Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake (1997)

"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anyone tell you any different!"

'Timequake' is Kurt Vonnegut's last novel, and appropriately enough it is a novel obsessed with the past. Although it lacks the violent inspiration of his earlier works, it has enough of the trademark Vonnegut charm, wit and worldly wisdom to act as a fitting bookend to his novel writing career.
   The central conceit is that on the 13th of February 2001, the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Unsure whether it should continue on expanding or just call it quits and  collapse, it shrinks back ten years. The end result is that everyone has to relive the past ten years on autopilot, all free will removed, making exactly the same stupid mistakes all over again. The main thread of the plot involves Kilgore Trout, homeless out of print SF writer and Vonnegut's alter ego, helping people deal with free will kicking in after ten years on autopilot with the timeless advice, "You were sick, but you're well again, and there's work to do." The timequake is a witty and apt metaphor for the sheer dismal-ness of the 90s, the effect of finding yourself in a world where people have decreasing amounts of autonomy over their own lives, where pop culture is terminally eating itself and regurgitating the same old ideas over and over again. In fact post-timequake apathy, which Vonnegut describes so well here, is increasingly indicative of our own times as much as anything else.  
   Ever since developing his signature style in 'Cat's Cradle' and 'Slaughterhouse Five' Vonnegut has tended towards unconventionally structured stories where much of the joy comes from the narrative voice and the philosophical diversions it makes. Vonnegut's frank, conversational style has allowed him to effortlessly inhabit a range of very different characters in his past novels, but whatever persona he's using his deadpan humour and warm humanism always shine through. 'Timequake' is like this but more so, with Vonnegut pretty much narrating as Vonnegut. He admits in the introduction that the book is basically a salvage operation, with the original book focusing more on the actual timequake story. The end result is that the narrative is frequently pushed to the side, as Vonnegut uses the themes and ideas raised by the skeleton of the original abortive work to reminisce on his past life in general and dispense worldly wisdom with that unlikely mix of sardonic humour and warm compassion, in the way that only Vonnegut can.

Pictured: sardonic humour and warm compassion

   Spiraling out from the story's central idea, Vonnegut reflects on the illusion of free will and how different people cope with this, leading him to look back on the various people he's know in his life, the circumstances and luck that lead to him taking the path he did through life, and the changing modern times he finds himself in. Fans of Vonnegut's work will notice several themes running through his work that are revisited here. Vonnegut remembers his experiences in World War II and ruminates on the futility of war and humanity's potential for self-destruction, as he does in 'Slaughterhouse Five' and 'Cat's Cradle', he expounds on the virtues of a supportive network of friends and family, one of the major themes of the underrated 'Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!', and he reflects on aging and death as he does in 'Deadeye Dick' and 'Hocus Pocus'. While this 'greatest hits' approach nicely ties together many of Vonnegut's major themes and concerns, it does point to my main problem with this otherwise very good book: these are all ideas Vonnegut has explored at greater length and developed more fully elsewhere.
   However, one would have to be truly churlish to hold this against 'Timequake' when the book itself is so full of warmth and laughter. Vonnegut is, after all, one of those authors that it is a pleasure to just listen to him ramble on. And 'Timequake' rambles beautifully, weaving together many laugh out loud moments with genuine pathos, and building to a suitably elegiac conclusion, seeing as it is the great man's last book.While it may not stand as the man's best work, that's a harsh grading curve to hit anybody with, and it provides Vonnegut with an opportunity to see Kilgore Trout, and by extension himself, out with style.

Dan Abnett - Embedded (2011)

"They'll blame this on minerals. Well, great. It isn't the fucking ground's fault, right? It's probably some giant domino effect. Some asshole somewhere said the wrong thing to another asshole at some fucking summit, and then some other asshole didn't get his preferential deal, and so he cut the profits on yet another asshole's contract and then... and then... and then... and it's a giant rolling ball of shit coming downhill and sweeping everything up. And that giant rolling ball of shit's called history, Bloom, and we were standing in its fucking way."

