Yo Grandpa’s Sci-Fi: Rogue Moon

Rogue Moon
Algis Budrys

I forget how or when, but Rogue Moon somehow made its way onto my official Must Read pile. (It probably involved The Coode Street Podcast somehow.) After a recent run of epic fantasy, genre busting short stories, and occasional weirdness, a Golden Age, big mysterious object story seemed like a pleasing diversion; the “hold” button for the local library was just one click away. Soon I was curled up with Budrys, a voice from the past and renown SF critic, and expecting a quick jaunt through the Competent White Men Solving Engineering Mysteries past of science fiction. It was not to be however – confounded expectations lay in my future.

Rogue Moon is apparently the inspiration for an Alastair Reynolds short story called “Diamond Dogs.” They couldn’t be more different, even though the starting point is nearly the same. Both build themselves from an inexplicable tower on a moon (our Moon in Budrys’ case) that basically acts as a real life arcade game, though where our games are designed to separate quarters from players through constant game death, these towers are designed to separate souls from bodies with constant real death. Both presumably teach some sort of skill that, honed through constant repetition, eventually sees the player through to grand triumph. As one might expect, Reynolds’ story involves bizarre, Sterling-esque body modification, Gothic mischief, and cyborg mayhem, as though he read the Budrys book and said to himself, “Once more, with feeling.” (In this case, “feeling” means “as though David Lynch and William Gibson had a literary love child and it involved cybernetic dogs.”) Rogue Moon is, well, certainly not that.

We are dealing with the above mysterious death tower, sitting there in baffling glory on the dark side of the Moon, and we are dealing with competent white men. Beyond that however, all Hard SF bets are off. In a precursor to the New Wave, Budrys prefers to check his Golden Age tropes at the door and dig into man’s inhumanity to man. In short, this is a character sketch of four very messed up people that is catalyzed by the big mysterious object. (There is a fifth character who carries about her the whiff of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but she’s basically a potted plant who just reflects the weirdos around her. This really isn’t her story.) We watch three men struggle to justify their manliness, a woman who defines herself by manipulation and seduction, a deeply dysfunctional love triangle between all but one of them, and some form of redemption for some of them, as the crazy Moon death tower kills and maims clones of the most manly of the men. The reader can expect nothing but charm from this one.

I think that reaction to Rogue Moon is going to split cleanly along lines demarcated by SF reader expectations. Anyone wanting to read another Rendezvous with Rama is going to be annoyed. Those who prefer just a smidgen of science with their examinations of the human condition will be overjoyed. John Ringo fans may end up cross-eyed in a corner, making that “b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b” sound by wiggling a finger over their lips. Enough people consider this a classic that serious SF students should probably check it out, but it might be best to know what’s coming.

Rating: The Damned United. I picked it up for the football (Leeds United!) and stayed for the insane character sketch of the one and only Brian Clough.

The Emoticon Generation

The Emoticon Generation
Guy Hasson

My turn has finally come around in The Emoticon Generation Blog Tour. I highly recommend reading the other posts in this series, both for the varied perspectives other reviewers bring to the book, and because I’m going to skip over many of the basics in this post. Others have been kind enough to summarize the stories, talk a little about the author, and trade comments about who liked what, so I’m going to jump right into the bits that interest me the most and poke around those topics for awhile.

The stories in this collection are unified by the near future theme. In some cases, they are only tangentially science fiction, for two reasons. First, the stories are always character focused. This is not Analog-style Hard SF, where competent white men solve engineering problems, it is SF where some science fictional idea kicks off a story that is almost entirely about the people involved. “Science” generally takes a back seat to “fiction.” Second, whatever concept lies at the root of the story feels as though it could be hitting the real world science news tomorrow. Or yesterday. In fact, Hasson is convincing enough in some of the stories that I would not be surprised to find out that some government somewhere is actually using the technology he describes. I know I’m not alone in thinking that “Ping!” might be a real word; I felt obligated to confirm that the entirety of the first story, “Generation E,” is in fact made up. I wasn’t sure.

Four of the seven stories take on one particular cutting edge endeavor that sits at the center of a large portion of SF discourse: digitizing people. Plenty of books take downloaded personalities as a given; it’s not a new idea, though I get the feeling that it has grown more ubiquitous in recent years. Some authors use their books as proxies arguing one aspect or another of the issue (Karl Schroeder, for example, or Greg Egan), while others, like noted internet puppy Charlie Stross, advocate in real life. Hasson doesn’t take a side in the debate, instead choosing to examine the researchers, early adopters, and guinea pigs that would make such a thing possible. He seems much less interested in the hows of the thing, or the effect it would have on us some hundreds of years down the line. Instead, Hasson teases out the ethical questions that will face us tomorrow, or next year, or next decade, if it turns out we can scan our brains into computers.

