Generation A by Douglas Coupland

There’s a sense in which it is pointless to review a Douglas Coupland novel. When casting about for some non-SF to read recently, I realised that I (a) couldn’t remember which Coupland novels I owned and (b) couldn’t remember which ones I’d read, because (c), they all blur into one.

Which is not to say that there is no pleasure in reading his books, just that he’s so zeitgeisty that every single iteration of his works bears the same relation to our contemporary culture. He’s always just ahead of the leading edge, surfing the wave of our so-called progress, reflecting it back at us with a parabolic mirror in a tight laser-like beam.

Read Microserfs and then read JPod. It almost seems like the same book, with the same set of characters, except somehow things have taken a much darker turn, like life. Coupland seems to like his characters to come in fives: each a collective hive mind which merges into one – like his books.

Clearly, Generation A is meant to make us think about Generation X. The annoying thing about Generation X was the way in which Coupland’s invisible post-boomer generation was overlooked (again) by the media in favour of a younger, more attractive demographic. In the media, “Generation X” came to stand for Bright Young Hipster Twentysomethings. Advertisers are interested in the under-25s, so that’s what the media went for. Generation X was about the neither-fish-nor-foul people whose cultural identity has been subsumed by the overwhelming numbers of the baby boom and by the inherent sexiness of those born more recently.

Coupland clearly wants to start again, beginning Generation A with an epigraph from Vonnegut, in which the X-stands-for-invisible is misinterpreted as X-stands-for-penultimate, implying that the Generations Y and Z that followed would be the last. In this construction, Generation X is an apocalyptic novel about the approaching end times. Generation A, taking its lead from Vonnegut, offers to wipe the slate clean, implying that endings can also be beginnings.

Generation A begins with this premise: all the bees are gone. The bee apocalypse is probably harder for people to get their heads round than the climate apocalypse. The idea that food crops won’t be pollenated is too scary to even contemplate. In a world without bees, apples become a mind-boggling luxury. It’s not just that we’d have to go without things, but that we’d have to live with the knowledge that it would be our fault: we killed the bees. That’s like waking up in the morning and realising you’re Hitler. I have trouble convincing students that the reason why so much of the world hates and resents the British is that for a couple of hundred years of colonial expansion, invasion, and imperialism, we were the bad guys. Our former colonies have a few hundred years to go before their future Monty Python equivalents can make jokes about “What the British did for us” without wanting to blow something up.

Generation A is narrated by five individuals from different parts of the globe, each of whom is stung by a (supposedly extinct) bee. The puzzle is to work out what happened and why. Why these people? In seeking the answer, we encounter a version of our society, the one we live in, with its instantaneous global village communications and Asian call centres and its tendency to want to solve problems with drugs.

One drug in particular, Solus, acts on the brain’s chemistry in ways which make its users feel okay about being alone. It creates a sense of pleasure in solitude, the kind you get when you’re all “peopled out” from all the clamour and noise, and want to spend some time on your own. With solus, you feel that way all the time. Happy to live a separate life, not hankering for human contact or love, not worrying about your children or parents. Solus creates the same sense of contentment in solitude that avid readers get when consuming a novel.

The point that Coupland makes is that we keep volunteering for this stuff. We voluntarily consume the products of intensive industrial agriculture – even if it means the bees are dying. Some of us volunteer to drive over-sized cars even though the oil is running out. A small percentage of us volunteer to do most of the air travel, which is supposed to be Bad For The Planet. But instead of stopping it, somehow, we defend its right to continue.

More disturbingly, we’re being socially engineered by our gadgets. Who hasn’t checked a text or taken a phone call from a distant person whilst in the presence of someone else? We value the distractions our gadgets bring us, interacting with our friends via electronic means. We stick earbuds in our ears and hope nobody sits next to us on the train. We drive our children to school instead of letting them walk or take the bus. We’re all becoming more and more addicted to Solus, and we can’t turn it off.

Generation A, like all Coupland books, is at times very funny, but it’s reflected beam of light-from-the-future is piercingly accurate. Recommended.

The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré

The Constant Gardener (published 2001) is of course one of the many Le Carré books which have been filmed. Didn’t catch the film myself, and the PVR fucked up when it was on TV recently.

Justin Quayle is in many ways a typical unlikely Le Carré hero. An unimportant man, as they say, a mid-level diplomat – not even a spy, not even pretending – who seems from the outside to be living a life of quiet, cuckolded, desperation as his much younger wife flirts at parties and gads about with her African lover.