Greyscale AND CGI on the same cover? You spoil us, Angry Robot

'Embedded' by Dan Abnett is a stodgily written military SF story that nevertheless includes some competently written action sequences. Its central conceit, about a journalist embedding his consciousness into a soldier so that he can get the inside scoop on a military cover-up operation, is intriguing and plausibly played out, and at times the novel flirts with some interesting ideas, which it never really makes the most of. The end result is uninspiring.
   One of the problems with the book is our protagonist, Lex Falk, an obnoxious journalist who is ready to sleepwalk his way through another assignment until he's denied access by the military, at which point he decides it's personal. The idea of a journalist not being this idealistic seeker of the truth is healthily cynical, and to be fair to Abnett Falk does undergo some character development along the way, ending up willing to risk his life to get the truth out because the people deserve to hear it. But unfortunately Falk's characterisation is just so annoying it's hard to enjoy spending time in the man's head. One doesn't need to sympathise, share the views of or indeed like a protagonist for a novel to work, and one of the benefits of fiction is that it asks us to empathise with those we might otherwise not, but for this to work the character does need to be compelling. Falk, with his sense of entitlement, his sleaziness and his casual misogyny, is simply unpleasant.
   Another problem with the book is the writing. Abnett's prose is clunky at best, and he is fond of cutesy neologisms, such as "presearch", or "wealthy" as a term meaning 'well', that are not nearly as clever as he thinks they are. The worst offender is "freeking®", the sponsored swearing that some of the characters have inserted into their speech. The idea of sponsored swearing is marginally witty, though the first time I saw it in writing I wanted to hurl the book across the room, and combined with 'wealthy', and the fact that the book sets up Space Communists as the bad guys, I was kind of hoping there would be some kind of satirical pay-off to having these in the obviously American soldiers' lexicon, as a way of telling us something about two contrasting cultures. However this never happens, these words are just there, glaring, gimmicky and serving no narrative purpose whatsoever.
   Having said that, once Falk is implanted into the soldier Neil Bloom's head, the book finds its footing a bit more and the plot finally kicks into gear. It's just a shame it takes almost a hundred pages before this happens. Bloom gets shot in the head, removing his conscious control and leaving Falk in charge of his body. There's an actually pretty great scene in which Falk slowly comes back to consciousness in Bloom's mutilated body and staggers up like a zombie. Through the rest of the book, Falk has to rely on Bloom's training to get him through the day. This is the real meat of the book, that soldiers train so hard so that they can internalise these actions so when they're dropped into combat situations, the autonomic reflexes take over, and they can trust these reflexes and their training to help them survive.
   What follows is by far the most successful part of the book, as Falk, in charge of Bloom's body, and the remaining soldiers in his platoon, must work together to survive. There is a tightly written, engaging action sequence in which one of the soldiers panics, leading to the death of many of the others. In this part of the book, Abnett at times approaches the gritty, from the ground view, as well as the violence and meaningless death, the horror, sadness and frustration at it all that we encounter in a truly great piece of war fiction like, say, The Forever War. However, as well as being a lesser writer, Abnett also lacks Haldeman's unwavering focus and purpose in writing about war. This comes across in Abnett's tone; he is never able to achieve the sincerity of Haldeman's writing. It also manifests in how easily Abnett lets his characters off the hook. Multiple soldiers all swear that they're going to kill the soldier who made the mistake, and many of them are gearing up to, but his reckless actions kill him before Abnett's characters are forced to make that moral choice. Similarly, at the end, Falk is only able to talk his way out of the situation due to a coincidence that stretches suspension of disbelief, though to be fair to Abnett I think having the military kill everyone before they could spill the secret would have perhaps been too cynical a move. 'Embedded' also spreads its philosophy pretty thinly on the ground, although the discussion quoted above, in which the soldiers make the point that war is frequently fought for the petty reasons of the rich and powerful, while the soldiers do all the dirty work, is well taken.
   'Embedded' is a mess and something of a missed opportunity, but for all its faults it does show the occasional flash of brilliance.  Unfortunately the one-note characters and poor quality of the prose drag it down, but these are things that can be fixed when a writer develops. In particular if Abnett had found something more concrete to hang that middle section of his novel on, 'Embedded' might have turned into something special.

Michel Faber - Under The Skin (2000)

"The thing about vodsels was, people who knew nothing whatsoever about them were apt to misunderstand them terribly. There was always the tendency to anthropomorphize. A vodsel might do something which resembled a human action; it might make a sound analogous with human distress, or make a gesture analogous with human supplication, and that made the ignorant observer jump to conclusions.
   "In the end, though, vodsels couldn't do any of the things that really defined a human being. They couldn't siuwil, they couldn't mesnishtil, they had no concept of slan. In their brutishness, they'd never evolved to use hunshur; their communities were so rudimentary that hississins did not exist; nor did these creatures seem to see any need for chail, or even chailsinn.
   "And, when you looked into their glazed little eyes, you could understand why."

Normally at this point I would bitch about film tie-in covers, but this one is actually pretty tastefully done.

