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The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N McIntyre

Pocket Books, 1997, 422 p, plus ii p Major Characters and v p Afterword

I’m not quite sure how to categorise this. I’ve seen it described as Alternate/Alternative History (what I prefer to call Altered History) but I can’t see any change in actual history in it. It has no discernible Jonbar Point, no ramifications for its future. Yes, it’s set in the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, but it’s not a purely historical novel either, though that aspect of the novel is very well executed. What it does have – and what tends to make it more of a fantasy than anything else – is a “sea monster,” a mermaid-like creature which turns out to be near human, brought to Louis’s court to provide him with immortality by eating a part of its flesh. (The first part of this premise – the human-like sea creature – is not really too far-fetched. There has been scientific speculation that humans spent part of their evolutionary history as aquatic creatures.)

Our viewpoint character is Marie-Josèphe de la Croix, lady in waiting to Mademoiselle Elisabeth Charlotte d’Orleans, Louis XIV’s niece. Marie-Josèphe was brought up in Martinique and her relationship to the court is, to begin with, opaque. She is an innocent, (she has not heard the word ‘whore,’ has never drunk wine, nor encountered the idea of homosexuality,) sent to a convent when her parents died and subjected to its repressive strictures. Her brother Yves is the Jesuit priest and enthusiast for scientific enquiry who was instrumental in capturing two sea-monsters and bringing them to Versailles. One of the monsters is dead and Yves is to carry out an autopsy on it. Questions of protocol and the need for the king’s presence tend to delay this though.

Marie-Josèphe finds herself sensitive to the creature. She can hear it sing, feel its pain, discern its meaning, and ends up relating its stories of persecution by humans to the court.

Coincidentally, Pope Innocent XII is on a diplomatic mission to Versailles (as a kind of rapprochement with the King) but he is keen for the live sea creature – which due to its tale-telling soon comes to be called Sherzad – to be taken back to Rome for study.

Other historical notables to appear in the text include Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, (Louis’s brother and Mademoiselle’s father,) Charlotte (Philippe’s Duchess,) the Chevalier de Lorraine (Philippe’s male lover,) James VII (II of England) and his wife Mary of Modena (in exile due to the so-called “Glorious Revolution.”)

Marie-Josèphe is talented, not only does she sketch the dissection of the dead sea-creature, she also composes music. This latter outrages the Pope, who insists – using Biblical references – that women ought to be silent. She is not short of enemies at the court but also forms friendships. Her relationship with her slave Odolette is complicated and develops in a way more attuned to modern sensibilities than those of the seventeenth century.

The writing is accomplished throughout and the interpersonal relationships depicted tend to strike true.

Pedant’s corner:- Yves’ (Yves’s. Since the ‘s’ of Yves is not pronounced then without an ‘s’ after the apostrophe then the possessive’s sound is not signalled by the spelling. All the possessives of names ending in ‘s’ are treated like this, Chartres’, Louis’, etc) “the duke and duchess d’Orleans” (these are specific titled people, not merely an unspecified member of a class. Their titles are proper nouns. So, “the Duke and Duchess d’Orleans. McIntyre generally tended to adopt a similar practice of using lower case whenever specific titles were used, even for mademoiselle de la Croix. Note in English she would be Miss de la Croix, not miss de la Croix,) perruke (innumerable times, peruke,) “His Holiness’ route” (His Holiness is singular, so, ‘His Holiness’s route’,) “she kept her own council” (counsel, is council a US usage in this context?) “her royal mistress’ ridicule” (mistress’s,) “Father de la Croix’ medal” (again, no ‘s’ is sounded at the end of Croix, it needs an ‘s’ to render the possessive accurately, ‘de la Croix’s medal’,) “her left aureole” (areola,) “and has sense of humour failed him” (and his sense of humour,) “a hareem” (x 2, usually spelled ‘harem’.)

Neom by Lavie Tidhar

Tachyon Press, 2022, 240 p, including 2 p Map, 5 p Afterword and 26 p Beyond Neom, an A to Z. Reviewed for ParSec 5.

Another downloading from Tidhar’s fertile imagination. Science Fictional ideas and references spin off this in giddy profusion. If you want your fix of the strange and wonderful, even the downright odd, get it right here. Set in the same future as the author’s Central Station (2016,) in which humanity and its adjuncts have sprawled across the Solar System, it takes its title from a city set by the Red Sea, a city which at the moment is only the dream of a Saudi prince but in this book, as Tidhar informs us in a short foreword, is old. There is also a prefatory map of the area which is not strictly necessary for understanding or enjoyment but adds to the effect. (Tidhar seems fond of such maps, they are also found in Central Station and Unholy Land.)

This imagined Neom “was built on the premise that anything can be fixed, made good, made better,” and is policed by the shurta. Not that it needs much policing. As one character’s viewpoint has it, “the only real crime in Neom was being poor. And only the poor joined the shurta.” Wars have come and gone. In the desert beyond the city lurk UXOs, Unexploded Ordnance, aka smart bombs. In the recent past Terrorartists, mass murderers, used pain and death as their paint, people as their brushes, “the experience itself became their canvas.” Such art requires witnesses. After all, “If a bomb went off in a crowded market and there was no one to broadcast and amplify the experience, did it really go off?”

