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?

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.

It’s taken me a while to get round to the third in a sequence that began with Forty Signs of Rain, continued with Fifty Degrees Below and now concludes with Sixty Days and Counting.

This trilogy is a real achievement in sustained writing about difficult ideas. We’re by now familiar with main protagonist Frank Vanderwal and his friends the Quiblers and the exiled buddhists from Khembalung. If the middle book of the three was concerned with a low point (a big freeze caused by the stopping of the Gulf Stream), in this one there are reasons to be optimistic, even if the problems faced by the world are immense in scale.

Phil Chase, the Vietnam veteran with a sound approach to the environment and a personal attachment to Franklin D Roosevelt, has been elected as President and sets out to make a difference in the first 60 days of his tenure. He and his advisors are “decapitating” the World Bank, giving a “root canal” to the US intelligence services, and negotiating hard with the Chinese, who are behaving “like terrorists” in threatening to burn their carbon and fuck up the world unless certain concessions are made.

Creative (and extreme) methods of reducing greenhouse emissions and rebalancing the climate include pumping vast quantities of water out of the sea into desert basins and onto the Antarctic ice sheet; or converting all US power production to solar generators; or using the nuclear reactors in US warships as temporary replacements for dirty coal power stations.

With Phil Chase in the White House, it’s like The West Wing on steroids: the ideal President who dares to say the things that the American people supposedly don’t want to hear, who overwhelms the two Houses with positive environmental legislation, and who blogs his radical thoughts, unspun, for the whole world to read.

Meanwhile, Vanderwal negotiates his way around personal problems and profoundly difficult solutions to mega problems (no solution is ever seen as easy, but with military levels of expenditure, there are solutions available). Robinson uses Vanderwal and Charlie Quibbler to muse upon these problems, and upon Capitalism, Buddhism, Game Theory, intelligence services, gene therapy, and low impact living. Vanderwal has been without a traditional place to live for some time. He has variously lived in a tree house, a garden shed, and his van. His is the truly radical outlook: live without all the things you don’t need. Desire nothing except desirelessness.

In this final book, the Buddhists and the game theory (is altruism or selfishness best to “win” the game?) come together and make a brilliant kind of sense. The answer, of course, is that like Captain Kirk in the first Star Trek movie, you rewrite the rules of the game in which “always defect” was the best option. You do this because the accounting system used in the old game was using the wrong set of numbers. As Charlie Quibbler points out to the World Bank representatives, oil companies only make a “profit” if they don’t have to pay for the environmental damage. You rewrite the rules and altruism becomes the ideal way to live and the only sure way of winning the game, in which nobody wins unless everybody wins. In the end, this reads more like an anti-capitalist sermon at times, but it is powerful stuff.

I like it. I’m still sceptical about that ability of humans to realistically affect climate one way or the other, but I’m really glad I read these books, even if my head is still spinning from all the facts and figures. Make no mistake: these are the major texts on the possible impact (and solution to) climate change. Not only recommended but required reading.

They moved in silence through the Hypothetical forest, though it was not entirely a silent place. No wind reached them at street level, but there must have been a wind blowing, Turk guessed, because the iridescent globes that crowned the tubular trunks occasionally bumped against each other and made a gentle sound that suggested a rubber mallet on a wooden xylophone.

Axis is the sequel to Robert Charles Wilson’s superb 2005 novel, Spin, which I reviewed earlier in the year. I’m torn about the necessity for a sequel. On the one hand, sequelitis afflicts the SF market, overloading bookshop and library shelves with the over-rated and over-familiar, or me-too attempts to strike gold with a copycat franchise. On the other hand, Spin was so extremely good that you wanted more of the same, and as soon as it could be provided.

If the title Spin was a slight misnomer (see my earlier review), then I’m afraid this title, Axis, strays even further from the core idea of the book, which is that the universe has been colonised (billions of years before we came along) by an infinitely connected, infinitely self-replicating nanomachine, one that can commit extraordinary god-like acts of engineering, creating an effect that can only be described as the nanotechnological sublime.

This sequel begins approximately 30 years after the events in the previous novel. If Spin ended on a note of optimism, as some humans were able to escape the oppressive conditions of the late late capitalist Earth through an arch constructed by the Hypotheticals (so-called because their existence is surmised by the humans who experience their effects), then Axis begins by dashing that optimism. It becomes clear that the oppressive and fearful regulatory authorities have passed through the Arch themselves, to the New World, the planet linked to Earth through the Arch. Worse than that, human nature being what it is, people have started exploiting the New World like Robber Barons, taking advantage of its frontier nature and trashing the new environment in exactly the same way as they trashed the old.

