Science Fiction

Clearing the decks before we get into this year’s Hugo nominees, here’s some stuff I’ve read recently:

• Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement – There are various approaches to establishing a setting for a science fiction story. One is to have the story in mind and let that dictate the details of the setting. Another is to extrapolate basic scientific theories in order to generate a realistic setting, which can then drive a plot. Mission of Gravity is very much the latter. Based on some newfangled data about the star 61 Cygni (that turned out to be inaccurate, but that’s beside the point), Clement created his world from reasonable extrapolations. Mesklin is an oblate planet with extreme gravity: 700 g at the poles but only 3 g at the equator. Then he posited a centipede-like alien species that could survive such extremes, cooked up a human crisis (a satellite has crashed at one of the poles), and chronicles the collaboration between the humans and a native ship captain and explorer. The story is rather simple, but it’s the setting and its various implications that really make this a winner. You get a lot about the Mesklinites’ perspective, much of which is interesting but makes perfect sense when you think about it. For example, they all have a crippling fear of heights, since at 700 g, even a tiny drop can cause death. Less obvious is their perception of the world around them. It makes sense that, for example, they’d have trouble conceptualizing the concept of flight or projectiles, but their view of the world as a giant bowl takes a little more work to get there (though it makes sense once you do). The story is episodic and a little repetitive, but it’s still one of the more enduring creations from the 50s that I’ve read. As an aside, I will be naming my next homebrew after Barlennan. It’s a good name, and it has the semblance of “barley” which also works. What? Oh, yes, the book is great and recommended for fans of SF from this era (it may be too advanced for newbs, but it’s short and approachable too).
• Mira’s Last Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold – Another Penric and Desdemona novella, this one picks up right after the previous story, Penric’s Mission, left off. Despite nominating that earlier work for the Hugo (as it turns out, it’s not eligible for the novella award because it’s a hair too long), I never really wrote much about it. Penric is a scholar, but was recruited for a covert operation. He is to travel to a foreign land an help a disaffected general defect to Penric’s side. However, he’s immediately betrayed and thrown into prison, while the object of his mission is arrested and punished in horrible ways. Penric must find a way to help the general (and his loyal sister) escape, and this being Bujold, there’s lots of great detail in how this is accomplished. Mira’s Last Dance finishes off the escape, and goes to some weird places, but is just as tightly plotted and fun as the previous Penric and Desdemona novellas. Well worth your time (though you’ll probably want to read Penric’s Mission first!)
• To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis – This is the second novel set in Willis’ Oxford Time Travel universe, but I’m having a hard time conceiving of how it could be any more different than the first novel in the series, Doomsday Book. They share some side characters, notably Professor Dunworthy, but are otherwise completely disconnected (and you can read this one without having read the first). They are both about time-traveling historians, but while Doomsday Book displayed almost none of the consideration for paradox and other time-travel tropes, To Say Nothing of the Dog is chock full of time-travel theorizing, paradox, and full-blown explorations of the mechanics of time-travel. Without giving anything away, Doomsday Book has some unbearably sad moments, while To Say Nothing of the Dog is an outright comedy. A romantic comedy, even. Ned Henry is assigned to recover the Bishop’s bird stump, a large piece of Victorian bric-a-brac for an overzealous recreation of Coventry Cathedral in 2057. It was last seen in the early 40s, but he’s made so many trips to that time period that he’s developed a serious case of “time lag”. The aforementioned Professor Dunworthy, knowing that Ned’s condition would be ignored, decides to send him to Victorian England, where he can hang out for a while and shake off the effects of time lag. Meanwhile, Verity Kindle has nearly destroyed the space-time continuum by accidentally bringing a cat from Victorian England back to 2057. Naturally, Ned and Verity must find a way to repair the timeline, ensure that the cat returns and survives, and that a certain other couple gets together. It’s all very Back to the Futurey, and it’s a lot of fun. I will say that it’s a bit on the overlong side, but as these things go, it’s quite enjoyable. The time-travel machinations are much more interesting here than they were previously, and it’s just fun spending time with some of these characters. Other characters are somewhat more annoying, but they work in the context of the story. Well worth checking out.
• Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein – It strikes me that I still haven’t read all of Heinlein,

  so I added a few of his books to my queue and got to this one first. An above average example of Heinlein’s “juveniles”, this one tells the story of Thorby, a young, scrawny, defiant slave-boy who isn’t fetching very much at the slave auction… such that a local beggar, Baslim the Cripple, is able to purchase him for a tiny amount. However, Baslim is not all that he seems. He almost immediately frees Thorby, but also offers to teach him languages, mathematics, etc… Baslim eventually runs afoul of the local authorities, and thus Thorby executes a contingency plan to escape the planet, ending up on a Free Trader ship at first, then moving on to a quick military assignment until his true identity as the heir to a wealthy business empire. As it turns out, these business ventures are nearly as dangerous as his other occupations. Again, a pretty solid example of the juveniles, not as good as Have Spacesuit, Will Travel or Tunnel in the Sky, but a good, quick read that hits on a lot of Heinlein’s typical notes.

And that’s all for now. Stay tuned for some Hugo nominee reviews coming in the next few weeks or so…

“Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” – Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Space is so big that it’s difficult for us puny humans to really internalize the distances involved. Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object from Earth and a few years ago, it became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. It’s not pointed at any specific star, but for the sake of illustration, let’s say that it’s headed towards our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, 4.2 light years away. At its current speed, it would take Voyager 1 over 70,000 years to reach it.

