Pan, 1995, 264p.

Blue Shifting contains short stories and novellas from Brown’s early career, two of them are original to the collection. Looking back at them it is striking how many of his recurring themes and tropes mark these tales. The typical Brown character is a misfit of some kind or a man awkward with women; a common plot driver is of people’s pasts hounding their presents; the typical setting is an artist’s colony or else somewhere secluded, usually on a far-flung planet.

The Death of Cassandra Quebec
Eva Hovanda, a minor artist, attends the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the sole true work of art by Nathaniel Maltravers (a commemoration of the death of his wife) and rediscovers her wiped memories of the event.

Piloting
On Nea Kikhládes, a world of augmented and even Supra Sapient humans, the Primitivist artist Benedict Wellard is preparing his final piece. The pilot he has requested to animate the fifteen years dead body of his daughter plays an unexpected role. This story is slightly flawed by the fact that Brown withholds a crucial item of information until the denouement.

The Art of Acceptance
An oddly affecting love story – or two – set in Brown’s Engineman universe but firmly on Earth. A tale of cloning, disfigurement and, two other familiar Brown tropes, a private detective and Eastern influence. Despite the title, no artists though.

The Disciples of Apollo
A man suffering from a terminal condition known as The Syndrome goes (after selling his classical record collection! Nothing dates so fast as the future) to a hospice where those so afflicted wait to die. He eventually, and for the first time, finds love.

Elegy Perpetuum
An artist who contends that an enduring work of art is worth more than an individual’s life is faced with a fateful decision.

The Song of Summer
A middle-aged man returns to the scene of his youth and his first, lost, only, love.

Epsilon Dreams
A well-plotted tale set on Altair II in a time when the penalty for murder is memory wiping and Encoded Identity Inserts allow personalities to be transferred to other bodies after death. Brown brings both these elements together in another story of emotional shipwreck.

Blue Shifting
At 5 am every day, surrounded by a blue radiance, Gregory Janner mysteriously shifts location from continent to continent. Eventually he falls in with a group of others similarly afflicted. This story did contain the rather pleasing typo of a “billowed” command, but also the more oxymoronic construction, “markedly unremarkable.”

In all these stories, as with those of a major influence on Brown’s work, Michael G Coney, well reflected in this book, the focus is always on human motivation, on how much of an emotional driver both love and loss are. This is SF with a human heart.

TTA Press, 2013, 92 p.

Novella no. 2 from TTA Press, publishers of Interzone and Black Static.

This is a strange atmospheric piece, very well written.* It is set in a Greece where iPads and emails are in everyday use and holographic people are difficult to discern from real ones but triremes roam the seas and Carthage has fought a war with Corinth within the past 100 years.

When narrator Layla Vargas was young her mother was executed in a bizarre way for having unnatural powers. Layla has now grown and set out for a new life in Atoll City. On the bus on the way she meets an old woman who will influence her future. Layla’s uncommon ability to sew tapestries attracts the attention of a woman whose son has a strange disease and who wishes Layla to cure him. Layla is reluctant to be thought unusual.

Despite the SF trappings there is throughout the feel of fantasy and the dénouement is firmly fantastical. It was refreshing to read a piece in that vein not firmly rooted in mediævality.

The writing is measured and beautifully modulated, the characters rounded and believable. The story concluded a bit like a popped balloon though, all the intrigue that had been carefully built up thereafter more or less dribbling away. It was as if Allan had come up against her word limit and had to find a way to stop. That’s a pity as there was scope here for more exploration of the scenario and greater length. Allan knows what she is doing though and does it well.

*It is a pity, however, that in a novella entitled Spin there is a “span” count of 1.

TTA Press, May-Jun, 2013.

This accompanied Nina Allan’€™s Spin, a TTA novella which I have promised to review here. My review of Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner appears in this issue, which I assume I received as a contributor’s copy.

The Machinehouse Worker’€™s Song by Steven J Dines
Men work stoically at their shifts in a machinehouse which they cannot leave until they succumb to an apparently psychological sickness, or death. The story is set at a time when only two of them remain.