'Under The Skin' by Michel Faber is a striking piece of role reversal and an unflinching look at the ease with which sentient people can be dehumanised. It is at once an impressive piece of SF imagination and a necessary examination of humanity's cruelty, and beautifully written to boot. The novel follows Isserley, a member of a race of dog-like aliens surgically altered to appear like an attractive human female so that she can pick up unwary human male hitchhikers who are drugged, castrated and de-tongued and processed into voddissin, a ludicrously expensive delicacy on Isserley's homeworld. Her normal routine is interrupted when Almis Vess, the idle rich son of the company in charge, visits the farm and sets free some of the human prisoners, claiming that humans are people too and shouldn't be eaten.

   One of the most striking aspects of the novel is the extent to which humans are othered. The novel is told in the third person from Isserley's point of view, so she refers to her species as humans, human beings and people, whilst referring to Homo sapiens as vodsels. This device not only cleverly reminds us of Isserley's alien perspective, but indicates how she and her people view us, not as intelligent beings with autonomy and rights, but as animals for the slaughter. This is further emphasised when Faber describes the processing and holding pens at the farm, and Isserly reflects that it's easy to mistake the vodsels for human when they are wearing clothes and walking around and talking, but it's possible to see their true animal nature once they have had their tongues and clothes removed, have been fattened up and are locked up in pens with their own filth. This of course reflects some of the thought processes that allows real world atrocities to happen in reality, whereby concentration camp guards can come to see their victims as less than human and so undeserving of basic human rights. It's a powerful and disturbing scene.

   But 'Under The Skin' doesn't limit itself to portraying just one kind of systematic inhumanity. Gradually, from the details Isserley reveals about her past life, her betrayed hope and dreams and her fears, we learn a lot about her people and the dystopian world they live in. Her home planet is uninhabitable on the surface, so everyone is forced to live underground. Their society is strictly stratified, with the rich living sheltered lives of luxury, using their power and prestige to manipulate naive young girls like Isserley used to be into sleeping with them for protection, while the vast majority work themselves into an early grave in dire, poisonous conditions. Deftly and in the background, without resorting to any moments of chunky exposition, Faber builds up a truly horrifying picture of a culture built entirely on exploitation and privilege that has destroyed its own ecosystem through its own greed and hubris, a dark mirror to our own. Of course this is a people that would have no problem with eating another sentient people.

   Amlis Vess, for all his professed compassion for the vodsels, is ultimately just a tourist. He admits that at the end of the day he's probably only going on this grand crusade just to annoy his father, who wants him to inherit the family business. Isserley quite rightly calls him out on his privilege a number of times, but she's hopelessly in love with him. This blinds her to the fact that he's perfectly happy to chase a trendy cause like vodsel welfare whilst doing nothing to alleviate the hellish plight of the working class on their homeworld, or indeed the ingrained sexism that is clearly still a problem there.

   It is perhaps in its feminism that 'Under The Skin' is at its most angry, and it is here that Faber reserves the book's most caustic satire, for Isserley herself is a victim as well. Having been through extensive and painful surgery to look like a completely different species, she is wracked by constant pain and in a constant state of extreme dysmorphia. The surgeon took Isserley's image from a magazine, so she has ludicrously oversized breasts that give her incredible back pains. Her face, arms and legs are all covered with surgical scars, but none of this matters to the men she picks up, who simply see a large pair of breasts. Faber mines some truly dark humour out of the idea that this would be enough to entrap horny males. The only parts of the book that aren't told from Isserley's point of view are from the point of view of the males she picks up in her car. The men, not even knowing that Isserley is an alien, other and objectify her as much as Isserley's people do to us vodsels. This is a book about meat markets, after all. Isserley's job is pretty much to act as live bait. Not only is she objectified by the vodsels, she gets this treatment reflected back at her by her own people as well. All her colleagues at the farm are male, and they patronise her to her face and smirk and make crude jokes behind her back, while her bosses put her in a situation where she is exposed to the risk of sexualised violence as part of her job. Small wonder that she winds up having to remind her people that she is the same as they are under the skin.  

   

   

 

M. John Harrison - The Kefahuchi Tract Book Two: Nova Swing (2006)

"How do we know what we come back to is the same?"

