I see from yesterday’s Guardian that the SF author E C Tubb died nearly two months ago. Wikipedia has quite a large entry for him and his work.

He was one of the select group of British SF authors who were published before the 1960s and was one of the co-founders of the BSFA.

Despite his prolific output -125 novels – if you had asked me I would have said that I owned none of them. I would have been wrong. I just checked my bookshelves and discovered a copy of his 1964 novel Moon Base. I read it so long ago, though, I’m afraid I can’t remember any details of it.

His was a name I always recognised, however. SF was such a small field in the 1960s you could not avoid it. His best known work was probably the Dumarest series of novels; 33 of them!

The Guardian obituary is appreciative.

E C Tubb, 15/10/1919-10/09/2010. So it goes.

Angry Robot, 2009. 373p

This is the freebie book I received in a BSFA mailing nearly a year ago. In it Karl Allman’s spaceship is attacked and destroyed and he has to descend with the help of only a protective gel to the surface of the nearest habitable planet, Isheimur, which has been partly terraformed and is inhabited by a group who live and speak in the manner of Icelanders. He is found broken-legged and unconscious and nursed back to health by the local Isheimuri whose chief thereafter regards him as under an obligation to repay this care and attention by working for him. Allman, of course, wishes to escape back to space. These scene setting chapters contained a prodigious quantity of relatively crude info-dumping.

Harvey makes much of the Isheimuri’s life on the edge – poor soil, thin air, lack of food, freezing temperatures, isolation etc – yet in the first part of the book Allman consumes seemingly more than adequate meals and the area teems with flocks of sheep. The Isheimuiri even have horses (which I always thought require a lot of fodder.) Hmmm.

The setting also gives Harvey the opportunity to portray illiberal politics, especially of the sexual variety, which he does attempt to gloss at one point; but all rather unconvincingly.

The narrative is shared between Allman, various Isheimuri and a hasty download from Allman’s ship which co-inhabits his brain. The ship download’s viewpoint, given the name Loki, a nod to Norse mythology – is narrated in the second person; and does not work well. The rest, more thankfully, are in third.

Other aspects of the writing also leave a lot to be desired. The viewpoint often shifts within a narrative section – a distracting authorial/editorial error. Sometimes a passage will contain information the viewpoint character cannot know. On occasion one will inform others about something the author (and we) know, but the character does not.

Even at the sentence level there are many infelicities. Take this sample phrase. “… he had an inner cauldron of anger that flared up at the slightest obstruction to life’s normal flow of life” (page 166.) Life’s normal flow of life? Wouldn’t the simpler usage “life’s normal flow” be more natural, and sufficient?

And parse this sentence if you will. (If you can.) “Arnbjorn and Orn pushed themselves to his father’s side.” Add in the fact that the “his” has no antecedent in a prior sentence and this becomes almost incomprehensible. It is certainly far harder work to read than if “their” replaced “his” or there were a sole subject of the verb, and “themselves” were “himself.”

We also have a terraforming machine that can “break down molecules.” Fair enough. But it also breaks “cerium and samarium from the ores down at sub-molecular level” (Eh?) “into nitrogen and oxygen, which it emits into the atmosphere.” The second part of this is scientific claptrap – nitrogen and oxygen as gases are molecular! The first also has holes – cerium and samarium are not molecular; neither are their ores, nor would they ever be, on or off Earth – and requires a power source so limitless that anything could be synthesised and so food, or any other, shortages would not be a problem; which, of course, vitiates the whole Isheimur scenario. And Harvey gives the impression (page 176) that carbon dioxide is dangerous to humans. It isn’t. Not at the levels indicated here.

Once an author loses our trust in this way it cannot be regained.

Perhaps I was now looking for flaws; because I certainly found them. Harvey has Allman say that the planet’s “magnetic field has just ‘flipped’ from warming to cooling” – more claptrap; a globe’s warming/cooling does not depend on its magnetic field orientation – and just over a page later, “carbon dioxide and water vapour will form a protective layer” (they would disperse throughout the atmosphere) “and seed the ozone layer with water and debris, thereby raising the temperature.” Well make your mind up, man! Is it the magnetic field change or the water/debris in the ozone layer which will cause the warming? In reality of course it would be neither.

The last section betrays a misunderstanding of the trajectoral dynamics of a spaceship under deceleration. Harvey has the engines of the Winter Song, a long-derelict ship once abandoned at Isheimur’s pole but which Allman has somehow managed to get to fly again, being switched on and off in an attempt to relieve strain on them while he tries to slam a comet – which the ship is pushing along with it – into Isheimur. (Don’t ask.) Such a procedure would result in the target being missed, not by a little but by a very long way indeed. It wouldn’t even get near the planet, still less hit it in a precise location. It’s as if a spaceship can be driven in exactly the same way as a car, and its arc were on a defined piece of roadway rather than being a complex interaction between gravity, acceleration and momentum.

Note that in all of the above I have not touched on the cardboardness of the characters, who are straight out of stock casting and provide us with no surprises, nor on Harvey’s habit of trying to create tension through exceedingly unsubtle cliffhangers.

