Norman Spinrad - Child of Fortune (1975)

 

It's a good job I try to avoid judging books by their covers because the cover of this one may be the worst I've ever seen - so bad it could be something by Douglas Adams. Thankfully I judge Child of Fortune by its author and so picked it up on the grounds of Bug Jack Barron having been exceptional. Child of Fortune probably isn't quite so stellar but is clearly the work of the same guy, thus presenting what may be the widest ever gulf between the greatness of a novel and the shittiness of its cover in publishing history. I see this cover and the only questions I have are 1) why? and 2) what happened to her legwarmers? Glowing praise from Timothy Leary just inside the front cover doesn't seem like much of a recommendation either, but let us have no further distraction.

Child of Fortune squares with Spinrad's observation that science-fiction as a genre could use some futures in which we're better than we are in the present day rather than worse, although his idea of what might constitute better is rooted in sixties counterculture for what that may be worth. It's the tale of a young woman going off on a voyage of self-discovery equivalent to the medieval wanderjahre, hippy pilgrimage, Native American visionquest, or Elizabeth Gilbert going to India to find herself. Being rooted in sixties counterculture, this entails quite a lot of sex and drugs, with the former being of the tantric variety, naturally. On the face of it, this isn't my sort of book at all, and yet excepting that it's possibly about fifty pages too long, I enjoyed it greatly. Child of Fortune is written in a locquacious and ornate prose which never quite overdoes itself so much as to challenge the attention span. With the spacefaring interplanetary setting and the societies encountered by our girl, it actually put me in mind of Peter F. Hamilton but with the influence of Cordwainer Smith supplanting the Jeremy Clarkson factor, so it's a ripping read even given the hallucinogenic pace, overload of images, and endless succession of people off their tits on some futuristic high.

It's about the evolution of its initially naive main character, but Child of Fortune works because it's also an allegory for the death of the dream of sixties counterculture - or at least what became of that dream if you prefer. For all the pleasure taken in a libertine pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, Spinrad never gets entirely swept up in the drippy evangelism of your Terrance McKenna types, presenting an evenly balanced view of the pseudo-spiritual realm it inhabits which, taking an objective stance, offers a significantly more positive statement about what happened in the sixties than anyone mooing amaaaaaaazing with their head stuck inside a bong ever managed.

I gather critics of the day hated this one, but frankly they can fuck off. It's funny, genuinely weird, beautifully written, strangely gripping, and is sort of about everything if you look at it from a certain angle.

Leviathan Wakes

James S.A. Corey Leviathan Wakes (2011)
I got so profoundly sucked into The Expanse that I'd probably describe it as either the greatest science-fiction television serial ever made, or at least as one of the few which has ever been worth watching; so it was sort of inevitable that I should backtrack and pick up one of the books, additionally curious due to my never having heard of it prior to the adaptation turning up on some streaming thing. Leviathan Wakes is, roughly speaking, the first series of The Expanse as a novel, and while I'm not sure it entirely supports the maxim of how lousy books tend to work better on the screen, it's nevertheless oddly underwhelming.

It's not bad, and is arguably well written, or at least efficiently written, but Peter F. Hamilton and Stephen Baxter both did this sort of thing much better in terms of the printed page. The problems with Leviathan Wakes are either minor or else simply difficult to quantify, but what they lack in clarity, they make up for in sheer force of numbers. To begin at a perhaps unusually picky level, I'm inclined towards scepticism with anything which mentions the New York Times on the cover, and which garnishes the same with glowing endorsements from more financially lucrative writers, and I actively distrust novels published in the trade paperback format, same size as a seventies Marvel comic, because it somehow feels ostentatious, demonstrative, and as though those involved are trying too hard to render something special - which is more properly the job of the cunt or cunts writing the thing, I would argue. Even before I'd taken the book from the shelf, it felt like a marketing exercise, like the Game of Thrones of science-fiction, like something which was thinking about the television series even before it had hit the book stands. The endorsement of George R. R. Martin therefore rang an unfortunate note for me, never mind that James S.A. Corey doesn't actually exist, being the pen name shared by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, both of whom belong to the same writers' group as the aforementioned Georgie. Film, telly and, to an arguably lesser extent, comic books tend to be collaborative efforts and hence corporate in nature to greater or lesser degrees, so I can forgive the occasional stench of marketing in such cases providing the narrative manages to do something interesting within whatever limits may apply; but it's different with the novel, or it should be. I'm not suggesting that only anguished hermits who suffer for their art are capable of churning out a decent novel, but there's a happy medium, and I never again want to find myself in the same room as an author who talks about writing in terms of the pitch, the franchise, or the demographic. I would prefer to read the words of people who wish to write rather than to simply entertain.

Trying hard to ignore the above reservations, I got to reading, finding it initially difficult to follow without my mind's eye attempting to reconstruct what it had seen on the telly, meaning it's quite difficult to assess how much I would have got from Leviathan Wakes without already having the special effects imprinted on me. It seems to be fairly well written for what it is - essentially a detective thriller as space opera - but I felt as though something was lacking, some spark of inspiration for which narrative efficiency, maybe even something derived from a formula, was hoping to compensate. It was like reading the book of the movie when it should probably be the other way round, except somehow the TV people did it better while remaining more or less faithful to the material; except they didn't. A few details we saw on the screen are better explained here, but then the book pulls moves which seemed a lot more convincing as television, not least being the inclusion of scenes set on Earth featuring Chrisjen Avasarala which were entirely absent from this first written instalment - conspicuously absent even, and yes, I know the book came first.

