Robert Heinlein - Methuselah's Children (1958)

 

I guess Bob had taken to thinking about his own mortality, or at least about his no longer qualifying as a spring chicken, whatever that is. I know the feeling. Methuselah's children are a group of extraordinarily long lived humans whose socially awkward longevity has brought them all together as a secretive subgroup inhabiting the fringes of human society. They're not a secret society in that they don't, as a group, have any particular collective influence on anything, and - unusually for golden age science-fiction - neither are they anything so obvious as homo superior or the coming race. They're simply people who live longer than the rest of us for reasons no-one quite understands. Anyway, fearing discovery and the possibility of dissection in order to glean the secret of longevity when even they have no idea what that secret could be, they band together and flee the planet, going off in search of a world where they can all live their lives without having to forge a new birth certificate every seventy years or so.

Whether by accident or design, Stephen Baxter would eventually revisit a few of these ideas in the Destiny's Children books, because they're worth revisiting, and Heinlein threw out some weird and fascinating ideas in this one. The problem is that we're two thirds of the way through the novel before anything interesting happens. I can barely remember what occurred during the first hundred pages. There seemed to be a lot of yacking, page after page of dialogue and not much else, and most of it the sort of snappy content-free repartee which made Stranger in a Strange Land such a fucking chore; so it's a relief when they steal the spaceship and flee the solar system because things happen, and Bob gets to play with science and relativity and the rest, which is where he excels. I also enjoyed the fact of this final third of the novel having the almost haphazard cadence of Simak or even A.E. van Vogt, eschewing the usual brilliant minds with elaborate scientific plans and the need to explain them at length. The long lived hundred or so thousand just sort of sneak onto the conveniently unoccupied New Frontiers - as the galaxy spanning craft is named - assuming there will be something to eat, places to sleep and so on; and one of the gang has conveniently come up with a revolutionary new star drive.

'It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.' He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking space drive. 'You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?'

'That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course, I don't really know that it will work,' Libby admitted. 'There is no way to test it.'

'Suppose it doesn't?'

Luckily it works, and we're off. The two extraterrestrial civilisation they eventually encounter are both friendly but very odd, and the crew of the New Frontiers decide to head back to Earth after all, because this isn't one of those novels about seeking out new life, new civilisations, or boldly going anywhere in particular. It's mostly about mortality, specifically that of the author.

'I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wisdom and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren't for us at all, ever. Either way, I'm satisfied to be living and enjoying it.'

I've had trouble reading later Heinlein, and you can tell the preoccupations which informed his less agreeable works were creeping in here, but he's still making the effort, still mostly at the top of his game, and still delivering much more than is promised by the summary on the back cover.

The Best of Lester Del Rey (1978)

 

It's taken me a little while, but Del Rey finally makes it into my own personal top tier, and I take back any disappointed noises I may have made on the grounds that van Vogt has fired off at least a couple of duds, and even Simak managed one. Of Del Rey's novels, most that I've read have been juvies - those being what I tend to find in second hand book stores for some reason - and although they've been good or even great, it's difficult to get the measure of a writer keeping at least some of his schtick reigned in for the sake of a particular audience; and then there's Day of the Giants which is fantastic, and Nerves which isn't. The Best of mostly comprises short stories which first appeared in Astounding, Galaxy, Unknown Worlds and the like, and this seems to be where he really shines.

It may be the ideas, which often pack a genuine punch of astonishment even after a half century of fucking everything having a twist ending; or it could be the telling, which is fresh, and engaging, and didn't seem loaded with reminders of having been written prior to the invention of teenagers - Superstition, for one example, reminded me of Stephen Baxter on more than one occasion. Whatever it may be, Del Rey does it with a lightness of touch that makes it seem easy and compels you to keep reading in much the same way as did Philip K. Dick, where the poetry is shaped in what is described rather than given as description in its own right.

This being said, I encountered a lull around half way through which picked up with the aforementioned Superstition, although this may have been down to me and my daily circumstances rather than to anything Lester wrote. However, focusing on his strengths, he seems at his best when jamming something which shouldn't work into the middle of an otherwise traditional story, then forcing everything else into line. If this sounds familiar, I suspect Superstition's apparent reference to the similarly awkward A.E. van Vogt may not have occurred just in my imagination:

'This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan's we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind-reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!'

