J. G. Ballard - The Drowned World (1962)

"'It suits you, Kerans, you look like the man from inner space.' The rictus of a laugh twisted his face. 'But don't try to reach the Unconscious, Kerans; remember it isn't equipped to go down that far!'"

Ballard's 'The Drowned World' is revolutionary because it takes what has always been the underlying theme in British post-war apocalyptic fiction - that the apocalypse comes from within us as a reaction to outside events, rather than being forced upon us by the events themselves - and vividly foregrounds it. This theme had been present in the 'cosy catastrophes' of John Wyndham, where the down to earth, practical British protagonists calmly take stock of their new situations and immediately adapt, through to the more brutal scenario in John Christopher's 'The Death Of Grass', in which the protagonist is forced incrementally to adopt a violent new morality to protect his wife and children, culminating in the murder of his brother. 'The Drowned World' certainly derives from this fictional traditional, and its vivid descriptive passages and crisp prose consciously echo these books. But what 'The Drowned World' does differently is to explicitly connect the post-apocalyptic landscape to its protagonist's psyche, the outer world the characters walk through reflecting their inner mind state. 

Ballard's early apocalyptic fiction is thus as much an exercise in exploring different extremities of human mentality as much as coming up with imaginative ways of destroying the world. In 'The Drowned World', the rising sea levels have left the cities submerged, creating a warm, swampy world reminiscent of the early Triassic. Correspondingly, the characters experience a series of regressions, whether down the spinal lumbar to an earlier, lizard evolutionary intelligence, as reflected in the tops of buildings sticking out of the water like a back bone, or a regression into the womb, as experienced by Kerans when he goes diving in London's old planetarium. As Kerans sinks further into a fugue, the modern part of his brain becomes submerged, like the old cities beneath the swamps. In this way, Ballard uses the world the book is set in to map and amplify the internal mental state of the characters.
   Later in his fiction, by the time of 'Crash' and 'High Rise', Ballard would focus on characters whose mentality allows them to live perfectly happily in their dystopian settings. It's interesting to note that this idea was present almost from the beginning in his work. 'The Drowned World', like any post-apocalypse novel, has a frightening setting, but Kerans' character arc is to shed any last remaining vestiges of previous civilisation, to submit to the calling of the dreams that plague everyone in the lagoon, and to make his way to the uninhabitable south, happy and at home in this hostile environment. Colonel Riggs, with his desire to continue a life of meaning, order and productivity, and even the pirate Strangman, who drains the lagoon to loot the ancient city underneath, are ultimately making the incorrect response to this environment by trying to force their respective visions over the top of it rather than just accepting it.
 

Ballard's writing is spare and precise, yet tremendously evocative. The thick, oppressive heat and humidity permeates the book's atmosphere, and his description of London submerged under a tropical marsh is almost psychedelic in its intensity. This is appropriate enough considering the book's fascination with the subconscious and dreams. Kerans' journey back through evolutionary time is reflected again in his journey from consciousness down to subconsciousness. Events unfold feverishly, with the narrative getting more bizarre as the book progresses, adding a touch of haze and unreality to the proceedings, as we are left to unpick what happens inside and out of Kerans' own head. As the book continues Kerans becomes more and more under the control of his own instincts as much as anything else; Colonel Riggs and Strangman are men full of agency who get things done, both would have made fine protagonists of an earlier strain of British apocalyptic fiction, whereas Kerans is happy to sit back and let others take charge, his own agency only kicking into action with the strong, primal urge he has to return to the equator. Really his objection to Colonel Riggs' and Strangman's two very different aims is the same; they both get in the way of him making this journey.
   The business of SF writers is not to predict the future; it is to write about the future in a way that reflects something resonant within their present. Ballard was certainly aware with this. As the extent of the damage caused by climate change becomes increasingly apparent, the vistas of sunken cities in 'The Drowned World' becomes more and more eerily prescient. Yet in the book itself, Ballard could not be concerned less with the actual causes behind his apocalypse. The thing that interests him is the psychology of people and how they fare under extreme conditions and mindsets. Ballard's great theme, that technology or the apocalypse don't aggravate anything that isn't already within us, proves more salient with each passing day. It is Ballard's understanding of the human mind under strain as much as his prophetic vision that makes 'The Drowned World' so resonant all these years on. 