Two of the stories, “Hatchling” and “Eternity Wasted,” deal specifically with, shall we say, digital personhood. If these AIs are sentient, be they created or copied, what rights do they have? Is it torture if the intelligence is just sitting in a computer somewhere? Is it murder to turn them off? Can we put these personalities to use for science? Considering the pitched battles being waged (in the US at least) over the rights of corporations and fetuses, where will people draw the line with AI? I can’t help but wonder if Kansas-based churches will picket and protest when digital people are being used as experimental subjects, or if they will just mutter about “‘dem newfangled eee-lectronics” and go about their business. What about the tech people that rise to the defense of digital rights and persecuted hackers? How will they feel about the mathematician locked away in his integrated circuit cell? Hasson has no answers, nor does he even directly ask the questions. One can sense his unease with the uses he seems to expect us to put these AIs to, however. I wonder if he read Tony Daniels’ Metaplanetary while writing? (Daniels has AIs stand in for Jews in his WWII-in-space epic.)

Two more, “All of Me” and “Her Destiny” play with even more prosaic questions. The first is pretty amusing in its way, wondering what might happen when someone’s digital copy is better than the real thing. I probably shouldn’t have been laughing at this story, but I was. (Sign of distasteful personality traits in the reviewer?) The second is a bit more fantastic, using digitized consciousness to play with ideas about fate and destiny. It walks a fine line between heartstring-tugging and mind-bending. Neither of these dig into the thorny ethical issues of uploaded intelligence, instead playing with what if questions that drift more into thought provoking entertainment.

The remaining stories maintain the similar balance of sympathetic characters and Keanu Reeves-esque “Woah” inducing concepts, but without the thematic unity of the above four. “Freedom is Only a Step Away” kept me thinking, all the moreso because I have been involved in teaching and am currently worried about my own children’s education. Hasson makes implications about the way our current society shackles us and cuts us off from our full potential, but hedges away from the anarchic premise of the story. I suspect he’s enjoying tweaking everyone, without actually making policy recommendations. “Generation E” is easily the most fun of the stories, again no doubt because my oldest child is just discovering email. As a fellow blogger said during our conversation about this, “You say your daughter is just writing gibberish, but do you really know??” Hmmm.

So these are my reactions to the stories. The book is fairly short, but there is lots to chew on. Hasson has said in other interviews that his number one goal is to blow people’s minds; I’d say he succeeds this time. Now I’m just waiting for one or another science blog to break the news that half of Hasson’s inventions are actually being put to use by Sony, the Russian government, or a start-up in Silicon Valley.

Trafalgar

Trafalgar
Angelica Gorodischer

I found out about this book from the always excellent Far Beyond Reality blog. I had planned on putting it further down the To Read list, but when I checked the library, there it sat. And so, Trafalgar Medrano, the daring hero of Angelica Gorodischer’s book, somehow leaped to the front of the line. To be honest, this is not at all what I thought I’d be reading right now. A quick look at the planned reading list for the year shows no Argentinian SF to speak of, but sometimes these things creep up on us.

Trafalgar is a slim volume of short stories that are, if not chronologically sequential, at least meant to be read that way. The central figure in each is Trafalgar Medrano, a galactic merchant who returns to his home base in Rosario, Argentina after each adventure to regale his circle of associates with heroic tales. Often as not, he does this in the friendly confines of his favorite Rosario cafe, while consuming remarkable quantities of coffee and tobacco. His most obvious literary counterpart is Nicholas Van Rijn, though Trafalgar bears little resemblance to Poul Anderson’s rather grotesque creation. The stories generally follow traditional SF paths, wherein the brave, capitalist hero finds himself in a strange land beset with strange troubles; only his wits and business acumen can save the day.

The fun begins when the reader realizes that Gorodischer isn’t just serving up the usual Campbellian fare. Instead, she is slowly deconstructing SF cliches and building a new perspective on the typical Competent White Man so prevalent in the genre. To begin with, many of the stories are told by women. (Trafalgar narrates his own of course, but usually within a framework of someone else reporting on what Trafalgar said, creating multiple layers in each chapter.) The ladies obviously take a different view of Trafalgar’s inveterate womanizing; they let him know that at every opportunity. The last story in the book presents our leading hero with an especially tart irony that all but the densest will enjoy.

