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.

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.

Paper Cities: an anthology of urban fantasy – edited by Ekaterina Sedia

The problem starts when the academics get involved, of course. I should know. The problem with Paper Cities, from Senses Five press is that someone got hold of the definition of “urban fantasy” and extended it, refined it, and rendered it utterly meaningless.

I’m not a keen reader of fantasy fiction, give or take the odd exception. But I do like Tim Powers, who has variously been described as a Steampunk writer (a review of a steam punk anthology is to follow) and an urban fantasist. He’s possibly a bit of both, though there’s very little steam in his so-called Steampunk novels.

I always quite liked the description of him as an urban fantasist. My understanding of the term is that he writes works of fantastic fiction with a recognisably real-world setting. The Anubis Gates, for example, mixes magic with Victorian London. Last Call is set in a recognisably modern Las Vegas, and his most recent novel Three Days to Never is set around LA in the recent past.

Fantasy proper, of the swords-and-sorcery kind, takes place in mythical lands, and often involves invented lore, language etc. Urban Fantasy, for me, should take place in a world much like the one we live in, but with added oddness, a reality that has been manipulated, whether in the form of belief (at least) in magic; or ghosts being real. Powers is a master at this. Creating a mobiüs loop of a belt to ward off psychic interest; following rituals to gain power or avoid trouble. All of it could be ascribed to something grounded in our reality, but in the world of Powers there’s something else at play.

This anthology, then, is a huge disappointment, because it sets out to broaden the definition of urban fantasy beyond any usefulness. Its definition of “urban” includes the kind of “city” and “castle” one might find in the traditional swords-and-sorcery epic. So there are too many stories here I’d just call fantasy. The other problem seems to be that most of these stories don’t really work as stories. They all seem more like excerpts or chapters from novels. The plots don’t go anywhere, nothing resolves itself.

This, in the end, is often the biggest problem with the fantasy genre. There’s too much money involved in creating 500-page epics with multiple sequels. Few exponents of fantasy seem to know how to knock of 10-20,000 words of self-contained short fiction.

Shame. Can’t really recommend this as it doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

The Shadow Isle by Katharine Kerr

I bought this one to read on holiday, but then it kept calling to me and I couldn’t resist picking it up (if you do read this book, you’ll know exactly which scene I’m referring to).

Not too long ago, there were indications that the previous entry in the Deverry series, The Spirit Stone (reviewed here in April), was going to be the last, and then this volume was announced, but even this is not to be the last. According to an author’s note in the book, there is still one more to come.

Like the previous volumes, this one picks up the story more or less exactly where it left off. This is, if you get the UK version, Book Six of the Dragon Mage; or, if you get the US version, Book Three of the Silver Wyrm.

One character has been transported to Haen Marn, the island that mysteriously vanished in an earlier volume. Others have joined the Ancients in the West Lands, while still others face the threat from yet more Horsekin raiders on the border. Meanwhile, apprentice magicians are learning their trade and Dallandra is still puzzling out the problem of turning a human-turned-dragon back into a human.

It is of course all silly fantasy stuff, but it’s far better written and more consistent and thoughtful than strangers to the genre might think. My daughter has started reading this series (she’s up to volume 4 of the 14 published so far), and she looks forward to reading what she considers “the best bits,” the scenes with Jill and Rhodry. She asked me if Jill and Rhodry were in this new one and I said, “Er…. no…”, because I didn’t want to give too much of the story away. The real answer is, “Er… yeah… sort of…”

Unlike earlier volumes, there are no flashbacks here, so this all takes place in the same part of the time-line. This volume didn’t suffer from the lack of flashbacks, but doesn’t feel quite as textured as earlier volumes. Like other long-running series I’ve read, we’re perhaps not moving on quite as quickly, or as often, as we could. We’re here for just a couple of seasons, really, whereas you might prefer to see things skipping along towards a climax at this stage. It feels very much like marking time.

I’m still missing the map, and I’m still suffering lack of sleep because there are no real chapter markers, and it’s hard to find a good moment to stop reading.

Whatever you do, don’t start reading here, but if you have read this far, you won’t want to miss this one, and the next (and last?).