'Nova Swing' is less a direct sequel to 'Light', the first book in the Kefahuchi Tract sequence, than a variation on a theme. Whereas that book played with golden age space opera tropes, 'Nova Swing' focuses down its attention on one work in particular: Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's excellent 'Roadside Picnic', quoted in the preface. The Kefahuchi Tract, the negative space wedgie from the first book, is falling to earth, and sections of it have landed on the nearby planets. The areas where the Tract has touched down, event sites, are a dangerous no man's land where the normal laws of physics and causality don't apply, like the Zones from 'Roadside Picnic', and as in that book, the desperate and the foolhardy eke a living smuggling alien artifacts and flotsam and jetsam out of the event sites. 'Nova Swing' is a success because it isn't just an excuse to find new ways to play with the Strugatskys' intriguing set up; it's a deeply thoughtful work on personal change, the illusion of the continuity of consciousness, and the difficult necessity of moving on. If anything I enjoyed it even more than 'Light'.
   In 'Nova Swing' a special branch of the police has been set up to deal with artifacts from the site imported into the city and the resulting havoc. With a new type of living artifact making its way into the city, they pretty much have their hands full. While this in itself is a compelling concept, what makes 'Nova Swing' so engaging is its focus on its characters, down and outs whose lives have settled into a rut despite living on the border of this great mess of unknowable constant change. It is this tension between the site and the stagnation of these characters that drives 'Nova Swing' and gives it its heart. So we have Vic Serotonin, a smuggler who earns his living bringing artifacts out of the site and selling them to gangsters and taking foolhardy tourists into the site, a man who is unable to make anything else out of his life because of his destructive fascination with the site. He is being pursued by Lens Aschemann, a brilliant Site Crime detective fashionably altered to look like Albert Einstein, who may or may not be the serial killer behind the one crime he couldn't solve that killed his wife, and who is also driven by an equally destructive infatuation with the site. Their game of cat and mouse drags in various other  bystanders, such as Liv Hula, who's tired of tending the failing bar on Straint Street for  all these years, Edith Bonaventure, ex-child star accordion player to the space ports and daughter to one of the pioneering explorers of the site, now dying of uncountable forms of alien cancers leaving Edith to look after him, and Antoyne, failed space jockey who once flew with Chinese Ed but hasn't done anything since then.
   'Nova Swing' plays as much with the tropes of noir detective fiction as it does with those of SF. The new artifacts working their way into the city are taking the shape of human beings, to disappear in the nightclubs and back alleys where their inherent strangeness goes unmarked. These people appear out of nowhere, no past history to define them or trap them. Elizabeth Kielar, the femme fatale who hires Vic Serotonin to take her into the event site, is one of them. Harrison explores at great length what an alien perspective hers is, and really just how strange the femme fatale archetype is. Compared to the other characters, whose lives and perspectives are shaped by their pasts, Kielar's personality inhabits an uncanny valley where her collection of responses and ticks never quite coalesces into believable human responses, and she knows it. While she may be an archetype character dropped in the narrative to seduce Vic Serotonin for the purposes of the story, she has enough self awareness to be wracked with existential doubt for the obvious and intentional gap she makes in the logic of reality. Similarly, Lens Aschemann is a knowing and twisted take on the invincible detective trope. Like a space age Sherlock Holmes, Aschemann, with his intentionally bizarre appearance and eccentric mannerisms, nevertheless always solves the case so the police have learned to give him the resources and let him get on with it. He wryly dispenses worldly wisdom to his younger and frequently exasperated assistant. However, the more time we spend inside Aschemann, the more we realise he is at least as damaged and obsessive as Vic Serotonin, and in the end their shared unhealthy fascination with the event sites swallows them both. And in the end, for all his grand theorising, Aschemann's understanding of the events that unfold is as flawed and as limited as all the other characters; despite his brilliant powers of deduction he is still limited  by his own human perspective with his own personal biases and blind spots.
   Aschemann reflects at one point that he views all crimes as some form of crime against continuity. But what are the event sites themselves if a constant crime against continuity? To some extent most of the male characters in 'Nova Swing', with the notable exception of Antoyne, share this rigidity of thought, which shapes both their destructive fascination with the event sites and their inability to change and adapt. Emil Bonaventure, pioneer explorer of the sites dying of multiple forms of bizarre cancer, wonders in a lucid moment, "How do we know what we come back to is the same?" But this applies not just to the sites but to anything we go through in life. The experiences we go through change us, and there is never any guarantee that things will go back to normal when you come through the other side. There comes a time when the illusion of the continuity of our consciousness is revealed as just that: an illusion. We are not the same person that we were ten years ago, and we have to face this fact and move on or risk being buried in the past. The events in 'Nova Swing' in one way or another provide the impetus for Liv Hula, Edith Bonaventure and Antoyne to accept that one part of their lives has come to a close and gives them the courage to move on to the next stage. Liv Hula reflects, after selling her bar:

"When she went inside, ten years of her life tucked themselves away in an instant, like the theoretical dimensions of long-ago cosmology. This was how life went. A single moment seemed to extend forever, then suddenly you were snapped out of it. The forward motion of time stretched whatever rubbery glue-like substance had fixed you there until it failed catastrophically. You weren't the person you were before you got trapped; you weren't the person you were while you were trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren't someone entirely different either."

