Rachel Pollack - Unquenchable Fire (1988)

This time in the neglected classics series, I'm talking about 'Unquenchable Fire' by Rachel Pollack, This is another book I've wanted to write about for some time. It's a really interesting mixture of the everyday life and the mythic, set in an America transfigured by spiritual and religious revolution. It's about spirituality versus religious hypocrisy, and the importance of story telling as a method of communion - something that links us, allows us to share experiences and empathise with others. Read more at the link.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Hard To Be A God (1973)

"How I'd like to let out some of the hatred that's accumulated over the past twenty-four hours, but it looks like I'll have no luck. Let us remain humane, forgive everyone, and be calm like the gods. Let them slaughter and desecrate, we'll be calm like the gods. The gods need not hurry, they have eternity ahead."

In 'Hard To Be A God', Arkady and Boris Strugatsky explore the rise of totalitarianism, and the inadequacies of theories of history to deal with actual history unfolding. The story is set on a planet with medieval level technology, where the kingdom of Arkanar is undergoing a power shift as the king's minister, in a flurry of anti-intellectual paranoia, is creating a pervasive and controlling state based on fear and oppression. The main character, Anton, is a historian from a utopian Earth of the future, sent to study the unfolding of history on an alien planet, is bound by a rule of non-interference similar to the Prime Directive in Star Trek; he does what he can to save the lives of the intellectuals hounded by Don Reba's storm troopers, but he is not allowed to interfere with the natural unfolding of history. As the situation in Arkanar grows more and more violent and out of control, Anton finds himself increasingly at odds with his superiors, who insist that, as their theory of history does not allow for the development of totalitarianism out of a medieval society, the situation cannot be as desperate as he paints it.
   'Hard To Be A God' deals with the key theme that runs through much of the Strugatsky's work, censorship and the artist's struggle against it. As in 'Definitely Maybe', the novel features artists who come up against powerful forces wishing to silence them, in this case Don Reba's storm troopers, and, as they would in that later novel, the Strugatsky brothers explore the different ways in which different people respond to censorship and state-sponsored oppression. The Strugatskys quite rightly identify censorship of ideas as a key sign that something has gone deeply wrong with a society. Arkanar is being manipulated by Don Reba into fearing and distrusting new ideas and perspectives, vilifying and persecuting the very people who are capable of dragging them out of the middle ages, something that can only lead to its stagnation. Anton tries desparately to save the artists and scientists of Arkanar, some of whom are stripped of honour and property and beaten, imprisoned, executed, or else compromise their art and integrity by pandering to the strictures set out by the state.
   The book's setting allows it to mingle the tropes of science fiction and Fantasy, and to subvert the standard middle ages setting of much Fantasy in interesting ways. Because we experience the world through the eyes of Anton, in the guise of Don Rumata, the well-connected noble he pretends to be in  Arkanar, we see it through a perspective closer to our own than those who live in it. Anton is disgusted by both the social injustices of the rigidly feudal system and the technological backwardness of the people who live in it. By pointing out how bad the people smell because of the lack of modern hygiene makes the medieval setting, which could be overly familiar to readers of genre fiction, especially vivid and resonant for the reader. This allows the Strugatskys to humourously satirise the upper classes, who strut around assuming their natural superiority whilst appearing to Anton and the reader as drunken buffoons. It's also part of how the Strugatskys subvert the general tropes and expectations of the book's medieval, Fantasy-esque setting. 'Hard To Be A God' deconstructs the idea of chivalrous noblemen as brutally as George R. R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire, with the Strugatskys portraying them as self-interested, aggressive, drunken boors. Similarly, the book plays with Fantasy mythology. There's an excellent passage where the authors describe the legends and myths that have built up around the Hiccup Forest, before revealing that they have been put in place there and exaggerated to hide the Earth people's secret base.
   'Hard To Be A God' is thoroughly cynical about human nature. While it features, on its periphery, a utopian society on Earth, it is fully aware of the horrors of history that humanity has had to go through to get to its current state of enlightenment. Don Reba's name is derived from Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's brutal secret police chief, and his horrific methods and brutality echo those of his real life basis. His betrayal and destruction of his own storm troopers when they get too powerful echoes Hitler and Himmler's destruction of Ernst Rohm and the SA, and his torture chambers are reminiscent of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. The Strugatskys acknowledge the violence and suffering which have shaped human history, but also the pettiness of human nature that drives much of history. The noblemen make ludicrous decisions because they're permanently drunk, which makes them particularly easy for Reba to manipulate. The feudal rights of the Barons Pampa wind up having to be fought for each generation in a wasteful, expensive and unnecessary war which always has the same outcome, all for silver mines which cost less than the war does and laughably trivial privileges for the Barons. The Stugatskys have a hope for what humanity can become, but despair at its violence, cruelty and idiocy. This despair ultimately overtakes poor Anton, as circumstances get to the stage where he is no longer able to stand by dispassionately. He reaches the point where whatever he does he winds up with blood on his hands, but his decisive action only causes more death and destruction.

Cordwainer Smith - The Best Of (1975)

"You have waited for me. I have waited too. It is time to die, perhaps, but we will die the way people did in the beginning, before things became easy and cruel for them. They live in a stupor and they die in a dream. It is not a good dream and if they awaken, they will know that we are people too."

 'The Dead Lady Of Clown Town', 1964

"Scraps of knowledge have been found. In the ultimate beginning of man, even before there were aircraft, the wise man Laodz declared, 'Water does nothing but it penetrates everything. Inaction finds the road.' Later an ancient lord said this: 'There is a music which underlies all things. We dance to the tunes all our lives, though our living ears never hear the music which guides us and moves us. Happiness can kill people as softly as shadows seen in dreams.' We must be people first and happy later, lest we live and die in vain." 

'Under Old Earth', 1966

Cordwainer Smith was the pseudonym of Paul Linebarger, a man who lived a colourful life, (among other things, he wrote the book on psychological warfare). He also wrote a series of science fiction short stories, and his lone SF novel, 'Norstrilia', all set in the same vast future history. 'The Best Of Cordwainer Smith', (later reissued by Gollancz as 'The Rediscovery Of Man' in the SF Masterworks series), collects twelve of these stories and presents them in order of internal chronology. Written between 1950 and 1966, while the stories show their vintage, at their best they are a compelling mixture of untethered imagination and striking imagery.
   Smith's future history, extending from around the year 2000 through 16,000 odd years beyond that, is held together by a couple of key concepts. The stories trace humanity's early attempts at braving the dangers of space travel, through to the formation of intergalactic empires, all under the guiding hand of the Instrumentality, a group of powerful people who rule humanity. The main narrative thread, alluded to and foreshadowed several times before it actually happens, is the Rediscovery of Man. The Instrumentality creates an environment for humanity free of pain, suffering and death, where most of the manual labour is carried out by robots, computers, and the underpeople - artificially uplifted animals with the intelligence and appearance of humans who are forced into menial servitude and treated as second class citizens because of their animal origins. This society soon slips into decadence and despondency. The Rediscovery of Man, humanity's salvation, can only be achieved not just by returning pain and suffering into human life so that it has meaning, but also by the emancipation of the underpeople.

The Future, mapped out for your convenience. 