I see from the book’s endpaper that Harvey has had four previous novels published. If this farrago is anything to go by that demands the question; how?

There is also, starting at page 412, an extract from Damage Time by Colin Harvey, headlined as Coming Spring 2010, which I didn’t read.

Needless to say, I shan’t be buying it.

The BSFA booklet containing the short stories and art works listed on the ballot form is handsomely produced. It’s dated 2009 because the awards were for stories published in that year. It’s a pity it didn’t arrive before the deadline but the BSFA has had trouble recently with printers and distributors for their magazines going bust on them. However, it still gave me the chance to catch up on the story which I had not been able to read online.

The Push by Dave Hutchinson

This is a traditional tale, traditionally told. No pyrotechnics, no fuss. Straightforward exposition, twist at the end. The Push of the title is a faster than light drive, improvements in which reduce the time dilation effect of its use but not enough for our narrator, Neil Hanson, not to appear much younger than his contemporaries who have done less travelling.

He has been called back to the planet Reith, which he helped colonise, because a problem has arisen with a local species, called rockers, which has suddenly developed sentience. These creatures also worship him as a god. This second factor is explained but the first, much the most interesting feature of the story to me, is unfortunately left hanging.

The characterisation is fine, you can believe these are real people – except for the newly sentient rockers, who are little more than props.

It’s not my favourite of the contenders but I would have placed it above several of them.

For my comments on the other stories on the ballot see here.

Today I received the latest BSFA mailing through the post. As well as Vector and Focus it contained the expected booklet of stories shortlisted for this year’s BSFA Award.

Unfortunately this is ten or so days late as the voting was to be by 3/4/10 and the award was presented on Easter Day, as usual.

You can’t blame the BSFA for this, the time scale involved is really too short to produce and mail out the booklet before Easter. It’s a historical accdent that the awards are announced at Eastercon, too hallowed by tradition to change now. It’s only the second year the BSFA has attempted to avail its members of this opportunty to cast their eyes over the nominations and is to be applauded.

The booklet is a lovely glossy thing and I’ll let you know what I thought of Dave Hutchinson’s The Push once I read it.

The winners of this year’s BSFA Awards have been announced.

Non-Fiction
Nick Lowe, Mutant Popcorn.

Best Artwork
Stephen Martiniere, Cover of ‘Desolation Road’

Best Novel
China Mieville, ‘The City and the City’

Best Short Story
Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia, ‘The Beloved Time of Their Lives’

Congratulations to the winners.

Commiserations to the others.

My favourite of the nominated short stories, Vishnu At The Cat Circus, has a chance of the Hugo for a novella.

THE CITY & YTIC EHT by China Miéville is on the Hugo list for Best Novel.

The ballot paper for this year’s awards is due to be completed before or at Eastercon. I’ll not be attending so I’ll need to email my votes. My thoughts on the fiction nominations that I have read are below.

Best Novel
Ark by Stephen Baxter (Gollancz) Not read by me.
Lavinia by Ursula K Le Guin (Gollancz) Not read by me.
The City & The City by China Mieville (Macmillan) See my review here.
Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts (Gollancz) Not read by me.

I bow to no-one in my admiration for Ursula Le Guin’s writing but I am slightly puzzled as to why Lavinia is on this list. As I understood it the book is a historical novel with no speculative content. If so, why it should be on the ballot for the British Science Fiction Association Awards?

Best Short Fiction

I was hoping to receive a booklet with all the short stories in it in my spring BSFA mailing, as we members did last year, but the package hasn’t arrived yet so I resorted to the internet to read most of the candidates. Links can be found on the page where the shortlists appear.

1. ”Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” by Eugie Foster
This one is very Science Fictional with a first person present tense narration. It depicts a society where people must choose a mask every morning. To be unmasked is a crime. The mask imprints them with a personality for the day which may mean a pleasurable or painful experience results. One day our unnamed narrator meets someone who unmasks both herself and him….
All the characters are unnamed; only the queen who set up and directs the system (and is clearly inspired by the bee genus) has a designation.
I might add this story has an unusual solution to the problems inherent in info dumping.
Interesting but violent.
It has echoes of last year’s winner Exhalation so may be one to watch.

2. The Push by Dave Hutchinson (Not on internet? Unread.)

3. Johnnie and Emmie-Lou Get Married by Kim Lakin-Smith
The story is a reworking of Romeo and Juliet (or, given the gang background, West Side Story) with a scenario reminiscent of the car race from Grease or even The Phantom Menace. I was also reminded of Roger Zelazny’s Deadboy Donner And The Filstone Cup (1988.)
The language contains a strange cross-Atlantic mixture and other infelicities. Lakin-Smith uses “arse” not “ass” but “dove” not “dived” and surely could have found a better verb than “splurged” for an exhaust emission. She also unfortunately has a car “loose” momentum as if it can set that quantity free, plus there is a “span” count of one.
This is readable but inconsequential.

