Corvus, 2012, 404p. This is the novel that has recently won the Clarke Award.

Family (there is only one, hence no qualifying article is required) lives in Circle Valley on Eden, a planet with no external light source save that of the faint Starry Swirl in the sky. The forbidding mountainous surroundings are known as Snowy Dark and no-one has ever climbed over them – nor wanted to. From the founding pair Tommy and Angela, marooned when their companions took the Landing Veekle up to the damaged spaceship Defiant to try to get back to Earth and help, Family has grown to over 500 members. Respect for tradition and its Oldest keep Family’s way of life as it has always been. But life is a continuing struggle. John Redlantern has realised that someday the food will run out. The novel describes the consequences of his actions in breaking Family tradition.

This reworking of the Adam and Eve story could have been a disaster (it is one of the hoariest clichés in SF) and there is a certain inevitability about John’s behaviour; we know it must be so to drive the plot. We also know that someone will eventually climb over Snowy Dark.

However, Beckett has peopled his novel with some compelling characters – not only John Redlantern, but also Tina Spiketree and clever, clawfooted Jeff, who is given to saying, “We are here. We really are here.” (Apart from claw feet the main genetic consequence of the inbreeding unavoidable in Family’s situation is in severe hare-lips, “batfaces.”) Moreover at the conclusion the plot also delivers a twist so that we and the characters are forced to reappraise their situation. And a nice touch is the reworking of the old phrase about Tom, Dick and Harry into a Family profanity.

The main viewpoint narrators are John and Tina but others also have the odd chapter. The frustrations John and his fellow youngsters feel at the restrictions and boredom of the AnyVirsies and Strornies where Family’s past is mythologised (mentions of telly vision, kee boards and lecky-trickity serve only to confuse the youngsters) or where disputes are resolved, are well articulated and so is the point of view of the adults who cling to what they know. The young count in wombtimes rather than years and are upbraided for it. The transition of the matriarchal, consensual, more or less cohesive Family life where even the concept of rape is unknown – there is nevertheless a lot of relatively guilt free sex – to a more confrontational, male dominated future of strife, of events allowing the domineering to take over, is a key one.

Beckett’s story telling brio overcomes any nagging doubts at the scenario. (There can be no photosynthesis here, so what kind of carbohydrates would be available? Would the local flora and fauna really be compatible with humans? Would they be comprised of the same amino acids as on Earth, allowing them to be eaten successfully? Would the necessary vitamins be present? Who is this story being told to? These have to be discounted, for without these conditions there would be no story for us to read – and the last applies to any work of fiction.)

While the characters frequently repeat adjectives for emphasis – cold, cold; dark, dark etc – the issues of inadequate proofreading which slightly marred the readability of Beckett’s previous novels Marcher and The Holy Machine are more notable by their absence here.

Whether read as Science Fiction or simply as fiction Dark Eden is good stuff, well worth its Clarke Award. I suspect it will stay with me a long time.

This issue should be out now. It contains my review of Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner.

I’ll shortly be publishing here my review from Interzone 245 of John Scalzi’s Redshirts. It was ….. interesting.

Edited to add. I see Jim Steel has informed us the issue will out in the next few days.

On Saturday we went to the Christain Aid booksale which is held every two years at St Andrew’s and St George’s Church, George Street, Edinburgh. It was mobbed.

This was my haul:-

The Hoose O Haivers took my fancy just because of its title – it contains short stories by Matthhew Fitt, Susan Rennie and James Robertson.

Rhoda Lerman’s The Book of the Night is a Womens’ Press SF publication from 1986.

The Art Nouveau and Art Deco book was spotted by the good lady (who herself bought 13 books!) It has some lovely illustrations.

Fleck is a verse comedy by Alasdair Gray.

Palace Walk is the first of Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo trilogy.

Goodness knows when I’ll get round to reading them.
The Hoose O Haivers and Fleck are quite short so I could fit them in easily enough I suppose. The Mahfouz looks like a long project though.

The book sale continues till Friday.

Orbit, 2013, 378p.

Brookmyre’s oeuvre has up to now been the crime/thriller novel, albeit tinged with humour. Bedlam is his first foray into Science Fiction. I came across an as yet unlent copy in my local library so thought, why not?

