John Wyndham - Jizzle

As a big fan of John Wyndham I was very pleased to discover this collection of short-stories that I was previously unaware of. First published in 1954 the stories appear mostly to date from the early 1950s. Reading these today I'm struck by how familiar they seem. Perhaps this is because their subjects and structures have been much emulated over the years. As such the tales lack the punch from their twist endings that readers probably enjoyed when the book was first published. That said, I enjoyed the stories as much for their contempory social comment as their plots.

Today Wyndham is mostly remembered as a science-fiction author, but his writing was actually often closer to fantasy or horror. Several of the stories in Jizzle are actually horrific, the title story for instance, deals with the consequences of a circus monkey that can draw, and how its extremely accurate pictures of people in compromising positions with others, lead to tragedy.

Several of the stories deal with a favourite subject for Wyndham - time travel, including a rather clever one involving a love-lorn woman who has just been dumped and visits a fortune teller. Rudely dismissing the predictions, she fails to hear the warning "that was your second marriage" and the reader is left to fill in the delightful gaps.

Women play a central role in many of these stories, though often as individuals looking for love. I'd like to suggest that Wyndham was breaking the mould in how women were portrayed but his characters tend to fall into various stereotypes. Because the books very much reflect the period they were written in they share some other stereotypes. One of the stories has a child playing with her dolls in a tea party. The gollywog in her game is the "naughty" character. I doubt that Wyndham was making a deliberate racist comment, but it certainly jarred when I read it 66 years after publication.

Chinese Puzzle is a comic story dealing with the arrival of a Chinese dragon in Wales. Ignoring the crude attempts to portray a Welsh accent in print, the story follows a rather predictable path, with the exception that a central role is played by the local Welsh Communist activist who sees the creatures' arrival in terms of the successful Chinese Revolution. Unfortunately the arrival of a red Welsh "peoples' dragon" turns the conflict into nationalism versus communism. The slightly predictable ending disappoints, but the premise is clever and there are some amusing digs at over-inflated egos in the Communist movement and the Nationalists. I loved Confidence Trick a story in which the London Underground plays a key role, proving that over-crowding on the tube is not a recent development at all!

Some of the stories felt very dated. Does anyone know what a flea circus is these days? But others have stood the test of time. Contemporary concerns about the impact of technology are dealt with neatly in The Wheel, which looks at a future where the wheel has been banned and the Church deals with heretics who try and make one.

Despite these being more fantasy, questions of science and technology run through many of the stories, including the consequences of misusing science (or indeed magical situations) to achieve personal profit. There's a definite sense of karma to most of the tales, protagonists get what is due to them.

All in all this is an entertaining collection that will probably be of most interest to those who are existing fans of John Wyndham. The stories didn't quite have the sense of relevance as The Kraken Wakes did when I re-read it a few years ago. But they are neat and tightly written, reminding me it is possible to tell a story in a few pages, just as well as several hundred.

Related Reviews

Wyndham - The Kraken Wakes
Wyndham - Web
Christopher - The Death of Grass

Stephen King - Elevation

Having thoroughly enjoyed Stephen King's most recent full length novel The Institute I was excited to see this novella in the shops. As I noted in my review of The Institute, one of King's skills is the description of life in small-town America, full of memorable detail and dark foreboding. So the fact this short novel, set in the fictional Maine town of Castle Rock, is based around this concept made the book even more attractive.

Unfortunately King fails to pull it off this time. There are two aspects to the story, both centred on the likeable, if dull, Scott Carey. Scott finds himself experiencing two simultaneous problems. The first is that he is losing weight rapidly. But unlike people on a diet he is experiencing no simultaneous decrease in size. Moreover, things he touches also lose their weight. At the same time Scott's lesbian neighbours, Deirdre and Missy, are experiencing the dark side of small town America. Here, the conservative minded locals, are boycotting their restaurant and silently mocking their marriage.

Scott, uses his new found weightlessness to rather unconvincingly pull the town together around the gay couple and rejuvenate their lives and business. This happens when he helps Deirdre, a former Olympic athlete, win the annual Thanksgiving run. The picture of Deirdre, her wife Missy and Scott on the finishing line is enough to convince the conservative inhabitants that gay couples aren't a bad thing.

There's nothing particularly bad about the tale. But it just doesn't work. Prejudice doesn't just vanish like this based on a pleasant photo in the newspaper. The one occasion that Scott does challenge the homophobia he is unsuccessful and warned off. For the story to work it needed a more powerful challenge to the bigots. The disease itself might be intended as a comment on contemporary politics, but it is unbelievable - and given that King can make killer cars, haunted hotels and giant alien spiders living in the sewers believable that's strange.

The weight loss, and its inevitable outcome, might work as a convoluted metaphor for Scott dying of cancer, but as a plot device it is completely unbelievable as King fails to setup Castle Rock as the sort of place were this sort of thing takes place. Clearly this is all a metaphor by King for Trump's America. But if King thinks that it is going to be this easy to knock back the bigots that he'll have a surprise. It's only a short book (in fact I was very annoyed to find some 30 pages of the already slim volume devoted to an extract from The Institute) so King fans can read it quickly without feeling they're committing to a major tome. But I guarantee most will be disappointed.

Related Reviews

King - The Institute
King - The Stand
King - Under the Dome
King - The Gunslinger
King - The Drawing of the Three
King - Wizard and Glass
King - The Wastelands
King - Wolves of the Calla
King - The Wind Through the Keyhole
King - The Dark Tower

Stephen King - The Institute

With The Institute Stephen King makes a big return to his classic form. The novel is a page-turner, building up from an unassuming start as disgraced policeman Tim Jamieson arrives in the small-town of Dupray, South Carolina. Here King excels at describing the lives of ordinary working class people as Tim gets to know the people and community. 

Thousands of miles away, and seemingly unconnected, Luke Ellis's parents are killed by intruders and he is kidnapped. Luke is a child prodigy who also has some unusual powers - he can move small things just with the power of his mind. Luke wakes in The Institute, in a room that is almost a total facsimile of his home at his parents'. Here he discovers a brutal regime that tortures children to develop their special powers, and, when appropriate, passes them on to an even shadier section.