It’s not just the womanizing that comes under fire. These secondary narrators subtly undermine the whole affair, deflating Trafalgar when he gets pretentious, though still recognizing his more noble accomplishments. There is an air of unreality to it all however, and I come away from the book wondering how much of it is supposed to be “factual.” Trafalgar is allegedly traveling the stars, but we see no evidence of planetary commonwealths or some such. Is he crazy? Is it all a deep secret? Should we take him at face value? I have no idea. That is, I suppose, part of the fun. He may be exactly what he claims to be, or he may be a compulsive yarn-spinner. Gorodischer delivers it all with a perfectly straight face, as though daring the reader to doubt her.

Even with all of these layers in place, Gorodischer still isn’t content. Woven into many of the stories is subtle social commentary, clear to those with the eyes to see, but unobtrusive, likely hidden to many. It is strongest in “The Gonzalez Family’s Fight For a Better World,” my favorite episode, when said family literally has to escape the tyranny of the past. This bonus of humanism means that Trafalgar is masterfully constructed, both in its pieces and as a whole, slowly opening into a strikingly comprehensive synthesis of the best characteristics of science fiction, fantastical writing, and square-as-a-box literature.

This book is a must read for the serious SF consumer. It broadens the science fiction’s cultural base and adds a feminist voice to the discourse without lecturing or haranguing. It picks apart hoary cliches without disrespecting its heritage. Best of all, Trafalgar paints an interesting and engaging portrait of a character that is familiar, but still manages to surprise. Gorodischer’s book will likely end the year on my top list.

Carve the Sky

Carve the Sky
Alexander Jablokov

Today’s post, the last of my 2013 SF Experience efforts, is a bit of a hidden gem. I first read Jablokov several years ago when I came across a random short story about romance among extreme body builders, the title of which I have since forgotten. However, the combination of near future snark, crazy ideas I would never think of (biceps sculpted like mountain ranges?), and underlying humanity stayed with me enough that when I saw his debut novel at a book sale recently, I snapped it up. Carve the Sky was published in 1991, unbeknownst to me despite being in the heat of my initial SF reading phase. It was followed by a couple of other novels, and then by a long break. Perusing the interwebs for info on the man, I see that he has recently published another novel, the first, he says, in about ten years.

I came into this without any expectations; naturally I was completely surprised. The book is an art thriller. It is another Solar System tale. Concerned as it is with a mystery surrounding a work of art, with artists in general, and to a lesser extent with religion, the easy comparison is with Jack McDevitt’s Alex Benedict novels, but with 26% more swashbuckling. More than those however, Carve the Sky feels a bit like a space-based Arturo Perez-Riverte novel. There is another, wilder, relationship I will draw later in the review, but for now we will stick to the basics. In short, there is a mysterious sculpture, multiple factions chasing after it, and a shocking answer behind all the questions.

Since I wasn’t paying total attention going into this book, it took me a few pages to catch on to the setting. Taking stock of my recent reading tallies up five books from 2012 that are Solar System exclusive (2312, Existence, Blue Remembered Earth, Caliban’s War, The Fractal Prince), plus another series from the mid 2000s (Metaplanetary). Comparing these to Carve the Sky yielded the surprising observation that, despite being over twenty years old, Jablokov’s book didn’t feel any older than the rest. Through a variety of artifices, he managed to dodge obsolescence almost completely. Considering that in 1991, Communism was still winding down, Terminator 2 was the gold standard for special effects, and Civilization was a new release, I would say that Carve the Sky has held up remarkably well.

Thinking about it later though, one thing did surprise me: the complete lack of cyberpunk. There is no internet, no hacking, no Singularity, or any of the technology that we take for granted now. On the lone occasion that characters need to stay in touch over long distances, they use the equivalent of phone booths. Still, the story is constructed in such a way that this isn’t very noticeable. Also missing is the vaguely anti-big corporation feel that cyberpunk codified into much of SF. There is, on the other hand, an echo of the Mechanist-Shaper schism that drives the de rigueur conflict between the inner and outer system. There is also an Earth recovering from decades (centuries?) of war and neglect, anarchic freeports in the asteroids, inscrutable religions, and crazy artists. The details differ somewhat from SF published Right Now, but many of the concepts are similar. I am uncertain if Jablokov was intentionally rejecting cyberpunk when he wrote Carve the Sky, or if it was still too early for cyberpunk tropes to have fully colonized mainstream SF. (I suspect the latter, for no good reason except that it doesn’t seem important. It’s just something that occurred to me later, probably in the context of a completely unrelated conversation.)

