Review of Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald’s 2004 River of Gods was a return to writing after a three year break.  Batteries obviously recharged, the novel won the British Science Fiction Award and was nominated for others.  The premise of the book so fertile in fact, 2009 saw the publishing of Cyberabad Days, a collection of short stories and one novella—a spillover of creative effort from the novel.  While a couple of the stories have the feel of a writer in the drawing room, trying out characters and angles for a larger work, most have been polished into more-than-presentable form.  The quality of the collection building to a crescendo, the three final stories are glittering examples of the power of sci-fi in short form.  Each set in the same India of 2047 as River of Gods, the following are my notes: 

A rather standard sci-fi foot on which to start the collection, “Sanjeev and Robotwallah” tells of a poor boy and the stars in his eyes for the war mechs that battle outside his village.  Possessing little of the flare that makes McDonald such a great prose stylist, the narrative is written in straight-forward fashion compared to Riverof Gods, but has a nice ending.

Review of The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge

For those unaware, The Snow Queen is a fairy tale originally written by Hans Christian Anderson in 1845.  Possessing all the elements that make tales fairy—innocence, love, severance, magic, and the blackest of evil, his story was ripe for a modern revisioning a la Roger Zelazny, Donna Jo Napoli, Jeff Vandermeer, Neil Gaiman, and a host of other writers who have used the seeds of the past to grow stories of their own.  Not letting the opportunity slip away, Joan D. Vinge wrote The Snow Queen in 1980.  Anderson’s story fully transposed into a science fiction setting, Vinge succeeds on a number of fronts, but falls short in others.  

The basic plot structure of The Snow Queen remains true to the original: a pair in love are separated and must escape the wiles of the Snow Queen to find their way back together again.  Triamat, however, is a far different setting than Anderson’s.  A water planet, two groups (called the Summers and Winters) inhabit what little land exists and every 150 years exchange power.  At the start of the novel, the transition from Winter to Summer is drawing nigh and the Snow Queen is preparing to sacrifice herself in the traditional ceremony which marks the handover.  Secretly, however, she has scattered clones of herself around the planet, hoping to keep her position after the transition.  

Review of The Last Colony by John Scalzi

John Scalzi has numerous fingers in the science fiction pie.  From writer to editor, blogger to being past president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, the man’s life appears to resonate the genre.  His novels a mix of Silver Age motifs with more contemporary ideologies, the third book in the Old Man’s War series, called The Last Colony, is no exception. 

 

Following on the heels of the success of the Old Man’s War and The Ghost Brigades, the novel continues the story of John Perry, Jane Sagan and their daughter, Zoe.  Now in old age, the couple think they have settled into the twilight of their lives to live a life of peace with their daughter.  However, when members of the Colonial Union approach and ask them to oversee a new colony—a colony for the future—the two accept and are sent to the planet Roanoke with a team and supplies.  Or so they are told.  Arriving at Roanoke, things quickly disintegrate.  Information they thought was factual turns out to be manipulative lies, and when the Conclave becomes involved, events only become more complicated.  Before too long Perry and Sagan’s peaceful retirement plans come falling apart.  What are the Union’s plans for the colony, and why does the Conclave care about such an out-of-the-way place, well, that is for the reader to find out.

Review of The Telling by Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin, having incorporated Daoism into numerous works of her fiction (see The Lathe of Heaven and all of the Earthsea Cycle), sought to take matters a little closer to home.  Utilizing a more hard-line ideology of contemporary China, her 2000 The Telling presents a Cultural Revolution scenario in a sci-fi setting.  The novel examines life on a planet where all traditional customs, beliefs, and practices have been outlawed, and its violators processed with impunity.  Playing off this well worn theme, Le Guin produces a book that confirms the tradition of dystopian novels featuring authoritarian excesses, while simultaneously injecting the value of storytelling. 

   

The Telling is the story of the anthropologist Sutty, a young woman who has been sent by the Ekumen to the planet Aka as an Observer of the people’s traditional beliefs and customs before they become entirely extinct.  The government, a purely capitalist institution called The Corporation, has passed laws that forbid anything related to the past.  Lawbreakers punished and reeducated, the old ways are slowly dying out.  Sutty, in an effort to find what few remnants of the past are still alive, takes a trip to the countryside and there encounters quantities of culture beyond her dreams.  Keeping it alive, however, may take her life. 