The New World, in fact, seems to be a bit of a disappointment (a bit like Australia, perhaps). People cling to coastal communities and the interior seems to be dry and inhospitable. Life is hard, a living is hard to make. This is not the new Eden we hoped for at the end of Spin. Still, every summer the skies light up with a spectacular meteor shower.

The only surviving character from Spin enters the narrative some way in, but the novel begins with Lise, a young woman in search of her 12-years-gone father, and Turk, a pilot/drifter she has met along the way. They soon encounter the (illegal) Fourth community (humans who have achieved a longer lifespan – or fourth age – using technology derived from the Hypotheticals), and become embroiled in their attempts to communicate with what they surmise is the intelligence behind the Hypotheticals and their effects. In other words, RCW continues here with his theme of dangerous religious extremists. In this case, the idea of god has been replaced by the Hypotheticals, but the fanatical attempts to know god continue, with the usual human consequences.

Meanwhile, the forces of conservatism are in pursuit of the Fourths, trying to control any alterations of the human genome, and using the kind of oppressive tactics that made sense in Spin, but make less sense here, because the ideas are just not developed enough. These authorities, who don’t allow morality to stall them, are too easy to evade.

Inevitably (and gratifyingly), encounters with the nanotechnological sublime leave the human characters helpless, and there’s a sense that (unlike with the previous novel) the human characters are just too small and insignificant to carry the weight of the ideas contained herein.

Like the New World itself, Axis is a bit of a disappointment. At around 300 pages, it’s short: and the design of the book itself is the only thing that ensures we even get to 300. There’s a lot of white space between chapters. Does this feel like the “holding pattern” novel in the middle of a trilogy? I don’t really know. We certainly learn a good deal more about the Hypotheticals than we knew before, but I don’t think we learn enough about the human characters in the story. We don’t spend enough time with any of them to care about them in the same way that we cared about Tyler Dupree and the twins in Spin. In the end, I wonder why Lise is there at all, unless she’s a central character in a hypothetical third novel.

I enjoyed reading it, but I’ve grown to expect much more from RCW. You’ll certainly not be able to resist reading this if you have read Spin, but there really isn’t a lot of point in recommending this to anyone who has not. Cautiously recommended then, with a reiteration of the strongest possible recommendation for Spin itself, which remains one of the best novels – in any genre – that I have ever read.

It was one of those “out on a limb” books during the writing — the kind where you ask yourself, “Can I get away with this?” But they don’t pay you for timidity, I guess. Every time I’ve stuck my neck out, in the literary sense, I’ve been rewarded for it.

Robert Charles Wilson is fast becoming one of my favourite SF writers. I’ve already reviewed The Chronoliths and Blind Lake on this blog. Surprisingly, The Chronoliths didn’t immediately strike me on first reading, and it was only when I picked it up a second time that I really got into it. Probably I was stressed and/or thinking about something else the first time I read it. Blind Lake presented no such problems, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Spin is Wilson’s most recent book, and it’s a corker. The breadth and depth of his imagination is incredible, but more than that, this is a beautifully-written book, too. Its style reminded me – throughout – of Douglas Coupland, and there’s almost no higher praise I can give. Imagine if Douglas Coupland sat down and wrote an extraordinary science fiction novel, and you’d – possibly – get something like Spin.

The Spin of the title is an acknowledged misnomer – as becomes clear as the plot develops. Simple human frailty is one of the key themes of this book, and it’s the all-too-human inability to encompass scientific vastness that causes “the Spin” to be misunderstood and misnamed. There’s also the background hum of political spin to consider, and that too is a theme of this great book. What happens to politics, what happens to society, when we are confronted with a technology so advanced and so powerful that it is clear that human politicians are irrelevant?

Like a Coupland novel, Spin revolves around three close friends, characters whose relationships are often strained but nevertheless enduring. The three are sitting out under the night sky one day in their youth, and the stars go out. The reason for this – and the consequences of it – are everlasting, and the three individuals come to cope with events in their own ways.

What is blocking out the stars turns out to be an advanced technology put in place by a hypothetical alien intelligence. The universe outside the apparent barrier is vastly accelerated relative to time on earth, which remains – subjectively – the same to those who still live there.

