Pan, 1989. 172p. (The cover shown is the Daw Edition.)

Joachim Boaz was a deformed orphan before the Colonnaders took him and reshaped his body with “silicon bones.” It was only after this radical surgery and to forget his past that he renamed himself after the two pillars of eternity at the ends of the universe, Joachim and Boaz. The enhancements mean he is susceptible to torments (and later, pleasures) to an intense degree and also that he is more or less incapable without his spaceship in close proximity.

He sets off to the elusive planet Meirjain, which takes a complex orbit in and around the closely knit stars of the Brilliancy Cluster, where time gems allow the past or future to be observed. Unfortunately such gems are contraband.

It is a measure of Bayley’s eclecticism that these meanderings, which many an SF writer would have explored minutely and at great length, are not the main focus of the book.

There are, though, musings on the cyclical nature of the universe and on whether Joachim will suffer his torments over and over again, all in Bayley’s somewhat dry style – which involves a lot of info dumping and telling rather than showing.

It would almost be absurd to complain that this tends to be at the expense of characterisation as Bayley’s intent is more to expound ideas but it does make for a less engaging reading experience.

Unfortunately, there is, too, a degree of casual sexism which may have gone unremarked on first publication over thirty years ago but jars badly nowadays and, towards the end of the book, the least enticing sex scene I’ve ever read.

This is probably one for Bayley completists only.

Gollancz, 2008, 502p.

I thought this one might be a bit of a slog. I know readers nowadays want a lot for their money but 502 pages is pushing things a bit. I buckled down, though, and got through over 100 pages a couple of nights so it wasn’t too much of a struggle.

Tom Dreyfus is the Prefect of the title, an agent of Panoply, the police force of the Glitter Band,* an agglomeration of diverse habitats orbiting the planet Yellowstone, a satellite of the sun Epsilon Eridani, the environment where the bulk of humanity now lives. Another detective novel, then, but with Space Operatic aspects.

The setting is a return to the universe of Reynolds’s previous Revelation Space novels but in this one the action takes place solely within the Glitter Band; apparently an ultra-democratic polity where votes on anything and everything take place all the time – including on whether Panoply may deploy weapons.

Someone has used a spaceship drive to destroy the Ruskin-Sartorious habitat thereby killing hundreds of people. The obvious culprit is punished but Dreyfus’s investigations lead him to believe this is merely cover for a much wider conspiracy. One of his assistants, Thalia Ng, is sent to begin software upgrades to the voting protocols on four habitats but when the last one is completed the constant contact (known as abstraction) the voters have with the centre is broken. A takeover of all four habitats ensues. The rest of the book is concerned with the efforts of Panoply to counter this insurgency and to prevent its spread to the whole Glitter Band. On the way this leads to the unmasking of two mysterious figures from the past, Aurora and the Clockmaker. The latter has put Panoply’s chief into mortal danger.

Once the set-up is over with and the plot gets into gear, the narrative flows nicely. There are plenty of twists and turns, with shifts in the balance of power, plus wheels within wheels, inside Panoply. Dreyfus is your standard good cop but is convincing as such, as is Thalia Ng. Some of their antagonists are a little less convincing, however.

A possible spoiler follows.

The main problem with the book is that the story merely stops. After those 502 (small font sized) pages the final conflict which the narrative sets up remains unresolved. Perhaps the book was too long already. Or is Reynolds going to give us a sequel? Whatever, while enjoying the ride, I was left somewhat unsatisfied.

*Since the disgrace of Mr Gadd I wonder if Reynolds regrets the name he gave this cornucopia of habitats?

Solaris, 2008, 294p

The usual caveat applies to this review.

Despite having the outward appearance of a novel this book is in fact a fix-up, stringing together a series of shorter pieces which Brown has published in various magazines or anthologies over the years along with one original story. In addition there is an introductory prelude, shorter “interludes” to link the stories, and a coda; all written for this publication. Despite the potential scope the stories are without exception located in and around a small town in West Yorkshire which Brown calls Oxenworth.

