Archives: Book Reviews

This is the online version of the SF and Horror Review Column appearing in Aurealis Magazine #41

It’s been an interesting few months in the speculative fiction publishing sphere, with many of the international big guns coming out with their latest blockbusters and, I’m happy to report, a local independent press that is still going strong and delivering some exciting titles. And with the forthcoming publication of Dreaming Again from HarperCollins Voyager and Greg Egan’s Incandescence published by Gollancz and distributed here through Hachette Australia, the bigger publishers are also doing their piece for locally produced speculative fiction.

2012

Ben Payne and Alisa Krasnostein (editors)

Twelfth Planet Press

Themed anthologies are a strange beast because, in addition to collecting together the best spec fic the editors can source, the book has to deliver on the overarching aim he/she/they intend for the collection. It brings the editor to the forefront of the reader’s mind by trying to make a point about their story choices. And quite a few of these animals have been seen lately: Ticonderoga’s Worker’s Paradise and to a lesser extent Fantastic Wonder Stories, Agog! Press’s upcoming Canterbury 2100, and dare I mention c0ck?

Editors are generally shadowy figures, working behind the scenes even though their contribution (IMHO) is significant. But Ben Payne and Alisa Krasnostein are well and truly out of the shadows as joint editors of 2012, the new anthology from Twelfth Planet Press, and they plainly state their intentions for the antho up front. Of course they want stories which will stick in our minds and leave us deeply affected; we all want that. But these stories are ‘about concerns that were important to all of us’. The concept of 2012 is grounded firmly in the very near future (four years away at time or writing). The concerns are then bound to be familiar: environmental degradation, terrorism, dwindling energy resources, pandemics and so on. The book aims to take the concerns of today and project them ever so slightly into a future that may be bleak or hopeful depending on the author. As a book concept I guess I can see some drawbacks. Do readers want a book that explores, for example, environmental catastrophe when we see that scenario played out every day on TV and in the press? Isn’t it all going to be a bit same-same, a bit mundane, scary though these scenarios are? And is there going to be enough contrast between the individual stories in terms of subject matter and tone?

The areas of concern in 2012 fall into three broad categories. The most obvious and frequented one is water, or the lack thereof. The book begins with Deborah Biancotti’s ‘Watertight Lies’ about a small group of scientists checking whether an underground cache of water is drinkable. The pacing is slow and I was unsure why the scientists, working in the outback, had to have American accents. We spend a lot of time early on in female protagonist Gabe’s head: she’s borderline claustrophobic and not enjoying her spelunk at all. Some background about the state of the planet is filled in: water is scarcer, the weather is hotter, then a couple of farmers turn up disputing ownership of the water and things turn nasty. That’s about it really. I was left with two questions: what is this story trying to say, and where’s the spec fic element? I couldn’t find answers to either.

More water worries in David Conyers’s ‘Soft Viscosity’ a story of jungle warfare and CIA nasty business in Central America. This was the weakest piece in the collection. The characters were stereotypes, the dialogue was stilted and the prose was approaching the purple. Skies weren’t skies unless they were ‘whitewashed’, jungles were ‘an endless wet of green hell’. It’s very much the Dan Brown school of writing. There’s obviously a market for it but it’s not one I subscribe to. And again I wondered how this was spec fic. The only such element I could discern was the drug a nasty Central American interrogator took so he could be free of guilt when he did nasty interrogator things to his victims. This just struck me as stupid. There are plenty of evil people out there who will do this kind of stuff without the aid of drugs. It’s a pity because towards the end there was a glimmer of a nice idea, but we had to wade through a lot that wasn’t to get to it.

The final water(less) world tale was Angela Slatter’s ‘I Love You Like Water’, which has shades of Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! but goes in quite a few unexpected directions, opposing the ideas of science and sympathetic magic and bringing them together in a satisfying climax. My only quibble is that our target year of 2012 didn’t provide sufficient time for the world she portrays to come about.

Then there’s the ‘playing god with our genes’ scenario. Tansy Rayner Roberts’s ‘Fleshy’ is a humorous twist on Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and it also scores some nice points about relationships, while Dirk Flinthart’s ‘The Last Word’ has a killer idea, great science and nice character interplay. It’s a hardcore story and he nails it.

