Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic (1972)

 

I've spent the last forty years of my life avoiding Tarkovsky's Stalker - although it's actually more a case of not bothering with than actively avoiding. The reason for this is that it was shown by the film club when I was at art college, and somebody told me I really needed to see it because it was amazing and just the sort of film you love which, as usual, was pretty much the kiss of death for me. It wasn't that I even disliked the woman who told me this but, for all of her many wonderful qualities, I simply didn't trust her judgement on this occasion.

This unfortunate initial impression was cemented a couple of decades later when I found myself on the receiving end of one of my cousin's lectures, this time inspired by his having just got back from some Tarkovsky related event. As always, his lecture took the form of a leisurely paced droning monologue so delivered as to make it very difficult for anyone to interrupt, and composed with the apparent assumption of my never having heard of Tarkovsky, and possibly having no idea of what films are either. My cousin is five years younger than me but went to a much better school, you see, so has often felt duty bound to impart his greater wisdom.

I tried to explain that I hadn't seen the film and had reason to believe it might not be my sort of thing, but he took no notice. After about thirty fucking minutes of this, as he paused to draw breath, I took the opportunity to quip, 'Go on, then - push your glasses up your nose and say, as my producer said to me.' This was an allusion to Ronnie Corbett's shaggy dog stories from The Two Ronnies, and an attempt to reiterate my lack of interest in a light-hearted and humorous way so as not to give offence. He momentarily gave me the blackest of black looks, then continued for another twenty minutes, the condescending fucking cunt.

What eventually brought about my own personal Tarkovsky glasnost was my friend Carl telling me he'd been reading Roadside Picnic - on which Stalker is based and which I hadn't heard of because my cousin was apparently right about me being a massive thickie; but I tend to trust Carl's judgement on most things, so I took the plunge and finally watched it on Netflix or Hulu or one of those.

It was good, as I probably knew it would be, and it looked amazing, but then Blade Runner also looks amazing, and I don't know if Stalker was quite worth the forty year wait. It felt like it should do more than just look amazing whilst hanging about on the screen for far too long.

'It's based on a book that's supposed to be great, although I've never read it,' I told my wife as we sat down to watch. Then, after about seven hours, I added, 'You know, I don't think I'll bother with the book after all.'

I wasn't actually aware that she'd ordered me a copy from Amazon as we were watching because our birthday* was coming up. I'd assumed she was just fiddling with her phone as usual. Amazingly she didn't say anything.

To get to the point at long last, I finally understand the reputation this thing has garnered over the years, and I suppose Stalker is an extension of that, although the movie is very much a remix of the novel rather than a faithful rendering. the premise is, as you may know, that aliens have visited our planet leaving behind all sorts of fascinating super-advanced garbage just as we might leave crisp packets and plastic forks behind following a roadside picnic, if we're louts. The visitation sites coincidentally foreshadow the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in so much as that you wouldn't want to live there and all sorts of weird and deadly effects apply, and so we have stalkers - as they are called - who brave the Zones and retrieve flying saucer detritus which they sell to the scientific community. Much of the detritus is bewildering or just plain deadly, but occasionally something will turn out to be a self-recharging battery, so here we have the ancestral form of all those shitty science-fiction shows about what secretive government departments do with all the stuff that falls from the sky; except Roadside Picnic is mostly wonderful, fairly close to being a masterpiece, and is also entirely believable and true to life, being about the people more than it's about the weirdness. As Ursula K. LeGuin writes in her introduction:

There are no superbrilliant intellects; people are commonplace. Red, the central figure, is ordinary to the point of being ornery, a hard-bitten man. Most of the characters are tough people leading degrading, discouraging lives, presented without sentimentality and without cynicism. Humanity is not flattered, but it's not cheapened. the authors' touch is tender, aware of vulnerability.

The use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism—superbrilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen.

I punched the air when I read that, and the pages that follow live up to the promise of the introduction; although that said, I found I got a little lost around halfway, mainly because I was subconsciously trying to match the narrative to what I could recall of the movie, which wasn't actually a whole lot. Anyway, having recognised that the movie was only loosely related, I started again at the beginning which, oddly enough, was a pleasure more than it was a chore.

Roadside Picnic is about the people, how they relate to the unknown, and the fact of the aforementioned unknown being absolutely unknowable - which is a pleasure to find in a genre that has tended to be more concerned with figuring it all out. Because we all live with the unknowable, even if we're just talking about death, Roadside Picnic feels like real life in a way which can't be said of your Asimovs or your Heinleins; and so it can also be read as being about religion, or even about the Soviet state as was - without actually criticising the Soviet state in any direct sense for obvious reasons. If Roadside Picnic is about anything, then it's arguably about everything.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can't do a thing! We can't stop it, we can't slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It's not because we do bad work. And it's not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn't the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.

