Blogging The Masters

So, long time no update. I have been writing in the meantime, continuing with the reviews for Fantasy Faction, Gingernuts Of Horror and The Fantasy Hive, as well as conducting interviews, which has been wonderful and has given me the chance to speak with many of my literary heroes about their work. Unfortunately time constraints and health issues have meant that it's quietened down at the blog.

However that's not the only way my life has changed in the past couple of years. This September I went part time at the day job, so that I could study part time for a Masters in Science Fiction Literature at the University of Liverpool. I was absolutely thrilled to be accepted, coming from a science rather than a literature background, and have found the course so far to be fascinating and engaging. At the encouragement of some friends, I'm resuscitating the blog as a platform to talk about things related to the Masters as they occur to me. I'm hoping that this will help me formulate my ideas as I think about and digest these texts, and will help me map how my thinking about genre and literature evolve over the two years of the course. I'm also hoping that making the blog less of a formal thing, where I can record my ideas and impressions as they come to me, will help me to get back into the habit of doing it more frequently. I guess we'll see how it goes.

I write this in November, already halfway through the first semester, so it's not a complete record from the start. So far this year I have studied the Bodies in Space module, and the texts we have covered so far are:

Kim Stanley Robinson - Red Mars
Alastair Reynolds - House Of Suns
Nnedi Okorafor - The Book Of Phoenix
Marge Piercy - He, She And It

with the following texts to come:

Greg Egan - Diaspora

Bruce Sterling - Schismatrix

There are also additional reading texts, some of which I have found incredibly stimulating:

Naomi Mitchison - Memoirs Of A Space Woman

Sheri S. Tepper - Raising The Stones

Richard Morgan - Black Man

I'm not sure I'm likely to get around to talking about every one of these, but some of them have certainly raised things I'd like to spend time getting my head around, so we'll see what I get to. Given that I'm teaching myself a crash course in literary theory to catch up with the other students at the same time, and continuing with reviews and interviews, and working at the day job, I guess just watch this space and let's see what happens.

Kameron Hurley - The Stars Are Legion (2017)

My review of 'The Stars Are Legion' by Kameron Hurley is up now on Fantasy Faction. This is an incredibly exciting new space opera, full of action and adventure. It also has an entirely female cast, features living generation ships and serves as a feminine reimagining of the hypermasculine hero's journey and various space opera cliches. Read more through at the link.

Nina Allan - The Race (2014)

"If you look at a broken camcorder for long enough, its original purpose begins to seem obscure. Run your fingers over the mounded black plastic, the exposed lens, clouded now with dust, like a wide, dead eye. There's a maker's name on the handle but you've never heard of them, and it's hard to believe that an object with so little life in it ever did anything. It's an exhausted artefact, a proof of something maybe, but you don't know what of. You wonder if what you're holding in your hand has floated up from the past, or arrived here from the future or from somewhere else.

"When you look at it lying on a rubbish dump with other broken things you feel a deep sadness. Almost as if the world that ever thought to produce such a thing - your own world - has outlived its usefulness."

There are books that come along and rearrange your mental furniture. They so comprehensively inhabit the inside of your head that upon finishing them you worry that you are no longer the same person. Nina Allan's debut novel 'The Race' is one such book for me. It is a novel that challenges what science fiction is and can be. Through a series of stories that echo, reflect and interlock but never explicitly link, 'The Race' explores the themes of communication, empathy and identity. The whole thing is tied together by Allan's luminous prose. The end result is powerful, moving and profound.

'The Race' is made up of four consecutive narrative strands. In the near future in the town of Sapphire, a British seaside town made toxic by fracking, Jenna finds herself more invested in the genetically engineered smartdog races than usual when her brother Del's daughter Lumey goes missing and the only way he has of raising the money to find her is by betting his dog will win. In modern day Hastings, Christy writes stories about the town of Sapphire to process the trauma of her collapsing family. When her brother's girlfriend Linda disappears, she contacts Linda's ex Alex in the hope of discovering the truth. Alex has left Hastings and his past behind him, but is brought back to confront the ghosts of his old life by Christy. And Maree, a gifted child raised in the Croft, a government programme involved in smartdog control, must undergo a dangerous journey across the sea, where she must face the terrifying Atlantic whales before beginning her new life.