And the we have the ones that defy pigeonholing. No surprise to find Karron Warren here, and she’s obviously still finding her overseas sojourn inspiring. ‘Ghost Jail’ is a multi-layered tale of guilt, revenge, and social upheaval. It’s a political freedom of speech ghost story, if you can imagine that, which has more to say than some novels. Martin Livings’s ‘Skinsongs’ is a wicked little piece that takes the cult of celebrity to its logical conclusion. While Lucy Sussex’s comic ‘Apocalypse Rules, OK?’ confirms what we’ve all suspected for a long time.

But Simon Brown’s ‘Oh, Russia’ again had me scratching my head. Frederick ponders the violent destruction of Russia while he waits for his wife to die. It’s a well-written piece but apart from being set in 2012 I couldn’t discern what was spec fic about it. And this got me thinking about Rudy Rucker’s attack on the Mundane SF movement which posits sober, fact-based extrapolations on ‘Disaster, innovation, climate change, virtual reality, understanding of our DNA, and biocomputers that evolve.’ Rudy is of the opinion (and I’m firmly in his camp) that, ‘Writing responsibly about socially important issues can be timid and boring.’ And, more importantly, ‘The idea [of SF] is to shock people into awareness. Show them how odd the world is. Whether or not you draw on realistic tropes is irrelevant.’ This kind of pc, firmly reality grounded SF is not my cup of tea, as you might have gathered. I know, I know, there’s room enough for all kinds of writing in the spec fic genre, but don’t expect me to jump up and down with glee at what is, effectively, SF-lite.

So I guess you can see I wasn’t engaged by ‘Oh, Russia’ whereas Sean McMullen’s 2012 story ‘Oblivion’ left me smacking my gob, highlighting as it does not simply a current problem, but tying it in very neatly with a philosophical solution and grounding both those elements in two well-portrayed characters. This one had the ‘wow’ factor the editors were looking for in spades. Which is why I guess it’s the last piece in the collection.

2012 doesn’t fail in its intent. But it doesn’t wholly succeed either, and I think the book’s concept contributed to that. Some authors really got on board while others struggled to meet the submission strictures and, as a result, their writing suffered.

Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams

Sean Williams

Ticonderoga Publications

Sean Williams does people extremely well. Whether they’re Nietzschian supersoldiers, engrammatic remnants of a long-destroyed Earth, or imperfectly recorded copies of far future freedom fighter/ mercenaries, they have one thing in common. They are engaging, rounded, entirely believable individuals facing extraordinary circumstances. Their humanity – however stretched or moulded – is recognisably intact. He’s also particularly good at Big Ideas, and it’s the clash of these two elements that has produced some truly memorable SF series.

But up until things really took off for him with the publication of The Prodigal Sun, co-written with Shane Dix (which was actually Aphelion Publication’s The Unknown Soldier – Book One of The Cogal in another guise), he was best known for his short fiction. So having firmly established himself as an international bestselling Fantasy and Science Fiction novelist, it’s nice to see Magic Dirt, which brings together a package of Sean’s shorter work from 1991 onwards, because even in his early writing that dual focus on character and idea, that’s served him so well since, is very much in evidence. Take for example the classic ‘A Map of the Mines of Barnath’ a dreamlike, Dantesque tale of a man’s obsession to find his brother in a mine with an inner topography that denies all logic. Or ‘Entre les Beaux Morts en Vie’, where young Martin risks being played for a fool by one side or another as he ponders what becoming an eternal revenant may cost him. Or ‘Ghosts of the Fall’ which could have been a standard post-apocalypse tale but retains a definite freshness and delivers the promise of hope in what seems a hopeless situation precisely because the protagonist appears so real and so believable. Or ‘The Soap Bubble’ a joyously irreverent tale which also has a cleverly solid basis for why it’s characters, human and alien, act as bizarrely as they do. Or ‘Evermore’ which presages his Orphans Trilogy some four years later and shows humanity existing in a very different form, prey to weaknesses both old and new. Or ‘The Butterfly Merchant’ set in his Books of the Change universe which extracts a very human truth from what seems a metaphoric fairy tale. Magic Dirt contains eighteen such tales, all of them good many of them excellent. This is a book no self-respecting lover of Australian speculative fiction can afford to be without.

