Copyright © 2009 Ian Sales
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Journey into Space
Toby Litt
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Reviewed by Paul Kincaid
One of the key things about science fiction, one of its joys for those of us who are addicted to the stuff, is that you can change the world. Indeed, if you don't change the world there is some question as to whether it is indeed science fiction. But though your science fiction should then, directly or obliquely, be about the way the world has changed, that isn't all it should be about. Writers who come to science fiction from outside the genre often seem to have a problem with this: they produce work full of some sweeping change, but fail to think through what led into and what springs out of that change.
Toby Litt, however, has got that essential point from the word ‘go'. He has, of course, revealed knowledge of and interest in the genre before now, but this is, I think, his first overtly science fiction novel. It seems, in some ways, old fashioned. We've had stories of generation starships as a stage upon which is acted out social or cultural or personal disintegration for at least 50 years now. And there are moments, when he feels the need to repeat technical points, that he reveals a hesitancy, an uncertainty about how far he can trust his audience. Yet, all in all, this is one of the most satisfying and accomplished science fiction novels you are likely to encounter from an otherwise mainstream author.
The first thing he recognises is that simply placing his characters within the confines of a generation starship is not, in itself, changing the world. A journey into space is actually a journey into oneself, and it is there that the cataclysm lies. As the novel opens the first generation has already all but died out and the ship is not yet half way to its destination. The 100 people aboard the ship (genetically far too few, of course, but dramatically just the right number to illuminate the denuding of social and cultural norms) leave behind a fractious earth, but, unknowingly, as their contact with earth becomes ever more attenuated, so their need for those ties becomes ever stronger. They live in a sort of panopticon, the ship's computer system, known as it, allows anyone to watch anyone else at any time. Yet their environment is failing, rooms are deserted, facilities are running down, there is no outside stimulus except each other and the ever more infrequent messages from home. At first this engenders a regimented atmosphere, an almost mystical devotion to ‘the Mission', but already there are rebels.
August and Celeste, almost identical cousins, escape from the narrowness of ship society into oddly sensuous word games in which they reimagine an earth they have never seen. At first they conduct this verbal affair out of the view of their fellows, but as their game becomes ever more erotic so they start coming to the awareness of the crew, and a wild incestuous fling awakens all the puritanical repression of this closed social world. But the norms have already been overthrown. Celeste's son, Orphan, misshapen and mentally subnormal, grows into a dictatorial lord of misrule. When word finally reaches the ship that the Earth has finally blown itself up, destroying the prop upon which they all depended, they abandon social restraints, giving in to Orphan's pleasure-seeking anarchy. By now the ship has turned around, heading home out of a need no one quite understands, and Orphan's daughter, Three, embarks on a personal quest to write a letter to posterity that somehow encapsulates the experience of doomed humanity, necessarily reinventing paper and ink along the way. In her turn, Three becomes the reluctant object of worship of a fundamentalist religion led by her own nephew that takes over the ship as it finally approaches Earth.
Within the isolated hothouse of the ship, massive social movements rise and fall with the generations, all within a relatively short novel, yet Litt never loses sight of the individuality of his characters. It's a novel in which the social and the personal subtly amplify each other, and it couldn't have been written as anything other than science fiction. That is what makes it a joy.
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Escape From Hell
Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
Escape From Hell!
Hal Duncan
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Reviewed by Paul F. Cockburn
Typical. You wait years for an Escape From Hell to turn up and two come along more or less at the same time. OK, so Duncan's version makes significant use of an exclamation mark, but its effect is annoyingly spoiled by the publisher's choice of font.
Anyway, here we have a fantasy novel and novella nominally dealing with the same subject. Both are founded on the concept that, after we die, we continue to experience some form of physical existence in a plane of reality not unconnected to the Judean-Christian view of Hell being a place of punishment for sins committed during our lives on Earth. Both books also opt for the administration of Hell to be in human, rather than satanic, hands—though while Niven/Pournelle use this to take a general swipe at the horrors of bureaucracy, for Duncan it seems a much more personal dig at US customs!