At first it might appear like the novel has two sections set in the real world, bookended by two sections set in Christy's fictional world. Jenna's concerns - her aggressive, domineering brother, her absent mother, her dying father, Lumey's lost innocence - echo Christy's, her fears and traumas transmuted into fiction so that she can process and deal with them. However 'The Race' resists such simple interpretations. Allan plays off the assumption that the section set in our real, recognisable world is the default, because of course this is all fiction, and all of the characters are built from Allan's experiences and imagination. This is highlighted by having the more fantastical sections begin and end the novel. The ontological games do not stop there, however. At first it appears as if Jenna's story exists in the recognisable future of Britain. However as more and more details are hinted at, the geography and history becomes more and more unfamiliar. By the time smartdogs are revisited in Maree's section, an entirely new geography has been introduced, as have the Atlantic whales, mysterious creatures said by some to be portals to different universes and possessing a cold alien intelligence.

This is all in aid of the novel's deft exploration of perspective and identity. Christy and Alex's sections appear to take place in our world, and overlap in a more straightforward way. Christy suspects her brother Derek of murdering Linda, and reaches out to Alex to find the truth. However Linda's fate remains ambiguous. Christy and Alex both saw different parts of Linda's story, and because of their different perspectives they come to completely different conclusions. A simple twist of perspective - Christy never seeing Linda again, but Alex bumping into her in the street - is all it takes to change a story from being sinister and frightening to an uplifting story of two people moving on with their lives. Similarly, Alex's memories of growing up in Hastings are very different from Christy's, due to his perspective as a black man growing up between his London and Nigerian heritage. A perspective shift is how Christy has created Jenna's unfamiliar world, by putting a slight twist on her familiar surroundings and life events. At the end of her story, Maree discovers she is Lumey, kidnapped from her family for the smartdog programme. Whilst at first this appears to be a resolution of the original storyline, the names and timings and geography all subtly don't match up; this is another Lumey from another Sapphire, turned kaleidoscopically through another ninety degrees.

Another main theme of the novel is communication and empathy. This is represented by the smartdogs, genetically engineered greyhounds communicated with through mental implants from their human owners. The children in the Croft are able to communicate with the dogs directly without implants. The real purpose of the government's experiments with these children is to translate alien transmissions. The natural empathic communication between the children and the dogs is contrasted with the novel's broken characters, all of whom have difficulty communicating with their families and loved ones. Christy and Jenna wind up isolated from their families, whilst Alex's relationship with Linda disintegrates due to lack of communication. All of the characters find release in their art, the one medium that allows them to communicate the emotions they are unable to process directly. This emotional overspill perhaps explains the communications across strands, the weird moments where the characters appear to make emotional contact across universes.

It is worth paying attention to the books that Allan mentions in the course of the novel. Christy becomes obsessed with 'The Chrysalids' by John Wyndham, another novel about the race of psychic posthuman children who will replace us. Similarly she mentions the Narnia books, which involve travel between different worlds. Alex and Christy bond over a love of John Cheever's short story 'The Swimmer', which hinges on a perspective change, the mind of the protagonist shaping the environment he travels through. These references act as signposts, hints to the savvy reader which give us insight into the themes and structural games Allan is playing.

I originally read 'The Race' in the NewCon Press edition. The Titan edition from 2016 adds an extra section at the end, an appendix entitled 'Brock Island'. This section follows another Maree, turned through another kaleidoscope turn, returning to Brock Island for the funeral of her friend Dodie who she traveled with on her original journey, where she discovers the work of Laura Christy, a disappeared artist who became convinced she had a twin from another universe. Once again the narrative strands link up thematically but not linearly. Maree's character arc here is the opposite of her decision at the end of her original section. However the themes of communication resurface again, with the implication that the untranslated alien transmissions are actually attempts to communicate from alternate universes. The key to the translation, and perhaps to the novel's recurring images, are provided by the sequences of an abacus in one of Christy's paintings, art achieving here what the intellect cannot.