   Cordwainer Smith wasn't the first SF author to set all his stories in a mapped out, shared universe. What gives his stories their distinct flavour is in the telling of them. Smith sought to imbue his stories with the feel of future myths and legends, going so far as to base some of them on myths or stories from around the world, and adopted several techniques from Chinese fiction, learned from his time spent studying there. Although in practice this is hit and miss, this results in his writing being more ambitious and more interesting than many of the other pulp writers of the time. Like an SF Lord Dunsany, his stories are full of archaic words and fanciful turns of phrase; when it works, it gives the stories a genuine sense of mythic wonder, when it doesn't, his prose becomes repetitive and knotty. Perhaps more interesting is how this mythic approach effects Smith's attitude towards continuity. While there is a clear underlying narrative thread building up to the Rediscovery of Man, continuity between stories is frequently vague, making their exact nature in the overall chronology possible to guess at but difficult to pin down with any accuracy. There is a genuine sense of fragments of stories and history long since past, passed down through different media and contexts, from which the reader has to unpick the historical threads. The fact that all this happens in the far future, dressed up in the style and language of the distant past, creates an engaging disconnect.
   The other thing that makes Smith's work distinctive is their sheer oddness. SF is frequently guilty of overexplaining. In a particular strain of the most traditionally science fictional SF, what is important, over characters, situation or novelty, is the extent to which the science of the fictional world is rationalised and thought out. Smith's stories are notable for how much they don't explain. Stories like 'Scanners Live In Vain' assault the reader straight out of the gate with a disorienting blend of bizarre imagery and neologisms. The future technology described, from the various dangerous ways of tackling space travel to the ambiguous powers of the computers, have seemingly been chosen for their power and resonance as images and ideas rather than functionality. Everything Smith describes, from solar sales so large they block out the sun to cat pilots hunting invisible space dragons to gorgeous golden ships bigger than planets, is gloriously impractical yet possessed with a strange, haunting beauty.

The SF Masterwork 'The Rediscovery Of Man' is in fact this collection reprinted, and not the 1993 NESFA omnibus of the same name, which collects all of Cordwainer Smith's short fiction. 

   The stories do show their age in places. While Cordwainer Smith's stories do frequently feature female protagonists who are at least as well developed as his male characters and imbued with a fair amount of agency, from the pilot Helen America in 'The Lady Who Sailed The Soul' to the messianic D'joan and reluctant resistance leader Elaine in 'The Dead Lady Of Clown Town', they are presented as being exceptional to their gender. 'The Crime And The Glory Of Commander Suzdal' features a planet whose inhabitants are violent, all-male homosexuals. To be charitable to Smith, he portrays the people of this planet in sympathetic detail as they death of all the planet's female population by a virus, and one could argue the appearance of a single sex planet that reproduces parthenogenesically in a work of pulp SF paved the way for later, radical LGBT and feminist readings of the same idea, so that, say, when Nicola Griffith wrote the excellent 'Ammonite', it was ably accepted into the mileau of SF. However none of this makes up for the fact that this is a thoroughly offensive portrayal of homosexuality, especially as Smith outright states that their homosexuality was responsible for turning them villainous. The casual homophobia makes 'The Crime And The Glory...' the least palatable of Smith's stories on show here, and means that it is impossible to recommend the book without reservations.
   This is a great shame, as many of the other stories have much to recommend them. In other places Smith's work shows signs of being quite open minded. The Lords and Ladies of Instrumentality tend to be equally as powerful as each other, and from their names one presumes of reasonably diverse backgrounds. The whole story arc of the Rediscovery Of Man is that humanity can only achieve transcendence after it treats the underpeople as actual people. Smith never portrays the underpeople as any less than fully human, and the stories that focus on their struggle for equal rights are the most moving in the book. 'The Dead Lady Of Clown Town' reworks the story of Joan of Arc as D'joan the dog girl leading a tragic and inevitably doomed non-revolution of the underpeople, and is genuinely heartbreaking. The story is recapitulated more hopefully in 'The Ballad Of Lost C'mell',  and here Smith shows that he has a good understanding of systematic injustice:

"Perhaps the policewoman thought that raw hatred would be shocking to C'mell. It wasn't. Underpeople were used to hatred, and it was not any worse raw than it was when cooked with politeness and served like poison. They had to live with it."

   Smith's work also shows a healthy cynicism about how Empires achieve and maintain power, informed one suspects by his day job. The Instrumentality are not meant to be nice or pleasant, and the reader is not meant to approve of them. They hold their power over humanity by brainwashing, drug monopolies and manipulation. 'Golden The Ship Was - Oh! Oh! Oh!' shows that the Instrumentality is wily, deceptive and manipulative, and is willing to go all the way to genocide to maintain its control over humanity, while 'Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons' shows just how jealously the Norstrilians guard the drug that grants longevity to humans. Perhaps the most powerful story in the book, and almost certainly the most strikingly odd, is 'A Planet Named Shayol'. Shayol is the hell planet that the Instrumentality uses as the ultimate punishment for criminals, and in a sequence that would make both Dante and David Cronenberg shudder Smith reveals just what that punishment is. The damned of the Instrumentality are exposed to parasites which cause extra organs to grow on their bodies whilst preserving their life for thousands of years in excruciating agony, and the Instrumentality harvests these extra organs for medical use. It is intense and nightmarish, yet oddly lyrical and moving in places. It demonstrates both Smith's understanding of and his contempt of the extreme punishments governments use to maintain their power. As such it displays all of Smith's strengths as a writer, and nicely summarises what made him unique.

James Blish - A Case Of Conscience (1958)

"Belief and science aren't mutually exclusive - quite the contrary. But if you place scientific standards first, and exclude belief, admit nothing that's not proven, then what you have is a series of empty gestures. For me, biology is an act of religion, because I know that all creatures are God's - each new planet, with all its manifestations, is an affirmation of God's power."

"Almost all knowledge, after all, fell into that category. It was either perfectly simple once you understood it, or else it fell apart into fiction. As a Jesuit - even here, fifty light-years from Rome - Ruiz-Sanchez knew something about knowledge that Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne had forgotten, and that Cleaver would never learn: that all knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.
   "The residuum was faith."

