The Terror by Dan Simmons

In 1865, Sir John Franklin led two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, on a doomed expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage through the frozen seas North of Canada. While traces of the expedition have been found, none of the 100+ members of the crews apparently survived.

Apart from the foolishness of such an enterprise, the British Navy were (of course) ill-equipped for the frozen North, and the sophisticated white men were in the habit of sneering at the Inuit peoples who knew how to live on the ice. The ships were frozen in and never emerged from the ice. Although the ships’ stores supposedly consisted of rations for three years, the tinned food is thought to have been badly preserved, and the hopelessly impractical clothing would have been constantly cold and wet.

All of this is amplified in Simmons’ long novel, a fictional account of what happened to the ships out there on the ice.

While not well received in all quarters, I found this 900+ page paperback to be gripping and visceral, and though the outcome seemed a foregone conclusion there is a certain poetry to the ending which seems fitting and satisfying.

Simmons chooses several points of view to tell the story, jumping from ship’s captain to doctor, to junior officers, and back again. In some ways, the story is like a scaled-up version of “Ten Little Indians”: we know people are going to die, but we read on to learn just how it happened. The twist in Simmons’ tale is the monster on the ice, an enormous beast with preternatural powers and an uncanny ability to rise up out of the ice to dispatch people in bloody ways.

But the real horror – or terror – here is to do with the poorly equipped, incompetent, doomed sailors on their fruitless and pointless mission. The very idea that people habitually set out to sea with little understanding of proper nutrition or food preservation, of science and nature, in order to find a sea route which would – at best – be passable for a month or two each year is truly astonishing. Simmons is great at bringing home the horror:

The Holland tents were soaked and never dried. The sleeping bags they cracked open in the late evening and crawled into as darkness fell were soaked and frozen inside and out and never dried. When the mean awoke in the morning after a few stolen moments of fitful sleep … the inside of the inside of the circular and pyramid tents were lined with thirty pounds of hoarfrost that fell and dripped on the men’s heads…

Highly recommended.

Steampunk – edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer

The big question with any anthology like this is, if you’re new to the genre, does this make a good introduction? I think the answer here is a qualified yes. It has to be qualified, because this is a genre which is at its best in the longer form – novella, at least, or novel – and at shorter lengths you perhaps don’t get as much time to immerse yourself in what can be a very strange fictional world.

What is steampunk? An alternative name for it might be “Victorian Fantasy”. Steampunk is a genre of science fiction inspired not by the latest developments in science and technology, or by speculation about the future, but by the original practitioners of fantasy and science fiction: Mary Shelley, H P Lovecraft, H G Wells, and Jules Verne. Steampunk re-imagines the science and technology of the late 19th Century and creates adventure stories full of steam-powered robots, airships, golems, and Victorian dress.

The setting doesn’t always have to be the 19th Century. Another way of thinking about steampunk is to see it as counter-factual historical fiction, or alternate history. So there can be a lot of “what ifs” as well as not-quite-right technology. Ian R. MacLeod’s fantastic novel The Light Ages is an example of this (in it, the industrial revolution is driven by aether/magic rather than by the steam engine).

If you watch any Doctor Who, you’ve already been exposed to some steampunk tropes. The Doctor, like the hero of Wells’ The Time Machine, is a time traveller. His incarnations often wear Victorian style frock coats and accessories; he stores his soul in a pocket watch; he encounters clockwork androids and moving statues; his TARDIS seems to be cobbled together from semi-organic parts and anachronistic technologies; and so on. This year’s Christmas Special, “The Next Doctor” was quintessentially steampunk: with an enormous steam-powered robot, Victorian setting, and even a hot air balloon.

So if you like that kind of thing, then you’ll like this. The collection begins with a very interesting essay which discusses the popularity of a certain style of 19th Century gung-ho dime novel fiction (Edisonades), which is (of course) forgotten as far as literature studies are concerned. It’s one of the ironies of English/American literature that you end up studying the stuff that hardly anybody reads. The really popular stuff, the trashy adventure stories and romances, are largely forgotten.