For me, the characters are what really shines in this book. Our erstwhile hero is both a discerning art curator and a special agent. He has a past, not troubled exactly, but eventful. The people in his orbit are a complicated bunch, all tied up hopelessly in a system-wide political near-crisis. The sculptors are suitably neurotic, the aristocrats properly feudal, and the church people ascetic and mystical. Oddly enough, the story taken as a whole reminded me of nothing so much as a Hannu Rajaniemi novel. The differences between the two are obvious, but something about Jablokov’s daring stylistic writing and the way he cloaks the familiar geography in a wholly alien, but completely human society makes Carving the Sky feel like an ancestor to The Quantum Thief. I could be totally in left field here, but I call them as I see them.

I wonder if Jablokov would have benefited, as Rajaniemi has, from having an internet fandom. This feels like the kind of book that would have generated frantic buzz among the community, had the community not been limited to snail mail and annual conventions. Instead, it remains under the radar and under appreciated. Or if it is appreciated, I haven’t heard about it, which may amount to the same thing. Carve the Sky is a surprising and engaging read. Jablokov deserves a place closer to the center of SF discourse; I wonder if his newer books will gain that place for him.

Rating: I’m wracking my brain for a suitable underrated footballer, preferably from Eastern Europe. I will gladly accept nominations in the comments.
Edit: Bulgaria ’94 has been suggested. I like the idea, but hope Jablokov’s new books fare better than Bulgaria did against Italy and Sweden.

YGSF: Analogue Men

Analogue Men
Damon Knight

This is my first post in the Vintage SciFi Not-a-challenge, but also the first post in an exciting new series here at Two Dudes. We’ve had Moldy Fantasy for awhile now, so now it is time for the SF counterpart to emerge: Yo’ Grandpa’s SciFi (pronounced Sah-Fah). And who better to kick off YGSF than, not just any Grandmaster, but with the very namesake of the Grandmaster Award, Damon Knight? I’ve never read Knight before this, so was fortunate to find this small, battered paperback at one or another of the book sales I haunt. Analogue Men, sometimes published as Hell’s Pavement, appears to be his first novel, though he had been writing short stories and criticism for many years before.

I’m not sure what to make of this novel. The basic concept is the “analogue,” a machine that convinces brains to cook up hallucinatory reasons for controlling behavior. Ostensibly used to prevent criminal antics, it is inevitably abused, leading to whole societies full of Norman Bates, forever hectored by imaginary spinsters. The first bit of the book feels rather like a poor man’s Space Merchants. Later it turns into Bizarro Hogwarts, then something really crazy, and finally a strangely unsatisfying conclusion, with stops at Thrilling Adventure along the way. It is mostly satirical, I think, though some of the targets of that satire have drifted into obscurity. At the same time, the book maintains its Golden Age sensibilities, especially for language and gender.

The story concerns itself primarily with the battle for Free Will, as one might expect when mind control is the bugaboo. (Speaking of mind control, is it just me, or is this a plot device that went out of fashion about the same time as psionics? I can’t think of recent books about it.) We follow a young, confused male as he journeys through the world, trying to make sense of the fact that his analogue appears to be broken. He finds himself free of the compulsions that those around him seem plagued by and, eventually exhausted by trying to fit in, ends up crashing through neighboring kingdoms, going to school, and having adventures. For whatever reason, the plot contrives to keep him sidelined during the most exciting bits of the conclusion, leaving the reader to wonder what sort of fun stuff is going on off stage.

Some things I liked about the book: once it gets rolling, there are some gripping action sequences and engaging world building. I’m not sure that the societies Knight proposes are natural progressions from the analogue, but they are at least interesting to read about. My favorite is the giant blank area that used to be the states of Washington and Oregon, because if there is to be one part of the nation that must transcend consciousness and turn their realm into really odd hippie heaven, it would be the Pacific Northwest. I also appreciate that Knight seems to be pushing the envelope with some risque stuff, though to modern eyes it seems more like sweaty-palmed teenage boy salaciousness. I’m giving him points for what I presume the intent to be, rather than the result.

Some things I didn’t like as much: I already mentioned the end, which felt off. The book has unquestionably aged, though most works from the era have. More than anything else though, there is a sense that things don’t totally hold together. I can’t quite put my finger on why not, but Analogue is a bit like a Jell-O that didn’t firm up. I looked at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction to see what might be going on, and uncovered its accusation that the novel format is not Knight’s strength. He is justifiably a Grandmaster, but much of what he did for SF was as a short story writer, a critic, and an editor, says the Encyclopedia; Anlogue bears this out.

