Brain in a Jar Books, 2023, 353 p. Reviewed for ParSec 9.

In the aftermath of an extremely virulent virus called the Whispers, which may or not have been man-made, optimised humans (Opts) such as Cassie White are widely held to have had something to do with it and subject to prejudice as a result. Somewhere around the same time there was also an AI war after which the Chinese People’s Republic was replaced by the New Chinese Republic (NCR.)

Cassie’s optimisation has given her an overwhelming need to be in space. Unfortunately, a side effect of her treatment was to be the sufferer of occasional blackouts. One such led to an accident on the Moon in which a coworker died. Drugs can control the symptoms but are not fully trusted – either by her or the wider world. She had been turned down for the first expedition to Jupiter’s moon Europa, on which her brother Chris was one of the crew. Its fate is shrouded in mystery and, most likely, disaster. Hence Cassie starts the book having to work underseas, the closest she can feel to the space experience. To her surprise a politician called Ketteridge, who had previously stirred up resentment against Opts, comes to her in secret with a proposition. His bait is a video of someone walking across the surface of Europa (could it be Chris?) and he wants her to join a second expedition to that moon to recover information valuable to him.

Earlier than our introduction to Cassie though, Gibson pulls off a similar sort of trick to the one Alfred Hitchcock gave us in Psycho, as a result of which the reader knows that two other operatives on the ship, Sally Braemar and Jeff Holland, are not who they claim to be.

Not that suspicion is lacking anywhere on board. Cassie’s replacement of the original crew member has flummoxed everyone, Commander Javier hates her for being responsible for that death on the Moon and fears a relapse on her part so keeps her in suspended animation throughout the trip and her subsequent involvement to a minimum, the others resent Braemar and Holland as possible spooks. Such a closely tied group containing possible traitors makes this aspect of the novel resemble an Alistair MacLean book. And unbeknown to them all, Marcus, Cassie’s last boyfriend, who when about to die of the Whispers had his brain downloaded into an AI (a group also now universally vilified and feared due to the war) has infiltrated his way on board and can observe them all through the ship’s robot repair machines. Plus a Chinese ship having on board another former lover of Cassie, a connection of which Javier is aware, is also on the way to Europa.

And the Yatagarasu, an AI controlled ship which made an unscheduled stopover at Europa, has since vanished from human ken.

All in all, plenty to keep us intrigued and turning the pages.

The remainder of the book deals with the obstacles Cassie has to overcome in getting to Europa’s sea floor in her search for Chris and with what she finds once she gets down there.

Gibson is good on the mechanics of underwater exploration and his descriptions of the extra-terrestrial life in Europa’s ocean do tickle the sense of wonder. A touch of mysticism, if not outright fantasy, tinges the fate of the first expedition, though.

Europa Deep is good solid (well a fair bit of liquid actually) stuff, ticking quite a few boxes. It will scratch the itch of the SF buff, ought to satisfy the thriller reader and even tease the horror taste buds.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “perhaps there were having a bad day” (they were having,) “she’d be damned if she’d spend one more time in this man’s presence” (I don’t see the need for that ‘one’. One more minute?) “ a few other of you” (a few others of you.) “There was a cheap hotel not from where she was” (not far from where,) Marcus’ (many times. Marcus’s, which did appear once,) Veles’ (many times, Veles’s,) “the cry of cicadas” (cicadas plural, so therefore ‘cries’,) “zero gravity” (technically there is still gravity; the more accurate term is free fall,) Karman Limit (elsewhere Kármán line.) “She pictured Braemar bursting into the lander at that moment, a wrench gripped in one hand and his eyes full of manic hatred” (the character Sally Braemar is female. The male was called Holland,) a missing colon between a message source identifier and its content. “Europa’s dark side” (I assume this meant the side of Europa permanently not facing Jupiter,) “went work in the NCR” (went to work,) N/O2 supply (strictly N₂/O₂ supply, though, whatever, the 2 ought to be a subscript,) skeptically (sceptically,) “as much to break the silence than anything” (as anything,) “none of them were Chris” (none of them was Chris.) “Rust and grime streaked its outer shell” (Would subsurface exploration suits for use on Europa really be made of iron?) span (spun,) Chris’ (Chris’s,) Necropolis’ (Necropolis’s.)

ParSec 9 has been published and can be purchased here.

I have not yet received my contributor’s copy* but – unless I’ve lost track – this one ought to have my reviews of:

Europa Deep by Gary Gibson,

Creation Node by Stephen Baxter,

Mindbreaker by Kate Dylan

and My Brother’s Keeper by Tim Powers.

*Edited to add; now received, and I hadn’t lost track. (Except I hadn’t noted that I have a fifth review in this issue, of Umbilical, by Teika Marija Smits.)