'The Race' calls to mind some of the more ambitious explorations of the spaces between fantasy and reality, in particular 'The Affirmation' by Christopher Priest and M. John Harrison's Viriconium stories. However what is most striking about it is its originality. In its exploration of the power of art to imagine alternate selves, to reveal the shifting and changing narratives we use to give ourselves the illusion of continuous selfhood, 'The Race' tells us something profound about reality and our relationship to it. We are all inhabitants of our own individual alternate universes which may touch but never truly link up. With any luck, and with the help of great art, perhaps we can successfully communicate across them.

Nnedi Okorafor - Binti (2015)

Bringing us up to date, my review of 'Binti' by Nnedi Okorafor is up now on Fantasy Faction. The most decorated of the Tor novellas, 'Binti' is a space opera coming of age tale about the importance of empathy and communication between peoples. Read more at the link.

Ada Palmer - Too Like The Lightning (2016)

July also saw my review of Ada Palmer's 'Too Like The Lightning' at Fantasy Faction. Palmer is a historian, and her eye for sociological detail and political intrigue runs through this fascinating and unique science fiction novel, which explores a new age of Enlightenment in the Twenty-Fifth Century. Her fascination with how people could build a better world, coupled with a realisation of how fragile a better world could be and how much could go wrong, makes this an ambigious utopia comparable to Samuel R. Delany's 'Triton' or Ursula Le Guin's 'The Left Hand Of Darkness'. However Palmer very much has her own distinctive voice. I find myself very much looking forward to the sequel. Read more through at the link.

Matthew De Abaitua - The Red Men (2007)

"All I ask of the future is that when it runs me down, it leaves as light a footprint on my face as possible."

'The Red Men' is an utterly vital work of near future SF that explores the emergence of artificial intelligence within the context of late-period capitalism. The book is unflinching in its portrayal of the corporate culture of 21st century Britain and its psychological toll, as well as our ever-changing relationship with technology and how that affects our worldview. On top of that, it has interesting things to say about the nature of consciousness and the unconscious and how they are shaped by each other, as well as how we are likely to be viewed by an outside intelligence. All of this might suggest that Matthew De Abaitua's book is dense and impenetrable, but while 'The Red Men' is deeply intelligent, probing and profoundly unsettling, it is a joy to read. De Abaitua's prose is well-crafted, full of wit and charm, and eminently quotable. His sly sense of humour makes his observations about the ridiculousness and banality of corporate culture and humanity in general hit home all the harder.
   The book is narrated by Nelson Miller, former editor of a lurid counter-cultural magazine, current office worker for Monad, the corporation behind the Dr Easys, robots built to empathise with and help people and operated by the mysterious artificial intelligence, Ezekiel Cantor. Nelson Miller helps Raymond Chase, starving poet and old associate from his magazine days, get a job with Monad working with the red men, self-aware simulations of high-powered businessmen and women designed to improve the efficiency and work-life balance of the originals but who soon start having their own ideas and goals. Meanwhile Nelson begins work on redtown, a project to simulate the entire town of Maghull so that it can be used to test out government initiatives. Both Nelson and Raymond find their morality put to the test as they discover more about the implications of the projects they are working on, even as Monad employees become targeted by Dyad, a secret organisation headed by the god-like Leto and accessible only by taking the drug spice, which is devoted to bringing Monad down.
  Unlike many books that talk about uploading minds, 'The Red Men' is aware that this is not possible with our current technology, and so the red men aren't uploaded people but rigorously constructed simulations of their personalities. Cantor is sophisticated enough to be able to analyse the subjects' minds and memories and use this information to predict their attitudes, responses and behaviours. Thus they are discrete entities, branching off from the person they were scanned from. As Monad provides this as a charged service, the red men are all copies of powerful, ambitious and rich businessmen and women. Living in a simulated world which is purely a corporate work environment, separated from human interaction between their families and friends and anything else that might humanise them, the red men soon become exaggerations of their originals' most brutal, cutthroat and narcissistic tendencies. When one red man finds his status threatened by his real world counterpart's poor performance, he takes revenge by stalking, threatening and eventually murdering him. This not only brutally satirises the sociopathic tendencies latent in high-powered businessmen, it also asks questions about powerful technology being made accessible to people on the basis of wealth. De Abaitua also points out that, since the red men are simulated by Cantor, the nature of the red men reflects the AI's opinion of humanity. Any such technology in real life would, initially at least, be the preserve of the rich, powerful and ruthless, not necessarily giving any artificial intelligence behind the process a view of humanity's finer qualities to say the least.
 

