Genevieve Cogman - The Invisible Library (2015)

"That was the whole point of the Library: as far as she'd been taught, anyway. It wasn't about a higher mission to save worlds. It was about finding unique works of fiction and saving them in a place out of time and space. Perhaps some people might think that was a petty way to spend eternity, but Irene was happy with her choice. Anyone who really loved a good story would understand."

'The Invisible Library' by Genevieve Cogman is a thoroughly enjoyable Fantasy adventure featuring alternate worlds, a steampunkish setting, great detectives, fairies, dragons, strong female characters and books, not to mention a compelling central concept. In its inventive use of alternate realities as a series of settings for the ongoing conflict between rival forces of order and chaos, it harks back to classic Fantasy works such as 'Three Hearts And Three Lions' by Poul Anderson or Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books. It is held together by its overarching love of fiction, and its steadfast belief in the value and importance of books; that stories are worth preserving because they tell us something important about the culture that produced them, and simply for the joy a good story brings.
   At the centre of 'The Invisible Library' is the Library itself, a vast, interdimensional space that a secret society of immortal dimension-hopping Librarians use to store fiction from alternate realities. It's an inspired creation, drawing on both Borges' infinite library and Edgewood, the house that acts as a portal between the worlds of humans and fairies from John Crowley's 'Little Big'. The Librarians themselves are a classic manipulative secret society, a force on the side of order but filled with dark secrets and arcane power games. Appropriately for a book about libraries, 'The Invisible Library' treats fiction as its playground, cheerfully mixing up Moorcockian Fantasy in its use of alternate dimensions and sinister, chaos-worshiping Fae, the Sherlock Holmes stories beloved of protagonist Irene in the form of the great detective Vale, and the scientific romances of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne in its steam-powered, Victorian-esque London. There are even elements of Lovecraftian cosmic horror in the villain Alberic, a rogue Librarian who has turned to the side of chaos to sustain his immortality. Cogman meshes all these disparate elements together seamlessly, and the book has gonzo invention to spare with its giant mechanical insects and clans of warring werewolves, vampires and fairies. It recalls the mad alchemy of the original steampunk novels by Tim Powers, James Blaylock and K. W. Jeter, rather than the more tired and cynical trappings of the genre that have been overused since.
   In keeping with the book's faith in the power of language, the Librarian's magical powers stem from language itself. The Librarians can speak the Language and force the physical components of reality around them to do their bidding, a literalised form of reification, which links thematically back to Borges. Cogman makes good use of the concept, exploring both the limitations of the technique - you have to phrase your requests very specifically for it to be useful, thus limiting its use as a 'get out of jail free' card for the heroes - and the extent to which it could be abused, in a troubling scene in which Irene uses the Language on a person to hijack an airship.
   As well as an intriguing set-up, 'The Invisible Library' also has well drawn and memorable characters. Vale, the Holmes-esque detective and Kai, Irene's assistant, trainee and secret dragon in human form, are compelling characters, all the more so for having the ability to act against Irene's and each other's interests when appropriate. Much of the philosophical weight of the book comes from Irene's attempts to keep Vale on her side. Vale is a rational and caring person who believes that the Library should use its powers to help people rather than just preserving books. One of the good things about 'The Invisible Library' is that, while the Librarians are unquestionably on the side of order, this does not necessarily mean that they are all good or nice; some of the Librarians will use any means necessary to acquire the books they are after, no matter how damaging the consequences to bystanders. We see this personified in the most interesting relationship in the book, between Irene and her ex-mentor Bradamant. Bradamant cares about completing her mission at any cost, and has thrown Irene under the train in the past to achieve this; as a result, Irene is especially conscious of how her actions affect other people, and wants to do her job without causing harm and to help people on the way if she can. Irene has to prove that she can get results whilst showing Vale that she is ultimately a moral person, unlike Bradamant. Cogman handles Bradamant and Irene's relationship very well; there's no denying that Bradamant is incredibly selfish, manipulative and unpleasant, even going so far as to drug Irene at the climax so that she can finish the job her way without Irene's interference, but she isn't the main villain, and by the end of the book there's a sense that she has learned to respect Irene, whilst Irene, by showing that she is both moral and competent is able to leave behind her hangups about being in Bradamant's shadow.

Poul Anderson - Three Hearts And Three Lions (1961)

"Hasten, hasten, best of horses! Oh, run, my comrade, run as no horses ever did erenow, for surely all men are pursued with us. Haste thee, my darling, for we ride against striding Time, we ride against marching Chaos. Ah, God be with thee, God strengthen thee to run!"

