Patricia A. McKillip - The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld (1974)

"Sybel, there must be a silence deeper than the silence of Eld between those stars; shall we go listen to it?"

"The giant Grof was hit in one eye by a stone, and that eye turned inward so that it looked into his mind, and he died of what he saw there."

'The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld' is a gorgeously told tale of love and the human cost of war and revenge. It has a love of riddles, inventive magical beasts, and a well-drawn cast of believable characters with a strong, engaging female protagonist. However what truly elevates the book is Patricia A. McKillip's poetic language. Her command of striking imagery and finely balanced phrases places 'The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld' in another category altogether from the faux-archaisms employed by Lord Dunsany and his imitators, a high Fantasy that almost qualifies as a prose poem.
   'The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld' takes a stock character that is usually a villain in most high Fantasy stories, the ice-queen wizard alone in her mountain fortress with only her enchanted animals for company, and turns her into a sympathetic, believable protagonist. Sybel is the descendant of a line of wizards with the ability to summon magical animals: the falcon, Ter, Gules Lyon, the Cat Moriah, the Dragon Gyld, the Black Swan of Terleth, and the Boar Cyrin, who answers all riddles save one. Her attempts to summon the White Bird Liralen are complicated when Coren of Sirle turns up at her gates, asking her to care for the baby Tamlorn, the son of King Drede. As Tamlorn becomes poised to fall between the rebel forces of Sirle and Drede's armies, Sybel finds herself drawn away from her hideout on the mountain of Eld and into the world of people, of which she wants no part.
   What follows is the story of the isolated, lonely Sybel learning to interact with people, as she becomes a mother figure for Tamlorn and negotiates the affections of Coren and Drede. This could be a standard, if wonderfully told, romance plot, if not for the nuance and depth. McKillip is fully aware of the depth and complexity of love, but also of the negative end of the spectrum of human emotions, how fear, hatred and jealousy can consume people. 'The Forgotten Beasts Of Eld' works so well partially because of how well grounded it is in real emotional depth.
   This is demonstrated in the book's treatment both of its villains, and of its protagonist as she makes more and more questionable decisions. There is no question that Drede's plan to have Sybel magically brainwashed so that she will love him and not attack him is monstrous, but Drede is not portrayed as a monster. He is shown to be a person who, because of the rumours about his wife's betrayal of him and his unsteady grip on power due to the forces of Sirle, is utterly hounded by fear, to the extent that he makes decisions that he knows are horrific. Even the wizard Mithran, who he hires to do the job, is revealed to be a bitter, lonely old man who has let his own lust for power consume his life. None of this excuses either characters' actions, but because we can understand where their motivations come from, and because we can believe that these people could end up like that, it makes the whole situation much more believable.
   Drede's plan is portrayed as the horrendous violation it is, and whilst neither Drede nor Mithran succeed, the event still clearly traumatises Sybel, and the book realistically explores the fallout from this. Sybel marries Coren so that she can move to Sirle and plot with his brothers, the Lords of Sirle, and her magical animals, to get her revenge on Drede. However, she soon becomes so obsessed with utterly destroying Drede that she stops thinking about what will happen to Coren, whom she has grown to truly love, and Tamlorn, who is now living with his father Drede and clearly loves and admires him. This is made worse by the fact that, in her desire to protect both of them, and to keep her revenge for herself, she refuses to tell either of them what happened. The book never condones Drede nor suggests that he doesn't fully deserve his comeuppance, but it does portray how Sybel's entirely understandable desire for revenge starts to consume her and cut her off from the people she loves.
   The book becomes increasingly morally complex as it goes along, exploring how good people can be driven to do bad things through entirely understandable motivations. This is illustrated by Cyrin's riddle about the giant Grof - the idea that we sometimes hide our own true motivations from ourselves, and to truly look into them can be painful. This is also symbolised by the Blammor, the ugly and frightening aspect of the Liralen that manifests to Sybel, Coren and Mithran as a cloud of smoke with ice for eyes that reflects back your own worst fears. Mirthan is too corrupted to survive his experience with the Blammor, but both Sybel and Coren have to face their own worst impulses before they can happily be with each other. As Coren says to Sybel,

"What do you think love is - a thing to startle from the heart like a bird at every shout or blow? You can fly from me, high as you choose into your darkness, but you will see me always beneath you, no matter how far away, with my face turned to you. My heart is in your heart. I gave it to you with my name that night and you are its guardian, to treasure it, or let it wither and die."

