Gollancz, 2012, 680 p.

The book starts atmospherically with a prologue scene set around the eruption of the Indonesian volcano of Tambora in 1815, which provided the loudest sound in recorded history – an explosion so great that 1200 miles away it was thought to be artillery and threw so much ash into the atmosphere it resulted in “the Year without a Summer” in 1816. Perhaps the first sign that this is not a straight historical novel is that a party of “The Prince’s Men” is on hand – on an ocean-going steamboat.

The novel proper focuses on Conrad Scalese, a rationalist atheist who writes libretti for a living. His latest work has had a triumphant premier but lightning has struck the theatre where it was performed. The local (Neapolitan) Inquisition interprets this as a sign of God’s anger at the opera’s blasphemy and arrives to take him in for questioning. He is saved by the local police chief who conveys him to a meeting with the King of the Two Sicilies who assesses Conrad’s suitability to write the libretto for an opera which the King desires in order to counter a Black Opera which The Prince’s Men plan to perform in a few months’ time. The Black Opera is the secular equivalent of a black mass. Not only will it cause the eruption of Vesuvius, Stromboli, Ætna and other volcanic regions in between, thus devastating the Two Sicilies, it will summon up Il Principe, the God whom the creator God left in charge of Earth. Other intrusions of the supernatural into the narrative have Conrad’s father appearing as a ghost and people known as the Returned Dead – not zombies but fully functioning humans except for lacking the need to breathe.

The premise – that volcanic eruptions can be triggered by singing – is of course unremittingly silly but must be accepted for purposes of story. Invocation of gods or devils by incantation is time-honoured in fiction so their summoning by singing is not too much further of a stretch (but still too much for me.)

Gentle’s characterisation and plotting are excellent, though. The web of relationships around Conrad and the betrayals inherent in the set-up – the Prince’s Men are even more dangerous than the Cammora of Naples or the società onorata of Sicily – are finely detailed. Gentle’s knowledge of, or research on, opera seems solidly based to a non-buff. The collaborative nature of a first production, not only composer and librettist but also the singers, was well depicted.

As befits an altered history of the nineteenth century, the victor of Austerlitz and Borodino, the Emperor of the North, also makes two passing appearances.

Conrad’s sweet-bitterness towards his former love is pithily expressed, “It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man,” and the perennial complaint, “why a sister and a sweetheart will invariably combine their forces to persecute the relevant male,” is aired.

Despite any negativity above Black Opera is never less than readable; even the supernatural stuff.

Pedants’ complaints:- “Sung” count: 1. Livestock is a singular noun. Plus we had a who’s for whose, lay for lie, a beaus for beaux and one, “I can’t explained.” Despite her Italian setting and liberal use of Italian phrases, Gentle employed librettos and palazzos as plurals rather than the Italian libretti/palazzi. (Both forms are, though, acceptable in English.)

Great to see that Ian Sales’s BSFA Award winning Adrift on the Sea of Rains has made it to another awards short list, this time the Sidewise Awards; which are for Altered History (or Alternate History as they affect to call it.)

Hodder, 2010, 496 p.

The usual fare from Turtledove. This time the altered history is that World War 2 starts in 1938 – though the actual Jonbar Point seems to be when Spanish General Sanjurjo survives his aeroplane flight from Portugal to Burgos to head up the Nationalist army in the Spanish Civil War which continues long after it did in our history as, after a failure of the talks in Munich two years later Hitler declares war on and invades Czechoslovakia. Major differences are that Poland then becomes a German ally, the invasion of France is not swift enough (apparently due to the early German panzers not being quite as effective as their later 1940 counterparts would be) and Japan eventually attacks the already war-embroiled USSR in Siberia.

The viewpoints are many, but hardly varied as the characters are as cardboard (or as functional) as always, or there simply to outline the war’€™s progress. The writing is as annoying as ever with its repetitions of information we already know. Particularly irritating was the observation that someone or other didn’t like some aspect of warfare “one bit” occurring again and again.

The reading is easy though; something I felt I needed after Gardens of the Sun. I don’t think I’€™ll be following the rest of The War That Came Early series though. There’€™s now another four of the beggars!

Gollancz, 2008, 321 p.

Unlike the previous volumes in Baxter’s “Time’s Tapestry” series which were spread over several centuries and as a result had a disjointed feel, the action in this one is spread over only a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The tale is tighter and more cohesive as a consequence.

The prologue features an Irishman called O’Malley who at MIT has invented a machine he calls a “loom” with which – with the contribution of the dreams of an Austrian Jew called Ben Kamen – he has managed to send a message back to pre-Roman Britain. It isn’t long before both the loom and Kamen have been snatched by the Nazis and incorporated into their greater plan of altering history to ensure the triumph of the Reich.

The meat of the book is set in and after the invasion of Southern England by German forces once the BEF had been destroyed on the shore at Dunkirk. A hasty (and to my mind unlikely) deal by Churchill with the US sees them given military bases – US sovereign territory – south of London. As Hitler is seeking to avoid war with the US the German advance halts when they encounter these. This struck me as more of a sop to possible US readers of the book than something that would have occurred in such a scenario. The presence of a female US newspaper correspondent and her son in the cast of characters also points in this direction. A demarcation line cutting off South-East England is where the war situation settles down.

Off-stage Churchill falls as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by Lord Halifax who nevertheless continues the war – which goes on more or less as in our timeline; Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, El Alamein all get a mention, Japan’s invasion of Australia is new though. Again it may be more likely that Halifax would have sued for peace, but perhaps that would have been unthinkable with a substantial part of the UK – not just the Channel Islands – under German rule.

