The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction, edited by Mike Ashley

The subtitle of this collection is a bit of false advertising: “New Generation Far-Future SF,” is what it says, but somebody sack the editor, because he has taken considerable liberties. He’s been asked to do the job, and then somewhere along the line he’s got all het-up by the know-nothing marketing monkeys who work for his publisher, and he’s decided, as a fuck-you, to find a few stories from the Golden Age which fit the brief. But do they really? I think not.

As one slightly bitter Amazon.com reviewer points out, 11 of the 19 stories in the collection were published before 2000. Certainly, some of them were being reprinted for the first time, but it turns out that relatively few of these stories are “new generation” and precious few are set in what now passes for the “far future.” I’ve pointed out before that the current trend in SF is to throw humanity into impossibly distant futures. In the Golden Age, writers generally thought in hundreds of years at best. These days, the fashion for post-human, sigularity SF thinks in terms of tens or hundreds of thousand years.

So there are a couple of stories that fit that brief, but a whole chunk of them that do not. This is carping, of course. I’m not saying that there aren’t extreme ideas here, but some of them are most definitely not “new generation” and the effect can be jarring, to encounter, for example, the thoughtless sexism of some of the Golden Age stuff (like “The Girl Had Guts” by Theodore Sturgeon).

That carping aside, I just wonder what the point of this collection is. Pick any of the Gardner Dozois “Best SF…” collections of the last 10-20 years, and you’d have a pretty similar representation of new voices and extreme ideas, all picked with Dozois’ unerring taste. Get his “Best of the Best” and this Mammoth collection pales in comparison.

Another one of my grumpy summer reads: not recommended.

A Hidden Place by Robert Charles Wilson

This reprint of Wilson’s 1985 novel A Hidden Place is a nice edition with a cover that gives very little clue as to its contents. Having just complained about the skimpiness of Michael Connelly’s The Overlook (see previous review), I have to admit that this, at 224 pages, is even skimpier. If not exactly a novella, it’s not much longer.

That said, though, this is far less formulaic than The Overlook, and wears its genre clothes awkwardly. It’s a depression-era mix: Of Mice and Men meets The X Files.

Wilson’s prose is superb, and this strange little tale of small town America unfolds gently, so that you do in fact feel inclined to take your time not to rush through the 224 pages and instead savour every word.

Travis is taken in by his Aunt and Uncle in Haute Montagne (terrible name) after his mother dies. He’s not a happy kid, and his Aunt’s house is not a happy home. They already have a lodger: an astonishingly beautiful woman who definitely does not belong in this place. Travis takes up with a local waitress, a slow scandal unfolds, and the brutality of the Depression is never far away.

Meanwhile, a confused and apparently simple-minded hobo, Bone, rides the rails around America with two other displaced persons, who take advantage of his memorable looks and size), as well as his apparent ability to take punishment that would kill anyone else. Bone is definitely out of the same literary tradition as Steinbeck’s Lennie, and of course we wait to find out what Bone’s connection with the mysterious scandal of Haute Montagne is all about.

One of the few books I’ve enjoyed this summer: and I’ve yet to read a bad Robert Charles Wilson novel, so: recommended.

The Overlook by Michael Connelly

I’ve had a grumpy bumper summer of reading, and this one didn’t help my outlook. I knew what to expect, because I’d heard Connelly talking to that nice Simon Mayo about it on Five Live, but the in-studio reviewers were raving about it, so I bought it anyway.

My copy was one of a pile “signed by the author” in my local Waterstones, but I wouldn’t have been bothered about that if the hardback hadn’t been half price, too. Anyway, Connelly’s signature looks like he was holding the pen in his mouth and signing four other books with his hands and feet at the same time.

So, what have we got? At 272 pages this is skimpy, an afternoon’s read. Originally serialised in the New York Times, Connelly rejigged it some for the book edition, but what you’ve got is a 24-style time-of-the-essence thriller featuring Harry Bosch.

It starts off with an execution-style killing, Bosch is called to the scene, the FBI get involved, blah blah. I’m reluctant to give more of the plot away. Quite a lot was given away on Five Live, and just one phrase was enough for me to know exactly how this one was going to turn out.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen the conflict-of-agency thing too many times, and frankly I’d expect more of Bosch these days – given the knocks he’s taken in recent outings – than that he’d get involved in yet another one.

There’s nothing wrong with Connelly’s writing in this one, it’s just that it’s all too thin. I think this was best left as an outing in a newspaper, perhaps publishable along with another (or several other) short piece(s). Strictly for completists, and whatever you do, don’t pay full price for it, because it is not a full-price book.

The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman

Marketed by good old Gollancz as one of a special selection of “SF Masterworks”, warning bells should have been ringing for me when one of the blurbs/review quotes suggested that this particular SF novel shaded over into the realm of literary fiction. Oo er. Personally, literary fiction is my least favourite genre, and I find it all terribly tedious.

The Child Garden could be described as part of the recent trend in exploring the post-human condition. In this case, humans have been (a) genetically engineered to photosynthesise at least part of their nutrition; and (b) left (by various ironic medical advances) with a terribly short lifespan and hardly any childhood. Most people are dead at 35 and therefore achieve adulthood at around 8 years of age. Knowledge is programmed into people by viruses, and teenagers are (and act as if they are) middle aged.

So far so standard. Larry Niven was writing about knowledge being programmed into people by strands of RNA in the 70s (see his early novel A World out of Time or the short story “Rammer”), and many of the other ideas were as familiar.

The literary part of this was the way it was written. All the ideas are over-laboured, and the prose is dense and repetitive, eminently skipable. It aspires to be Dickensian in the manner of The Light Ages, but it ends up emulating Dickens only in as much as it is a bit dull.

This was a real disappointment, because I was quite prepared to trust that Gollancz had genuinely selected some corkers in its SF Masterworks series. But looking at the list, that purveyor of wank Philip K. Dick is over-represented, and I’m afraid that Ryman’s Child Garden is more of the same. Incidentally, the blurb on the cover mentions a London surrounded by rice paddies, as if this was some kind of prescient global warming tome. I honestly have no idea where the blurb writers got the bit about rice paddies from. Maybe a bit I skipped.

(Gollancz’s list does have some good titles, but I do wish they’d revisit their classic series of annual “Best of the Year” collections, edited by Terry Carr.)

Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs is the creator of the character Temperance Brennan, forensic pathologist, as featured in the TV Series Bones. Now, Bones on TV is quite good, because it’s got that bloke from Buffy/Angel in it and other supporting cast members who make up the shortfall in the lead character, who is uptight, smug, ungiving and generally annoying. In fact, the chemistry between Emily Deschanel and David Boreanz is excellent, and Boreanz in particular is showing that his turn as Angel was no fluke.

But the books upon which Bones is based are a different matter. This was my first, and (I suspect) my last. The problem with a writer who makes such a huge deal out of the fact that she has the same expertise as her lead character and works in the real world in the same professional capacity is that she comes across as a bit, well, smug. Arrogant. Self-regarding, self-promoting, conceited, and generally up herself.

In other words, Kathy Reichs looms large as you read the book, and you wish she wouldn’t. In fact, you miss all the TV characters, none of whom are in the book. You miss Seeley Booth. In print, I didn’t care about any of the characters, and I wanted it all to be over in a nice, neat, TV-sized 42 minutes. It wasn’t.