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Christopher Priest

I was shocked to learn of the death of writer Christopher Priest.

Yes he was 80 and it seems he had cancer (but of  course I did not know that) but the news nevertheless came as a jolt.

I had followed his blog posts – see my sidebar – but he usually posted intermittently so the lack of recent posts did not seem significant.

I had probably heard of him in the 1960s via short stories but certainly by the time of his first novel (Indoctrinaire, 1970) and I bought and read his books keenly. His work makes up a substantial portion of my SF collection. Typically the reality in his narratives is slippery, with things gradually morphing from the seemingly quotidian to something more other worldly.

He will most probably be remembered for his stories set in the Dream Archipelago, a world recognisably like ours but yet twisted slightly out of true and which evolved over time.

I was lucky enough to meet him a few times at Science Fiction conventions. The last time was at the Harrogate Eastercon (six years ago now) – quite some time since we had last met – and since I am a relatively little known SF writer/reviewer – I was surprised he recognised me. He even remembered I hail from Dumbarton and introduced me to his partner Nina Allan (whom he married last year) as coming from the town. He was unfailingly courteous, friendly and encouraging.

I have of course read most of his books and have reviewed many of them on here (the link is to every mention of Priest on this blog.) His prose never fell below the highest quality. Had his work not been so closely aligned to Science Fiction and the speculative he would undoubtedly have received more praise from the usual literati suspects than he in fact did.

My consolation (if there is one) is that there are still some of his books on my tbr pile.

Christopher Mackenzie Priest: 14/7/1943 – 2/2/2024. So it goes.

 

ParSec 9

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.)

D G Compton

I saw in Saturday’s Guardian that writer D G Compton has also died (in November. They took their time publishing the obituary.)

His was a familiar name on the British SF scene from the 1960s onwards but his work was always a little out of the SF mainstream.

However looking at my records I only seem to have one of his books on my shelves, Nomansland, published in 1993.

 

David Guy (D G) Compton: 19/8/1930 – 10/11/2023. So it goes.

The Floating Hotel by Grace Curtis

The above titled book will be the latest of my reviews for ParSec.

I have not sampled any of Ms Curtis’s work before, though she has had a previous novel, Frontier, published.

The publishing blurb says “There will be more!!!”

Is that a threat or a promise?

Time will tell.

The Chinese Time Machine by Ian Watson 

NewCon Press, 2023, 269 p. Reviewed for ParSec 7.

This is the latest collection of stories from Ian Watson, who has been active in the SF field for over fifty years. These were all first published within the last seven.

We start with four stories under the rubric The Chinese Time Machine. Each describes an expedition into the byways of times past. Our travellers, David Mason and Rajit Sharma, set out from a basement lab in Oxford in 2050 on behalf of the Time Institute in Beijing in a Chinese dominated world whose kaleidoscopic and shifting background is elaborated over the four tales. It is obvious that Watson has had huge fun devising and writing these episodes exploring the paradoxes and confusions of timelines in tales where tenses have to be twisted in order to convey the contingencies of “times gone by yet to be.” They are also replete with allusions and jokes. In them there are echoes of John Brunner’s The Society of Time and Connie Willis’s Oxford Time Travel stories. Not the least of their pleasures is that the characters remain blissfully unaware of how their activities change history. Watson’s delight in word-play and allusion also permeates the rest of the collection.

In the 1st Trip: Brave New World by Oscar Wilde, our brave time adventurers, complete with wrist computers and translators worn as necklaces, pluck that author from France in 1897 so that, instead of dying in 1910, he can write his work that will change literature, Brave New World.

The 2nd Trip: The Kidnap of Fibonnaci is made in an attempt to stop that mathematician’s influence inflicting capitalism on the world and makes much of the fact that little is known of Fibonnaci’s life.

