Whippleshield Books, 2012. 54p plus 21p appendices.

Not only does the usual warning apply to this review, the book has a quote from me on its back cover.

In a timeline where NASA did not abandon Moon landings and the Cold War gradually became hotter and hotter before finally boiling over, a group of US astronauts is stranded on the Moon with the Earth only a devastated, barren cloud of dust in their sky. Their only hope of survival is a piece of weird Nazi tech “liberated” at the end of WW2, a “torsion field generator” known as the Bell, which one of them is using to try to jump into a universe where life on Earth is still intact. This ongoing story strand, told in an urgent present tense, is interspersed with the back story of Colonel Vance Peterson, a gung-ho USAF pilot whose past is related, in reverse, in italic sections with larger page margins. After several abortive tries with the Bell a shift at last brings a blue Earth. There is no radio contact but telescopes reveal a space station in Earth orbit. The astronauts cobble together fuel and a return vehicle from the left over Lunar Descent modules scattered near their Mare Imbrium base. Peterson flies it “home.” To reveal what welcomes him would be a spoiler.

Both narratives are seen from Peterson’s viewpoint and crammed full of the alphanumeric soup that was/is NASA speak. I must say, though, I wasn’t entirely convinced by Peterson’s blinkered psychology.

An abbreviations section is provided in the appendices for those who need it and a glossary reveals the history of the US and Soviet space programmes in the altered timeline. Sales’s research is not exactly worn lightly – the man has probably forgotten more about the space programme than I ever knew – but it adds a high degree of verisimilitude and is arguably necessary.

Overall, though, this story stands comparison with any of those nominated for the recent BSFA Awards.

And the quote? “Science Fiction as it might have been. A FALL OF MOONDUST meets DR STRANGELOVE – with a dash of The Cold Equations.”

Methuen, 1986, 185p. (Also known as Crompton Divided.)

Due to “virus schizophrenia” Alistair Crompton has had his personality divided. Two of his alter egos have been decanted into Durier bodies and sent to far-flung parts of the galaxy. Crompton himself, an abstemious prude, has developed a fine nose and concocts subtle perfumes for Psychosmells Inc. After trying to steal a highly expensive essence he seeks out his alter egos to attain “Reintegration.” The first, Loomis, who lives on the planet Aaia, is a prodigious womaniser, likes his life and so does not want to re-merge. Crompton manipulates things so that he will. They move on to the planet Yggia where after a long search they discover the third personality, Dan Stack, is homicidal. They come to him as he is about to be hanged for murder (though the victim hasn’t quite died yet.) The merge takes place just as the hanging reaches its culmination. It then turns out the victim is a fourth alter ego.

The absurdities do not stop there as the Reintegration is not straightforward and in a search to achieve it the united but unintegrated personalities travel to the Intersentient Therapeutics Centre where all sorts of weird things happen.

In all of this the characterisation never rises above the stereotypical, not to say sketchy. In addition the book is riddled with info dumping and overloaded with science-fictional neologisms. There are frequent typos – but one was magnificent, “his sanity was underminded” – and, among the poor jokes, an OK one when Crompton says, “I’m a paranoid schiz,” and his interlocutor replies, “There’s quite a few of you lads here.”

Character names such as Al Dente and firms called Harbinger&Omen clearly signal the book is meant to be light-hearted. Whether it may have been funny in 1978 when it was first published is moot. It certainly isn’t now.

Night Shade Books, 2011, 288 p.

God’s War is set on an isolated theocratic world named Umayma which has few off-world connections and four main countries, Chenja, Nasheen, Ras Tiega and Mhoria. These are all Islamic type theocracies but with varying degrees of rigour, especially in their attitudes towards women and alcohol is freely available, at least in Nasheen.

The environment of the planet has altered humans’ make up. Ras Tiegans, for example, can shift shape, though there seems to be no consequence attending this ability, neither energy deficiency nor any other debilitation. Technology is mediated by insects (Hurley usually calls them bugs) controlled by people called magicians.

Chenja and Nasheen have been at war for centuries – most men are at the front (though women are sent there too) and society is dominated by females. A few bitter old men, former soldiers of course, add a touch of background. Nasheen is a monarchy – the current ruler is Queen Zainab – but an organisation whose members are known as bel dames is a rival power in the land.