The enigmatic aliens of the title have appeared suddenly, offering to restore the dead to life – either to come back to Earth or to help in populating the galaxy. An implant under the skin of the temple starts its mysterious work when its bearer dies. The uncorrupting bodies are then ferried to the nearest Onward Station for their essence to be beamed off-planet for the process to be carried out. Returnees come back six months later, subtly changed, to carry on with their interrupted lives or to say farewell to friends and family before departing to the stars on Kéthani business.

There is something about the Onward Stations that is reminiscent of the tower which featured in Brown’s collection The Fall Of Tartarus – see link above – and also recalls a similar structure in Brown’s early novel Meridian Days.

The Brown tendency to feature religion is again to the fore, this time mixed with those perennial literary issues of love and death as the author works through the many responses humanity brings to the aliens’ gift. A new focus, here, is on the vagaries of married life and the joys of fatherhood. An uncommon (or should that be common?) touch is the frequent mention in the earlier segments of Leeds United Football Club.

Curiously it always seems to be snowing in Brown’s West Yorkshire. Did the Kéthani bring a change of weather with them?

There is a huge erratum on page 59 of my edition, covering two lines of text. I had to read the paragraph containing it several times in order to get the full sense. Other typos were few in number. I mention this only because such things are avoidable.

The stories, despite the inevitable repetitions entailed in their initially disparate origins, do add up to a coherent, if disjointed, narrative, though on occasion they can feel a little rushed. (This could be explained if Brown had a strict word count to adhere to for their original publications.) Despite having different narrators most adopt a similar tone. All are eminently readable.

Throughout there is the nagging doubt about the nature of the Kéthani’s motives. Brown never fully resolves this issue – though the last segment comes close. A US author would certainly have taken the idea in a completely different direction to Brown and I was reminded a little of Murray Leinster’s The Greks Bring Gifts (whose title is a nice play on “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”) a novel of which Brown may be unaware.

The inherent difficulty with a scenario such as this is how do you portray the returnees as different from the characters they were before resurrection? Brown does not quite bring this off, not helped by having the narrator of the interludes die partway through the book – though appearing in later segments as a returnee though.Force majeure, perhaps, in that that segment may have been written early in the sequence and Brown was stuck with it.

As a working-out of what it might mean for humanity if death were to have no dominion, however, the lassitude and ennui that may ensue, the new goals that would need to be sought, Kéthani is a worthy achievement.

Faber, 2007

Is it possible to review a book without regard to its content? To treat only of its literary merits – the prose, the characterisation, the plot – and not their ramifications? If so, then Be Near Me is a fine novel, well written. The prose is fluid and consciously literary, if a little over florid in a few places, and the characters are well enough observed.

A more or less English Catholic Priest, David Anderton, comes to a small Ayrshire parish where he is regarded with suspicion as an incomer. Only his part-time housekeeper, Mrs Poole, and two fifteen year old parishioners called Mark and Lisa make any effort to see him as an individual and not an interloper. The remainder of the book, interspersed with flashbacks of Anderton’s childhood and his life as a student, when he had a boyfriend who died in a car crash, an event which precipitated his retreat into the priesthood, deals with the unravelling of these latter relationships.

I may be wearing my teacher’s hat here but from its inception Anderton’s relationship with the teenagers was ill-advised and implied trouble. His response to the views they express – and the language they used – on their first meeting during a school lesson was inadequate at best, diffident and lacking in the moral guidance you might expect from an educator – or a cleric.

O’Hagan intends this of course. Anderton’s confused and ineffective response in this early encounter is emblematic of his attitude to his ministry and to the crisis that later engulfs him. He seems lost and insecure, but wilfully – and frustratingly – so. As a portrait of a man unable to prevent, indeed intent on, his own ignominy Be Near Me is exemplary.

This review could finish here were it not for the caveat expressed in its first sentence. Potential readers of the novel unwilling to have their reactions possibly prejudiced should also stop here.

As O’Hagan has reservations about the treatment of Roman Catholicism’s adherents in Scotland – which admittedly not all of his co-denominationalists necessarily share – I hesitate to write this; but I found his subject matter troubling. Or, rather, the way in which it was approached.

He has Anderton remember his school at Ampleforth and mention tales of abuse by the Brothers but say he neither witnessed nor suffered any himself. Is there a hint of disingenuousness here; is this too dismissive of the issue?

