Adrenalized

2022

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I have been remiss in not doing these annual reviews more regularly. I have no excuse. Other words get in the way sometimes. 

But this, one year into my “official” retirement, I have no excuse not to do. So.

I read, cover-to-cover, 89 books in 2022. Compared to 48 in 2021. I try to make it through 70 to 80 a year, but some years…well. A handful in ’21 were doorstops, but really, I have no excuse for not getting through the nearly 100 books I read only partly. 

Of the 89 this past year, 40 were some species of science fiction. That’s up in percentage from the past few years. A handful were rereads, like Samuel R. Delany’s Tales of Neveryon, Heinlein’s Space Cadet, Laumer and Dickson’s Planet Run, Greg Bear’s Heads. As I’ve noted before, I rarely reread. I read slowly, compared to some, and I have too many books on my TBR pile to choose to go over something I’ve already been through. This past year, I’m finding that to be a mistake.  (I started this a few years back with Charles Dickens. I’d read most of his work in high school, came away hating it, and deciding that I needed to revisit that impression. It has been…instructive.) 

Planet Run by Keith Laumer and Gordon R. Dickson is an anomaly for me. It’s what a friend of mine calls a “shitkicker”—and adventure with not much else going for it but the adrenaline. A crusty old spacer is hauled out of retirement to participate in the planetary equivalent of the Oklahoma Land Rush. He’s seasoned, wizened, world-weary, but gets saddled with the wet-behind-the-ears son of the politician who has blackmailed him into doing this. Bad guys abound, betrayal happens, it would have made an excellent Bruce Willis film anytime in the past 20 years. I read it first at 13 and there is something about it that just does it for me. I’ve read it four or five times since and it is always fun. Nothing deep, nothing timeless (or maybe there is), nothing one couldn’t find in a good Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour (it is basically a western). But it still makes me smile. It is one of the few books I loved as a kid that does not make me cringe to read now.

The Bear…well, Greg Bear passed away November 19th, 2022, from complications from heart surgery. I still have a few unread Bear novels on my shelf, but I read his Queen of Angels for the first time and realized that there are 5 books in that universe, including Heads, which proved to be as wickedly clever this time as the first time. The jabs at Scientology are impossible to miss, but it’s not satire. Queen of Angels was fascinating and a book one wonders if it would be  fêted today. It hues close to a few stereotypes that, while I felt he subverted, might nevertheless be read as problematic today. At its heart are questions of nurture vs nature psychology and the costs of potential intervention—therapy of a more intrusive type.

Of the SF read for the first time, then, right off the top was Gregory Benford’s Shadows of Eternity, which produced a curiously nostalgic reaction for me. Benford “borrowed” an alien species from Poul Anderson and wrote a very different sort of first contact novel that took me aesthetically right back to the Eighties, even as the approach to character and extrapolations of technology are very much of the moment.

I heartily recommend Stina Leicht’s Persephone Station, first in a series (?) that gives as an all-female crew (and supporting cast) in another “shitkicker” that has no lack of adrenaline and ample speculation involving corporations and indigenous rights and a neat Magnificent Seven riff. 

Andy Weir’s Artemis could have come from an outline left behind by Heinlein. Enormous fun, set entirely on the moon, action, problem-solving, and—again—corporate shenanigans. 

I read Ken McLeod’s trilogy beginning with Cosmonaut Keep, continuing with Dark Light and Engine City, which is a large-scale space opera somewhat in the mode of Iain M. Banks an involving interspecies intrigue, vast machinations, and ending on an ambivalent note where what problems have been plaguing the characters seem to be solved but not exactly resolved. He handles the whole time dilation question rather well and manages to tell family sagas and personal relationships against the background of centuries.  (It’s tricky to do these kinds of sagas which center on families without it becoming A Family Saga, with all the kind of homey baking bread sentimentality one usually encounters.)

I want to make special note of Nicola Griffith’s Spear, which is a compact and compelling retelling of the Arthurian—or, rather, the Percival legend—done from an unexpected point of view. Firstly, the writing is, as we expect from Griffith, first-rate. Secondly, she delivers a feminist twist which is only that in retrospect. As always, the story comes first. But story and character are bound up in the double helix of narrative. Griffith is doing some of the best history-based fiction around. The sequel to Hild is coming out soon and we should be prepared for a treat. 

Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace is the sequel to her marvelously complex debut, A Memory Called Empire. It picks up where the first left off and enriches the universe she has built, quite well. This is the kind of immersive world-building long-valued in SF/F, particularly effective because of the juxtaposition of cultures which throws the aspects of each into relief. Martine’s main character is herself something of an outsider, groping for Place in a milieu of which she has too little experience. 

Another epic work in SF I think very important is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry For The Future. This is in many ways not a science fiction novel—in fact, it could be argued that a good chunk of it is textbook—but it is speculative, in that none of the specific events detailed have happened but the world is very much ours. It presents a scenario in which the world finally tackles climate change. In that so many things work and come together to positive effect I suppose render the novel SF, but…

Becky Chambers’ new series, Monk and Robot, continues with A Prayer for the Crown Shy, part of the tor.com series of novellas. All I can say is that Chambers is one of my favorites authors. She writes about community is ways I find remarkable and refreshing in science fiction. 

Two novels about radically altered futures I found compelling. Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star, which is reminiscent (in structure) of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Benjamin Rosenbaum’s  The Unraveling. Both novels offer views of future social arrangements quite removed from our own and both present backgrounds of unexpected breadth. The writing in both is amazing and the ideas will linger.

To my great pleasure, John Crowley published a new one, Flint and Mirror, which indulges his penchant for presenting magic as a potential more than a reality and offering a view on the borderlands. This one is a historical, about the Irish Problem at the time of Elizabeth I. Unexpected. 

I continued with Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisy Dobbs series. I haven’t decided yet whether she’s doing history with embedded mystery or the reverse, but the novels have been tracking Miss Dobbs chronologically as the world heads for WWII. The last two so far, war is upon Britain and Maisy finds herself doing more security work than private investigation. We have grown up with these people now, so to speak, and the world Winspear is investigating is marvelously evoked.

Not intending to, really, but I did  a partial reread of the Ian Fleming James Bond novels. I indulged in a marathon review of the movies and wrote commentary and decided some comparison to the original novels and stories was in order. I was surprised both by how well-written many of them were and at the same time how shallow. I recall as a teenager plowing through them with relish. This time it was an academic review that yielded a few surprises, but on the whole I came away feeling I never have to look at them again.

I read Emily St. John Mandel’s new one, Sea of Tranquility. Whatever she might say, this is straight up science fiction, with time travel and an apparent time paradox. Given another fifty pages, she might have made it a very good SF novel. As it stands, it was enjoyable but derivative and relied too much on the good will of the reader. It was reminiscent of several older works by SF writers, most especially Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol stories. My best guess is, her point is to suggest that we all live in closed loops. (She might try to remember next time that gravity is different in other places and that someone who grew up on the moon might have a very difficult time standing up on Earth. Such details, which may seem fussy to literary writers, can make or break a narrative in science fiction.)

