All the Shortlisted Stories BSFA, 2013, 90 p.

(The awards for 2012 will be presented this Sunday (31/3/13) at the Bradford Eastercon.)

Immersion by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld, no. 69)

A domineering culture known as Galactic has a piece of tech called an immerser which at once disguises its wearer but also provides him or her with cues to fit in culturally.
The narrative is twofold – one in second person from the viewpoint of a non-Galactic woman who never takes her immerser off (originally in an effort not to embarrass her Galactic husband,) the other in third person focusing on Quy, a non-Galactic inhabitant of Longevity Station, and whose sister Tam is trying to unravel the complexities of Galactic tech to neuter the effect of immersion.

The story could be read as an allegory of US influence on the modern world, the (possibly unthinking) extension of its ways and attitudes onto other cultures. Equally valid is the view it is about addiction (in this case to immersion) or even submersion. The immerser acts as a kind of hijab, hiding its wearer behind a persona. In the process it removes some of the personality it covers.

Doubts concern the mechanics of the story and the relationships within it, examination of which makes it, in the end, unconvincing.

There was a strange usage (late minute revisions) and a typo (it wasn’t where Quy’s had last left it.)

Song Of The Body Cartographer By Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Philipine Genre Stories)

Among a set of creatures known as Timor’an, Siren is a body cartographer tasked with examining her lover Inyanna’s body map to find the reason for her inability to fly with a windbeast. And then to carry out the repair work which might mean Inyanna will leave her forever. Told in third person from Siren’s viewpoint this is a simple love story with an unusual setting.

The reading experience is marred by a few infelicities (dispair, a simply relocation) plus some misplaced commas.

The Flight of the Ravens by Chris Butler (Immersion Press)

This is a novella rather than a short story. Set mainly in Amsterdam in 1889, with excursions to Vienna and Frankfurt and also to the Amsterdam of 1452, it starts with two children entering a house and encountering an old man and a vortex which absorbs one of them. The remainder works through the ramifications of this for the girl, Elizabeth, and the father of the boy, Huginn Raaf, who form a compact to try to prevent a reoccurrence of the tragedy. The narrative features a fire giant confined within the vortex and a rather unconvincing Sigmund Freud whom, under Huginn’s prompting, Elizabeth consults. The ravens of the title are Odin’s companions, Muninn and Huginn. (Yes.) The characters don’t come to life and Butler’s use of words is occasionally awkward while his adoption of viewpoint within a scene can be too diagrammatic -“This was it then,” when we reach the climax? Otherwise the text was clean. To my mind this is a fantasy story, and not SF.

Limited Edition by Tim Maughan (1.3, Arc Magazine)

In an intensely surveilled society – an exaggerated version of our consumer driven one – a new type of must-have trainers which make stuff appear round them every time thee touch the ground is advertised on to the spex people wear. On spex, ))blink((ing takes the place of mouse clicking on a computer. Cash-starved Grids and his mates decide to raid the shop the trainers will be sold in to get themselves the shoes. The narrative is interspersed occasionally with Twitter style comments from the affluent or deprived commenting on the proceedings as they unfold.

The characters speak in a demotic that attempts to be futuristic or “street.” The twist, when it comes, is not really surprising.

There were two grammatical oddities. “Him and College look skyward.” “His clothes is splattered.”

Three Moments of an Explosion by China Mieville (Rejectamentalist Manifesto)

This is an extremely short piece (550 words or so) featuring the extension of marketing into warfare and (here) demolition projects. Logos appear in the explosion remnants. Its main thrust, though, deals with people who use a time-dilating drug to climb and descend the building as it collapses in what would be the most extreme of sports. It did contain, though, an irritating overuse of “&” instead of “and.”

Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales (Whippleshield Books)

My (extended) thoughts on this are here.
The more remote from it I get the better this story lies in my memory.

And here is the Locus 21^st Century poll for fantasy

1 Gaiman, Neil : American Gods (2001)
2* Clarke, Susanna : Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)
3 Rothfuss, Patrick : The Name of the Wind (2007)
4* Miéville, China : The Scar (2002)
5* Martin, George R. R. : A Feast for Crows (2005)
6 Rowling, J. K. : Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007)
7 Bujold, Lois McMaster : The Curse of Chalion (2001)
8* Miéville, China : The City & the City (2009)
9 Fforde, Jasper : The Eyre Affair (2001)
10 Bujold, Lois McMaster : Paladin of Souls (2003)
10 Pratchett, Terry : Night Watch (2002)
12 Gaiman, Neil : Coraline (2002)
13 Wolfe, Gene : The Wizard Knight (2004)
14 Pratchett, Terry : Going Postal (2004)
15= Gaiman, Neil : The Graveyard Book (2008)
15= Lynch, Scott : The Lies of Locke Lamora (2006)

I have read only four here – and two by the same author. Notably one of these made it onto the SF list as well, which shows how hard differentiating SF from Fantasy can be. (The only one that I’ve not read which I might look out for is the Wolfe.)

