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.

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.

Roc, 2003, 560p

It’s a weakness, I know, but I can’t resist Altered History.

This one is set in a world where the Spanish Armada wasn’t scattered by Protestant winds but instead succeeded in deposing Elizabeth of England who is now languishing in the Tower of London.

Aside: The invasion did not go beyond the Scottish border. How likely that would have been given that at the time the Scots were, to Spanish eyes, even more heretical than the English, is questionable. While it does make the title appropriate as the Romans used the word Britannia to describe the parts of (Great) Britain they held, it is not Turtledove’s focus.

Our main narrator is none other than William Shakespeare – a brave move by Turtledove as any comparisons can only be invidious. Cue, though, lots of Shakespearian allusions said by, or mostly to, the character in the book. The narration is shared with one of the Spanish invaders, Félix Lope De Vega y Carpio – a historical figure, a playwright himself, in Spanish literature second only to Cervantes and of whom, to my shame, I had never previously heard – who in the book thus admires Shakespeare but is also an inveterate ladies’ man. Another agonist is, of course, Christopher Marlowe. Yet more references accrue. There are walk-on parts for Elizabeth, Robert Cecil, William Cecil and Francis Bacon. Throughout, there is ample opportunity to indulge in a series of Elizabethan and Spanish epithets, botchy core, mooncalf, louse of a lazar, callet, trull, cunning woman, maricón, bruja, puta and phrases such as aroint thee, etc.

The plot concerns the secret engagement of Shakespeare by Robert Cecil (Lord Burghley) into writing a play, Boudicca, set in a previous invaded Britannia, the performance of which is intended to ignite a revolt against the Spaniards when the time is ripe. At the same time he is commissioned by the conquerors to write King Philip, a play in praise of the ailing Spanish King.

During all the subsequent strutting and fretting (Turtledove’s got me at it now) some of the characters wax a bit too poetical, often long-windedly, which tends to break up what flow there is. An English law enforcer, Constable Strawberry, constantly mangles his words – even more than Mrs Malaprop – as in the character Dogberry from Much Ado About Nothing, an affectation that in Turtledove’s hands I found tiresome.

Things do speed up markedly, though, when the old King dies, the time comes for the play to be put on and the inevitable revolt begins. It may not be a coincidence that there is little opportunity for blank versification in this portion of the novel.

Ruled Britannia is not anything other than a read for entertainment. A passing, or indeed close, acquaintance with Shakespeare, Marlowe and De Vega’s works may heighten the experience but, overall, don’t look for insight such as you would find in even the most minor of their efforts.

After writing this review I found a rather good summation of the book, its faults and felicities at http://laughingmeme.org/2003/03/26/ruled-britannia/.

Harper Perennial, 2008. 411p

Meyer Landsman is a homicide cop in the Jewish reservation of Sitka – in Alaska. This is a world in which the Soviet Union seems never to have existed, the atom bomb was dropped on Berlin in 1946 and Jews decisively thrown out of Palestine in 1948; after which they were granted limited rights to live in the northern US province. As a result these settlement Jews are known in some quarters as the Frozen Chosen. Along with his partner – a half-Jewish half-Tlingit Indian – Landsman is investigating the murder, apparently during an unfinished chess game, of the son of a local gang boss who is also a chief rabbi. To complicate matters Landsman’s ex-wife has just been installed as a replacement for his immediate boss.

The book contains a torrent of Yiddish words and phrases. So much so that the effect is a bit like being battered around the head with Jewishness. Enough already. In this context it is just as well that Chabon has a Jewish background as the frequency of the appearance of the epithet “yid” is astounding. This is casually racist language which I suspect no non-Jewish author would nowadays feel comfortable in using.

The book is certainly a page turner but I am slightly puzzled as to why it has received quite so much acclaim. (Not so much the SF awards and nominations; the genre has what can seem a desperate desire for validation from outside and leaps at the chance to reward mainstream writers who stray within its bounds.) Yes, the writing is fine and the characterisation effective, there is abundant Jewish wisecracking and a knowingness about the noirish elements. (Chabon was deliberately echoing Chandler.) But….

It’s a police procedural which morphs into a conspiracy thriller. Landsman is a maverick cop with a drink problem, a failed marriage and a cavalier attitude to standard procedures. So much so familiar from the average TV cop drama. Landsman even has his badge removed. This confiscation leads to him at one point relying on his membership of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union as he is forced to produce his “Sons Of Esau” card when questioning someone. This incident did, though, allow me to hope that the fear I had that the book’s title meant that Landsman and Gelbfish would get together again by the book’s end may have been unfounded. (In this regard the title The Frozen Chosen would have removed any such temptation from the author.) There is, too, the rather clunkingly named government agent Cashdollar and the the fact that the conspiracy Landsman uncovers is more than a little far-fetched. The mind-set of the US government depicted – eager for the fundamentalist end times – will be more familiar to American readers but seen from the UK it’s a piece of not-even-half-baked lunacy. (It is possible that noting such ideas only encourages them, Mr Chabon.)