'A Case Of Conscience' is a truly unsettling work of fiction. It is a nuanced exploration of the often fraught relationship between science and religion, focusing in particularly on the theological question of if there are other forms of sentient life out there, did Jesus die for their sins also? This is a genuine issue that has been debated by theologians of different backgrounds. The question forms the basis of C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, ultimately a much less intense work than Blish's. The aliens on Lewis' Mars and Venus have no Original Sin, and so never fell from their state of grace; Earth is the only planet where Jesus had to be sent because the Fall of Man only happened to us. 'A Case Of Conscience' is much less comfortable. Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, the Jesuit priest and biologist sent to the planet of Lithia to determine its suitability for humanity, decides that because the Lithians live a perfectly moral Christian life without any need for God, the whole planet must be a trap designed by Satan to dissuade people from believing in God. What follows is one of the most potent dissections of Catholicism outside of Graham Greene's 'The Heart Of The Matter', Like Greene's novel, 'A Case Of Conscience' explores how a person with courage and integrity can wind up making a horrific choice that, from the point of view of his own convictions, is the moral choice.
    A lot of this works as well as it does because of how closely Blish plays his narrative cards, and how well Blish develops Ruiz-Sanchez as a character. The entire edifice of the book would come crumbling down around itself were Blish to make the nature of Lithia explicitly demonic, but equally Ruiz-Sanchez's struggle would be meaningless if he were simply an easily-manipulated or self-deluded buffoon. Ruiz-Sanchez is instantly likable, clearly a dedicated and perceptive biologist who's faith enhances rather than detracts from his interest in science. Out of the humans who have visited Lithia, Ruiz-Sanchez is the only one who can speak their language anything close to fluently and the only one who has friends among the Lithians. The first half of 'A Case Of Conscience' focuses on Ruiz-Sanchez and the three other humans who have been sent to assess Lithia, mostly as they discuss their reasons for and against opening the planet up to humanity. Before we hear Ruiz-Sanchez's argument, we hear the arguments of his colleagues. Cleaver, a materialist and physicist, argues that Lithia should be cordoned off from the rest of humanity, so that he and the other free can turn the planet's vast natural resources into a munitions factory and make a fortune by using cheap local labour. Michelis, a humanist, points out just how unethical and paranoid Cleaver's intentions are, and points out how much humanity could learn from the peaceful and prosperous Lithian society. Naturally, from what they know about Ruiz-Sanchez's character, and from his own repeated assertion that his decision about Lithia will be based on conscience rather than reason, Michelis and Cleaver, and indeed the reader,expect him to side with Michelis. So it is genuinely shocking when Ruiz-Sanchez declares that Lithia be isolated from all human contact forever.
   Ruiz-Sanchez's argument is an interesting one, not least because it damns him in the eyes of his own church. By acknowledging that the devil could have created the Lithians, he is committing heresy, because the doctrine of the church states that only God can create things. Very often in science fiction we come across alien cultures that share morals similar to our own, and it very rarely commented on how incredibly unlikely this is. Ruiz-Sanchez points out that for the Lithians to live entirely by an arbitrary code of conduct that just so happens to completely match Christian ethics, which they do, simply because they find it works for them, is an incredibly unlikely thing to come about by chance. Because the Lithians are able to live this life as paragons of good Christians in their perfect society, far more so than any human struggling to live their life by Christian tenets ever achieves, demonstrates that it is possible to live a good, Christian life without the existence of the spiritual side of Christianity, that is, without God. This is reflected in the biology of the Lithians, who, as bipedal reptiles with young that have aquatic and amphibious lifecycle stages, undergo recapitulation of evolution outside the womb. Everything about the Lithians supports the theory that intelligent life can develop, thrive and live a full moral existence without the interference of God at any stage in the process. The planet's very ecosystem, comprising of lush Jurassic forests, even resembles an image of Eden before the Fall. Ruiz-Sanchez can only assume that the entire thing is a trap to draw people away from God and towards damnation, and hence he feels responsible for any souls lost as a result of contact with it.
   Whatever one's spiritual beliefs or lack thereof, there is something terrifying about a devil that subtle. And of course in reality evil is capable of subtlety, as Ruiz-Sanchez himself points out. But the idea that the very existence of an entire planet could be an intellectual trap is deeply disturbing. It is also incredibly solipsistic and arrogant, and is an interpretation that completely robs the Lithians themselves of any kind of agency. 'A Case Of Conscience' also doubles as a critique of colonialism. Ruiz-Sanchez sees the Lithians in terms of how similar their society conforms to his idea of a good society as both a Jesuit and a product of however many years of Western civilisation. However this blinkers him from seeing them as their own people, and ultimately from seeing them as anything but a threat to his own ingrained system of belief. So Ruiz-Sanchez is entirely capable of having pleasant conversations with Chtexa in Chtexa's own language and expressing genuine interest in the Lithian's own culture whilst in his mind labeling him as a product of the mind of Satan, only existing to drag him into temptation. It is this attitude that leads him to side with Cleaver over Michelis, which instead of letting the cooped up, frustrated and paranoid Shelter society on Earth learn from cultural exchange with the Lithians allows Cleaver to exploit the Lithians behind the UN's back, and ultimately to the book's tragic conclusion, all whilst believing he is doing right by his conscience.
   Chtexa gives Ruiz-Sanchez a flask with one of his young in it in the spirit of cultural exchange, and the second half of the book focuses on Ruiz-Sanchez and Michelis's attempts to raise Egtverchi, Chtexa's son, on Earth, Egtverchi becomes a celebrity with is own TV show, where he incites chaos amongst the Shelter society's disillusioned millions. Egtverchi's mantle of dark messiah feeds into Ruiz-Sanchez's and the church's view of the Lithians as demonic in origin, and the rioting he unleashes threatens to turn into a full-scale apocalypse, spelling out the end of the Shelter society that has allowed Earth to survive in the shadow of potential nuclear annihilation since the end of the cold war. However Egtverchi doesn't stir anything up that isn't already there; like Shevek in Ursula Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed', his presence as an envoy from a different way of life means that he acts as a catalyst to all those disillusioned and suffering under a deeply unfair and unstable system. The' Shelter system has built up by essentially forcing people to live underground in structures that were built to survive the nuclear apocalypse, and the cramped and paranoid living conditions has bred generations of people with undiagnosed and untreated psychological conditions. There's also a subtle undercurrent here of how parents bring up children into their own psychoses and neuroses, in Egtverchi as much as the people of the Shelter society. Lithians don't look after their young; the process of development allows the Lithians to become at home in every type of ecosystem present on their planet. On Earth, being looked after by his reluctant surrogate parents, rather than becoming a well-developed adult, Egtverchi behaves like a stroppy teenager, resentful of both his biological and foster parents. Ruiz-Sanchez and Michelis also fail Egtverchi as parents in multiple ways; Ruiz-Sanchez in particular being utterly unable to provide moral guidance to a creature who, were he in his natural environment, would not need it. In the end, Egtverchi escapes aboard a freighter bound to Lithia, a snake on his way to spread corruption to Eden.
   The ending of the book is spectacularly bleak. Ruiz-Sanchez is not immediately excommunicated from the church, as he expects. The Pope shares his view that Lithia is demonic in origin, but rather than being a world of intelligent beings created by the devil, he views the entire planet as a hallucination designed to test people's faith, and insists that Ruiz-Sanchez perform an exorcism on the whole planet. Ruiz-Sanchez's exorcism coincides with the exact moment that Cleaver's mining for munitions goes catastrophically wrong, and the end result is the destruction of the planet. The clever thing about how Blish plays this is that depending on one's theological bent you can read this as you choose. Is Ruiz-Sanchez's exorcism responsible for destroying the planet? The important thing is that Ruiz-Sanchez believes so. Now, as a result of consistently doing what his moral code tells him is the right thing, he is damned again because he caused the deaths of Cleaver and his excavation team, who would have been unshriven at their death and so are damned as well, not to mention that he has wiped out an entire sentient race and his own alien foster son.
 
 

Nicola Griffith - Slow River (1995)

"She has read many fairy tales and understands instinctively that those who are dragged places unwillingly must find their own way back."

'Slow River' by Nicola Griffith shares many of the concerns of cyberpunk. Set fifteen minutes in the future, it explores the intersection between technology and identity, as well as being deeply concerned with corporate ethics, or lack thereof. Reading it, I found myself thinking of the famous William Gibson quote, "The street finds its own use for things." Yet, whilst most of the original cyberpunk texts are noir-infused SF thrillers, 'Slow River' is a much more thoughtful, reflective book. It achieves its impact through character development and Griffith's eloquent, lyrical writing. The end result is a powerful, haunting novel, and its anger is all the more effective for being carefully revealed. It is also a deeply feminist novel, both in its themes of female characters searching for and ultimately achieving their own agency, and in the way its almost entirely female cast effortlessly spans a wide range of motivations, viewpoints and morality.
   'Slow River' is very much about the quest for identity, so it's appropriate that the novel opens with the main character having hers stolen. Lore van der Oest is the daughter of a powerful family at the head of a global corporation, who is kidnapped just before her eighteenth birthday. She escapes, and finds herself naked on the streets of a city, injured and with her Personal Identity, DNA and Account insert removed. She is rescued by Spanner, a thief and con artist. The fact that her family didn't pay her ransom, coupled with the recent suicide of her sister after years of abuse at the hands of her mother, leads Lore to turn her back on her origins and try to make a new life with Spanner. The narrative is split into three threads told concurrently, reflecting Lore's fractured identity. One thread, told in the third person present tense, follows Lore throughout her early life, from five years old up until the kidnapping. The second thread, told in third person past tense,  details Lore's life with Spanner. The final thread is told in first person past, and tells of Lore's attempt to start afresh with an honest job after splitting up with Spanner. The different voices in which these threads are written tells you something about how well structured the book is; the present tense of the early life sections give them an immediate yet child-like quality, while the switch to the first person for the chronologically last thread highlights Lore's attempt to take control over her own life. Yet the fact that the narrative threads run concurrently until the end of the book show that Lore has not yet achieved full control over her own identity until she confronts her past.
   Another effect of telling all three parts of the story at the same time is that we get to see the corruption of Lore's spirit at the same time as we see how innocent she was and how hard she is working to redeem herself. As a member of the powerful van der Oest family, Lore's childhood is shaped by both the spectre of abuse and her parents' ambitions for her. During her relationship with Spanner, she is finally able to leave the influence of her family behind, but she winds up being subject to Spanner's much stronger personality. Spanner may be effortlessly charming, but she is ultimately a damaging influence on herself and anyone who comes into her range. She ekes out a living on the margins of a digital society, involved in various types of internet scams of varying unsavouriness. At first, Lore doesn't question who is being hurt by her and Spanner's actions, and is just glad after her abuse at the hands of her kidnappers to be on the other side of the equation:

"She knew that sometimes Spanner made money from other people's suffering, but she did not have to see that, and she had suffered, too. Everyone suffered. It was just a question of making sure she was using them, and not the other way around."

