Review of Tik-tok by John Sladek

It was Plato who posited the idea of a utopian system which places the most intelligent—the people most in touch with the idea of life, that is—as head of state, calling that person or persons the philosopher king(s).  Limited only by the subjectivity of ‘intelligent’, it seems a practical ideal in the best interest of all.  Such an idea becomes increasingly powerful when a person looks into the political system of the “most powerful nation on Earth” and notes those who achieve the top position are/were clearly not on Plato’s mind.  The American political process paving the way for the most manipulative, power hungry, and financially well-connected people, no sane person would consider them the cream of the philosophers’ crop.  Brilliantly satirizing this aspect of politics, and the so-called “civilized state” backing it, is John Sladek’s 1983 Tik-tok.  Biting commentary, Sladek tells the story of a rebellious iconoclast and his unlikely rise to power.  Oh, and he’s a robot.

At the outset, Tik-tok is an ordinary robot working in the home of the Studebakers and performing domestic tasks.  Asimov circuits no longer functioning, however, Tik-tok is free to exercise his will in any fashion he sees fit, including brutally murdering the blind girl next door when she tracks mud on his floor.  Believing robots incapable of harm, none are the wiser in the ensuing investigation.  Having painted a mural on the wall to cover the spray of blood, Tik-tok calls a local art connoisseur to appraise his work before the Studebakers return from vacation.  Though initially disliking the painting, the Studebakers become convinced when a patron of the arts is willing to pay top dollar, and set up Tik-tok in their garage with an easel and supplies.  The snarky robot only gaining more freedom from there on, before anyone knows it the Clockman Company is establishing enterprise all around the globe.  Trouble is, does anyone know the dirty little secrets behind the rise to power?

Review of "Auk House" by Clifford Simak

Of the directions science fiction can travel, perhaps the following two are the most disparate: stories with the most imaginative concepts vs. relevant fiction.  Most writers in the field aiming for a mix, problems occur only when the eyes go in one direction and the feet the other.  Clifford Simak’s 1977 novella “Auk House” is one such example. 

At the outset of “Auk House”, David Latimer is seeking a house to rent for the summer.  Trolling the shores of Cape Cod, he comes to a large colonial with a “For Rent or Sale” sign and inquires at the local realtor’s office.  Given the key to have a look, he finds the house a touch too big for his personal needs but entirely suitable for the series of paintings he has in mind.  When walking back to his car to talk with the realtor, however, things take a turn for the strange: his car is missing.  Returning to the house to gather his wits, things turn even stranger: a butler is on hand, and a spread of food awaits in the dining room, complete with guests.  Dazed, Latimer settles in for a bowl of soup and starts asking questions.

Review of Cenotaxis by Sean Williams

Religion is traditional subject matter of science fiction.  James Blish portrayed a Jesuit priest on an alien planet in A Case of Conscience; Frank Herbert utilized pseudo-Islam to fulfill a political agenda in Dune; Walter M. Miller presented the positive side of Christianity’s moral and epistemological role in society in A Canticle for Leibowitz; and on and on goes the list of genre works integrating commonly held beliefs into story.  Adding his name to the list in 2007 was Sean Williams.  Set at a time after the events of the first novel in the Astropolis universe Saturn Returns, Cenotaxis is a novella the author calls book 1.5 in the trilogy, and acts as a segue to the second, Earth Ascendant.

Cenotaxis is the story of Jasper, a man who believes he is God, and indeed seems omniscient.  Captured by the (new) Continuum, at the outset of the story he sits in prison and is being threatened with revealing the true source of his super-human intelligence by the Continuum’s general, Imre Bergamasc.  Jasper confident in his beliefs, he asks the aging man: "There's only one question worth answering, Imre Bergamasc: if I really am God and you have captured me, then what does that make you?".  So confident, in fact, Jasper remarks to himself after: “I can't, at this moment, tell whether he hopes to win or to lose.”  Bergamasc tasked with bringing Earth back into the fold of the Continuum to prevent the steady onslaught of the Slow Wave, the backstory of how Jasper came to be in custody unravels, and indeed, his question is answered.

Review of Saturn Returns by Sean Williams

What if you took the scope and style of Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space and softened it with the somber, more humanist approach of Iain Banks’ Culture series?  While the prediction of offspring is certainly a crapshoot given the how chance is inherent to reproduction (an anomaly or two certainly arising), the majority of the litter would, however, appear as Sean Williams’ Saturn Returns.

Full on space opera, Saturn Returns is the stage-setting for a three book series called Astropolis.  The first chapter brilliantly depicting a confused awakening, the novel quickly thereafter quickly expands to galactic proportions, the full compliment of universe building tools employed.  Not a return to the Golden Age, Williams’ post-singularity vision of humanity populating known space is dynamic yet regulated.  From gestalt minds (massive AIs) to Primes (humans still in their original form), Frags (pieces of group minds) to Singletons (a copy of a Prime), the state of biological life on Earth is a distant memory.  Factions and empires forming (as in any space opera), a war broke out, called the Mad Wave, pitting one faction of humans against another.  The history of how the dust settled after spotty, the story opens in a distant quadrant of the galaxy with another wave, the Slow Wave, creeping in.