Based in Nairobi, Quayle tends his garden and puts in his 9 to 5 at the British High Commission, ignored or sneered at by his colleagues – and particularly by his line manager Sandy Woodrow, a serial adulterer who has feelings for Quayle’s lovely wife Tessa and has asked her to elope with him.

Meanwhile Tessa pours her energy into aid work, supporting the women of Kenya as much as she can, and causing the occasional diplomatic embarrassment when her passions take her “too far”.

But then she turns up dead, with the African/Belgian doctor whom everybody assumes was her lover, in an out-of-the-way spot up country. Quayle is sequestered in Woodrow’s house to protect him from the press, and after the funeral is quietly ushered to the airport to take a leave of absence back in Blighty.

What’s brilliant about this is that Le Carré introduces us to Quayle (and his tragic marriage) as others see him. We see him through Woodrow’s eyes, and through Sandy’s wife Gloria’s eyes. We see part of the British police investigation, the behind the scenes manoeuvrings. Quayle is meek, mild, undemonstrative, unimpressive, living entirely within himself. Sandy himself seems more affected by Tessa’s horrible death, and we learn why, as he obsesses about her lovely face, her beautiful silhouette through her clothes against a backlit window.

One vignette tells us all we need to know about Tessa and the obsessive Woodrow. In hospital following the still-birth of her child, Sandy comes upon Tessa as she breastfeeds a sick Kenyan woman’s baby because the living baby’s mother is too sick to do so. That’s Tessa, putting her own grief aside to help a sister in need. Meanwhile, Sandy stands over her ogling her breasts and getting hot under the collar, convinced that her wanton display of boob means that she’s gagging for it.

And before you know it, you’re almost 200 pages into a 560-page novel, and then – at last – you start to learn something about the sidelined Justin Quayle’s inner self. It seems to be such a bold stroke, to withhold – and withhold – Justin’s point of view, for a third of the length of the book. And then you get it, not all at once, but slowly and painfully, you realise the strength of the marriage, of the love between Justin and Tessa. You learn how Gloria has fallen for Sandy, because she perceives his inner strength; how Tessa’s friend Ghita has fallen for Sandy, and how Tessa’s supposed lover was… well, spoiler alert.

So now Justin does what unlikely Le Carré heroes do. He stubbornly refuses to fit his stereotype, and manages to follow his wife’s footsteps as he investigates the causes of her death. We’re talking Big Pharma, big profits, and the endless exploitation of Africa by unscrupulous corporations. Le Carré adds in a note at the end that the truth is far, far worse than his fiction.

It’s not easy, and it’s not a slick operation, but Justin has some help along the way; still, ultimately he’s fighting the kind of implacable foe who will not be defeated. Le Carré is as angry as ever, but more gentle – in the way of Quayle – than he has been in other recent titles like Absolute Friends. The power of these corporations, the governments they’ve corrupted, the unlikeliness of any happy outcome – ever – makes for a profoundly depressing outlook, but the sheer poetry of Justin’s dogged determination – his constancy indeed – provide the possibility of something to be redeemed from this world.

This is not sentimental. We’re not meant to leave this with a warm feeling about the few good people there are in the world. We’re supposed to realise that some victories – even the most comprehensive triumphs of the powerful – are sick and hollow and that the closeted lives we lead as beneficiaries of developing world exploitation are part of the sickness.

Highly recommended.

The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

At the end of my review for The Lincoln Lawyer, Connelly’s previous book about Mickey Haller, self-proclaimed “sleazy defense lawyer”, I suggested that the Bosch-meets-Haller sequel wasn’t far away and here it is.

Detective Bosch and Haller are half brothers, something Bosch knows but Haller doesn’t. Haller has been off the scene for a couple of years after being gun shot and then becoming addicted to pain killers. At the beginning of The Brass Verdict, he’s about to make a tentative return to work when 31 active cases drop into his lap.

Another lawyer has died in suspicious circumstances and left Haller his practice. Unfortunately, the dead lawyer’s briefcase and laptop were stolen, so Haller has to scramble to get up to speed. One of the 31 cases is a high-profile Hollywood murder case. So far so good, but then Bosch turns up and starts asking questions about the dead lawyer and why he was fielding phone calls from the FBI, and what happened to $100,000 that disappeared from his bank account, and Haller finds himself caught up in the sleazy tactics of his predecessor before he’s quite ready to get back to full-time work.