I finally read a Paul J. McAuley trilogy I had been meaning to for years, starting with Child of the River. In many ways it reminded of Gene Wolfe’s magisterial Book of the New Sun. Out in the hinterlands of galactic space, an artificial world with a long history that has evolved into a mythic background and a kind of avatar of a past race come to fulfill, etc etc. The adventures and worldbuilding are exceptional, but it ended with the feeling that another book would have been in order to satisfactorily wrap things up.

One last SF recommendation is Annalee Newitz’s new one, Terraformers, which draws on her strengths in anthropology and ecology and tells the story of the denizens of a world that has been remade by a corporation intending to lease it out to rich vacationers. The beings who did the actual work, however, presumably designed to die off when their utility is at an end, are still there and a struggle begins to claim rights. High finance, environmentalism, indigenous issues, and all the related politics combine in a rich, fascinating novel of generational evolution.

I’ve been dipping back into the past and catching up, filling in gaps. A couple of Clifford Simak novels, a reread of Ian Wallace’s Croyd (which is remarkably weird), early Le Guin (Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile), and….

David Copperfield. Yes, the Dickens. I read this one aloud to my partner and came away with a modified view of Dickens. At least in this novel, what to a modern sensibilty comes across as verbosity, is actually very careful scene-setting and social explication. The 19th Century did not offer  movies and the stage was not universally available. I found very little that might be excised from the narrative. It all mattered.

I read Piers Brendon’s The Dark Valley, which is a heavy history of the 1930s, from the onset of the Depression to the start of World War II. Brendon takes a global view and examines each major political aspect—America, Europe, Britain, Asia—and gives a narrative of the runaway cart that took the globe to war. The parallels to the present are clear, but also deceptive. Yes, there are movements and conditions, but the failure of solutions then should not be taken as inevitabilities now.

I read Walter Isaacson’s Code Breaker, the biography/history of Jennifer Doudna, the geneticist who has given us CRISPR and whose work was part of the technological foundation thst produce the COVID vaccine is apparently record time. Isaacson, as usual, does an excellent job of making the science accessible. The people, though, shine in this lucid view of modern science.

As is my usual habit, I read some odd bits of history. For my writing, I rarely do project-specific research. Instead, I cast a wide net and gather a variety of details until suddenly they become useful. To that end, I read the following: The Future of the Past by Alexander Stille; There Are Places In The World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness by Carlo Rovelli; Utopia Drive by Erik Reece; Freethinkers and Strange Gods by Susan Jacoby; A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson; Worldly Goods by Lisa Jardine; Beyond Measure by James Vincent.

And the rather impressive History of Philosophy by A.C. Grayling. 

I can recommend all of the above whole-heartedly. 

I also read Sherlockian novels that surprised me. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (yes, him, the former basketball player) is a serious Sherlockian and did two novels centered on Mycroft. I recommend them. Sherlock is in them, of course, but not yet out of university. They are surprisingly good. Or perhaps not so surprising, Maybe the word is uniquely good. There have been pastiches and homages to Holmes and most of them are forgettable if enjoyable. These two I feel contribute meaningfully to the mythos.

Along those lines, the Victorian Age has become almost a genre in itself, and I read my first Langdon St. Ives book by James Blaylock. I’m still unsure what to make of it, but I was impressed. We shall see if I continue the series.

There are a number I have left out. Not that they were bad, but I’m not sure what to say about them here. I discovered some new-to-me authors that I recommend—Sarah Gailey, Daniel Marcus, Nadia Afifi. 

I finally read a classic I had long avoided. High Wind In Jamaica by Richard Hughes. I’m still trying to decide how I feel about it. In many ways it is an ugly story. Children captured by pirates, who turn out to be quite not what anyone would expect. It seems to me to be a study of what happens when childhood fantasy collides with the fantasized reality. In that way, it is well done and evocative.  What it says about human nature and the condition of childhood is complex and layered.

I may have further thoughts later. For now, this review has gone on long enough.

I’m looking forward yo 2023.

Good reading to you all.

Cities, Colonies, Past, Present

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

We dream of colonizing the stars. Or being colonized. Or simply contacting other sentient beings. We look up on a clear night and reject the ancient notion that we are all alone. We understand too much to accept that.

But some of us still insist on it and that insistence could constrain our ability to recognize realities.

Charlie Jane Anders has chosen to pursue that particular human blindness as the basis for the situation in her new novel, The City In The Middle Of The Night. Humans live on a world arrived at after long journey from Earth in a ship that is fast becoming the substance of myth. The Mothership is gone, or at least no longer responding to the humans on the surface, and generations have passed as the colony has bifurcated into two urban concentrations of strikingly different organizational style, with a lot of unaffiliated people strewn across the narrow landscape between them.

Xiosphant is a cloistered, suffocating city with rigid customs and a strict curfew. It is a walled, ceilinged city within which citizens are directed according timetables and a class structure that reminds one of the fever dreams of old East Bloc nightmares.  The other city, Argelo, is more like an open-air bazaar, a libertarian paradise only with the real consequences such a free-for-all would create.

Both cities are gradually heading for collapse. Resources are running out, the ability to repair old machinery is disappearing, and the environment itself is becoming more antagonistic.

That environment…

I mentioned both cities exist on a narrow landscape. That is because the planet, January, is tidally-locked, and only a thin band between dayside and nightside is habitable.  A brutal environment dominates on either side of this band. In the Night, the cold is lethal, and the Day will burn.

Anders gives us the landscape, the implications, and the inevitable social details layered together with an enviable seamlessness that sinks the  reader into the world. The attention to detail never competes with the story and especially not with the characters of the two viewpoint voices.

Sophie and Mouth could not appear more different. Sophie is painfully shy, a country girl come to the city of Xiosphant to attend school. Smart but almost pathologically afraid of the world, she falls in love with her roommate, Bianca, who is everything Sophie is not—bright, glamorous, daring, ambitious. And politically daring, bringing Sophie into a world of rebelliousness which turns out to be more talk than action.  Mouth, on the other hand, is a nomad, attached to a group of smugglers running between Argelo and Xiosphant, trafficking in unlicensed oddities and sought-after luxuries, anything that can be slipped by the over-regulated barriers of the encased city. Mouth is violent, taciturn, seemingly weary of the world in ways that make her appear an old, cynical survivor.

Neither of them are what they appear to be and, more, neither of them are that different. Both outsiders, both needing others to create places for them in which to feel relevant, neither of them really able to fit into their respective societies. In the end, “fitting in” is just a way of saying “self desertion.” As the story proceeds, they eventually reverse roles, Mouth becoming fearful and withdrawn, Sophie turning outward.

But outward in an unexpected way.