Following on from the Locus 20^th century polls I posted about a few days ago this is their list for SF novels published from 2000 on.

1 Scalzi, John : Old Man’s War (2005)
2 Stephenson, Neal : Anathem (2008)
3* Bacigalupi, Paolo : The Windup Girl (2009)
4 Wilson, Robert Charles : Spin (2005)
5 Watts, Peter : Blindsight (2006)
6* Morgan, Richard : Altered Carbon (2002)
7 Collins, Suzanne : The Hunger Games (2008)
8 Gibson, William : Pattern Recognition (2003)
9* Miéville, China : The City & the City (2009)
10 Stross, Charles : Accelerando (2005)
11* Mitchell, David : Cloud Atlas (2004)
12* McDonald, Ian : River of Gods (2004)
13 McCarthy, Cormac : The Road (2006)
14* Harrison, M. John : Light (2002)
15= Willis, Connie : Black Out/All Clear (2010)
15=* Chabon, Michael : The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)

7 out of 16. I’m obviously not keeping up with modern SF.

That same Locus Poll also listed the top 15 Fantasy novels from last century.

Again asterisked means I’ve read them, ** that I can’t remember and (*) only the first of the trilogy.

1(*) Tolkien, J. R. R. : The Lord of the Rings (1955)
2* Martin, George R. R. : A Game of Thrones (1996)
3 Tolkien, J. R. R. : The Hobbit (1937)
4* Le Guin, Ursula K. : A Wizard of Earthsea (1968)
5* Zelazny, Roger : Nine Princes in Amber (1970) 971 70
6 Lewis, C. S. : The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
7* Miéville, China : Perdido Street Station (2000)
8 Rowling, J. K. : Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997)
9* Crowley, John : Little, Big (1981)
10* Adams, Richard : Watership Down (1972)
11 Goldman, William : The Princess Bride (1973)
12* Martin, George R. R. : A Storm of Swords (2000)
13 Beagle, Peter S. : The Last Unicorn (1968)
14** White, T. H. : The Once and Future King (1958)
15 Pratchett, Terry (& Gaiman, Neil) : Good Omens (1990)

I don’t have quite such a high hit rate here – unsurprisingly, as I prefer Science Fiction to Fantasy: but there is of course a lot of crossover between the two and the boundary is blurred. Even so I would have said Perdido Street Station was SF rather than Fantasy.

The BSFA Award shortlist for stories published in 2012 has been announced.

For best novel we have:-

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)

Empty Space: a Haunting by M. John Harrison (Gollancz)

Intrusion by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)

Jack Glass by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit.)

Unusually I have read three out of the five already, two of those courtesy of Interzone and its kind reviews editor. Thank you, Jim.

My views on 2312 I posted on this blog only two days ago. Those on Empty Space will be forthcoming.

Intrusion I reviewed here.

As for the short stories I have read only one of them so far, the last on this list; and very good it was too.

Three others, though, are available to read on the net. Doubtless the BSFA will be producing its usual booklet.

Immersion by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld no. 69)

The Flight of the Ravens by Chris Butler (Immersion Press)

Song of the body Cartographer by Rochita Loenen-Ruiz (Phillipines Genre Stories)

Limited Edition by Tim Maughan (1.3, Arc Magazine)

Three Moments of an Explosion by China Mieville (Rejectamentalist Manifesto)

Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales (Whippleshield Books)

Pan, 2006, 307p.

This is a collection of Miéville’s shorter fiction culled from various previous publications, with some original to this book.

Looking for Jake. After an unspecified disaster has depopulated London an unnamed narrator goes looking for his missing friend Jake. The very Art Deco Gaumont State cinema in Kilburn is given several mentions and an image of it appears on the book’s cover. See also the picture at the end of this post.

In Foundation a First Gulf War veteran haunted by his experiences there is known as a house whisperer because he talks to buildings. Their foundations talk back.

The Ball Room, a story written along with Emma Bircham and Max Schaefer, has the eponymous play area of a furniture warehouse not entirely dissimilar from IKEA cause its clientele to experience strange and compulsive goings on.