The protagonist, Nixnyssa, is a former bel dame, disgraced and now turned bounty hunter – she kills deserters and the like and cuts off their heads. The Queen engages Nyx and her team to find and retrieve – or kill – an off-worlder called Nikodem who may be able to provide one side or the other in the war with the crucial advantage to win it. Opposed to Nyx are factions within the bel dames, trying to find Nikodem for their own reasons. Bizarrely, boxing – yes, pugilism – is one of the aspects of the plot.

Hurley has invested a lot in her scenario but less in her characters who frequently amount to no more than one attribute. In addition, at the level of the prose, authorial care can break down. Several times Hurley employs one phrase or other in consecutive sentences, a trait which, to my mind, is clumsy at best and better avoided. Towards the climax typos begin to escalate, as if she was rushing to her conclusion. The novel is also slow to develop.

God’s War is a deliberate attempt to reverse the usual gender stereotypes – the profoundly unsympathetic Nyxnissa is said to be a sexual omnivore (but we actually see very little, if any, sex in the novel) and relishes violence while Rhys, one of her male companions, is a God fearing prude and a crap magician to boot. The novel panders to the usual blood-and-guts hungry audience though.

Orbit, 2010, 376p, plus author interview.

Since Christopher Priest’s bemoaning of the Clarke Award shortlist in which Halting State’s sequel Rule 34 is included I bumped this up my reading list.

The usual caveat applies to this review. I did see an early version of the first chapter or so, back in the day. The author is a fellow member of the East Coast Writers’ Group and of Writers’ Bloc.

The setting is a near future independent Republic of Scotland in 2016 or so. A bank in an on-line game is robbed, despite the levels of encryption involved. A panicked employee of Hayek Associates (the Edinburgh company overseeing the game) calls the local police. This leads to the involvement of our first viewpoint character, Detective Sergeant Sue Smith. The other two narrators are Elaine Barnaby, an insurance fraud investigator, and Jack Reed, an IT specialist just sacked from his previous job and on a bender in Amsterdam. An unusual facet of the book is that all three strands are written in the second person – a notoriously difficult authorial trick to pull off. Here the conceit is mostly effective. It only falls down a few times and after a while becomes almost unnoticeable. (Sue Smith’s narrative voice jars, though, at the times when USian creeps in – Defence with an “s,” “out back” for “out the back,” “fit” for “fitted.”) As the story proceeds layers of complication add in, as not all is what it seems, even in the real world.

The dangers of writing SF set in the near future are apparent even only four years after original publication (2008.) The banking-crash-induced recession and our present day austerity are entirely absent and the ubiquity of the location software, of driverless vehicles and so on feels a bit premature. Not to mention that a Scottish Republic is unlikely in the short term. However, if read as an Altered History (which will actually be necessary in five years’ time) these problems disappear.

Such technologies’ vulnerability to hacking/decryption is foregrounded, highlighting our growing dependence on such things. (I would add that they are equally vulnerable to a simple loss of electricity supply to servers etc.)

One of Christopher Priest’s complaints was that Stross uses “Och aye” dialogue. On this ground I acquit him. The book is set in Scotland after all. Not being Scots born it is more than commendable that Stross makes the effort to convey local speech – he still lives in Edinburgh – even if sometimes his ear is not perfectly attuned. (Oh, and the word dreich doesn’t have a “t” at the end.) He even has one of his narrators display the Edinburgher’s antipathy to all things Glaswegian.

The book is clearly aimed at a target audience of games players in addition to SF readers. Small portions consist of the MMORPG which was hacked into; these integrate well with the main thrust, as indeed does game playing. In this respect, pace Mr Priest, outright literary quality might be considered to be a drawback. Horses for courses. Halting State is not deep and not pretending to be, but I enjoyed it. Whether a “light” novel like this deserves an award, though, is surely a matter of subjectivity.

Penguin Red Classics, 2006, 563p.
Translated from the Russian, Master i Margarita, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997.