Being a sequel to their 1976 novel Inferno, the Niven/Pournelle Hell is already established—in fact, it was established about six centuries ago. The geography and mechanics are taken wholesale from Dante Alighieri's 14th century epic poem, ‘The Divine Comedy': Hell is a series of nine concentric Circles, each representing a gradual increase in the wickedness of inhabitants invariably punished by an eternal repetition of their chief sin. Travel right down to the bottom, and you'll find Satan himself, frozen eternally at the Earth's core, the only exit from this horrendous domain being to crawl down a small gap next to his legs.
Duncan's Hell, by contrast, is Escape From New York meets Jacob's Ladder; it “looks not unlike Manhattan, but ragged and hollow like every window in the city of skyscrapers was smashed, every building shelled and shot up, every surface painted with dust and ash.” It's a modern Hell of 24/7 ‘Vox News’ on TVs you can't turn off, of Guantanamo torture rooms and an unbreakable determination to break the human spirit once and for all.
In the Niven/Pournelle Hell, some six centuries have passed since the poet Virgil guided Dante on that original journey. Keeping to the Dante template, our modern hero—former SF author Allen Carpenter—encounters an ongoing parade of real, deceased people mostly from the 20th and early 21st centuries—conveniently listed in a seven page list of ‘dramatis personae’ at the start and chosen by the authors to symbolise particular sins and conditions punished in Hell. Unfortunately this means the book increasingly resembles an unending parade of judgement on z-list celebrities and non-entities, which frankly becomes somewhat repetitive. Clearly, each encounter is supposed to push Carpenter and his new companion—the poet Sylvia Plath, whom he frees from the Wood of Suicides—towards a fuller understanding of the underlying mechanics of Hell, but the book's perfunctory prose echoes a lack of narrative gravity at its heart.
Duncan, by contrast, fills his Hell with vibrant fictional characters—although it's probably no coincidence that the young gay man shares his first name with the US student Matthew Shepard, whose brutal homophobic murder shocked much of America in the late 90s. However, by not having anyone's estate or relatives looking over his shoulder, Duncan enjoys far more freedom to use and develop his characters; as a result, the potentially clichéd “hitman, hooker, hobo and homo” from central casting quickly gain the reader's sympathies as they unite to make the ultimate prison break.
It helps, of course, that Duncan's narrative is powered by such emotive and beautiful writing. Niven/Pournelle may insist that Escape From Hell is “a fantasy novel, not a treatise on theology and salvation,” but with its plain language it comes over as an adventure novel left high and dry by its literary affectations. Every single chapter starts with a quotation from the authors’ preferred Dante translation—the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's, don't you know—which frankly just ingrains the book's too-rigid shadowing of the original poem. Arguably, this helps highlight the differences between Dante and his modern successor; unlike the voyeuristically judgemental Dante, Carpen
ter genuinely wants to liberate those who he feels deserve a better eternal fate, and so has returned to Hell to be absolutely sure that—at the very least—"everyone can be rescued” if they wish to be, and that the universe isn't “in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism."
In Duncan's picture of Hell, there seems little doubt that this is, indeed, the case; there's a suppressed rage powering almost every line, which is why—strange as it may seem—that exclamation mark in the title is so apt. Sure, in Niven/Pournelle Hell, nasty things can and do happen to people—up to and including being burned to charcoal, or blown to smithereens by a suicide bomber—but whatever happens the one certainty is that they'll always come back in some form. It may take time and a lot of pain, but they'll end up back in the Circle of Hell they were originally assigned to—until, it is suggested, they accept responsibility for their sins and so can move on. By contrast, in Duncan's version of Hell, not only can dead souls in hell fade from perception as the “forgotten,” the grim reality is that even the dead can die. Which, if nothing else, adds an easily comprehensible tension to much of the narrative, as ultimately all of Hell's police attempt to stop the gang of four.
