Guy Haley - The Emperor's Railroad (2016)

Once again I have been remiss in updating the blog, I can only plead the rest of life getting in the way and apologise. So here are some posts that I have missed. First up in the Tor novella series was Guy Haley's 'The Emperor's Rairoad', an inventive mix of Dying Earth Fantasy, zombie post-apocalypse fiction and Western. Read more through at 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.
 

Nalo Hopkinson - Brown Girl In The Ring (1998)

"'But doux-doux,' Prince of Cemetery said, 'Your granddaughter head full of spirits already; she ain't tell you? All kind of duppy and thing. When she close she eyes, she does see death. She belong to me. She is my daughter. You should 'fraid of she.'"

'Brown Girl In The Ring' is an innovative re-imagining of the post apocalypse tale, in which vividly realised urban decay is juxtaposed with Afro-Caribbean folklore and mythology. The novel convincingly portrays the inner city of Toronto after economic collapse has lead all the wealthy corporations and businesses to withdraw from the centre, leaving behind poverty and violence. However, whilst post apocalyptic stories like 'The Drowned World' by J. G. Ballard show their protagonists going through a sort of psychological metamorphosis to come to terms with their new surroundings, in 'Brown Girl In The Ring', the characters make use of their traditional skills and knowledge to better cope with the transfigured world around them. Hopkinson's characters react to the situation around them, rather than letting themselves be passively shaped by it. This aspect is present in Hopkinson's feminist approach; her characters Ti-Jeanne and Gros-Jeanne, her grandmother, are powerful women with agency who can summon and channel spirits, and who don't need men to support them.
  Nalo Hopkinson presents a vivid yet nuanced depiction of a post-apocalyptic situation. With the businesses and law enforcement agencies terrified to set foot in the centre, everything is run by Rudy and his gang, who maintain their power through crime rings, fear and coercion. Hopkinson doesn't shy away from portraying the violence and poverty that have become a part of the characters' every day lives, from Ti-Jeanne's dangerous walk home to the gangs of street kids living in the sewers and looking out for themselves. However, rather than succumbing to despair, the communities in Hopkinson's Toronto work hard to survive, forging a new life from a mixture of street savvy and traditional knowledge and practices. Ti-Jeanne's community is made up of racially and culturally diverse survivors who have been forced to become self-sufficient, from the East Indian restaurant owner Roopsingh who makes Canadian and Carribean food to herb growers and urban farmers like Gros-Jeanne who sell him ingredients. Gros-Jeanne herself epitomizes the book's synthesis of modern knowledge and traditional practices. She is an ex-nurse who acts as the community's healer, augmenting her medical knowledge with her traditional herbal remedies and her ability to channel the spirit world. Hopkinson's aesthetic is reflected in the characters' dialogue, a rich blend of Afro-Caribean dialect that gives the book its distinct flavour.
   'Brown Girl In The Ring' is also notable for its explicit feminism. The book revolves around its three central female characters, Ti-Jeanne, her mother Mi-Jeanne and her grandmother Gros-Jeanne. All three are distinct characters with strong personalities, and the book explores how Rudy, in his masculine arrogance, woefully underestimates all three women, leading to his downfall. Hopkinson is particularly good at exploring the characters' different aspects of womanhood, allowing them to take on traditional roles and aspects of femininity that male writers typically use as excuses to exclude female characters from taking part in an action-packed, post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure/horror story. Ti-Jeanne is a young mother who is still breast-feeding her baby. She carries her baby with her practically everywhere throughout the book. For many male writers, this would be grounds for writing her out of her own story, her role as a mother with a baby taking precedence over her role as the protagonist of her own story. Hopkinson allows her to remain the protagonist; having a baby doesn't make Ti-Jeanne any less a person with agency, with obstacles to overcome and issues to solve, and she doesn't let it stop her. Equally, however, Hopkinson fully explores Ti-Jeanne's nurturing and caring feelings for her baby, showing how Ti-Jeanne can be both a good mother and a fully realised character at the centre of a book. Similarly, Gros-Jeanne is an old woman whose role is defined as a healer and a dispenser of wisdom; Hopkinson allows her to fully embody this female archetype whilst still having a character of her own, a powerful, headstrong woman who cares for her family but makes some terrible mistakes. Mi-Jeanne is a particularly interesting character; as a homeless woman struggling with mental health issues and a mother who abandoned her child she is thoroughly Othered by society, and as the duppy in Rudy's bowl she has been forced to commit horrific murders for him, yet Hopkinson still manages to connect to the human core of the character and to pave the way for the process of reconciliation between her and her estranged daughter to
begin.
   As well as exploring the strength inherent in femininity, Hopkinson also explores masculine weakness. Rudy, a truly monstrous character, ultimately became a bully himself in response to all the bullying he suffered throughout his life, the only way his rigidly masculine perspective sees to avoid receiving pain being to inflict it on others. Similarly, Tony, Ti-Jeanne's boyfriend and the father of her child, is revealed to be a very weak man, unable to stand up to Rudy despite knowing full well that the things Rudy asks him to do are wrong. His lack of moral fibre scupper any chance he has of making up with Ti-Jeanne.
   'Brown Girl In The Ring' also explores issues of social justice. Its central plot is set in motion because Premier Uttley, the governor of Toronto, needs a new heart, so the director of the hospital contracts Rudy to arrange to have a fresh human heart provided for her, knowing full well that Rudy provides him organs by harvesting them from poor people living in the centre that no one with any power will notice has disappeared. As a metaphor for the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy it's not subtle, but it is viscerally powerful and the implications are well thought out and deftly handled.
   However, perhaps the most striking aspect of the book is the elegant way it incorporates Afro-Caribbean mythology into its urban post-apocalyptic setting. Gros-Jeanne, Mi-Jeanne and Ti-Jeanne share the ability to channel the Orisha spirits. These give Gros-Jeanne her healing powers, and Ti-Jeanne her powers to see how people will die. In 'Brown Girl In The Ring', the spirit world encroaches on our own world with hallucinogenic intensity, from Ti-Jeanne's vision of the Jab-Jab to Ti-Jeanne's eerie possession by Prince of Cemetery when Gros-Jeanne calls on the spirits, to the nightmarish final sequence in which the spirits take their vengeance on Rudy for abusing magic. Hopkinson manages to seamlessly integrate these spiritual beliefs into her realistically conceived SF world, creating something both powerfully memorable and unique.
 

