SF and Fantasy Masterworks

Sherri S. Tepper, Grass (1989) SFMW 48

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 16:28:00 +0000

The complex ecology and well-conceptualised social arrangements of Sheri S. Tepper's Grass (1989) invite comparison to Frank Herbert's Dune (1965), with Savannah replacing silica.

However, whilst the hostile habitat of Herbert's work provides a secondary focus to the politico-economic machinations at its heart, Tepper's novel has more of a symbiotic feel to it. The religious totalitarianism of Sanctity and the social order of Bons and Commons may ostensibly serve to provide a hierarchical infrastructure upon Grass and in the celestial interrelations it exists within, but as the novel unfolds it becomes clear that it is the planet's complex ecology that is its primary interest, and the reason for its titular association.

The issue with any world-building novel is once you've started building, a certain sleight-of-hand is required in order to divert the reader from speculating as to what else may lie beyond the authorial gaze. Luckily, the peepers, Hippae, foxen and absent (corporeally, at least) Arbai are diverting enough for us not to be overly troubled by the fact that the planetary ecology we are introduced to is somewhat limited.

The sinister Hippae perplex:

But the Hippae are herbivores," Tony protested still, thinking of his father. "Behemoths. Why would they – " "Who knows what the Hippae do, or are?" offered Brother Mainoa. "They stay far from us, except to watch us. And when they watch us – " "We see contempt," breathed Marjorie so quietly that Tony was not sure he had heard her correctly. "We see malice." "Malice," agreed Brother Mainoa. "Oh, at the very least, malice. (loc. 3378-82)

The esoteric foxen fascinate:

The foxen let it happen. They allowed themselves a comfortable retirement. They let happen what would. Then, when it all went wrong, they chose to discuss it philosophically. When men came here, they learned new ideas of guilt and redemption and talked about that. They engaged in great theological arguments. They sent Brother Mainoa to find out if they could be forgiven. They talked of original sin, collective guilt. They're still doing it. They haven't learned that being penitent sometimes does no good at all. (loc. 6405-8)

Overall, like Father James, the reader is content enough to relax into this substantial and rewarding SF Masterwork and allow the planet at the centre of the tale to envelop them:

Now the Brother reclined against the breast of a foxen, like a child in a shadowy chair, while Father James tried to convince himself yet again that the foxen were real – not dreams, not amorphous visions, not abstractions or delusions. Conviction was difficult when he couldn't really see them. He caught a glimpse of paw, or hand, a glimpse of eye, a shadowed fragment of leg or back. Trying to see the being entire was giving him eye strain and a headache. He turned aside, resolving not to bother. Soon everything would resolve itself, one way or another. (loc. 6975-79)

Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head Of Cerberus (1972) SFMW 8

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sat, 19 Oct 2013 16:12:00 +0000

Gene Wolfe's 1972 sequence of three linked novellas ('The Fifth Head of Cerberus', '"A Story," by John V. Marsch', and 'V.R.T.') is simultaneously a murder/mystery story, post-colonial allegory, and a cautionary tale concerning cloning and the impact such technologies could have on a theoretical human intergalactic diaspora.

The first and third tales are presented sequentially, although not in temporal succession, and both feature the character Dr. John V. Marsch, an anthropologist supposedly from Earth. The title of the intervening tale suggests that its author is also Dr. Marsch, but its subject matter (the tribulations of a group of aboriginals from the plant Sainte Anne, twin planet to Sainte Croix) offers an adjacent look at the work's thematic interests.

At the core of the mysterious mediations that occur between characters (who may be clones), versions of characters (who may be aboriginals), and their clones (recessing, near-infinitely), lies the hypothesis that Marsch is interrogating, posited by Dr. Aubrey Veil who is, as the reader discovers, a suitably shady individual herself:

“Veil’s Hypothesis supposes the abos to have possessed the ability to mimic mankind perfectly. Veil thought that when the ships came from Earth the abos killed everyone and took their places and the ships, so they’re not dead at all, we are.” (Loc. 385-87)

She believed, though she pretended not to, that the Annese have devoured and replaced homo sapiens—Veil’s Hypothesis, and she is Veil; it has been used for years to discredit other heterodox theories about the original population of Sainte Anne. But who, then, Tante Jeannine, are the Free People? Conservatives who would not desert the old ways? The question is not, as I once thought, how much the thoughts of the Shadow children influence reality; but how much our own do. (Loc. 3282-85)

Despite its relative brevity, the text possesses an exceptional semantic density which invites, but also purposefully challenges, interpretation through its panoply of narrators, indeterminate chronology, and textual filters. 'V.R.T.,' for example, is presented as a series of textual fragments, diary entries, and interrogation reports.

Collectively, these devices can enrich the text's enjoyment for those who take pleasure from such equivocal and enigmatic writing, but equally it could frustrate readers who seek a simple tale, well told. The observation 'Let me see if I can cure my habit of skipping back and forth and give everything of interest in the order in which it occurred' (Loc. 2237-38) broadly describes how Wolfe stands in relation to his text.

To be fair, Wolfe (who's narrative voice is a (G)ene-splice away from that of the narrator 'Number Five') does offer the reader fair warning that The Fifth Head Of Cerberus is going to offer more in the way of spirals of indeterminacy than it will provide in deductively-reasoned facts:

You wish to find what is true, and I’m afraid you’re going to find damned little; I want what is false, and I’ve found plenty. (Loc. 2083)

Among his many other authorial accomplishments, Wolfe is technically commanding, a builder of compelling worlds, and a master-craftsman of plotting. For this reader, The Fifth Head Of Cerberus stands as a high-water mark of speculative fiction, and is a obvious and worthy candidate for inclusion in the SF Masterworks list.

“We wish to discover why we fail, why others rise and change and we remain here.” (Loc. 1007-08)

Note: the second, alternate cover to the numbered (I think) sequence of SF Masterworks only came to my attention when seeking images for this post. I do not own a copy of the alternate cover version, but if anyone who does has any more details that I can add in this regard, please feel free to forward them on, and I will amend this entry accordingly with a credit.

New stuff, and lots of it

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 12:29:00 +0000

As I'm already an unfeasibly long distance away from ever catching up with Orion's publication schedule, I can only celebrate rather than be daunted by the fact that the Fantasy Masterworks series is going to be revived.

The first five titles have now been announced, and I've added them to the sidebar. Unsurprisingly, bearing in mind the changes that have been made to the SF Masterworks series, the revived series will be unnumbered and boasts an attractive new uniform cover design template.

I've also added links and images to the slew of new SF Masterworks titles for which pre-publication details have been released.

Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968) SFMW 4

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sun, 21 Jul 2013 10:34:00 +0000

“I notice you’ve never had any hesitation as to spending the bounty money I bring home on whatever momentarily attracts your attention.” He rose, strode to the console of his mood organ. “Instead of saving,” he said, “so we could buy a real sheep, to replace that fake electric one upstairs. (Loc. 125-27)

The title of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) certainly seems to invite the interpretation that Ridley Scott doggedly pursued in his 1982 film, Do Androids Dream of Origami Unicorns? No, wait… Blade Runner.

However, to my mind Dick's novel is rather less of a metaphysical mystery of machine consciousness than it is an obsessive-compulsive meditation on the many ways the author's characters conspire to alienate themselves.

Certainly, there is a sense in which the novel invites the reader to see humanity in androids and humanity as automata ("Most androids I’ve known have more vitality and desire to live than my wife", loc. 1251-52) and Dick goes to some lengths to explain the evolution of the various tests that have been developed in order to distinguish automaton from human.

The key point here is the indeterminacy that the act of attempted discrimination provokes and the Voigt-Kampff scale's unreliability in identifying differences between the two subjects, as well as the fact that the means of gradating the likelihood of android identity is perpetually being redefined, the Voigt-Kampff scale being merely the most recent iteration:

A small class of human beings could not pass the Voigt-Kampff scale. If you tested them in line with police work, you’d assess them as humanoid robots. You’d be wrong, but by then they’d be dead (loc. 545-46)

Beyond this, however, Dick's characters seem to do a good enough job of keeping themselves at arm's length from their own phenomenological experience. Deckard even comes to envy and fantasise about androids:

He wondered, now, about her, too. Some female androids seemed to him pretty; he had found himself physically attracted by several, and it was an odd sensation, knowing intellectually that they were machines, but emotionally reacting anyhow. (Loc. 1257-59)

The quote with which this review begins illustrates the densely layered emotional estrangement the novel's protagonist, Rick Deckard, has swaddled himself in: the association of the acquisition of money with the potential to acquire the living commodities (the prices of which he compulsively reviews) which, it is inferred, would in some way improve the quality of the lives of himself and his wife; the willing enslavement on a societal level to the influence of the mood organ; the totemic worship of animals in a post-apocalyptic environment that has destroyed many species to the point that the possession of fake animals is considered to be a social pre-requisite, and so on:

Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article. He had therefore no choice except to continue. (Loc. 238-41)

The tyranny of the object over the subject, one of the mainstays of postmodernist thought, finds a precursor in one of Deckard's author-reported observations:

He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. (Loc. 600-02).

Dick seems both terrified of and fascinated by the commodity-informed nature of urban life, to which he speculatively assigns a self-replicating nature -- when no-one is around to see it happening:

By coming here he had brought the void to them, had ushered in emptiness and the hush of economic death. (Loc. 635-36)

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more[…] No one can win against kipple,” he said, “except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization. (Loc. 881-83, 892-95).

