Stanisław Lem – Solaris (1961)

“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.”

The photo is sideways because I hate movie tie-in covers. And not because my photography skills suck. Shut up.

Aliens may be central to the ideology and appeal of SF, but they are frequently not all that, well, alien. Frequently life on other planets is reduced to a thinly veiled caricature of some culture the writer feels is suitably exotic, or a broad representation of whatever human characteristic the writer feels like dealing with today. Both of these approaches are as common as all hell and are thoroughly problematic, the former being straight-up racist and the latter robbing the aliens of any real sense of agency and reducing them to simplistic stereotypes. This is especially common in TV and movie SF – think the classic Star Trek rubber forehead alien – for fairly obvious reasons. Before the advent of CGI it was simply not feasible to build truly alien aliens, and it doesn’t hurt that having human actors makes them more immediately easy to relate to. This isn’t to say that Star Trek and others haven’t told some good stories in this mode. Occasionally Trek would try to come up with more unusual aliens, usually resulting in the god-like alien, who had the power to take human form so they could conveniently be portrayed by a human actor, but also had whatever magical powers the plot demanded. In many ways this is an even lazier alternative, exchanging science for the worst kind of deus ex machina magic. Again this isn’t to say that good stories haven’t been told using this mode.

    When it comes down to it, many of the aliens we encounter in SF can fit broadly into either of these categories. Both of them are disappointingly unimaginative and ultimately unscientific. The appearance of humans has been determined by millions of years of evolution, shaped by the circumstances and environments we encountered on this planet. It is simply unrealistic to assume that any intelligent life we might encounter would have been exposed to exactly the same evolutionary pressures, and simply arrogant to assume that our bipedal mammalian structure would be the gold standard in an infinite universe. Then there is the assumption that aliens would think and behave in ways that are broadly analogous and understandable to human beings. An intelligent life form would again be shaped by its own alien culture, however that may have developed. There is no reason to assume that it would share our values; perhaps we would not even be able to understand each other’s cultures or even thought processes and motivations. Very few works of SF acknowledge this; even writers like Iain M. Banks who create aliens with wonderfully imaginative appearances still have them behave in understandable, relatable and ultimately human ways.

   ‘Solaris’, by Polish author Stanisław Lem, is an exception to this rule. It takes as its major themes how utterly unknowable the truly alien is and the difficulty of communication between life forms so radically different they cannot share any common reference points. It is a tribute to the power of Lem’s vision and the importance of his ideas that ‘Solaris’ is one of the few works in translation to find a permanent place in the British/North American canon of science fiction, despite the only English translation available being the notoriously poor 1970 translation from a French translation of the original Polish. (The first direct Polish to English translation was finally released in 2011 as an audiobook and then as an ebook, but as I dislike audiobooks and I do not own a kindle, this review is of the old translation). It has also been adapted into a film three times, which considering the philosophical nature of much of the text and the sheer trippiness of much of the action, is thoroughly baffling.

   The book centres on Dr. Kris Kelvin, a deeply damaged psychiatrist visiting the Solaris Station, a research space station located over the ocean planet of Solaris. The ocean on Solaris is a single living entity that appears to have some form of intelligence, but all attempts to communicate with it have proven futile. He has been sent to investigate the mental health of the crew, but he soon has his own problems to worry about as he is faced with an apparition of Rheya, his dead wife. It turns out the crew have all experience these visitations, and that it is the ocean’s equally futile attempt to communicate with them. One of the scientists eventually develops a technique to destroy the apparitions. This is pretty much all of the plot, but the novel makes up for the thinness of the plot with its psychological depth.

   Much of the novel is taken up by Lem’s description of the Solaris and the various scientific attempts to understand it. This is an example of exposition done incredibly well. Much of the point of the book is how unknowable this alien life is, and this is reflected by the fact that the scientific community, despite decades of research, actually knows very little about Solaris. In a sequence worthy of Douglas Adams, Lem hilariously lampoons self-important scientific writing and the fickle gaze of mainstream media’s scientific interest. Despite Solaris being the only known example of such a life form, the scientists have nonetheless given it a scientific name and classification. Humanity’s history with Solaris is a history of competing scientific theories of philosophical interest but of absolutely no practicality as the organism is so far outside our experience no one has the slightest idea about how to go about testing these theories. There is not even a scientific consensus on whether or not Solaris qualifies as intelligent life.