Emily St. John Mandel - Station Eleven (2014)

"What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty."

'Station Eleven' is a post-apocalypse novel about the importance of art, the fallibility of memory and the fragility of our existence. It tells the story of the Travelling Symphony, a nomadic Shakespeare company that tours the area around the Great Lakes twenty years after humanity has been decimated by an aggressive flu pandemic, performing plays and classical music to the surviving communities. However, due to its inventive nonlinear narrative structure, the book also spends a significant amount of time exploring its characters lives before the collapse of society. The book achieves a powerful sense of pathos and an appreciation for the wonders of the modern world by exploring what it would be like to lose all that. By exploring the way its characters' lives have woven around each other and interacted both before and after the collapse, it makes profound observations about individual perspective and the subjective nature of memory. At a time when the age-old conflict between genre and literary fiction has been rekindled, 'Station Eleven' is a triumphant example of how a writer outside of SF can combine SFnal tropes and ideas with literary techniques to enrich both forms.
   One of the charges frequently leveled at literary fiction that plays with SF tropes is that non-genre writers are dilettantes who don't fully understand the ideas they're using or their history in the genre. One of the things I really liked about 'Station Eleven' was how Emily St. John Mandel has written a book that is tonally different from your standard post-apocalyptic SF, yet her appreciation of genre shines through. The Travelling Symphony's motto, written on their lead caravan and tattooed on Kirsten's arm, is "Survival is inefficient," which is taken from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. I like that a Shakespeare company can have a motto lifted from Star Trek, and it fits in with one of the themes of the book, which is that ultimately we decide what things hold significance for us, from the paperweight that different characters place different emotional weight on as it passes through their hands, to Clark's museum of iPhones and credit cards, a tribute to the lost technology of the old world.
   Genre fiction raises its head as well in Station Eleven, the comic series being written by Miranda that gives the novel its name. In the comics, Station Eleven is a space station the size of a moon designed to look like a planet, on which a handful of escapees from the alien conquest of Earth live in a flooded twilight world. Miranda is a central character in the book, though she dies in the early stages of the flu pandemic. She ties together most of the other characters, from her relationship with Arthur Leander, the actor whose heart attack on the night of the flu outbreak kicks off the book, to Kirsten, an actor with the Travelling Symphony whose copy of Station Eleven is one of her few prized possessions. Station Eleven itself, with its eerie, deserted twilight world and its oppressed citizens longing to return to a world they can never get back, becomes a central metaphor for the characters' situation in the book. This is despite the fact that Miranda created Station Eleven purely as a passion project distinct from her job, and only ever vanity published it in a small print run. The point is that all art, as a form of human expression, is worthwhile, and that by its nature it resonates with people. From Station Eleven to Star Trek to 'King Lear', they were all created out of love and speak to the people who experience them; they are a coping mechanism for both the creator and the audience, and this is what makes them important.
   'Station Eleven' has a nonlinear structure, its narrative split between the post apocalypse, the time immediately leading up to the collapse, and times in the characters' lives many years before. It also makes use of multiple viewpoint characters. The advantage of this approach is in the accumulation of detail from different perspectives; the characters interact before and after the end of the world, and we see different scenes through different eyes, fragments of old letter or articles revealed and completed in other characters' stories. In an SF novel, it would be unusual to spend so much time in a post-apocalypse novel before the actual apocalypse; we know what our world is like today, and that's not what we're interested in. With 'Station Eleven', the accumulation of detail and context serves to help us understand the characters better, giving more insight into their actions and decisions, why they choose to hold onto what they do. It also allows Mandel to illustrate the importance of perspective and the subjectivity of experience. As a novel of the apocalypse, it is necessarily about loss and regret, all the things that we take for granted in the world today gone forever. However in order to tease out what loss and regret really mean, it is necessary to turn to the context of individual experience. Arthur Leander's journey, from struggling small town actor to reluctantly famous star, forces him, like Lear, to think about the things he regrets - his numerous failed marriages, his inability to spend time with his son - and take stock of what's important. Similarly, the collapse of civilisation coincides with Clark's own soul searching, and provides Jeevan with a chance to start a more meaningful life. Ultimately, all of the characters' emotional journeys converge on the same thing that the apocalypse forces everyone to confront: with the loss of the life you know, what would you miss, what is important to you that you would keep, and what would you change?
   A shallow reading of 'Station Eleven', with its troupe of actors and musicians performing Shakespeare in the ruins of civilisation, might accuse it of softness, a hopelessly naive vision of humanity. In most post apocalypse novels, culture is the first thing to go to the wall in the rush to bludgeon your neighbour with their own femur. 'Station Eleven' is an undeniably optimistic book, which one doesn't normally say about post-apocalypse fiction. Not only to people maintain their humanity in the face of total societal collapse, at the end, it's implied that one of the settlements has rediscovered electricity. It's hard to imagine an apocalypse more different than Ballard's stories of people's mental states regressing to reflect the ruined landscapes, or the string of awful yet totally rational decisions the protagonist takes on the road to hell to protect his family in John Christopher's 'The Death Of Grass'. However, while 'Station Eleven' doesn't dwell on the violence, it is most definitely still there. Mandel hasn't let her characters off the hook or taken the easy way out. Kirsten, August and the rest of the Travelling Symphony are people who have had to do horrible, violent things in order to survive, and suffered horrific violence in the process. They have come out the other side, and they still think that Shakespeare and classical music are worth preserving. There's something wonderfully inspiring and moving in that.