Leviathan Wakes is a decent novel, above average even, but not an exceptional one, whereas The Expanse really is an exceptional television show. It's way too fucking long considering what it spends most of its time doing and how much of the dialogue reads like it wants to be on telly when it grows up. It's not lacking in poetry or even worthwhile themes - mostly concerning humanity's habit of collectively shooting itself in the foot - and it's efficiently pacey, and even where we can see it obviously wants to be telly when it's older, at least it wants to be decent telly rather than Babylon fucking 5; but, like I said, Peter F. Hamilton and Stephen Baxter have both done this sort of thing so much better; which is probably why we don't really need Netflix versions of Night's Dawn or the Xeelee Sequence.

Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories

Voltaire Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories (1775)
My quest for Voltaire's Micromégas finally brought me here, Micromégas being your boy's concession to proto-science-fiction wherein an enormous bloke from Saturn meets an even more enormouser bloke from Sirius and they have a conversation about stuff. This also meant re-reading Candide, which was actually a pleasure as this seems to be a significantly better translation than the first one I tried; or at least I got more of the jokes.

While Micromégas and Memnon - which also features a person from Sirius - are of obvious interest as proto-science-fiction, the fantastic aspects serve primarily to support points made in the other stories by different, more prosaic means, so there's probably not much fun to be had in examining Voltaire as a sort of eighteenth century Peter F. Hamilton; so I won't.

Voltaire's philosophical focus seems mostly concerned with the disparity between that to which humanity aspires, and that which it is seen to do; so his stories tend to be populated by optimists forever finding themselves bitten in the ass by an unexpectedly harsh reality. Reduced to its most basic form, I'd say he's exploring the gulf between objective and subjective experience, and in doing so, pointing out which emperors happen to be wandering around in the nip, albeit without quite the same degree of bile as Jonathan Swift.

This collection comprises four longer stories and a bunch of much shorter efforts, some of just a couple of pages length. It almost certainly helps if you understand elements of eighteenth century politics and the history of France, which I don't, so those tales with a more obviously eastern influence - notably Zadig - came across as a little dry for my tastes, meaning there's not much point reading them unless one's powers of concentration are fully engaged; but Voltaire's wit and insight tend to be a constant, allowing one to power through even when lacking the faintest fucking clue as to what he's talking about; and while I can see why Candide seems to be regarded as his hit single, both Ingenuous and Count Chesterfield's Ears and Chaplain Goodman are just as lively, just as philosophically rich, and just as worthy of our attention.

The Mote in God's Eye

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle The Mote in God's Eye (1974)
This may have been the most boring novel I've ever attempted to read. It's less hateful than Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, but that's hardly a recommendation. I'd promised myself no more Niven because whilst he has some great ideas, they are often the only thing going for an otherwise irritating novel; but Pournelle seemed kind of interesting when I read about him in Charles Platt's second Dream Makers book the other month, and I suppose I must have wondered about the title at some point.

I started, then eventually decided I couldn't read another word at around page three-hundred. The next two things I tried reading both featured cats being killed - albeit accidentally in the case of Sid Vicious - which depressed me, inspiring a return to Mote on the grounds of feline destruction being one sin it seemed unlikely to commit; but after another couple of days with less than a hundred pages to go, I realised that it really was as dull as it had appeared during the previous sitting.

The story is set against a backdrop of humanity as a well-established galaxy spanning empire which encounters alien life for the first time and is thus obliged to have a bit of a rethink; and somehow they found a way to make it about as interesting as a sales report.

Niven's weird alien civilisation is kind of engaging up to the point at which it started to remind me of the cantina in Star Wars or something written by Douglas Adams, as always seems to happen; and no - I don't actually care whether or not he got there first and should thus be hailed as the father of smirking aliens who crack knob gags. The rest is your basic military science-fiction bearing a suspicious resemblance to sixties Star Trek:

'Commander Sinclair, have we enough energy for a report to Fleet?'

'Aye, Skipper, the engines hold verra well indeed. Yon object is nae so massive as we thought, and we've hydrogen to spare.'

Unless I imagined it, the great majority of the text seems to be taken up with important space navy types holding ponderous conversations about how such and such an alien discovery is likely to influence the political economy of such and such a colony world. This is savoured with military protocol and ensigns screaming sir, yes, sir. It gives the impression of an author enamoured with his own martial testimony, imagining that a military background has furnished him with an experience so much richer than the rest of us could begin to imagine, and now he's going to afford us a glimpse of the magic by describing nervous young recruits summoned to the offices of grizzled old warhorses covered in medals. What heady days those were!

Additionally, it's not particularly well written and every other page seems to throw in some element that doesn't make sense.

'We'll have to go through it,' Whitbread's Motie said. She twittered to Charlie for a moment. 'There are alarms and there'll be warriors on guard.'