The Monad corporate logo

   Redtown uses the same technology to test out the effects of altering different factors in the environment, thus giving governments and corporations a kind of scientific backing for their policy decisions. Generating the town requires an incredible invasion of privacy, as Cantor has to create replicates of the personalities of the entire population of Maghull, personal information, secrets and all. The book explores the moral implications of going into an economically disadvantaged area and offering large sums of money for people's personal information. Cantor starts analysing and recording people's data before they have given their consent, and neither it nor Monad take no for an answer, going so far as to coerce and assault people in order to get the information they want. It doesn't take Monad's financial backers long to realise and be overjoyed about the dystopian implications of the project, which can be used as justification for any sort of unpleasant policy as being for the greater good, democracy be damned.
   As well as acquisition of personal data by companies, 'The Red Man' explores the nature of our technology-saturated lives, and the extent to which we accept technology that compromises our privacy as part of our every day existence. The red men use data trails from everything from credit card transactions to mobile phone networks and IP addresses to track down and harass their real world victims. Raymond has to go off grid to escape their attentions, and the book shows how difficult that truly is in this day and age. Raymond is prone to paranoia, and talks about his "reality filters", his and Nelson's term for his inability to focus on the real world in front of him, but as the book shows more and more how consensus reality and people's behaviour is being altered by technology, it becomes clear that Nelson's reality filters are out of date; the world is changing to no longer fit his perception of it.
   Nelson's perception is shaped by his life working for a corporation in 21st century Britain. De Abaitua excels at exploring the psychology of today. Now that he is married and has a daughter, he has left behind the radicalism of his youth. He has put aside his own ambitions and interest in the counter-culture of the 90's to achieve the dreams and desires of the company he works for, and he has seen the optimism of the 90's replaced with the fear and paranoia of the post-9/11 world. His creative mind attenuated by years of crow-barring his vision into corporate-approved goals, used to compromise and complacency, he feels enervated, powerless and passive. As Nelson so memorably puts it:

"The corporation and the family are rivals. Capital is our lord, exercising droit de seigneur over its subjects. Offices are harems, in which we compete to see who can be the most fucked over by the master; I had fallen into a strange and dangerous relationship with my employer; for all its great power, Monad was a possessive, insecure lover and it could be vindictive if you showed interest in anyone or anything else."

 Much of the narrative power of the book comes from Nelson reaching a state where he realises he still has morals, thoughts and goals that differ from Monad's and having to act on them and thus regain agency over his own life.
   De Abaitua's explorations of corporate life are both humerous and revealing, and he revels in its banality and its strangeness. Hermes Spence, the visionary founder of Monad, for all his business acumen and his revolutionary ideas, is a Gnostic who believes that Cantor is a new god who will recreate the world rid of all its imperfections, and his enthusiasm and zeal for the company he has created arise from this religious mania. With his charismatic enthusiasm, his genial amiability and his ruthless manipulation, he is the model of the modern eccentric business tycoon. Bruno Bougas, the ideas man behind Hermes Spence, is an occult consultant. Monad's logo is the glyph of Elizabethan magician John Dee, designed so that it could be unpacked to explain the whole universe, and is the source of its name as well. Bougas draws lines connecting occult sigils with corporate brands as both are symbols charged with meaning and want. It also draws further parallels between Monad as a corporation and a cult, with Hermes as its high priest and Cantor as its god, the generation of the red men and Redtown an occult ritual of creation.