The idea that human brains can’t cope with vast scales – like geological time, like distances measured in light years – is not new. The climate change lobby has had to invent ever more urgent reasons for people to worry about so-called global warming, simply because it became clear that a vague threat over 100 years hence just wasn’t seen as “a clear and present danger” by most people. So instead we have this invented “sudden onset” climate change, and every weather anomaly is seen as a further sign of our doom.

In Spin, the time outside the Earth’s artificial bubble is moving so quickly that millennia pass in a matter of subjective months. And it’s Wilson’s creative play with this idea that forms the fascinating core of this book. What happens to our sun over millions of years? What happens to the rest of the solar system? How might we humans deal with or make use of the anomalous passing of time? Such vast themes might seem cold an impersonal but for the Coupland-style human relationships Wilson puts into his story.

Highly recommended.

Gardner Dozois’ 23rd annual collection of the Year’s Best Science Fiction is, as ever, the perfect introduction to an eclectic mix of wonderful new fiction, selected with an unerring eye for all that’s good about contemporary SF, whether it’s the modern space opera set in an impossibly distant future, or the elegiac pastoral. The only shame of it is that at 660 pages and over 300,000 words, it still doesn’t seem quite enough.

I treasure these annual collections, and on this occasion I’m taking my sweet time over reading it, so this will be by way of a review of the first half-dozen stories, just about any of which are worth the price of admission on their own.

I first read Ian McDonald’s novella “The Little Goddess” in Asimov’s magazine last year. Once of the disappointments for me this year is that I have read a few of these stories before, which is the price of a magazine subscription. Set in a future India, this is the story of a young girl selected at birth to be a goddess, and is an exploration of the bizarre world she finds herself in, and her eventual escape from it. Those who pick up a science fiction collection with a narrow view of what constitutes the genre will be dismayed by stories such as these. I’ve read book reviewers on Amazon complain that there aren’t enough space stories in these collections, but those people are missing out on a richly textured reading experience that immerses you in a completely different reality.

Second up is Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Calorie Man,” which is a zeitgeisty tale of a world gone wrong under the twin influences of fossil fuel depletion and GM crops. This is the kind of story that should be required reading, in my opinion, because it focuses the mind on precisely why GM crops are wrong: not because of “frankenstein” mixes of genetically adjusted wheat or corn entering the food chain, but because copyrighted and sterile seeds are pure evil.

In this story, everything is seen in terms of calories and joules: how much energy it is worth, and how much energy it requires to get it. Nobody can afford to travel far in this future, and suburban commuting areas have been abandoned, being slowly reclaimed by the huge multinational seed companies for calorie production. Nobody can grow anything without a licence (sounds horribly plausible, doesn’t it?). There’s a hint of some horrible interlude of dying off, a Great Extinction, as people literally scrabbled in the dirt for a few calories to survive. River traffic is back, and everything runs on a kind of futuristic clockwork: powerful springs that have to be wound up by genetically modified beasts on treadmills.

This is a fantastic vision of the future with a powerful contemporary relevance.

Alastair Reynolds’ “Beyond the Aquila Drift”, third up, is a satisfying modern space opera, set in a future in which humanity has discovered and made use of an interstellar transport system. They can use it, but they don’t understand it fully, and when it throws up an occasional error, nobody knows why. The error in this story is a huge one that sneaks up on the narrator and is revealed to him piece by piece. This reminded me of one of the classic stories of the Golden Age, and makes this collection three for three.

“Second Person, Present Tense,” by Daryl Gregory was also in Asimov’s last year, but it’s another stunning tale, this one of a designer drug that separates the “self” from the “mind”, which is described in terms of the English parliamentary system. The self is the Queen, who “approves” decisions taken by the parliament (the mind), but only after they have already been made, and the neural messages sent out to the body, like so many rubberstamped laws. It’s a brilliant analogy, and the idea that the “Queen” might die, and be replaced, makes for a superb piece of short fiction. Again, recommended reading for anyone, SF fan or not.

“The Canadian who came Almost all the way Back from the Stars” is co-written by Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold. It’s a story of theoretical physics set in a remote Canadian nature reserve, and it’s also a tale of doomed platonic love, conspiracy theories, and office politics. Fantastic, in all the ways you can think of.

Finally, taking us 124 pages in (what’s that? 62,000 words?), we have “Triceratops Summer” by Michael Swanwick. This one struck me as being a kind of pastoral, elegiac companion piece to Ray Bradbury’s famous story, “A Sound of Thunder.” A building contractor is on the way home one day when his journey is halted by a herd of triceratops crossing the road. As a set-up for a short story this is brilliant, and the subdued little tale that follows is just lovely. It asks that question, What would you do if…? and answers it in exactly the way that I think I would.