'Can we go over it?'

'You'd pass through an x-ray laser, Horst.'

'God's teeth. What are they so afraid of?'

I've read that passage seven or eight times, and I still don't understand why Horst would pass through an x-ray laser. I can't tell whether it's a prediction or a facetious comment which says something or other about Horst, most likely suggesting that he lacks a due sense of caution, but even with this potentially being the case, the phrasing doesn't quite work; and there are similar weird semantic hiccups throughout.

While we're here, there's one human woman in the entire book, who is naturally married off to some military dude at the end. The sexism wouldn't ordinarily bother me, except it's clearly symptomatic of a wider problem. Stephen Baxter and even Peter F. Hamilton did this sort of thing so much better.

So yes, well done, lads - you've knocked Heinlein right off his throne with this one.

The Dreaming Void

Peter F. Hamilton The Dreaming Void (2007)
I'm still unable to work out what it is that Peter F. Hamilton does which makes his books so readable. They're the size of housebricks, this one is eight-hundred pages, and I just slip through the thing, reading fifty pages in the time it would otherwise take to read twenty. It doesn't seem to be that the print is particularly large or the language discernibly simplified, and oddly, nor is the narrative even necessarily so gripping as to account for such page-turnitude - in terms the Daily Mail would probably recognise. Yet, there it is. Whatever it is, he does it very well, and this doesn't even seem to be one of his good ones.

I wasn't going to read any more, but having loved Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy pretty much without reservation, I had a hankering; combined with coming across a copy of this one in Henry Pordes on Charing Cross Road and finding myself relishing the typeface used on these English versions, it being so much more alluring than on US editions of Hamilton. It turns out that the story has certain elements in common with Night's Dawn, namely technologically advanced star-spanning future humanity pitted against something powerful and devouring with religious overtones, physiologically malleable animals, concerns with immortality, transcendence and the afterlife and suchlike. I have a vague impression of various details serving as allegories to Bush's war on terror, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, but this may just be a case of current events repurposed as archetypes; and xenophobia and fear of progress also figure. In any case, if anything specific is said, it's either been saved for a later volume or is simply difficult to unpick from disparate strands following a slightly confusing cast of fairly generic characters. It might have been easier had I read the novels preceding this trilogy, Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained, but I haven't and it shouldn't have been necessary.

Yes... characters...

Hamilton writes great characters, it has been said elsewhere and more than once, but actually he kind of doesn't. The narrative is told through his characters, but most of them seem fairly clichéd; and given that this is 3580AD, it seems odd that everyone should be talking and acting like persons starring alongside Ross Kemp in one of those grunting ITV dramas - some wearying cop show, tough guy bends rules to get the job done, tarts with hearts, hard nut with a soft center still dealing with the pain of losing his son, tip-offs from persons oozing Cockney charm - something called Thief Takers comes to mind, as it often does for me because although I never saw it, it has the worst title ever committed to telly and I feel fairly sure it must have ticked at least a couple of the above boxes*.

To be fair, this is only what Hamilton did in Night's Dawn, but Night's Dawn had the advantage of a profoundly weird setting and attendant props - the affinity bond, living starships, sentient habitats grown from engineered coral, and everyone who ever died coming back to life, not least of these being Madonna and Al Capone. Whilst Void has plenty of nice ideas of possibly equivalent potential, they're not well drawn - presumably because I never read Pandora's Star - and it all seems a bit Larry Niven, lacking anything with the surreal flair of the voidhawks. Plus, there's the occasional sprained literary ankle - something I failed to notice in Night's Dawn, if it was even there - and this sort of thing:

'Yes. He'll get his appointment the day after the Eggshaper guild announces its sculpted a ge-pig that can fly.'

Even without noting that its should probably be either it has or it's, a ge-pig is, in the story, a utilitarian creature with physical characteristics molded by agency of human telepathy, so, as we've already seen, whether or not the resulting creature has wings and the power of flight is down to the choice of the Eggshaper doing the work; and secondly, why the fuck would that particular expression still be in use in the thirty-sixth century in a different fucking universe? Additionally, why would anyone still remember either Johnny Cash or Pink Floyd - not denigrating the qualities of either, but references to the same are a little distracting.

I'm told that the conclusion to this trilogy is disappointing and not dissimilar to the conclusion of Night's Dawn, so I doubt if I'm going to bother with the other two. There are some nice ideas, but that's about as far as it goes.

*: I find titles which are simply collective nouns for whoever populates the story somewhat lacking poetry. Being as someone will eventually make a show about members of the criminal fraternity called Crime Doers, I hereby state my having thought of it first in anticipation of any royalties which may be my due.

The Amber Spyglass

 

Philip Pullman The Amber Spyglass (2000)
I probably shouldn't have left it so long. I read the first two of the trilogy back in 2015 and somehow just couldn't quite get around to this one. I generally dislike trilogies, or at least those comprising a single extended story split into three - as distinct from three vaguely related stories sharing either characters, settings or concepts. I generally dislike works of such length because it takes an exceptional author to sustain my interest over so distended a word count, and not many really seem able to pull it off without a degree of droop entering the equation. Michael Moorcock, David Louis Edelman and Peter F. Hamilton have all managed it, as did Stephen Baxter - although the Xeelee books were mostly self contained. C.S. Lewis didn't, and it's probably not fair to comment on Tolkien given that I was about fifteen when I stalled at the beginning of the third volume; of course there are also trilogies by Brian Aldiss and Phil Purser-Hallard, and I still have one book to go in each case.