Moving on from the past is never easy, and you can never leave your past, or who you were, behind entirely, but it's a necessary part of being alive.

Simon Ings - City Of The Iron Fish (1994)

"In the beginning, my father once explained to me, the inventive powers of the Ceremonies were so great that the whole City was changed. Even before the scraps of poetry escaped between the ribs of the fish - even, indeed, before the sun had set on the Ceremonies themselves - the streets of the City would begin to shift. The usual hills were laid flat, revealing great, half-recognized vistas; elsewhere, great ironstone crags and grassy banks appeared from nowhere, with rivulets coursing down them, and at their foot ran waterways which gave onto canals which gave onto ponds, and with them all sorts of bridges and sluices and tatty terraced houses with overgrown bank gardens; staircases and slip-ways would slide in and out go view do the celebrants as they left the Circus; sometimes the Circus itself would disappear only to repeat itself further down the road. You might never find the expected streets, but sometimes one of them would appear of a sudden behind you as you walked.
   "People in those early days tried flagging their houses before the Ceremonies so that afterwards they might find their way home again. Whether the flags worked is not recorded, but the habit of making and planting them stuck, even when, centuries later, the City had grown too complex and well-realized for a single Ceremony to much alter its geography." 

"Fantasies aren't 'hopeful', they're an admission of failure - mere masturbation." Blythe Maravell

In 'City Of The Iron Fish', Simon Ings uses Fantasy to explore an ambivalence towards Fantasy and our relationship towards art as a whole; is art's role to provide an escape from the harsh, unforgiving nature of reality, or is its job to force us to confront the truth, however uncomfortable and bleak that may be? Ings achieves this by forcing his characters to confront the fact that they may be fictional creations living in an artificial world.
   The eponymous City, with its seafaring traditions and plentiful supplies of water, sprawls across two opposing hills linked by bridges. Yet it is situated in the middle of a vast desert, and the river running between the hills is one of tarmac. The City is maintained by powerful magic, which is governed by a complex and seemingly meaningless series of rituals. The people who live there have ideas and old stories about other times, other places and ways of life, but no one has ever found anything outside the City but desert. Every twenty years, the Ceremony of the Iron Fish renews the magic supporting the City, but in recent times the power of the ritual has faded, and people are starting to lose faith.   While most people are happy not to question their situation, Thomas Kemp, fallen scholar and narrator, just can't help picking at the threads of weirdness surrounding him. Who put the seafaring City in the middle of the desert? Is there a wider world out there, and why is the City cut off from it? Of course there's an easy answer for those of us reading the book: because this is how the author wrote it. Compelling Fantasy or SF settings don't necessarily need to make a whole lot of ontological sense, but the works in question rarely deal with what effect living in such a transparently artificial environment would have on those who live there. There's a tendency to cordon off kitschy Fantasy art from surrealism, but in a way being trapped inside a Roger Dean painting would be as disturbing as finding yourself on the beach in 'The Persistence Of Memory'; neither parse as real. As Thomas Kemp describes his early life with his parents, going away to university, his sexual awakening, Kemp as a character is rounded and believable but the setting, intentionally, never quite convinces. There is something dreamlike about the City, with its ancient formalised meaningless rituals and