I have finished Gary Gibson’s Europa Deep and sent the review off to ParSec.

In the meantime two further review books have arrived for me to peruse.

These are Mindbreaker by Kate Dylan, an author new to me, and Creation Node by Stephen Baxter of whom that can not be said.

Those two should keep me busy.

You may have noticed on my sidebar the book Europa Deep by Gary Gibson.

This is to be the latest of my reviews for ParSec online magazine.

I know Gary, at least to talk to at conventions. It’s been a long time since I did though. He now lives in Taipei. The book was mailed to me all the way from there.

Nov-Dec 2015

Five Conversations with my Daughter (Who Travels in Time)¹ by Malcolm Devlin. The title pretty much sums this up. The narrator’s daughter travels back in time – on only five occasions – to talk to him when her body in his time is asleep.
We Might be Sims² by Rich Larson. One of a group of three convicts forced to make a trial run to Europa thinks they may be in a simulation.
Heartsick³ by Greg Kurzawa. Martin has his heart, dying for seventeen years since the drowning of his daughter, removed.
Florida Miracles by Julie C Day. Inside, Esta hears the voice of Mrs Henry. The day comes when Mrs Henry wants out.
Scienceville⁴ by Gary Gibson. In his basement Joel Kincaird has constructed a map of Scienceville, the town he’d invented as a teenage boy but after an exhibition in which he’d displayed some of his drawings he gets emails from people who claim to have lived there.
Laika by Ken Altabe. The (USian) narrator’s great uncle Dimitri – a real Russian – is dying and asks him to look after his dog Laika whom he claims to be that Laika, the first living creature in space.

¹ summersaults (somersaults)
² snuck (sneaked; I know it was written in USian but still.)
³ miniscule (minuscule), plus written in USian so we had he felt obligated rather than he felt obliged.
⁴ Despite Gibson being Glaswegian this is written (at least in part) in USian so we have recess for interval, couple hours for couple of hours, ‘getting on what, four years?’ for ‘getting on for what, four years?’ (He lives in Taipei now though (and his protagonist lives in New York.) Ikea (surely it’s IKEA?)

Tor, 2012, 359p.

After a strange encounter with a renegade, when a dangerous piece of technology, an instantiation lattice, is forcibly inserted into his brain, information specialist Luc Gabion is called in to investigate the murder of a member of the Temur Council, one of the Thousand Emperors of the title, rulers of the Tian-Di, half of the two parts into which humanity had split after the events of Gibson’s previous novel Final Days.

Thereafter we are plunged into a mix of power politics, interstellar intrigue and action sequences with all the attendant skiffy stuff – armed insect–like machines called mechants, jump gates, books that release their contents on contact, enhanced humans with disseminated consciousnesses – of which devotees of Space Opera are fond.

I have a feeling that Gibson may have rushed this one; or else was squeezing too much into his word count. Quite a lot of the background information was revealed through dialogue and as a consequence seemed unnatural. (Yes, no-one in novels actually “talks” as in real life; but even so.) The mayhem count will please those who like that sort of thing though

Curiously a crime was “perpetuated” at one point but “perpetrate” was used later in an appropriate fashion. Compared to Final Days there was an increased span count of 5 here – though there was one “spun.”

Tor, 2011, 373p.

Set in 2235, this is an unusual take on the apocalypse story. The time-honoured British approach to such a tale typically focuses on the post-apocalypse scenario. By way of contrast Gibson has his disaster unfold in front of us. To this end he employs the novel foreshadowing method of letting us and his characters (by viewing recordings from the future) know what will happen before it actually does in “real” time. The McGuffin is a series of tethered wormholes that allow interstellar travel but also act as time machines through which the future can be observed or even intrude into the present. This raises the concept of a kind of predestination as attempts to prevent the destruction of Earth seem foredoomed. Mitchell Stone, who has “died” and been resurrected by some process of the “Founders” who have left a network of wormholes behind them when they departed to the far future where these connections no longer exist, says such tied wormholes fix future history and pre-empt free will. The disaster – initiated by a device being brought back through a wormhole – will potentially leave millions dead but he is instrumental in its genesis and claims it is an attempt to “save” everyone and liberate them from this lack of choice. This is not how things appear to the others, though.

At one point the exigencies of the plot require some of the characters to take a trip to the Moon in a replica of a Saturn V. This is a curious authorial decision as in a very much plot driven, action-heavy tale where by that stage time is of the essence, the days-long journey does tend to hold up the story somewhat.

In a story such as this characterisation is not the essential point. There is not much fleshing out here, except in the coda, but it is a page turner. Another plus point is that we have no silly names such as Gibson employed in his Shoal sequence.

Span count: one. (Though there is a “spun” later on.)

