Valor’s Trial, Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff does MilSF like nobody else does. Torin Kerr is truly one of the great characters in the subgenre, and this latest book in the series (and possibly the last, depending on who you interpret the ending) is yet more evidence that Huff knows the things that can go wrong with this kind of a series and this kind of a character in this kind of subgenre, and she does not make the kinds of mistakes that have been made by others working in the same vein. ::cough::David Weber::cough::

One of the inherent problems in writing space opera/MilSF is that you have a hero, and to make the story interesting, you need to have that hero do uncommon, in fact, heroic things. And the more novels you write in the series, the more heroic deeds your character has attached to her name But in a real military organisation, the more of a legend you become, the less you fit into the ranks, because military organisations work by suppressing individual action and identity in favour of the group identity, the mass action.

And by the time we get to this book, Torin Kerr has a lot of heroic and noteworthy deeds attached to her name. She’s not just a Gunnery Sergeant, doing what any Gunnery Sergeant would do – she is an individual with a legend building around her, and that makes her a disruption in the ranks, not an asset.

And Huff knows and understands this. A large chunk of the novel shows us just what happens in a military environment under stress when a personality cult goes wrong, and throughout the novel we see both Kerr and those around her questioning how the cult of personality growing around her will affect her ability to fulfill her function effectively, and affect the ability of others to fulfill theirs.

This novel ties up a lot of loose ends from previous books in the series, and leads Kerr to the only possible solution to the problem her fame and unusual success have caused for her and for the Marine Corps. It’s also a rousing SF version of the prisoner of war breakout story that kept me reading anxiously and eagerly right to the end.

If this is the last Torin Kerr novel – it’s a great way for her to go. If there are more, they will be very different, and that’s going to be interesting if it happens.

Brava, Gunnery Sergeant Kerr, and brava, Ms. Huff, for treating the character with respect and sending her off in style.

Spider Robinson: The Deathkiller trilogy, aka The Lifehouse trilogy
Mindkiller
Time Pressure
Lifehouse

To begin with, I have to say that I have a complicated relationship with the works of Spider Robinson. He’s a writer who has a tendency to frequently use, and sometimes overuse, some very specific and highly recognisable themes, motifs, habits, re-cycled character types. Some of these I don’t mind until it gets really bad – such as his love of puns and his tendency toward chucks of heinleinesque first-person narrator exposition, and his willingness to openly use Canada as a setting for some of his books. Some of his other writing tics I tire of more quickly. Also, I find his works to range widely in quality, from the very good, to the downright awful; generally, the more self-indulgent hes being, the weaker the book seems to be.

And in the end, there is definitely such a thing as too much Spider at any given time.

Just so you know where I’m coming from.

I’d read the first two books in this trilogy a long time ago, but since it had indeed been a long time ago, I decided to re-read them before proceeding to the third book. So, here are my thoughts on the trilogy and its individual volumes.

Overall, it’s an interesting experiment – to write three novels about a scientific development that will completely and totally change not just human society but human nature itself forever, without ever actually showing us more than the tiniest glimpse of what human life and society will be like, or how it got to be that way – we never see inhabitants of this brave new world living in the future, and we see very little of the people who make the discoveries on which it depends, and who bring this new world into being. In a sense, Robinson is showing us his vision by negative example – here are the things it is not – and be inference – here are its effects on people who are not part of it.

Since Robinson’s future vision in this trilogy is in many ways analogous to the visions of religious mystics concerning life after death, or outside of time and space as we know it, this approach makes a certain kind of sense. How can he realistically describe things that no human can experience outside of the mystical state that has been called, among other things, satori, or the beatific vision? Instead of trying to do so, Robinson shows us this future through sideways glances, through the hopes of those who live before the change, and the second-hand tales of travellers from the transcendent future.

Great ideas, but like Robinson’s oeuvre in general, the quality of the individual volumes is highly uneven.

Mindkiller, the first volume in the series, is in my opinion the best. The structure is interesting – two interesting protagonists, in two timelines separated by six years, propelled by circumstances, embark on dangerous quests that have strong emotional appeal to draw in the reader. At first, you wonder what is the connection. Then, as you engage with the protagonists, you forget to ask that question any more, and finally, the clues start falling and you see how it all fits together. A good science fiction novel by any standard.

Time Pressure is difficult for me to look at objectively, because Robinson sets this volume right in the middle of a time, place and culture that I know only too well. In fact, odds are that I know some of the people who were inspirational models for some of the characters, because it’s a very small and somewhat insular setting and both Robinson and I were part of it at the same time. (Aside: and yes, I met Robinson on several occasions totally unrelated to SF while we were both a part of this setting. See, one of the women in the commune I lived in was dating one of the dancers in Jeanne Robinson’s troupe, and in a small community, that’s enough of a connection to make meeting each other inevitable. I remember him well, because he was already a well-known SF author. I doubt very much that he remembers me at all.)

So for me, the setting predominates my responses to this book, as I deal with both extreme familiarity and the disconcerting effects of seeing the hippie culture of the North Mountain of the Annapolis Valley, nova Scotia, which was my culture for almost a decade, through the eyes of someone who also lived through it, but from a different perspective – again, inevitable, as Robinson is an ex-pat American and I’m a native Nova Scotian. We couldn’t ever have seen the that place in that decade in the same way. But I will make one factual correction to his narrative for anyone who’s read the book: the North Mountain hippies were not, as Robinson suggests, largely ex-pat Americans. A few of the many communes that flourished during the 70s had a lot of Americans, especially the Rajneeshi commune. Many had a couple of Americans among them. There were some very prominent members of the wider hippie community throughout Nova Scotia who were American. But most of the folks who were year-round, settled members of the community were Canadian, and most of those were from the Maritimes. The commune I was a part of had no Americans among its core group. The summer hippies were a different story, but after around 73 or 74, they hardly counted anyway.

