Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010

by Damien Broderick

  On the surface, we have a tale that might almost have issued from the pen of Daphne Du Maurier, ripe for a Hitchcockian transformation to the screen.[1] But of course the gulf between the sensibilities of Du Maurier and Ballard is immense.

  Ballard is a Hermes of “inner space,” a term he popularized during the New Wave. Whether limned through omniscient narration or firsthand, as here, the psychic landscapes of Ballard’s characters assume a heft and presence congruent to, and substantial as, his meticulously rendered outer geographies (the imaginary resort of Vermilion Sands, the atom bomb-racked atolls of the Pacific, Cape Canaveral succumbing to a plague of Martian dust). The Jungian and Freudian swamps into which Paul and Jane Sinclair plunge with perverse eagerness, lured on by the will-o’-the-wisps of their fellow debauched Eden-Olympians, are the real terrain of the story. Spiked with all of Ballard’s trademarked tropes unrepentantly arrayed—the drained swimming pool, the downed pilot, the sexualized auto-crash, the JFK assassination—as well as his gnomic dialogue and black, black humor, this book is also a captivating Chandlerian mystery whose solution is assembled from honest clues without scanting or cheating.

  But at least as important as the psychological explorations are the sociocultural commentary and extrapolative contrarianism for which Ballard is famous. Sf author Bruce Sterling has maintained that out of the past fifty years of science-fictional forecasts, no one has captured the evolving lineaments of our world better than Ballard. Indeed, in sketching the rough beast continually being born out of the confluence of media and dreams, this book comes closer to a report on tomorrow’s headlines than many a “hardcore” science fiction novel. Wilder Penrose’s theory on dealing with modern insanity—”Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and has been throughout history. At times it grips entire nations in a vast therapeutic spasm”—raises frissons of recognition in the post-September 11th landscape. And Ballard produces actual shudders when he writes, “Like all the graffiti at Eden-Olympia—a fifty-million-dollar office building and a few francs’ worth of paint turns it into something from the Third World.”

  Although Ballard had not written a book in which the science fictional elements were foregrounded since at least The Day of Creation, the focus here on the abyss before us marked this novel as the work of our bravest oracle.

  [1] Ballard name-checks Hitchcock in Chapter 16; these two mordant, icy auteurs share many qualities, an observation that has not found its way into print before. At least the comprehensive book-

  length study by Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, has no index citation for the filmmaker.

  61

  Michel Faber

  Under the Skin (2000)

  CONVENTIONALLY, horror is treated as a unified genre, a useful marketing category, its products conveniently compartmentalized in the same way that booksellers shelve together all their fantasy stock, their science fiction, their thrillers and their chick lit. However, the curious thing about horror is that the term does not in essence describe a set of tropes or venues—which is notably, if not universally, true of sf and fantasy—but rather a readerly reaction, a frisson, an emotional climate. The set of signifiers that are associated with horror—werewolves and zombies, ghosts and monsters, biological strangeness and madness, to name a few—can be utilized in echt fantasy or science fiction, leaving the host genre dominant, with a horror overlay. Whereas the mere appearance of an elf or unicorn—sans explicit scientific rationale—is enough to denote a fantasy, and the mere appearance of a spaceship or alien—sans overt magical basis—is enough to denote a work of science fiction, the mere visitation of a bona fide ghost does not destroy the science-fictionality of a work, as we have seen in Pat Murphy’s The Falling Woman (Entry 7).

  Horror sf, or sf horror, has a long and notable heritage, extending back at least as far as Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing.” Lovecraft famously synchronized stark cosmological realities as distilled by contemporary astronomers with horror motifs in his Cthulhu Mythos stories. Eric Frank Russell, a dab hand at conventional horror stories for the pulps, injected shudders into his sf novel Sinister Barrier. Colin Wilson pioneered space vampires in his The Mind Parasites. Many of the films of David Cronenberg qualify, as does Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic, and Ridley Scott’s famous series that began with Alien. More recently in prose fiction, Michael Shea has made something of a specialty of sf horror, notably with his award-nominated novella “The Autopsy,” which for a long while stood at the acme of this hybrid kind of tale.