The complexity of the book's view of love, as something that ties the couple together but that can also be twisted and subverted into something damaging and ugly, is refreshing. In the end it is not just their love that pulls Coren and Sybel back from the brink, but knowledge, wisdom and self-awareness. Both Coren and Sybel, having looked into themselves, can see something of Drede in themselves, a man who let his feelings for his wife be twisted into something unpleasant and destructive by his fear and jealousy. Coren and Sybel first have to reject their own destructive, violent impulses, before they can return to each other purified, as symblised by the Liralen shedding the aspect of the Blammor to take its true form.

Brian Aldiss - The Malacia Tapestry (1978)

"'Somebody told me that Satan has decided to close the world down, and the magicians have agreed. What would happen wouldn't be unpleasant at all, but just ordinary life going on more and more slowly until it stopped absolutely.'
   "'Like a clock stopping,' Armida suggested.
   "'More like a tapestry,' Bedalar said. 'I mean, one day like today, things might run down and never move again, so that we and everything would hang there like a tapestry in the air for ever more.'"

'The Malacia Tapestry' is a lyrical Fantasy about a stagnating magical city. Following on from his experimental New Wave works 'Report On Probability A' (1967) and 'Barefoot In The Head' (1969) but before his re-invigoration of hard SF with the Helliconia trilogy (1982 - 1985), Brian Aldiss turned to Fantasy to explore his usual themes of degeneration and decay. Like the later Viriconium novels, the only other books it much resembles, 'The Malacia Tapestry' forgoes traditional plot in favour of atmosphere, generated by some of Aldiss's finest prose. The impoverished actor Perian de Chirolo undergoes a series of misadventures in the city of Malacia, cursed by ancient magicians never to change, and the course of these events reveal the life of the city, in which myth and superstition have mingled inseparably with very real magic. Malacia is rendered in hyperreal, magical realist intensity, its languid decadence allowing Aldiss to reflect on the nature of art and the necessity of change.
   Much of the distinctive flavour of 'The Malacia Tapestry' comes from its invocation of the grotesque and the grime, something it shares with Viriconium but descends back to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books. Perian and his actor friends are all heavy-drinking, philandering lowlifes, as comic as they are tragic, and the image of the plague-ridden corpses being airlifted through the sky on inflatable balloons to infect the camps of the invading Turkish army is equally ridiculous and horrifying. As well as creating a compelling tone, this approach allows Aldiss to ground the novel, making Malacia feel more real and lived-in than your standard high Fantasy setting, which in turn allows him to blur the line between magic and myth within the story. Malacia features winged humans, dinosaurs, (called 'ancestrals' by the Malacians), and magicians, placing it firmly in the realm of the fantastic. However, the magicians don't use their powers to fight evil, but sell fortunes and perform tricks for bored tourists by the side of the road, the winged humans are not angels but are just another kind of people, who interbreed with normal humans to have children with vestigial wings, become frustrated housewives, and lose their ability to fly as they get older, and the dinosaurs are either used as domestic animals or hunted for sport by the upper classes. Thus Aldiss subverts the fantastical elements in the story by making them mundane.