The dominant religion of the novel's world, Mercerism, sees practitioners linking mentally with other devotees via Empathy Boxes to share the experience of Wilbur Mercer. Dick playfully describes Deckard's assessment of the androids' own aspirations towards a collective spiritual experience which, in the author's typical idiom, reveal a kaleidoscopic number of possible readings as to its symbolic connotations, inside and outside the text:

Roy Baty (the poop sheet informed him) has an aggressive, assertive air of ersatz authority. Given to mystical preoccupations, this android proposed the group escape attempt, underwriting it ideologically with a pretentious fiction as to the sacredness of so-called android “life.” In addition, this android stole, and experimented with, various mind-fusing drugs, claiming when caught that it hoped to promote in androids a group experience similar to that of Mercerism, which it pointed out remains unavailable to androids. (Loc. 2368-72)

In our own pre-technological singularity era, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? can be a tough read; not because it is particularly challenging, structurally, but because of the conclusions it invites. For analogue-educated digital converts of a certain age such as myself, the novel's vision of an entropic future seems much closer now than when one of science fiction's greatest visionaries brooded over the implications more than forty years ago:

Yet, the dark fire waned; the life force oozed out of her, as he had so often witnessed before with other androids. The classic resignation. Mechanical, intellectual acceptance of that which a genuine organism—with two billion years of the pressure to live and evolve hagriding it—could never have reconciled itself to. “I can’t stand the way you androids give up,” he said savagely. (Loc. 2567-70)

Time and tide, he thought. The cycle of life. Ending in this, the last twilight. Before the silence of death. He perceived in this a micro-universe, complete. (Loc. 2377-78)

Colin Greenland, Take Back Plenty (1990)

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:44:00 +0000

'I would not shake my credit in telling an improbable truth, however indisputable in itself' (Lawrence Sterne, The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67); Vol. 1, Chapter XI (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 53

'Here [Tabitha Jute] was now, years later, in Schiaparelli, heading for a fateful encounter which would completely and utterly change her life, my life, all our lives' (p. 10)

Colin Greenland's British SF Association and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Take Back Plenty reminded me of Lawrence Sterne's extraordinary magnum opus in a number of ways. The principal similarity resides in the fact that for a considerable stretch of this 482 page novel, nothing really happens.

Tabitha Jute, captain for the Kobold class freighter Alice Liddell, encounters renegade performance troupe-cum-criminal gang Contraband, and accepts a commission to take them to Plenty, and beyond. They're captured, there's a disaster, salvation of a sort for some, and that's about it, really.

Driven from her normal reserve, [Tabitha] talked more to the ship on this trip than she ever had, and not on technical or navigational questions. On this journey through the realm of virtual, her chosen companion was an imaginary one. When people, natural, human, or otherwise, become too much to bear, your best friend may be an artifact (pp. 231-2)

For me, much of the interest in Take Back Plenty lay in the chapters that punctuate the main narrative wherein Tabitha relates anecdotes from her past life to Alice. Providing a flighty contrapuntal theme to the sustained chord of the main work, the interplay between the captain and the ship's artifact proved to be more compelling to me than the narrative itself in a work which is 'digressive[...] and[...] progressive too, at the same time' (Tristram Shandy, op. cit., p. 95).

How gratifying it would be to record that before the Ugly Truth skipped back into normal space our resourceful heroines once again turned the tables on their tormentors, and effected a second cunning escape. Alas, it did not happen; and even I, with all my narrative liberty in time and space, my freedom to conjecture what shadows flit through the inviolable regions of the living mind -- even I am bound by truth. Were I to trifle with the truth in the slightest respect, albeit for our mutual pleasure at watching valour confound villainy, could I then win your trust for any other feature of this astonishing tale? (p. 418)

The conclusion of Take Back Plenty confounds the expectations such passages provoke that the novel is narrated by an omniscient authorial voice. The familiarity this device, beloved of eighteenth century novelists and those who subsequently emulated them, confers is exploded at the end of the work when the identity of the narrator is revealed in a most pleasing manner.

Take Back Plenty is an enjoyable addition to the SF Masterworks library, and is a work to be enjoyed in the page-turning tradition of the Space Opera genre it emulates (and indeed contributes to) rather than meditated over.

Philip K. Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney (1965) SFMW 32

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:12:00 +0000

"I'll have a true factory in the old sense, the pre-war sense."
"'The pre-war sense,'" she echoed. "Is that good?" (loc. 3252-54)

Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney revisits the author's habitual thematic obsessions of justifiable paranoia and the transmogrification of the illogical into the plausible and externalises, rather than internalises, them.

Written in 1963, but not published until 1965, Dr. Bloodmoney's narrative encapsulates what Frederic Jameson describes as the 'pastiche and schizophrenia' of the cultural forms of late capitalism. The influence of the closing of Berlin's borders and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the ratification of the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963, and -- entirely appropriately, this being Philip K. Dick -- the 1964 film Dr. Strangelove (which the novel predates in everything other than title) are all contextual influences upon the work, and are echoed within it.

In the novel's historic present of the 1980s, civilisation struggles to reassert itself after having nearly been eradicated as the consequence of a defence-related nuclear accident in 1972 which has led to the destruction of the world's pre-existing infrastructural, political and economic organisation. The titular architect of the disaster, Dr. Bruno Bluthgeld ('blood money') lives on in the work, serving as a sort of totem for the failures of character that allowed the world to produce a means of 'defending' itself that if used would also destroy it.

The fact that humanity now seems set on working towards the reproduction of the forms that led to the moment of catastrophe make the recuperation of a positive reading of this bleakly pessimistic work difficult to construct, as characters yearn to devolve responsibility for their actions and dream of problems being 'automated out of existence' (loc. 3446-48):

Our little fragile world, Bonny thought, that we labored to build up, after the Emergency. This puny society with out tattered school books, our 'deluxe' cigarettes, our wood-burning trucks—it can't stand much punishment; it can't stand this that Bruno is doing or appears to be doing. One blow again directed at us and we will be gone; the brilliant animals will perish, all the new, odd species will disappear as suddenly as they arrived. Too bad, she thought with grief. It's unfair; Terry, the verbose dog—him, too. Maybe we were too ambitious; maybe we shouldn't have dared to try to rebuild and go on. "I think we did pretty well, she thought, all in all. We've been alive; we've made love and drunk Gill's Five Star, taught our kids in a peculiar-windowed school building, put out News & Views, cranked up a car radio and listened daily to W. Somerset Maugham. What more could be asked of us? Christ, she thought. It isn't fair, this thing now. It isn't right at all. We have our horses to protect, our crops, our lives. . . . (loc. 3232-33)

If Dr. Bloodmoney is pregnant with anything, it is not the fecundity of parturition but rather the despair of not being able to give birth to the new. The foetal Bill is trapped within the body of his internally conjoined twin, Edie; Walt Dangerfield is trapped in orbit around the Earth, neither able to achieve escape velocity, nor return; psychokinetic phocomelus Hoppy Harrington strives to escape a body that holds more potential than any he could adopt.

Philip K. Dick's body of work is one of the cornerstones of the science fiction oeuvre, yet in a sense stands outside it. Dr. Bloodmoney is an archetypal Dick novel; conceptually perplexing, thematically dense, and richly rewarding to read and revisit, it is another excellent entry in the SF Masterworks series.

Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood (1984)

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 14:30:00 +0000

'Was it possible that the stories could survive that long? Tales of the glaciers, and the new forests, and the advance of human societies northwards across the marshes and the frozen hills?' (Loc. 3581-83)

Winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1984 and World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1985, Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood is the first entry in a sequence of works set in an ancient woodland that brings the myths and legends of Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norse origin to life, as well as revisiting vignettes of medieval, seventeenth century, and even early twentieth century folk histories.

Returning to Oak Lodge, the family home on the edge of Ryhope Wood, after recuperating in southern France from wounds received towards the end of the Second World War, Stephen Huxley discovers his brother Christopher has become obsessed with breaching into the heart of the ancient forest, a mania that similarly consumed their late father during their childhood.

When Christopher fails to return from one of his lengthy excursions, Stephen sets out to discover more about the woodland realm for himself. An encounter with Guiwenneth, a mythago whom his father also had a fixation with, initiates a sequence of events that sees Christopher setting off into the forest himself in the company of Harry Keeton, a former RAF airman whose facial disfigurement was inflicted by things mystical rather than martial.

The Huxleys speculate that the mythagos are brought into being as a consequence of Ryhope Wood being within a 'ley matrix' (Loc. 555-56) that provides a 'creative field that can interact with the unconscious'. It is within the unconscious, the Huxleys propose, that mankind carries 'pre-mythagos', images 'of the idealized form of myth creature[s],' remaining 'in our collective unconscious', and 'transmitted through the generations.’ (Loc. 581-90)

The Huxleys own familial relations are interpolated within rather standing outside of the mythagos both pursue, and come to embody. Christopher records how 'the Urscumug opened its mouth to roar, and my father seemed to leer at me' ; The last I saw of my father’s mythago was its towering black form, swaying slightly as it stared into the distance, its nostrils quivering, its breathing a quiet, calm, contemplative sound. Loc. 836-7, 3775-78). It is with more of a sense of acceptance than despair that Christopher acknowledges his own transition into the mythago realm: 'I had become a part of legend myself. Christian and his brother, the Outlander and his Kin, working through roles laid down by myth, perhaps from the beginnings of time' (Loc. 3831-33).

In Mythago Wood, Robert Holdstock crafts an hypnotically plausible liminal reality that conjoins the richness of Northern myth and folklore with the tangible sense of historic events that the age and silence of ancient woodlands are still capable of evoking in those that walk them. An excellent entry in the SF Gateway library, and one that is bound to whet the reader's appetite to journey on to Lavondyss.

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 13:44:00 +0000

On one level, Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker is a straightfoward, linearly-plotted tale of a young adult's experiences in a post-apocalyptic British east coast landscape subsequent to the death of his father in a work-related accident.

However, such an unadorned description does little justice to the complex, richly allusive nature of this extraordinary, peregrinating, puzzling work.

Every 1 knows about Bad Time and what come after. Bad Time 1st and bad times after. Not many come thru it a live. (p. 2)

Christian fabulation, folklore, mythology, technology, atomic theory, and popular culture intersect in Riddley Walker in complex ways which invite multiple, parallel readings of their significance.

Thematic points of origin in the text between 'the 1 Big 1 or the Spirit of God of the Littl Shyning Man or what ever' (p. 150) are indistinguishable. History and language have become muddied and muddled in the work, which is presented in the first person in phonetically-inflected language by a titular narrator through whom meaning is iterated, but also impeded:

You know some times you get a fealing you dont want to put no words to. (p. 54)

The frequently encountered (and fully documented) 'Eusa Story' is simultaneously a retelling of the tale of St. Eustance, and a referent to the USA -- presumably one of the participants in the cataclysmic atomic event (the '1 Big 1') that led to the destruction of the previous civilization from which the world of Riddley Walker emerged -- as well as a computer 'user', as fragments of the language we encounter suggest.

