“Diving into the Wreck” was a superb novella published in Asimov’s magazine in the December 2005 issue. I enjoyed it so much that I sought out books written by Rusch, including her Retrieval Artist series, so you can imagine I was quite excited to see that the original novella had been expanded to a full-length novel, just published.

The original premise is quite simple: take the idea of earth-bound wreck diving, with all its intrigue and inherent dangers, and set it in space. I absolutely love SF stories about exploring mysterious abandoned ships and/or settlements. An empty ship found floating in space is always an invitation and a threat, and I love this sub-genre, which you can trace back to the likes of Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and more recently to Richard Paul Russo’s Ship of Fools.

Unfortunately, I found the full-length Diving into the Wreck to be a bit of a disappointment, given how high my expectations were. Perhaps because I’ve just completed National Novel Writing Month, perhaps because it’s made up of two novellas and a third bit, it shows too many signs of being written at widely different times, and contains repetitions and contradictions which don’t work themselves out easily. You can definitely see the joins. Rusch’s heroine, Boss, comes across as paranoid and awkward for no good reason, and reads a little too much like the (similarly paranoid) Retrieval Artist.

In the end, I found long stretches of this just too irritating for pleasure, and I’m afraid that the full length book is no match for the novella. Sometimes less is more. I feel the same way about Nancy Kress’ “Beggars in Spain” which I’ve read (as a novella) several times, but would never read as a full-length book.

I recommend that you look out for the novella, but avoid the novel. Sorry.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Inevitably, with William Gibson’s name on the cover, I found Spook Country in the SF section of my local Waterstones, but it’s really more of a techno thriller, except written more in the style of the espionage genre: low key, lots of inner voice, and the playing out of a game rather than the sense of an against-the-clock struggle. At least three genres in this hybrid then, not to mention William Gibson’s status (according to Amazon) as a “cult” writer.

There are three narrative threads here, which eventually converge for the climax. One narrative point of view is that of Hollis Henry, a musician-turned-writer who is trying to make a start on a career in journalism after losing most of the money she made as a member of a Pixies-like cult indie band on unlucky ventures. She’s taken an assignment for a mysterious startup magazine and soon finds herself lost in the kind of radical ambiguity characteristic of espionage. But what kind of espionage? Official? Unofficial? Industrial?

Another point of view is that of Tito, a young man in New York City who belongs to some kind of crime (or is it?) syndicate. He’s from Cuba, but his family is ethnically Chinese, except they speak Russian. Or Spanish. Or speak Spanish but text in Russian. Except its with the Roman alphabet, so they’re texting in an approximation of Russian. Tito is some kind of runner, dropping off iPods full of data for an old man, and escaping – when he needs to – with the urban acrobatics of freerunning.

He’s being watched by some kind of black ops agent called Brown, who may or may not have any official status, but who has kidnapped from the street a Russian-speaking tranquilizer junkie called Milgrim (rhymes with Pilgrim), who is our bewildered third point of view. Milgrim’s primary concern is always his next pill, but he’s also a survivor and an opportunist.

None of those providing a narrative point of view really knows what is going on, and they all go along for the ride for their own reasons, permanently confused and trying to make sense of the unfolding events, or looking for a moment of clarity. The techno- part of the techno-thriller concerns iPods, cobbled-together VR headsets, GPS chips, encrypted cell phones and container ships. Unlike other techno thriller writers, and probably because of his experience in SF, Gibson creates a timeless technological backdrop, any of which is possible now and not at all futuristic, but none of which can be particularly pinned down to a time or place. So there are no “amazingly fast” quad speed CDROM drives, just the taken-for-granted quotidian stuff we’re surrounded with all the time.

The most engaging of the narrative points of view, for me, is Hollis, the female singer from a defunct rock band. One member of the band is dead, another (like Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground) seems to have settled for suburban domesticity, while the lead guitarist – called Inchmale – is married and living in Buenos Aires. For Hollis, Inchmale is like a missing limb, not because of any romantic attachment, but because they were even closer: bandmates, creative partners, the Lennon-McCartney of Hollis’ band The Curfew.

Hollis starts of in LA, meeting with some artists who are using GPS data to create virtual art installations. But she’s uncomfortable with her assignment, not sure who she’s working for, and keeps encountering strange coincidences, or the feeling that she’s under surveillance. As her sense of paranoia grows, she gets sucked further into a mysterious world of semi-official espionage and shipping containers that seem to endlessly circle the world. (This shipping container idea reminds me of Don Delillo’s waste ship in his novel Underworld.)

I enjoyed this. It’s paced like a Le Carré-style espionage novel, but immersed in a recognisable technological world with some sense of morality eventually seeping through all the grey areas. Recommended.

This 2004 novel by Joe Haldeman is an undemanding Hollywood-style SF adventure story, which tells the story of two aliens stranded on earth for so long that they can’t remember anything about who they really are or why they are there.

With today’s special effects, you could see this as a film, though the main protagonist and its antagonistic monstrous other would have to be played by several different actors and actresses. So perhaps not. As other reviewers have noted, there’s not much original in the shapeshifting alien premise, but the execution is professional and intelligent enough to set the novel aside from any Hollywood attempt at the same idea.

The story of the two aliens takes us through recent history, as each one tries different personae and seeks knowledge of others like it. The story switches back and forth between historical moment and “now” (which is about 20 years from now). The “now” chapters tell the story of a group of scientists who have discovered an artefact deep in the ocean and are secretly scrutinising it with hopes to profit from any wonders it reveals.

Haldeman writes economical, unflabby prose, and keeps the chapters short enough to ensure that the scene shifts constantly, and you – the late night reader – always feel you can manage one more chapter before your eyes drop. A classic page-turner, in other words.

This is a very entertaining read, with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until close to the end. You might guess something of the ending in advance, but your enjoyment won’t be spoiled by that. Recommended

British SF writer Gwyneth Jones has always impressed me when I come across one of her stories in the annual Best Of anthology edited by Gardner Dozois. Usually, if I want to read more by a writer, I have to buy on Amazon, because the “SF” shelves in Waterstones are otherwise occupied by Lord of the Rings, Terry Pratchett, and Star Trek tie-ins.

While some quite respectable writers hack out the occasional tie-in book for Star Trek, Star Wars, or even Doctor Who, I’ve never been so obsessed with a TV show that I wanted to read a book based on it.

So I was somewhat surprised to come across Spirit in the Milton Keynes Waterstones, and in spite of my general policy of not paying Waterstones prices, I couldn’t resist it. How did Spirit manage to sneak past the Waterstones buyer and get onto the shelf with all the Fantasy books?

The answer, I suspect, lies on the front cover, which at first glance has every appearance of a fantasy novel: a young woman in rags in the foreground, carrying an infant, looking over what might be a fantasy landscape.

But this is not a fantasy novel, it’s New Space Opera, but it has the satisfying slow build up, cast of characters, and intrigue of the best fantasy novels. It gives itself away a bit in the blurb by mentioning it that it’s a retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, but somehow knowing this just adds to the pleasure of reading it.

I’ve never read The Count…, but enjoyed a radio adaptation I once heard. All you need to know is that it’s a corking adventure story with a very satisfying dénoument.

Jones creates excellent aliens who behave in freaky ways. In one of her short stories, a peace envoy from one alien race eats a peace envoy from the other side of a civil war.
As well as properly alien aliens, Jones creates a truly weird form of interstellar travel, which only the hardy dare experience in full consciousness.

If you know The Count of Monte Cristo, you will enjoy this; and if you don’t, you’ll discover a hard SF ripping yarn with an excellent female protagonist who serves her revenge stone cold. Highly recommended.