But ultimately she gets to the stage where she cannot live with what she and Spanner are doing, and realises that Spanner's outlook on life is flawed, and that she can only truly gain agency and heal from the wounds of her past by living a life that allows empathy for her fellow humans.
   The book draws parallels between Spanner's prostitution and the van der Oest's business practices. The van der Oest's wealth comes from their jealously-guarded monopoly over the bioremediation biotechnology necessary for cleaning the drinking water and environment. Whilst this technology is a good thing that improves people's lives, gives them safe drinking water and fixes the mistakes of the industry-driven past, it is corrupted by the van der Oest's greed. The van der Oest get their way by wining and dining politicians, and when that doesn't work they have a black ops group happy to resort to kidnap and blackmail. Both Spanner and van der Oest operate happily in their own social strata, unaware and unconcerned by those that they harm. In the third narrative thread, Lore is forced to come face to face with the victims of one of her and Spanner's pornography scams and a man born without limbs as a result of an error in one of the van der Oest's bioremediation projects, both people who have had their lives scarred by Lore's complicity. The book's anger at complicity is a theme that recurs at the end when Lore confronts her father for failing to notice that his wife was abusing his children.
   However, for all its anger, 'Slow River' ends on a hopeful note. The three narrative threads meet, Lore is able to reclaim her own identity but on her own terms, and begins a much more healthy relationship with Magyar, a colleague at the wastewater treatment plant where she has been working. After all her trauma, she is ultimately able to heal and move on with her life. It is a powerful and moving ending, all the moreso for being hard earned.

Big Sky Fanzine Issues 3 and 4 - SF Masterworks special - available now!

A special announcement. The e-fanzine Big Sky, edited by Pete Young, has just released a two-part special edition covering the complete Gollancz SF Masterworks series, a series that regular visitors to my blog will know that is very close to my heart, and featuring contributions from yours truly! The fanzine includes my reviews for Samuel R. Delany's 'Nova', Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Left Hand Of Darkness', (both issue 3) T. J. Bass' 'Half Past Human', as well as reprinting my reviews of Robert Heinlein's 'Double Star' and John Crowley's 'The Deep', which originally appeared here on this blog. In addition it features reviews and commentary on the complete series by many other talented bloggers, writers and professional authors (Ian McDonald, Jo Walton, Scott Lynch, G. K. Chesterton and TIM POWERS!). Please do visit Big Sky's index page here and give them a read, there is a wealth of fantastic writing here. I would like to thank the editor Pete Young for giving me the opportunity to be a part of this project, and for his tireless work and enthusiasm in putting the whole enormous project together. I am pleased as punch, and incredibly honoured to have my work published in this fanzine, which really is a great read - check out issues 1 and 2, which I did not contribute to but which feature a wide range of interesting and informative articles from early Japanese SF to a detailed discussion of pulp. Thanks again Pete.

J. G. Ballard - The Drowned World (1962)

"'It suits you, Kerans, you look like the man from inner space.' The rictus of a laugh twisted his face. 'But don't try to reach the Unconscious, Kerans; remember it isn't equipped to go down that far!'"

Ballard's 'The Drowned World' is revolutionary because it takes what has always been the underlying theme in British post-war apocalyptic fiction - that the apocalypse comes from within us as a reaction to outside events, rather than being forced upon us by the events themselves - and vividly foregrounds it. This theme had been present in the 'cosy catastrophes' of John Wyndham, where the down to earth, practical British protagonists calmly take stock of their new situations and immediately adapt, through to the more brutal scenario in John Christopher's 'The Death Of Grass', in which the protagonist is forced incrementally to adopt a violent new morality to protect his wife and children, culminating in the murder of his brother. 'The Drowned World' certainly derives from this fictional traditional, and its vivid descriptive passages and crisp prose consciously echo these books. But what 'The Drowned World' does differently is to explicitly connect the post-apocalyptic landscape to its protagonist's psyche, the outer world the characters walk through reflecting their inner mind state. 

Ballard's early apocalyptic fiction is thus as much an exercise in exploring different extremities of human mentality as much as coming up with imaginative ways of destroying the world. In 'The Drowned World', the rising sea levels have left the cities submerged, creating a warm, swampy world reminiscent of the early Triassic. Correspondingly, the characters experience a series of regressions, whether down the spinal lumbar to an earlier, lizard evolutionary intelligence, as reflected in the tops of buildings sticking out of the water like a back bone, or a regression into the womb, as experienced by Kerans when he goes diving in London's old planetarium. As Kerans sinks further into a fugue, the modern part of his brain becomes submerged, like the old cities beneath the swamps. In this way, Ballard uses the world the book is set in to map and amplify the internal mental state of the characters.
   Later in his fiction, by the time of 'Crash' and 'High Rise', Ballard would focus on characters whose mentality allows them to live perfectly happily in their dystopian settings. It's interesting to note that this idea was present almost from the beginning in his work. 'The Drowned World', like any post-apocalypse novel, has a frightening setting, but Kerans' character arc is to shed any last remaining vestiges of previous civilisation, to submit to the calling of the dreams that plague everyone in the lagoon, and to make his way to the uninhabitable south, happy and at home in this hostile environment. Colonel Riggs, with his desire to continue a life of meaning, order and productivity, and even the pirate Strangman, who drains the lagoon to loot the ancient city underneath, are ultimately making the incorrect response to this environment by trying to force their respective visions over the top of it rather than just accepting it.
 

Ballard's writing is spare and precise, yet tremendously evocative. The thick, oppressive heat and humidity permeates the book's atmosphere, and his description of London submerged under a tropical marsh is almost psychedelic in its intensity. This is appropriate enough considering the book's fascination with the subconscious and dreams. Kerans' journey back through evolutionary time is reflected again in his journey from consciousness down to subconsciousness. Events unfold feverishly, with the narrative getting more bizarre as the book progresses, adding a touch of haze and unreality to the proceedings, as we are left to unpick what happens inside and out of Kerans' own head. As the book continues Kerans becomes more and more under the control of his own instincts as much as anything else; Colonel Riggs and Strangman are men full of agency who get things done, both would have made fine protagonists of an earlier strain of British apocalyptic fiction, whereas Kerans is happy to sit back and let others take charge, his own agency only kicking into action with the strong, primal urge he has to return to the equator. Really his objection to Colonel Riggs' and Strangman's two very different aims is the same; they both get in the way of him making this journey.
   The business of SF writers is not to predict the future; it is to write about the future in a way that reflects something resonant within their present. Ballard was certainly aware with this. As the extent of the damage caused by climate change becomes increasingly apparent, the vistas of sunken cities in 'The Drowned World' becomes more and more eerily prescient. Yet in the book itself, Ballard could not be concerned less with the actual causes behind his apocalypse. The thing that interests him is the psychology of people and how they fare under extreme conditions and mindsets. Ballard's great theme, that technology or the apocalypse don't aggravate anything that isn't already within us, proves more salient with each passing day. It is Ballard's understanding of the human mind under strain as much as his prophetic vision that makes 'The Drowned World' so resonant all these years on. 

Jack Womack – Random Acts Of Senseless Violence (1993)

“Lookabout people. Beef me overlong and I groundbound you express. Down down down you go down and I be bottomed out set to catch. Snatch your whispers and tape what plays then hit rewind and scream you to sleep, siren you ass and then ex you proper. Lookabout all you. Spec your mirror and there I be. Crazy evilness be my design if that’s what needs wearing. All people herebound be evil-souled heartside, no ho they sweet talk. Shove do push and push do shove and everybody in this world leave lovelost hereafter. Lookabout. Chase me if you want. Funnyface me if you keen but mark this when I go chasing I go catching. Eye cautious when you step out people cause I be running streetwild come nightside and nobody safes when I ride. I bite. Can’t cut me now. Can’t fuck me now. Can’t hurt me now. No more. No more.”