Review of Redwall by Brian Jacques

For those who have not discovered Brian Jacques delightful and exciting Redwall series, you’re in for a real treat. Though aimed at the young (I first enjoyed the first book at age eleven), it can easily be enjoyed by adults as long as its intentions are understood (I read it this year, and though the experience was not the same, I still enjoyed it).  A combination of animal and heroic fantasy, Jacques transforms the meadowlands and forest into an epic landscape where mice, badgers, shrews, moles, hares, foxes, stoats, and all variety of woodland creatures live in pastoral harmony, fighting for survival when evil looms.  The series now standing at twenty-two books in total, the first, entitled Redwall, was published in 1986 and is the subject of this review.

Redwall Abbey is a brick structure standing in the middle of Mossflower Wood.  A place of safety and tranquility, woodland creatures come and go, meet with friends, receive medical attention, or just enjoy a good meal with the brothers and sisters safe behind its high walls.  (Thankfully, there is no religion at Redwall Abbey despite the setting.)  All is well in the Summer of the Late Rose until Cluny the Scourge, a bilge rat, comes careening up the road in a cart laden with rough-cut mercenaries and an eye to making the Abbey his new home.  Father Mortimer unwilling to simply hand over the keys, the normally bucolic Abbey finds itself in a fight for its life against the treacherous villain.

Review of The Sky Road by Ken Macleod

For those who have read the first three books in Ken Macleod’s Fall Revolution series, The Sky Road will be a sublimely satisfying last bow.  None of the books connected linearly in a strong sense of the expression (in other words, it’s not necessary to read them in order but it goes a long way toward manifesting the overall vision), The Sky Road offers yet another perspective on the future of humanity through the splintered lens of politics and technology.  The novel is a delicately pointed end to the series, and while certainly the most subdued, may be the best of the four.

Like The Stone Canal, The Sky Road is divided into two stories told in alternating chapters.  The first focuses on a young man named Colvis colha Gree and is set at a time centuries in the future when the world has re-built itself to a pleasantly bucolic/industrial state many years after a major civilization-destroying apocalypse.  Though a history major at the local university, Colvis is working his summer vacation as a welder on a crew building the first rocket the world has seen in ages. Technology beyond mechanical considered “black knowledge”, the rocket represents mankind’s first excursion back into space since the Deliverer saved humanity.  Meeting a young woman while drinking at the town market one day, Colvis suddenly finds his studies and work have a connection. 

Review of The Cassini Division by Ken Macleod

The Stone Canal, predecessor to The Cassini Division, saw a flurry of technical, and as a result, social developments, move one part of humanity to post-human status.  And so while Wilde and Reid’s personal matters were resolved, larger matters, that is, an agreement between standard and post-humans was left hanging, a peaceful resolution far from certain.  Focusing precisely on this schism, The Cassini Division, Ken Macleod’s third novel in the Fall Revolution sequence, brings the implications of Singularity to full head.

Set 350 years after the events of The Star Fraction, The Cassini Division is told through the eyes of Ellen May Ngwethu, captain of the spaceship Terrible Beauty and one of Cassini Division’s most prominent officers.  Assigned the protection of humanity, she and her comrades occupy the moon Callisto, dutifully guarding the wormhole and the hive-like construction on Jupiter from any post-human incursion.  At the outset of the novel, Ellen is sent to Earth to bring back Sam Malley.  A brilliant physicit responsible for the mathematics supporting the engineering of the wormhole, Cassini Division has a mind to enlist his help for a sortie through the ‘hole to meet with New Mars.  A non-cooperator—capitalist, that is, finding Malley amongst the dirty underbelly of London’s non-Socialists on Earth proves tricky, while convincing him to join their team proves moreso.  Ellen fully believing the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, she pursues her mission with confidence and stubbornness, and ultimately takes her fight to other star systems.  Whether the post-humans have good intentions, well, that the reader will have to discover alongside Ellen.

