Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Spin – by Robert Charles Wilson

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.

Katharine Kerr – The Gold Falcon

So a trilogy is a series of three books, right? What’s a word for a series of twelve?

One of my daughters is currently completely obsessed with the Lemony Snicket books. She’s read 11 of the 12 (so far) in the Series of Unfortunate Events. You may be thinking that she only has the 12th episode to read, but you’d be wrong. No, the one she hasn’t read is #5. She has, in fact, read them in a completely random order. And if she finishes one and doesn’t have a new one to read, she just re-reads one. What’s a word for a thirteen-ogy? The 13th is due out in October, I think.

My other daughter is similarly obsessed with the Daisy Meadows Rainbow Magic Fairy books. Now, this series is a real racket. The books are all slim (Horrid Henry thickness) and have more or less identical plots, and there are fucking forty of them. I’m pretty much convinced that there is no such entity as “Daisy Meadows”, and she is in fact just a computer programme run at the publishing house. I hate these books with a passion, but my 5-year-old loves them. Well, I suppose it’s not really very much different than me buying the Beano and Wizzer and Chips and Cor! every week. Or Macworld, MacUser, and MacFormat every month when I was older.

So I understand how from the outside something can seem strange, obsessive, and a little bit silly. That Lord of the Rings film sequence, I thought, revealed the utter tripe lying at the heart of that book, which I have read many, many times. Being immersed in the book: great. Watching it on film? Embarrassing.

Katharine Kerr’s sequence of novels set in the fantasy milieu of Deverry and the Westlands started 12 novels and 20 years ago. She’s been ill lately, so fans have been starved of new material for some time (imagine if she’d died before finishing it, and you’ve been following the sequence for 20 years!). The Gold Falcon was – or so I thought – going to be the last, but it seems that she had too much material, so there appear to be two more in the offing.

In a way, that’s shame, because a trilogy of quadrologies has a certain neatness to it. Still, I’m happy to keep reading them if she’s happy to keep knocking them out.

So what do you get? At around 400-pages per book, 12 books, you’ve got a fantasy saga on a truly epic scale. Makes some other fantasy sagas look like small potatoes. The deep premise is that people die and are reincarnated, and that their fate/character flaws etc. continue to affect their lives even in future incarnations. So the series covers (so far) 500 years of history, and multiple generations of reincarnated characters. Preposterous! I know! But you can’t help being sucked in by it all.

The whole thing started when a young man had an inappropriate relationship with his sister. He fucked up her life, his life, and the life of the guy she was supposed to marry. It’s all a horrible tangled mess, and one of the triangle makes a rash vow not to rest until he’s put things right. Well, it takes him 500 years, doesn’t it? This character, Prince Galrion, becomes a powerful sage/magician (dweomermaster) called Nevyn, who keeps meeting up with his betrothed and her brother (and others) in all their incarnations, until he finally gets it – in EastEnders style – sorted out.

Kerr tells this story over the first 8 volumes or so, but it’s not a straight chronology, oh no. Instead, she darts back and forth in time, showing (again and again) how the past affects the present, and how people struggle to get out from under or accept their destiny/fate (or wyrd).

All the fantasy elements are here. Swords, sorcery, men and women, elves, hybrids, shape-changers, even dragons (in the later books, she builds up to it). It’s all very silly, but it’s great fun. You become immersed in the story, the language – people talk in a sing-song style, truly, saying somewhat instead of something and it gladdens my heart instead of I’m happy (well, it all helps the word count, no doubt).

If you loathe and despise the fantasy genre (as I loathe and despise those Fairy books), you’ll hate this. But if you’ve ever entertained the notion… For example, if you’ve enjoyed Lord of the Rings but wouldn’t know what else to pick up – well you just might find a life-long friend in Katharine Kerr. You can be sure that by the time you’ve reached the last in the series (if there ever is a last), you can – like my oldest – go back and re-read from the beginning.

Kerr’s a good writer, I think, and so much better than the likes of David Eddings that she’s in a different league. There’s quite a lot of scholarship under the surface – Celtic mythology, for example – and she always stays true to the rules of her fantasy world. She keeps all the balls of the plot in the air, and she makes it all seem deceptively easy. There are some great characters, and it can become unputdownable. Big problem I had with The Gold Falcon, there are no chapters: so you just keep reading on and on, with no natural break. I was up till gone one in the morning as I was finishing it up.

Highly recommended, if you like that kind of thing, but you’ll want to start at the beginning. One thing to watch out for are alternative titles! Don’t buy some from the USA and others from the UK, for example, or you might end up with the same one twice. The good news for those starting fresh is that the early episodes are available from Amazon Marketplace resellers for as little as one new pence!