Sophie is arrested for a crime she did not commit but claims responsibility for in order to protect Bianca. Instead of incarceration, though, the police choose to expel her from the city, where by all rights she should die. Instead she meets one of the Crocodiles and learns that the world, January, is not at all what she and everyone else believes it to be.

When the colonists arrived, they found life forms.  But instead of recognizing them as coequal sapients, the humans decided they were animals, to be hunted and feared and in some cases eradicated. The humans could not go into the Night to discover the cities.  There was no shared language, nothing to suggest the possibility of coexistence. Sophie and Mouth had both come of age believing humans to be the only self-aware, tool-making creatures on the planet, and Sophie discovers suddenly that this is all a lie.,

Or an undiscovered truth.

Sophie and Bianca end up having to flee Xiosphant. Mouth is part of the group that helps them do so, because Mouth uses Bianca for something her companions know nothing about and feels obligated. Because revolution is coming to Xiosphant.

On the journey, Sophie and Mouth form an unexpected bond which becomes crucial as the reality of January reveals itself.

What Anders uses here is the historical reality of human beings assuming. Imperialists assume they are superior, people assume other species are theirs to use, civilizations assume they are always and everywhere the best. Humans arrive at January—named for Janus, the two-faced god—assuming they will dominate. Like Roanoke, like Providence Island, like Easter Island, like numberless other places humans arrived to conquer and dominate and instead had their insignificance proven to them by time, resource, terrain, disease, and their own politics, the ambitions of those first settlers have become a desperate hanging-on, fingernails shredding.

But the addition of an ecological disaster, one created inadvertently by these interlopers, has imperiled the indigenes, and some way must be found to communicate.

This is exceptional world-building and great storytelling. Anders portrays how the same characteristics that can make people exceptional are the same ones that can undo us. She seems to be warning us throughout that the danger going forward is in the assumptions we decide to bring with us and leave unquestioned.

 

 

Reaching For Stars

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Let me get straight to the point:  Mary Robinette Kowal’s new novel, The Calculating Stars, is one of the best alternate histories I have read since…

It is 1952. Dewey is president. Elma York and her husband, Nathaniel, are on vacation in the Poconos. They both work for the newly-formed National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Nathaniel is the chief engineer and has a reputation for putting up America’s first satellites. Elma is a mathematician, a superb one. She is also a former WASP pilot, which fact figures prominently in all that follows.

In the midst of their idyllic vacation, a meteor slams into the Atlantic just off the east coast. It destroys Washington D.C. and wreaks havoc up and down the seaboard. Elma and Nathaniel manage to get out and to her plane and west until a fighter squardon challenges them, learns who they are, and escorts them to Wright-Patterson Air Base, the only fully operational military base within range. There they learn the extent of the immediate losses.

CalculatingStars_comp_v7_final-220x338

Quickly, the government scrambles to get up and running. The only surviving member of the Cabinet is the Secretary of Agriculture, who becomes Acting President until an election can be held. This, too, is very important.

While the pieces are being picked up and some kind of order restored, Elma is asked to calculate the size of the meteor so her husband can go into the meetings with the paranoid military and convince them this was nothing to do with the Soviets. She crunches the numbers and discovers to her shock and dismay that this was an extinction-level event. In 50 or 60 years, the Earth will be too hot for survival.

Kowal lays all this out meticulously. The science has the resonance of reality.  So do the politics, the culture, the economics. In fact, this is a very well thought-out scenario. For Elma, Nathaniel, the Acting President it means one thing:  humanity has got to get off the planet.

Which kicks the space program into high gear in the early 1950s.

The novel is soaked in telling details. And while it offers plenty of science and rocket-geek delight, it is also a story of challenging culture and social norms and overcoming personal difficulties in the face of all that the 1950s—our 1950s—was about to be. Kowal brings the culture into play with a seamless grace that produces a “well, of course that had to change” which occasionally leaves a residue of embarrassment.  Embarrassment at how we know things were and even how they still are.

We talk about Wake Up Calls when faced with growing or entrenched social problems, matters of injustice, the unexamined givens of the world. Kowal delivers the ultimate Wake Up Call.

And then shows us just how resistant people can be to making absolutely necessary changes if they challenge how we believe the world ought to be.  She puts ought to be on trial in a compelling narrative that seems to be all about building the future writers like Heinlein and Clarke expected. They neglected a few of the underlying pitfalls of trying to do so.

As well, we are treated to a protagonist completely human, flawed and excellent in her abilities and craft and sensibilities. Elma York is composed of the stuff we want to cheer and she carries us along with a convincing humanity that includes a heart as large and full one could wish for.  Her relationship with Nathaniel is wonderfully portrayed.

But it is Elma’s constant checking of privilege as she works to bring women into the astronaut corps and has to face the fact that she had often been blind to things sometimes right in front of her. Living up to her own values becomes a process well worth following.

This the first book in a new series. If it continues with the same verve and attention to detail and sheer passion, we may be looking at a landmark work.

Below Dragons, There Be

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Empire City suffers under circumstance unprecedented in history.

Or does it?

Depending on how one takes one’s metaphors, it may be that the pair of dragons, which rose one day out of the sea to take up a circling position above the metropolis, occasionally spitting fire down at random targets, is just another form of an old problem, one going back to Ur or Sodom and Gomorrah or Rome or London or Sarajevo, each in their own way suffering calamity that subsequently defined them.  Dragons come in many forms—earthquakes, vulcanism, sacking, a blitz, snipers. As buildings burn, collapse, streets are torn up, and safety becomes a once-long-ago idea, what the people in those cities do determines whether the city survives or fades into myth.

Individuals are often remembered. Gilgamesh, Lot, Nero, Churchill—

Duncan Ripple, Swanny Dahlberg, Abby.

Who?

One day in the future, they will be remembered as the heroes of Empire City. They, the last of Late Capitalism’s Royalty, who forged an alliance that saw the end of the terrible reign of the dragons. Two of them scions of great families who did not flee their tormented city even after fifty years of fire and death, one a girl out of Nowhere who found and met her destiny as a dragonslayer. Because of their selfless efforts, Empire City could be reborn.

If this sounds unlikely, hagiographic hype, well, it is.  And yet, reading Chandler Klang Smith’s novel, The Sky Is Yours, one wonders at all those other epic personalities to whom we attribute greatness. Some we know well whether or not they deserved their reputations (and even how mixed said reputation may be) while others are sketches, idolons of the past, forms into which we pour the substance of our own aspirations toward greatness. The realities may have been just as epically different.

Duncan Ripple, a former reality tv star (his childhood up through adolescence), as a consequence of which carrying a bloated sense of his own greatness, has reached majority and is on his way to meet his future bride, Swanny. Swanny has spent most of her life being groomed by her mother, whose shark’s instincts, business savvy, and stainless steel sense of purpose focus all her considerable powers for just this event, which will bind two of the largest family concerns together. Swanny, however, is a devoted Romantic, her ideas about marriage drawn from countless over-the-top and somewhat purplish novels. She is also dying from a genetic disorder, one symptom of which is teeth that never stop coming in (hence the need for an on-staff dentist).

