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I was saddened to learn that science fiction author James P. Hogan passed away on July 12th, at the age of 69. Hogan was the author of numerous books, of which I own a great many, including Voyage From Yesteryear, Inherit the Stars, Code of the Lifemaker, and Multiplex Man. Rest in peace.
David Drake is among my favorite authors, so I was quite excited when this book arrived. The Legions of Fire 
The story begins in Carce, capitol city of an empire that dominates the known world. Corylus, a soldier’s son with a scholarly bent who grew up on the empire’s frontiers, attends a public recital given by his friend Varus, a young aristocrat and scholar with aspirations of being a poet. Varus is reading his poem when he, Corylus, and Varus’ sister Alphena are seized by bizarre visions, and Varus shocks the crowd- and himself- when he stops reading his poem, tears the manuscript apart, and begins making apocalyptic pronouncements warning of the imminent destruction of the world by fire. Pandareus, Varus and Corylus’ rhetoric instructor, takes the two young friends to meet his friend Priscus, one of the commissioners of the Sybilline Books- ancient prophecies that only a few men have ever seen, kept under strict guard and opened only by order of the Senate of Carce. During the meeting, Varus falls into another trance, and a startled Priscus reveals that Varus’ rants are in fact quotes from the Books.
Terrible supernatural forces are gathering around Varus’ family and friends. Varus’ father Saxa has been spending most of his time with a strange man named Nemastes, who claims to be a sorcerer from Hyperborea. Alphena, visiting the temple of Tellus with her and Varus’ stepmother Hedia (who is not much older than they are) to pray for a suitable husband, is terrorized when the statue of the goddess moves and speaks in a man’s voice, proclaiming that she will marry Spurius Cassius- a famous citizen of Carce put to death by the Senate centuries ago. Corylus finds himself repeatedly slipping over the boundary into some other world, where strange beings urge him to kill his friend Varus before it’s too late. The cataclysm spoken of in the Sybilline Books that Varus has unwillingly prophesied is real, and its architects intend to use Varus as their instrument to bring it about. The barriers between worlds are weakening, and Varus, Corylus, Alphena, and Hedia all find themselves drawn into strange realms nothing like the world they know, where they must struggle to survive and find out how they can stop what is coming. If they fail, the entire world will burn.
I greatly enjoyed this book. Drake once again demonstrates his talent for intense action and complex plotting, juggling four major plot threads and viewpoint characters as their stories separate and then intersect again. Drake’s use of historical and mythological inspirations is very effective, and he creates a world that feels very concrete and real and yet profoundly strange at the same time.
I liked the characters- the hedonistic yet grim-minded and duty-bound Hedia, earnest and straightforward Corylus, intellectual yet sentimental Varus, and fearful but determined Alphena. With Alphena and Varus, Drake also does a nice job of portraying courage and determination shown by people who are in completely over their heads, each in their own way, and know it but still press on. Drake has a knack for infusing the mindset of his viewpoint characters into the way each section is written without hitting the reader over the head with it, and makes each plot thread feel like its main character.
The setting is a little unusual. The Legions of Fire is not historical fantasy, but the story is set, sort of, in the early Roman Principate during the reign of Emperor Tiberius; for most practical purposes, Carce is Rome. Aside from Carce itself, even the names are kept the same: there are references to the Gauls and Carthaginians, real historical (to the characters as well as the reader) figures like Julius Caesar and Spurius Cassius, the Rhine and Danube rivers, and so on. I found this a bit jarring at first, but quickly came to like it. It allows Drake- who was a classics major in college and has frequently used his extensive knowledge of Latin literature and Classical history as inspirations- to set his story in a world that feels very solid and defined without the need for large digressions providing background information, and ancient Rome offers a setting that feels as alien as any fantasy culture. In my case, it helped that Classical antiquity is a longstanding interest of mine, but I think the setting will be enjoyable even for people who don’t have that background.
The fantasy elements, too, are in large part grounded in real Roman (and Norse) beliefs, such as the prophetic Sibyline Books that are consulted by the Senate in times of crisis. Magic in Carce is likewise based on old Roman beliefs: It is secretive, feared, widely disapproved of both legally and socially and yet widely sought, and people who claim to wield it are more likely to be charlatans and con men than authentic magicians. Genuine magic in Carce’s world is rare, sinister, and frequently unsavory and disturbing. Other aspects of the story draw on Norse myths. Again, you’ll get more out of this aspect if you know something about the source material, but even without that background knowledge it’s quite evocative and effective on its own.