   Aldiss then goes on to explore the interaction between the magical elements and the myths and superstitions of the Malacians. The city of Malacia has its own distinct culture, which is different from ours partially because it has been shaped and molded by these fantastical elements, however the ambiguity between what is real and what is myth makes it difficult to tell by how much. Malacian cosmology is an inversion of the Christian creation - they believe that the world was created by Satan, and that God appeared later to rebel against him and act in the interest of humans. Magicians, who worship Satan, and symbolise stasis, coexist with priests who worship God, who symbolises change. Thus the people of Malacia live their lives caught between these two opposing forces not of Good and Evil, but of Law and Chaos. Malacia's ancient curse preventing change symbolises the encroaching victory of Law, a society sliding into its own decadence. However, how much of this is the result of the magicians' curse, and how much of it is the ruling elite of Malacia and its council brutally preserving their own power at the expense of the downtrodden and exploited working class, is left to the reader to interpret. Aldiss hints at how seriously we shouldn't take the Malacian's own traditional views in the use of 'ancestrals' to describe the dinosaurs, and Perian's father's research into the Malacian's evolution that suggests they are descended from the dinosaurs, despite the characters' blatant mammalian natures.
   All of this hints towards the political thrust of the book. Despite the best efforts of the ruling council, rebellion is fermenting in Malacia due to the horrific conditions faced by the city's large, working class population, whose exploitation keeps the aristocracy of Malacia in power. Aldiss explores how the feudal societies standardly depicted in Fantasy would be fairly miserable for the majority of the population, and the necessity of social change to give more power to the people. The Malacian aristocracy are all portrayed as hopelessly decadent, self-absorbed and manipulative, whilst the working class cast of Bengstohn's play are much more sympathetic, their anger stemming from the struggles they face trying to make the best of life in a system that is unfairly stacked against them. Bengstohn hopes that his play, captured by the new medium of his innovative photo system, will spread his message that the ruling classes are morally bankrupt and prove a useful tool for bringing down the whole stagnant system. Thus, the actors in his play will play a part in bringing change to Malacia, ironically by standing still for long stretches of time while his device captures the image. Aldiss also explores how resistant people are to change, and how insidiously the forces that maintain the status quo enforce themselves on people's world view. Perian, as an actor with an academic father and a well-married sister, codes as middle class, but to all intents and purposes he lives in comparable poverty to the rest of Bengstohn's workers. However, his greatest desire is not to overthrow an unfair system that does him no favours, but to become part of the ruling class himself, improving his lot but doing nothing for anyone else. Perian complains that the plot of Bengstohn's play is unoriginal and cliche-ed, its moral too obvious, but he remains impervious to its message until he lives out the plot in exact detail himself. It is this alone that is sufficient to awaken the revolutionary instinct in himself, rather than the message in any art.