I was less gripped by the subplot that centres on the aims of The Institute than I was by the story of rebellion by Luke and his friends. Luke's escape and his eventual meeting with Tim is gripping, but the climatic resolution seemed a little contrived. I'm not sure that the authorities would be so quick to believe Luke's outlandish story - though I did like the idea that the Institutes' forces could be defeated by the townsfolk.

But what makes the book so compelling, and indeed characterises the best of King's work, are the small details that make the impossible so believable. In this case The Institute is deprived of funding, is run down and badly managed. Anyone who works in the public sector will recognise King's depiction of a failing bureaucracy that has grown stagnant.

But the real meat of the story is the rebellion of the children, born out of their mutual solidarity. In a world where the US government does put children in cages, the points that Stephen King is making are not exactly subtle but the fear of powerful quasi-government organisations is real. A real return to form, and existing fans of King will enjoy this tightly written novel.

Related Reviews

King - The Stand
King - Under the Dome
King - The Gunslinger
King - The Drawing of the Three
King - Wizard and Glass
King - The Wastelands
King - Wolves of the Calla
King - The Wind Through the Keyhole
King - The Dark Tower

Kassandra Montag - After the Flood

After the Flood is the latest bestseller inspired by the contemporary environmental crisis. The novel is set in the near future when a catastrophic flooding event caused by masses of water leaking out of the centre of the Earth has flooded almost all the land except for the tops of what used to be mountains. What's left of humanity has become entirely dependent on the sea, and farming of the small amounts of remaining land. Pockets of people have formed dozens of communities, increasingly dominated by "raiders" whose violent, pirate-like behaviour means they can steal what they want and menace for goods to sustain themselves.

The book focuses on Myra who survived the rapid flooding of the interior of the United States, but whose husband, when the water finally arrived, ran off with her daughter Row. Myra herself was pregnant with her second daughter Pearl. When we first meet these two they are surviving by fishing and then trading their catch for other necessities. The author, Kassandra Montag, sets up the context very well - we get a sense of small communities on the edge of existence, threatened by external violence, and eking out an existence on what is left from the collapse of civilisation.

Myra has given up hope of seeing Row again, but by chance learns of her survival, likely as a breeding material for one of the pirate gangs. Her journey to find her, which involves becoming part of a crew on a boat capable of the long distance voyage, make sup the rest of the book.

Since I'm partial to novels about the collapse of civilisation, I was looking forward to reading this, but I found myself frustrated. I thought the characters tended to be one-dimensional, and behave unrealistically. I liked Pearl particularly, though her strange habit of collecting snakes made no sense at all and I thought that her mother treated her appallingly. Pearl's fear that her mother was more concerned with her first daughter than her well-being certainly felt true, though Montag has Myra deny it through the novel. I didn't however feel convinced by any of the characters motivations and while the action sequences were fun, they seemed to only exist to hold together a rather less enjoyable story based on the characters' relationships.

But the biggest problem was that the premise of the book was utterly implausible and no-one seemed to question it. The cracking open of the Earth's crust and the release of vast quantities of water (utterly vast if we're talking about covering almost all the continental United States) defied plausibility, physics and belief. This undermined everything else about the novel. Sadly I was left disappointed by this latest attempt to help us think through the consequences of climate change.

Related Reviews

Wyndham - The Kraken Wakes
Robinson - New York 2140
King - The Stand

Stephen Baxter - World Engines: Destroyer

*** Warning Spoilers ***

I picked up Stephen Baxter's latest novel World Engines: Destroyer after a very positive review in the Guardian. Sadly the book didn't live up to it's promise despite having an agreeably interesting premise.

Astronaut Reid Malenfant awakes in his own far future. His body has been in cold storage since a shuttle accident which killed his co-pilot. Malenfant's own partner Emma Stoney had also been killed exploring Mars' moon Phobos. He is awakened because, impossibly, several hundred years into their mutual futures, Earth has received a message from Stoney.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel is that Malenfant awakes in a future that he cannot understand and which cannot, for the most part, accept him. His brash ways are incompatible with the slow moving life of a post-scarcity, post-space age society. In fact, he is only useful really, for being willing to try and visit Phobos to find out what is happening there and because of the threat to Earth from a rogue planet.

Arriving at Phobos with a motley crew of rejects, Malenfant and his companions discover that the moon is a gateway to a whole number of different universes, each with a "jonbar hinge" that makes them subtly different. In one Russia and the US engaged in major nuclear war, in another Britain stayed out of the Second World War and let Hitler and Stalin slug it out with nuclear weapons. Characters and crews from this travel to Malenfant's timeline and visit the outer solar system to try and understand what's taking place there.

The problem is that the book really isn't up to the interesting premises. All the characters, without exception, are extremely annoying. The British crew are such caricatures that I wondered if the author had ever met anyone from Britain. Malenfant and the people from his own timeline are so annoying I kept hoping they'd be pulled slowly into a massive black hole, though it would have to be massive indeed to overcome the gravity of Malenfant's own massive ego.

From around page 300 there are indications that the only reason the next 300 or so pages exist is to set up the sequels. There are subplots that make no sense (what's the can of Cola about?) and pages upon pages of exposition about technology that are boring and unnecessary.

The most interesting stuff here receives little or no resolution - specifically the nature of Phobos. But then the publisher's wouldn't get the profits from another sequel would they?

Unless you're a major fan of Baxter's work I would avoid this.

Related Reviews

Baxter and Reynolds - The Medusa Chronicles ("Bloody Terrible")
Pratchett & Baxter - The Long Earth ("Quite Disappointing")

Stephen King - The Stand

Today it seems that post-apocalyptic novels are ten a penny. The combination of Trump's Presidency, Brexit and the climate catastrophe have driven all sorts of authors to write about the end of civilisation. Few of those get to grips, in my opinion, with the likely reality - which is likely to involve global war for diminishing resources, rather than the Swiss Family Robinson fantasy of isolated groups living in the midst of plenty as they rebuild civilisation.