If anyone is still reading, sorry for taking so long getting to the point and so inadvertently summarising how long its taken me to recognise the brilliance of this novel in some form or another, but we all got there in the end. Whatever garbage you were about to read, read this instead.

*: We have the same birthday.

Asimov's Science Fiction 429/430

Sheila Williams (editor) Asimov's Science Fiction 429/430 (2011)
Finding myself merely whelmed by the previous issue I tackled, this one has come as a very pleasant surprise. It's another double issue so there was a lot to get through here - two novellas, a couple of novelettes, and six short stories - and although not everything pushed the right buttons for me, there was nothing annoying, or that I failed to enjoy on some level. Kit Reed's The Outside Event skates close to being a bit too self-conscious for its own good in occurring at a writers' retreat, but nevertheless gets away with it. I'm not sure if this is a first for me and the digests, but it might be.

Taking a more positive view than competent and not actually annoying, the two novellas are, in particular, exceptional. Kristine Kathryn Rusch's Stealth is space opera which actually bothers to tell a story rather than fixating on either technology or weird physics, and succeeds possibly by virtue of an atmosphere created through posing more questions than it answers. I still didn't really understand what the stealth was supposed to be by the time I finished, but it didn't seem to matter. Even more impressive, and possibly ranking as the best thing I've read in a digest, is Kij Johnson's The Man Who Bridged the Mist. As with Stealth, we're left to fill in a few unexplained gaps without any harm to the integrity of the story, and it may even be this wiggle room which leaves us with such a plausible sense of scale, and by extension reality. The story inhabits a society at late seventeenth century levels of technology, but the mist across which our man must create a suspension bridge suggests a world other than Earth without anything being clearly stated, and we should also take into account that this mostly agrarian society additionally treats the sexes as equal - so at least we know it's not fucking steampunk, and nor does it read like the work of someone in love with flywheels and top hats. As with Ursula LeGuin's writing - of which I am favourably reminded - a lot is said without very much seeming to happen; and so The Man Who Bridged the Mist is about progress, psychological as well as technological, its cost and how it leaves us changed.

 

'We are not meant to cross this without passing through it. Kit—' Rasali said, as if starting a sentence, and then fell silent. After a moment she began to speak again, her voice low, as if she were speaking to herself. 'The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort: tonight, do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry's headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things, right? A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer, because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I'm waiting until I know how I will be changed.'

It's not often a digest features a story of such depth that I'm moved to pick quotes in illustration of its theme, but there were a few which could have served just as well as the above. I'm sure there was a time when a contribution to Asimov's failing to include either robots or spacecraft would have brought in a tidal wave of grumbling, but as a discussion of the consequences of progress The Man Who Bridged the Mist is exactly the sort of thing they should be publishing.

...and while we're here both Eleanor Arnason's My Husband Steinn and A Hundred Hundred Daisies by Nancy Kress are of equivalent excellence, so that's three new names on the list from just one issue.

The Witling

Vernor Vinge The Witling (1976)
I'm not quite sure how this one came to leap from the shelf and into my shopping trolley. I vaguely recall finding Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and The Peace War underwhelming beyond their admittedly sparky ideas, and nothing on the cover of this one promises anything likely to change my mind; and yet I picked it up, for some reason, and it's fucking great, and so much so as to leave me wondering why the other two failed to get me going.

Anyway, this being my third Vinge, I think I've spotted the theme, specifically that he very much enjoys fucking around with the laws of physics as they apply to space and how one moves around therein. Here it's a pseudo-mediaeval alien civilisation which has evolved an ability to instantaneously teleport from place to place. The rhythm of the story and the cadence of its characters borders on Tolkien, albeit less cloying, or at least something by Ursula LeGuin, and this contrasts very well with how their society is seen through the eyes of technologically advanced human visitors - with the story riding along on the fact of said visitors having found themselves stranded on this strange world.

The Witling isn't anything mind-expanding, but it does that which it does exceptionally well and makes for a thoroughly breezy read which does much to remind the reader what first drew him* to the science-fiction novel.

*: I've made this hypothetical person masculine because I'm referring directly to myself, and also because girls are more likely to read romance novels or the latest issue of Woman's Hat Monthly than anything by Vernor Vinge.