   More seriously, Lem takes the opportunity to satirise scientific post-colonialism. The quote at the top of the page shrewdly points out the post-colonialist attitude present in much of the way SF deals with aliens – the Trek ideal of humanity spreading justice and democracy across the unenlightened galaxy. Humanity is incapable of dealing with Solaris because people have approached first contact expecting to see something recognisable and ultimately human reflected back at them within the alien. Solaris is so utterly other that many scientists refuse to acknowledge that it counts as intelligent life, not so much because it doesn’t appear intelligent but simply because it doesn’t conform to our narrow ideals of what ‘life’ is.

  Yet by the end of the book we are left with no doubt that Solaris is an intelligent being attempting to communicate. Solaris is prone to bizarre formations that appear and disappear across its surface. Some of the novel’s most poetic (and most resolutely unfilmable) sequences arise from Lem’s description of the mysterious and beautiful formations such as symmetriads and asymmetriads that spontaneously form and collapse across the surface of the ocean. Dr. Kelvin eventually realises that simply being able to accurately copy a symmetriad and drop it in the ocean wouldn’t necessarily allow us to communicate any better with Solaris because we still fundamentally don’t understand what these formations could possibly mean for the ocean. This is reflected in Solaris’ doomed attempts to communicate. While it is able to flawlessly replicate Kelvin’s wife from his image of her in his mind, the replication isn’t able to act as an avatar for the ocean – an obvious solution to the communication problem that a lesser author would have taken. Because of Solaris’ nature as a massive sentient ocean it can no more understand what individual human beings are than we can understand it. So while the imitation Rheya appears to have consciousness and self awareness, as well as all of the original Rheya’s memories from prior to her death, and can communicate as the original to Dr. Kelvin, she cannot know that she is the creation of an utterly alien being or what that being is trying to communicate. Her presence causes Dr. Kelvin such emotional distress he assumes that Solaris is intentionally trying to torture him, before recognising it as an attempt to communicate using the only information it has available to it yet utterly devoid of understanding of what that information means. But it does reveal that Solaris wants to communicate with humanity and is willing to try, perhaps the only thing these two widely different organisms share. 

M. John Harrison - The Kefahuchi Tract Book One: Light (2002)

   "The Kefahuchi Tract.
   A singularity without an event horizon. A place where all the broken rules of the universe spill out, like cheap conjuror's stuff, magic that might work or it might not, undependable stuff in a retro shop window. You couldn't make anything of an idea like that, but you couldn't stop trying. You couldn't stop trying to engage it."

   Back in 1974, M. John Harrison wrote the incredibly disgruntled deconstruction of the space-opera 'The Centauri Device'. The book is overwhelmingly cynical, and its focus on a desperate down-and-out antihero was refreshing. Instead of SF's standard focus on the heroic square-jawed pioneer, 'The Centauri Device' is explicitly about the disenfranchised, smugglers eking out a marginal living on the fringes of society. Reaching the stars hasn't changed fundamental human nature, with greed and paranoia motivating most of the characters. However, by the end the book collapses in on its own pissiness, with the author killing all his characters and destroying this quarter of the galaxy. After moving on to fantasy and literary fiction, Harrison returned to space opera with 'Light' in 2002. It builds on all the strengths of 'The Centauri Device', but with a more mature perspective. 'Light' is still a book deeply aware of the fundamental flaws in ourselves and under no illusions about our likelihood of overcoming them, but it is more generous in spirit than its predecessor. While it still manages to subvert a good many space opera tropes, at the end instead of ending the game by kicking over the board, Harrison grants his characters some reprieve and his readers some genuine, good old fashioned SF sense of wonder.
   'Light' has a complex structure, following three separate narrative strands, one in the present day, two in the 2400s. In the present day strand, physicist Michael Kearney, who will invent the system of physics used to power spaceships in the future, tries to escape the attention of the mysterious and frightening Shrander - the shape of a horse's skull, but with ribbons streaming off of it - by murdering innocent women. One of the 2400 strands follows Seria Mau Genlicher, a girl surgically altered to merge with alien and human technology so she can pilot a K-ship, as she tries to unravel the mystery behind a strange package. The third is about Ed Chianese, a once infamous smuggler turned virtual reality addict on the run from his creditors. All three strands are linked by the Kefahuchi Tract, an impenetrable and uknowable ribbon of space weirdness that deposits untold alien wonders on its shores. At the end of the book, all of these narrative strands come elegantly together, as it is revealed that all three characters are being manipulated by the Shrander, which is the last survivor of an alien race that seeded humanity as a last-ditch attempt to create a race that might be able to investigate and understand the riddles of the universe that they were unable to.