Reports of Certain Events in London is a typographical riot of fonts, scripts, reports, “handwritten” letters, interpolations and transcribed pamphlets and employs an unusual framing device. Narrator “China Miéville” inadvertently opens a package delivered to his address but intended for a Charles Melville and finds himself fascinated by the contents – the proceedings of a group devoted to tracking the shifting location of, and combats between, London’s feral houses.

Familiar has a witch making a familiar out of a mixture of his own body fluids. It disgusts him and he gets rid of it but it comes back to haunt him. Ho-hum.

Entry Taken From a Medical Encyclopædia is errr…. an entry from a medical encyclopædia. Complete with footnotes and references. The infection described is caused by pronouncing a word in a certain way, which thus propagates itself in the victim’s brain.

In Details a young boy takes food every week from his mother to an old woman who keeps herself close, in the dark, barely opening her door before snatching the food, closing it again and getting him to read to her. She once saw something nasty, not in the woodshed, but in the details of a brick wall. She has been hiding from the patterns out to get her ever since.

Go Between sees a man receive from a mysterious organisation messages concealed inside his purchases. He fails to deliver the final one and wonders if he did the right thing.

An old man buys himself a seventieth birthday present, an old window with stained glass. He discovers he can see Different Skies through it, but there are potential horrors on the other side.

An End to Hunger has a genius computer programmer infuriated by the eponymous charity’s campaign. He works to expose its sponsors’ hypocrisies. They don’t like it.

In ‘Tis the Season Christmas and its accompanying paraphernalia have been privatized. Yuleco owns the rights and so Christmas^TM, Santa^TM, Mistletoe^TM, Rudolph^TM etc are all under licence – even tinsel is illegal without one, never mind a tree. An unnamed father has won a prize to Yuleco’s official party. On the way there he and his daughter get caught up in the anti-privatisation protests. Slight, in a fun way. I just hope it doesn’t give anybody in power any ideas.

Jack in Mieville’s city of New Crobuzon, familiar from Perdido Street Station and The Scar, is a Remade. Altered as a punishment – feathered wings for arms or oily gears for innards and skin changed, or otherwise bizarrely surgically changed – Remades are looked down upon by the “normal” citizens. Jack Half-A-Prayer fights the system, standing up for the underprivileged. The city can tolerate so much as a release valve – but Jack goes too far.

On The Way To The Front is a graphic short story illustrated by Liam Sharp which would take longer to describe than it did to read. The reproduction is in black ink and might have benefited from colour (which would obviously have been too expensive.)

The Tain is much the longest story in the collection, a novella set in the aftermath of Earth’s invasion by the creatures who live behind mirrors, the Tain of the title. A Londoner is strangely immune to their attentions and sets out to parley with their leader. One of the Tain is also a viewpoint character. Not your usual alien encounter story.

While not every story hits the mark, as a whole the collection illustrates Miéville’s range and writing ability. It also highlights his fascination with London and his recurring theme of otherness, the not-quite-identical.

And here is the majestic (in that monolithic, Stalinist kind of way) Gaumont State Cinema.

Science Fiction is dead – again.

Or at least moribund according to Paul Kincaid in his review of both of the Year’s Best SF collections for the LA Review of Books.

Actually I have some sympathy with parts of his argument – which does chime with what I said about this year’s BSFA Award short story nominees.

I also agree that when the SF tips over into Fantasy or wish fulfillment, the “six impossible things before breakfast” scenario, we might as well give up.

He may also have a point about a lot of modern short story – or novel length come to that – SF being retreads of well-worn themes. (But the writer in me says that if I nevertheless have something to say, a newish angle on a trope if you will, doesn’t that story deserve to be told? We can’t all be dazzlingly inventive all the time. And while of course SF ought to harbour, even showcase, the experimental the virtue of a story starting at the beginning and going right through to the end is often a relief as a reader.)

Where we really differ, though, is in Kincaid’s seeming request for optimism. I don’t know about Paul but I can’t see much to be optimistic about right now; nor for the foreseeable future.

I obviously can’t say often enough SF is never about the future. It’s about now. And the here and now is profoundly depressing.

I suppose a little hope would not go amiss but where is it to come from? The Arctic ice is melting at a rate of knots, extreme weather events are multiplying and we haven’t been back to the Moon for 40 years.

We might not deserve it perhaps but we may be getting the only SF that is presently possible.

I have temporarily stopped reading Looking For Jake by China Miéville about halfway through to concentrate on my latest Interzone review (of Empty Space by M John Harrison) in order to have plenty of time to get the review done.

