vogt channelling Vicky Pollard or maybe some of the earlier, slightly more warped John Waters movies - which I suggest as a recommendation in case that isn't obvious: she probably isn't likely to get commissioned to write anything so respectable as the next Young Bond novel, but she writes with the kind of mad genius which can't be faked, and which by definition needs to cut its own path. I hope she realises that her writing has a lot more going for it than many of the things from which I gather she has drawn influence, and I hope this is the first of many such appearances in print.

Liberating Earth is great. Now can we have a full-length Kate Orman novel, pleeeaaase.

...and in case you were wondering...

Erasing Sherlock

Kelly Hale Erasing Sherlock (2006)
Nosing around on the internet in search of Erasing Sherlock reviews for the sake of comparing notes in the event of there being some major detail of the narrative which I've somehow missed, I encounter:

The way Holmes is described I could not avoid imagining our modern day Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, in the role - although the novel might have been written with Jeremy Brett in mind as Sherlock was not even a twinkle in the eyes of Moffat/Gatiss at the time.

I suppose I'm not really entitled to my usual upswell of wrath given that I tend to picture Sherlock Holmes as Basil Rathbone - or Peter Cook at a pinch - and that while I'm almost certain I enjoyed whichever book it was I read as a kid, I more recently found the same author's The Lost World borderline abominable; but nevertheless, I like to think of Erasing Sherlock as a novel rather than as something which didn't quite get the funding to become a brill television show; and as for fucking Cucumber, give me fucking strength, and once you've given me fucking strength kindly fucking fuck the fuck off.

...and yes, that sound you heard was indeed my sneering.

Anyway, Erasing Sherlock began life as a time travelling Holmes novel which won an award of some kind, and justifiably so, and was then reborn as a Faction Paradox novel without, so I gather, too much tweaking given how it was already in that same thematic ball park. The story is roughly an expansion of that detail of quantum theory in which the act of observation changes that which is observed. Here we have a time travelling student observing the great detective as part of her doctorate, changing the nature of that which is observed specifically by shagging him; which turns out to be part of some larger experiment investigating whether or not it is possible to change the past, in this case by erasing the historical figure of Sherlock Homes, hence the title.

As may be apparent from the above, this all works on a number of layers. At one end of the scale we have the notion that the events of the narrative reduce Holmes to a merely fictional character - just as he is in the universe in which this novel was written - which might also be deemed to pertain to the macrocosm of how an author relates to her characters. One interpretation might be that Kelly Hale specifically wished to relate to this character in sexual terms, thus I suppose presenting further commentary as an aspect of fan fiction; although this isn't something which is made explicit in the text, and Holmes is far from an idealised fantasy figure, but it's there if you want to look for it. That said, I tend to dislike supposedly erotic fiction usually because it bears more relation to the clichés of advertising than to that which it purports to evoke, but Kelly Hale writes it really well, focussing on the texture and poetry rather than peddling typically gushing crescendos. Thankfully this isn't Fifty Shades of Sherlock; and yes, I'm sure some loser has already engaged themselves with that particular pointless exercise, and there will be the inevitable dreamy picture of sodding Cucumber on the cover of the resulting shitty Amazon eBook.

If I have any criticism of Erasing Sherlock, it is only that it feels at times a little like characters waiting around for the massive explosions of the final chapter, in the meantime busying themselves with the intrigue of picking over various plot details to see what happens; but having said that, I've a feeling this may be more to do with me than the novel, given that I'm not predisposed towards an interest in either Holmes or detective fiction as a genre, and it has been quite difficult to read some of this one with all sorts of feline drama going on at the other end of the bedroom - Kirby producing massive lung-destroying human-size turds in the litter tray, Tony trying to roger the kittens and all sorts of stuff you don't really need to know about. The salient points are that Erasing Sherlock is a wonderfully observed and rendered piece of fiction which manages to do at least a little more than just have adventures and solve puzzles, and as everyone keeps saying, Kelly Hale should be a household name on the strength of the quality of her prose; and if you're incapable of reading this one without thinking ooh Cucumber, maybe you should stick to your beloved Jason of Star Command DVDs, or just cease to exist altogether. Either would be acceptable.

