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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.
Stephen Hunt’s steampunk/fantasy novel The Court of the Air was one of the best books I read last year (see my review), so I was quite excited when the follow-up The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
Like The Court of the Air, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves is set in a world where magic and steampunk technology exist side-by-side. Sorcerers who draw energy from the ley lines of the earth exist alongside industrial mass production, steam power, airships, primitive firearms, and huge mechanical computing devices. The focus is once again on the Kingdom of Jackals, a mercantile nation kept safe by its monopoly on the jealously guarded technology to build airships.
The story focuses on Amelia Harsh, an archaeologist who has dedicated herself to the search for lost Camlantis, a glorious ancient civilization that the academic establishment of jackals regards as a myth. Regarded as a crank for her obsession with Camlantis, she has been shut out of academia and deprived of funding when an unexpected benefactor appears: Abraham Quest, the greatest industrialist in Jackals, a renowned philanthropist, humanitarian, and social reformer, and the man whose brilliant manipulations of the stock market led to the bankruptcy and suicide of Amelia’s father. Amelia is reluctant to work with him, but he can offer what she has sought all her life- ancient records revealing the place where Camlantis once stood and the chance to vindicate her theories at last.
Unfortunately, what had been fabled Camlantis 10,000 years ago is now a deadly, almost impenetrable jungle filled with hostile inhuman natives, huge predatory reptiles, and the agents of a vast collective mind that rules the deepest parts of the jungle and tries to subsume anyone who wanders to close into itself. Harsh must travel upriver into the jungle via U-boat, accompanied by her old friend Commodore Black, Quest’s force of deadly drug-enhanced foreign mercenaries, a U-boat crew recruited from convicted slavers who have been promised clemency if they survive, and a steam man jungle guide of dubious mental stability.
Into these events is drawn Cornelius Fortune, a reclusive aristocrat who lives a secret life as Furnace-Breath Nick, feared vigilante and scourge of the brutal revolutionary regime that rules Jackals’ neighbor and greatest foe, Quatershift. When a brilliant inventor he has rescued from the prison camps of Quatershift and brought to Jackals suddenly vanishes without a trace, Fortune is confronted with deadly political machinations involving the Jackelian criminal underworld, steam man bodies vanishing from their graves, and mysterious attempts on the life of Abraham Quest. Somehow, these events are also connected to ancient Camlantis, and both Cornelius Fortune and Amelia Harsh will have to confront the legacy left by that ancient the utopia- a legacy that could mean the death of every human being on the planet.
The Kingdom Beyond the Waves is an excellent follow-up to The Court of the Air. Like The Court of the Air, it is very fast-paced and has lots of action, though it didn’t feel quite as frantic as its predecessor, perhaps because at least some of the concepts were already familiar to me from the previous book. Nevertheless, the rapid progression of events, continuing revelations, and the book’s sheer volume of creative ideas give the book the same manic quality that I enjoyed in The Court of the Air.
The characters are not especially deep or complex, but nevertheless they are interesting and succeed well in inspiring emotional investment. The Kingdom Beyond the Waves is somewhat dark in tone, but less so than The Court of the Air, and like its predecessor its relentless energy allows it to be dark without being depressing or dispiriting. Some of the prominent themes of The Court of the Air are seen again here, with both books reflecting a sense of striving and hope combined with a distrust of utopianism.
Like its predecessor, The Kingdom Beyond the Waves does a great job of being extremely dense in both events and ideas without seeming overstuffed, and of being diverse and varied without seeming jumbled or incoherent. In Hunt’s hands it feels perfectly natural that airships, lost civilizations, sorcery, a heterodox archaeologist/pulp adventurer, submarines, a race of intelligent steam-powered robots, a jungle ruled by an evil hive mind, and a character best described as “The Scarlet Pimpernel, if The Scarlet Pimpernel had been a shapeshifting steampunk cyborg” all show up in the same story.
Just like its predecessor, I can’t recommend The Kingdom Beyond the Waves
I’ve been kept busy lately by some work-related stuff, along with the seven or eight distinct illnessess that have all apparently taken up residence in my digestive system simultaenously and started battling for supremacy, but I’m back in action. Look for new reviews both here and at BSCreview very soon.
Here’s some very good news, via SF Crowsnest: Solaris Books has found a buyer. It was announced a few months ago that their parent company, the Black Library, was going to start focusing solely on its primary purpose as the fiction-publishing arm of Games Workshop. Solaris’ new owner is British game developer Rebellion Developments. Rebellion has experience with publishing, through creating their own SF/Fantasy/Horror imprint Abaddon Books and by acquiring seminal weekly comics anthology 2000 AD and RPG/tabletop game company Mongoose Publishing. 2000 AD is the source of Judge Dredd, among other things, and Mongoose is the publisher of the current edition of the legendary Traveller and the new RPG based on David Drake’s Hammers Slammers stories, so presumably the new guys in charge know their way around the SF field.
(Though their greatest accolade may be this line from the Rebellion Developments Wikipedia page: “Their first known title was Alien Vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar, which was considered one of the few good games for that console.” Seldom has a single sentence been so coldly factual and hilariously brutal at the same. Poor Jaguar. I guess the world just wasn’t ready for your 64 bits of processing power and godawful controllers.)
I’ve really come to like Solaris over the past year or so, and it’s through Solaris that I’ve discovered a number of authors, such as Andy Remic, Eric Brown, and Jeffrey Thomas. I’m very happy to see it will continue.
The second edition of the Grasping for the Wind Linkup Meme is live, with what is almost certainly the largest collection of SF blog links ever assembled by mortal man. If you have a blog and want to participate, check out Grasping for the Wind to add your site and get the code to put the links on your own blog. And now, in all its cyclopean grandeur, the list:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Romanian French Chinese Danish Portuguese German
A
The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
B
The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf
Book View Cafe [Authors Group Blog]
C
Cheaper Ironies [pro columnist]
D
Daily Dose – Fantasy and Romance
Dave Brendon’s Fantasy and Sci-Fi Weblog
E
F
Fan News Denmark [in English]
Fantasy and Sci-fi Lovin’ News and Reviews
G
H
I
I Hope I Didn’t Just Give Away The Ending
The Internet Review of Science Fiction
J
K
L
M
Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf and Book Review
Marooned: Science Fiction Books on Mars
Missions Unknown [Author and Artist Blog Devoted to SF/F/H in San Antonio]
The Mistress of Ancient Revelry
N
O
P
Q
R
S
Science Fiction and Fantasy Ethics
Sci-Fi Songs [Musical Reviews]
T
Tor.com [also a publisher]
U
V
Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic
W
X
Y
Z
Romanian
Cititor SF [with English Translation]
French
Chinese
The SF Commonwealth Office in Taiwan [with some English essays]
Danish
Portuguese
Life and Times of a Talkative Bookworm