There you have it: the first fifth of the 23rd annual collection: every one a winner so far.

This sequel to Forty Signs of Rain takes up the story in the aftermath of the flood that inundated Washington D.C. at the end of that novel. In Fifty Degrees Below we learn that the flood does little to change the political landscape, but that things do start to slowly change as the consequences of the halting of the Gulf Stream are felt.

One of the great fears of so-called Global Warming, the consequences of the loss of the Gulf Stream to Northern Europe and North America would be immense. Kim Stanley Robinson is alive with statistics. Size of population set against ability to produce food, for example. He points out that, as it stands, Europe just about manages to feed itself, but if it were to slip into a Canadian/Siberian style climate, that ability would be compromised.

“Fifty Degrees Below” refers to the winter temperatures experienced in Washington D.C. during a mid-winter “cold snap”. Minus fifty degrees F is (oddly) around -46°C (how does that happen?), so we’re on common ground here. At these temperatures, your car won’t start. Your arctic sleeping bag won’t help. Your power consumption will be so high that there will, inevitably, be power cuts. The only hope in those circumstances is real fire…

Now, the (pessimistic) Crichton take on this is that climate change is both inevitable and impossible to predict since change is all the climate has ever done, throughout history. KSR’s more optimistic viewpoint is that phenomena like the (theoretical) stalling of the Gulf Stream are caused by human activity, and – as such – can be cured by human activity.

One of the more optimistic projects proposed in Fifty Degrees Below is to work to improve the efficiency of solar panels so that somewhere in the South West desert of the USA, a large array of panels can supply the entire United States with electricity. Elsewhere, genetically engineered lichen boosts the carbon-fixing properties of trees; and the UN organises a Niven-like project to restart the Gulf Stream using vast quantities of, er, salt.

Such projects require political will – on the one hand – and high levels of international co-operation on the other. One of Robinson’s more optimistic predictions is that a scarily cold winter will encourage both to happen. But there’s your problem, isn’t it? Because if global warming is about warming most people won’t mind. As Shelagh Fogarty said on Radio Bloke this morning (in reference to the recent warm snap), “I was getting used to living in Seville.” So, of necessity, global warming needs to be about being bloody cold before anyone will want to do anything about it. It’s when his SUV won’t start that Joe America will pay attention.

Kim Stanley Robinson tends to do things in threes, so presumably there will be one more book (called Sixty Something Something?) to tie up the loose ends left by this one. Oh yeah, I just looked it up, and it’s to be called Sixty Days and Counting.

As always, I find KSR’s style to be less than engaging. His main protagonist, Frank Vanderwal, is still an idiot. In fact, there is more focus in this that previously on Vanderwal’s slightly fucked mind. Vanderwal’s mental state is a synecdoche or something for the global climate. While his brain doesn’t work properly, nor does the climate. He has a relationship with a mysterious woman from the intelligence community, but it’s hard to tell if she really exists. He lives in a tree house and plays frisbee golf with similarly homeless people. He is, it has to be said, hard to like.

Still, we need to know what happens, don’t we? So we’ll read the sequel. And this book is to be admired for its engagement with big ideas and huge problems. And the biggest problem, suggests Robinson (not for the first time in his writing career), is with the political system we call democracy.

What fascinates me about the negative reviews for State of Fear, Michael Crichton’s 2004 environmental thriller, is the way in which the reviewers clearly resented the lecturing (hectoring) tone of the novel, as if that was something new from Crichton.

In my experience (and I’ve read a fair few of his, though not all of them), that’s what you pick up Crichton for. He likes to do that thing that’s so tricky to pull off: to mix enough fact in with the fiction so that you end up wondering what is real, and what is possible. I think what annoys people is when he’s preaching about something that kind of contradicts something you hold to be true. And that’s what this novel is about. “Most people” buy into global warming. And “most people” are probably wrong. Anyway, you don’t pick up a Crichton for the characters or the snappy dialogue. If you do, then you’re sadly deluded and should read some different writers.

The premise of State of Fear is that Politics + Science = Bad Science. Now. If we were in the pub, and I expressed that opinion, I think a lot of people would agree with me. A well known phrase or saying concerning wood and trees springs to mind. Politicians, it’s obvious are not – in general – scientists. Go further: media people are not – in general – scientists, either. Most wannabe journalists and reporters are Arts graduates. Am I wrong? You know I’m not.

