by Andy Cox
I would highly recommend this excellent book to anyone interested in how classic short fiction works. All of the contributors to Morphologies have their own unique angles on the craft, but each is constructive and informative. The truth is, all first-rate stories are unique; and that is what makes them great.
THE MADONNA AND THE STARSHIP
James Morrow
Tachyon pb, 192pp, $14.95
reviewed by Duncan Lunan
One respect in which SF differs from reality is that most stories take place in a world which has no science fiction, so the characters are unprepared for whatever they find to be happening. The exceptions tend to involve media sci-fi rather than written SF: in Mark Clifton’s When They Come from Space, ETs who’ve been watching our television broadcasts turn up in the form they expect us to expect. In Galaxy Quest, the cast of a long-running and strangely familiar TV series are abducted by aliens who think it’s all true. In Arthur C. Clarke’s story ‘Armaments Race’, one of the Tales from the White Hart, the special effects team of a US TV series have to produce a succession of ever-more-impressive death rays until they come up with a disintegrator which actually works. It’s probably no coincidence that most of The Madonna and the Starship takes place on the New York set of a very similar series in 1953. Dylan Thomas dies offstage halfway through the book, rather disappointingly since the characters know him and keep quoting him – in one scene going all round the line from And Death Shall Have No Dominion which James Blish used as a title just at that time.
The series may be imaginary but the sponsors are real: “BROCK BARTON AND HIS ROCKET RANGERS! Brought to you by Kellogg’s Sugar Corn Pops, with the sweetenin’ already on it, and Ovaltine, the hot chocolaty breakfast drink schoolteachers recommend!” In Britain at that time few homes had television but we did have Dick Barton on radio and Dan Dare on Radio Luxembourg, sponsored by Horlicks, and its deservedly forgotten rival sponsored by Ovaltine, which featured a flying saucer crewed by very Young Adults and armed with a nuclear weapon – used to trigger a volcanic eruption, much like the one on page seventeen of this book. James Morrow is only two years younger than myself. In the acknowledgements he claims that the inspiration for this book came from research rather than childhood memories, but I wonder.
“Even the grottiest pulp SF performs a salutary cultural function,” writes Morrow in his afterword. His characters do take their young audience seriously, to the extent that each episode is followed by a short science lesson from ‘Uncle Wonder’, urging their child star and their viewers to try experiments at home, always ending with the mantra ‘Safety first!’ In consequence they are visited by a delegation of Qualimosians – “by-God extraterrestrials, complete with crustacean physiognomy, insectile eyes and an antisocial agenda.” They’ve come to present the show with an award for its values, but also to wipe out irrationality wherever they find it, especially in religious belief. Unfortunately Brock Barton shares studio facilities with a Sunday morning religious show called Not By Bread Alone, and the only way to save the world is to subvert it and present a ‘special’ portraying the Christian story as a hoax.
In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute’s entry on Morrow concludes, “JM’s work has been likened to that of Kurt Vonnegut, and similarities are indeed very evident. But while Vonnegut never disbelieves in the medium of his art, JM has great difficulty giving credence to the artifices of fiction. This may be the price paid for passion and clarity of mind; and it may be a price worth paying.” The metafiction of The Madonna and the Starship might have been written in answer to that. Its central character is Kurt Jastrow, sharing his first name with you-know-who but his last name with a distinguished astronomer and science writer, the author of Red Giants and White Dwarfs (“a masterpiece of science” according to Wernher von Braun), Until the Sun Dies and The Enchanted Loom. Paddy Chayefsky called him “the greatest writer on science alive today” and Sir Bernard Lovell said of him “Very few scientists are capable of writing as fearlessly and honestly as Dr Jastrow”. Calling the character ‘Sagan’ would have been too obvious…but to whatever extent the Qualimosians represent the spirit of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, the ‘live and let live’ moral of The Madonna and the Starship is closer to Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World. And what’s more, it’s funny! My one regret is that we don’t see more of the child star, Andy Tuckerman, who gets only one good line but whose similarity to ‘Zuckerman’, the passionate opponent of nuclear proliferation, suggests Andy might have been intended for a bigger role. But if his part in the story had to be abridged for publication, maybe that, too, was a price worth paying.