Big Sky Publishes In-Depth Compilation of SF Masterworks Reviews

If there is anything that binds the science fiction community together (in love and hate, and in sickness and in health), it is discussion of what is the best of the genre.  There are numerous 'Top 100' or 'Best SF of All Time' lists populating the web, Locus surveys the community every decade or so, various websites feature ongoing polls, NPR had a vote a few years ago, there is an online list quantifying assigned texts, etc.. But there is no master list the community can agree on in majority.  What we do have, however, is Gollancz's ongoing SF Masterworks series. The closest thing sf fandom has to a genre canon, what started as a few dozen titles in 1999 has expanded into more than a hundred as of 2014.  Individuals may whinge about certain titles being described as ‘masterwork’, but the fact remains the selections at least meet the definition of ‘classic’, and do in some form or other represent the evolution of the field, for better and worse.

As many of the titles were out of print, the main service of the SF Masterwork Collection is to put back on shelves books on the edge of extinction.  Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke H.G. Wells, J.G. Ballard, and others are well known in (and often outside) the genre, and are in little danger of going out of print.  But writers like Joanna Russ, John Crowley, Cordwainer Smith, Michael Bishop, and many others have written books that may have received some recognition when they initially appeared, but have faded over time—and undeservingly so.  SF Masterworks is doing the community a service by keeping their visions alive in print.

Enter Pete Young’s Big Sky fanzine.  Devoting its third and fourth issues to the SF Masterworks series, together they are a carefully crafted compilation of reviews taken from some of the more considered blogs, websites, and columns featuring science fiction online.  Beyond the gush of Amazon five-star reviews, Young scoured the web looking for material which better balanced opinion with commentary and light analysis.  The result is more than 430 pages of informed perspectives on many of the genre’s greatest works—a real treasure for the science fiction reader who seeks to engage a text.  The two fanzines are available for free at Big Sky, here.

Review of Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox ed. by Ian Whates

Themed anthologies are a risk, especially the more specific the theme is.  Titles like ‘Witches’ or ‘A.I.’ place the underlying stories in the potential position of following the same patterns and routines ad nauseum.  Such anthologies must be consumed over a longer period of time - intervals necessary to truly appreciate the content.  (See George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois’s Songs of the Dying Earth for the perfect example.)  It was thus with trepidation I set about reading Paradox: Stories Inspired by the Fermi Paradox (NewCon Press) edited by Ian Whates.  To my surprise (and enjoyment), it is an extremely varied anthology worth the risk. 

While I hesitate to rehash the idea to a group of readers familiar with science fiction, it’s worth doing so in order to establish a baseline. A concept that results in a question, Fermi’s Paradox asks: if the universe is full of planets which possess equal potential for intelligent life as Earth, why hasn’t contact been made?  The stories in Paradox thus look at not only the ideological rigor underpinning “potential”, but also the larger context of aliens, first contact, and alien encounters.  Or, in other words, before, during, and after Fermi’s question is answered.

Review of The Mirror Empire by Kameron Hurley

The epic fantasy market is bursting the shelves these days.  So many titles appearing in fact, micro-genres have splintered off as writers are forced to greater lengths in achieving originality.  Thinking to add her own imaginative world to the fray, in 2014 Kameron Hurley penned The Mirror Empire (Angry Robot books), first in the Worldbreaker series.  Combining the magic and visuals of mmo gaming with an epic fantasy mindset atypical for its superficial treatment of gender but quite familiar for the quests, grasps at power, and kingdom sweeping wars beneath, fans have a new title to chew over in deciding whether the genre has reached its saturation point, or if there is is room for one more on the shelves.

Set on a sprawling, diverse world, The Mirror Empire capitalizes on ‘epic’.  Multiple cultures located in multiple lands using multiple types of magic in multiple battles and feuds that extend beyond good vs. evil, Hurley throws the contemporary conception of epic fantasy upon the reader.  In one region resides a society grouped in clans that bears a strong resemblance to those of samurai/ninja stories, right down to the Japanese names.  Trained assassins wielding various steel and biological weapons, magic assisting those whose star is in the ascendant, and sedition and subterfuge continually in the shadows, the clans’ future is about to change as the ruling empress lies on her deathbed, her unprepared brother waiting in the wings.  In a land far to the north, a matriarchal society exists, and one of its leading generals, Zezili, has just received a strange command from her queen.  Unquestioningly devout, Zezili follows the orders perfectly and sets about slaughtering her kingdom’s working class.  But when she sees the dead’s blood used for arcane magic, a whole new world reveals itself—literally and figuratively.  And lastly, when a young girl named Lilia and her mother are attacked by marauders, the mother is forced to send her daughter through a portal into an alternate world to save her.  Arriving at a temple, Lilia grows up amongst other youths her age, but remains determined to find her mother.  When chaos arises around her, a chance opportunity appears, and she is taken on a journey with a mysterious dark assassin who wields magic beyond the wax and wane of stars.  Lilia’s own powers slowly unleashed, her mother draws closer one tumultuous step at a time. 