I first read The Stand in the early 1990s and had little recollection of it other than it involved a clash between good and evil in a post-apocalyptic American wasteland. Re-reading it I was pleasantly surprised to discover an epic which cleverly challenges some of the stereotypical "end of the world" stories. Despite being written in the 1970s the book itself felt remarkably fresh and sadly relevant.

The story begins with an accidentally release of an experimental biological weapon "Captain Trips" which rapidly spreads across the states. The original version of The Stand was shortened by several hundred pages and the complete book released a few years later, has much more on how this happened and the way that the military attempt to keep control. These extracts help make the book feel much more gritty, and relevant, as the US state desperately attempts to hang on to power. The collapse of the chain of command as almost 9/10 of the population succumbs to Captain Trips means that those remaining soldiers descend into horrific barbarism.

Small groups of survivors share dreams that pull them in two different directions, setting up the Good v Evil climax to the books. One group are pulled towards an elderly black woman, Mother Abigail, a deeply religious person who becomes the focus for new, democratic society around Boulder Colorado. The others are pulled towards a recurring evil figure from King's canon, Randall Flagg, who runs a type of fascist society that rapidly sets about putting civilisation back together - the sort of society where the trains run on time, but those who dissent are crucified from telegraph poles.

The upturning of the genre occurs when Mother Abigail realises that her purpose in bringing the good together was not to rebuild civilisation in a new, democratic and fraternal way, but to destroy Flagg and his creation. It's leads to a magnificent about turn in the story, as key figures realise their destiny is not to live life in a new society, but to travel across the desert and engage in a confrontation that will decide humanity's future.

It being Stephen King, the delight of the book is in the detail. The individual stories of those who survive the pandemic are told with wit, sympathy and horror. In fact one of the reasons I class King as such an excellent writer is his ability to expose the dirty underbelly of US society through the medium of horror. Racism, poverty, unemployment and misogyny are the backdrop to the tales of pandemic. This is not a pleasant white middle class society, set in picket-fenced suburbia, brought to its knees.

Instead it's America, warts and all, that collapse and that makes the anguish of the survivors, who wonder whether anything has been learnt from it all so important. King doesn't think so - the circle opens and closes, history repeats, it's all inevitably going to go wrong - but that doesn't diminish the story itself. The characters too are far from one-dimensional. They agonise over choices, change allegiances and do the unexpected - though not always for the right reasons. It makes for a remarkably satisfying reading experience.

One other influence I noticed was ecological. King shows many animals - particularly dogs - dying as a result of Captain Trips and his characters worry about the population explosion of pests like rats. King is clearly influenced here by George R. Stewart's classic (if far less brutal) end of the world novel Earth Abides. But I wondered whether Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was also an influence. His characters, looking for drinking water, note that the factories haven't been shut down long-enough for the rivers to be safe, and one buries his rubbish rather than throwing it on the road - "not going down that route again" seems to be the message.

Like his other classic IT, The Stand will be all too frequently dismissed because of its genre. But both works deserve reading for the light they shine on our troubled times and for the epic story-telling.

Related Reviews

King - Under the Dome
King - The Gunslinger
King - The Drawing of the Three
King - Wizard and Glass
King - The Wastelands
King - Wolves of the Calla
King - The Wind Through the Keyhole
King - The Dark Tower

Brian Aldiss - Greybeard

*** Warning Spoilers ***

Brian Aldiss' 1964 book Greybeard sits alongside John Wyndam's The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes and John Christopher's The Death of Grass in what might be described as classic English novels about the end of the world portrayed through the collapse of the British state. As we face environmental Armageddon I'm finding such  doom-laden science fiction novels both attractive and terrifying, and Aldiss' book is no exception.

Set years after atomic weapon tests have sterilised all of humanity and most mammals, the book looks at how civilisation has fallen and how humanity has survived. The story follows the eponymous Greybeard as he, with his wife and other friends, travel down the River Thames with the aim of reaching the coast. Having left the relative safety of a small village where they'd lived for decades, we follow the group's adventures which allows Aldiss to tell us how the world is coping as the youngest generation reaches their 50s. In flashback we learn what happened in the aftermath of the last baby being born.

This is where it is interesting for contemporary readers. How will civilisation proceed if we see global environmental breakdown? We are unlikely to live through a gradual breakdown of society. Aldiss' describes how, as fewer and fewer children are alive, the world erupts into global conflict as states try and secure young people as future assets. Greybeard takes part in some of these wars, which are brutal - frequently killing the young who they are trying to capture. As economies collapse (people simply stop working as there is no future) states' breakdown and local dictators arise to control and protect local populations in a gross parody of feudalism. Readers familiar with Wyndam's work will recognise similar themes from the end of his Triffid novel. Eventually plague defeats these dictators and humanity survives in tiny villages, fearing outsiders and growing ever older.

Greybeard is a compelling read. I fear it has a lot to tell us about how climate chaos will likely lead to extremes of violence locally and internationally as states try to maintain their existence, though perhaps it under-estimates even that. The novel itself is well-written and compelling, even though I found the ending a little too positive and predictable.

I read Greybeard alongside the new book by Extinction Rebellion which I'll review shortly. The joint experience didn't leave me feeling particularly positive. But at least we have the chance of stopping environmental disaster through radical, mass political action. But the time is short, and in the real world it is the children who will suffer the most.

Related Reviews

Wyndham - The Kraken Wakes
Christopher - The Death of Grass
Morrow - Is this the Way the World Ends?
Robinson - New York 2140

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Walking to Aldebaran

You know that thing when, as a child, you wanted something so very badly that it hurt? But when you got it, it wasn't what you wanted to have at all? Well Gary Rendell, the British astronaut at the heart of Adrian Tchaikovsky's short novel Walking to Aldebaran really really wanted to go to space. He was lucky enough to have his dream come true, when an alien artefact is found far out in the solar system. When a robot probe investigates it is found to defy several laws of physics, and so a multi-nation human mission is sent to explore it. 