In my previous blog life, I argued several times that there simply isn’t enough data to support the theory of global warming (or anthropogenic global warming, to give it its full title). When they can’t predict the weather five days in advance, no way can they predict the global climate 100 years hence. In fact, as Crichton mentions in the novel, most environmental groups don’t even acknowledge theories about chaotic systems and complexity that have developed over the past 30 years. We all know chaos theory exists, that its central tenet is sensitive dependency on initial conditions. What that means, in practice, is that in large and complex systems there are far too many variables for any kind of accurate modelling or prediction. Computer models about what happens to our climate 100 years from now are just guesswork. Nobody knows. Predictions up to now, from as recently as 20 years ago, Crichton points out, have been wildly wrong. 300% wrong. What Crichton says, and I agree with him, is that until they manage an accurate prediction of, say, 10 years, we should just ignore the computers and hope they go away. He goes further: says there are too many computer geeks sitting behind computers, and not enough real research going on in the field. We don’t even know, he says, how to manage a national park as a wilderness. It’s true. National Parks have been around for 100 years or so, but it’s only in the last 10-20 years that park managers realised that forest fires are good for the environment and wild life.

What is certain is that the climate and the environment will change. Because that’s what they do. The Earth, says Crichton, is currently on its third major atmosphere. We’re in the middle of (or at the end of, who knows) a general warming trend that started in 1850 and came after a 400-year “mini ace age.” Note the use of the diminutive. 400 years, in these terms, is “mini.” In global terms, in terms of brains-the-size-of-planets, 100 years in this little world is barely measurable.

It’s clear to me that what’s going on, in terms of Kyoto and all the legislation coming down like birdshit from above us, is that governments are seizing upon an opportunity to increase taxes. It’s a Clarkson argument, but it’s right. For example, just the other day they were talking about making airlines pay VAT for fuel, which they don’t currently have to do. Adding VAT, they say, would be an anti-global warming measure. Except, if you think about it, it wouldn’t be. Imagine your £20 easyjet ticket. How much of that is for fuel? Say a fiver. Add VAT to the fiver: 87 and a half pence. So, are you going to cancel your weekend in Barcelona because the ticket costs an extra pound? No, of course you’re not. So, will adding VAT to airline fuel reduce the number of flights, passengers, or the amount of fuel used? No, of course it won’t. What it will do is raise £xbillion for the government to spend on sweets.

There’s so much debunking going on in this book that it made me laugh. I really enjoyed it, but then I didn’t come into it “believing” in global warming, so I wasn’t offended when all the people who believe in it are made out to be charlatans and idiots.

Now, one reviewer called Kim Stanley Robinson the anti-Crichton when he published Forty Signs of Rain, his own take on the global warming thing. But now I’ve read the Crichton I can see that the two novels share a lot of common ground. Central to both novels is the way that science is conducted, and both find it lacking. Both make strong arguments that environmental research should be double-blind, so that scientists aren’t influenced by their paymasters – no matter who they are. Both feature lead characters who are a bit dumb and lack affect. Both make arguments about events being manipulated to suit an agenda other than the truth.

Crichton is optimistic about the future. He thinks that people in 2100 will be better off than us, just as we are better off in so many ways than the people of 1900. Crichton sees fear being created by politicians and the media in cahoots with each other as panic follows crisis follows panic. If its not salmonella in chocolate bars, it’s p a e d o p h i l e s. If not them, then the environment. If not that, it’s the Iranians, or the Koreans. He points out that the whole global warming fear started around 1989, when the communist threat receded and the Cold War ended. It’s a cynical view, but its one with which I have sympathy. It’s a fact that newspapers have to be filled with something, and TV schedules all have news bulletins. And there’s a lot of complete bollocks out there, I’m sure we all know. And a lot of peer pressure: to conform, or face abuse. I’d argue that the real subject of this book is not really the environment but the media, and the way they fail to keep us informed.

Which brings me back to the beginning, and the abuse that was hurled at Crichton for publishing this. If they could burn him at the stake, I’m sure they would. It’s not a brilliant book, not even in narrow Crichton terms, but it is fascinating, and I think everyone should be exposed to these arguments, and feel like they need to learn more, before they spout yet more bollocks about global warming.

