Yesterday the booklet containing the short listed stories and artwork for the BSFA Awards for works from 2012 landed on my doormat.

It’s a handsome enough thing, seeming thicker than in previous years.

I’ve already read Ian Sales’s Adrift on the Sea of Rains (my thoughts on that are here) and three others of the stories on the internet which I was going to post about soon.

I’ll now be able to complete the set before voting.

Gollancz, 2012, 302 p. Reviewed for Interzone 243, Nov-Dec 2012.

Sub-titled on the cover and the main title page as “A Haunting,” Empty Space follows on and amplifies the universe Harrison constructed with his novel Light and continued in Nova Swing.

In early twenty first century London, Anna Waterman, obsessed by the memory of her first husband Mike Kearney, shuttles in an affectless way between her psychologist Helen Alpert, her daughter Marnie and other rather shiftless denizens of her world. Every so often on her night strolls she imagines her summerhouse is on fire.

In Saudade City, on the planet Saudade, overshadowed by the lurking strangeness of the astronomical anomaly called the Kefahuchi Tract, riddled by its impossible physics, Enka Mercury and Toni Reno are bizarrely murdered to the sound of a disembodied voice saying, ‘My name is Pearlant and I come from the future.’ Their bodies hang suspended, rotating and slowly disappearing. An unnamed police assistant with data scrolling down her arm helps investigate the crimes.

R I Gaines is struggling to make sense of the mysterious apparition known as the Aleph, the figure of a woman contorted in an awkward way (and mysteriously accompanied by a cat) and who may bear some sort of relation to the Tract.

Meanwhile Fat Antoyne, who is no longer fat, and Liv Hula, undertake a commission from the elusive M P Renoko to transport odd containers called mortsafes in their spaceship “Nova Swing.”

Many of these characters are familiar from Light and Nova Swing but here Harrison extends and refines their relationships.

The Waterman sections of Empty Space, at least in the early stages, are related in what seems a straightforward mainstream prose and are at odds with the SF elements – which are as jargon-filled as any devotee could wish. But this highlights a problem.

The trouble with ‘six impossible things before breakfast’ scenarios, with impossible physics, is that if nothing is explicable, if things just happen, then nothing means anything – or everything. When chains of causation are lost narrative becomes problematic and the trust between writer and reader can be undermined.

While considering the Aleph one of Harrison’s characters muses that the universe is “a useless analogy for an unrepresentative state.” This could, though, be a description of the novel Empty Space itself as Harrison is attempting a literary description of that unrepresentativeness, with all the cognitive dissonance that implies.

What redeems the book is Harrison’s prose; which sweeps grandly along, his descriptive powers manifest, the Waterman sections being the most flowing, apparently effortless.
Nevertheless; that Harrison in the end brings all the strands together – thus also resolving the whole of his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy – comes as something of a release – and relief. The connections between the various types of haunting are finally made; though they are more than a little strained. Maybe even impossible: for the strangenesses around Saudade and the wrongness of the Tract physics remain pretty much unresolved.

Still, Harrison devotees and those who loved Light and Nova Swing will find Empty Space a notable conclusion.

My review of Planesrunner by Ian McDonald has been delivered to Interzone.

A full month ahead of deadline as it happens.

It won’t see the light of day for a couple of months, though.

Just popped onto the doormat has been my latest Interzone review book, 800 words by the end of March. It’s Ian McDonald’s Planesrunner.

It’s a departure of sorts for him as it’s a “young adult” book. I don’t believe he’s done one of those before.

It seems to be a steampunk kind of thing. The obligatory airship features on its cover anyway.

Orbit, 2011, 358p.

Set in the 2020s, Rule 34 is a sequel of sorts to Halting State, and features DI Liz Kavanaugh, career now shunted off course by events some years ago and in charge of the unit which trawls the Internet for cybercrime of various sorts. Most of the action takes place in Edinburgh, though there are diversions to Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan, and the newly independent Republic of Issyk-Kulistan. The notion of a sock puppet country is an amusing one, if alarming given the referendum due to take place in Scotland next year.