4. Vishnu at the Cat Circus by Ian McDonald. (Not on internet? Read from the collection Cyberabad Days.)
This reminded me more than a little of Midnight’s Children. But it’s a Midnight’s Children hyped up on steroids, overdosed on speed and LSD. Told in McDonald’s trade mark pyrotechnic prose it is the life story of Vishnu, a gene-enhanced Brahmin (see his novel River Of Gods,) who ages at half the pace of normal humans. It traces his arc from harbinger of the future to obsolescence and the getting of wisdom of sorts, all mixed up with a compelling depiction of a future India and replete with AIs, other universes and picotechnology. The Paul Daniels allusion and the reference to a Goodness Gracious Me sketch may be over the top for some but I was amused – and the second was justified by the subject matter.

5. The Beloved Time of Their Lives by Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia
An unusual story of undying love transcending the boundaries of time.
Jonathan meets the love of his life, a physicist, in her old age. When she dies in his arms he resolves to investigate time and eventually uses the somewhat unorthodox medium of a McDonalds to travel back in time to meet her in her youth. The story is light hearted but contains a degree of amusing speculation. Unfortunately it is slightly marred by being told to us rather than unfolded for us.

6. The Assistant by Ian Whates
This story is about a chief cleaner whose company keeps their client’s building free from infestation by microbots and regenerating moulds and other Science Fictional whatnot. The latest attack weapons turn out to be powered by a strange source.
Conventionally told in the first person this is unusual SF in that it focuses on humble workers rather than on innovators or inventors or explorers.

To pick one of these is like choosing between sellotape, string, glue and Blu-Tack. They all hold stuff together but in different ways; for different purposes.
Vishnu at the Cat Circus is the most ambitious – but it has room to be. The others are shorts. Vishnu is a novella. This argues for the BSFA to split its short story category like the Hugos do. I believe the difficulty here, since the BSFA membership is relatively small, might be there may not be enough nominations for this to be practicable.

Well, here’s a noble thing. Unusual in these me! me! me! times.

No sooner has the ink dried on the BSFA ballot (we’re going to have to come up with some new metaphor for use with electronic media here) than Science Fiction Awards Watch gives us the news that Hal Duncan has withdrawn his nominated piece Ethics and Enthusiasm from the award ballot.

His reasons for this are that his blog essay is marginal to the field at best and others in the final ballot are more central and therefore more deserving of the award.

What a refreshing stance.

Good on you, big man!

Thanks to Jim Steel – see my sidebar – for this news and the link.

The BSFA Awards shortlist for 2010 has been published.

There are links to four of the short stories and to all the artworks plus various of the non fiction pieces on the ballot.

I’ll not get all the novels read and probably not all the short stories either unless the BSFA does a booklet of them like it did last year.

Ah, well.

The latest BSFA mailing dropped through my letter box yesterday. It’s been a while. I thought they’d forgotten about me.

No Focus but the Vector is a J. G. Ballard special.

Plus there was a freebie book, Winter Song, by Colin Harvey, published by the relatively new SF imprint Angry Robot. Presumably they think the PR accruing from this will outweigh any possible loss of sales.

Or maybe it’s just an attempt to get it on the BSFA Award Ballot….

Cynical? Moi?

Rescue Stories by Andrew West

A space ship crewed by descendants of humans whose make up is of various blends of mixed gender and hence use non-specific personal pronouns, who call themselves numwyn and communicate by “melding” (actual spoken words are very much infra dig) has suffered damage and landed on a planet unknown and too far from numwyn civilisation for rescue to be possible. Neither are they able to carry out the necessary repairs themselves.

They come up with a plan to accelerate, by means of propagating myths among the indigenous inhabitants, the advancement of these locals from their copper smelting stage of development to a point where they will be able to help the stranded numwyn.

While Rescue Stories is well enough written, there are unfortunate instances of characters telling each other things they must already know and a huge info dump sequence describing the advancement of the indigenes and – somewhat unnecessarily I thought, as the nunwyn surely wouldn’t care – comparing it to Earth’s. (This last seems to be present to allow West to get something off his chest.)

Again, the ending more or less writes itself and is not really any sort of surprise.

The theme is of course similar to Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God, which I mentioned in my review of the BSFA Award nominee Crystal Night by Greg Egan, except this one is played out through the medium of memetics.

Rescue Stories is not a bad effort, though.*

*Note:- In case you thought it was, this is not meant to be patronising. “Not bad” is the best accolade someone who comes from the West of Scotland bestows on anything they rather like.

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Was I asking too much of these stories? Presumably they were submitted in the hope of publication or at the least of attracting attention to the author for the future. However, taken as a whole they failed to meet what I think of as professional standard. In the previous issue of Focus its editor, Martin McGrath, contends that only around 10% of the 120 stories submitted to him “were obviously incompetent in the basic mechanics of writing.” Yet I found at least three of the six on the short list lacking in this regard. Hence I shudder to think what the stories that made up that 10% were like. Perhaps my expectations for this sort of competition are too high.

Of the six stories I much preferred Nina Allan’s Time’s Chariot. On turning to the authors’ published histories it was not surprising to find she has the most widespread portfolio of previous appearances in print. It seems she may not be one to watch but rather has already arrived.