The story - some unknown force instantaneously throwing a number of spacecraft across two-hundred thousand light years - actually sounds like the work of A.E. van Vogt, here presumably rendered as A.E. van, then just plain Aevan in case that wasn't obvious; and what follows slaps the reader about the face with the similarly inexplicable whilst simultaneously pondering on religious models of reality with the sort of conviction that Dick managed in a few of his later books. Related themes of theology and morality are revisited in For I Am a Jealous People, The Seat of Judgment and Vengeance is Mine, each of novella length and as such extremely satisfying. I was mostly expecting well-executed tales of robots and rockets, but Lester Del Rey obliges you to consider what you're reading.

This comes just after some online observation made about how he could be a bit of a twat in real life, but the same has been said of Harlan Ellison - one of Del Rey's proteges - so I don't really care.

Asimov's Science Fiction 393/4

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 393/4 (2008)
The lesson here was don't rush out and snap up the next issue before you've read the rest of the one you've just bought, which no-one told me. It seemed like a safe bet because Stephen Baxter's Ice War had been terrific in the September issue; and it's probably significant that it's taken me fifteen fucking years to get around to reading this one. I guess I knew on some level.

Actually, it's not a bad issue - just a bit underwhelming without the virtue of being a pleasantly slender volume through which one may breeze over the course of an afternoon. Specifically, it's a fat double helping of 240 pages comprising two novellas, two novelettes (which are shorter), and five short stories. The short stories vary, but are mostly decent and there's nothing which feels like a waste of time; although by the same token there's nothing I felt worth singling out as specifically noteworthy, possibly excepting Peter Higgins' Listening for Submarines which at least works up a powerful sense of atmosphere.

Of the novelettes, I gave up on Brandon Sanderson's Defending Elysium because the word holo-vid turns up in the third paragraph and after a couple of pages I felt I was reading something inspired by Gerry Anderson's Godawful Space Precinct TV series; and I couldn't generate the enthusiasm to read Ian R. MacLeod's The English Mutiny past the first couple of pages - an alternate history wherein the English rebel against the forces of the Colonial Indian Empire or something. It seemed well written but felt like homework. So I gave Defending Elysium another shot, made it all the way to the end, and concluded that my first impression had been about right.

On a more positive note, The Erdmann Nexus by Nancy Kress was great, and I felt could have been expanded to novel length, although the end didn't quite work for me. Likewise, the final page of Robert Reed's Truth seemed a bit unnecessary given how well it had been doing up to that point. Much of its extended page count comprises a conversation between a prisoner and his interrogator, and it does well to hold the attention in the absence of any other dynamic, building a mood so pensive and ultimately depressing as to become quite harrowing, given how much of the world of Truth is clearly the one we see outside our windows.

 

Some years ago, I had carelessly stepped off my earth, entering a realm that only resembled what was home. I was lost, and it was the worst kind of lost. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't decipher which day and which hour had transformed everything familiar and happy.

And just like the one outside our window, it gets worse:

 

'About a thousand nukes went off, and wildfires are still burning, and the entire continent is poisonous dead. The field office is abandoned. We aren't getting any messages from anybody. Not a squeak. We've got some security cameras working, our only connection to the surface, and they're only working on battery power. It's the middle of August, but there isn't any sun, and judging by what we can see and what we can guess, it isn't even reaching forty below at noon.'

Anyway, Truth justifies my having this one on the shelf, as does the novella from Nancy Kress. It's a respectable issue, just nothing life-changing.

The Chase

John Peel The Chase (1989)
Here's another Target I bought for the sake of completism, sad fucker that I am, and fairly recently too. I hadn't read one in years and noticed that I had all but about fifteen of the things, so I hit eBay on the grounds that most of them were still affordable and it would give me a massive hard on to see them lined up in order on a shelf.

Something like that anyway, and it's nice to have the option of re-reading them given that I no longer have the patience to watch it on telly. It even feels a bit weird watching the old ones which I once loved, although that's more to do with me and television in general than me and Who. At the risk of repeating myself, Who was once very special to me, and if I squint a bit - at least enough so as to occlude everything since about 2005, particularly the fans - I can still sense a bit of the magic.

When I was a kid, it felt like something which got made almost in spite of the company responsible, something which bordered on horror - as it did in the early seventies - and a fairly extreme existential horror to anyone under the age of ten. The 1973 Radio Times special was mind blowing because it hadn't occurred to me that there might have been Who before I'd started watching, or that there had been monsters I'd never heard of.

