Tag Archives: science fiction

Fifty-one in 22 – reading this year

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At the start of 2022 I was reading a dense tome called “Railroaded – transcontinentals and the making of modern America” which was all about the development of the railroads, the growth of monopoly capitalism, and the effect this has had on American culture. I had to skip whole chapters; it was fascinating – but alas, rather intermittently and unreliably so. I was at the same time re-acquainting myself with the pulp science-fiction of Philip Jose Farmer (his “World of Tiers” series), and Sven Hassel’s “Monte Cassino“, a story of the second world war in Italy as seen from the German perspective.

In January I read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s historical novel “Red Sky at noon” about – cough – war in the Ukraine. Reviewed here. His novel opened “The red earth was already baking and the sun was just rising when they mounted their horses and rode across the grasslands towards a horizon that was on fire“. What an opening! I read Tim Marshall’s “The Power of Geography“, a weaker book, perhaps than his earlier outstanding “Prisoners of Geography”.

In February I finished another historical tome, Ray Allen Billington’s “Westward Expansion – a history of the American frontier”, which I’d recommend to anyone interested in this topic, an abiding fascination of mine. This book covers the whole, from the early Spanish incursions to the closing of the frontier at the end of the nineteenth century. Also in February I found time to read William Gibson’s “Agency” – one of his stories involving computer-generated “stubs” of a somehow alternate past rather like the recently filmed “The Peripheral” which I read years ago and am watching now.

In March I found myself enjoying John Julius Norwich’s history of “France” (how many of us in England know anything other than the very basic facts about that country?) and also military historian John Keegan’s “History of warfare“. I was then a little ambivalent about the highly recommended “Humankind – a hopeful history” by the Dutch philosopher Rutger Bregman. Very readable and informative but not a book whose conclusions I could whole-heartedly agree with – a bit like the work of Yuval Noah Harari in this respect. It’s not all about nodding sagely in agreement, nor all putting the book down in frowning consternation.

A short interlude in May saw me reading a book called “How steam locomotives really work“. I’ve still got that one – not given it away. It’s a gem in that it conveys an understanding of a very complex and difficult technical subject without resorting to advanced mathematics. In May I read the first novel of a friend of ours, Mrs Ruth D’Alessandro’s “Calling WPC Crockford“, an engaging memoir of rural policing in the 1950’s. We eagerly await both a sequel and watchable early Sunday evening TV adaptions thereof. Keith Robert’s “Pavane” – reviewed here – I had never heard of, despite its publication as an “SF Masterwork”. I thought I know my SF – but perhaps not? A pavane is a kind of Latin dance. This Pavane is a remarkable alternative history, a work of writing craftsmanship, a finely shaped bow or arc of story from beginning to end.

In June I read another sci-fi classic, Doris Lessing’s “Shikasta“. Shikasta is our earth, as seen from the viewpoint of those who try to settle it from afar. Like much great work by her and other female science-fiction writers such as Ursula le Guin, there are much deeper ideas at play here: this is not guns and heroes space-opera. A key idea explored in Shikasta is the importance of collectivism and community. At the far extremity of her argument in this direction, we see the idea that individualism itself could actually be a form of mental illness. You may be sure I don’t agree with that.

I was Between East and West – that is, touring in Eastern Europe – with Anne Applebaum, and then, I travelled from Portugal to India with Roger Crowley for an eye-opening account of “how Portugal forged the first global empire”. Remarkable to read what happened when men from Portugal – a primitive and feudal middle-ages culture – arrived at length in the Indian Ocean. They entered a sea of traders, free markets, and if by no means a democracy, then certainly, a functioning multi-cultural melting pot. The Portuguese, possessed as they were of vastly superior military technology but a much weaker moral and cultural understanding, swept the lot away and as good as destroyed everything they touched. There is a lesson there for us all.

