E.M.Forster – The Machine Stops

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Book Review, E.M.Forster, SF, Short Story, The Machine Stops

Considering the time of writing, astonishingly and horribly prophetic

E.M.Forster wrote this ‘Science Fiction story’ in 1909. Pre-computer, pre-world wide web, pre-smart talking to itself technology.

Just over 100 years later this seems not like science fiction at all, more, something which might be a mere handful of years away, and in many ways, already here.

Set sometime in the future (at the time of writing) human beings have gratefully done away with all the challenging, messy stuff of having to communicate with each other, and skilfully negotiate co-operation with another face to face human being, in real time and place.

Instead, each lives softly cocooned like a babe inside a personal pod, where all wants are regulated by sentient technology. The technology ‘The Machine’ was once created and conceived of by humans, but now it does things so much more efficiently than any one human can do. All needs, be they of ambient temperature, health and well being, education, entertainment, furniture, are seamlessly provided by the machine, and the human being in its pod never has to rub up against the messy flesh of another. Communication happens by seeing (and hearing) each other on some kind of screen. You in your small pod, me in mine

Everything that can be controlled, is, and everything that can’t, in the material world, is regarded as unpleasant and dangerous.

Living happens in the personal pod, deep below the earth, where the air supply is regulated, and purified. The surface of the earth is deemed dangerous, the air not fit to breathe. The Machine has told us so, so it must be true.

Vashti, the central character is happy in her pod. Her son is a difficult and challenging embarrassment to her and their ‘meetings’ on screen do not go well. He also has disturbing things to say about The Machine, and appears to harbour dangerously subversive ideas about a better, earlier time, when people communicated directly with each other. And then………well, the title of the story shows where this will lead.

Twenty-first century readers can’t help but look around at a world where we are all clutching our little screens,facetwitting, Instachatting, occupying the same space as each other in cafes, on buses, colliding on the street, but rarely connecting with each other, in real. Terminals in shops instruct us that we have placed an unrecognised item in the bagging area. Doctor’s surgeries require us to register our arrival on a screen, whilst the receptionist communicates only with her own terminal. And children, so we are told, no longer realise that potatoes grow in the earth, milk comes from cows, and, from early years are plonked in front of screens with brightly coloured moving shapes, emoticons and squawking sounds, so their harassed parents can get on with the important stuff of staring at their own little screens, busy with brightly coloured moving shapes, emoticons and squawks of their own

Whilst I certainly prefer Forster’s more ‘traditional’, literary novels of relationship this is a horribly possible vision, and it is tempting to categorise it as contemporary fiction, not Sci-Fi at all

A short piece, it punches the gut and leaves the reader gasping for breath

And, the inevitable link to my virtual bloggy buddy FictionFan, who once again brought something to my attention I would otherwise not have known about. You can read her review here. We have never met, in real, and I realise the whole wonderful book blogging community is a ‘virtual’ like Forster is warning us about. There are many good things about our virtual connections, but I sincerely hope to live out my days on the surface of this planet, not beneath it (that can come later!) and welcome the real faces of real people as we meet each other, bump against each other, and even talk, face to face, in real time and space

A version a little more alarming than the better known one by Simon and Garfunkel

The Machine Stops Amazon UK
The Machine Stops Amazon USA

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Lionel Davidson – Kolymsky Heights

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Book Review, Espionage, Kolymsky Heights, Lionel Davidson, Siberia, Spy story

A stylish, chilly, Siberian set thriller, with dabs of Sci-Fi

Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights was first published in 1994. As the major political adversaries are Russia on the one hand and the intelligence services of Britain and North America on the other, the book was slightly out of time with itself, as the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s meant that Russia was not quite such a potent repository for parking all ideas of ‘the foe to be overcome’, a necessary part of any adventure story.

I’m certainly, on the strength of this one, interested in investigating more of Davidson’s books. This one was re-published in 2015, to critical acclaim. Although I can’t quite concur with Philip Pullman who said it was “The best thriller I’ve ever read” , being a devotee of early Greene and Eric Ambler for that accolade, it is certainly, in my mind ‘a tremendous thriller’

Something appears to be going on at a research station deep in Siberia, and surveillance satellites and spy planes have taken some curious photographs. A Soviet scientist who once attended a conference sends an ambiguous and unsigned message to an English academic whom he met at a conference some years earlier. It is not easy to see and understand quite who the real recipient of the ambiguous message should be, nor even where the scientist sent the message from, or how. He has vanished from the scientific community.

