Christopher Priest - Fugue For A Darkening Island (1972)

"Everywhere they caused social upheaval; but in Britain, where a neo-racist government had come to power on an economic-reform ticket, they did much more."

   'Fugue For A Darkening Island' is Christopher Priest's damning indictment of Britain's innate conservatism and xenophobia that rings disturbingly true some forty years after it was published. It is also about the dangers of not standing up to evil. In some ways it can be seen as a riposte to the 'cozy catastrophes' of John Wyndham, in which middle class English folk respond to the apocalypse with their typical stiff upper lip and good sense and so maintain order and decency in the face of chaos. Here Priest wields a similarly dry, paternalistic tone to great ironic effect as he undermines the very notion of English decency.
   In 'Fugue For A Darkening Island', the incident that precipitates the catastrophe isn't an alien invasion or a plague. Africa is rendered uninhabitable by nuclear weapons, causing a massive exodus of refugees. Whereas in the rest of the world they simply cause the standard problems one would expect from an influx of a large population in need of food and shelter, in UK, where a racist far right government has come into power, they are met with suspicion, hostility and violence, eventually leading to a civil war with the African immigrants and their supporters on one side and the fascist government and the military on the other. The story centres on Alan Whitman, a British everyman who has never taken a moral or political stance his entire life. He and his wife and daughter are forced to leave their home by the conflict, and join up with a gang of refugees, where he is separated from his family.    
      In addition to its uncompromising subject matter, 'Fugue' is also ambitiously constructed, the structure designed to mimic that of a fugue, with three interweaving plot strands that echo each other as they progress. Episodes from the protagonist's early life are intertwined with the narrative explaining how the political situation collapsed and a third strand follows the protagonist through a socially disrupted England as he tries to find his wife and daughter. What could have been an unnecessary complication turns out to be an effective storytelling device. The disrupted narrative echoes the fractured state of mind of the protagonist, and the contrast of his state of mind and his behaviour throughout different points in the crisis allow us to see just how much he has been damaged by the experience. Additionally it lets us know more about Alan Whitman the person. The frank descriptions of his sexual awakenings may not initially seem to have much to do with the plot at hand, but as the narrative progresses and we get more and more information about his character, it casts some of his later decisions and behaviour in a different light. Whitman is a selfish and self-absorbed man, with that stereotypical British desire to avoid confrontation at all costs. Thus, he finds himself trapped in  a loveless marriage, constantly cheating on his wife and oblivious to the feelings of his young daughter, lacking the courage or conviction to either commit to his marriage or admit it isn't working and move on. This same fear of committing oneself is echoed in Whitman's response to the political situation developing around him. He initially joins a pro-immigrants rights group at his work, but doesn't actually do anything apart from go on a single protest march, and pulls out when the government starts cracking down on dissident activity. He even acknowledges the public's worrying political apathy in the face of political extremism, but fails to notice this characteristic in himself. There is an absolutely cringe-worthy scene in which he finds himself at a pub laughing nervously as an acquaintance makes racist jokes about the immigrants.
   This reluctance to commit haunts Whitman and drives his every action, even as he is forced out of his home by a situation created by his brutal fascist government. It is only as he searches for his wife and child, who have been kidnapped and sent to a makeshift brothel by the militant African forces, that he starts to make the first steps towards action. He shoots down a helicopter with an African pilot out of revenge, but when he goes to investigate the wreckage and finds the pilot still alive but mortally wounded he still cannot make himself either kill the man out of revenge or to put him out of his misery.
   As the story progresses, Whitman becomes more and more of an unreliable narrator. His natural inward focus is intensified by the crisis, and while he still shares his thoughts and experiences in his clipped, detached manner, it becomes clear that his sense of perspective towards outside events is becoming more and more warped as his decisions become less and less rational. The way Priest uses a dry and understated voice to ironically underscore just how twisted his protagonist's perception is brings to mind Anna Kavan's similarly apocalyptic 'Ice'. There is a scene towards the end when the rest of the UK has collapsed into anarchy where Whitman comes across a sleepy middle class village which is blissfully unaware of the situation outside its walls, which is reminiscent of the middle class family in Samuel R. Delany's 'Dhalgren' who still behave exactly the same as always and ignore the complete breakdown of social order going on outside. Priest similarly mines this situation for all the dark humour possible.
   The version of Whitman narrating one of the chronologically earlier narrative strands tells us that the government and military exercised a policy of genocide against the Africans, and he knows that the morally right thing to do is to side with them, however he keeps shying away from actually doing so. By the end of the book he discovers that his wife and daughter have been killed by the African military for not submitting to the brothel clientele's demands, which is finally enough to force his hand in the other direction. He goes on to kill an African boy and runs off into the countryside to seek revenge. By this stage, Whitman is too damaged to see that the Africans themselves are not to blame for the situation; the white nationalistic forces have brothels staffed by female African prisoners of war whom they treat exactly the same, which Whitman himself visits earlier in the story. Both armies have committed horrific atrocities against civilians on both sides, but this is a situation that has come about because the government responded to an influx of immigrants by putting them in concentration camps and trying to exterminate them. If Whitman or the rest of the UK population had the courage to stand up for what was right, rather than deferring to the last moment, this could have been avoided. Towards the end, Whitman's view is so distorted by grief and insanity that he can only see the Africans as enemies, however the only Africans who directly appear in the text, (apart from Lateef, the leader of the refugee group Whitman joins, whose origin remains ambiguous), are all victims rather than villains - the starving refugees arriving on the boats, the prisoners of war in the brothels, the dying helicopter pilot. This is my main gripe with the book, really, that all the Africans and women who appear in the text have no agency. I get that it's a conscious decision on the author's part to emphasise the limited perspective of the viewpoint character, but it's still frustrating.
   'Fugue' is an uncomfortable and uncompromising read. In a world where the UK's government is the farthest to the right it's been in years, and a substantial proportion of British voters are proving that they don't think that government is right wing or xenophobic enough, we would all do well to remember Christopher Priest's warning.  
 