Eclipse One: edited by Jonathan Strahan

Most of the short story collections I buy are reprints, meaning that they’ve been through at least two layers of editorial control. First in the publication that originally printed them (Asimov’s Magazine, or the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction etc.), and then by the editor of the collection (usually Gardner Dozois, whose taste nicely coincides with my own).

With Eclipse One, the first of a proposed new series from Nightshade Books, Jonathan Strahan is trying to do something different. This is not one of the many annual “best of” anthologies, but a collection of new fiction in the vein of the old Universe collections edited by Terry Carr.

When I read this in Strahan’s Introduction, I sat up and paid attention, because I have fond memories of Terry Carr’s annual Best Science Fiction of the Year collections, which all had the familiar Gollancz yellow cover and were a staple of my library borrowing in my teens and twenties. I don’t recall reading many of the Universe collections, however, which were a different beast entirely. A brand new collection of stories especially commissioned is a much riskier prospect than the quality assurance offered by a Best Of collection.

So what do we get here? Fifteen stories, some familiar names, 260-odd pages, and a fair mixture of fantasy and SF. Rather than the doorstop-style 300,000-word volumes put out by Dozois each year, this feels more like an extra thick edition of a quarterly magazine. Conspicuous by its absence is the New Space Opera or anything resembling Hard Science. Instead you get the quirky, the odd, the mysterious, and the purely fantastical. It’s a nice mixture, actually, recalling the Gollancz collections of the 70s and 80s. The opener is typical: “Unique Chicken Goes in Reverse” by Andy Duncan is just the type of offbeat story Terry Carr might have chosen, and it’s neither fish nor fowl, really. I couldn’t tell you whether it’s supposed to be SF or fantasy, or both, or neither. It’s just a slice of life, slightly mystical, personal, and poignant.

The well known names here include Garth Nix, Gwyneth Jones, and Bruce Sterling. Given the vast quantity of short SF I read, I wasn’t all that familiar with the writers here, partly because they come from a fantasy background. I was pleased to see the Gwyneth Jones story (because I particularly enjoyed her entry in the latest Dozois collection), and I’ve discovered quite a few writers I’ll seek out for further reading. The short length isn’t an issue, either, because the stories within are so different from each other that you find yourself reading at a more ruminative pace.

My one complaint is that the cover price ($14.95 or £7.35) is a bit steep, though I guess the price is worth paying to support new writing. There are a number of cheaper options available in the Used section on Amazon. Eclipse Two is due October 2008, according to the publisher’s web site.

Certainly worth seeking out if you have a jones for new SF beyond the Best Of annuals.

The Spirit Stone by Katharine Kerr

As previously mentioned on this blog, far from finishing at Volume 12, Katharine Kerr’s epic fantasy series continues here with Vol 13, the Spirit Stone, and the forthcoming Volume 14, The Shadow Isle, which is to be published in May.

This upsets the symmetry of the series somewhat. The Spirit Stone is billed as Volume 5 of The Dragon Mage, whereas you could see it as Volume 1 of the something else.

I always find it slightly confusing when it’s been a while since I read one, because the story really picks up more or less where it left off, so you have to remind yourself of the various characters, their incarnations, and relationships. A Table of Incarnations is provided at the back of the book, though I like to have a map, too. The earlier series had useful maps, but I think things have spread so far and wide now that you would need a small atlas at the beginning of the books. I don’t think the economics of publishing allow for this.

Anyway, it’s more or less standard Kerr fair. The Alshandra cult is still going strong, though there are beginning to be doubts in the minds of some adherents. The Horsekin are building a fortress in Westfolk territory, and an alliance of humans, elves, and dwarves band together to do battle. Personally, I find the battle sequences and territory wars the least interesting aspect of this. The real interest lies in the various mysteries: what is the mysterious black crystal pyramid, and whose is the spirit who is trapped inside? Why won’t the wound of Rori the dragon ever heal? And who are the mysterious brother and sister who emerge part-way through this story, who are neither human, nor elf, nor horsekin? (A glance at the cover art for The Shadow Isle gives the clue that they may become more prominent in the next volume).

Nevyn and Jill are reborn as Neb and Branna, and their particular spiral of fate seems to have settled, though there is unfinished business with several other characters.

An enjoyable entry, though I have the same complaint to make as I made with the last one: no chapters, which means that it’s hard to find an opportune moment to put it down and do something else. Like sleep.

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.