Following my bulk-purchase of the Kristine Kathryn Rusch "Retrieval Artist" series, Amazon kindly recommended that I purchyase City of Pearl by British writer Karen Travis. (Don't read that top reader review, because it's full of bleedin' spoilers!) And, believe it or not, it's great, and I'm dead chuffed.

Like the Retrieval Artist novels, City of Pearl is set in the future (23rd century), and it involves religion and awkward relations with alien cultures and the things you are – and aren't – allowed to do on a planet not your own. There are also brilliant glimpses of the kind of future we might all have – if we continue to allow big chemical companies to stick copyright notices on the building blocks of life. Imagine, for example, a future in which all food crops are genetically modified and copyright. How does your garden grow?

(And how typical of the news media that serves us so badly that they tend to focus on the "Frankenstein"/contamination aspects of GM food and not the real reason these companies pursue it.)
A group of Christian colonists have set off to Cavanagh's star, sending a single message back to Earth: don't follow. It's assumed they've been lost, but then Shan Frankland is appointed to lead a small expeditionary force on a 150-year round trip… to do what? The key plot device here is that Frankland is confidentially briefed using smart drugs that only release information into her head piecemeal, so she actually doesn't know her mission, just that she freely agreed to it.

She spends her time with things "on the tip of her tongue", as it were, the information just not within reach of her conscious mind. She leads a group of seven Royal Marines, seven scientists, and one journalist to a beautiful almost-Earthlike planet (less oxygen, higher gravity, longer seasons), where she finds a group of humans living an idyllic pastoral life – but dwelling underground. It turns out they're only barely tolerated by the guardians of the planet, who are quite willing to erase whole cities in order to preserve the planet's ecology.

There's lots of good stuff here about the inability of humans to think of "lower" life-forms as "people," even if they're quite intelligent. And stuff about signs and messages misread, misunderstood, or not even recognised as messages. All science fiction is about the time in which it is written, whether or not it's set in the future, and it's clear that the post-2001 SF about the fate of a standard set of – problematic term : Western – values in the face of peoples who see the world through quite different filters (the metaphor here is of aliens who can see colours in what we see as clear glass) is very interesting indeed.

One of the most boring aspects of Science Fiction as it is filmed – for movies or TV – is the knee-jerk assumption that humanity is in the right. I'm so bored of the "threat to Earth" theme that it spoils my enjoyment. The greatest weakness of any SF film or TV programme is the production assumption that the audience will not be engaged unless somehow Earth and/or humanity is under threat. As such, there are never any of the real joys of SF – the creation of wonder, or the evocation of the completely alien viewpoint.

This is just one of the reasons to love Karen Traviss' City of Pearl and its sequels. Because although there are a handful of sympathetic human characters, the people you're rooting for are the aliens who are trying to deal with the peculiarly skewed morality of the humans they encounter.

This first sequel, Crossing the Line carries on the story where it left off, with former police officer Shan Frankland learning to cope with her new status as a carrier of an alien parasite that keeps her alive with miraculous healing powers, but also alters her DNA on a whim. Shan sets up house with Aras, an alien who also carries the parasite, and they begin to deal with the politics of an alien society and the strained diplomatic relations with humans and other species, and the questions raised by disputed territory and a fragile but intelligent water-based species that cannot defend itself.

The issues are both environmental protection and interspecies morality, as incompatible cultures interact. This is a well-paced genre piece that highlights – for example – the horror of a vegetarian species (who consider all creatures to be "people" – intelligent or not) when they encounter meat eaters.

More importantly, it's a cracking story with the ultimate heroine: Shan Frankland, a woman who is prepared to make huge sacrifices yet expects and receives no recognition. In City of Pearl Aras executes a human scientist who dissects an alien child (one of the protected squid-like aliens) after being specifically told not to do such a thing. In Crossing the Line the stakes are raised even higher, as some of the humans commit horrifying acts which both beggar belief and have the sad ring of familiarity.

The inevitable escalation is superbly told, and the climax is both shocking and exciting, setting up the next sequel, The World Before. I've mentioned before that Traviss hasn't got a British publisher, a ridiculous situation, but thank goodness that the internet makes that kind of distinction kind of irrelevant. It's true she writes American-style SF, but she does so in a distinctly British voice, which makes for a refreshing read. Spot on!

The third in her series set on or around Bezer'ej, The World Before continues where Crossing the Line left off. Rather than feeling like a satisfying conclusion to a trilogy, this feels like a marker on the way to somewhere else, and there are indeed at least two further sequels to follow.