British and American intelligence mysteriously converge on the English academic. They are keen to discover who this message is really being sent to.

Enter a classic, unbelievable, with-one-bound-he-was-free hero, Johnny Porter. But the bounding one, possessing any manner of physical and linguistic skills, is nonetheless very far from ‘cartoon’. He is not James Bond, he does not indulge in a string of bed-hoppings with the pulchritudinous, though he does have a great ability to charm people. He is indeed a good man, an intelligent man, – and an extremely reluctant spy. Johnny Porter, also known as Jean-Baptiste Porteur, comes from a tribal Indian background from a particular area of British Columbia. He is an academic, and involved in various progressive causes. He’s also a loner, and a bit of a shape-shifter, in that he can successfully pass himself off as belonging to a number of possible ethnicities, from part Korean to part member of a number of Siberian ethnic groups – Evenk, Chukchee.

Evenk herder and his reindeer – in summer

Pullman’s foreword to my edition is an unusually fine foreword. I read it, as is now my wont, after I finished the book. Too many forewords reveal plot. Pullman doesn’t, though he does let us know why the book is so successful. It is a classic ‘hero quest’ story: an unlikely person, with hidden gifts, sets out on a dangerous adventure. Along the way they will meet surprising companions who will aid them in their dangerous quest. Fairy stories would make the companions magic talking animals, fairy godmothers disguised as poor beggar-women and the like. The dangerous quest (and there is a lot of danger here) in fairy and myth involves something of great and rare value. The quest will transform and extend the seeker. And IF successful the seeker will bring the gift of value back to his or her wider community. And there may very well be a rival quest going on at the same time by those forces who wish to stop the good seeker being successful. This is NOT a fairy-story, but it has the myth/fable structure, meaning ‘helpers’ may be surprising. The quest adventure is a classic kind of story, and can be done well or badly.

Here, it is done very well indeed. One of the real pleasures is that Siberian setting, and the complexities of different ethnicities, languages and cultures within that vast region. Another is the very detailed physical descriptions of how exactly our hero gets to do some of the things he is doing. For those who care about these things these detailed descriptions do not include graphic and gratuitous accounts of violence or sexual encounters. But it is the detailed descriptions of, for example, the building of a particular truck type vehicle which can cope with cross country Siberian travel, which also does give me some reservations. It is a long read, nearly 500 pages, and at times those descriptions, whilst they ground the story in reality, sometimes do hold up the forward pace. Greene and Ambler go for greater tautness, and a shaving of excessive detail. Perhaps they trust, a little more, that the reader acknowledges the genre, and WILL suspend their disbelief if enough, but not too much, reality joins the dots of the one freeing bound!

Nonetheless, recommended!

And, finally, big thanks to the excellent Karen from Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, who sent me racing to buy this one, after her unstoppably appetite whetting review.

Escapist reading of fine quality is some comfort in these parlous times

Kolymsky Heights Amazon UK
Kolymsky Heights Amazon USA

Philip K Dick – The Man In The High Castle

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Alternative History, Book Review, Philip K. Dick, Science fiction, The Man In The High Castle

Conceptually interesting, never quite engaging the heart

Philip K Dick’s alternative view of the outcome of the Second World War has been an interesting reading and reviewing experience.

I was absorbed by the reading, but, unlike my best reads where reflecting on the experience, in order to review it, brings increased enjoyment, as complexities, nuances and depth in understanding why the writing worked so well, arise, my reflection rather lessened my assessment of this book.

The Man In The High Castle reflects of course the time it was written in (1962) and has possibly dated. I think it has to be considered also in the light of other writing at that time, particularly writing arising out of the SF genre, which is primarily where Dick’s writing came from

The book is set in America, fifteen years after the Second World War was won, in 1947, by the Axis Powers. Imperial Japan has control over the Pacific States of America (the Western States) Nazi Germany controls the Eastern States, and there is a area of neutrality between the two occupying forces, in the Rockies. A terrible, not quite spelt out, but easy to imagine devastating ‘experiment’ has been carried out by the Nazis in Africa.