The Master and Margarita displays its oddness from the start. A stranger appears to two men in the Moscow district of Patriarch’s Ponds and makes predictions of weird events – including the death of one of the pair. These predictions, of course, come true; and in short order. For the stranger – accompanied by someone who appears as a large black cat – is the Devil. Thereafter we are treated to all sorts of wonderful happenings: instant transition to Yalta, various illusions disguised as fantastic stage tricks, flying witches, a man transformed into a donkey, a party at the Devil’s house.

The Master of the title is a would-be author whose novel about Pontius Pilate has been roundly trashed in the press (despite it not having been published.) Margarita – married to a man she does not love – is the Master’s mistress, resentful of the effect the novel’s reception has had on him and of those who caused it. Extracts from this novel (an account of the torment Pontius Pilate undergoes as he is forced to condemn one Yoshua Ha-Nozri – who avers that all men are good – for comments about Cæsar) are intermittently included in the larger narrative. This is an excellent piece of writing in its own right, especially the descriptions of Yershalaim (Jerusalem.) Other recognisable names here include the priest Kaifa and one Judas of Kiriath. This internal novel (whose manuscript has been burned by the master) is responsible for the Russian phrase “manuscripts don’t burn” – as the Devil tells the master in the main narrative when returning it to him – but its contents intrude into the main body only twice, when Matthew Levi, Ha-Nozri’s sole follower, pops up in modern Moscow and when Pilate is finally reconciled.

Reflecting the Stalinist era in which The Master and Margarita is set there is much talk of possible arrests (some of them for foreign currency violations, though, which could be irregular in any polity) but the apprehension of the police and the necessity for secrecy are never far away.

Any work of fiction is an attempt to describe circumstance to which the reader has no other access but whether the full flavour of a novel such as The Master and Margarita is ever captured by any translation is problematic. The cultural assumptions under which it was written are always different to those of the reader. In the end, for me, the characters lacked sufficient agency as the fantastical elements of the book overpowered all the others. As a metaphor for lack of political and judicial accountability, though, violation of cause and effect is fair enough.

Greenhill Books, 1994, 264 (+ xiv) p

Despite its title this book is not about the German aeroplanes of the First World War but rather the pilots who flew them. When originally published in 1931 it was the first book in English to deal with the German airmen of the time. Many of those names were familiar to me from other books on the war in the air (Quentin Reynolds’s They Fought For The Sky, Alexander McKee’s The Friendless Sky) but these mainly dealt with the Western Front. Here, as well as names such as Max Immelman, Oswald Boelcke, the Richthofen brothers, Werner Voss, Ernst Udet and Herman Göring, coverage is also given to other war theatres: Gunther Plüschow’s exploits in the far East, flying out of Tsingtao till it fell to the Japanese, Leutnant v Eschwege – dubbed “The Eagle of the Ægean Sea” by his Bulgarian Allies – whose base was Drama in Macedonia, “odd jobs” on the Eastern Front blowing up Russian supply railway lines, and in the Sinai doing the same to railways and aqueducts. These latter adventures at times read almost like Biggles stories, though not fiction and told from the opposite side.

The book is prefaced by an introduction (from 1994) by Norman Franks giving some historical context and two lists; pilots who achieved a “score” of 30 or more and all who were awarded the “Pour le Mérite” (“the Blue Max.”) It also has an odd typographical quirk where every semi-colon is preceded by a space ; as here. Was this a 1930s standard?

Since 1931 some of the incidents have been illuminated by more recent research. For instance, the famous “Red Baron,” Manfred von Richthofen, is now thought to have been killed by a bullet fired by an infantryman rather than Captain Roy Brown.

‘Vigilant’ (Claud W Sykes) when dealing with the Western Front has an irritating habit of referring to “English” aeroplanes or pilots when “British” would be more accurate but this is probably the term the Germans used and he is telling the tales from the German viewpoint. He is clearly much taken with the valour and chivalry of fliers on both sides and takes pains to point out that the German air force kept flying and fighting up to the armistice but the last sentence of his final paragraph, “Im Kreig geboren, im Kreig gestorben.* Germany has no flying Corps and we all look forward to the day when no country will need one. But a few months before we celebrate the tenth anniversary of the armistice, two Germans, setting forth from a Dominion of the British Empire, flew the Atlantic from east to west. The third member of the crew was a British subject. Germany has still a future in the air!” reads somewhat chillingly now.