Anyway, I think The Chase may have been the first Hartnell I watched on VHS, simply because I'd taken to renting a VCR and I happened to see it in a sale. It probably wasn't a great place to start, but I thought it was wonderful regardless; and if I still frequented such places, virtual or otherwise, which rated Who stories in order of artistic merit, I'm sure I'd still be getting massively defensive over this particular dog's dinner. For those who spent their youth engaged in healthier pursuits, The Chase was apparently plotted by giving action figures to a couple of three-year olds, setting them out in the garden, then seeing what they came up with. So they start off in the sandpit, which all goes pear-shaped when someone gets their bollocks out; leading to brief experiments by the pond, or pretending the garden shed is haunted; ultimately ending up in the flower bed with a load of ping pong balls brought into play because of reasons. This at least saved Terry Nation the embarrassment of recycling the usual plot, I suppose.

All the same, The Chase bulges with beautifully stupid ideas, even if they're strung together in a rhythm which suggests everyone's treading water until Peter Butterworth can get time off from whatever Carry On they were shooting back in June 1965. Nation's script did more than we saw on the screen, and Peel's adaptation makes use of this, filling in details for which neither time nor budget allowed first time around; and it's hardly Stephen Baxter, but considering the extended Crackerjack sketch which Peel attempts to pummel into something vaguely less ridiculous, it's not half bad either.

The first part, as you may be aware, occurs on the planet Aridius, inadvertently presenting a harsh lesson in nominative determinism; but where the screen version was cut to the essentials of amusingly theatrical aliens and the notorious ballbag octopus, here we get something that could almost have been Richard Shaver thanks to just the slightest expansion of this first third of the story. After Aridius, it's mostly business as we probably expect, and not even Peel can make Morton C. Dill either funny or interesting but, you know, we're already off on a good foot, and I kept on reading, and nothing insulted my intelligence like some of the recent stuff, and mostly it reminded me of why I had once been so endlessly fascinated by Who.

See! Sometimes I do have something nice to say about it.

Asimov's Science Fiction 392

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 392 (2008)
I've encountered an unusual number of recurrent patterns in this issue, some to the point of irony, not least being Robert Silverberg mourning the progressive spirit of science-fiction's new wave as a casualty of the juvenile and populist, whilst mentioning in much more than just passing the publication of his own Lord Valentine's Castle, of which the looooooong excerpt I read in Fantasy & Science Fiction a while back seemed the very definition of the stuffily traditional crowd pleaser; but never mind.

During the course of his book reviews, Paul Di Filippo laments that while there have been numerous heirs to the traditions of Clarke and Heinlein, there haven't been so many following in the footsteps of that other member of the big three after which this magazine is named; and this lament occurs in the very same issue as William Barton's novella, In the Age of the Quiet Sun which revisits Asimov's tales of asteroid mining without necessarily repeating them. Barton avoids just photocopying Asimov by means of a narrative voice grounded in the immediately recognisable world of an astronaut who makes throwaway references to episodes of Land of the Lost which he saw when he was a kid, and which I didn't so I had to look it up. It could have been horribly post-modern but is handled well and is convincing, even for a story in which we discover a sophisticated extraterrestrial derelict in the vicinity of Jupiter. Indeed, the prosaic clutter of our guy's thoughts renders Barton's story all the more credible in terms which seem very much like an update of what Asimov did on his good days. In the Age of the Quiet Sun turns out to be one of the better things in the collection.

I found Horse Racing by Mary Rosenblum a little charmless. It imagines a conspiracy whereby super-rich venture capitalists buy - although sponsor might be a better word - promising children without anyone realising, assuming the good fortune of their getting to go to a better school or whatever is down to pure luck; but it isn't, because this is how said venture capitalists ensure that someone who might grow up to cure a disease or solve the issue of global warming gets to do so, which is cute, not least in seeming to support the notion that all of the worlds ills may be cured through the wonders of a free market. Maybe I just misread the thing. Maybe it was actually a parody of that which it appears to propose.

I gave up on Derek Zumsteg's Usurpers after two pages. He's a sports writer and this was his first pro-fiction, written in experimental style and so reminding me of that thing about those who run before they've learned to walk - which you would think might have been obvious to a sports writer of all people. I gather it's something athletic, and locker room high jinks ensue in loosely punctuated present tense sentences clipped so as to create impressions rather than statements.

Fifty kids fifteen to eighteen stamp their feet. Stretch. Check each other out. Hopping in place to stay loose. Bitching about the bus ride over. Vinyl benches tied up their back if they're from a poor zip. Those boys recognise King, stop him as he passes. Exchange complicated handshakes. Wish him luck and mean it. Tell him to fuck shit up and mean it.