In this world people are noded at birth to be part of the communication system known as the Conversation, “that virtuality of worlds that is all around, as persistent as air.” We follow various characters – human, robot and jackal – as they make their way in and around or towards the city. For herself to survive and to pay for her mother’s care Mariam took any job she could (“Neom was a city for the rich and the rich needed the poor in order to be rich,”) and we see her in several of them, firstly when she gives a flower to the robot, who subsequently keeps bumping into her at her various employments. The boy, Saleh, goes with the Green Caravanserai carrying an artefact he has salvaged from a terrorartist event wherein his family died and which he hopes to sell. The jackal, Anubis, teams up with him in El Quesir. Shurta member Nasir is attracted to Mariam but the time somehow isn’t right. On a patrol one night in the desert he and his companions Laila and Habib come across the robot digging a hole. Its activities attract the dangerous attention of UXOs, drawn in by emanations from the golden limbs it is excavating.

All come together at Mukhtar’s Bazaar of Rare and Exotic Machines where the golden parts are to be reassembled into a golden man, with Saleh contributing its missing piece, the black hole at its heart, a beacon for robotkind, the last work of terrorartist Nasu.

As a writer Tidhar is frequently playful, allusive and self-referential. Grace notes await the attentive reader. There are sly quotations of the Laws of Robotics (here regarded as being only ever a philosophical concept,) a small black monolith in a corner gives someone a headache when they look at it, mentions of the Up and Out, his own Lior Tirosh is included in a list of admired poets. The robot points out the meaning of Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew” speech in the question, “If you wrong us shall we not revenge?” saying Shylock understood violence. There is acute observation too. “Religions propagated much like viruses. They evolved, spread, died.” His characters are sketched economically but believably.

A harsh critic would complain it all ends too soon and we don’t really see much of Neom the city, but, as Tidhar’s Afterword (in which he explicitly bows to Cordwainer Smith) says, he’s always loved future histories, so there could be more to come from this source. There is, though, a 26-page A to Z of the Central Station universe to bulk things out.

Tidhar has of late become fairly prolific. Perhaps he’s made good use of lockdown. Neom shows there has been no drop-off in quality.

Pedant’s corner:- Elias’ (x 3, Elias’s,) “Nasir feared the hole will close up on them” (feared the hole would close up,) “none were ever turned away” (x 2, none was ever turned away.) “It had voice like old sand grinding” (It had a voice like,) “Mukhtar genuinely troubled”  (Mukhtar was genuinely troubled,) distill (distil.) “‘I wish you didn’t come’” (hadn’t come,) a full stop instead of a question mark at the end of a question (x 2.) “‘The trick is finding someone who would listen’” (who will listen.) “‘One of the Monks lay in the carrot patch. Their head was bashed in’” (Its head,) “‘an when I got to’” (and when I got to,) “how they’d went out to dinner together” (how they’d gone out,) “it existed in a state of relative piece” (relative peace,) no one (no-one,) “and the figure in on the pedestal” (no ‘in’ needed.) “He shined his torch around” (He shone his torch.) “‘It’s only <em>miniature</em> black hole’” (only a <em>miniature</em> black hole’,) “the nanite algae that grows” (algae that grow,) “sank in nano-goo” (sunk,) virii (viruses?) “fell into quicksand, fell into pits” (fallen into quicksand, fallen into pits,) “she put the air condition on” (the air conditioning.) In the A to Z; “often and affectionately to Polyport” (often and affectionately shortened to/known as Polyport,) “though stories told in the Outer System” (though stories are told in,) “often moving from world to another” (from one world to another,) “where there presence” (their presence,) synthetising (synthesising,) utlising (utilising.)

 

The Stolen Lake by Joan Aiken

Jonathan Cape, 1981, 270 p.

This picks up the story of Dido Twite after Night Birds on Nantucket, the third in Aiken’s ‘Wolves’ trilogy. She embarks on His Majesty James III’s* ship Thrush en route for Britain. The ship is diverted to South America by a message requiring Captain Hughes to respond to a request for help from Queen Gunevra of New Cumbria. This South America was colonised by ancient Britons when the Saxons invaded Britannia. New Cumbria’s two neighbouring kingdoms are called Lyonesse and Hy Brasil.

Dido is befriended by the Thrush’s steward Mr Holystone but Captain Hughes has little time for her. Nevertheless, on landfall Hughes wants Dido to accompany him to the Queen’s court. New Cumbria is a strange place where girl children between five and fifteen are absent – said to be prey to flying creatures named Aurocs, so many girls are sent away to avoid this fate. Queen Gunevra desires the British to persuade King Mabon to restore her lake (which he removed as ice-blocks in retaliation for the abduction of his daughter Elen on her return from education in England.) Gunevra expects Dido to claim to be Elen to satisfy him. She wants the lake back so that her husband will be able to sail back to her across it, something she has been awaiting for hundreds of years. This referencing of the story of King Arthur is exploited further in the rest of the tale during which Dido as usual meets people who wish to do her harm.

The characters tend to the cartoonish but its intended readership (YA readers) will not mind about that.

*In Scotland this would have been James VIII.