Dunk, as he styles himself, is flying to the Dahlberg Estate to commence the process, paying no attention to anything but himself (as usual), and runs into the sweeping tail of one of the dragons.  His HowFly tries with programmed valor to save itself (and him) but ends up crashing into the island of refuse outside Empire City where lives Abby, the Girl, brought there by The Lady years before to escape what the Lady called People Machines, to raise Abby (who does not actually know her real name) apart from all the artifice and decay of the ancient metropolis. Abby is an Innocent when Dunk slams into her island. She rescues him, nurses him back to life, and then provides him with the first real sexual experience of his to-date superficial, televised, and facile existence. She becomes a surreal Enkidu to his decidedly problematic Gilgamesh.

When Dunk is rescued by his uncle, a wheel-chair-bound sybarite who almost made history by attempting to kill the dragons (who nearly killed him), he drags Abby back with him where ensues the opening rounds of disruption about his Destiny, Fate, personal ambition, desire, and all the miscalculations endemic to Planned Futures. The meeting with his intended goes badly, the families end up in stressed relations, and the marriage may (or may not) be off.

Except Swanny does marry Dunk, although Dunk has no intention of actually giving up Abby, who the rest of the family intends to send off to an asylum.

Then things go very strange.

There is ample plot to satisfy any desire for the delight of improbable twists, and the situations evolve into life lessons, the world (the city, at least) is brought closer to the brink. This is a detailed portrait of how things simply will not hold without a center, especially after a point of no return is reached, and the pathos of those who still hope that things can be turned around. The landscape is entropic in the extreme, locked in a moment of tumble, and the characters flail about for anchors that will not remain in place.

Klang Smith shows herself to be a masterful juggler.  There should be no way for all the components at play here to cohere, and yet they do.  They do with a surprising and pleasurable grace and at times the writing is nearing transcendence.  This is allegory, metaphor, and potboiler mingled artfully to make an elegant mockery of expectation and resolution. Who these people are and who they become as they spin around each other just as the dragons circle overhead suggests, finally, that superficiality requires substance to survive, and that try as some might to remain shallow, depths are there to fall into whether we like it or not.

Dunk’s reality show was called Late Capitalism’s Royalty and there is much here that does not even attempt to be subtle about the economics of greed, the consequences of avarice, and the futility of treating systems like religion. Empire City is a place in constant economic collapse.  The dragons can be seen to represent the inevitability of forces beyond the Market to disrupt, depress, or destroy any attempt to enforce the conformity of Success.

It is Abby finally who brings the whole into focus and elevates the entire thing above the level of mere dystopic indulgence.  Abby, trash-heap naif, loyal, speaker to animals, honest sensualist, who only wants to know where she came from and what her name really is, who represents the human spirit unafraid to go where love takes it.  Others try, begin to overcome the expectations of their upbringing, make the attempt at enlightenment, heroism, freedom.  Abby simply is.

Klang Smith has taken the trappings of what has become the standard æsthetic of dystopian novels and added enough satire, insight, and possibility to the mix to make the book less about starting over and more about genuine rebirth.  Weird, funny, gruesome, a collapsing wavefront of chaos harnessed finally by an inevitability that leaves us options.  The Sky May Well Be Ours.

Profits, Patents, and Pirates

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Annalee Newitz,  cofounder and editor-in-chief of io9, has written a novel that has all the signs of being a major touchpoint in science fiction. Where in previous generations, physics or information technology have been at the heart of seminal works, speculations on nanotech or colonization tools, ecology or libertarian excursions in ruminations about personal power, Autonomous bases its meditations on questions of ownership and resource allocation in a future where both are matters of patent law.

If this seems like improbable grounds in which to grow a gripping, nail-biting action plot, reconsider. Wars are fought over exactly these two issues all the time. In fact, it would be difficult to name a war that wasn’t unleashed over both factors. Even those which might be described by other metrics, their prosecution still depended on these things.

We live in an age wherein most of the time we hear about such conflicts as courtroom exercises, involving lawyers and academics.  Even so, to assume this is dull matter for exciting drama is to admit to a paucity of both imagination and understanding of the world around us.

Captain Jack Chen is a pirate with a personal submarine and a working knowledge of pharmacology. She “liberates” drugs and see them distributed through networks that get them to people who ordinarily can’t afford them, who need them, and who are denied the benefits of longer life, healthier bodies and minds, and opportunities contingent on just those things simply because of where they live, the class in which they’re stuck, and the politics in which they’re trapped. Captain Jack is an idealist who has learned the hard way to behave pragmatically and extra-legally in order to live with herself.  As a young graduate student, she became politically active and established a group of radicals to challenge Big Pharma.  When they tried to put their ideas into action, Jack was caught, tried, sent to prison.  Her career was effectively over.

Many decades later, she plies a trade as pirate, reverse-engineering expensive drugs and seeing them made available through a variety of outlets.  For the most part, she’s a well-known nuisance.

But then she makes available a work-enhancement drug called Zacuity that quickly turns into a nightmare.  Not only is it addictive, it supplants the will to regulate concentration and application, leaving its victims remorselessly pursuing single tasks to the point of starvation and death. Taking a closer look at the drug, she finds the problem: it’s not that she made a mistake in the reverse engineering, but that she did not—the drug is designed this way.  Which means the company, one of the massively huge pharmaceuticals, unleashed this intentionally.

Which also means that she has become a target.

A human-robot team are set on her trail, orders to kill her as a patent terrorist.  The chase is on.  Jack wants to undo the damage she inadvertently caused, but she has to do it before they find her, or no one will know about the potential catastrophe about to be unleashed.

Beyond all this, which Newitz handles with smooth assurance and uncommon good sense, the novel is about what is or is not justifiable in a society where property has taken on new levels of sophistry in its applications via indenturing, robotics, AI, debt obligations, and the prerogatives of patent-holders in matters of life and death.

This is the 22nd Century.  Robotics and AI have developed to the point of self-awareness, or at least the kind of apparent consciousness that is definitionally indistinguishable from organic, “natural” consciousness.  There are degrees, of course, but functionally, in society, there always have been when it comes to role allocation.  Does an artificially constructed intelligence possess any rights to self-determination? And how do you distinguish between one emergent form of intelligence and another in pursuit of a justifiable legal framework of slavery?

Newitz clearly has her own opinion, but it doesn’t hi-jack the given world of the novel to grind axes.  She simply presents a perfectly plausible set of social and technological conditions and show us the interactions—some of them inevitably outré, but logical—and lets the reader react.  While the surface story is concerned with patent law and the abuses of big business and future pharmaceuticals, underneath, humming along like a finely-tuned Socratic dialogue, are these questions of personal ownership and the ethics of recognition.  Of course, in the end, it’s all the same argument, but so much is slipped in as subtext, virally delivered in the form of a first-rate story, that we might not realize it till well after the final, recognizably polymorphic scene.