Review of The Star Fraction by Ken Macleod

Back cover copy claims Ken Macleod’s debut The Star Fraction (1995) is like “modern-day George Orwell”, and there is some truth in it.  Not an examination of totalitarianism, the novel is rather a thought experiment on technology in an environment as rife with subtly variegated politics as the scene Orwell covered in WWII Spain in Homage to Catalonia.  Given the dry wit and experimentatal mode, however, I would say that Macleod is more Heinleinian.  Regardless of classic parallels, however, the first of the four books which comprises the Fall Revolution sequence, The Star Fraction, is an astonishingly confident debut which examines poly-sci in a way neither author did: the Singularity.

Before jumping to the review, I think it is necessary to position the The Star Fraction within the context of the series given it is certainly not an A-B-C-D affair.  When I picture the Fall Revolution sequence in my mind’s eye, a lobster claw appears.  The Star Fraction being the wrist from which two stories branch, The Stone Canal forms the claw and The Cassini Division its pointed end, while The Sky Road forms the second storyline, the pincer.  Setting the tone (style, pace, mode of presentation, etc.), The Star Fraction introduces readers to Macleod’s brand of sci-fi and presents the major themes at work in the three books which follow.  Thus, if you are thinking of reading Macleod, it is strongly encouraged to begin with this novel.

Review of Effendi by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Listening to The Writer and the Critic recently (a monthly podcast out of Australia), there was a brief discussion on the value of fragmenting a narrative: does it enhance or detract from a novel?  My personal opinion that it is very similar to using present tense narrative; sometimes an author just tries to be different to no effect for no other reason than to break the monotony of their style, and I think the same applies to fracturing a narrative.  It can also be a pointless way of rearranging how a story is told simply to try something different. But there are also times that it complements the subtext under discussion.  Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Arabesk series, as I mentioned in my review of Pashazade, is one such set of books, of which Effendi, the subject of this review, continues consistently.

Introduced in Pashazade, Ashraf al-Mansur is a young man with a big question mark plastered over his past and present.  Shoved into a situation he himself only marginally accepts, believing the ancestry he is presented is just as ambiguous as knowing for certain how he was altered in childhood and where his present-day life is headed.  Thrust into the position of Chief of Detectives at the outset of Effendi, the uncertainty continues.  A brutal set of murders targeting Zara’s father Hamzah right at the start of his new career, he has no time to step delicately into the role, the city catching fire around him in the aftermath of the grisly deaths.  El Ishkandryia threatening to collapse inwardly, Raf must navigate a slow boiling stew of commercial and political interests toward helping the people he cares about toward a peaceful resolve that does not entirely destroy the city.

Review of Pashazade by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Science fiction at the beginning of the 21st century continues to expand the boundaries of the genre.  A variety available like never before, some stories have evolved little from those which appeared at the genre’s birth while others continue to press and challenge norms, seeking unexplored territory in the hidden yet remaining interstices.  And some bridge this gap.  Resting on the tropes of past generations yet combining those selected to create something original, Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s underrated Arabesk trilogy is one such example.  Pashazade, the introduction of the setting El Ishkandryia and the man Ashraf al-Raf and his singular set of problems, is part alternate history, part cyberpunk, part mainstream fiction, and all detective noir.  Though telling a self-contained story, it paves the way for the two books which follow, Effendi and Felaheen.

WWI never having expanded beyond the Balkans, the geo-political outlook of Grimwood’s Arabesk is different than our own.  The Ottoman Empire has taken over North Africa, and a liberal yet Islamic state occupies the upper part of the continent, including Alexandria, which in the novel is called El Ishkandryia.  A 21st century city with 21st century problems, Grimwood does not appropriate a nostalgic or jaded view of traditional Arabic and Islamic values for entertainment purposes, rather incorporates them into a setting that seems to fully synergize Western urbania with familiar ideas of the Middle East.  Muezzins can be heard, muddy coffee is served, and nobility still hold place.  Simultaneously, social ills, the latest technology, and the vice of all humanity exist in proportion.  Never once digressing into info dump territory, El Ishkandryia is fully exposited through character and plot—a testament to Grimwood’s skills and the quality of the book.