Review of Saint Rebor by Adam Roberts

Liberace revived, a neural net guillotine, robot brain builders, designer illnesses (like perfume!), endorphin drought, lunar Kafka—Adam Roberts is one of the most dynamic figures in science fiction at the moment, and his 2015 collection Saint Rebor (NewCon Press), which this list of ideas is a partial representation of, proves precisely why. 

Containing eleven stories (and one poem), three of which have never before been published, Saint Rebor is a brisk, vibrant collection that highlights the elasticity of Roberts’ imagination. “Gerusalemme Liberace” is the story of that flamboyant pianist, brought  back to life and parading the streets of the ancient city.  Preaching universal love in an awkward manner, Islamic and American governments join forces to put an end to the ‘threat’ in witty, relevant fashion.  Wikipedia defines ‘anhedonia’ as “the inability to experience pleasure from activities usually found enjoyable”.  After aliens arrive in the solar system, humanity experience the phenomenon in the story of the same name.  Begging aliens for the secret to interstellar travel, what are they willing to pay?

Review of City at World's End by Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton made a name for himself (at a young age) in the 1920s writing pulp science fiction and fantasy.  Captain Future and the Interstellar Patrol some of his most well known pulp creations, he is one of the most well known authors from the era.  So involved with genre, in fact, he met and married Leigh Brackett, another writer of speculative fiction.  Brackett’s writing more understated than his own, her presence brought about a change not only in Hamilton’s life, but also his writing.  It is in City at World’s End (1951) we see her influence.

City at World’s End is, for Hamilton, a mature effort. More in line with works of the time by Wilson Tucker and Ray Bradbury than the previously popular E.E. Smith or Murray Leinster, it utilizes a social experiment to attempt to elaborate on the human condition—ray guns, evil aliens, and space battles left to his pulp creations.  A nuclear explosion picking up Small Town, USA and depositing it millions of years in the future on a barren Earth, it looks at the social reaction to extreme change.  The problem with the experiment is, the maturity is relative.

Review of Good News from Outer Space by John Kessel

“Elvis Found Working as Ski Instructor in Alps”  “Family Chat with Santa Claus on Holiday in Caribbean” “Killer Ants on the March from Mexico” and of course: “Astrologists Confirm New Year Alien Apocalypse”  But if they were only harmless supermarket tabloid headlines intended for comedic effect all could be forgiven.  But the fact people exist with professed knowledge of such events is where the reality of humanity takes over.  And for as much as the premise of the Age of Information would seem to dispel such notions, it may only confuse matters further, particularly in the religious context.  Reality so diffuse across available media, religion in post-modern life has taken on its own tabloid ambiguity.

John Kessel’s Good News from Outer Space is a novel existing at the intersection of Christian doctrine, the mysteriously unexplained, and the technical and social sides of modern life (at least as it stood in 1989).  Bouncing off religious fervor, alien encounters, psychoses, and the media, the novel is a darkly humorous snapshot of that quirky, irrational side of humanity that quests for knowledge about the underlying reality of existence, and in the absence of said knowledge, can substitute the thing lying closest to hand with complete conviction.  Witty, coy, and sadly profound, Kessel writes with his finger on the pulse of humanity’s irrational tendencies, as scary as they sometimes are.

Review of Way Station by Clifford Simak

Why can’t we all just get along?  Because it’s complicated.  Because Billy Bob slept with my girl.  Because Sally called me stupid.  Because we need to keep gasoline prices down.  Because we’re animals.  Because the gods have deemed it so.  Because… I suppose I could take up the rest of this review with answers to that question.  But in the end, would any of the reasons be an overarching ideal that is inescapable?  Before you think too much about it, have a read of Clifford Simak’s 1963 novel Way Station.  Simple in presentation and simple in aim, it nevertheless carries the baton of hope humanity can overcome its tendency toward self-destruction.  (And yes, there are guns.)

Enoch Wallace lives in the extreme backwoods of rural Wisconsin in a time shortly after WWII.  Having fought in the Civil War, he is something of a human phenomenon; Wallace still looks like a thirty year old male.  But living so far from civilization, he’s been left alone, that is, until a CIA agent gets wind and decides to investigate.  Coming upon Wallace’s home while the man is out on his daily walk through the woods, the agent discovers that Wallace, interestingly enough, inhabits only one room of the old farmhouse, the remainder of the building blocked off with an invisible, impenetrable shield.  It’s the gravestone in the family plot beside the house with a most unusual grave marker, however, that really gets the agent’s attention.

