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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Reading Lists…

Post by Simon Holyhoses

A very long time ago I set myself up with several programs of reading.

The first one was to understand European literature. I started off with classical greek. I started to learn classical greek itself but soon slacked off and started reading translations (Loeb, Penguin, Oxford classics etc).

Yes, they can be dry and dusty like an old man’s cock, but I’ve been from Homer’s star-roofed plains of Troy to the Munchausian tales of Lucian; from the youthful, sexy iambs of Archilochus to the crusty poetical jigsaw puzzles of Callimachus. Never mind the sheer and rocky tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, or the Bucolics of Theocritus, Bion and the rest.

All these years on, I’ve got 7 books left to read before I can begin reading translations of literature written in Latin from the Roman empire.

But something awful has happened. Recently I’ve taken to noting dates in the covers of books when I start to read them, and again when I finish them. Partly vanity, partly a practical way of tagging a book to say that I have read it.

It seems that since August 2003 I’ve read just two books. Translations of Arrian’s “Campaigns of Alexander”, and Josephus’ “Jewish Wars”. This is horrifying news. On that basis it may be another three years before I finish the Greek stuff.

It get’s worse though. Not only is this a startling reminder of my own mortality and status as a Failed Reader of Literature: it is also a shocking indicator of the folly of much that I do.

You see, I have lists of translations of Sanskrit, Anglo-Saxon literature, the Viking sagas, Middle English stuff, Renaissance works, Tudor stuff, The Romantics, Fin de Siecle poetry, First World War stuff, James Joyce, Kathryn Mansfield, Virginia Wolf. And that’s just the European Literature.

Here alone I’m forced to conclude that I already have more books than I will get to read before I snuff it.

Three years ago I stopped reading computer books: they are the modern equivalent of the chap book; disposable trash that is of no use to anyone who isn’t terminally bored.

There’s music too. I have a cabinet of bookshelves full of books about music: tutorials, theory, about guitars and amplifiers. What about all of those?

There’s my philosophy list. When I say “philosophy”, I mean analytical philosophy rather than the looser modern bookshop definition along the lines of “New Age” or “Religion”. Theory of Mind. Formal Logic. That sort of stuff. I’m currently bogged down in Kant (and probably have been for about 5 years now).

And there’s all the miscellaneous clutter I’ve picked up along the way: stone-age history, Egypt, Incas and Mayans, early China, a book about the Queen of Sheba. There’s a cupboard full of books about war that my mum’s friend Eddie has leant me.

And the current list of “must read soon” books that don’t fit into a list:
a) Where late the sweet birds sang – Kate Wilhelm (Rob lent me this several lifetimes ago).
b) The history of association Football which I want to read as a sort of posthumous cap tipping to my dad.
c) The labyrinth of time – saw it mentioned in an astronomy magazine and thought, “yes”.
d) A fat book about wild flowers that seems to offer no practical use other than as coffee table fodder.
e) The fossils of florissant – it is possible to know what butterflies looked like 30 million years ago.
f) History of Country Music.
g) A Basque grammar that I bought for a laugh.
h) Last but not least, a book about how to be self sufficient, which my wife bought me. It has a useful chapter on how to manually slaughter pigs and cattle. This may well be the ace up my sleeve come the post-oil-economy apocalypse.