'Three Hearts And Three Lions' is another charming and hugely influential Poul Anderson fantasy. While it lacks the strum und drang atavistic intensity of 'The Broken Sword', much of that book's invention and storytelling deftness is on display here. Whereas 'The Broken Sword' is fully emerged in its brutal Fantasy world of vengeful doomed Vikings and manipulative gods and elves, in 'Three Hearts And Three Lions' Anderson uses a modern day viewpoint character who is swept into a magical realm, who acts as a viewpoint character for the audience. Holger Carlsen is an affable everyman who finds himself transported into a different world where it seems like he is destined to play a key role. As such he's the ancestor of all the subsequent modern day viewpoint characters thrust into fantastical situations they don't understand, from Michael Moorcock's Erekose to Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant, and 'Three Hearts And Three Lions' has provided a blueprint for subsequent variations and deconstructions of the chosen one story.
   Holger Carlsen is a Danish engineer who, during World War II, is hit by a shell and wakes up naked in a forest, in a world where it turns out that magic is very much real, elves, trolls and giants exist alongside the legends of our world, and the history of our world is just myths and legends. Carlsen finds that he is the knight of Three Hearts and Three Lions, a figure that appears to be of great importance in this world. Duke Alfric and Morgan le Fay, the leaders of the Faeries, are incredibly keen to have him either killed and out of the way, whilst a Saracen is looking for him. With the help of Hugi the dwarf and Alianora the swan-may, Carlsen goes in search of the sword Cortana, which is tied with his destiny as the knight of Three Hearts and Three Lions, and may have the power to send him home.
   Anderson uses Carlsen as a viewpoint character, through which the audience gets to vicariously experience the wonder and confusion of being plunged into a strange and fantastical world. However, while characters such as these can make an easy entry point for the reader into what might otherwise be a strange and disorientating world, they also run the risk of being so much of a blank slate that they come off as bland, or worse, as a wet blanket, oblivious to the wonders around them as they try desperately to get back home to rural Kansas. Anderson avoids this quite elegantly and inventively. Carlsen's stolid engineer's mind allows him to succeed as a knight by coming up with very modern and practical solutions to the fantastical challenges that face him. So he defeats a dragon not by expertise with a sword, but by using cold water to make it overheat like a boiler, and he works out that the curse of the troll's gold is caused by the radiation released when the carbon in the troll turns to silicon when it turns to stone in the sun.
   This rationalism extends to Calrsen's ontological understanding of the fantasy world he finds himself in. Calrsen theorises that, as quantum theory allows for an infinite number of alternate universes, it's possible that a universe exists in which all the myths and legends of our world are fact, and magic exists as a physical force, and that he has somehow been transferred across the boundaries between alternate realities. Michael Moorcock would later develop this idea as the basis for the multiverse, the ever shifting alternate realities through which the Eternal Champion wanders. It's interesting that a writer like Anderson who is so adept at writing wonderful fantasy stories should be so concerned with rationalising them, perhaps coming from his need as a writer of hard SF to make sure the worlds in his writing follow the laws of physics, and have vaguely plausible excuses for when they don't. Rather than making his fantasy world less magical, the fact that the non-magical aspects of the world are so realistically rendered makes the fantastical aspects of the world more believable.
   'Three Hearts And Three Lions' also presents another idea that would provide a cornerstone for Moorcock's Eternal Champion series, namely that of the eternal struggle between the forces of Law and Chaos. In Anderson's book, Law, as represented by humanity and Christendom, is under threat by the forces of Chaos, as represented by the forces of Faerie, which is mirrored by the conflict between the Allies and the Nazis in our universe. While the idea has the seeds of its origin here, Moorcock would go on to develop the idea of the balance between Law and Chaos more fully in his work. In 'Three Hearts And Three Lions', Law is basically the equivalent of good, whilst Chaos is evil. In Moorcock's work, neither Law or Chaos is good or evil in and of itself; they are two natural forces that need to be in equilibrium, and evil arises when there is an imbalance in either direction. This allows Moorcock to fully explore the nuances only hinted at in Anderson's work.
   Moorcock would later echo Carlsen's fate with that of Erekose. Carlsen discovers his identity as the knight of Three Hearts and Three Lions is that of Holger Danske, a knight of Arthur's round table who returns during times of chaos to save the world. Having saved humanity from the encroaching forces of Faerie, he is whisked back to our world where he helps to defeat the Nazis. But this means he is separated from his love, Alianora, as Erekose is from his love Erminzhad, and he is destined to search for a way to travel across alternate universes to find her again.
 