George R. R. Martin - A Song Of Ice And Fire Book One: A Game Of Thrones (1996)

"'The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends,' Ser Jorah told her. 'It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace.' He gave a shrug. 'They never are.'"

Perhaps the most surprising thing about 'A Game Of Thrones', the first volume in George R. R. Martin's sprawling 'A Song Of Ice And Fire' series, is how focused it is. It has a cast of thousands, nine of which are viewpoint characters, yet it rattles along at a healthy pace despite its 800-odd pages, and there is something thoroughly elegant about how the different strands of the plot unfold to their grim conclusions.
   'A Game Of Thrones' is most assuredly Fantasy, from the detailed maps at the front of the book to the appendix detailing all the different family lines, replete with house sigils and words. But in many ways it's a deconstruction of modern fantasy as we know it, and of the various tropes and assumptions that are the very lifeblood and appeal of Fantasy as a genre.

Always start your book with a map. Preferably two.

  Tolkien's influence is pretty much as unavoidable in modern fantasy literature as, say, Star Trek's is on TV space opera. Martin is undoubtedly influenced by Tolkien, but while some books written in his wake have done little more than recycle the same character archetypes and symbols, Martin proves that by playing around with and subverting them there's still a lot of life and appeal left in them. So there is no dark lord waiting in Mordor with the serial numbers filed off here. There are no shining heroes either - many of the characters are deeply unpleasant, and even the characters with more heroic tendencies are far from perfect, and capable of making shocking mistakes. Magic exists - or at least, we have dragons and the zombie-like white walkers, but most of the people think they are extinct or legends.
   More than anything, though, there is a realistic focus on the feudalistic, medieval-ish setting that is the default for most Fantasy literature, and what it would really mean to live in such a society, especially for those disenfranchised by such a system. Amongst our viewpoint characters, we have Jon Snow, a bastard born to a Lord's family who is treated with contempt by his father's wife and will never be able to live the life given to his brothers and sisters born in wedlock; Tyrion Lannister, whose dwarfism mean that despite being intelligent, charming and by far the most likable character in the book he is an outcast treated with contempt by his father; and Daenerys Targaryen, a thirteen year old girl sold as a wife to the Dothraki in exchange for warriors by her vicious and power-mad brother. Experiencing the world of Westeros through their eyes strips away the romantic sheen from the age of chivalry and exposes just how harsh and difficult live could be in such times if you weren't a rich, white male (plus ca change....).
   In a lesser author so many different viewpoint characters could be confusing, (it's still helpful Martin states at the header of the chapter who's view it is), but Martin uses this device really well. It allows him to explore the fictional world through a variety of conflicting viewpoints, so we see many of the main characters, as well as things that happen, in different lights, helping to create a richly developed world. Additionally, Martin uses reminiscences or asides in one viewpoint character's chapter to set up Chekhov's guns for other characters. So for instance, when Tyrion remembers his past fascination with Aerys Targaryen's dragon skulls stored in the basement at the Red Keep in King's Landing, it tells us something about Tyrion's character, but also sets it up so that when Arya runs into 'monsters' while chasing cats we know what they are, even if she doesn't. It's an elegant way of making the text do extra work, which , in a volume this dense, is definitely appreciated.
   One of the main themes of the book is honour, and whether or not it's possible to have it in a society that doesn't really value it. This comes back round again to deconstructing the whole idea of chivalry. Many of the book's most unpleasant characters are lords and ladies, or indeed PRINCES. They show again and again that it is possible to behave in a courtly manner and still be a complete monster. I really enjoyed the chapters from Sansa's viewpoint, much as I don't care for the character. Basically she's tragically wrong genre savvy. A young girl who finds herself betrothed to the Prince, she declares herself hopelessly in love with him and is super excited about going to court and meeting noble knights like in the stories she loves. She's so blinded by her vision of how she thinks things should be it's far too late by the time she realises what is blindingly obvious to everyone else - that Prince Joffrey is spoilt, cruel and vile, and many of the Lannisters and their hangers on are not much better.

The Lannister words are "We're jerks! Except for Tyrion. He even gets to slap Joffrey. It's awesome."

