The book begins by delving into the topic of cyborgs. While film and fiction has given us RoboCop and space adapted astronauts with nuclear fuel cells instead of lungs, the authors espouse a more prosaic vision. They envisage developments in the field of hearing aids, retinal implants and prosthetic limbs. So don't hold your breath for implantable chips that will help you to work out your finances at the beginning of the month. On the plus side, you'll be glad to discover that those of us who wear eyeglasses are technically considered cyborgs!
Because it takes a realistic perspective, the book inevitably deflates many of our treasured expectations. Accordingly, the robots described in the second part take the form of anonymous household appliances rather than chromium androids bent on bringing humanity to its knees. Old debates, such as whether machines can reach a state of ‘selfhood’ and whether machine intelligence will outstrip human intelligence are presented in a fresh, comprehensive manner that breathes new life into the subject.
The style is discursive, mildly humorous and gently provocative. The majority of theories put forward in the book are backed by meticulous research, interviews with leading figures in the relevant fields, and of course, by the illustrious Benford name. Nevertheless, this is a work of speculation, as opposed to a scholarly piece, so the authors have thankfully allowed themselves the license to make some giant leaps and grandiose claims.
Much of the book's success lies in the fact that the subject matter is examined with reference to relevant sf literature. Thus, on the future of transformed humans, we find references to Pohl's Man Plus, while on the idea of the pseudo human robot we have everything from the Tin Man to AI's Gigolo Joe. This adds greatly to the accessibility and appeal of the book, making it a pleasurable read for fans of the genre.
For those even moderately up to date with popular science literature, Beyond Human offers little by way of factual revelation. Having said that, writers should find inspiration for any number of stories, and those who like to debate or privately ponder will find plenty to absorb their attention. The moral of the book is that the issue lies in regulating and controlling our own behaviour in relation to these technologies rather than in the evolution of the technologies themselves. Be warned! If you meet me over the next few weeks, that's what I'll be talking about.
Copyright © 2007 Peter Loftus
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Dagger Key and Other Stories
Lucius Shepard
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A poet of the unpalatable and the profound, Lucius Shepard returns with a remarkable new collection of nine stories and a ‘Story Notes’ section at the back which is interesting enough in its own right to qualify as a tenth tale. Indeed, it would seem that a delineation of some of Shepard's earlier life is a staple first ingredient of any review of the man's work or interview with the author. So be it.
Early traveller, war correspondent, bouncer, boxer, paperwork processor, rock ‘n’ roller, and an award-winning writer whose beautifully intricate sentences and tales, whose understanding of human nature (his male-female relationships are astonishing), and whose pungent, moody and eloquent prose makes one call to mind a philosopher swerving between the intellectual and the muscular: like Rousseau bench-pressing one-twenty at the gym.
In ‘Stars Seen Through Stones’ we have a cautionary tale set in the rock ‘n’ roll business, and relationship failures on many levels—not to mention one of my favourite descriptions in the whole book: “I had seen him, thinking himself unwatched, slumped on the couch, clicking the remote ... mired in the quicksand of depression ... a crummy king forsaken by his court, desperate for admirers.” Imagine a solo like that on most of the pages and we might begin to comprehend the power of Shepard's writing. Another favourite is from ‘Dinner at Baldassaro's': “He was decisive as an ax."
'Liar's House’ is an enjoyable story based on the dragon myth of Griaule, while leadership squabbles and secrets surface in the aforementioned ‘Dinner ... ‘. But it's the male-female relationships to which I referred earlier that I will end with, where dialogue is used to show the inadequacies of human communication—which shows the gap between the stunning prose that Shepard uses and the sheer force of things that sometimes cannot be said between two partners: “Everyday, there'll be two or three times when I see you, like just now, when I look up and see you, and it's like a blow ... a physical blow that leaves me all ga-ga. I want to drop everything...” “I don't mind having [this conversation] again, but we're not going to resolve anything. We'll never figure it out."