The artefact, nicknamed after the frog it resembles, turns out to defy any attempt at understanding - physical laws, time and motion all seem to break down in unpredictable and inexplicable ways. Gary finds himself a loan survivor of the exploratory team, and stumbles around the frog in an attempt to get home. In doing so he discovers various weird, wacky, dangerous and insane aliens and puzzles. While Tchaikovsky is brilliant at describing the aliens that survive in the artefact, the book's real wonder for the reader is what the artefact is. Is it an abandoned alien portal? Is it a dead space-ship? Is it something else entirely while the species exploring it are doing little more than a hedgehog might using a tunnel under a motorway? 

There are many reasons I loved this book. Firstly it's really tense and creepy. Secondly I love novels of first contact, space archaeology and science-fiction twists. But I also liked how Tchaikovsky made all the characters real and balanced the contemporary story of Gary in the artefact with the story of how he got there. I loved the idea that the multi-national crew all learnt Danish as part of a rebellion against their bosses back on Earth - the author's description of the crew and their interactions was done brilliantly.

While the basic concept of the book might not be that original, this is an excellent twist on the tale that packs more into it then many 500 plus page novels.

Related Reads

Tchaikovsky - Children of Time

Tchaikovsky - Children of Ruin

Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Ruin

Children of Ruin is the sequel to Adrian Tchaikovsky's smash hit Children of Time and follows on directly from the end of that novel (excluding a tedious journey between stars). In CoT travellers from Earth seeded a planet with DNA to accelerate the development of a safe ecology for their colonisation. Unfortunately it ended up creating a species of intelligent spiders which, when Earth's technological society collapsed evolved on their own. Follow up missions led to war and the mutual collaboration. At the end of the novel they head off into space to investigate a planet from which human radio signals have been received.

Children of Time begins in parallel with the earlier novel telling the similar story of the failed attempt to explore and terraform an Earth like world. This time, arrogance, accident and technological sabotage also led to the creation of a hyper-intelligent community of octopuses, who in the absence of humans are able to utilise our technology to reach into space. Unfortunately, and in a somewhat crude Malthusian metaphor, the octopus civilisation growths too rapidly to escape over-crowding and pollution - leading to war.

Into this mix add a third, utterly alien (as intelligent octopuses and spiders aren't really alien) intelligence that absorbs all other intelligences into its collective mind. This is the complex mix that our human and spider heroes arrive to, and war, mutual incomprehensibility and a giant stalking alien made of stone and bits of shell, threaten to annihilate everyone. While it's all a bit of a rush, and suffers slightly from too many viewpoints, the plot is pulled together rather neatly.

As in the first book Tchaikovsky is able to use his aliens to make somewhat wry comments on our own civilisation. But I did feel that space-faring octopuses were a little over the top. Though it does mean that he get away with sentences that contain phrases such as "solar system of molluscs" entirely without a tongue in cheek. Tchaikovsky ponders a lot more in this book on intelligence, communication and social breakdown (as well as intelligent molluscs), which means the pace is quite different to the first book. I didn't quite enjoy it as much as the CoT, but its a satisfying sequel and fans of the first book should definitely get hold of it.

Related Reviews

Tchaikovsky - Children of Ruin

Robert Heinlein - I Will Fear No Evil

As I described in my review of Farah Mendlesohn's critical biography of Robert Heinlein, The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein I have an ambiguous relationship with his novels. But Mendlesohn's repeatedly returns to a major novel by Heinlein which I had never read - I Will Fear No Evil and given what she says I felt I ought to read it before, perhaps, coming finally to terms with Heinlein.

First published in 1970 and written in 1968-1969 it bears all the hallmarks of that period. It focuses on the life of Johann Smith, an extremely wealthy billionaire (though he is implied to be even richer than that sounds today) who is coming to the end of his long life. Heinlein uses age, as he does in several of his books, to allow characters to comment expertly on the present through their experiences of the past. So at one point Smith's eventual character visits the home of a poor family and shows how to cook using "depression cooking" despite not having cooked for them-self in decades.

At the end of his life, Smith, uses his wealth to have his brain transferred to a replacement body. By coincidence the only person able to make this donation is the recently murdered, extraordinarily beautiful Eunice who was Smith's secretary. Once in Eunice's body, Johann (who renames them-self to Joan) appears to co-exist with Eunice in the new body's brain. Many reviews discuss whether or not this is meant to be real, or some form of psychosis on the part of Johann. I'm not sure it matters for most of the book (except, perhaps the ending). Of more interest is what Heinlein does with it.

About a third of the way in I had dismissed the book as a "masturbation fantasy", something the publisher of my 1970 edition appears to agree with when they write of the "mind-blowing results" that occur following the transplant. Mendlesohn also points out that it could be read as "soft porn" though it is pornography in the form of titillation - that explores questions of gender change, homosexuality, partner swapping and so on - without explicitly detailing it. Telling rather than showing, so to speak. Heinlein might in many ways be applauded for some of this - and he certainly is less hostile to homosexuality in this book than in others. It is notable, for instance, that Johann is very much straight before the transplant, but while sharing a body with Eunice, Joan is very much bisexual. It's explained that this is a result of Eunice's own bisexuality before her death. Thus Johann's sexual world is opened up after the operation.

The problem is that Heinlein isn't really being all progressive here. In fact what bothered me was two fold. Firstly Joan's rediscovery of the joys of sex, and the expansion of horizons that takes place, seems very much designed to please the males she knows. Joan enjoys the sex, but their enjoyment is almost secondary to ensuring the male partner is having a good time. Secondly, and linked to this, is that Heinlein uses a rather standard trope when it turns out that almost all the women around him before the operation were actually desperate for sex all the time and had hidden, vigorous sex lives. This isn't of course a bad thing. But Heinlein's use of this appears designed to titillate his readers, a sort of "every woman is read to have sex with all men as soon as it is offered". Heinlein takes this to extremes - one of his female characters enjoys a gang rape for instance. Mostly it is about Joan kissing, screwing and flirting with everyone they meet. It's particularly unsettling for some characters as Joan has Eunice's' body and they knew her before the operation. I found the section when Joan visit's Eunice's former partner quite disturbing as a result.