The whole thing is written in this way and is as such unreadable, resembling the thought bubbles of persons in eighties X-Men comics which at least had a visual context to make sense of the shorthand, and I've no fucking clue what vinyl benches tied up their back is supposed to mean; but then I don't understand why sports writers even exist. I cycle twenty miles a day but not once have I felt the urge to read about cycling.

Following which, it gets better. Soldier of the Singularity by Robert R. Chase is good, or possibly efficient, with a twist ending which is at least integral to the story and doesn't just pull astonished faces at the reader. Midnight Blue by Will McIntosh pulls off a reasonable Ray Bradbury impersonation without being too obvious about it. Cut Loose the Bonds of Flesh and Bone by Ian Creasey is briefly satisfying and nicely observed.

Slug Hell by Steven Utley is set in the Paleozoic and is probably the greatest of the shorter short stories in this issue. Nothing really happens aside from a few time travelling paleontologists holding forth on the subject of prehistoric invertebrates and continental drift, but sometimes that's all you need.

The Ice War by Stephen Baxter gets the cover for obvious reasons, and while I remember it as amazing, this time around I'm troubled by details which I'm not sure I even noticed fifteen years ago. It's approximately a prequel to Anti-Ice, bringing those peculiar ice things to Earth in the eighteenth century, and specifically to the attention of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Isaac Newton as the three of them happen to be sharing a coach journey, which all feels a bit too Doctor Who for comfort, not least because even though each of them just happens to mention their respective famous novels, as they would, only Newton seems to have a legitimate reason for his presence, in this case engaging in discussion of whether God intervenes or simply prefers to leave things running. Swift dies before he's able to finish Gulliver - for some reason - and Defoe only seems to have showed up for the sake of mentioning that he wrote Robinson Crusoe, so it all seems a bit gratuitous; but outside of this, it's still Stephen Baxter and is therefore fucking fantastic in all other respects. If anyone is still writing science-fiction in a couple of hundred years time, someone will write a novel about an alien invasion as experienced by Irvine Welsh, Stephen Hawking, and J.K. Rowling as the three of them try to enjoy a lovely day out at the seaside.

There was also some poetry but, well, you know…

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.

Heir to the Empire

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

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

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

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

Heavy Water

Martin Amis Heavy Water (1998)
Never having paid much attention to literature, or at least what is generally held to be literature, I tend to discover authors more or less by accident, excepting those whose books have robots and spaceships on the cover. This is probably why Martin Amis has pretty much passed me by until now. I'm aware of his being the spawn of Kingsley, but then I only read New Maps of Hell relatively recently, and then because it discusses books which have robots and spaceships on the cover. I've heard of London Fields, although I'm not sure why, and have mostly encountered the name of Martin Amis in relation to Will Self, usually in dismissive terms suggesting that Self and Amis think they're all lush because they use long, fancy words but really they aren't lush because they're just stuck up and think they're clever and better than the rest of us. I think this means we're not supposed to read their works because only people who've spent at least five years working on the bins are allowed to write novels; which is bollocks because Will Self at least has patently produced some crackers.

Anyway, it seemed time I gave Martin Amis a shot and I found this one - short stories, which I always think is a good place to start.

Assuming there has, at some point, been fuss, then I can certainly see what it was - or possibly is - about. I assume Amis being so often paired off with Will Self is, aside from their both having gone to good schools, down to their respective fictions being, if not Swiftian, then something in that direction, and in this case so much so as to allow for The Janitor of Mars, which is science-fiction as much as anything and reads as though he's taking the piss out of Stephen Baxter. Despite frequent playdates within the same reviews, it would be difficult to mistake Amis for Self or vice versa. On the strength of the stories here, Amis is a lot more direct and it would probably be difficult to accuse him of self-indulgence with any conviction. Thematically, the two of them inhabit similar territory, but probably not to the point of it being worth discussing.

The last two in this collection of nine were a little underwhelming: What Happened to Me on My Holiday is written in a phonetic approximation of some regional dialect, and the story doesn't quite reward the effort of translation; and Straight Fiction inverts established gender preferences to comic effect - Hollywood stars exposed as secret heterosexuals etc. etc. - but doesn't quite live up to the promise of the gag. The rest, however, are fucking astonishing. Amis' writing grips the reader like hands physically emerging from the open pages to grasp you by the shoulders. He intrigues from the first sentence, presenting such peculiar combinations of people and the lives they've ended up living that you can't not want to find out where the fuck it's going to go, because there's nothing predictable, nothing promising specific conclusions, not even in the inversion narratives of the aforementioned Straight Fiction, or Career Move which swaps mumbling poetry circles for Hollywood glitz and bullshit without so much as a knowing smirk. Although the last two don't quite pay out in full, everything here does something fucking weird whilst communicating the same in terms so immediately accessible, even populist, as to be dizzying.