A minor thread running through the book is the chess references. Landsman’s father had been a keen player but managed to destroy any appeal the game might have had for Landsman himself. Nevertheless he is still familiar enough with its practices to recognise the game at the murder scene as important.

One curiosity. I’d never seen flautist rendered as flutist before.

Even with my predisposition to altered histories the scenario and setting didn’t really ring true to me. Would the inhabitants of such a settlement really be so despised? Be looked down on so much by mainland USA? They are still, after all, Holocaust survivors. And would Sitka society have evolved the way Chabon depicts?

Despite these caveats I thoroughly enjoyed it. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is excellent stuff.

Tor, 2003

At this time of the year I’m knackered and not up to reading anything demanding. I wasn’t going to post about this one as I only read it to see how Turtledove dealt with a juvenile. However, I was amused to note that he gets rid of the parents by the end of chapter four. Classic children’s tale scenario.

It isn’t quite an Altered History story. The book’s young heroes are part of a culture that can travel to parallel worlds (known as Crosstime Traffic) to exchange trade goods slightly technologically advanced of those in the market world in return for grain which their own society processes into oil substitutes. They of course find themselves stranded in one of these worlds – a heavily bureaucratised descendant of an altered Roman Empire – and caught up in a siege. Turtledove is careful not to place them in too great danger, however.

In many ways Turtledove’s style is ideally suited to this sort of book as the prose is functional and undemanding but to my mind, even taking account of the target market, information is still repeated too often and his elaborations of the differences between the cultures are heavy handed. There was, though, a delightful explanation of the declension of nouns in Classical Latin plus a mention of the Ablative Absolute.

Though set in the late 21st century, the Crosstime Traffic culture appears not all that different from the present US – it still has Home Depots and WalMarts, for example – with no hint of other countries in its world. Despite knowledge of resource depletion in its own timeline its attitude to the other worlds is merely exploitative – although the characters do think they’re lucky they haven’t yet met a parallel world more advanced than their own.

I hope Turtledove’s young readers aren’t superstitious. The book has thirteen chapters.

Vintage, 2005

This is Roth’s Altered History, set in a 1940s America where Charles Lindbergh became President – apparently mainly as a result of taking to the air on the campaign trail in the Spirit of St Louis – then forged an understanding with Hitler and so kept the US out of World War 2. Given Roth’s lineage the book unsurprisingly deals with the implications of this outcome for America’s Jews, who are increasingly made to feel alien in their own land. As a result, the Roth trademarks from the other books of his that I have read (Portnoy’s Complaint and My Life As A Man,) viz masturbation, obsessive sexuality and male angst, are muted, if not absent.

The story is rendered more rooted than it might have been otherwise by the fact that our narrator is named Philip Roth. We are hence invited to believe that the family depicted is the author’s own from his youth, reimagined in the changed circumstances. This allows Roth the author, through the medium of Mr Roth the character, to express more forcibly the anger that any citizen must feel in being deprived arbitrarily of the benefits of citizenship.

Coming from a mainstream literary perspective Roth’s handling of this material is distinctive. A Science Fiction author would likely have approached the scenario from a completely different direction. And Roth does that rather annoying mainstream thing of giving us a potted biography of every character who happens to pop up whether we need this information or not. In this case it may be of everyone whom the actual young Roth met in the 1940s. There are also longueurs in the narrative which would be absent in a more plot driven Altered History.

At times, too, so much background is loaded into it that the novel reads more like a history book. Roth presumably believes that his setting is too far removed from the present day to be accessible without it. This approach culminates in the penultimate chapter where the book ceases to be a novel at all and instead descends into a – nevertheless thoroughly readable, Roth’s prose easily encompasses exposition – recitation of events and a farrago of ever wilder conspiracy theories all told by Philip at one remove, rather than experienced by him at first hand. The unlikely heroine of the piece (and this is not really a spoiler as there’s nothing there to spoil) turns out to be Mrs Lindbergh. That the impact of these events is brought home to Philip in the final chapter, through the medium of his fellow-travelling Aunt and some former neighbours, in no way remedies the egregiousness of this colossal info dump. Quite simply this is not the way to write a piece of fiction; high- or lowbrow.

It has to be said that not much in the way of jeopardy ever befalls the Roth family, most of it lies in Mr Roth’s mind. Yes, Mr Roth has to change his job to a poorer one; but there are no outrageous restrictions on their civil liberties, no concentration camps – only the intermittent attentions of an inquisitive FBI man and a later series of riots spilling over into pogroms which don’t affect the Roth family directly.