Later Anderton reveals himself as guilty of what is essentially a sexual assault (even if a minor one) on Mark. That his “victim” is nearly of the age of consent and that the act was not followed through neither excuses nor expiates it.

Yes, Be Near Me has things to say about jumping to conclusions, mob rule and vigilantism, the tabloid tendency to simplify complex matters and the failure of an adversarial justice system to penetrate to the truth of things.

But it comes close to implying that such abuse didn’t happen or, if it did, was relatively inconsequential; misunderstood even.

I am not saying that one ought not to write about paedophiles, nor that they may not be considered sympathetically in fiction, only that, if they are, it should be with due care and attention to their victims and to its seriousness; and in this I think O’Hagan fails, which is an extremely severe defect. In his choice of narrator and in the age of that character’s “victim” O’Hagan seems to be skating round the issue rather than confronting it. Minimising it, if you will. And is that not reprehensible?

Notwithstanding this objection, however, whatever else Be Near Me does as a novel, it made me reflect on these matters. And, in the end, to promote such reflections is one of serious fiction’s functions.

MacMillan, 2009, 312p.

Another detective story! I thought I’d read this after The Night Sessions in case it got on the ballot for the BSFA award. (It has.) I had bought it on the strength of Miéville’s previous outings, Perdido Street Station, The Scar and Iron Council but didn’t know its content.

After an event known as Cleavage which happened a considerable time in the past, the city of Besź, which is somewhere in Eastern Europe, is crosshatched with Ul Qoma. Cleavage has resulted in both cities coexisting independently of each other but in the same location, in some cases sharing the same buildings. Their inhabitants must unsee any manifestations of the other which they may notice, otherwise breach may occur. Areas within only one of the cities are known as total to its inhabitants and alter to the other’s.

This central conceit can, I suppose, be taken as a metaphor for divided cities or societies everywhere, or even a split personality, but here instances of intruding into the other city, ie breaching, whether by accident or design, will incur the attentions of Breach, a mysterious organisation which deals with such transgressions.

Aside: I wonder if Miéville ever toyed with the idea of calling his novel Split as in the Croatian city. Perhaps that would have localised things to too large a degree to the former Yugoslavia, though, or he may have considered it too obvious a pun.

In all other respects the novel’s world is ours (complete with MySpace pages.) The two are normal cities, they have hinterlands and they (or their countries) have diplomatic relations with the rest of the world; and with each other. There are rumours of a third city, Orcinny, interweaved with Besź and Ul Qoma, but no-one is supposed to talk about that.

As to the plot, the body of a murdered American woman turns up in Besź and the investigator, Tyador Borlú, swiftly comes to the conclusion the murder actually took place in Ul Qoma. However it transpires that the body was transported across the divide legally; in the only way that is possible. Breach is not invoked and Borlú has to go to Ul Qoma to aid the investigation there; where the murder victim had been part of an archæological dig. The working through of the story thereafter is pretty standard conspiracy thriller stuff and not really speculative fiction at all, though the unusual background has a minor plot function.

Regarding the speculative nature of the book, to both cities’ inhabitants the observances of demarcation – the seemingly necessary unseeing, the unhearing – are only really a convention; they are not physically prevented from straying into the other reality, which in that sense is not, therefore, another reality, and while the consequences of breaching are implied to be dire, Miéville does not explore this aspect fully.

The unseen twinned city conceit is a good one but once again Miéville doesn’t really do anything with it. In the end it is no more than the backdrop to the thriller story which, with only minor tweaks, could equally well have been set in a truly divided city.

I was swithering about the classification I would assign to this book in my categories. I was leaning towards fantasy since crosshatching, the intrusion of another reality into the normal world, belongs in that tradition but I have decided on SF even if the only thing that makes THE CITY & YTIC EHT Science Fictional is the mention of Cleavage. There is/was a mechanism for the break, it was an event with a cause even if Miéville doesn’t go into detail as to how it happened.

These are not, though, major difficulties with the narrative. Miéville is in full command of his story and the prose flows freely. THE CITY & YTIC EHT is much easier to read than, for example, Iron Council which dragged rather. Give it a whirl if you have a penchant for detective thrillers or the mildly strange environment.