HOLLOW WORLD
Michael J. Sullivan
Tachyon pb, 384pp, $15.95
reviewed by Simon Marshall-Jones
If you’d just been diagnosed with a terminal illness, what would you choose to do in your remaining time? Go on a round-the-world cruise? Climb Mount Everest? Or maybe do what Ellis Rogers does: build a time machine and project himself into the future.
Rogers is an MIT-educated scientist, and the story opens with his being diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and given just six-to-twelve months to live. He’s trapped in a loveless marriage, but his wife Peggy still cares for him despite blaming him for the suicide of their son, and he spends most of his spare time either tinkering on his machine in the garage, or drinking with his buddy Warren, his intellectual, spiritual, and physical opposite. However, the terminal diagnosis has given him the impetus he needed to go ahead and try the machine out. Much to his surprise, the device works, and he zooms forward to what he thinks is two hundred years in the future.
He arrives in a forest on a seemingly abandoned world, with no signs of humanity apparent. Following the course of a river, he soon finds a familiar landmark, the Ford Museum, but still he finds no indications that anyone’s around – that is, until he hears the sound of someone being murdered. This is the turning point – the start of a new adventure.
The time travel device in Hollow World is secondary to the main thrust of the novel, merely serving as a literary hook upon which to hang the strands of the narrative. The future in which Rogers is pitched is not the two hundred years he calculated, but two millennia. Not only has the physical world changed, its inhabitants having moved underground, but homo sapiens itself has metamorphosed into a race of identical-looking, genderless, hairless mannequins who display none of the negative traits of humanity apparent in Rogers’ time. There’s no violence, everyone lives according to their own whims, sex and biological reproduction have been replaced by artificial means, no one dies, and no one gets ill. Society has changed immensely, its stratification turned upside-down, a place where artists and geomancers (what we would call meteorologists) being highly venerated.
Sullivan has, at least superficially, woven a sparky science-fiction yarn, but that would be too shallow a reading; there’s a lot more going on here than that. It explores the nature of love, one’s relationship to oneself and to others, to one’s environment and how it shapes human beings (both as individuals and collectively), as well as looking at how the Other is perceived. Rogers, known as a Darwin (as he was born through natural means), is a stranger in Hollow World, not just culturally but also physically, in essence being the alien. But it is Pax, the shy, sensitive bowler-hatted arbitrator, who not only shows him how to accept his new world, but also himself.
The other theme which pops up is one’s definition of paradise. Warren, his old drinking buddy, turns up, now the leader of a tiny community living on the planet’s surface who have embraced ‘the old ways’. Warren’s transference to the future also changed him, but in a more fundamental, less transcendent way. A fanatical God-fearing ‘Old West’ frontiersman, he wishes to institute the New United States of America, believing it his divinely-ordained mission. However, his definition of paradise amounts to nothing more than a reversion to the aggressive and competitive humanity of two millennia earlier, achieved by reintroducing
genders, and simultaneously providing what amounts to a final solution with regards to all those who live below ground. Stopping him is Rogers’ own mission.
Sullivan writes fluidly, his vivid descriptions and characterisations being especially sharp. He paints the world in bright lights and shiny colours, while Ellis Rogers is drawn as being out of joint with the new world (having been similarly burdened in his own time) as well as a man heavily infected by guilt. Pax is entirely engaging, a wide-eyed innocent, albeit possessing some very special qualities. Warren is the antithesis of everything Rogers believes: Ellis is also Christian, but cleaving to the New Testament in contrast to his friend’s fire and brimstone Old Testament approach. In the latter part of the book, it is the dynamics between these two which drives the story along at its helter-skelter pace.
This is a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging story with a satisfying philosophical edge elevating it entirely. Recommended.