I had no trouble getting back into His Dark Materials, even if I couldn't quite remember all of what had been before. It opens well, and I had retained enough to keep me interested and not overly bewildered, although I've still no fucking clue who those little people with the dragonflies were supposed to be. Also there seems to have been some kind of switcheroo as to who was the villain, so I read on in the assumption that both of Lyra's parents were probably arseholes, and in the assumption that Pullman had discarded the fantasy tradition of moustache-twirling evil, instead writing something which works more like real life, at least in moral terms.

Lyra travels into the realm of the dead and rescues all of the ghosts for reasons I never quite understood, and the dæmons with which everyone on her world is born seem to be a metaphor for awakening sexuality, or at least the intellectual maturity which hopefully coincides with the advent of the same; and Dust is somehow related, although it's also dark matter - so Donald Trump probably wouldn't have much Dust whilst Carl Sagan would have lived his life enveloped in a cloud of the stuff, or something like that. I don't know. I was a bit lost as to why everyone was doing whatever they were doing and what they hoped to achieve. Like I say, I probably shouldn't have left it so long.

I enjoyed the wheeled beings, but the whole enterprise got bogged down in dreary Tolkienesque battles as the end drew near, so I switched my evening reading session to Lewis Black's Nothing's Sacred for the sake of something to look forward to before I go to sleep. Despite all those sparkling images and delightful sentences, it was ultimately a relief to have finished the thing.

I'd been warned about His Dark Materials being an atheist diatribe, which would have been a problem because I dislike authors assuming their readers to be idiots, but thankfully the warning seems to have originated with someone more sensitive to such things than I apparently am. Pullman clearly doesn't think much of organised religion, and that's fine, but there's no obvious metaphors waggled in our face with the usual qualifier of don't you think this is terrible? If the book has a message, it's more or less delivered by John Parry:

'And this is the reason for all those things: your dæmon can only live its full life in the world it was born in. Elsewhere it will eventually sicken and die. We can travel, if there are openings into other worlds, but we can only live in our own. Lord Asriel's great enterprise will fail in the end for the same reason: we have to build the Republic of Heaven where we are, because for us there is no elsewhere.'

So try not to blow it whilst you're alive, because you almost certainly won't get a second chance. The narrative presents us with examples of those who blow it because they've spent too long worrying over things which don't matter - people who are, as a direct result, generally disagreeable fuckers. The tale works well enough, and it's a good point, and it's told with verve and imagination, but I'm sure it didn't really need to be as overextended as it is. So it's either good but could have been better, or I really shouldn't have left it so long.

The Colour of Magic

Terry Pratchett The Colour of Magic (1983)
Still wondering whether Peter F. Hamilton may have destroyed my love of reading, I picked this up. I wasn't really planning to read any more Pratchett but with The Colour of Magic being the first of the Discworld novels, it seemed a safe bet that it would at least be worth a chuckle. I would have preferred the edition which had the title spelled correctly and the more rustic cover - as opposed to this awful crap clearly designed to appeal to hipster Douglas Adams fans who might be put off by artwork reflecting the actual thrust of the story - but never mind.

Sure enough, it is worth a chuckle - a sort of Monty Python take on Lord of the Rings, or at least something in that genre; doing what Douglas Adams did but with wizards, dragons, spells, and a flat world balanced upon the backs of four elephants, and doing it better. On close examination, there's not a whole lot of story - slightly incompetent wizard is saddled with an amusingly hapless out-of-towner on a quest without any clear objective, so they're really just going from place to place and getting into trouble until it ends - but the key to the tale is its telling: wonderfully peculiar scenarios, big stupid ideas, and wit that never lets up. It takes the piss out of the genre and its conventions like nothing else, and yet does so without the slightest hint of sneering - possibly by virtue of the obvious affection Pratchett felt for his characters and their ridiculous lives, but also by means of pinning the reality of the Discworld to the logic of physics and specifically certain aspects of quantum theory, lending everything a sense of veracity which seems absent from most things involving dwarves, quests, and talking swords; and most important of all, it's very, very funny without feeling like it has to crack jokes all the bleeding time.

The only problem, at least for me, was that Terry Pratchett's detail is so rich, so beautifully written, and so convoluted in the service of its farce, that I found it hard to keep track of the story at certain points, of who was who and what they were up to this time. I think this may be more to do with my reading habits - an hour at breakfast and another before I go to sleep - than with the book. I kept coming back to it and finding myself lost, necessitating a skim of previous pages, so I think it may simply be that this sort of thing is better appreciated when read over fewer sittings, with longer periods of time spent on each occasion. I seem to recall the same thought having occurred to me when I read the others.