Burning with Optimism's Flame

Jay Eales (editor) Burning with Optimism's Flame (2012)
Despite my salivating each time some new Faction Paradox commodity extends itself into noumenal reality, it's taken me an age to get around to this one, and partially because it first appeared as I was up to my eyeballs in writing Against Nature. Initially I was cautious on the grounds of fearing there might be some short story coincidentally duplicating one or more of my own vague ideas or themes, and so I wished to avoid the collection as a source of possible influence - not least due to having heard that Daniel Ribot's La Santa Muerte was not only set in Mexico but would also feature a certain Death Goddess who briefly turns up in my own extended leaflet. Since then it's just been a case of it slowly rising to the summit of a mountainous to-be-read pile.

I had been primed with slightly lowered expectations by internet mumblings along the lines of it's not as good as the last one, is it? - referring of course to 2011's A Romance in Twelve Parts, the previous Faction Paradox collection. Thankfully and possibly inevitably said mumblings translate to it's not identical to the last one, is it?, for the tone and focus of this anthology is somehow quite different. It feels more like an extension into mainstream science-fiction writing, by which I mean Isaac Asimov and all of those guys, as opposed to Babylon fucking 5 or any of those Doctor Who affiliated Short Trips collections but with more skulls. Jay Eales, it turns out, really knows how to pull an anthology together, as distinct from just asking a load of mates to come up with stories. I'm still not entirely sure how the title figures in all of this, whether it refers to some overarching theme I've failed to spot, but whatever the book does, it does it exceptionally well for the most part.

As has probably been said by someone or other, the beauty of Faction Paradox is that it really doesn't have to be about Faction Paradox to the point that no-one has yet really demonstrated that it's definitively about either the shared universe created by Lawrence Miles and others, or even just something so vague as a certain aesthetic. Some of the connections made here are accordingly very tenuous indeed, but it doesn't really matter because the only legitimate reason to pick up a book so far as I'm concerned is in anticipation of good writing, which is what you get.

Admittedly I found the opening stories a little variable - either too subtle for their own good or a little closer in spirit to Neil Gaiman than I generally like in one case, although they're all decent in their own ways. Nevertheless, the contrast - at least for me - when I came to Kelly Hale's contribution was almost shocking - a woman apparently incapable of writing a dull sentence whose work exudes the sort of effortless class that draws the reader in without the need for any obvious narrative hooks; and this quality recurs throughout the collection making the necessity of clear ties to some unifying mythology entirely peripheral.

Stephen Marley's All the Fun of the Fear, for one example, seems particularly tenuous as Faction Paradox literature, but if you can't appreciate a story in which the moon is seen to appear in the heavens wearing a hat, then maybe books aren't for you after all. Similarly sickeningly impressive are contributions from Simon Bucher-Jones, Jonathan Dennis, Sarah Hadley, and Philip Purser-Hallard all of which inspire questions as to why these four aren't yet at the stage of finding themselves buried in gold by eager publishers in the style of Edifis at the end of Asterix and Cleopatra.

They each respectively pack enough ideas for a decent novel into short form; and to concede a couple of specifics, Remake / Remodel begs the question of whether we might ever expect a full-length Faction Hollywood book, and Philip Purser-Hallard's wonderful ecclesiastically themed De Umbris Idearum only makes me resent the time and brain cells I wasted on Mary Doria Russell's Godawful Sparrow, all the more demonstrating as it does that strong religious themes can make for elegant science-fiction in the right hands.

I seem to have ended up gushing again, which can probably be safely dismissed as symptomatic of a lack of impartiality on my part. This book hasn't actually changed my life, and may not be the greatest collection I've ever read; but nevertheless it takes its subject mythology in a variety of unexpected directions, and does so with consistent style, and is as such difficult to fault; even though I didn't get to do the cover. Mutter. Mumble.