3rd Trip: The Emperor’s New Wallpaper is the longest story in the book. Mason and Sharma are accompanied to St Helena by Colonel Maggie Mo, ostensibly to replace the wallpaper made with arsenic dye said to have contributed to Napoleon’s early death so that he will survive for a time. Maggie has ulterior motives and takes them all, Napoleon included, back to the construction of the Terracotta Army as she wishes to establish a world-wide Chinese hegemony well before its time. The tale is somewhat sprawling and even strays to a Lakota Sioux – and Cheyenne – inhabited Mars (which they call Barsoom) before its resolution. Watson’s jocular narration here finds room to comment on the alliteration heavy prose style of these stories.

4th Trip: Sherlock Holmes and the Butterfly Effect (written with Cristina Macía) sees Mason and Sharma travel back to abduct Sherlock Holmes (who claims Dr Watson was an invention by Conan Doyle) so that the United Kingdom of Europe – headquartered in Brussels of course and this future China’s great rival – will not come about. They fail but persuade Maggie Mo to travel back to become Holmes’s chronicler.

The premise of Hot Gates (a literal translation of Thermopylae) is that a process called melting, which erases landscape features – and consequentially kills the people living there – is happening to disputed border regions. Our narrator is a vulcanologist surveying Jerusalem hoping to observe its destruction, which of course occurs – and during which he constructs a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon.

Monkey Business riffs on the monkeys typing Shakespeare trope. Watson makes the most of this chance to include multiple allusions to the bard’s work. The city of Scribe is where thirty-seven robot monkeys (which are more like baboons) are carrying out their task. From the outset it is clear that this world is artificial, or at least not ours. Mixed in with all this is a tale of a pilgrim to the city and a swain she meets on the way, giving the title monkey business added resonance.

When the Aliens Stop to Bottle is an invasion story. Octopus-like aliens calling themselves the Oktagon have appeared on Earth and nullified all the nuclear weapons launched at them. Narrator Jen is on an overcrowded train trying to get home when an alien enters the carriage and asks for her Eye-dentity before displaying an interest in philosophers.

Heinrich Himmler in the Barcelona Hallucination Cell has Himmler on a visit to Spain demand to see the hallucination cell which, to prevent sleep, has a tilted bench and bricks jutting from the floor plus “degenerate art” on its walls when he starts to hear voices from the future in his head. But are they communicating with the real Himmler or one from a different reality?

Clickbeetle is a story regarding an unusual punishment using that tiny insect placed into the ear as an irritant. Its irregular clicks are akin to tinnitus and compared to Chinese water torture (a torment said here to be apocryphal.) The story manages to range widely across the history of such tortures and of Dr Mengele’s experiments.

Journey to the Anomaly explores the differences among the crew of a ship sent out from a star clump containing various sentient races to said anomaly, a solar system whose planets’ orbits are arranged too regularly, in other words our sun’s. Its twenty-one pages contain a plethora of SF ideas.

The Birth of Venus features the coming to awareness of a set of posthuman AIs and their subsequent adventures. It speculates on a universe where Beryllium 8 isn’t unstable and carbon atoms could have formed earlier than they did in ours.