The Vision: Little Worse Than a Man

Tom King & Gabriel Hernandez Walta

The Vision: Little Worse Than a Man (2016)
I'd never heard of Tom King, nor Gabriel Hernandez Walta - whom I assumed to be related to the Love & Rockets brothers, but seemingly isn't - and, aside from enjoying a couple of John Byrne issues of West Coast Avengers about a million years ago, I never really gave too much of a shit about the Vision as a character. Nevertheless, Little Worse Than a Man caught my eye when Jonathan Dennis posted that he'd been reading it on facebook, and there it was in Barnes & Noble looking all intriguing and shit, and I'd made it to page-three-hundred of The Snoring Void and felt as though I deserved a treat, and the girl working the counter said I've been meaning to read this one, which seemed like a good sign.

The bad news, by some definition, is that this is just half of the story, and I gather the other six issues will be collected once they've been published; but otherwise - holy shit!

The Vision, in case anyone requires a recap, is a synthetic man created by Ultron so as to screw with the Avengers - technically a synthezoid, and that's apparently totally different to an android. Oh yes it is. He sports an eye-watering red and green colour scheme; he can fly, walk through walls, shoot lasers and all of the rest; his sentence structure is overly analytical and hence unintentionally amusing, much like Data from Star Trek or Mr. Logic from Viz comic, and now he wants more than anything to be human, or like a human - just a regular guy who mows his lawn and pays taxes.

Naturally I was expecting laffs aplenty in roughly the same vein as an episode of The Munsters, but this is something much better. The excessive logic jokes are all there as Mr. and Mrs. Vision settle in and the two Vision kids attend the local high school, but the story is handled with such loving attention to detail that the laughter feels wrong, almost cruel, and the story slowly escalates into quiet psychological horror. It's that thing about how we are more repulsed by a close approximation of humanity than a patently unrealistic one, because the fear is so much more profound when risen from that split second it takes us to tell the difference between that which is human, and that which isn't. The more the Visions try to fit in, the more David Lynch it gets and the less we notice we're reading a superhero book. In fact, it feels more like science-fiction in the Philip K. Dick tradition - a genuinely rare thing given that most supposedly Dickian fiction seem to have been identified as such by people who may not have read his books but nevertheless consider Blade Runner to be one of the greatest movies ever made, which it really isn't.

Like nothing else I can think of, this book is both hilarious and yet absolutely chilling, often within the space of the same speech bubble, and the artwork is gorgeous. This might even be the best thing Marvel have ever done.

The Infinity Doctors

Lance Parkin The Infinity Doctors (1998)
The magic of Doctor Who is that as a franchise it can be used to tell absolutely any kind of story, squeak the Whovian pod-kidults on a fairly regular basis - and please note depressingly telling use of the term franchise. It's one of those things people say because they've heard someone else say it, which actually translates to adventures in the wild west contrasted with adventures on one of Jupiter's moons as somehow equating to thematic variation rather than just a change of scenery. Try telling D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow as Doctor Who - or any other grown-up book for that matter - and the claim is revealed as absurd because The Rainbow is fine as it is and doesn't need to be Doctor Who. Annoyingly it also misses the point that there is a particular type of science-fiction story which Doctor Who seems almost uniquely suited to telling simply thanks to it being a serial of several decades duration, allowing writers to focus on some particularly weird narrative twists without first having to spend five-hundred pages on background and continuity; and this, I would say, is - or at least was - the great strength of the - ahem - franchise, if we really must call it that like the loyal little product-sponge cunts we have apparently become.

To further lay a few of my doubtless contentious cards on the table, Doctor Who ended when it came back on the telly in 2005. Certain gibbons of my unfortunate acquaintance have made the usual sneering noises about continuity, and about being more open-minded when it comes to the possibility of the Doctor enjoying a quick knee-trembler from time to time, or that maybe he had a Time Lord mummy and daddy whom he wuvved vewy, vewy much, but it isn't that which bothers me.

Doctor Who began as a kid's show, and as a kid's show it moved accordingly with the times, occasionally playing with the Prisoner dressing-up box in the sixties, going all Mission: Impossible in the seventies and so on, eventually settling into the habit of weirdly pseudo-allegorical narratives such as Logopolis, Castrovalva, Warrior's Gate and so on - or if not allegorical then certainly ponderous and a long way down the road from William Hartnell battering Daleks with his cane whilst screaming take that, you soppy metal cunt! Towards the end of the eighties Who began to suffer mild schizophrenia, unable to decide whether it was Jorge Luis Borges or Timmy Mallet, and was thus cancelled making way for the novels, most of which did a reasonable job of keeping things going in the right direction. Being written by fans, there was of course a certain reliance on fanwank - entire stories spun from minor points of earlier continuity just like what that Alan Moore might have done - but Who stayed true to itself, regardless of contradictions, because if a narrative so fixated on time travel and the fluidity of established history can't occasionally change its mind, then it may as well just be Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century.