The novel has a succession of viewpoint characters, most of them rendered in the second person to lend a sense of immediacy and pace. Until things are drawn together towards the end these multiple viewpoints seem too many but of course they are connected. In a novel dominated by unseen presences how could it be otherwise? There is some musing on the possibilities of recognising artificial intelligence when it occurs and on the relative uselessness of the Turing Test.

This world of driverless vehicles is perhaps a little too implausible so near to the present but overhead surveillance drones are not and illegal fabbers in garden sheds is a nice touch. However the hazards of writing near future SF are illustrated here by the fact that DI Kavanaugh is a member of Lothian and Borders Police Force. All Scotland’s police areas are, at the moment, in 2013, in the process of being amalgamated into one.

The quote from Christopher Brookmyre on the cover is appropriate as Rule 34 inhabits a similar sort of milieu to Brookmyre’s œuvre, especially his Angelique De Xavia books, though Stross does not essay quite as much humour.

In a thriller it is plot that is important, and Stross gives us this in spades. Rule 34 was a Clarke Award nominee last year.

Time’s Tapestry Book 3.

Navigator is set between the years 1066 and 1492, with some scenes in England and the Jerusalem of the Crusader Outremer but the action occurs mostly in al-Andalus, the region of Spain then still ruled by the Moors. This book spans the gradual and piecemeal destruction of Islamic Western Europe. (Baxter notes the harshness and crudities of its replacement.) This necessarily highlights the contest between the Christian West and Islam which at the book’s start has been going on for 500 years, to its inhabitants seems unending, and is of obvious relevance today. Baxter carefully reminds us that it was the Muslim Arabs who preserved (and extended) the knowledge of Greece and Rome and manages to throw in a list of English words – still in use today – that are derived from Arabic.

The disruptions of history involved in this volume of Baxter’s “Time’s Tapestry” series are various. One is an interpolation from a future where the Muslim army was not defeated by the Franks at Poitiers and they went on to rule all Europe. Another is the development of war machines known as the Engines of God and a new agent of destruction which a parchment calls Incendium Dei, and turns out to be gunpowder. The main thrust of the prophecies in which the two families the story follows are entwined is the contest between looking west and Columbus’s voyages to the Americas or to turn east to combat the remaining forces of Islam.

The three main sections of the book – set in the years 1085, 1242-1248 and 1472-1491 respectively – have stories which, though they are connected loosely, do not really overlap which can make the reading a disjointed experience as it is not always the case that they occur at natural times to lay the book down.

The attractions of tales such as these lie in seeing what changes, if any, to our history are unfolded and what historical people pop up perhaps unexpectedly. (Roger Bacon in this instance.) A lot of history – arguably mostly all but forgotten in the West, except in Spain – is run through here, relatively painlessly, though occasionally the necessity for characters to talk about events holds back the action. The nature of the Weaver of Time, or his/her (I feel almost sure it will turn out to be his) possible adversary, the Witness, has still not been revealed. But there is always Volume 4; which, given the 500 year or so time span each volume of Time’s Tapestry encompasses, will take us up to the present, or nearly.

Millenium, 1999, 351 p.

I read this book mainly for completeness: Haldeman’s The Forever War was published in 1974 and Forever Free in 1999 and I had sampled most of his oeuvre up till then but had missed this. However I came across it in a local charity shop and realised I hadn’t read it on publication. It’s neither sequel nor prequel, being related only thematically to the other “Forever” books.

Despite the plot depending on the Jupiter Project – a vast particle accelerator built in orbit round that planet: think of a Large Hadron Collider pumped up (and up) by steroids – the action in this novel remains resolutely Earthbound. Julian Class has been conscripted to operate a soldierboy, a mechanical war machine, the ultimate in remote warfare. Along with his platoon, Class is jacked in to the soldierboy control system. While the platoon is jacked together his every thought and memory is open to the others, and theirs to him. In his downtime he is a physicist, in a relationship with fellow physicist Amelia, twelve years his senior. Their age difference is not the only problematic aspect of their affair, he is black, she white – and racism is still present in Haldeman’s future scenario.