Even with those complaints, it was an interesting read. I won’t call it essential, but it was fun, hasn’t been visited too many times by the Suck Fairy or the Sexism Fairy (no small accomplishment), and has some bits that are memorable. If the author were to dig a little deeper into the story, open up the world a bit more, and let his characters take a bigger role in the goings on, we might have an exciting story on our hands.

Rating: England 1982. This was a particularly frustrating World Cup for the birthplace of football, as they bowed out weakly in the second round after dominating their opening matches.

Brass Man

Brass Man
Neal Asher

Brass Man is the third volume in Asher’s Polity series, following Gridlinked and Line of Polity. I have read, but not reviewed, both. I suppose that each book is technically stand alone, but they are best enjoyed in sequence. Brass Man in particular feels like the second half of a duology, continuing several story threads from Line of Polity. Things are fully continuous however, as this volume’s namesake is a holdover from Gridlinked and made no appearance in the second book. Brass Man being the middle book of a fairly popular series, I’m going to assume that most people landing on this post are already Asher fans and familiar with The Polity. (The alternative is to be wildly confused for the first hundred pages or so; I would be rather surprised if many people stayed with the book long enough to make sense of what they would have learned reading in chronological order.) Based on this assumption, I will structure this review a bit differently than normal, starting with my reactions and conclusions before highlighting some aspects of Asher’s writing that deserve a deeper look.

Like I said, anyone who has either read, or is considering reading, Brass Man is probably already a Polity fan. Praise or criticism would no doubt fall on deaf ears, so let us just say that this is my favorite Asher book thus far. He has a better command of his plots and characters than before, and is writing with greater precision and clarity. My biggest complaint with Gridlinked was the somewhat disjointed narrative arc; things happened that weren’t necessarily crucial, or even related, and Asher toyed with a few ideas early on that were left by the wayside, not as red herrings, but simply as dangling plot threads. In Brass Man, there is little fat. The story is complex and multilayered, but I didn’t get the sense that it was threatening to careen off the rails. He has maintained the dark, glittery edge that made the initial Polity books fun, but sanded off the rough edges that snagged once in awhile. To anyone who hasn’t read these and is curious, start with Gridlinked but please know that most of its shortcomings are remedied by the time Brass Man arrives.

Asher is part of the UK invasion crew that dominates contemporary space opera. Like most of them, he owes a debt to Iain M. Banks, Asher perhaps more than most. His Polity is a clear descendant of the Culture, though where Banks laces his future with utopian whimsy, Asher takes a darker path. This is because more than any of his countrymen save Richard Morgan, Asher has internalized the cyberpunk aesthetic. Not so much with hacking and mirror shades, but the hard-boiled, noir atmosphere in a stellar empire is a perfect 21^st Century construct. This is a future that has maintained its shadowy sides despite the high technology. The hero Ian Cormac deserves to be played by a science fictional Bogart, beset by diabolical villains and dangerous seductresses. (I’m not sure what Bogart would make of AI, aliens, or near sentient shuriken, but that is a quibble for another time.)

Other motifs emerge as Brass Man proceeds. Asher places the bulk of his action on the frontier, in this case called The Line of Polity, figuring that life is pretty drab inside a stable, AI-run commonwealth. This reminds one of Banks of course, but they are hardly the only authors that choose the wild outlands to anchor their SF. Even with all the options presented by a galactic frontier, Asher shows a clear predilection for inhospitable planets, especially those with horrifying wildlife. I hope to never be reborn as a Neal Asher character, since the chances of me being devoured, dissolved, dismembered, or simply squashed by the native fauna seem prohibitively high. More conventional death is also abundant, but the animals are scarier than the terrorists.

Brass Man is not for those looking for profound meditations of the human condition. Instead, it is a festively violent, far future, slam bang action thriller, full of nefarious villains, imaginative technology, scary wildlife, and a hard boiled hero. Asher’s writing improves with each book, so I am looking forward to Ian Cormac’s next adventure.

Rating: Leeds United, circa 1974: Championship caliber material and lots of gruesome violence.

Death Sentences

Death Sentences
Kawamata Chiaki

I learned about Death Sentences from an article I now cannot find, a shame because it discussed the story surrounding the book’s translation and early efforts to get Japanese SF into English markets. The publisher, the University of Minnesota Press, isn’t the first place I look for Japanese SF, so this was completely off my radar until I read the now lost article. (It also provided a good overview of the books available in English and where to find them; this is where I first heard about Vertical Press.) I’m sure the publication hurdles were considerable, but Kawamata’s book is certainly deserving of a wider audience. It picked up all of Japan’s major awards in 1984 and Kawamata still has fingers in many Japanese genre pies.