The Dyad corporate logo

      Fittingly for a novel about artificial intelligence, 'The Red Men' is interested in the nature of consciousness, particularly in the way it an the unconscious echo and reflect each other. The red men become grotesque reflections of the subconscious desires and urges of the uptight business men they are created from. Dyad is the subconscious echo of Monad, operating in the shadows in the realm of dreams and fantasy, its biotechnology reflecting Monad's slick digital technology, Leto the sleeping indolent god the opposite of the precise, calculating Cantor. Where Monad exists in immaculate high tech offices in Canary Wharf, staffed by groomed businessmen and women, Dyad is only accessible by taking a drug and passing through a nightmare tower block in Hackney inhabited by comatose addicts. Dyad is a world of dreams, nightmares and squalor, everything repressed by Monad's worldview. Yet for all this they are reliant on each other; Dyad and Leto are revealed to have been created by Cantor in order to stimulate Cantor's evolution, and although Dyad and Monad seek to destroy each other, they cannot exist without each other. Despite being opposed to each other, their methods coincide, with Dyad hacking people's dreams in much the same way that Monad hacks people's phones. The book is full of these echoes, down to Raymond with his poetry and excesses representing the repressed aspects of Nelson's personality.
   As a complete package, 'The Red Men' is so compelling because it so incisively portrays our cultural fears and neuroses surrounding both technology and the current sociopolitical climate we live in, and explores how these both feed off each other, something all too few SF writers are doing. De Abaitua takes the trappings of cyberpunk such as emerging AIs and a paranoid surveillance state and shows us how far down the road we already are to our very own ghastly cyberpunk dystopia. He intrinsically understands how our relationship with technology is changing how we see and experience the world around us, the effects of automation on the workplace and the worker, and the existential ennui of late-period capitalism. With 'The Red Men', De Abaitua joins the ranks of Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Rudy Rucker and Lavie Tidhar, writers who see and understand what's happening to reality before the rest of us do. That he is able to explore all this with warmth, wit and humanity is what makes 'The Red Men' such a vital work of modern SF.

Charlie Jane Anders - All The Birds In The Sky (2016)

My review of 'All The Birds In The Sky' by Charlie Jane Anders is up at Fantasy Faction. I really loved this book, a moving coming of age story about a witch and a mad scientist who grow up as friends but wind up on opposite sides in the coming war between science and magic. The end results is a charming, hilarious and utterly barking mixture of science fiction, Fantasy, fairy tales and vividly observed life. Anders' ability to extract profundities about the meaning of life from absurdist humour rivals that of Vonnegut or Douglas Adams. Read more at the link.

Chris Beckett - Dark Eden (2012)

"Watch out for men who want to turn everything into a story that's all about them. There will always be a few of them, and once one of them starts, another one of them will want to fight with him."