The structure of US society has been altered by nanoforges, which allow the construction of small to medium sized objects merely by providing them with the correct quantity of the necessary elements. (No. Me neither.) The use of nanoforges is strictly controlled within and without the borders of the US. A war is being waged in Panama. Insurgent type guerrillas called the Ngumi are the soldierboys’ enemies.

Jacking time is restricted ostensibly because it may lead to tiredness and mistakes, but it turns out to change human attitudes and behaviour in a strange way, which I shall not spoil here.

Any SF story which posits a change in human behaviour sets the writer a problem as the characterisation may seem to be off-kilter, but characterisation has never really been Haldeman’s strong suit. He does get you to turn the pages, though.

Polygon, 2011, 254p

The Speak of the Mearns is an unfinished novel first published in 1982, almost 50 years after Gibbon’s death. The book also contains several of his short stories and some essays. The fiction’s setting lies in lands near Stonehaven in North-East Scotland, close to those in Gibbon’s most celebrated work, the trilogy A Scots Quair, which I have yet to read. (I saw the BBC Scotland television adaptation many years ago and will get round to reading it some day.) It is n almost elegiac chronicling of a way of life, a way of being, that was all but extinguished even as he wrote about it, though he recognised it as a harsh existence.

Gibbon also wrote under his real name of J Leslie Mitchell, works which included two Science Fiction novels, Three Go Back and Gay Hunter. (You can’t imagine anyone naming a novel Gay Hunter nowadays.)

Most of the fiction in the book contained an ingredient I had not previously associated with Gibbon: humour. However the final three stories – after a second introduction – stand in contrast to the others, being set in Egypt – as were several other of Mitchell’s novels and stories.

As an unfinished novel The Speak of the Mearns naturally has some infelicities but has an interesting narration, most being in standard third person but with parts in the second person. However the viewpoint can shift from the internal thoughts of one of the characters to another within the same scene. The introduction (which, for safety’s sake, I did not read till after the fragment novel) suggests this is a technique Gibbon employed to good effect in A Scots Quair.

One of the essays, Literary Lights, is about Scottish writing. He says that those Scots writing in English felt alien to our southern cousins, as if they had translated themselves. Gibbon takes care to make the distinction between writing by Scots and that in Scots, claiming that none of the practitioners of the time (himself included) wrote in Scots, barring only the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid and Lewis Spence. That writing in Scots would necessarily restrict your readership and thus was a very valid reason not to (and still is to this day) does not seem to have weighed with him. As far as he himself is concerned he says his technique was to “mould the English language into the rhythms and cadences of Scottish spoken speech*, and to inject into the English vocabulary such minimum number of words from Braid Scots as that remodelling requires.” (*Surely a tautology there.)

Since a fair few of the Scots words he uses were unknown to me (though their sense could be inferred fairly easily) he surely failed in the second part of that mission. In my defence I plead that I am only half-Scots. It has to be said, however, that if their use by English TV presenters is any guide then some Scots words are now more widely spread than when I was young.

Gibbon also claims that Scottish writing was about 20-30 years behind the times, A J Cronin, for example, dragging realism into Scottish letters long after it had appeared in English or foreign writing. That in the 21^st century it is English writers – as opposed to Scots or Irish we must suppose – who are now backward was noted in the last paragraph of this review in the Guardian on 4/1/13.

A recent poll in Locus (the main news magazine for those with an interest in Science Fiction and Fantasy) had the following results for SF novels of the 20^th century.

Those asterisked I have read. **means I can’t remember if I read it long ago or not.

