Thomas Olde Heuvelt - HEX (2016)

My review of 'HEX' by Thomas Olde Heuvelt is up at Fantasy Faction. Olde Heuvelt is a bestselling author in the Netherlands, but this is his international debut. It's a chilling and unsettling Horror story about how quickly fear can spread through a community of normal, down to earth people and cause them to do all manner of terrible things. It's also an exploration of the tropes and ideas around witches, from history through to Horror through to the fairy-tale, as well as a modern Horror story that makes good use of modern technology and how it shapes our lives. Read more at the link.

Tor Novellas: Kai Ashante Wilson - The Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps (2015)

I am thrilled to announce a new series of articles I shall be running at Fantasy Faction, in which I review the Tor novellas line. Tor have launched a line of novellas, aiming to promote this shorter medium, and focusing on bringing new authors from diverse backgrounds to attention as much as more established names. I really like this series because the shorter novella form frequently allows writers to experiment and take risks that they might not be so comfortable taking with longer works, resulting in a number of really interesting and exciting reads. First up is 'The Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps' by Kai Ashante Wilson, a writer whose short fiction I have admired for some time. Here he experiments with the forms and assumptions of the Sword and Sorcery genre to create a beautifully written tale of bisexual and gay love with a diverse cast. Read more at the link.

Ken Liu - The Paper Menagerie And Other Stories (2016)

Apologies for the radio silence, I have been writing but a combination of poor internet and real life have prevented me from updating the blog as regularly as I should. In the meantime, my review of Ken Liu's short story collection 'The Paper Menagerie And Other Stories' has gone up at Fantasy Faction. I have been a fan of Liu's short fiction for a while, and was very impressed by his novel-length debut, 'The Grace Of Kings'. The stories collected in 'The Paper Menagerie' cover a staggering stylistic and emotional range, and confirm Liu as one of the masters of the form. Read more through at the link.

Peter Tieryas - United States Of Japan (2016)

"Every great empire has a mountain of corpses underneath it as a foundation. The Romans, the Chinese - even the Americans wiped out millions of Indians and enslaved the African natives. No one remembers those who were sacrificed. Its like our earthquakes that wipe away the glories of the past. We've used the atomic torpedo on the Americans three times and they were all launched on the same day. There's still fierce debate about whether it was even necessary. The Americans were ready to surrender."