So. Two Escapes From Hell. Are the heroes successful in getting out? Let's just say that in one Escape it becomes clear that the heroes have no hope or intention of changing the Hell they find themselves in; in the other, they end up leading thousands—millions—of the damned on an Assault on Heaven itself. You can guess which is which.
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The Mystery of Grace
Charles de Lint
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Reviewed by Lawrence Osborn
Charles de Lint is a master of the art of finding the magic in the everyday, specifically in the everyday life of urban North America. Many of his previous novels have been set in and around the city of Newford, but in The Mystery of Grace he begins to explore a new setting in the American south-west: a town called Santo del Vado Viejo with a rich ethnic mix that allows him to draw on European, Mexican and Indian magical and mythical traditions.
One of the reasons I always enjoy de Lint's writing is his very strong characterization and this novel is no exception. The Mystery of Grace is built around two main characters: Grace, a Latina motor mechanic, and John Burns, an Anglo graphic designer and would-be artist. At the beginning of the novel, Grace is slowly coming to terms with the recent death of her grandfather while, years after the event, John still feels guilty about the death of his kid brother. De Lint has the gift of being able to take us to the very heart of a character's passions—in the case of Grace, her passion for classic cars, rockabilly and tattoos. His description of the relationships between characters is also excellent; for example, he sketches a convincing portrayal of Grace's relationship with her grandfather entirely through her memories. More important for the development of the book is the way he traces the gradual development of the relationship between Grace and John, and particularly the healing it brings about in John's life. But his gift for characterization extends beyond the central characters; I think it is because he genuinely likes his characters that he enables the reader to sympathize with a character, to feel that you would want them as friends.
De Lint's world building is as strong as ever. This time, he has created a pocket universe inhabited by those who have died within a few blocks of the Alverson Arms—the apartment building where Grace lives. The rules of this world have been carefully thought through and dovetail with those of the otherworldly realms of his other novels and short stories. But unlike those, this is a closed claustrophobic realm and its inhabitants are condemned to mere existence enlivened only by the opportunity for twice-yearly visits to the world they have left behind.
And so to the plot, which sadly is very difficult to describe without spoilers. It contains two main story lines. One is a romance: John and Grace meet at a Halloween party. Unfortunately one of them died a fortnight earlier and is only allowed to return to this world twice a year. In spite of that restriction, their relationship flourishes. There is a resolution (at least implicitly) to their problem, but it is by no means as straightforward as you might expect about two-thirds of the way into the story.
The other plot strand is the mystery of the Alverson Arms world. Who created it? And why? And what can the souls trapped in this world do? Inevitably there is a villain behind it, but once again de Lint's gift for characterization comes to the fore and gives the reader some insight into what has driven her to do this. Less satisfactory is the religious dimension that creeps into the resolution of this aspect of the plot. In most of his novels, the central character finds the inner strength to overcome the problem that confronts them. However, in this case, a kind of quasi-religious faith is invoked by the inhabitants of the Alverson Arms world as they struggle against the woman who has trapped them there.
For me, his treatment of faith (and particularly veneration of Our Lady of Altagracia) is a significant flaw. But even a flawed de Lint novel is essential reading because of the way he brings his world and his characters to life and the way he imbues the ordinary with a patina of magic.
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Yellow Blue Tibia
Adam Roberts
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Reviewed by Kevin Stone
All of us have thought on the possibility of whether life exists beyond our world. We have all read the various reports of people claiming to be abducted, although a lack of evidence often qualifies abductions and sightings as being nothing more than hoaxes. Still, the question can be raised as to why those who have made such claims have had their lives so genuinely affected by these encounters, whilst the rest of us remain blissfully dismissive of the whole affair. This is where Adam Roberts’ latest piece of speculative fiction steps in and tries to put forth one theory on all this.