Pedant’s corner:- A fair bit of the dialogue was in non-standard English. Otherwise, nothing to report.

Ilario: The Lion’s Eye by Mary Gentle

Gollancz, 2007, 669 p.

This is set in Gentle’s First History universe which she introduced in Ash: A Secret History. It is a stand alone novel though, merely sharing the same background.

We meet narrator Ilario trying to enter Carthage, a city under the dark shield of the Penitence and hence no view of the sun, and with naphtha lights providing illumination. Marcomir, the border guard she deals with, offers her a place at the boarding house of his mother. Once there, lust struck, they stumble to bed together. At first this might seem merely to show us that Ilario is a true hermaphrodite, having functional sets of both sex organs, but the encounter is to have plot ramifications. The morning after, Marcomir’s mother gives her a drugged drink and she wakes up to find herself a slave once again.

Freed by her/his King, Rodrigo Sanguerra of Taraconensis in Iberia, Ilario had fled after her/his true parentage was revealed, leading to her/his supposed father, Viderico, the King’s right-hand man, suborning her/his mother, Rosamunda, into trying to kill her/him to expunge the shame of engendering a freak. This wasn’t the first time Rosamunda had attempted this since after the birth, Ilario had been left on a hillside from which she was rescued by a couple who raised her/him as their own. In late childhood she/he was offered to the king as an amusement and, as a slave, no threat to anyone.

The beautifully intricate and cleverly designed plot revolves around the tension between the desire of Carthage to take over Taraconensis, the high politics of Ilario’s homeland – at first navigated from a distance – efforts to avoid assassination by Viderico’s agents, and Ilario’s desire to be an artist, exploring painting and the New Art of true representation (perspective.) Through it we are taken not just to Carthage but all over the Mediterranean of this scenario, to Rome, known as the Empty Chair since no Pope has sat there for centuries, to Venice, a growing power, to Alexandria-in-exile, seat of the Ptolemies in what is still called Constantinople by adherents of the Green Christ, whose religion mixes in aspects of the Christianity we know with elements of Mithraism.

This all comes about since Ilario is bought by the Egyptian eunuch Rekhmire’, a “humble buyer of manuscripts” (though a de facto spy) and a cousin to Alexandria’s ruler, the Pharaoh Queen Ty-Amenhotep. In Rome, while apprenticed to Masaccio, a master of the New Art, Ilario encounters a golem-statue designed as a weapon to be used against the Alexandrine monarch, meets in Venice a pseudonymous Herr Mainz who has a new, quick method of manuscript reproduction (ie he is really Gutenberg,) and her real father (and delighted to be so) Honorius, the lion of Leon and Castille, recently retired from fighting the Franks on behalf of King Rodrigo and whose personal guard accompanies him. Along the way Ilario discovers she/he is pregnant by Marcomir and, the dangers heightened manyfold for a hermaphrodite mother, is operated on by a Turkish doctor, Bariş, in the manner of Caesar. (Since this is less than halfway through the book much of the tension of that situation is thereby vitiated.) Both mother and infant survive, the daughter, Onorata, another complication that Ilario has to deal with. The lack of love Ilario confesses for Onorata is belied by the way in which she/he ensures there is always someone around to care for her. Honorius’s soldiers are exemplary in this respect. In Constantinople, all are astounded by the huge size of a ship which has lost its way in a storm, not least its complement of five thousand men. The ship’s captain is Zheng He and it is part of a Chinese fleet exploring the world. Both Alexandria and Tarconensis will seek to use this as a lever against Carthage. Somewhere in amongst all this Rekhmire’ restores freedom to Ilario again.

Much of Ilario’s thoughts veer towards drawing and painting and the implements and materials required but there are also many reflections on the lot of the hermaphrodite. Ilario gets to see things both ways, “Men alone together talk as if women are children; women together speak as if men are not-very-intelligent animals.” Gentle displays a flash of feminism towards the end when Rosamunda says that, freak or not, Hilario’s possession of a penis (however rudimentary a one) gives her/him agency, places her/him above women in the pecking order.

Ilario is an engaging character throughout and the others we meet in this portrayal of a world that never was (or, if we are to believe Ash: A Secret History, was expunged,) behave in ways that are entirely believable.

Finally, I must thank Gentle for introducing me to the wonderful word exomologesis which, however, I am sure I will never use again.

Pedant’s corner:- Anagastes’ (Anagastes’s. Except for Azadanes, Taraconensis and Gades, other names ending in ‘s’ – such as Honorius – are given s’s as their possessives,) calcium sulphate (as a paint additive/colouring. In this time period it would surely have been called gypsum.) “Not only is Rekhmire’ legally paid my wages” (Not only has Rekhmire legally paid,) “in their practise” (practice,) laying (several times; lying,) lay (several times; lie.) “The slow grey light of dawn illuminated in the sky” (no need for that ‘in’ surely?) elipse (ellipse,) cartilege (cartilage,) “because ‘is unwise’” (because ‘it is unwise’,) “to down out” (to drown out,) “to breath in” (to breathe in.) “I belated realise” (belatedly,) “woman accompanied by male relatives” (women accompanied,) “the polished finished of his helmet” (the polished finish,) jailor (jailer,) Aldro (elsewhere Aldra,) fontanels (fontanelles,) “I brought0my cloak” (type-setting error for ‘I brought my cloak’,) sung (sang,) “a crew of oarsman was in evidence” (oarsmen,) “moved two and fro” (to and fro.) “Instead I throw up, like a child” (the rest of the passage was in past tense; ‘threw up’.) “‘I’d wrap in anchor chain and dump it’” (wrap it in anchor chain,) sunk (sank.) “I could have done with somewhat to keep me occupied” (something is more natural than somewhat, here,) “looked at blankly at” (has one ‘at’ too many,) drunk (drank.)

Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

Tachyon, 2018, 264 p, plus Mem>iv p Preface, 3 p Historical Afterword, and 2 p Afterword by Warren Ellis.

Taking as its inspiration an expedition by Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and Nahum Wilbusch into Africa in 1904 seeking out a possible homeland for the Jews, and Herzl’s own utopian novel Altneuland (Tel Aviv in Hebrew: and yes it did give its name to that city) which he set in a peaceful Jewish state in Palestine with equal rights for Arabs, Unholy Land imagines what it could have been like if both had come into being. It is also a meditation on the treacherous call of home.

Here, that homeland in Africa, on the borders of Uganda and Kenya, came to pass. It is called Palestina and viewpoint character Lior Tirosh, a writer of crime novels, was brought up there. When the novel starts, he is making the journey from his present home in Berlin, on the suggestion of his agent with the hope he might write something on the political situation there. Unlike in the similarly (though unhistorically) inspired The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, there are tensions between the Jewish settlers and the original inhabitants, paralleling the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Israel of the reader’s reality. A wall is being built to keep terrorists out. (Of course, as one character says, it serves equally well to keep Jews in.) Tirosh himself witnesses a suicide bombing of a bus.

This aspect of the novel is an Altered History where the Holocaust never happened and (in an aside) Hitler was assassinated in 1948. There are too, allusions to stories Tirosh either has written or might write which, in our universe, Tidhar has actually written – Osama and one featuring Hitler as a private detective. The sections following Tirosh are told in the third person but it soon becomes apparent that these passages are being written by a Special Investigator Bloom who also contributes first person sections to the book. To complicate things further there is a third strand, written in the second person, describing the calling back to service of a special agent, Nur Al-Hussaini, who, like Bloom, has travelled between various realities via what Bloom calls a crosshatch and she a sephirot, places where the boundaries between the worlds blur and crossover can occur. Depending on which reality you inhabit the city Bloom ruminates on can be thought of as Jerusalem, Ursalim or Yerushailam.

Of this unsteady landscape Bloom says, “people think of reality as immutable: solid and reassuring, that it is true merely because it is there.” But, “The world is the sum of what it could be, what it might have been and how it could have been.” Of his calling he says, “There are always borders, and there are always those who guard them lest they fracture.” Tirosh experiences the blurring slowly, in the end all but forgetting his connection to his world and agent in a quest to find Deborah, a niece who has gone missing from Palestina.

It is a measure of Tidhar’s skill as a writer that this all makes sense as you read it. Jewishness is obviously of salient importance to him (naturally enough, since he is an Israeli.) The place of Jews in this world is problematic at best. He puts this into Bloom’s thoughts, “That is the condition of being a Jew, I sometimes think – to always be one thing and another, to never quite fit. We are the grains of sand that irritate the oyster shell of the world.”

As well as being an intensely readable thriller if you care to look at it that way, Unholy Land pleads the case for somewhere, in one of the realities, being a place where that last sentence no longer holds.

Pedant’s corner:- “a row of cars … were queued up” (a row was queued up,) “for the people seek retaliation” (for the people to seek,) “and its fruit were skulls” (its fruit was,) “the lay of the land” (lie, it’s ‘lie of the land’,) “over an irritant embedded it in the host body” (no need for that ‘it’,) “when a different peoples had to share the same land” (omit the ‘a’,) “‘you are nought but the ephemera’” (nought = zero, the number, and is not equivalent to ‘nothing’: ‘you are naught but the ephemera’,) “body wracked with painful coughs” (racked.)

Breathmoss and other exhalations by Ian R MacLeod

Golden Gryphon Press, 2004, 315 p, plus iip Introduction, Big Lies, by the author. First published 1972.

In his introduction to this collection MacLeod says that works of fiction are complex lies and if you’re going to do it well you really ought not to stick to realism so much as make your lies as big as possible in order for readers to recognise something they’ve known all along.

In this book MacLeod’s lies are profound, considered, and each has a sense of inevitability about it, a revealed truth if you like. Not one of them is disappointing in any way.

Title story Breathmoss is set on the planet Habara where men are an extreme rarity – as they are in wider galactic society. Jalila was brought up in the high mountains by her three mothers (only one of them biologically so.) Gateways between the stars allow travel to other worlds in ships piloted by a chosen few tariquas.