Lauren Beukes - Moxyland (2008)

"'What, like the kids' games? That Moxyland shit? Murder and mayhem. Training them to be savage, don't you think? It's not about making friends with kids all over the world, it's about getting ahead, getting one over.'
"'But don't you think it's appropriate? Considering.'"

'Moxyland' is a brutally cynical yet frighteningly believable look at state surveillance and viral marketing, and how digital technology's utopian potential can be co-opted by forces of social control. Set in a vividly realised near future Cape Town, and shot through with future slang, it follows its four young, frequently unsympathetic protagonists as they struggle to express their individuality in an increasingly corporate-sponsored world, and find out, in no certain terms, who really holds all the power. Lauren Beukes deftly evokes a dystopian near future, a divided society living in fear, still suffering from the after effects of apartheid. She uses her characters' differing backgrounds to explore the diversity of different peoples living in the city. Through the ambitions, fears, prejudices and viewpoints of her characters, Beukes expertly dissects the attitudes, disparities and jealously-guarded privileges that have shaped their society.
   The plot is kicked off when Kendra, an up and coming photographer, is injected with a nanobot tattoo by the makers of the soft drink Ghost as part of an underground marketing campaign. She soon finds herself caught up in the schemes of Toby, a smug, arrogant trust-funded blogger, Tendeka, a homosexual would-be revolutionary trying to balance his anti-corporate ethics with the need to secure funding for his programmes to improve the lives of Cape Town's streetkids, and Lerato, an AIDS orphan who has been put through education by corporate funding and now works for Communique in a high powered corporate position that she hopes to advance from by selling company secrets. As all four of them fight for their own autonomy against the government and corporate forces that control their lives, the full nature of that control is revealed, along with the awful trade-off that both the characters and their society has made of their rights for the illusion of comfort and safety.
   'Moxyland' presents a chilling portrait of a government which, hand in glove with the corporations that prop it up, has gone to war with its citizens in the name of protecting them. This is a government that uses the threat of terrorism to justify releasing bio-engineered Marburg virus on a subway full of people, that uses fake identities over the internet to lure would-be dissidents out of the woodwork, then uses those dissidents to justify greater power for itself. Beukes draws out the similarities between the totalitarian government and the corporations that prop it up; both are self-serving institutions that are nominally meant to have the interests of the people at heart, but both place their own bottom lines above human rights, and even human lives. The book is darkly cynical about the idea of any person maintaining their own agency in such an atmosphere. All of the characters believe they are acting in their own interests and to further their own agendas, but in the end all of them are revealed to have been manipulated by government and corporate forces to serve ends other than their own.
   Beukes asks some very interesting and pertinent questions about digital technology and internet culture, especially about their utopian intent verses their use as tools for government surveillance, corporate spying, and even the petty and vindictive use that people frequently put them to. The book takes its name from a children's game in the novel, a massive multiplayer online role playing game in which the rules are enforced by a cute monster character called Moxy. Tony plays it in order to earn some quick cash, and observes that the game doesn't encourage children from all over the world to play and interact with each other, but rewards those who form gangs and bully those weaker than them, which is cynically pointed out as being good practice for the real world. It's also echoed in what the government in the book is doing in its plan to entrap terrorists, hiding behind fake identities and sock puppets, the standard operating procedures of your standard internet troll, and it foreshadows Lerato's ultimate recruitment into the government's secret internet security force, after training in the playgrounds of petty corporate theft.
   It also goes some way to explaining the selfish, narcissistic outlook of the characters, who are very much products of their society. The characters are all compelling and well developed, and the book explores how their various flaws stem from the intersection of their personalities and their social positions. Lerato's ruthless ambition partially arises from her upbringing as an AIDS orphan with very little in the way of future prospects if she didn't get a very comparative corporate sponsorship. Tony is intelligent, witty and charming, but because he is a pampered, spoiled rich kid who has never had to do a day's work in his life, he is sickeningly self-obsessed and self-absorbed, with almost a sociopathic lack of empathy. His obsession with digital technology and live-blogging everything through the cameras in his jacket contrast him with the more down-to-earth Kendra, who has an abiding interest in analogue technology, reflecting her more grounded perspective before she is corrupted by selling her soul to a corporation. At the beginning, Tendeka does genuinely seem to care for the streetkids that he looks after, however his preciousness over his ideals, which lead to him not accepting corporate sponsorship for his streetkids project, winds up stopping him from helping them, unlike his lover Ashraf who is just as idealistic but a lot more practical. Tendeka has his family's money to fall back on, which allows him to be picky about where he gets his money from, but Ashfar, who comes from a poorer working class background, doesn't have that luxury, and realises the importance in actually getting the work done. Tendeka's own high ideals and his desperation ultimately make him an easy pawn for the government, and he winds up causing much more damage than he does helping people, despite his good intentions.
   'Moxyland' shows science fiction at its best, examining in unflinching detail our interface with technology and how this is changing both our society and ourselves. It does so with a diverse range of well-developed and believable characters, and with powerful, succinct prose. It ranks as one of the most disturbing and haunting dystopias in recent history. The end result is a stark warning that has only become more pertinent in the years since it was published.
 

Genevieve Cogman - The Invisible Library (2015)

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

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

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.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Hard To Be A God (1973)

"How I'd like to let out some of the hatred that's accumulated over the past twenty-four hours, but it looks like I'll have no luck. Let us remain humane, forgive everyone, and be calm like the gods. Let them slaughter and desecrate, we'll be calm like the gods. The gods need not hurry, they have eternity ahead."