While the Edisonade celebrated technology and invention, steampunk more often focuses on the dark side, the unintended consequences (the enslaved child labourers in the Doctor Who Special are an example).

The first story here is James P Blaylock’s “Lord Kelvin’s Machine”, which is about an attempt to foil an evil genius who wants to destroy the world by triggering volcanic eruptions. There are other stories here from Ian R. MacLeod, Mary Gentle, Ted Chiang, Paul Di Filippo, Rachel E. Pollock and Neal Stephenson.

Perhaps the most disturbing story here is “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel” by Joe R. Lansdale, which takes the form and content of the Edisonade adventure novel and mixes it with very dark stuff indeed, including graphic violence and sexual violence.

“The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance” by Michael Chabon is set in an alternative America in which the rebels haven’t successfully revolted, and the British are still in charge – complete with air ships and plans to travel into space. It’s interesting, but reads a bit too much like the opening of a novel.

Ted Chiang’s “Seventy-Two Letters” is a golem story, set in a world in which automata are animated by the magic of the Kabbalah (and face opposition from the equivalent of Luddites).

The collection finishes with a survey of steampunk sources by Rick Klaw, and another survey of steampunk graphic novels and comic books.

Recommended, but do read some novels as well.

The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman

I’ve missed out on most of Joe Haldeman’s career. I believe I read The Forever War a couple of decades ago, and I dismissed him as one of those gung-ho Viet Nam vet writers who writes SF novels as extended metaphors for the war.

More recently, I came across his superb novella, “The Hemingway Hoax”, which I believe was later published as a full-length novel. I’ve not read the longer version – it worries me. What could you possibly add to a perfect novella to turn it into a novel? Anyway, I realised belatedly that Haldeman was a more three-dimensional writer than I’d given him credit for. His style is fresh, natural, contemporary – you’d never believe he started his career in the 70s.

The Accidental Time Machine was published last year, and it’s a straightforward SF adventure with a simple premise. There’s very little toying with paradox and and brain-aching concepts, and it’s straight on with the story, a ripping yarn about a graduate student who builds a bit of lab equipment that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. Instead, it seems to be able to move forward in time. The twist is, it goes further forward by a factor of twelve each time it’s switched on.

Problem is, it has a tendency to move a little bit in space, too – which makes it the Maguffin – or the main driver of the plot.

Haldeman keeps the science plausibly in the background – though an author’s note at the end links it to recent scientific research. His hero is pleasantly hopeless – though smart enough to learn, and the future he encounters is intriguing. The book’s an effortless read, it’s not one of these 900-page epics with two sequels, so it’s well worth picking up.

There’s a taster for Haldeman’s latest, Marsbound, at the end, which is enough to make you want to read that one, too.

Recommended.

The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter

The H-Bomb Girl, for younger readers, is a time travel story calculated to appeal to the Doctor Who set.

Laura, 14, has moved to Liverpool with her mum, who is separating from Laura’s dad, who is in the RAF. It’s 1962. Liverpool is an interesting place, just coming out of the post-war austerity years, with a young and exciting music scene centred around a band called The Beatles.

Laura’s dad is paranoid about something, and there’s some strange bloke lodging with Laura and her mum, and one of Laura’s teachers is strange, too, looking at her funny and making gnomish comments. Across the Atlantic, the Cuban missile crisis is in full flow, and for a time it seems as if the world will end.

This story is a delight, full of great detail on British life in the early 60s, but also stuffed with anachronisms and strangeness, time-travel tricks and parallel worlds. As an adult you notice a few logical inconsistencies, but to give a younger reader a taste for modern science fiction it would be hard to do better.

I bought this for my daughter, following my appeal on the other blog for recommendations. I’d already spotted this on another web site, but hadn’t realised it was so recently published (Sept 2007). With a female protagonist of about the right age and a time-travel adventure, this hit the target (ten year old girl) perfectly: she raced through it and would like more of the same, she says.

Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson

Robert Charles Wilson’s 1998 novel Darwinia has been hard-to-find for a while, but is now available in this new (September 2007) edition. Strangely, I just mis-typed the author of this book as Charles Darwin. Charles Wilson is making a career habit of giving his books slightly misleading titles, and this is no exception. Although the “new continent” that appears in place of Old Europe in this novel is ironically named Darwinia by some elements of the press, it’s actually (in terms of landmass and geology) more or less the same as Europe, only with all signs of civilisation (and native flora and fauna) removed.

That’s the premise of this novel: an extraordinary event sees Europe disappear before most of the cataclysmic events of that terrible century, the 20th, have taken place, and the resulting land mass appears to be free for exploration and exploitation by the only world superpower, the USA.

That’s how it’s set up, at least, but of course events intervene and things are not quite what they seem. There are familiar RC Wilson themes here: the technological sublime, religionism, politics, oppression, and the willingness of individuals to make enormous sacrifices for a greater good that they barely understand.

I didn’t enjoy this as much as other RCW books. He’s clearly nagging away here, as in other novels, at similar ideas. (In The Chronoliths, giant monuments to a despotic leader appear from nowhere (apparently from the future); in Spin, an enormous, imposed, technological artefact cuts the Earth off from the rest of the universe; in Darwinia, a whole continent is replaced with another.) What it all adds up to is hard to say, except that individuals are insignificant in the larger scheme of things, which is always a depressing thought (even if it’s all-too-true), and that human nature is, on the whole, pretty shoddy. It is a big downer when you realise, in Darwinia, that having been presented with a whole new continent to play with, human beings immediately set about ripping it apart and stinking the place up.

Still, this is another novel of big ideas, written in RCW’s usual literary style, and like everything else of his, recommended.

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

This new 2007 edition of Charles Stross’ 2004 novel The Atrocity Archives brings its artwork into line with other books by the same author, such as Glasshouse, which I reviewed a while ago. The Atrocity Archive (singular) was originally serialised in Spectrum SF. For the novelisation, the award-winning novella “The Concrete Jungle” (set in the same milieu) has been added as a postscript – hence the plural Archives of the title. What with the introduction by Ken MacLeod and the author’s own Afterword, this brings the page count up to a respectable 336 pages.

In the Afterword, Stross explains a few of his influences (Len Deighton, HP Lovecraft) and acknowledges that Tim Powers ploughs similar ground with Declare, which he hadn’t read when he was writing this.

Regular readers will be aware that I rate Declare very highly indeed, combining as it does the two genres of urban fantasy and espionage. But while Declare is the work of a mature professional writer at the very top of his game, The Atrocity Archive is a first novel, written when Stross was still working in IT. It carries with it a youthful exuberance and a lot of IT-crowd in-jokes, but it probably runs out of ideas too quickly, and its hero/narrator Bob Howard finds it all just a little bit too easy to work things out. He manages to stay on top of the game, and provide explanations to those around him, whereas Powers’ Andrew Hale spends much of his time struggling to make sense of the extraordinary events he’s caught up in.

Still, I enjoyed this as much as you might expect, even if the central idea of a secret government department of the civil service, which one accesses through a deserted tube station, rankles a bit on a personal level. (In 1983, I wrote a short novel called The Obald, which had as its central idea that there exists a secret government department which is accessed through those mysterious and unlabelled doorways one sees in old tube stations. It was probably not all that bad, though too short, and might even have been publishable if I’d made more of an effort. An idea ahead of its time, perhaps. At the time, the fashion in SF was heading towards cyberpunk, which dominated the field until around 1990.)

Bob Howard appears to be an IT drone working for The Laundry (the secret government department), but at the beginning of The Atrocity Archive is activated as an agent, and finds himself involved in an operation concerning parallel worlds, nazis, and magic. The difference between this and the world-within-the-world imagined by Powers is that, for Stross, so-called magic has its origins in quantum computing. Or something. Howard’s love interest, Mo, unlike Elena in Declare, doesn’t have to do much more than get kidnapped and tied up on a couple of occasions so that she can be rescued.

