So. Another part of our imagined future has gone into the past.

Nichele Nichols is of course most famous for playing Lieutenant Nyota Uhura in the original Star Trek TV series (and subsequent films.) For a black woman to have a role as an important member of a military company was a breakthrough for the 1960s and she was lauded as a role model by no less than Martin Luther King.

It is widely believed that her kiss with William Shatner in one episode was the first inter-racial kiss on US TV (but it may not have been.)

Grace Dell (Nichelle) Nichols: 28/12/1932 – 30/7/2022. So it goes.

I was sad to read today of the death of Vonda N McIntyre.

She first came to my attention with the short story Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand – a Nebula Award winner in 1974 and which formed the first part of her later novel Dreamsnake which won the Hugo and Nebula for best novel in 1979. The story was unusual in that its protagonist was a healer rather than a fighter. It was immediately obvious McIntyre’s writing was up there with the best the genre had to offer.

Looking at my records I find I have six of her books (including one short story collection.) One of the novels, The Entropy Effect, was in the Star Trek franchise, and much better written than it probably needed to be.

I reviewed her 1986 novel Superluminal here.

In all she won three Nebulas and that Hugo.

She may not have been prolific as a writer and not so prominent latterly as she was at the turn of the 1970s/80s but she is undoubtedly one of the most noteworthy SF authors of the late twentieth century.

Vonda Neel McIntyre: 28/8/1948 – 1/4/2019. So it goes.

This peer reviewed paper seems to be experimental proof of an electromagnetic space drive capable of getting to Mars in 70 days.

At least according to the Daily Galaxy.

It may not turn out that way though (on the face of it it breaks the laws of Physics which of course “You cannae change, Captain,”)* but it still makes me feel like I’m living in the future.

*From this clip Scotty actually said “can’t” rather than “cannae”:-

I just heard today of the death of George Clayton Johnston, co-writer of Logan’s Run with William F. Nolan, and scriptwriter for Star Trek and The Twilight Zone.

And yesterday there was Lemmy, whom I see had the same birthday as me though he was older. One of those in the public eye to be known only by a single name his music wasn’t exactly to my taste (Silver Machine in his Hawkwind days – and on which he took the vocal – excepted) but he was one who certainly lived up to the rock’n’roll lifestyle of legend.

George Clayton Johnson: 10/7/1929 – 25/12/2015.

Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister: 24/12/1945 – 28/12/2015.

So it goes.

Picador, 2015, 339 p, including 2 p Acknowledgements and 3 p Questions for Discussion.

Well, it’s a long time since I’ve read a good disaster novel. (Or any disaster novel at all really.) Not that this is a disaster novel per se as it spends a good bit of time on pre-apocalypse matters. The third person narrative varies between the viewpoints of actor Arthur Leander, his first wife Miranda, his friend Clark, former paparazzo turned paramedic Jeevan Chaudhary and Kirsten Raymonde, a child, then later an adult, actor.

Arthur Leander collapses on stage of a heart attack on the night the Georgian Flu comes to Toronto. Jeevan Chaudhary is in the audience and tries to aid him but fails to prevent his death. Before the performance Leander had given Kirsten two “issues” of a sumptuously produced limited edition comic book, the Station Eleven of the title. Kirsten values these through the years of travail ahead; for the Georgian Flu turns out to be particularly virulent, causing death within hours, hence civilisation swiftly falls apart. The few survivors eke out their existence as best they can.

The narration flits between pre- and post-apocalypse detailing Leander’s life story; Kirsten’s wanderings in Year Twenty with The Travelling Symphony – despite the name they perform Shakespeare plays as well as music – with its slogan (derived from Star Trek: Voyager) Because survival is insufficient; Clark’s pre-disaster memories of Leander and his post-apocalypse life in Severn City Airport, Michigan, where he sets up a Museum of Civilisation; Miranda’s experiences with Leander; along with Jeevan’s memories of his life. (There is no reason to suppose that Mandel has ever read it – in all probability she hasn’t – but the Travelling Symphony elements reminded me a bit of Larry Niven’s Destiny’s Road. Mandel is a much better writer than Niven, though, and her story more complex.)