Again, space is big. Some science fiction takes advantage of this and even manages to generate the fabled sense of wonder from the scale of the universe, but a pretty sizeable portion of the genre is dedicated to shrinking the universe down to a more manageable scale. To accomplish this, science fiction writers wave their hands really, really hard, and we’re left with a class of travel known as Faster Than Light (FTL). The special theory of relativity implies that such travel is basically impossible, but science fiction authors need FTL to make certain stories possible. So up yours, Einstein! We’ve got some exciting space opera to write.

John Scalzi’s latest novel, The Collapsing Empire, posits a FTL method called “The Flow”, which allows humanity to spread out through the universe to establish colonies on tons of other planets. But the Flow isn’t quite as stable as it seems, and thanks to the interdependency of all the planets in the empire, a collapse of the flow system would be catastrophic to the empire. Spoilers, I guess, but hey, it’s right there in the title of the novel. As FTL fables go, this isn’t exactly original, but Scalzi leverages the tropes well, and spins a fun little space opera yarn that’s filled with his usual snappy, page-turning dialog and characters.

I always enjoy Scalzi’s novels, but I found something wanting in his past couple efforts. Both Lock In and The End of All Things, enjoyable as they were overall, fell prey to some glaring problems with exposition and info-dumping. This isn’t exactly unusual for science fiction (that hand waving that enables things like FTL takes its toll), but even accounting for that, there were some egregious examples of this sort of thing in those books. Lock In was particularly bad, opening the book with a bald, encyclopedia-like explanation of his worldbuilding that is almost completely superfluous (i.e. you could have picked up the majority of that information through context as the story unfolded). Thankfully, with The Collapsing Empire, Scalzi has reversed course and at least achieved normal SF exposition standards. The story introduces us to the Flow during a mutiny (that is entertaining and well executed), and it even foreshadows the collapse that the rest of the story fleshes out.

Speaking of which, the book is populated with your typical cast of Scalzi characters. There’s a family of scientists studying the Flow, one of whom is tasked with traveling to the empire’s capital to inform the freshly minted Emperox (who, naturally, wasn’t expecting to ascend to the throne, but has to deal with it because her brother died in a freak accident). The Emperox, of course, has to deal with all the attendant nonsense that every new emperor encounters. Then there’s a starship captain (or business owner, or whatever) who says “fuck” a lot. Like, really, every other word out of this woman’s mouth is “fuck”. A little excessive, but she’s a pretty cool customer, a little on the shrewd and unforgiving side, but good at handling the various crises Scalzi puts her in. Finally, there’s a clan of villains that are vying for power in this new empire, and they’re all suitably nefarious. The POV changes around a fair amount (moreso than usual for Scalzi, but right on the nose for Space Opera) and while this is the first in a series and you can clearly see future potential, the ending brings enough closure and satisfaction that I wasn’t annoyed (as a lot of first-installments tend to do for me). Apparently some have complained that the novel is short, but I thought it was fine, and indeed, one of the things I like about Scalzi’s books is that they tend to be around 300 or so pages of pretty tight plotting. Not a lot of filler or bloated literary wanking, which I like.

You know what’s funny? Scalzi writes Nutty Nuggets. Spaceships, blasters, competent heroes, space pirates, all on display here. These are fun page-turning books that focus on ideas and storytelling. Yeah, he’s an opinionated guy and his politics are on full display at his blog, but he writes good books. That’s all I really care about, and The Collapsing Empire is pretty darned good. I’m looking forward to more in this series.

Just recapping some recent Science Fiction reads… Some Hugo nomination phase fodder here, but mostly just catching up on older SF.

• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers – The Wayfarer is a hyperspace tunneling ship that’s seen better days. We join the crew through Rosemary Harper who has the exciting job of… clerk. But she’s trying to escape a checkered past and the boring and relatively peaceful work of a hyperspace tunneling job hits the mark. Things are livened by a diverse and alien-filled crew. So this was sorta billed as Firefly meets Ursula Le Guin, which is a comparison that doesn’t really do this book any favors. It’s not that this is a bad book or anything, just that expectations were probably set too high. To be sure, what we really get is character-driven and episodic in nature (not too far off the mark there), but it doesn’t quite cohere into more than the sum of its parts. Each character is well drawn and most experience some sort of conflict, it’s just that many of these episodic elements just sort of fizzle away. The crew does exhibit a refreshing lack of gritty cynicism and angst, and it’s very nice to see a group of people be supportive and nice to one another, even if the close quarters and cross-cultural differences can cause some friction. Even though I felt the stakes of most conflicts were underwhelming, I was having a pretty good time hanging out with characters I genuinely liked. The ending setpiece is the best in the book and actually does manage to generate some stakes and tension (where most of the preceding do not); this strong finish does help a bit too. Ultimately, this is a very enjoyable read that bucks a lot of negative trends in the SF genre, but it never quite reached the dramatic heights I was looking for. A nice introduction to the universe though, and I was curious enough to revisit the series with the most recent entry:
• A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers – This novel tangentially picks up where The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet leaves off, focusing in on one character (and a former side character) instead of following the crew of the Wayfarer. Spoilers for the previous book! But this could also be a standalone! Lovelace was the AI of the Wayfarer, but got some circuits fried during a particularly dangerous mission. While her core functions were saved by a total system shutdown and reboot, her memories have all been lost. As a result, relationships with her crew have degraded, particularly with the Engineer Jenks, who was in love with her. Not wanting to cause such disharmony, Lovelace is loaded into a new body (unusual for an AI meant to live as a ship) and takes off with her new friend Pepper, a specialist in this sort of thing. Lovelace needs to adjust to her newfound mobility and independence while finding her place in the universe. Meanwhile, Pepper is struggling with her own conflicts, and the Lovelace sections are crosscut with her backstory, detailing her difficult childhood and affinity for AIs. Chambers manages the same optimistic, positive, and supportive character-driven tone for this novel, but the focus on two characters with dovetailing themes really benefits the story. The stakes still aren’t sky-high and I miss some of the characters from the previous book, but the story is overall more cohesive and entertaining too. Not exactly diamond-hard SF, but it’s still a pleasure to read and an improvement over the meandering of the previous book. I liked this enough to throw it a Hugo nomination, though I think there’s probably only a low to middling chance that it’ll become a finalist…
• Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp – American archaeologist Martin Padway is visiting 1938 Rome during a peculiar thunderstorm. So peculiar that when it’s over, he finds himself in 535 AD. As an archaeologist, Padway is intrigued by living through history, but quickly accepts his fate. As he does not want to spend the remainder of his life watching the Dark Ages fall upon Italy (as happened in our timeline), Padway adopts an ambitious course of technological improvement. Starting small with copper stills and distilling brandy, he eventually works his way all the way up to printing presses and even telegrams. Of course, Padway’s mysterious inventions and enlightened attitudes eventually necessitate political wranglings… It would be another millennium before Machiavelli wrote The Prince, but it turns out that politics of this era can be just as cutthroat at this time. While not the first Alternate History story, this appears to be among the most influential. John Campbell is famous for his work editing Astounding Science Fiction magazine, but he also edited Unknown, a magazine for more fantastical flights of SF and Fantasy. This is where Lest Darkness Falls was originally published, what with it’s simple time travel premise. That being said, once that premise is established, de Camp does a remarkable job keeping things grounded. Yes, Padway is able to accomplish a lot in very little time, but he’s beset by complications at nearly every turn. He doesn’t just invent the printing press. He does so and then realizes that no one makes ink that will work for it. Then he uses up all of Rome’s paper supply to print his first newspaper, so he has to invent better paper production facilities. And so on… Comparison with Mark Twain’s 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is inevitable, but despite the similarities of their premise, the books are quite divergent. Twain was more interested in satire and social commentary of his own time, while de Camp was more interested in getting the history and technology right. Both stories will make you think, but de Camp’s will obviously appeal more to the hard SF mindset. It’s a short and entertaining read that holds up well and might make a good introduction to SF for younger readers. The book I bought featured several additional stories inspired by de Camp’s work, by authors like Frederik Pohl, David Drake, and S. M. Stirling, but these are somewhat less successful in my mind. Still worth the purchase for the original story though!
• The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood – The story of Offred (literally Of-Fred), a handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic dictatorship established in what used to be the United States. In this society, human rights are curtailed and women’s rights are even more restricted. Handmaids are a class of women kept for reproductive purposes and assigned to various bigwigs who want children. She is currently assigned to a man named Fred, referred to as “The Commander”, and she tells this story in first person. She describes the world as it is now, occasionally remembering what it used to be like before the revolution, her failed escape with her husband, and so on. These sorts of dystopian visions rarely strike a chord with me, and while that’s also the case here, it does have some interesting speculations. Atwood claims that the grand majority of the book is based in reality, whether it be from history or from current theocracies in the world. I’m always wary of the criticism of “that couldn’t happen here”, but at the same time, while Atwood has created a chilling society, she doesn’t do the greatest job describing how that society was created or maintained. It is mentioned offhand that an attack on the government, killing the President and most of Congress, led to a theological revolution that immediately suspended the Constitution under the pretext of restoring order, but it feels pretty flimsy. There are a couple other mechanisms discussed, but we don’t really get much about how power is maintained in this theocracy, instead focusing on personal relationships within the household. This is well done, of course, but then, there’s not a ton of plot going on here either. This does call to mind Orwell’s 1984, which this book is clearly indebted to (right down to the structure, with the epilogue establishing that the story we just read took place in the past, and that we’ve moved on from that dystopia, though Orwell’s epilogue is less direct in that notion). I suspect both books are seeing an uptick in sales due to our new orange-skinned overlord. While neither book really explains what’s going on today (we live with stranger problems), it’s still worth a look. Personally, I prefer 1984, but you could do worse.
• Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang by Kate Wilhelm – In the wake of environmental disaster (global cooling you guys!) and global infertility, a large family sets up an isolated community in an attempt to survive the coming apocalypse. To combat the infertility, they resort to cloning with the thought that after a couple generations, the clones will regain the ability to have children the old-fashioned way. The only problem is that the clones don’t really see it that way, rejecting the plan and researching ways to keep the cloning viable indefinitely. Soon, it emerges that the clones have an abnormally strong emotional and mental connection with each other, such that they lose a certain sense of individuality. This makes travel and separation exceedingly difficult, and the realities of post-apocalypse society begin to impinge on the clones’ plans. They find themselves losing creativity and unable to maintain much of the equipment they use to survive, and so on. Enter Mark, a child of sexual reproduction and individual to the core who threatens the clones’ way of life. I don’t know why I went through this period of reading dystopias and post-apocalyptic novels, but hey, I actually really enjoyed this one. It helps that there’s some actual science in this fiction, coupled with an actual plot. It’s not the most page-turning narrative, but it’s got a lot of interesting ideas that kept me reading. This novel won the Hugo in 1977, so it has that going for it as well.
• Starplex by Robert J. Sawyer – Ah, now this is more like it. Space opera comfort food. Humanity has made it to the stars with the help of a giant network of “short cuts” (basically wormholes), made contact with two other races (and a third that wants nothing to do with anyone else, called the Slammers), and set up a cross-species exploration vessel called Starplex. After mysterious green stars begin floating through the shortcuts, the crew of Starplex is about to encounter revelations about the shortcuts and who set them up, along with a host of other challenges. So this is basically throwback Golden Age SF adventure, and it’s a lot of fun. There’s not a ton of character development, and what there is kinda misses the mark (notably Keith Lansing’s midlife crisis and desire to cheat on his wife or something – fortunately, this resolves itself and winds up not being as much of a drag as I initially thought), but the ideas are great and they just keep coming. The alien races are well drawn and thought out (and indeed, their relationships are a lot more interesting than the human ones). You could argue that the story goes a bit too far and makes everything work out a little too pat, but after having steeped myself in misery and disaster with the last two books, this one was a real breath of fresh air. It captures that sense of wonder that makes SF so exciting and it’s got quite a few well-executed setpieces and action sequences. Well worth checking out, and I’m most certainly going to read more Sawyer when I can…