I’d recommend The Legions of Fire
Bitter Angels
Terese Drajeske is a former operative of the Guardians, the organization tasked by the United Earth Government with countering threats to the peace between earth and her many colonies. She is jolted out of the more peaceful life she has built for herself by the news that Bianca Fayette, her longtime friend and mentor, has been mysteriously killed while conducting an investigation. Despite having once sworn that she would never return to the Guardians, Terese agrees to come out of retirement, despite the pleas of her family and the risk that she will destroy the peace and happiness she has found since the devastating events that drove her out of the Guardians the first time.
Terese travels to the Erasmus system, where Bianca died. Once a prosperous group of settlements, Erasmus suffered an economic collapse after advances in faster-than-light travel made its formerly lucrative position as a shipping hub obsolete. It’s hereditary rulers maintain their grip on power through a massive system of surveillance and secret police and a crushing system of debt bondage that keeps the bulk of the population in a state of permanent indentured servitude to their rulers. Though seemingly too impoverished and busy struggling for survival to present a serious threat to outsiders, the Guardians believe that Erasmus is a source of instability and a potentially serious threat to the peace of interstellar civilization. Terese will have to delve deep into this oppressive, decaying society to discover just what happened to Bianca, and find out what she had discovered that was worth killing over.
Bitter Angels is a good book, but a somewhat frustrating one. The book has a strong start, a strong conclusion, and lots of good elements that sometimes felt like less than the sum of its parts due to pacing problems. After a very effective setup, the story started to drag, spending a lot of time seeming like things were about to get more interesting without doing so. I liked the premise and the setting enough to keep going, and was ultimately glad I did, but too much of the time I spent reading felt like something I had to trudge through to get to the payoff.
The book does have considerable strengths. Erasmus is a very well-done setting, and Anderson does a great job bringing it to life. There’s an intense sense of decay, fear, and desperation as we see as we see the people of Erasmus struggling to escape their crushing debts to their rulers, while draconian laws, ubiquitous government surveillance, and the power of the secret police to create a nearly Stalinist level of paranoia.
I thought Therese’s emotional struggle as she is torn between loyalty to her dead friend and her promise to her family that she would never go back to the Guardians was very well-done. Therese’s relationship with her husband is a particularly strong element here, as Therese faces the possible dissolution of her life’s great source of stability. Despite his relatively modest time on stage, her husband is a well-drawn, sympathetic character; his importance to Therese, and hers to him, comes through strongly, and his pain and fear at the thought of his wife returning to a career that nearly killed her and left her psychologically shattered is palpable. Similarly, the portrayal of the sacrifices made by characters from Erasmus as they struggle through their lives in a dehumanizing, spirit-crushing society was very effective and added a lot.
Overall, I would recommend Bitter Angels
One of the things I love about science fiction, and especially hard science fiction, is that it rejects conventional presumptions about what it’s proper for fiction to be about and treats things like science, logical and creative extrapolation, system-building, and- more generally- reason as worthwhile subject matter in their own right. Greg Egan (Diaspora, Permutation City, etc.) is an unabashed practitioner of science fiction in that vein, so I was quite pleased when his new novel Incandescence
The story follows two characters in the far, far future. Rakesh is a citizen of the Amalgam, a galaxy-spanning civilization home to an immeasurable host of organic beings, artificial intelligences, and uploaded personalities. An adventurous man (or male-identifying uploaded intelligence), he has grown restless living in a society that tamed the galaxy and seemingly discovered everything that can be discovered eons before he was born.
The story begins when he is approached by a stranger named Lahl, who tells him that she has evidence of a species unknown to the Amalgam, deep in the galactic core. The core is the domain of the Aloof, an enigmatic civilization that has spurned the Amalgam’s attempts to communicate for millions of years. Despite this, they broke their silence long enough to show Lahl- who was taking a shortcut through Aloof space to cut a few thousand years off her travel time- a meteor containing fossilized DNA-based cells that belong to no known known species, and that must have originated in the core itself.
For their own incomprehensible reasons, the Aloof have charged Lahl with the task of finding a “child of DNA,” a member of a species born from the smae panspermia that gave rise to the sample and to many of the species of the Amalgam, willing to help seek out the DNA’s source. As a human, Rakesh fits the bill. Presented with this opportunity, Rakesh agrees to enter the domain of the Aloof in search of the discovery he thought he’d never have a chance to make.
