He was a prominent SF writer from my youth when I devoured the SF shelves on my local library. As a result of reading them then I do not have any of his books on my shelves though I particularly remember The Death of Grass (which was always a title I thought cried out for parody) – a catastrophe novel which was much grittier than most.

He had a swathe of pseudonyms but, as John Christopher, is most well-known for his series of books featuring the Tripods (a full list, along with his other John Christopher novels, is on Fantastic Fiction) which were made into a BBC TV series.

John Christopher (Christopher Samuel Youd):- 16/4/1922- 3/2/2012. So it goes.

I have fond memories of this author’s 1972 novel The Patterns of Chaos which had some humorous aspects. The Survival Game is from four years later and unfortunately shows its age.

Two star kings are in dispute over whether or not to join those aligned with Earth in a federation. To resolve matters they agree to have their respective champions engage in a game of survival on the dangerous planet Avida. King Oontara chooses an Earthman, Colonel Bogaert, as his (unbeknowing) champion. His rival King Xzan has chosen a former resident of Avida as his. Meanwhile a Pretender to the throne of the emperor Kanizar has taken advantage of his absence to launch an attack against his capital planet. Kanizar’s wife and children escape and accidentally become Bogaert’s companions while they are trying to get to safety on Earth and stow away on the ship on which he is hi-jacked to Avida.

I suppose we are to take from the book’s title that the bigger game in which all the civilisations (I use the word loosely) in the novel are engaged is of survival but the treatment can not carry such a weight. Neither is the staleness of the premise the only problematic feature, the characterisation is uniformly minimal – not to say non-existent. There is an attempt at humour, of a sort, as Bogaert is sometimes referred to as ‘Colonel Bogey’.

The Survival Game is the sort of story where people from Earth are called Terrans and are infinitely resourceful and competent, effortlessly running rings around other inhabitants of the galaxy. In the past 35 years we have, thankfully, gone beyond that.

It’s just possible that this was a send-up of a style of writing around at the time, but if so I do not recall it and it does not read as pastiche. File it in ‘of its time’ and move on. Perhaps I should not go back to look at The Patterns of Chaos.

PS I noticed on Library Thing that The Survival Game has 4½ stars. Come on guys! You have to be kidding.

Astoundingly like an eye, isn’t it?

I’m reminded of an SF novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

Gary’s aim is to bring back to life some otherwise out of print books never before made available for e-readers.

Most of the projected releases are by authors known to him – and to me, it must be said. I’m particularly glad to see Angus McAllister appear on the list.

I don’t have an e-reader myself (I’m a bit of a Luddite; I prefer reading ink on paper, where it won’t be a calamity if you drop it in the bath) but if I had I would be buying these.

*or whatever the equivalent e-thingy is.

The book is set several generations after the devastating Gene Wars of the late twenty-first century. Varieties exist of humans genetically altered by what Sullivan terms virii (though why “viruses” would not have sufficed is difficult to see.) Unaltered, true humans cannot survive on Earth in the open but are confined to reservations, known as rez. Society is now run by a group of disembodied Heads – known as “the Pickled Brains” – who were found in the ruins of the buildings occupied by Ingenix, the company largely responsible for the Wars.

A series of interplanetary portals has been found at Underkohling, somewhere in the outermost reaches of the Solar System, from some of which no-one returns. The fugitive bosses of Ingenix were thought to have escaped through one of these. When indications show that travel back through this gate may be possible Daire Morales goes to investigate and is drawn through the portal.

On Earth, Jenae Kim, an altermode who has gills and so can breathe underwater – such altermoders can also communicate telepathically with dolphins – is employed by the Heads to help decode the data from the Underkohling gate and is aided by her dolphin pod.

Morales finds a strange world beyond the gate, inhabited by children and adolescents who only have time to reproduce before a “distortion” changes them into something inhuman and inimical. Those who show signs of distorting are driven out before they can inflict damage. The surroundings of this world – the lywyn – are a repository of memory mediated by the “ghosts” of those who have distorted. (Lethe is classical Greek for forgetfulness and was one of the rivers of the underworld.)

Jenae Kim gradually becomes drawn into conflict with the Heads and the threads of the novel draw together with a hijacked expedition to the gate.

This was Sullivan’s first novel and as such it is impressive. The main characters’ motivations are comprehensible and distinct.