Octavia E. Butler - Parable Of The Sower (1993)

"In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn."

Octavia E. Butler's 'Parable Of The Sower' is a chilling look at an all too believable dystopian future. Set in the 2020s, it portrays a USA brought to its knees by economic and social collapse. Unchecked climate change has led to massive crop failures, causing the price of food to skyrocket. Shortsighted and self-serving social policies passed by the government have led to rampant poverty, debt slavery, starvation and drug abuse, whilst the rich and ever-dwindling middle class hide in gated communities from the increasingly disaffected and disenfranchised poor. 'Sower' is such an unsettling read today because these issues that Butler was writing about in the 1990s are only becoming more relevant with each passing day. As the destruction of our environment for profit continues apace, the gap between the haves and have-nots widens, and events of the past year demonstrate just how thoroughly broken the US justice system is, Butler's novel serves as a timely reminder of the endgame for the path we are currently on. Yet for all that it is a stern warning, Butler retains hope that there is a better way, and that we can build a fairer, wiser, more just, more sustainable existence.
   'Parable Of The Sower' tells the story of Lauren Olamina, a preacher's daughter who lives in a gated community, one of the few remaining enclaves of the middle class in southern California. Lauren's community is not rich, but it can just about support itself, which is enough to make it the target of envy and attacks by the increasing numbers of street poor, those living in utter poverty outside the walls of the compound who must resort to thievery and worse to survive. Lauren realises that it is only a matter of time before their community will fall to thieves or arsonists, and tries to prepare as best she can for life outside the walls by reading and learning important skills, whilst those around her live in denial. She also begins to develop a new religion, Earthseed, based only on what she knows herself to be true and useful, around the central idea that God, the only constant, is change, and that while change is inevitable how we react to it is our choice. Her family and her community is destroyed in a fire, and she begins her dangerous journey through the wreckage of California to the relative safety of the mountains in the north, building a new Earthseed community as she goes.
   The story is told through Lauren's journal articles, so it is primarily through her eyes that we experience the world of 'Sower'. In some ways, 'Sower' is a cousin to another disturbingly prescient 1993 dystopian novel told through the journal of an adolescent girl, Jack Womack's 'Random Acts Of Senseless Violence'. Both Lauren and Womack's Lola Hart lose their family to violence, and must adjust to their new life on the street. But while Lola Hart descends into brutality and becomes alienated from everybody she knows, Lauren has, thanks to Earthseed, a much stronger moral compass, and so while she has to make harsh and difficult decisions in order to survive in her new environment, she never loses her essential humanity in the process, and as her journey continues and she grows as a person, she realises that she can help more people and is able to reach out and connect with others.
   Butler manages to convey information about her world almost entirely without exposition, instead exploring her characters in depth and using their attitudes and approaches to delineate the world they live in. While Lauren is the central viewpoint character, because she is an astute observer of people and a devoted chronicler, we also get to see the views of a variety of different characters. We get our first glimpse of life outside the compound from Lauren's brother, Keith, who runs away from home to make a living for himself outside. Keith falls for the dark glamour of a life lived outside of the rules of society and, more crucially, the rules of his father. He makes his money from stealing and dealing with drug dealers, addicts and gangs, and ultimately is horrifically tortured and killed for reasons that are never revealed. Telling details about the world are evoked through the differences in perspective of the older and younger characters, with Bankole and Lauren's father still having an instinctive trust of authority figures like the police and the government that Lauren and her generation find baffling.
   Butler's other works, notably 'Kindred' and the Patternist series demonstrate that she has a keen understanding of the horrific ways in which people have historically used and abused each other, and her knowledge and understanding of this inform the horrors of the future she imagines in 'Sower'. The debt slavery legalised by President Donner is explored in all its horror. Butler shows how the government's scheme to remove minimum wage and environmental and worker protection legislation results in a situation where the workers have absolutely no rights, can be sucked into debt for the company and bought and sold at the company's whim, with children inheriting their parents' debt on their death. Butler also explores the extremes that those living on the streets are frequently reduced to to earn the next meal. Many women are forced into prostitution to feed themselves and their children, and the threat of murder, violence and rape is never far away.
   However, while Butler explores with her usual brutal honesty the absolute worst that humanity is capable of doing, what makes 'Sower' stand out among post-apocalyptic dystopias is that it also shows humanity at its best. Which is quite a thing to be able to say about a book that includes pregnant teen cannibals. While the destruction of Lauren's old community is tragic, it does lead to her forming her own community, one built around more important guidelines than material wealth. Lauren's new Earthseed community is pleasingly diverse, as she joins up first with Harry, one of the white boys from her compound, and Zahra, one of the wives of a rich man form the compound who bought her off the streets, and then with a range of people she encounters on the road, from Jill and Allie, two white sisters they rescue form the ruins of their house to Emery, a half Japanese, half African American escaped slave on the run with her son, to Travis and Natividad, an African American and Mexican couple. The only conditions for joining are that they won't steal and that they will help and protect each other. The horror of all that Lauren and her friends encounter on the road is contrasted with how this disparate group of individuals learns to care and understand each other, and becomes willing to start a new community together built around their shared values. Lauren's Earthseed philosophy suggests that, when working together to improve each other's lives and in balance with nature, the stars themselves are the limit. The timely moral of Butler's story is that we can build a better world and achieve great things, but only if we think long and hard about the path we're on and make the appropriate changes.
 