Roi is an alien living in a strange world of tunnels called the Splinter, where the strength and direction of of gravity depends on your location and everything is brilliantly lit by the all-pervading light they call the Incandescence. She lives a normal life, tending crops nourished by the light and heat of the Incandescence with the rest of her work team, until the day she meets Zak in the weightless heart of the splinter, the Null Line. Too old, eccentric, and unhealthy to be targeted for recruitment by a work team, he spends his time trying to understand the nature of their home, seeking lost records and studying the shifting patterns of weight around the Splinter. Like everyone she knows, the question of why their world is as it is is something she had never taken an interest in before, but her encounter with Zak awakens, for the first time in her life, to understand. So overwhelming is her curiosity that it overpowers her natural biochemical bonds joining her to her work team, and she begins returning to the null line to learn more from Zak. Together, starting with simple experiments about motion in the weightless environment of the null line, they begin probing into the nature of their strange home. As time passes, their discoveries lead to an ominous conclusion- the Incandescence is not the safe, eternally static place they had thought, and their growing understanding may be the only way to preserve the Splinter from catastrophe.
I really enjoyed Incandescence, but I have to be a bit cautious in recommending it. If you like hard science fiction that really delves into the science, I recommend it strongly. If you don’t, you’re likely to find it rather dry.
For those who do like especially science-heavy hard science fiction, this book has much to recommend it. Egan creates two radically different but fascinating environments in the Amalgam and the Splinter. I liked the way the Amalgam is introduced- it initially seems like a strange but somewhat recognizable future, but it quickly becomes apparent just how alien it really is. Despite that, it didn’t have the chilly, eerie feeling that I often associate with settings involving the extremely distant future, posthumanity, and/or large-scale interstellar civilizations without faster-than-light travel. I enjoy that feeling, generally speaking, but Incandescence’s Amalgam was a pleasant change of pace. The Amalgam characters were generally not delved into deeply, and their psychology and mode of existence was quite alien in some ways, but to me their personalities and interactions had a sense of good-natured warmth to them that I don’t often see, and I quite enjoyed that.
The Splinter is a fascinating creation that should intrigue people who like science fiction about life in environments radically different from our own in the vein of Hal Clement, Robert Forward, or Stephen Baxter. There have been many books about bizarre environments, but incandescent is the first SF novel I’m aware of to use a location- an object closely orbiting a black hole- where the effects of relativity can be readily seen in day-to-day life.
One of the things I enjoyed was that the book is about science not just as an existing body of knowledge, but as a process of learning and discovery. Again, this is not the sort of thing that can be recommended for people of every taste, but I found it very satisfying to follow Roi as she learned the underlying laws behind her world, gradually seeing things that seemed meaningless, baffling, or arbitrary come together into a coherent, comprehensible whole. Egan is also quite ingenious in showing ways that intelligent beings might be able to gain a sophisticated understanding of physics in an environment where the science that drove so much of it’s advancement on Earth, astronomy, is impossible.
Greg Egan’s Incandescence
David Drake is known first and foremost for his importance to the field of military science fiction, and many of his recent books have been space opera or heroic fantasy. However, many of Drake’s early publications were in the horror genre, often influenced by the classic pulp fantasy, horror, and “weird fiction” of writers like H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Manly Wade Wellman.
Balefires: Tales of The Weird and Fantastic
The settings are quite diverse. Several of the stories, drawing on Drake’s own experiences, involve American troops in the Vietnam War. Drake’s interest in history also frequently comes to the fore, with a number of stories stories set in Viking Age Scandinavia, the Roman Empire, or other eras. There are also a number of stories set in contemporary America (including one about 30 miles from my home, which I got a kick out of.) Some of the stories are clearly influenced by cosmic horror in the vein of Lovecraft or Howard. Others portray evils on a more human scale, and a few stories are more in the mode of heroic fantasy, albeit of a very dark sort. The one anomaly is “A Land of Romance,” a fun, light-hearted story written in tribute to influential SF writer L. Sprague de Camp.
Drake’s talent for depicting intense, furious action manifests itself a number of times, but the dominant mood of many of the stories is not visceral terror but a relentless feeling of cold. Horror that draws its atmosphere from the idea of a pitiless, uncaring universe beyond human comprehension is quite common thanks to the popularity and influence of H.P. Lovecraft, but Drake does it better than most, and the effect is quite chilling. (Among other things, I think Drake’s relatively austere writing style, which is highly evocative while remaining very straightforward, is generally better-suited to this sort of bleak tone than the more ornate style often associated with Lovecraftian horror.)