Autonomous is the kind of novel science fiction is most adept at producing—the thoughtful, philosophically-attuned thriller that leaves you with plenty to mull over once your adrenalin stops pumping.

Strange Inversions

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Jeff Vandermeer has been mining the hills of what for a time was called New Weird for years. His Veniss Underground stories are exemplars of the power of the oblique, the odd, the displaced, the exotic in service to demonstrating one of the principle delights of science fiction, namely that setting is character. His newest novel is another example of how landscape transforms imagination and redirects the focus of our self-reflection.

The City—unnamed, unlocated, but somehow American for all its desolate ambiguity—has been reduced to the condition of decimated near-abandonment. We are told the entire world has undergone a series of collapses and that this city is representative of most of it. Those remaining pick over what is left, and there would seem to be plenty.  But there is a constant danger, the looming presence of Mord, a giant bear that can fly. It tortures the landscape and the survivors, eats indiscriminately, slams about remaking the skyline according to no discernible plan. Mord is just a great big bear with no table manners.  And that uncanny ability to fly.

Rachel is a seasoned scavenger who finds it useful to shadow Mord. One never knows what good salvage one might find in his wake. The risks have been worth it in the past. As the novel opens, though, she has made a find that will reshape everything she thought she understood about the world she inhabits.  It is an odd bit of biotech, a blob attached to Mord’s hide, just large enough to find and still fit inside her pocket. It is, in its indefinable way, attractive.  She describes it sometimes as a vase that occasionally has wings. She calls it Borne and brings it back to her domicile, the Balcony Cliffs, where she lives a not altogether unpleasant life with her lover, Wick, who is some kind of biotech engineer. Wick immediately dislikes Borne, wants to take it to dismantle to see how it works, but Rachel refuses. This creates the first real conflict between them, which grows worse as Wick begins to see Borne as a threat.

Because Borne is changing.  Growing, certainly, but also acquiring new traits. Rachel discovers one day that it can talk. She hides this fact from Wick. As Borne continues to grow and change, she continues to try to hide its capacities from Wick, but Wick is not fooled.

Into this comes new threats. There are factions in the City, vying for power, control, advantage, in a game that feels purposeful but ultimately has little point. There is Mord, of course, raw power, incontestable, frightening.  There is also the Magician, another human who may or may not have been a colleague of Wick’s back when he worked for the Company, whose facility still stands, still functions, and had much to do with the destruction that befell the city. There is the Company itself, which continues to exert an influence albeit of an almost subterranean kind.  Once it had been the power in the city, but since the general collapse, both locally and globally, it persists because at least it seems to possess structure.

And Wick, after a fashion, because he is a node of stability in the chaos.  He makes things people will trade for, that people need, although his ability to do so is diminishing because the resources he needs, which Rachel is so adept at finding, are dwindling. As they do and his production shrinks, their danger increases.

Borne is a fey factor, an unknown in all this, and Rachel finds her attachment to it both comforting and unnerving. Her attachment to Wick is of a different kind and, for all the stress on it, more secure than she comprehends.

It is a curiously compelling story.  It reveals, offers insight, confers meaning, even when it is unclear what underlies all the struggle. Rachel’s inability to give Borne up resonates, as does Wick’s well-reasoned suspicions of it. The disturbing changes in Borne unsettle in a perversely familiar way. And Mord just scares us with his unpredictable rages and the offshoots of his savage personality which appear to do murder to what remains of order and humanity in this landscape, which as we continue on, feels ever more like somewhere we’ve been before, if only we could remember…

Borne as creation bothers us and intrigues us and somehow we understand that it—he—is not really our enemy.  This is confirmed in the novel, but that confirmation is not what brings this to the forefront of our myth-responsive memory.  Borne takes in everything—literally eats reality—and excretes nothing. Just grows. But he should, because we sense what Borne is. Borne is incomplete.  Borne requires…

Comparisons are never one to one, rough at best, but then originality is not served by direct corollaries.  Something that is “just like” something else may have novelty but it does little to feed the desire of new truths and fresh perspectives. Nevertheless, they are potent when done well, and this is done well.

Wick—in this instance, an obscure form of Wizard—is in some sense the creator of all that Rachel moves through.  He worked for the Company until he was expelled, and when we learn finally all that he may have created his place becomes clear in Rachel’s universe.  He protects her more than she knows because he is responsible for so much, in a way a master narrator. He cannot ultimately protect her from herself, and that is where the elements of this marvelous piece of clock-work aligning and arranging come together.

As borrowings go, Alice Through the Looking Glass will suffice. There’s even a mirror. But that landscape—collapsing, reforming, surprising, terrible and amazing—is what we find when our illusions are outgrown as we persist in living within the precincts of an imagination that will not yield to new possibilities and the stronger forms of mature dreams.  The child must be reborn into a bolder reality, and if in that reality bears cannot actually fly, well, there are other wonders to sustain us.

Cannibale Verité

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 4 Comments

Stories live inside stories. Like Matryoshki dolls, they nest inside each other. The walls are permeable, the delineations indistinct, and viscera moves from one to another to another, and so, osmotically, verisimilitude emerges with reference and resonance. We recognize the truth of stories because they remind. Even when we’ve never heard that particular story before, the lexical and symbolic soup, sometimes called culture, we swim in makes certain elements part and parcel of what we recognize as truth.

Fiction depends on this mantle of story sediment. The better a writer understands the essential reality of the material, the more potent the experience is for the reader. The more we identify with character, connect with setting, and surrender to the flow of the narrative, the more substantive is the story and the truer it feels.

It’s a risky thing for a writer to make the nesting itself part of the story, to show the workings of narrative baldly, like pulling away the curtains on the machinery of the narrative and make it one of the surface elements. Like a magician explaining the trick as it is being performed, the only thing that can save the experience from the failure of banality is if the exposition of form enhances the total experience.

For example, Kea Wilson’s new novel, We Eat Our Own, from the first line exposes its inner workings and makes us complicit in the construction of the experience. The second-person present tense is like a set of instructions. She not only is telling the character what is happening but she is showing us how the inevitable accrues and acquires momentum.

Frightening momentum, in this case.

A young actor, struggling, in 1979, accepts a role in a film being shot in the Columbian rainforest. It’s an Italian horror film, being made by a director with a long list of credits and a certain reputation. This is his first film done on location. Our actor is a last-minute addition because the first American actor they hired would not even get on the plane after reading the script. The director needs an American, preferably an unknown.

