Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #212

by TTA Press Authors

  But never underestimate the power of religion to destabilise matters. At the centre of the galaxy is the Dreaming Void, a sort of artificial black hole that may hold paradise within its walls. The problem is that in order to support this paradise, it's slowly consuming the galaxy. When a human named Inigo begins dreaming of what lays within the Void, the word spreads. Soon he's gone from dreamer to prophet, and as the novel begins, millions of his followers are hoping to embark on a Pilgrimage into the Void. The problem is, most aliens and humans believe that when the pilgrims drive their starships into the Void it will trigger a catastrophic expansion. The pilgrims may or may not find heaven, but everyone else gets sucked into a black hole. All that carefully-honed peace will certainly follow.

  This is where the action kicks in, early and often. Suffice it to say that the sort of set-pieces that one remembers long after having finished a Hamilton novel are here in plenitude, executed with skill, grace and verve. Hamilton's cast of characters offers some enjoyable returns from the first two novels alongside equally enjoyable new creations—he manages to create a character whose dreams are a Peter F. Hamilton planetary romance, and a damn good one. In any effort of this size, there can be missteps; Hamilton indulges his inclination for bestseller-level sex in an imaginative environment, to be sure, but those scenes tend to ground matters a little too much. And while the pacing is always brisk, readers may find themselves experiencing galactic whiplash as they jump from one side of the Milky Way to the other at a speed considerably faster than light. But let your reading mind lead, and your all-too-human brain will quite willingly follow.

  Copyright © 2007 Rick Kleffel

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  Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction

  Jeff Prucher, Editor

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  Science fiction, with its clutter of clones and robots and climactic drift, has finally crossed over. A glance at something like 1984 shows how invasive the terminology has been, and a shoal of televisual and cinematic creations have also imprinted themselves on the psyche. Then there is a fannish argot that seems deliberately opaque and which already has several small guides dedicated to it. All in all, the proposition of a dictionary must have looked like a runner.

  One expects omissions. However, there is one that shouts of the difficulties that have arisen here. Reaching for my default dictionary, the Oxford Concise English Dictionary, I read on the jacket that it contains 240,000 words, phrases and definitions. There is no mention anywhere of the size of Brave New Words. Is it because a hardback dictionary that contains fewer than nine hundred entries might seem a tad ... light? When you notice that around seventy of those definitions start with the prefix ‘space', you start to see the scale of the problem. A couple of letters have no entries at all. Pruncher has padded out the contents with eleven one-page articles on such seemingly randomly chosen subjects as Star Trek and robots, but they feel superfluous.

  The fannish language does deserve inclusion, but is it much more than a historical curiosity today? The replacement of the fanzine by the Internet forum has, of necessity, enforced a more transparent form of language. The old ways are dying.

  There is also the matter of the more serious language of SF. There is no mention of ‘Mundane-SF’ here, despite the movement having been around for several years now, but ‘Slipstream’ is present, and correctly dated back to Bruce Sterling's SF Eye article. Curiously, one of the later citations is an Interzone review of Territories, but Territories is not itself cited. Then we turn the page and find that twice as much wordage has been devoted to ‘Smeg’ and its variants. Some may find this annoying.

  The famous anagram origin of ‘Ansible’ is not mentioned in its entry (it would have been nice to find if it is apocryphal) but there is pleasure to be had in tracing the shared usage of words, even when portmanteau neologisms are meant to be obvious narrative shortcuts. ‘Braintape', for example, has a meaning that escapes no one.

  So there it is. Fun? Yes. Useful? Certainly. Essential? Sadly, not.

  Copyright © 2007 Jim Steel

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  Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard

  Dominika Oramus

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  Grave New World presents an ambitious and rich account of Ballard's oeuvre, tracing a handful of themes (apocalyptic social implosion, war phantasmagoria, pathological boredom, the Death Drive, the dialectic between mental and physical landscapes) from The Wind from Nowhere, Ballard's 1961, strapped-for-cash brain-fart début, through his early science fiction in its various engagements with New Wave and other avant-garde contexts, his postmodern memoirs, and all the way through the recent paranoid fables up to and including Kingdom Come (2006). Not unusually for a book foreshadowed by academic papers, there's a fair amount of repetition, but it's no bad thing—it means you can generally dip in and pick up the thread fairly quickly.

  Oramus tries to jigsaw her chosen themes into the underlying and unifying core of Ballard's work. I query not whether she succeeds but why she bothers—whether or not Ballard's work possesses deep invariances, it is certainly superficially various, and any sharp reader will be as interested in the variety as the core. More useful than those monopolising conclusions are the early chapters, which summarise major critical approaches to Ballard's work and supply potted introductions to the theorists who most inform it (Nietzsche, Spengler, Jung, Fukuyama ... the list goes on). Grave New World might have paid a little more attention, in this section, to the Marxist heritage of several theorists (Debord in particular comes across as Baudrillard's, sort of, squire), as well as to the ways their ideas have been received and challenged in recent years. “The represented world seems more real than the world outside of pictures"—this supposed to be like, uh, a newsflash?

