Having said that Green's concerns are personal, there is a quest of sorts, but this is equally unconventional. Green lives in a world where gods and humans live more immediately with one another, and although she begins life with no more fortune than her face, others believe she has acquired a power they can use. However, Green has always been an attentive scholar and has acquired a thoughtful attitude towards religion and a belief in a personal moral authority, all of which will be put to good use as the story unfolds. To say more would be to give away the novel's ending, but Green's interest in issues of belief gives this novel a strong foundation.
No matter how different types of fantasy are currently proliferating, in the end it all down to two simple approaches: produce more of the same as skilfully as one can, because there's a ready-made market for well-written formula, or else push at genre expectations and see what happens. These days, as a reader, I want the latter, and Jay Lake has produced the kind of fantasy I'm looking for, rich in detail (his invented cities seem particularly ‘real'), strong though selective in action, rich in ideas and intensely thoughtful too. It was a pleasure to read this book, and a wrench to finish it.
Copyright © 2009 Maureen Kincaid Speller
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"IT” CAME FROM OUTER SPACE: OCCASIONAL PIECES 1973-2008
Christopher Priest
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Reviewed by Duncan Lunan
Several people have said to me that the quotation marks in this title are also in the title of the Ray Bradbury film, but I can't confirm that from the sources I have, including Jerry Yamamoto's essay on it in Science Fiction America (ed David Hogan, McFarland, 2006). The title piece is a riposte to Lester del Rey's ‘The World of Science Fiction’ (1979), rejecting del Rey's attempt to specify what science fiction is. In the first essay, reprinted from Vector, 1985, Chris Priest adds “...in generalising about ‘the field’ or about ‘literature’ or about ‘science fiction’ or about ‘it’ a writer can talk in metaphor about his own work", particularly its autobiographical aspects, but there's little here about space. I'd hoped to learn something about his co-authorship of Helen Sharman's autobiography Seize the Moment (Gollancz, 1993), but it's not even included in the two lists of his published work.
The accounts of his early life and career include the first British Milford writers’ conference in 1972. Evidently things had calmed down a bit when I began attending in the mid-70s: what I learned from that played a big part in shaping the Glasgow SF Writers’ Circle ten years later, and that's now in its 22nd year. We're currently discussing ‘when does borrowing become plagiarism?', which is the theme of an essay here on The Dam Busters, Enemy Coast Ahead and a novel The Hiding Place. That's in the section on ‘Books and Writers'; the Milford account is one of two obituaries of Richard Cowper, accompanying pieces on Robert Sheckley, Stanislaw Lem and Anna Kavan.
Most of the essays are short, so there isn't scope for the bigger themes of Brian Aldiss's collection The Shape of Further Things, for instance. As a result there's quite a bit of repetition in the section on H.G. Wells, and they might have benefited from editing into one longer analysis. Many pieces are book reviews, and Part Five ‘Some Science Fiction’ was interesting because I covered many of the same titles for the Glasgow Herald at the time. On Rendezvous with Rama, for instance, my concern was that the characters were lifted with only minor name changes from Arthur C. Clarke's first published novel The Sands of Mars, while the technology within Rama was indistinguishable from that in The City of the Stars. The rest is description of the habitat proposed by Cole and Cox in Islands in Space (1966), and Chris Priest reckoned the novel is essentially a description of Bruce Pennington's cover painting for the 1974 Gollanz edition. The recent BBC two-part dramatisation focused on the political and religious aspects, which neither Chris nor I thought important.
In The Sands of Mars Clarke's author-character rediscovers one of his own stories, “written so long ago that he had completely forgotten the ending". But having reviewed Fugue for a Darkening Island for the Herald, I find it harder to believe that Chris could forget its complex structure as completely as he claimed in 2002.
An intriguing collection.