What I can say about the book aside from my highly personal engagement with it is that I think it’s a fairly decent SF story about time travel from the perspective of the ones travelled among, and not the ones travelling. I do think that Robinson has used the “male musician who has become spiritually stagnant over guilt because he thinks the accidental deaths of his partner and their children were all his fault” protagonist a little too often, and that’s one of the things that bugs me about the book. And, reminiscent of the two seemingly unrelated plot lines in Mindkiller, it takes a while before you see how it relates to the previous book in the series.

The last book, Lifehouse, is, alas, an example of what happens when Robinson gets way too self-indulgent. First of all, the book is completely unnecessary. We know at the end of Time Pressure that something along the general lines of the Lifehouse set-up is going to happen, and that incidents like the one that forms the novel’s plot are going to happen and will have to be dealt with.

Second, the book is far too narrowly focused with respect to its connection to the overall, barely seen future. While the storylines of two previous novels, like this one, are tightly focused on the protagonists – even though this volume has a lot more key protagonists – their contribution to our understanding of the off-stage developments that lead to this massive change in human existence is to illuminate crucial and far-reaching aspects of that obscured narrative. Lifehouse gives us nothing more about the future beyond a few administrative details.

And third, it’s too cliched, overly complicated, way too full of in-jokes, too much of the plot hinges on coincidences, some of them of the most unlikely order. Making almost half of the key characters science fiction fans is kind of a death knell. It sort of boils down to “look how naive and gullible and yet how clever and resourceful SF fans are because they think about impossibly weird stuff every day” (there’s some of this in Time Pressure, but not nearly as much).

In my opinion, of course, it’s an example of Robinson at his worst.

And with that, I think I’ve had enough of Spider Robinson for some time to come.

Precursor, C. J. Cherryh


Yes, I am continuing to read Cherryh’s Atevi series, and continuing to enjoy it immensely. This really is the kind of novel/series that I love – full of social and political complexity, well-developed civilisations (particularly alien ones), and great characterisation.

Something that I am very interested in here is the way in which Bren Cameron, the viewpoint character of all the novels to date, is dealing with becoming a person without a home culture – he has sufficiently assimilated to atevi culture that he doesn’t feel at home in his birth culture, but at the same times, the divide of alien biology and psychology prevents him from becoming atevi, no matter how deeply he has come to identify with the atevi.

Also, the step-up in political complexity, now that both the atevi and the humans living on the planet have fully engaged the returning human shipdwellers, with their own unique social structure, aims, and factions, is just making me squee with delight.

And so, it’s time to go buy the next volume.

The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, Vandana Singh

This is a collection of short stories by the most remarkable Vandana Singh, whose work I am growing more and more in love with the more of it I read.

In these stories, Singh writes about apparently quite ordinary people – specifically, people who are often women and often Indian – who find themselves in strikingly unordinary situations and circumstances, or who suddenly feel distanced, alienated as it were, from what once seemed normal and familiar. Her gift for delineating character with subtlety, precision and sometimes gentle humour is in peak form here, enabling us to understand and identify with the rich humanity of her characters, and thus experience a universe much larger and richer than we normally encounter – learning greatly thereby.

As Singh notes in the essay that concludes the collection:

Speculative fiction is our chance to… find ourselves part of a larger whole; to step out of the claustrophobia of the exclusively human and discover joy, terror, wonder, and meaning, in the greater universe.

Singh sees another function for speculative fiction (beyond the simple fun of it all, which she also celebrates), one that is also at the heart of many of the stories in this collection:

Science fiction and fantasy posit other paths, alternative futures, different social arrangements as well as technologies, other ways that we could be. Before we do, we must dream.

I’d be hard pressed to pick a few favourites from this collection to talk about – they are all very, very good.

There’s an interesting review of The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet here.

Archangel, Sharon Shinn

This was my first introduction to Sharon Shinn’s writing, and I was quite enraptured. The book itself is one of those “looks like fantasy but it’s really science fiction once you realise what’s going on” stories, which can be very interesting reading when you know that you are seeing in action highly developed technology that is, to the people in the story, indistinguishable from magic – or in the case of Shinn’s Samaria novels, of which this is the first, divine providence.

As the novel begins, Gabriel, leader of the angels’ hosts of the Eyrie – one of three angelic hosts whose responsibility it is to care for the people and the land of Samaria – is preparing to assume the position of Archangel, the most senior position among angels and the one who must – with his pre-ordained, human spouse, the Angelica – preside over the annual ceremony of worship that prevents the god Jovah from destroying all of Samaria. The only problem is that when Gabriel goes to the oracle of Bethel to find out who he is to marry, he discovers that the village she was born in was destroyed years ago, and no one knows where she is. And he has six months to find her, marry her, and make sure that she is trained and ready to sing the Gloria with him.

Archangel is on the one hand the story of Gabriel’s search for Rachel, his destined bride (but destined by whom?) and his attempts to build a relationship with her once he finds her. It is also a novel about abuse of power and the struggle for social justice in a corrupt regime – for in the process of learning who Rachel is and what is in her past, he learns that even the highest and mightiest of angels can fail in duty and compassion. falling from the heights to the depths.

Alternatively, it is the story of how a woman who refuses to follow custom blindly, who demands justice for all, can change the heart of a ruler and the course of a world.

It's also an interesting look at society under a theocracy (that may not actually be a theocracy at all, and in the absence of a god at the top, what is a theocracy but a dictatorship, no matter how well-meaning), and at the reality of politics and oppression in the nice little feudal fantasy lands that some SFF writers are so fond of setting novels in.

I’m looking forward to reading the remaining books in this series.

Not too long ago I bought a book bundle offer at an online auction to help Vera Nazarian, and received a generous stack of classic (and not so classic) science fiction from the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s. Some I’d read before, some I hadn’t, and some, to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure if I read when I was a kid or not. Here's my thoughts on some of them.


Worlds of the Imperium, Keith Laumer.

