Review of The Machine's Child - Kage Baker

The mysteries of the Cambridge Library's book ordering decisions have reached a new high this week, with The Machine's Child. This excellent book is - I discovered on page 12 or so - seventh in a series of at least ten closely inter-woven novels. Cambridge Library has none of the others, although it does have a book of short stories by the same author. Not much help.

The result was rather like reading some of the middle chapters of a book, without ever reading how the characters got to their present predicament, or how they're going to get out of the even worse predicament that they eventually reach (trapped in a virtual Victorian library filled with improving reading). So it's a real tribute to the excellence of Kage Baker as a novelist that she effortlessly scooped up the naive reader, set out the plot so far without allowing the pace to sag, and got on with the next chapter of the adventure.

Any attempt of mine to sum up the plot is going to struggle. However, in a nutshell, an all-powerful time-travelling corporation is up to no good, and Alec and his Artificial Intelligence companion are out to stop them. In a previous novel, Alec's lover, Mendoza the botanist, was kidnapped by the Company, and Alec must try to rescue her. This is only slightly hampered by Alec being a construction of the Company for their own sinister ends, and by his body being alternately possessed by an Elizabethan martyr and a Victorian colonialist. And did I mention that they're all on a time-travelling pirate ship that runs into Robert Louis Stevenson?
 

I'm not sure that I could actually recommend starting at this point in the saga - not least, because the plot has got pretty far fetched by this point and I would have liked to have been led up through the improbabilities gradually. On the other hand, great plotting and great writing by Kage Baker mean that I'll definitely look out for more. I might even suggest that Cambridge Library buys the first book in the series...

Review of Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1915)

A group of Edwardian explorers follow in the footsteps of Conan-Doyle's The Lost World and find something even more extraordinary than living dinosaurs - a functioning society made up entirely of women. 

Chosen because: on a 'blind date with a book' event, Cambridge City Library.

Preamps the only Edwardian novel which culminates with a woman kneeing her husband in the balls while the reader cheers her on, Herland is a science fiction novel with a difference. Written in 1915 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, best known for her gripping short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper', this novel takes a serio-comic look at contemporary attitudes to women.

Intrigued by rumours of a mysterious kingdom of women, three young Edwardian explorers follow in the footsteps of Conan-Doyle's famous trio, by flying their fragile plane up into an inaccessible mountain valley. Like the well -educated men they are, they know that such a thing is both biologically and socially impossible.When they see well built roads, and well engineered buildings, they know at once that there are some men somewhere in the society. How could women possibly design and build such structures eithout fallings out and cat fights? And yet, of course, this is indeed a Utopia entirely of women.

The novel rapidly turns into a series of discussions between the men, trying to justify the contemporary British and American ways of life, and the women, who repeatedly puncture their pretentions and pull apart their arguments. There are intriguing discussions of the importance of population control (the women choose to give up their ability to have babies in order to balance the population) and the role of education and upbringing (in this soicety, mothers do not necessarily bring up their children). The views of the women, which we might guess are similar to those of Gilman herself, are challenging, and can be read both in the historical context and in terms of Gilmans own troubled life experienced, particularly of motherhood (a short biography of the author is included in the edition that I read).

To be honest, the plot does flag about half way through (there's only so many discussions about how great the world would be with no men and no sex that I could take), with the exception of the excellent kneeing in the balls episode. However, for anyone interested in early 20th century writing, and pnarticulaty in gender roles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this is a must. It's also great to read something other than 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by this talented writer. And if you haven't read 'The Yellow Wallpaper', then go out and read it now.

Special kudos to Cambridge City Library for introducing me to this novel via their 'blind date with a book' event - in which readers were invited to take out a brown paper wrapped book, with only a brief description to guide your choice. The fun was of course in getting it home and unwrapping it. A great chance to pick a book without the normal structures of author, title and cover art.

Review of Arcanum, by Simon Morden (2014)

Chosen because: arrived in the village library

I'm not sure if this counts as a science fiction novel, but I enjoyed it so much that I'm reviewing it anyway. Because you have to love a novel in which a group of heroic librarians, dubious booksellers and assorted hangers-on, including hunters, princes and Jews, use their wits and research capacity to overcome disaster.

The kingdom of Carinthia exists in the Alps, about 800 years after the Roman empire was brought down by the rampaging Goths and their overwhelming magicians. Because this is a Medieval world in which, at the beginning, magic is all-powerful. With the aid of the mages of the White Tower, the Carinthians live without the aid of science or engineering, in houses lit by magic, with ploughs steered by spells, and wagons guided by runes. Until one day, the lights go out and the magic disappears...