Correct order:

Daggerspell
Darkspell
Dawnspell
Dragonspell

A Time of Exile
A Time of Omens
A Time of War
A Time of Justice

The Red Wyvern
The Black Raven
The Fire Dragon
The Gold Falcon

Forthcoming:
The Spirit Stone
The Shadow Isle

If you visit Amazon UK, you will see listed a book in the series called The Black Stone. This book does not, and will not, ever exist. Kerr states on her web site that her publishers issued the title on a list of forthcoming publications (when she was ill, I think), and for some reason Amazon seem unable to take it down. The next book will be The Spirit Stone, with at least one more to come.

If you want an introduction to Kerr as a writer, she has written three science fiction novels, Polar City Blues, Freezeframes, and Snare. I love Snare, which kind of straddles Sf and Fantasy. It’s one of those fantasy-like novels which turns out to be concerned with old/forgotten technology. It’s a good read, and a good place to start with Kerr’s writing. Again, available quite cheaply from Amazon Marketplace.

Writing Styles

I don’t like a writerly writer, you know the kind. I’ve really gone orf literature and hate to read anything literary. Even with my favourite genres, I really don’t like that stuff some writers try to do with language.

Take science fiction. I like a rollicking good yarn, and I read for the plot, for the ideas, for the fun of it. But I never took to cyberpunk and the like, because I simply can’t stand all the messing around with language, all the “this is how people will talk/think in the future.”

It’s like watching an American film, set in an American city, but dubbed into French. You can follow the plot, and understand quite a lot of what people are saying, but you have to work too hard and don’t enjoy the experience.

Some things have merits beyond their status in a particular genre. They have interesting things to say, and if you pay attention you can find a lot to say about them. But if you come at me from the position that I’ve got to work hard to start with, I start resenting you immediately. I’ll work when I want to work, when I think something is worth the work.

It’s like books that start with several pages of italic text. I never enjoy that.

This is making me sound lazy and stupid, and perhaps I am, but it’s not as if I’m not willing to give things a chance. For example, every year I buy Gardner Dozois’ anthology of the Year’s Best SF. This is sometimes a mixed bag. Dozois has good taste, but he’s not infallible, and some years are just better than others. But often the whole point of short SF is that you don’t know what’s going on until near the end. So it’s not as if I never do any work on a story to get into it. But make me work just for the sake of working, just because you fancy writing in a particular Newspeak style, good-bye.

I know it means I’m missing out on a huge chunk of stuff, but I’m as sure as anything that I’m not missing anything I’d enjoy. Any SF writer who gets featured in the Guardian regularly, for example, I’m sure I’d hate.

Over the years I’ve come upon a number of writers who have become firm favourites, and they always seem to be relatively obscure in this country. I don’t know why this would be. It’s not as if I set out to be a contrarian. Reading, primarily, for the plot, as I do, you’d think my tastes would be kind of mainstream, but examples like Michael Connelly, whose books you will find in W H Smiths/Waterstones are a rarity.

For a long time, one of my favourite writers has been Kate Wilhelm, whose books are always hard to get hold of in the UK. As you can see from her bibliography, not only is she prolific, she’s a genre crosser. I would have first encountered her in the legendary Luton library SF section, but she’s written more thrillers and legal procedurals in recent years. As far as her SF goes, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is a classic of the genre. She’s particularly good at the post-apocalyptic novel, viz that, and Juniper Time among others. And she’s good at combining suspense with SF ideas, as in Huysman’s Pets. Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang is actually one of those formative novels, and I can’t believe you haven’t read it.

Not by coincidence, Wilhelm was married to Damon Knight, another excellent writer. Won’t make the kind of headlines that Philip K Dick does, but then Dick’s notoriety is more in the line of rock star/drugs than quality of writing. I find most of his famous stuff impenetrable. As for Damon Knight, The Man in the Tree is superb. It’s about one of Knight’s favourite themes, one that is currently quite fashionable: the idea of multiple universes (the multiverse), and having the ability to switch between them. I just read a Crichton (Timeline) based on the idea. But both Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm are always more concerned with the human impact of such ideas. So The Man in the Tree is about the tormented life of a man who discovers that, with a little mental twist, he can switch between universes, so that events which have happened, suddenly did not happen.

Finally, dear reader, I should mention again the great Tim Powers, one-time winner of a Philip K Dick award, but a much better writer. Powers likes to uncannily combine fract and friction, populating fantasy plots with historical personages such as Byron and Shelley (or, more recently, Kim Philby). I have never read a bad Powers novel. It was his most recent, Declare, which set me off on my recent espionage jag. But frankly, Powers makes espionage more interesting by including elements of the supernatural. All the paranoia of the spy game, the wilderness of mirrors, and the vicious game playing of SMERSH and NKVD and OSS and the CIA makes so much more sense if they were also running scared of demons. Final note: if you like Neil Gaman, you will almost certainly like Tim Powers.