A fast-paced parallel universe caper, in which the protagonist is kidnapped from an Earth that appears to be our own by agents from a universe where science has found a way to navigate the various world-lines in order to assassinate a dangerous warlord from yet another world-line. It’s a fairly straight forward spy caper, and a very quick read. Like so many genre novels of the era, the only woman character is a “love interest” for the hero – she’s portrayed as intelligent, brave and beautiful, but does little of substance beyond serving as a compensatory “reward” for the hero, torn from his own world to save another.


Phase IV, Barry N Malzberg.

An alien influence provokes accelerated evolution among a colony of ants somewhere in Arizona. Soon the ants are on the move, destroying homes in a “planned community” being built in the region. The area is evacuated, scientists arrive to investigate.

Much of the novel is a science fictional reworking of Carl Stephenson's famous short story "Leiningen versus the Ants" – only the ants have developed a form of intelligence and the ability to adapt rapidly to threats, and they have a purpose, not just a blind instinct to follow. And that changes the ending completely.


Citizen of the Galaxy, Robert A. Heinlein

This has always been one of my favourite Heinlein juveniles. It’s a classic reversal of fortune story, complete with an ironic justice payoff – the victim of interstellar slave traders turns out to be one person most suited to track interstellar slavery to its very roots and eradicate it.

There is some wonderful worldbuilding in the section that’s set among the Free Traders, to say nothing of a consciousness of power relations between the sexes that to some extent belies the accusations of sexism that are frequently levelled against Heinlein. In Free Trader society, the conscious separation of a person’s roles within the Family and the Ship produces a culture in which each person’s abilities are acknowledged and used – meaning that men and women work together at the jobs they do best – but at the same time, everyone follows strict gender roles as members of the Ship’s Family – roles that are obviously constructed as a response to the social needs of a people divided into small clans that must practice exogamy to avoid the risks of inbreeding.

My main quibble with the book is that it ends far too quickly – just as the protagonist Thorby has just begun the task that all of his history has prepared him for.


Rocket Ship Galileo, Robert A. Heinlein

The first Heinlein juvenile, this reads more like a “boy’s own” adventure than just happens to involve rockets than a science fiction novel. The plot is simple – a group of boy scientists find a mentor, decide to build a rocket that will take them to the moon, and in the process, foil the evil intentions of Nazi space pirates (this are not nearly as cool as it sounds).

What bothers me is the basic set-up of the story. From a teenager’s perspective, it’s a great adventure story, but read from the viewpoint an adult, it sure looks like criminally negligent exploitation of three naive young men by a single-minded scientist who can't persuade anyone to give him the backing to carry out his experiments in a safe and ethical manner. Instead, he uses the unpaid labour of the boys and never discloses the full scope of the risks – particularly the indications that someone who is not averse to violence is trying to keep him from getting to the moon. Also, what is up with the parents of these boys? Two boys simply tell their parents about the scheme, and they say “if that’s really what you want, dear.” The third set of parents initially say no, but when creepy exploitative scientist talks to them about using their kids as unpaid labour and risking their lives in space, we discover that all the parents are really worried about is their kid not going to a good school in the fall – and when creepy scientist promises to tutor the boy, this makes it OK. This rather spoiled my appreciation of what is a slender and formulaic tale to begin with.

However, one nice touch is the inclusion of a Jewish boy as one of the junior scientists, and he turns out to be the one most suited to be the co-pilot (creepy scientist is of course Captain and pilot), which gives him at times some opportunities to be heroic.


Glory Road, Robert A. Heinlein

I liked this when I first read it, and I still like it. Sure, it’s basically a very thin adventure fantasy/RPG/arcade game plot, namely, the Quest for the McGuffin. Hero and party overcome obstacles of increasing difficulty on the path to the McGuffin, overcome the Big Boss who guards the McGuffin, take the McGuffin back to its proper place, then hero marries princess.

And it features three of Heinlein’s favourite characters: the super competent, super beautiful woman; the curmudgeonly old geezer who’s been there and back and knows it all; and the straight-as-an-arrow young man who is about to learn what the world is really all about.

But as one of Heinlein’s rare forays into fantasy, it’s interesting, and it does answer the one question that not too many writers of standard adventure fantasy ever get around to answering – what happens after the plough-boy cum hero settles down with the princess? And at least the princess in this case isn’t just the bait, er, reward for the successful hero, she’s part and parcel of the mission, from planning to execution and she decides whether she’s also part of the hero’s reward.

In that sense, it’s a lot better than a fair number of others of its ilk.


Earth Unaware, Mack Reynolds

If ever a cover was not just totally disconnected from the actual contents, setting and plot of a book, but wrong in every respect, it would have to be the cover of Belmont Books’ May 1968 edition of Mack Reynolds’ Earth Unaware (originally titled Of Godlike Power).

The cover features a muscled, nearly nude barbarian warrior with flowing blond locks and a fluffy loincloth. Clinging to his arm is a red-haired woman with ample breasts, hips and thighs, wearing something dark and vaguely furry that covers her torso and nothing else. They seem to be standing in a cloud of low-lying yellow fog against a dark, featureless background. At their feet is something vaguely mechanical, somewhat suggestive of an abandoned futuristic oversized grenade launcher. It’s all done in an impressionistic, soft focus, pseudo-Franzetta style.

The book itself is a modern speculative fantasy set in a North America not too far advance from the date of writing, in which increasing capacity for the mass production of consumer goods has led to the (once expected and highly anticipated) leisure society, where material abundance and technological advances have resulted in increasingly shorter work-weeks and a massive demand for popular entertainment. The protagonist is Ed Wonder, the host of a radio show that features interviews with people who claim to be reincarnations of Alexander the Great, or to have been taught a new philosophy of life by aliens from Jupiter.

Then Ed and his friends, socialite Helen Fontaine and newspaper columnist Buzz De Kemp find the real deal among all the stories of somewhat questionable veracity – a travelling preacher who advocates an end to consumerism and profligate wasting of natural resources, calling for a return to a simpler way of life, who has the power to change the world with the over-heated Biblical style curses he utters in the heat of anger or passion for his view of how people should live.