‘Random Acts Of Senseless Violence’ is the most brutal, the most disturbingly prescient and the downright best work of dystopian fiction I’ve read in a while. It’s a great piece of writing, imbued with enjoyable future slang. It’s also a reminder of what a powerful tool SF can be to engage with issues in the real world. Although it was written in the 90s and is clearly – vividly – set in a pre-gentrification New York, its setting of a world where capitalism in hyperdrive has lead to economic and social collapse is distressingly familiar.    

   Our viewpoint into this world is Lola Hart, a smart and level-headed 12 year old girl in a lower middle class family who receives a diary for her birthday. Due to an increased difficulty in finding jobs in their own field and escalating debt, her family is forced to move from their nice middle class house to a poorer area. What follows is a process of education and transformation, as Lola discovers just how sheltered her life has been up until this point, and that she needs to adapt to her new surroundings in order to survive. News events previously confined to the TV screen, such as mass riots, feral gangs roaming the neighbourhood or the army occupying the streets, has become an unavoidable part of her daily life. Five presidents are assassinated in one year, the economic recession becomes so bad the government decides to print new denominations of money, and Lola’s parents are hopeless at saving money and supporting their children. While her father works himself to an early grave, her mother sedates herself and her sister withdraws, Lola adapts and survives.

   Womack uses the framing device of Lola’s diary very well. It’s a great way to really get inside the protagonist’s head, and you can mark her progress as her voice mutates from standard English bursting with enthusiasm and grammatical errors as you might expect from a child, to the hard future slang she learns off the street with her new friends. The future slang is so good I almost wish the whole book was written like this, in the manner of A Clockwork Orange or Riddley Walker, but the cumulative effect of experiencing the change is worth Womack opening the book normally. Too the point, choppy and violent, with a lot of plausible-deniability-providing passives for verbs, the slang actually tells you a fair bit about the people who use it, and is just a whole lot of fun. However the emotional range Womack is able to convey, with and without the slang, is what is truly impressive. By the book’s devastating ending, Lola sounds heartbreakingly world-weary for anyone, let alone a child of 12.

   ‘Random Acts Of Senseless Violence’ is also noticeable for its natural and positive portrayal of the lesbian relationship between Lola and her friend Izzy, and Izzy’s relationship with Jude. Izzy and Jude are African American girls around Lola’s age whose gang she falls in with when her family moves. Their friendship and relationship is never portrayed as anything other than loving and supportive, and they are engaging and well-rounded characters in their own right. Womack also deftly subverts any snobbery, having them reveal just how smart and ambitious they are in a game of make believe that echoes one played with Lola’s public school friends at the beginning of the novel. Lola’s old friends come off as petty, pampered and narrow-minded by comparison.

   It is impossible to talk about this book without mentioning Womack’s Manhattan. The city is evoked as vividly and as graphically as Delany’s Bellona, yet any mythic allure is utterly seeped in griminess and seediness. I cannot think of any other novel, let alone SF novel, that so intentionally drags the reader down the roughest of back alleys to expose the heart of corruption. This is beautifully reflected in the world of politics, the conniving politicians, and the implied arranged assassinations. The sleaze of late Rome is conjured up by how the succession of forgettable presidents, king for a day, step up to power and profess to be sorry about the death of their predecessor and exert ever more insane and draconian laws, like so many rival gangsters in The Pit.

   Lola needs to be adaptable in order to survive the book. Over the course of the narrative Womack really puts her through the shredder. Her father dies, cutting off the family’s main source of income to boot, her mother becomes increasingly ill, her sister is put into the care of her horrid, snobby aunt Chrissie and Lola’s increasingly erratic behaviour drives Izzy away from her and back into Jude’s arms. As she says, “The world brutalizes however you live it whatever you do.” Her adaptability allows her to continue to survive despite all this, but at the cost of her previous identity. Ultimately there has to be a line somewhere. Jude and Izzy understand this because they grew up with the street, Lola is new to it so she has a harder time appreciating it. Hence how the ‘random senselessness’ comes into it; Jude and Izzy are frequently violent, but always for a reason. They steal but they dupe rather than bludgeon the victim, they take revenge for transgressions against them but it has to be personal and the other person has to understand why it is you are doing this to them. To be more than the dreaded DCons, the bogey men of this world, you have to be able to rationalise your actions. In times of chaos that line is even more important, and Lola crosses it when she brutally murders her dad’s old boss. Womack plays a nice sleight of hand here, because the boss really is an odious little shit and you are gunning for Lola to take her revenge, but when her friends call her out for it you realise basically they’re right. Lola has broken the code of the street, so she must become an outcast. The book ends where it does because she recognises this and actively casts off her diary, the last vestige of her old personality. 

John Crowley – The Deep (1975)

“Crowned men with red tears running from their eyes held hands as children’s cutouts do, but each twisted in a different attitude, of joy or pain he couldn’t tell, for of course they all smiled with teeth. Behind and around them, gripping them like lovers, were black figures, obscure, demons or ghosts. Each crown had burning within it a fire, and the grinning black things tore tongue and organs from this king and with them fed the fire burning in the crown of that one, tore that one’s body to feed the fire burning in this one’s crown, and so on around, demon and king, like a tortured circle dance.”

In ‘The Deep’, as much as in ‘Engine Summer’, John Crowley displays both his gift with beautiful prose as well as his empathy with everyday suffering. Which is not bad at all for a first novel. Where its political manipulations between multiple morally ambiguous sides anticipates George R R Martin’s ‘A Song Of Ice And Fire’, while Martin delights in dreaming up new and inventive mental and physical punishment to destroy his characters’ lives, Crowley’s characters meet with simple, unglamourous deaths, frequently lost offscreen in the indiscriminate chaos of battle. All that’s left is the sadness of pointlessly wasted human life.

   I suspect you could argue long and pointlessly as to whether ‘The Deep’ is SF or Fantasy. It is set on a flat circular world that is supported on a giant pillar that rises out of the eponymous Deep, a void of nothingness that surrounds the world. The sun and numerous moons orbit around it, and an ancient beast known as Leviathan sleeps underneath the world, coiled around the pillar. So you have a premise not dissimilar to a severely warped Discworld or World Of Tiers, and indeed you might wonder what effect living on such a different world to ours would have on the people living on it. Well, the answer is perhaps less than you would think, seeing as the whole world is caught up in a viscous struggle for power that has been going on for time out of mind. You have your fairly standardish Fantasy set up, where the Folk, your average common people, are looked after – read exploited – by the Protectors, the landed gentry. The Protectors are divided into two factions, the Reds and the Blacks, who have been fighting each other for many generations. The knowledge in the world is controlled by the Grays, a brotherhood of priests and scholars, and just to confuse matters there is a group of freedom fighters called the Just, who see it as their task to assassinate everyone in the Protectors’ class to gain freedom for the Folk. Not that the vast majority of the Folk support their endeavours in any way. The neutral Endwives camp out near battles and clean up the mess, saving who they can.

   Much of ‘The Deep’ deals with the futility of war, the pointless and never ending cycle of revenge, betrayal and violence. The two sides are even named after chess pieces, suggesting how they are all reduced to pawns in someone else’s strategy, pieces on the board. Or perhaps checkers is the more apt metaphor, with everyone’s brilliant strategies shown to be so much hot wind. Much like a game, whoever is in the position of power seems to have absolutely no significance for anyone outside of the people playing. The most sympathetic Protector is the vaguely Ned Stark-ish Redhand, whose honour and general decency get him absolutely nowhere fast in this particular game. At least by the end of the book, there is a sense that everyone is sick and tired of war, and there is at least some kind of hope for a way out of the cycle of destruction.