The' Little Shyining Man the Addom' refers to both a Christ (and perhaps also Adamic) analogue, and the splitting of the atom. The Eusa Show, enacted with puppets modelled on traditional Punch & Judy entertainments, represents aspects of the puppet show from which it has been derived but also introduces novel elements which serve as a gloss, or perhaps a satire on, or possibly even a theatrical requiem to, the lost knowledge of the past:

Eusa says, 'I dont know what Ive los I aint very qwick.' The Littl Shyning Man says, 'Wel Eusa you bes qwicken up fas then becaws there gone Good Time and here comes Trubba.'
Eusa says, 'It looks like you see Trubba all ready you aint even in 1 peace.'
The Littl Man says, 'Eusa dont you know who done thise to me dont you onow who toar me in 2? Dont you know who opent me like a chicken time back way back in the wood in the hart of the stoan?'
Eusa says, 'How cud I know that?'
The Littl Man say, 'Becaws youre the 1 as done it.'
Eusa says, 'I dint know that Ive los it clean out of memberment.' (pp. 49-50).

The prehistory of Riddley Walker is a conundrum, despite the fictive future of the work being dated with some specificity:

There's a stoan in the Power Ring stannings has the number 1997 cut in to it nor we aint never seen no year number farther on nor that. After Bad Time dint no 1 write down no year count for a long time we dont know how long til the Mincery begun agen. Since we startit counting its come to 2347 OC which means Our Count.'
I said, 'Dyou mean to tel me them befor us by the time they done 1997 years they had boats in the air and all them things and here we are weve done 2347 years and mor and stil slogging in the mud?' (pp. 100, 124)

Relatively early in Riddley Walker, before aspects of the novel's back story are introduced towards the end of the work, the reader is invited either to conclude that magical realist elements feature in the novel's universe, or that genetic adaptation or mutation has taken place across not only humanity, but other species:

The dogs begun running round me all in a circel roun and roun with ther littl heads up hy and ther hy sholders up. They begun running on ther hynt legs. The sky wer black the stoans gon wite the dogs gone all diffrent shyining colours and the wite stoans shyning thru them. I tryd to hol it like that but I los it wernt man a nuff right then. (p. 157)

The 'fits' that Riddley has become a focus for this theme, leaving the reader to ponder whether the titular protagonist has epilepsy, or is perhaps manifesting some sort of evolutionary effect precipitated over thousands of years by his progenitors' exposure to radiation:

I had like a mynd flash of colourt lites with clicking and bleaping it wernt like nothing I ever acturely seen nor heard only in dreams. I cud like feal the woal circel of the dead towns in me and see a line of grean lite sweaping round that circel from the senter. (p. 89)

A sense emerges during the course of the work of the possibility of the existence of a genetic-level code trigger or gene mutation: I wer programmit diffrent then from how I ben when I come in to Cambry. Coming in to Cambry my hed ben ful or words and rimes and all kynds of jumbl of yellerboy stoan thots (p. 163)

Technologies have clearly informed the language and thinking of the society from which the communities of Riddley Walker have evolved:

Like it says in Eusa 5: 'Evere thing blippin & bleapin & movin in the shiftin uv thay Nos. Sum tyms bytin sum tyms bit.' (p.101)

This is an historic figure of speech suggesting 'we made ready and got underway' rather than suggesting that there are live terminals.

We pult datter and we printowt we wer roading Goodparleys show (p. 202)

Green Man myths and subsequent discoveries could be as prosaic as the discovery of the remains of a garden supply centre, but they also have a symbolic value as a signifier of rebirth and regrowth:

I had a idear of what it wer going to be when I unrapt it. I were right. It wer Greanvine. Carvit out of wood and paintit it wer may be 1/2 as big as a real face. The back of it flat and the front of it ful roundit it wer that same and very face I seen in my mynd. Them wide open grean eyes staring up at me wylst the vines and leaves growit out of his mouf (p. 165)

Granser recreates the 1 Littl 1 -- gunpowder -- using 'yellerboy stoan [sulphur] and Saul & Peter [potassium nitrate, or saltpetre] and chard coal [charcoal]' (p. 185):

He wer pounding the yellerboy stoan to a fine powder. Then he done the same with some chard coal. Done it with a boal and pounder. He had the Saul & Peter all ready that wer kirstels like salt. He took little measurs and measuring out yellerboy and chard coal and Saul & Peter. Mixing them all to gether then and me watching. It wer like the 1st time I seen a woman open for mee and I wer thinking: This is what its all about then (p. 189)

Orfing reveals that the technology humanity was in possession of prior to the apocalyptic nuclear event is still extant as colonists had already passed beyond our galaxy. This passage also suggests that the trances Riddley has experienced and the 'telling' that takes place elsewhere in the work are genetic echoes of post-Singularity bioengineering which connected humanity together; the receptors remain, but with the collapse of the technologies that enabled them, the facilitating data is no longer being generated:

To have them boats in the air which they callit them space craf and them picters on the wind which that wer viddyo and going out beyont the sarvering gallack seas. Not jus singing it you know. Acturely going it acturely roading out thru space. Jus try to get it in your mynd try to happen it in your head o dint they trants hy you cud feal the thrus and the boost of it you know the jynt woosh of them liffing off and to the stations. Which they jumpt 1 station to the nex you see and til they jumpt right out beyont them gallack seas. I tel you Riddley lissening to then trantsing and telling it wer all mos like being in 1 of them space craf o the yoaring and the roaling o the nertial and the navigation of it' (p. 195)

After the explosion that kills Granser reintroduces gunpowder-making, civil discord is unleashed and the existing order is overthrown. Orfing says:

It looks to me like that Fools Circel is broakin now I dont think therewl be no mor regler hevvys and any Eusa folk whatre stil a live theyre all too binsy running a roan trying to go bang. Plus a woal lot of other peopl as wel by now parbly. Fars we know there bint no mor bangs yet but we dont have the leas idear whats going to happen. Right now there aint even no Pry Mincer its what they call a care maker Mincery with regenneril guvner me from the Ram at all the forms. (p. 198)

A thread of existentialist thought runs through Riddley Walker:

Our woal life is a idear we dint think of nor we don't know what it is. What a way to live. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome[...] The thot come to me: EUSAS HEAD IS DREAMING US' (pp. 7, 61)

'Them peopl as jus want to hol on to what theyve got theyre afeart to chance any thing theyre afeart to move even 1 littl step forit.' (p. 125)

He said, 'I never sung no beginning becaws you wont never fynd no beginning its long gone and far pas. What ever youre after youwl never fynd the beginning of it that why youwl all ways be too late. Onlyes thing youwl ever fynd is the end of things. What ever happens itwl be what you dint want to happen. What ever dont happen thatwl be the thing you wantit. Take your choosing how you like yuowl get what you dont want. (p. 150)

If I wer a figger in a show what hand wer moving me then? I cudnt be bothert to think on that right then. Theres all ways some thingwl be moving you if it aint 1 thing its a nother you cant help that (p. 170)

A transcendent and richly rewarding entry in the SF Masterworks series, Riddley Walker is an essential read.

I thot: Whyd we come here? Id knowit some kynd of thing like this myt happen. Whynt we stay hoalt up? Whynt we go somers far a way? Becaws you cant stay hoalt up. Becaws there aint no far a way. Becaws where you happen is where you happen[...] Stil I wunt have no other track (p. 206, 215)

Year-end update

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 05:58:00 +0000

As usual, I find myself apologising for the slow progress I've made in advancing this project during 2012. Posts have been infrequent and seldom as expansive as I would have liked.

As is customary here, matters have been exacerbated by the fact that more new books, both print and digital, have come into the house during the past twelve months than have been read. Plus ça change, and all that.

You'll probably not fall into a dead faint if I plead the usual reasons of time constraints (somewhat ironically for an avid reader of speculative fiction, I know), and the fact that my consultancy has had a good year.

Beyond this, I do have a couple of pieces of relevant news to convey.

Firstly, I started co-curating new client (and publisher of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks, of course) Orion's SF Gateway's social presences on Twitter, facebook and Pinterest in November 2012, which has been a lot of fun. Consequently, I'll be adding ebook reviews of the SF Gateway titles I buy (yes, buy) on the blog in the future. In fact, I'm reading one at the moment. I'm also hoping that if it's true that ereader users read more books than print readers, the imbalance in my buying-to-reading ratio may move in the right direction in 2013.

Secondly, I've added some code to the Blogger template in order that social buttons now appear at the bottom of each post.

Enjoy the holidays, and happy reading in the new year and beyond.

Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (1983) FMW 47

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 04:57:00 +0000

"One of these time gaps is just outside Kensington, five miles from the Strand, on the evening of the first of September, 1810. And unlike most gaps that close to the 1802 source, this one is four hours long."

Time travel, demonic magicians, werewolves, cross-dressing heroines, Romantic poets and Egyptian gods: The Anubis Gates is a sovereign salmagundi of some of the pillars of speculative fiction.

Laphroaig-swilling, cigar-toting literary professor for hire Brendan Doyle is commissioned by plutocrat J. Cochran Darrow to travel back to 1810 through a time gate in order to verify the identity of stoner sonneteer Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Suffice to say, things don't go according to plan.

The principal enjoyment of The Anubis Gates lies in allowing oneself to be dazzled by the pyrotechnics of the tale itself, and as such there is little purpose in rehearsing the panoply of plot twists the work provides. It is a novel of incident rather than ideas which places a premium on the pleasures of thematic divagation rather than focused rumination and as such is a far from taxing, albeit thoroughly enjoyable, read.

Winner of the 1983 Philip K. Dick Award, The Anubis Gates is an entertaining, undemanding, and fully immersive entry into the Fantasy Masterworks series.