Gary Gibson (see here or click on my side-bar) has set up a new e-book publishing imprint* called Brain In a Jar Books whose blog/web page is here.

Gary’s aim is to bring back to life some otherwise out of print books never before made available for e-readers.

Most of the projected releases are by authors known to him – and to me, it must be said. I’m particularly glad to see Angus McAllister appear on the list.

I don’t have an e-reader myself (I’m a bit of a Luddite; I prefer reading ink on paper, where it won’t be a calamity if you drop it in the bath) but if I had I would be buying these.

*or whatever the equivalent e-thingy is.

Tor 2010. 393p. Third Book of The Shoal Sequence.

This continues the adventures of Dakota Merrick and the Shoal member Trader In Faecal Matter Of Animals which started in Stealing Light and was followed by Nova War. The plot concerns the seeking out of an ancient weapon called the Mos Hadroch and its transportation across the galaxy for use in ending the war against the civilisation known as the Emissaries in which the Shoal have been engaged for centuries.

The name Mos Hadroch has faint echoes of Frank Herbert’s Dune series but Gibson’s is a more straight forward action adventure story with twists, turns and betrayals aplenty, not to mention novae, space battles and murder, though there seemed to be a bit less violence than in the two previous volumes. All this is grist to the Space Opera mill which Gibson is grinding. But some of his characterisation runs up against a problem common with SF which deals with humanity in altered states. For example, Nancy Kress’s Beggars In Spain has humans who no longer need to sleep and are said to be more intelligent as a result. However their behaviour and actions are not depicted as being so endowed.

Here, several of Gibson’s characters have machine implants in their heads but beyond being able to communicate with each other (and some spaceships) at distance their behaviour does not seem much different from that of “normal” humans, either in Gibson’s invented world or our own.

Empire of Light rounds off his trilogy nicely but Gibson still leaves the possibility of sequels.

Throughout the 1950s, the early 1960s, through the late 60s efflorescence of the New Wave and into the 1970s and 80s a stream of English authors came to prominence in the SF field and had novels published in Britain. To my mind there was a clear distinction in the type of books all these authors were producing compared to those emanating from across the Atlantic and that certain characteristics distinguished the work emanating from either of these publication areas. While Bob Shaw was a notable Northern Irish proponent of the form during this period and Christopher Evans flew the flag for Wales from 1980 something kept nagging at me as I felt the compulsion to begin writing. Where, in all of this, were the Scottish writers of SF? And would Scottish authors produce a different kind of SF again?

Until Iain M Banks’s Consider Phlebas, 1987, contemporary Science Fiction by a Scottish author was so scarce as to be invisible. It sometimes seemed that none was being published. As far as Scottish contribution to the field went in this period only Chris Boyce, who was joint winner of a Sunday Times SF competition and released a couple of SF novels on the back of that achievement, Angus McAllister, who produced the misunderstood The Krugg Syndrome and the excellent but not SF The Canongate Strangler plus the much underrated Graham Dunstan Martin offered any profile at all but none of them could be described as prominent. And their works tended to be overlooked by the wider SF world.

There was, certainly, the success of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark in 1981 but that novel was more firmly in the Scottish tradition of fantasy and/or the supernatural rather than SF (cf David Lindsay’s A Voyage To Arcturus, 1920) and was in any case so much of a tour de force that it hardly seemed possible to emulate it; or even touch its foothills.

David Pringle noted the dearth of Scottish SF writers in his introduction to the anthology Nova Scotia where he argued that the seeming absence of Scottish SF authors was effectively an illusion. They were being published, only not in the UK. They (or their parents) had all emigrated to America. Though he has since partly resiled on that argument, it does of course invite the question. Why did this not happen to English SF writers?

It was in this relatively unpromising scenario that I conceived the utterly bizarre notion of writing not just Science Fiction but Scottish Science Fiction and in particular started to construct an SF novel that could only have been written by a Scot. Other novels may have been set in Scotland or displayed Scottish sensibilities but as far as I know I’m the only person who deliberately set out to write a novel of Scottish SF.

It could of course simply be that there was so little SF from Scotland being published because hardly anyone Scottish was writing SF or submitting it to publishers. But there were undoubtedly aspirants; to which this lack of role models might have been an off-putting factor. I myself was dubious about submitting to English publishers as they might not be wholly in tune with SF written from a Scottish perspective. I also thought Scottish publishers, apparently absorbed with urban grittiness, would look on it askance. I may have been completely wrong in these assumptions but I think them understandable given the circumstances. There is still no Scottish publisher of speculative fiction.