  But the arrival of Michel Faber’s first novel, Under the Skin, dethroned Shea, and the book seems likely to occupy the pinnacle for a while, so mercilessly, brilliantly creepy is it.

  Fittingly enough, we begin intimately, as if parasitically riding the shoulder of a woman named Isserley, while she prowls the highways of Scotland in her beat-up car, looking for hitchhikers. Isserley favors brawny males, and the reader’s first supposition—artfully fostered by Faber’s minimal clues, delivered in elegant prose seasoned with a stream of Isserley’s thoughts—is that the woman is a sex addict. Isserley pictures men naked, dreams of shifting them about into different positions.

  When Isserley finally secures a suitable male, her conversation seems to trend in that same direction. We share the hitchhiker’s thoughts, increasing our anxiety for him at the hands of…a dangerous, unstable nymphomaniac? But then comes the first of many jolts derailing our preconceptions. At the flick of a switch, hidden needles filled with a drug spring up and paralyze her rider-victim. The narration cuts away as, we presume, she disposes of him offstage, in some unknown fashion and to some unknown fate.

  Another day, and Isserley hunts again. We are now determined she is a serial killer. Ah, but of what stripe? Talk of comrades at a farm lead us to believe she’s part of some Manson-like cult. But little by little, in excruciatingly extracted bits and pieces, as if fragments of a corpse are washing up onto the beach Isserley touchingly loves, the reality is delivered to us. Seldom has a “big reveal” been so expertly and tantalizingly withheld.

  Isserley is an alien, surgically altered to resemble an attractive human woman, but only upon cursory inspection. “The rest of her was a funny shape, though. Long skinny arms with big knobbly elbows… Knobbly wrists too, and big hands…but narrow, too, like chicken feet. And tough, like she’d done hard work with them…no disguising how short her legs were. Still, those tits…” It’s no wonder Isserley looks odd, given that this is the real conformation of her species, seen undisguised in Amlis Vess, rich scion of the alien corporation that has set up a feedlot on earth, to produce luxury meats for consumption on the home planet:

  He stood naked on all fours, his limbs exactly equal in length, all of them equally nimble. He also had a prehensile tail, which, if he needed his front hands free, he could use as another limb to balance on, tripod-style. His breast tapered seamlessly into a long neck, on which his head was positioned like a trophy. It came to three points: his long spearhead ears and his vulpine snout. His large eyes were perfectly round, positioned on the front of his face, which was covered in soft fur, like the rest of his body.

  Amlis Vess has come to inspect his holdings, and at this point Isserley’s sad, predictable, harsh life goes into the offal bin. Vess is a crusader, a kind of PETA acolyte who believes that the “vodsels” (humans) are the same “under the skin” as Isserley and her cohorts. Vess’s visit and beliefs upset Isserley, eventually making her sloppy and undermining her orderly exile.

  Faber employs his clinical yet gorgeous prose like a scalpel across the reader’s sensibilities, particularly when unflinchingly describing the feedlot and abattoir technology of the aliens. His work resembles the early Ian McEwan of The Cement Garden era, the medical precision of Michael Blumlein, or classic J. G. Ballard, particularly in his use of outré metaphors. Here is Isserley’s estimation of a Homo sapiens penis. (Recall that she thinks of herself as “human”
and Earthlings as animals.) “His penis was grossly distended, fatter and paler than a human’s, with a purplish asymmetrical head. At its tip was a small hole like the imperfectly closed eye of a dead cat.”

  But Faber’s most empathetic and analytical passages are reserved for his tortured heroine. Despite her unthinking, evil ways, we identify utterly with her dilemma, thanks to Faber’s narrative magic, feeling every ounce of self-disgust and despair, every pain in her racked limbs (which bear the allegorical freight of a human transsexual, too). This is the true miracle of the novel: we realize that the worst horror is that inflicted by aliens upon the least of their kind, not by aliens upon their cattle.

  Of course, numerous satirical or Swiftian themes abound in the book. Colonialism, elitism, carnivore behavior, workplace automatism, corporate loyalty, bleeding-heart cluelessness, even foodie decadence (pay attention to how the alien chef gloriously describes marinating techniques and other such kitchen-show staples), all come in for a sound drubbing. But paramount over any such skewering is the portrait of a woman, however alien, coming to grips with her ethical choices and her final realization that a bad life cannot be lived rightly.