Grimm Reality

Simon Bucher-Jones & Kelly Hale Grimm Reality (2001)
In the event of either of my readers being somehow unaware of the fact, in between getting itself cancelled for trying too hard in 1989, and subsequent rebirth as a series of flashing lights in 2005, The Doctor Who Telly Show spent its wilderness years as a series of novels. Some were utter shite - yer basic button-pushing continuity landfill - and some were pretty good.

Grimm Reality belongs to the latter category, and succeeds for two reasons: firstly its having been written as a novel rather than as something to be purchased because there's a picture of the TARDIS on the cover; secondly its having been written by authors who can  form sentences without falling over or giving themselves a headache. As a recovering addict, someone who once splashed out on a couple of these things every month for about a decade, I really cannot overemphasise how greatly I appreciate authors and publishers making a bit of an effort. Too many of these books relied upon the tenuous novelty of what would happen if Cybermen teamed up with Ice Warriors to invade a Dalek nudist colony, the sort of stories in which people say things grinningly, which feature sentences like his voice went up and down, and which assume the reader to be a gurgling moron with a reading age of about nine. Pardon the acerbic tone, but I still don't understand why a few more of those Doctor Who books couldn't have been a bit more like this, given that all it would have taken is for editors to refrain from commissioning novels by people who can't actually fucking write.

Axe duly ground, Grimm Reality deposits the TARDIS crew in a world of fairy tale populated by gnomes, giants, sleeping princesses and the like, hence the industrial strength pun of the title. Happily, not only is this the more visceral pre-Disney strain of Brothers Grimm narrative, but the traditional cock-obvious plot twists are neatly anticipated and avoided:

He wanted to believe, but he had a lot of experience to put aside: in the last hundred years, nine times out of ten the banshee had been a thing from Antares 5, the foo fighters bemused alien jellyfish, and the ghost usually a teenager in a sheet. Even when he hadn't got a full explanation for things, he'd always felt there ought to be one.

In a way he'd be pleased to find indivisible Giants.

He wanted Giants that couldn't be reduced to men on stilts, or aliens from a low-gravity world in cyber-braces. He wanted Giants that rumbled the world with their ultimate bone-shaking largeness, Giants that couldn't be explained away.

Of course, an explanation is eventually delivered as the sort of bewildering nosebleed physics Simon Bucher-Jones always writes with such poetry; and its an explanation which cannily keeps the promise of the above, thus avoiding stooping to the sort of anything goes lazy writing currently informing the related television show wherein the entire galaxy is saved by someone having a bit of a cry.

I could be reading too much into it, but this rather neat solution suggests an underlying theme, perhaps a subtle commentary on narrative conventions enslaved by their own continuity: a story told for its own sake rather than that of a - shudder - franchise; and to this end, Grimm Reality reads very much as a novel featuring a character once played by Paul McGann, rather than just the four millionth exciting adventure for that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as etc. etc. It's less Harry Potter, more Clifford D. Simak writing gnomes into his science-fiction novels on the grounds that he's Clifford D. Simak and he'll write what the hell he likes.

Speaking of the accursed television show, I've found myself surprised at how the current incarnation takes so many narrative cues from novels like Grimm Reality, and yet still gets it wrong through overstatement, reducing everything to clichés, shorthand or gimmicks. This was how it could have been - intelligent, gripping, entertainingly weird with big ideas, jokes that don't outstay their welcome or require revolving bow ties to alert viewers to the occurrence of madcap antics, and pleasantly rounded characters - notably Anji Kapoor who I don't remember working quite so well in  other tales.

Both Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale have written better than Grimm Reality, and it's by no means the greatest Doctor Who story ever told, but it's pretty damn good. It just seems a shame that, with hindsight, novels of this standard should have been the average rather than upper range, but no matter.