How to Get to Apocalypse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Worlds of Clifford Simak

Clifford D. Simak Other Worlds of Clifford Simak (1960)
This was originally a twelve story hardback collection by the name of The Worlds of Clifford Simak, divided in half and reprinted as two individual collections due to the limitations of paperback book binding in the sixties. The six stories which didn't make it into this one were also printed in paperback form as The Worlds of Clifford Simak, which seems confusing but never mind.

It's been a while since I read any full length Simak, meaning cover to cover as distinct from stories appearing in the digests, and I somehow forgot what a pleasure it can be when he's firing on all four cylinders. Well, I didn't forget, but merely recalling having enjoyed a Simak or two isn't really the same as what you get from actually reading; and this one has been a real pleasure.

Given the number of short stories he churned out over the years, it's inevitable that they can't all be The Big Front Yard - which is amazing although it isn't in this collection - but this is nevertheless an impressively solid set with only Green Thumb representing any sort of dip in focus or standard, albeit not actually much of one. Of those authors who have achieved escape velocity from the science-fiction ghetto - here assuming such a shift is even desirable purely for the sake of argument - it seems increasingly strange that Simak remains yet to join Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury and others on the shelves of persons who otherwise wouldn't be seen dead reading anything with a picture of a rocket on the cover. His stories explore what it is to be human, or more accurately to belong to something bigger than ourselves, which he does by means of strange and fantastic ideas we tend to identify as either science-fiction, or science-fiction by virtue of their not really belonging anywhere else; and the warmth and humanity of his stories is both powerful and profoundly moving, yet without eschewing realism at the expense of the dunderhead positivity which often blights the work of authors going for the same sort of effect. He doesn't always get the balance quite right, but he shines bright in this lot with homespun tales of seemingly familiar people in weird or jagged situations unlike anything I've noticed anywhere else in fiction. Dusty Zebra, Carbon Copy, Founding Father and Idiot's Crusade are in particular amongst the best Simak I've read, and I've read a lot.

Without Absolution

Amy Sterling Casil Without Absolution (2000)
This came into my possession because I'd added it to an Amazon wishlist and somebody felt like buying me a birthday present, which was initially puzzling as I couldn't remember who Amy Sterling Casil might be or why I'd been drawn to the book. Eventually I recalled having read Casil's Mad for Mints in a back issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which only presented further confusion because while I remember thinking it was sort of entertaining…

Well, whatever the case - I'm glad to have read this, not least when considering the alternate realities in which I might not have bothered. Casil's introduction mentions her having been influenced by Ray Bradbury, which I'm definitely feeling, although I think maybe I prefer her writing in an admittedly general sense. It's been a while since I read Bradbury, and I remember a few crackers, but Casil's people seem less at the mercy of the sort of borderline cloying sentiment to which Bradbury occasionally succumbed. That said, Casil's emphasis on evocative image rich detail seems very Bradbury, and she treads a fine line in supporting the narrative on a flow of sensations without formally spelling everything out. In a few cases, it doesn't quite work, and I found An Officer of the Faith a little too abstract for its own good, but mostly it's powerfully effective once you've cottoned on to what's happening.

Without Absolution is mostly science-fiction, or speculative, or whatever you want to call it - that ambiguous literary hinterland inhabited by the aforementioned Ray Bradbury, Ursula LeGuin and others - a non-genre of girth sufficient to encompass both the future of plastic surgery and a sequel to Beowulf - which must have taken some balls to write, never mind pull off, as us rootin' tootin' folk say. There's also some poetry, and I'm afraid I still don't really get poetry, although it's clear that it's very closely related to Casil's gorgeous, if occasionally slightly disturbing prose; and The Renascence of Memory is a masterpiece.

Blindness

José Saramago Blindness (1995)
Ursula LeGuin seemed to think this was something special and it sounded great. Happily, I chanced upon a copy at Half Price and Ursula was right, as usual. The quick version is that Blindness is Day of the Triffids had it been written by Borges, but deserves a somewhat more thorough account. Our story begins when everyone in the world - so far as we're able to tell - is suddenly unsighted for reasons which remain undiscovered and which probably don't matter. The blind are at first quarantined in an abandoned asylum, with food left sporadically at the gate in the hope of their being able to fend for themselves without infecting anyone else; except, whatever it is, it doesn't seem to be a disease and the food deliveries soon cease. Naturally, it doesn't take long for civilisation itself to cease, and human existence becomes a vision of hell as all that we take for granted is stripped away - electricity, running water, law, order, food, transport and working toilets. Blindness is potentially one of the most harrowing things I've read, except Saramago clearly understood that what he wanted to say about human nature might be lost to the visceral horror of its telling. In fact, he specifically states as much near the end of the novel while additionally describing one of his solutions.

