Neal Asher has become one of my favorite authors as of late.  This makes for some frustration when you’re living in the United States, where much of his work has not been published, making it necessary to either import or scour eBay and the like.  (Aside from Asher and Stephen Baxter, I almost never import books- I’m too cheap, I prefer to buy domestic editions of books by foreign authors to encourage the publishers to bring more of their stuff to this country, and my vast backlog makes waiting for a domestic release basically a non-issue.) Fortunately, Night Shade Books has been bringing more of Asher’s work to the U.S., first with Prador Moon and now with the prequel to Asher’s Ian Cormac series, Shadow of the Scorpion: A Novel of the Polity.

Part of Neal Asher’s Polity future history (Gridlinked, The Skinner, etc.), Shadow of the Scorpion is a story of the early days of future Earth Central Security agent Ian Cormac.  The young Cormac enters the service of the Polity as an infantryman in the aftermath of the Prador War, a cataclysmic conflict between humans and the monstrous Prador that lasted decades, destroyed whole worlds, and took billions of lives.  Fresh out of training, Cormac is assigned to the security forces on the devastated planet of Hagren, a Polity world that suffered ecological devastation and the death of half of its human inhabitants during the war.  Now rebuilding has begun, but the inhabitants are threatened by surviving Prador still lurking in the wreckage of a crashed Prador dreadnought, and by human Separatist terrorists who will commit any atrocity to overthrow the Polity and the artificial intelligences that rule it.

What should have been a relatively simple assignment policing Hagren while its society is rebuilt and civic order restored becomes much more when treason is discovered amongst Cormac’s squad mates, and Cormac is chosen by his superiors for a hazardous mission to infiltrate a local separatist cell.  This sets Cormac on a dangerous journey across the devastated former battlefields of the Prador War, pursuing humans as lethal and pitiless as the Prador themselves.

Interspersed throughout this story, Shadow of the Scorpion also tells of Cormac’s youth in the dark days of the war, and of the mysterious scorpion-shaped AI war drone that haunted his childhood- and that has seemingly reappeared.

I really liked this book.  It provides plenty of the intense action Asher is known for, and continues to explore the setting of Asher’s future history.  On a purely action/adventure level, the book definitely delivers, with Asher’s usual talent for excitement, description, and visceral power brought to the forefront.  It also gave me what were probably the two things I most wanted from Asher: more information about the character Ian Cormac, and a closer look at the society of the Polity itself.

Most of the Polity universe books are set primarily on worlds outside the Polity, or on the Polity’s frontier, or on worlds suffering some crisis, and are shown mostly from the perspective of Earth Central Security personnel or people outside normal society.  The flashback portions of The Shadow of the Scorpion gives us a nice look at Polity’s society on Earth itself, as experienced by average people.  I love the world-building aspect of science fiction, so I enjoyed this a lot.

An important part of the flashbacks revolves around technology to edit or erase your own memories, sought by Cormac’s shell-shocked older brother after returning from a tour of duty as a field medic on the front lines of the Prador War.  Quite plausibly, this is a much-sought service during the war, common enough to support the existence of large clinics dedicated to it, and Asher explores it well.  The book chillingly juxtaposes the psychological devastation of war and the grotesque physical injuries wrought by Prador military technology, with the Polity’s enormously advanced medical science seeking to reassemble shattered minds with same casual efficiency with which it repairs broken bodies.

While there is still plenty of action, this is a more character-based story than is typical for Asher, and fortunately I think the characterization here is stronger than what I’ve seen from him previously.  The portrayal of a newly recruited Ian Cormac several decades younger than the one we first met in Gridlinked is well done- Cormac is still recognizably Cormac, but he displays a previously unseen degree of emotional vulnerability befitting a man who has not yet become desensitized by decades of violence and horror.

The flashback sequences from Cormac’s childhood are also well-done.  Asher’s portrayal of the young Cormac, a bright, introverted, precociously serious-minded child, rang very true to me.  (There’s a brief line suggesting that Cormac has been diagnosed with mild autistic tendencies, and while it’s not the focus of the story, I think Asher’s portrayal is one of the more insightful and understanding fictional portraits of it that I’ve seen.)