Kingsley Amis - The Alteration (1976)

"'Go back no more than four hundred years or so. Over all the time since, Christendom has been a tyranny of a rare sort. By way of the soul it rules the minds of most and the acts of all. As effect, no wars throughout Europe but the one, a war with long breaks of peace, a war against a power that can never be crushed and can be held in only by standing in arms from year to year: the best possible form to draw off any will to rebel or quarrel. And, in the last fifty years, Christendom has finally drubbed a power much more awful than the Turk could ever be, one that now lives on as it can in New England among boors and savages: science. God be praised.'
   "'Amen,' said Lyall automatically.
   "'Amen to amen. It was a close thing. A little longer, and science would have abolished God and brought our world to ruin.'
   "'You don't mean abolish, you mean take attention from, leave on one side.'
   "'I mean abolish, I mean deny, I mean disprove.'"

In 'The Alteration', Kingsley Amis explores what the world would have happened if the influence of Catholicism had never declined. In this it echoes Keith Roberts' superlative 'Pavane', one of a number of alternate history novels that Amis tips his hat to. As in 'Pavane', Amis' story focuses on the characters in this world, allowing the way different people interact to tell us about how it's different from our own instead of relying too much on heavy exposition. This allows Amis to create a well realised alternate time line, with many historical in-jokes and nods to other works in the same field, whilst still telling a powerful and satisfying story.
   In this case, the jonbar point is the Reformation. In the world of 'The Alteration', instead of splitting with the Catholic church, in order to prevent a schism Martin Luther becomes pope. Protestantism never emerges, and so the Catholic influence over Europe never diminishes but only grows stronger. The world described in 'The Alteration' is similar in a number of respects to that in Roberts' 'Pavane'. In both books Catholicism informs and controls all aspect of life in Britain. Science is outlawed as heresy, so electricity is banned and most technology runs on steam or gas. The world wars never happened; in 'Pavane' Roberts puts this down to the lack of technological development, in 'The Alteration' one of the priests explicitly states that peace within Catholic Europe was achieved by uniting them in war against the Turks. Both books explore a society in which the power of the patriarchy is maintained by religious oppression, where dissent is swiftly and brutally punished. However the concluding tone of the books is a little different. Whereas Roberts ways up the cost of religious oppression against the technological horrors of the holocaust and nuclear destruction and finds merit in a world developing science more slowly and cautiously, Amis' book is much more cynical and dystopic. At the end of 'The Alteration', it's revealed that the pope, unwilling to change the church's stance on birth control, is trying to solve the population growth problem across Europe by secretly putting drugs in the water to reduce the birth rate, a plan he is testing out on unknowing subjects.
   'The Alteration' focuses on Hubert Anvil, a choirboy with an incredible voice who is marked for castration by the church in order to preserve his voice for the pope and the glory of God. Amis uses this central idea as both an example of the unnecessary brutality of an institution that would mutilate a child, and as a way of illustrating how much of the Catholic church's control over its people comes from control of sexuality. As a New England reverend says in the book,

"What they had intended to do to little Hubert Anvil was shocking without being surprising, considered Pellew. All their temporal over-magnificence, all their pharisaism, all their equivocation, all their ruthlessness came from one source: the celibacy of their priesthood."

Not only is Hubert denied from ever reaching sexual maturity, but priests are forced to be celibate, birth control is banned, and homosexuality, indeed any kind of sexuality outside of married heterosexuality, is banned. Amis explores the importance of sexuality in the human experience, the part sexuality plays in one's self identity, and hence how repressing this becomes a powerful tool of social control.
   Resigned to his fate but wanting to know what it is he will be missing out on, Hubert asks his family and friends what sex is like. This allows Amis to explore the complexity of human sexuality, and the confusion and mystification that surrounds it for young adolescents. From the stilted allusions from his conservative father's answer to the more down to earth answer from his brother to the crude smut he hears from his classmates and the stable boy, to his own budding feelings for a girl, Hubert is unable to collate these answers into a consistent whole. Amis deftly portrays the curiosity, excitement, apprehension and fear that adolescents face around the idea of sex.
   While it's realistic that Hubert would not feel comfortable asking friends who are girls or his mother about sex, this does mean that the book builds up a pretty one-sided, male-centric view of sex, and only heterosex at that. While you can argue that the book sidelines women and female views of sexuality, and any view whatsoever of LGBT sexuality, as an artistic choice to reflect the deeply conservative society it depicts, that doesn't mean these people wouldn't exist or have a viewpoint, albeit one they would have to keep secret, in such a society. At least Hubert's mother, Dame Anvil, is a strong enough character to resist Hubert's alteration as much as she can, and is given sexuality, though she is reduced to using it to protect her son. It's also worth pointing out that the elder castrati who select Hubert for alteration are very othered, in some part to make Hubert's fate even more awful than it already is, and again this is something that would realistically be a thing in the society depicted, but it's still uncomfortable.
   Ultimately Hubert decides that something this important must be worth keeping, even with the promise of wealth and celebrity weighing against it, and tries to escape to New England, where Protestantism has belatedly emerged. He gets as far as the airship just before takeoff before coming down with testicular torsion and having to have his nads surgically removed anyway. This is a particularly cruel diabolus ex machina on behalf of the author, but it only serves to emphasise the unstoppable power of the Catholic church in this world: an unlucky coincidence starts to look like God really is on their side.
 