Medical technology company Neurosphere’s employee Ross Baker, shortly after discovering by chance his girl-friend is pregnant and without talking to her about it, has a new type of brain-scan and wakes up inside a computer game which he quickly recognises as he was an avid gamer in his past. Not long after this he is killed there but immediately “respawns” to start all over again. He soon finds a way out into a series of virtual worlds which are in the process of takeover by an organisation dubbed the Integrity which is citing a phenomenon known as “corruption” to seek by force to keep these worlds forever separate one from another. In these digital adventures Baker adopts his former multiple game-player name of Bedlam. There are, though, occasional chapters set in the “real” world where Baker is/was in conflict with his boss over the rights of digital consciousnesses.

My reservations about stories set within virtual worlds were set out in the third paragraph of my comments on Iain Banks’s Surface Detail. Briefly, if there is no real jeopardy, if there is no danger of death, what threat is there? Beyond tedium of course.

Unfortunately most of Bedlam is set within the virtual worlds and as such is seriously unbalanced. I could not suspend my disbelief and found myself longing for the “real” world. In this regard the pregnancy element is a rather transparent way to try to enlist our sympathies with the digitally trapped Baker. Moreover Brookmyre’s style at times jars badly with the scenario. SF and humour are notoriously ill-matched bedfellows. A successful amalgam of the two is very difficult to achieve. Brookmyre has made little or no concession to the peculiar demands of writing SF and has adopted a similar tone to that in his thrillers. There were also signs of the book being pitched towards the US market (tic-tac-toe, medieval, asshole.)

Brookmyre’s typical readers may enjoy the virtual scenes – or not – but as SF Bedlam is perfunctory at best. Perhaps gamers will take to it.

Last year it was Chris Priest who incited controversy over the Clarke Award, this year it seems to be the judges themselves – for not including a book by a woman on their shortlist.

The contending books are:-

Nod by Adrian Barnes (Bluemoose)
Dark Eden by Chris Beckett (Corvus)*
Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway (William Heinemann)
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Headline)
Intrusion by Ken MacLeod (Orbit)*
2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)*

I’ve read the last two of these and Dark Eden is on the TBR pile.

The overlap with this year’s BSFA Awards novel short list is strong (asterisked titles) but only 2312 is also up for the Hugo.

I’m a bit surprised that M John Harrison’s Empty Space didn’t make the list, it’s the sort of book that Clarke Award juries tend to like.

Whippleshield Books, 2013, 80p.

This is the second in the Apollo Quartet, the first of which, Adrift on the Sea of Rains, has just won the BSFA Award.

Once again we have an Altered History. Here, Alexei Leonov was the first man on the Moon but the Russians quickly gave up going there to concentrate on Space Stations. Our hero, Brigadier General Bradley Elliott, USAF, though, was the first – and only – man on Mars, in 1979. What he found there drives the plot as he is recalled to NASA twenty years later to undertake a faster than light trip to Gliese 376 to investigate what has happened to the colony there.

As in Adrift, there are two strands interleaved with each other (which is not unusual) and tricks with typography but again the Glossary which follows rounds out the tale – even if one part of it appears to contradict a piece of dialogue in the text. That latter could have been a deliberate misdirection, though and a Coda explaining the central conception and the FTL drive is a less successful addition to the formula.

With his utilisation of the glossary Sales seems to have found a new way to tell the space exploration story. It is of course a species of info dumping but he has arguably turned the necessity into a strength.

He is very good on the nuts and bolts of space travel, especially if you can thole the alphabet soup of NASA terminology. A list of abbreviations is given to help with this. Elliott is a complex enough figure though the other characters are less fleshed out; but in an 80 page book only 47 of which are actual story it could hardly be otherwise.

I’ve been out and about all day and was shocked and saddened to hear on the car radio that Iain Banks is suffering from terminal cancer.

I’ve only met Iain a few times but he was always unfailingly polite and good company, not to mention supportive.

Though it seems there is one more novel to come he will be much missed in the UK SF community and the wider literary world.

Long time readers may remember my post where I said it was Iain’s first SF novel Consider Phlebas that demonstrated that being Scottish was no longer a barrier to having SF published and as a result he represented something of a role model for me.

My thoughts are with him and his loved ones.

Sandstone Press, 2011, 240 p.

It’s nearly Clarke Award time again so I thought I’d sample last year’s winner.

While having some of the trappings of Science Fiction and a scenario which would appear to be genre The Testament of Jesse Lamb doesn’t read like SF. The experience is more like that of a literary novel, the treatment focuses on Jessie rather than on the Maternal Death Syndrome (MDS) that is the SF element. While there is no sense of wonder here it is nevertheless easy to see why the Clarke judges might choose it. And the Clarke Award has a history of rewarding the “bordering on SF.”