Shiny Magazine

Alisa Krasnostein, Ben Payne and Tansy Rayner Roberts (eds)

Twelfth Planet Press

The idea behind Shiny is, simply, brilliant. It’s an online magazine which delivers YA speculative fiction stories right to your e-door on a quarterly basis (issues 4 to 6 will set you back a total of $8!). If you’re an adult and you are seeking further ways to inculcate your unsuspecting child, niece or nephew into the ways of spec fic and ruin their lives forever, then Shiny is a great option. If you’d class yourself as a young adult and you already have a love of spec fic, then con your nearest oldling into shelling out and subscribing for you.

Issue 3 of Shiny has a very entertaining mix of strong, young adult characters facing some unusual situations. Katherine Sparrow’s ‘The Future is Already Seen’ is a very nicely put together story about a school science project into déjà vu which ties parallel worlds and young love / angst into a neat package. Toby, the young protagonist in Lisa A Koosis’ ‘Light on Water’ faces a difficult decision as she comes of age and has to choose between life in a bubble or life on the outside. And Sarah Totton’s ‘Some Peoples’ Kids’ features a young oracle with real attitude in a story that just gets more bizarre as it goes along – very enjoyable. The YA genre is very strong in Australia and overseas at book length. It’s nice to see a regular publication of short stories which can expand on that and provide another avenue for younger readers.

The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction Volume 1

Dave A Law and Darin Park (eds)

Dragon Moon Press

Ian Irvine, apart from being a multiple award winning author of SF, Fantasy and YA novels, has for many years now shared the benefit of his experience as a writer with anyone who cares to browse his website at http://members.ozemail.com.au/%7Eirvinei/index.html. So it’s not surprising that he would be a contributor to the new ebook The Complete Guide to Writing Science Fiction Volume 1. Many moons ago, Chimaera Publications sold some excellent Writer’s Digest titles edited by Ben Bova on just such a topic. This latest ebook is the same kind of thing with essays covering the art of writing and selling Science Fiction. There’s something for everyone who dreams of turning out a successful SF story here, whether you’re a newcomer to the field or you’ve been at it for a while. Ian’s chapter on The Art and Science of Book-Promotion is pure gold as a practical, detailed ‘how to’ guide based on real-life experience and backed by gentle encouragement. For someone approaching their first novel publication, it’s worth the cost of the whole book just on it’s own. The other articles, some by equally accomplished authors such as Orson Scott Card and Piers Anthony, are a mixture of solid background pieces, practical tutorials, and cautionary warnings on the more obvious pitfalls of the trade.

The Atrocity Archives

Charles Stross

Hachette Livre Australia/ Orbit

This is an odd initiative by Orbit: not a novel, not a collection of short stories but two novellas and an essay by Charles Stross. Looking at the imprint page, I approached the work with some degree of trepidation. This is the pre-Iron Sunrise Stross. If the aforementioned Dan Brown has taught me anything it’s to be very wary of the so called ‘back-catalogue’.

Bob Howard is the IT go-to guy in the Laundry, an organisation where you have to sign the Official Secrets Act before you can even know of its existence. Like most of the employees, Bob was press-ganged into service when his studentish dabblings with polynomial theory threatened to unleash enough dark energy to flatten Leeds. After months of boredom, his request for active duty is accepted and he finds himself in the type of situation that switches from uncomfortable tedium to underpant-staining terror in the firing of a synapse. The back story to the Laundry neatly marries real-life WWII events such as Bletchley Park’s code breaking efforts, Alan Turing’s work and SOE operations in Europe with a secret battle to stop squamous things From Beyond invading our realm and possessing and/ or eating us. In ‘The Atrocity Archive’ Bob is drawn deeper into the Laundry’s machinations as he goes up against a plot to assert pan-dimensional Nazi supremacy. In ‘The Concrete Jungle’, the use of Gorgonism as a national security tool goes horribly wrong.

The mix of Lovecraftian themes, dimension-hopping Nazis, bureaucratically hidebound yet super-secret government departments and high-tech computer geekdom married with unspeakable eldritch powers is an infectious one. And the ‘truth’ behind the Jewish holocaust in ‘The Atrocity Archive’ is both gruesome and effectively realised. The jokes are so-so and some of the situations predictable, most notably Bob’s ongoing rubber-stamp battle with sometime supervisor Harriet. Stross is still flexing his writerly muscles here looking for a more definitive voice. The essay at the end makes some interesting points about the nature of horror, but seems by inference to accord more weight to the stories in The Atrocity Archives than they really deserve. They’re just not that profound. What they are however is a fast-paced romp, and an enjoyable one at that. The Atrocity Archives is followed by another Bob Howard book, The Jennifer Morgue.