its grotesque caricatures of characters recalling Gormenghast, down to the bizarre names. With its mutable geography, unexplained isolation and deserted, crumbling alleyways - 'the sort of landscape you might imagine someone concocting who had never seen a city, and had no idea what it was for' - the City resembles Bellona from Samuel R. Delany's masterpiece 'Dhalgren', another book in which the characters begin to suspect they and their situation are fictional. And so, logically enough, when Thomas and his friend the artist Blythe Maravell go on a journey outside the City to find out what is there, they come to a place marking the boundaries of their artificial existence, outside which they simply cannot exist. 
   None of this would be effective if what had gone before didn't give the illusion of reality, and while the City itself and the more grotesque supporting characters frequently signpost their impossible nature, Thomas and Blythe are wonderfully convincing and well rounded characters, and the everyday lives of the people they encounter throughout the City and living on the fringes of the desert ring true. Because of this, we are able to feel Thomas' and Blythe's existential horror as they reach their hands past a certain point and see them reduced from flesh to articulated plastic to stick drawings. 
   The book goes on to explore the effect this revelation has on both characters, and also on the City as a whole, as others make the same journey and a cult of despair and nihilism spreads. Thomas becomes an artist and seeks solace in Fantastical art, that which seeks to imagine a future everyone is beginning to realise is impossible for the City, before becoming depressed and burying himself in debauchery. Blythe, on the other hand, uses her art to confront the bleakness and hopelessness she sees all around her. The two characters struggle with the balance between hope and despair whilst the City crumbles around them into chaos. Whilst Tom eventually finds escape into Fantasy hollow and meaningless, he declares near the end of the book, 'One problem with despair... it makes you stupid!' And in many ways his despair leads him as poorly as his earlier optimism did, and Ings' depiction of a society where despair has curdled into violence and hatred is truly chilling. Ultimately, the characters band together to make a last stand performing the Ceremony of the Iron Fish in order to restore the City before it is destroyed by the nihilists. Fittingly, this has no bearing on the outcome, the real founding ceremony having been carried out by Thomas as a child in the beginning of the book and corrected later with Blythe's help, but it allows the characters to regain some semblance of agency, and the result is even the more grotesque characters get a chance to shine, to show us what they are made of. 
   'City Of The Iron Fish' ends with the whole idea of the City being scrunched up and tossed aside by its creator. However this isn't as bleak an ending as it may seem. With the Ceremony of the Iron Fish, the book explores the idea of art as an act of creation or reification, giving reality and meaning not just to a fictional world we imagine but the world we perceive around us. However with the second half of the book's slide into despair and bleakness, it also explores writing as an act of destruction, the act of creating people restricted by artificial boundaries as cruel, the author as a capricious god doling out cruelty upon cruelty to their creations. With the apparent destruction of the manuscript of the book, the characters are finally free from this external influence. All the characters get to interact again with those who died over the course of the narrative, giving them a chance at closure the story wasn't going to allow them. And meanwhile, the City starts to take on a new and different form, as the unseen writer prepares to write again, but not before they provide Thomas and Blythe with a way out of the narrative.   