Arthur C. Clarke, Rendezvous with Rama (1972) SFMW 65

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 12:22:00 +0000

'On a billion television screens, there appeared a tiny, featureless cylinder, growing rapidly second by second. By the time it had doubled its size, no one could pretend any longer that Rama was a natural object. Its body was a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it might have been turned on a lathe - one with centres fifty kilometres apart. The two ends were quite flat, apart from some small structures at the centre of one face, and were twenty kilometres across; from a distance, when there was no sense of scale, Rama looked almost comically like an ordinary domestic boiler.' (Loc. 191-95)

In this manner, Arthur C. Clarke introduces the titular Big Dumb Object (BDO) of his Hugo and Nebula award winning 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama.

One of the features of Clarke's fiction is his re-orientation of aspects of human arrangements that tradition has sanctified, and the interpolation of plausible extrapolations from current research. Rendezvous with Rama is no different, with its representation of polygamy (in all combinations; Loc. 586-88) and appealing, but effectively enslaved, superchimps or 'Simps':

Their rearing and education had probably cost as much as that of the average spaceman, and they were worth it. Each weighed less than thirty kilos and consumed only half the food and oxygen of a human being, but each could replace 2.75 men for housekeeping, elementary cooking, tool-carrying and dozens of other routine jobs (Loc. 776-78)

For all this, and as its title suggests, the main interest of the work resides in Clarke's description of the BDO itself. His description of the crew of the survey vessel Endeavour's exploration of Rama's interior is striking, and often suspenseful:

And now he understood the purpose of those mysterious trenches, the Straight Valley and its five companions; they were nothing less than gigantic strip-lights. Rama had six linear suns, symmetrically ranged around its interior. From each, a broad fan of light was aimed across the central axis, to shine upon the far side of the world. (Loc. 1279-81)

However, subsequent to the appearance of the organic automata that cleanse and maintain the BDO during its journey, the text loses much of its mystery, although it retains a good deal of interest:

'What we failed to take into account was the possibility of non-biological survival. If we accept Dr Perera's very plausible theory, which certainly fits all the facts, the creatures who have been observed inside Rama did not exist until a short time ago. Their patterns, or templates, were stored in some central information bank, and when the time was ripe they were manufactured from available raw materials - presumably the metallo-organic soup of the Cylindrical Sea. Such a feat is still somewhat beyond our own ability, but does not present any theoretical problems. We know that solid state circuits, unlike living matter, can store information without loss, for indefinite periods of time. 'So Rama is now in full operating condition, serving the purpose of its builders - whoever they may be.' (Loc. 2762-68)

Ultimately, readers may be disappointed to glean little from the work that can provide them with satisfactory answers to the two questions that exercise the minds of the crew of the Endeavour: 'Who were [the Ramans] -- and what went wrong?' (Loc. 501). This may be asking the wrong questions of Rendezvous with Rama, as one senses that Clarke's purpose was to invite the reader to capture and reflect on the sense of wonder developed within his description of the BDO's geography in this excellent addition to the SF Masterworks series, and take it with them beyond their reading of the novel, and into their own lives:

The nature and the purpose of the Ramans was still utterly unknown. They had used the solar system as a refuelling stop - as a booster station - call it what you will, and had then spurned it completely, on their way to more important business. They would probably never even know that the human race existed; such monumental indifference was worse than any deliberate insult. (Loc. 3294-96)

Jack Finney, The Body Snatchers (1955)

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 07:26:00 +0000

Parasitic alien seed pods capable of replicating organic life settle near the Californian town of Santa Mira and begin to create copies of its inhabitants. Dr. Miles Bennell becomes aware of the invasion through his patients' reports of changes in the behaviour of family members.

Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers lacks internal coherence.

It is never adequately explained how the initial pods manage to position themselves next to their victims, nor what happens to those Santa Mirans who are reproduced, nor, if the pods need to be cultivated in the manner the final scene suggests, how the first generation harvested themselves, nor how the pods are able to propel themselves into and through space.

Looking beyond its shortcomings, the most productive reading of Finney's work may be as a study in the undermining of mid-fifties American values. A Cold War paranoia that speaks of a coming-to-awareness of the alienation that the seeds of consumerism have propagated in American society pervades the work. The havoc that the mindless compulsion of the parasitic invaders wreaks mirrors the power of self-interested economic individualism to erode and ultimately destroy a sense of communally forged, collectively expressed shared values, and intimates that the socio-economic enemy within is far more of a danger to the continuation of social arrangements than that which any external threat may pose.

I'd grown up here; from boyhood I'd known every street, house, and path, most of the back yards, and every hill, field, and road for miles around. And now I didn't know it any more. Unchanged to the eye, what I was seeing out there now -- in my eye, and beyond that in my mind -- was something alien.

The lighted circle of pavement below me, the familiar front porches, and the dark mass of houses and town beyond them -- were fearful. Now they were menacing, all these familiar things and faces; the town had changed or was changing into something very terrible, and was after me. It wanted me, too, and I knew it. (Loc. 1349-51; 1351-53)

Bennell and his handful of unadapted associates seem powerless to act against the alien agency, and incapable of formulating a plan to resist them:

We were[...] overwhelmed, not knowing what else to do, how to fight back, or against what. Something impossibly terrible, yet utterly real, was menacing us in a way beyond our comprehension or abilities; and we fled. (Loc. 1497-98)

"Miles, when did all this happen?" Becky gestured to indicate the length of the semi-deserted street behind and ahead of us. "A little at a time," I said, and shrugged. "We're just realizing it now; the town's dying." (Loc. 1677-80)

Unlike film adaptations of the work, Finney chose to give The Body Snatchers a redemptive, and deeply unconvincing, ending. However, the lasting impression that this uneven yet highly readable entry to the SF Masterworks series makes on this reader is that societies that are prepared to allow themselves to be dominated by forces intrinsically hostile to the collective good come to regard elements of their own genus as outsiders.

"You look shocked, actually sick, and yet what has the human race done except spread over this planet till it swarms the globe two billion strong? What have you done with this very continent but expand till you fill it?" (Loc. 2516-18)

Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon (1960)

noreply@blogger.com (Diamat) — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 14:46:00 +0000

Rogue Moon relates the attempts of a team of scientists to tame an alien artifact discovered on the moon in order that its secrets may be studied: an 'obsidian hulk, toppling perpetually, perpetually re-erecting itself, shifting in place, looming over the bunker[...] reflecting the light of the stars, now dead black and lusterless.' (Loc. 2319-20).

However, the artifact proves itself adept at killing those who enter it, and a strategy is therefore developed whereby facsimiles of explorers are beamed to the moon (leaving their original selves alive on Earth) in order that they may progress incrementally through its maze-like interior before the duplicate is killed. The physiological strain and psychological impact of the transmission has the unfortunate effect of sending the subject insane, and the search is on for 'a different kind of man to send. A man who won't go insane when he feels himself die' (loc. 114):

The matter transmitter analyzes the structure of whatever is presented to its scanners. It converts that analysis into a signal, which describes the exact atomic structure of the scanned object. The signal is transmitted to a receiver. And, at the receiver, the signal is fed into a resolving stage. There the scanned atomic structure is duplicated from a local supply of atoms -- half a ton of rock will do, and to spare. In other words, what the matter transmitter will do is to tear you down and then send a message to a receiver telling it how to put you together again.

"The process is painless and, as far as your consciousness is concerned, instantaneous. It takes place at the speed of light, and neither the electrochemical impulses which transmit messages along your nerves and between your brain cells, nor the individual particles constituting your atoms, nor the atoms in their individual movements, travel at quite that rate.

"Before you could possibly be conscious of pain or dissolution, and before your atomic structure could have time to drift out of alignment, it will seem to you as if you've stood still and the universe has moved. You'll suddenly be in the receiver, as though something omnipotent had moved its hand, and the electrical impulse that was a thought racing between your brain cells will complete its journey so smoothly that you will have real difficulty, for a moment, in realizing that you have moved at all. (Loc. 859-69).

That section of the work that takes place on the moon is both linguistically and conceptually among the finest work in science fiction that you're likely to encounter. However, the novel's denoument constitutes a scant ten percent of its extent, and much of the rest is taken up with tedious sub-soap opera theatricals concerning the triangular relationship between Dr. Edward Hawks, the research scientist leading the project, the explorer Al Barker, and the vampish artist Claire.

A brief and largely unsatisfactory entry to the SF Masterworks series.

You have to decide how much of yourself can be changed before you consider yourself dead. (Loc. 978-79)

Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) FMW 49

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 13:45:00 +0000

I picked this off the virtual shelf (although I also have the print copy) after the recent death of Ray Bradbury as a way of honouring the passing of an influential and much-loved author whose works I am not as conversant with as I would like to be.

Something Wicked This Way Comes describes the encounter of adolescents Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade with the mysterious Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, an eerie circus sideshow that arrives in the middle of the night by railroad.

On discovering the dark purposes of the troupe's visitation, Halloway and Nightshade do what they can to stave off its threat to their own persons as well others prior to embroiling Halloway's father Charles in events.

Stylistically, I found the work uneven. Bradbury seems to lurch between the most chokingly florid prose and undeniably majestic passages that are startling and arresting in equal measure.

Structurally, the novel is disappointing. For me, the plot lacks interest and development and Bradbury relies on careering from set piece to set piece in order to retain such engagement as the work is able to muster. Personally, I found this tedious in the extreme.

Thematically, the struggle between an under-defined evil and a less-than-convincing goodness lacks interest, the depiction of adolescence is strained, and the delineation of the father-child relationship too oblique.

Consequently, more than once I felt I was left 'holding a book but reading the empty spaces' (loc. 487-77). However, Something Wicked This Way Comes does deliver some wonderful passages between the breathless and underwhelming plot devices, and is an acceptable late entry in the numbered run of the Fantasy Masterworks series.

For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles - breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them. (loc. 2892-96)

Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. (loc. 3436-38)

Christopher Priest, The Prestige (1995)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 12:47:00 +0000

'Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent.' (loc. 537-39)

Christopher Priest's brilliant 1995 novel contains a vertigo-inducing number of duplicities, doubles, and doubts. A dense yet eminently readable piece of literary science fiction, The Prestige is a satisfying and compelling novel which is told twice through the mouths of its duelling (in every sense of the word) protagonists within a narrative frame that connects the past and present of the work deftly.