I wish it hadn't taken me so long to get here, but never mind.

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.

Earthlight

Arthur C. Clarke Earthlight (1955)
I hadn't really planned on reading any more Arthurs, but there I was in Half Price, and - for the first time in many years - without a to be read pile higher than the Empire State waiting for me back home, and thence did my eye come to rest upon a triumvirate of Arthurs, and the other two had great covers; and thusly didst I then recall the pleasure taken in previous Arthurs I had read many years ago, specifically taken in the economy of his prose, cool and clear as spring water lending an unexpected frisson of novelty to subjects which might be deemed a little dry under other circumstances.

I'm not sure why I've written that first paragraph in Marvel Shakespearean, but the point is that I've bought some more Arthur C. Clarke, of which this is the first. Naturally it's hard science-fiction - as the genre has come to be known - meaning speculation based upon scientific principles which are already fairly well understood, and nothing straying too deeply into the realms of aliens, time travel, hyperdrive, or anything too severely hypothetical. That said, our tale is set upon the moon, with colonies established on both Mars and Venus, Earthlight having been written before data from the Mariner or Venera space probes somewhat dispelled the possibility of the latter.

Earthlight is mostly speculation pinned on some story about a dispute between the Earth and moon which loosely alludes to the European colonisation of the Americas and the subsequent declaration of independence. The characters aren't very interesting because it's basically a novel about nerds, squares, Poindexters, and Brainiacs living on the moon with war breaking out because someone returned someone else's compass late and had quite clearly been using it to play darts, or summink. In fact, the central third of the novel is almost entirely unreadable, being mostly nerds, squares, Poindexters, and Brainiacs discussing vectors. Thankfully, Clarke really comes into his own when describing a weird and unfamiliar environment, such as are the lunar surface and outer space itself, so the first and final third of the novel are surprisingly gripping, even evocative for something so otherwise dry; seemingly suggesting the possibility of Earthlight being Clarke's attempt to transpose E.E. 'Doc' Smith style space opera into a working universe of known science; and certainly it foreshadows Stephen Baxter more than almost anything else I've read. Some twit on Goodreads described it as appallingly sexist due to the complete absence of female characters, but it seems a bit of a redundant observation, all things considered, and this would be a generally amazing book were it not for the big chunk of espionage landfill clogging up the central section.

Empire of the Atom

A.E. van Vogt Empire of the Atom (1947)
Empire of the Atom, published in 1956, is a fix-up of five short stories originally published within eighteen months of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There's a sequel, The Wizard of Linn, which was actually one of the first van Vogts I read, but I can't remember much about it and I don't think it made any strong impression on me; so I came to this more or less blind. In fact, based on the title, I had always imagined it would be some sort of subatomic precursor to Stephen Baxter's Flux.

Anyway the existence of the atom bomb clearly brought about a significant rethink in popular culture, representing a moment in which the world and the course of the future lost its established cohesion, and science-fiction authors realised it might not turn out quite so shiny as Hugo Gernsback would have had us believe. Without actually bothering to check, beyond noting that John Wyndham's Chrysalids was published in 1955, I suspect that Empire must surely have been amongst the earliest projections of life after the atomic bomb. A.E. van Vogt tended to examine his subject in terms of the biggest picture possible, so it makes sense that he should depict our post-nuclear future as something dynastic, something grand on the scale of the rise and fall of the Roman empire. To this end, Empire of the Atom is, more or less, van Vogt's Slan mashed up with Robert Graves' I, Claudius, even to the point of including a dynastic family tree as preface.

I'm afraid I don't actually remember Claudius in any great detail, although this may have helped more than it hindered, but van Vogt's take is fairly compelling with a deformed mutant offspring standing in for the stammering historian, trying to get by within a court of scheming relatives. The star of the book, however, seems to be its environment, an ingenious hybrid where those left with only bows and arrows in the wake of atomic collapse are nevertheless able to fly what spacecraft have survived the disaster miraculously intact, waging war between Venus, Mars and even colonies on the moons of Jupiter.