It's quite a feast, this book, and vigorously recommended.
Copyright © 2007 David Mathew
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Ragamuffin
Tobias S. Buckell
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Humanity's destiny amongst the stars was once to build vast empires across that final frontier, relying on just bravery, ingenuity and the occasional thermonuclear device. Nowadays, such blatantly anthropocentric attitudes are clearly untenable; so instead our imaginers throw humanity into starscapes already colonised by more technologically advanced species, where humanity's goal is just to find their niche within political, economic and technological hierarchies that have possibly already been in place for millennia.
So it is with Tobias S. Bickell's novel Ragamuffin, set in a cosmos where numerous races, including humanity, live under the control of the self-termed Benevolent Satrapy—an ancient, seldom seen race which uses enforcer species and humanity's own trade organisations to help keep a lid on our unbridled technological advancement. The Satrapy's ultimate sanction against rebellious worlds is isolation; the 48 planets under their control are linked together by a subway system of wormholes—there's even a diagram at the front of the book just to underline the subway analogy—and there are few societies willing to risk being cut off from the network. Although, as the novel soon begins to explain, it's when something starts opening the wormholes again that you really have to worry.
The focus of the novel, certainly to begin with, is the super-cool Nashara; in some ways a typical modern sf hero—a hard-bitten, technologically augmented fighting machine with built-in secret IT weapon. But she is a she, and she is black, which is certainly less common. But with almost half of the book focusing on Nashara and her escape from an increasingly complex set of plots and conspiracies, it does comes as something of a narrative surprise when the book shifts for a whole quarter of its length to an entirely different set of characters and events on the recently ‘reconnected’ human colony of New Anegada—called Nanagada by its Caribbean-descended inhabitants. Here there is an ongoing struggle between two human cultures; the easy-going Afro-Caribbeans, holding on where possible to both scientific rationality and technology, and the cruel-hearted Azteca with their predilection for appeasing alien gods with human sacrifices. This is possibly where the book runs closest to the wind in terms of suspension of disbelief; it is also where it comes clean on being a sequel of sorts to Buckell's début Crystal Rain, which was set entirely on Nanagada.
However, Buckell's authorial voice is sufficiently brisk to keep you reading a narrative that rattles along at a fair pace (thanks in part to its use of snappy three to six page chapters), and some of the characters’ Caribbean roots give an interestingly different tone to the dialogue. Most importantly, for all its hints of a third book yet to come, Ragamuffin has a genuine focus on consequences—people, whole planets and humanity's place within the cosmos change irreversibly between chapters 1 and 71, and through the characters the reader is left well aware that the results will not necessarily be for the better.
Copyright © 2007 Paul F. Cockburn
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The Merchant's War
Charles Stross
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After one of most extended overnight successes in the business, it now doesn't seem a week goes by without another new novel by Charles Stross—or one that isn't in a different genre. As far as I know, Stross hasn't yet turned his hand to full-b
lown Mills & Boon style romance. But The Merchant Princes series, of which this is the fourth volume, is probably the closest of his works to the other literary meaning of that term, and fulfils all the criteria of action-filled and outrageously plotted adventure romp, with a resourceful and independent-minded heroine in Miriam Beckstein, ex-business journalist and (it transpires) long lost orphaned heiress of a clan of world-walking drug smugglers in a semi-feudal alternate world.
What started out as a seemingly simple parallel world fantasy has become, by this fourth volume, something quite other: a increasingly complex melange of Spraguean science-fantasy, with elements of political-conspiracy and procedural thriller, plus frequent digressions on trade, economics, political systems and military-industrial espionage and hardware. New readers, at least to this series, are best advised to go back and start at The Family Trade; Stross's sketchy (and, it has to be said, rather clunking) backfills are more an aide mémoire for previous readers than any coherent explanation of The Story So Far.