In this version, the Japanese conquerors are seen as a far greater force for civilisation, far more cultured, far more enlightened. There are pretty well no moderate Germans. Martin Boorman is Chancellor, and Hitler, still alive, but elderly and ravaged by syphilis is out of power. However the succession to Boorman is hotting up, and factions within Germany are splitting and plotting to take control (none of which depart from fascist ideology)

Map of world in Man In The High Castle, Wiki Commons

Set in San Francisco, Japanese controlled San Francisco, one of the ‘civilising’ influences is seen to be the Chinese Book of Changes, the I Ching, an ancient text which had a major influence on the counter-culture of the ‘real’ 1960s. Dick himself used the I Ching in order to write this book. Carl-Gustave Jung examined, at depth, the philosophies and world view of this text. Indeed, Jung wrote the foreword to the translated edition which first appeared in English in 1951. The Book of Changes was less ‘divination’ (though it was certainly used that way in the West), and more meditation, leading to indication of possibilities and reflection about possibilities from taking (or not taking) particular courses of action. It is a poetic, metaphor rich text, needing to be understood in the culture of its creation.

Using the Yarrow Stalks Flicr Commons Hella Delicious photostream

Several of the central characters in Dick’s book seek guidance on the correct choices to be made ‘the way of the superior man’ which the book suggests should be followed.

Robert Childan is an American who has capitalised on the Japanese interest in ‘Americana’ by running a high end ‘antiques and genuine American heritage’ business – some of which, is in fact high end forgery. So, as well as alternative history around the Second World War, there is also a fake, or alternative, creation of American culture. For example, in the book, Roosevelt was assassinated. What is the special potency, magic or energy associated with a ‘this is the precise weapon’ or a fake version of something? There is a subtext around the real and the fake, genuine art and forgery.

One of the most sophisticated and nuanced characters is Nobusuke Tagomi, a high ranking Japanese businessman, and one of Childan’s major customers. Tagomi is one of the most subtle and developed characters in the book, one who is willing to take responsibility for his own actions. I wondered how much Dick’s own interest in psychology, philosophy and psychology had gone into the greater humanity and authenticity of Tagomi, than I found in any other character in the book. Tagomi, to this reader, was the most ‘truly human’ precisely because he was most complex, and most reflective on his human nature – which is to be conflicted within itself.

And yet, nothing to see: nothing for body to do. Run? All in preparation for panic flight. But where to and why? Mr Tagomi asked himself. No clue. Therefore impossible. Dilemma of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure.

Two other central characters are Frank Frink, a craftsman – who is Jewish, and of course absolutely has to keep his ancestry hidden, and his estranged wife Juliana, a judo instructor.

There are also characters in the book who are absolutely not who they seem to be. The two Axis superpowers are also squaring up for a conflict between themselves. Germany is well ahead. It has the hydrogen bomb, and has already begun to colonise space.

A major focus of the book is something which has become almost literary mainstream now – a book within the book. There is a book, banned by the Axis Powers, which presents an ‘alternative history’ – a history in which the Allied Powers won the war. This book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, has become a hidden, furtive, cult classic, which inspires its subversive readers to believe that another kind of history might have been possible – or could cohere and rally people behind a symbol, a way of thinking, which might change the future.

It was easy to tell which were the Germans. They had that healthy, clean energetic, assured look. The Americans on the other hand – they just looked like people. They could have been anybody

With the central focus of the alternative history within the alternative history, Dick is playing very interesting mind games with his readers about the nature of reality, creating a feeling of dislocation, ideas about bifurcating, endlessly splitting reality

At the time of the writing, this must have been quite startlingly interesting and challenging, particularly coming from a writer whose background was populist rather than academic and lit ficcy

I thoroughly enjoyed the shifting, teasing thought provoking aspects of the book, but where I foundered was where I have often foundered in the past in ‘traditional science fiction’ where the writers are more skilled at concept and the ideas behind the science, and the fiction around the possibilities of that science, but are, it seems, less interested and skilled in the narrative which arises from within an empathic inhabitation of character.

This does not mean that character must be loveable, by any means, but it does mean that all characters have to make sense to themselves, have an understandable authenticity, be fully rounded, fleshed out, and not merely vehicles to carry plot and idea forward.

We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious

So, on reflection, I cannot say I loved this book because I only engaged intellectually, in the interesting ideas, and in the outside observation of page turning plot. But I cannot say that I really found myself involved with, or engaged by any of the characters.

What I did find myself wishing for, was that Dick had written another book, called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, with a further book perhaps within it.

I know that on the back of the TV adaptation someone has of course jumped on the marketing possibilities of this and written his own book with this title. Not, by all accounts, very good, and I’m not at all drawn to its perusal.