It's difficult to say much about a 3rd in a series without spoiling earlier episodes, but suffice it to say that for those who have read this far, there are twists to the story that keep it getting more interesting.

For example, the humans who encounter the main aliens here, the Wess'har, learn to fear them because of their extremely strict environmental policies and their view that all beings have a right to exist without interference from others. In such a context, the proliferation of humans – even on their own planet – at the expense of other life-forms and the biosphere – comes to seem like an out-of-control infestation.

But it turns out that these Wess'har are a colony of softy liberal pacifist hippy environmentalists who left their home planet thousands of years before because they wanted to have even less impact on their environment than was culturally acceptable back home. The World Before, the place they come from, holds even more mystery, and needless to say, the home planet Wess'har turn up in this episode and seem determined to deal with the human threat by any means necessary.

There's a lovely moment in this when a Wess'har scientist resurrects a pair of parrots from a gene bank and finds them not only beautiful, but intelligent enough to learn speech. Now, think of the way parrots get treated and threatened and exploited in this wonderful world of ours and imagine what the Wess'har might think of us!

The question at issue here is actions vs. motivations. We all know about the Road to Hell, but the humans here encounter a species that doesn't care what you thought you were doing or what you wanted to happen. They make judgements based on actions and their consequences alone. There's no such thing as an accident, or collateral damage that is somehow excusable: you are responsible for your actions. Another cracking read from Traviss, and can't wait for the next instalment.

With the recent publication of Fifty Degrees Below, a sequel to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Forty Signs of Rain, I thought it was time to check out Robinson’s take on climate change.

As one Amazon reviewer puts it, with this climate change trilogy, Robinson is setting himself up as the Anti-Crichton. Michael Crichton has recently caused controversy with State of Fear, his take on environmental issues, and has been adopted by some elements of the US Congress as a credible sceptic on the issue of global warming.

On this blog, we like to cover the big issues. Which means we don’t pay much attention to the whole Iraq thing, which is going to seem very small potatoes indeed should our civilisation come crashing about our ears.

‘We can go to them and say, look, the party’s over. We need this list of projects funded or civilisation will be hammered for decades to come. Tell them they can’t give half a trillion dollars a year to the military and leave the rescue and rebuilding of the world to chance and some kind of free market religion. It isn’t working, and science is the only way out of this mess.’” – Forty Signs of Rain, p290

Global warming and climate change can be slippery terms. I believe the latter is probably inevitable, but I think we all know that a phrase like global warming is counter-intuitive, because one of the ways the climate could change is that a lot of us could get very, very cold indeed. Cold enough to consider killing cats and dogs for their fur, perhaps, Mr McCartney.

The issue rests on two questions. Is climate change a result of human activity? And, if so, can human activity do anything about it? I think the answer to the first question is not enough data (which is essentially Michael Crichton’s position). And I think the answer to the second is, well, then it’s probably too late.

And let’s not confuse things by pointing out that the polar ice caps on Mars, as well as those on Earth, are shrinking.

I’ve never been much of a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson’s writing style. He goes in for Hemingwayesque zero-degree narration, which is quite clever, but when the subject matter of the book is a little bit dry, well, it can be a little bit too dry. But it is a sophisticated style, and unless I’m being particularly thick, things aren’t necessarily all that they seem. Here, for example, is one Amazon reviewer’s take:

this is not as billed – most of the story is lost in the minutia of venture capital funding and the mechanics of scientific research. The most important event in the book (the stopping of the Gulf stream) is disposed of in a short telephone intercept…

Indeed. This reader was certainly reading for the plot, and didn’t really enjoy the stuff about venture capital and real-world politics. But, actually, that’s the most important thing in Forty Signs of Rain. Robinson’s setting it up that way because the way science is conducted, and the way politics works, is precisely why there is not enough data on climate change and why the political will to do something about it is absent.

One of the main characters, Frank Vanderwal, is on secondment to the National Science Foundation in Washington. Just before his year is about to end, he issues a parting shot, complaining that science is conducted wrong, that it shouldn’t rely on proposals and response to proposals, and should instead be setting the agenda and demanding funding for certain research. What’s wrong with science, and with the politics of global warming, is that it relies entirely on lobbying – on the one hand – and on grant application and review on the other. What governments should be doing, argues Vanderwal, is commissioning research, asking or telling scientists what to research based on what organisations like the NSF – in collaboration with similar organisations all over the world – are saying.