Ultimately the book is really a long discourse on what it means to be American (that is, I feel obliged to say, being a citizen of the US rather than born in the continent in which that country lies) and the inclusiveness that entails. Here is where more of the doubts creep in. Whatever Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic views may have been – and Roth goes some way to exculpate his Lindbergh from them – a fascist takeover in the US would surely have had other, more obvious, targets for dehumanisation. In the end, perhaps because he is unwilling to believe the worst of his fellow countrymen or else as a sop to their sensibilities Roth rather lets the US off the hook. This, I note, is in stark contrast to what the English SF writer Keith Roberts did for the UK in his excellent short story of a Nazi-dominated Britain, Weihnachtsabend.

Is The Plot Against America a commentary on the recent Bush administration? On how easy it is for freedoms to be subverted; how the price of freedom is eternal vigilance? If so, it is rather too diffuse to be effective.

I was so, so disappointed in this book. Its central idea has the potential to be huge but in his tight focus on the family Roth the author renders it far too small. Mainstream literature sometimes prides itself on illustrating the universal by anatomising the particular. In this context choosing as the narrative voice a boy between the ages of 7 and 9 is too limiting. The themes simply cannot be dealt with adequately from the young Philip’s perspective.

Before reading this I would have contended that Altered History in and of itself is always a subset of Science Fiction. The Plot Against America, however, is not SF, since Roth, within his plot, falls too short, even implicitly – never mind explicitly – of contrasting his scenario with what actually happened, and the book is the poorer for it.

But after the novel finishes we are provided with postscripts on the actual lives of historical characters mentioned in the text. Part of the joy of reading Altered History is in recognising figures such as these in their new context; one of the drawbacks is you might miss a few in the passing. Roth’s end notes can only be there to bolster his fiction; to say, “Look at the research I did – or the prodigious memory I have.” Had the novel been written halfway adequately these notes would be superfluous.

NEL, 2001

After Living Next Door To The God Of Love I thought I’d better try something a bit lighter. But Colonisation 3 still took me a while to read (mainly because I’m knackered at this time of year.)

It was business as usual. Two dimensional characters doing things purely for plot purposes and this time it became even more obvious there are far too many arbitrary connections between them for plausibility. Plus my suspicions as to where the plot was going were confirmed. Yet it all does slide down so easily. However, the book didn’t so much end as stop suddenly. Plenty of loose ends left flapping around. Another Lizards series to come? (Yes, I know there’s Homeward Bound, which for the sake of completeness I will read sometime.)

Still, for those who know Turtledove’s background he did slip in a rather surprising joke about the utter uselessness of the study of the history of Byzantium. It was almost worth the time investment in reading the book. Almost.

Being interested in both Science Fiction and history I just love that sub-genre of SF which comes under the description of Alternate History but I must say I dislike the term itself.

Alternate of course means “by turns.” Alternate History ought, then, to mean history that occurred, changed, then reverted to its first course, then back to the second, etc. etc.

Alternative is no use either as it means “the other of two” – of only two; and of course there are myriad possible scenarios for history as it wasn’t, not merely two.

Proper [ie serious] historians denote Alternate History speculations (in which they do indulge themselves from time to time) by the term counterfactual history which, while being correct in essence, is a bit Latinate and unintuitive, not exactly snappy.

Which leaves us with what?

I know it’s probably too late now, but can I make a plea that we start calling the stuff Altered History?

Baen, 2005

I’m a sucker for this sort of stuff. Alternate History, as it’s called, is where historical events are re-imagined as they might have been, but weren’t. Here the focus, as in Alternate Generals I and II, is on military matters.

The main interest in tales like these is on the speculation. In this volume we get; Joan of Arc not burned, but re-tried, and inadvertently starting her own religion; Mark Antony winning at Actium but suffering ever more attempts to restore the Republic, MacArthur captured on Corregidor and, in a different story, it is Eisenhower who is charged with defending the Philippines; Gengis Khan converts to Judaism and instead of a Pleasure Dome is building a new Great Temple to hold The Ark Of The Covenant; Robert E Lee, victor at Gettysburg, is ambassador to Britain when a second existential crisis hits the Confederacy; a US Special Forces team is sent outside the chain of command by President Nelson Rockefeller to assassinate Ho Chi Minh in his cave hideout near the Chinese border.

Enjoyment of a story is not necessarily related to how much background knowledge of the situation the reader already has. In The Burning Spear At Twilight Mike Resnick has Jomo Kenyatta use propagandistic methods to gain Kenya independence. I’m afraid I didn’t know enough about the Mau-Mau “emergency” to be sure where all the speculation lay but the story succeeded on its own terms.