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Definitely Maybe (1976)

"Well then, buddy, how do you expect to explain fantastic events without a fantastic hypothesis?"

Dmitri Malianov is on the verge of a major breakthrough, a discovery that will recontextualise the entire field of astrophysics, Nobel prize winning stuff. So he's sent his wife and kid away so he can concentrate. Unfortunately poor Dmitri can't get a break. First a delivery arrives with crates of vodka and caviar, then a ludicrously attractive woman turns up in a short skirt. And when he still refuses to be put off his work, that's when the government heavies turn up threatening him. Speaking to his friends, he finds out that they too have been on the verge of great discoveries in their own quite disparate fields before becoming similarly distracted. Someone, or perhaps something, really doesn't want them to make these discoveries.
   In 'Definitely Maybe' the Strugatsky brothers examine what happens when the human spirit is faced with an immovable force that cannot be reasoned with. It is a chilling work of intense paranoia, made all the more powerful for being rooted in the Strugatskies' real life experiences writing science fiction in soviet Russia, where they frequently faced censorship. In the afterword Boris Strugatsky explains the difficulty they faced at every turn publishing this very book itself. There is an undercurrent of bitterness and frustration evident in 'Definitely Maybe' that gives its satirical humour a real bite.
   The Strugatskies are masters of tight plotting. Despite its short length, 'Definitely Maybe' is perfectly formed. The creeping sense of inescapable dread is expertly built up, culminating in a pile up of unlikely reveals, each designed only to further obfuscate and misdirect the protagonist. While he and his friends desperately try to come up with some plausible explanation to explain their circumstance, poor Dmitri is constantly having the rug pulled from under him. The explanation of a jealous supercivilisation determined to stop humanity from developing to a level where it could compete with them only makes sense to these characters because they are clutching at straws, hoping against all available sense and evidence that they are up against something that can be understood or reasoned with. Dmitri's learned friend Vecherovsky comes up with the theory that it is not another civilisation bringing humanity's brightest and best minds to a screeching halt, it is a natural force that exists to limit the extent to which a civilisation can progress. This idea is rather more interesting than the concept of malicious alien intelligence precisely because a force of nature is something physical and absolute that cannot be argued or reasoned with, like gravity. It's a potent metaphor for the force that cannot be grappled with, because it both appeals to our sense of knowledge and science, in that there are natural limits on any animal population which of course includes human, as well as invoking an almost Lovecraftian horror of a vast and indifferent cosmos next to which we will always be insignificant.
   But what 'Definitely Maybe' is really interested in is how people react in the face of such a force. The Strugatsky brothers write knowing full well that everyone has their price. If a force you cannot fight offers you everything you could possibly want with one hand and threatens to annihilate you and everyone you care about with the other, what choice do you have? Is it possible for a person still to have integrity in a system where the cards are so comprehensively stacked against you? These are the big questions 'Definitely Maybe' wrestles with. Dmitri sees his friends reduced to spineless cowards who, while they have everything they desire, will never achieve anything with their lives. However, because he has a wife and child and would be putting them in danger otherwise, he too capitulates and gives up his life's work and his shot at greatness. However, his friend Vecherovsky, who has no family ties, takes it on himself to collect Dmitri's and all the others' work so that he can work on it and preserve it for future generations to work on. The story ends on a hopeful note, albeit ambiguously. Humanity can still struggle on against such forces, because concepts such as science and the truth are important.
 

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.