Triolet by Jess Hyslop
Mrs Entwistle grows poems (which seem to be exactly like flowering plants but speak their verses when touched.) One day she gives James and Lisa a triolet. Its repetition presages alteration.

Sentry Duty by Nigel Brown
An alien stands guard for her Sisterhood and interacts with the human whose skycart has landed in their territory. This story would not have been out of place in a 60s SF magazine.

The Angel at the Heart of the Rain by Aliette de Bodard
An immigrant from a war torn country comes to terms with her new existence.

Thesea and Astaurius by Priya Sharma
A reworking of the Minotaur story featuring the woman Thesea. Minos is a blood-crazed madman and Deadalus wields modern technology.

The Core by Lavie Tidhar
Achimwene follows his lover Carmel through Central Station. She is a strigoi, a data vampire to whom the Station’s children are attracted. A strange piece, undermined for me
by the use of the word “faint” once each in the first two lines, describing respectively the light and a glow.

Cat World by Georgina Bruce
Narrated by an eight year old girl, an orphan who lives on the streets with her sister. Flavoured chewing gum takes their minds into Cat World. Her sister disappears and she has to fend for herself.

The James White Award is a short story competition open to non-professional writers and judged by a panel of professional authors and editors. The winner receives a cash prize, a trophy and publication in Interzone. This year’s winner, selected by Aliette de Bodard and Ian McDonald, was:-

You First Meet the Devil at a Church Fete by Shannon Fay
A well written tale narrated by one Stuart Sutcliffe, who is tempted by the devil with promises of the band he’s in with John and Paul – and George – becoming big. Stuart turns him down. The rest is history.

It was with great sadness that I heard today of the death of Iain M Banks.

A great hole has been torn in the fabric both of British SF and of Scottish literature.

We can only mourn for the novels he will now be unable to write.

Iain Menzies Banks, 15/02/1954 -€“ 9/06/2013. So it goes.

Hodder, 2010, 496 p.

The usual fare from Turtledove. This time the altered history is that World War 2 starts in 1938 – though the actual Jonbar Point seems to be when Spanish General Sanjurjo survives his aeroplane flight from Portugal to Burgos to head up the Nationalist army in the Spanish Civil War which continues long after it did in our history as, after a failure of the talks in Munich two years later Hitler declares war on and invades Czechoslovakia. Major differences are that Poland then becomes a German ally, the invasion of France is not swift enough (apparently due to the early German panzers not being quite as effective as their later 1940 counterparts would be) and Japan eventually attacks the already war-embroiled USSR in Siberia.

The viewpoints are many, but hardly varied as the characters are as cardboard (or as functional) as always, or there simply to outline the war’€™s progress. The writing is as annoying as ever with its repetitions of information we already know. Particularly irritating was the observation that someone or other didn’t like some aspect of warfare “one bit” occurring again and again.

The reading is easy though; something I felt I needed after Gardens of the Sun. I don’t think I’€™ll be following the rest of The War That Came Early series though. There’€™s now another four of the beggars!

The Women’€™s Press, 1985, 248 p.

This is an anthology from a time when it was thought there had to be a Women’s Press and a collection of SF stories by women writers only. Given the relative rarity, still, of published SF written by women – though the barriers are no longer so high and the practitioners are at least on a par with and often surpass their male counterparts – arguably the desideratum is as important now as it ever was. The avowedly feminist perspective, the didacticism, of a lot of these stories dates them though. Then again most SF from the 80s would be similarly dated.

Big Operation on Altair Three by Josephine Saxton
On a regressive colony world an advertising copywriter describes the unusual procedure devised to illustrate the extreme stability of a new car.

Spinning the Green by Margaret Elphinstone
A fairy tale. It even begins, “€œOnce upon a time.” A treacle merchant on his way home from a convention encounters a group of green-clad women in a wood. They demand a price for the rose he has picked for his youngest daughter. Curiously this world has computers, televisions and round the world cruises but the merchant travels on horseback.

The Clichés from Outer Space by Joanna Russ
Satirises the portrayal of women in the typical slush-pile SF story of pre-enlightened times -€“ like the 1980s -€“ with four overwrought, overwritten examples. (As they no doubt were.)