Guess how many of these people are alive by the end of the book

  
 Into this confusion a Visitor is sent from beyond, a nameless being with silver skin and superhuman skin with a vitally important purpose to bring to the people, if only he could remember what it was. Due to his amnesia he starts the book as a wide-eyed blank slate, and is thrown right in the middle of the power struggle between the Reds and the Blacks, following a Red takeover from the Black king. Slowly we see him become wise in the ways of selfishness and deception as he learns more about the world he’s found himself in. The Visitor’s corruption is deftly handled. In his initial state, friendly, unthreatening and full of a hunger for knowledge, everyone he encounters finds him unsettling for these character traits as much as his bizarre appearance. Up until the moment where he takes action for himself, he is guarding the life of his friend.

   But it’s not just his surroundings influencing his behaviour; the call from his true purpose is too strong to ignore. And his change in behaviour is linked to what that purpose is. The Visitor is a messianic figure, sent from the heavens to redeem this poor war-torn realm. And to a certain extent that’s true. One of the characters spends a large chunk of the book trying to figure out an ancient riddle: if everyone has two parents and so four grandparents and so on all the way back up the line, how come the small world is not overcrowded? Where do they go? Well, of course, they die. The Visitor has been sent to facilitate this by being a bloodthirsty warrior, leading the world even further into mayhem, death and destruction in order to keep the population down.

   This is a brutal and shocking twist, and it gets right to the heart of what the book is about. Just because it is possible to imagine a higher power, should it exist there is no guarantee it would be the kind of higher power we’d like, or that its idea of our best interest would match ours. The world of ‘The Deep’ is ostensibly one where bad things happen on a regular basis, but it’s not in spite of God’s plan, but because this is God’s plan. When the Visitor, having travelled to the very edge of the world, summons Leviathan and speaks to it, he finds that the god-like being – it is never named explicitly – originally took mankind from another planet to this artificial world because people begged for a return to simpler times, without fully understanding what that wish meant. Eternal life as the perpetual motion of eternal struggle and strife. In ‘The Deep’, the covenant God made with humanity is simply a really bad bargain on humanity’s side. 

Joe Haldeman – The Forever War (1974)

“Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there... the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.”

‘The Forever War’ is at heart a war novel. Joe Haldeman had served in Vietnam and his experiences inform the book. The concept is pure hard SF worthy of Robert Heinlein or Larry Niven. Soldiers are conscripted to fight in an interstellar war. Because of relativity a few years passing for the soldiers means many decades passing back on earth, they return home to a world hopelessly alien to them that has forgotten all about them. The soldiers finding themselves lost and out of touch in a world that has drastically moved on without them is a powerful metaphor for the reception the soldiers returning home from Vietnam received in reality. The main weapon that the soldiers use to fight the hive-mind aliens is even powered armour, same as in Heinlein’s ‘Starship Troopers’. But the two books could not be further apart. ‘The Forever War’ is about the horror and futility of war, and the senseless waste of lives lost and displaced that follow.

   The protagonist is William Mandella, one of a hundred strong and healthy young people with IQs above 150 called up to fight against a terrifying unknown alien threat that has been destroying Earth spaceships. From the beginning, Mandella is cynical about the army. He studied physics and was looking to go into teaching and has no desire to be in the army or fight in a war. Unlike the protagonist of ‘Starship Troopers’, who learns that the army is always right, Mandella’s experience is one of horror, pain and grief. There is an argument that any anti-war story has the problem that it is inherently glamourising war by turning it into entertainment, no matter what the ultimate message. ‘The Forever War’ uses this to its advantage by initially appearing to be a fun, Heinlein-esque space adventure yarn, in much the same way that William Goldings’ ‘Lord Of The Flies’ initially appears to be a Ballentyne-esque boys’ adventure before things start to go wrong. Mandella, with his high IQ, his easygoing competence and his laidback, wry tone, could easily be a Heinlein protagonist.

   The recruits start off their training on the moon, and then on the planet Charon, more than twice the distance from the sun as Pluto, to prepare them for the conditions of war in space. It doesn’t take long for things to start going wrong in these harsh conditions. The soldiers are warned that the slightest mistake in space can lead to their deaths, and many of them die messy, unglamourous deaths in training. Much of the novel’s power comes from the way Haldeman describes these deaths. The tone is achingly sad but never over the top, calm and without embellishment as Mandella describes truly horrific death. It effectively conveys the feeling of loss over this senseless waste of human life.

   Soon enough Mandella and the others are shipped off to the first confrontation with the Taurans, engaging in a series of bloody battles that most of them don’t survive. Mandella doesn’t relish killing other sentient beings, and survives more through luck rather than battle prowess, and the one battle that he does actually lead goes pretty poorly. Haldeman does a really good job of conveying the idea that war is not full of glorious victories and excitement, but long stretches of routine interrupted by moments of terror and violence. It’s another reason why ‘The Forever War’ is so crucial; it’s just about the only military SF book that’s not violently militaristic. The book is also sensibly cynical about both the military and the government. The army is not above implanting subconscious conditioning in the soldiers’ heads to make them better killers, without telling them. At the end it turns out that the Taurans had never known war until encountering humanity, and that the war had been started and prolonged by humans because the Earth economy needed a war to fuel it.

   On top of all this, ‘The Forever War’ is a deeply affecting love story. Mandella’s relationship with Marygay Potter, another soldier in his original company and the only one to survive as long as he does, is perfectly natural and believable. Throughout the novel they become more and more important to each other as they end up being their only remaining connection to the world they grew up in. I will admit to getting a bit emotional at the bits where he discovers her grievously injured in the acceleration shell, when they are separated again the final time they are ordered back into duty, and again at the end when he discovers that she has been waiting for him to return all this time.

   The message of ‘The Forever War’ about the human cost of war is always relevant, and it’s all the more important in a genre that frequently celebrates and glorifies violence. At a time when an adaptation of ‘Ender’s Game’ by Orson Scott Card is hitting the theatres, (a book that is well written but problematic before you even get to Card’s deeply unpleasant personal opinions), it’s clear that militaristic tendencies are still alive and well in the genre, and Haldeman’s deconstruction of those ideas remain just as powerful and moving as it must have been when it was first published.

Robert A. Heinlein - Double Star (1956)

"Let us protect our own - but let us not be seduced by fear and hatred into foolish acts. The stars will never be won by little minds; we must be big as space itself."

It's not difficult to argue that Robert A. Heinlein was the greatest out of SF's Big Three. Out of him, Asimov and Clarke, only one of them was consistently able to write character and dialogue. He pioneered many of the subgenres and basic ideas of SF, and wrote great stories in the ones he didn't himself help to develop. So why have I read far more Clarke and Asimov than Heinlein? Michael Moorcock nails much of what makes me uncomfortable with the man's work far more eloquently than I ever could here. To illustrate from my experience, last year I read Heinlein's 'Have Spacesuit - Will Travel', one of his classic juveniles. It's a tremendously fun, fast-paced space adventure filled with well-drawn characters, inventive aliens and sound physics. So why didn't I like it? At the end, the Mother-Thing's race kill an entire planet-ful of aliens because they deem them dangerous and aggressive. They then put mankind on trial and decide that humans aren't quite dangerous and aggressive enough to warrant genociding them out of existence. Basically, I find this morally objectionable as well as wildly inconsistent. No one has the right to mete out judgement to other species, or rain down destruction on a less powerful people utterly unable to defend themselves against  you as punishment for aggression. I found the Mother-Thing's people to be smug and hypocritical, yet the narrative and the narrator side with them, and if you have a problem with that, or with the way that the alien aggressors' ugliness is treated as part and parcel of their villainy and why they deserve to be destroyed, Heinlein couldn't care less. Heinlein's strong, uncompromising attitude colours much of his more iconic work - like, say, Starship Troopers, even more so. This is, of course, Heinlein's prerogative and Heinlein's opinion, and I in no way deny his right to it, but it makes much of his work difficult for me to enjoy uncritically.
   So imagine my surprise on finding out that 'Double Star' finds Heinlein defending democracy and equality. (Mea cuplua - it's worth remembering that people you disagree with are as capable of complexity as anyone else). The premise of the novel - a sleazy out-of-work actor his hired to impersonate a politician - could be horrifically cynical, but it actually turns out to be the opposite. True, you have to find a super good reason to justify duping the public, but the book isn't really about that. It's about Lorenzo Smythe's transformation from a xenophobic, selfish and petty man into the genuinely honest, altruistic and thoroughly moral politician Bonforte.
   Many of Heinlein's characters are born special. Kip from 'Have Spacesuit - Will Travel' has his fair share of adversity to overcome in the shape of his poor background and unsympathetic surrounding community, but there's no question about his intelligence and courage, even before he discovers he's a kid genius and saves the world. Lorenzo Smythe is a more engaging protagonist because he has to overcome personal issues as well as situational difficulties. As he studies Bonforte through recordings of his life, speeches and beliefs, he comes to understand where the man's moral centre and convictions come from, and to cast of the shackles of his own prejudices. It is Lorenzo, not the real Bonforte, who makes the speech quoted at the top of the page. Like Bonforte, he comes to realise that in order to reach the stars, humanity is going to have to overcome its petty prejudices, and that it is imperative that humanity not turn the stars into yet another empire run on exploitation and human privilege.
   Heinlein's gift with characterisation and dialogue is in full swing here. The novel is told in first person from Lorenzo's point of view, and his crude, sarcastic and cynical voice is frequently hilarious and ultimately a very canny instrument with which to tell this particular story. His transformation is handled deftly and subtlety as his character changes and he adopts more and more of Bonforte's dignified tone. 'Double Star' is as breezy, fun and engaging as 'Have Spacesuit - Will Travel', but not only do I find its outlook more palatable, it is also an excellent character study.