Poul Anderson - The Broken Sword (1954)

"'Can you not feel it? The monstrous slumbering power locked in that iron, held by those runes so ancient even I cannot  read them - the power ravenous and resistless and - evil! there is a curse on that weapon, Skafloc. It will bring the bane of all within its might.' Her eyes were wide and frightened. She shivered with a cold not that of the dungeon. 'I think - Skafloc, I think it were best for you if you walled up that sword again.'"

Poul Anderson's 'The Broken Sword' was first published in the same year as Tolkien's 'The Fellowship Of The Ring'. Both books are landmarks in Fantasy in very different ways. Ably informed by their authors' passion for and study of Norse mythology and Icelandic sagas, the books set both the subject matter and the tone of the Fantasy genre from then until the present day. Yet the books could not be more different. Compared to the bulk and meandering of Tolkien's masterwork, 'The Broken Sword' clocks in at a remarkably swift 274 pages, and in place of Tolkien's gentility is a savagery and brutality that harks back to the original sagas and myths that both books draw on. While the tropes and modes that Tolkien set in stone would influence the bulk of mass market Fantasy produced for decades, Anderson's novel, though less well known, anticipates the grimdark nature of modern masters like George R. R. Martin and Joe Abercrombie, whilst providing an alternative template to Fantasy for those put off by Tolkien's twee-ness that would be taken up by the likes of Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison. 'The Broken Sword' is frequently regarded as a Fantasy classic, yet after reading Anderson's disappointing 'Tau Zero' I had been avoiding more of his work. Yet where 'Tau Zero' is clumsily written with poorly realised characters, 'The Broken Sword' sings off the page, and while it would be a stretch to paint it as overtly feminist, in this regard it is easily more progressive than 'Tau Zero' and 'Lord Of The Rings', having multiple strong female characters with agency. 

So good it's been a Fantasy Masterwork twice

'The Broken Sword' is about doom. Characters have to face the frequently bad consequences of their and their ancestors' actions, frequently hindered by supernatural forces much stronger than them. It opens with Orm, a viking who kills an Englander and all of his family in order to steal his land, save for an old witch who escapes. The witch, desiring revenge, directs a passing elf to steal Orm's newly-born son and replace him with a changeling, setting off a series of events that can only end in their mutual destruction. Skafloc, Orm's son, is brought up among the elves, learning their skills with fighting, hunting and magic. Valgard, his photo-negative changeling, his brought up as Orm's son, where his aggressive and surly nature isolate him from his family. Whilst Skafloc is beloved by the elves and goes with them to fight in their wars with the trolls, Valgard is manipulated by the witch into killing Orm and his sons and selling his daughters to the trolls in order to become one of their generals. The elves and the trolls are natural enemies and always at war, yet they can't let their fighting get too serious otherwise the gods and the giants will join in, leading to the end of the world. Yet the gods are already involved; on the day Skafloc was brought to Alfheim, a messenger of the gods presented him with a broken black blade, saying that one day he will have need of it. This is Tyrfing, forged by the giant Bolverk, a powerful weapon destined to play a role in Ragnarok.
   The book unfolds beautifully, events following on from one another in inevitable certainty towards Skafloc and Valgard's twinned fate. The book is driven by Anderson's beautiful prose, (something I genuinely never thought I'd write); using almost entirely words with Old English sources, full of inversions, and evocatively poetic, Anderson accurately summons the feel and texture of the Norse myths he draws from as much as the subject matter. Characters even frequently burst into verse, like the skalds, which of course Anderson knows the rules for and follows. Which is not to say he shies away from violence. 'The Broken Sword' features enough bloody battles and brutal violence to satisfy the most hardened of Abercrombie fans. It also rattles along at an incredibly sprightly pace, largely due to the fact that Anderson is incredibly focused on the main thread of the narrative. Lesser writers would have used the diversion of Skafloc and Mananaan's flight from the ice giants to pad the book out, whereas Anderson hints at wider adventures tangential to the main narrative, allowing our imagination to play within the gaps left by the main story and freeing him up from getting bogged down in trivialities while he's building to the climax. The book also manages to tie together multiple strands of mythology. Anderson lifts from Norse, Irish, Celtic and Christian mythology when he chooses, yet has the talent to tie it together into one coherent world.
   Of course none of this would work if the book didn't have strong characters to inhabit this coherent world. Skafloc and Valgard are perfect foils for each other, each cursed by being in the other's natural place, each manipulated by forces outside their control, ultimately their hatred for each other winds up being the last thing they have. The forbidden love between Skafloc and his sister Freda is all the more affecting because Freda is a well developed character in her own right. Freda is smart, resourceful and can handle herself in a fight, winding up with a fairly impressive troll body-count. In the end, she is the one with control over their relationship, and her tragic decision to return to Skafloc at the worst possible time is hers alone. Simirlarly, Leea, Skafloc's elf foster mother, though she is defined in the book largely through her relationship to Skafloc, but is cunning and wily. Leea and the rest of the female elves even get their turn to save the day, as they kill the trolls in their sleep and steal the keys to let Skafloc and the elf army into the castle. Leea and Freda even have conversations that aren't about Skafloc, allowing the book to technically pass the Bechdel test. Again it's not perfect but it's considerably better than 'The Lord Of The Rings' in this regard and many of the Fantasies that follow it. Then there is Tyrfing, the black blade, the broken sword itself, a weapon of evil that howls like a demon, must drink blood once it's been drawn, and ultimately turns on its user. The influence on Michael Moorcock would be clear even if his endorsement wasn't on the cover of the latest printing.