The first major manifestation of this comes when Ed and Helen visit one of the preacher’s tent-revival-like meetings. Helen interrupts his sermon on the wastefulness of modern society, provoking his anger – which results in a curse on the vanity of women. Ed and Helen leave the meeting, but before the evening is out, Helen finds herself driven to wash off her makeup and comb out her high-society hairstyle. The next morning, Ed (and the world) discovers that women everywhere are avoiding cosmetics and anything else that might enhance their appearance, choosing functional clothing and wearing their hair au naturel. And only Ed and Helen can even being to figure out why.

So, no, no barbarians, blond or babe-like, but an interesting satire-cum-thought experiment. I’d read some of Reynolds’ other books when I was younger, and I found this as enjoyable in its own way as my memories of his other books.

Distances, Vananda Singh

There’s an image that’s not all that uncommon in science fiction, that of the being who physically and mentally connects with, inhabits or is inhabited by, perceives and encompasses, some aspect of space-time that other beings cannot access or comprehend. Often this ability gives these special being abilities to make otherwise impossible connections, bridge gaps between representation and understanding, navigate sapcewarps, see theoretical relationships, patterns, causalities,totalities, because of this multi-faceted kind of synesthesia.

Anasuya, the protagonist of Distances, has such a gift. When she is submerged certain fluids, she can perceive and explore complex mathematical formulae when expressed in chemical solutions, aided by tiny symbiont organisms in her body, transforming the chemical notations into transcendent vistas that she can somehow travel inside of – and then record her perceptions in holographic form via nanites for others to analyse.

This gift is one of many abilities shared by her people, who live a semi-aquatic existence on the shores and in the coastal waters of one region of her world. Unlike most of her people, she has left the sea and travelled to a stone city in the desert where people not her own have built, among others, a temple to mathematics. It is here that the technology that permits her unique way of seeing mathematically-described spaces and relationships to be recorded and used by others was developed.

It is also to this stone city that a team of mathematicians from the planet Tirana have travelled in search of help in solving an immeasurably complex mathematical problem that describes a previously unknown geometric space. Anasuya is asked to help them, but in the process, she discovers a secret that will change life on both their planets.

Distances, physical, emotional, and conceptual, how they are perceived, how they wound, and how they can sometimes be bridged, play a large part in the themes and imagery of the book. Both Anasuya and the Tirani delegation have travelled far to meet in this city that is alien to them both. Woven into the story are various accounts of myths and events that are centred on creating and covering distances. And Anasuya’s work leads directly to a change in the understanding of distances itself, and in the distances she has kept between herself, her creativity, her past and the people around her.

It’s a profoundly poetic work, and one that continues to resonate at levels that I don’t know how to express in words.

I've been reading science fiction (and what was, in my youth, its upstart cousin, fantasy) for going on half a century now - the first book I can remember buying off the grocery store paperback carousel was James Schmitz's Agent of Vega (The PermaBooks 1962 edition - I can still see the cover in my mind), and odds are that was not the first science fiction book I'd read.

In that time, I've built and sold or given away at least a dozen complete libraries of SFF titles - my life was for many years an unsettled one. But now that I've become a home owner, and have many walls that can be lined with books, it's my ambition to recreate all the libraries I've owned - or at least, all the best parts of them.

So I've given my partner a long list of SFF books I want to own once more, and every once in a while he finds himself in a used bookstore and buys several of the titles off that list.

AS it happens, there's been some of these re-acquired books hanging around in the to-be-read pile, and this past week I decided it was time to read them all.


Double Star, Robert Heinlein

This has always been one of my favourite Heinlein novels - probably because of the combination of the craft of acting displayed by the main character and the plot focusing on political intrigue. To me, there's still something profoundly engaging - and yet, upon re-reading, profoundly disturbing - about this portrayal of how one person comes to surrender not only his future, but his identity, for a cause. It's an interesting mediation on the idea of personal sacrifice for the common good and the processes that lead one to commit to such sacrifices.

We see Lorenzo as a tragic hero, because Heinlein presents the cause he comes to champion as a just one. But one must also look at the process Lorenzo undergoes here - a traumatic separation from everyday life, enforced isolation from everything familiar, deep immersion in a specific political viewpoint, being surrounded with people who strongly espouse this viewpoint and stress the importance of the task he has been recruited for in such a problematical way... it's the same set of techniques used in cults, in military basic training camps, in fundamentalist madrasas, in all sorts of places where one breaks down personal identity and replaces it with devotion to a cause or an organisation.

And in the end, Lorenzo has vanished and the person he has become doesn't even think all that highly of who he once was, satisfied that the ends have more than justified the means.


Beyond This Horizon, Robert Heinlein

One of Heinlein's quirkiest and least focused novels, I've always thought. We have some of the classic and contradictory elements of a Heinlein future - societies where the libertarian idea of arming everyone and allowing private duels to settle personal conflicts co-exists with the profound degree of social control necessary for the acceptance of a world-wide genetic breeding program. We have an attempted revolution by Luddite-inspired neo-facists (complete with plans to eliminate the inferior races - in this case, people who have not been part of the government breeding program), a love story between a man who doesn't want to further his carefully designed genetic heritage and the woman chosen by the agents of the state as his ideal genetic counterpart, numerous paeans to rationality and the wonders of science, a quest for the truth behind paranormal ideas such as reincarnation and telepathy, and a seemingly socialist political and economic system in which a well-run centralised state produces higher and higher citizen living allowances and excess production that can be used for just about any hair-brained scheme that comes to mind, as long as it can be argued to be in the interests of science, the people, or something else noble and iconic.

It's fun to re-read, but I still have no clue, after all these years, of what Heinlein might have been trying to say on this novel. Maybe that no one ideology has a hard-and-fast hold on utopian ideas, or that no matter how utopic a civilisation my seem, there will always be people who aren't content - some who will want to destroy, and some who will want to grow in new directions? Who knows. And Heinlein isn't around to tell us.