*Born in the war, died in the war. This refers to the fact that the German Flying Corps did not exist as such before the war and was forced by the armistice to hand over its aeroplanes and so did not outlive it.

Abacus, 2006*, 402p.

The usual Brookmyre shenanigans, this time involving the nexus between politicians in the then new Scottish Parliament, the tabloid press and religious organisations. Boiling A Frog is a third outing for Jack Parlabane; except outing is not quite le mot juste, as for most of the book Parlabane is in prison after breaking into the headquarters of the Catholic Church in Scotland.

The book is flawed by the fact that the plot mostly happens in flashback or offstage while Parlabane is in jail and concerns a conspiracy to restore the primacy of “family values” to public life by framing various MSPs. It was as a by-product of the conspiracy and an unsettled state of mind due to problems in his private life that Parlabane was trapped into attempting the break-in.

If you stop to think for a minute the whole thing becomes unbelievable but believability has never really been the point with Brookmyre. You go along for the ride.

While not as amusing as other Brookmyre stories Boiling a Frog nevertheless has its moments.

Nowhere in the text is the strange title alluded to. An explanation is, however, given in the author’s note before the start.

*I read a reprint. The book was originally published in 2000.

Gollancz, 2011, 339p

This one is odd. Normally a novel unfolds by the interactions of various characters and the intertwinings of their stories – however separate their narratives may seem to be from the outset – all set out in a standard narrative format, albeit with digressions or flashbacks or indeed flashes forward. This book strays far from such conventionality. It is set out as a gazetteer. Each “chapter” title is that of an island in the Dream Archipelago – a place of indeterminable geography due to “temporal gradients” and a “vortex” which distorts perception – which Priest has visited before. Different “chapters” take different forms: some are exactly like entries in a gazetteer (including tourist information relating to local laws, currencies used etc) others are more conventional first person narratives, there is even a police (Priest uses the description policier) interview transcript; but all drip information either about the world of the Dream Archipelago or its inhabitants. Indeed were I to be hypercritical I could describe the book as a giant info dump interspersed with (relatively few) short stories.

However, SF likes to think of itself as innovative. Where better to find altered ways to tell stories, to redefine what constitutes a novel? And this is on the BSFA Award short list (but not the Clarke, to whose choices this year Priest has objected.) I somehow doubt, though, that writing novels as if they were gazetteers is going to catch on.

Nevertheless in The Islanders a picture of the world and its complexities builds up over time. Early on, a confession to a murder in a theatre leads to an execution – later episodes cast doubt on whether the death was a murder at all, and if so who was really responsible. The narrative sections are mostly concerned with creative types, mainly writers and artists. Events are experienced through various eyes and are seen to be as mutable – or incapable of full comprehension – as the Archipelago’s geography.

Yet – to be hypercritical again – none of the stories really requires the off-Earth setting, each could take place in our here and now. Much of the discourse is familiar, we have cars, computers, the internet, email; the flora and fauna are unexceptional, we even have bananas. The world, set between two warring powers – one from each of the two polar continents which are separated by the ocean in which the Archipelago (more or less protected by the neutrality pact which is supposed to safeguard the islands’ sovereignties) sits, is almost humdrum in its similarities to our own. The islands’ polities appear akin to our own Channel Islands, being feudal and overseen by Seigniors some of whom are more benevolent than others. And warring powers behave as they will in any time or place.

The Islanders is novel, I would agree. But a novel? It’s ingenious and an impressive achievement; but in the end the structure does not fully satisfy; there are too many interconnections between the “chapters” for the book to convince as a gazetteer, and too few for a rounded novel. Nevertheless between the three candidates for the BSFA Award which I have read so far it is, I would say, the strongest contender.

Over the past few weeks I have read the short stories nominated for this year’s BSFA Awards. I am assuming that, as in the past couple of years, the BSFA will be producing a booklet containing them but since each has been posted on the internet (there is a link from the BSFA’s Awards page to the online versions which is how I managed to read them – though I found off a screen is not the most comfortable of ways to do so) perhaps that might not happen.