Italo Calvino - The Complete Cosmicomics (1997)

"What each of us really is and has is the past; all we are and have is the catalogue of the possibilities that didn't fail, of the experiences that are ready to be repeated. A present doesn't exist, we proceed blindly towards the outside and the afterwards, carrying out an established programme with materials we fabricate ourselves, always the same. We don't tend towards any future, there's nothing awaiting us, we're shut within the system of a memory which foresees no task but remembering itself. What now leads me and Priscilla to seek each other isn't an impulse towards the afterwards; it's the final action of the past that is fulfilled through us. Goodbye, Priscilla, our encounter, our embrace are useless, we remain distant, or finally near, in other words for ever apart."

 "I don't want to boast, but from the start I was willing to bet that there was going to be a universe..."

Italo Calvino was an Italian writer who wanted to write stories that adequately reflected the rapid growth of scientific knowledge in the 20th century. Naturally the stories he produced in this mode, mostly between 1963 to 1968, would be at least somewhat SF-nal in nature. But considering Calvino's pedigree of historical fiction, and the narrative experiments he would go on to make, the result was hardly going to be straightforwardly Campbellian. 'The Complete Cosmicomics' collects every one of what Calvino dubbed his 'cosmicomic' stories, from the previous collections 'Cosmicomics' (1965), 'Time And The Hunter' (1967), 'World Memory And Other Cosmicomic Stories' (1968) and 'Cosmicomics Old And New' (1984). They demonstrate a novel way of combining hard science and the mythic and literary, resulting in a series of exquisitely crafted tales overflowing with enough sensawunda to rival any Golden Age SF classic. Mythic hard SF, if you will.
   The short stories in 'Cosmicomics' introduce us to Qfwfq, the protagonist of pretty much all the cosmicomic stories and a large part of why Calvino's central conceit works as well as it does. Described by Calvino himself as a 'cosmic know-it-all', Qfwfq is an ancient being who is as old as the universe, (or so he claims). In his time, he has been the primordial matter in the big bang before it exploded, unicellular organisms, mollusks, dinosaurs, human beings.... Qfwfq has been around and seen it all, and is not shy about telling you so, with many cheerful diversions. His homespun, folksy tone is paradoxically exactly right for talking about the unknown wonders of existence, as he bitches about supernovae like they were eccentric family members or smirks about coming up with an idea before his fellow bacteria did. The end result is not unlike listening to a cosmic Ronnie Corbit talk about the formation of the universe. In this way, Calvino makes quantum physics and evolutionary biology immediate and relatable, allowing us to experience the world bursting into colour with the formation of the atmosphere in 'Without Colours', contemplate the vast amounts of time taken for a full galactic revolution in 'A Sign In Space', or experience the cramped living conditions before the Big Bang in 'All At One Point'.
   The cosmicomic approach to science is worthy of note. Each story is prefaced with a quote, detailing the scientific concept central to this particular story. But outside of the core concept, Calvino throws scientific accuracy to the wind, allowing the story to play out with a mythic or fairy tale quality, or even with a daffy cartooniness. And so fishermen can climb up poles to reach the moon, Qfwfq can play marbles with atoms or, as a dinosaur, hide in plain sight in front of the mammals, and run around the moon with a pirate as it emerges from the earth. This serves to make sure the stories are always fun, however abstract or complicated the physics gets. However it also allows Calvino to experiment with the narrative structure, as in 'The Origin Of Birds' where he asks the reader to imagine the action happening as in a newspaper comic, with Qfwfq manipulating the edges of the frame to make good his escape. The mythic qualities mean that when Calvino retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, as he does more than once here, the mixing of SFnal concepts and ancient myth feels natural as opposed to jarring.
   By 'Time And The Hunter', Calvino's experimentation moves from the realm of mixing language with science to mixing language with maths. The Qfwfq stories in the first section seem almost conventional in light of what follows. 'Priscilla' conceives a love story as the life cycle of a single cell, through the stages of Mitosis, Meiosis and death, whereas the stories in 't zero'  reduce and simultaneously amplify a warrior attacking a lion, a car chase, a man driving to meet his lover before his rival, and Dumas' 'The Count Of Monte Cristo' to mathematical expressions, single crucial moments as vital junctions of possibility. The latter, with Dantes considering Dumas writing 'The Count Of Monte Cristo' as part of his escape plan, is particularly reminiscent of Borges. The same could be said of 'World Memory', which is about reification and the impossibility of objective observation.
   Calvino's cosmicomic stories manage to be fun and entertaining, and at the same time effectively illustrate their central scientific conceits. But there is more to them than that. Throughout them all, with their reiterations of love and loss, and the recurring image of what exists being the mirror image of what does not, a kind of sadness for the path not taken - Qfwfq, for all his love of the new, is prone to fits of nostalgia - serve to give the stories more emotional depth than you might think. Calvino fought in the Italian Resistance during World War II, and 'The Dinosaurs' explores Europe's struggles with the specter of fascism.
   My favourite story in the whole collection is 'The Light-Years', in which Qfwfq sees a sign in a galaxy a hundred million light-years away saying, 'I SAW YOU', and works out that at the time two hundred million years ago when the light they saw him by must have traveled there he was doing something unspeakably embarrassing, and so after much agonising writes back, 'WHAT OF IT?', and then has to wait another two hundred million years for the reply. For me, this perfectly sums up the marriage between humour and high concept that makes these stories so compelling.
 

Ann Leckie - Ancillary Justice (2013)

"That division, I-Justice of Toren and I-One Esk, was not, I have come to think, a sudden split, not an instant before which "I" was one and after which "I" was "we". It was something that had always been possible, always potential. Guarded against. But how did it go from potential to real, incontrovertible, irrevocable?
   "On one level the answer is simple - it happened when all of Justice of Toren but me was destroyed. But when I look closer I seem to see cracks everywhere. Did the singing contribute, the thing that made One Esk different from all other units on the ship, indeed in the fleet? Perhaps. Or is anyone's identity a matter of fragments held together by convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?"