Copyright © 2009 Duncan Lunan
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LAVINIA
Ursula Le Guin
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Reviewed by Laurence Osborn
Ursula Le Guin's latest novel is a re-working of the later volumes of Virgil's Aeneid. She tells the story of the arrival of Aeneas and the Trojans in Italy from the perspective of a minor character in Virgil's poem. Lavinia is the daughter of King Latinus of Laurentium and is destined to become Aeneas’ second wife. And that is nearly all that Virgil tells us about her.
As Lavinia herself complains, Virgil slighted her life and scanted her in his poem. But now Le Guin sets the record straight. She remains faithful to Virgil's account of how the Trojans settle in Italy, choosing to expand on Lavinia's life rather than alter the story as it has already been told. But she carries on where Virgil left off, telling us of the marriage of Lavinia and Aeneas and their life together until his death just three years after landing in Italy.
Lavinia can be read as a historical novel in the sense that Le Guin has lovingly re-created the relatively simple bronze age culture that ultimately gave birth to Rome. In the course of telling Lavinia's story, she paints a sympathetic picture of their daily lives. I was particularly struck by her portrayal of the part religion played in their lives—a much simpler, more pantheistic religion than that imagined by Virgil, a religion of ancestral spirits and numinous places.
At court, Lavinia cultivates a self-effacing persona to appease the uncertain temper of her mentally unstable mother. With her peers, she is altogether more spirited—running wild with girls of her own age, going alone to holy places, even spying on the Trojan camp when they first arrive in Italy. But she is an unlikely heroine by the standards of modern culture. Where we are conventionally encouraged to find freedom and fulfilment by expressing our individuality, Lavinia finds them within the constraints imposed upon her by society and ultimately learns to use those constraints to her advantage. She embraces her role as priestess of the household. Her marriage to Aeneas is a matter of destiny rather than live though she does grow to love him.
But there is another dimension to Lavinia, which transforms the novel from a simple historical novel into something much more experimental. Le Guin's Lavinia is aware of herself as the product of someone else's imagination. At several points she recounts visits to the sacred spring of Albunea where, across the centuries, she speaks with Virgil as he lies dying. So far, so strange. But even aware of her fictionality she doesn't hesitate to question and contradict her creator. And the strangeness is compounded by Virgil, who reveals that he too has a vague sense of being involved in another story—a story in which he guides someone he meets in a dark wood. And, to some extent, Virgil guides Le Guin's Lavinia as elsewhen he guides Dante.
But ultimately Lavinia like Dante is left to go on alone. The Aeneid breaks off with the death of Virgil's rival for the hand of Aeneas. Thereafter Lavinia has to forge her own path: three short years with Aeneas; years during which she brings up Silvius, the son she bore Aeneas, and faces down her stepson Ascanius; and then on into old age ... and beyond? In contrast to the violent and very obvious ending of the Aeneid, Lavinia ends in quietness and mystery in the sacred grove that meant so much to Lavinia in life ... a grove now haunted by a little owl that sometimes remembers what it was to have been a Latin princess who loved a Trojan hero.
I have read and enjoyed most of Ursula Le Guin's previous novels, but I think this one is her finest achievement. It certainly deserves to be at the top of your ‘must read’ list.
Copyright © 2009 Laurence Osborn
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THE ACCORD
Keith Brooke
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Reviewed by David Mathew
&n
bsp; It might qualify as irony that the German word Ohrwurm- translated into English to represent a snatch of music that one repeats in one's head, over and over, throughout a day—came to mind on more than one occasion while reading The Accord. Along with the word springing to mind was Louis Armstrong singing ‘We Have All the Time in the World', for reasons I shall come to shortly.
The novel is not set in Germany, although with the merest peep at what the author doesn't say, it could easily be set anywhere and everywhere. Why is this? Largely because of what the Accord is, but also because of the sentiments—expressed positively or negatively—of the key characters. But first, what is the Accord? Variously described as ‘a corrupt project from the outset', ‘a blasphemous shadow world, occupied by simulacra and soulless echoes', and ‘heaven', the Accord is a conglomeration of approved virtual realities, and a place (or series of places) that we might inhabit when we die.