On its own, each one of the above stories is amusing, informative and thought-provoking. Read immediately after each other, with only slight pauses to reflect (as is required for review,) and their cumulative effect can be a touch intense. Take your time, though, and you’ll be fine.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Acknowledgements, The Emperor’s New Clothes (In the Contents and as the story title this was The Emperor’s New Wallpaper. On the contents page “About the Author” is given as starting at page 371 (it’s actually 271.) Otherwise; obsolete (obsolete,) Padddyfields (Paddyfields,) chilis (chillis,) “an annex” (an annexe,) conjouring (conjuring,) times (multiply,) “4 .25” (no space after the 4; ‘4.25’,) “deuxième bureau” (shouldn’t this be capitalised, “Deuxième Bureau”?) schooma’am (schoolma’am,) Sharman (x 1, Sharma,) halfs (as in half-pints of beer. I would have thought it should it be halves,) Surtees’ (Surtees’s,) Porteous’ (Porteous’s,) “as opposed to  surrendering to the Russians” (at Waterloo it was the Prussians who fought alongside Wellington. But this may be – is – an altered history,) “outside of” (x 2, no ‘of’, just outside.) “Clouds are whispy” (wispy.)  “Gracefully Maggie yields les jumelles just a sentry kneels, sights, and fires a crossbow” (seems to be missing either a few words or punctuation.) “A few more arrows follow suite from crossbows” (follow suit,) “the peasant army charge” (charges,) “to be scraped of its hull” (off,) teepees (tepees,) mathematical (mathematical,) mantlepiece (mantelpiece,) Wells’ (Wells’s,) “inside of” (x 2, just inside, no ‘of’,) Holmes’ (Holmes’s – which did appear earlier,) bacterias (bacteria is already plural; one of them is a bacterium,) “isn’t nice even it’s passably pretty” (even it it’s,) “rains never falls” (fall,) ne’re (ne’er.) “type thorough the hours of night” (through,) accommodate (accommodate,) tressle (usually trestle,) glitch/es (usually glitch/es,) “a chamelion’s tongue” (chameleon’s,) Eye-denity” (Eye-dentity,) “barely 5 mills long” (mills is not an abbreviation for millimetres; that is ‘mm’. I have heard people say ‘mils’ as in ‘10 mils’ but the abbreviation is ml, pronounced ‘mil’ however many there are,) “doubles in numbers” (doubles in number,) “voice with chords” (they may communicate musically but ‘cords’ is more likely,) CO2 (x 3, CO2,) “should not be taken refer to” (taken to refer to,) “two a. m. -ish” (two a.m. -ish,) collapsment (should this perhaps be spelled collapsement?) connexions (x 2. But elsewhere – correctly – connection,) “the imagery of … suggest” (the imagery …. suggests,) “none of these are” (none of these is,) dispensably” (dispensibly.)  Syncronisation (Synchronisation.)

World Out of Mind by J T McIntosh

Corgi, 1961, 186 p. First published 1955.

This was McIntosh’s first novel. In it human society relies on a system of tests to determine suitability for employment and government posts, grading people as Brown Stars, White Stars etc. Our protagonist Raigmore has no memory of existence beyond a few months ago but is making steady progress through the grades. Early in the book he makes himself known to Alison Hever, a White Star seemingly beyond his reach. He also knows himself to have a mission buried in his mind and has conversations with others with the same task. They are revealed to be aliens (Nwyllans) having taken on human form, an advance guard for an invasion. Raigmore’s elevation to the status of a White Star will be the culmination of their preparations. The fall of the Earth colony on Mars is the final prelude, a warning that resistance is useless. However, Raigmore’s assimilation into Earth culture and his feelings for Alison Hever alter his loyalties.

This has all the hallmarks of its 1950s origins, the only surprising thing as far as that is concerned is that it features a woman (Hever) at the apex of human governance.

It is humans’ “fantastic” love of freedom that is supposed to have turned Raigmore’s allegiance. Despite the Nwyllans’ benign (in their own eyes) intentions and the benefits they would bring – progress, collaboration, the end of war – humans “insisted on their right to make their own heaven or hell.” (This supposed superiority of humans’ unique capacities over other possible entities’ has, of course, never been tested.)

Pedant’s corner:- “‘The less you know that better.’” (The less you know the better,)

Michael Bishop

I was sad to read in the Guardian on Thursday of the death of Science Fiction writer Michael Bishop.

He was one of my favourite SF writers of the 1970s and 1980s.

I have read eleven of his books including two short story collections and the novel he co-wrote with British SF author Ian Watson.

His was always a humane approach to writing SF.

He had a knack for memorable story titles. From my early days reading the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction his story The White Otters of Childhood stood out as demanding to be read.

Then who could not be intrigued by And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees? (This story is also known as Beneath the Shattered Moons. So good he named it twice.)

And there is his novel Philip K Dick is Dead Alas.

Michael Lawson Bishop: 12/11/1945 – 13/11/2023. So it goes.

Reading Scotland 2023

Thirty four Scottish books read this year; equally divided between female and male authors. Fiction, Poetry, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Non-fiction, Football. I have linked to my reviews if they have appeared here.