Harry Turtledove’s Shock And Awe needs some comment. He has Jesus of Nazareth – biblical quotations and all – as a rebel leader (of “ragheads,” to their opponents) against the Romans (who are “western imperialists.”) The conceit of using modern day language like this, and in the Roman soldiers’ mouths, in order to point out the parallels quickly wears thin and is a rather heavy handed way of eliciting sympathy for the underdog. And did Turtledove really intend to invite comparisons of Saddam Hussein with Christ? At one point we could have had an “I am Spartacus” moment but in the end Turtledove sticks too closely to biblical outcomes for the story to be satisfying.

Brad Linaweaver’s A Good Bag features the theosophist Madame Blavatsky but is extremely lightweight and really no more than drivel.

Coming from this side of the Atlantic I always find it amusing when the British are the enemy. In Roland J Green’s “It Isn’t Every Day Of The Week…” the war of 1812 follows a different course. The story culminates in a British invasion of Georgia. Due to the tale’s epistolary nature we are told the events rather than shown them and as a result the story doesn’t quite cohere. In this history the British don’t seem to burn the White House….

As a Scot, I found Lillian Stewart Carl’s Over The Sea From Skye more interesting. A defeated Duke of Cumberland flees Bonnie Prince Charlie’s followers and ends up on Skye where he encountters Flora MacDonald. The story itself is superfluously topped and tailed by extracts from Boswell’s journal which seem to be there only to shoehorn in a reference to the still loyal American colonies, and also has an unnecessary afterword. The author also suggests the original Union Jack incorporated bits to represent all four constituent nations of the union.

This would have been highly unlikely. In reality the Irish cross of St Patrick was only incorporated in 1801 and the gold and black Welsh cross of St David (whose colours would clash with the red, white and blue) never has been.

Esther Friesner’s First Catch Your Elephant, about the reasons for Hannibal abandoning the Alps crossing, is meant to be humorous but is tonally askew, psychologically unconvincing and, in the end, succeeds only in being annoying.

Not so much a good bag as a mixed bag, then. Too many of the stories strove for relevance in the actual world, but on the whole the book was diverting. Don’t pick up Alternate Generals III if you’re looking for literary excellence, though.

New English Library, 2000

I found this one a bit of a slog. A move from the sublime (The Execution Channel) to the cor blimey.
The set up is that extraterrestrial lizards interrupted World War 2 in 1941/2 and 18 years or so later are established across the warmer parts of the Earth and also occupy China, Australia and Poland. See my review of the previous volume in this series, Colonisation: Second Contact, for further details of this background.

I know new entrants to Turtledove’s scenario require some infill from previous volumes but we surely don’t need so many reminders of lizard (and human characters’) behaviour – or is it just the author keeping track? It’s as if Turtledove relies on cue cards for each of his dramatis personae (et saura) and so (forgetting we know this stuff already?) reminds us of that character’s particular tic each time we encounter them again. This gets wearing after a while. And would new readers start here? Surely they would go to Colonisation: Second Contact first; or even World War:In The Balance.

The new slants to the story arc in Down To Earth are the introduction to Earth, from the lizard’s world, of crops and both domestic and food varieties of animals, with the likelihood this presents of concomitant destructive effects on Earth’s ecosystems, and the attempt by humans to raise two lizard hatchlings from eggs to adulthood. But not much actually happens. There is a real sense of marking time here. Relationships are extended or made but the plot doesn’t advance far, if at all. It is the second in a trilogy after all.

I was trying to work out why the Colonisation series doesn’t work even in the limited way that Turtledove’s World War/Balance books did. It’s not just that the lizards appear too thick, too hidebound, to be technological spacefarers. It’s also that the war aspects are largely missing; until nearly the end of Down To Earth there is no actual combat in the Colonisation series, and even then we only get two scenes of fighting from the latest war (between the Third Reich and the lizards) with the earlier humans’ rebellion in China not described in terms of fire fights. As a result there is little by way of tension.

Turtledove’s writing remains functional but rarely rises above it. The breaks between chapters appear to be placed arbitrarily or maybe just come after a set number of words – there is no structuring to the chaptering as such. The characters are there only to string the story along. They rarely if ever come to life, resolutely refusing to fill anything other than plot functions.

Also in Down To Earth the emphasis on Jewish experiences finally does come over too strongly.

Though the prose reads smoothly enough there is no real meat to it. I realise Turtledove’s concerns are elsewhere but this is a missed opportunity to speculate on what such an alien invasion could have meant for mid, and late, 20th century Earth.

However there were still enough teasers for me to want to know where the story is going, especially as I wish my suspicions to be confirmed.

Part 3 of Colonisation over Easter, then.