Spook Country

William Gibson

Viking

There is much to compare between Gibson’s impressive return to form, Pattern Recognition, and his latest work Spook Country. The latter concerns Hollis Henry ex-band member of ‘Curfew’ now a freelance journalist who has been hired by technology magazine Node to work up an article on ‘locative art’; basically, this is art that exists in cyberspace (and only seen through networked goggles), which is tagged by GPS to a specific terrestrial location – an example being the dead body of River Phoenix ‘lying’ outside the Viper Room on Sunset. But things are not, of course what they seem for Hollis who, like Cayce in Pattern Recognition, is actually working for Blue Ant, the shadowy non-company that was so interested in The Footage. Now it seems they are interested in something else. Something that is being tracked in a very roundabout way by Bobby Chombo, reclusive mathematical genius and GPS-hacker. Meanwhile in New York, Tito, a member of a boutique espionage family, is delivering obsolete i-pods to an old man with connections to Tito’s father, who worked for the Cuban equivalent of the KGB. Tito in turn is being shadowed by Brown, a humourless spook who’s sequestered drug addict Milgrim away in a hotel room because of his affinity for translating Volapuk, an idiomatically obtuse Russian SMS language.

The thing about reading a Gibson novel is that you feel instantly cooler. You’re in amongst people who operate on a different plane, where things mean more, and actions carry ever-greater risks. This is backed up by a portrayal of a technological sub-culture coming at us like news from the cusp: the idea of locative art is so groovy, if it isn’t already happening, it should be. The action builds slowly but the prose had a vivid sense of place and time, I didn’t feel it dragged. I just wanted to drink all the detail in. The other thing about Gibson’s writing here is what Adam Browne called its ‘eerie precision’. Tito lives his life by a ‘systema’ on which his survival literally depends from moment to moment. Everything he does, every reaction and muscle twitch is guided and designed to bring about a pre-determined effect. Brown, the undefined spook, also lives a precise life, analysing the actions of the Illegal Facilitators he shadows and marshalling his forces to bring them down in a surgical strike. And Gibson’s prose repeatedly focuses our attention on simple, vivid detail which again evokes an exact effect.

And so we move towards finding out what the ‘something’ is that everyone, in some way or another, is interested in – and why. And that’s where it all falls apart. Unlike Pattern Recognition the story does not reach a satisfying end. Gibson said in an interview for Amazon that he didn’t know what the ‘something’ was until late in the piece. I wish he had. He does such a brilliant job of building us up for a huge pay-off. But, as it turns out, the pay-off just isn’t sufficiently mind-blowing. I mean I know sometimes that’s what life is like, but the end of a 300+ page novel just CAN’T be.

Brasyl

Ian McDonald

Gollancz/ Orion Books

www.orionbooks.co.uk

The shoutline on the cover proclaims, ‘F**king brilliant. I’m as jealous as all hell – it’s a beauty’, the quote attributed to SF Master Richard Morgan. And Brasyl is certainly a beauty to look at, wrapped in an iridescent stencil-cut cover with a colourful kaleidoscope of images beneath. But the flashes and explosions don’t end there. From line one we are thrown mercilessly into a heady, crazy country and drenched in its own rich cultural references, lifestyles, mores and indifferences. It’s hard to keep up. Brasyl dazzles, Brasyl titillates, Brasyl delights. Or rather, charms you with a succession of gewgaws and an episodic three-strand story that runs from the eighteenth century to the mid twenty-first.

In 1732, Jesuit priest Luis Quinn arrives in the Portuguese colony charged with seeking out a rogue priest who has ‘gone native’ in the best Colonel Kurtz/ Heart of Darkness traditions. In 2006, Marcelina Hoffman is an executive for surely the trashiest reality show TV station ever. And in 2033 Edson, small-time entrepreneur and spandex sex-toy/ superhero, gets involved with some heavy quantum computing dudes and falls for Fia who, due to her facility with the multiverse, appears marked for death. Because you see, all is not well in any of these time-periods. There is a shadowy organisation called the Order who are all about maintaining the status quo and stepping hard on anyone who approaches some understanding of the true nature of reality.