A Case of Conscience, James Blish

Another classic that leaves me with unanswered questions, even after re-reading it again after so many years. The novel is in two parts. In the first part, a team of scientists from Earth evaluate Lithia, a newly discovered planet which is home to a technological but pre-space flight alien civilisation to determine what kind of relationship should exist between it and Earth. One of the scientists, a physicist, wants to turn the planet into a physics weapons lab because of its wealth of fissionable materials. Two others want to open it up for mutual trade. And the fourth, a Jesuit priest and biologist, has decided that it is a Satanic trap for the human conscience, a planet where all adults of the dominant species behave in the most moral of fashions even though they have no religion, no god, no revelation, no experience of sin and grace.

In the second part, the scientists return to Earth, carrying with the a gift - the carefully stored embryo of one of the Lithians. The alien grows rapidly to adulthood and, cut off from his culture, deliberately becomes a focal point for the frustrations and discontents of a vast underclass of human beings, sparking riots and threatening to create fractures in human society. Eventually he is taken prisoner and sent on his way back to Lithia. Meanwhile, the priest has come under severe criticism within the church because in his assessment of Lithia, he has fallen into the heresy of manicheanism, in granting Satan the ability to create of his own accord - an ability that must be reserved for God. However, the Pope himself suggests a way out - Satan can create illusion, which, once exorcised, will vanish. At the same time, the physicist has been given the go-ahead to create his weapons research lab on Lithia.

The climax leaves the reader with no resolution to this case of conscience. Through the offices of a convenient advance in technology, a group of scientists - including the conscience-tormented priest, watch Lithia in real time as they wait for the physicist to begin a dangerous experiment that one of the scientists on Earth has predicted will destroy the planet. As he watches, the priest decides that he must try to carry out the Pope's recommendation and begins his exorcism. The experiment, as feared, fails with devastating consequences.

Has God chosen to destroy Satan's illusion via the material tool of a scientific experiment gone awry? Or has the theological issue been a red herring all along, and the real sin here the way that a arrogant physicist has been given the opportunity to destroy an entire planet of sentient beings? Blish clearly wanted his readers to think about the interrelationships of science and religion, and the effect they have on society, for themselves.


Slan, A. E. Van Vogt

One of the classic stories about the emergence of a super race, their persecution by "ordinary" humans, and their struggle for survival and plans for and/or success in achieving benign control over all of humanity, mutant and otherwise, for the greater good of all. Scratch the surface and it's a particularly ugly justification for a fascist utopia, but at the same time, it's such a deep-seated nerdly wish fulfilment fantasy that, as a nerd myself, I can't help identifying with the orphaned slan Jommy Cross and his search for the secret slan organisation that, he believes, must exist, so that he can give them the benefit of his father's scientific discoveries in their goal of preparing to take over the world.

Fantasy is, after all, one of the places where we can imagine the things we would never want to really do.


Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

Ah yes. The classic anti-censorship novel, which interpretation Bradbury recently repudiated, insisting that it's all about how bad television is for you. Well, I won't deny that there's a profound critique of the ways in which North American society has, for quite some time now, been creating dumber and dumber forms of public entertainment (it's fascinating to compare the "families" the Montag's wife is so enthralled by with the most recent forms of entertainment to hit the public airwaves, the participatory reality show where viewers can influence what happens on the show), and the effects that this may be having on society.

But if censorship is control of what people are allowed to see, then this is clearly about censorship, and what happens to people in censored societies when they realise what is being kept from them.


October Country, Ray Bradbury

In re-reading this collection of short stories, I was reminded both of how good a writer of the short form Bradbury is, and of how truly grotesque and disturbing his vision could be. There is a great deal of death and decay in these stories - suitable for the season where the weather turns cold and living things die and many cultures have their festivals of the dead. Bradbury was a master of may genres, from science fiction to horror, and this is certainly a collection of some of his finest examples of the latter.

And now, for a quick look at my recent anthology reading.

Sword and Sorceress III, Marion Zimmer Bradley (ed.)

I’d originally bought this because I wanted to collect all of Charles Saunders’ short stories about Dossouye, the Abomeyan woman warrior, most of which were first published in the early Sword and Sorceress anthologies edited by the late Marion Zimmer Bradley. But that’s hardly the only reason to read (or re-read) the anthology. It’s great fun to go back and revist the early stories of other favourite fantasy writers, like Jennifer Roberson, Diana Paxson, Elizabeth Moon and Mercedes Lackey.

The Sword and Sorceress anthologies played a significant role in the development of a new kind of woman-centred fantasy , and a new generation of writers, mostly women, who knew how to write it. Sometimes it’s a very good thing to travel back and look at where some of the great female characters of heroic fantasy, and the people who created them, had their beginnings.


Sword and Sorceress XXIII, Elisabeth Waters (ed.)

From the retrospective to the modern day – this is the second volume of the Sword and Sorceress anthologies to be edited by Elisabeth Waters and released by Norilana Books (by publisher Vera Nazarian). Featuring stories by well-established writers who have been part of the Sword and Sorceress phenomenon from the beginning, like Patricia B. Cirone, Mercedes Lackey and Deborah J. Ross, as well as relative newcomers such as Pauline Alama, Leah Cypress, and others.


Tesseracts Q, Jane Brierley & Elisabeth Vonarburg (eds.)

One of the biggest disadvantages to being monolingual– and worse, being a monolingual speaker of English – is that it’s hard to really read globally. Many works in English are translated into many other languages (can you spell cultural imperialism? I thought you could.), but only a small percentage of the interesting writing, in any genre, in languages other than English gets translated into English.

And so, much thanks to Jane Brierley and Elisabeth Vonarburg, who have selected some of the interesting work that Quebecois(e) writers have been producing, and publishing it in translation for the benighted monolingual English to read. There are some very interesting stories in this anthology, and in addition, it offers the chance for the reader to immerse herself in a different tradition – science fiction with a different set of working assumptions about treatment and style. Many of the stories here are more “literary” than much English-language science fiction, and ask different questions. And that makes the experience of reading works in translation doubly engaging.