Ah, you were in quarantine, Yes, Was it hard, Worse than that, How horrible, You are a writer, you have, as you said a moment ago, an obligation to know words, therefore you know that adjectives are of no use to us, if a person kills another, for example, it would be better to state this fact openly, directly, and to trust that the horror of the act, in itself, is so shocking that there is no need for us to say it was horrible.

Additionally, as you may notice from the above, Saramago utilises his own conventions of punctuation and grammar, embedding dialogue within the text without indicating quotation or even direct attribution to the speaker, instead trusting the cadence of the words to distinguish speech. He abruptly switches tense or makes occasional authorial observations, even speculating what may happen next, and there are plenty of commas, not many full stops, and very few paragraph breaks. It's initially disorientating - not least because we never learn the names of any of our people, persisting with identification such as the doctor, the doctor's wife, the boy with the squint and so on right up until the end - but it soon becomes absorbing by somehow placing the reader at the centre of the horror, so it feels as though the book is occurring around you rather than simply on the page; and it really is horror of the most harrowing sort, the kind which occurs here in the real world when we reduce ourselves to living garbage. Yet Saramago keeps his emphasis firmly focussed on the positives, even when those positives constitute just the faintest glimmer of hope in a brutal world of blood and shit, forging a powerful parable about human nature without it reading like transgressive body horror drivel, and yet without pulling any descriptive punches. Blindness is honestly not like anything I've read before.

Words Are My Matter

Ursula K. LeGuin Words Are My Matter (2016)
Ever since I first read LeGuin's review of Jeanette Winterson's Stone Gods in the Gaurdani, I knew she was one of the good ones, someone who understood in a world of complete fucking idiots. She found a lot to like about The Stone Gods but spent a couple of massively enjoyable paragraphs rolling her eyes and sighing over Winterson's refusal to acknowledge that a novel in which someone colonises an alien planet can be termed science-fiction - on the grounds that science-fiction is such a boy thing or some such bollocks amounting to the usual snobbery one tends to experience with proper authors. The review is reprinted in this collection, along with a few similarly righteous and massively satisfying truths fired off in the general direction of Margaret Atwood; so I couldn't not buy the thing.

I'm not usually too stoked at the prospect of a writer writing about writing, but LeGuin's essays are packed with insights of the kind which I'd assumed were just me and probably no-one else in the universe. She dissects the relationship between proper writing and that which has come to be termed genre, bursting a multitude of self-important bubbles along the way, and even tackles the myth about whether people really are reading less these days and which people we're talking about when we make such generalisations. For what it may be worth, she doesn't believe that we are reading less, which is encouraging.

LeGuin proves similarly fascinating when discussing the work of other writers - both as reviews and dedicated essays harvested from various literary mags. Here she sheds fresh light on H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard and others with such clarity and enthusiasm as to have inspired my purchase of a novel by at least one of the names I hadn't heard of - and naturally there are a few. She brings a refreshing feminist perspective to her subject while remaining even-handed and generous throughout, preferring to focus on positives even when dealing with books she clearly didn't enjoy and so eschewing the didactic tendencies of Atwood and Winterson.

Finally, we end with a diary written while at a writers' retreat on some island, with pleasing emphasis on the wild bunnies she encounters. It's not often I find myself wanting to hang out with an author as a result of having read their work, but Ursula really does come across as having been a genuinely wonderful person. We could do with a few more like her, generally speaking.

Highwood

Neal Barrett, Jr. Highwood (1972)
Internet research has revealed to me that Neal Barrett, Jr. had a reasonably respectable career as a writer following this early effort and - of more direct interest to me - was born in San Antonio; so I was well disposed towards this as I turned to the first page, or at least curious or hopeful or something. It came stuck to Barrington Bayley's arse as part of an Ace Double, and gets off to a tremendous start.