I’m in awe of the sheer volume of research and art that MacDonald has put into creating the world of Brasyl. If I didn’t know he grew up in Northern Ireland, I’d swear he spent his youth playing ‘futebol’ on the dusty streets of Cidade de Luz. The world he portrays is as disorientating as any alien landscape and I found myself initially enchanted by it’s idiosyncrasies, aided – to some extent – by a glossary (maddeningly incomplete) of Brazilian terms in the endmatter. But as the novel progressed, it started to get just a bit too much. I began to suffer, particularly in the second half, ‘shiny thing fatigue’ as each new chapter opened with some startling image, a trick that McDonald uses too often to remain effective. And then I began to look below the sparkle and the breakneck pace and consider the actual plot… ‘F**king brilliant’? Well, it’s a good story, but it didn’t blow my mind. And I did wonder at why the Order would charge a Marcelina doppelganger from another universe with the task of discrediting our universe’s Marcelina – and so tipping her off that some weird shit was going on – when it would have been more effective just to assassinate and replace her right off and infiltrate the Order’s main opposition. The story also suffered from not allowing us to see the Order’s side of things, resulting in their portrayal as one-dimensional black-hats, and I wonder if this was the reason for a jarring, but all too brief, point of view shift into the mind of Yanzon, Order Admonitory, in the last thirty page of the book. Look, if it’s a masterpiece, it’s a flawed one. But having said that, the voice is strong, the writing is accomplished, the story is entertaining – a good one for a rainy weekend when you want to be transported to the sun-drenched beaches of the copa.

Matter

Iain M Banks

Orbit

If you haven’t read a Culture Novel, where the hell have you been for the last twenty years? I have to admit I’m a fan. Banks writes galaxy-sized space opera effortlessly, has a wicked sense of humour and a nasty streak. The Culture is the ultimate human society: space-faring, endlessly modified, and wise enough to know not to interfere with other species. Unless it’s a job for the euphemistically named Special Circumstances division who are not above political murder-squads, coups, and the usual and not so usual panoply of dirty tricks, all in the name of maintaining an ‘on-balance’ benign universe.

Matter, the latest Culture Novel, centres on events on the 8^th and 9^th levels of the vast shellworld Sursamen – a giant onion of a planet with successive levels of differing biospheres supporting widely variant lifeforms. The Sarl, approximating a seventeenth century level of technology and society are at war with their ‘neighbours’ on the level below. During a decisive battle, the wounded Sarl King Hausk is brutally murdered by tyl Loesp, Hausk’s ‘faithful’ lieutenant, apparently in secret. But the king’s second son, Ferbin who is a bit of a wastrel, witnesses the murder and after reuniting with his servant, Holse, travels through the levels of the shellworld and into space seeking some race or individual who will help him see justice done and the throne restored. Meanwhile Djan Seriy Anaplian, Ferbin’s sister, who was ‘gifted’ to the Culture by a disappointed father years before — and who is now a trainee Special Circumstances operative — hears both Ferbin and Hausk are dead and begins the long journey home to comfort her remaining brother.

One review of Matter I read in a major Australian newspaper bemoaned the fact that the setting for much of the early story (the Kingdom of Sarl) owed more to the fantasy genre and didn’t have enough cool Culture gizmos. But the theme of different technological levels rubbing up against one another — the seemingly elastic rules of non-interference — is a familiar one in Banks’s Culture books (see Inversions and Use of Weapons for classic examples). It’s also a staple of SF. And in Matter, Banks is doing something you don’t see very often: portraying a technologically backward race that has full knowledge that there are far more advanced races in their backyard. Further, we see Ferbin interact with these races, trying to elicit help from them which throws up moral ambiguities about the ‘right thing to do’. The other element the story illustrates poignantly is how ultimately helpless a less advanced society is when they have something the ‘big boys’ want, the meaninglessness of their own tiny stories in the grand scheme of things, and how little they count in actions to ‘protect the greater good’. Banks is also playing with us in Matter, setting up a fairy tale story of evil regents, regicide and ‘enchanted’ princesses, a quest for justice, a coming of age tale, all of which seem to be following the familiar arc until he gleefully derails the whole thing, shifting the focus to underlying powerplays and conflicts most of our protagonists are far from able to understand much less defend against. The dizzying technology is there too – the shellworld itself, the highly advanced Involved races, the idiosyncratic Ship Minds. There’s action and philosophy, laughter and malignancy and, being a political animal at heart, a bitter mirror held up to our own current military and political lunacies. Matter is slick, engaging and beautifully crafted.