Orbit, 2009, 368p

With The Night Sessions Ken MacLeod strides firmly onto SF detective territory and adds his own unique twist. Following on from The Execution Channel (to which it is not a sequel) it is the second of Ken Macleod’s forays into near (well, nearish) future thrillerdom and features acts of terrorism and the police efforts to solve them. It could also be firmly described as Scottish SF as it is set almost wholly in Scotland.

[Aside: Even since before I started this blog I have been pondering writing a piece about Scottish SF. With this book as a spur I may inflict it on you soon.]

There are excursions into New Zealand, though, while solettas – which reduce global warming by directly screening the sun – and a couple of space elevators provide Science Fictional colouring. Another important element is the inclusion of robots/AIs. The police have robot assistants called lekis which, while large, seem to be spider-like, or tentacular at any rate, as well as a collection of smaller bug-like machinery which can infiltrate small places and provide points of view linked in to the police communications system. Other robots are revealed to be useful in construction in space.

The events of the book take part in a world where wars over oil (aka the Faith Wars) have defeated the forces of organised religion – at Armageddon/Megiddo no less – and made these organisations marginal at best, if not quite underground operations. The first terrorist victim is a Catholic priest, the second, in an echo of Covenanting times, an Episcopalian Bishop of St Andrews.

The plot concerns the getting of religion by a group of robots, given the word by a Presbyterian in New Zealand whose sermons – a neat play on the word sessions by MacLeod here – are relayed in real time to members of a sect (of the Third Covenant) in Linlithgow.

As is to be expected given the subject matter, MacLeod’s knowledge of biblical texts is to the fore. There are also some SF in-jokes which the casual reader (if there is such a beast) may miss.

The Night Sessions is a fine blend of the SF and thriller genres. The writing flows, the clues are placed where they are needed and (spoiler alert?) the denouement depends on one of the SF elements. MacLeod could obviously handle a straight detective novel with no difficulty but doing so would perhaps not have allowed him to explore the theme of religion in quite the same way.

Picador, 2004, 312p

This book was not marketed as Science Fiction but in any straightforward reading of the term would be so, as it is fiction about Science, specifically quantum mechanics and wave functions. Science Fiction as understood, though, is not generally thought of in this light but rather as extrapolative. However, Mobius Dick fits the bill in this sense also, as its background involves a set of experiments to produce a vacuum array which can generate energies in excess of 1000 Eka-electronvolts which could lead to wave functions not collapsing on being observed and the end of the world as we know it. Fear not if you know nothing about the behaviour of subatomic particles, the necessary details are lucidly set out by Crumey in the appropriate places. (Or did I just find it lucid because I had encountered most of these ideas already? Studied them, even, when a student.)

The narrative is multi-stranded, beginning with an enigmatic text message to a physicist, John Ringer, reminding him of a lost love. Another strand is set in a hospital where patients are being treated for Anomalous Memory Disorder, AMD, a condition in which they appear to have false memories. A third contains extracts from a book by a certain “Heinrich Behring” but which is copyrighted “the British Democratic Republic 1954” and which focuses on Erwin Schrödinger. An Altered History too, then.

It is, as well, a consciously literary endeavour featuring in addition to the above; Bettina von Arnim, the composer Schuman and a letter from an unsuccessful Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne. No surprise it’s not marketed as Science Fiction. The John Ringer sections are Ballardian in tone and when he ventures into rural Scotland also have a tint of the testament of Gideon Mack, which I reviewed recently.

Crumey never pushes the connections between the sections. We are left to ourselves to infer that AMD is a manifestation of superimposed quantum states and the many worlds of uncollapsed wave functions. The characters, on opening doors etc, by and large treat any incursions into or from other worlds as if they are hallucinations, which interpretation is also entirely adequate.

The afterword, also by “Heinrich Behring,” like the sections featuring Schrödinger and Schumann, is written from the perspective of a world where Goebbels replaced Hitler, Britain was invaded but after liberation became a socialist/communist state and neither Melville nor Thomas Mann achieved critical acclaim. “Behring” depicts Schrödinger – who never amounted to much in this altered history – finding his famous (in our world) equation Hψ = Eψ in the scribblings of a madwoman.