   'Ancillary Justice' is a good ol' fashioned space opera, with all the scale and interplanetary trappings that those of us who are fond of the genre miss while we're away. But it's also an uncompromising look at individuality and what that means for hive minds and their component parts, or, on another level, small cogs in a large machine. It's also a nuanced exploration of the legacy left behind by empires as they run out of space to expand into, and of the subjectivity of gender and the cultural assumptions embedded in all of us. Clearly there's a lot going on here. But Ann Leckie manages all of this in a book that's a concise and enjoyable read.
   The book follows Breq, who used to be Justice of Toren, a massive interstellar battleship with a hive mind made up of the ship and its ancillaries, AI soldiers made from the zombified corpses of previous battles. Justice of Toren is part of the armed forces of the Radchaai, a powerful interstellar empire much feared by their enemies (read: anyone who happens to be in their way). But an act of betrayal has destroyed the ship and all the other ancillaries, leaving Breq alone to take revenge against the person who took everything from her.
   The plot clicks along at a good pace - one strand follows Breq as she goes in search of the MacGuffin that could possibly allow her to take a shot at someone powerful enough to take out a Radchaai ancillary carrier, whilst the other strand shows us how we got here in the first place. 'Ancillary Justice' is the first book of a trilogy, but the ending manages to be satisfying in itself whilst still leaving pieces on the board for the author to play further down the line.
   Now, onto the real meat of the novel. 'Ancillary Justice' has an interesting way of dealing with gender. The Radch don't mark gender at all, and use 'she' as the default pronoun. Here Leckie is inverting the standard sexism you get in a lot of genre fiction, and specifically in a lot of golden age space opera, where female characters may as well not exist, or only exist to validate or reward the male lead. However the situation is more complicated than that. It's possible to read this as a story where every character is female, but the Radchaai are still humans who reproduce sexually, and Breq frequently offends people from alien cultures by misgendering people (something that must have a high risk of happening in contact between alien cultures but is dealt with surprisingly rarely in SF). So it's actually possible to read the gender and sexual orientation of the characters in any way the reader pleases; the Radchaai nonessentialism about gender allows them to be fluid and open to interpretation. This very openness allows the reader to reflect about their cultural conditioning surrounding sexuality and gender roles. When Breq returns to Radchaai space after twenty years of exile, we get this wonderful passage:

"I saw them all, suddenly, for just a moment, through non-Radchaai eyes, an eddying crowd of unnervingly ambiguously gendered people. I saw all the features that would mark gender for non-Radchaai - never, to my annoyance and inconvenience, the same way in each place. Short hair or long, worn unbound (trailing down a back, or in a thick, curled nimbus) or bound (braided, pinned tied). Thick-bodied or thin-, faces delicate-featured or coarse-, with cosmetics or none. A profusion of colors that would have been gender-marked in other places. All of this matched randomly with bodies curving at breast and hip or not, bodies that one moment moved in ways various non-Radchaai would call feminine, the next moment masculine. Twenty years of habit overtook me, and for an instant I despaired of choosing the right pronouns, the right terms of address. But I didn't need to do that here. I could drop that worry, a small but annoying weight I had carried all this time. I was home."

   However the Radch is far from all sweetness and light. The Interstellar Empire is such a standard trope in SF that we take a lot of its implications for granted. 'Ancillary Justice' takes a good look at some of these assumptions. The Radch is a brutal empire that conquers other worlds and turns a proportion of their population into undead robot slave soldiers. They have used genocide to crush rebellions. If over the course of the novel Breq doesn't quite have a crisis of conscience over her faith in the Radchaai empire - her quest is driven almost entirely for personal vengeance - her favourite officer Lieutenant Awn very much does, as indeed does the Lord of the Radch, Anaander Mianaai. In fact these two very different moral crises - over when is the right time to stand up to power, and over whether or not to commit genocide - together precipitate the destruction of Justice of Toren and set the plot in motion. Mianaai admits that the Radch economy is fueled and sustained by the constant expansion and conquest of new space, and that, having swallowed up all the little fish, the Radch are running out of suitable targets. The book also explores how much the identity of the conqueror becomes embedded in the culture of the people, and how difficult it is to change that mentality. There's a grimly hilarious scene where Breq and Seivarden, a disgraced military officer, are invited to tea by some upper class Radchaai twits who have clearly never been within sniffing distance of fighting as they mouth off on their half baked jingoism.
   Which brings us to another thing 'Ancillary Justice' does well - class. The Radchaai have a rigid hierarchy built around the standing of one's house. Members of the upper class are expected to pass their aptitude tests with flying colours and go into high ranking positions in the military, whereas members of the lower classes are expected to keep in their place. Officers like Lieutenant Awn, who come from a working class background, are seen as upstarts who should never have been allowed to pass the aptitude tests in the first place. Leckie realistically portrays the sniping and resentment of Awn's fellow officers, as well as Awn's own frustration at dealing with an intrinsically unfair system that the privileged are unwilling to even acknowledge.
   It's worth mentioning that all of this lands as well as it does because Leckie has created memorable and compelling characters. All of the major characters exhibit growth and development over the course of the book, from Lieutenant Awn's tragic realisation that she should have stood up for what was right sooner, to the depth of Lieutenant Skaaiat's feelings for Awn. Seivarden's growth from a snobby, unsympathetic upper class officer to someone who truly cares for and respects Breq and has started to share many of her concerns is particularly compelling. And then we have Breq herself, possibly the most alien character in the book. It is a testament to Leckie's skill that she is able to make her such a compelling and relateable protagonist, even when describing scenes from the point of view of Justice of Toren. I eagerly await book two.