The flashback scenes about Cormac’s older brother’s return from the war are also effective, and do a good job of portraying something often unexplored in stories of soldiers returning home.  Mixed with the happiness of seeing your loved one safely home, there is the tension and awkwardness of reuniting with someone you care about who has been profoundly changed, the trepidation of wanting to reach out and reconnect with someone deeply marked by experiences you can never truly understand and not really knowing how.  The portrayal of this is fairly subtle, yet to me unmistakable and quite poignant.

Shadow of the Scorpion is well worth reading for any fan of Neal Asher, action stories, vivid far-future societies, or examinations of some of the questions raised by technologies to reshape the human mind.  I think you’ll get more out of it if you’re already familiar with Ian Cormac and the Polity (Gridlinked would be the place to start there), but it is a self-contained story that stands well on its own.  I highly recommend it, and I hope Nightshade continues to bring this sort of book to the U.S.

io9 has an article entitled “Charles Stross Explains Why UK Scif Is More Hopeful Than US Scifi.” The title left me baffled, as if I had seen an article entitled “Stephen Hawking Explains Why Siberia Is Hotter Than the Photosphere of the Sun.”

My impression has long been that British science fiction is darker and more depressing than what’s produced in America. Stephen Baxter is generally quite downbeat, as (to a lesser extent) is Alastair Reynolds. If I had to describe the mood of either author’s works in a single word, it would probably be “bleak.” Peter F. Hamilton is more upbeat, but I still don’t think I’d call him optimistic.

Even more positively portrayed futures usually seem to be used as setting for dark stories. Neal Asher’s Polity universe is very optimistic in most respects-life is very good for the great majority of humanity- but the plots and events are usually pretty dark. Iain M. Bank’s Culture is perhaps the most utopian society in science fiction, but it’s largely there as a backdrop for some of the most depressing stories in science fiction.

I haven’t read Ken MacLeod, but my understanding is that a number of his books portray an anarchosocialist future society in a pretty positive way, so there’s that. Still, darkness seems to be the general trend.

I’m not saying this as a criticism of these authors; I like dark. But I’m wondering: Is my assessment correct, or is there some big strain of optimistic British SF that I’ve missed?

Jake Seliger has an interesting post about remarks made about fantasy by Patrick Kurp, in which Kurp says:

Fantasy feels like a cheat, an evasion, a con game for stunted children. I read to know the world, in particular the human world, even to celebrate it, not to slum in another. Ours feels sufficiently mysterious and wonder-filled, so ghosts, witches, aliens and magic spells come off as kitschy, redundant gimmicks.

I strongly recommend Seliger’s post. He gives an interesting defense of fantasy that is worth reading.

I’m interested not so much in Kurp specifically as in what his remark suggests, because I think it shows an important part of the reason why fantasy and science fiction is so looked down upon, a question that’s been on my mind lately. Calling something childish or the like is, of course, a common attack leveled against fiction that does not take place in the real world as we know it (or its past), as well as a common criticism of people who read such fiction. Why?

I think it largely boils down to this. Children often have vivid imaginations, and so imagination is strongly associated with children in our culture. Children tend to have all sorts of traits that are not appropriate for adults. People often have a need to prove themselves grown up, to others and perhaps to themselves. Thus, use of imagination beyond imagining fairly mundane real-world events is disreputable. As a result, it’s often not enough to simply say, “SF doesn’t interest me,” or even to say that SF is all aesthetically bad; some psychological or moral fault must be ascribed to SF and/or its readers.

It’s worth noting that the small number of speculative works that have gained respectability are usually social/political commentaries, satires, or allegories, e.g. 1984 and Brave New World. (Or the new Battlestar Galactica, for that matter.) Imagination is more excusable when the imaginative elements of a work are only a stand-in for something about the present-day world, merely sugar to help the medicine go down. Some SF fans themselves seem to implicitly accept this, arguing that SF should be respected because of its potential for metaphor or allegory.