I have a few others in progress right now, but we’re also heading into Hugo season, so I’ll probably start in on the fiction categories shortly after they’re announced in April…

Vintage SF Month is hosted by the Little Red Reviewer. The objective: Read and discuss “older than I am” Science Fiction in the month of January.

“Their flight was not less exhilarating for being explainable.” – Tau Zero, Page 19

Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero follows the story of the starship Leonora Christine, a colonization vessel staffed with 50 of the best and brightest that Earth has to offer. Their goal is to travel to a distant star system using a Bussard ramjet to accelerate at a modest but constant rate until they reach an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. This makes their voyage subject to relativity and time dilation; it will take 5 years from the crew’s subjective, while 33 years will pass on earth. Tragedy strikes when the ship passes through an unexpected nebula, damaging the deceleration capabilities of the ship. Since the ship’s engines must be kept running in order to provide protection from stray objects and radiation, the crew is doomed to continue accelerating ever closer to the speed of light, thus increasing time dilation and traveling ever farther from home in terms of both distance and time. Will the crew manage to find a way to slow down and find a suitable planet for colonization in time to create a viable population that can thrive?

So this book has a reputation as a classic, and indeed, the hard SF bits are nice and chunky giving the reader that sense of wonder so many of us crave from our SF. Alas, it’s the crew interactions and character touches that didn’t quite connect with me. I find this to be a relatively common challenge with novels from this period between the New Wave in the 60s and the hard SF revival in the 80s (another example of great hard SF ideas mixed with middling character work from this same era is The Mote in God’s Eye, even if that remains one of the great first-contact stories due to the lower proportion of character work there).

To be fair, much of the interior reflection in the novel works. The crew handles their initial setbacks well, but as the true implications dawn, there are some pretty weighty troubles to deal with. It doesn’t take long before they realize that while only a few years have passed for them, it’s likely that everyone they have ever known has long since passed away. Once they reach a speed where millions of years are passing for every one year of travel, these implications start to take a even more of a toll on the crew, as it becomes clear that all of humanity as they knew it is probably long gone. Unfortunately, much of the crew interactions feel forced and unrelatable. Old Earth politics, love triangles, cheating, authoritarian controls on various aspects of life aboard a spaceship are all viable story components, I guess, but I found myself not caring much about these aspects of the story, which actually do comprise a sizable portion of the narrative.

The hard SF bits are harnessed into an effective driver for the story, even if some things don’t quite fit with the current science and cosmology. I mean, yeah, at the speed they the ship was moving, it would be blueshifted far enough to kill people instantly from radiation poisoning, but that would make for a pretty anticlimactic story. Similarly, the “Big Crunch” speculated in the book probably wouldn’t work that way and even if it did, the ship’s odds at surviving are doubtful. None of this is enough to totally outweigh the sense of wonder brought on by a ship traveling so fast that it could witness the end of the current universe, the big bang of a new universe, and travel billions of years into the span of said new universe to find a planet that would be habitable in a timeframe that would allow for 50 people to create a viable colony. (Spoilers, I guess.) All in all, Anderson evokes the grandeur and scale of the universe well enough that it kept me motivated to get past the characterization bits.

So it’s a neat idea, reasonably well executed, but the character work is middling at best. In this way, it also reminded me a bit of Gregory Benford’s Timescape (cool ideas bogged down by inane dinner parties), which is funny, because I recently read a Benford short story called “Relativistic Effects” which recalls Tau Zero to such an extent that I have to believe Benford was directly inspired by Anderson’s work. Another runaway ship witnessing a new big bang, and so on, but captured in a tiny fraction of Tau Zero‘s already pretty short length (approximately 200 pages). Incidentally, that short story collection that had the Benford work also contained an Anderson story called “Kyrie” that also deals with time dilation (as it relates to black holes). That story really kicked me in the face and was the inspiration for picking up Tau Zero in the first place. Ultimately, I’m glad I read this and hope to read more Anderson at some point, but I’d recommend checking out The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF and reading the two aforementioned stories rather than Tau Zero… which I guess says something about this book. On the other hand, I can see why it’s hailed as a classic, the science bits are interesting, and it’s definitely worth reading for students of the genre. However, back on that first hand, while I generally don’t mind the stereotypical flat characters of hard SF, I feel like this book shot for some ambitious litfic characterization and didn’t quite clear the bar on that front, which lessens the overall appeal some.