There is always a problem in such a scenario with how to depict non-humans in the round. Too often they can be one or two-dimensional at best. Here the altered humans known as One Eyes are not particularly fleshed out – to be fair they are mainly background – but most of the children beyond the gate are merely ciphers while the main agent in this setting, their leader Tsering, has an attribute which is largely due to plot necessity and alters as a due result.

You may recall I had not been overly impressed with Sullivan’s Someone to Watch Over Me. Her last year’s BSFA Award nominee Lightborn was more engaging – and shows an interesting parallel with Lethe as regards motifs – but I still would probably not have bought this but for sighting it in a second hand bookshop (in Haworth.) It is good stuff, though.

The full lists can be found here.

The fiction nominees are:-

Best Novel:-

Cyber Circus by Kim Lakin-Smith (Newcon Press)

Embassytown by China Miéville (Macmillan)

The Islanders by Christopher Priest (Gollancz)

By Light Alone by Adam Roberts (Gollancz)

Osama by Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Of which I have (so far) read one.

Best Short Fiction:-

The Silver Wind by Nina Allan (Interzone 233, TTA Press)

The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell (Asimov’s, July)

Afterbirth by Kameron Hurley (Kameron Hurley’s own website)

Covehithe by China Miéville (The Guardian)

Of Dawn by Al Robertson (Interzone 235, TTA Press)

I have read none of these as yet but only The Copenhagen Interpretation is not available online via the BSFA page linked to above. Presumably the booklet of nominated stories that the BSFA has produced for the past two years will be repeated this time around, too.

In his recent Bengal Station trilogy Brown has been revisiting some of the conventions of Pulp SF. He has also treated us to a Big Dumb Object novel in Helix. In Guardians of the Phoenix, he has turned his attention to the disaster novel, or rather, to the post-Apocalypse tale. Here too, though, there are faint echoes of Pulp SF in the Phoenix of the title.

The Earth is parched, the oceans boiled away. Resource wars and plagues have reduced humanity to dreams – and fears – of the old times. In a handful of small communities sparsely spattered over Europe a few surviving humans cling on, barely scratching a living from the harsh, sun-battered environment.

To begin with there are three main viewpoint narratives. With large animals extinct and plants beyond scarce, Paul traps lizards on the girders of the Eiffel Tower to feed his dying mentor Elise. In Aubenas the locals net bats for food and their leader quietly supplements their diet with a little cannibalism. A band of renegades has kidnapped the daughter of one of the elders of the decimated community in Copenhagen.

The action kicks off when the renegades turn up in Paris to seek out the rumoured food horde in a bank vault. A group from Copenhagen has pursued them. In the resulting gunfight the chief renegade, Hans, escapes and Paul, who had fallen into his clutches, is rescued.

Since Elise has died Paul joins the Copenhagen group’s onward trip to drill for water below what had been the Bay of Biscay. Hans returns to his former home in Aubenas just in time to join an expedition to Bilbao to find the remains of an abandoned project designed to save humanity from extinction.

As usual with Brown the focus is mainly on the characters, who are well rounded – the relationship between Dan and Kath from Copenhagen is particularly well laid out and Hans makes a convincing psychopath – though Paul, even given his earlier relative isolation, is perhaps still a little too naïve. Given the above the book’s plot has to follow certain lines but there are twists and turns along the way. The resolution is saved from being a bit of a deus ex machine by very short premonitory chapters featuring members of the Bilbao project, which however give the Phoenix game away somewhat.

As an adventure story the novel works admirably but I found I couldn’t quite buy the scenario – an Earth where the water has evaporated from the oceans would admittedly have a consequent runaway Greenhouse Effect but unless all the atmosphere had gone along with them it would surely be more like Venus, constantly overcast, and hence sunburn would be no problem. (I also wondered how in a parched world as depicted would plants be able to photosynthesise and thus keep O₂ levels up? Though animals to breathe it in have of course mostly disappeared.) These quibbles aside however Guardians of the Phoenix is fine entertainment.

(Plus 4 pages of acknowledgements, 1 page “about the author” and 24 pages containing three short stories from winners of a competition to set a story in the milieu of Beukes’s previous novel Moxyland, an unnecessary addition to my mind.)