'United States Of Japan' is an alternate history that manages to bring something fresh to the well-mined 'Axis wins World War II and rules the USA' seam whilst asking probing and pertinent questions about Imperialism, censorship and torture. Directly in dialogue with 'The Man In The High Castle', Philip K. Dick's iconic novel with a similar premise, where Dick imagines a relatively benign Japanese occupied West Coast in comparison to the Nazi occupied East, author Peter Tieryas is more keenly aware of the downsides of the Hirohito Japanese Empire, from its rigid social hierarchy to its war crimes, as well as the horrors suffered by Japanese Americans during the war. He also has a keener understanding than Dick of Japanese pop culture. The end result is a book that is both an exciting, pulpy adventure full of action, violence and giant mecha fights and a thoughtful and disturbing dissection of the tactics by which world powers are forged and maintained.
   Captain Beniko Ishimura is a video game censor. Infamous for turning in his parents as traitors when he was still a child, now he is a layabout and womaniser, overlooked for promotion by his superiors because of his attitude. His life changes when Agent Akiko Tsukino of the Tokubetsu Koto Keisatsu, the Japanese secret police, enlists his help in tracking down General Mutsuraga, whom Beniko served under in San Diego. Mutsuraga is suspected of being behind 'United States Of America', the subversive but highly popular new video game that imagines a world in which the Americans won the war, which the George Washingtons, a desperate band of American rebels, are using as their latest propaganda tactic. Their journey to the heart of San Diego is an exploration of the seedy underbelly of the Empire, the limits of Akiko's conviction in her beliefs, and the ghosts of Beniko's past.
   'United States Of Japan' opens with the Japanese armed forces in America liberating the Japanese Americans from the internment camps. The spirit of victory and jubilation among the prisoners is soon shattered by the soldiers unceremoniously killing a woman for insulting the Emperor. This is Tieryas' approach in microcosm; in-depth knowledge of the horrors of World War II are used to show the sinister flipside to life in the United States of Japan. Each of these things in turn tells us something about our reality. The world in 'United States Of Japan', by the lat 80's, has advances in biotechnology far outstripping our own, with complex human-machine interfaces, cures for most cancers, and work being done on limb regeneration. But then Tieryas makes it clear where all these medical advances have come from by invoking Unit 731, the Japanese army's biological and chemical warfare department that carried out lethal human experimentation, which in this alternate universe is still going strong. The impressive life-saving medical advances have been built on human suffering and death. This in turn reminds the reader that modern research on hypothermia and phosphene gas has referenced the Nazi deathcamp experiments, and that the members of Unit 731 were never brought to trial in return for giving the Americans access to their research on bio-weapons. Similarly, the USJ is in possession of technology far more advanced than our own, with mobile personal computers and a rudimentary form of internet already in widespread use, not to mention the giant mechas. But again this technological advancement has been achieved and driven through years of war providing the funding and inclination, in much the same way that the American space programme was built on the rocket science of the Nazis. Thus the book, through the remove of its alternate history conceit, reminds us how many of our modern day creature comforts are tainted by the horrific legacy of the genocides of World War II.
   However 'United States Of Japan' isn't only concerned with the legacy of the past. Indeed any worthwhile alternate history doesn't only provide an engaging answer to the question, "What if?", it should also use that different perspective to shed new light on aspects of our own world. The book is also very much about the biggest anxieties facing the United States of America today: surveillance, torture, terrorism, and racism as a fallout of colonialism. The USJ is a surveillance state worthy of Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. Beniko's turning in of his parents even echoes a plot point from that book. The people live in fear of the secret police, and live in a world of censorship where history is rewritten. Echoing Winston's job rewriting old newspapers, Beniko works as a censor regulating video games. This demonstrates how Tieryas updates Orwell's paranoia for the digital age; part of Beniko's job as a games censor is monitoring people's choice of games and their choices within the game to root out subversive thought. Rather than betray themselves by seditious writing, the modern day potential revolutionary is more likely to be given away by their browser history. This ties into our current fears that the government could be tracking us via our internet profiles and IP addresses. Indeed, there is thematic significance in the George Washingtons spreading their revolutionary message via video game, the internet acting both as a tool for control but also as a space where subversive messages can be spread and insurrection can happen. It's also a powerful argument for video games being an artform in their own right, one where conversations about politics and how to build a better world can happen.
   One of the major themes of the book is the dehumanising nature of torture. Tieryas is correct in portraying torture not as a useful tool for garnering intelligence information, which it isn't, but as a tool used by brutal regimes for imposing fear, humiliation and control over victims. Part of Akiko's job in the Tokko is administering torture to suspects; the goal is rarely to get information but usually to frighten or punish those that the Tokko has already deemed guilty. Over the course of the book she finds herself subjected to her own methods when she is first captured by the George Washingtons and later framed by her own superiors. Despite the presence of SFnal forms of torture, like genetically engineered viruses designed to kill prisoners in the maximum amount of pain, many of the tortures portrayed in the book are more grounded, from 'excrement torture' to flesh eating ants to the interrogation techniques used by the agents. Tieryas excels in portraying torture deglamourised, in all its horror. It is the domain of the secret police not because of its value as an information gathering tool, but because it is part of the general architecture of fear and paranoia that powers a police state. As Akiko suffers through the pain and humiliation she inflicted on others, she comes to have a new found respect and empathy for her victims which makes her question her fanatical belief in the Emperor.
   'United States Of Japan' explores the West's fear of home-grown terrorism, and how this relates to the USA's and the United Kingdom's legacy of colonialism and imperialism. The George Washingtons are violent murderous insurgents, but Tieryas takes the time to show us where they are coming from. They are rebelling against an oppressive system of invading rulers who have overwritten their history and their culture and have imposed a racially segregated hierarchy upon them in which they are second class citizens. This is a direct reflection of the USA's and Britain's colonial past, the conflict engineered by the USJ in San Diego echoing these countries' abysmal record in the third world. Tieryas explores how the fallout from a racist and oppressive system can only be violence, the kicking back of people forced into impossible situations. It is this complexity that makes the book so compelling.
   All of which suggests that 'United States Of Japan' is heavy going; the impressive thing is that it manages to cover all this thematic ground in an enjoyable, pulpy action adventure. Tieryas takes us on a tour of the underbelly of USJ society, a trek through the grime and gunge of strip malls inhabited by sushi restaurants and hookers through to yakuza-run offshore video game tournaments. The books takes an infectious joy in showing the weird, wonderful and terrifying subcultures and characters that manage to thrive beneath the cracks of an oppressive dystopia. Like Dick's 'The Man In The High Castle', 'United States Of Japan' is interested in how people live in an intrinsically corrupt world. Nowhere is this more clear than in the struggles of its two main characters. Akiko's journey is one towards redemption; as she sees more of the hypocrisy of her own government and the secret police, and understands more of the pain and suffering she has been inflicting on people. she learns to question the things she has accepted all her life as the truth. Beniko's story is no less compelling; learning that he turned in his parents is the kind of thing that immediately distances a protagonist from the reader. However the more we get to learn about him and his history, the more we learn that much of what he shows the world is a front, and that underneath is someone who does actually have an admirable moral code. The final section of the book recontextualises his actions in a way that is both surprising and finally brings the character into clearer focus, ensuring that the characters as well as the world stay with the reader long after the book is finished.