Will I manage a third Vintage review this month? Only time will tell, but I do have a book lined up (assuming I finish the two I’m currently reading…)

Vintage SF Month is hosted by the Little Red Reviewer. I don’t know how I missed this before, but since I’ve already read two vintage (i.e. “older than I am”) works this month without even trying, I figured it would be fun to participate! First up: Wasp, by Eric Frank Russell:

“… the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and was buzzing around his face. … The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being, the wasp’s size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid. In this instance, the wasp didn’t use it. Nevertheless, that wasp killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap.” – Wasp, pages 3-4

Terrorists make for unlikely heroes, especially in our post 9/11 world, but Eric Frank Russell’s 1957 novel Wasp represents a valiant effort that feels prescient and relevant to this day.

Sometime in the future, humans are at war with the Sirian Empire. Even though the humans posses superior technology in nearly every way, the Sirian Empire is able to compensate because their population outnumbers the humans by a ratio of 12 to 1 (along with commensurate advantage in resources). What to do when confronted with numerical inferiority? Resort to asymmetrical warfare! James Mowry is the titular wasp, a single human saboteur sent to the Sirian empire to sow discord and disruption. Given suitable circumstances, one man against a whole planet can “obtain results monstrously in excess of the effort.”

He is, in effect, a terrorist. His tactics start out innocently enough. Phase 1 of his plan simply involves slapping subversive stickers all over various cities in order to establish the existence of a (nonexistent) resistance organisation named Dirac Angestun Gesept (Sirian Freedom Party). Subsequent phases escalate to targeted assassinations and bombings. He is aided by the panic of the Sirian government, depicted as an oppressive police state that engages in censorship and forceful suppression. Ironically, one of the strengths of asymmetrical warfare is that when your enemy commits a major act of violence against the people, you (the terrorist) win and you become stronger.

This is certainly a peculiar book. Terry Pratchett once commented that he “can’t imagine a funnier terrorists’ handbook.” The tone of the book is certainly lighter than you’d expect from the above description, and it does have a dark, dry humor to it that is surprising. Mowry is a likable enough agent provocateur, but he is still a terrorist. We really don’t know that much about him, actually. His recruitment at the beginning of the novel is coerced and I read it to basically be a death sentence (i.e. even if he survives, he will simply be redeployed). Russell does his best to soften the violence against the Sirians leadership by portraying them as obnoxious bureaucrats, but he leaves room for doubt due to reprisals on the innocent population (who are mostly portrayed as ordinary, perfectly nice people). We’re clearly meant to root for Mowry, but Russell doesn’t quite let us off that easy and provokes questions that are not easily answered.

Of course, the procedural aspects are great, and hold up pretty well too. Most of the tactics used in the novel feel logical and independent of hand-wavey technological cheats. For instance, there’s a clever variant on a typical “follow that car” sequence in which Mowry, not wanting to attract suspicion, tells the cab driver that he doesn’t remember the exact name of where he’s headed, but he does remember the how to get there, so he’ll just direct the driver as they go. Humor emanates from some of these tactics as well, like when the Sirian government, attempting to counter Dirac Angestun Gesept by requiring every organization on the planet, from the lowliest knitting group to the largest corporation, to formally register. Unphased, Mowry obtains a form and formally registers Dirac Angestun Gesept (Purpose of organization: Destruction of present government and termination of war against Terra. Names and address of elected officers: You’ll find out when it’s too late.). The 4GW crowd would probably love this book… if they didn’t already have a well worn, dog-eared copy. The Sirian level of technology does seem suspiciously like that of 1950s earth, but Russell mitigates that with his earlier notion that the Sirians are technologically inferior.

Russell did serve in the RAF in WWII, and that’s lead to some speculation that he had at least some firsthand experience (or at least, knowledge) of disruption in occupied Europe. As an anecdotal observation, the depiction of asymmetrical warfare in fiction was beginning to uptick in the 50s and 60s (I’m thinking of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in SF, as well as French memoirs and even some films like Jean Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows). In this respect, Russell’s work does seem prescient, though it would be interesting to do more formal research to see how fiction depicted terrorism over time.

Aside from Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman has also counted himself a fan, and even set about trying for a movie adaptation:

The only book I’ve optioned was WASP. I started the script, wrote about a dozen pages, then Sept 11th happened, and I let the option lapse; I didn’t think that the world (or at least the U.S.) would be ready for a terrorist hero for a very long time. And he is a terrorist—one man tying up an entire planet’s military might as they look for a huge non-existent organisation, using nothing but the 1950s plot-equivalent of a couple of explosions and a few envelopes filled with anthrax powder…

It would make for an interesting movie, though I’m guessing they’d rethink the Sirian appearance of purple skin, bowlegged gait, and funny ears. Regardless, I think it’s something we could handle now, so perhaps, someday…

It’s a short, easy to read book with little in the way of character depth or stylistic flourishes, but it’s also fascinating, prescient, relevant, darkly funny, and a little scary. Certainly worth a few hours of your time.