The Intersection by Gwyneth Jones
Two space dwellers from an environment where privacy is impossible, “SERVE sees all, SERVE records all,”€ take a holiday to observe the indigs of the underworld. Bristling with acronyms and told rather than unfolded this is more an exercise in information dumping than a story as such. (And de rigeur ought to be spelled with a “u”€ after the “g”.)

Long Shift by Beverley Ireland
A woman who is employed to use her mind to demolish buildings safely is given a priority assignment monitoring a subsidence which turns out to be worse than expected.

Love Alters by Tanith Lee
Women only have babies with women, and men only with men. This is the right, the straight way to do it. Our female narrator is married to Jenny but then falls in love with someone else. A man.

Cyclops by Lannah Battley
A space-faring archaeologist discovers Earth was not the cradle of humanity by uncovering an ancient manuscript written by “€œAeneas.” It has a clever explanation of why the Cyclops appeared to have one eye. The story’€™s balance is out of kilter, though.

Instructions for Exiting this Building in Case of Fire by Pamela Zoline
A remedy for the world’€™s ills involves the kidnapping, and resettlement, of children.

A Sun in the Attic by Mary Gentle
In Asaria, women take more than one husband. Roslin, head of House Mathury, is married to a pair of brothers one of whom has gone missing. The Port Council does not like his scientific investigations.

Atlantis 2045: no love between planets by Frances Gapper
In a repressive future society letters are too dangerous to write. Jene is a misfit, earning her family penalty points to the extent that they have her classified as a Social Invisible. Then one day her equally invisible aunt returns from being Ghosted.

From a Sinking Ship by Lisa Tuttle
Susannah works trying to communicate with dolphins. She is happier with them than with humans; so much so that she is unaware of the impending nuclear war. The dolphins understand the danger; and have an escape plan.

The Awakening by Pearlie McNeill
In a heavily polluted future world Lucy has doubts about her daughter’s participation in the Breeding Roster.

Words by Naomi Mitchison
Is about the inadequacy of language to describe new experiences – especially those induced by a device to stimulate brain synapses.

Relics by Zoë Fairbairns
A woman’€™s visit to a Greenham Common type peace camp is overtaken by the beginning of a nuclear war. She is placed in a freezing cabinet and woken decades later to be part of an exhibition illustrating her times. The future people get it hopelessly wrong of course.

Mab by Penny Castagli
A post-menopausal woman who takes a yoga class gives birth – from a lump on her head – to a tiny child. This apparently prefigures the demise of the male.

Morality Meat by Raccoona Sheldon*
A simple morality tale. Droughts and grain diseases have killed off the supply of meat but as always the rich still manage to get their share. Meanwhile every pregnancy is forced by law to go to full term. Adoption Centres provide a service for those who do not want or otherwise cannot keep their babies. But parents cannot be found for all the children.

*Raccoona Sheldon (Alice Sheldon) is also known as James Tiptree Jr.

Apples In Winter by Sue Thomason
People from another world interfere with a native culture.

I see from Locus and The Guardian that one of SF’s luminaries, Jack Vance, has died.

I can’t say I’ve read a lot of his work – I picked up his Araminta Station on the raffle at the BSFA stall at an Eastercon once and I have the “tribute album” Songs of the Dying Earth on my tbr pile so have that to look forward to.

He was prolific, though.

Jack Vance (John Holbrook Vance.) 28/7/1916 -€“ 26/5/2013. So it goes.

Gollancz, 2009, 440p.

In the aftermath of The Quiet War, the Outers – humans altered to cope better with living in the further reaches of the Solar System – have been driven beyond the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Parts of Gardens of the Sun are set in bubble habitats round Uranus, Neptune and Pluto or on wandering asteroids but the action, such as it is, also ranges back to Earth. This division of humanity – which also includes so-called Ghosts who follow a mystic claiming to have messages from the future – is the source of conflict in the novel. There are several sub-plots including the ongoing search for the gene wizard Avernus, one of the many characters from The Quiet War to reappear here, along with others such as Sri Hong-Owen, Macy Minnot, Loc Ifrahim, Felice Gottschalk and Cash Baker. The gardens of the title turn out to be habitats gengineered by Sri Hong-Owen to allow life to be easier amid the harshness of space.