 
 
 

Sarah Pinborough - 13 Minutes (2016)

My review of '13 Minutes' by Sarah Pinborough is up now at Fantasy Faction. This is a wonderful book. Containing barely any speculative or fantastic elements, it tells a compelling and disturbing story about the perils of social life as a teenager that reflects on the nature of the truth, our real identities, and to what extent it is possible to really know other people. Read more at the link. 

Tim Powers - Medusa's Web (2016)

Apologies to the delay in linking to this, my internet has been unreliable. But my review of 'Medusa's Web', the new Tim Powers book, was up at Fantasy Faction last month. It sees Powers continuing his fascinations with time travel and California to tell a story that makes us reflect on our reality, and comfortably sits up there with his other books. Needless to say I loved it. Read more about it after the link.

Matthew De Abaitua - If Then (2015)

"She had accepted the stripe because people like her had no choice: that was the lesson of the Seizure. That was why they called it the Seizure - it was the moment when meaningful choice was taken away from the majority of people, as their labour lost its value, and they could no longer sell their time, so they had to sell emotions, relationships, access to their bodies. It had felt like the end of the world, but it wasn't. Her humiliation was familiar to the men and women who came into her library, first or second generation imigrants fleeing variations of the Seizure in their own country. The Seizure was not an apocalypse but the moment an advancing front had finally caught up with her."

"Your decisions are made six seconds before you are aware of them. What you think of as free will is post-rationalization. You live in the past, James."