As we hurtle on towards the end of our current orbital cycle, I thought I’d check out some of the SF/F that’s been making waves this year in preparation for the Hugo nomination process. I’ve discovered some pretty good stuff, but little that is really inspiring. Still, I have one or two things that will probably end up on my nomination ballot, so that’s a good start.

• Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel – A little girl accidentally discovers a giant metal hand buried in South Dakota. After decades of study, the government finally starts making some progress. They’ve located other body parts and, amazingly, they fit together, creating a huge, pilotable mecha. Told from the perspective of a nameless interviewer with a surprising amount of political power and influence, the book consists mostly of his interviews and debriefings. It’s a surprisingly effective framing device, and while the story moves quickly and efficiently, it does get fairly ridiculous as it moves on. There are some tantalizing hints at future conflicts, but since this is the first in a series, we don’t really get much of that. This book concerns itself more with the discovery and initial baby steps (pun intended!) than with grand, galactic conflicts. All well and good, but it makes the ending feel a bit anticlimactic. It’s a fun, page-turning book, but not something that is really inspiring me to pick up the next in the series when it comes out next year. It reminds me a little of Lost, but unfortunately that cuts both ways: I love the mysterious and speculative aspects of the story, but what’s been revealed so far does not exactly inspire confidence that it will end much better than Lost did… but I’ve been wrong before! This would probably make a great TV show though (found footage? mock documentary?)
• Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee – Captain Kel Cheris has a knack for unconventional combat tactics. Unfortunately, in a battleground where armies rely on emergent properties of rigid social systems called “calendars”, her innovations are considered heretical, even when she succeeds (or at least, prevents a rout). She’s thus given a chance to redeem herself by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a star fortress that has recently been captured by heretics. To do so, she enlists the help of an unstable military genius, Shuos Jedao. Of course, since he died centuries ago, only his mind survives… and is thus temporarily implanted inside of Cheris’s brain. This book is difficult to pin down. On its surface, there is tremendous complexity. The calendrical weapons and exotic effects are well drawn and entertaining, to be sure, but it’s difficult to grok how they work simply from their (often grotesque) effects (which is all we are really exposed to). There are various factions within the calendar, and other emergent effects as well. This rewards close reading, but you can also only go so far. Fortunately, while we don’t know how this stuff works, I do get the feeling that they are internally consistent and rigorous, so it doesn’t feel like magic (nor does it seem to fall into the typical magic trap of escalating powers). All of this is worldbuilding and only really surface-level detail though. The story itself is a little more straightforward and essentially boils down to the relationship between Cheris and Jedao. There’s a sort of mentor/mentee relationship there, with differing but complementary skillsets. For his part, Jedao is manipulative and sneaky enough to earn the reputation he has as a madman/mass-murderer, but also sympathetic enough to make you wonder if he isn’t quite as crazy as he seems. This is also the first in a series, but I’m much more likely to pick up the sequels in this case (fingers crossed that I’ll remember enough about the worldbuilding to not be completely lost), and this book will be on my Hugo nomination ballot next year.
• The Dispatcher by John Scalzi – In a world where murder becomes nearly impossible (anyone who is killed simply disappears and awakes in their home, alive and well), Tony Valdez has taken on the job of a Dispatcher. Someone who legally kills people who would normally die under natural causes (i.e. when someone is going to die, he murders them, so that they can remain alive), a handy tool to have in an operating room or if you’ve been in some sort of accident. When a fellow Dispatcher is seemingly kidnapped, Valdez is recruited by a detective to sort it all out. So this idea is pretty much nonsense, but Scalzi does a good job fleshing it out, speculating on how the world changes because of this and figuring out various workarounds to the “rules”. Much like his last novel, Lock In, this plays out like an above-average police procedural with speculative flair. The plot is twisty and turny enough, and Scalzi’s general skill at pitter patter dialogue fits well. Definitely a worthy listen (this is currently only available as an audiobook). Not sure if it’s Hugo-worthy though, and if I remember correctly, its audio-only release may create eligibility issues.
• Dark Matter by Blake Crouch – Jason Dessen is a physics professor who probably could have made some breakthroughs if he’d prioritized his career over his family, but he didn’t, and now lives happily with his wife and son. One night, he’s kidnapped and knocked out my a mysterious masked man. He awakes in a strange new world, similar but not quite like his own. A world where he did make the decision to prioritize career over family. His wife became a successful artist and their son doesn’t exist. As he puts together the pieces, he is aided in an escape attempt… and ends up traversing several alternate universes in an attempt to find his way home to his family. This is another pop-SF story that executes a little better than Sleeping Giants and barely skirts past the feeling of being SF-lite. Certainly a page turner and very entertaining, this only really manages a true sense-of-wonder jolt towards the end of the novel. Just when Dessen thinks he’s made his escape, the shit really hits the fan. It’s a neat concept, and the solution works satisfyingly enough. After reading a bunch of “first in a series” books, it was nice to have something self-contained. Ultimately, this is pretty good. Not quite Hugo level for me, and it’s another book that almost seems ideally suited for a TV adaptation, but I enjoyed it well enough.
• All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders – Patricia Delfine discovers she has magical powers when she is a little girl, speaking to a wounded bird and visiting the Parliament of Birds in a giant world-tree. Laurence Armstead has a knack for science and technology, building a two-second time machine when he’s just a young boy. Of course, these two outcasts become friends, even if they’re constantly interrupted or pulled away from one another. Decades later, the world is falling apart around them, and Patricia and Laurence keep running into each other. Can they save the planet? The idea here is intriguing – part fantasy, part science fiction, put them together and watch the sparks fly. Alas, this leans pretty heavily on the fantasy side of things. SF gets its licks in, but feels a little too stylized. The story fits together reasonably well. There is one jump in time that’s a little more disruptive than it should be, it eventually gets back on track. The book has a nice whimsical tone to it that works well, even if that’s not normally my thing. This is certainly not a rote pop-SF concept, but it is a page-turner and comports itself well. I don’t know that it will make my ballot, but Anders has some Hugo cred already (having won with her novelette, Six Months, Three Days back in 2011) and I think it could end up on the ballot.