Although this is less ‘science fiction’ and more ‘an alternative view of history and an examination of ‘reality’ itself’ it did remind me that my own greater willingness to immerse in SF came from writers who wrote within the genre, but were/are also more obviously writers who create subtler, more believable individual humanity.

There is a very interesting foreword to the ebook by Eric Brown – which I read AFTERWARDS – and am very glad I did so, as it spells out the plot . Small gripe – why oh why are so many forewords prone to spoil, not enlighten, the reading experience? Is it the ego of a foreword writer, which demands foreword, why can’t the foreword be placed as it clearly so often should be – as an afterword? Unless a foreword were perhaps to restrict itself to something more modest.

My after-reading of the foreword was interesting, in that many of the ideas I was forming about the writer himself and his personality (which of course gives rise to the book a writer will write, both its strength and its weaknesses) were borne out. I shall not detail them here, as curiously, I think the biography itself might predict and predispose the reader.

I did strongly like the book – a very clear four star, but it is as much in the context (and the limitations) of its own time. And, for many reasons, the authorial voice is not a voice which absolutely resonates with me.

The Man In The High Castle Amazon UK
The Man In The High Castle Amazon USA

Charles Lambert – The Children’s Home

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Book Review, Charles Lambert, The Children's Home

Midwich Cuckoos and The Beast

One of the great strengths of Charles Lambert’s eerie, unsettling short novel is that he sets up an odd world, one which seems inherently plausible but he does not attempt to dot the is and cross the ts of logic. There is sufficient day to day, detailed reality to carry the fantastical elements, and the writing style, which eschews whimsy and the ethereal, rather serves to underline the strange normality of its weirdness. This means that the odd and the more usual versions of ‘reality’ sit alongside each other in a kind of delicious tension of opposition

Morgan Fletcher is the heavily disfigured scion of an extremely wealthy family, whose strange family business goes back for at least a couple of generations. The reader (and Morgan himself) is not quite sure what the family business was – some kind of world trade, as his grandfather amassed all sorts of strange travellers’ curios from far off lands.

Something has happened, some kind of breakdown in society, and Morgan lives in isolation. His wealth means there are various retainers and servants about the place, but no one sees Morgan except his housekeeper, Engel, who arrived some time ago. Outside the walls of Morgan’s empire, there were at some point violent encounters between citizens. We assume as a result of some kind of apocalyptic collapse of society. Various myths have probably circulated about Morgan’s terrible disfigurement, and it’s quite possible that everyone is as afraid of seeing the terribly damaged man as he is of being seen. So one myth which Lambert’s book is hinting at is ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – and of course, in the fairy tale, the Beast is actually possessed of far more beauty in his soul than most of the ‘unbeastly’, of unexceptional physiognomy. There are mismatches between the outward mask and the inner beings of many. And Morgan is clearly a good man. However, children begin to arrive at his domain, no one is quite sure from where, or indeed, why. And Morgan’s goodness is shown by the fact he gives them sanctuary. And, pleasingly, the mysterious children are not repelled or frightened by his damaged appearance. Instead, they trust him.

Figures In The Mist, photographer Vtal, Deviant Art, Commons

The children are not quite what they seem. They have some curious abilities – their ferocious intelligence, their speeded up development, for one thing. Another literary memory being used is John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos. The reader, like the children, like Morgan, begin slowly to become a little less sure of their own, or anyone else’s agenda. There is also a ‘good doctor’ who comes initially to take care of the children’s health, and a firm friendship develops between Morgan and Crane, as they try to understand where the children have come from, who they are, and what is the purpose which Morgan is playing out in their lives.

There are also sinister forces outside, figures of authority, who threaten the children.

Lambert’s great skill is to start his story in the sweet and light, and by increments to turn those lights down, to create shadows, twilights, rustlings, and slowly leave the reader feeling more and more unsettled and uneasy.

As others have noted, this book crosses genres – it is a literary fiction, post-apocalyptic, science fiction-ish horror fantasy thriller digging around in dark myths and imaginings.

And its knotted up genres are brilliantly woven together. Lambert leaves the reader (well, for sure he left this one) with the feeling that there are probably further allusions to be found. There is some very dark and shocking stuff – but the darker Lambert gets the more delicately and subtly he describes things. He understands that less is far, far more, he really does

it set me thinking about those books we were given to read as children, about travellers and shipwrecked sailors. How they found themselves in strange lands. magical lands where time went backwards or animals spoke their language. But they weren’t strange or magical to the people who lived there, were they? The people who lived there were normal. How formless it all is until an outsider gives it form

I recommend this strongly – and suggest it is best read when the nights are still quite long, for full uneasy hairs up the back of the neck effect!