It’s quite hard to get your head round, but that’s what Forty Signs of Rain is about. First of all, scientists aren’t really free to collaborate because of the obsession with capital and money and patents and exploitation of discovery. So there’s too much secrecy – and that’s within one country, before you even consider the paranoia of governments and security agencies. And research is too dispersed and scattershot, again because scientists are working in commercial environments, looking for breakthroughs that will be profitable.

So scientists aren’t really speaking to each other, and they don’t really understand each other, and this atomised approach to a huge potential problem like climate change means that nobody is joining the dots, seeing patterns, and identifying possible solutions. And if someone does spot something potentially interesting – as Vanderwal does – then they have too much self-interest for it to be shared with the wider community.

This is one of the cleverest aspects of the book. Vanderwal’s internal monologue is sometimes anthropological (we are all primates, fresh from the savannah, and a lot of our behaviour is based on the instincts of primates) and sometimes concerned with game theory, and in particular whether altruism or selfishness will win the game.

This could fool you into thinking that Vanderwal is a good guy, the moral compass to point us through the maze of Washington and scientific politics. Like this Amazon reviewer:

…some fairly poor attempts to inject some excitement in to these scenes of domestic bliss, in the form of an encounter with deadly nightshade and a near miss with the kid and some passing traffic (and with another characters pointless road rage encounter)

The character who has the “pointless” road rage encounter is Vanderwal. Except it’s not pointless, obviously. The point is, Vanderwal (observing humanity dispassionately, thinking of us all as primates driven by instinct) is not perfect, and not infallible. He’s driving in the multi-occupancy lane and attempts to avoid detection by cutting up a pickup truck in order to hide his car from a patrol car. Clever, he thinks, except the pickup truck driver has an attack of road rage and pursues him through the streets.

In other words, Vanderwal thought he was controlling a situation, but got it badly wrong.

Lesson two. Vanderwal sees a grant application from a mathematician that could have some exciting impact on research into gene therapy. He happens to have connections with a company doing research in gene therapy, so he “cleverly” sees to it that the funding application is refused, in order that the company can make the researcher a job offer and keep his research for themselves.

Except, of course, Vanderwal is outmanoeuvred by another scientist on the funding committee who has exactly the same idea about a company she is connected with, doing research that (it will turn out) is loosely related to gene therapy, but more directly relevant to finding a viable carbon-fixing solution.

As for the deadly nightshade, it was actually poison ivy, and I wouldn’t care to suggest that the encounter will prove to be irrelevant.* It might even be interesting, later on.

In any event, Vanderwal is not as clever as he thinks he is, and when he meets a mystery woman later on in the book, you get the feeling he’s being played. This is all going to pay off in the sequels to follow.

Forty Signs of Rain lays out the problems with scientific research, the difficulties of political lobbying, and the sometimes awkward human relationships involved in both. The sequel will describe the onset of severe climactic change, when the global temperature plummets. This is set up with two slices of beautiful irony. On the West Coast, an unusually lashing storm (part of a Hyperniño in its 42nd month) causes massive erosion of sandstone cliffs at Encinitas, near San Diego. This is not a fictional threat. This, from the Las Cruces Sun:

Sand and solitude
Want to escape the hordes that descend upon most San Diego beaches? Go to Encinitas and turn west on D Street. The avenue dead-ends where the land plummets to the ocean, and there you will find a wooden staircase leading to the small, narrow beach about 60 feet below. Down here, you will find no hot-dog stands, no lifeguard and no restrooms. But you will find room to spread out, especially on the weekdays. (The beach can be thick with surfers on the weekends.) Just make sure you plant yourself well away from the cliffs, which look about as solid as Social Security’s future. “

Turn west on D Street, it says. The land plummets to the ocean, it says. Where are Streets A, B, and C, I hear you ask? Lost to the sea, in October 1889. Robinson merely points out that what happened once will surely happen again.

And on the other coast, more irony. First victim of the coming catastrophic changes in climate? Why, Washington DC, of course, which is a mere 10 feet above sea level and built on a swamp. A couple of storms converge, coincident with a high tide, and politics-as-usual is under water.

Excellent. I’ll read the first sequel in the new year.

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*Poison ivy has interesting properties: only a billionth of a gram of the potent Urushiol oil is needed to cause a rash; and only 7 grams of the stuff would be needed to cause a rash in every person on earth. It remains active even on dead plants for at least five years; and samples centuries old have still caused rashes.