Like this, but with more ribbons.

 
   The three main characters of 'Light' are all damaged, at least as much as John Trunk, the protagonist of 'The Centauri Device'. Harrison succeeds in creating three very memorable, complex and well-rounded protagonists, who, while they aren't always likable, are always compelling. Michael Kearney is a brilliant physicist full of potential, and his ability to see links between the randomness of determined patterns and the determined patterns in seeming randomness provides humanity with the conceptual breakthrough that allows them to travel between the stars. However he is completely swallowed up and destroyed by his fear, eventually teeming up with a lunatic to go on a killing spree across Europe. Seria Mau Genlicher decided to abandon her physical body and become part of a K-ship when she was thirteen, following the death of her mother and her abuse at the hands of her father. Although she is now part of a powerful machine capable of operating across 14 dimensions, she is still at heart a lost and frightened girl, liable to lash out, which winds up having lethal consequences for her human crew. It is strongly implied that Ed Chianese is Seria Mau's long lost brother, carrying the same psychological scars, which has driven him to live a reckless life on the edge as a smuggler and eventually leading to his virtual reality addiction.

Dr. Haends to surgery!

   The Shrander says of Kearney, "Now there was someone who fell back from himself... he was just too frightened of the things he knew." To some extent this describes all the characters, but whereas Kearney is beyond redemption, Seria Mau and Ed Chianese are, at the end, able to escape from their past to some extent. While there is no doubt the Shrander is manipulative, it also seems to deeply care about its human pawns. The events of the story are one long plot to get Ed Chianese in the correct place and frame of mind where he is ready to go and explore the Kefahuchi Tract, something no one has returned alive from. However the Shrander allows Seria Mau to escape from her ship and gain a new corporeal body, and gives Kearney a true moment of peace before his death. The Shrander says to each of them, "You can forgive yourself now," the first step towards acceptance and moving on from the past.  

 

   Acceptance is a major theme of 'Light'. As the Shrander says, "There will always be more in the universe. There will always be more after that." Even if humanity are able to understand more about the Kefahuchi Tract than the Shrander's people did, there will always be more things out there beyond human understanding, more than can ever be explored. 'Light' takes issue with the whole idea that the universe can actually ever be understood - it is too large, too varied and weird for that. Early on, Harrison explains what happened during humanity's first encounters with alien civilizations. Apparently every different alien species uses a different kind of faster-than-light drive, built on different and contradictory physical assumptions. While their attempts at understanding the universe have bought them no closer to the truth, the important thing is that they tried - they had that initial interest in their surroundings and the hunger for knowledge that drove them to attempt space travel in the first place. Seria Mau observes, 

"Generally, it was impossible to understand the motives of aliens. 'Motives,' she thought, staring at the collection of legs and eyes in front of her, 'are a sensorum thing. They are an Umwelt thing. The cat has a hard job to imagine the motives of the housefly in its mouth.' She thought about this. 'The housefly has a harder job,' she decided."

But 'Light' is fundamentally about our desire to understand our place in the universe, and the universe around us, something shared by all the aliens and humans in the book. Even as they grossly misunderstand each other, use each other or kill each other, they are all held together by this saving grace. As Ed Chianese gears up to delve into the Tract, war is breaking out all around. But he is able to share a moment of empathy with the Shrander because of this universal desire towards greater understanding. 

    

 

Christopher Priest - A Dream Of Wessex (1977)

"The tide was going out, and for a moment Harkman had an hallucinatory image of some bottomless drain far out at sea, into which the water was emptying, drawing back from the shore and leaving the bay sodden and bare, the muddy remains of the twentieth century scattered like shipwrecks across the land."