In a fine stroke, Wilson keeps the actor’s name from us, eventually referring to him only by his character name. Already we are descending into the caverns of nested narratives. Like Dante who got lost in a dark wood and found his way into Hell, our actor takes the part and gets lost in a dense forest. And because of the way Wilson has chosen to tell her story, not only are we privy to the hell into which he descends, we know how he’s going and are powerless to prevent it.  In fact, we don’t want to prevent it, because we are hungry to know what he does when he realizes where he is.

It’s not all told this way. There are third person stretches, past tense, present tense, and a heady dance of omniscient viewpoint throughout. All of which serves to bring us, layer by layer, into the central theme that carries through the novel like humidity or mosquitoes. Wilson is exploring the way in which we feed on each other. Indeed, how we depend on a kind of food chain of the soul in order to know not only who we are but what we ought to do and where we need to be. For some, those who have a tenuous grasp on self-knowledge to begin with, the cannibalism can take on aspects of gluttony, draped in byzantine rituals designed to keep us blind to our own dysfunctions.

Like our actor, who asked repeatedly to be shown pages, a script, told what his character is supposed to be doing and, most importantly, why—but is repeatedly refused, and in fact looked upon with annoyance because he needs to know. He doesn’t.  But it’s not just his part in this bizarre movie (which involves cannibalism, of course) of which he is ignorant. He has no clue about much of anything.

The assembled production company, cut off from civilization (because a phone line has yet to be run to the town outside of which they’re shooting), stumbles and reels through the whims and impulses of the director, who seems to have a clear idea what he wants but won’t tell anyone what it is. (At one point, during a trial, being asked to defend his film and the risks he took with his people, he demands”Did it frighten you?”)

Into the mix we discover a group of young revolutionaries set up nearby.  They are involved in kidnapping and extortion and have an arrangement with a drug cartel. They need money to fund their grandiose dreams of overthrowing the government and instituting a Marxist state. Maybe.

More layers, more stories, all intersecting, bleeding through each other, fertilizing, polluting, transforming.  Reading Wilson’s prose is like listening to freeform jazz, where everything reaches a point of apparent chaos and then, with startling precision, comes together to create a very precise, rich effect.

Fake deaths, real deaths, soul death, murder, suicide, and the headlong pursuit of a path chosen because, in the end, it seemed like the path available, work hand in glove with the revealed structure of the book to drag us into it in such a way that recognizing an essential aspect of human nature—or our nature—is impossible to avoid.  Wilson shows us the costs of not knowing and the painful necessity of making choices n the face of too little information and too much expectation. Of ourselves and others.

I said this is a new novel.  It is also, impressively, a first novel.  It does not feel like a first novel. It feels like the mature work of someone who understands human nature and sees how the structures we inhabit prompt choices often tragic and surreal.

In the end, that question lingers:  did it frighten you?

It’s about humans on the edge, making art and chaos.

Yes, it did.

Defending Angels

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It is arguable that we live in a post-colonial age. We no longer see major powers moving into previously independent places and usurping the land and the people and declaring them to now be part of some empire. Not the way we did in the 18th and 19th centuries. (We wink at smaller-scale examples of roughly the same thing, but while Ukraine may be prey to Russia, we don’t see Russia trying to occupy New Zealand.) The scramble for Africa was the last eruption of such hubris. And there are now plenty of studies indicating that it was never a profitable enterprise anyway, that every power that indulged its imperialist urge did so at great expense that was never recouped, not in the long run. At best, such endeavors paid for the re-formation of both the imperial power and its colonies into more modern forms independent of each other.  At worst, it was pillage that benefited a few individuals and large companies and resulted in short-term wealth-building and long-term grief for everyone involved.

Yet the impulse drove relocations of population, experiments in applied bureaucratic overreach, and an ongoing debate over the ethics of intrusion.  One could argue that the Aztec civilization was a horrible construct with human sacrifice at its aesthetic center and the world is well rid of it.  On the other hand, it is equally true that the Spaniards who toppled it had no right to do so and unleashed a different sort of ugliness on the indigenous populations. Every European power that followed them into the so-called New World bears the same weight of shame for the wanton destruction of things they could not understand.  If here and there something positive came out of it, that something was by accident and had no real part of the initial decision to Go There.

With what we now know—ethically, scientifically, behaviorally—if given the chance to do it again, would we?  And if we decided to go ahead anyway, would we do anything differently or would we still be dominated by a subconscious obsession to exploit for resources to fuel a growing population trapped within an economic system that seems custom made to produce the necessary excuses to do what we want with whatever we find?

We seem forever to be doing things that go sour on us and then having to clean up the mess and apologize and figure out how to prevent a repeat performance. The problem with that is, one situation is not so exactly like another that the lessons do not come with big loopholes and the opportunity for rationalizing our hubristic avarice.

In short, we never learn.

At least, not in aggregate.  We understand this as well and so a good part of our political theorizing is geared toward a place wherein the individual moral insight can be effectively balanced against the rock-stupid momentum of the group; and in which the common wisdom of historical experience as exemplified by the group can temper the less enlightened passions of the individual.  In other words, to find the point at which we can allow for the individual who is correct to trump the so-called “will of the people” and conversely where that common will can morally check the individual who may only be thinking of him or herself, the group be damned.

Underneath, threaded into, and informing Marguerite Reed’s Philip K. Dick Award nominated novel, Archangel, we find this ongoing debate carried on at several levels.

Ubastis is a world seemingly ideal for large-scale human settlement.  Two waves of advance “scouts” grounded to do extensive surveys, impact studies, and established trial settlements. It became clear that this was a vital ecosphere and that, compatibility aside, questions of too much too soon drove the negotiations that prevented a rush to fill it with human excess.  Dr. Vashti Loren, widow of the spiritual and moral leader of these two waves, is one of the principle advisors on the ad hoc committee overseeing Ubasti, which exists as a kind of protectorate.  The rest of human polity is hungry for it to be opened for a larger human presence, which the people who live there know will mean the ruin of a unique biome. Vashti becomes the focus of all the efforts to forestall such open colonization.  As the widow of a slain “hero” she carries great weight.

She is also a problematic figure in this culture.  She is a genetically unmodified human in a larger culture where modification has become so widespread that “Natches” are special. That she is a protector of an “unmodified” ecosphere is only the first layer of what becomes a deeply meaningful representation of not only human moral responsibility but also human potential in an alien cosmos.

Reed gives us a civilization where aggression is being gene-modified out of individual humans, even though wars are ostensibly still fought, uprisings happen, and certain strain of bloodlust remains a given in controlled contexts. That Vashti is wholly unmodified adds to the irony that she also hunts native species as part of her job as an exobiologist and as a kind of PR component to assuage outworlders who are curious, acquisitive, and need persuading that Ubastis requires the time to be understood before the exploitation full-scale human settlement will bring. She takes outworld visitors on sdafari to hunt the local big game.

