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.

The BSFA Awards for fiction this year coincided with my views.

Chris Priest’s The Islanders won the best novel.

And Paul Cornell’s The Copenhagen Interpretation the short story award.

John Meaney’s compering of the awards has attracted some criticism.

the guardian* reported only on the novel award, unsurprisingly focusing on Chris Priest’s Clarke Award comments.

*I hate that lower case!

This was, I think, the other deco building I spotted in Morecambe but didn’t have time to photograph 3 years ago. It’s on the seafront, heading northwards from the Midland Hotel.

But there was more. Much more.

Almost the first Art Deco building we came upon this time though was what looked like a toilet block!

Further still along the front was this:-

There was also a deco pub down a side street,

the Lloyds Bank building,

Morecambe Visitor Centre,*

a deco style bridge between two buildings,

and some nice deco-ish glazing on a disused hotel.

There may have been more still but we only stayed one night.

Also on the sea front was a warren of a second hand bookshop, absolutely stuffed to the gunwhales – the SF was mostly old stuff and stacked high making exploring it a bit problematic. The good lady secured a couple of purchases of vintage crime, though.

*Edited to add It’s not a visitor centre. The Morecambe Visitor is the local newspaper. See the first comment on this post.

As well as publishing his own book Adrift on the Sea of Rains, Ian Sales has been editing the anthology Rocket Science which is being launched this weekend under the imprint of Mutation Press.

Mutation Press’s previous venture, the anthology Music for Another World, was full of high quality content. I expect no less of Rocket Science.

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.

They give with one hand and take away with the other….

Also in Saturday’s guardian review was the first part of the Guardian Book Club feature on Robert Harris’s Fatherland, wherein John Mullan says “Speculative fiction” might once have been synonymous with SF but now more strictly refers to an alternative, but plausible, historical scenario.

More strictly? There is a definition of speculative fiction which excludes SF?

This seems to me to be a dismissal of the more explicitly SF altered histories. Is Mullan attempting to distance his preferred examples from what he sees as less worthy; or am I too sensitive?

Nevertheless I had to laugh when Mullan immediately wrote that a modern classic of speculative fiction is Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. That book not only failed as a novel, it failed as an Altered History (for my review see here). Can a story where history is restored swiftly to the “right” path really be considered speculative? Is it not then an author’s ill-thought out musings, onanistic even?

I’ve not read Fatherland but from the description it seems to invest more into its scenario than Roth ever did in his.

In that extent Fatherland is SF, and Roth’s book isn’t.

An article by Tom Holland in Saturday’s guardian review about the aftermath of the Roman Empire argued that there was no sudden change from classical to mediæval times, no instant forgetting, but rather a long interregnum in which the rise of Islam was an important feature.

Holland points out that the transition was all a messy business, triggering the evolution of legends of various sorts, which in Britain involved the King Arthur stories plus the evocation of elves and orcs to account for the gigantic ruins of Roman buildings. He sees Tolkien’s endeavours as an attempt to restore these myths to the culture.

The article surprisingly, to my mind, mentions Science Fiction favourably in that Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy and Herbert’s Dune sequence both recognised what Holland sees as the salient aspect of the transformation somewhat before it gained foothold in academe.

When I read the books it was easy to recognise that Asimov’s trilogy was modelled on the fall of the Roman Empire but it is the character of the Mule that Holland finds interesting – a Muhammad like figure with unusual powers. (That the Mule upset the apple cart of the Foundation’s “psychohistory” suggests to me a reflection of Asimov’s world-view.)

The parallels of the Dune sequence with Arab culture were of course unmistakeable even as a very young teenager. Paul Atreides (Muad’Dib) as Muhammad was at that time a step beyond me but is unmissable now. Herbert did seem to be in sympathy with Arab culture if not necessarily the religion it spawned. At the time I took his critique to be of the phenomenon of religion as a whole rather than Islam per se and I see no reason to alter it.

(The article further ponders the historical evidence surrounding the life of Muhammad, a matter on which I am not in a position to judge.)

Historically, the Roman Empire’s fall cannot be seen as anything other than significant. That authors still continue to see it as a template within which to set their stories – Holland mentions Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica as other not so rigorous examples – is testament to the endurance of its legacy.