Death Sentences is what might happen if The Ring was co-written by Umberto Eco and Phillip K. Dick. The story chases after a poem that leaves dead bodies in its wake (the power of words!), twisting and turning throughout the Surrealist period of the early 20^th Century, 1980s Japan, a Gibson-esque dystopian Japan of the near future (paranoia!), and, briefly, Mars (science fiction!). It is a dizzying narrative, but all related in efficient, matter of fact prose, as though a poem written in France by a mysterious kid named Hu Mei that drives its readers into a fatal, dream-like trance is a perfectly normal turn of events.

This is the kind of book where individual mileage will no doubt vary greatly. I found the premise thought provoking, but I don’t really remember the characters. They were nice enough people I guess, but names and details now escape me. Those more educated about philosophy and literature will probably enjoy certain parts of the book more than I did, as Kawamata appropriates several Surrealists as characters, while name checking many others. As I understand it, those people killed by Hu Mei’s poem die on the same day and under the same circumstances as they did in real life; no doubt a fun game for anyone tuned into the Surrealist Movement. There is another character late in the book that Kawamata uses to show his disdain for a particular writer, but I didn’t realize that until reading an accompanying essay afterwards. These sorts of games, as well as the fact that a poem is the killer, remind me of Eco and figure to amuse astute readers.

I initially expected the focus to be on the near-future dystopia, as the book is billed as a relative of the cyberpunk emerging at the same time. Instead, a lot of attention is paid to the 1980s narrative track, wherein the employees of a small press in Tokyo prepare an exhibition for a department store that unleashes Hu Mei’s poem on an unsuspecting Japan. This, and the personal details that unfold, rather betrays the promise of poetic mayhem. On the other hand, what better counterpoint for a grim police state than nerd romance centered on obscure scholarship? The twists at the end also caught me off guard, though I liked the final solution. I do detect a whiff of, “now how do I get myself out of this?” as the plot starts to wind down, apparent in the slightly disjointed feel of the last two sections.

Death Sentences gets credit for being different, or at least for combining familiar elements in an unfamiliar way. It’s the kind of book I would give to a literature type who is willing to try SF, or a jaded reader tired of big mysterious objects, first contact, and the like. I enjoyed the book, despite its imperfections, and while it isn’t my favorite Japanese SF, I hope it gets a wide recognition.

Rating: The dystopian parts of the book remind me of the North Korean soccer team.

Strata

Strata
Bradley P. Beaulieu
Stephen Gaskell

I got my copy of Strata from an early giveaway on the excellent Far Beyond Reality blog. It then sat unread on my hard drive for some months, until a trans-Pacific flight prompted me to finally buy a Kindle and set into a few of the ebooks that have been piling up. Strata thus has the honor of being the very first title for my Kindle; I finished it just out of sight of land. Until a couple of years ago, Strata probably wouldn’t have been published on its own. At 70 pages, it is more likely to have been a novella anchoring a short story collection or fix-up, rather than an independent publication. In these electronic days however, one can slap a much lower price tag on and pitch a novella by itself, which is exactly what the authors have done. The story feels just right at its present length, but with a couple hundred pages less to process, my critical reaction is destined to be proportionally shorter.

Strata is what happens when Anakin Skywalker’s pod racing meets the Pullman Strike of 1894, if the resulting offspring were to be marinated in a fiery inferno. The story starts off knee-deep in solar plasma, as two men race through a course that skims dangerously through the outer layers of the sun. They are employees of a massive power station that orbits near the sun, shipping the harvested energy back to a hungry Earth. Management appears to have slept through that part of Trickle Down Economics 101 when students learn that profits eventually make their way to the unwashed masses, as the bosses are perpetrating the usual Management tricks. Tickets to the station are cheap, tickets home are exorbitant, everything costs more than the workers can make, which drives them into a drug-induced and debt-ridden stupor.

From there, racing comes in and out of the story, but most of the narrative follows labor issues. The situation on the largest power station is explosive, to put things mildly, with plottings, secret police, sudden disappearances, turncoats, spies, and other such fun and shadowy stuff. Beaulieu and Gaskell take advantage of the shorter form to keep tension ratcheted up throughout; the novella length allows room to elaborate but prevents reader exhaustion. While the solar racing bits are more creative, the labor unrest is also engaging. The situation is predictable, though the authors prevent things from disintegrating into a Marxist screed. Through it all, the solar racing acts as an anchor for both Labor and Capital, and thus the story as well.

Strata is a good read and certainly worth the small price tag. I’m sold on Beaulieu’s writing and plan to check out the Slavic fantasy trilogy he has out from Nightshade. Hopefully this novella will get enough attention to draw more SF from the pair, as I will certainly give it a read if they deliver.