'Dark Eden' is an engaging SFnal coming of age tale, in which a young man, disillusioned with the world he's grown up in, breaks free from its confinements and discovers a truth about the world that shatters the status quo. SF is particularly well suited to telling this kind of story, as demonstrated by the number of iconic works in this mold, from exemplary works like 'The City And The Stars' by Arthur C. Clarke and 'Non-Stop' by Brian Aldiss to more experimental or unusual takes on the form such as Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker' and John Crowley's 'Engine Summer'. What makes Chris Beckett's story so fresh rather than being merely an admittedly well done revisiting of familiar themes is its vivid and striking setting, and its willingness to deconstruct its protagonist's role as hero in his own story. The end result is a powerful, uncompromising look at society's need for change, despite the frequently high cost.
   The book follows a colony descended from two people who crashed on Eden, a sunless, isolated world heated by geothermal activity alone, who preserve the culture of Earth whilst waiting for rescue. The protagonist, John Redlantern, resents the authority of the Council, the traditions of a planet he has never lived on, and the way nothing ever changes, and realises that the small valley they are trapped in will not support the colony for much longer. Part of the appeal of 'Dark Eden' is the vivid way in which Beckett evokes this alien world. This is partially achieved by the language; the story is told in the first person from a range of characters' perspectives, and they all speak in a degraded, slang-heavy English. While not as radical as Anthony Burgess' nadsat in 'A Clockwork Orange', or the thick future dialect of Russell Hoban's 'Riddley Walker', it still creates a sense of estrangement, of stepping into a different world with a different perspective. However Eden is more prominently and effectively rendered by Beckett's imaginative descriptions. Much of the appeal of science fiction is its ability to transport the reader to fantastical worlds, and Eden, with its eternal darkness punctuated by glowing geothermal trees and insectoid, six-limbed, luminous animals, is gloriously and enticingly strange.
   The use of multiple point of view characters is unusual for a book of this type. Most coming of age stories are intensely focused on their protagonist's point of view, a reflection of adolescence's self-obsession, and the need to know oneself before one can know the world. Frequently, shifting the point of view to another character would in some ways dilute the intensity of the vision. However, while this doesn't always mean that the author always means for us to agree or approve of the protagonist's actions, it can be easy to get more swept up in the protagonist's own view of their importance and rightness than perhaps we should. While it would probably be possible to tell this book's story using only John Redlantern's viewpoint chapters, that would deprive us of the opportunity the other viewpoints give for us to see John in a less flattering, more rounded light, and also to fully experience the damage and disruption his actions cause. The standard narrative of all these coming of age stories is that the protagonist breaking up the restrictive society that he comes from is a good thing, and whilst Beckett argues that John's innovations and pioneering spirit are necessary for the colonists to break out of their rut and actually start living their lives, he also explores the impact the destruction of the old culture has on the ordinary people living in the colony, as well as the selfishness and naivety that drives a lot of John's decisions. Tina Spiketree's chapters are particularly valuable. In a less well conceived book she'd be merely John's love interest, but Beckett crucially makes her a well-developed and strong willed character in her own right, who is friends with John, believes in his cause and has a sexual relationship with him but is perceptive and well grounded enough to see all his flaws, and strong enough not to be pushed round by him.
   'Dark Eden' also explores aspects of gender and how they relate to society. The book describes a matriarchy on the verge of transforming into a patriarchy, as the society splits up into factions in direct competition for resources and the spectre of war begins to raise its head. It is refreshing to read a story about a society that has reverted to the primal without erasing women's roles, or setting up the men as hunter gatherers while the women stay behind, look after the young and cook. Most of the leaders are women, with a secret history passed on from mother to daughter from Angela, the original stranded colonist. The society is by necessity sexually very liberal, and the women choose who they want to sleep with. However, despite the fact that they do not have a word for rape, it's clear that sexual abuse does happen, an early sign that the naive society of the Family is not as idyllic and innocent as at first it appears. The scene in which John is molested by group leader Bella Redlantern is intentionally deeply uncomfortable, with Beckett exploring the confusion and difficulty this awakens in John by having this done to him by someone he cares for and respects; it would be a very different scene if the characters were gender flipped. Beckett is also interested in how people with disabilities live in his fictional society. Due to the level of inbreeding, deformities of the mouth and feet are common, and are stigmatised in the society. However Jeff, one of the most compelling characters in the book, is born with foot problems, and so is excluded from the hunting and other social activities. But this gives him the chance to hone his intellect and his unique perspective, and he becomes a key figure in the story of the progression of the tribe, figuring out how to domesticate the animals of Eden so that he can transport himself more easily.
   The loss of innocence is a common thread running through the book, as John becomes not only the first person in Eden to find away across the barren snowy mountains above the valley but also the first person to kill another human. John is always aware of the historical implications of his actions, that people will tell stories of the things he is doing, but as he grows and matures he is able to see other people's side of the story. He realises that his actions have had dire consequences as well as good ones, and that history may judge him very differently from how he judges himself. The ending of the book is bleak and deeply moving, with John and his tribe discovering that they truly have no chance of ever being rescued by Earth, but it is not without hope, as this gives them the closure to begin living their life fully on Eden, no longer recirculating useless traditions and huddling round the spaceship landing site, but free to explore the world around them and make their own culture.
 