This is a very good book indeed, suffused with sadness but still affirming life. The characters all ring true to life – plus of course the inevitable death(s) – and there is a glimmer of hope for the future at the end. A curiosity was that only the odd pages are numbered and that only if they didn’t coincide with a chapter heading. Even though it has more of a mainstream feel had I read this before the cut-off date I would certainly have nominated it for the BSFA Award – the book was first published in 2014 – but sadly I was a month late.

Yet, even in a book as good as this there are entries for Pedant’s Corner:-
“The line of jets, streaked now with rust.” (Only iron – or steel – can form rust. Aeroplanes aren’t made from iron. If they were they’d not get off the ground. Iron is much more dense than the aluminium jets are made from.) “He’d laid awake” (lain.) In one chapter – a supposed transcription of an interview with Kirsten by the editor of the New Petoskey News – King Lear and New York Times are underlined. Is this due to the pre-word processing convention that submitted manuscripts contained underlining where italics were to be used in the final copy – italics being beyond normal manual typewriters – and these instances were missed in the transcription?

There is a plaque in Linlithgow which commemorates the birth of Starfleet Master Engineer Montgomery Scott, aka Scotty from Star Trek.

Here’s a photo of it.

You’ll note he was born in 2222.

Edited (12/8/24) to add. I believe the museum this plaque was situated in has closed or moved.

Illustrated by George Craig. Nelson, 1960, 186p.

I bought this in a charity shop in Linlithgow. One time I was there they had a swatch of (overpriced) E C Eliott books with wonderfully nostalgic covers – in particular one called Tas and the Postal Rocket. On my next visit most had gone but this one had been brought down from a frankly ridiculous £19.99 to something more reasonable for a book without its dust-jacket. At the same time I bought a Prof A M Low book of similar vintage.

This is perhaps what was once called a juvenile – young adult would be pushing it a bit; it’s definitely not a grown-up kind of tale. Kemlo is a Space Scout, brought up in space on a satellite as part of a quasi-military organisation. Space infants are kept in a nursery looked after by their mothers and nurses. Scouts graduate to their own quarters between the ages of six and nine. The boys’ and girls’ quarters are separate – and this is all we hear of the girls. Despite this apparent distancing and a large degree of control over their own activities the Scouts still have reverence for and defer to their parents who can visit at any time but are mostly absent. Nevertheless Kemlo’s relationship with his father and mother seems not very different from one in a “normal” family.

The story is a farrago of nonsense about the imminent building of a huge satellite mixed in with a rudimentary plot about the extension of the restrictive social arrangements down on Earth up into the space environment. There is also a load of guff about weightlessness and gravity. The station has gravity “rays” and levers which can switch gravity on and off. For some odd reason – unexplained here – the Scouts all have names which begin with K. There are lumps of info dumping and conversations which exist only to outline or advance the plot.

Spookily there is a chief engineer who speaks in Scotticisms. Perhaps Gene Roddenberry read Kemlo books! By the way I’ve still to find the plaque in Linlithgow to Star Trek’s Scotty, the one that says he’ll be born there in 2222 or something. Apparently it’s in Annet House Museum.

Kemlo and the Satellite Builders is firmly of its time in its social and political attitudes but there is something unabashedly optimistic in it. And the illustrations are a retro delight. Not that that redeems its many failures.

Pedants’ corner:- Gravity rays! “We get our power by feeding gravity rays across the generator fins of our power units, because we’ve no natural gravity up here.” So: 1) where does the power for the “gravity rays” come from? 2) the generator fins obviously do not generate, they transform, 3) they do have natural gravity, they just won’t notice its effects because they’re in free-fall.
The Scouts are told the new satellite will, “not be in orbit with Earth. It therefore will not spin on its own axis in order for it maintain the velocity necessary to retain it in an orbit.” Satellites do not need to spin to stay in orbit. Simple velocity (linear, not rotational) balancing the attractive force of Earth is enough.
The Satellite is made of uraniametal, “the strongest and lightest substance known to man.” Really? Substitute least dense for lightest and metal for substance and you might get close. Otherwise a kilo of uraniametal will still be 1,000 times heavier than a gram of lead (or a gram of anything come to that.) Oh; and any gas is much, much “lighter” than the equivalent volume of any solid.