   The book also questions what good honour and chivalry are, really, in the scheme of things. Following the climactic battle, Tyrion meditates on this, thinking about a knight he saw drown trying to cross a river in his full armour:

"Crossing a river at night on a crude raft, wearing armour, with an enemy waiting on the other side - if that was gallantry, he would take cowardice every time. He wondered if Lord Brax had felt especially gallant as the weight of his steel pulled him under the black water."

This cynicism extends to the narrative. This is a book in which no noble dead goes unpunished. Lord Eddard Stark, one of the few truly honourable characters in the book, reveals to Cersei Lannister that he knows her secret and is going to tell King Robert, giving her a chance to escape, when he knows that the previous man in his position was killed by the Lannisters to keep this secret. Unsurprisingly, this pretty much winds up getting him killed. Similarly, Daenerys' attempt to prevent the Dothraki warriors from raping a maegi leads to the death of her husband and her unborn son. But then this links in to how self-centred the viewpoint of even the sympathetic characters like Eddard and Daenerys are. Eddard is so bound to his honour he cannot see how his rigid adherence to it has wound up ruining other people's lives, until it's too late and his family is in danger; similarly Jon Snow is genuinely surprised to find out that his peers perceive him as a smug bully, because while he is a bastard, he was brought up in the Stark household and has the advantage of their wealth, education and training that wasn't available to his peers.
   'A Game Of Thrones' wears its Fantasy colours on its sleeve, but Martin has written SF in the past, and names many SF authors as influences. This comes through in the well-developed and convincing world building. We very much get a sense of Westeros as a real place, in some ways that almost feel SFnal. The central story, with its rival dynasties, echos Frank Herbert's Dune series as much as any fantasy narrative, and while we never get an explanation for Westeros' unusual season cycles, with summers and winters lasting many years, there's always an underlying feeling that it could be explained away in a scientific manner, like, say the aeons-long seasons in Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy.
   While 'A Game Of Thrones' is thoroughly engaging, exciting and entertaining, it's not perfect. Juggling so many characters in so many different places is a tricky balancing act at the best of times, and while Martin rarely falters in this book, the strain shows in places, and it's going to be difficult to maintain the focus 'Game' has over the following six books. Trigger warning - there is a whole lot of rape in this book. For the most part, it's played for drama rather than exploitation, and is there to highlight just how bad things were for women in medieval times and that raping was just one of the things armies did after a battle was won and it was just accepted, which is of course A BAD THING. However, Martin does go to this well a lot, to the extent that the reader starts to get numb to it, and it's just something that's frequently happening in the background. I don't think this is intentional on the part of the author, but it is an issue that needs treating with sensitivity and care, rather than slapped on to garnish a battle scene to make the story seem more gritty.
   There is a sense of Diabolus Ex Machina in some of the more outlandish plot developments - things don't just go wrong, they go wrong in the most gut-wrenchingly, barkingly mad way possible. My personal favourite of these is when Catelyn Stark, on the run from the Lannisters and with Tyrion captive, goes to her sister Lysa for help, only for us to find out that Lysa is petulant, spoiled and completely insane, and that Lysa's son, heir to a powerful house and vital tactical hold, is a simpering mummy's boy still breastfeeding at the age of six. Fortunately, these are pretty evenly distributed across all the opposing factions, to the extent that in the end it kind of works out more like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where it's just a super bad day for everyone involved. Joffrey's villainous triumph, where he executes Ned Stark, actually winds up being a woeful tactical error, leaving the Lannisters with nothing to bargain with when the Starks capture Jaime Lannister and inciting the houses of the north to swear fealty to the Starks instead. Martin's fondness for brutally killing off beloved characters rivals Joss Whedon's, and while that can give a thrilling sense that anything can happen and everything is up for grabs, it can also get off-putting. The last section of the book, with Ned Stark's shocking death and Sansa being forced to look at his severed head by an insufferably smug Joffrey, is almost unremittingly dark. However, the book ends with an image of death and rebirth, and dragons, which does make everything better. Roll on book two!


