Tag Archives: scifi

A review of R.A Heinlein’s “Citizen of the galaxy”

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“Citizen of the galaxy” is one of the novels referred to as one of Heinlein’s “juveniles”, that is, work aimed at younger readers, what we today might call “YA” fiction. It stands up very well as reading for adults, and remains very readable today, though first published in 1957. I have just re-read it because it is for me what I would call “comfort reading” – easy, relaxing, unchallenging, entertaining. I re-read it because I am aspiring storyteller myself. Re-reading and studying the work of a master craftsman like Heinlein is never going to be a waste of time for anyone claiming to be writer of stories.

“Citizen of the galaxy” is what we call – using a German word – a bildungsroman. The word translates into English as “building up story”. A Bildungsroman follows the life of someone – generally but not always a young person – on their journey from boy to man, from girl to woman, from callow youth to wise and considered adulthood. The hero faces challenges, rises to them and grows up, increasing in moral stature as the story goes on. It is probably the most common storyline or plot in all literature.

Spoiler alert: On a faraway world, a beggar, by some incredible chance, manages to buy a slave boy, and raises him as his own. But the beggar is not what he seems: he is actually an undercover agent working to stamp out slavery. Years later, as the boy grows up, the beggar is found and killed by the police. The youth escapes, and becomes apprenticed to some space merchants – traders travelling between the stars. Later, he enlists in the military, and there his real identity is found. He is the long-lost son of one of the wealthiest families in existence, the owners of vast corporations spread across hundreds of worlds. He is restored to the bosom of his family, where in due course he discovers evidence that his father was murdered, and he himself sold into slavery as a small boy, by people within that web of corporations controlled by his family. Spoiler alert ends

The story is set in a star-flung future centuries from now. Humankind has faster-than-light travel and has expanded out to the stars, inhabiting hundreds of worlds in a volume thousands of light-years across. Some of the those worlds are conspicuously 20th century – Woolamurra, visited by the traders, is clearly Australian. Jubbul, where the beggar lives undercover, sounds very Asian. It has a capital city called Jubbulpore and a language – Sargonese – that “is a kind of Sanskrit”. There’s a loose “Terran Hegemony” centred around Earth, and this represents civilisation. At the edge of this Hegemony, a frontier; beyond it, anarchy and wilderness – plenty of inhabited worlds out there, some inhabited by aliens, others, by men and women.

The action opens at a slave auction in the city of Jubbulpore, the capital of the Empire of Nine Worlds. Heinlein perhaps carries on the implicitly racist attitudes of the 1950’s here; his Terran Hegemony – though this is never stated out loud – is implicitly white, post-American and democratic. His Jubbul, the capital of the Nine Worlds, is literally beyond the pale, over the frontier, uncivilised, and it is implicitly Asian in origin. His traders, when our hero meets them, are Finnish. They are both clannish and inward-looking. It is interesting to see a parallel with Alistair Reynold’s clannish and inward-looking “Ultras” – the traders and starfarers in his “Revelation Space” stories set in the 28th century. Heinlein, in this respect, was an original who generated ideas to be copied.

In this respect of copying, Heinlein has quite openly borrowed the plot of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” for Citizen of the galaxy. A beggar boy is lifted from obscurity and trained in spying techniques; the beggar boy as he grows up discovers his true identity. Heinlein does not even bother to conceal it; indeed, he embraces it. A minor character in Citizen of the galaxy is someone called Creighton. We recall from “Kim” that the shadowy figure who arranges for Kim to be educated and trained as a spy, is a Colonel Creighton.

Heinlein has a reputation for what is called “hard” science fiction. This is not always entirely deserved. In “hard” science fiction the physics and engineering in the stories are robust. Heinlein and his wife reputably once spent a week doing a complex calculation in ballistics (this was before microprocessors, much less calculators, were invented) to provide technical correctness to a single sentence in his juvenile novel “Space Family Stone”.  Yet in this juvenile novel we have unexplained inertialess faster-than-light travel.

In this novel we are mostly free of Heinlein’s usual hectoring and lecturing the reader on his politics and moral philosophy. This isn’t “To sail beyond the sunset” or even “Starship Troopers”. Mostly: he does argue that three things will emerge wherever there is a physical frontier. First, traders will range beyond that frontier, buying and selling. Second, there will be bandits and outlaws preying on honest people, and thirdly, slavery will come into being. One might question these assertions. Underlying them though, is a fundamentally American understanding of history, an understanding of history rooted in the idea of there being a frontier – an edge – beyond which there is wilderness.