In a tour de force of literary legerdemain, plot elements are revealed gradually from different sources to much the same effect as the physical acts of prestidigitation described in the book that facilitate the delivery of 'the prestige, [...] the product of magic' (loc. 990):

First, he said, the magical effect would be increased if the illusion could be viewed from all angles. Secondly, if it could not, and a small segment of the audience had to glimpse the secret, it did not matter! If five hundred people are baffled, he said, it was of no importance that five others should see the secret. (loc. 842-45)

The Prestige is an exceptional and highly recommended entry in the SF Masterworks series.

Janet Russ, The Female Man (1975; 1970)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 11:24:00 +0000

I approached Joanna Russ's The Female Man with some trepidation.

I had hoped that the reputation the work has earned as a cornerstone of feminist science fiction since its publication in 1975 (written 1970) would find expression in a subtlety of argument that transcended the bludgeon and bluster of the politics of gender of forty years ago.

Sadly, it does not.

Let's be clear about this. If we are asking 'does this work have an historic significance?' then the answer in my opinion is yes, it does. However, if we are asking 'does this novel have any merit as a work of science fiction, and is it still worth reading?' then I would have to answer 'a scant amount', and 'frankly, no' respectively.

Although incoherently presented, the four fictive worlds which overlap in The Female Man through the persons of Joanna, Jeannine, Janet and Jael invite productive reflection on the part of the reader with regard to their relation to the author, whom they may be interpreted as being facets of. Whilst such a reading effectively elevates Russ to the status of an Everywoman figure, which was doubtless not her intention, the trope allows for the consideration of possible futures and alternate histories of the female subject which are thoughtful and engaging.

However, it is easy for the reader to be sympathetic to the novel's concepts when considering them outside of the textual contexts within which they are presented. The Female Man wavers stylistically between the hectoring, the overwrought, the juvenile, and the unreadable. When the narrator observes 'This is the lecture. If you don't like it, you can skip to the next chapter' (loc. 466) I suspect that I could not have been the only reader to have concluded that not just the chapter in question but rather the entire novel reads like a testy diatribe against The Evil That Men Do and were left 'numb, numb with boredom' (loc. 2610-11) while struggling through it.

The Female Man is a curio you may wish to dip into for any number of reasons, but it really isn't something you need to take the time to read or study, and is a dubious addition to the SF Masterworks series.

Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers' laps and punch the readers' noses. Rejoice, little book! For on that day, we will be free. (Lo. 3154-56)

Frederik Pohl, Jem (1979) SFMW 41

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 04:30:00 +0000

Frederik Pohl's Hugo and Nebula nominee Jem (1979) is a rich, complex and conflicted novel that considers what a future of planetary exploration may look like through the lens of the late Cold War politics of the eighth decade of the twentieth century.

The Earth Pohl envisages is organised around fuel ('Greasies'), food ('Fats') and people ('Peeps')-producing blocs rather than geographical land masses, which makes for some unusual alliances. A restructuring of social and economic arrangements has putatively been undertaken in order to preserve world peace:

No nation could afford to fight any other nation in the whole world anymore. Food, Fuel, and People each owned enough muscle to smash both the others flat, and all of them knew it. (Loc. 2651-52)

Logic, however, has little to do with the nature of human relations, and it is Pohl's jaded but historically contingent perspective on humanity's seemingly irredeemable, atavistic and insuperable desire to compete and fight in perpetuity that drives the novel's plot: 'Remember Clausewitz: war is the logical extension of politics.' (Loc. 779)

Kung's Semistellar Object was not much larger than a planet itself. As stars went it was tiny, barely big enough to fuse nuclei and radiate heat, but it had a planet of its own that sounded like fun. Hot. Humid. Dense air, but about the right partial pressure of oxygen to be congenial to life—including the life of a human exploratory party, if anybody cared to spend the money to try it out. (Loc. 886-87)

The marginally habitbal planet Jem features three beautifully realised alien races:

At least three species seemed to possess some sort of social organization: a kind of arthropod [the 'crablike Krinpit', Loc. 1567]; a tunneling species, warm-blooded and soft-skinned; and an avian species—no, not avian, she corrected herself. They spent most of their time in the air, but without having developed wings. They were balloonists, not birds. (Loc. 303-6)

Pohl goes to some lengths to fashion separate historical, cultural and sociological matrices of understanding for two of the Jem's three races, and these passages form some of the work's most arresting, compelling sections. However, it is mankind's persistence in preying on itself throughout the work that the reader may find most bewildering, if all too plausible:

The world she had left was blowing itself up, and the world she had come to seemed determined to do the same. (Loc. 4025)

And so, at the last, what can one say of them? What is to be said of Marjorie Menninger and Danny Dalehouse and Ana Dimitrova—and of Charlie and Ahmed Dulla, or of Sharn-igon and Mother dr'Shee? They did what they could. More often than not, they did what they thought they should. And what can be said of them is what can be said of all persons, human and otherwise, at the end: they died. Some survived the fighting. Some survived the flare. But in the long run there are no survivors. There are only replacements. And time passes, and generations come and go. (Loc. 4787-91)

The novel's cataclysmic conclusion is followed by an afterword considering the intriguing proposition that humanity will only thrive subsequent to its genetic makeup having been tempered by other influences. Left to its own devices, Pohl implies that the history of humanity will continue to repeat the cycles of tragedy and farce Marx identifies in the 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte'.

Pohl imagines the implications of the final act that the Fats' commander Marge Menninger undertakes and the way in which the native species and the new arrivals intermingle in Jem's future, six generations hence:

Why fight Utopia? he thinks to himself. And so in that moment he completes the process of growing up. And begins the process of dying. Which is much the same thing. (Loc. 4915-16)

Walter Tevis, Mockingbird (1980) SFMW 70

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 15:16:00 +0000

Robert Spofforth, 'mankind's most beautiful toy,' (p. 278) is 'the last of a hundred robots designated Make Nine, the strongest and most intelligent creatures ever made by man. He was also the only one programmed to stay alive despite his own wishes' (p. 4).
Spofforth's personality has been derived from 'a brilliant and melancholic engineer named Paisley['s] […] personality, his imagination, and his learning had all been recorded on tapes when he was forty-three, and afterwards the man was forgotten' (p. 4)

However, Spofforth 'did not really want to live. He had been cheated – horribly cheated – of a real, human life, something in him rebelled against living the life that had been thrust upon him' (p. 10)

It is difficult to review the work without disclosing its plot, namely [select text to read] Spofforth's program of social engineering to make man extinct as a species and thereby allow his machine protocols to finally let him destroy himself. Spofforth's ambitions are threatened when Mary Lou and Bentley stop taking the sedatives and drugs, which (although unknown to them at the time) also contain contraceptives, and therefore place his agenda in danger through their propagation.

Spofforth's solution is to separate the pair by jailing Bentley for the illegal act of cohabitation, and to experiment with his pseudo-humanity in the interim by taking Mary Lou away with him and installing her in his apartment as a surrogate wife, despite his sexlessness.

Paul Bentley is what passes for a university professor in the twenty-fifth century that Tevis envisages. Education has become a much-degraded and perfunctory affair in the novel as humanity has lost the ability to read. Bentley is extraordinary in that having discovered some books, rare but nevertheless unvalued artifacts, he has taught himself to read with them. Bentley now wishes to teach others to do the same, and presents himself to Spofforth, Dean of Faculties at New York University (but formerly Director of Population Control) at the beginning of the novel. However, Spofforth sets Bentley about the task of recording the dialogue in archival silent film instead.

Mary Lou Borne is an escapee from a public dormitory for children who grew up in the desert and has been on the margins of the society the novel depicts ever since.

A section towards the middle of the work narrated by Mary Lou offers some insight into her radicalisation by an old man called Simon whom she encountered and lived with for a time in the desert. Simon inculcates in her the idea, if not a full understanding of, the impact that 'the death of intellectual curiosity' has had upon humanity, and the fact that 'everybody's head is a cheap movie show' (p. 98). Spofforth in his turn also has some bitter things to say along the same lines later in the novel: 'The American Individualist, the Free Spirit. The Frontiersman. With a human face indistinguishable from that of a moron robot. And at his home or his motel he had television to keep the world away. And pills in his pocket. And the stereo. And the pictures in the magazines he looked at, with food and sex better and brighter than in life' (p. 174).

Mary Lou offers some jarring reflections on her relationships with Bentley and Spofforth, which invite the reader to consider her inner life as a character more intently than the narrative to this point has suggested that they may need to:

'Paul was pathetically serious. It's comical just to remember how his face looked when I threw the rock at the glass on the python cage, or how gravely he went about teaching me how to read. And he used to read over the first parts of this journal, when we were living at the library, and purse his lips, and frown – even at the bits I thought were funny.

Bob was hardly better. It would be silly to expect a robot to have a sense of humour, but it is still hard to take his gravity and his sensitivity. Especially when he tells me about that dream he keeps having and that he has had all of his long life. At first I was interested, but eventually I became bored with it.

I suppose that dream has much to do with my living here in this three-bedroom apartment with him. It was almost certainly the beginning of his desire to live and act like an ordinary human being of a long time ago, to try to live a life like the life of the dream's original dreamer.' (pp. 98-99)

I miss Paul. I think I loved Paul in some small way. But when I get right down to it, I don't really mind this life, this being the companion of a brown-skinned robot. What the hell, I used to live at the zoo, for Christ's sake. I'll make out.' (p. 99)

Education's aim in the novel is to shame, pacify and alienate, expressed through parroted maxims such as “when in doubt, forget it.”' (p. 22); 'quick sex is best' (p. 10), and 'alone is best.' (p. 28)

This deadening of affect and interpersonal relations is completed by the tranquilisers (sopors), joints and drugged food that are routinely ingested by the citizenry. Self-immolations by combustion are described frequently within the novel, their agents depicted as being unable to either iterate or comprehend the stunted nature of their lives, but seemingly driven by deeper urges to end their existences rather than endure the mockery of being that Spofforth's plan has imposed upon them.