At the end of The Clan Corporate, Miriam's unwilling marriage to the brain damaged Prince Creon (The Idiot) was interrupted when the pretender to the throne, Egon (aka The Pervert, though never to his face) gatecrashed the party, set fire to the palace, killed half the ruling family and declared the trader families outlaw. Miriam barely escapes the massacre by world-walking to New Britain, though hardly to safety.
Meanwhile, one of the clan's defectors to our world has set the FBI off on a panic chase for a nuke hidden in downtown Boston, and a three-sided shooting war breaks out between opposing groups on at least two worlds. And somewhere around the middle of The Merchants’ War, a group of Duke Angbard's bright Harvard-educated researchers discover not only a fourth world (one that appears to have been devastated in a far future war) but that there are potentially infinite other worlds out there.
The already convoluted plot gets more complex still, and ends yet again on another delicately poised cliff-hanger. I'm intrigued to know where this will go next, but frankly, at this point, it could go almost anywhere.
Copyright © 2007 Steve Jeffery
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Pirate Freedom
Gene Wolfe
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The first thing you do when reading a book by Gene Wolfe is take note of who is telling the story. Remember, Wolfe's narrators, even the omniscient third person, are rarely truth tellers, though they are always presented as if we could have no alternative but to trust them. Because Severian remembers everything, it does not mean that he tells everything. So, in Pirate Freedom we are in the hands of Father Chris, a Catholic priest in contemporary America who is confessing to murder, theft and sex. Now what could be more honest than that? Except that as the book goes on we have more and more reason to feel uncertain about what we are being told.
Let's start with the character's name: Father Chris or, in another life, Captain Chris. We never learn his full name, except that he tells us that others find it difficult to pronounce. Yet there is not this difficulty with any of the other characters, who come from a host of cultures, including English, Spanish, French, Carib, Amerindian and African. What's more, when we are, just once, given a phonetic pronunciation of his name, it comes out as something other than Chris.
So our guide through this swashbuckling tale is a mystery, and what actually happens is a mystery too. Chris frequently resorts to elisions of various sorts: “and so on,” he says regularly, or even, more blatantly, “if I told you everything that happened it would take more time than I have.” The story is littered with gaps that we are left to fill as best we can.
Even the most fundamental part of the story is missing. We start at some point in the near future when Cuba is no longer communist. Chris's father is a New Jersey casino operator (and, we presume, gangster) who goes to Havana to open a new casino, and puts the young Chris in a Catholic school attached to a monastery. Then something outside the monastery changes—we never know what or why or how—and when Chris, as a young man, chooses to go out into the world, he finds himself in the middle of the 17th century. For want of anything better to do, he becomes a seaman, then his ship is taken by pirates, and suddenly he becomes a pirate captain himself. (Remember, another common element in Wolfe's books is that his characters rarely take a position, rather they are imagined into them by the other characters—think Operation Ares and The Book of the New Sun and Free Live Free and, well, you get the picture—so Chris is seen by his fellows as a pirate captain, and so becomes one.) Naturally, he proves to be a superb seaman, a brilliant tactician, a great pirate.
From here on, the novel is filled with all the colour and action of an old romantic pirate story. Women disguise themselves as men in order to become sailors and follow their love; there are castaways and sea battles and chases and buried treasure with secret maps. It's nothing like the stories, Chris tells us, as he provides some gritty everyday detail, but in its broad sweep this is exactly like all the stories And though he never gives details—"and so on"—Chris is clearly the archetypal romantic hero, since every woman he meets is in love with him, and he wins every hand to hand fight. Then something happens, Chris is swept through time once more, into a twenty-first century earlier than the time he left. And there he becomes a priest in modern America, but with one eye on the situation in Cuba, so that when Castro falls he might go back and somehow be reunited with the woman he left in the 17th century.