Things are likely aggravated by the fact that most modern fantasy, like science fiction, is heavily based on system-building and logical extrapolation: if X were the case (X being “magic is real” or “time-travel is possible” or whatever), what would happen? Logic and systematizing, as I’ve said before, are disfavored personality traits; having a strong interest in them is considered to be mostly the preserve of nerds, weirdoes, and losers. Fantasy is (obviously) not connected to science in the way science fiction is, but it often shares science fiction’s rational approach to a great extent.

That might explain why magical realism is usually considered legit literature: it has imaginative elements, which is iffy, but it doesn’t compound the sin by thinking about the imaginative elements rationally. Weird stuff just happens, and people and the world in general don’t respond realistically. (I’m not saying this as a criticism; different forms of literature engage different aspects of the human mind to different degrees, and that’s perfectly legitimate.)

Similarly, while mystery is often highly rational in orientation, it does not usually imagine things that could not happen today (or in the real past, for historicals.) Mystery is Genre rather than Real Literature, but it is still far more respectable than science fiction or fantasy.

Respectability for fantasy or science fiction is most likely a hopeless cause, at least in the current cultural climate. It has the stigma of childishness and Nerd Cooties at the same time. A genre might be able to get away with one; you won’t get away with both.

At last week’s Mind Meld at SF Signal, the question asked was:

What are the best examples of SF/F worldbuilding?

This is a question I like to think about, since I think worldbuilding- and especially the process of extrapolating how this or that technology or social change would affect the world- is one of the core virtues of science fiction that distinguishes it from more conventional fiction. People always say- or chant- “All fiction is about people,” and in a trivial sense that’s true, but it’s often less true in science fiction than in other genres. A science fiction story certainly can be about people (that is, the psychology of specific individuals, or some alleged truth about the “human condition”), but it doesn’t have to be, and that’s one of its strengths.

(This, I think, lies at the core of why science fiction is held to be inferior to “literature:” it rejects mainstream culture’s privileging of emotion and socialization over other human faculties, such as reason. Most people- and, what’s more important, most opinion-shapers in this area – are primarily socially/emotionally/people oriented, and people often consider subjects outside their own field of interest and/or competence is to be inferior or unworthy. It’s also a common human tendency to find people who aren’t like you to be some mixture of baffling, pitiful, and repulsive, and so disdain for the stereotypical nerd spills over onto the interests and pastimes of the stereotypical nerd. There are other factors, but I think this is the heart of it.)

But I digress. So, what are some of my favorites?

The Oikumene and worlds beyond of Jack Vance’s Demon Princes series (The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love, The Face, The Book of Dreams, currently available in two omnibus collections) is the first thing that comes to mind. There are so many interesting locations, and there are few who can make places come alive like Vance: Dar Sai and it’s bizarre mating customs and strange sports (someone ought to get a real hadual league going), the cruel and morbid people of Sarkovy, the diverse worlds of the vast Rigel Concourse, and many more. Vance is also the unsurpassed master of the fictional epigraph as world-building device.

The old BattleTech universe was tremendously detailed and interesting, especially if you have some of the old House sourcebooks that came out in 80s. It’s actually pretty remarkable how much background material they created for a tabletop war game, and I love that sort of thing. Granted, there’s no real reason anyone needs to know what the legal status of Lutheranism is in the Rasalhague District of the Draconis Combine in order to adjudicate battles between giant robots, but it’s fun to have information like that if you like to immerse yourself.

Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise is a good one, and my favorite post-apocalyptic setting. There’s lots of interesting stuff – Skyholm, a pre-war aerostat whose inhabitants rule parts of Western Europe, the well-intentioned but oppressive Maurai nation that rules the Pacific, the near-anarchic and rapidly industrializing Northwest Union, held together by its Lodges. There are lots of little things that made it feel more real to me- for instance, the fact that the nuclear war that shattered civilization centuries ago is called different things (the Doom, the Judgment, etc.) in different cultures, or how pre-Doom religions have evolved in subtly different ways in different parts of the world.

I love the setting for John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy, the Golden Oecumene. I can’t really do justice to it, because it’s it probably more densely packed with ideas than just about anything I’ve ever read; I sometimes felt as if every page had enough imagination to support whole novels. It also manages the feat- a difficult one, I’ve argued- of being an exciting story within a utopian society, without even the expedient of venturing into some hostile realm outside the utopia being portrayed. I love Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, for instance, but the Culture itself is really the least interesting thing about the books it appears in. Not so the Oecumene.