As a storyteller, and as someone very familiar with Heinlein’s published work, another thing I notice is the re-use of characters and the recycling of set-piece scenes. A few we see cropping up from novel to novel are:

  • The ostensibly venal and predatory older man who is actually honest and very helpful to the hero (James J Garsch here, but Jubal Harshaw in “Stranger in a strange land” and Henrik Schultz in “The cat who walks through walls”)
  • The naïve but honest youth who somehow fails to see obvious female romantic intent (our hero here and elsewhere in Heinlein’s work)
  • The mature lady (a brothel-keeper, a mother-in-law, a senior soldier) with a heart of gold but a stern and forbidding exterior
  • The Master of a ship – Heinlein knew ships, whether warships or cruise ships

Set piece scenes?

  • Friction between two enlisted men of different rank settled by fighting in the washrooms
  • People in the community closing ranks to help someone stay hidden from the police or the authorities
  • Policemen being bribed or otherwise “choosing not to notice” what is right in front of them

All in all this is an excellent read, recommendable if you can cope with science fiction at all.

A review of “New Pompeii” by Daniel Godfrey

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Recently I was discussing my writing and reading with a friend of mine, someone I consider wiser and more Godly than I. A man of few words, his sage remark summing up our conversation was, “read more fiction”. That night I ordered three books. The first was “North Woods” by Daniel Mason (short stories about New England, recommended by the Economist). The second was “Children of the dead end” by Patrick MacGill, which I was recommended to by visiting the town of Kinlochleven in the Highlands. This was an autobiographical novel of an Irish navvy and his journeyings in childhood from Donegal to being a “man of the road” in Edwardian Scotland. The third, was “New Pompeii“, a science-fiction thriller by Daniel Godfrey, again, recommended by the Economist. For those with a snobbish bent towards literary fiction, this is perhaps the least considerable of the three. But I read it first and I will review it first.

New Pompeii started slowly, but it built up in pace very well, and it ended very strongly. I have found in recent years that a lot of fiction, particularly science-fiction, tends to end weakly, as if the author ran out of steam towards the end. I was anticipating yet another weak ending here, and I was disappointed! The protagonist is called Nick Houghton. This, for obvious reasons, pleased me. This is the closest I’ve ever got to being in a book myself – although in Steven King’s “The Stand” there is a minor baddie called Carl HOUGH, and a major goodie called NICK Andros…

That said, this Nick Houghton I found unsympathetic; a little too prissy and sensitive for my tastes. He’s an academic with little consequent grounding in reality, a sufferer from migraines, a man very much in thrall to an overpowering father, also an academic. Nah – that ain’t me, that’s not my kind of guy. One might say of this character, “He’s definitely on the spectrum” – though of course, aren’t we all? Yet, I think it’s important in good fiction to have characters with flaws; better still if they are modern flaws, like suffering from migraines, like neuro-divergence, OCD or excessive risk aversion.

Notwithstanding this character who I found I would not like, and some early plot twists that caused my suspension of disbelief to shiver slightly like a Jenga tower towards the end of a game, the story developed well. If there was one grave flaw it was the baddies – the antagonists – were pantomime baddies, badly drawn men, somewhat unconvincing. Whelan. the former soldier, was the stock hard man, but neither convincingly evil nor convincingly redeemable. He was never frightening. McMahon his boss, was no more than just a cipher; a boor and indeed a bore, pasted into the role of CEO.

I found this book unputdownable – I read it through continuously in one go and I paid full price for it. I think that gives me the right to be critical. Serious questions arose in my mind about the siting of the city of New Pompeii – which cleverly, the author does not reveal. In practical terms, where could such a city be placed such that it would not be swiftly obvious to the Roman inhabitants that it was not Pompeii? It would have to be within a couple of degrees of latitude of southern Italy – otherwise after a few years the climate would soon betray its location. It could not be at an equivalent latitude in the southern hemisphere – that would become obvious on the very first night, from the different stars and constellations. There would have to be a “no-fly” zone round the city with a radius upwards of 30-40km – or the city situated where there was no possibility of overflight by commercial aircraft. Can’t have our Roman citizens wondering what contrails are.

The surprise is not that Whelan and NovusPart have underestimated their Roman captives, but that those captives remained quiescent for so long. The author’s characters did pick up on some things – the change in colour of carrots, and the change in the size of chickens – over 2000 years – but not others. I read once that Venus, the Morning Star, was visible in broad daylight until modern air pollution rendered it otherwise. It seems unlikely to me that no-one in New Pompeii would not have spotted artificial satellites rushing across the sky. Underlying this point about underestimating the people of the past is an important principle. What I call the “myth of continuous improvement” is at work. Today we often tend to assume that things have got better, that we are morally, intellectually and even physically superior to our forebears. The author brings home nicely the point that this is not necessarily so.