With Iain M Banks and Consider Phlebas the game changed. Suddenly there was a high profile Scottish SF writer; suddenly the barrier was not so daunting. And Phlebas was Space Opera, the sort of thing I was used to reading in American SF, albeit Banks had a take on it far removed from right wing puffery of the sort most Americans produced. Phlebas was also distant from most English SF – a significant proportion of which was seemingly fixated with either J G Ballard or Michael Moorcock or else communing with nature, and in general seemed reluctant to cleave the paper light years. Moreover, Banks sold SF books by the bucketload.

There was, though, the caveat that he had been published in the mainstream first and was something of a succès de scandale. (Or hype – they can both work.)

[There is, by the way, an argument to be had that all of Banks’s fiction could be classified as genre: whether the genre be SF, thriller, in the Scottish sentimental tradition, or even all three at once. It is also arguable that Banks made Space Opera viable once more for any British SF writer. Stephen Baxter’s, Peter Hamilton’s and Alastair Reynolds’s novel debuts post-date 1987.]

As luck would have it the inestimable David Garnett soon began to make encouraging noises about the short stories I was sending him, hoping to get into, at first Zenith, and then New Worlds.

I finally fully clicked with him when I sent The Face Of The Waters, whose manuscript he red-penned everywhere. By doing that, though, he nevertheless turned me into a writer overnight and the much longer rewrite was immeasurably improved. (He didn’t need to sound quite so surprised that I’d made a good job of it, though.)

That one was straightforward SF which could have been written by anyone. Next, though, he accepted This Is The Road (even if he asked me to change its title rather than use the one I had chosen) which was thematically Scottish. I also managed to sneak Closing Time into the pages of the David Pringle edited Interzone – after the most grudging acceptance letter I’ve ever had. That one was set in Glasgow though the location was not germane to the plot. The idea was to alternate Scottish SF stories with ones not so specific but that soon petered out.

The novel I had embarked on was of course A Son Of The Rock and it was David Garnett who put me in touch with Orbit. On the basis of the first half of it they showed interest.

Six months on, at the first Glasgow Worldcon,* 1995, Ken MacLeod’s Star Fraction appeared. Another Scottish SF writer. More Space Opera with a non right wing slant. A month or so later I finally finished A Son Of The Rock, sent it off and crossed my fingers. It was published eighteen months afterwards.

I think I succeeded in my aim. The Northern Irish author Ian McDonald (whose first novel Desolation Road appeared in 1988) in any case blurbed it as “a rara avis, a truly Scottish SF novel” and there is a sense in which A Son Of The Rock was actually a State Of Scotland novel disguised as SF.

Unfortunately the editor who accepted it (a man who, while English, bears the impeccably Scottish sounding name of Colin Murray) moved on and his successor wasn’t so sympathetic to my next effort – even if Who Changes Not isn’t Scottish SF in the same uncompromising way. It is only Scottish obliquely.

So; is there now a distinctive beast that can be described as Scottish Science Fiction? With the recent emergence of a wheen of Scottish writers in the speculative field there may at last be a critical mass which allows a judgement.

Banks’s Culture novels can be seen as set in a socialist utopia. Ken MacLeod has explicitly explored left wing perspectives in his SF and, moreover, used Scotland as a setting. Hal Duncan has encompassed – even transcended – all the genres of the fantastic in the two volumes of The Book Of All Hours, Alan Campbell constructed a dark fantastical nightmare of a world in The Deepgate Codex books. Gary Gibson says he writes fiction pure and simple and admits of no national characteristics to his work – but it is Space Opera – while Mike Cobley is no Scot Nat (even if The Seeds Of Earth does have “Scots in Spa-a-a-ce.”)

My answer?

Probably not, even though putative practitioners are more numerous now – especially if we include fantasy. For these are separate writers doing their separate things. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether they have over-arching themes or are in any way comparable.

PS. Curiously, on the Fantastic Fiction website, Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton and Alastair Reynolds are flagged as British – as are Bob Shaw, Ian McDonald, Christopher Evans and Mike Cobley – while all the other Scottish authors I’ve mentioned are labelled “Scotland.” I don’t know what this information is trying to tell us.

*For anyone who hasn’t met the term, Science Fiction Conventions are known colloquially as Cons. There are loads of these every year, most pretty small and some quite specialised. The Worldcon is the most important, an annual SF convention with attendees from all over the globe. It’s usually held in the US but has been in Britain thrice (Glasgow 2, Brighton 1) and once in Japan, to my knowledge. The big annual British SF convention is known as Eastercon because it takes place over the Easter weekend.

Edited to add (6/6/2014):- Margaret Elphinstone should be added to the list above of Scottish authors of SF. Her first SF book The Incomer appeared from the Women’s Press in 1987, the same year as Consider Phlebas, but I missed out on it then. My review is here.
See also my Scottish SF update.

Edited again to add (4/4/18) Elphinstone’s sequel to The Incomer is A Sparrow’s Flight which I reviewed here.