The 1971 Sphere reprint has a beautiful cover, but includes the Bowdlerised text in which Anderson himself made his own book less awesome. Both Fantasy Masterworks editions happily restore the original 1954 text.

In the end, the gods manipulate elves, trolls and humans alike for their own means. Odin has been driving everything from the start, to fix Tyrfing and to breed Skafloc and Freda's son, whom he claims from Freda as a price for saving Skafloc, so that he can be a hero who will wield the dangerous sword for the gods. This ties into the book's main theme of fate. All the characters are up against hugely powerful forces, there is nothing for them to do but to choose how they will face them. Having left 'The Broken Sword' open for a sequel, Anderson never wrote it. But it's enough that he wrote this great book, one that we can be thankful for both its own merits and its influence on generations of Fantasy writers to come.

Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop (1958)

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

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

Poul Anderson - Tau Zero (1970)

   There is a cliche about hard science fiction, that it concentrates on the science aspect at the expense of the character work necessary to make compelling fiction. This is frequently unfair to a genre that is at its heart about the human condition - great SF is resonant because, however weird and wonderful the world the author creates, the characters still reflect something recongisable back to the reader. This can allow SF writers to ask daring questions about the directions society may be heading in, but equally it can mean an enthusiastic and gifted writer can get bogged down in the technical details. Personally, I don't tend to read SF books based on their 'hardness'; as long as the ideas and characters are compelling I'm willing to allow some pretty flagrant flaunting of the laws of physics. However, I do appreciate authors doing their research, and if the writer can teach you about a new aspect of science whilst speculating entertainingly on how people will use that technology and how it will affect people's lives, you have the makings of a compelling story. Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is a fantastic example of hard science fiction taken to the level of high art. Robinson's research on everything from the physics and bioengeneering necessary to colonise Mars to pertinent aspects of psychology for space travel is endlessly fascinating in and of itself, but it's coupled to a complex and tightly woven narrative about personal and social change, told in evocative and lyrical prose. The Mars Trilogy refutes that old cliche about hard SF, but if you wanted a text-book counter-example to support it, you could do worse than point to Poul Anderson's 'Tau Zero'. 

The equation's on the cover because it's the main character.

   'Tau Zero' is a thoroughly frustrating read. It's built around a fascinating concept - the characters travel in Bussard ramjet, a spaceship which is able to accelerate to just below the speed of light, which allows it to travel the vast distances of light years between the stars within a relative shipboard time of a number of years.  The closer you get to the speed of light, the slower relative time passes for you compared to outside the ship. Or at least that's as well as I understand the concept. 

Our hero's first appearance

   Anderson is really good with describing these concepts in a simple and engaging way. Or at least I presume so, for all I know he may be grossly oversimplifying, but I'm willing to take this on trust. And the book takes this core idea to a very interesting place. During their travel, the ship's deceleration mechanism is damaged, which means that the ship has to keep on accelerating, driving tau further and further down, and so  over the course of a number of years relative time, the ship outlives the entire collapse and rebirth of the universe. 