Interfictions: An Anthology of Interstitial Writing, Delia Sherman & Theodora Goss (eds.)

What, you may be asking yourself, is interstitial writing? For the long answer, you can read this Wikipedia article or this essay by Delia Sherman, one of the founders of The Interstitial Arts Foundation and co-editor of this anthology.

For a short answer, it is writing that exists in between. In between what, you may ask. In between something that you think you have all neatly boxed up and categorised, and something else (or several somethings else) that you think is different from the first something. It’s work that colours outside the lines. And it’s interesting to explore – which is exactly what this anthology is all about. Many of the writers whose work appears in this anthology are known primarily as science fiction or fantasy writers, including Catherynne Valente, K. Tempest Bradford, Christopher Barzak, Holly Phillips, Vandana Singh, Rachel Pollock and Leslie What – and in fact, many of the stories are ones that would not seem particularly out of place in an anthology of fantasy, or science fiction, or horror, or the other genres that fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction. And yet – there is something extra about each of these that harkens to something else even as it seems to be, when looked at in a certain light, something you think you can clearly identify.

So what, you may ask. Read the anthology and find out, I may answer.

The Collected Short Fiction of C.J. Cherryh

C.J. Cherryh is known primarily as a long form writer – in a long career of writing mainly well-regarded novels, she has only published enough short fiction to fill one, admittedly thick, volume – and fully a third of those are related short stories from a themed short story collection originally published in 1981 as Sunfall, set in the cities of an unimaginably old Earth, where only those who cannot bear to leave their planetary home remain. The remaining stories bear publication dates ranging from 1979 to 2004 – occasional pieces scattered throughout the working life of a major writer of SFF, all different, and all interesting. It’s a good collection to own.

Mothers and Other Monsters, Maureen McHugh

Maureen McHugh is one of my favourite authors, who alas has not written nearly enough, due to health issues (this has happened to too many of the women whose work I enjoy reading). This collection of short stories by the author of China Mountain Zhang and Mission Child is a treat to be savoured. And I did.

McHugh’s stories, more often than not, are about people of little power or agency, people who at their core are not really all that unlike most of us, no matter how strange their circumstances may seem – people trying to find ways of surviving, getting by, getting through, doing what they can, managing, but not always successfully. They are often painful, often sad, but also often stories of small victories – which perhaps only seem victories to the person who achieves them.

Black Man. Richard Morgan

Richard Morgan’s Black Man (published in the US as Thirteen) is a powerful examination of race, religion, gender, identity politics, the ethics of genetic engineering, the future of American fundamentalism, the nature vs. nurture argument, society’s treatment of returned soldiers, the question of what happens when people or nations do something just because they have the power to do so, and probably a few more things I’m blanking out at the moment, all wrapped up in the guise of a fast-paced and violent crime thriller.

It’s complex, and exciting, and a little unwieldy in places, but I found it fascinating reading.

In Conquest Born, C. S. Friedman

At one level, C. S. Friedman’s In Conquest Born is space opera at its best – two galactic civilisations, the Azeans and the Braxins, locked in a centuries-old conflict, brought to a head by the personal opposition of two powerful and charismatic personalities, each the war leader of one side. And on that level, it’s a magnificent read, full of political machinations and battles in space and daring forays into enemy territory and betrayals and surprising alliances and everything else you could want.

But it’s a lot more than that. It’s also an interesting examination of gender and race. Both empires are highly homogenous in physical type, to the extent that the Azean protagonist, Anzha, is virtually an outcast for much of her early life because she does not bear the racial imprint of golden skin and white hair. Furthermore, Azea’s culture can be seen as a somewhat feminised culture by traditional gender stereotypes, while Braxin culture is highly male-dominated and hierarchical. Think Athens and Sparta, and you’re headed in the right direction.

Another area that Friedman explores is that of the difficulties of interpretation between cultures – something that is often overlooked in space opera. In Friedman’s universe, alien cultures are really alien to each other, and you can’t just match up words and concepts and communicate with ease.

This is definitely a thinking person’s space opera.

Dust, Elizabeth Bear

Start with a traditional science fictional setting: the multi-generational space ship (The Jacob's Ladder) stalling in its journey whose passengers, long years after the original catastrophe, have forgotten their goal and begin to evolve their own society, feudal/medieval in structure, with strict lines of caste/national identity based on the ship's duties of their ancestors. Add in some nifty new science fiction concepts, like artificial intelligences and bio-engineered nanoorganisms. Now toss in a big dose of Biblical and Arthurian legends and archetypes, from the grail story to the Garden of Eden, and give the recipe to one of the most original minds writing speculative fiction today, Elizabeth Bear.

What you get is not easy to describe, but very rewarding to read. And it’s the first in a trilogy, so there’s much more to come. This makes me happy.

Plugged In, Maureen McHugh & L. Timmel Duchamp

A slim volume containing just two stories, this book was released in limited edition by Aqueduct Press at WisCon 32 in 2008, where both Maureen McHugh and L. Timmel Duchamp were Guests of Honour (and I am extremely grateful to my WisCon-going friends for snagging a copy for me).

Both stories are solid science-fictional offerings dealing with the interaction of humans and technology; McHugh tackles the complexities of contact with an evolving AI, while Duchamp looks at the effects of advances in reproductive technologies on gender role and identity. Both are worth reading.

The final two volumes of L. Timmel Duchamp’s absolutely enthralling and thought-provoking Marq’ssan Cycle, Blood in the Fruit and Stretto are on my list of the best books I read in 2008.

In this series of novels, Duchamp has written not only an engrossing science fictional saga story about the effects of a global intervention by aliens proves the catalyst for meaningful change, and the women who in various ways give their lives to that change, but also a truly masterful analysis of how oppressive and fascist states and organisations (and personalities, there’s more than a whiff of Reich and Marcuse in some of Duchamp’s characterisations of both states and characters in these books) function and respond to resistance, and of the various ways of resistance to oppression, whether it be at the level of the personal, the social, or the state. It’s also a deeply feminist analysis of power relations and how they can operate constructively or destructively, depending on the means, methods and goals.