This book, like The Lincoln Lawyer before it, is a fascinating read. The level of detail you get as Haller builds his case is extraordinary; you wouldn’t think the minutiae of practising law would be interesting, but they are. Haller is always searching for the “magic bullet”, the key piece of evidence which will blow the case wide open and plant reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. Connelly is so very practised at writing this kind of thing that it’s all too easy to find yourself unable to put the thing down at one in the morning. A genuine page-turner that builds to a gripping climax.

Highly recommended.

Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones

First published in 2001, Gwyneth Jones’ Bold as Love is an odd mix of prescience and confusion. Whoosh goes the sound of many of the pop-culture references in this novel going over my head; dong ding are the bells that ring.

The counterculture. We know who they are; we might even agree with them on many points; we might even consider ourselves part of the counterculture. Except, it’s never as simple as just one culture, or just one counterculture. The problem with countercultures is that we can often disagree as violently with each other as we do with the Man.

‘But that wouldn’t be a problem for you, would it, Sage? Being a Celt yourself.

‘Yes it would,’ said Sage, cheerfully. ‘I hate ‘em, crystal swinging faggots, neo-fucking Bronze Age dykey matriarchs with their fuckwit psychic powers. Sooner they get wiped out by that mutant-cholera epidemic they are asking for, the better I will be pleased.’

Dong ding, indeed.

Climate campers, road protesters, tree-huggers, war-stoppers, custard-throwers, Tarot fanciers, eco-mentalists, organic organists, Alternatives, herbalopolists, homeo-pacifists, indie rockers, bikers, Islamists, Nationalists, anarchists: all of these and more could lay claim to the countercultural title, and most of them make an appearance in Bold as Love. They’re hardly likely to agree to disagree. A lot of them probably live in Brighton, which is where the author lives, it says here. Brighton seems to be Flake Central at the moment. All the flakes I know live there.

Britain is falling apart, the infrastructure is crumbling, everything is in crisis. The political classes are short termers, incompetent grafters and opportunist chancers. Dissolution festivals are going on all over the place. It’s like August Bank Holiday weekend on designer steroids. One of the political chancers hits upon the idea of inviting some leading counterculturalists to some kind of think tank summit with the aim of healing the rifts of Broken Britain and/or making the government look cool. Some of them treat it as a joke.

Our heroes are Ax, an obscure indie rocker with gifted guitar fingers; Sage (aka Aomoxomoa), some kind of Grateful Dead-worshipping immersive electronic multi-media artist billionaire; amd Fiorinda, a fucked-up teenage singing sensation of no fixed hairstyle (Rutles joke). They find themselves caught up in events (in the case of Ax, as part of a Master Plan), but then fall victim to one who is playing the game more seriously than they. Things take a dark turn.

At times this is inspired; at times you can almost see events like this unfolding for real. Elsewhere, it sometimes feels as if you’re viewing things from too-oblique an angle; you want the camera to turn around a bit and give a clearer view. There are some disturbing elements too. Child abuse, casual drug use; the characters hide behind masks and you wonder whether you like them or not; or care. It’s dense and seems to go on forever, and reaches no real resolution (there are no less than four sequels, and a confusing web site that positively screams www.1996.com).

In the end I’m not sure. I found it interesting, enjoyable at times, boring at others. I wanted it to end, and found myself strangely moved in places. The acid test is whether I’d pick up one of the sequels, to continue living with these characters for another 400 pages or so. The answer is, not right now, maybe later.

I’ve overdosed on SF this summer. Just read a Michael Connelly and it was like a breath of fresh mountain air. I might read another of these, later. I like Gwyneth Jones’ style

Cautiously recommended.

Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2008 Edition; and 2007 Edition; both edited by Rich Horton; also: The Year’s Best Science Fiction: 26th Annual, edited by Gardner Dozois; and, The New Space Opera 2, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan; and, Eclipse 2, edited by Jonathan Strahan

Phew. I’ve certainly, probably, overindulged in the old science fiction anthologies this summer. So what else is new?

Here are three very different approaches to the science fiction anthology. Gardner Dozois has been creating a doorstep of around 300,000 words every year for the past twenty-six, with each collection offering a wide variety of writers and styles, and a brilliant diversion. Once you’ve amassed a collection of these, er, collections, you have a pretty comprehensive survey of the development of science fiction writing over the past three decades. It’s in the nature of these anthologies to offer reprints of previously published work, so, for example, if you subscribe to Asimov’s, or Locus, or have read any original collections in that year, you’ll recognise quite a few of the stories. But Dozois has good taste, and rarely includes a story you’d consider skipping. I’ve possibly skipped just a couple in all the many volumes I’ve devoured.