Despite there being enough in this book to fill a whole series of novels, reading this one was hard going. The different characters’ stories are too remote from each other, even if some do overlap by the end, and are not in any case the main focus of the narrative which often reads like a history of the future (except with use of the pluperfect – usually a sign more is being crammed in than the story can bear.) It is in effect one long info dump and the scenes where the characters interact seem like addenda.

McAuley’s future environment is impressively detailed, though, as indeed was Kim Stanley Robinson’s in his 2312 which tended to neglect plot. It’s a pity we’re told most of it instead of being allowed to experience it.

Gollancz, 2012, 309 p. Reviewed for Interzone 245, Mar-Apr 2013.

For the first two-thirds of Redshirts the thought recurs that it’s either the most intriguing piece of SF you have read in a long time or else a sad waste of dead tree. The set-up has replacement crew-members on a starship slowly noticing strange events occurring – especially to those who attract the attention of senior officers and are as a result assigned to accompany them on away missions, where, invariably, one of the minions is at best badly injured, at worst killed. So far, so interesting.

The trouble is that the main characters are barely worthy of the name, being more or less indistinguishable. Moreover we are treated to various mundanities of their lives normally omitted in fiction. Yes, they are supposed to be walk-on parts in a different narrative, a bad Science Fiction TV series from our time, and hence might be expected not to be fully fleshed – but they are the main characters in ours and doesn’t the reader always deserves more? Moreover, dialogue is rendered as “Dahl said,” “Duvall said,” “Hester said” etc making it feel like a shopping list. In addition the prose rarely rises above the leaden and workmanlike.

And yet the text plays games with narrative and with the reader, features characters who become aware of themselves as players in a story and who take steps to alter their fate. There is even a false ending, allowing Scalzi to address the reader directly.

Viewers of a certain 1960s US TV SF series – which bears a superficial resemblance to the scenario here – may have noticed certain … illogicalities. Scalzi clearly enjoys laying out the faults, the playing fast and loose with the laws of Physics, the lack of internal consistency, the black box resolutions, which can plague such an enterprise. It is generally not regarded as a good idea for a Science Fiction novel explicitly to refer to SF, yet given the subject matter here it would be remiss not to. Indeed the plot of Redshirts depends on it.

After the amended ending – and making up the last third of the novel Redshirts as an entity – we have no less than three codas, subtitled first person, second person, third person, each narrated in its subtitular mode, respectively by the writer of, and two of the actors in, the TV series. These comment on, illuminate and extend what has gone before. The writer is not cheered by criticism distinguishing between bad writing and being a bad writer, the two actors find their destiny in life. While the codas’ styles are disparate, and thus a welcome relief, the last still has dialogue framed like a shopping list. Crucially though, the characters in them feel real.

In the main narrative Scalzi shows he can do bad writing very well. (Now there’s a back-handed compliment.) If you don’t know what’s to come in the codas, though; if you’re not, say, reading Redshirts for review, that could be a fairly large hurdle to overcome.

Barricade Books, 1997, 176 p.

This is what it says on the tin – a book of SF by Japanese authors. Whether this is the best of Japanese Science Fiction I can’t say because my knowledge of Japanese SF is restricted – shamefully, perhaps – to this book. This was one of my main reasons for picking it up and handing over money for its contents. Most SF published is written from either a US, a UK, or other Anglophone perspective or else is European. Japanese culture is so distinctive that Japanese SF may be something other.

The book carries on its cover an encomium from Analog, “BUY IT. Buy it in such quantities that the editors and publisher will bring us more.” Sadly people must not have bought it in quantity as I believe no such follow up ever appeared. Below are potted comments on each story.

The Flood by Kobo Abe, translated by Lane Dunlop.
Narrated in the style of a fable, this story features the mass liquefaction of people and the consequences of that transformation.