While Weaver can be read as a one-off with no detriment to the reading experience there are several nice touches where Baxter has his characters travel to locations which appeared in earlier books in the series; places like Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall and Richborough in Kent (Roman Rutupiae.)

This is the sort of thing that Harry Turtledove essays so frequently. Baxter’s characters are more rounded than Turtledove’s generally are and the extra twist of the loom makes for an added commentary on the contingency of historical events.

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.

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.

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.

Harper Voyager, 2009, 584p.

I had been about to start this book when I received Robinson’s 2312 for review for Interzone. I don’t usually read books by the same author very close together so I slipped this one down the queue.

As the title suggests it features Galileo Galilei, who one day in early 17^th century Venice encounters a strange man who informs him of the recent Dutch discovery of the magnifying power of two lenses fixed in a tube. Galileo soon improves the device markedly, sells it to the rulers of Venice and then, fatefully of course, turns his own towards the Moon and Jupiter.

It soon transpires that the stranger is from the far future, the 3020s, and is able to transport our hero forward in time where Galileo witnesses proof of his observation of the circulation of Jupiter’s four main moons. Here there is a plot involving human interference with sentiences in the oceans of Ganymede and Europa; and in Jupiter itself. Subsequent trips to the 3020s elaborate somewhat. Galileo’s memories of these trips are made hazy by an amnestic drug. There are strong indications that this is an altered history – or at least an alterable one as a faction among the Jovians wants Galileo to suffer martyrdom for the sake of Science. Indeed, Galileo is shown evidence of and experiences his own execution. However, the events in the end follow those in our timeline. Robinson follows modern interpretations of Galileo’s reputed remark, “Eppur si muove,” (“And yet it moves”) as being uttered well after his trial rather than directly on his recantation. There is also a nice touch when Robinson, paraphrasing Einstein, has Galileo refer to himself as “standing on the shoulders of dwarfs.”

The narrative voice is mostly third person, the tale apparently being told by Galileo’s assistant Cartophilus. Occasionally this opts for the first person plural and towards the end uses the singular I or me. Cartophilus is eventually revealed to be one of the long-lived Jovians though this is obvious to the reader very early on.

Despite the Science Fictional gloss the far future sequences are unconvincing while by contrast the scenes in Italy are absorbing and compelling. Galileo’s life and circumstances are admirably evoked as are the politics of the time. Those in the Jovian system come to seem a distraction from the real drama of the coming inquisitorial trial and the unfolding of Galileo’s life. Robinson has written an affecting and engrossing account of Galileo’s life. Perhaps, though, his publishers might not have accepted such a book from him without the tacked on Science Fiction elements.

Time’s Tapestry Book One Gollancz, 2006, 302 p.

In the prologue, set in pre-Roman Britain, a woman giving birth starts to speak in tongues. Handily there is someone on hand who has traded with Rome and not only understands the Latin phrases but can note down her words. These are later interpreted as a prophecy.

The main narrative is then structured round the descendants of those who attended the birth who pass the legend down the generations. The three main sections are set centuries apart; during the second Roman invasion of Britannia (Claudius’s undertaking,) Hadrian’s decision to build his wall between the Tyne and the Solway and Constantine’s visit to these islands. The families are moved to intervene at each of these critical junctures. One of the families interprets the prophecy as being the attempts of a Weaver of time pulling at the threads of its tapestry.

In the epilogue another birth is accompanied by a similar phenomenon but this time the words are in Saxon, so cueing Book Two.

I wasn’t quite sure whether to list Emperor under Altered History or not. Our history isn’t altered (of course a different history may have been) but there are discussions of the possibility of alteration. These discussions, while necessary for the overall arc of Baxter’s Time’s Tapestry sequence, seemed to me to be a bit too modern, jarring a little with the setting.

The style of the narrative unfortunately required a prodigious quantity of information dumping and historical description. Reading a novel is a relatively painless way to access history, though, and what I know of those times wasn’t contradicted by the narrative. There was also a strange mixture of British usages (shag and screw for example) and Americanisms (“fit” as a past tense.) Baxter also incorporates a mention of the iniquities both of wealth disparities and of excessive taxation, the first of which may be a relatively recent concern – in historical terms. The characterisation was sketchy, though adequate, but characterisation isn’t the main point in a book like this, the speculation is. Indeed at one juncture Baxter makes a defence of “imaginative” fiction in precisely these terms.

Emperor isn’t high literature but isn’t setting out to be. Enjoyable enough, though.

Another of the prominent Science Fiction writers of my youth and young adulthood, Harry Harrison, has died.

He was probably known best for his Stainless Steel Rat books and also for the stories of Bill, the Galactic Hero, whose title gives a flavour of Harrison’s sardonic wit. In these books Harrison played against the usual conventions of the SF action adventure.

Ouside the narrower SF world his most familiar work – via the film Soylent Green starring Charlton Heston – is probably the novel Make Room! Make Room!, one of the first to touch on overpopulation as an imminent problem. Harrison said the film, “at times bore a faint resemblance to the book.”

He was also one of the earliest purveyors of Altered History. His A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! was published in 1972, with his Eden trilogy, where dinosaurs never died out, following in the 1980s. The Stars and Stripes trilogy (1998- 2001) imagined a British intervention on the American continent during the American Civil War leading to war between a Reunited States and Britain. (The US won. Of course.)

He edited more than a few important SF anthologies with English SF author Brian Aldiss with whom he also helped introduce serious criticism to the genre.

Henry Maxwell (Harry) Harrison: 12/3/1925 – 15/8/2012. So it goes.