 

Karen Joy Fowler - Sarah Canary (1991)

"It might even be true. It was not for him to know. A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it. What we say occupies a very thin surface, like the skin over a body of water. Beneath this, through the water itself, is what we see, sometimes clearly if the water is calm, sometimes vaguely if the water is troubled, and we imagine this vision to be the truth, clear or vague. But beneath this is yet another level. This is the level of what is and this level has nothing to do with what we say or what we see."

'Sarah Canary' is one of SF's most powerful explorations of the Other. Fittingly for a book about First Contact, it deals with alienation. But Sarah Canary doesn't act as a filter to give us a fresh perspective on humanity as much as a focal point that draws in the novel's motley crew of disenfranchised. Sarah Canary isn't really the protagonist; she doesn't actually do much, we never find out anything about her motivations or thoughts, and Fowler deliberately leaves her true nature ambiguous. She's a walking Outside Context Problem, and how the various characters perceive and react to her reveals the prejudices, concerns and fears of the 1870s America she mysteriously appears in. 
   The masterstroke of 'Sarah Canary' is not just in how it explores the lot of the disenfranchised, but also how it highlights the inhumanity of the society that allows this. The book takes us on a tour through Chinese labour camps, mental asylums, Indian shanty towns and carnival shows, emphasising that, unless you were a particular subset of straight white male, this was a time and place that granted you precious little rights. We meet Chin Ah Kin, who first discovers Sarah Canary, a Chinese immigrant who was more or less kidnapped and brought to the States to work on the railways. They are joined by B.J., an escapee from the asylum, which is run on a strict budget with little care for the patients' well-being and no meaningful way of treating them, and Adelaide Dixon, a suffragette who is routinely persecuted for daring to suggest that women should enjoy sex. All three of them perceive Sarah Canary differently, but all three of them try to help and protect her. Along the way they encounter a series of unpleasant white men who plan to exploit her one way or another.
   All of this makes the book sound much more didactic than it actually is. 'Sarah Canary' is far more well rounded and complicated than that. Fowler deftly reveals the extent to which prejudice can divide people. Initially, Chin, B.J. and Miss Dixon view each other with the same hostility and suspicion that society faces the with, but through their shared experiences with Sarah Canary they gain both a mutual respect for one another as people and a profound understanding of each other's circumstances. Additionally  none of the unpleasant white men are straw men. Fowler makes them well developed enough as characters that we are able to see where they are coming from, even if we don't sympathise. Frequently they too are in their own ways victims of a cruel and exclusionary society - for example Harold, perhaps the closest the book has to a villain, is revealed to have been driven to the brink of sanity following his experiences in a prisoner of war camp following the end of the Civil War. 
   One of the main themes of the book is perception - how our perception shapes the way we experience the world, and whether or not this prevents us from ever really seeing the truth. The quote above reminds me of Philip K. Dick's famous maxim, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". Here we have almost the opposite problem - when you can't separate out how your own beliefs colour something, how can you ever know what reality truly is? This links back to the theme of prejudice, and how the characters are in reality very different from how they are perceived to be. Chin has to deal with the possibility that he may be lynched wherever he goes, yet he is perceived as being dangerous. Miss Dixon is called a slut and a whore because of her campaigns for women's rights, yet she has barely had any experiences with men and is at heart a romantic. Everyone thinks B.J. is crazy, yet in the chapter where we get to experience his viewpoint we find out he is perfectly lucid, if oblique. This all makes it thoroughly appropriate that Sarah Canary herself is only perceived by others, so the truth as to who or what she actually is is never revealed.
   Sarah Canary's true nature is only hinted at. Although it's possible to read the book as straight historical fantasy with no SF elements whatsoever, the juxtaposition of the alien and alienation is too resonant to ignore. Throughout the book she is compared or described in supernatural terms. She is also compared to a butterfly, specifically with regards to her mysterious transformation at the end, and from Chin's first encounter with her he associates her with the image of a one-winged bird. The combined vision we get from all these images perhaps gives us an idea of what her true form might be. 