In 'Hard To Be A God', Arkady and Boris Strugatsky explore the rise of totalitarianism, and the inadequacies of theories of history to deal with actual history unfolding. The story is set on a planet with medieval level technology, where the kingdom of Arkanar is undergoing a power shift as the king's minister, in a flurry of anti-intellectual paranoia, is creating a pervasive and controlling state based on fear and oppression. The main character, Anton, is a historian from a utopian Earth of the future, sent to study the unfolding of history on an alien planet, is bound by a rule of non-interference similar to the Prime Directive in Star Trek; he does what he can to save the lives of the intellectuals hounded by Don Reba's storm troopers, but he is not allowed to interfere with the natural unfolding of history. As the situation in Arkanar grows more and more violent and out of control, Anton finds himself increasingly at odds with his superiors, who insist that, as their theory of history does not allow for the development of totalitarianism out of a medieval society, the situation cannot be as desperate as he paints it.
   'Hard To Be A God' deals with the key theme that runs through much of the Strugatsky's work, censorship and the artist's struggle against it. As in 'Definitely Maybe', the novel features artists who come up against powerful forces wishing to silence them, in this case Don Reba's storm troopers, and, as they would in that later novel, the Strugatsky brothers explore the different ways in which different people respond to censorship and state-sponsored oppression. The Strugatskys quite rightly identify censorship of ideas as a key sign that something has gone deeply wrong with a society. Arkanar is being manipulated by Don Reba into fearing and distrusting new ideas and perspectives, vilifying and persecuting the very people who are capable of dragging them out of the middle ages, something that can only lead to its stagnation. Anton tries desparately to save the artists and scientists of Arkanar, some of whom are stripped of honour and property and beaten, imprisoned, executed, or else compromise their art and integrity by pandering to the strictures set out by the state.
   The book's setting allows it to mingle the tropes of science fiction and Fantasy, and to subvert the standard middle ages setting of much Fantasy in interesting ways. Because we experience the world through the eyes of Anton, in the guise of Don Rumata, the well-connected noble he pretends to be in  Arkanar, we see it through a perspective closer to our own than those who live in it. Anton is disgusted by both the social injustices of the rigidly feudal system and the technological backwardness of the people who live in it. By pointing out how bad the people smell because of the lack of modern hygiene makes the medieval setting, which could be overly familiar to readers of genre fiction, especially vivid and resonant for the reader. This allows the Strugatskys to humourously satirise the upper classes, who strut around assuming their natural superiority whilst appearing to Anton and the reader as drunken buffoons. It's also part of how the Strugatskys subvert the general tropes and expectations of the book's medieval, Fantasy-esque setting. 'Hard To Be A God' deconstructs the idea of chivalrous noblemen as brutally as George R. R. Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire, with the Strugatskys portraying them as self-interested, aggressive, drunken boors. Similarly, the book plays with Fantasy mythology. There's an excellent passage where the authors describe the legends and myths that have built up around the Hiccup Forest, before revealing that they have been put in place there and exaggerated to hide the Earth people's secret base.
   'Hard To Be A God' is thoroughly cynical about human nature. While it features, on its periphery, a utopian society on Earth, it is fully aware of the horrors of history that humanity has had to go through to get to its current state of enlightenment. Don Reba's name is derived from Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's brutal secret police chief, and his horrific methods and brutality echo those of his real life basis. His betrayal and destruction of his own storm troopers when they get too powerful echoes Hitler and Himmler's destruction of Ernst Rohm and the SA, and his torture chambers are reminiscent of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. The Strugatskys acknowledge the violence and suffering which have shaped human history, but also the pettiness of human nature that drives much of history. The noblemen make ludicrous decisions because they're permanently drunk, which makes them particularly easy for Reba to manipulate. The feudal rights of the Barons Pampa wind up having to be fought for each generation in a wasteful, expensive and unnecessary war which always has the same outcome, all for silver mines which cost less than the war does and laughably trivial privileges for the Barons. The Stugatskys have a hope for what humanity can become, but despair at its violence, cruelty and idiocy. This despair ultimately overtakes poor Anton, as circumstances get to the stage where he is no longer able to stand by dispassionately. He reaches the point where whatever he does he winds up with blood on his hands, but his decisive action only causes more death and destruction.

Nnedi Okorafor - Lagoon (2014)

"We are change."

"Human beings have a hard time relating to that which does not resemble them. It's your greatest flaw."