I’ve become increasingly fond of Neal Asher’s Polity universe. My favorite location in it is probably the world of Spatterjay from his book The Skinner, with its relentlessly nasty ecosystem. Spatterjay has some interesting social speculation, too: The bite of the Spatterjay leech transmits a virus that gradually changes the human body, making the host stronger, tougher, and faster-healing until he is almost unkillable. The human settlers thus have a rather casual attitude towards violence- they have prize-fights where disemboweling someone is merely the equivalent of a boxing TKO. He’ll be fine, just stuff his intestines back in and let him walk it off…

Finally, Larry Niven’s Known Space deserves a mention. I love the juxtaposition of hard science fiction elements with the more implausible or even outrageous concepts Niven comes up with. On the one hand, you’ve got carefully thought out use of reaction drives, slower-than-light travel and civilizations, and other hard SF staples. Even the more fanciful elements are dealt with rigorously- momentum is conserved when you’re sent through a teleporter, for instance. On the other hand… A billion years ago, telepathic aliens crushed a slave revolt with a massive telepathic transmission that killed all sapient life in the galaxy! Human adults are actually just the adolescent form of a race of hyperintelligent genocidal aliens from the galactic core! Luck is genetic, and you can selectively breed for it to create nigh-invulnerable people! It’s sort of like going to a really interesting physics lecture and then taking LSD halfway through, but without those pesky dissociative fugue states and giant spider attacks.

Any thoughts? Any favorites of your own to nominate?

I love the 4^th of July. Growing up, several of my summers revolved principally around the massive horde of illegal fireworks and flammable materials my friend who lived next door possessed, so this is usually a great day for me. Unfortunately, the universe delivered an emotional straight knee directly to my groin earlier this week, so I’m less celebratory than usual. Neither getting a copy of Neal Asher’s Polity Agent from ebay nor spending last night at my local bar getting Phenylethylamine Girl (previously introduced here) to laugh at my goofy childhood anecdotes has been able to lift me out of my bad mood.

On the plus side, I see that Tobias Buckell linked to my Crystal Rain review at Crucial Taunt. Look for the next edition of my column there in a few days, and a new review here as well. Reading Buckell actually helped some poorly organized thoughts I’d been having for a while about race and science fiction to finally congeal, so watch for that too.

My new article on Neal Asher is up at Crucial Taunt. Have a look.

Warning: this post has what you might call a thematic spoiler for Jack Vance’s The Book of Dreams, though nothing that would be likely to diminish your enjoyment of that book.

A few days ago, SF Signal had a discussion on the best and worst endings of books. This got me thinking about the subject, because endings are often the aspect of fiction that I find the most interesting. They’re the biggest determinant of a story’s “aftertaste,” for lack of a better term. My own preferences are towards the grim or melancholy side of things, though not exclusively. Some of my own personal favorites:

Poul Anderson, The Night Face- Great buildup, and at the end… Anderson rips your heart out with a single sentence.

Glen Cook, Soldiers Live- Very poignant for me after spending so much time with the Black Company. Like Croaker, I’ll always have the memories.

David Drake, Rolling Hot- The first Drake novel I read, and the one that made me a devoted fan. I can’t recommend this one enough. (It’s included in the Drake collection The Tank Lords.) It was especially effective for me because, atypically for one of Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers stories, one of the principal viewpoint characters isn’t a soldier, but a civilian who gets dragooned into joining the conflict. The whole book is a series of savage muay thai kicks to the emotional groin, and the very end is just devastating.

Jack Vance, The Book of Dreams- The culmination of the five-novel Demon Princes series. Anticlimactic, but that’s the point, and it works wonderfully. You’ve won what you’ve dedicated your life to- leaving you with nothing.

Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man- The climax of the story sort of comes out of nowhere, but the very end manages to be blackly humorous and straightforwardly horrifying and disturbing at the same time.