  
   

Brian Aldiss - Non-Stop (1958)

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

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

Jeff Noon - Vurt (1993)

"Deja Vurt. Must be. That's the name of the feeling you get sometimes, in Vurt, when you've done this one already, but you're in the Vurt anyway, remember? And you're thinking it's real. So a loop is made in the head, and it becomes a kind of Haunting. Memories of your previous trips start to play on the feather dreams, shifting them out of phase, like a feedback wave. Maybe this was the answer. I'm in a Vurt, getting a real cool Haunting."

   Jeff Noon's 'Vurt' is The Pavement to Philip K. Dick's The Fall. 'Vurt' is explicitly PKDickian, from the way the title and the sly Vaz advert echo 'UBIK' to the way the plot plays out as a sort of 'greatest hits' of elements from some of Dick's strongest works. As well as 'UBIK', there are touches of 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch' (dimension-hopping drugs), 'The Game Players of Titan' (dimension-hopping Lovecraftian horrors) and 'A Scanner Darkly' (state surveillance and drugs). Two of the female characters, Bridget and Mandy, could even be expies of the interchangeable brunette and redhead doomed femme fatales that crop up in most of Dick's novels. Yet, in much the same way that Pavement's debut LP 'Slanted And Enchanted', for all its obvious Fall influence, still manages to sound vital and relevant, 'Vurt' is able to reconfigure these ideas in a way that is engaging and timely, as well as being a damn slight more streamlined than a lot of PKD's own work.
   To give credit where credit's due, 'Vurt' is still a sublimely odd fish. It manages to fit in nicely with the then-current cyberpunk milieu without actually featuring many cyberpunk elements. Perhaps this is one more artifact of Philip K. Dick's influence, seeing as he was so influential on the cyberpunk movement. However, there's a bit more to it than that. While nothing in 'Vurt' is particularly 'cyber', it is quite explicitly 'punk'. Perhaps moreso than any SF novel since Thomas M. Disch's '334', 'Vurt' focuses on the down-and-outs. This is not so much William Gibson's vision of the street finding its own use for technology as a bunch of kids on the dole in Manchester council estates finding release where they can. The setting is vividly and memorably evoked, and is one of the things that gives the book its own distinct feel, despite its obvious predecessors. 'Vurt' also has a lot of fun with language. Jeff Noon was influenced by dub music and the idea of 'remixing' his text to come up with something similar to William Burrough's cut-up technique. 'Vurt' is never as radical as Burrough's work - indeed, it's probably not as radical as Norman Spinrad's similar experiments in 'Bug Jack Barron' - but it's a compelling and ambitious idea that gives rise to some startling, effective passages.
   'Vurt' is set in a recognisable but distorted Manchester, in which robots, psychics, talking dogs that can interbreed with humans and humans coexist. Vurt itself is a sort of shared dreamspace that you access by sucking on feathers. Objects, feelings and people themselves can be transferred to and from Vurtspace, providing they are replaced by an object of equal value. Our protagonist, Scribbler, lost his sister/lover to the Vurt in this way and woke up with a tentacled Lovecraftian horror that they nickname The Thing From Outer Space. In a retelling of the Orpheus myth, the book follows Scribbler's quest to exchange the Thing for his sister so he can rescue her from the Vurt. He is helped by his gang, The Stash Riders, when they're not all too blitzed out of their skulls on feathers to do anything, and hindered by the police and their sophisticated surveillance robots.
   What makes 'Vurt' truly Dickian is the upsetting of the hierarchies of reality. From fairly early on, it's insinuated that the Vurt is not merely a psychological space but is also a series of alternate dimensions, arguably as 'real' as our own. The Thing is a nice subversion of the standard H. P. Lovecraft story of malevolent unknowable beings encroaching on our own reality; the Thing is here entirely by accident, all it wants is to get back home, and it winds up being as much a victim as anybody in the book. The twist at the end features another UBIK homage, which also functions as a cute reference to Lewis Carroll's 'Through The Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There'. Scribbler manages to rescue his sister, but the price he pays is that he has to stay trapped in the Vurt, where he learns that they are all stuck inside the dream of a sleeping woman, and all of the various realities will simply disappear if she ever wakes up. Scribbler is being groomed to eventually take her place.
 