Christopher Hibbert has published a life of Admiral Lord “Nelson – a personal history“. Nelson was a flawed man and not quite the untouchable English hero we see on the plinth in Trafalgar Square. I read the journal of Osborne Russell, a nineteenth century trapper: “nine years in the Rocky mountains“. I waded through Frank Snepp’s “Decent Interval“, about the Vietnam War. Upsetting. It put me in mind of a character created by the writer Richard Morgan who said “Anyone who still loves his country just hasn’t read enough history books yet”. Never a truer word wrote in fiction…

As summer turned to Autumn I had another good read on an upsetting and blood-soaked topic, “Partition” by Barney Spunner-White. This came about following a re-read of Kipling’s “Kim” and then a canter through Kipling’s short autobiography “Something of myself“. From upsetting and blood-soaked, to the engaging writing of Andrew Marr’s “The making of modern Britain”. Then, back to Norman times for “The White Ship” by Charles Spencer, being a history of pre-Plantagenet England, based loosely around the foundering of the aforementioned ship at Barfleur in 1120. Only two people survived. The king’s son and heir to the throne, William the Conqueror’s grandson, was drowned. This tragedy precipitated decades of bitter and bloody civil war.

Becky Chambers’ gentle and uplifting “social” science fiction “A closed and common orbit” tells the story of a woman – herself rescued from destruction as a child – who befriends and helps another woman. With Becky Chambers work it’s all in the emotional back-story: two plots move towards one another, only combining in the final pages. M John Harrison provided “You should come with me now“, being a collection of rather odd but compelling short stories about ghosts. Deeply strange, and rather reminiscent of the work of China Mieville. In the autumn, I re-engaged with the local library after many years away, and I borrowed and read “Thin Air” by Richard Morgan. You’ve read one Richard Morgan sci-fi/detective novel, you’ve read ’em all… Unremitting, gory violence. A bad tempered and ill-mannered former enforcer hero. Market forces gone mad. Explicit sex. All the usual Morgan tropes. Somehow unputdownable. More? Yes: Adam Robert’s “Bete” – another bad-tempered and irascible hero in a world where animals can talk – and do. Also, Sylvain Nouvel’s “Sleeping Giants“, a novel in the form of a series of interviews with a never-named representative of a shadowy and all-powerful government agency.

Moving back to non-fiction to finish, Jorge Cham wrote “We have no idea“, being a jocular, cartoony, sub-Bill Bryson account of how little science the human race actually knows. Refreshing reading, as I finished the year with Steven Weinberg’s (again highly recommended) “The first three minutes” about the birth of the universe. I thought it would be good; though he had a few good phrases, overall I was disappointed. I suppose cosmology IS complicated – see my comments above about advanced mathematics. I read Christian Woolmar’s “Cathedrals of Steam” about London’s great railway termini, which was a great account though it dwell on how things might have been better organised. I found Theodore Dalrymple’s anecdotes from the under-class (“Life at the bottom“) the more depressing for it being over twenty years old and knowing that little if anything has improved in that time.

Fifty-one books. Around a fifth of them, were re-reading. Only two-thirds I read in paper copy – the rest were on a Kindle. This year, a little over half of my reading was pure fiction. I re-read some old favourites: “The Lord of the Rings“, Heinlein’s “The cat who walks through walls“, and Stephen Baxter’s “Moonseed” and “Ark” to mention a handful. I finish the year deep in Nick Hayes’ “The Book of Trespass” which is troubling but exciting reading.

Ahead of its time: Robert Heinlein’s “Friday”

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A review of Robert Heinlein’s “Friday“

I first read “Friday” not long after it came out. It remains a remarkable novel, worth reviewing and unpicking even now forty years after its release. It’s a “Cyberpunk” novel published two years before William Gibson published “Neuromancer”; it was environmentally aware decades before the modern movement to environmental sustainability.  It posits a balkanised North America that to this day few if any other authors have dared describe. Its heroine, the female spy of the title, remains a relatively unknown icon of feminine power and ability.