The tale is told with a certain gravity through van Vogt eschewing his usual disorientating literary techniques in favour of a more classical style. I've a feeling it makes some fairly profound statement about humanity repeatedly kicking itself up the arse, but I seem to be the only person who noticed so I probably imagined it; because for all its promise, while Empire of the Atom is certainly respectable, it's some way short of van Vogt's best. On the other hand, that he managed to pull off such a ludicrous premise at all speaks volumes about the man and his enduringly underrated talent.

The Outward Urge

John Wyndham & Lucas Parkes The Outward Urge (1961)
If the name of Lucas Parkes sounds familiar, it's because it's one of the pseudonyms under which Wyndham occasionally wrote, and The Outward Urge was published as a collaboration with himself so as to distinguish it from Triffids and the others, it being quite different in tone. Without bothering to check the dates, I'd say it's more or less Wyndham doing an Arthur C. Clarke, or if that doesn't work, then very much foreshadowing Stephen Baxter's vaguely dynastic tales of realistic space exploration. The Outward Urge begins with the slightly annoyingly named Ticker Troon helping to build a space station in Earth orbit, then sequentially visits the moon, Mars and Venus through successive generations, finally concluding in the general vicinity of the asteroid belt with one of Troon's descendants.

Technically, it's hard science-fiction, as we used to call it back when I were a lad. Wyndham's environmental and technological predictions are based on what was understood to be possible at the time of writing, so rockets travel at rocket speed, and if the Venusian landscape upon which George Troon sets up his first dome seems implausibly habitable, it's nevertheless come a long way, conceptually speaking, since C.S. Lewis wrote Perelandra. As a novel leaning heavily on the issue of how to survive on other planets, The Outward Urge is a little dry by Wyndham's usual standards, although is thankfully free of the creaking slapstick seen in a couple of his lesser novels; but is approximately as readable and compelling as you would expect of the author of Triffids. Although it's possibly worth noting Wyndham having predicted Reagan's star wars initiative, novels of this kind often tend to reveal more about when they were written, and this is particularly true of The Outward Urge, dominated as it is, by cold war politics. So it's a mostly decent read, and particularly so in the case of the Martian episode, but probably not essential.

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 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.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Douglas Adams The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980)

I reviewed the first one about a month ago. In fact the main reason I hunted the first one down was because I found The Restaurant at the End of the Universe in a branch of Half-Price, and a copy with the proper cover no less, and it would have been weird reading book two once again without first reminding myself of its predecessor; and - as already stated - it was in part a journey of discovery, namely discovering whether I'd been wrong about Adams all these years; and if I'm to subject myself to something I know I'll probably dislike, I reasoned, then it's going to be with books sporting the proper covers or not at all - the proper covers being those dating from when I read this stuff first time round, as opposed to some of the self-consciously wacky crimes against design in which Adams has since been wrapped - cartoon comedy planets blowing raspberries just in case anyone mistakes this stuff for Stephen Baxter.

To recap, my problem with Adams is that he was never as funny as claimed, and whilst his writing was fine for radio or television, it's just not that great applied to a novel, or at least to these novels. I mean it's not actually terrible, but these books really don't belong in any of those balls-achingly predictable lists of fifty science-fiction classics you must read.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe suffers from the same problems as the first part of the story, namely that it's a series of static scenes in which a bunch of guys stand around passing wry commentary upon some absurd aspect of their situation before a magic wand plot device whisks them off to the next set piece for more of the same. There are three women in the whole thing. Trillian doesn't get to say much, whilst the other two are introduced as love interest on the second to last page and are typically a bit dumb, which probably isn't too surprising given that the central part of the book all seems a bit Jeremy Clarkson with hindsight - chaps lusting after sporty spaceships in the restaurant parking lot followed by excessively loud rock band jokes, Led Zeppelin blowing up planets and so on and so forth; and all held together by a glue of purportedly witty observation which, as a number of people have since pointed out to me, is pretty much dollar store P.G. Wodehouse. I say, old chap, I hope you won't think me impolite but I can't help noticing that you appear to have parked your spacecraft atop my greenhouse, and I wouldn't mind but I was rather hoping to make the rounds with the jolly old flit gun at some point this afternoon blah blah blah...

Yet, for all it's flaws and annoyances, I kind of enjoyed this one. It may simply be nostalgia for the first time I read it, but it seems less laboured than the previous instalment. Also, it has a fairly satisfyingly rounded conclusion, and so much so that it feels like these first two volumes really should be considered a single novel so as to allow the positives to cancel or at least balance out the worst of the clunk. Unless it really is my imagination, my guess is that Adams was simply a better writer by the time he sat down to pull this one together, so while it remains a radio script shoehorned between two covers, the shoehorning isn't so laboured, and there are passages without the author digging you in the ribs and asking if you get it every three seconds.