It wasn't the introduction of a natural born Doctor who might nip off for a sneaky fuck every once in a while which rendered the show pointless in 2005 - although such details certainly served to diminish its uniqueness, reducing everything to just more generic cult TV landfill to be gathered on the shelves with all the other DVD boxed sets. It was the spirit in which it had been revived and how this tarnished the entire enterprise. Doctor Who began life as the work of cranky eccentrics who had difficultly playing nicely with other children and ended up writing for the BBC because they wouldn't have lasted two weeks as a milkman, and this was when the BBC believed it knew better and had a duty to educate the thickies whether we liked it or not. It believed it knew better because it was a cultural institution rather than a purely financial enterprise, dedicated to promoting elevated thoughts, arts, and in part to the literature of awkward anti-establishment buggers like Orwell and Huxley. Even as the BBC evolved, it retained some of this element, which continued in the Who novels during the nineties due to their similarly being the work of individuals pleasing themselves rather than a corporate agenda, and individuals raised on the work of cranky eccentrics who had difficulty playing nicely with other children.

The show returned in 2005 as a product designed by committee to provide optimum entertainment value to specific consumer demographics, retaining a percentage of its former typically English idiosyncracies for the sake of brand identification, then filling in the rest with proven formula material which had been seen to work for Babylon 5, Buffy the Ratings Slayer and others - notably a shitload of catchphrases, generic emotional crises, and more boo-hooing than your average Mexican telenovela, sweetie. Its anti-authoritarian content had been commodified as a marketing strategy. I'm probably repeating myself here, but it's relevant to what follows, and it brings me an almost sexual sense of satisfaction to upset those who might be upset by the above.

Anyway, to get to the point, there I was wading through yet another Peter F. Hamilton housebrick when I got to page three-hundred and just couldn't go on. I needed a break so I read Daniel Bristow-Bailey's The Ruins because it was short and had just turned up in the mail; and yet I still couldn't quite face getting back into The Dreaming Void so I picked this because I once read Who books to the point of obsession, thus quantifying The Infinity Doctors as comfort food; plus I vaguely recalled not quite getting it first time around, and Lance Parkin is clearly not lacking in talent so there was an appealing mystery there.

Despite that Doctor Who can be used to tell absolutely any kind of story, Whovian pod-kidults tend to argue over this book due to its featuring an ambiguous incarnation of the Doctor occupying an alternate non-canonical history; or it could be the first Doctor before he left Gallifrey, or the Eighth, or the last one, but the truth is that it doesn't matter. Oddly, I've only just noticed that the title makes most sense as a conflation of The Three Doctors and Arc of Infinity, television stories featuring Omega, the Time Lord who invented time travel and in doing so got himself trapped inside a black hole; and this tale riffs on both of them. Odder still is that much of it reads quite strongly as a television production in written form. By this I'm not referring to the tendency of certain Who authors who would quite clearly love to be writing something for telly, but find themselves obliged instead to plump for second best, a mere book which is pants because books are boooring innit, thus resulting in what is usually just a script with the phrase he said grinningly inserted hither and thither. Lance Parkin knows better than that, as is demonstrated by those portions of The Infinity Doctors which I suspect may serve as homage to Stephen Baxter, particularly the nosebleed physics, the wonderful descriptions of the process of universal expansion and so on, plus a mention of The Time Ships and the presence of a fictional element named baxterium.

Rather, the narrative unfolds as though we're watching a sequence of scenes upon a stage, rarely with a cast of more than five - some of them probably English character actors with lines provided by a BBC script writer, not least the Baldrickesque guard who refers to one of the Time Lords as that bloke. I suspect this is deliberate given the element of homage in combination with a few peculiarly self-aware passages, most notably:

'The best thing about books,' the Doctor confided to his fellow diners, is that you can always tell when you're getting to the end. No matter how tricky the situation the hero's in, you hold the book in your hand and think, hang on, I'm two-hundred and twenty-nine pages in, with only another fifty-one to go. It started slow, but it's building to a climax. This menu, though, with every single detail spelled out for you on an infinite number of pages is just dull. Where's the fun if everything's possible?'

...and yes, this monologue does appear on that very same page with another fifty-one to go.

There's a lot to recommend The Infinity Doctors, but its ambition somewhat outstrips its achievement, at least for me. It successfully invokes more ponderous television episodes such as The Keeper of Traken - with everything played as stagey pseudo-Shakespearian - but not quite by terms which work consistently on the page. The result is that some of the tale is unfortunately a little dull, leaving an overall impression of dramatic progression without much descriptive evidence of the same or any strong suggestion of there being anything much at stake; and of the fifty-one pages still to go, I managed about twenty before I lost interest and reluctantly shuffled back to The Dreaming Void.

The Infinity Doctors reads like a story stretched out to a much greater page count than was really necessary - much like Savar's TARDIS - or perhaps simply like something which could have used a further rewrite just to tighten up the saggy bits. It certainly has its moments and is in no sense a bad book, but Lance Parkin has written better.

A Fire Upon the Deep

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)
I recall enjoying Vinge's The Peace War, and had since kept one eye open for this on the grounds of it apparently being his magnum opus. However, referring back to my review of The Peace War, written many, many centuries ago as a series of standing stones in a field to the right of the A46 as you pass Stoneleigh heading in the direction of Finham sewerage treatment plant, and reprinted in this collection, I find that my memory has lied, and that while I regarded The Peace War as chock full of great ideas, I found it otherwise quite a dull book. Sadly A Fire Upon the Deep isn't much of an improvement.