Review of Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories by Leigh Brackett

As NASA’s Curiosity rover trundles about the surface of Mars today, another page turns on the glories of pulp science fiction.  Leigh Brackett’s vision of a land populated with humans and aliens, ancient cities and creatures, long-buried secrets and mysterious deserts fades a shade closer to pale as one desolate desert image after another is beamed back to Earth.  But there was a day when her works shone with the hope and possibility of life on the planets beyond Earth. Gollancz bringing together the best of these stories in one collection, Fantasy Masterwork’s Sea Kings of Mars and Otherworldly Stories is the imaginatively nostalgic look back to a time when the solar system held more possibilities.

The collection contains five novelettes, five novellas, one short story, and one novel.  Though organized chronologically by publishing date, little actually links the stories.  A few are set on Venus and a handful feature the character Eric John Stark, but the majority are the plights and travails, adventures and journeys of various men and women across the ancient Martian landscape.  All manner of the vividly fantastic and anachronistically technical emerging in their tales, the collection is by default science fantasy, but certainly the motifs and mindset of pulp fantasy fill the book’s cup.

Review of Miracle Visitors by Ian Watson

Abductions in the middle of lonely fields; crop circles; strange lights hovering in the sky and disappearing at impossible speeds; beings in society who look just like us but are not; strange, late night visitations.  What does it all mean?  Do people who claim such things need psychiatric help, or are they real experiences, real perceptions?  Is it something they are among the chosen few to be participant to, or is it mere hallucination?

    He raced his bicycle towards the rise.

    Resting among the gorse sat a wingless metal ellipsoid as large as a milk tanker. It no longer glowed, but seemed to be pulsing as if breathing: a metallic lung, emitting a bee-like hum.  As he watched, it steadied, firmed.  Light streamed from a porthole.

Such is the intro to Ian Watson’s 1987 Miracle Visitors.  A persistently evolving novel, what starts as an alien encounter develops into a story of consciousness, perception, and hints of the collective unconscious.  Arabic sufis, anti-gravity Ford Thunderbirds, and a little green man round out the genre contribution to what is a kaleidoscope story difficult to pin down—just like claims of alien encounters.

As a boy, Michael Peacocke had the above alien experience riding his bicycle home late one afternoon on an empty meadow road.  But he has no memory of it.  It’s when taking part in Prof. John Deacon’s hypnosis studies that the knowledge escapes.  Relaying the details of the encounter while in a trance, even stranger events conspire around Peacocke, little to his knowledge.  In faraway North Africa, an unearthly wiseman makes himself known to a local sufi—the wisdom of the ages spun perennially in the aftermath.  A young woman in the US sees a green goblin.  And a former Air Force pilot, now UFO hunter, sees things he’d never seen before.  But it’s when returning to the meadow road that Peacocke gets the (conscious) experience of his life.  Taken on a most amazing ride in a Ford Thunderbird souped up on alien matter reactors, he learns what’s happening behind the closed doors of the perceived reality.  Or does he?

Review of Childhood's End by Arthur Clarke

The mission statement of this blog is an Olaf Stapledon quote, pre-WWII.  The writing on the wall as far as he was concerned, Stapledon challenged writers and artists regarding the purposes and intent of their creations. Europe facing another major conflict, he felt authors should use the power of their voices to speak out against warfare, and injustice in general.  The war came and went, leaving in its wake a great deal of doubt whether the civilization humanity had supposedly created was just an illusion, or indeed a shattered vase.  A Stapledonian shot in the arm needed to refocus humanity’s collective spirit in the aftermath, Arthur C. Clarke provided one in 1953 with his first novel, Childhood’s End.

Humanity on certain path to nuclear self-destruction, Childhood’s End opens with an alien group, dubbed the Overlords by Earthlings, arriving in space ships and parking themselves above the world’s major cities.  Never revealing themselves, they rule passively via technology and other means from their massive, floating ships, and in the process prevent mankind from further damaging itself.  The eventual result a utopia on Earth, humanity’s journey toward self-actualization in the universe is, however, only just beginning.

Review of The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs genre milestone A Princess of Mars ended with the hero appropriately back on Earth where he’d begun his tale.  One plot line was left unresolved, but had the book not sold as well as it did, the reader could have walked away satisfied the circle was completed.  But with Dejah Thoris trapped in the First Born’s Temple of the Sun, a Martian year to go before she is to see the light of day again, the ending of The Gods of Mars is anything but complete.  With the red carpet laid out for a third installment, The Warlord of Mars follows upon The Gods of Mars, but, brings the tale of John Carter to a close, no loose ends.