Highwood is a relative of Aldiss's Hothouse, or maybe something from Ursula LeGuin, or Ewok soft porn at the less complimentary end of the scale. It's set on a world where the trees are tens of miles high and home to entire communities of lesbian natives resembling lemurs. The males live in a separate segregated community, either in another tree or miles down on the forest floor - the author seems a bit vague about the details. Kearney Wynn comes to this world to study these natives and immediately finds herself at odds with Hamby Flagg, who seems to be some sort of colonial caretaker stationed on this peculiar world. Hamby is accompanied by Teddi, a robotic teddy bear who provides the counselling and emotional support necessitated by such a thankless and solitary posting. Of all the novels which have ever reminded me of Philip K. Dick, this one reminds me of Philip K. Dick a lot, at least up until the last couple of chapters - and in a good way, writing with the same sort of rhythm - expressive without getting too fancy - and characters who could easily be on vacation from Ubik or A Maze of Death or one of the others.

However, Highwood seems often wilfully vague in what it's trying to describe, and I made it right to the end without quite working out what had happened to the colony of male natives seen earlier, or - honestly - what the fuck was going on; and before it gets resolved, the author whips off the mask and reveals that we've actually been reading a very different book, one which seems to promise a lot but turns out to be ham-fisted bollocks. That lesbian Ewok colony was actually some sort of metaphor for women's emancipation, which Kearney realises is all a waste of time, and she only ever thought otherwise due to having had some funny ideas in her head - probably all that book learnin'.

She stepped back from him, thrust her fists stubbornly against her hips. 'No—you listen to me, Hamby Flagg. I didn't climb all over this damn planet and half a dozen others for my health—or for science, either, for that matter. I was looking for a man, Flagg. I didn't know that, of course, and I sure as hell wouldn't have admitted it to myself, but it's true, nevertheless. And now that I've found one, moth-eaten and grimy as you are, I kind of like what I've got. Though God knows you're not what I had in mind—or thought I had in mind, anyway. But I do not intend to waste all that time and effort just to—to provide a very unappetising picnic for those things!'

Highwood opens like some lost Philip K. Dick novella and ends like the sort of conservative and occasionally Christian science-fiction which has always made Analog magazine a bit of a lottery.

Never mind.

The Dispossessed

Ursula LeGuin The Dispossessed (1974)
I had high hopes for this, knowing a fair few for whom it's an all-time favourite; and although I can see why, it wasn't really doing it for me. It's a decent, thoughtful read, making its point by comparison of a society divided in two, one living on the large, approximately habitable moon of the other's world. Annares is a functioning anarcho-syndicalist society living without religion, hierarchy, or any centralised power, whereas Urras is a capitalist society more closely resembling our own. While it may be tempting to read this as allegorical to the relationship of the United States and Soviet Union as was, the parallels work only in a very general sense because The Dispossessed strives to make much broader observations about human institutions; and it works because, although it ultimately comes down on the side of the individual liberty afforded by the anarcho-syndicalist society, there is no stacked deck in play, and we get to see both the relative merits and pitfalls of each system.

I read a second hand copy of this book, one which had evidently been used by a student taking notes towards a thesis of some description, so every page has a sentence or two underlined, usually with some footnote, women considered to be property and so on. This background noise was actually a bit annoying, and felt a little like having Margaret Attwood digging me in the ribs and scowling whilst coaxing me towards a certain conclusion; but happily, once I'd learned to ignore the embellishments, the narrative is revealed as mostly questions with very little that is didactic.

For her as for him, there was no end. There was process: process was all. You could go in a promising direction or you could go wrong, but you did not set out with the expectation of ever stopping anywhere.

Of course, I'm sure there will still be idiots who read this as a communist diatribe or whatever, or who at least come to that conclusion, presumably having had the book read to them; but there will always be idiots so there's probably not much joy to be had in getting upset over the fact.

Personally I found LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness more convincing and probably a better book, but The Dispossessed is nevertheless great.

Galaxy volume two

Frederik Pohl, Martin H. Greenberg & Joseph D. Olander (editors)
Galaxy volume two (1980)
I have a vague impression of Galaxy as having been one of the better magazines in the same way that Fantasy & Science Fiction seems to be one of the better magazines for short science-fiction which may or may not involve robots, spaceships, aliens, and the like. I suspect this impression mainly comes from my having noticed how many of Philip K. Dick's short stories first appeared in Galaxy; although rummaging around on Wikipedia, it seems the magazine probably deserved its reputation for having broken new ground, and for maintaining a certain standard.

This collection - presumably along with the first volume, of which I don't have a copy - seems to represent a sort of post-mortem, a greatest hits set published in the year of cancellation. Either the anthology is nothing like so good as it should be, or I'm approaching science-fiction saturation point. It's not a bad collection, and maybe the first volume is amazing, but given the names invoked on the cover, it should surely be a lot more fun than it is.