So far it sounds simple, perhaps. It's not simple.
Noah is the architect of this astonishing achievement, and he is a man in love with the wife of a powerful politician, who in turn happens to be a man with an ‘amplified lust for life', ‘a mind deranged by passion and rage', and for whom the tag ‘master of control’ seems rather watered-down. The man is an influential thug, and very early in the novel he kills his wife (who has done nothing wrong at this point), which in turn leads to Noah's suicide and subsequent framing for the murder.
This should be Noah's way of meeting his beloved Priscilla in the ‘heaven’ that he has created, but of course there is a problem or two. Not every scrap of information has been approved for this universe-wide upload of information, for one thing; and ‘heaven', being traditionally occupied by the dead, seems awfully quiet—even a ‘heaven’ London—until more people die to come up and say hello. What is worse, Noah cannot even find Priscilla, let alone build the life that he longed for while he and she were still corporeal.
There's a bigger problem than any of these, however. The politician who objected so to the love triangle is not content with letting his wife be with Noah, even if they happen to be dead. And he is prepared to stalk them, using any powers of mental or physical force at his command. While Noah clings to the notion of there being ‘all the time in the world'—a fact in the universe(s) he has made—there is certainly a hostile interpretation to that same phrase. And heaven encompasses everywhere, does it not, if it's your own heaven?
As well as being a masterful story, The Accord is a feat of daring and accomplished composition. I loved the brisk movement from third person preterite to a more intimate first person; but even these tenses and voices are beautifully counterpointed by short sharp sections from Noah to ‘you’ (ie to Priscilla), which read as elegiac and mournfully joyful as a Bukowski poem. This is hungry writing. Romantic, edgy, moving, tight and fast, The Accord is Keith Brooke on incandescent form and in an angry, sweary mood. The Accord offers a sense of obscene wonder the likes of which this reviewer might not have felt since Geoff Ryman's The Child Garden. This is Keith Brooke at his absolute best.
Copyright © 2009 David Mathew
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THE CITY AND THE CITY
China Miéville
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Reviewed by Mike Cobley
In 1963, Robert Silverberg wrote a short story called ‘To See The Invisible Man’ in which a man, due to antisocial behaviour, is sentenced to be invisible for a year, ie being sent to Coventry. Ordinary people are required by law not to speak with him or have any contact with him, for a year. It's been a while since I read it, but it ends with the man having reached the end of his sentence, walking out a free man, able to speak with ordinary people again. But then he sees another convict outside condemned to the same sentence, and out of a surge of compassion he breaks the law by walking up to the guy and hugging him.
A similar conceit is the fundamental structural maguffin in Miéville's The City And The City. Here we have two cities occupying the same geographical location, each with its own population, city authorities, its own buildings, streets and road names. Due to some unspecified grand schism far back in the past, the citizens of both cities have adopted psychological and social taboos against interacting or even seeing the other, even to the extent of not looking directly at things like buildings or cars specific to the other side.
The story, a first person narrative, begins in Beszel as a murder mystery investigated by Inspector Tyador Borlu; later, Borlu crosses into the other city, Ul Qoma, where he has to maintain the strict taboo of not recognising or interacting with his own city, which he can see all around him. The taboo and separation of the cities is maintained by a mysterious organisation called Breach, who seem to have access to all-encompassing, over-riding powers thereby making sure that radicals and tourists do not wreck the intricately careful mass blindness.
This was an interesting read—at the start, I felt that the prose was too colourless (yeah, that transparent prose thing!) and flavourless, add to which ... I just didn't (and still don't) buy the central conceit of selective social blindness. On a personal reality-check level, it just didn't seem remotely plausible. However, China Miéville spins a mean tale and I was intrigued enough by some of the unstated possibilities to keep reading. I'm glad I did—the story developed some nicely weird situations and led me down some unexpected avenues. So all in all, this was an enjoyable and thought-provoking book, which also reminded me how to believe in a coupla impossible things before and after breakfast!