   This is a wonderfully compelling idea. The concept of relativity is a difficult one to intellectualise, and there is a wonderful sense of vertigo induced by that unimaginable amount of time and vast interstellar distances, all shooting by in the blink of an eye. There is something both tragic and heroic about this little ship, this small pocket of surviving humanity hurtling onward into infinity, long after the very galaxy that birthed her has dwindled and died. Plus we see that Anderson is very much interested in the human element. He is concerned with the physical and psychological toll that such a flight into unknown space and time would have on the people themselves. All the elements are here for a really compelling tale. So what goes wrong?

   There are two main problems here - the characters themselves, and how the author treats these characters. Anderson's ship is populated by a diverse, international crew of astronauts and scientists, both male and female. So far, so good. Unfortunately, much of the characterisation is very broad. I'm sure the intention here was to depict a future where minds from all over the world work together in harmony for the good of science, as Kim Stanley Robinson does very effectively in 'Red Mars', but in 'Tau Zero' many of the characters are so broad as to be stereotypes. Also, there is a tendency for the characters most important to the plot to be American or European; several of the scientists with more exotic sounding names only appear in scenes when the author feels like we need more speaking parts to share the exposition. 

   And oh, the exposition. Being a fan of SF, I actually quite like exposition, and am all for a quick paragraph explaining everything nicely and concisely when otherwise you would be stumbling around and hinting at things that later wind up being crucially important to the plot. Unless you're, say, Gene Wolfe, and creating this kind of ambiguity is your intention. But Anderson deals in physical certainties, and boy do we struggle with some truly clunky pieces of dialogue, where characters explain things to other characters who already know these things for the benefit of the audience. You could design a good drinking game around the different variations of 'As You Know, Bob' dialogue he uses throughout the book.

   Then we have the characters themselves. Our protagonist is Constable Charles Reymont, a square-jawed, masculine, no-nonsense kind of guy, who, once the crisis occurs, manipulates everyone so he can basically run the ship, because someone has to keep a level head, especially with all these women faffing around with their emotions. Other characters occasionally grumble about his heavy-handed methods, but the narrative and the author go out of their way to justify every one of Reymont's actions, to the extent that he comes across as somewhat Mary Sue-ish. This could have been made more bearable by having some of the supporting characters have stronger viewpoints or motivations, and allowing the conflict between these characters to play out. Again, Kim Stanley Robinson does this very well in 'Red Mars', where all of the characters have their own motivations and differing political beliefs, and no one really gets favourable treatment from the author. Indeed, 'Red Mars' has a character, Frank Chalmers, who resembles Reymont both physically and in character, and in the course of the book his Machievellian attempts to gain more power and influence over his fellow shipmates and colonists very much comes back to bite him in the ass. It's hard not to wonder if Robinson had read 'Tau Zero' and written the character of Frank Chalmers as a direct response to Charles Reymont. In 'Salt' by Adam Roberts, the central conflict between the two groups of colonists begins on the ship, and the author is able to explore the motivations and the greivances on both sides of the conflict; indeed one of the strengths of Roberts' book is that it explores the hypocrisy and narrowsightedness of both sides as human beings rather than supporting one political agenda over another. Intershipmate tension is a great method to ratchet up the conflict in SF, but by pandering to his favourite character Anderson doesn't really get the most out of it.

   And then there's Anderson's treatment of the female characters, which is just lousy. All the female characters are nominally scientists, which is nice, but the narrative treats them either as rewards or incentives for the important male scientists, or producers of babies. There is actually a scene where the female First Officer basically has to have sex with the brilliant physicist to stop him from having a nervous breakdown, because they need him as a functional member of the crew. There's another scene where a woman selfishly jeopardises the safety of the ship  by secretly allowing herself to get pregnant. It's clear that Anderson shares his protagonist's old fashioned casual misogyny, and one gets the impression the only reason either of them tolerate the presence of women on the ship is because, when the Leonora Christine finally touches down, they're going to have to restart the human race somehow.    

   I found 'Tau Zero' an exasperating read. Here you have a truly engaging concept, and an author with the intelligence and enthusiasm to do the concept justice, stymied by uninspiring writing and casual misogyny. It's a real shame, because there were sections of the book I enjoyed very much, and I still think there is the core of something very good here, but by the end of the book I was struggling to engage with the fate of the Leonora Christine, because, as much as I'm always up for watching something circumnavigate all of space and time, I no longer cared what happened to the people inside that ship.