To give credit where it's due, Vinge is clearly a dab hand at massive brain-strangling concepts, and is able to write about them without jumping up and down shouting look at me with all my ideas so big as to make Einstein look like a wanker! For starters, I understand - possibly incorrectly but I can't be arsed to look it up - that Vinge's name is synonymous with the concept of technological singularity, the point at which technology is able to produce something superior to itself, and the future becomes a much stranger place than we could ever hope to predict. A Fire Upon the Deep appears to explore this general idea with the Blight, a near omniscient power born from a technological singularity many centuries before the story begins. To this cake he adds a peculiar yet believable race of pseudo-canine gestalt creatures, the Tines, of which an individual comprises four or five animals operating as a pack, liberally icing the result with a galaxy layered into zones by differing laws of physics, some more conducive to faster than light travel and artificial intelligence than others.

It's astonishing stuff, sure enough, and if you're going to have space opera, then it really needs to strive for the sort of scale invoked here, but...

One hundred pages in and, excepting some of the chapters depicting the pseudo-mediaeval Tine society, I was mostly too bored to take much of it in. I had a look at Wikipedia in the hope of working out what I'd just read. It sounded fairly interesting, so I started again. Ultimately it was okay, I guess, at least in so much as I made it to the end, but I'm still not sure quite why it needed to be six-hundred pages long. I think the problem is that most of it is written more or less in what I have come to think of as Doctor Who casual, the grammar and syntax of a twenty-something media studies graduate who writes television tie-in fiction influenced more by telly than by anything of the medium in which he - and it usually is he - is working. It's the narrative equivalent of Comic Sans. There's not much in the way of poetry. And sentences beginning with and abound, seemingly signifying a fear of commas, and there are parentheses all over (always an indication of someone who can't be bothered) and there's something called a godshatter, and some bloke achieves mastery over all of reality at the end just like in an X-Men comic, dramatised of course by short non-sentences which don't actually do anything, but which presumably represent some sort of ham-fisted attempt at crossing stream of consciousness imagery with a Nicolas Roeg film. Like this. Irritating. Very bad. Utter shite, in fact.

It's not terrible so much as that it lacks flair, and is in this case additionally handicapped by the conceit of having an entire galaxy chatting away, explaining the plot to itself on an enormous star-spanning internet message board, which doubtless seemed very futuristic back in 1992. The book does it's job, but that's about all, and there's a certain lazy tone wherein people decide to check it out or to take a serious look at themselves, yeah? In this regard, Vinge is a low level offender, and he at least keeps enough of the narrative together to prevent it turning into Larry Niven, but at six-hundred pages it's still far too much of not enough.

A Fire Upon the Deep is not without value, but on the other hand even Peter F. Hamilton does this sort of thing better. Actually fuck it - even Lionel Fanthorpe did this better in Galaxy 666 which similarly intrudes upon regions of the universe with variant physical laws, and did so with more charm.

Equations of Life

Simon Morden Equations of Life (2011)
Equations of Life is the first of a trilogy, a novel presented to me for my birthday by my brother-in-law, and probably not something I would have picked up on my own impetus largely owing to an extraordinarily poor sales pitch on the back which incorporates the equation of Russian mobsters + Yakuza + Something called the New Machine Jihad = One Dead Petrovitch. Samuil Petrovitch is the hero of the piece, and whilst this sort of mathematical strapline worked a certain charm on posters for the Ritz Brothers' The Gorilla, a 1939 film promising thrills + laughs = entertainment, it seems cheesy here, suggestive of airport bookstall action thriller landfill.

Happily the novel itself turns out to have a low cheese index, although it reads in places as though there may be something of a balancing act going on. I tend to dislike fiction which suggests it really wouldn't mind too much if someone turned it into a gritty television drama in which Ross Kemp impersonates Bruce Willis bending the rules but getting the job done. I don't really want to read books that wish they were on telly because it feels like a waste of everyone's time. Peter Hamilton sometimes skates perilously close to this sort of thing, and Equations of Life seems occasionally torn between media.

'I reckon on another hour, Princess, and the Paradise militia will be having a fish dinner in your old man's Zen garden.'

'Your band of criminals will be slaughtered by my father's men. Then they will come for you.'

'I don't think so. First sign of them or your jihadist friends, and that trolley you're attached to goes out the window. Seems a shame to waste a good pair of cuffs, but you've got to make sacrifices.' Sorensen snorted at his own attempt of humour.

To be fair, that's the only paragraph in the entire novel which struck me as sufficiently reminiscent of some exhausting Lynda La Plante miniseries to warrant being set aside for later sneering; and this probably constitutes an achievement given the general thrust of the narrative. It should perhaps be noted at this point that I'm somewhat ignorant of action-thriller-crime-drama or whatever this is as a genre, and so my prejudices may result from simple lack of familiarity with a certain style of writing.