A good deal of the book is narrated by Bentley in the first person in the form of a journal that Spofforth instructs him to keep during his studies. Bentey's auto-didactic program brings him to self-consciousness, and prompts him to question every aspect of the rigid social structures his world is governed by: 'I discovered the word “memorize.” And this was the definition given:”To learn by heart,” and how strange that was – heart, to learn by heart. I could not understand it all. And yet the word “heart” somehow seems right, for I know that my heart has always beaten. Always.' (p. 35). Readers also share, and are thereby invited to reflect upon the implications of, several epiphanic moments in Bentley's self-education, including his coming to understand the purpose and function of dictionaries (pp. 69-72).

During his incessant search for printed matter, Bentley encounters a text published at that point in the novel's prehistory where reading died, which is interesting to encounter in our own historic moment as digital books supersede their printed antecedents:

'I have a copy of the last book ever published by Random House, once a place of business that cause books to be printed and sold by the millions. The book is called Heavy Rape, it was published in 2189. On the flyleaf is a statement that begins: “With this novel, fifth in a series, Random House closes its editorial doors. The abolition of reading programs in the schools in the past twenty years has helped bring this about. It is with regret...” and so on.' (p. 114)

Bentley also encounters a book by Alfred Fain called The Last Autobiography wherein the author opines 'A friend of mine who works part time as the head of a publishing house says the average book finds about eighty readers. I've asked him why they don't stop publishing altogether. He says he frankly doesn't know, but that his publishing company is such a tiny division of the recreation corporation that owns it that they have probably forgotten about its existence. He doesn't know how to read himself, but he respects books because his mother had been a kind of recluse who read almost constantly, and he loved her dearly.' (pp. 117-18).

The work also envisages the impact of a future peak oil crisis within the novel's fictional world from Tevis's 1980s viewpoint 'before the Death of Oil and long before the Nuclear Battery Age […] when gasoline had become more expensive than whiskey, and most people stayed home.' (p. 173)

Subsequent to his escape from prison, Bentley takes shelter briefly in a defective factory, a 'mindless parody of productivity' (p. 168) which stands as a metaphor for the banal nature of the endless consumption of manufactured needs in a world of finite resources: 'The factory was a closed system. Nothing came in and nothing went out. It could have been making and unmaking defective toasters for centuries, for all I knew.' (p. 167)

Mockingbird begins and ends in Manhattan. This paradigmatic urban environment, read backwards from the twenty-fifth century Tevis imagines to the historical present of the work's composition around 1980, holds a totemic fascination for the author as an archetype of everything that has gone awry with human endeavour: Manhattan, where 'white men had focused their fretful intensity of power and money and yearning, pushing up buildings in hubris, in mad cockiness, filling streets with taxis and anxious people, and, finally, dying into drugs and inwardness.' (p. 277) The SF Masterworks edition's cover echoes this sentiment, with the Empire State Building which features in the work situated between the shattered remnants of two other skyscrapers, the outlines of which it is impossible not to view post-911 as representing the former World Trade Center.

Tevis lambasts organised religion through its representation as an historical curio as described by Bentley:

'I am not certain whether Holy Bible is a book of history or maintenance or poetry. It names many strange people who do not seem real […] As well as I understand it, Jesus claimed to be the son of God, the one who was supposed to have made heaven and earth. That perplexes me and makes me feel that Jesus was unreliable. Still, he seems to have known things that others did not know and was not a silly person, like those in Gone With The Wind, nor a murderously ambitious one, like the American presidents.

Whatever Jesus was, he was this thing called a 'great man'. I am not certain I like the idea of 'great men'; it makes me uncomfortable. 'Great men' often have had very bloody plans for mankind.' (pp. 140, 141-42).

The prostration of the intellect before the tyranny of monotheism is considered at greater length during Bentley's residence within the neo-fundamentalist community of Baleen he encounters towards the end of the novel, but which I will not address at length here.

Mockingbird plays with layers of symbolism in a deft and satisfying manner, for example the tableau that Mary Lou forms in the artificial python's cage at the zoo: 'she had to stand tiptoed and reach as far up as she could reach, just to catch the bottom of the fruit with her fingertips...”Why did you pick it?” I said.”I don't know,” she said. “”It seemed to be the thing to do.”' (pp. 41, 47) The scene amusingly parodies the Biblical Eve and the serpent retrospectively in the context of the narrative arc that follows and the fate the awaits Bentley prior to the text's resolution.

Tevis seems to disclose his own fondness for Kentucky's most famous export in ensuring that his protagonist is well-provided with what you would have thought to have been a near-impossible commodity, to acquire namely bourbon: 'I have a half bottle of whiskey – J.T.S. Brown Bourbon – and a pitcher of water and a glass on the table.' (p. 250)

Despite the consolations of mellowed alcohol, the melancholy air that pervades the work is encapsulated in the titular quote that reoccurs frequently in Bentley's mind after his initial exposure to it during his film studies left an enduring impression:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' spoken by an old man to a young girl.' (p. 20)

The quote's lilting yet downbeat cast seems to colour much of Bentley's world-view, and he reaches for it frequently when unable to express himself in any other manner. 'It was my intention in beginning this to summarize what I have learned about human history and how that history appears to be coming to an end. But the prospect of trying actually to do it, after thinking about it for so long, is more than I am up to facing.' (p. 230).

The novel proposes that whilst a machine intelligence coming to consciousness may regret the fact of its own existence, humanity, although prey to the same exigencies of fate, appears better equipped to deal with its vagaries. The following exchange between Spofforth and Bentley occurs close to the end of the work, where the former's life is close to its cessation, and the latters is about to bloom fully:

'I am sick of life. I never wanted it.'
I stared at him. 'That's the name of the game. I never asked to be born either.' (p. 237)

That is not to say that Tevis, through the mouth of his protagonist, does not rue the fact that our species-being is not perhaps a little better equipped to deal with the tests to our patience that human interactions can present. In conversation with a sentient bus that he adapts for his own use, Bentley asks:

'Why are you so... so pleasant?' I said.
'We all are,' the bus said. 'All thought buses are pleasant. We were all programmed with Kind Feelings, and we like our work.'
'That's better programming than people get,' I thought, with some vehemence.
'Yes,' the bus said. 'Yes it is.' (p. 252)

It becomes evident during the course of the work that Bentley is the titular mockingbird, his solitary intelligence the song, and the edge of the woods the precipitous twilight of humanity:

'Only the mockingbird sings at the edge of the woods,' the bus said.'
It was startling to hear that. 'You took those words from my mind?' I said.
'Yes. They are often in your mind.'
'What do they mean?'
'I don't know,' the bus said. 'But they make you feel something strongly.'
'Something sad?'
'Yes. Sad. But it is a sadness that is good for you to feel' (p. 258).

Mockingbird is beautifully structured, perfectly paced, artfully composed, and compelling in its subject matter. It is a most satisfying entry to the SF Masterworks series, and is to be commended to new readers without reservation.

Philip K. Dick, Ubik (1969) SFMW 26

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 04:25:00 +0000

'Runciter took a good long look at the fifty-cent pieces. He saw at once what the attendant meant; very definitely, the coins were not as they should be. Whose profile is this? he asked himself. Who’s this on all three coins? Not the right person at all.

And yet he’s familiar. I know him. And then he recognized the profile. I wonder what this means, he asked himself. Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. Most things in life eventually can be explained. But — Joe Chip on a fifty-cent piece?

It was the first Joe Chip money he had ever seen. He had an intuition, chillingly, that if he searched his pockets, and his billfold, he would find more.

This was just the beginning.'

Glen Runciter's 'prudence organisation' offers the services of psychically gifted anti-telepaths and 'pre-cogs' who foresee future events and intervene in order to influence the outcomes they have envisioned to counter the effects of telepaths employed by other businesses.

Runciter, and/or Runciter's team is/are killed having been lured off-world to Luna by business rival Ray Hollis. The novel subsequently recounts the quest of Runciter's technical lead, Joe Chip, to try to determine what has happened as the world around him appears to begin to revert to the early decades of the twentieth century.

It is impossible to determine whether the text is unfolding from the reported point of view of Runciter, or Chip, or whether they are both dead on the basis that all three positions are presented and vie for the reader's acceptance and belief. In this way, the text colludes with the indeterminate nature of the author's intentionality in disorientating the reader: "We haven’t gone anywhere. We’re where we’ve always been. But for some reason — for one of several possible reasons — reality has receded; it’s lost its underlying support and it’s ebbed back to previous forms" (Loc. 2348-50). For example, after a continuous section of chapters constituting more than half of the novel's length, the narrative shifts from Chip to Runciter's point of view with no visual signifiers such as asterisks or a section break to signify the same (Loc. 2899).

Matters are complicated by the fact that Dick wrote Ubik at the height of his addiction to prescribed amphetamines, dispensed as a treatment for depression and anxiety. Dick's world-view appears to imbue amphetamines with health-giving properties, and it makes perfect sense to him that they should be available to Glen Runciter from a vending machine (Loc. 2096-7) at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium where the book begins and ends, and where much of its reported actions may be taking place in the minds of the deceased, suspended in half-life in a cryogenic 'cold pac'.

A further layer of befuddlement is added to the novel's already complex perceptual structure in the person of Jory, a half-life teenage inhabitant of the Beloved Brethren Moratorium whose over-developed psychic abilities may be allowing him to rampage through the intelligence of other residents, influencing and possibly even consuming their minds.

Finally, there is the titular artifact Ubik itself. Each of the work's chapters begins with an advert for Ubik repackaged as some sort of consumer good, be it a foodstuff, a cosmetic or a medication. This alone invites a meta-textual reading of Ubik as a critique of the disorientating, alienating, all-pervasive nature of late capitalism. However, within the context of the narrative, Ubik is presented as something offering a (fake?) redemption, a substance that, if only Joe Chip could lay his hands on a spray can of it, Glen Runciter's messages inform him would stop further temporal regression. For the majority of the work's extent, however, Ubik remains tantalisingly out of reach for Chip, reverting from its spray form to an unusable powder or balm leaving him to 'wonder how much difference Ubik — dangled toward [him] again and again in countless different ways but always out of reach—would have made' (Loc. 2554-55).

Ubik is described in both scientific and religiose ways.