Catherynne M. Valente - Palimpsest (2009)

"Terrible things occur when you outgrow the space allotted to you. You cannot really circumnavigate Fairyland like September did, not really. It's too big for you." 

   'Palimpsest' is one of those weird, monolithic tales about a different reality that impinges on our own, or, in this case, we impinge on it. The only other books remotely like it are John Crowley's 'Little, Big', in which we learn, by insinuations, that the world of faerie is encroaching on our own, and 'Dhalgren' by Samuel R. Delany, in which the protagonist journeys through a shifting, mythic city cut off from the rest of the world. Indeed, the quote above echoes the central mantra of 'Little, Big' - "The further in you go, the bigger it gets", while the lyrical and evocative closing lines of 'Palimpsest' remind me of the iconic ending of 'Dhalgren'; if the narrative of 'Palimpsest' is not recursive, it does suggest that others will follow the protagonists' journey. More than that, Catherynne Valente's prose achieves a level of hallucinatory vividness and poetic lyricism on a par with Delany and Crowley, although her narrative voice is most definitely her own. And like those two books, 'Palimpsest' manages to weave together strands from mythology and folklore into something so convincing you have a hard time believing it's not real.
   This is all the more astonishing when you consider how loopy the premise is. Palimpsest is a magical dream city that you can only visit by sleeping with someone who has already visited the city. Everyone who has visited it is marked by a tattoo of a portion of a map of Palimpsest. This is the area of the city where you wind up after your night of passion, and the tattoos of your prior lovers mark the limits of the areas within Palimpsest where you are able to travel. When people arrive in the city they are bound together in a group of four known as a Quarto, and all four people feel whatever the others do while they are in the city. The story follows one Quarto on their quest to find a way to move to Palimpsest permanently.
   So far, so bonkers, but from that description you'd be forgiven for thinking this is simply a more risque portal fantasy, a sort of X-rated Narnia. However the book easily transcends such accusations, thanks both to the detailed world-building in the scenes set in Palimpsest and, more importantly, its excellent character work. In many ways, 'Palimpsest' is a deconstruction of the portal fantasy, asking what type of person would want so desperately to escape the real world that they seek to leave it permanently. Obsession, addiction and debasement are all major themes.
   All four of our main characters are severely damaged. Amaya Sei is a Japanese train-enthusiast whose mother was mentally ill and eventually committed suicide; November Aguilar is an American beekeeper who was dragged through her parents' long and painful divorce; Oleg Sadakov is a Russian-born locksmith living in New York who has an intense relationship with a hallucination of his dead sister; Ludovico Conti is an Italian book binder whose wife has left him. All of them are ill at ease in the real world. However, with each of them it's not just a case of being an outcast with a tragic past finding a magical world where everything finally makes sense. The city manages to find exactly the right weak-point in all of their psyches to claw its way deep into their being; it doesn't take long for all of them to be desperate to move to Palimpsest permanently.
   The interesting thing about this is that Palimpsest is not some idyllic fantasy land. It is a strange and frequently hostile and dangerous place. It is revealed early on that injuries gained in Palimpsest will not go away when you wake up in the morning, and that visitors have been killed there. Palimpsest has just emerged from a bitter war, fought between Casimira, who believes that immigrants (i.e. us) should be allowed to visit and stay in Palimpsest, and the other supernatural beings who live there, who see mere humans as inferior being who do not belong there. As a result, visitors are frequently in danger of muggings or worse. In addition, all four characters wind up having to pay a price for entry, likened to the coins placed on the eyes of dead people to allow them to pass into the afterlife. November loses her fingers and is covered in bee stings, Sei becomes accidentally pregnant, Ludo has his tongue cut out, Oleg goes through such a deep depression he almost starves to death.