In his debut novel 'The Red Men', Matthew De Abaitua examined our relationship with technology and asked probing questions about artificial intelligence and the nature of consciousness. His second novel, 'If Then', is loosely connected to his previous novel - it is set in the same world, and shares a single character, Alex Drown, former Monad employee now working for the Institute - however while it shares some of the same themes and concerns it largely stands alone. Like its predecessor it is a striking and haunting work of modern science fiction, but 'If Then' speaks perhaps even more urgently to our times. The book recalls the classic post apocalyptic fiction of John Wyndham, or the lyrical evocation of an England that never was in Keith Roberts' 'Pavane', but filtered though our modern fears and concerns. It is a rigourous exploration of the nature of consciousness and how our minds are shaped by their surroundings and experiences. It is a reflection on love and marriage, and on the perils of ceding responsibility for doing the right thing. And it is a harrowing portrayal of the horrors of war and the nature of sacrifice.
   Set after The Seizure - a slow apocalypse which has resulted in the collapse of civilisation following a confluence of economic, social and political pressures - the book is set in the town of Lewes, which is now cared for by the Process, a series of algorithms that determine  every aspect of the citizens' lives. Gathering data from implants in the citizens' heads, the Process weighs up the wants and needs of every person in the town and allocates jobs, food and resources accordingly, and evicts those that it determines will cause trouble. The lives of the townspeople begin to change when James the town bailiff discovers a replica of a World War I era soldier on the outskirts of the town, and it becomes clear that the Process is preparing for war. From visiting Alex Drown and Omega John, the eccentric genius behind the Institute and the Process, James discovers that the soldier, John Hector, is a replica of a real life soldier who was involved in the formation of the Institute. Omega John is dying, and the Process is recreating the context and environment of the turmoil that created the Institute in order to create a successor so that the Process won't die with him.
   'If Then' manages to simultaneously extrapolate our current relationship to technology and imagine a world in which much of the technology we take for granted now no longer exists. Thanks to the Seizure, there's no more internet, wi-fi or mobile phones, and most technology-based jobs or middle class office jobs have been rendered obsolete. The people of Lewes have in some ways gone back to a pre-industrial lifestyle, in which everything they need, from food to clothes, is produced in the town. De Abaitua reminds us how tenuous the world we live in is, our technology fueled by nonrenewable energy sources, our lifestyles and jobs unimaginable a hundred years ago and only made possible by exploitation of cheap third world labour. However, life in Lewes is overseen by the Process. Every citizen has an implant which constantly monitors their physical, mental and emotional states and feeds this information back into the algorithms that govern the Process, and they are monitored by surveillance technology embedded in the birds, animals and trees. This is a level of surrender beyond the limits of our current existence, in which we give up our personal information to social media, internet providers and search engines, but it is clearly extrapolated form the ease with which we have made this sacrifice. The citizens of Lewes have agreed to this out of a desire for safety and certainty in a deeply uncertain world. The Process operates under the greater good; it calculates the needs and desires of the everyone in the town and ensures that these are met.
   But of course there is a flip side to this. De Abaitua portrays the restructuring of human society following the Seizure as necessary and inevitable; however he points out that surrendering control over your lives to an authority is essentially a moral cop-out. 'If Then' recognises that the greater good for some is frequently at the expense of others. This is brilliantly explores through the character of James. As the town bailiff, he is tasked with removing those that the Process has deemed to be unnecessary or dangerous. His implant is more extensive and complicated than the other citizens, and allows him, during times of eviction, to become the physical embodiment of the combined will of the town via the Process. This involves him suiting up in power armour and forcibly removing people. The entire point of this is so that the evictions can be carried out without it being anyone's fault; James and the town are ceding responsibility for their actions. This allows them to kick out anyone deemed undesirable by the Process and to not feel bad about it, despite the fact that life outside the town can mean starvation and death, and with the advent of the Process' re-enactment of World War I much worse.
   Everything comes to a head when the Process starts evicting schoolchildren. James' decision to go along with the eviction without questioning the Process is a moral failure, but he is acting under the will of the people, and his implant has made him addicted to the power armour during the eviction period. The moral failure extends to all the other citizens who sit by and let the evictions happen or who happily take part in the eviction ceremony, showing their support of the Process' will. In a particularly haunting scene, Ruth, James' wife and a school teacher, defuses a potentially violent confrontation between James and some of the citizens who don't agree with evicting the children by intervening and placing the children on the eviction cart herself. Her actions save her husband but exile the children under her care. In the evictions, 'If Then' unflinchingly explores the social dynamics involved in casting out people and ignoring other people's suffering, and the way that, for certain groups of people and especially during times of fear and crisis, society condones this to an extent.