Her deceased husband, Lasse, was murdered by a renegade “soldier”—a Beast, a BioEngineered ASault Tactician, a member of a clone experiment in super soldiers—as a result of trying to prevent poaching.  The Interests trying to discard the treaty that keeps Ubastis inviolate have all along been probing at the defenses, trying to engineer excuses for open incursions.  Vashti kills the Beast.  That action calls into question her sanity, but she effectively defends herself from charges that would see her “re-educated.”

What she did not know was the deeper game her husband was playing to bring about a future independent Ubastis—and that it involved the Beasts, the lot of which have been presumably destroyed as too dangerous. Vashti begins to learn what her husband never told her when she is confronted with a Beast that has been smuggled onto Ubastis by the governor’s wife.  She vows to kill it, but that impulse itself gradually morphs into powerfully conflicted responsibilities, the details of which comprise the plot of this densely-detailed and finely-realized novel.

Vashti. The name has history. She was the Queen of a Persian ruler who requested she appear naked before a banquet he was holding in honor of other kings.  A “higher politics” was obviously going on and his demand of his wife was obviously part of the impression he was trying to make on his fellow kings.  Vashti refused.  Harriet Beecher Stowe later declared that Vashti’s refusal was the first blow for women’s rights.  She followed her own code.  Her husband’s request was deeply inappropriate even in that culture.  Vashti stood by her own values.

Make of that what you will.  Reed’s Vashti is a woman dedicated to a set of principles which are sorely tested in the course of the novel.  Watching her come to terms with political, ecological, and moral realities and steer a course between the shoals of competing colonial, imperial, and personal demands makes for a compelling read.  She is a superbly realized, flawed character, and the questions she raises, wrestles with, and reacts to lend themselves to consideration long after the last page.

This is excellent science fiction.  It takes the abstract, the conjectural, and the epistemology of human systems and moral dictates and makes them personal, the stakes high, and answers often problematic, leaving us with a great deal to think about.

Traditions and New Eyes

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

I recently finished rereading a book from last year, preparing to read the sequel. I should cop to the fact that my reading has rarely been what you might call “timely” and I’ve gotten worse over the last several years.  When I wrote reviews for actual pay this was not as much a problem, because I had to read current material.  But left to my own devices, I pick and choose from my to-be-read pile at random, pretty much the way I buy books to begin with.  So I might read an old Agatha Christie concurrently with a newer physics tome by Kip Thorne after having finished a very new history of the sinking of the Lusitania, then pick up a newish novel while at the same time rereading some Ted Sturgeon… So it goes.

So I am very much “behind” almost all the time.  I served as a judge for the PKD Award one year and managed to read an unbelievable number of recently-published SF novels.  I can commit and stay the course when required. But in general my reading keeps me in a kind of ever-imminent nontime in terms of how I encounter works.  I don’t sort by decade when I start reading, not unless something in the text forces me to recognize it.  So to me, it is not at all odd to see James Blish and Iain M. Banks and C.J. Cherryh and Ann Leckie as in some sense contemporaneous.

So when I encounter a novel like Charles E. Gannon’s Fire With Fire I have no trouble—in fact, take some delight—in seeing it as part of a continuous thread that connects Doc Smith to Poul Anderson to C.J. Cherryh to any number of others who over the past 70 + years have mined the fields of alien encounter/politicomilitary SF.  And when I say I found the closest affinity with Poul Anderson at the height of his Terran Empire/Flandry period, that is, for me, high praise.

I loved Dominic Flandry.  Not so much the character, though there is that, but the milieu Anderson created.  One of the appealing aspects of his future history, especially those stories, was the authentic “lived in” feel he achieved, rarely duplicated by his peers, and seldom realized to good effect now.  Gannon does this.

The story in Fire With Fire is nothing new.  Earth has begun to settle other worlds around other stars and it’s only a matter of time before we encounter other space-faring civilizations.  In fact, we have, only it isn’t public knowledge, and in some instances it’s not something the discoverers even want noticed.  While Anderson had the Cold War to work with, Gannon has the transnational world, with all its disquieting ambiguities over what constitutes nations and how they differ from corporations and the undeniable motivation of profit in almost all human endeavors, leading to an ever-shifting array of allies and enemies in arrangements not always easy to define much less see.  He takes us through all this quite handily.  It’s not so much that he knows the pitfalls of human civilizations than that he recognizes that the field is nothing but pitfalls.

“All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.”  Hobbes’ dictum plays in the background throughout as good guys dupe both bad guys and good guys, people are moved around and used like game pieces, power is unleashed—or not—based on calculi often having little to nothing to do with ethics and morality.  This is politics writ large and individuals learn to surf the swells or drown.

Into which is tossed Caine Riordan, an investigative journalist who is also a good man.  He is unfortunately snatched out of his life through a security mishap, placed in cryogenic suspension, and awakened 14 years later with a hundred or so hours of missing memory dogging him through the rest of the book, memories having to do with the two men in whose thrall he seems now to be. Nolan Corcoran, retired Admiral, and Richard Downing, former SAS and often reluctant aid to Admiral Corcoran.  Not reluctant in being unwilling to serve, but reluctant about some of their methods.  They run a secret organization designed to prepare for exosapient first contact.  It practically doesn’t exist, sort of in the way gravity under certain conditions doesn’t exist, and now Caine has become their tool.

Without going into details, which are a major aspect of this novel, suffice to say it is about that first contact and the political ramifications thereof. This is a not a new idea and much of the book may, to some, feel like ground well trod, but there is ample pleasure to be had in the trek over familiar ground seen through fresh eyes.  What is done better here than the usual is the economic and political backgrounding and the debates over the impact of first contact.  Furthermore, the seemingly impossible disaffection among the various political entities comprising the world we know are displayed to lend a plangent note of nailbiting despair to the very idea that we might pull ourselves together sufficiently for anything remotely resembling a world government.

To be sure, Gannon adroitly addresses the hoary old notion that when we meet the aliens they themselves will already have worked all this out long since and be in a position to pass elder judgment on our upstart species.  They haven’t.  They have a (barely) workable framework among themselves, but the advent of introducing another new race into their club proves to be an opportunity for old issues to be forged into new knives.

Gannon handles all this well.  He clearly has a grasp of how politics works and has imaginatively extended that knowledge to how nonhuman species might showcase their own realpolitik. He has a flair for detail.  He handles description very well, sets scenes effectively, and even manages to disguise his infodumps as conversations we want to hear.  Most of the time, it has the pleasurable feel of listening to a good musician groove on an extended improvisation.  Throughout we feel sympatico with Caine and the people he cares for and the situation is certainly compelling.

For me, this was a walk down a street I haven’t visited in some time.  I read this novel with a considerable experience of nostalgia.  It is part of a tradition.  A well-executed piece of an ongoing examination over issues we, as SF fans, presumably hope one day to see in reality.  We keep turning this particular Rubik’s Cube over in our collective hands, finding variations and new combinations, looking for the right face with which to walk into that future confrontation.  One may be forgiven if this particular form of the contemplation seems so often to turn on the prospect of war.  After all, aren’t we supposed to be past all that by the time we develop star travel and put down roots elsewhere?