 

M. R. Carey - The Girl With All The Gifts (2014)

"She also knows that not all the evils that struck this land had the same cause and origin. The infection was bad. So were the things that the important-decision people did to control the infection. And so is catching little children and cutting them into pieces, even if you're doing it to try to make medicine that stops people being hungries."

'The Girl With All The Gifts' is a competent and thoroughly readable post-apocalyptic thriller, a good example of the kind of consistency that can be achieved late in a genre's run simply by cannily assembling or recombining the best ideas and tropes a subgenre has to offer. It has solid main characters that it develops thoughtfully along the way, a reasonably original concept for the lead and a powerful and even moving ending. Unfortunately, the novel fails to rise above its influences. For all that it plays with the tropes and ideas it evokes, it never quite manages to synthesise anything new or particularly striking from these component parts. Perhaps more problematic is the way the lack of balance and nuance between the characters means that the book ultimately falls short of doing justice to its big themes. Be warned, there will be spoilers from here on out.
   It's impossible to talk about 'The Girl With All The Gifts' without giving away the Big Twist, which is that Melanie is a zombie, and the book is a zombie book. Melanie, the protagonist, is a ten year old girl who has spent all her living memory in an underground base, restrained to a wheelchair and locked in a cell when she's not in class. She and a bunch of other children are educated by teachers and minded by soldiers, while outside the world is overrun with hungries (what we're calling zombies this time round, not one of my favourite terms for them). The book keeps Melanie's ontological statues a secret from the reader and from Melanie herself for the initial portion of the book. This is an interesting idea, used to immediately humanise Melanie and her classmates and so to start the discussion about what it really means to be human, which is the major theme of the book. I have to say I liked this portion of the book the best by far, with Carey very effectively subverting the trope of the creepy child. Melanie is instantly likable, and the treatment she and her classmates receive from the adults tips the reader off immediately that something is very wrong. That something of course is ultimately the dehumanising treatment the zombie children are receiving at the hands of the adults at the facility who fail to see them as human. Now, none of this is particularly original. The set up and its execution echoes Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go', which unfortunately for Carey is a much better written exploration of similar ground. Science fiction in general has a long history of engaging with the Other to explore how people dehumanise those they deem less than human, and frequently does so very effectively via children, as John Wyndham does in 'The Chrysalids' and 'The Midwich Cuckoos', books whose influence is felt very strongly here. Perhaps some of the problem is Carey's lack of subtlety. The Big Twist is so heavily foreshadowed that, if you're familiar with the kind of games that genre fiction likes to play, you're unlikely to be surprised when the reveal comes. I also suspect he misses a trick by slipping out of Melanie's viewpoint into that of the teachers and the soldiers. It's possible to imagine a shorter, more intense book set entirely in the underground bunker, making the most out of Melanie's unusual perspective to create a work of Wolfean ambiguity.
   However, Carey soon moves us away from the bunker. Melanie is chosen by Dr. Caldwell for vivisection - the entire point of the base is to study these sentient zombie children in the hopes of developing a cure - and avoids having her brain removed by a fortuitously timed attack on the base, which leaves Melanie, Dr. Caldwell, her favourite teacher Miss Justineau, and Sergeant Parks and Private Gallagher from the military detail guarding the base, stranded outside. The book quickly changes into a post-apocalypse survival thriller, as the mismatched group of civilians and military men must make its way through zombie-infested terrain to Beacon, where the last remnants of humanity is holed up. From here on out the book takes a disappointing nose-dive into utter predictability. Carey takes us through all the stations of the crash, running through a virtual checklist of post-apocalyptic tropes. Does the stolen car break down almost immediately? Check. Does Sergeant Park get frustrated at the civilians for not following his orders, but the civilians ultimately come to realise that under his gruff exterior he genuinely has their best interests at heart? Check. Did the government try to contain the spread of the zombie infection by using increasingly unpleasant and heavy-handed methods against its panicking population? And so on. Carey faces the problem that anyone writing a post-apocalyptic zombie thriller in the year 2014 faces, which is that this is ground that has been very well trod on. Yet one does not need to be heavily versed in the genre to be familiar with everything he wheels out here. Anyone who's read 'The Death Of Grass' by John Christopher and seen the Romero zombie films is going to recognise nearly every scene and scenario that plays out. 'The Girl With All The Gifts' doesn't do enough to distinguish itself from these predecessors. By the end of the story, the largest shadow cast over the book is Richard Matheson's 'I Am Legend', which plays exactly the same trick with humans assuming that the monsters they are fighting are, well, monsters, instead of sentient living beings who will replace them, and indeed the endings of the two books converge, to the extent that the not inconsiderable emotional impact of Carey's ending is attenuated by how similar it is.
   This is a shame because there is a lot of stuff that Carey does well. Sergeant Parks' character arc may be familiar, but it is done very well here, with Parks developing into a genuinely likable and sympathetic character from his early portrayal as a vicious meathead. Both Miss Justineau and Dr. Caldwell are female characters with agency, strength and some depth. And Carey's explanation of the zombie apocalypse is very well thought out. Carey's zombies are caused by infection with a variant of the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the fungus that manipulates the brains of ants, as popularised in the David Attenborourgh documentary 'Planet Earth' and various zombie-themed Cracked articles. While post-Max Brooks and '28 Days Later' the infection model for zombies is nothing new, Carey thinks it out and its relationship to its human host, and how this allows for the zombie children like Melanie to retain control of their higher brain function unlike the first generation of zombies, in convincing biological detail. However I wonder if this isn't part of the book's problem. 'The Girl With All The Gifts' commits the very SFnal sin of explaining everything in incredible and often unnecessary detail. One of the advantages of operating in such a well-worn corner of genre is that you can actually assume that the vast majority of your readership will be familiar with at least the general shape of the story you are trying to tell; so you can show the reader the charred fields between the towns without having to explicitly point out that this was caused by the government raising the villages to try to stop the infection, say. Suggestion and insinuation, followed by leaving it to the reader's imagination, can be a more powerful technique than exposition.
   However I felt the book's biggest problem is the treatment of Dr. Caldwell, and to a lesser extent Miss Justineau. Dr. Caldwell represents science untethered from its moral and ethical responsibilities. Whereas Melanie is a person who happens to look like a monster, Dr. Caldwell is a person who happens to be a monster. She is the kind of person who is totally happy to remove a child's brain without anesthetic. Dr. Caldwell's brutal experiments recall the worst technological horrors of the 20th century. For the book to succeed, it's vital that she works as a character. However she is easily the least convincing character in the book. Carey tries to set up Caldwell in opposition to Justineau, with Caldwell claiming that her research will save lives, whereas Justineau's kindness to the children won't help anyone in the long run. However not even Caldwell believes this; her characterisation is ultimately that of a sociopath. She is not remotely interested in saving people, she is only interested in solving the intellectual puzzle that the zombies pose for her. You suspect she'd happily vivisect her own mother if it brought her closer to the truth. This renders her argument and any counterbalance she's narratively meant to be against Justineau entirely moot. The thing is, history has taught us that there are people who would do such unethical experiments, and whilst a good many of them may well have been shrieking psychopaths, a good many of them probably weren't. 'The Girl With All The Gifts' misses a chance to explore the banality of evil; the SS officer who goes home and has dinner with his family. Additionally, Dr. Caldwell's failure as a narrative counterbalance to Miss Justineau winds up having a negative impact on Miss Justineau's characterisation. Without a well-developed opposite to bounce off, in order to stop her from coming off as too perfect Carey decides to give her a back-story in which she accidentally ran over a kid and never reported it, getting away with it because society collapsed straight afterwards. It's a tin-eared decision that would probably have been avoided if Dr. Caldwell was a deep enough character to be able to make Miss Justineau reflect on her own complicity in Dr. Caldwell's programme.