Written in the late 1960s when questions of sexuality and freedom were increasingly being discussed. Heinlein is both reflecting the wider world and putting his own spin on it, which in hindsight looks somewhat conservative. Behind all of this is the urban decay of America. Jobs are hard to come by and even illegal work is actively taxed. Drugs and illiteracy are a major social problem and Johann/Joan are able to hide from all of this - literally fencing themselves off through their wealth. Johann, and then Joan, also use their wealth as a means to buy off their own guilt - paying cash to those they like who are living in poverty - including Eunice's old husband. Though this is strictly for those who deserves it - Eunice's former mother in law gets nothing as she's an alcoholic on welfare.

Unusually for Heinlein there are no cats, though blood transfusion plays a big role (Heinlein was a major advocate of blood donor-ship - though here the metaphor is closely linked to the donating of a body). There is also only a passing mention of incest; though Joan impregnates herself with Johann's stored sperm - effectively becoming, at the end, mother and father of their own child.

Many of Heinlein's grander themes are explored here. For those trying to understand him, it's an essential read, but its marred by Heinlein's own limitations - politically, culturally and socially. Leaving aside the bad erotica, it seems initially to be somewhat progressive, but I don't think it is as progressive as the author thought it he was being. Far more interesting and innovative writing would come out of the new movements for liberation. Ironically, as I read the second hand edition I had, it literately fell apart in my hands. It felt like a fitting end to my engagement with Heinlein.

Related Reviews

Mendlesohn - The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein
Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

Heinlein - Starship Troopers
Mitchison - Memoirs of a Spacewoman

Victor Lavalle - The Ballad of Black Tom

***Contains Spoilers***

I've never really had much time for the works of H.P. Lovecraft - all those over-long descriptions of eldritch horrors tended to put me off. But plenty of people are, and Victor LaValle is one such fan, though his distaste at Lovecraft's racist views is highlighted by his dedication - "For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my complicated feelings".

But in this short novel LaValle gets his revenge on Lovecraft by taking his genre and characters and turning them into a brilliant critique of a racist society. Set in a Lovecraftian New York, LaValle's short novel begins with Tommy, a small time wheeler-dealer who is constantly trying to make ends meet, in particular to help out his father. Tommy is also a talentless musician who dreams of the big time, but isn't good enough (indeed his one shot at the big time was terminated after one song when the band ditched his efforts).

Tommy is picked up by a wealthy, white, businessman Robert Suydam who wants him to play at a party - a party that is part of summoning the nameless horrors that exist "outside". New York here is not our New York, but a close parallel where magic is real. This 1920s "Jazz Age" world is different, but much the same. Crooked, racist cops kill Tommy's father in a painful scene that is reminiscent of countless accounts of US police killings of poor black people today. Suydam wants to fix this, but not through a Civil Rights movement:

Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor. It's all sound and filth and spiritual putrescence... But what if that could change? ... When the Sleeping King awakes he will reward us with dominion of this world. And all your enemies will be crushed into dust.

So Suydam dreams of releasing the nameless horrors of the other world in order to free humanity, and, in particular, free the oppressed and downtrodden. It's an excellent setup, that neatly skewers Lovecraft and inverts the horror genre. But the book is more than a great idea - its brilliantly written, gasp out loud horrible in a couple of places, and nicely paced to an excellent climax. Most interestingly is the trajectory of Tommy who goes from a relatively harmless hustler (who defaces a book of magic to prevent it being used for evil) to full on monster; driven, not by a glimpse of the nether-world, but by racist violence.

I suspect those who know Lovecraft's work well will get a lot more out of this than I did. I did not know, until after I'd finished it, that some of the characters, principally Suydam and the detective Malone, are straight out of what two writers describe as Lovecraft's "most bigoted story". But even if you don't know Lovecraft's work I'd recommend this short novel as an excellent addition to the growing body of fantasy and science-fiction that is tackling big questions of racism, oppression and bigotry.

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Solomon - An Unkindness of Ghosts
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Hanna Jameson - The Last

It has been three years since Donald Trump's election which means that those authors who were inspired to write post-apocalyptic fiction in the wake of his inauguration are now having it published. Hanna Jameson's The Last is very clearly modelled on events after Trump, or a similar US President (who remains nameless in the novel) causes a nuclear war to break out. The question of the Presidency, and who voted for "him" is a running plot-line through the book which centres on a small group of residents trapped in a hotel in the Swiss mountains in the aftermath of the war.

Jon Keller is the focus of the book. He's torn by angst having failed to reply to a last text message from his wife, and attempts to deal with the trauma by investigating an apparent murder that took place just before the end of civilisation. What makes the book great is the exploration of how individuals cope with what has taken place - one character, a doctor, points out that everyone is in mourning - not just for their loved ones, but also for the lives they have lost. So while disaster aficionados will enjoy the parts of the book that deal with survival in the aftermath of the collapse of civilisation, there's much more than just the usual hunting for food and fuel. On occasion Jameson links the too together rather well, as when she depicts characters, particularly Jon, trying to use their phones to call home or conserving batteries to listen to MP3's one last time.

Unfortunately I felt the book was weakened by am unbelievable ending, but the various threads (and the murder mystery) are tied up rather well despite this disappointment. Highly recommended for those people who are thinking through the end of the world.

Related Reads

Robinson - New York 2140
Morrow - Is this the Way the World Ends?

Farah Mendlesohn - The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein

I have an ambiguous relationship with Robert Heinlein. On the one hand, I read and re-read many of his novels from childhood through my teenage and later years. For some reason, on a lone cycling trip through France at the age of 18 the only book I took with me was Stranger in a Strange Land which I read several times; re-reading it in later years. Several other novels have stuck with me for various reasons. Time Enough For Love I enjoyed mostly for its interludes which described slices of life of Lazarus Long whose long existence enabled him to experience many different times, places and loves; Glory Road I enjoyed as a teenager for its swords and sorcery, only later coming to view it as faintly ridiculous and I read Farnham's Freehold a couple of times and on each occasion spotting something that angered me more. Friday was, for many years, a favoured tale of pure adventure with a strong female lead that was unlike much else in the science fiction genre.

That Heinlein's books could be read and sometimes enjoyed over such a period is a sign of his innovation and strength as a story-teller. What became much clearer was that there was an ambiguity to his writing which was at times, frankly revolting. As a teenager I remember finishing To Sail Beyond the Sunset and for the first and only time in my life, defacing the book in anger at what I saw then as the complete degeneration of Heinlein's politics.