On the one hand, in a description larded with jargon seemingly for comic purposes, a spray can of Ubik is described as 'a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of antiprotophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means—for a specific time, anyhow—an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity…which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures' (Loc. 3242-48).

On the other, Ubik appears as some sort of self-aware life-force with supernatural abilities:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. (Loc. 3267-69)

In summary, Ubik is a work of exceptional interest and an outstanding entry into the SF Masterworks series, offering both a rewarding reading and re-reading experience, and an archetypal example of Philip K. Dick's unique and dislocating craft.

Gregory Benford, Timescape (1980) SFMW 27

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 13:13:00 +0000

Gregory Benford's 1980 Nebula award-winning novel imagines what scientists of the late 1990s would do if they wished to send a message back in time to the early 1960s to warn their historic peers of the catastrophic effect that long-chain molecule pesticides have had upon the environment, and to thereby change the course of history.

Expressed in so reductive a manner, the text sounds preposterous and juvenile, but is in fact both nuanced, sophisticated and at time hugely enjoyable if the reader is prepared to suspend judgement on the absolute truth-value of the physics it contains. Benford's novel has often been praised for its hard science and plausible explanations of how tachyons could theoretically travel faster than light and, if aimed at the correct coordinates at the right time could theoretically send messages backwards or forwards in time.

Benford's work contains a number of dramatic set pieces: the discovery of the note in the bank vault proving that messages have been received; Greg Markham's fevered dream state as he perishes in an air crash in the original timeline whilst resolving crucial equations; the fact that Kennedy survives the assassination attempt which killed him in our reality as a consequence of a student interrupting Oswald whilst fetching a journal featuring an article by Gordon Bernstein discussing his discovery of the 'spontaneous resonance effects' - Markham's transmissions from the future - and the inevitable meeting of the two protagonists in an alternate future that they have both been instrumental in constructing.

The latter conceit is that which precipitates the final sequence of occurrences depicted in the gripping last 30 pages of the novel and elevates the work above the status of being merely 'interesting but worthy'. It is as clever a re-imagining of such a hackneyed historic event as a reader is ever likely to encounter.

The novel does have its weaknesses. Beyond Bernstein in the 1960s and Markham in the 1990s, Benford and his sister-in-law Hilary Foister Benford, whom the author credits as having 'contributed significantly to the manuscript' in a special acknowledgment, have a tendency to indulge themselves in some broad but generally unconvincing characterisations in the persons of their extensive ensemble cast. The bit-part characters' contributions to the plot are slight and their antics can give the work something of a 'soap opera' feel at times. The novel could easily have lost at least a quarter of its 400 pages without impacting on its thematic development in any way. For example, whilst it's nice to meet Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse (p. 173), and read a peon of praise in honour of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (p. 213) you have to wonder what they are doing in the book.

Overall, Timescape nevertheless ranks as one of the most enjoyable entries in the SF Masterworks series, and despite the Benfords' tendency towards the linguistically gaudy (some of the laboured puns the characters are forced to opine can grate, for example) the work contains some thought-provoking, powerfully conveyed ideas:

'Behind the equations were immensities of space and dust, dead but furious matter bending to the geometric will of gravity, stars like match heads exploding in a vast night, orange sparks that lit only a thin ring of child planets. The mathematics was what made it all; the pictures that men carried inside their heads were useful but clumsy, cartoons of a world that was as subtle as silk, infinitely smooth and varied. After you had seen that, really seen it, the fact that worlds could exist within worlds, that universes could thrive within our own, was not so huge a riddle. The mathematics buoyed you' (p. 176).

'He had a sudden sense that time was here, not a relation between events, but a thing. What a specifically human comfort it was to see that time as immutable, a weight you could not escape. Believing that, a man could give up swimming against this river-run of seconds and simply drift, cease battering himself on time's flat face like an insect flapping against a blossom of light' (p. 410).

'No matter how the days moved through them, there always remained the pulse of things coming, the sense that even now there was yet still time' (p. 412).

Orion launches SF Gatweway

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 12:29:00 +0000

Congratulations to Gollancz's Darren Nash on the launch of the highly promising SF Gateway. I was taken with this proposition as soon as I read the following press release:

Imagine your perfect specialist bookshop; it stocks not just the highlights from your favourite authors’ careers, but every book they ever wrote and the people who run the shop have an encyclopaedic knowledge of SF. The future of Science Fiction and Fantasy e-book publishing is here. We invite you to join us.

Suddenly, owning a Kindle seems very important. I say more about why I feel such initiatives as SF Gateway are significant to the future of publishing here.

Much as purchasing another electronic device doesn't fill me with glee, I have to concede that the limitations of the battery on my current HTC phone means that reading SF Gateway titles on my Kindle Android app is not a viable option. I will therefore be adding an SF Gateway review section as soon as I've purchased a dedicated e-reader, and have read my first title from the launch list.

As long-time readers of this blog know, nothing happens quickly around here, so such developments are unlikely to take place before the end of 2011. Of course, by that time I may have decided to get an Android tablet instead - or perhaps a spare battery for my phone.
In other news that is bound to cheer readers of this blog, Gollancz have used the SF Gateway forum to announce the welcome return of the Fantasy Masterworks list. I've put in a plea that the numerical sequence and ormer fcover design are retained. If you feel the same way, please add a comment to this thread.

Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime (1987) SFMW 66

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 10:44:00 +0000

Lucius Shepard's Life During Wartime (1987) conjoins the standard Apocalypse Now reading of Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness with the author's own experience of living in Latin America and use of hard drugs, whilst Scarface plays on a constant loop in the novel's background.

The story arc is an unholy mess, emerging unconvincingly from the first section ('R and R') which was originally published as 'a Nebula award-winning short story' in its own right.

One can only assume it must have been a slow year for the short form of genre fiction.

The Wikipedia entry for the novel currently provides more detail about this dreary, preening work than I am prepared to waste further time rehearsing here. Suffice to say the idea that the titular war, not to mention the totality of the global economic and political structure, are being manipulated as part of a psychically-conducted vendetta between two ancient Panamanian families is preposterous in the extreme.

In the interests of fair balance, it should be noted that when the fit takes him Shepard is capable of writing beautifully, and has the keen eye of a miniaturist: 'her blue skirt swayed like a rung bell' (p. 64); 'over the bumpy hill road in the hotel's Land Rover[...] they seemed to be pulling the night along with them' (p. 116). However, the author's ambitions appear to have exceeded his abilities over the duration of the 418 pages of this work. Perhaps Shepard's aspiration did not extend beyond writing a novel of some weight, if not of any substance. If so, he achieved his target only at the expense of some uneven characterization, a meandering, repetitive, and parchment-thin plot, and occasionally lurid prose.

If Life During Wartime must remain in your slush pile, be sure to put it at the bottom. Not only is that where it deserves to be, but the heft of this weak addition to the SF Masterworks series will provide a solid base for the books above it to rest upon.

Walter M. Miller Jr, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) SFMW V

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 06:20:00 +0000

'Over each city a sun appeared and was brighter than the sun of heaven, and immediately that city withered and melted as wax under the torch, and the people thereof did stop in the streets and their skins smoked and they became as fagots thrown on the coals. And when the fury of the sun had faded, the city was in flames; and a great thunder came out of the sky, like the great battering ram PIK-A-DON, to crush it utterly. Poisonous fumes fell over all the land, and the land was aglow by night with the afterfire which caused a scurf on the skin and made the hair to fall and the blood to die in the veins' (p. 198)

'From the confusion of tongues, the intermingling of the remnants of many nations, from fear, the hate was born. And the hate said: Let us stone and disembowel and burn the ones who did this thing. Let us make a holocaust of those who wrought this crime, together with their hirelings and their wise men; burning, let them perish, and all their works, their names, and even their memories. Let us destroy them all, and teach our children that the world is new, that they may know nothing of the deeds that went before. Let us make a great simplification, and then the world shall begin again.' (p. 72)

A cornerstone of the post-apocalyptic SF sub-genre, 1961 Hugo winner A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) was the only novel Walter M. Miller Jr published in his lifetime. The work emerged from short stories that Miller published separately, rewritten as the three parts of the final text: Fiat Homo ('Let there be man'), Fiax Lux ('Let there be light'), and Fiat Voluntas Tua ('Let thy will be done').

Fiat Homo is set in the 26th century some centuries after a cataclysmic nuclear war referred to as the 'Flame Deluge' subsequent to which humanity has reverted to a neo-medievalism.

Fiat Lux takes place some six centuries later in 3174 as the Earth emerges from the new Dark Ages into which it has descended and begins to experience 'a revival of learning in a dark world' (p. 174)

Fiat Voluntas Tua occurs a further six centuries in the future in 3781. Technologies have been rediscovered, and humanity teeters on the brink of self-extermination once again.

The novel is set largely within a monastic world of 'bookleggers' and memorizers, custodians of an intellectual history that the 'simpleton' survivors of the Flame Deluge sought to destroy having deemed knowledge to have been the cause of humanity's near-destruction:

'To escape the fury of the simpleton packs, such learned people as still survived fled to the sanctuary that offered itself. When Holy Church received them, she vested them in monks' robes and tried to hide them in such monasteries and convents as had survived.' (p. 73)

The titular character, a scientist before the cataclysmic events that reorient the narrative's history, seeks refuge with the Cistercians:

'Isaac Edward Leibowitz, after a fruitless search for his wife, had fled to the Cistercians[...] Father Isaac Edward Leibowitz had won permission from the Holy See to found a new community of religious[...] Its task, unannounced, and at first only vaguely defined, was to preserve human history for the great-great-great-grandchildren of the children of the simpletons who wanted it destroyed.' (p. 74)

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a brilliant but melancholy work, the relentlessly maudlin nature of which gives some insight into the depressive nature of its author, who took his own life in 1996. It is characterised by its protagonists' lengthy reflections on humanity's seeming inability to cast aside its own predilections towards self-harm, and its inability to break out of its orbiting of disaster and set a heading down a route of progressive, linear development.