I have previously lamented the fact that the general run of fantasy novels seem to be set in a default mediævality and that no-one is trying to write fantasy in a contemporary setting. Well Zoo City is taken by some to be SF – it was on the BSFA Award shortlist for best novel last year – but to my mind fantasy would be a better description. In particular magic is an essential component of the setting and plot. Yet the novel takes place in the present day! (Albeit a present day thoroughly transmogrified.)

Zinzi December is an aposymbiont – who are derogatorily termed as animalled. Aposymbionts are individuals who, as a result of committing a serious crime, have gained an animal companion with whom they have a psychic link, in the process acquiring an attribute. This is not quite the same as in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which Beukes does refer to in the text, as in his universe the animals begin attachment at birth. Zinzi’s companion is a sloth and her attribute is sensing lost objects. She can follow psychic threads to recover things. This is her apparent job but to pay her debts she moonlights as an email scammer. She is engaged by two rather unsavoury individuals (both animalled) to find a lost pop star and is drawn into a world of intrigue, backstabbing and murder.

Narrated in an urgent present tense, apart from the interpolations of cod press articles and psychological papers fleshing out the background, the novel is of a piece with the thriller feel of much near future SF. But Beukes is good at this – very good indeed – the gritty realism makes her scenario entirely believable while you’re immersed in it. That the novel takes place in South Africa may be one factor in its appeal. African phrases and words are utilised frequently but not so as to obfuscate or confuse. The acceptance of magic is a given (as it may be in “our” South Africa.)

Where the story veers away from thriller SF into fantasy is that the transformation of the world to one where animals can become “familiars” is not given much of a rational explanation.

Zinzi and her boyfriend Benoît, whose animal is a mongoose, are well drawn, nuanced characters with full backstories which mercifully emerge from the story as it is told rather than being dumped on the reader. Others are equally believable.

This was fun, sharp and (the misuse of pre-empt aside) well written stuff.

It’s not often a novel is concerned primarily with language but Embassytown is that exception. Unlike in Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue series, however, Miéville does not merely dally with the idea of language and translation but instead embeds this concern in the narrative; indeed the plot’s resolution is dependent on language and communication.

On a planet named Arieka, at the edge of known space, the Bremen colony of Embassytown is a habitable enclave surrounded by the otherwise poisonous demesnes of the indigenous Ariekei who are known as Hosts. Their language (Miéville emphasise its importance to the novel by naming it Language rather than Ariekan) contains no facility for lying and also requires the simultaneous uttering of two words/thoughts in order to be understood. This leads to a typographical representation oddity which I cannot fully reproduce here and is merely one illustration within the book of Miéville’s fascination with duality, a seam mined repeatedly in his earlier novels. “Twinned” Ambassadors referred to as doppels are identicalised individuals, kept identical by regular cleansing sessions which remove the superficial blemishes picked up between these ablutions, have been tested for empathy and trained to interact with the locals by speaking simultaneously. They have names such as ArnOld, RanDolph, CalVin, MagDa, CharLott or JoaQuin and are always referred to in the plural in constructions such as “the Ambassador were” – except when their components are on their own. The first three sections of the book, up to the initial crisis, are also twinned, with succeeding chapters respectively headed as Formerly or Latterday. Here, the difficulties of communicating with the Hosts and the struggles of a few of them to adopt human modes of speech are laid out. The remainder of the book deals with the fall-out from that endeavour.

Narrator Avice Benner Cho is a former immerser – a traveller in the immer, the void between planets – who, unusually for one of her kind, has returned to Arieka. Like many Embassytowners she has been made into a simile (she is the girl who ate what she was told, rather than what she wanted.) These human similes help the Ambassadors to talk with the Hosts. Avice’s status is, of course, vital to the plot’s development.

Disappointingly in a book so concerned with language, Miéville somehow manages (twice) to use grit where gritted is surely preferable but overall Embassytown is impressive. It may well be a front runner for this year’s BSFA Award, or even the Hugo. It is not flawless, though. Too many Ambassadors are indistinguishable (not in themself, but between them – you see where this twinning thing makes comment problematic) and the characterisation and motivations can be sketchy. That the Hosts are mere plot carriers is more forgiveable as they are not human and Miéville has taken pains to underline the difficulty of cross-species understanding.

Overall, though, as an intellectual exercise, an exploration of the idea of language as a defining cultural construct, the book succeeds admirably.

I have now posted my review of this anthology – first published in Interzone 233, Mar-Apr 2011 – onto my side bar under the “My Interzone Reviews” heading.