Looking back now I find myself much more at odds with Heinlein. Farnham's Freehold is frankly a racist book and parts of Time Enough for Love or Stranger in a Strange Land make me very angry indeed; my last reading of Stranger in 2005 left me aghast in some places, notably the infamous line put in the mouth of a female character that "Nine times out of ten, if a girl gets raped, it's at least partly her own fault". Then I saw Stranger as reflecting Heinlein's trajectory towards reactionary politics. But now I am not so sure.

Because I retain some of the enthusiasm for Heinlein from my younger years I was drawn to Farah Mendlesohn's new book on Heinlein's writing. It is not a biography, rather a thematic study of almost all his writings. Having read it I found myself warming much more to Heinlein as a thinker, even though I felt, as I think Mendlesohn does too, that at times he was extremely and dangerously naive. Mendlesohn illustrates this well when studying the racial politics of Farnham's Freehold. She argues that Heinlein thought it would be an anti-racist work because it inverts slavery, making white people the slaves and black people, in a post nuclear war USA, the masters. Instead it is a novel that racists would enjoy - in particular (spoiler) because the black slave owners turn out to be cannibals. Heinlein's failure to grasp what racism is, lies at the root of this contradiction.

But the point that Mendlesohn makes is that this reaction would have upset Heinlein. He was, particularly for his time, very progressive. He had, for instance, a "deep-down belief in justice and in sexual and racial equality"; and wrote about topics that today are quite common within science fiction but were rarely talked about (or were even taboo) at the time - including gender, race and trans-questions. His language might today seem clumsy, but it was innovative - particularly when one looks at his attitude to "family" which rejects the western norm. This is, of course, why some of his books, like Stranger became icons of counter-culture - his characters have sex, take drugs and resist authority. But he did, as Mendlesohn says, "drift to the right" and in part I think this is because he was cynical about social movements. His engagement with politics was, in the context of the US at least, one that was relatively mainstream - attempts to launch radical movements were still born and floundered on what I think was a limited understanding of how society worked.

Mendlesohn writes that while "Heinlein's political opinions changed over his forty-year writing career, it is important to understand that his underlying beliefs did not". I think this is an illuminating point. Whatever Heinlein is doing there is a very emphatic "right and wrong" to his core beliefs. One of the problems that people often identify with Heinlein's books is that they feel like lectures at times - with characters extolling a particular world view. Time Enough For Love does this is several ways - with the interludes with Long's sayings interspersed with other tales where he gives waxes lyrical on a theme (slavery, racism, gun ownership) etc. Here Heinlein's characters (and we must assume Heinlein himself) have a particular vision of a better society, though it is rarely different at an econoimc or political sense, rather as the result of different personal relationships.

In discussing For Us, the Living (which I have not read) Mendlesohn says that

there is a clear sense in this book of the communitarianism still current in American life in the 1930s. In For Us, the Living civic duty is focused on contribution, and respect for the individuals social liberty; privacy is absolute, childrearing is no longer solely an occupation for women... and sexual jealousy is a mystifying illness.

It all sound very attractive, but there is no sense of how to get there. Heinlein writes about revolution in several of his books. But they are not Revolutions that socialists like myself would recognise. They are top down movements, led by small groups of people, or other intelligences, which Mendlesohn (in my opinion, mis-characterises, as being like Bolshevik organisation). But without mass involvement in such movements how will people transform themselves and "rid itself of the muck of ages" as Karl Marx argued. Heinlein provides no answers.

As the quote above indicates, Heinlein's attitude to sex and sexual relations is inseparable from his wider attitudes to interpersonal relationships and the family. In these he is firmly in the progressive camp; though Mendlesohn points out he "dives gender equality from gender roles". As a young reader of Heinlein in the 1980s and 1990s I found his discussions on such things exciting and innovative; but I found his attitude to incest troubling. Time Enough for Love and its follow-ups are, essentially a long tale about the hero eventually getting to have sex with his mother. However Heinlein dresses this up, it is odd and I was surprised that Mendlesohn didn't discuss it further.

In many ways its easiest to characterise Heinlein as a classic Libertarian, though that word is inadequate. It is possible at every stage to cherry pick Heinlein's "good" policies - he opposed the draft his whole life, he celebrated differences etc, but mostly he appears to be politically adrift. Indeed this is a point that Mendlesohn makes very well when discussing his attitude to racism:

There is never any question which side Heinlein stands on the debate... but we also need to be aware of the lack of nuance and sensitivity to the oxygen he breathes. Heinlein understands and opposes enslavement and colour prejudice, but he does not really see that racism has a wider infrastructure. He does not understand what we now frame as systemic racism.

I think this sums up Heinlein extremely well. He has instincts (some good and some bad) but he has no real framework to understand or explain them. Hindsight is, of course, a wonderful thing and the world is a different place to the one Heinlein was writing in. His novels are full of mansplaining white characters, which can be hard to stomach today. But on the other-hand he had many innovative ideas which certainly shaped science-fiction but had wider influences too. For me Mendlesohn's book was in someways a way to understand my own thoughts about Heinlein, an author who had a influence on me. I think her insights into his motivations and the ideas that informed his writing clarify those writings and put them in a wider context. Farah Mendlesohn's book is thus a stimulating read for fans of Robert Heinlein (and those who used to be) and an excellent piece of literary criticism.

Related Reviews

Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
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Temi Oh - Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

It is 2012 and it's an alternative Earth also on the brink of ecological collapse. Yet there is hope. Back in the 19th century astronomers learnt of the existence of Terra-Two, an earth-like world a few light years from our solar system. Robot exploration tells scientists that it is inhabitable, and ripe for colonisation. The global super-powers, principally Great Britain, dispatch missions to prepare Terra-Two for mass colonisation - its a new chance to start again.