1* Herbert, Frank : Dune (1965)
2* Card, Orson Scott : Ender’s Game (1985)
3* Asimov, Isaac : The Foundation Trilogy (1953)
4* Simmons, Dan : Hyperion (1989)
5* Le Guin, Ursula K. : The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
6 Adams, Douglas : The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
7* Orwell, George : Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
8* Gibson, William : Neuromancer (1984)
9* Bester, Alfred : The Stars My Destination (1957)
10** Bradbury, Ray : Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
11* Heinlein, Robert A. : Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
12 Heinlein, Robert A. : The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
13* Haldeman, Joe : The Forever War (1974)
14* Clarke, Arthur C. : Childhood’s End (1953)
15* Niven, Larry : Ringworld (1970)

People obviously voted for their favourites from their youth and not in terms of literary quality.

The only one of them I would put in a top ten is the Le Guin. My memory of that is that it was one of the best books I have ever read, never mind just SF books. It was a long time ago, though.

And where is Robert Silverberg on the Locus list? Shameful.

NewCon Press, 2011, 254p. (Cyber Circus and Black Sunday)

On a future Earth, or possibly some other planet altogether, known as Sore Earth, where an agricultural innovation known as Soul Food has led to soil despoliation and dry, barren conditions, a flying circus whose big top doubles as an airship roams a post war countryside to entertain sets of miners who employ vast burrowing machines in their endeavours.
The main characters are the circus acts, all with varying degrees of augmentation. The ex-soldier, Hellequin, is one of the enhanced vision HawkEye (Hellequin having unwillingly chosen his cybernetic eye as the lesser of two evils.) Desirous Nim – or is it Desirious, the spelling keeps shifting – is a woman wired up to glow from within. We also have the transvestite Lulu, plus Pig Heart, who has a pig’s heart and lusts after the wolf woman, Rust. Also prominent are the ringmaster Herb and D’Angelus, a gangster figure who pimped Nim out before she escaped his clutches and whose attempts to recapture her drive the plot.

The story consists of a series of violent episodes, with no-one questioning the brutal nature of life on this world, which nevertheless seemed to me not to require such a callous disregard for the better angels of our nature.

As well as confusion over the spelling of Nim’s qualifying adjective, which, since she is supposed to be an irresistible beauty, ought in any case to be “Desirable,” the text is further littered with homophones (assent for ascent, peddle for pedal,) malapropisms (slating his thirst,) adjectives used as nouns (“a sense of nauseous,” “mouth blackened with visceral,”) other spelling mistakes (eek out, fury limbs,) grammatical errors (“It breezes out past the edge of the ring, lifts and swooping over the heads of the gasping audience,”) and common typos (hanging on for dead life.) I have noted before Lakin-Smith’s form in this regard. These things matter because they tumble the attentive reader out of the story in order to try to make sense of what has just been read thus highlighting its constructed nature and destroying suspension of disbelief. It is possible that every one of these solecisms was a deliberate choice by the author for some arcane reason possibly to do with attempting to make the language feel futuristic. If so it failed – at least for this reader. Then consider the fact that “court-martialled” is rendered in its accepted form on one page but given on the very next page as “court-marshalled.” Such lack of care and attention to detail goes beyond any striving for effect into the realm of the slapdash or carelessness and verges on contempt for the reader. NewCon Press is a small publisher whose resources may not stretch to a proof reader: but if they did I would suggest they ask for their money back.

As ever such infelicities emphasise other problem areas. The circus’s airship apparently uses steam as its lifting source. (It often requires to set down to fill with water.) Why? Water needs a lot of energy to vaporise it. The heat employed to generate the steam would surely be more efficiently used directly; as in a hot air balloon. Plus water is a scarce resource on Sore Earth. But then, of course, the plot depends on Cyber Circus seeking out a water source.

The other story in the book, Black Sunday, is better, with only one homophone but some unconvincing attempts to mimic US speech. Though it shares a burrowing machine with Cyber Circus it’s dated as the 1930s and apparently set in the US dustbowl – but there are slaves so it can therefore only be construed as an altered history.