This is entertaining and imaginative, and certainly worth reading. As Stross says in his Afterword, if you enjoy this, you’ll enjoy Declare, and vice versa. There’s another in the series, The Jennifer Morgue, which is on my list of things-to-read.

Phase Space by Stephen Baxter

This collection by British Science Fiction writer Stephen Baxter contains stories originally published between 1997 and 2002. They’re loosely linked around a couple of recurring ideas and arranged together in the book within a thematic structure with such catch-all section headings as Dreams, Worlds, Paradox, and so on.

The loose relationship, underlined by recurring names/characters and ideas, doesn’t really hang together as strongly as a novel, but leaves you instead with the impression of a writer worrying at ideas, approaching them from different angles, picking away.

Probably the best entries here are the ones that stand best alone, because in the end the idea of “thematically linked” is hardly strong enough for the collection to have any real punch. Ultimately, any collection of SF (by different writers) published around the same time is going to contain repeated ideas. So the ones I enjoyed here include one of the earliest, “The Fubar Suit” (recurring theme/idea here is nanotech); “Lost Continent” (alternate worlds, reality is a simulation); and “The Twelfth Album” (alternate world, in which The Beatles released one last record), which was the reason I bought this book in the first place.

At his best, Baxter can be thought-provoking and eerie, and can write stories you wish could go on longer; the worst here are the ones that were (to me) wilfully muddled and obscure, with only the loosest relationship to the majority of the others here.

Cautiously recommended: if you like stories about alternate universes, nanotechnology, and ponderings on the Fermi Paradox. It really does make you wonder.

The Best of the Best Volume 2 – edited by Gardner Dozois

The subtitle to this collection is “20 years of the best short science fiction novels,” referring to the fact that this follow-up to Volume 1 is concerned with that peculiarity of the science fiction genre, the novella.

Those who regularly embark on National Novel Writing Month are aiming for a minimum of 50,000 words in order to achieve their goal. Now, 50,000 words is pretty short for a novel, and I’d have thought 80,000 would be more of a standard length, and in the science fiction genre we’re used to mammoth books of 150,000 words and longer.

It’s only in the SF genre that I’ve seen mention of novellas (and their smaller siblings, novelettes), which can be thought of as either very long short stories or very short novels: 30,000 words, maybe a little more.

At their best, novellas acheive a wonderful feat: they somehow manage to flesh out the characters and settings of a short story to make them more substantial, but without leaving that sense that things have been padded out to meet some requirement of the publishers. I remember reading Tim Powers’ first two novels and appreciating the tight, concise writing in those 50,000 worders. A novella keeps things tight whilst allowing the writer longer to fully explore the new world s/he has created.

These novellas are lifted from the first 20 years of Gardner Dozois’ ever-excellent annual ‘Best of’ collections. I’ve been buying these regularly for a good while now (I review the 24th collection below), but there was still enough within these pages that I hadn’t seen before, because they date from those collections I hadn’t read. Gratifyingly, I only remembered one story with any clarity (mainly because I re-read it relatively recently), and I enjoyed re-reading even the most recent of these (from the 20th collection) without feeling I was going through the motions. In fact, though I must have read Alastair Reynolds’ “Turquoise Days” less than five years ago, I didn’t remember any of it.

This is partly a function of my reading such a devil of a lot of short SF, and also of having had a lot on my plate in the past couple of years.

Anyway, as always with Dozois, this impeccable collection is pure gold. Starting with Robert Silverberg’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, every single novella is excellent, entertaining, thought provoking, and sometimes moving. Probably my favourite here is “The Hemingway Hoax” by Joe Haldeman, which turns an anecdote about Hemingway’s lost manuscripts (stolen from a train in Paris at the very beginning of his writing career) into a meditation upon alternate universes and time travel. This, like some of the others here, was later extended into novel length for publication, but it’s a near-certainty that the shorter version is better.

“Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress is another wondrous novella later lengthened, but included here in its original form. It takes post Human Genome project ideas about “designer children” to one of the possible conclusions. What if you could design a human being who had no need of sleep?