Angela Carter - The Passion Of New Eve (1977)

"Here we were at the beginning or end of the world and I, in my sumptuous flesh, was in myself the fruit of the tree of knowledge; knowledge had made me, I was a man-made masterpiece of skin and bone, the technological Eve in person."

'The Passion Of New Eve' is powerful, hallucinatory and deeply angry. It tells, in language alternately mythic and grittily realistic, of Evelyn, a young man who forcibly undergoes a sex change to become Eve, and then goes on a journey of sexual discovery across a post-apocalyptic USA. Along the way it explores the mutability of gender, society's expectations of gender roles, and the horror of sexual violence. It is a harrowing and striking piece of writing, made all the more so by Angela Carter's poetic language.
   I'd like to get the negative part of the review out of the way first, because, being central to the conceit of the novel, there's no way around this. The book's portrayal of transition is problematic at best. Evelyn's transition to Eve is an act of sexual violation and violence, performed on an unwilling victim. The other trans character in the book, the actress Tristessa, has lived her entire life as a woman, and the fact that she has male sexual organs is used as a shock reveal, which plays into the negative portrayal of trans people as deceptive. This is unfortunate as Carter has a lot of interesting and positive things to say about how unhelpful and arbitrary gender stereotypes and society's expectation of gender roles are, and the book does have moments where it quite sensitively explores how Eve and Tristessa live and come to terms with their sexuality as people trapped in bodies whose biological sex they don't relate to. Eve and Tristessa are both sympathetically portrayed and well-drawn characters, and I suspect in these respects the book would have been reasonably progressive in the 70's. However the book still makes the error of portraying transition as either an act of sexual violence or an act of deception, and this lets it down in a big way.
   'The Passion Of New Eve' follows Evelyn, an English man who has moved to New York just as society is starting to crumble. Following an abusive relationship with Leilah, an African American stripper, which culminates in Leilah being sterilised by a botched abortion, he runs away into the desert, where he is captured by the women of Beulah, an underground city of radical feminists who surgically turn him into a woman, Eve, and plan to birth a new humanity from the ruins of the old by impregnating her with his (pronoun trouble) old seed. Eve escapes back into the desert, where she undergoes a series of degredations and experiences as she comes to terms with her new sexuality and her place in the collapsing world.
   The book is unflinching in its portrayal of sexual violence against women. Evelyn's treatment of Leilah is sickening, not least because, as Evelyn himself points out, it is far from out of the ordinary. Her injury and sterilisation as the result of an abortion decided by the man have plenty of historical and real life precedent, and the characters' backgrounds give the abuse a racialised aspect, recalling the sexual abuse of African-American women by white slave owners. Eve's treatment once she becomes a woman is no less horrendous. She is captured by Zero the poet, an old man with one eye and one leg who lives in filth with his pigs and dog, and forced to become one of his eight wives. Eve and the other wives are raped multiple times by Zero and subjected to sexual humiliations and degredations. This isn't a case of rape being used as backdrop, to make the story seem more gritty, or as a cheap way of providing character depth; Carter exhaustively catalogues the ways women are subjected to sexual violence in order to show just how messed up gender relations between the sexes are. It's meant to be deeply unsettling and horrifying, especially when it's pointed out how common place this all is. The sexual violence Evelyn suffers at the hands of the women of Beulah is juxtaposed with this; although experiencing life as a woman allows Eve to achieve a sympathy and empathy with women that was previously unavailable to him, the act of violence itself is only ever portrayed as that. Evelyn may be an abusive shit, but he doesn't deserve what happens to him, and the book never suggests that he does. Evelyn's enforced transition into the new Eve is simply another act of violence in the struggle between the genders, the brutally logical outcome in a collapsing society where violence is met with violence.
   The world of 'The Passion Of New Eve' alternates between being realistically delineated in stark detail, such as the grimy interior of Leilah's flat, or the stomach-churning filth and squalor of Zero's farm, and mythic, deeply symbolic lanscapes, such as the womb-like underground city of Beulah, or the system of underground caves through which Eve experiences a reverse birth at the end. The ultimate effect is intensely disorienting, as Eve journeys through vivid dreamscapes such as the rotating labyrinth full of waxwork effigies that is Tristessa's secret desert home, and has bizarre encounters with religious child soldiers. The world never quite coalesces into something that parses for reality. Like Ballard's 'The Drowned World' or Moorcock's 'The Shores Of Death', the warped and ravaged apocalyptic landscapes exist as much to reflect the inner world of the protagonist. Like Moorcock, Carter is adept at adapting psychedelic, symbolic and frequently thoroughly Freudian imagery and working it into a fantastical or SFnal context. As well as Adam and Eve, Tiresias is frequently evoked, as well as the Amazons and the Cybele. This aligns 'The Passion Of New Eve' both with the more inventive end of the pulp spectrum and with the myths and legends from which pulp frequently draws.