And indeed, with Dejah Thoris trapped, it is up to her beloved John Carter to rescue her (for the millionth time) from the jaws of death.  Trailing a Thern and First Born into an underground cavern in the opening chapter, he learns of a secret entrance into the Temple of the Sun.  But worse yet, he learns the pair plot to kill Dejah Thoris before her allotted year is up.  Spurned to action with the ever-faithful Woola at his side, John Carter embarks on yet another rescue attempt (rolls eyes).  An extended chase that takes Carter to the North Pole, every color of man on Barsoom—red, black, white, yellow, and green—is eventually drawn into the plight.  Battles on ice, secret entrances, double-bluffs, new alliances, enemies turned friends—all of Barsoom intersects for the massive conclusion of the John Carter epic.

Review of The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs is one of the most over-the-top novels ever written.  Inspired by pulp and in turn inspiring pulp to this day, its heroic absurdity—ahem, sentimentality possesses a verve for storytelling that plumbs the depths of exaggerated and imaginative fiction like few other period works of such length. And once the train starts rolling, it’s tough to stop it.  The Gods of Mars (1914), sequel to A Princess of Mars, sets the dial to twelve for John Carter’s wild return to Barsoom.

Transported back to Earth amidst an oxygen crisis at the end of A Princess of Mars, John Carter never learned whether the woman he loved, Dejah Thoris, or the son they were waiting to hatch (hatch!!!) suffocated or not.  Praying to the sky above his New York home one night that he might return to know their fate, at the outset of The Gods of Mars John Carter once again finds his corporeal-self transported away from Earth.  Arriving in an unfamiliar land, he’s unsure whether he’s on Barsoom or not. Strange plant men assaulting him in an exotic landscape that is nothing like his memories of the red planet, it isn’t until he meets up with his old friend Tars Tarkas that the truth slowly unfolds: he has arrived in Dor, the land of the dead.  All manner of exotic adventure unraveling, Carter must fight through peril and danger to escape a land no Barsoomiam has ever escaped from to learn what has befallen his beloved Dejah Thoris and son in the ten years since he last set foot on Mars.

Review of Transfigurations by Michael Bishop

Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is one of the science fiction’s landmark works.  A philosophical and psychological study of a man confronting the inherently unknowable, the imagery, events, and overall experience of the novel lodge in the mind, begging questions for which one uncomfortably has no immediate answer.  So strange and haunting, a person can only think of the main character’s experiences as the most figurative representation of ‘alien’ possible.  Bringing the idea closer to home corporeally but no less existentially is Michael Bishop’s “Death and Designation among the Asadi” (1973).  The premise so fertile, he revisited the novella years later, extending the story into the novel Transfigurations.  Layers upon layers, it possesses the same quest for understanding in an irrational scenario as Solaris, but adds an anthropological element, tying in evolutionary and biological aspects.  No less uncomfortably thought provoking, Bishop’s novel is likewise a classic of the genre.

Transfigurations is the story of Thomas Benedict.  Living on Bosk Veld, he is in regular contact with a friend, the anthropologist Egan Chaney, who is in the field studying the mysterious aliens who inhabit the planet. Chaney’s notes becoming more erratic as his experiences with the monkey/lion Asadi become increasingly bizarre, Benedict begins to fear for his friend’s life.  The Asadi openly copulating, having staring contests with psychedelically pinwheel eyes, participating in randomly violent acts, appearing subservient to a flying homunculus, and disappearing into the jungle as soon as the sun sets every day, Benedict’s fears are well-placed.  Jaw-dropping descriptions of a sacred pagoda the last word he gets from Chaney, all communication is suddenly cut off.  It thus takes the appearance of Chaney’s daughter on Bosk Veld, a young woman named Elegy and her chimpanzee biomodified to look like an Asadi to motivate Benedict to enter the mysterious jungle and find his friend.  Benedict likewise becoming subsumed in the desire to explain the behavior and doings of the Asadi, he soon finds himself stepping in familiar footsteps.  With Chaney’s notes as a guide and the fresh discoveries of Elegy and her chimp opening doors, the mysterious pagoda lies ahead.

Review of Taflak Lysandra by L. Neil Smith

Ohh, bargain bin, you lottery of surprise and displeasure, how you hold our fate in your hands.  Delight or disappointment just a penny or two away, your risk elevates the shock of surprise and softens the fall of displeasure.  The latter significant, with L. Neil Smith’s 1988 Taflak Lysandra, a bargain book I found for less than a dollar, a softening was needed.  Core sci-fi which makes the simplest of demands on the reader, it is perhaps best appreciated by the YA audience or the juvenile libertarian—if at all.