It's still some way short of being the classic everyone seems to think it is, and Terry Pratchett did this sort of thing so much better, and six times nine isn't forty-two last time I looked - unless that's Adams admitting that the cartoon philosophies bolted onto his narrative are genuinely meaningless - but The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is certainly readable. He really should have left it at just the two books.

Ralph 124C41+

Hugo Gernsback Ralph 124C41+ (1911)
As editor and publisher of Amazing Stories, Hugo Gernsback - whose name is to this day honoured in the Hugo awards - was either the father of modern science-fiction, or the worst thing that ever happened to the genre. With this latter stance championed by Brian Aldiss, it's difficult to resist the temptation of taking the opposite position just for the sake of it, but much as it pains me to admit, he does have a point:

Gernsback's segregation of what he liked to call scientifiction into magazines designed to contain nothing else, ghetto-fashion, guaranteed the setting up of various narrow orthodoxies inimical to any thriving literature. A cultural chauvinism prevailed, with unfortunate consequences of which the field has yet to rid itself. Gernsback, as editor, showed himself to be without literary understanding. The dangerous precedents he set were to be followed by many later editors in the field.

Gernsback's brand of science-fiction typically starred the inventor as hero, a scientific superman saving the day and getting the girl usually by agency of something involving a special kind of radio wave or newly discovered energy source. It is at worst, simple-minded Victorian utilitarianism, as Aldiss states, and arguably a fairly direct ancestor to the hard science-fiction of Asimov, Clarke, Baxter and the like. On the other hand, the success of Gernsback's magazines did a great deal to popularise at least their own version of the genre, bringing in a great many new writers and ultimately expanding the field to something broader than just the stuff of which Brian Aldiss approves.

Ralph 124C41+ is one of only two novels written by Gernsback, and certainly evidence of his being without literary understanding in so much as it is essentially a series of droning predictions, descriptions of weather control technology and other marvels of the year 2660 strung upon a thoroughly flimsy narrative. Our Ralph, the world's most celebrated inventor, falls in love with a woman encountered during a wrong number. Their first date is a tour of futuristic power plants, industrial farms, floating cities, and so on, with the lucky, lucky girl presumably enraptured by Ralph's lengthy descriptions of how these things work.

'The evolution of letter-writing has been a slow and painful one. Our remote ancestors, many thousand years ago, carved their letters in stone slabs. Later on, the more civilised Egyptians wrote their letters upon papyrus. Still later, upon the invention of paper and ink, communications and letters could be written much better and faster in that improved manner. Later still, the typewriter came into use.'

What a silver-tongued fox he is, to be sure.

Gernsback's intentions are clearly educational, predictive, and populist rather than literary, and although here he apparently foresaw both The Flintstones and the Discovery Channel, it's quite surprising how spectacularly he failed to predict much of anything else. Whilst admittedly there's one device here which sounds like radar, and another which suggests a photoelectric cell, Gernsback falls on his arse time and again, not least because he doesn't even seem to have been paying much attention to early twentieth century science, let alone its possible future. In one rather gruesome passage a dog is revived from death by means of blood transfusion from a goat - all of which suggests that Gernsback, like Ridley Scott, probably thought The Island of Doctor Moreau was a novel about medical advancement. Haematology may have been rudimentary in 1900 by comparison with today, but it was definitely better than whatever Ralph was working with in this novel. Even more implausible - and I would have thought distinctly lacking in romance - is the restaurant at which our two lovebirds have their feeding tubes inserted.

While eating they reclined in the comfortably upholstered leather armchair. They did not have to use knife and fork, as was the custom in former centuries. Eating had become a pleasure.

'Do you know,' said Ralph, 'it took people a long time to accept the scientific restaurants. At first they did not succeed. Humanity had been masticating for thousands of years and it was hard to overcome the inherited habit. However, people soon found out that scientific foods prepared in a palatable manner in liquid form were not only far more digestible and better for the stomach, but they also did away almost entirely with indigestion, dyspepsia, and other ills, and people began to get stronger and more vigorous.'

...and of course we get a lot of energy from all those turbines at the Diarrhoea Energy Plant. I found it difficult to read this passage without being reminded of that Simpsons episode in which Mr. Burns explains how ever since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun...