Dick's Oh, To Be a Blobel! is obviously wonderful, but is unfortunately of such quality as to make the stories which follow seem for the most part cranky, fussy, poorly conceived, and written by people who don't get out much. Ursula K. Le Guin's The Day Before the Revolution is still at least as great as it seemed last time I read it; and Harlan Ellison's Cold Friend is pretty damn sparky; and I've never read any John Varley, but after Overdrawn at the Memory Bank I shall be keeping an eye open for more; but as for the rest, I'm sat here looking at the contents page. I read the lot and yet I can't remember a single thing about any one of them. Actually, that's not strictly true. I recall that Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's collaborative The Gift of Garigolli felt like being stuck in an elevator with Groucho Marx and made no sense whatsoever, so I stopped reading it. Maybe these stories just seemed better at the time, back when they still had the shock of the relatively new on their side. Maybe I need to come back to this one in a more receptive frame of mind.

Stardreamer

Cordwainer Smith Stardreamer (1971)
I'm a bit mystified as to why it should have taken me so long to stumble across this guy's work. I've known his name for some time, although I'm not sure why given his absence from the many science-fiction anthologies I've read over the years, right up until last month when his Alpha Ralpha Boulevard stamped itself firmly on my consciousness. He clearly had a reputation, fans, and an established body of highly distinctive work, so who knows? Maybe he was just a bit too weird to have ended up sandwiched between Isaac Asimov and Murray Leinster in the sort of collections I routinely read.

Cordwainer Smith turns out to have been the pen name of one Paul Anthony Myron Linebarger, a prolific author who employed various pseudonyms whilst working in adjacent genres. Significantly he was additionally a keen scholar of Chinese culture and tradition through it having played a role in his upbringing, which doubtless accounts for the form taken by his science-fiction, which has the feeling of traditional Buddhist parables in certain respects.

Stardreamer posthumously collects eight short stories, most taking place within the same peculiar mythology, a future universe governed by something called the Instrumentality of Mankind, which is described and developed with a rare literary flourish suggestive of Ursula LeGuin or more recent authors such as Iain M. Banks or China Miéville. The narrative has a beautiful, poetic flow suggestive of something which feels substantially philosophical on some level, yet without being a bore about it.

This was a delight to read from start to finish. I wish someone had told me about this guy sooner.

The Terminal Beach

J.G. Ballard The Terminal Beach (1964)
I didn't get on very well with Ballard last time, finding Vermilion Sands to be kind of like reading one of those fucking awful David Hockney paintings of a Californian swimming pool. Having now read this one, I'm still not absolutely convinced about the guy, but the collection does at least have a little more in the way of texture. The Terminal Beach comprises twelve short stories - no shared narratives as with Vermilion Sands, although the beach theme reoccurs throughout and is specifically addressed in The Reptile Enclosure:

But I think the psychological role of the beach is much more interesting. The tide-line is a particularly significant area, a penumbral zone that is both of the sea and above it, forever half-immersed in the great time-womb. If you accept the sea as an image of the unconscious, then this beachward urge might be seen as an attempt to escape from the existential role of ordinary life and return to the universal time-sea...

So it's about thresholds, I guess, which makes sense given that Ballard writes at length about the future and just what the hell we're going to do when we get there, whether allegorically as with The Drowned Giant, or arguably more literally as with the story after which the collection is named - a thoroughly depressing portrait of life in the wake of environmental collapse. The surreal imagery, elegant prose, and general focus is such that you really don't have to regard Ballard as an author of science-fiction if you don't want to, and such categorisation seems mainly to acknowledge that it's simply a better fit than whatever else you might want to call it - as with Burroughs, Moorcock, Ursula LeGuin, Will Self and others.

The people of Vermilion Sands led lives of bland Mediterranean luxury. Whilst there's not too much of that here, Ballard nevertheless writes with a slightly detached quality so that while we witness effects we do not directly experience them, excepting possibly the violence of the bloke who - from what I can work out - willingly has his eyes pecked out by gulls in The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon, apparently as some sort of Oedipal gesture which went way over my head. It's not that any of these stories lack emotional content, or that Ballard should have included more injured puppies, but beyond the admittedly satisfying surrealism, I've found it difficult to fully engage with some of this material, or to really see why it might be desirable for me to do so. It might be the lack of humour, although clearly there are some nods in that direction and not everything has to be Spike Milligan; but in places it felt as though I was reading through a codeine haze.

Here among the blocks you at last find an image of yourself free of the hazards of time and space. This island is an ontological Garden of Eden, why seek to expel yourself into a world of quantal flux?