Michael Moorcock - The Shores Of Death (1966)

"There comes a point in a situation like this where you become so far removed from actuality that your own system of lies defeats you. It has happened often enough in the past. Your lie becomes your reality - but it is only yours. You begin to operate according to a set of self-formulated laws that conflict with the actual laws of existence."

'The Shores Of Death' is Michael Moorcock's post-apocalypse novel. Whilst Moorcock has always had a penchant for destroying the world in creative ways, and the situation here is as imaginative as one would expect, the real focus here is on how people react to the end of the world and the knowledge of the impending extinction of the human race. It's a novel about fear, and how both individuals and societies react to it. In the introduction, Moorcock compares the structure of the novel to that of J. G. Ballard's 'The Drowned World' and Brian Aldiss' 'Greybeard', in that the book first explores the effect of the disaster on society before focusing in on its effect on one individual. As in those books, the SF-nal set up of the apocalypse provides a stark setting that reflects the psychology of the characters. But whereas Ballard explores the atavistic primal unconscious buried beneath the veneer of civilisation, Moorcock concerns himself with how even a utopian society can slide into extremism when faced by fear, and how when confronted with our own mortality even intelligent and well-adjusted individuals can wind up making terrible, selfish decisions.
   In 'The Shores Of Death', aliens stopped the rotation of the earth, using a form of radiation that eventually makes people infertile. Life is only possible on the hemisphere facing the sun, or in the band of twilight between that hemisphere and the freezing cold dark of the hemisphere stuck facing night. Clovis Marca escaped from the twilight region where he was born to become a popular government official in the utopian society on the light side of the Earth. Following the discovery that the entire human race has become infertile, people must face the fact that they will be the last generation of humans ever to live before the race becomes extinct. As fear spreads, the formerly utopian society degenerates into paranoia, violence and extremism. Meanwhile Clovis becomes unhealthily obsessed with tracking down Orlando Sharvis, a brilliant scientist charged with crimes of horrific human experiments, who nonetheless could be the only person capable of saving the human race from extinction.
   Moorcock's portrayal of a decadent society on the verge of collapse is compelling and disturbing. The continuous thread throughout all of Moorcock's work is the balance between Chaos and Order, and how both are necessary for change, which itself is necessary for a healthy society. Like the planet frozen on its axis, the society in 'The Shores Of Death' has stagnated, and its utopian nature is the flipside to a darker side. The news of humanity's imminent extinction shows up how fragile this well-ordered society is, how quickly it descends into destructive decadence. People move from one party to another, trying to hide how frightened they are behind the mask of hedonism. Moorcock perfectly captures the undercurrent of nervous tension, people desperate to convince themselves that they're having a good time so that they won't have to dwell on their own mortality. This volatile atmosphere leads to the formation of a fanatical cult, the Brotherhood of Guilt, who are convinced that humanity's fate is a divine punishment, and a group of masked, uniformed vigilantes, lead by Clovis' old colleague and friend Andros Almer, who decide to take stopping the cult into their own hands. As the government collapses due to apathy, the power of Almer's vigilantes grows, and Almer uses more and more extreme methods to garner and maintain control, until he winds up the dictator of a fascistic society ruled by fear.
   Now, none of this is particularly subtle, but that's actually kind of the point. The people in the book are just as capable of seeing the historical parallels as the reader, and know exactly where this is going as well, yet they are unable to stop it. The point is that people should know better when extremism comes knocking at our door, but it thrives on fear, which all too often strips away our ability to act rationally. At the end of the day there usually isn't anything particularly subtle about a despot's rise to power, and that's what makes 'The Shores Of Death' so unsettling. There's a fantastic scene in which Clovis confronts Andros Almer and pleads with him to see reason, but it turns out that Almer knows damn well the consequences of what he is doing, and is consciously playing the villain. Faced with the same fear that everyone else is facing, Almer is stepping into the role of dictator not so much to gain control of the situation as that it provides him with a set script and rules to work to. Even if the role is villainous, it's still a clearly defined role, which he finds preferable to facing his own mortality, something for which there is no script. Moorcock gets a lot of mileage out of showing how Almer is ultimately swallowed up by the one dimensional pantomime villain role that 'dictator' is.
   Clovis deals with his fear in a different way that is no healthier. He withdraws from his social responsibilities and becomes obsessed with tracking down Orlando Sharvis, despite frequently being warned off him by the mysterious Mr. Take. Sharvis represents science completely uncoupled from its ethical responsibilities. A post-human who has modified himself to be a giant with a snake-like head, Sharvis takes no actions for himself but will happily grant any request asked of him, for a horrific price. In order to reach his secret base on the inside of the moon, which is now submerged in the ocean on the dark side of the Earth, Clovis first has to make his way through a village inhabited by those who have made a bargain with Sharvis, a horrifying vision of hell filled with people suffering the ironic consequences of their poorly phrased wishes. The nightmarish fates of these people and Mr. Take's own explicit warnings are not enough to dissuade Clovis from making a Faustian pact with Sharvis. Again, it's not difficult to see exactly where this is going, and the power Moorcock generates from this is that the reader can clearly see the intelligent and streetwise Clovis driven into this terrible bargain because of his own fear, when he could have lived the rest of his life happily with the woman who loves him. Fear of our own mortality frequently results in us not living our lives to the full. And so Clovis is granted immortality, and the ability to reproduce with his girlfriend, ensuring that both himself and humanity will continue, but at the expense of ever being able to feel anything again.