Rating: The Pacific Futsal Cup. Both the sport and the book are compact, end-to-end action on a smaller scale.

The Eternity Artifact

The Eternity Artifact
L.E. Modesitt Jr.

L.E. Modesitt Jr. has been on my radar for a few years now, but I never got around to reading his books. This interview at the excellent Far Beyond Reality page finally jolted me into action, so I picked up one of the books the author himself recommends as a good SF starting point. I have to confess to a couple of concerns before I started reading, though they were generally settled by the interview. First, Modesitt is remarkably prolific, writing books at a pace that makes one suspect hackery. Second, his most popular work seems to be fantasy, which I read considerably less of than science fiction. Finally, he resides in Utah. I can say this as a long time former resident of the place, but I have grave doubts of anything worthwhile coming out of Utah, unless it somehow relates to Utah State University. Go Aggies.

However! My fears were rapidly dispelled. Modesitt may not be Tolstoy, but his craft is solid. Proportionately, he writes a lot of fantasy, some of which I plan to read sometime soon, but he slips comfortably into SF at will. He does indeed live in Utah, but it is in Cedar City (one of the few places I might tolerate) and is a transplant from Washington DC. All in all, I had nothing to fear. That said, when I was poking around the interwebs to refresh my memory on some plot points, I was surprised at the vehement reaction some reviewers had to The Eternity Artifact. Apparently Modesitt is a divisive writer, though I can’t imagine why; being enraged over a Modesitt book seems about like being enraged over a Honda Accord.

Eternity is ostensibly a Big Mysterious Object story, as the protagonists race out into space to investigate an alien planetoid. The BMO is never really the point of the story though, as Modesitt uses it as a launching pad to explore subjects both macro and micro, with the actual secret of the BMO fading into the background somewhat by the end. The micro is supplied by his characters, four of which take turns in the first person. The narrative duties are split between a social science professor, a tug pilot, a famous painter, and a deep cover spy. The shifts in voice are jarring at first, but one soon gets used to each character’s quirks. Modesitt uses the four to piece together the mystery, since each have their own perspectives and discoveries to share. The artist, for example, brings a completely different viewpoint to what is otherwise a standard SF yarn, while the professor allows for some more expansive world building.

The macro view is the backdrop through which the BMO moves. Modesitt has lifted a galactic society directly out of Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, complete with a Judeo-Christian empire, a Muslim empire, one each for China and Japan, and even an incarnation of the secular West. The BMO is interesting by itself, but what really grabs the author’s (and characters’) attention is the way each star-faring government reacts to it. Much conversation passes between the investigators about why one group or another would launch an attack, claim the technology for themselves, or suppress everything in the name of orthodoxy. This is interesting for me, but I’m sure that some readers would prefer more space battles, more riddle solving science, or crazier aliens.

More than anyone other author, Modesitt reminds me of Jack McDevitt. Their approaches are different, but both pay close attention to the way society moves around their protagonists and what shapes the decision made by each character. McDevitt tends to put his ethical questions directly into the story, making them a part of the narrative, while Modesitt spends more time having his characters talk over the societal issues rather than being a part of them. Modesitt is well-served by his time in DC, bringing an insider’s view of the politics and economics of empire. Hard SF is generally limited to the physical sciences, and only recently to anything beyond astrophysics, but Eternity is Hard Soft SF, as it were, Hard SF for the social science masses. Swap out lengthy infodumps about stars, warp drives, and thermodynamics with political science, economics, and history, but leave the BMOs and space battles, and a Modesitt book emerges.

I can see why some readers might not go for this. I just happen to be part of a narrow demographic that loves Hard SF and Space Opera but has a graduate degree in political economy, so my tastes may be a bit rarefied. Still, this sort of attention to the underpinnings of world building is hardly unique to Modesitt, or offensive to large swathes of fandom; Daniel Abraham’s books are just one example of popular SFF that spends as much time muttering about comparative advantage as wormholes or mystic runes. Still, even pulling out Modesitt’s somewhat unconventional narrative structure and insistence on highlighting the squishier side of science, Eternity is a solid addition to the BMO canon. The mystery is suitably entertaining, the characters are given as much attention as the technology, and enough things blow up to warm my explosion-happy heart cockles. While I’m hardly a Modesitt veteran, I have to agree with his assessment that this is a good place to start with his books.

Rating: La Liga’s Malaga. A Spanish side purchased by a member of the Qatari royal family, buying players from all over the world, competing in the Champion’s League, and having financial trouble because said Qatari apparently doesn’t feel like paying his players. Not that Eternity is this messy, but it’s a good multicultural kerfluffle.