'Can you believe that that brute is the lineal descendent of men who supposedly invented machines that flew, who traveled to the moon, harnessed the forces of Nature, built machines that could talk and seemed to think? Can you belive that there were such men?[...] I can't accept it. How can a great and wise civilization have destroyed itself so completely? (p.139).

Man as an 'imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection' (p. 155) of the design of the Creator that he was personally burdened with believing in echoes the title of Miller's famous 'Dark Reflection' short story and gestures towards the dejected world-view of A Canticle for Leibowitz, tempered by fleeting hope: 'Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection' (p. 156).

However, it is a burden that Miller, a convert to Catholicism after the Second World War, seems to have been both ill-equipped to bear and unwilling to reconcile himself with. For example, whilst it is ostensibly the character of Abbot Zerchi who enunciates the following passage in the novel, but they seem rather to be being mouthed by the conflicted author himself in the historical context of the late 1950s, with war behind it, war within it, and war ahead of it:

'The world's been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty? What am I saying? It's been in a habitual state of crisis since the beginning – but for half a century now, almost unbearable And why, for the love of God?What is the fundamental irritant, the essence of the tension? Political philosophies? Economics? Population pressure? Disparity of culture and creed? Ask a dozen experts, get a dozen answers. Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother? If we're born mad, where's the hope of Heaven? Through Faith alone? Or isn't there any? God forgive me, I don't mean that.' (p. 275)

'Are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?[...] Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing?' (pp. 280-81).

'They had not yet seen the madness and the murder and the blotting out of reason. Then they did it, and then they saw it'. (p. 292)

Abandoning the earth in the novel's final sequence, the last monk to board to the spaceship bearing humanity away from the planet it has been such a poor steward of murmurs Sic transit mundus: 'thus passes the world' (p.338) in much the same way as Kurt Vonnegut shrugged 'so it goes' whenever his authorial eye happened to linger momentarily over the ineluctable stupidity of our species-being.

In A Canticle for Leibowitz, mankind's imbecility and incapacity to learn from the mistakes of its past as it wheels around to embrace future catastophes of its own making is personified in the figure of the omnipresent wanderer or pilgrim. A mythical figure of extraordinary age whose longevity is put down to his partaking of the milk of a mutant goat, the wanderer resembles both an Old Testament prophet, and the person of Leibowitz himself:

'And now this Francis, he meets a pilgrim – wearing what?- wearing for a kit the very burlap cloth they hooded Blessed Leibowitz with before they hanged him. And with what for a belt? A rope. What rope? Ahh, the very same -[...] By tonight, the whole novitiate is buzzing with the sweet little story that Francis met the Beatus himself out there, and that Beatus escorted our boy over to where that stuff was and told him he'd find his vocation' (pp. 52-53)

Published in the stand-alone 10 volume SF Masterworks hardback series, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a superb addition to the SF Masterworks list. It is a haunting, lyric, obsessive, and more than slightly depressing meditation - in many senses of the word - on the ways in which our lives are is lived 'in a dark sea of centuries wherein nothing seem[s] to flow' and within which 'a lifetime [is] only a brief eddy, even for the man who live[s] it.' (pp. 92-93).

'[Change] will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and fury, for no changes comes calmly over the world. It will be so. We do not will it so.[...] Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power.[...] They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry. But that is how I see it.' (p. 228)

'We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries' (p. 259)

Walter M. Miller Jr, Dark Benediction (1951-57) SFMW 69

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 29 May 2011 10:13:00 +0000

Best known for his Hugo Award-winning A Canticle For Leibowitz (1959), Walter M. Miller Jr also authored dozens of stunning short stories in the 1950s, 14 of which are gathered together in this highly attractive entry into the SF Masterworks series.

The tales are not of uniform quality, but the work's best pieces rank among the very finest examples of the short form in the canon of speculative fiction. Miller's mastery of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre, his struggle to make sense of religious convictions, his attractive, sparse style and the manifestation within his work of the depression it is suggested that he lived with prior to his suicide in 1966 combine to produce a complex, satisfying corpus which merits frequent revisiting.

A child's frantic combing of the future for a cure which medical science has failed to provide for him in 'The Will' (1954) is compelling and mysterious, whilst 'Anybody Else Like Me' (1952) presents meditations on evolutionary telepathy presented in the disturbing contexts of rape.

Construction worker Manue Nanti struggles to come to terms with the atrophying of his lungs in 'Crucifixus Etiam' (1953) on a Mars without faith:

'Faith needed familiar surroundings, the props of culture. Here there were only swinging picks and rumbling machinery and sloshing concrete and the clatter of tools and the wheezing of troffies. Why? For five dollars an hour and keep?' (p. 57).

A 'machine' comes to a sacrificial self-awareness in 'I, Dreamer' (1953) as it learns the truth about its origins, while 'Dumb Waiter' (1952) presents a brilliantly conceived parable about humanity's limited capacity to perceive both its salvation and destruction in the self-regulating yet vulnerable technology it develops as an engineer struggles to save a civilization his peers are intent on destroying:

'Humanity has waited a hundred thousand years before deciding to build technological civilization. If he wrecked this one completely, he might never decide to build another [...] Some men thought that the a return to the soil was desirable. Some men tried to pin their guilt on the machines, to lay their own stupidity on the head of a mechanical scapegoat and absolve themselves with dynamite. But Mitch Laskell [...] liked the purr of a pint-sized nuclear engine much better than the braying of a harnessed jackass' (p. 88).

'Conditionally Human' (1952) is one of the anthology's highlights. The protagonist sets about righting the wrongs the state's strict control of the conditions of reproduction have wrought, 'knowing that it would never be all right [...] as long as the prohibiting, the creating, the killing, the mockery, the falsification of birth, death and life continued [...] He hoped Man could fit into it somehow' (pp. 235, 265).

'Dark Benediction' (1951) provides the volume's titular inspiration and forms its conceptual centre. The story offers a stirring, thematically multi-faceted study of our primitive responses to crises, fear of difference, and qualified contextualization of unexpected and societally transformative change. 'Dark Benediction' provides the reader with an opportunity to reflect upon the fact that destiny is not ours to control, and that unstoppable external forces could radically alter what it means to be human. Our curiosity, the story suggests, could be the death of us in the face of an implacable evolutionary process over which we have no influence; humanity, the story suggests, is not a Leibnizian monad, and we should perhaps be grateful for the universe's attention, whatever the outcome.

Regardless of other stories of lesser quality that it contains, 'Dark Benediction' is an excellent entry into the SF Masterworks catalogue. Miller's perspectives on his topics are usually engaging, often challenging, and occasionally macabre in the extreme; see 'Vengeance For Nikolai' (1957), with a plot as outlandish as anything Jacobean Tragedy has to offer.

'When the machine age cracks up, you crack up, too. Because you never made yourself its master; you just let yourself be mechanically pampered' (p. 105).

'If the universe lets you live, then you're doing all right' (p. 135)

William Gibson & Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine (1990)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 16:58:00 +0000

Alternate history, particularly in its Victorian 'steampunk' form, is a sub-genre of SF I favour only slightly ahead of post-apocalyptic settings. Contributing genre-defining novels to the canon is nothing new to either of the co-authors of 'The Difference Engine', with both Gibson and Sterling having shaped our understanding of 'cyberpunk'.

With authors of such pedigree, and a theme that would seem to be tailor-made to please me, why did I find The Difference Engine so unsatisfying?

It was not the authors' playful inversion of Victorian political mores. I very much enjoyed learning about the ramifications of the Time of Troubles within the work, the dissolution of 'the declining and decadent Tory blue-bloods, a class destined to be swept from power by the rising middle class and the savant meritocrats,' heralding 'the revolutionary tenor of the coming age of industry and science', sliding through 'strikes, manifestos and demonstration, to riots, martial law, massacres, open class warfare, and near total anarchy. Only the Industrial Radical Party, with their boldly rational vision of a comprehensive new order, had saved England from the abyss (pp. 140-41).

It did not reside within the language. Gibson and Sterling do a creditable job of daubing the text with splashes of cross-class Victorian patois. The strenuous efforts the authors go to in order to demonstrate their mastery of language in its re-imagined historic context are pleasurable, and plausible to both eye and ear in a way that, for example, Tim Powers' deployment of contemporary idioms within the sixteenth century Venetian setting of The Drawing of the Dark just are not, to the work's great detriment.

It was certainly not the unique steampunk flavour that the authors succeeded in imbuing the work with. The Difference Engine's steam gurneys, autocafés, National Credit plates, and nested loops of subversive code contained within the camphorated cellulose punch-card of the Modus Programme introduced into the Grand Napoleon engine, among other things, were all highly entertaining.

For me, the failings of The Difference Engine reside chiefly within its plotting. Structurally, I take no issue with the authors' roaming authorial eyes having fallen upon different characters to lead the reader through the narrative, disappearing and reappearing in turn, either in person or as ciphers. Rather, it is the novel's philosophical pay-off in the final section wherein the reader is hurriedly compelled to consider the work as a parable of the role of the 'clacking' (hacking) of derivatives of Babbage's Analytical Engine for the purposes of political intrigue and the deleterious effect the consequent development of machine intelligence has on the fate of humanity ('human faces that are borrowed masks, and lenses for a peering Eye', (p. 382)) that is so unsatisfactory.

Whilst the 75 pages that advance the plot of this intriguing SF Masterwork at the beginning and end of the novel would have made a gripping short story, the intervening 300 pages serve more as a broadly independent thriller with steampunk tendencies than they do as part of a larger, integrated whole. With the baton-changing protagonists having been pursuing Captain Swing throughout the pages of the work, the confrontation between Edward Mallory, his brothers, the secret policeman Ebenezer Fraser and the elusive agitator himself is particularly disappointing.

'Is it not strange that we mere mortals can talk about a subject – truth – that is infinitely complicated? And yet - is not a closed system the essence of the mechanical, the unthinking? And is not an open system the very definition of the organic, of life and thought? If we envision the entire System of Mathematics as a great Engine for providing theorems, then we must say, through the agency of the Modus, that such an engine lives, and could indeed prove its own life, should it develop the capacity to look upon itself The Lens for such a self-examination is of a nature not yet known to us; yet we know that it exists, for we ourselves possess it' (pp. 376-77).