What makes Mobius Dick ineluctably Science Fiction (whther it is labelled as such or not) is this looking in at our world, where a woman can become Britain’s PM, an actor President of the US and the many worlds theory is taken seriously, and finding it absurd.

But to label the book at all is to do it an injustice. It hums with ideas and wit, and not a few literary puns.

I haven’t been so impressed by an author new to me for a long time.

Little, Brown, 2002, 419p

This is another novel featuring Detective Inspector Angelique De Xavia, who appeared in A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away (see my review here.)

Its prologue was faintly annoying as Brookmyre seemed to be indulging in explicitness merely for the sake of it. Moreover, when the book proper unfolds it is apparent that its chronology and the bulk of the narrative don’t quite fit. However, the main story as it progresses is engaging and the complex plot is revealed at just the right pace.

Brookmyre’s signature blending of humour with crime is again a key component. The set up, here, involves a bank robbery carried out by a gang dressed as clowns, or rather as one member of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band. The robbers are at pains to make sure the hostages they have taken (which include De Xavia after she infiltrates the building and is captured) are put at ease; their leader insisting they are not the bad guys.

The character of DI De Xavia does not convince as it did in A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away as, here, she enters into a, quite frankly, unbelievable relationship. But, for plot purposes, she must. Brookmyre’s touch lets him down with this but the book is never less than readable; at times laugh, or at least chuckle, out loud funny and the plot is well worked out.

It was also refreshing to read a depiction of members of the criminal fraternity who were not unremittingly ill intentioned – though, of course the real baddies in the book are.

Hodder and Stoughton, 2005, 597p.

This is really Colonisation:4. Many of the “characters” from the Colonisation series reappear here.

This is the book, though, where we finally get to see the Lizards’ original world, Home. A US starship, with the aid of cold sleep technology adapted from that of the Lizards’ has been sent there to try to negotiate a basis of equality with them.

There are some sly asides about the US Ambassador to Home, referred to solely as the Doctor, who can only be meant to be Henry Kissinger. Unfortunately he does not wake up from the cold sleep necessary for the transit so one of our previous Colonisation acquaintances is pitched into the ambassadorial role. Also a character named Nicole Nichols is surely a nod to the communications officer of the original Star Trek.

There was one typo I thought was brilliant. “Buildings gradually got farther and father apart.”

Homeward Bound is an effortless, light read. Turtledove’s narrative goes down smoothly, as it always does, but the characterisation is still weak and repetition of information and attitudes far too frequent. He leaves open the possibility of yet more sequels.

Tor, 2009, 407p.

The usual caveat applies to this review.

This is the second adventure featuring Dakota Merrick; first introduced to us in Stealing Light (see link above.) We also meet our old friend – foe, really – Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals, one of the Shoal, a civilisation of water breathing creatures who dominate most of the human area of space and restrict access to it. (Another Shoal has the slightly more agreeable name Swimmer in Turbulent Currents.)

The title Nova War is a bit of a misnomer as the greater part of the book concerns Dakota’s travails in escaping (or not) from the clutches of various Hives of Bandati – winged, social-insect type creatures by whom she is imprisoned when the book starts. It is not till later (and mostly off-stage) that any interplanetary conflict occurs.

The earlier sections at first seemed to be symptomatic of middle-part-of-trilogy malaise but once Dakota is free of the Hives the action picks up. Dakota also comes into conflict with the Shoal’s main adversaries the Emissaries, an elephantine race with a peculiar religious obsession and extremely loud voices, who were only given brief mentions in the previous book.

While Gibson mostly avoids the troubles inherent in a sequel of telling us once more of prior events – more or less by the commendable expedient of ignoring any need to do so – there is a deal of info dumping and some episodes tend to be related rather than revealed. Also, the relaying of simultaneous events occurring to different characters is sometimes out of kilter.

Nova War, while depicting less overt violence than the previous volume in the sequence, keeps the pot set up in Stealing Light boiling nicely.

The third book of the Shoal sequence, Empire Of Light, comes out later this year.