This is, to all appearances, a stand-alone novel, but there are enough gaps and hesitations that I wouldn't be at all surprised if a companion volume appeared at some time. If you want a riproaring pirate adventure, this is for you, but read it carefully—because there is a lot more going unsaid within this book.
Copyright © 2007 Paul Kincaid
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Dragonhaven
Robin McKinley
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Robin McKinley's Dragonhaven is set in a contemporary America that is almost, but not quite, like our own. In this world, dragons are real but dangerously close to extinction. The last remaining members of the species live in carefully-secured preserves, the largest of which is Smokehill National Park. The discovery of a human poacher inside Smokehill, dead beside the dragon he shot, sparks a media frenzy that threatens the survival of the park. But unknown to the poacher's bloodthirsty parents, the dead dragon left something behind: her baby. In the fractured American politics of dragon conservation, it is illegal for any human to interfere by saving and raising that baby. But fourteen-year-old Jake Mendoza, who has already lost his own mother, cannot let the baby dragon die.
Dragonhaven is told from Jake's perspective, in the circular, elliptical mode that he uses to write down the story, years later. The first thirty-two pages are enough to stretch any reader's patience; consisting almost entirely of exposition about Smokehill itself, they make a less than gripping read. However, readers who make it through that slow opening will be rewarded by the sheer emotional power of the events that follow. Jake is forced into a messy, painful self-transformation that rings absolutely true, as he is forced to give up his own independent life to become a newborn dragon's mother.
The pacing of Dragonhaven is deliberately slow, sometimes maddeningly so, and McKinley purposefully elides expected moments of tension. For instance, when Jake worries, early in the book, that the poacher's parents will win and Smokehill will be disbanded, the older Jake immediately adds, ‘Smokehill is still around, and everyone [ ... ] would say that it's in massively better shape’ (94). At moments like that, it becomes clear that the point of the book is not the external plot. What matters—and what is perfectly, magically conveyed—is the development of Jake's relationship with the dragons. It is a book about the relationship of humans to other species, and about grief and healing. The dragons themselves feel utterly real, and the halting beginnings of communication between human and dragon are transcendant.
Readers who come to this book
expecting a fast-paced, traditional fantasy plot will be disappointed. Written in the style of a literary novel, Dragonhaven is a beautiful, infuriating, messy miracle of a book, equally accessible to teenagers and adults. I can't wait to re-read it.
Copyright © 2007 Stephanie Burgis
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Queen of Candesce
Karl Schroeder
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At the close of the first volume of Karl Schroeder's Virga sequence, the devious aristocrat Venera Fanning was left tumbling through the air toward certain death in the fires of Candesce, the central sun and light source of the artificial world that gives the series its name. Queen of Candesce is her story; the story of what happens next.
What happens is that she escapes her doom by chance. We meet her again as she is plucked from her comatose Newtonian trajectory by an ageing dandy of Spyre—a vast, ancient and decaying piece of macroengineering, a rotating tubular habitat that sustains upon its inner surface a complex civilisation declining into insular decadence. Just the sort of place, in fact, that Venera Fanning is suited to.
Though not the sort of place she might have chosen to end up; her only wish is to return to Slipstream, her home, to find out whether her Admiral husband still lives. But escaping from Spyre will be no easy task, despite her possession of the plot McGuffin, the key to Candesce. Spyre is busily conspiring with physics to destroy itself, and its population of feuding families and micronations are too busy maintaining their fragile political détente to address the wider issue of their very world fragmenting beneath their feet.
Queen Of Candesce differs from the swashbuckling boy's-own adventure of its predecessor. While set in the same world, following the manipulative Ms Fanning makes for a more ‘feminine’ plot; driven less by physical action than by intrigue and politics. Fanning is a believable and surprisingly sympathetic flawed heroine. She is a vicious court politician to the core thanks to her cruel upbringing, but as the book progresses we see her learning that other people's feelings aren't just pieces on a chess-board—although her iron will and determination are tempered by this knowledge rather than broken.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #213 Page 19