Reading the series, following the lives and thoughts of the various viewpoint characters in your head, is a curiously multi-layered experience – each book is at the same time a complex political/psychological thriller and a workshop in identifying, resisting, subverting and ultimately, replacing the fascist architecture built up in one’s own mind from years of living in a society where authority is defined as coming from without and from above, difference is used as a tool of control, not a resource to be shared.

This series really is some of the most important feminist and political writing out there at this time.

Rising of the Moon, Flynn Connolly

Science fiction has produced a fair number of profoundly feminist works dealing with oppression and resistance, whether individual or en masse – Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s tale, L Timmel Duchamp’s Marq’ssan cycle, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy, Joanna Russ’s The Two of Them and The Female Man, James Tiptree Jr’s “The Women Men Don’t see,” to name but a few – but I must admit to some puzzlement as to why Connolly’s Rising of the Moon is not as well-known as some of these others. Set in a future reunified Ireland where the entire country has come under the control of a viciously patriarchal Catholic Church, where women cannot own property, work after marriage, or even as unmarried women hold any jobs with status or authority, where they must always be under the guardianship of a man, where birth control and abortion are illegal, Connolly's dystopic vision draws a stark picture of a police state run as a theocracy, where both men and women live under close control but the worst oppressions fall on women.

Connolly’s main protagonist is Nuala Dennehy, who as a young woman was inspired by her father’s stories of the heroic freedom fighters of Ireland’s troubled past, left Ireland so she could study and then teach her motherland’s true history. Returning home to visit after 15 years away, she is appalled by the growing violations of human rights and the worsening status of women, and is drawn into an organized resistance network led by women. With her skills in public speaking and her knowledge of Irish history, and the deeds and words of its martyrs, Nuala becomes the voice of a woman’s revolution.

Connolly has expertly depicted the hypocrisy and brutality of a regime that practices censorship and terror in the name of spiritual truth and God’s love; and just as expertly, she explores the ethical struggles of resistance fighters who chose to act knowing that violence and death will inevitably come before victory can be achieved.

The novel is filled with quotations from and references to historical freedom fighters and figures of resistance around the world, from Stephen Biko and Malchom X to Bernadette Devlin and Rosa Parks; without ever being didactic, it’s an introduction to the history of political resistance and revolution, yet remains at all times the story of a small group of diverse women, each one of them fully realised characters in their own right, who commit themselves to freedom.

They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then we'll see the rising of the moon.
-- Bobby Sands

The Wiscon Chronicles, Volume Two, L Timmel Duchamp & Eileen Gunn (eds.)

The subtitle of this volume is “Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution and the future,” which is about what one expects from the folks who frequent WisCon – or so I’m told, since alas it is not an experience I ever expect to enjoy at first hand.

This, the second volume in a planned series which documents the major themes and events of the WisCon phenomenon, attempts to archive the best, or at least the most interesting of WisCon 2007.

The contents include essays prompted by panels and events, summaries of panel discussions, personal mediations and remembrances of attendees, speculations on the future of WisCon, and much more.

As with the first volume, I can only express my thanks to L. Timmel Duchamp of Aqueduct Press for publishing this book, which makes it possible for me to know, even if only a little, and at such remove, what all the cool feminist fen are talking about.

Solution Three, Naomi Mitchison.

Naomi Mitchison was never reluctant to challenge anything – the sexual mores and gender assumptions of the times she lived in, the political regime and class structure of her homeland, or any tradition or system of ideas that seemed to need a bit of shaking up and airing out.

In the early 1960s, after a long and distinguished career writing contemporary and historical fiction, and socially and politically progressive non-fiction, Mitchison wrote her first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, in which she presented an image of a future in which women had transcended the limited roles prescribed to them by the social and economic conventions of the time.

By the mid 70s, the world of ideas was full of theories about how to change the future, to remake it nearer to an ideal world, free of such evils as aggression, sexism, racism, poverty and hunger. Some feminists were advocating the use of genetic techniques to change the biology of reproduction in the hopes of eliminating sexism, and modifying desire to remake the concept of pair bonding, and the family. Some argued that it was the heterosexual family dynamics that created violence and greed in human beings, that the very nature of heterosexual sex distorted power relations between men and women. Scientists advocated the use of genetic manipulation to relieve world hunger. The air was full of radical ideas of using technologies of science and social change to remake the human experience into a kind of paradise.

In Solution Three, Mitchison takes a hard look at the kind of society that might come about given the adoption of such ideas and technologies, and delivers a serious critique of a world that, in sacrificing both social and genetic diversity, has created yet another set of limitations to be challenged. Yet at the sam time, she insists that the solution to such problems is not a return to previous, unacceptable ways of organising human existence, but to move forward, finding new paths that build on past lessons.

A Thousand Words for Stranger, Julie E. Czerneda

In A Thousand Words for Stranger, Czerneda introduces us to the Clan, a humanoid species in a galactic spanning civilisation where many species interact, with powerful psionic powers, most notably the ability to travel instantly across interstellar distances. But the Clan have a problem – they’ve been controlling their own breeding, in an attempt to develop even more powerful abilities in themselves. And their powers are connected to their ability to reproduce, and the stronger they become, the less able they are to safely mate and reproduce.

Against this backdrop of biological necessity, A Thousand Words for Stranger tells the story of Sira of Sarc, a powerful clanswoman with an idea that could save her people, and human telepath and space trader Captain Jason Morgan. Adventure, romance, and an interesting alien culture all add up to an enjoyable read. And there are more volumes set in the Trade Pact universe, so there’s more to discover.

Futureland, Walter Mosley

Futureland is a collection of nine inter-related stories set in the same bitterly dystopic future, sharing a cast of characters exploring the many faces of racism and classism in North America from a black perspective.