I’ll probably tackle a few others before nominations close, but I don’t have a ton of stuff left on my list of 2016 stuff that I’m super interested in…

Without going to far into the history of Science Fiction, there was a revival of epic, large-scale Hard SF in the 1980s led by three authors: David Brin, Greg Bear, and Gregory Benford. Dubbed the “Killer B’s”, they seemingly incorporated the strengths of New Wave authors while returning the genre to its rational, optimistic, Campbellian mode. Less navel-gazing, less counterculture, less dreary pessimism… Interestingly enough, it feels like we could use another such revival these days. Alas, we seem to have descended into an ill-advised political morass, misdiagnosing core SF tenants for political victimhood. It sometimes feels like there’s no escape in modern SF (this is probably something worth exploring in its own post sometime, not in a short intro to some reviews)… but luckily, I have plenty of books like these to discover. Three are from the Killer B’s, the other two are just from authors whose last name starts with a B (and one isn’t even SF!) Cheating? If you say so. Let’s stop quibbling and get to the books:

• Startide Rising by David Brin – Earth’s first Dolphin-led exploration vessel Streaker has crashed in the uncharted water world of Kithrup, pursued by bloodthirsty zealots fighting over them in orbit. They’d discovered a long lost fleet of spaceships thought to belong to the fabled Progenitors, an idea that is heretical to many competing and hostile alien races, who are now out to destroy the Streaker and its human/dolphin crew in order to hoard the secret to themselves.

  Technically a sequel to Sundiver, this could potentially be read as a standalone, and while I enjoyed both books, this one represents a dramatic improvement over Sundiver (which I’d say is overlong and muddled). At first I thought this might suffer from the same flaws, but it turns out that much of what I thought of as being needlessly tangential or episodic turned out to be artfully tied together in the end. And it’s a really fantastic ending, one that surprises and delights at each new turn. There are a lot of plot lines here and Brin does an exceptional job setting them up and then bringing them together. There are still some loose ends which I presume will be addressed in the third book in the series, but this one remains satisfying in itself (a trick I wish modern authors could pull off better, if this past year’s Hugo finalists are any indication).

  The perspective of “uplifted” dolphins is an interesting one and makes up the bulk of the novel, though we do get ample exposure to their small coterie of human crewmates as well. It’s funny, I was trying to think what a film/tv adaptation of this might look like, and I suspect we’ll never see it because the Dolphin bits might seem ludicrous if they’re not visually perfect, even if it works great on the page. I suspect many will see Brin’s optimism and notion of Earthican exceptionalism (uh, my phrasing, not his) as jejune and unsophisticated, but I kinda love it for that. Their escape plan is only hinted at, but you can piece together the big parts, leaving enough twists and turns for the finale. We don’t find out much about the Progenitors, but the planet Kithrup has its own mysteries that make up for that (and it turns out, are not wholly unrelated). The book periodically checks in on the alien forces fighting in orbit, but these sketches are less successful. Perhaps it’s because we only get little glimpses, but something about these races has never really clicked with me (even the ones from Sundiver). But that’s only a quibble, this comes highly recommended, especially for fans of Hard SF and Space Opera.

  It won the Hugo and Nebula and while it is not the first work from the Killer B’s, it seems to represent the tipping point at which people seemed to realize that something special was going on. This novel paved the way for Bear and Benford (even if, again, they were writing before this novel). This is perhaps an oversimplification and worthy of further exploration in its own post, but for now, I’ll just say that I can see why this novel would have been inspirational. I will most certainly be revisiting this series in the future…

• Blood Music by Greg Bear – Vergil Ulam is a scientist working on unlocking the computational potential of cellular material. When he crosses the line and uses human cells for his experiments, he’s fired and directed to destroy his samples. Instead, Virgil secretly injects himself with the engineered cells with the hope that he could smuggle them out and recover them later to continue his work. Naturally, the cells have other plans. The mad scientist experimenting on himself is a time-honored, if a bit silly, story. One would think it’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t work in the rigorous confines of hard SF, but this turns out to be one of the best executions of such a trope that I’ve read. Virgil isn’t exactly the most exciting protagonist, but he gets the job done, and Bear takes this story way, way beyond what I would have expected from the opening of the book. I mean, it goes to some really bonkers places. I don’t want to say much to spoil it, but this is a great, standalone story that is well worth checking out. This was also nominated for the Hugo and Nebula, but lost out because it had the great misfortune to be published the same year as Ender’s Game. You better believe I’ll be reading more Greg Bear.
• Timescape by Gregory Benford – Thrill to a story of time travel, tachyons, environmental disaster, encoded messages from the future, and… dinner parties? The politics of academia? Barry Goldwater? Marital infidelity and more dinner parties? Yes, so I’m a little more mixed on this tale of future academics (in the far flung year of 1998!) attempting to send a message back to 1962 in order to forestall an environmental disaster.