Ring Around the Sun

Ring Around the Sun
Clifford Simak

I’ve spent a lot of time lately finding new authors, reading debut novels, and catching up on the hottest new books. After all the excitement of The New, it was time for something Old; Clifford Simak answered the call with some truly Golden Age stuff. Simak, despite winning a Hugo for Waystation, doesn’t really get talked about as much as many of his contemporaries. He may not be in the Asimov-Heinlein-Clarke pantheon, but I would rate him equal to Alfred Bester or Cordwainer Smith, both of whom seem to garner more frequent mention. Going out on a serious jazz nerd limb, I would call Simak the Hank Mobley of science fiction. Anyway, taking a break from my library raids, I pulled out Ring Around the Sun, an old paperback of which I purchased somewhere forgotten.

Ring is steeped in the 1950s, but some of its themes are eerily prescient. Mostly though, it’s the 1950s. The Cold War pervades all in a way unique to the age, something that younger readers will probably fail utterly to understand. It’s hard to explain to someone who grew up in the 90s how all-encompassing the Cold War was, or why the Soviets were such reliable bad guys. (It has been noted by many that the general reaction to Clarke’s 2001 or 2010 took as a given both spaceflight to Jupiter and the USSR still hanging around. Its sudden collapse in 1989 took everyone by surprise, inevitable though it may seem now, which is why so much SF at the time blithely assumed that the Soviets would be with us well into our expansion into the Solar System.) It is also difficult to replicate the undercurrent of dread that nuclear war engendered; vague fears of terrorism, the Rise of China, or environmental collapse lack the operatic finality of mutual assured destruction. Ring isn’t a John LeCarre novel and the Soviets aren’t really the bad guys, but the Cold War is lurking behind everything that takes place.

At the same time, Simak hints at some questions that would later appear books by writers like Iain M. Banks and Charles Stross. In the book’s future, the distant 1970s, stuff that doesn’t break is beginning to come to market. The Forever Car, which will run forever, razor blades that don’t dull, and other such objects are creeping into the national economy, wreaking subtle havoc. Oddly enough, the 70s were exactly the years when cars made by companies with names like Toyota, Honda, and Datsun entered the US market, cars that lasted years longer than their American counterparts and eventually crippled Detroit. While the Forever Car’s importance fades as the book wears on, its economic possibilities are both the most interesting part of the book and the factor that keeps it relevant now.

The Forever Car and its counterparts represent the post-scarcity economy that one hopes will eventually sweep away our current system. Simak’s characters are going through what contemporary writers would term an economic singularity, that brief, turbulent period when new technology completely upends a society. Simak ignores innovation and fashion, which have prevented our current, long-lasting stuff from swamping the new consumer goods market, but the response of the old guard is predictable: entrenchment, aggressive propaganda, nationalistic fervor, and finally violence. Lest this seem an exaggeration, think of Detroit’s tactics, both labor and capital, since Japanese cars, robotics, outsourcing, and fuel efficiency concerns developed. Clearly, this was my favorite part of the book, and the most surprising, considering its age.

But only part of the book is spent digging around an economic morass. (Probably just as well for 80-90% of the readership.) Much of the rest concerns itself with a trope that was popular at the time, but seems to have fallen into disuse: supermen and/or mutants among us slowly conquering the world. I wonder a bit about the rise and fall of these guys, since only the X-Men are carrying this particular torch at the moment. Regardless, Simak pairs his economic fun with the future leaders of mankind. (Note that I use “mankind” rather than “humanity” on purpose here, since it’s the 50s and white men are doing most of the talking.)

Mostly though, this is a Simak story, which means that sympathetic characters move at a stately pace towards a calm resolution. There are interesting ideas and plenty of action, but like most of the author’s books, Ring is about good people trying to do the right thing. Simak focuses on the Everyman behind each superman and villain, interested as much in the humanity of their stories as the gadgets and world building. This sets him apart from much of Golden Age SF and makes his books must read material. Ring Around the Sun is worth seeking out for a host of reasons: the near-prophetic bits about an economic singularity, the claustrophobia of the Cold War, Simak’s unique spin on SF, plus the whole “this is a good book” business. As an added bonus, my copy contained a vintage ad from the Science Fiction Book Club, advertising the hottest new books for just 10 cents. I wonder if they will still honor it?

Rating: Gerson, the underrated, far too obscure midfield mastermind behind Pele’s greatest Brazilian teams. I spent an inordinate amount of time looking this one up.