The first action of the novella follows Jalila’s journey down from the mountains to the seaside town of Al Janb where after a few days she coughs up from her lungs the breathmoss which had helped her to breathe the rarefied mountain air, spilling it into the sea. From a site across the bay over the horizon rockets rise to the orbiting space station where the local Gateway lies. Macleod’s evocation of the sights and sounds of Al Janb, the society in which Jalila lives, its customs and trappings (dreamtents, tideflowers, that breathmoss) is masterful. Neither is he prepared to rush his story. The accumulation of detail is part of its strength.

One day Jalila notices a strange looking person fishing. The reader immediately knows this is a male, but Jalila has to be told, then her investigations reveal that he, Kalal, is in fact a boy not a man. Their friendship grows but does not develop in the way that the reader might expect. In fact her first lover is the local centre of teenage attention, Nayra. The crucial encounter of her life though is with an aged tariqua in a ruined castle someway out of town.

This is a beautifully told, wise story of coming of age, getting of wisdom, and time (or perhaps relativistic) travel.

In Verglas a lone settler on the planet Korai – always unnamed, though his wife Marion, and children Robbie and Sarah are given due recognition – comes to terms with his existence. It is an odd story, Marion, Robbie and Sarah having transformed into winged predators more suitable to the new world while their bodies remain more or less intact in a mound outside his base. A traverse across country – albeit inside a mechanical device – involves the use of many mountaineering techniques and terms and the inevitable accident provides tension.

The Chop Girl scratches that endless itch in parts of British culture to dredge up stories set in the Second World War. Our unnamed female narrator was a kitchen procurement orderly on a bomber base where she gained a reputation as a chop girl, a witch, a harbinger of death, after several men she had dallied with after a dance or evening together (with her always careful never to go the whole way) did not come back from their next flight. Then Squadron Leader Walt Williams comes to the base, a man with a charmed life, survivor of many freak accidents. She soon senses there is something strange about him, an other-worldliness. MacLeod’s atmosphere of realism blended with spookiness is excellently conjured up.

The Noonday Pool features an ageing composer, Sir Edward, who lives near Worcester and is obviously modelled on Elgar. (An afterword explicitly states that he was, but is in most ways different.) The story is seen through the personas of Peg, a girl seemingly inhabiting the wild, Sir Edward, and his housekeeper Mrs France. Sir Edward is having trouble negotiating his old age and composing any more music. Peg is an enigmatic presence with feral tendencies – and who may even be a werewolf – Mrs France a down-to-earth, practical figure. The Noonday Pool is somewhere in the woods nearby to where Peg takes Sir Edward one day. The story resists explaining itself but like all MacLeod’s work is beautifully written.

New Light on the Drake Equation is the story of Tom Kelly, told from the retrospect of his old age and a last encounter with the love of his life, Terr. Tom’s consuming interest has always been the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life, a search in which almost everyone else has lost interest now that no such life has been found elsewhere in the Solar System, not by the (modified) humans who have finally landed on Mars nor by the probe sent to Jupiter’s moon Europa. He still conducts his search from a mountain installation near St Hilaire, a village in the Massif Central of France which is also a centre for the night life of flyers, genetically modified people with wings, taking advantage of the thermals. In this world genetic adaptation is commonplace, even acquisition of a different language is achieved simply, by imbibing a vial of the appropriate serum, though Tom of course prefers the old ways. Replete with mentions of classic SF, in which Tom was enraptured in his youth, and a discussion of both the Drake equation and the Fermi Paradox, it is threnodic in tone and in that last encounter with Terr becomes a ghost story.

Isabel of the Fall recounts a myth, or, rather, is a commentary on one, from the world of Ghezirah. In the aftermath of the War of the Lilies, Isabel, unremarkable, not too intelligent but not dim, not beautiful but not ugly, is taken from her orphaned origins to be an acolyte of the Dawn Church, trained to sing in the light of Sabil in the mornings from her minaret, directing it towards the mirrors that distribute it over her valley of Nashir; and sing it out again at night. A minor fault in mirror 28 leads her to examine the courtyard of the Cathedral of the Word – a vast library – where she sees a young girl, Genya, dancing. Her apology to Genya for the lack of light goes on to become a friendship which is a betrayal of both their churches, and precipitates the fall of the title. Although the tale has aspects of fantasy various bits of high tech are present in the piece and its Science Fictionality is confirmed when we find Ghezirah is a Dyson sphere.

The Summer Isles, an Altered History, has a tonal quality similar to Keith Roberts’s Weihnachtsabend (see part way down this link) except here Britain – aggrandised as Greater Britain and run by the Empire Alliance and its leader John Arthur – has not collaborated with a fascist regime but itself become one. Narrator Griffin Brooke (known by his pen name Geoffrey Brook) is a homosexual whose past links to Arthur from before the Great War (which the Allies lost in 1918 – presumably as a result of the success of the German Spring Offensive) lead to him being embroiled in a plot to remove Arthur from power. The Summer Isles of the title are off the coast in Scotland and a supposed refuge to which ‘filthy Jews’ have been sent for resettlement. Other camps on the Isle of Man have a more sinister character. The usual grace notes of altered history occur, King Edward VIII and Queen Wallis, for example, along with Churchill as Prime Minister in the 1920s and not making a success of it. But in the main this is an extremely well told story about life, regret and loss.