Copyright © 2009 Mike Cobley
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THE CITY AND THE CITY
China Miéville
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Reviewed by Paul Kincaid
Let us ignore the truly terrible title. Let us ignore also the introduction by Zoran Zivkovic, which seems to be an introduction to the heroism of small press publishers and not at all to Robert Freeman Wexler, still less to the stories collected.
No, let us turn straight to the stories, which is, after all, what matters here. They are exercises in surrealism, an increasingly dominant mode among the upcoming generation of writers of the fantastic. But where some seem to feel that all they need to do is pile absurdity upon absurdity, not realising how hard it is to attract and retain the sympathy of the audience when anything can happen and so there are no consequences, Wexler introduces carefully controlled absurdity as if this is the way the world really is. It is that assumption of the real underlying the surreal that makes these much the better stories.
Well, some of them. The first story, ‘Suspension', simply has a four-armed man falling over in the snow. There is no explanation for the extra limbs, they attract no attention from the other characters, they do nothing to shape the personality of the protagonist, they have no effect upon the story (such as it is). The effect is a sense of pointlessness about the exercise, and the second story, ‘Tales of the Golden Legend', though it has an undeniable charm, is not much better.
But work your way past this opening (an off-putting start to any collection), and the stories suddenly begin to accumulate power and interest. ‘Indifference’ probably tries a little too hard to be ‘significant’ and so ends up feeling more pretentious than it should. But ‘Valley of the Falling Clouds', set in an old West of unexpected dangers, including the clouds of the title and the fungi they release, is full of stunning images. And ‘The Green Wall', about an inspiring glimpse of jungle that offers hope in a dispiriting urban America, is also a fascinating working-out of ideas.
Best of the bunch, however, is the final novella, ‘The Sidewalk Factory: A Municipal Romance', which is worth the whole of the rest of this chapbook put together. It is a sort of anti-utopia: the inhabitants of an island state subject to increasingly absurd government decrees. The geography of the island, its regimented social structure, and its relationships with the client states along the mainland all recall Thomas More's novel, but then it is twisted to distort the image just enough to make it interesting. I loved the fa
ct that if you were able to accept the surreal elements of the world, the whole thing made a coherent sense. This was a place just on the edge of being believable, and within that shape everything the characters do and everything that is done to them makes perfect sense. This could become one of my favourite stories of the year.
Spilt Milk Press: electricvelocipede.com
Copyright © 2009 Paul Kincaid
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THE SOLARIS BOOK OF NEW SCIENCE FICTION VOLUME 3
George Mann, ed
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Reviews by Andy Hedgecock
George Mann begins The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Volume 3 with an appeal for a better balance of light and shade in sf—for spaceships as well as dystopias. My hackles tend to rise when editors and critics take a prescriptive approach to the tone and thematic concerns of stories, but the piece does highlight Mann's devotion to diversity in sf—and his commitment to finding and publishing entertaining short fiction. And—to an impressive extent—the quality and variety of the 15 stories on offer reflects the ethos set out in the introduction. The collection takes in a raft of sf subgenres—philosophical, noir, spy thriller, hard sf, alternate reality, steampunk—and delivers to a consistently high standard.
I'll discuss a few highlights here: Paul Di Filippo's contribution picks up the gauntlet Mann casts before his readers and writers with ‘Providence’ an engaging, funny and bleak tale of a collapsing society of intelligent machines hooked on vinyl records. ‘The Fixation’ by Alastair Reynolds concerns an ancient geared artefact—the Mechanism—that has influenced science and philosophy in several civilisations and links parallel versions of Earth. Reynolds coherently sets out the possibilities and risks of entropy exchange and offers a profound reflection on the nature of reality and the human condition without compromising the flow of his narrative for a second. Ken MacLeod's ‘iThink, Therefore I Am’ is a snappy philosophical gag—a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of surrendering one's judgment to knowledge-based tools. A very short piece, but it's genuinely witty and provocative.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #222 Page 14