So, where do you turn for a collection of brand-new, previously unpublished work? That’s the job of the original anthology, of which The New Space Opera 2 is an example. I’ve previously reviewed, and enjoyed, Volume 1 (though the first edition didn’t mention that there’d be others). With this second edition, Dozois and Strahan have again commissioned a collection of bang-up-to-date new stories, which is just as enjoyable as the first. Amazingly, none of the writers in this second edition were featured in the first, showing just how many talented writers are working at the moment.

Another original anthology, also edited by Jonathan Strahan, is the Eclipse series. I’ve previously reviewed Volume 1, and – as promised – Eclipse 2 was published late in 2008. I have to confess to feeling a little disappointed in Volume 2. There are a few good stories, but the mixture of fantasy, slipstream, and SF didn’t grab me this time. Your mileage may differ, and the series is certainly worth supporting.

The nice thing about Eclipse, or the Asimov’s anthology I reviewed a while ago, or (to a lesser extent) The New Space Opera, is that the books aren’t massive bricks and so are easier to carry around with you. Sometimes you don’t want to be weighed down by 300,000 words, and its this niche of the market that Rich Horton’s “Best of the Year” clearly targets (links: 2007; 2008). Though he draws from the same sources as Dozois, he producers slimmer volumes with fewer stories. In effect, he boils down the field even more than Dozois. As such, there are some stories that will appear in both volumes – though not as many as you might think.

Like Dozois, Horton does a good job of picking a wide variety of writers and styles, but each story is entertaining and worth reading. I noticed a maximum of four in each volume that had also appeared in the Dozois collection, which isn’t too bad.

There has to be a word of warning to those considering the original anthologies here, or indeed Strahan’s YA original anthology The Starry Rift. Inevitably, any story printed in an original anthology will be under consideration for the “Best of the Year” collections, and this is what I found this year. Quite a few of the stories in Dozois’ 26th annual were in Eclipse, or The Starry Rift, or The New Space Opera. So the wider you read, the more likely you are to find yourself reading the same stories twice… or more.

Still, most of these come highly recommended. Dozois sets the standard for completeness, but Horton is the one for those who want less weight, or just want to dip a toe into the water. As for fans of space opera, The New Space Opera collections are essential reading.

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.

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

After giving The Caryatids a bit of a slagging, I thought I’d go back to where it all started for Bruce Sterling, and assess is almost legendary early novel Islands in the Net, which was written long before most of the world had even heard of the internet (1988), let alone used it. Here’s what the Wikipedia on Sterling has to say about it:

A view of an early twenty first century world apparently peaceful with delocalised, networking corporations. The protagonist, swept up in events beyond her control, finds herself in the places off the net, from a datahaven in Grenada, to a Singapore under terrorist attack, and the poorest and most disaster-struck part of Africa.

It’s a trap, of course, to judge a work like this on the basis of its predictions. Like 1984, it wasn’t really in the business of predicting the future, just pointing out those aspects of the future which are/were already with us.

Nevertheless, like 1984, Islands in the Net does an extraordinary job of predicting some of the major issues of the early 21st Century: failed states as havens for all kinds of ‘pirates’, a world obsessed with so-called intellectual property, weak states, nuclear weapons falling into the ‘wrong’ hands, powerful corporations, and a growing dependence on electronic data. All of this is in there, and more. So, some things are “wrong”, and the world of the novel isn’t entirely recognisable as the one we live in, but it’s still as recognisable to us as some elements of Orwell’s 1984 (surveillance society, permanent war, two-minute hates in the media etc.).

That said, it’s still more of a Menippean Satire than a novel, though it has more narrative plot than The Caryatids. Clearly, Menippean Satire is what Sterling does. One thing he doesn’t really do is offer solutions to the various warnings in the book. Surely our personal data needs to be kept secure, and huge government databases are specifically not secure, but apart from adopting a paranoid style, there doesn’t seem much for an individual to do.

I enjoyed this more than The Caryatids, but still found it a bit of a drag. But then that’s true of a lot of important books, in the end, and maybe more people should read Sterlng. Islands in the Net on the school curriculum, anyone?

Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine 30th Anniversary Anthology – edited by Sheila Williams

In many ways, this is a disappointing collection – not because the stories aren’t excellent, which they are, but because there aren’t enough of them. Asimov’s publishes so much high quality short fiction that they could easily fill ten of these anthologies – and they should. There’s certainly room in the market for a similar collection of SF novellas.