Cardboard Box by Ryo Hanmura, translated by David Lewis.
Imagine all the existential pleasures and angst of living as a cardboard box that is aware of itself and its surroundings. The joys of being filled; the emptiness otherwise. You don’t have to. This story does it for you.

Tansu by Ryo Hanmura, translated by Shimizu Mitomi, Joel Dames, Stephen Davis and Grania Davis.
A man is driven to distraction by his large family one by one taking to spending their nights on an old wooden chest.

Bokko-Chan by Shinichi Hoshi, translated by Noriyoshi Saito.
Bokko-Chan is a robot in the form of a beautiful woman, built by a bar owner to increase his trade. Her enigmatic responses lead one customer into folly.

He-y, Come On Ou-t by Shinichi Hoshi, translated by Stanleigh Jones.
After a typhoon a seemingly bottomless hole appears where a shrine had been. The hole becomes a dumping ground for unwanted material of all kinds, nuclear waste, incriminating evidence, compromising diaries. An allegory of the dangers of over-consumption. For where does it all go? This is reminiscent of Ted Chiang’s Tower of Babylon but predates it considerably.

The Road to the Sea by Takashi Ishikawa, translated by Judith Merril and Tetsu Yano.
A boy who has never seen the sea goes in search of it. An old man tells him it is in the sky. He carries on regardless, meeting no-one in his trudge across a desert land. To reveal more would be a spoiler.

The Empty Field by Morio Kita, translated by Kinya Tsuruta and Judith Merril.
Told in a disjointed style with non-standard punctuation and many newly coined compound words this concerns a once green and pleasant field, now empty, where excited children and an old man await the coming – or not – of a flying saucer.

The Savage Mouth by Sakyo Komatsu, translated by Judith Merril.
Using an operating machine a man starts to replace all his body parts with artificial ones. What he does with the removed portions reveals the savage mouth in us all.

Take Your Choice by Sakyo Komatsu, translated by Shiro Tamura and Grania Davis.
A man pays a fortune to choose his future from the three available at a seedy “time travel” shop. Like others before him he chooses the world doomed to destruction. The process is a con but that isn’t the point of the story.

Triceratops by Tensei Kono, translated by David Lewis.
The title rather gives this one away. A father and son see a triceratops on their way home one night and subsequently dinosaurs pop up all over the place. Everyone else seems to ignore the manifestations. To explain the sudden appearances there is mention of dimensional faults and time-lag universes but these seem more of a sop than anything else.

Fnifmum by Tensei Kono, translated by Katsumi Shindo and Grania Davis.
Fnifmum is a creature who grows through time, expanding into the future while contracting more slowly from the past; but he can access all the points along his body. Losing contact with his gene partner in the past he moves to the future and encounters two humanoids. The translation in this story has one awkwardness. What it terms “carbonic acid gas” is more usually known in English as carbon dioxide.

Standing Woman by Yasutaka Tsutsui, translated by David Lewis.
Mammals can be planted in the ground as dog- or catpillars, eventually turning into dog- and cattrees. A writer who has just finished a short story sets out to post it in a manpillar, who used to be a postman, and talks to him/it. Conversations like this are against the law. The writer then goes on to talk to his wife.

The Legend of the Paper Spaceship by Tetsu Yano, translated by Gene van Troyer and Tomoko Oshiro.
An apparently mad woman flies a paper aeroplane while naked. She is Osen, whom all the men of the village come to for sex, even when she has a son. The child, Emon, is burdened with telepathy and eventually blows away the cobwebs in Osen’s mind, discovering the cause of her madness and his inheritance.

Is there anything here that bespeaks difference? That we can point to as Japanese? Well, the style of a lot of the stories tends to parable or fable but that’s not unknown elsewhere. There is a certain distancing, of us being told things rather than shown them but some of this may be due to the filter of translation. What is present is a sense of the slightly altered, the askew, the not-quite-right. By contrast with most US SF the protagonists tend to be reactive or passive rather than proactive. There is also a tendency to take life as being contingent and prone to oddnesses. While no individual story would appear too out of place in any SF anthology, as a whole the collection definitely has a different feel from an Anglophone one.