“Friday” addresses racial prejudice and everyday sexism. It addresses police brutality, corruption amongst public employees, and – a favourite theme for Heinlein – the relationship of the individual with the state.  It upsets conventional storybook wisdom and in this respect is years ahead of its time. It would make a cracking film if only someone would write a screenplay for it.

Spoiler alert! Friday Jones, a female James Bond, calls herself a “combat courier”.  She is also an “artificial person”, that is, she is not born of woman, but a genetically enhanced superhuman rather like the characters hunted down by Deckard in “Blade Runner”.  She kills someone she finds following her while passing through an airport in Kenya. Hours later, the Nairobi Hilton is fire-bombed minutes after she checks out. She fails to connect these incidents. Arriving back at base in North America, she settles down for a ride in a horse-drawn carriage: in this world, fossil-fuel driven ground vehicles are not allowed. They are somewhere in what today is the Rust Belt of Illinois and Michigan: the chauffeur notes that “two hundred years ago, all these trees and fields were factories“.

Seconds later she is betrayed by that same chauffeur, captured by the enemy, and interrogated. Heinlein subverts the usual spy genre tropes and puts the obligatory torture scene (from which the hero escapes, as the climax of the book, right near the end) right at the beginning. Torturing a woman also is not normally the done thing. But Friday remains cheerful: she suggests to her torturer that he go and do something which she believes is anatomically possible, for some males…

She’s rescued, and nursed back to health. Her boss, the character in this story representing Ian Fleming’s “M”, sends her on break, and she goes to New Zealand to see her adopted family. Heinlein has always had innovative and unusual (and indeed questionable) ideas about marriage and sex. Friday belongs to a “line” or “group” marriage. Men and women, but in a line, as if for a dance. The difference is, all of the men, maybe 2, 3, 4 or eight men, are married to all of the women. Like Don Henley sings, “this could be heaven or it could be hell”…

All seems well until the “senior wife” in the marriage (the oldest wife and in this case one of the founding members of the marriage) finds out that Friday is an “artificial person”. Friday is summarily divorced. One minute, in the bosom of her family, the next, out on the street.

On the rebound, our heroine has a fling with a handsome Canadian airline pilot. As you do…perhaps. While she is in bed with him, a terrible world event happens, something rather like 9/11 but many orders of magnitude worse. “Black Thursday” or something like that. All airline traffic is stopped. Governments collapse; martial law is introduced; the Four Horseman have a brief canter through the world, and tens of thousands of people die or are imprisoned. Armed police come to the airline pilots house, and there is violence: a policeman lays hands on someone. Friday kills him, and she has to flee.

She spends a long time travelling round what in our world is the continental United States, trying to get back to base and report in to her boss. In this world, the United States has long gone: it is several different countries – the Chicago Imperium; British Columbia, the Republic of California, and the Lone Star Republic.  The story is set in the late fifties – we know this because at one point a lady of a certain age buys a lottery ticket ending in “99”, saying that this is a lucky number – it was the year of her birth. But we don’t know what century – certainly well into the 3rd Millennium. There is faster than light travel and a dozen or so settled planets around different stars. All industry and all vehicles are powered by “Shipstone” batteries, which working in some unknown proprietary way. Commercial aircraft are “semi-ballistic” glide rockets undertaking transcontinental journeys in merely hours. 

A favourite device of Heinlein’s is to see society through its small ads: in this part of the book there are fascinating job adverts: “Tranuranics Golden Division on Planet Golden around Procyon-B wants experienced mining engineers. Five year renewable contract”…the reader is told that the advert omits to mention that humans are unlikely to survive 5 years in the job…

Eventually Friday makes it back to her boss and checks in: he sets her to work on something we take for granted with Google and the internet: completely undirected and unsupervised research. This would have been very difficult to do in 1982 without access to reference libraries of books. After some weeks of this he rings her up in the middle of the night, and asks her “when will the next outbreak of Bubonic plague be?” A voice tells him the answer, and she is astonished to find that the voice is her own. That knowledge is the side-effect almost, the fruit, of her undirected research.  A few days later, her boss, an old man, is dead of natural causes, and she is out of a job.