Pedant’s corner:- flashes of lightening (lightning,) sunk (sank.) “The rockets rose and rose in dry crackles of summer lightening” (lightning.) “Jalila span around” (spun,) windowledge (window ledge.) “We’ve only got four kinds of taste receptor on our tongues” (was obviously written before the discovery of umami – [published 1996],) platypi (platypus is from Greek; the plural would be platypodes, I think, but in English platypuses is fine,) sprung (sprang,) sunk (x 2, sank,) “each time I forget” (rest of tale is in past tense; forgot,) maw (used as in ‘mouth’. A maw is a stomach,) “the fluid I’ve been given” (I’d been,) “and I lowering it” (no need for the ‘I’,) outside of (outside. Please,) “this strange new sliver creature” (silver,) cookhouse (kitchen,) WRAF (x 2. In World War 2 the women’s RAF was known as the WAAF, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, not the WRAF. Doubtless this had to be translated for the story’s publication in the US,) “their twenty mission tour” (Bomber Command tours comprised thirty flights, not twenty,) NAFFI (x 10. The correct acronym is NAAFI, for Navy, Army and Air Force Institute,) hangers (x 4, hangars,) “and they’d have been all hell to pay” (and there’d have been,) “a slow and ugly butterfly pined on the needles of half a dozen searchlights” (pinned on the needles?) “Nissan hut(s)” (x 2, these were not Japanese. ‘Nissen hut(s)’,) bousers (bowsers,) “(his) dog ran up her” (ran up to her,) knarled (gnarled,) “her buxom heaving” (bosom.) “Where had it began?” (begun,) “had given up with whatever had once bugged them” (no need for that ‘with’,) “if one was to believe the figure of which was assigned to it” (no need for the ‘of’,) “they skived spare radio telescopy and mainframe processing time” (skive means to avoid, not to procure,) “though the message was going out in any cause” (in any case,) “which would had surprised Salvador Dali” (would have surprised,) “Edgar Rice Burrows” (Burroughs,) “Yate’s Wine Lodge” (Yates’s,) “huge near-stella aggregations of matter” (near-stellar,) “of whatever he’d drank the night before” (drunk,) “my two ex’s” (exes,) unfocussed (unfocused.) “‘Do, don’t they?’” (‘They do, don’t they’,) “until the booze finally wreaks some crucial organ” (wrecks.) “He gazed as the hills in the east” (at the hills,) boujour (bonjour,) “weird costumes and make-ups” (make-up,) “proud of him to” (too,) “a tiny representations” (representation,) interfered (interfered,) “within each their cells” (each of their cells,) “spread it vast roots” (its vast roots,) “the size of small planet” (of a small planet,) smoothes (smooths,) hurrumphs (usually spelled ‘harrumphs’,) “and we’re generally been ‘tolerant’” (we’ve,) “the warmth of this own flesh” (of his own flesh,) “for a week of so” (or so,) “the Cumbernald’s” (It two people called Cumbernald; so Cumbernalds,) “won the George Cross at Ypres” (in our world the George Cross is awarded to civilians, not soldiers,) “a homosexual affaire” (an attempt to glamourise ‘affair’?) Ramsey MacDonald (Ramsay?) “to keep the prols happy” (usually spelled ‘proles’,) newshordings (newshoardings.) “I brought myself an expensive new gramophone” (bought myself,) air raid practise (practice,) “the two PC’s” (PCs.) “A hesitate” (I hesitate.) “Presidents De Gaulle and Von Papen” (von Papen perhaps but in an alternative 1940 de Gaulle would still have been an almost unknown minor army officer,) “with its tall widows” (windows,) “the mossy urns and statutes” (statues,) “lightening blasts of flashbulbs” (although flashbulbs do light – and so lighten – things, I think ‘lightning blasts’ makes more sense and there are previous instances of this error to take account of.) “Still less that real” (less than real makes more sense,) “not waiting him to come out and help me” (not waiting for him.) “I was finally ready for axtive again” (active service again,) “to have made little impression of the world” (on the world,) “quavers that he’s like another” (that he’d like another,) pints of Fullers’ (Fuller’s,) “in the crowds sobbing howls” (crowd’s,) “the fireman’s angry voices” (firemen’s,) the Cumbernald’s (this time it was ‘of the Cumbernalds’, so Cumbernalds’.)

The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal

A Lady Astronaut Novel, Tor, 2018, 382 p.

This is the second novel in Kowal’s Lady Astronaut sequence where a 1952 meteorite impact off the Atlantic coast of the US caused not only the inevitable initial devastation (including the deaths of almost all the US government) but, due to the vast quantities of water vapour propelled into Earth’s atmosphere, also a runaway greenhouse effect and an ensuing space programme to colonise Mars as an escape – see The Calculating Stars.

At the start of this book, Elma York, our narrator and said Lady Astronaut, has for some while been part of the lunar base built in preparation for the first Mars trip but is returning to Earth. The craft undergoes a malfunction and crash-lands. The first to reach it are not the expected rescuers but a group of Earth-Firsters (who wish the resources for the space programme to be spent on Earth instead.) This will lead to suspicion that there was sabotage and there are moles within the Mars project. One of the few black astronauts on the craft becomes a focus for this due to the prejudices of a South African, DeBeer, on board.