Karen Joy Fowler - Sarah Canary (1991)

"It might even be true. It was not for him to know. A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it. What we say occupies a very thin surface, like the skin over a body of water. Beneath this, through the water itself, is what we see, sometimes clearly if the water is calm, sometimes vaguely if the water is troubled, and we imagine this vision to be the truth, clear or vague. But beneath this is yet another level. This is the level of what is and this level has nothing to do with what we say or what we see."

'Sarah Canary' is one of SF's most powerful explorations of the Other. Fittingly for a book about First Contact, it deals with alienation. But Sarah Canary doesn't act as a filter to give us a fresh perspective on humanity as much as a focal point that draws in the novel's motley crew of disenfranchised. Sarah Canary isn't really the protagonist; she doesn't actually do much, we never find out anything about her motivations or thoughts, and Fowler deliberately leaves her true nature ambiguous. She's a walking Outside Context Problem, and how the various characters perceive and react to her reveals the prejudices, concerns and fears of the 1870s America she mysteriously appears in. 
   The masterstroke of 'Sarah Canary' is not just in how it explores the lot of the disenfranchised, but also how it highlights the inhumanity of the society that allows this. The book takes us on a tour through Chinese labour camps, mental asylums, Indian shanty towns and carnival shows, emphasising that, unless you were a particular subset of straight white male, this was a time and place that granted you precious little rights. We meet Chin Ah Kin, who first discovers Sarah Canary, a Chinese immigrant who was more or less kidnapped and brought to the States to work on the railways. They are joined by B.J., an escapee from the asylum, which is run on a strict budget with little care for the patients' well-being and no meaningful way of treating them, and Adelaide Dixon, a suffragette who is routinely persecuted for daring to suggest that women should enjoy sex. All three of them perceive Sarah Canary differently, but all three of them try to help and protect her. Along the way they encounter a series of unpleasant white men who plan to exploit her one way or another.
   All of this makes the book sound much more didactic than it actually is. 'Sarah Canary' is far more well rounded and complicated than that. Fowler deftly reveals the extent to which prejudice can divide people. Initially, Chin, B.J. and Miss Dixon view each other with the same hostility and suspicion that society faces the with, but through their shared experiences with Sarah Canary they gain both a mutual respect for one another as people and a profound understanding of each other's circumstances. Additionally  none of the unpleasant white men are straw men. Fowler makes them well developed enough as characters that we are able to see where they are coming from, even if we don't sympathise. Frequently they too are in their own ways victims of a cruel and exclusionary society - for example Harold, perhaps the closest the book has to a villain, is revealed to have been driven to the brink of sanity following his experiences in a prisoner of war camp following the end of the Civil War. 
   One of the main themes of the book is perception - how our perception shapes the way we experience the world, and whether or not this prevents us from ever really seeing the truth. The quote above reminds me of Philip K. Dick's famous maxim, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". Here we have almost the opposite problem - when you can't separate out how your own beliefs colour something, how can you ever know what reality truly is? This links back to the theme of prejudice, and how the characters are in reality very different from how they are perceived to be. Chin has to deal with the possibility that he may be lynched wherever he goes, yet he is perceived as being dangerous. Miss Dixon is called a slut and a whore because of her campaigns for women's rights, yet she has barely had any experiences with men and is at heart a romantic. Everyone thinks B.J. is crazy, yet in the chapter where we get to experience his viewpoint we find out he is perfectly lucid, if oblique. This all makes it thoroughly appropriate that Sarah Canary herself is only perceived by others, so the truth as to who or what she actually is is never revealed.
   Sarah Canary's true nature is only hinted at. Although it's possible to read the book as straight historical fantasy with no SF elements whatsoever, the juxtaposition of the alien and alienation is too resonant to ignore. Throughout the book she is compared or described in supernatural terms. She is also compared to a butterfly, specifically with regards to her mysterious transformation at the end, and from Chin's first encounter with her he associates her with the image of a one-winged bird. The combined vision we get from all these images perhaps gives us an idea of what her true form might be. 

  
   

Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop (1958)

"Adversity makes thinkers of us all. Only now, when the long journey means no more than a retreat into darkness, do I begin to question the sanity behind the whole conception of inter-stellar travel. How many hapless men and women must have questioned it on the way out to Procyon, imprisoned in this eternal walls! For the sake of that grandiose idea, their lives guttered uselessly, as many more must do before our descendants step on Earth again. Earth! I pray that there men's hearts have changed, grown less like the hard metals they have loved and served for so long. Nothing but the full flowering of a technological age, such as the Twenty-first Century knew, could have launched this miraculous ship; yet the miracle is sterile, cruel. Only a technological age could condemn unborn generations to exist in it, as if man were mere protoplasm, without emotion or aspiration.
   "At the beginning of the technological age - a fitting token to my mind - stands the memory of Auschwitz-Berkenau; what can we do but hope that this more protracted agony stands at its end: its end for ever, on Earth, and no the new world of Procyon V."