You may have noticed from my side-bar that I’m reading Kemlo and the Satellite Builders by E C Eliott. That was one of the pseudonyms of Reginald Alec Martin.

I’ll post about the book later but one of its main attractions was the illustrations it contained – in all their 1960 finery.

The copy I bought was without its dust jacket but the hard cover itself is illustrated, as is the spine, and there is an internal coloured illustration as a frontispiece.

There were a further six internal black and white pictures, four of which are below. All illustrations are by George Craig.

Nothing dates so quickly as the future. Witness the lever switches, metal grilles over loudspeakers and flashing lights of the original Star Trek.

Gollancz, 2012, 309 p. Reviewed for Interzone 245, Mar-Apr 2013.

For the first two-thirds of Redshirts the thought recurs that it’€™s either the most intriguing piece of SF you have read in a long time or else a sad waste of dead tree. The set-up has replacement crew-members on a starship slowly noticing strange events occurring – especially to those who attract the attention of senior officers and are as a result assigned to accompany them on away missions, where, invariably, one of the minions is at best badly injured, at worst killed. So far, so interesting.

The trouble is that the main characters are barely worthy of the name, being more or less indistinguishable. Moreover we are treated to various mundanities of their lives normally omitted in fiction. Yes, they are supposed to be walk-on parts in a different narrative, a bad Science Fiction TV series from our time, and hence might be expected not to be fully fleshed – but they are the main characters in ours and doesn’€™t the reader always deserves more? Moreover, dialogue is rendered as “Dahl said,”€ “€Duvall said,”€€ “€€œHester said”€€ etc making it feel like a shopping list. In addition the prose rarely rises above the leaden and workmanlike.

And yet the text plays games with narrative and with the reader, features characters who become aware of themselves as players in a story and who take steps to alter their fate. There is even a false ending, allowing Scalzi to address the reader directly.

Viewers of a certain 1960s US TV SF series – which bears a superficial resemblance to the scenario here – may have noticed certain …. illogicalities. Scalzi clearly enjoys laying out the faults, the playing fast and loose with the laws of Physics, the lack of internal consistency, the black box resolutions, which can plague such an enterprise. It is generally not regarded as a good idea for a Science Fiction novel explicitly to refer to SF, yet given the subject matter here it would be remiss not to. Indeed the plot of Redshirts depends on it.

After the amended ending – and making up the last third of the novel Redshirts as an entity – we have no less than three codas, subtitled first person, second person, third person, each narrated in its subtitular mode, respectively by the writer of, and two of the actors in, the TV series. These comment on, illuminate and extend what has gone before. The writer is not cheered by criticism distinguishing between bad writing and being a bad writer, the two actors find their destiny in life. While the codas’€™ styles are disparate, and thus a welcome relief, the last still has dialogue framed like a shopping list. Crucially though, the characters in them feel real.

In the main narrative Scalzi shows he can do bad writing very well. (Now there’s a back-handed compliment.) If you don’€™t know what’s to come in the codas, though; if you’€™re not, say, reading Redshirts for review, that could be a fairly large hurdle to overcome.

The above titled book by John Scalzi will be my latest review for Interzone, issue 245. (Or may be. It’s first reserve. Whatever, 500 words by the end of January.)

Despite his having published innumerable novels I have not yet read anything by Mr Scalzi. (There are only so many days in a year sadly.) Time to remedy that.

The back cover blurb mentions the following strange goings on on board the spaceship which is the book’s setting:-

– Every Away Mission involves some kind of lethal confrontation with alien force.

– The ship’s captain, its chief science officer, and the handsome Lieutenant Kerensky always survive these confrontations.

– At least one low-ranked crew member is, sadly, always killed.

All this sounds familiar somehow; but intriguing.