  The meat of that plot is fantastic, and Benford hits many hard SF tropes right in the sweet spot. I particularly enjoyed the examination of sending a message back in time, where Benford actually takes the movement of earth’s entire solar system (and galaxy) into account whilst aiming the message (though that is later overridden by other considerations, it’s still something I’d think more time travel stories would take into account, but don’t). Likewise, the work of decoding the message and trying to figure out what it means is interesting enough, and even the bureaucratic encumbrances encountered during that process make for interesting reading.

  Where Benford falls down is, well, the dinner party portions of the novel, which, unfortunately, comprise far too much of the narrative. It’s not that they’re necessarily bad (though, yeah, some of it really is bad), just that they don’t really fit with the rest of the story, feeling oddly out of place and wreaking absolute havoc over the pacing of the story. As a result, it feels like almost nothing happens until near the end of the novel, when you start to see repercussions of the messages from the future. What’s more, as the reader, you’re operating under more information than most of the characters, so you know what’s coming next and not in a good, Hitchcockian sort of way either. It’s one thing to have your characters go through the paces so that they can reach a logical conclusion that the reader already knows, it’s another to have them spend 80% of the novel doing so. I’ve read some Benford before and while he always includes interesting bits and even some good turns of language, I always find myself disappointed on the whole. I can’t say as though I’ll be pursuing more Benford anytime soon…

• The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks – A while back I got all fired up about finding some new space opera worth its salt and decided to read the first novel in Ian Banks’ long-run Culture series, Consider Phlebias. Episodic, sloppy, and overstuffed, it was nonetheless imaginative, intelligent, and stuffed with extra-crunchy space operatic tropes. While I ultimately found it disjointed and mildly disappointing, I liked it enough to proceed with the series (uh, a few years later).

  It turns out that this second novel in the Culture series is a narrowly focused and sharply drawn narrative that represents pretty much the stylistic opposite of Consider Phlebias. No series of jumbled vignettes here, everything is tightly plotted and interconnected, following the perspective of a single character: Jernau Morat Gurgeh, the titular Player of Games, the best strategic gamer in the Culture. Having mastered all forms of gamedom, he’s also bored out of his skull. One suspects this is meant to illustrate the dissonance that the concept of the Culture, a post-scarcity utopia governed by AI, represents. Would human beings react favorably to such a situation, or would the devolve into pure hedonism? Or violent rebellion? Gurgeh represents this conflict well. Left to his own devices, he has mastered games but discovered it an ultimately hollow achievement. What’s next? What matters enough to be next?

  The answer comes in the form of Contact, the group responsible for interacting with other civilizations (diplomatically… or not, as the situation dictates). After some prodding and outright coercion from an annoying AI, Gurgeh accepts a long-term assignment to the empire of Azad in order to represent the Culture in their culturally-ascendant game, also named Azad. It seems that the entire empire, from the lowliest worker to the emperor, is governed by the game. In essence, ruling the empire equates to playing the game, and the philosophy of the game represents the philosophy of the empire.

  Fictional games are tricky to deploy in a narrative like this, and Banks gets around many of the difficulties admirably, describing higher-level meta-gamed and strategic philosophy more than tactical moves. This allows for some maneuvers that would be otherwise suspect, such as when Gurgeh manages a near miraculous reversal after almost immediately falling prey to a talented game player. But it also allows Banks to leverage an underdog sports analogy as well as provide several interesting game-related revelations that are insightful without feeling like a cheat on Banks’ part. It is a little surprising that the empire of Azad would allow some of these shenanigans to go on as long as they do, but Banks manages to keep the explanations for Gurgeh’s continuing success satisfying enough that it works. Some of the final revelations, while surprising to Gurgeh, might not be as surprising to experienced readers of SF (You mean to tell me that Contact has more pointed motives for Gurgeh’s presence than they let on? No way!), but it all works well enough in the end, retaining just a hint of ambiguity as to what Gurgeh’s endeavor actually means. Meanwhile, Banks’ elevation of a game to civilizational levels gives him ample room for a multi-layered exploration of various themes and philosophies. I ultimately enjoyed this a great deal more than Consider Phlebias, and it hangs together as a narrative much better as well. Banks wasn’t a member of the Killer B’s and comes out of a different tradition, but I’m happy to include this one in a post like this. Once again, this is a series of novels that I will most certainly be revisiting.

• Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold – A follow up to last year’s Penric’s Demon, this one follows Penric as he consults on the murder of a pig farmer and the request of Locator Oswyl (basically a police detective). They seek Inglis, a young shaman whose role in the pig farmer’s murder is unclear. This takes place a few years after the last story, and Penric has gone through all the training needed to become a sorcerer, and his relationship with Desdemonia (so ably established in the previous novella) has grown and matured. As usual, Bujold weaves an interesting and entertaining tale, one that is, in some ways, simpler than the first novella, though it turns out to be a lot more complicated than that. I won’t ruin it by getting into details, but it’s a worthy read. It probably ranks below the last novella for me, but still pretty good on the whole.

And there you have it. The Six Weeks of Halloween fast approach, so put your horror hat on, it’s going to be a bumpy, terrifying ride.