Taflak Lysandra is the story of one young lady, Lysandra, and her underleaf (yes, under leaf) adventure among the alien Taflak.  Like something out of a Saturday morning cartoon, Lysandra, her coyote father (father’s brain, coyote’s body), an eccentric professor, and a yeti (not what you think) embark on a journey through the leafy core of a planet in their subfolia ship to explore regions unknown.  Adventure, of course, ensues.  Aliens and cabals, fights and battles, and, naturally, the ever-present Sea of Leaves and its mysterious depths.

Review of "Tendeleo's Story" by Ian McDonald

The first two books in Ian McDonald’s Chaga series, the eponymous novel (called Evolution’s Shore in the US) and Kirinya, both feature white main characters dealing with a strange alien invasion in black Africa.  While local characters do appear as secondary, it’s fair to say much of the concerns of the continent are filtered through Western eyes.  Partially righting the imbalance is “Tendeleo’s Story” (2000), a novella set in the colorful, culturally tense milieu.  Like another short work in the setting, “Recording Angel,” it more concisely expresses aspects of the series, but gains a significant degree of perspective from someone locally dealing with the creeping crystalline invasion. 

Tendeleo, whose name means ‘early-evening-shortly-after-dinner’ in reference to her birth time, is the teenage daughter of the pastor at an Episcopalian church in rural Kenya.  Village life comfortable, things are turned upside down, however, when a chaga meteorite lands a few kilometers from her home.  Visiting the impact site with her little sister and given a tour by a few of the UNECTA scientists gathering data, Tendeleo has a part of her brain activated by the work, advanced technology, and mysteries she witnesses there. But she never has a chance to act on the interest.  The chaga taking over her village a short time later, life is spun out of control as she and her family are placed in a squalorous refugee camp on the outskirts of Nairobi.  Taking life in her own hands, the sacrifices Tendeleo subsequently makes break the heart, but prove worth it in the end.

Review of Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds

Movements within science fiction have come and gone—New Wave, cyberpunk, the Silver Age, etc.  But one which has been there nearly since the beginning is space opera.  No matter whether one cites E.E. Doc Smith’s Skylark series or Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, its popularity has ebbed and flowed, but always the sub-genre has had its foot in the field.  The canvas writ large, prose barely competent (Simmons and a few others are exceptions), complex plots, and semblances of character—all zig and zag across the galaxy to save something (anything!), discover the mysteries abound, and prevent the worst cataclysms from being unleashed on the universe.  Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series, opened by the eponymous novel in 2000, is no exception—in any way.

Starting as three separate strands that eventually intertwine, Revelation Space opens with the archeologist Dan Sylveste and the dig he is participating in on the remote planet Resurgam.  A mysterious obelisque revealed in the layers of dust from a long lost civilization of bird-like humanoids, Sylveste, along with the beta-level construct of his conniving father, attempt to interpret the mysterious runes on its sides.  Traveling near light speed in a massive Conjoiner space ship is Ilia Volyova.  On a mission to save her captain who is dying in cryo-sleep of a strange plague, she will stop at nothing to find a cure—including kidnapping and murder.  And lastly is the assassin Khouri. Legally working the bizarre architectural construct that is Chasm City, after one of her kills she is approached by a mysterious entity called the Madamoiselle and given an offer that goes against her oath as a legal assassin.  The bait too good, too personal to decline, it isn’t long before she is undercover, looking for a ride to Resurgam.  The three’s stories conflating in smooth fashion, the they find themselves chasing and facing a mystery that could mean everything to not only them, but all sentient species.

Review of A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

I am agog.  Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1912 A Princess of Mars is a book I’d never read, that is, until turning the last page today—and I am agog.  Like a genre rosetta stone, I now understand the root of America’s pulp science fiction and fantasy tradition.  Purple prose, heroes of a larger-than-life variety, a plot that continually expands its extent of incredulity, science fiction cum fantasy cum science fantasy—all the pulpy pieces are in place in one big, mythically maudlin male fantasy of the finest, squishiest cheese.  And the blazing sexism, disguised racism, undoubted ethnocentrism—everything WASP-ish, I’m just agog…

A Princess of Mars is the story of John Carter, a man who comes to be the greatest hero Mars has even known.  An officer in the Confederacy, after the Civil War he goes west seeking a fortune in gold in Arizona.  Finding a rich vein, he and a colleague head to civilization to get the equipment and laborers they will need to mine it.  But a tragedy occurs, and Carter is forced to defend himself.  Finding a cave to hide out, strange forces take over, and before he knows it, he lies naked in the middle of the Martian wilderness.