The UK's mission is crewed by a tightly selected group of young adults and an elder group of experienced astronauts. The latter won't live to see the destination but the youngsters will be adults, in the prime of their life upon arrival. Do You Dream of Terra-Two begins with their selection and education, a bizarre mix of Harry Potter and high-science were these gifted students are crammed with information, subjected to a battery of exams and medical tests and go through puberty. With the eyes of the world on them they prepare for space, say good-bye to their families and head off.

Temi Oh does an excellent job on this part of the novel. The characters' back stories reflect the UK in this alternate and our own timeline - the children are from poor and wealthy multi-cultural backgrounds. The different trajectory of history in this novel has not changed Britain's role in the world - only its global position in the 21st century. Some readers may well enjoy the copious references to contemporary culture - one of the six teenagers, the polyglot Poppy, reads Harry Potter in Latin and Korean on the space-ship; and brands like Cafe Nero get plenty of mentions. Personally I found this self-reference a little annoying, like the author was trying too hard to prove that they knew Britain in 2012 to future audiences.

But the meat of the story is the relationships between the astronauts as they get underway. Quickly the pent up tensions and emotions begin to create division on the ship, and teenage hormones don't help. Some of young astronauts have been come through their training hyper competitive, and a strict regime means that despite being in space, their mission becomes more a reality TV show. Oh writes brilliantly about the sense of loss and alienation the young astronauts go through and there is a good portrayal of the depression that one character experiences.

It would be deeply unfair of me to describe how the story continues. Major events early in the book have a lasting affect on the crew's experiences. Oh's portrayal of the mission and its planning highlight the illogicality of seeing young adults as simply being less developed versions of their older selves. A point not lost on those who watch from home. Towards the end, one character's subtle musings on why governments engage in such high-profile, costly spectacles are neatly contrasted with the 2012 Olympic Games.

Despite being in a very science fiction context this is not a highly scientific novel. Oh is well versed in space science; but on occasion I raised my eyebrows at some of the portrayals of the mission. It is, for instance, madness to think that the spaceship would make a stop at a base near Jupiter on its way out of the solar system (why would you give up that delta-v?) I won't mention a couple of others as they give away key aspects of the story; and that's the point really. Temi Oh is writing a novel about relationships, friendship and alienation - not hard science; and any inaccuracies in the latter are about ensuring that the former works better.

This is a unique novel, highly enjoyable, tense and well-written. A brilliant debut and I look forward to the authors' future books, though I hope the ending to this isn't ruined with a sequel.

Related Reviews

Burke - Semiosis
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James S.A. Corey - Cibola Burn

Cibola Burn, volume four of the Expanse Series, continues with the soap-opera like structure of the earlier books. Each chapter's focus is on a different character and while central figures from earlier books return (and seem insanely indestructible) new characters are added and some even make it to the end of the book alive.

Unusually though Cibola Burn isn't set in multiple locations across the universe. This time the setting is a much more claustophobic alien planet. In the previous volume our heroes helped explore a set of enormous gates that had opened on the edge of the Solar System. These gave humanity access to a myriad of alien planets, light-years from Earth. At the start of the story a craft full of colonists has burst through the gates and set up a new home on one of these planets; a planet claimed by a mega-corporation which is keen on its easily accessible mineral wealth.

There follows a complex stand-off as each group stakes its own claim and James Holden and his crew are sent in by the UN as mediators, until the planet itself intervenes to get rid of its unwanted inhabitants.

No one would pretend that the Expanse series is great literature. Yet it is compelling reading - well paced and entertaining, and like a soap-opera you know what you are going to get. It's with a only a tinge of guilt that I look forward to the next volume.

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Sue Burke - Semiosis

Novels of first contact are extremely common - it's been a standard subject for science fiction since almost the beginning. A slightly smaller subset of first contact novels deal with the arrival on and exploration of alien planets. But Sue Burke's new book Semiosis is probably unique in its depiction of the intelligence that the arrivals from Earth encounter.

Fleeing an Earth ruined by war, ecological crisis and inequality, a small group of settlers arrive on Pax to try and create an egalitarian, peaceful society. Early accidents leave their numbers depleted, but enough humans survive to begin to carve out an existence from their surroundings. Imported seeds from Earth take root and the local flora and fauna appears, at least in some cases, to be edible. Until its not. Suddenly the food turns poisonous, and it quickly becomes clear that Pax's new arrivals have to deal with an extremely complex local ecology where the plants themselves are sentient.

What follows is a fascinating story that examines the way that ecology is always a system of interlocked relationships between plants and animals. Intervening from outside can disturb an equilibrium and the system will react to try and fix that. The humans face a choice - repeatedly in fact - as to how to best relate to the rest of the world. Should they react with the strategies that they fled earth to avoid - with destruction and combat? Or should they come to a mutual arrangement with their fellow sentient beings, and risk losing their own identity?

It's a very readable, interesting and extremely unusual novel that I recommend to science fiction fans. Semiosis' tale of an idealistic group of people arriving in an alien world and being thwarted by the local ecology reminded me a little of John Wyndham's novel Web, but Sue Burke brings a very different and excellently written twist to an age old science fiction plot.

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Stuart Turton - The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

*** Spoilers ***

Combining a complex time-traveling plot with elements of Gothic horror and a classic whodunnit set in an English stately home, this is an intriguing novel that deserves the praise its been getting from reviewers. While not entirely as novel an idea as some suggest - it reminded me a great deal of Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - it is original enough to suck the reader into the frightening world of Aiden Bishop.

Every evening, during a plush party at her family's country home, the crumbling Blackheath, Evelyn Hardcastle dies at 11pm. For a small number of individuals this has happened thousands of times the day repeating when they wake up. Aiden Bishop experiences it slightly differently - when he wakes up he inhabits a different person, retaining his memories of the previous day, until they are also reset after a week; when the whole cycle restarts. Bishop quickly learns that if he is to escape he needs to find out what is happening and that will require him solving the mystery within the limitations of the bodies he inhabits - he carries with him their health issues, and their characteristics - and avoiding the wild card in the house - the Footman who seems bent on killing the people Bishop inhabits.