  In justice, Grave New World only wants truck with such theory for what it can illuminate in Ballard's work, but here again the book misses a trick. Ballard is an extraordinary storyteller and poet: as soon as any study of him immures sufficient quotation, this comes clear. Inasmuch as Ballard's work also performs expositions and criticisms of contemporary Western society, it exists in the tension between, on the one hand, accuracy and clarity, and on the other, what makes a good story. Taking it seriously should also mean trying to work out how true its ideas are; that means situating them in intellectual traditions in which they are unpopular.

  Copyright © 2007 Lara Buckerton

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  Set the Seas on Fire

  Chris Roberson

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  An updated version of a previously published chapbook, Set the Seas on Fire is a virtuoso performance that combines the sea-faring story with fantasy set in the Napoleonic era. Roberson quickly sets the scenes with two intertwining stories.

  First we are introduced to the young Hieronymous Bonventure, who is ostensibly being taught how to fence—but in the developing acquaintanceship with his tutor, he learns the deeper reasons for his tuition. The main narrative is set in 1808, with the HMS Fortitude (on which Bonaventure is Lieutenant) in desperate need of repair after a skirmish with a Spanish galleon. Coming across survivors from the galleon, they hear of an island of terror where the ship is beached. Once ashore, the crew meet the inhabitants, and embark on individual adventures—with Bonaventure getting more out of falling in love than he could ever hope for—before finally descending into Hell.

  Roberson combines a sense of period with the strong sense of wonder and fear. Whilst the setting is Napoleonic, the reader is never left with a sense that the period is a backdrop. It oozes onto the page, not just in the warfare and hierarchy, but in the mannerisms and etiquette. At one level he harks back to the ‘Fantasy of Manners’ school—but at another, the action takes hold and really makes the story special.

  Untypically for fantasy, his characters encounter the Other and are overwhelmed by it. The sheer alienness of Pacific native culture to Western minds (long the preoccupation of an
thropology) is developed so well that, ultimately, it is both familiar and different. Roberson does not try to understand the stories, but he uses them brilliantly to demonstrate the strengths and shortcomings of the main protagonists.

  Set the Seas on Fire is a thoughtful but rip-roaring adventure, combining Hornblower and Lovecraft with a subtlety certainly not seen in the ‘New Weird’ or other naval stories. The other writing of Roberson's that I have read has left me astounded at his control of silences and muted responses amidst terrifying situations, and Set the Seas on Fire is certainly in that class. I cannot recommend this book too highly as an intelligent, readable novel.

  Copyright © 2007 Iain Emsley

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  Mainspring

  Jay Lake

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  One of the most interesting things happening in American science fiction and fantasy at the moment is the emergence of a new generation of writers through the small presses. In magazines like Polyphony and Leviathan and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and in chapbooks and websites, the same names keep cropping up, building a reputation, getting into Best of the Year anthologies and onto awards shortlists. Jay Lake is one of the leading lights in this circle; prolific both as author and editor, edgy and restless in style, it was only a matter of time before his novels started to appear from a mainstream publishing house. What is surprising, therefore, is how old-fashioned this novel feels. Where we might have expected something challenging, unconventional, maybe a little rough around the edges, what we get is smooth, sleek and familiar.

  It's a boy's own adventure story full of exotic locations, swashbuckling action, threats that aren't really too threatening, villains who turn out okay in the end, attacking natives, noble heroes, mysterious orientals and a young hero who comes of age, wins the girl and completes the quest all at the same time.

  What makes it exotic is the steampunk setting. We are in an alternate universe that really does run like clockwork. The sky is crossed by the brass tracks that carry the sun and planets, while the earth itself is divided in two by the gigantic brass teeth of the cogwheel that keeps it on course. Our hero, an apprentice clockmaker in colonial New Haven, (the year is 1900, Victoria is on the throne and America is still part of the empire), finds himself given the unwelcome task of winding up the mainspring of the world because the universe is running down.

  What makes this novel unusual is that young Hethor is given his task by the angel Gabriel. In this orrery writ large, God is manifest in the heavens, and Lake never questions religion or, indeed, uses the clockwork metaphorically to explore the regulation of life in this universe. Rather, Hethor simply accepts his task and sets off to the South Pole by way of a spell in prison, adventures aboard a naval airship, war against flying creatures, a daring crossing of the equatorial cogwheel, true love in the African jungles, and a host of bizarre encounters. Lake keeps the action moving, there is a restless pace to the narrative that you wish sometimes would just slow down long enough to explore this world. The colour is vivid, at times garish, everything is noble or dastardly or strange, coincidences abound, and God is forever dropping little gold tablets with cryptic messages at the feet of our hero to keep him on track. It is, in other words, high and exotic adventure that keeps you reading, though you are in the end left wondering why it isn't quite as satisfying as it should be.