Review of "Anticopernicus" by Adam Roberts

Coming to the knowledge Earth is not the center of the universe was a major milestone in human history.  Though perhaps affecting Western religions the most, the seep of that knowledge into the everyday person’s brain nevertheless could not have had anything less than profound impact.  While on one hand it’s possible to see realizing Earth as a satellite as a step forward in confronting this thing we call existence, there is likewise a distancing effect.  If Earth is not center of the universe, to what other mass forces and wills are we subject?  If we are but pawns in interstellar physics, to what else are we beholden?  Tackling the issue through a human lens, Adam Roberts self published the novella “Anticopernicus” in 2011.  The story of a woman whose deep space catastrophe places humanity just in front of another important milestone, it re-contextualizes the future of human existence in significant fashion.  I still think Copernicus would have been appreciative.

When aliens appear in the outer galaxy and request an audience, Ange Mlinko is one of the pilots selected to fly a delegation to meet them.  Removed from the list at the last moment, however, she returns to her normal life.  Indifferent to the rejection, life goes on and she eventually gets a gig capturing an ice asteroid for the Martian colony.  But after picking up the object and heading to the red planet, a string of bad luck unleashes itself.  One of her crew dies in unforeseen circumstances, and a short time later, another larger catastrophe wrecks itself upon the ship.  Staring her fate in the eye, mankind’s first contact with aliens conflates with her predicament, forcing the apathetic young woman to examine life from a new perspective.

Review of The Embedding by Ian Watson

At its worst, science fiction is cheap, shallow entertainment on par with mainstream popular fiction that fails to induce anything in the reader save the thought ‘time wasted’.  At its best, however, science fiction can be a powerful tool for exploring the human condition and supply deep-reaching questions for thought.  Done right, it expresses aspects of existence that literary realism can (literally) only dream of.  After all, the opportunities for comparison and contrast, profundity and insight are exponentially myriad when the universe, not just the world, is your canvas.  Taking full advantage of the possibilities, Ian Watson penned The Embedding in 1973.  Using linguistics as a bounce point, humanity’s chances/willingness/ability to merge toward a common understanding are examined under a genre light that features aliens, political intrigue, jungle tribes, and language experiments in intelligent if not hackneyed fashion.

While there are several side stories, The Embedding can be divided into three main flows.  The first is set in the deep jungles of Brazil where the Xemahoa tribe live.  Pierre is a French anthropologist observing the tribe, taking particular note of their use of language.  Rather languages: everyday speech is in a format readily translatable into other known languages, while in their religious ceremonies another language, a language which combines fungal psychedelics with embedded words and phrasing, is used.  A controversial dam project threatening to force the Xemahoa away from their ancestral home and fungal grounds, it isn’t long before politics ad violence interrupt Pierre’s research.  Meanwhile in the UK. a highly experimental language study is underway—one that would certainly be illegal were it performed today.  Linguist Chris Sole teaches brain damaged children using embedded language, experimental drugs, and physical techniques that occupy the gray area of abuse, all in the hopes of not only better understanding human communication, but perhaps unlocking something deeper in the brain.  Appearing about a third to halfway through the novel is the third storyline.  Passing through the Milky Way is an alien ship, returning to its home world.  Its mission to understand reality deeper than known reality, they come looking to barter knowledge for knowledge in the hope humanity may offer some piece to their reality puzzle.  They, of anyone in the story, find the unexpected.

Review of "The Gods Themselves" by Isaac Asimov

After what might be understated as active output in the 1950s, Isaac Asimov took a bit of a breather, waiting more than a decade to publish his next novel, The Gods Themselves.  Serialized in 1972, it sees Asimov taking his criticisms to heart (e.g. no aliens, no women, scientists as altruistic gods, etc.) and challenging himself to write a story which defied his storytelling to date, as well as experimenting with format.  That he dedicates the book to “mankind” only heightens the ambition. Though revealing a certain timidity working outside his zone of comfort, Asimov’s effort is admirable, the novel he produced deserving of the genre categorization if ever there were one.

The Gods Themselves is a difficult book to summarize from a story point of view.  Actually three novellas, the first Against stupidity… tells of a proud and demanding physicist’s accidental discovery that beings from a parallel universe are siphoning energy from Earth.  Like a circuit, energy is likewise transferred back to Earth, albeit in a different form.  The debate whether this exchange is safe for the planet, one ideology versus another, is something that can only have been taken from Asimov’s real world experience in the laboratory encountering scientists with conflicting agendas.  (The “scientists as altruistic gods” demon, slain.)