The viral disease MDS – an apparently terrorist-disseminated sort of hybrid of AIDS and CJD for which no-one has claimed responsibility – has spread all over the world and means pregnancy is a sentence of death for the mother, whose brain spongifies over the nine months gestation. Despite there being those who think humanity should accept its fate various avenues are being tried to find a cure or remedy in an attempt to ensure live births but the main one focused on in the book has volunteers known as Sleeping Beauties kept in a coma throughout their pregnancies, incubating frozen embryos which have been vaccinated against MDS. But, of course, these hosts will die after the birth.

Narrator Jessie Lamb is a teenager with bickering parents and the usual adolescent angsts. Her fretting about whether her friend Baz likes her or not and her fears about his dealings with another girl called Rosa are well handled and utterly convincing. This feels like the memoirs of a teenager in a terrible time.

We first meet Jessie while she is being held captive, this segment being printed in a sparse sans-serif typeface. While incarcerated she starts to write down her backstory, the chapters of which are rendered in a more reader friendly font. The reasons for Jessie’s plight become apparent long before they are revealed in the narrative. Captivity segments and their typeface pop up irregularly throughout her story until the envoi.

The ramifications of MDS for society and the future are explored through Jessie’s father, a scientist at a Research Clinic, her Aunt Maddy, lovelorn and childless, and her relationships and interactions with her friends and those she meets.

The circumstance of Jessie’s father being a scientist at a clinic researching into MDS and its alleviation was a bit too pat. There was a sense of targets being set up only so they could be knocked down, tinged with more than a dose of anti-Science.

There was a “Scott” free. Isn’t that normally rendered with one “t”? (It is apparently from the old Norse skot, a tax, via Middle English scotfreo, exempt from royal tax.) Rogers also has a habit of writing “to not” rather than “not to.” And she renders email as e mail. Also strange in a book so otherwise steeped in Britishness is the use of the Usian “different than” at one point rather than the more usual “different from.”

Notwithstanding these quibbles, Jessie herself and her feelings, the awkwardnesses of adolescence, are beautifully conveyed. This is undeniably a superior read.

Via Jim Steel’s blog we have this year’s Awards as given on tor.com.

Jack Glass by Adam Roberts won for best novel. (I have not yet read this.)

Best short story was Adrift on the Sea of Rains by Ian Sales.

I’m delighted for Ian.

Best Artwork was Blacksheep for the cover of Jack Glass

Best Non-Fiction winner was The World SF Blog, Chief Editor Lavie Tidhar.

Congratulations to all the winners.

Edited to add:- I have now added the World SF Blog to my sidebar.

Cosmos Books, 2008, 304 p.

A drug called slip allows people, shifters, to move between parallel universes – which are arranged in a tree shape. Charles Bowen is an immigration officer in a universe (not ours) where his main job is to deal with shifters in an effort to eradicate the problem they represent. Here the poor and unemployed are kept in sink estates known as Social Inclusion Zones from which it is difficult to break free. Unusually, and all the more welcome for it, the main setting for the novel is the Bristol area. Bowen likes to think of himself as a guardian of the borders – between universes in his case – the “Marcher” of the title. He is himself attracted to shifting without at first quite knowing why.

Shifters are treated as criminals because they can do what they like and then evade capture by shifting. To be fair some of them follow the cult of Dunner, based on Norse mythology, and are dedicated to mayhem. These misfits commit a massacre in Clifton which allows the government to crack down hard on Social Inclusion Zones and any shifters – cultees or not – who are captured.

In the chapters written (in first person) from Bowen’s viewpoint his relationship with a social worker called Jazamine and his part in her shifting are treated as haunting him but the relationship itself is only portrayed at its beginning, its end (her shift) and otherwise in snapshots. Other sections are written in third person but as narrated by Bowen.

The proof–reading is at times inadequate. At various points a word required to make complete sense of the sentence is missing, “He was (a) decent man,” “He looked as if he’d (be) more comfortable,” “But (it) was hard to turn away,” and there are places where the author has clearly changed one part of a phrase or sentence but not another where sense requires it, “I’ve never understand this bit,” “Carl that he had always known that acts of courage would lead to something new,” “he had been moved him to another high security unit.”

Beckett’s previous book The Holy Machine was a treat despite suffering from the same issue with words missing. Marcher is less focused and also has too much telling rather than showing plus some not too well integrated info-dumping. His latest novel, Dark Eden, has been nominated for this year’s BSFA Award.