Review of The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014 Edition ed. by Rich Horton

Rich Horton’s take on the year in speculative fiction is, historically, the one more willing to seek out the overlooked niches and corners of genre in concatenating its sequence of ‘best of’.  The 2014 Edition of The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy (Diamond Book Distributors) proves no different. Of the thirty-five stories featured, only four can be found in Jonathan Strahan’s year’s best anthology and two in Dozois’—of which one is common amongst all three.  Potential buyers can thus be assured they are not treading old ground while having the possibility of enjoying stories located somewhere in the fuzzier interstices of genre.  

In a rather perfunctory introduction (I suppose after writing roughly a dozen, the task could be daunting), Horton acknowledges the field is branching out internationally, or at least the English language field is doing a better job of recognizing efforts beyond the former British empire.  And indeed the anthology reflects this.  The second story is a translation of “Trafalgar and Josefina” by the Argentinean Angélica Gorodischer, which is one crotchety old lady’s recollection of the rise and fall of a fantasy land.  “Call Girl” by Tang Fei is the story of a high school who sells not herself but virtual stories, in the form of dogs, told from the backseat of a beat up car.  (Yes, it’s Weird.)  “Town’s End” by Yukimi Ogawa is equally strange, telling of a marriage agency and the bizarre clients and requests which come its way.  “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly” by the up and coming Thai writer Benjanun Sriduangkaew is the story of a virtual woman seeking her sister in the esoteria of a virtual world.  Sriduangkaew’s story a stand out, it still lacks the sheer dynamism and re-readability of “On the Origin of Song” by Naim Kabir.  Puzzle pieces that click together on the second go round, this is a rich story filled with imagery and culture that shifts and moves to rhythms and patterns of its own (and for this reader is the best in the anthology).

Review of Who? by Algis Budrys

Citing the quality of prose, the integrity of subject matter, and the poise of the field at that stage in its evolution, Barry Malzberg states that the 1950s were the greatest era of science fiction in American history in an episode of The Coode Street Podcast. With the careers of writers like Fritz Leiber, Wilson Tucker, Ray Bradbury, Alfred Bester, Theodore Sturgeon, and Robert Heinlein in full stride, it’s an easy position to defend.  (In fact, Robert Silverberg considers the 50s the true Golden Age, not the decade prior.)  Involved as both writer and critic and heralded by his peers, the contributions of Algis Budrys to the era have, unfortunately, faded in recognition.  Perhaps for foregrounding humanism over modernism’s technological wonders and man in space, he may have been pushed to the background—behind the decade’s other big names Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.  As good as, if not better than most of the novels produced by the Big Three in the 50s, Budrys’ 1958 Who? deserves revived recognition.

At core a mystery, Who? opens with a carful of ANG government officials (the Allies of WWII) waiting at the European border of the SIC (a Russian-Chinese socialist state) for an important physicist to be returned.  Hostilities between the East and West four decades in the past, the men and border guards are at ease, that is, until the man they came to pick up is escorted across.  As much metal as biological, Marino’s left arm, major chunks of his torso, and his entire face have been modified, steel now as much a component as flesh.  Rogers, one of the ANG security officials, calmly drives the metal man to an apartment before slamming the door and calling his bosses in a panic.  Have the Russians embedded sophisticated spyware in his metal parts?  Is it really Marino behind the metal mask?  Has he spilled data associated with the top secret K-Eighty-Eight program?  A team of technicians and psychologists descend on Marino in the aftermath, but their research is unable to confirm his identity, and with nothing left to do, ANG turn him loose in the real world as an ordinary civilian.  The freedom incomplete, however, Rogers and his agents decide to do the only remaining thing they can in order to know whether it is really Marino behind the mask: research his past and observe his present to see how they compare.  What they find is what none expected.

Review of Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip Jose Farmer

At the risk of being overly simplistic, Jacque Derrida’s concept of deconstruction/post-structuralism (whichever you want to call it) is at heart the perspective any ideological paradigm can be picked apart, bone by bone, until the skeleton lies in shambles on the floor.  The purpose not nihilistic in nature, it is intended, rather, to cast a wrench of relativity into such lofty ideals as modernism, and the rigid mindset of structuralism that came in tow.  In practice, I have yet to read a science fiction text that deconstructs the Silver Age better than Philip Joe Farmer’s 1967 Riders of the Purple Wage.  From its irreverent title to the telling conclusion, the bones are dust.

Anything but a modernist vision of man as hero among the stars in his gleaming space ship, Riders of the Purple Wage is a satirical vision of the future.  Like Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Farmer creates a futuristic setting to comment upon contemporary issues.  But, where the life of Guy Montag is described in terms the reader can easily access, Farmer places a blackly sardonic spin on the narrative, the mood and imagery becoming surreal.  And the surreal is seen lexically, as well.  Written in irreverent prose that boils and bubbles into some of the most bizarre, dense, and oddball usage of language, the story of Chibiabos Elgreco Winnegan is an obtuse dystopian stone skipping in Alice in Wonderland waters.