John C. Wright, The Golden Transcendence- I’m not all death and gloom. This is the last book of the Golden Age trilogy, one of my favorite science fiction series ever. Like The Night Face, but with a very different set of emotions at the end, it has a truly perfect final sentence. With the conclusion of his trilogy, Wright leaves the reader feeling- as he should- exultant.

If novellas count, Neal Asher, The Engineer- Creepy. As. Hell.

While I’m at it, I’ll throw in a movie:

Colossus: The Forbin Project- Great science fiction movie that sees its own grim logic through to the bitter end. (It’s also quite fun, the second time you watch it, to imagine that the movie chronicles the birth of Neal Asher’s Human Polity.)

Those are the ones that first come to mind and have really stuck with me. Anyone else have a list of favorites?

Those filthy microbes thought they could stop me, but I am not thwarted so easily. My interview with Neal Asher is now up at FantasyBookSpot. Have a look. You can also check out my review of Asher’s The Skinner, or my review/discursive ramblings on Gridlinked. Neal Asher’s own blog can be found here.

Read in 2007, that is, not necessarily published in 2007. I acquire books more rapidly than I can read them and always have a large backlog waiting to be read. As a result, my top ten for 2007 includes very few books actually published in 2007. My top ten, in no particular order:

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds- Collects the short stories set in Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe. Great hard science fiction/ space opera with a touch of horror.

The Draco Tavern by Larry Niven- A rather strange book of connected short (often very short) stories that form a sort of episodic novel. Full of interesting alien races, technologies, and ideas, with speculations on topics from religion to artifical intelligence to cosmogony. Essential for Niven fans, or anyone who likes science fiction that gets you thinking.

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester- Fully deserving of its classic status. Exciting, strange, and wonderfully inventive.

Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson – I read this book’s predecessor, Gardens of the Moon, on the strength of various reviews. I liked it, but didn’t see why Erikson was so huge. Then I read the sequel, Deadhouse Gates, and was utterly blown away. It’s just stunning in every respect- action, imagination, emotional impact.

Coalescent by Stephen Baxter – One of the creepiest and most disturbing science fiction novels I’ve read in a long time.

Pandora’s Star/ Judas Unchained by Peter F. Hamilton – One continuous story, so I’m cheating a bit and counting this as one rather than choose between them. Lots of excitement, and some interesting speculations on subjects like the social effects of immortality and personality downloads.

Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson – My all-time favorite post-apocalyptic novel, by my all-time favorite author.

The Wreck of the River of Stars by Michael Flynn – An absolutely stunning work- hard science fiction combined with wonderfully drawn characters and tremendous emotional power. Utterly heartbreaking.

The Line of Polity by Neal Asher- Had to buy it as an import because the geniuses at Tor decided to release books 1 and 3 of Asher’s Ian Cormac series in America without publishing this one, which is book 2. But it was well worth it! Asher demonstrates himself to be a master of space opera here, with intense action, a fascinating future society, and one of my favorite alien characters, the bizarre and enigmatic Dragon. I can only hope that Tor gives this book a proper release in the United States soon.

Chindi by Jack McDevitt- A wide-ranging story about an expedition sent out in search of an enigmatic alien civilization. Full of enjoyable characters, intriguing mysteries, and the thrill of discovery.

I’m back! It feels good, too. I’ve been busy- recovering from my hospitalization, seeking more work, getting my exercise routine up and running again, and getting some computer problems dealt with. Now, back to business.

Something I stumbled upon while searching Amazon.com- an upcoming Neal Asher book entitled Shadow of the Scorpion that is apparently a prequel to the Ian Cormac series, featuring Ian Cormac as a young man in the aftermath of the Prador War. It’s listed as being published by Night Shade Books, though it’s not on their site yet.. I’ll definitely be looking forward to this one.

This is very neat – via Geoffrey Plauche comes news of the Libertarian SF Forum. It’s always nice when two of my nerdly interests combine. If, like me, you always find yourself finishing a new science fiction book and thinking, “You know, that was cool, but there weren’t enough privately owned arbitration firms,” check it out. This could be great if it takes off.

Alastair Reynolds has an interview up at Physics World. Sadly, there is still nothing from him on the all-important subject of labor relations.