The Silver Wind by Nina Allan, from Interzone issue 233, is a kind of time-travel story mixed with parallel worlds. It tells of the encounter of a man from a fascistic future Britain with a genius who makes clocks (which he refers to as time machines.) To begin with there is too much info dumping and throughout a lot is told rather than shown. Perhaps the story needed more space to breathe but I felt the sureness of touch of an accomplished story teller was missing. There is a use of words that is not quite precise – eg “hoping one soldier would not see me” rather than “hoping none of the soldiers would see me” – and twice we are treated to the peculiar phrase, “It was growing dusk,” but at least Allan knows the use of “nor” as in, “not for love nor money nor any of these new-fangled gadgets.”

The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell, from Asimov’s, July2011, is set in an altered future where European monarchies strive to keep the balance of power throughout the Solar System, souls have weight that is aligned to dark matter and Newton came up with a kind of relativity theory which allows space to be folded – all amenable to a tale of espionage and derring-do admixed with betrayals of various sorts. This stretches suspension of disbelief at times but overflows with ideas and is excellently written.

Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley, from Kameron Hurley’s website, is about a woman in a backward-leaning religious society which is engaged in a never-ending war, whose rulers have deliberately cut it off from the stars – originally as an escape from whatever’s out there but now to prosecute the war better. In her forbidden astronomical observations she finds God in a torn filter laid across the night sky. Again there is a fair bit of info dumping – perhaps inevitable in stories of short length.

Covehithe by China Miéville, from The Guardian, 20/4/11, features sunken oil-rigs returning to land to drill into the earth and lay – eggs? seeds? – from which smaller rigs later emerge. Atmospheric, but again info-dumpy. The human involvement in Covehithe – a father and his daughter observing one such landing – doesn’t really overlap with the SF background. Another scenario where society has suffered extreme breakdown and the military has a strong presence.

Of Dawn by Al Robertson, from Interzone 235, has a woman whose soldier brother has been killed being inspired by his poetry, the music of a long neglected composer, an all but forgotten TV documentary and a figure from Greek myth to produce a synthesis of poetry and music by bringing all those strands together. The final part of the jigsaw is provided by a shadowy figure in a village commandeered by the army long ago, but which had inspired both poet and musician. The story contains echoes of the Green Man myth and illustrates that English fascination with the pastoral. The info dumping here is well embedded.

The futures shown by the five stories are all bleak, having in common repressive regimes of either military or religious stamp. SF is never about the future, though. These stories tell us a lot about where we are now.

As stories though, rounded works of fiction, I found most of them unsatisfying. The only truly successful one was Paul Cornell’s. If these represent the best of last year the SF short story is in a bad way.

The Mercat Press, 1986, 288p

The House With The Green Shutters has an important place in Scottish literature as when it was originally published in 1901 it represented a break from the sentimentality of the Kailyard School and prefigured the work of Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Grassic Gibbon, among others. A warning, though. The book does contain a wheen of Scots words and phrases which may be a barrier to the more general reader.

The eponymous house, an imposing edifice in the town of Barbie, has been built by John Gourlay to reflect his position in the life of the town where he has a monopoly as a carrier. Gourlay has a “guid conceit of himself,” as we Scots say, and throws his weight about both metaphorically and – as he has a shortish temper – at times literally. His son, also called John, expects to inherit the carriage business and has neither the motivation nor aptitude to shine at school.

All begins to change with the return to Barbie from a sojourn in Aberdeen of James Wilson, whom Gourlay, in true Scottish fashion, at first dismisses due to his origins, (the, “Ah kent his faither,” reflex – see under ‘ken.’) Wilson soon sets himself up as a rival carrier. The opportunity the coming of the railway presents to Wilson gives him the lever to outwit Gourlay and precipitate a slow spiral of descent. Gourlay’s determination to outdo Wilson in everything leads him to send his son to University in Edinburgh where his character faults become magnified.

Throughout the book the author illuminates many aspects of the Scottish character as well as more general traits. The “bodies” – perhaps “sweetie wives” would be a more modern description – who gossip and scheme on street corners are especially well depicted. However, as perhaps reflects the times in which the book is set, the women characters are little more than cyphers.

The novel is apparently the first book in the English (sic) language read by Jorge Luis Borges (see under ‘criticism’) who thereafter, “wanted to be Scotch.” Bizarre.