It makes sense quoted in isolation, but came across as generic philosophical landfill in context of the tale from which it is taken. Sometimes making some fucking sense can really help a story, you know?

Okay, so I enjoyed The Terminal Beach, albeit with certain reservations; and I'd say this is down to my own tastes rather than necessarily to Ballard's ability as a writer, although I still say his reputation is probably inflated somewhat out of proportion. Admittedly I've yet to read High-Rise or Crash or any of the other supposed classics, so I'll happily revise my opinion should I need to do so; and having read this lot, I can now at least imagine the possibility of the aforementioned being as wonderful as everyone seems to think they are.

The Farthest Shore

Ursula LeGuin The Farthest Shore (1973)
My mother bought this for me one Christmas when I was a kid, specifically the newly published Puffin edition with a cover illustration by David Smee. It must have been 1976, I think. She was probably trying to expand my horizons a little, given that I'd been reading Target Doctor Who novelisations to the exclusion of almost everything else since 1973, but unfortunately it didn't work. I seem to recall liking the cover, but the story sounded old fashioned - as I probably would have described it at the time - and so I never read it; and then at some point down the line, I no longer had a copy.

Several decades later, I've read and enjoyed a couple of Ursulas, and enough so to want to read more and to wonder what The Farthest Shore was like. I keep seeing it on the shelves in Half-Price but my guilt over never having read the one I was given for Christmas is such that I really need that same Puffin edition; and to cut a needlessly long story short, I eventually found one.

The Farthest Shore was - at least at the time of writing - the third part of a trilogy, although a trilogy of three related books rather than a single sprawling saga split into smaller pieces, so my having read neither A Wizard of Earthsea nor The Tombs of Atuan doesn't seem to have presented any significant problems. Nor does the fact of it being a fantasy novel, which is nice, because it's a genre I usually dislike now that I've picked up enough to upgrade my definition from the simpler pejorative of old fashioned. The Farthest Shore, unlike most wizard-based fantasy fiction I've encountered, unfolds at a natural pace, to the rhythm of real life, you might say. Magic has lost its power at the far reaches of the realm of Earthsea, and so our two protagonists set out to discover why. They travel across sea, from island to island, and they encounter friends and foes as an inevitable consequence of their progress, and with none of the rigidly episodic feel I've noticed in lesser works.

That which happens may well happen for a reason, but we're never really sure if it's anything to do with the story or just part of the landscape. There's no suggestion of our needing to take notes because it will all add up to something or other in the climatic final chapter. There are no elves or dwarves or totemic sacred rings found mysteriously at the bottom of a judiciously purchased flagon of mead. Admittedly there's a wizard, a number of dragons, and persons returning from the dead, but LeGuin has made her own world here, which is nice because that's something at which she has always been exceptionally good. The magic of Earthsea - which is used sparringly rather than just splashed around for the sake of it - seems to contain a higher than usual philosophical content and concerns itself with ontological ideas of duality and balance, here specifically that magic is failing due to certain forces at large in the world of Earthsea, or because there's a disturbance in the force - if you prefer. There's a lot of it which puts me in mind of Mesoamerican lore regarding the workings of the universe, and specifically our binary concepts of good and evil simply being different points on a scale. Apparently though, this is a Taoist thing, and so the novel seems loosely pertinent to its time given the rise of the environmental counterculture in the sixties and seventies.

Anyway, as a novel The Farthest Shore seems possibly low on incident, but it doesn't really matter given the richly atmospheric texture; and its point is clearly communicated without anyone having to keep score of which goblins helped forge a mystic tampax from the sacred sheep of some place with a name containing no vowels. I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed this had I made the effort to read it back when I was eleven, and it may even have sent me down an entirely different road, but I don't suppose there's much good to be had pondering over the what ifs.