As it is, we have this collection from Tachyon publications, which is a terrific idea. Inevitably, a lot of the stories here have already been anthologised (by Gardner Dozois, for example, in his annual Best of the Year collections), but it’s useful to collect them under the Asimov’s banner. I subscribed to Asimov’s for a year or so, but got fed up of all the snail mail spam reminding me to renew my subscription, or phone-a-friend, or whatever. I also didn’t like anticipating what I’d eventually read in the annual Dozois collection.

I’d happily buy a Best of Asimov’s every year, though, publishers take note.

This collection features some of the major names in SF who have emerged in the past decade or so, including Robert Reed, Stephen Baxter, Charles Stross, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Swanwick; and some of the major names of earlier eras who have continued to write to a high standard or have since died, including Robert Silverberg, Octavia E. Butler, Isaac Asimov, Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula K LeGuin. As such, it’s an excellent survey of the past 30 years and a pocket-sized reading list. Next time you’re browsing the SF on Amazon, you can safely ignore the shit being promoted on the front page and run a search on any of the names here, all of whom write readable, imaginative, and thought-provoking fiction.

The late Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” for example, is an astonishing story about a near-future situation in which a worldwide virus has attacked the human brain, leaving people mentally incapacitated but alive, unable to speak or make sense of the advanced industrial civilisation they wake up in.

Ursula LeGuin’s “Ether, OR” is a flight of fancy about a strange rural town and the people who cope with its weird ways. Kelly Link’s “Flying Lessons”, from the mid-90s, has the ancient Greek gods living out their myths in modern-day Scotland (you can read it here, by the way).

Perhaps my favourite story here is Robert Reed’s “Eight Episodes”, which is a meditation on one of those short-lived SF TV series (like Firefly, or Surface, or dozens of others) which gets cancelled by the network part-way through its run and garners a cult following. Except this one, about an alien invasion, is very strange indeed, and nobody seems to know who was responsible for producing it.

A great collection, worth having, and probably not as daunting as the 250,000-300,000 word behemoths that Gardner Dozois put out every year. Certainly one for those who want to dip their toes into contemporary SF, and as such highly recommended.

The Caryatids by Bruce Sterling

You can imagine that when Cory Doctorow reviewed The Caryatids on BoingBoing, I went straight onto Amazon to buy it. His enthusiasm for the book was boundless, and to be honest I was expecting an absolutely top drawer science fiction novel about climate disaster and its aftermath.

Read Doctorow’s review and you too may be inspired to buy it.

I was disappointed, however, not least because this isn’t actually a novel at all. It’s a Menippean satire in which a single character (in this case, a clone, so a character with multiple personae) circulates the world of 2060 and essentially interviews a variety of other characters with particular points of view. That’s it, really. It’s not that there are no ideas of interest here (all the ideas in Cory Doctorow’s review are present and correct), but there’s no narrative plot, no satisfying resolution, and no character development.

There’s a lot of gnomic speechifying, though the dialogue is oddly stilted (perhaps deliberately, given the characters’ Balkan origins), and so this reminded me of early Don Delillo novels like Americana for a lot of its length. Not as funny, though. In fact, there’s not a lot more here than you read in Doctorow’s review: you get the idea, but then it doesn’t go anywhere.

Disappointing. And by no means the best novel of 2009, I hope.

Point of No Return – Scott Frost

I was disappointed by this, the third Alex Delillo novel. I’d previously enjoyed Frost’s Never Fear, but found this to be both preposterous and skippable: no point of return.

Whereas Alex Delillo of the Pasadena PD seemed quite a different sort of protagonist in the earlier book, with positive personal relationships and respect for her colleagues, here she runs all the classically stupid risks you’d expect of an out-of-control maverick cop, and it’s all so ridiculously portentous that you just want to tell her to get a grip.

Like Spook Country (see review below), this book has Iraq (and GPS chips) as part of its backdrop, but not for one moment does it seem reasonable for a detective in the Pasadena PD to get involved in the affairs of a bunch of mercenaries and military types (who operate a long way out of her jurisdiction) in her search for a missing LAPD cop she met once at a conference. What?

Conspiracy is it? Cover up? Another one?

The inner voice of Delillo, as she agonises and labours every point and lurches from place to place, grates on the nerves. What has this got to do with her job? Nothing. But she takes “a few days off” anyway to look into matters, never seeming to notice that she’s making everything a lot worse than it was to start with. There are no scenes here with more than two people: Delillo goes through a series of one-on-ones with people who either (a) drop dead, or (b) disappear, and whinges so much about every little thing that goes wrong that you wish she’d (a) drop dead, or (b) disappear.

No point, no return, not recommended.