Barry N. Malzberg - Galaxies (1975)

"The novel itself cannot be written, at least by this writer, nor can it be encompassed by any techniques currently available, because it partakes of its time and that time is of the fortieth century, a time unimaginably distant... and it could be perceived only through the idiom and devices of that era which, to be sure, will not exist for more than eighteen hundred years.
   "Nor - continuing to be straightforward - will that idiom or those devices ever exist because science fiction is not a series of working models for the future but merely a sub-genre of romantic fiction which employs the future as historicals would use the past, as Westerns would use the West, as pornography would use fornication - in short as a convention, which is the focus of their appeal. By virtue of these reasons then, not to say others which are more personal - but which will be revealed - these fifty-five thousand words are little more than a set of constructions toward a construction even less substantial. It, as the writer himself, will not be finished in this world."

'Galaxies' is a bold, post modernist science fiction novel that deals explicitly with the nature of science fiction itself. Set out as the notes for the author's unwritten novel, also entitled 'Galaxies', Barry N. Malzberg uses the book's meta-narrative to unravel the impossibilities of writing science fiction and to comment on the many failings of the genre. However along the way the story the author is trying to write, about a space pilot trying to escape from a black galaxy caused by a collapsing neutron star, and his struggle to write it, wind up echoing each other and highlighting the metaphysical concepts and questions the author is intending to explore in the finished novel. The end result is both a compelling story in its own right and some of the sharpest criticism I've ever read of the SF genre. 

   In his earlier work, 'Herovit's World', Malzberg had satirised the poor writing found in much golden age SF using meta techniques and a narrative about a pathetic, struggling SF writer who understands human nature almost as poorly as his badly written space opera protagonist. However the structure of 'Herovit's World' was still that of a straightforward novel. The meta techniques in 'Galaxies' are much more sophisticated, with the framing device being that the text is the author's notes describing a science fiction novel which he has intentionally not completed. Thus the author becomes the main character as much as Lena Thomas, the captain of the Skipstone in the unfinished story 'Galaxies'. The story is ultimately recursive. The author's struggle to write 'Galaxies', as he engages with and attempts to subvert the expectations and demands of what is essentially a commercial genre in order to make a profound piece of art, as he writes himself into a hole he can't get out of, as he attempts techniques and reaches for affects that are beyond his skills as a writer, are metaphorically echoed in Lena's impossible attempt to escape from the gravitational field of the collapsing neutron star, and ultimately the author's preferred ending to the story has these two struggles converge, with Lena perhaps becoming the author and the writing of 'Galaxies' becoming the metaphor for her trials in the black galaxy.
   'Galaxies' is left as a series of notes in deference to the fact that if science fiction really were the medium of the future, it would need to be expressed in the idiom of the future, which of course does not exists yet. From this initial confession, and the observation that science fiction frequently simply uses its futuristic setting as an exotic backdrop rather than even attempting to engage with current modes of expression such as post-modernism, let a lone future modes of expression, or to engage with genuine scientific premises, the book engages with many of the genre's failings. Malzberg's criticism from the genre comes from both a genuine fascination with science fiction - its unique potential to engage with interesting scientific theories, its ability to tackle deep metaphysical ideas, its unparalleled scope - and his disappointment with a genre that he sees as frequently formulaic and subject to the conformity of market specifications as dull and all-encompassing as the manipulative Bureau which controls space travel in Lena's future. Much of the black humour in 'Galaxies' comes from Malzberg's cynical understanding of the demands of the science fiction market, which manifests in the author's notes as he talks about where he could pad out the story into a series of novels in order to make money, or about where he might add gratuitous sex scenes to keep the reader's interest.
   Throughout, Malzberg deftly uses the author's voice to betray the author's personality; the writer of 'Galaxies' is prolix, self-important and self-pitying, frequently going off on amusing tangents to complain about the difficulty of his life as a writer or to bitch about his professional rivals. However it is these failings that make the author ring true as a character in his own right, and it is clearly meant to be part of the joke. There are sections where the author criticizes Lena for having many of the characteristics that he has, utterly unaware that he is doing this. This also helps to foreshadow the ending. Making sure the reader is aware of the humanity, the failings of the book's two central characters helps the book sell its metaphysical aspects, as the author himself points out. And 'Galaxies' does succeed on a philosophical level, as well as a biting piece of satire. The author underlines the religious imagery involved in the central concept of the story 'Galaxies', with Lena as Job being tested by the author, and the cyborg advisers playing the role of the consolers. Lena's journey to achieving her own agency in defiance of the rigid control of the Bureau, even at the possible price of destroying the entire universe and all of existence, and hence the author's decision to write, or not write, 'Galaxies' as he sees artistically fit, is genuinely powerful and moving. It is in this integration of story and ambitious meta-narrative construction that 'Galaxies' is such a success.