The Word for World is Forest

Ursula LeGuin The Word for World is Forest (1972)
I realise that James Cameron's Avatar borrows from a great variety of sources - Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dances with Wolves, and the Smurfs to name but three - but it really feels like a massive fucking chunk of it came from this novella, albeit with a few other bits bolted on so as to save the effects guy being stood around all day twiddling his thumbs and looking bored. It's a short novel, really more of a novella, which originally appeared in Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions anthology. The story concerns a bunch of industrially motivated human colonists pissing off the natives of a largely arboreal world, and I would guess refers to the historical colonial treatment of native populations in general, particularly in North America and more recently the Amazon, with a sizeable chunk of Vietnam war thrown in. The little guys get treated like shit and so they fight back, and the book carries the kind of ecological message you would probably hope it would carry unless you're some sort of finance-based Republicrat Randian machine consciousness; and it carries the message well, without sermonising or reducing everything to black and white. Having been drawn from the LeGuin spigot, The Word for World is Forest is of course beautifully written in pastoral terms as the sort of rustically poetic folk saga she does so well. My only criticism, I suppose, is that you pretty much know how the story will turn out just from the title and the cover painting even before you've flipped the thing over to read the blurb on the reverse; so although highly readable, it's also kind of short and a little lacking in surprises. Then again, it was written as a long-ish short story and does it's job as such, so I'm not complaining.

The Lathe of Heaven

Ursula LeGuin The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
I've now read most books published by most of the authors I really, really like. I have therefore reached that point of realisation that if it's considered a science-fiction classic and there it is right in front of me on the shelf in the second hand place, then I may as well bag me a copy providing it isn't Heinlein. Whilst Ursula played a blinder with The Left Hand of Darkness, it somehow didn't quite inspire me to run out and grab everything else carrying her name. I'm not even sure why not, but anyway, here I am four or five years later, submerging that toe to greater depth.

The Lathe of Heaven is characteristically beautifully written in so much as that it reads like a proper book - you know, even Margaret Attwood might enjoy it; and I suppose it belongs to the satirical tradition of science-fiction in the broadest sense. At least it has enough in common with later Philip K. Dick as to account for why a LeGuin quote should in particular have graced the covers of so many of his novels when Granada reprinted them back in the eighties.

Our man in The Lathe of Heaven has dreams which change the world, leaving only himself with the memory of how things were before his own subconscious somehow influenced reality. He seeks psychiatric help, but the psychiatrist only primes his patient with suggestions leading to dreams which depopulate the Earth and bring on an alien invasion. There's no explanation for how the dreams of one person can have such a devastating effect, but that's hardly the point of the novel, and the point of the novel is, I suppose, that one should be careful what one wishes for. It's neither inordinately original nor particularly profound, but nevertheless makes for just the kind of well-rounded, satisfying read you probably expect from Ursula LeGuin. I suppose my only criticism, if we really need one, is that it felt like an overly extended short story rather than a novel in the sense of The Left Hand of Darkness and so doesn't seem to quite attain escape velocity equivalent to that of the aforementioned, although of course they're both very different books.

Still - very readable and better than a kick up the arse.

The Brakespeare Voyage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wind's Twelve Quarters

Ursula LeGuin The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975)
I've actually already read half of these short stories, having picked up The Wind's Twelve Quarters volume two some years ago which, bewilderingly, wasn't a further grouping of tales following on from this collection, but is actually the second half of this book divided and published as two separate volumes for no immediately obvious reason.

Ursula LeGuin writes fiction of undeniably literary character which tends to use genre as the narrative demands. Some of her work is easily identified as fantasy in that it features wizards and the like, and whilst sometimes this works fine for me, as a rule I tend to glaze over during passages in which people say 'twas and yonder or address each other as my liege. Simak pulled it off admirably in The Fellowship of the Talisman because he's Simak, and although it might be argued that LeGuin is either the better or at least the more poetically erudite writer - not that I'd necessarily agree with either - she's a lot more readable when there's some contrast between the setting and the language by which it is described; in other words those tales of Kings and their dragons to which her writing seems best-suited engage me less than the more fantastic scenarios involving space travel and life on other planets, these being rendered all the more plausible through the sharp relief of faintly Baroque prose.

I say that the collection was divided into two separate volumes for no immediately obvious reason, but having come to the end of the last and seventeenth story, I'm inclined to wonder if somebody at Panther - publishers of the bifurcated edition - didn't deem this material just a bit too chewy for 275 pages, deciding that it might work better served in smaller helpings. It isn't that LeGuin is a bad writer - far from it, given the excellence of The Left Hand of Darkness and at least a few of the stories here - but God her prose can be dry and uninviting at times.

I'm not even sure why this should be, or perhaps more fairly why I myself should find this to be the case, but even though I'd already read half of the stories included, I just couldn't get on with this collection and actually found the author's notes more engaging than many of the tales they introduced. Semley's Necklace, April in Paris, Things, The Stars Below, and Direction of the Road each stood out as wonderful and perfectly formed almost to the point of absurdity, and given that I've been unable to detect any obvious variation in quality of writing, I have absolutely no idea why the other stories did so little for me. What a strange book.