Whilst we're here, I tend to find myself on amber alert when reading something in which it becomes obvious that the author believes his years at an English university amount to sufficiently rich a cultural experience to instil every word with the cosmopolitan veracity of ten eight-hundred pound male Hemingways. This is a significant problem particularly in Doctor Who tie-in fiction wherein we can travel halfway across the universe to discover that the people there are also into Vic & Bob and Ned's Atomic Dustbin, and they too worry about making their grants stretch to the end of the year. It  comes across as arrogant, insular and wanky, and unfortunately I now find my hackles making an ascent whenever I read a novel about a university graduate conspicuously written by a university graduate.

Samuil Petrovitch is a student at a London university studying very hard sums, which raised an eyebrow given that his author seems to have had a similar educational background; but nevertheless Morden gets away with it, deftly avoiding potential pitfalls with the grace of a master, even keeping it going as our hero meets sexy gun-toting nuns and prevents London being taken over by machines. It's a story falling roughly between Johnny Nemo and Judge Dredd somehow rooted in something that works very much like unshaven contemporary reality of the kind which keeps Ross Kemp in work. Told as a fast paced page-turner*, the whole thing really should fall apart like a soufflé in a late 1970s situation comedy, and yet somehow Morden gets us through, keeping it all in place even as our hero devises a working theory of everything and a virtual reality representation of Japan achieves sentience and tries to remake London in its own image. I suspect the key is that Morden sticks to the script, resists the sort of knowing winks which could have turned the entire narrative over to parody, and simply, he's just a decent writer who really knows what he's doing; or at least that would be my best guess.

Equations of Life reads like something that will probably soon be turned into a shit film with a ton of CGI and people grunting and swearing at each other in the pouring rain, so it might be wise to read it now before Jason Statham puts you off the idea; and it really is worth reading. Even aside from whether it actually does anything beyond engaging one's attention - which it does very well, by the way - the setting of an alternate London as the terrible consequence of unchecked capitalism is both horrifying and fascinating.

*: I would argue that all novels are page-turners, with the possible exception of those novels written entirely upon one side of a single massive sheet of paper.

Triplanetary

E.E. 'Doc' Smith Triplanetary (1934)
Prior to tackling E.E. 'Doc' Smith, I'd been primed with conflicting opinions of the chap's work. My friend Gareth rated the Lensman series quite highly, whilst I got the impression that Carl viewed E.E.'s oeuvre as being on par with Bernard Manning or perhaps The Mission in their respective fields of racist comedy and po-faced sixth form poetry set to music with far too much echo. Being as Gareth had a habit of dropping words like yonder and behold into casual conversation, and Carl was usually on the money about most things - much as I sometimes wished it were otherwise - I approached Smith's 1920 novel The Skylark of Space with great trepidation; and against expectation it turned out to be great - also fairly stupid what with the constant pipe-smoking, ships travelling seven-hundred times the speed of light, and giggly women rushing off to fetch their coloured pencils - but it read like the work of someone who had a lot of fun writing it, and so was difficult to dislike.

1934's Triplanetary is a little more earnest, and quite conspicuously a forerunner to the space opera of Stephen Baxter, Peter F. Hamilton and those guys. It's competent, with convincing descriptions of protons and the like, and much closer in both spirit and execution to the sort of fiction one associates with Asimov than the Flash Gordon dynamic that informed Skylark. That said, it's a little long-winded in places and not particularly engaging. There's a possibility that Edward Elmer may have addressed this when he came to revise Triplanetary in 1948, adding new material so as to make it a prequel to the Lensman books - all very exciting, or least it seems that way from the blurb on the jacket of my copy which describes all manner of things that don't happen in the story because they've screwed up and printed the earlier 1934 version inside this edition.

Never mind.

Compensation might have arrived in the form of the supplementary novel length Masters of Space, a 1961 collaboration with E. Everett Evans, another guy with initials suspiciously biased towards the fifth letter of the alphabet. The only problem is that Masters of Space is pure shite. I read thirty or so pages before bed, then another thirty as I woke next day - as is my habit - gradually realising during this second stint that I was unable to recall a single detail of what I'd already read. On close investigation this turned out to be because it doesn't really have a plot as such, just page after page of inconsequential conversation apparently written by someone who didn't quite get to grips with why Some Like It Hot was such a great film. Another emergent trope is that of the brilliant female scientist with massive tits who has had the additional foresight to be blonde - and we all know what blondes like, right guys? In fact there's a whole troop of nubile and knockery female theoretical physicists here; and even a planet full of realistic lady automatons with no inhibitions, if you know what I'm saying - and being automatons their function is to make men happy any way they can, and I mean any way.

Masters of Space is soft porn with space exploration standing in for the more traditional washing machine repair, and it's the soft porn of an era in which Dragnet was considered edgy - all veiled references to bosoms and coming across like a faintly sinister uncle smirking to himself at a teenage niece's sixteenth birthday party; which is why it took me a while to actually identify it as such. One kind of expects porn fiction to incorporate anatomical detail, a few rude words, or at least some sort of reference to things going in and out of other things, but here it's all knowing winks and mildly stomach-churning observations about how such and such a gal could pass for seventeen. It may sound side-splitting, but actually sitting down to read this shit is another thing entirely. I managed fifty pages, and that seemed like more than enough.

Looks like Carl was right after all.

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.