I’ll be getting back to Looking For Jake in due course.

Tor, 2011, 431p.

On a world where a race known as the Unmer was vanquished decades ago their artefacts still haunt the human inhabitants. Much-valued Unmer “trove” is scattered randomly over the sea-bed and material called brine, poisonous to humans, is emanating from ichusae, or sea bottles, and making the sea level rise slowly but inexorably. Protective clothing must be worn if there is danger of contact with brine as humans develop “sharkskin” on any exposed surfaces, which leads to pain and death. Those fully immersed, however, still carry on a life as “the Drowned,” swimming about freely under the brine, but are feared and persecuted by the authorities.

Telepaths known as Haurstaf helped defeat the Unmer and act as a kind of secret service (or, since they act for both sides in conflicts, more like an inquisition.)

This is a fantasy world with a difference. Yes there are dragons and slaves, but while the political structure is still monarchical (Emperor Hu) there are guns – and boats with engines. Refreshingly not the usual mediæval milieu, then.

In addition the Unmer trove has a technological basis. A rationale is given for the otherwise magical overflowing of brine from unstoppered ichusae and for the properties of Unmer artefacts. One of the characters knows about the wave-particle duality of light and muses on gravitation. These aspects of the novel make it Science Fiction rather than Fantasy. In feel, however, it leans more towards the fantastical.

In the prologue one of the so-called Gravediggers of the subtitle, Colonel Thomas Granger, offends Emperor Hu and they have to spirit themselves away to the city of Ethugra to escape his ire. The novel proper starts when an enslaved woman recognises Granger as the man she had a relationship with years before and pleads with him to save herself and her daughter, Ianthe, whom Granger surmises to be his child too, by buying them. Ianthe turns out to have powers to find trove, powers which will interest the Haurstaf and the local Mr Big, Ethan Maskelyne.

The novel sometimes has aspects of a quest story, at others of the military insert and retrieve mission. Pleasingly, very few of the characters are mere ciphers (though Emperor Hu is something of a caricature of the spoilt aristocratic brat.) Campbell knows how to draw a reader in to his story and to keep the attention.

Unfortunately, at the production level, the text is ill-served by having words – frequently “the” or “a” – missing or repeated and other typographical errata of various sorts. Another example of the tendency of publishers to look on their publications simply as “product” and wheel them out without due care.

Novels are not product. At least, the good ones aren’t.

Rant over.

Sea of Ghosts is a superior fantasy, well worth a read. The paperback is now available.

Harper Voyager, 2011, 959p (plus 56p of genealogies.)
Book 5 of A Song of Ice and Fire and a wristbreaker. For my thoughts on book 4 see here.

The action this time is mostly set over the sea from Westeros; following the adventures of Tyrion and Daenerys in Andalos and Valyria but Jon Snow’s problems at the Wall and other matters in the North are also prominent.
The writing is not always as assured as it was in Books 1-4 but still drags you in. Martin’s adaptation of his usual chapter heading (the viewpoint character’s name) – resorting at times to uses such as “The Wayward Bride” and “The Spurned Suitor” instead – also muddies things. In these cases it can take a little time to work out who the section is about especially as Martin’s modus is to start with a scene not immediately following the one his character had most recently appeared in before then filling in the gap.

Martin again employs the sly trick at a chapter’s end of apparently killing off a character only to reveal several sections on that death has been averted.

I’ve always visualised Tyrion as looking like Antony Worrall Thompson, an image I just can’t get rid of when reading about him. As in A Storm of Swords the complexities of his character means the reader’s expectations can be confounded but he remains consistently interesting. Daenerys, though, here seems curiously indecisive.

With 956 pages to get through a sense of marking time begins to grow but in this volume the overall story arc of A Song of Ice and Fire is cranked up by the emergence of a lost Targaryen heir to the Iron Throne closer in line than Daenerys.

Martin’s focus is perhaps inevitably on nobles and their doings. While the scope of his vision is broad we do not see much of the small folk, who appear mostly in the background. Then again in a mediæval world how likely is it that such people would be able to become movers and shakers, drivers of plot?

The possible Science-Fictional aspect to Martin’s cycle is again alluded to in mentions of the First Men. As well as the obvious comparison with the Wars of the Roses minor parallels with our own world are understated but present. (The Valyrians left not only their steel but also roads which have survived centuries.)

In earlier volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire it was possible to imagine there might be but as the saga wears on it becomes clearer that there’s not much scope for hope in Martin’s invented world. The outcomes seem unremittingly depressing. Perhaps in Vol 6, The Winds of Winter?