   For any of this to make sense, Palimpsest itself has to be vividly realised. Valente's descriptions of the dream world are incredible. Despite the danger, the city is genuinely alluring, with its heavy air of mystery, its impenetrable social rituals, its people with heads or limbs of animals and its finely crafted vermin. Valente's command of atmosphere is deft, and she is able to change the tone from whimsical to sinister and genuinely quite frightening without missing a beat.
   Valente also does interesting things with the structure of the book. It is told in the third person omniscient, and devotes alternating pairs of chapters to each of the characters. In the beginning, the first chapter in the pair is set in the real world and the second in Palimpsest. About halfway through, when the characters are starting to become more and more obsessed and entrenched in the world of Palimpsest, the order switches over. The chapters in Palimpsest are written in a different, slightly more ornate font than the rest of the book, and this is matched by the language, which becomes more poetic and descriptive, at times approaching Lord Dunsany levels of floridness, at other times addressing the reader directly. By the end we learn that these portions of the book have been narrated by the city of Palimpsest itself. All these techniques serve to subtly create a solid distinction between the real world and Palimpsest.
   In the end, all four characters are able to move to Palimpsest permanently. I really like that the book leaves it up to the reader whether or not this is was a good choice, or if it was worth the price they paid. At the beginning of the book, when the four characters first visit Palimpsest and are bound in their Quarto, a fortune-teller gives them each a strange tarot card prophesying all the disaster they will face over the course of the story. This being fiction, the prophecies play out, all though not necessarily in the ways you might imagine, so being able to snatch any kind of happy ending from that is an achievement. The book ends with Casimira's war finally won, the gates of Palimpsest opening, and the city itself calling all who hear to enter, which manages to underscore the triumphant and emphasise the sinister.
 
   

Ward Moore - Bring The Jubilee (1953)

"Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1933. Neither the dates nor the tenses are error - let me explain:"

   Listen: Hodgins McCormick Backmaker has come unstuck in time. Well it's clear from that incredible opening sentence that time-travelling shenanigans must be involved, but it quickly becomes apparent that it's far from the whole story.
   'Bring The Jubilee' is an iconic and early example of Alternate History, a variant of SF in which instead of imagining the future the author imagines what would have happened if a crucial moment in the history of our world played out differently. Two of the most popular Jonbar points in Western SF, where the alternate world diverges from our own, are the American Civil War and World War II. Philip K Dick's 'The Man In The High Castle' is the go-to example of the latter, in which he vividly imagines a world where the Nazis won; 'Bring The Jubilee' is the most celebrated case of the former, with the South emerging victorious.
   In many ways, 'Bring The Jubilee' is a much purer example of the genre at its finest, and a stronger case for  what alternate history can bring to the table that perhaps straightforward SF can't. Excellent as it is, 'The Man In The High Castle' is very Dickian, with its multiple shifting realities and the final revelation that the alternate world within the book in which the Allies won is not the same as our world, and in fact neither may be 'real'. 'Bring The Jubilee' is much more focused on the historical details of its alternate world, with historical and cultural differences thought out in great detail. It's also a lot more character-based than the traditionally plot-based PKD.
   In a recent interview, Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the Mars Trilogy, was asked about the differences between straightforward SF and alternative history, and had this to say:

"In a way, there's not much that alternate history can do. I think it's a weaker form than science fiction proper. In science fiction proper, you're saying, 'This is going to happen to all of us. It's not my dream, it's not surrealism, it's prophecy, this is coming for us,' and you read science fiction and go, 'Wow, this is going to happen for me or my children,' or whatever. Alternative history is saying that, well, this didn't happen, but if it had, it would have been a really interesting cool thing. That's a much weaker statement than, 'This is coming.' So, all you can do, I think, is make a new story space, which is nice, and you can also suggest that history is changeable." Kim Stanley Robinson, interviewed by io9

   This is certainly a valid stance, however, I think it also hits quite nicely at what can make alternate history done well so appealing. Works like 'Pavane' by Keith Roberts (Queen Elizabeth is assassinated on the eve of the Spanish armada) or Robinson's own 'The Years Of Rice And Salt' (the Black Death kills 99% of Europe's population) have a very individual texture and atmosphere, drawn from a setting at once instantly recognizable yet subtly alien. 'Bring The Jubilee' easily sits in such exalted company. The world-building here is truly exquisite; in its slim 240-odd pages, Moore packs a surprising amount of detail about the history and culture of this alternate timeline. Impressively, much of this is done by naturalistic dialogue and the attitudes and actions of the various characters.
   Alternate histories also allow us to reflect how fragile the strands of history are; we got where we are today by a combination of luck and happenstance, rather than by forethought, careful planning and great men choosing the correct choices at crucial moments.
 

Adapted from the extensive 'Bring The Jubilee' Wikipedia entry

   This is a theme that crops up a lot in 'Bring The Jubilee'. Our protagonist Hodge is constantly pulled between the two opposing concepts of fate and freewill. An inhabitant of the impoverished North, his great passion is history, and he wants nothing more than to be able to study it. However at every turn he is confronted with difficult moral quandaries. This is highlighted early on by the opposing views of his two mentors, one a cynic representing resigned fate, the other an idealist representing freewill. Despite the nagging of his conscience, Hodge repeatedly avoids doing what he believes is right by not taking any action. But, as a great Canadian progressive rock trio once said, 'If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.'
    When he finally becomes a historian, he gets the opportunity to travel back in time to witness the decisive Battle of Gettysburg first hand and jumps at the chance. Of course our protagonist would never be so bold as to intentionally alter the chain of events, but it turns out his mere presence there is enough to change history so that the Confederate forces don't occupy a crucial point in the battle, allowing the Union to win. Hodge winds up stranded in the past, as his actions have erased his timeline in which the time machine was built, and history unfolds as we know it.
   What I like about all this is how it emphasises the randomness of history, the dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time. 'Bring The Jubilee' would have been a much less effective book if it had been about an actively heroic figure going back in time to set right what once went wrong. Hodge realises how badly his world turned out - companies are allowed to hold people in what amounts to virtual slavery, minorities are exploited and have little to no rights - but the key facet of his character is his lack of moral fibre in the face of conflict. He never intended to change anything, and does his best to avoid it happening, but it happens anyway. I also like how this leaves completely unresolved the conflict between fate and free will. How can Hodge have free will, when the pivotal action that he takes was done entirely by mistake and against  his will? How can there be such a thing as fate when our timeline only exists because Hodge's timeline existed beforehand and he went back in time and made a mistake?
   And while it's clear Moore feels our world turned out better than the world in 'Bring The Jubilee', he refreshingly keeps a clear head about the bad things that have happened in our reality. Hodge is writing his account before the turn of the century, and is not filled with hope and optimism for the future. We learn that World War I in the original timeline, fought from 1914 to 1916, was less bad than in our reality, and Hodge faces the new century with trepidation, fearing that human nature has not changed and that the emerging conflict will be unavoidable. And of course, we all know how that turned out, because this is the REAL timeline. Isn't it?