Meanwhile, in the Jewish quarter of the town, magic is held as non-kosher, and the Jews have worked out their own technologies. It's down to the Jews, or at least, to one particular Jew, Sophia Morgenstern, daughter of a dodgy bookseller, to help the young Prince Felix and his subjects adjust to their new world. Unfortunately, the rival city states of Bavaria and Wien, not to mention the Dwarves, have their own plans for the tiny kingdom.

Simon Morden is apparently a rocket scientist in real life, which is no doubt what makes him so gleeful as his characters work out fundamental scientific principles - with a particular nod to the importance of gravity - all the time battling to keep Carinthia running. If this makes the novel sound overly worthy, it shouldn't. It's a tribute to the joys of libraries, of research, of finding things out for yourself, just as much as it is a discussion of the competing demands of rulership, and plain fantasy about the end of magic in a Medieval world.

Heartily recommended, particularly for fans of Lois Bujold McMaster and Diana Wynne-Jones.

Review of Bellwether, by Connie Willis

A comic portrayal of a team of scientists struggling to continue their research despite hopeless bureaucracy, diminishing funding and romantic entanglements - not to mention the difficulties of getting a decent cup of iced tea.
 
Chosen: bought after being introduced to her novels via a friend

I'm not sure whether you can call this a science fiction novel in the mainstream sense - no aliens, no far-flung planets, no adventures, even - but it's certainly fiction about science.

Connie Willis is a hard writer to categorise. Her novels range from the very funny To Say Nothing of the Dog, a time-travelling romantic comedy, to much more serious but gripping looks at history, such as the duology Blackout and All Clear.

Bellwether is set in a reseach lab in fashionable Boulder, Colorado, where sociologist Sandy is trying to track down the underlying source of trends and fads of all kinds. Meanwhile, her colleague Bennett is struggling to find the funding he needs for his research into chaos theory, and Management is trying out yet another management strategy du jour.

It's much quieter and lighter than her other books, and as such was a bit of a disappointment to me when I first read it - it certainly doesn't have either the pace of Blackout / All Clear or the screwball comedy of To Say Nothing of the Dog. But it's one that I've come back to repeatedly.  Engaging characters, a very neatly worked-out plot (no suprise, as TSNotD is structured in the style of a classic 30's murder mystery), and most of all, an author who clearly has a topic she wants to explore. The increasingly bizarre fashions followed by the characters (particularly the duct-tape) are a recurring comic touch. And its a nice reminder that middle-aged scientists and sociologists are every bit as driven by trends as their younger, more obviously fashionable juniors.

It's quite an achievement to combine a discussion of scientific breakthroughs, the problems of blindly following the fashion, and romantic comedy. Well worth reading, if only to see how lucky you are not to work at HiTek labs with fashion conscious Flip as your personal assistant.

One minor but important point. Connie Willis is totally wrong about bread pudding in this novel - it is delicious and Sandy's on-off boyfriend is quite right to change his mind about it.

Where are all the women?

The mystery that we are supposed to be wondering about in Dan Simmons' Hyperion is the approaching end of the world, the nature of the all-powerful, unknowable Shrike, and the 7 pilgrims' quest to prevent Doomsday.

What I am actually wondering about is, 'where are all the women?'.

So far, across a planetary federation of what seems to be thousands if not tens of thousands of planets, we have been introduced to no fewer than four women. The first was a native who kindly nursed a passing missionary / anthropologist and so merited an entry in his diary. One was a nurse who smoothed a soldier's fevered brow and was exploded by aliens ten seconds later, leaving the solider to get on with the serious manly duty of stealing spaceships. The third turned out not to be a woman at all, but - after several pages of lovingly detailed descriptions of her naked body - a monster. (I know, that happens to me a lot too. You go for a coffee with a woman you happen to meet, and lo and behold, she turns out to be a monster with retractable spikes spinning out of her vulva. You can't go back to that cafe again.) We do still have one woman to be fully introduced to, so lets hope for the best.*

The best thing is that at one point, the missionary / anthropologist wonders how the tribe he is studying manages to reproduce themselves, given their total taboos around bodies. I think he should be wondering how his own galaxy-wide civilization has managed to keep going, given that there are apparently 3 women and 1 female-looking monster to reproduce the entire next generation. In fact, the Shrike needn't bother to kill anyone off - it can just wait for nature to take its course.