Despite the cosmic horror aspects, however, much of what is horrifying in the stories is more personal in nature. As is the case of in much of Drake other work (most notably his military SF), the most terrifying things arise from human psychology- the psychological devastation left by trauma and violence, what suffering and brutality can twist people into, the dulling of emotion and conscience, and the things that human beings will do, condone, or become.
In addition, each story has a short preface written by Drake about how the story came about and the idea behind it. These provide some very interesting information about various stages in Drake’s career, as well as some of the influences that have shaped his work- growing up in Iowa, classic science fiction and fantasy, his military service in Vietnam, and his love of Classical history and literature. It’s quite interesting for the insights it gives on Drake’s work, as well as his thoughts on horror fiction more generally and his first-hand accounts of what the field was like in the 1960’s and 70’s.
All in all, Balefires
Stories collected in Balefires:
The Red Leer
A Land of Romance
Smokie Joe
Awakening
Denkirch
The False Prophet
Black Iron
The Shortest Way
Lord of the Depths
Children of the Forest
The Barrow Troll
Than Curse the Darkness
The Song of the Bone
The Master of Demons
The Dancer in the Flames
Firefight
Best of Luck
Arclight
Something Had to be Done
The Elf House
The Hunting Ground
The Automatic Rifleman
Blood Debt
Men Like Us
28
Before he turned to writing, Graham Sharp Paul served as a commissioned officer in the British and Australian Navies, and then worked in finance and business consulting until he retired to write in 2003. His debut The Battle at the Moons of Hell
I read this book almost purely by chance: I was at the bookstore, didn’t see anything that I particularly wanted, and finally picked it because I didn’t want to feel like I’d wasted the trip by going home empty handed. Happily, my choice paid off. Score one for the sunk-cost fallacy.
The Battle at the Moons of Hell focuses on the story of Michael Helfort, newly commissioned Junior Lieutenant in the fleet of the Federated Worlds, one of the preeminent polities in human space. Helfort is assigned to the DLS-387, a small reconnaissance vessel. DLS-387 is traveling on a routine patrol when it receives urgent news: a Federated Worlds civilian liner, the Mumtaz, has been hijacked and the advanced terraforming equipment it carried stolen by agents of the Hammer of Kraa, a brutal theocratic regime that has been a frequent enemy of the Federated Worlds. An informant in the Hammer government has revealed that Mumtaz’s passengers and crew have been taken to the world of Hell, a barely-habitable planet where the Hammer puts prisoners, dissidents, and heretics to work in nightmarish labor camps.
DLS-387 is ordered to change course for Hammer space for a covert reconnaissance flyby that will provide intelligence for a Federated Worlds rescue mission and retaliatory strike. Penetrating so deep into enemy space will be dangerous, and if DLS-387 succeeds the larger conflcit with the Hammer still lies ahead. The Federated Worlds cannot allow hostile powers to abduct and enslave its citizens – and Helfort cannot leave his mother and younger sister, passengers on the Mumtaz, to die hundreds of light-years from home.
The Battle at the Moons of Hell is a promising debut for Paul. The action is exciting and extremely tense. Paul does a nice job of providing a panoramic view of events, moving from Helfort and his crewmates at the front to the imprisoned passengers of the Mumtaz to the highest levels of government on both sides. Paul also largely avoids resorting to the sort of large lumps of exposition that many people find frustrating about military science fiction and space opera.
My primary complaint is that the characterization of Michael Helfort himself is lacking; he is defined enough to make me care about what happens to him, but he still seemed rather flat. Most of the secondary characters suffered a similar problem. (I should note that this aspect improves considerably in the subsequent books.)
I thought the action scenes were great, on the other hand. Paul’s descriptions of battle do a good job of bringing out the sheer size of space, with ships exchanging salvos that take several minutes to reach their targets, while the crews hold their breath as ship defenses duel with vast clouds of rail gun-propelled metal slugs to decide the ship’s fate. Paul exploits this to the hilt, and generates a tremendous sense of tension from it. His details and description are highly effective and give Paul’s description of space combat a ferocious tone that feels almost physically punishing.