Nnedi Okorafor's 'Lagoon' is a first contact novel, in which the aliens land in Lagos. It is a fresh and original take on the subject, not least for its setting, which is vividly and powerfully evoked by Okorafor. However as well as providing a welcome antidote to all the British and American-centred stories in which the aliens land in New York or London, the aliens in 'Lagoon' have not just come for the President and the protagonists; their arrival is a cataclysmic event with enormous implications for everyone living on Earth. 'Lagoon' portrays the reactions of a diverse cross-section of all the various walks of life and perspectives in Lagos, as well as the effects it has on fish and animals - human beings aren't Earth's only inhabitants after all. The end result is an ambitious, powerful and complex story, in which the city of Lagos plays as central a role as Okorafor's characters.
   Okorafor portrays Lagos with passion and in great depth. She clearly has a great love for and fascination with the place, its energy and bustling vitality, but also has a canny understanding of its many and complex problems, the poverty, corruption and religious tensions. This allows her to portray the good and the bad about Lagos as it reacts to alien visitors, with considerable nuance. This is aided by the fact that Okorafor is interested in everybody's response. Her narrative takes in not just her main characters, but expands to follow 419 scammers, the students' LGBT society, the military, gangs, prostitutes, manipulative religious leaders and differently abled street kids. So many depictions of anywhere in Africa by Western media portray the entire continent as one homogenized culture, so it is both refreshing and necessary as a British SF reader to engage with a work that portrays Lagos in all its complexity. Okorafor understands the value and importance of giving all of these different, and frequently marginalised characters, a voice. Everyone reacts to the news differently, coming as they do from different backgrounds and with different perspectives, and the cumulative effect of this is that it allows Okorafor to portray first contact as the cataclysmic, perspective altering event it would not doubt be.
   'Lagoon' also subverts the standard human arrogance which assumes that we would be the only species on Earth that the aliens would be interested in interacting with. Okorafor's aliens land in the sea, and their first interaction is with fish. Throughout the book they are just as interested in interacting with animals as they are humans, offering them the same help. The uplifted animals provide us with the first hint of what the aliens are doing; they don't see their job as being to add anything, but to act as a catalyst for the animal or person's desire. In this way they act as instigators of social change. One of the results of the aliens landing is that the sea life now has the weapons to fight off humans polluting their environment. The new world that the aliens will create will have to be fairer not just for people but for animals as well.
   As well as interacting with Lagos' people and wildlife, the aliens also interact with the spiritual forces that have been living in Nigeria along with the humans. Ijele, the Igbo Chief of Masquerades, Legba, the spirit of the crossroads, and the Bone Collector, a road monster that consumes human victims of road accidents, all manifest and interact with the aliens, and it is revealed at the end that the entire story has been spun by Udide Okwanka, a giant story weaving spider who lives in a cave underneath the city, and who has been inspired by the aliens to stop weaving and take part in the story. These are all forces that have been in Nigeria before the arrival of the aliens, forces which give the country the strength of character and history to react to something as big as alien visitors. This is also shown in the supernatural powers of the three main characters, who were specially selected to be ambassadors. Adaora, a marine biologist, was born with webbed hands and feet, and has a natural affinity with the water. Anthony, a famous rapper, is able to tap into the cosmic rhythm and use its power. Agu, a soldier, has super strength. These characteristics have put them on the edge of human society and the spiritual world, and allows them to interact with the aliens on more equal footing and as ambassadors of both.
   Part of what gives the book its unique flavour is its dialogue, much of which is written in Nigerian Pidgin English. Okorafor has a great ear for dialogue, and the different registers, how much slang the characters pepper their speech with, gives the reader more information about their background and their personality, as well as greatly contributing to the sense of place. The book's structure is interesting as well, moving from the third person present for much of the book to sections related by minor characters in the first person when the aliens are mingling with the humans and chaos has broken out. These sections help to deliberately disorientate the reader in the midst of all this chaos, creating a sense of disorder and speed as the reader is rushed around different places and viewpoints. There are also more poetic sections, as rendered directly by Udide Okwanka the spider, harking back to the oral tradition and linking this thoroughly modern work of SF to the traditional. The book ends on an appropriately ambiguous note; the aliens have arrived, Ayodele's sacrifice has made humanity open to interacting and sharing with their alien visitors, all possibilities are open for a new dawn for Lagos. What happens next is left to the characters, and to the reader's imagination.