  62

  China Miéville

  Perdido Street Station (2000)

  WHEN CHINA MIÉVILLE’S towering phantasmagorical second novel, Perdido Street Station, gained the Arthur C. Clarke Award in the UK for best novel of 2000, readers had a strong inkling that a major new talent had arrived on the scene. But the full depth of Miéville’s future accomplishments could hardly be fully intuited at that moment. A rapid succession of sui generis books. The establishment by example of a whole new subgenre—the New Weird—and the personal authorial victory of widespread mainstream recognition, with his 2011 offering, Embassytown, earning coverage in such unlikely venues as Entertainment Weekly magazine.

  None of this is undeserved. With his Bas-Lag series of three books to date, Miéville follows in the tradition of Wyndham Lewis, Alasdair Gray and Mervyn Peake, pulling off the most impressive act of narrative “subcreation” (to employ Tolkien’s term for the literary instantiation of an entire “secondary world”) in ages. These books, conflating hip urbanism, realpolitik and outré flights of fancy, make one take heart for the vitality of what can at times seem like a played-out, doddering genre.

  The world of Bas-Lag exists akimbo from our familiar fields, dappled, eccentric, unthinkable and hypnotic. And yet, and yet—how ultimately true and pertinent to all that we hold dear are the people and issues and living conditions encountered in this skewed mirror. The engaging, repellent city of New Crobuzon, where all the intricate loops of Miéville’s tale tangle, is rendered with a combination of minute specificity and bold strokes. The swamps and fens, alleys and aerial trams, insane monuments and crumbling slums are impastoed with Miéville’s precise and rich prose: “In the outline of stillborn streets shacks of concrete and corrugated iron blistered overnight. Inhabitation spread like mould.” Yet the text never grows clotted, but instead, thanks to the constant action, remains compulsively readable.

  Several off-kilter kinds of technology blend with various magics to render New Crobuzon a Victorian parody, yet with its own character. Not quite a dystopia or police state, the polity is still heavy-handed and repressive, filling the evil half of the moral equation. But the counterforces of good in this scenario are themselves a base and motley lot, lusty, unrepentant and truly alive. Mostly thieves and artists, they all revolve around one rogue scientist named Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin. Through Isaac’s ill-considered researches a horrible threat, the slake-moths, are loosed upon the city, and the bulk of the book deals with the battle against these Aliens-style predators.

  There are scenes here which, like the captivating patterns of the slake-moths, are impossible to expunge from memory. If I mention an aerial battle that involves a blindfolded man with a dog strapped to his back—and the dog is issuing the orders!—then you’ll have the barest hint at the wonders that wait within.

  Miéville also accomplishes the nigh-impossible: social commentary on our own world without weighty preaching. The situation of New Crobuzon’s working poor, so reminiscent of the lot of citizens in Brazilian favelas and other global slums, comes across with great impact. Life is entropy with a grin: Perdido Street Station makes this abundantly clear, as does Miéville’s Bas-Lag follow-ups, The Scar and Iron Council.

  A massive nautical tale of obsession, magic and outlaw existence, The Scar contains enough plot for several lesser novels. The neo-Gothic, steampunkish city of New Crobuzon is in turmoil, following the events of the earlier book. Instead of producing a direct sequel to Perdido Street Station, Miéville chose to go off at an angle to his established path, opening up broader vistas of his entrancing, unique world of Bas-Lag. Whereas the previous book never ventured outside the confines of New Crobuzon, this book ranges across the map of Bas-Lag, revealing to us more history, more geography, more cultures. It was a bold, expansive move, and much was gained by this tactic. Miéville’s subcreation becomes more extensive, more of a whole organic quilt rather than a single intensely embroidered patch.