  Copyright © 2007 Paul Kincaid

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  Postsingular

  Rudy Rucker

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  When it comes to unique voices in science fiction, few can claim to have quite as distinctive a style as Rudy Rucker. Postsingular is packed full of the larger-than-life weirdness that has become his trademark; classic genre tropes and clichés rub shoulders with mathematical theorems and wild technological speculation, delivered in prose that captures the the languid vibe and hippie undercurrents of California.

  Rucker's novels move fast; within the first thirty pages of Postsingular, planet Earth has already been destroyed by semi-sentient nanobots, then restored thanks to the intervention of a Silicon Valley technogeek named Ond and his autistic son Chu. Long since fired from the company that released the nanoswarm, Ond has been working on an alternative system that will network the world without the need to disassemble it to its component atoms in the process, and the ‘orphidnet’ is born.

  But Ond's ex-boss, the obsessive genius Jeff Luty, hasn't dropped his dream of Vearth—a simulated planet devoid of dirt and mortality—and is working hard on a way to override the orphids with a new nanoswarm. It's not long before all manner of characters are pulled into the plot, from scheming politicians and boat-dwelling hipster artists to street-kids boot-strapping their brains with the computational resources the orphidnet has to offer ... and the beings from the next reality along.

  Rucker is a writer whose work you either love or hate. I'm happy to be in the former camp, but it's easy enough to see how his breezy surrealist style might put some readers off—if nothing else, it's very at odds with the traditional po-faced voice of science fiction. But therein lies its power; Rucker's quick-draw style acts as a sleight-of-hand that allows him to slip some of sf's biggest tropes and ideas beneath the reader's radar, as well as touching some very human character aspects that are often skipped over (or, worse still, rendered tiresome) by the pens of others. Postsingular has all the bells and whistles that only a computing professor could provide, but never at the expense of the story.

  Copyright © 2007 Paul Raven

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  Radio Freefall

  Matthew Jarpe

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  Debut novels now always seem to come with an ‘in the tradition of ... ‘tag; while this might be a useful signpost for the reader, there's also the very real danger of disappointment. The publishers of Matthew Jarpe's first novel say it's in ‘the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'; that is bound to make any reader conversant with sf think about moon colonies, mischievous AIs and the attempted crushing of a libertarian society by an oppressive Earth-based regime.

  And, initially, Radio Freefall seems to cover the bases: except that we only get up as far as a low orbital space station called Freefall, the AIs revel mostly in their role as literal deus ex machina, and the forces of globalisation are personified in the frankly dull Walter Cheeseman, the monomaniacal founder and CEO of the ubiquitous technology corporation WebCense. Against him Jarpe places the hardly sympathetic Quin Taber, an aggrieved former WebCense employee who is investigating the origins of a sentient AI—the Digital Carnivore—which now inhabits the ‘upper level’ of the net. And then there is the tech-genius and old-time guitarist Aqualung, who seems content enough to be swept along by events, but can't always resist making a stand.

  Jarpe's prose is extremely readable, even though the wry authorial undertone seems sometimes too close to Aqualung's individual persona—which wouldn't matter quite as much if the other characters around him were not depicted in such broad brushstrokes. Also, Jarpe seems unsure of what he wants the book to be. Near future political and technological extrapolation? Mystery story? (Aqualung's secret identity is ineffectual because we're inside his head from the start.) A rock band's rise and fall? It's all of these, and yet slightly less.

  If you're looking for a near future described in Charles Strossian intensity, move on. It's a decent enough read, though, and it at least touches upon some fairly serious ideas along the way. But in both subject and treatment, it's not exactly going to set the internet alight. Or—going by the band's lyrics—the music charts either.

  Copyright © 2007 Paul Cockburn

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  Splinter

  Adam Roberts

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  Splinter is a re-imagining of a little-known Jules Verne novel Off on a Comet. It was originally inspired by Eric Brown and Mike Ashley's 2004 anthology, which invited modern authors to put
their own slant on whatever most excited them from Verne's repertoire.

  It tells the story of Hector, an art historian who returns from Europe to find that his father, Hector senior, has sold the family home and set himself up as the head of a ‘cult’ deep in the Mojave Desert. Hector senior has been experiencing visions of the end of the world and has gathered together a group of followers with no more plan than to survive the impending cataclysm.

  Young Hector carries enough emotional baggage, without having to deal with the fact that his father is most likely unhinged. It doesn't take long before the truth is revealed, however. Before Hector's first night in the commune is through, a mysterious object collides with the Earth, sending the ranch and those on it spinning slowly into the void on the titular splinter of land.

  Splinter is not a catastrophe story in the traditional sense. First of all, young Hector doesn't even believe the world as he knows it has ended. The other characters, primed by his father's prophecies do believe, but puzzlingly, don't seem inclined to do anything about it. Instead, they continue as if nothing had happened, carrying out chores and swapping stories at meal times. Young Hector responds to the situation in a similar spirit; smoking cigarettes, mulling over his unresolved conflict with Hector senior and trying to figure out how to get the alluring alpha female Dimmi into the sack.