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. 

Ryu Mitsuse - 10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights (1967)

Ryu Mitsuse's '10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights' is in it for the long haul. Starting off with the formation of our planet, and extending its narrative tendrils out to the heat death of the universe, this is a novel that redefines being truly epic in scope. In that sense, the only comparable works are Olaf Stapeldon's 'Last And First Men' and 'Starmaker', but Mitsuse's work is both stranger and more lyrical. In its mixture of hard science fiction and Eastern spirituality, it echoes the work of Roger Zelazny, in particular 'Lord Of Light'. However, at the end of the day it's very much its own beast. The cover of the Haikasoru translation has "The GREATEST Japanese science fiction novel of all time" enthusiastically emblazoned across the front, and while I've not (yet) read enough Japanese SF to comment on that, '10 Billion Days...' is certainly an engaging and thought-provoking read, that easily stands next to the best of Western SF from the same era.

Unsurprisingly, given the novel's massive scope and many narrative strands, it takes a while to set all of the story's moving pieces into motion. Mitsuse saves most of the explanation, such as it is, for right at the end, so you're kept guessing as to what's actually going on throughout most of the book. Fortunately the journey itself is a lot of fun, taking us reeling through ancient Atlantis to Jerusalem in the time of Christ and on to crumbling ruins on distant planets in the far future, and when you do figure out what's going on it's a doozy.

Basically, Plato, Siddhartha and the demigod Asura are rebuilt as cyborgs and sent to the far future, where they try to find out the reasons behind the collapse of human civilisation from the gods themselves. Unfortunately for them, they are pursued by Jesus of Nazareth, who has also been cyborgified and sent into the future, and is a blaster-wielding badass. Our three heroes are pursued by Jesus from the future ruins of Tokyo to collapsing metropolises on other planets where robots rise up against humans who have stored themselves as digital memories to another galaxies where the god-like aliens have preserved themselves in pocket dimensions to outlast the passage of time. These sequences are fantastic, and would be worth the price of entry alone. Mitsuse creates a decaying universe reminiscent of Gene Wolfe's 'The Book Of The New Sun', and as with Wolfe's masterpiece, the reader is left to puzzle out and interpret many of the details themselves, as characters are whisked through times and places they don't fully understand.

In a cruel inversion of 'Childhood's End' by Arthur C. Clarke, at the end of her journey Asura discovers that the so-called gods are giant aliens who, in order to stop humanity from ever reaching its full potential and competing with them, visited earth and planted the seeds of humanity's eventual destruction into the entire human race's psyche. These aliens were responsible for the destruction of Atlantis, and Jesus, mistakenly believing that one of these aliens is the true god, has been acting as their agent of destruction, spreading their influence across the planet. In a final act of callousness, the aliens have set themselves up as future redeemers who in times to come will save humanity, when in reality they are humanity's oppressors. Asura also discovers that she and Siddhartha are agents of a less malevolent god-like being, whose influence was simply not strong enough to prevent the destruction of the human race.

Ryu Mitsuse is asking pretty big questions here. His book is about the' nature of the universe that we live in, and the nature of god. '10 Billion Days...' asks the question, what kind of god would create a people so prone to violence and self-destructive tendencies? Mitsuse's protagonists are inspired to continue their journey against perilous odds simply because they feel they have to know, why would god doom humanity to extinction, and offer a false hope of redemption? There is an excellent scene where Asura confronts the god-like alien directly, and he responds by subjecting her to a violent psychic attack. It reminds me of the scene in Star Trek V when Spock asks the god-like alien, 'What would God want with a starship?' and gets zapped for his troubles. Both scenes show the god-like aliens as being petulant and cruel and act as the final tip-off to the audience that they are nothing like what they claim to be. (Needless to say Mitsuse handles this with far more elegance than Shatner does.) The image of Jesus as a deluded Knight Templar type is both powerful and disturbing, and the book gets a fair amount of mileage out of the fact that this is initially how Pontius Pilate and Judas see Jesus, but they cannot possibly guess how close they are to the truth because of how little of the bigger picture they are allowed to see.

The book ends tragically but beautifully. Asura's long struggle comes to an end, and she gets the answers to at least some of her questions, but she outlives the gods themselves, and is left alone on their planet, now crumbled to dust, waiting for the heat death of the universe. It is a fittingly bleak and vertigo-inducing finale.
   

John Crowley - Engine Summer (1979)

'Engine Summer' by John Crowley is one of the most moving, lyrical and downright cruel post apocalyptic novels you will ever read. Although I try in these reviews not to give away too much of the plot, it's nearly impossible to talk about the emotional heft of 'Engine Summer' without revealing the twist at the end, so spoilers for a thirty-four year old SF novel to follow.