The setting is somewhat lightly sketched in, but still interesting. In his portrayal of the Federated Worlds, Paul does some interesting things with the idea of a society where neural implants are widespread and people can download data (including the equivalent of mail and phone calls) directly into their brains, carry recordings of everything they see and do in their heads, or have behavioral blocks installed. I especially liked the book’s portrayal of the internal politics of the Hammer of Kraa; its almost Stalinist brutality and ruthless, bloody purges as members of the ruling elite struggle for dominance did a great job of evoking an utterly nightmarish society.
I liked The Battle at the Moons of Hell
(Note: This is a revised and expanded version of a review originally written for Crucial Taunt.)
Over at the SFWA blog, Nisi Shawl writes on the subject of writing about characters from races and cultures other than your own. It’s a great article and has some excellent ideas for improving one’s own knowledge and insight.
The number of aspiring authors who shy away from writing about characters of other races because they believe themselves unable to do so well is strange, since there is probably no genre that spends more time with people or beings unlike the author than science fiction. Jack McDevitt is not an archaeologist. Elizabeth Moon is not autistic. Iain M. Banks is not a machine intelligence. David Drake is not a psychologically reconditioned rapist. Neal Asher is not an alien space-faring biomechanical sphereoid with a penchant for strange, cryptic pronouncements. Dan Simmons is not a Jewish college professor who has spent the last twenty years grappling with his religious beliefs while watching helplessly as his beloved daughter ages backwards into infancy.
Writing about characters of another race or culture is not an insurmountable challenge compared to this. There is, of course, an added degree of risk if it is done badly, in terms of causing real-world offense or anger, that doesn’t apply to portraying the inhuman; Peter Watts need not fear being upbraided by space-going philosophical zombies who thought the aliens in Blindsight were offensive stereotypes.
Anyway, I definitely recommend checking out Shawl’s article. Discussion of racial and cultural diversity in science fiction topic tends to be vague and platitudinous, so it’s great to see more writing about the nuts and bolts of actually doing something about it.
I live! The stars are right, and after aeons of slumber Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic rises from the depths like a deep scary rising thing.
I wish I could say I was doing something interesting during my absence, like traveling the world or slowly digging my way to freedom after my overburdened and dangerously shoddy bookshelves collapsed and buried me alive under my Poul Anderson collection, but the reality is that it was simply a combination of computer problems, other time-consuming projects that took up my attention, and various family crises. To people who enjoy this blog (yes, both of you), my apologies. I’ve got new stuff in the works, so stay tuned.
It is widely agreed, I think, that the most prominent technological trend generally unanticipated by science fiction is the enormous growth in computer technology. This results in older science fiction often having technology that seems like a mismatched jumble of the astonishing and primitive: interstellar civilizations with faster-than-light travel where microfilm is the state-of-the-art in data storage is a common example. I’m not bothered by it, but it certainly jumps out. (And there are exceptions, including what is arguably the most prescient SF story ever- Murray Leinster’s astonishing “A Logic Named Joe,” which predicted home personal computers, the internet, search engines, and internet telephones. Not bad for a story published in 1946, when a cutting-edge computer cost more than five million inflation-adjusted dollars and weighed 30 tons.)
What brought this to mind was an amusing example I was recently reminded of. A friend of mine caught the movie Short Circuit 2 on television few days ago. Not exactly rigorously hard science fiction, but it was, in its time, one of the more prominent popular depictions of the idea of artificial intelligence. (And perhaps the high-water mark of the obsession with wacky comic relief robots that loomed like a vast black shadow over much of the 1980s. ) Protagonist Johnny 5, a self-aware robot with at least human-level intellect, boasts at one point that he possesses “5oo hundred megabytes of memory.”
I’m typing this on the computer I use for work and most other things writing-related. It’s a few years olds, and was not a top-end model even when it was made. It has 160 gigabytes of memory. I have a 1 gigabyte USB flash drive shorter than my pinky finger. I paid about $20-30 for it a few years ago; compared to what you can get now for the same price, 1 gigabyte is nothing impressive.
A figure intended to make audiences think “amazing computer technology from a secret government lab” when I was a child is now dwarfed by cheap consumer electronics you can buy in a Wal-Mart clearance aisle and carry in your shirt pocket. It makes me wonder what technological trends (and soical trends, for that matter) present-day science fiction is missing, and what glaring omissions will strike readers 40 years from now as the equivalent of “Wow, 500 megabytes!” or interstellar starships that calculate their trajectories with microfilm records and a slide rule. If anyone has any guesses, I’d love to hear them.
I’ve reviewed Michael Flynn’s space opera The January Dancer at BSCreview. Check it out.