It's striking just how different men and women's writing can be. A friend's novel, set in the religious turmoil of the 16th century, includes powerful dukes, noblemen and soliders, but also the whole host of sisters, grandmothers, sisters-in-law, aunts, nuns, women just getting on with the shopping - in short, the type of mix of genders and ages that she and I see in real life. Lois McMaster Bujold, whose work I'm a great fan of, is another writer who thinks about the gender realities of life in the future, and tackles the mystery of the general lack of women in the future head on. Which leaves me wondering - do most men science fiction writers simply live in a woman free world?

* There is also a one week old baby girl on the pilgramage, but she mainly seems to play the portable role of a handbag or other arm decoration. Certainly she behaves like no other baby I've ever heard of.

Review of Tea from an Empty Cup by Pat Cadigan (1998)

A complex crime novel set in a world where virtual reality has become more attractive than real life, and where identity is endlessly alterable.

Chosen by: discovered on the science fiction shelf on a Mill Road charity bookshop

Set in some unspecified time in the future, Tea from an Empty Cup follows the story of  detective Lieutentant Konstantin, whose latest case involves the murder of a virtual reality addict. Just as the gamer 'dies' within the game, his throat is cut in real life. This turns out to be only the start of a series of disappearances and deaths, and Konstantin makes the decision to take on the dead man's virtual avatar in order to investigate the case. At the same time, young Yuki is looking for her missing boyfriend, and also, you've guessed it, takes on his virutal persona to track down his movements.

There's also a bizarre sub-plot about Japan having been overwhelmed by a tsunami, and the inhabitants' attempts to recreate their lost Japan in the virtual world.

It's an intriguing premise, but for me, the novel really failed to grip. The main flaw was that the plot was simply too confusing - with two women on different missions both taking on a character in the virtual world, the result was that I could never remember which was which, who they were pretending to be, and who they were looking for. In a twist about three quarters of the way through something even more confusing happens, but by that point I was pretty much failing to follow the plot, and so cant remember what it was. I certainly wasn't able to develop any relationship or empathy with either of the main characters, and was left unmoved by their cyber-fates.

First published in 1998, the novel is perhaps most interesting today as a relatively early take on the potential implications of virtual reality, and video gaming  (the author was for a conencted with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick). However, for me, the overly complex plot and the under-defined characters let it down.

Review of Plan for Chaos, John Wyndham (2009)

A photojournalist in 1950s New York is appalled to discover that a series of women, each one looking identical to his fiance, are being killed. He's even more appalled when the deaths turn out to be merely part of a convoluted Nazi plot to take over the US, led by his aunt.

Chosen because: seen in the science fiction section of Waterstone bookshop, Oxford


When I saw a 'new' John Wynham novel on the shelves of the science fiction section at Waterstones in Oxford, I had to buy it straight away. Wynham's classic novels - The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and all the rest of them - were some of the first science fiction that I ever read, and I put one of his short stories down as responsible for my current profession (it's the one in which a Soviet botanist dies in mysterious circumstances on the Moon, for those of you that know it).

Plan for Chaos was in fact apparently one of his earlier novels, one that he was working on at the time of The Day of the Triffids, and which he put to one side without re-drafting when The Day of the Triffids was accepted for publication.

The story line is frankly rather silly - the type of thing that Clive Cussler would be using for a Dirk Pitt adventure if he hadn't already done Nazis to death. A top-ranking Nazi has escaped at the end of the war, and developed a new technology for IVF and human embryo growth (in a very similar way to Huxley's Brave New World). She uses it to grow a master race of identical young Nazis, all of whom are genetically her children, who are going about taking over the world in a mysterious and roundabout way.

Our hero, a young photographer for a New York newspaper, is appalled to see a photograph of a dead woman who is identical to his fiance (and cousin) Frieda. He's even more appalled when he discovers that a whole string of women, all of them identical to Frieda and each other, are being found dead across New York. Then Frieda disappears...

Its fair enough to begin by saying that it's not great. Wyndham has hit the problem that (as I speedily discovered in writing my first novel) people locked up in a prison for chapters on end are not especially thrilling. Even when the people holding the hero and heroine prisoner are Nazi clones in an underground bunker, you can still get very fed up of people stuck in one place.

I'm always particularly interested by the speculative and predictive aspects of Wyndham's novels - the social effects of rising sea levels in The Kraken Wakes, the political effects of increased life spans in Trouble with Lichen - and this one doesn't have the same intellectual punch. Some of the ideas haven't aged particularly well - in particular, the horror of the hero and heroine at the idea of IVF per se seems rather unnecessary today - and having been primed by Lois McMaster Bujold's Ethan of Athos, I was extremely dubious about who had actually looked after all these clones in their early years.

The result is a novel which is most interesting as a comparison with Wyndham's other writing, in order to see what he gets right so often elsewhere, rather than as a good read in itself.