The spaceship is central to the iconography of SF. Spaceships are fast and powerful, a symbol of freedom and exploration, of humanity's ingenuity, the means by which they will take their rightful place among the stars. Who can deny the immediate sense of wonder generated by those images, or that Pavlovian response generated by the name or shape of the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon? To many, spaceships are what makes a story SF. Therefore, it takes an author of some audacity to so brutally deconstruct the idea of the spaceship in their first full length SF novel as Brian Aldiss does in 'Non-Stop'.
   In its short history, the reality of space travel has always been very different from how it is portrayed in fiction. As much as SF writers love to go on about what a harsh, unforgiving medium space is, space travel is overwhelmingly portrayed as fun. As much as Picard and co. run into danger every week, they get to do so in luxury in their all-mod-cons giant floating conference hotel. While this is instantly appealing, and undoubtedly if humanity continues with this space travel malarkey I'm sure things will eventually improve, the reality of space travel is simply much less glamourous and much more dangerous. The other key issue SF frequently takes for granted is, of course, the massive distances in space and the huge amount of time it takes to traverse them, if we're playing by the rules of Einsteinian physics. Poul Anderson's 'Tau Zero' explores one realistic method of travelling the vast distances of space (albeit not very dramatically satisfyingly, in my humble opinion), but in 'Non-Stop' Aldiss explores another practical solution to this problem - the generation ship. A generation ship solves the problem that journeys between the stars would take several human lifespans by allowing it to do just that - the descendants of the original crew will eventually arrive at the ship's destination.
   The characters in 'Non-Stop' don't realise they are on a spaceship. It's one of several theories circulating to explain the world they are living in, but for Roy Complain, average hunter for the Greene tribe, he is too busy struggling to survive day to day, hunting for the tribe and fighting off threats, from the mysterious Giants and Outsiders to frighteningly intelligent rats. However that all changes when the power-hungry priest Marapper finds a plan of the ship, and leads Complain and a bunch of misfits in a desperate attempt to find the control room and seize control of the ship for themselves.
    'Non-Stop' is so effective in part because of how wisely Aldiss handles the reveals. It doesn't take us long to figure out we're on a spaceship; indeed, writing this Aldiss must have known this would have been given away fairly immediately by the blurb and the cover art anyway. However it quickly becomes apparent something more complex is going on; this is revealed to our point-of-view characters piece by piece, as nearly everyone they encounter has only parts of the information, so we only get the full story at the end. This results in a darkly humourous game of 'Fortunately, Unfortunately', as each time our characters learn more about their situation, this information is almost immediately subverted. Aldiss' plotting is so tight, and there is sufficient foreshadowing, that each reveal is a surprise yet it never feels like a cheat.
   Aldiss also displays an almost Ballardian zest at displaying the collapse of society under pressure. The ship suffered a disaster, and the images of people living in its decaying quarters amongst machines they no longer understand the function of whilst plants from hydroponics have overrun the decks is like something out of 'High Rise' or 'The Drowned World'. This is also echoed in the verve with which he examines the downfall of various petty authority figures as their conceptions of reality are shattered and the situation spirals even further out of control.
   I felt I had to include the quote above in full, from the original captain's diary found by the characters at a crucial moment, to illustrate how far Aldiss goes in his trashing of the generation ship. To Aldiss, the major problem with this form of transport is not that so much can go wrong; although everything does and with aplomb. It's that it is essentially a form of institutionalised cruelty to resign the fate of entire unborn generations to something they didn't choose, just so they can be a stepping stone for a generation to come. At the end of the book, Complain finds out that the ship had reached Earth generations ago, but the Earth governments had decided that the ship dwellers were a potential bio-hazard and so had quarantined them in orbit indefinitely, whilst keeping them all in the dark. When one of the Earth men explains that they were doing it for the ship dweller's own good, Complain rightly calls him out on being patronising and self-serving.
   'Non-Stop' is, like much SF, a coming of age story at heart. Roy Complain evolves from living purely in the moment to gradually gaining more and more agency over his own situation. The story works beautifully as a metaphor for growing up. Complain starts of the story trusting authority figures such as Marapper, but by the end of the book he has seen so many people crumble because their clear perceptions of the world around them have been proved wrong. He learns that his and everyone else's assumptions of the world around them is just that - their own assumptions, worthy of questioning to uncover the truth.
 
 

Ward Moore - Bring The Jubilee (1953)

"Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1933. Neither the dates nor the tenses are error - let me explain:"

   Listen: Hodgins McCormick Backmaker has come unstuck in time. Well it's clear from that incredible opening sentence that time-travelling shenanigans must be involved, but it quickly becomes apparent that it's far from the whole story.
   'Bring The Jubilee' is an iconic and early example of Alternate History, a variant of SF in which instead of imagining the future the author imagines what would have happened if a crucial moment in the history of our world played out differently. Two of the most popular Jonbar points in Western SF, where the alternate world diverges from our own, are the American Civil War and World War II. Philip K Dick's 'The Man In The High Castle' is the go-to example of the latter, in which he vividly imagines a world where the Nazis won; 'Bring The Jubilee' is the most celebrated case of the former, with the South emerging victorious.
   In many ways, 'Bring The Jubilee' is a much purer example of the genre at its finest, and a stronger case for  what alternate history can bring to the table that perhaps straightforward SF can't. Excellent as it is, 'The Man In The High Castle' is very Dickian, with its multiple shifting realities and the final revelation that the alternate world within the book in which the Allies won is not the same as our world, and in fact neither may be 'real'. 'Bring The Jubilee' is much more focused on the historical details of its alternate world, with historical and cultural differences thought out in great detail. It's also a lot more character-based than the traditionally plot-based PKD.
   In a recent interview, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy, was asked about the differences between straightforward SF and alternative history, and had this to say:

"In a way, there's not much that alternate history can do. I think it's a weaker form than science fiction proper. In science fiction proper, you're saying, 'This is going to happen to all of us. It's not my dream, it's not surrealism, it's prophecy, this is coming for us,' and you read science fiction and go, 'Wow, this is going to happen for me or my children,' or whatever. Alternative history is saying that, well, this didn't happen, but if it had, it would have been a really interesting cool thing. That's a much weaker statement than, 'This is coming.' So, all you can do, I think, is make a new story space, which is nice, and you can also suggest that history is changeable." Kim Stanley Robinson, interviewed by io9

   This is certainly a valid stance, however, I think it also hits quite nicely at what can make alternate history done well so appealing. Works like 'Pavane' by Keith Roberts (Queen Elizabeth is assassinated on the eve of the Spanish armada) or Robinson's own 'The Years Of Rice And Salt' (the Black Death kills 99% of Europe's population) have a very individual texture and atmosphere, drawn from a setting at once instantly recognizable yet subtly alien. 'Bring The Jubilee' easily sits in such exalted company. The world-building here is truly exquisite; in its slim 240-odd pages, Moore packs a surprising amount of detail about the history and culture of this alternate timeline. Impressively, much of this is done by naturalistic dialogue and the attitudes and actions of the various characters.
   Alternate histories also allow us to reflect how fragile the strands of history are; we got where we are today by a combination of luck and happenstance, rather than by forethought, careful planning and great men choosing the correct choices at crucial moments.
 

Adapted from the extensive 'Bring The Jubilee' Wikipedia entry

   This is a theme that crops up a lot in 'Bring The Jubilee'. Our protagonist Hodge is constantly pulled between the two opposing concepts of fate and freewill. An inhabitant of the impoverished North, his great passion is history, and he wants nothing more than to be able to study it. However at every turn he is confronted with difficult moral quandaries. This is highlighted early on by the opposing views of his two mentors, one a cynic representing resigned fate, the other an idealist representing freewill. Despite the nagging of his conscience, Hodge repeatedly avoids doing what he believes is right by not taking any action. But, as a great Canadian progressive rock trio once said, 'If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.'
    When he finally becomes a historian, he gets the opportunity to travel back in time to witness the decisive Battle of Gettysburg first hand and jumps at the chance. Of course our protagonist would never be so bold as to intentionally alter the chain of events, but it turns out his mere presence there is enough to change history so that the Confederate forces don't occupy a crucial point in the battle, allowing the Union to win. Hodge winds up stranded in the past, as his actions have erased his timeline in which the time machine was built, and history unfolds as we know it.
   What I like about all this is how it emphasises the randomness of history, the dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time. 'Bring The Jubilee' would have been a much less effective book if it had been about an actively heroic figure going back in time to set right what once went wrong. Hodge realises how badly his world turned out - companies are allowed to hold people in what amounts to virtual slavery, minorities are exploited and have little to no rights - but the key facet of his character is his lack of moral fibre in the face of conflict. He never intended to change anything, and does his best to avoid it happening, but it happens anyway. I also like how this leaves completely unresolved the conflict between fate and free will. How can Hodge have free will, when the pivotal action that he takes was done entirely by mistake and against  his will? How can there be such a thing as fate when our timeline only exists because Hodge's timeline existed beforehand and he went back in time and made a mistake?
   And while it's clear Moore feels our world turned out better than the world in 'Bring The Jubilee', he refreshingly keeps a clear head about the bad things that have happened in our reality. Hodge is writing his account before the turn of the century, and is not filled with hope and optimism for the future. We learn that World War I in the original timeline, fought from 1914 to 1916, was less bad than in our reality, and Hodge faces the new century with trepidation, fearing that human nature has not changed and that the emerging conflict will be unavoidable. And of course, we all know how that turned out, because this is the REAL timeline. Isn't it?