Overall though, this was a page-turner that showed and did not tell. It was a story concerned with people rather than with the enginery and natural philosophy associated with time travel, or with geomorphological and natural change over 2000 years. It is the people that are important, as indeed the protagonists themselves noted.

A review of Pavane, by Keith Roberts

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A review of Pavane, by Keith Roberts

This is one of the “SF Masterworks” series which has re-issued, over the decades, some absolutely classic titles. Some of them are well-known to me; others, like this one, I had never heard of. You can see the list yourself here. I’ve read 21 of the 73 titles in the softcover list. It is necessarily some editor’s subjective choice, and there is a tendency for Philip K. Dick to appear rather too often in my view.

But this is about Pavane. A pavane, we read, is a kind of Latin dance. This is important. Roberts has written a work with six “measures”; six long chapters, each of them meaningful, each of them drawing us onto an inevitable conclusion. We start in the late 1960’s, and we finish sometime near the end of the 20th century, describing the growth of, the antecedents of, a very English revolution. A humble engine-driver at the beginning, further on has become a rich business man. His niece becomes the mother of a firebrand aristocrat, the Lady of Corfe, whose actions bring the established order down in flames and ruin. Throughout, there is an older hidden England, a faerie England, at work. It is at work for good. It is a concealed spiritual England such as C.S Lewis hints at “That Hideous Strength” – although he speaks rather, of “Logres”, a spiritual Britain.

Pavane is an alternative history. And it is remarkable as such, for it is a work of writing craftsmanship, a finely shaped bow or arc of story from beginning to end. In this alternative history, Good Queen Bess is assassinated in 1588; the Spanish Armada is successful in its conquest of England, and the entire Reformation is brought to a bloody halt, unlikely as it may seem (more on that in a minute.) The Catholic church militant then reigns from Rome, supreme and unchallenged, for centuries down to modern times.

The story starts in the late 1960’s in Dorset. Part of the attraction of the novel for me was the writer’s clear love of and knowledge of Dorset, an area I know and love myself. Most of the action is set between Dorchester and the Isle of Purbeck.

We see how control of innovation can prevent progress: in this alternate 1960’s, steam traction engines haul goods along rough unmade roads, often threatened by bandits in the woods, and subject to the constraints of impending darkness and winter weather. The use of concrete is tightly controlled and even banned – because concrete can be used to create fortifications, and hence foster rebellion against Rome, which is ruthlessly put down by the Church Militant.

There is no electricity; there is no radio or TV. Petrol and diesel engines have been invented, but the church has circumscribed the use of these new-fangled devices by Papal Decree. But in this world, unthinkable rebellion is brewing slowly, in the woods, in the fields, in the quiet villages. It is a world where the strength of England is found in the countryside.

Writing as a believing Christian here, I sense that Keith Roberts perhaps has little time for church or religion – but he never becomes openly anti-Christian, as in the worldview seen in such work as the “His dark materials” trilogy of Philip Pullman. He writes with a light pen of the faeries, the “old people”, of the old religions and the older Gods – Wotan, Thor, Freyr. In this he prefigures – or at least reminds me of – the much later work of Neil Gaiman in his excellent “American Gods”.

Pavane was very readable, very engaging, and full of delightful and evocative language. If I had a criticism of it, it would be of the opening premise – that the assassination of Queen Elizabeth I, and even victory for the Spanish Armada, would have been enough to destroy the Reformation and the protestant energy and faith of north-western Europe.

I’d argue not. I’d argue for a historical inertia; doubtless there are “cusp” points in human history when much can change subsequently because of a single event. But I’d argue that there are far fewer of them than science-fiction authors might like. I’d suggest the assassination of JFK might have been one; I’d certainly argue that the death from disease of Prince Arthur, allowing his younger brother Henry to become Henry VIII, was another.

But I think, rather, that there is a kind of historical inertia. I don’t think it’s quite so easy to change history through the turn of a card or the flap of a butterfly’s wing. I’d suggest that there is considerable cultural and historical momentum, which is preserved and not lightly shifted. Consider: throughout history there have been many times when reactionary forces might have won on the battlefield, but didn’t – would it have made much long-term difference even if they had?

Realistically would England be that different now if Charles I had won in the English Civil War? Would America today be really that different if the thirteen colonies had failed to prevail in their Revolution? And even if the South had won on the battlefield in the American Civil War, as a slave economy competing in a free market it could never have prevailed against the North in the long term. When the conservative, the reactionary and the traditional meets the progressive, the proactive, and the forward-looking, in the long run, there can be no doubt about what the outcome will be. The status quo is never acceptable.