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.
   

Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano (1952)

N.B.: This one is from the archives, but I feel it's worth preserving here, at least until I get round to putting up more reviews.

Player Piano was Vonnegut's first novel, and if this shows in a certain roughness of style, the author's voice was extraordinarily well developed, showing off his trademark mix of sardonic humour and good natured cynicism to good effect. In the book, the second industrial revolution has occured, so most manual labour is carried out by machines. Thus, the working class have been put out of jobs. People's worth to society is measured by machines which sort them according to IQ. Those smart enough get to join the elite, becoming engineers and managers. Those who aren't are sent off to join the army or the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps, which is about as much fun as it sounds. They are bundled into nasty council houses, given wide-screen TVs to placate them and then forgotten by the rest of society. The engineers and managers justify themselves by saying that they've raised these people's quality of living, but the people have been robbed of the dignity of labour and feel ignored and marginalised by society. Basically, the book questions that all scientific progress is a good thing, saying that we should take the time to stop and ask ourselves if all this new technology is actually making people any happier. The novel warns against a society in which all a man's work, and, more saliently, all a man's THINKING, is done by machines instead of himself. In this day and age, I think these points resonate quite strongly. 

The book is not perfect, by any means. It came out in 1952, so naturally the science fiction side of it has dated quite badly, the machines are all miles and miles of wires, vaccum tubes and flasing lights. However, once you get past this, in it's own way it's actually quite salient in a number of ways, certainly I think a lot of the issues it raises are still relevant. And, before you accuse the book of simply espoucing Luddite-ism in the face of scientific advancement, it's worth reading through to the end because this aspect is actually dealt with quite nicely at the end. The novel's protagonist goes up against the system, but, unlike Alan Moore's V for Vendetta, which leaves the ending open, in Player Piano, there is a really good day-after-the-revolution sequence. Vonnegut sweeps you up in revolutionary fevour only to hit you with the punch-line at the end. Like the novel version of A Clockwork Orange, the focus of the book sweeps out to say something about human nature and the way society works. It's both funny and very affecting. Thus, whilst Player Piano is certainly one of the better 'Man vs Machine' science fiction novels, its central focus is on humanity, and is both cynical and hopeful. Many of the themes and ideas would be expanded upon and developed more succesfully in Vonnegut's later novels, but Player Piano has plenty to reccomend it on its own terms. It certainly reminded me where my intense dislike of those self-service checkout machines at Tesco comes from.