Friday gets another job eventually – couriering something out to the royal family on The Realm, a fabulously rich and infamously totalitarian space colony. On the starship voyage out there, she becomes aware that she is pregnant and being closely watched by bodyguards everywhere. She works out that the unborn child planted within her is destined to become a royal daughter. She will go into hospital alive, go under anaesthetic for what she thinks is a minor procedure, and that will be the end of her.

With some difficulty, Friday escapes: she jumps ship at a colony world halfway; more by luck and plot devices than her own skill and judgement. She escapes from her bodyguards, disappears into the woods, and settles down to a normal existence as a colony wife, Cub den leader and mother.

A review of “The long way to a small angry planet”, by Becky Chambers

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A review of “The long way to a small angry planet“, by Becky Chambers

A readable example of what some have referred to as “social” science fiction, that is, science fiction that (at least ostensibly) deals with the human or personal story rather than engines, guns, planets and stars – though all of the latter four items figure in this book. Other examples of this sub-genre would be Maria Dona Russell’s The Sparrow (reviewed here) and Dark Eden by Chris Beckett, reviewed here. We can include in this category, some sci-fi classics like Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.

I found this copy in a pile of second-hand books in a church in the Peak District, and it did make for entertaining and satisfying holiday reading. To me, that is enough. However, once into it, one swiftly became aware of the rather conventional Californian left-liberal politics and moral philosophy of the author. It’s all co-operation and warm fuzzy feelings, and that’s fine, as far as it goes – even if it all seems a little far-fetched to this hard-headed and cynical reviewer.

At one level, this is exactly what I have long called for – science fiction that is positive, warm and encouraging, eschewing the dreadful dystopian vision of many modern writers. At another level, it beggars my belief at least – there are no convincing baddies in this book, save possibly for a few prison guards. There’s never any sense that things could go badly wrong.

What’s the story? A young, well-born woman escaping from her past, takes a job as a clerk on a ship…a ship whose crew, all have their own secrets. The ship is then swept up into an escalating war, from which they narrowly escape. The plot, which is solid and believable, is pretty much used as an excuse for five or six essays or short stories on the secrets of the crew. We have a nod to Vernor Vinge’s “Fire on the deep” in that humankind are part of a pan-galactic community of sapient species, all connected by some form of galactic internet. We have a borrow from Ursula Le Guin in the use of her word “ansible” to mean a device enabling faster-than-light communication. The author must be familiar with the darker futures described in the works of such writers as Richard Morgan and Alistair Reynolds. She has worked hard to portray something better, and has brought us something – there’s no other word for it – more feminine.

Part of the back-story is that humankind has managed to completely ruin the earth, and yet somehow be technically able to escape to the stars and thus be rescued, as refugees escaping from a desolation, by compassionate star-faring aliens. There’s a strong theme of pacifism in here; the captain of the ship, an otherwise sensible and upright fellow, has pacifist leanings. The “Exodans” – the humans who have escaped from the dying earth, have learned lessons in that escape, ostensibly, about peace and war, about the importance of co-operation versus competition. These are, perhaps, important lessons. It is an interesting position to take, but it is a feminine position. It’s not a position I wholly share. I think aggression, chutzpah, arrogance, risk-taking, curiosity, and immense energy are some of the fundamental qualities that have brought humankind out of the dust. The meek will inherit the earth, as R. A Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long notes, “but only in plots about six foot by three foot”.

In the end, if the author is weak on engineering and logic, she is strong on relationship, on friendship, and on compassion. I’m happy for faster-than-light travel to be illogical or inadequately explained, in exchange for a series of sketches of broken people moving toward healing, towards a kind of very secular redemption. It works, as far as it goes. As a man I’m afraid my suspension of disbelief did fail in places. Humans are nasty as well as good, and the balance is a little too much in favour of the good here. No-one is that nice in reality. But well worthwhile and thought-provoking reading.