   The book is split between James' life as the town bailiff in Lewes, followed by his experiences in the Process' recreated World War I, where he serves with John Hector as a stretcher bearer at the landing at Sulva Bay. While the former are told in the past tense and are filled with lyrical descriptions of the English countryside, the latter are told in viscerally immediate present tense and are almost overwhelmingly vivid. Omega John gained the ability, following experimental brain surgery at Sulva Bay on a sniper shot to the head, to pass on the lived experience of being in the trenches in the war, and attempted to stop it by passing on this experience to the Allied leaders. De Abaitua accomplishes something of this in theses sections, his punishing accounts of the horror and suffering of war would surely turn the most jingoistic reader into an avid pacifist. The book compares the many needless deaths of World War I to ritualistic blood sacrifices, asking what the need was for all those people to die and who could have possibly benefited from such mindless slaughter. The Institute was founded by Omega John following his experiences in the War; appropriate seeing as World War I did change the face of the 20th century and set the stage for the technological advances that would be responsible for its most infamous horrors. The recapitulation of the 20th century some hundred years later also suggests a cyclical nature to our history, an inability to escape the tragedies of the past due to being stuck in the same modes of thinking.
   James' life as a stretcher bearer is contrasted with his life as the town bailiff. As a stretcher bearer, his role is to bring help and comfort to those in pain, whereas as the bailiff he found himself ending the safety and comfort of people's lives. James finds a new sense of meaning in his new life; whilst surrounded by fear, pain and death, in his role as a stretcher bearer he has the opportunity to show compassion and kindness. James volunteered for the role of bailiff despite understanding the risks and the price of the invasive surgery because he felt he and his wife would be safer if he was closer to a position of power. His old life is motivated by fear and selfishness. Despite all the horror and the dangers the stretcher bearers face, James recognises that in that life he has the greater potential to do good and so finds it more rewarding. 'If Then' is also very much about James and Ruth's marriage. De Abaitua explores the idea of marriage as a shared experience. James and Ruth clearly love each other very much. Their relationship has weathered the Seizure and a complete change of their lifestyles, and James' memories of Ruth support him in the trenches. However they are ultimately driven apart by their experiences, after James' experiences in the War and Ruth's experiences trying to look after the children she and James evicted force them to examine the moral choices of their lives before and how their relationship actually gave them a place to hide from their moral responsibilities. Just because people love and care for each other doesn't necessarily mean that they will encourage each other to be their best, or that they will always still have a place for each other in their lives.
   The book's most indelible character is Omega John, the dying genius behind the Institute and the Process and the man whose braincells the implants are developed from. Omega John used to be John Hector before his experimental brain surgery and his experiences in the War awakened him to his full potential. He is a fascinating character because he started off as a pacifist who signed up to the war as a stretcher bearer because he still wanted to serve his fellow man even as he refused to fight, but ends his life being responsible for recreating the War and so being responsible for many people's violent deaths. Somewhere along the way his increased intelligence, his artificially extended lifespan and his god-like plans for protecting the remains of humanity have lead him to lose touch with what it means to be human, to the extent that he dresses up as one of the butcher generals his younger self would no doubt have been disgusted with. Again, De Abaitua points out the fallacy of using the greater good to justify slaughter; perhaps the new John Hector created by the new War will ensure the future survival of humanity by the continuation of the Process, but this has only been achieved by murdering thousands of innocent people.
   The idea that Omega John needs to recreate World War I in order to create a copy of himself links to the book's most intriguing concept. 'If Then' explores the idea that, as Omega John says, "The mind is a process. It's not a thing." 'If Then' asks very interesting questions about the way our minds differ from computer programmes and artificial intelligence, the extent to which we are a programming of our instincts, urges and desires. The Process operates, like a computer, as a series of algorithms, but human consciousness cannot be broken down into these. Omega John requires a recreation of the complete context surrounding himself to recreate himself because his mind is not just the meat in his head; it's how that meat interacts with its environment. It's not enough just to make a physical copy, that copy must have the same experience of being forged in the fighting of World War I in order to make it the holistic thing that it is. The creation of a single person's mind requires the wholesale creation of Sulva Bay on the coast of Lewes, huge chunks of land bulldozed and quarried to make it the correct shape, heaters hooked up to raise the ambient temperature, artificial flies created. There are links to psychogeography here, the idea that the physical surroundings influence the way people think, but in this case extended - the relationship to the environment that produced the mind is integral.
   Like 'The Red Men', 'If Then' is a vitally intelligent book that asks the difficult, probing questions we need to be asking ourselves about consciousness, morality, how we are going to live in the future and our own humanity. If it is less fast-paced and pithy than 'The Red Men', it makes up for that in De Abaitua's growing maturity as a writer. 'If Then' is a deeper, richer and more assured book, more emotionally affecting, its prose more lyrical and powerful. De Abaitua once again taps into our fears and concerns to look at where we as a people might be heading, but this time connects it back to the past and where we've come from. It is, in the best sense, a profoundly worrying novel, one that the reader's mind keeps returning to long after finishing.