'Engine Summer' tells the story of Rush that Speaks, a youth on the cusp of manhood who lives in the idyllic pastoral settlement of Little Belair. Inspired by the stories of saints he hears from a wise old woman, he sets out in search of his own sainthood, and in the process suffers a series of revelations about the nature of the world he lives in and the people he shares it with.

Simple enough so far. It is a coming of age story, which is a familiar set up in post-apocalyptic SF; Russell Hoban would use a similar template for 'Riddley Walker'. 'Engine Summer' lacks the almost violent linguistic inventiveness of Hoban's masterpiece, and its spirituality is more subtle and muted, but it achieves a similar sense of pathos for its doomed protagonist and his dreams of a grander, less ruined age. The images of a youth travelling through the flotsam and jetsam of our ruined future, the significance of which has long been forgotten, also form a central part of Gene Wolfe's masterful Book Of The New Sun series. However it's hard to imagine more different protagonists than Severian and Rush that Speaks; in stark contrast to Wolfe's charming but utterly unreliable narrator who creates a tapestry of possible interpretations of every event that he relates, the people of Little Belair, and Rush that Speaks in particular, pride themselves on 'truthful speaking' - to say what you mean and mean what you say. Indeed, this facet of Rush's nature is what allows him to become the redemption to the 'angels' - the people who inhabited the Earth before the great disaster - at his own personal cost.

We find out at the end that our narrator is not Rush himself - he is a recording, whose purpose is to retell his life up until the moment of recording, which he has done over three hundred times in the past six hundred years. Through sharing Rush's formative experiences of exploration, awakening and disillusionment, the angels, and the reader of the book, are able to come to a better understanding of their own life experiences, but this version of Rush is doomed to relive these vivid and heartbreaking experiences over and over again. It is a strikingly cruel ending, and in a way a powerful metaphor for the existence of, and the way we as consumers of fiction use, fictional characters.

All of this conveys little of the wonder of Crowley's prose. He is a wonderfully lyrical writer. The style of 'Engine Summer' is less ornate and poetic than that of Crowley's influential fantasy masterpiece, 'Little, Big', but it is more naturalistic and affecting for being less mannered. It has an almost brutal concision lacking from the epic sprawl of 'Little, Big'. As wonderous as 'Little, Big' indeed is, 'Engine Summer' may well be his greatest work.

Samuel R. Delany - The Einstein Intersection (1967)

"Endings to be useful must be inconclusive." Samuel R. Delany

'The Einstein Intersection' sure manages to get a lot done in the course of its slim 159 pages. Before embarking on the glorious impressionistic sprawl of 'Dhalgren', Samuel Delany's books were notable for the sheer power of imagination and narrative complexity that he was able to achieve within concise and punchy stories. Published between 'Babel-17' and 'Nova', Delany's other two long(ish)-form early masterpieces, 'The Einstein Intersection' sees him moving towards the open-ended complexity and ambiguity that characterises 'Dhalgren', whilst still maintaining all of his early clarity.
   'The Einstein Intersection' is steeped in mythology and folklore, both ancient and not so ancient. The protagonist Lobey represents both Orpheus and Theseus, as he navigates his way through physical and metaphorical labyrinths to find a way to bring back his Eurydice, a deaf-mute telekinetic, from the dead. As you'd expect, music plays a central role, and in this case is actually a manifestation of Lobey's psychic powers. Along the way he encounters avatars of Billy The Kid and Jesus Christ. The text features quotations at the start of each chapter, from wide ranging and un-sci fi sources as James Joyce, Bob Dylan and Isidore Ducasse's 'Maldoror'. Additionally, some of the text is taken straight from the author's journal from the period when he was writing the novel, giving an unusual insight into the thoughts, experiences and processes that fed into the story's creation. In this way you can feel Delany moving towards the recursive metatextual surrealism of 'Dhalgren'.
   The book is also a post-apocalypse yarn, in which humans have long since departed but aliens have taken use of their bodies to inherit the earth, which would be echoed in the central conceit of Gene Wolfe's 'The Fifth Head Of Cerberus' five years later. The characters are inhabiting bodies alien to them, on an alien world, and are afflicted by an outlandish variety of mutations. They themselves are frequently as confused as the reader is about the world they find themselves in.
   Delany effortlessly weaves these two strands together at the heart of the novel, which is about the extent to which we do or do not inhabit the mythology of the past. Lobey knows that he represents Orpheus; he is told so several times during the narrative, and he knows how the story of Orpheus ends. But Lobey is not human; he is an alien wearing the shape of a human, and so he is wearing the shape of humanity's myths. In the section of the book where we learn the significance of the title, one of the characters asks Lobey what he knows about mythology:

"I don't want to know what's inside the myths, nor how they clang and set one another ringing, their glittering focuses, their limits and genesis. I want their shape, their texture, how they feel when you brush by them on a dark road, when you see them receding into the fog, their weight as they leap your shoulder from behind; I want to know how you take to the idea of carrying three when you already bear two."

Lobey thinks that he is predestined to fail, as the original Orpheus did before him. But each telling of the story is different. At the beginning of the book, Lobey doubts that Orpheus actually made his journey, reasoning that if he went he would have come back with Eurydice. At the corresponding point in his journey, it turns out that looking back was the correct decision, as what he had brought back with him was merely another illusion. While people, their lives and their stories change - we are not the same people as the ancient Greeks - mythology still holds a deep resonance for us. The characters in Lobey's world are unable to escape the pull of human mythology, trapped as they are in what remains of our bodies. Witness the fate of poor Green-eye, Delany's Christ stand-in, murdered as part of a ritual no one involved in understands. But that does not deny them the opportunity to ultimately decide their own fate.