The story begins in Stalinist Russia after the Second World War, where a group of science fiction writers are called to a top secret meeting by Stalin himself, to concoct a new greater threat to re-unite the Soviet people under the banner of Communism—one from beyond the stars. Just as suddenly, the project though gets shut down, with the writers dismissed back to their lives never to discuss their fateful meeting and their ideas with anyone for the rest of their lives. Fast forwarding 40 years later, an apparently coincidental encounter between two of the writers reveals a shocking truth—everything they planned, everything they imagined is suddenly, inexplicably coming true...
As always Roberts has come up with an intriguing and original piece of SF by taking Stalin's very real fascination in aliens and using it as a platform to discuss what he believes is a cultural contradiction concerning UFOs. It would be unfair to pinpoint this as the only reason to pick up this book though. The story moves quickly and is driven by dialogue which combines humorous banter and philosophical discussions about UFOs and also the suggestive nature of science fiction. Towards the end, the narrative stumbles around a bit as it tries to pull all the threads together, but it gets there in time to conclude yet another stimulating read from one of Britain's foremost SF writers.
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One Second After
William R. Forstchen
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Reviewed by John Howard
John Matherson is Professor of History at Montreat College in Black Mountain, North Carolina (where the author lives and is Professor of History in the real world). On one entirely normal afternoon, as Matherson prepares to celebrate his younger daughter's birthday, all electrical devices suddenly go dead. There are no radio, TV, or mobile phone signals, and all computers fail. Even all the vehicles on the nearby Interstate highway come to a halt.
Matherson is slow to realise what has happened. A nuclear warhead has been exploded above the atmosphere, and created an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). This has rendered useless anything that depends on a computer to keep it going—which is now just about everything. With no power and almost no transport
, with outsiders stranded there and townspeople unable to get back home, Black Mountain and its surrounding area starts to descend into chaos. And there's no news from the rest of the country at all. Although the EMP itself caused relatively few deaths, the complete and utter failure of all devices and infrastructure dependent on computers means that the body count soon begins to soar. It is as if the US has ceased to exist, and everybody has been thrown back into the tough and lawless world of the early explorers and pioneers.
One Second After is the latest in a long line of books in which an author addresses a particular concern through fiction. An author seeks to warn a complacent country, its people, and especially its government (and/or those who could be influential) of a looming future conflict or other political catastrophe. For example, in the decades before World War I there was a rash of stories of the invasion of Great Britain or the threat of the ‘Yellow Peril'. A novel like H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come (which is hardly a novel at all) warned of the world-shattering consequences of modern warfare and its grim immediate aftermath.
Forstchen's view and that of his friends is that the danger of an EMP attack is clearly a real and present one. One Second After comes armed with both Foreword and Afterword. In the former, Forstchen's friend and one-time collaborator Newt Gingrich, the Republican former Speaker of the House of Representatives, invokes Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank (1959), a post-apocalyptic novel dealing with the effect on a small US town of a sudden nuclear attack. In the latter, Captain Bill Sanders USN, also invokes Frank's novel. The political and military impetus (and ancestry) behind One Second After could hardly be less explicit.
In practice this can mean that a story never fully takes off as a story, and the serious content is not taken as seriously as perhaps it should be, and as the author wishes it to be. Here, the characters rarely really come alive: they are there to go through the motions and fulfil their assigned roles against the larger overshadowing background of a US disabled by its own complacency as much as by an attack from outside. This is played out against the backdrop of a collapsing small town, a microcosm of what is happening throughout the collapsed nation. Nevertheless, while the characters’ viewpoints switch back and forth between the over-sentimental and the brutally realistic, this means they do actually engage with the changing situations in which they find themselves. As the story advances, Forstchen gives longer gaps in time between chapters, which gives an appropriately telescoping effect of acceleration, as friend and new foe alike die and more institutions cease to function. Whatever the politics involved, the only real strength of the novel is the mounting sense of mourning for the loss of something that was basically fine, and which can never be replaced. That remains. You can't go home again.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #221 Page 15