   In 'A Dream Of Wessex', a group of thirty-nine academics experience a collective dream of an optimistic future, by way of the Ridpath projector. The hope is that by submerging themselves in an utterly realistic and convincing version of a better future they can discover beneficial paths to take in the present. However, in the projection their conscious will becomes subsumed to an alter ego who lives in that time, and David Harkman, one of the academics, has gone missing within the projection for two years and refuses to come out. Meanwhile the board of trustees have decided the project isn't delivering results, and hires Paul Mason to redirect the projection. Unfortunately for all of the academics, and especially Julia Stretton, who used to be in a relationship with Paul, Paul is a selfish, manipulative and abusive sociopath with delusions of grandeur whose warped perspective threatens to swallow up the entire projection.
   'A Dream Of Wessex' comes at a point in Priest's career when he was moving away from works like 'Inverted World' and 'Fugue For A Darkening Island' which play games with the boundaries of genre and their protagonists' perception but can still be comfortably classified as SF, towards his later works, such as 'The Affirmation' or 'The Glamour', which have a more ambiguous relationship towards their SFnal elements.   'Wessex' still has a central SF element in its dream machine, especially in the very Philip K. Dick-esque climax, which echoes the stripping away of subsequent layers of reality and illusion that runs through all his work. Towards the end the academics in the future dreamworld have reactivated the Ridpath projector within the dream world, and the spiraling of layers of reality rivals that in UBIK or 'Inception'.
   However the narrative focus remains almost entirely on the characters, specifically the destructive relationship between Paul and Julia, which Priest explores with almost surgical precision. The dream Wessex of the future  has provided Julia with a realised escapist fantasy that she can retreat to following her disastrous relationship with Paul, one that his presence in her new life threatens. Roger Zelazny used the metaphor of a dream machine to explore the effects of an obsessive and deranged personality on another person's mind in 'The Dream Master', but that was just between two people. Paul's obsessive drive to possess Julia is so powerful it disrupts a consensus reality shaped by thirty-eight other people. Priest derives some dark humour from just how twisted and egotistical Paul is. When he enters the projection, despite being the newest member his subconscious makes him the leader of the whole project, and his projected self is sickeningly handsome, charming and loved by everyone. When Julia regains her memories in the projection, she realises that this is genuinely how Paul sees himself. Paul is also unable to share the same optimistic future that the other members of the projection enjoy. While all the academics have created the future Wessex as an island paradise, an idyllic tourist resort that is still self-maintained and governed, Paul believes this to be an unrealistic and childish fantasy, so when he joins the projection Wessex becomes a polluted oil field, bickered over by large companies. His ultimate plan is to send off all the other academics into the future a second time, using the projector in the real world, leaving Julia trapped forever with him in the projection. He is a truly loathsome character, and his ultimate fate, trapped alone in the nightmare of his own consciousness, is well deserved.
   While Julia is a more sympathetic character, she shares with all the characters in this book a tendancy towards escapism and solipsism. In the end, she escapes Paul's malign influence, but decides to stay in the dreamworld with David Harkman, who has figured out the nature of the reality they live in but has become immune to the conditioning that the scientists use to wake them and has decided to stay in the dream world. By this stage in the book, everyone has passed through at least two dream projectors, and there is no guarantee that any of the surviving characters are sharing the same reality anymore. The David Harkman that Julia rides off into the sunset with could just be a figment of Julia's imagination, or he could be the real one and she could be a figment of his. David and Julia's love for each other has led them to reject reality and their original philanthropic mission and possibly even their own real company. Inadvertently, they may both be sharing Paul's fate.
   It is entirely appropriate that 'A Dream Of Wessex' was written at the turning point in Christopher Priest's writing career, as in many ways it is a metaphor for the artistic process of writing, and specifically writing SF. Like the academics in the projection, the SF writer imagines a future different from our own to tell us an important message about the present day. The fictional worlds created by writing provide us with a refuge from the harsh realities of real life, but can also give us succour and strength. However, perhaps in the ambiguity of the ending it is possible to detect Priest's frustrations with the constricting boundaries of genre fiction, the escapism and solipsism of a clique of fans and writers who have gotten lost in their own fantasies and forgotten what they came here for in the first place.
 

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.