This is 1961 after all. Racism and sexism are rife in wider society, as they were in our history. Even in this radically altered world, women’s proficiency in technical professions has been accepted only grudgingly, if at all.

Once again Elma is used as a poster girl for the programme (replacing one of the original women chosen for the Mars trip) since she is the publicly acceptable female face of the space effort (as well as an excellent mathematician.) This is a strain as Elma has issues with dealing with groups of people. Her coping strategy, internal recitations of prime numbers, the digits of π or the Fibonacci sequence, is slightly less to the fore here than in the earlier book, though.

Along the way we have an illustration of how difficult and messy the job of unblocking a toilet in weightless conditions would be and also how inherently dangerous an environment space is – not to mention the potential disaster an outbreak of disease on one of the three ships represents.

The situation gives Kowal the opportunity to explore the internal dynamics of a prolonged space flight, complicated in her case by the fact that Mission Commander, Stetson Parker, with whom Elma has a long-standing antipathy, is on her ship. The enforced proximity does, however, allow Parker’s character to be illuminated more closely.

I found there to be a remarkable focus on domestic chores – especially baking. Then again, the women have been allocated such tasks by Mission Control as being eminently more suited to them, a source of ongoing resentment. But the supplies required for baking to be a possible culinary objective on such a flight would be prodigious. Then again, the technology available (teletype machines, for example) is of 1960s vintage. Once more the relationship between Elma and her husband Nathaniel, part of the ground control team, is described in coy terms.

The Fated Sky isn’t great literature, but it isn’t meant to be. It reads easily, does what it presumably set out to do, entertain, and slips in some observations about the nature of humanity forbye.

Pedant’s corner:- “the rachet handle” (x 2, elsewhere ‘ratchet’,) bandanna (bandana,) “A Black man across the aisle with a crooked nose” (why is Black capitalised – and why would an aisle have a crooked nose?)acclimation (acclimatisation.) “Behind this skepticism are a combination of factors” (Behind this scepticism is a combination,) crafts (the plural is craft.) Both these last two were in one of the cod news reports with which Kowal precedes each chapter, O2 (x 3, O2,) ambiance (ambience,) CO2 (CO2.)

The Society of Time by John Brunner

The Original Trilogy and Other Stories, edited by Mike Ashley. British Library, 2020, 287 p. Reviewed for Interzone 290-291, Summer 2021.

 The Society of Time cover

This British Library reprint, subtitled “The Original Trilogy and Other Stories” contains five novellas first published in 1961 and 1962. The “time” trilogy was collected as Times without Number shortly after then. Its three stories are set around the four-hundredth anniversary of the victory of the Duke of Parma’s Armada over the English fleet when a (Catholic) Spanish Empire – centred on the British Isles – of which our protagonist Don Miguel Navarro, a licentiate of the powerful Society of Time, is a citizen, is at its peak. These are, then, tales of Altered History, with place names such as Jorque and Londres
Curiously we are told Spain itself has been reconquered by “virile” Islam but nothing more is made of this. The Empire’s main rival is instead a Confederacy of Northern European states. The Society of Time controls the time travel machines of the Empire (“Borromeo showed us how we might rotate the dimensions of substances so that the worlds became flat and we could voyage back into time,”) and has rigorous rules to prevent interference with History. A similar organisation in the Confederacy acts likewise. The Islamic powers we must assume to have no time travel capability. All three stories centre round the inevitable (otherwise no story) floutings of these interference protocols. Miguel, a rather correctly behaved individual, is also shocked by other infractions the Society’s members condone, such as pandering.

In the first novella, Spoil of Yesterday, Miguel immediately recognises a work of Art as an illegal import from the past and arrests its owner. The breach is resolved by a trip to the past to replace it immediately after its removal, but the reader does not take this time trip with Miguel, is only told of it. In the second, The Word not Written, Miguel finds that prominent members of the Society actively explore ruptures in time when an argument between them is attempted to be settled by allowing female warriors from a time which would not have occurred bar interference to come to their present, with disastrous results. Again, only a trip back to the past, again unseen, restores the status quo ante. Only Miguel and his confessor retain memories of the infringement. In The Fullness of Time, in retrospect a cunning title, we do finally accompany Miguel to the past. The Empire’s exploitation of the mineral resources of its lands in the New World is protected by the (carefully worded, so as to avoid any possible contravention) Treaty of Prague between it and the Confederacy. Evidence has been found of the Confederacy using its time travel capability to mine in the past where it had no right to. While (in a nod to what actually happened in the reader’s world) recognising that without the Empire the natives of the New World might have been ground between the interests of competing European nations, Miguel’s companion, a Mohawk, resents the Empire’s intrusions on the natives’ ancient lands, despite his tribe becoming a leading light in Empire circles. It is his interference in the past which drives the story and ultimately ensures there will be no more Don Miguel tales.

This is all still very readable, though Brunner’s writing occasionally lapses into cliché, the characterisation is sometimes rudimentary, and there is a rather awkward portrayal of sexual roles and attitudes.

The other two novellas are stand-alones which arguably do not belong with the trilogy though editor Mike Ashley’s introduction says Brunner was at his best at novella length.