Story after story presents a future where all but the richest and most powerful people, the corporate elite, live out their lives struggling to keep above the divide between those who have jobs and homes, however precarious their hold on them may be, or fighting to survive once they have slipped below it and fallen into the underclasses, where return to the world above – literally as well as figuratively – is next to impossible and sometimes even doing the best one can isn’t enough to keep going. As Mosley develops his bleak picture of an America that has failed its citizens, he demonstrates in his primarily black protagonists a growing awareness among victims of this futureless society, that one way or another time has come for a change in the essential power relations of a world that had consistently promised freedom and equality, and equally consistently lied.

This is a work that should make white readers stop and think very hard about one of history’s lessons, that sooner or later, all empires crumble and all ruling classes are brought to their downfall.

Variable Star, R. A. Heinlein & Spider Robinson

Well, this was touted as a brand new story from Heinlein’s notes, brought to life by one of Heinlein’s greatest fans and a solid SF author in his own right, Spider Robinson.

What it actually was, I think, was a Spider Robinson pastiche of an idea that Heinlein had for one story but which he subsequently used as the basis for three or four of his other juveniles instead. I don’t dispute that they found an outline for a novel that Heinlein never wrote – in the exact same form as the outline, anyway – but the story has so many familiar plots, subplots and themes that I rather suspect that the main reason the Heinlein never turned this particular outline into a novel is because he decided (rightfully, I think) that he had too much going on in the outline for one novel and broke it up into several other books.

Seriously. If you’ve read Time for the Stars, you know about 75 percent of the plot. (It is worth noting, I think, that Time for the Stars was published in 1956, the year after Heinlein wrote and shelved this outline. The POV character is different, but the plot’s very similar. For the POV character, we have one of Heinlein’s dirt-poor farmboys headed to space to make his fortune.

One of the major themes of the outline, which is all about the corruption of wealth with an interstellar commerce backdrop, was probably part of the seed for Citizen of the Galaxy (which appeared in 1957).

The remaining part of the plot is a Heinlein staple – very young girl, preferably a genius, falls in love with older boy/young man , and spends the novel finding a way to make him realise he loves her/making him love her/waiting to grow up enough so that expressing his love for her isn’t statutory rape. In this case, it’s the time dilation effect that allows the young girl genius to magically become the same age as the initially much older protagonist by the end of the book. However, it’s worth noting that another book published in 1957 - The Door into Summer - also deals with finance and corruption, and features a young girl who manages to catch up to the older man she loves, this time thanks to his spending a few decades in cold sleep. The fact that in this outline, it was a rich little girl and a poor but worthy young man got re-used in Have space Suit Will Travel (published in 1958).

Incidentally, the outline was missing an ending, so Spider Robinson supplied one that is quite his own. But my gut says that the ending Heinlein intended to go with the “lost” outline ended up as the basis of the Dora interlude in Time Enough for Love - young girl, passionately in love with much older man, ends up homesteading on a colony world with him.

I wasn’t sorry I’d read it, because I do like Spider Robinson’s stuff, and I have a fondness for Heinlein’s juveniles, but it certainly wasn’t a brand spanking new Heinlein story, nor did it live up to the hype.

And now I have read the last of the Miles Vorkosigan novels. It took some time to locate Memory, as it doesn’t seem to have been reprinted nearly as often as the others in the series, And of course I had to wait until everything else had been read before I could read the last book of the series, Diplomatic Immunity.

It’s been a wonderful ride. Miles Vorkosigan is one of the few disabled science fiction heroes, and that’s struck a real chord with me from the beginning. Even after advanced medicine fixes most of the physical limitations caused by his brittle bone syndrome, he still thinks like a person with a disability – not unreasonable, since that’s what he grew up as, and that’s in part how the society he was born into and chose to remain in thinks of him – as a weakling a “mutant,” a damaged being, despite his courage and intelligence and political influence.

It’s a good ending, to see him established in his own country, happily married, a proud parent, with important work to do.

Ave atque Vale, Miles.

At least until I re-read your story again. Or Bujold decides she has something more to day about you.

OK, I'm getting all fangrrl crushy here.

I have now read Invader and Inheritor, the second and third books of C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series.

I continue to be enormously impressed with Cherryh’s ability to realistically convey alien cultures. And I am, as you’d expect, delighted by the complex political negotiations, speculations and plots that are multiplying as we see more factions within the atvei and the humans on Mospheira. It’s fascinating to watch as the central protagonist and man between two worlds, Bren Cameron, human paidhi, or translator/diplomat/cultural observer, among the atevi, becomes more and more integrated into the atevi “world” while still consciously remaining human in perspective – understanding and communication without assimilation – and yet how aliened and isolated he has become from the human “world” on the island of Mospheira. And how, at the same time, it is becoming a necessity for him to start to build a bridge with the “world” of the spaceship humans.

And then there's the whole bit about watching a species with a completely different understanding and perception of mathematics than the one that human have, tackling an accelerated industrial and scientific revolution based on the human path of development.

And just to underline the issues of cultural difference and how they affect communication no matter how important it is and how hard you try, there's Bren's personal relationships with not only the atevi around him (Jago, Tabini, Ilsidi in particular), but also with ship-born and ship-bred Jason, paidhi-in-training to the atevi from the ship.

I’m just loving this series.

Channelling Cleopatra, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

What if you could commune at the most intimate level with the mind of an ancient hero, philosopher or poet, learn their secrets and have their wisdom and experience available to you at all times? What would you do to have that advantage? Would it be preservation of a historical treasure beyond value, or the worst kind of theft? And how would the person whose mind you had resurrected feel about it all?

These are some of the questions considered in Scarborough’s Channelling Cleopatra. It’s on the whole an interesting book, one that I was particularly fascinated by because I happen to have a mild obsession with the historical Cleopatra. It was a pleasure to see that the book does her character justice, and that it takes the questions raised by the storyline seriously – most notably the issue of Western appropriation of cultural artefacts (using the term quite loosely in reference to this book). Other enjoyable aspects of the book are the number of strong female characters, in addition to the Great Queen herself, and an element of a mystery/spy thriller tossed into the mix.

Fun to read.