Other well-known writers included are Walter John Williams, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick, Frederick Pohl, Ursula K. Le Guin, Greg Egan, Ian McDonald and Ian R. MacLeod, whose “New Light on the Drake Equation” is one of the few I’d read before. It’s a characteristically elegiac story of a lonely old man persisting in a lonely pursuit of an unfashionable scientific cause.

I’d especially recommend this collection to anyone who finds short fiction problematic but would be interested in discovering new writers. As a sampler of the best in contemporary science fiction this is hard to beat, and it makes a fine stop-gap between Dozois annual collections.

Highly recommended.

The Year’s Best Science Fiction – Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois

Seems like only yesterday that I was reading the 23rd Annual Collection edited by Gardner Doizos, and here we are with the 24th. Actually, it was almost exactly a year ago – one day difference. In fact, I could have posted this review yesterday, having just finished the book, but decided to wait till today.

Now that’s consistent reading behaviour, I’m sure you’ll grant me, and this 24th Annual represents consistent, high-quality, book editing on the part of Gardner Dozois.

For your money ($21.95 is the US cover price; I paid £9.97 on Amazon UK), you get 652 pages of original, recent, science fiction, by some of the greatest names working in the field.

The opening tale, “I Row-Boat” by Cory Doctorow, apart from the cute SF pun of its title, is a sweet and interesting tale of what happens following the Singularity that sees human beings upload themselves as data, and artificial intelligences gain status as sentient beings. The rowing boat of the title is Robbie, who has chosen, in spite of his sentience, to continue to work as a boat, carrying passengers out from a larger boat on diving expeditions. But what happens when the coral reef the divers are visiting itself gains sentience? And who are these divers? People? Or downloaded intelligences occupying human shells?

Robert Charles Wilson’s “Julian: a Christmas Story,” describes a post-oil religious society which scavenges its past without ever quite believing in it. The narrator tells a story about Julian, who will become known as Julian the Agnostic or Julian Conqueror at some indeterminate point in the future. In this story he’s a kind of exiled prince, son of a deposed leader, and propagator of heretical ideas.

“Tin Marsh” by Michael Swanwick is a claustrophobic story of planetary prospecting, a Treasure of the Sierra Madre in space. The narrator is a prospector who torments her partner to breaking point and suffers the consequences when the statutory anti-violence chip in his brain malfunctions.

“The Djinn’s Wife” by Ian McDDonald, is one of his trademark tales of the Indian Subcontinent in the future, a place which mixes ancient religious ideas with bang up-to-date explorations of artificial intelligence.

Kage Baker’s “Where The Golden Apples Grow”, like “Tin Marsh”, takes us to one of the traditional frontiers of classic science fiction. Whereas “Tin Marsh” is set on Venus, “Golden Apples” is set on a newly colonised Mars. The title’s homage to Ray Bradbury is a bit of a giveaway. So Mars is a bit like the wild west, or the Australian outback, and there are colonists and farmers and long distance truckers who ship ice from the poles to the settlements on the equator.

Alastair Reynolds has two stories in the collection. “Signal to Noise” is a superb tale of a scientist crossing between alternate realities as a stream of data – data that gradually degrades as the noise level increases. This is also a poignant story of grief and loss: what happens if the “you” in this life suddenly loses a loved one, but can temporarily visit an alternate universe and take the place of the “you” who has suffered no such loss? His other entry, “Nightingale” couldn’t be more different. Set in the same future as his other Conjoiner/Ultra novels (see review of Absolution Gap, below), it’s an atmospheric story of an incursion into an apparently deserted hospital ship in search of a war criminal.

Gregory Benford’s excellent “Bow Shock” is a brilliant story set in the very recognisable milieu of university scientific research, complete with office politics, professional jealousy, vicious backbiting, and the pressure to publish. In the end it’s another poignant story about a scientific discovery that is much more than it initially seems.