THE QUEEN OF THE TEARLING
Erika Johansen
Bantam hb, 433pp, £12.99
reviewed by Jim Steel
Johansen’s reported seven-figure advance is an impressive calling card for someone who is so new to publishing that, at the time of writing, she doesn’t even have her own Wikipedia entry. However, Google informs us that “Some results may have been removed under data protection law in Europe”. Intriguing. Are there skeletons? Of course, there might well be other Erika Johansens out there. So much for the basic research.
What we do know is that her trilogy is already being made into a major Hollywood franchise starring Emma Watson. We could well be looking at the next Hunger Games/Twilight series. All this has the effect of almost reducing books themselves to the state of spin-off products before they even hit the shelves. The films will no doubt keep the bones of the plot, but the flesh will be rendered anew. People will come to picture Watson and the multi-million-dollar production when they read the trilogy. This might be no bad thing. The first novel, The Queen of the Tearling, is seriously lacking in quality at the start, although it soon grows into itself. And, at the very least, readers of the future will come to the books knowing whether Tear is pronounced “rip” or “drop”, thus avoiding any sense of dislocation.
So we begin. Nineteen-year-old Princess Kelsea Raleigh (can we have a princess called Kelsea? Like, totally!) is in safe hiding in the Reddick Forest when she is summoned to the throne of the Regent upon reaching her majority. (Through no fault of the author, Reddick is first mentioned in one of the most unlucky line-break splits it has ever been my misfortune to encounter.) It soon becomes apparent that the Regent has no intention of giving up power and Kelsea is rapidly involved in a kidnapping/rescue adventure on the way.
This is no run-of-the-mill secondary world, something which goes a little way to mitigating the lack of any serious attempt at feudal nomenclature or characterisation. There are places named New London and New Europe, and it is swiftly revealed that this world was long ago discovered and colonised by the British and the Americans. Contact has, of course, been lost. It’s a land where people are equally happy to talk of magic and antihistamines. Medicine, or the lack thereof, is a big thing in this world, since the ship containing the medical staff sank. So far, so fuzzy. The Tearling portion of this New World was founded by William Tear, a William Penn utopian, although in recent years the Tearling has had to send an annual human tribute to the rival kingdom of Mortmesne which is ruled by the Red Queen and is very much in the ascendant. The pre-Crossing land of America, already many centuries in the past, is a place of myth. The obvious analogies with the European settlement of North America are there, of course. There is also a disturbing hint that this is a whites-only world for reasons that are not yet revealed, and Christianity, although banned by Penn, has re-established itself, although Kelsea herself is ambivalent about it at this stage. If some, or all, of these themes are developed in the remainder of the trilogy then we might have an impressive work on our hands, regardless of how clunky the dialogue sometimes is. In its defence, Kelsea’s library cheekily contains copies of Tolkien, a writer famously cloth-eared when it came to reported speech.
Kelsea is refreshingly plain for a princess, although that won’t survive Hollywoodisation – phrases such as ‘far too plain for my tastes’ will bounce off when flung at Watson. She is also surrounded by strong male characters, which had the potential to undermine any empowerment. There is the mysterious masked folk hero know as the Fetch – responsible for the earlier kidnapping – and Lazarus, nicknamed the Mace, who is a fierce and loyal, if taciturn, warrior. Not the deepest of characters, but both could have drowned her out on the page if used carelessly. However, she is very much her own person. She is naive, naturally, to begin with, but she is someone possessed of great inner strength. The early graphic violence that surrounded her in the countryside progresses into scenes of urban intrigue as she starts to establish her own grip on power. And plenty of other female characters from all classes step up to the mark. This is not a book that betrays its own potential.
Plot-wise, this volume resolves itself satisfactorily while setting up the next instalment. Judgement is conditionally suspended.