Once Gernsback has run out of things to explain, he tags on a bit of story involving the improbable kidnap of the soon to be Mrs. 124C41+, and although there's no scene in which a grinning top-hatted villain ties her to a railway line to a soundtrack of frantic piano music, it sort of feels like there is.

In summary, the story is utter crap, and the writing is fucking terrible; and yet I can't help but admire and enjoy this book somehow, even beyond being well-disposed to anything shunned by Brian Aldiss. For all of it's many, many, many, many, many, faults, Ralph 124C41+ is written with such obvious enthusiasm and delight in its own droning testimony that it generally avoids becoming boring, and the sheer novelty of science as written in Gernsback's world of screwy pre-Einsteinian physics is surprisingly engaging. It may be terrible as science-fiction, but it's nevertheless a fascinating glimpse of something or other, and mere low-brow heritage is not in itself sufficient reason to dismiss this peculiar historical artefact, the relic of an age in which man dared to dream of meals unsullied by the misery and inconvenience of cutlery and mastication.

This is available from Black Cat Press for which you should find a link somewhere on the right-hand side of this page.

Moonseed

Stephen Baxter Moonseed (1998)
I haven't touched any Baxter for a while, having somewhat overdosed a few years ago - overdosed because whilst he's a fine writer, his books can be fucking depressing at times; but still, I always liked the sound of Moonseed, and it was always the next one I would have read had I carried on, and so it was difficult to resist when I chanced upon a copy in Half-Price Books.

Moonseed is hard science-fiction in the Asimov sense, eschewing magic wand plot devices such as warp drive and artificial intelligence, instead more or less sticking to what is known and understood, aside from the moonseed itself, although admittedly I suspect some of Baxter's reliance on quantum theory may be stretching the point a bit. As a straight disaster novel, Moonseed gets off to a good start by blowing up Venus, leaving it hanging as a baleful cloud in the night sky while Earth struggles with the collapse of the food chain - an effect of radiation levels soaring after the destruction of the inner planet. Bad turns to worse as rocks brought back from lunar missions are found to contain moonseed, an unidentified viral substance which devours and processes terrestrial minerals towards mysterious ends. As an outbreak of moonseed transforms Scotland into a huge active volcano, humanity at last understands what became of Venus and what will soon happen to Earth.

It's a big, fat housebrick of a novel which goes some very peculiar and unexpected places in the last hundred or so pages, yet still keeps the science reasonably hard. As something which sort of remakes The Blob as a geology textbook, its strengths are numerous, not least forcing a genially preposterous conclusion to work as something approaching believable with a barrage of engrossing science.

Unfortunately these strengths contrast with the regrettably weaker material which takes up the central chunk of narrative, material which prompted at least one reviewer on the Goodreads website to ponder whether Moonseed might be an early Baxter novel dating from before he got the hang of writing people. There are points at which the characters read as though they've been written by a mathematical process, their dialogue a bit too close to what you might find on one of those prime time ITV detective thrillers usually starring someone who used to be in Eastenders; and there are far too many characters, and all defined by occupation like Fisher-Price people - the doctor, the butcher, the policeman. Keeping track of them all becomes a chore, particularly under the onslaught of Baxter's characteristically overwhelming pessimism - Venus blowing up, environmental collapse, everyone having cancer, the breakdown of society, dead babies, volcanoes everywhere, extinction, the release of a new ELO album and so on.

It's frustrating because Baxter has stated that he doesn't view his writing as pessimistic.

'So,' he said, 'you're what we'd call a survivalist? You think that when it all falls apart we should pack up and head for the hills?'

'No.' Now she did sound offended. 'Of course not. We're human beings. We got where we are by cooperating, by helping each other. It's just that the future is so dangerous.'

'Yep.'

'We're going to have to be smart to survive, on any timescale you care to think about.'

This exchange roughly encapsulates what Baxter has tried to do in a good few of his novels, namely presenting the hope that we as a species may triumph over adversity through unflinching realism and scientific endeavour, the realism being a more useful alternative to pretending that problems faced by humanity are not so great as they may seem. So whilst it's commendable that he pulls no punches when dishing out the grim, he's sometimes less able to provide a decent reason to keep reading through the relentless tide of death, cancer, and extinction. He just about pulls it off here in so much as I enjoyed the last couple of hundred pages, but it was a bit lumpy in places. Still, in terms of big ideas done well, Moonseed is up there with his best despite its shortcomings.

A Red Sun Also Rises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genuinely wonderful stuff.