There are two (at least) answers to that.  The first, quite cynically, is “Why would we be?”  Granted that most wars have at least something to do with resources.  One side wants what the other side has, and you can do the research and find cause to argue that even the most gloriously honor-driven wars had deep economic aspects to them.  Certainly the conduct of all wars has deep economic consequences.  But while that is true and might be argued for most wars, it is also true that many wars need not have been fought as there were other means of securing those resources.  But that didn’t matter.  It was the war, for someone, that mattered more even than the well-being of the people, the polity.  That ill-define and in retrospect absurd thing Glory is a very real ambition down through history.  Wars get fought as much for that as for anything else.  Suddenly having all your resources needs met would do nothing to dampen that.  In fact, it might exacerbate the Napoleonic impulse in some instances.

Because the reality is that Going There will do that.  Not survey missions, no, but if we assume the level of technology and capacity that allows for colonies on world in other solar systems, then we can assume a post-scarcity economy.  It’s the only way it makes sense.  We will not solve economic problems with an interstellar empire, the empire will be the result of those solutions.

So that leaves us with the second reason we may still face war.  No less cynical but more intractable. Racism.  Not the kind of small-minded nonsense we deal with in terms of skin color and language, but the real deal—wholly different biologies confronting each other over the question of intelligence and legal rights and the desirability of association.  Deeper even than that is the history and tradition brought to the question by two civilizations with absolutely nothing in common, having developed in isolation more profound than any we might imagine on the face of the Earth.

Not that either of these are inevitable, and it may well be that sophistication of technology and its responsible use breeds requisite tolerances.  But this is, as likely as it sounds philosophically, not a given, any more than war with aliens is inevitable. So we talk about it, in the pages of fictions with long traditions. There are certainly other possibilities, other scenarios, and there are other writers dealing with those.  Gannon is dealing with this one.

And doing so with a thick cord of optimism that raises this above the level of the usual “Deltoid Phorce” clone in the tradition of Tom Clancy or some other purveyor of gadget-driven war porn.  Gannon asks some questions in the course of this novel which keep it from descending to the level of the field-manual-with-body-count-in-technicolor.  This is more like what Poul Anderson would have written, with no easy answers, and heroes who are not unalloyed icons.

It’s worth your time.

Nicely done, Mr. Gannon.

The Visceral and the Vast

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / 1 Comment

One of the ongoing struggles with what might be called epic science fiction, of which “space opera” has been a mainstay for many decades, is finding the balance between the plausibly human and high-tech melodrama.  Science fiction was born out of a passion for innovation and event which often overwhelmed or even shut out attempts at telling human stories.  It was a genre of heroes, villains, and grand conflict.

In the wake of the New Wave movement of the 1960s, certain forms diminished in prominence for just this reason.  Writers wanted to connect with their characters, tells stories that mattered on more than an adrenalized level, do work that might attain to the standards of literature, which meant more modest scales, closer scrutiny of the human heart, and a muffling of melodrama.  The lesson, unwelcome as it sometimes seemed in certain quarters, was learned and work produced after the 1970s reflected a shift in focus from the grander to the ordinary, at least in the treatment of character.  But to manage that the scope of the work suffered constraint.  The vast scope that made so much science fiction so much fun diminished, occasionally to claustrophobic dimensions.

With the resurgence of space opera in the late 1980s, beginning with Iain M. Banks’ and his Culture stories, we have seen the gradual humanization of the form to terrific effect.  (To a large degree, C. J. Cherryh had been doing this all along, but she had occupied her own niche, as it were, for over a decade before space opera itself enjoyed a renaissance.)

Suddenly we had the wide stage of interstellar space, many different alien species, the concomitant politics, and the kind of characterization one might expect from any competent novelist in any genre.  Occasionally, we saw superior examinations of the human, utilizing the surgical theater of the future and great distance to open the characters up to unique experiences which reflected back new insights.

Ann Leckie’s first novel, Ancillary Justice , is the latest example of what is possible in this revitalized format.  In a way, she has even given us a bit of a metafiction in that the story is about reducing the vastness of form into a cramped human scale—and then letting us see the former scale from this new perspective.

Breq is all that remains of a huge starship, Justice of Toren, one of the proud ships of the immense fleet of the Radch, an expanding human empire.  The Justices are troop carriers, among other things, main components of invasion forces—which the Radch call “annexations”—doggedly increasing the human sphere in the galaxy.  An act of betrayal from the most unlikely source of all has caused the destruction of the ship except for this one component, an ancillary which now works toward revenge, a shadow of her former self.

To describe the betrayal would give too much away and one of the chief pleasures of this novel is the onion-layer unfolding of the levels of plot and counterplot.  Aliens are involved, codes of conduct, and a class structure that is quasi-aristocratic and mercantile at the same time.  In some ways it reminds one of France’s ancien regime.

Leckie has done a number of clever things throughout.  The class structure is taut but not impermeable, although its rules make advancement agonizingly difficult and fraught with traps.  She has turned gender on its head—the preferred pronoun is feminine: everyone is “she,” even the males.  It makes little difference until Breq finds herself having to deal with societies that are more rigidly structured along gender-role definitions.  The ancillaries themselves could be virtually sexless and maybe they are—they are one-time humans taken as prisoner, their personalities overwritten and replaced by the sentient AI complexes of the ships.

The ships are aware.  And through their ancillaries they are ubiquitous.  The ships also have complex emotions.  Although Leckie never says, it is likely the ships have feelings because of their ancillaries.  The interface goes both ways.

Loyalty is both to the Radch and to individuals within it.  Ships have their favorites.

And in this instance, a favorite has been made a pawn in a much larger game being played by the absolute ruler of the Radch herself.

This game leads to the destruction of Justice of Torren—at least as a starship.  Breq, its last surviving ancillary, maintains loyalty to the cause it adopted in the wake of the betrayal and intends doing something about it.  Breq complains occasionally of its truncated memory, its limited resources, its smallness especially in the face of what it has to do, but it becomes clear that Breq retains enough of its former self to do the one thing it thought it could never do again—be human.

Leckie plays ends—several of them—against middles—more than one, it seems—to great effect, and manages to convey it all through the limited perspective of a single character.  This is a remarkable achievement, especially set as the story is against such vast backgrounds.  The driving problem of the action turns on a bit of political philosophy which we deal with today: what happens when the government turns on itself over a difference of opinion about policy?  While this may sound trite, the repercussions are anything but, elevating the book one more level.

Ancillary Justice is itself a consequence of a turning inward or against over a question of direction, and it answers the challenge well.  There is nothing expected about this book.  It goes in seemingly familiar directions, to apparently familiar places, but then leads the reader to nowhere he or she has been before in quite this way.  A wholly subversive work in the best sense of the word.

A sequel is promised.