FUTURE INTERRUPTED
JONATHAN McCALMONT
8. Rest in Peace, Uncle Bob
I remember Robert A. Heinlein being dead, which is not the same thing as remembering when he died. Back in the 1990s when I was first getting into science fiction, Heinlein was almost out of print in the UK. Contemporaries such as Asimov and Clarke still enjoyed vigorous sales and a reassuring amount of shelf space but Heinlein himself was disappearing beneath the historical waves with only the spires of Starship Troopers still visible. In fact, Heinlein’s legacy was far more obvious in the works that reacted against his style and values, from the stripped-back futurism of cyberpunk to the progressive politics of the so-called Radical Hard SF. I remember Uncle Bob being dead but something seems to have disturbed his well-earned rest.
After decades of being an American phenomenon, Heinlein’s works are back on the shelves of Britain’s remaining bookshops. Gollancz’s prestigious Masterwork series has expanded to include Double Star and The Door into Summer alongside its existing editions of Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Meanwhile, non-fiction presses have been doing their part to stimulate academic interest with the publication of not only a two-volume hagiography by William J. Patterson but also a series of critical volumes that acknowledge the problematic aspects of Heinlein’s patriarchal individualism and sex-positive incest advocacy but try to present them as evidence of a complex and progressive sensibility. Even the storm-tossed seas of online fandom are helping to wash Heinlein back into the limelight as certain corners of American genre culture have taken to using his position and popularity as indicators of the moral and aesthetic health of science fiction as a whole. What is going on here? Why are we seeing a concerted effort to repair the reputation and standing of a man who died over twenty-five years ago? There are a number of answers and most of them are partially true.
One explanation is that Heinlein’s back catalogue represents a substantial financial interest for the copyright holders. Time, fashion and the collapse of the mid-list are unkind to long-dead authors and while Uncle Bob’s books might well have leapt off the shelves in 1988, the current beneficiaries of Heinlein’s estate must now work harder to keep his books in the public eye. Sometimes this work might involve working with tame biographers, other times it will involve cutting deals that make little money for the estate but do at least keep Heinlein’s books in print. Clareson and Sanders’ book The Heritage of Heinlein includes anecdotes about Heinlein’s widow trying to block re-publication of work that she deemed ‘vulgar’ but the concerted effort to get Heinlein back into print suggests that such prissiness has now been replaced by steel-eyed pragmatism and the realisation that the dead no longer look after themselves.
Another thing to bear in mind is that while Heinlein’s reputation has been declining in the
UK for decades, American genre culture still considers him to be a central figure in the history of science fiction. One of the more regrettable aspects of the online marketplace of ideas is that sharing a language with Americans and Australians means that it is proving difficult to maintain the distinctively British genre culture that once flowed from British magazines, conventions and publishers. Like every other product of neoliberalism and late-stage capitalism, the Internet provides a level playing field on which local concerns and sensibilities are dismembered and devoured by their much larger and better-resourced competition. Don’t get me wrong… American genre culture features an over-abundance of great stories, books, writers and ideas but the price of gaining admission to that abundance includes having to pay attention to American issues, American histories and American ideas about what constitutes a canonical author.
Shifting realities of genre publishing aside, the campaign to restore Heinlein’s reputation and standing may also have something to do with the fact that a particular generation of science fiction readers are now reaching the end of their natural lives. The growing concern about Heinlein’s status and visibility are reminiscent of a similar concern regarding the status of the film producer and director Roger Corman.
One of the most intriguing books about American film that you are ever likely to read is Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. Drawing on extensive interviews and biographical research, Biskind describes how the post-war baby boomer generation came of age in the 1960s and set about changing the face of American film. The book’s opening chapters are upbeat and filled with anecdotes about the likes of Warren Beatty, Francis Ford Coppola and Dennis Hopper taking on the system and convincing the studios to give them enough freedom to reach a new generation of filmgoers. However, while this strategy did deliver huge successes such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather, it also allowed for ruinous failures like William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate. According to Biskind, New Hollywood engineered the golden age of 1970s Hollywood but their excesses and individualism also paved the way for an backlash in which studios reasserted control and forced talent to cooperate with the blockbuster business model that endures to this day. The nuance of this historical account is entirely missing from a recent film made about the exact same time frame.