If Benford’s world is familiar enough to be happening today, right now, in a university near you, Robert Reed’s novella “Good Mountain” takes place in an environment so alien that it takes you pages to work out what’s going on. In this strange tale, what seem to be human beings mix with what seem to be genetically engineered sub-humans (“mockmen”) and travel to unfamiliar places on board what seem to be giant worms. On a world barely able to support intelligent life, they wrestle with forces beyond their control, seeing their society gradually disintegrate into fire and suffocating darkness.

If that wasn’t weird enough for you, David D. Levine’s story “I Hold My Father’s Paws” sees an estranged son and his father try to reconcile just before the father decides to become somewhat less (or more) than human.

If some of these stories are good old-fashioned modern space operas, others are most definitely post-Singularity humans-are-just-data stories of physical transformation and interface problems. Mary Rosenblum’s “Home Movies” explores the life of a person who records experiences on behalf of clients who cannot be physically present.

On the other hand, Daryl Gregory’s compelling “Damascus” explores the link between religious psychosis and some variant of CJD (or Mad Cow Disease, if you’re a cow).

Greg Egan’s “Riding the Crocodile” manages to be both post-singularity and a kind of space opera, as humans-who-are-data decide to explore an inaccessible part of the universe at the end of an impossibly long life.

“The Ile of Dogges” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette is set in the censor’s office in the time of Ben Jonson, and features a cameo from Jonson himself, who attempts to bribe the censor into not burning the only copy of his latest play. I’ll leave you to guess where the science fiction comes in.

Ken Macleod’s “The Highway Men” is another tale of the post-oil economy, featuring the kind of accidental hero you might expect to find in the highlands of Scotland.

Stephen Baxter’s “The Pacific Mystery” is an absolute corker of an alternate history, and the only story here I’d read before (In The Mammoth Book of Extreme SF). It’s set in a world in which World War 2 didn’t really happen, because the British appeasers held sway and for some reason the Japanese were unable to cross the Pacific to make war on the USA. But why…? is the great pleasure of this lovely and ultimately sad story.

There are many great stories here, but I’ll mention just one more. “Every Hole is Outlined” by John Barnes (not that John Barnes, surely?) is another space opera involving long-lived humans who are a breed apart. It’s also a kind of deep space ghost story, which leads me to conclude that this collection is imbued with sadness, a sense of missed opportunities and loss. If you read “Every Hole” and “The Pacific Mystery” and “Good Mountain” back to back you might find yourself weeping for the fate of humanity.

These sad stories probably reflect something at large in our culture that we’re barely aware of, and probably won’t recognise properly for some time to come.

As usual, unmissable and highly recommended.

The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers

Another Powers entry in the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series, The Drawing of the Dark takes us back to the Siege of Vienna in 1529, during which Suleiman the Magnificent’s over-extended forces were (just) defeated by an admixture of poorly supported conscripts and mercenaries.

This is another of Powers’ secret histories, one which seeks to explain just why Suleiman chose to attack Vienna so late in the season (October), and all the ill-fortune that beset the Ottoman army on their way to Vienna.

Brian Duffy, an Irish swordsman and mercenary, is recruited by the mysterious Aurelianus to act as bouncer in the ancient Herzwesten brewery and inn (former monastery) in Vienna. The beer at this brewery is renowned, but Duffy is still bewildered to find himself beset by obstacles, attempts on his life, and the kind of supernatural incidents that have dogged his life on his journey from Venice to Vienna to take up his post.

Inevitably, he finds himself embroiled in events beyond his ken, and in spite of his resistance, realises that he can be instrumental in preserving the West against the Ottoman onslaught. The message here is not that the East is necessarily evil and the West good, but that a certain balance exists in the universe, which is in danger of being overturned.

I love the idea that western civilisation is built upon the brewing of beer, and even that the true key to human progress is not the gift of fire but the gift of beer. This is the first Powers novel to really play into the Fisher King monomyth, the beginning of a long line of books in which he has explored elements of the myth from different angles (up to and including his recent novel Three Days to Never).

You could call this novel fantasy (does indeed feature swords and sorcery), or magic realism, or steampunk, or even counterfactual history: whatever it is, it’s a superb exploration of the nature of heroism and a superb sideways look at a slice of history.