In Father of Lies a small area of England is on no maps and technology breaks down when it is entered. Miles Croton is part of a group investigating the phenomenon and penetrates the anomaly on foot after his car will no longer work. He almost straight away sees a dragon from whom he soon has to rescue a naked woman tied to a stake and finds he has entered a world based on mythology (mainly but not exclusively Arthurian.) While this might seem like a fantasy scenario Brunner supplies a rational explanation for them.

The Analysts by contrast is a tale of unusual architecture. Joel Sackstone can visualise from a drawing how a building will be experienced by its inhabitants and as such has been crucial to his firm’s success. A new project baffles him by its design – on which the clients are irrevocably set – seeming to lead people in a direction that isn’t there. In amongst all this oddness Brunner managed to include some asides on sexual and racial politics.

The following did not appear in the published review:- contains the phraseology of the time eg coloured for black.

Pedant’s corner:- “two capital L’s” (strictly speaking the plural is ‘two capitals L’, but that is not how people say it,) focussed (focused,) “if there was anything more undignified than a Licentiate could do” (if there was anything more undignified that a Licentiate could do,) “once for all” (once and for all,) “landing astraddle of the branch” (landing astraddle the branch,) staunch (stanch,) “that all was not well” (that not all was well,) a full stop where there ought to have been a comma, “ten year ago” (years.)

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

A Lady Astronaut Novel, Solaris, 2019, 506 p, including 3 p Acknowledgements and 6 p Historical Note.

The Calculating Stars cover

Each chapter of the book is prefaced by a cod news clipping. Kowal uses these to provide background (and commentary on the times) but takes care to make clear that this is an altered history in her first two words, President Dewey. In case you were in any doubt about the timeline, the chapter proper then starts with “Do you remember where you were when the Meteor hit?” Said meteor (actually, as Kowal points out, a meteorite) hits the sea just off Maryland on March, 3rd, 1952, and wipes out most of the surrounding area, US government and all. Narrator Elma (Wexler) and her husband Nathaniel York were luckily up in their mountain cabin and so survived. Elma is a woman of many talents, a mathematician, a pilot and a war veteran. Due to her hothousing in maths (and proficiency relative to her male counterparts, which in turn led to her being held up as an example to them; never a good place to be) she has developed a visceral fear of speaking in public, manifesting in a vomiting reflex. She is also the first to calculate the likely results of the impact. After the initial cooling phase due to reduced sunlight hitting the ground the volume of water raised into the atmosphere will induce runaway global warming since H2O is a potent greenhouse gas. Her husband realises that humans will have to get off Earth. After persuading the new powers that be an accelerated space programme is the result.

The scenario allows Kowal to address the inherent sexism of the times – but women are eventually allowed onto the space programme (it would be silly after all to engage in a colonisation programme without them.) The Yorks’ initial billeting on the black Major Lindholm after their survival of the impact also leads her to an awareness of racism, her own heretofore more or less unconscious attitudes, but also that of wider society. The figure of Colonel Stetson Parker (here the first man into space) provides an embodiment of sexism and sense of sexual entitlement, from which Elma was only saved during the war by being a General’s daughter.

This isn’t great literature but it is story and all passes easily. The reader can have some fun looking out for resemblances and differences to the space programme in our timeline – the Moon rocket here is an Artemis 9 instead of a Saturn V, for example. Despite an attempt to be forthright in the opening paragraph, there is a rather awkward treatment of the Yorks’ sex life.

I do have a couple of quibbles with the scenario. Given much of the US eastern seaboard has been wiped out would there have been sufficient resources left to mount a space programme? Okay it’s an international effort, but still. And in this perennially cloud bedecked post-disaster world (“Do you remember when you last saw the stars?”) would enough crops have been able to grow to sustain life as we more or less know it?

However, Elma is an engaging enough narrator to encourage me to read the next two novels in the sequence.

Pedant’s corner:- “Neither of us were squeamish” (neither of us was,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (x 2.) “‘What.’” (it was a question, therefore ‘What?’) “export of corn and oats were blocked” *export … was blocked,) “I was looking for ejecta that wasn’t going to be there” (ejecta is plural; ‘ejecta that weren’t going to be there’,) “some involvement over was chosen” (over who was chosen,) “a small women” (woman,) O2 (O2,) “lays over the Earth like a blanket ” (lies over,) “smoothes out” (smooths out,) Williams’ (Williams’s.)

Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times Again

And so, back to the beginning of Bookshelf Travelling for Insane Times, which started with Judith at Reader in the Wilderness but is now hosted by Katrina at Pining for the West.

These books sit on the very top of that bookcase I featured in the first of these posts, above the shelves that contain all my (read) Scottish books.

Books Once More

They’re here because they fit into the space – at least in the case of the three “What If…” books, What If?, More What If? and What If America? – anthologies of Altered History stories – and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America. Then there is Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, Colin Greenland’s excellent Finding Helen, a Paul Torday, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Marina Lewycka’s A Short History Of Tractors In Ukrainian, non-SF works by SF writers Brian Aldiss and Norman Spinrad, Robert Standish’s Elephant Walk and three books by Erich Maria Remarque including the incomparable All Quiet on the Western Front.

If I were filing my books thoroughly systematically these would all have to be moved.

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