No Dominion  by Louise Welsh

Hieroglyphics by Anne Donovan

For the Good Times by David Keenan

Wild Geese by Nan Shepherd

Paper Cup by Karen Campbell

The Christmas Truce by Carol Ann Duffy

A Would-Be Saint by Robin Jenkins

Something Like Happy by John Burnside

The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark

The Dark Remains by William McIlvanney and Ian Rankin

Scotland’s Lost Clubs by Jeff Webb

The Oath Takers by Naomi Mitchison

Vinland by George Mckay Brown

Beethoven’s Assassins by Andrew Crumey

Chimera by Alice Thompson

Hester by Mrs Oliphant

Antimacassar City by Guy McCrone

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

The Philistines by Guy McCrone

Fishnet by Kirstin Innes

A Gift From Nessus by William McIlvanney

Sea-Green Ribbons by Naomi Mitchison

Companion Piece by Ali Smith

Night Boat by Alan Spence

Europa Deep by Gary Gibson

Murder in the Merchant City by Angus McAllister

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

The Puritans by Guy McCrone

King Hereafter by Dorothy Dunnett

Escape From Hell by Hal Duncan

The Pearl-fishers by Robin Jenkins

The Bachelors by Muriel Spark

Klaus by Allan Massie

Early in Orcadia by Naomi Mitchison

 

Best of 2023

These are in order of reading; 18 in total, 9 by women, 10 by men, 8 by Scots (italicised,) 4 translations, 1 SF/Fantasy. The links are to the reviews on here:-

Paradise Reclaimed by Halldór Laxness 

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker 

For the Good Times by David Keenan

The Infinities by John Banville

Wild Geese by Nan Shepherd  

Paper Cup by Karen Campbell

A Would-Be Saint by Robin Jenkins 

Master of the Crossroads by Madison Smartt Bell 

Beethoven’s Assassins by Andrew Crumey  (my review was published in ParSec 8 and will appear here in due course.)     

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell 

The Liar’s Dictionary by Eley Williams

Fishnet by Kirstin Innes 

The Gaze by Elif Shafak

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell 

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker 

Cybele, with Bluebonnets by Charles L Harness

Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez

My present read (Luka and the Fire of Life by Salman Rushdie) may be an addition to this list (but then again it may not.)

Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds

Tor.com, 2019, 172 p.

Reynolds can be relied upon to give us good, solid well-written SF. This is a departure from his usual galaxy-spanning Space Opera epics though; a tale of environmental catastrophe and time travel.

Permafrost is the name of the time travel project, whose base is located in Kogalym in the far north of Russia. In 2080, after an event known as the Scouring has removed nearly all life on Earth starting with insects and radiating outwards from there, Valentina Lidova, an 80 year-old woman is recruited into the project seemingly because she is the daughter of mathematician Luba Lidova who worked on the mathematics of paradoxes. It is explained to Valentina that time has a block structure, more like a crystal lattice than a river, circuit diagram or tree. But the lattice isn’t static. It can adjust itself or be adjusted.

The project is regulated by four AIs named The Brothers, each after one of those in the Karamazov novel. The time travel mechanism involves twinned electrons called Luba pairs one of which is sent back into the brain of an experimental subject in the past.

The choice of Valentina as the first chrononaut (though Reynolds eschews this term) surprises the rest of the trainees as she joined the most recently. She is sent into the mind of Tatiana Dinova, a woman undergoing brain scans in 2028.

Complications ensue when Valentina discovers Tatiana is able to communicate with her and when others of the trainees sent to an earlier time begin to interact with her. It seems that even further in the future than 2080 efforts are being made to disrupt their mission and their controllers have become desperate and taken risks.

The story then settles down into what are in essence two chases, one in 2028 to secure the caching of a sample of seeds for use in 2080 and one in 2080 to obviate interference from the further future.

This is excellent, well-constructed SF.

Pedant’s corner:- “There were flaws in it imperfections,  impurities and stress points.” (There were flaws in it; imperfections,) “the thunderclap arriving after a lighting flash” (lightning flash,) focussing (focusing.) “Cho had even showed me” (shown me.)

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