In the afterword Stuart Turton tells of the long gestation period for the book. After finishing it I hoped that I would find an online map that showed the various interactions taken by the key characters, but perhaps no one has managed to complete this complex task. It's a task that is made difficult by the way that characters in the story, including Bishop, can change events depending on their actions. It's also worth noting that Blackheath itself, the house and gardens, are a major part of the book - their crumbling decor, faded gradeur and long hidden mysteries, forming a perfect backdrop to the story.

Like all good murder-mysteries almost everyone has secrets that affect the story, and nothing (or nobody) is quite what they seem. Turton's book is tightly written, and I was surprised to find no obvious plot holes - the story is so complex, the characters so interweaving, that I kept thinking it wouldn't hold together. I did find that my enjoyment was reduced slightly by my desire from early on to know what was actually happening, and perhaps this is why I felt that the book (at around 500 pages) was slightly too long. But Turton keeps the tension up all the way until the last pages and the ending was, for me at least, extremely satisfying.

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North - The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
North - Touch
North - The End of the Day
Mandel - Station Eleven

Emma Newman - Before Mars

This cracking novel begins with the arrival of Anna Kurbin on Mars. While she is a qualified geologist arriving at humanity's only base on the Red Planet, it quickly becomes clear that she is really there to paint her unique canvases so that the ultra rich owner of GavCorp, the multinational (multi-planet?) organisation that runs the base, can get even richer.

Initially Kurbin thinks she might be going mad, an after effect of the long journey, when she discovers a note that she appears to have left herself in her new quarters. This note warns her about the base psychiatrist. How did it get there? Quickly Kurbin begins to find other discrepancies in the behaviour of the personnel on the base - a human footprint in a unexplored part of Mars? That's much stranger than meeting Man Friday.

This is a very tightly written thriller that hooked me from the start. While dealing with greedy multinational corporations, the lies that their avatars tell, and Kurbin's search for truth, it also has a nice interplay of geopolitics, the personal crises that will take place as people leave the planet and musings on motherhood, gender and relationships among isolated groups of people.

A highly enjoyable, and very original piece of science fiction, with a brilliant plot-twist of an ending, set in a future world where corporations put profits before the interest of the inhabitants of two planets.

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Morrow - Is this the Way the World Ends?
Stephenson - Snow Crash

Poul Anderson - Mirkheim

Poul Anderson was a prolific US science fiction author whose career spanned the post-war period. He published dozens of books, stories and articles and had an interesting personal background - born of Scandenavian parents and growing up in the USA, he moved to Denmark with his mother after his father died then returned to a farm in the American mid-west at the outbreak of war. Like his contemporary Robert Heinlein, Anderson's politics were right-wing libertarian and they certainly shine forth in Mirkheim.

On one level this is a story with quite a lot of potential. It contains a number of characters that Anderson repeatedly used in some of his novels, but is not part of any extended story arc. It deals with the imperial machinations of various galactic powers as a planet, Mikheim, is discovered. Mirkheim, for reasons that are rather ponderously explained in the introduction, is a source of very rare metals which are not easily obtainable despite the huge size of the galaxy. The planet quickly becomes the centre of a confrontation between various galactic trading blocs that are centred on particular planetary (human and alien) systems.

This confrontation threatens all out war and the central characters of the novel are in a race against time to stop the non-human threats and ensure that free trade is allowed across the galaxy. War is bad for trade, and intergalactic capitalism cannot allow it to happen so the agents of the Polesotechnic League (yes really) are sent out to sort out the problem. Anderson is quite happy to use the novel's conclusion to set out his own views on government and state. Nicholas van Rijn, one of the key characters in the book, who appears to be some sort of trader, freebooter and head of a galaxy spanning financial, trading empire sets out the problem:

The League was once a free association of entrepreneurs what offered goods and services but did not force them on nobody. It is not private outfits what fights wars and operates concentration camps, it is governments, because governments i those organisations what claims the right to kill whoever will not do what they say.

The idea that companies do not force products on others will be news to many, as will the idea that governments aren't acting in the interest of corporations at home. But such are the limitations of libertarianism. Does this matter? Well it shouldn't. Decently written political novels can be enjoyed by those who don't agree with them politically. The problem with Mirkheim is that the whole story appears to be a setup to enable Anderson to get on his soapbox. A problem that is also closely associated with Robert Heinlein. In addition, while van Rijn's accent and awkward sentence construction is a reflection of his Dutch origins - the rest of the book is full of convoluted writing, over-written descriptions and strange language. The introduction is also painfully long and boring. I won't be reading it again, and I'll probably give the rest of Anderson's books a miss on the strength of this.

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Paolo Bacigalupi - Ship Breaker

There seem to be no shortage these days of novels set in a future dystopian world ruined by environmental disaster. Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker stands out for me because it captures the lives of those who are at the bottom of the pile in a ruined world. Evoking the men and women who are ship-breakers in India today, dismantling vessels for scrap and materials, this book begins among the impoverished communities of the United States, similarly breaking up old ships (usually oil tankers) so the raw materials can be sold at vast profits by corporations.

Nailer is one of these workers, a young boy about to grow to large for his job of crawling through the dark passages of the wrecks and removing cable. His future is uncertain, and in addition, his father is a violent drug addict who abuses Nailer. Bacigalupi sets up his world well. Nailer stands on the shore gazing at the beautiful, wealthy clippers that move on the horizon, traders and pleasure craft that he cannot imagine. His world is poor, violent and frightening. Exposed to the brutal "city killer" storms that are one legacy of the warmed world.

Everyone Nailer knows is hoping for their lucky break - the chance to escape poverty. But for most that doesn't happen. Nailer's chance comes when a clipper and its wealthy passenger are wrecked nearby and Nailer has to return her to her family.

I didn't realise, when I picked this up from the library, that it was a young adult novel. It is still enjoyable but clearly aimed at a youthful audience, who will appreciate the pace and tension, as well as the brilliantly drawn relationships between the young characters. I also appreciated that many of the main characters are female and black, something that's unusual in novels, but also reflects the reality of those who currently live and will live on the fringes of an economy destroyed by climate change. There are some odd moments - for instance this future world appears to have lost all its radio and telephone communications ability - but this is a clever and thoughtful book that depicts a future far different from the shiny technological utopia climate denying politicians often promise.

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Robinson - New York 2140