  There’s a plethora of wonders here. Miéville’s fecund imagination conjures up vivid images on every page. His alien races are truly alien, and his humans are exotically colored. Uther Doul, an Elric-style outcast, has to be one of the best literary pirate figures ever written. And the supporting character named Tanner Sack emerges as one of the most sympathetic. Set-piece by set-piece, Miéville knocks you on your butt. Whether presenting us with giant mosquito women or undead vampires, Miéville knows how to ratchet up the suspense. And the overall tale matches the apocalyptic novels of Mark Geston in its levels of insane damnation. Finally, Miéville cleverly gets us to reverse our allegiances from New Crobuzon to Armada in the exact same fashion that his heroine Bellis does.

  For his fourth novel, Iron Council, Miéville returned to the grotesquely alluring world of Bas-Lag and its mightiest city, New Crobuzon, rewarding his fans. Yet the third entry in the series is eminently readable for novices also, featuring a new cast of characters and easy immersion in the various species, politics and culture of New Crobuzon.

  The tale follows two parallel tracks—symbolically quite fitting, seeing that a mighty railroad train lies at the heart of the novel—which converge toward the climax. Between alternating episodes from both narrative tracks, we learn in an extended flashback the story of “golem master” Judah Low’s young manhood, how he worked for the grand, monumentally crazy scheme of building a railway across the treacherous terrain of Bas-Lag, and how he helped form the Iron Council when he and others stole the vehicle that was essential to the enterprise, converting it into a “perpetual train” of independence and freedom. Eventually a dozen different subplots cohere, culminating in a massive battle for the soul of New Crobuzon, with enormous sacrifices—sometimes at deadly cross-purposes.

  Miéville succeeds in his ambitious program here due to a number of factors. First are his sheer language abilities. Like Ian MacLeod, a fellow British fantasist, Miéville writes gorgeous sentences that are obviously crafted with painstaking effort, yet which read smoothly and elegantly, sheer poetry. Whether he’s describing monsters such as the “inchmen”—“Colossal and grossly tubate, a caterpillar body studded with tufts, ventricles opening and closing sphincters, dun with warning colors. The man-torso congealed into the front of that yards-long body...”—or gothic buildings or convoluted action sequences, Miéville employs diction and syntax in idiosyncratic ways, not content to fall back on clichés. Secondly, Miéville exhibits immense fertility of both plot and setting. The dozens of “xenian” sentients who share Bas-Lag with the humans, the welter of incidents that make up this history, all spew forth in convincing multitudes. Bas-Lag possesses the inexhaustibility of the real world.

  Next comes Miéville’s allusiveness. Literary precedents—Tolkien, Vance, Peake—are playfully invoked (consider that one dire battle is resolved by the unexpected arrival of hors
e-clan warriors), but so are real-world milestones. The war between New Crobuzon and Tesh bears comparison to the conflict between the USA and Iraq. The revolt of the underclass in the city harks back to Paris, 1968. And could the Mayor of new Crobuzon be Maggie Thatcher? No doubt! Anchoring his tale in both the literature of the fantastic and real history gives it a science fictional solidity that other more rarefied fantasies lack. Miéville’s sense of multiculturalism is another plus. His creation is not a whitebread affair, but partakes of many different flavors suitably transmogrified: Hispanic, European, African, Anglo. Finally, Miéville’s flair for rich characterization is pronounced.In short, what Miéville has accomplished is to render a world both utterly estranged from ours, yet eerily congruent, and to populate it with figures who breathe and bleed and love, and whom we may care deeply about.

  63

  Jamil Nasir

  Distance Haze (2000)

  DISTANCE HAZE trembles in the phase space between Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach and Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars—or maybe Dennis Overbye’s Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The words flow like honey, with just enough grains of pepper to gravel the tongue; it is a book for the ear, and the inner eye.

  Sf writer Wayne Dolan, something of a dud after five books (success with his first two, the next flopped, his marriage crumbling, his child lost to him), visits the lavishly endowed Deriwelle Institute for the Electrical Study of Religion. He hopes to reignite his flagging career with a popular science account of crackpot but enthrallingly New Agey doings at the Institute, where Nobel laureates and workaday drudges seek the spirit in the lab. Dolan plans a book akin to bestsellers about the Santa Fe Institute, driven in doing so to examine the murk in the depths of his own self-damaging and dissatisfied soul.