I was very happy to receive this as an ARC, from the publishers, Aardvark, via NetGalley. This is the second book I’ve read from Aardvark – on this showing, a most interesting publisher, going outside the mainstream

I was alerted to this wonderfully satisfying and strange read by Fiction Fan. You can read her great review with unsettling graphics here

The Children’s Home Amazon UK
The Children’s Home Amazon USA

Claire North – The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

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Book Review, Claire North, Metaphysics, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Time travel

Time speeding up, again and again, in a hi-fi, sci-fi, thriller

Claire North’s (who she?) wonderful page-turning mind-mangle across, primarily, the mid to latter part of the twentieth century is dizzying, disorientating and dazzling!

North is already a successful author with a couple of pen-names, within particular genres – YA and fantasy. This book is so very very different that it seemed sensible to use separate names, for different audiences, and to avoid preconceptions

Harry August, is a `Kalachakra’. This concept (if not the word itself) can be found in philosophical thought from both the European Classical Philosophical Tradition, and, (where the term comes from) from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (sometimes written as Kalacakra) It refers to the concept of time being circular, the wheel of time, as opposed to linear The circularity of time is a concept within which many ideas, from the nature of matter/time and their connections, to the idea of parallel universes, forking time/choice, re-incarnation and the transmigration of souls, can find a home. The Kalachakran is also aware, and has memory of their prior incarnations

Complexity and simplicity”, he replied. “Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet, if asked to explain it in simple language to a child – in simple language which is not deceit, of course – we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is to waste it.

North has taken the idea of a kind of repetition of time/choice (say, in filmic terms, Groundhog Day AND Sliding Doors) but has come up with a very clever and mind blowing concept – linking classical thinking and the future – that, from recorded history, there have always BEEN those who were reborn, again and again, within their own time frame – not, as it were, time travellers from the future or from the past – if you were born, as Harry August is, in his first life in 1918, and are then reborn, you are reborn into your own life and your own time – still, where you were born the first time, in the same place, but you will have awareness of that earlier life, and may perhaps make different choices, parallel choices, choices which may be occurring in a parallel universe. The clever twist is, there will be other Kalachakra, born perhaps half a generation or a generation later, who may be able to bring you awareness of the future – and `messages’ can be passed, next generation child to dying elderly person back and forth through time. Confused? Dizzy? Its like walking in one direction on an escalator travelling in the opposite direction.

Kalachakra el Paso 2012 Steve Osborne, Wiki Commons

A club, (dating back thousands of years, reflecting all those thousand years back circular timers) the Cronos Club, a secret organisation, passing messages back and forth in time, exists to protect its own. The law, the rule, which must not be broken is that the large events of past and future must not be changed – to seek to bring future knowledge back into the past is to irretrievably change the nature of the past and thus the future, with potentially cataclysmic effects.

Unfortunately someone, or more than one someone, is subtly doing this. Small scientific changes begn to happen, from some time in the 1920s, which should not have happened at that time. Very very subtle technological changes, opening the possibility for earlier discovery of yet more changes. And some members of the Cronos Club are aware of this.

North keeps a wonderfully firm hand on her inventions, technologies, theories of physics, and marries this to a very human story. This is absolutely a `literary’ novel full of authentic psychology, believable people and relationships in time and space, friendship, betrayal, greed, thirst for power and domination, with a very well thought through twist. There really is plenty for those who like their science fiction to have science within it, not just fiction. There are no aliens, no spaceships, no intergalactic battles – just us, within a period from 1918, comprising most the last century, and a little into this – but with a deeply unsettling, deeply plausible twist – the world is ending (as it will, one day) but, it appears that it will be ending faster as knowledge from a little in the future, gets used a little earlier.

One of the first commercially available mobile phones from 1983 – or was that 1963?

The book is full of brilliant pull-the-rug-out twists, which had me absolutely shouting Oh NO Oh YES in shock and recognition. And, as a not so often used driver of `what is the central relationship here’ – it is not a romantic one, not a parent/child – it is friendship, and its glues and sunderings.

This was, quite honestly, a book I could not bear to put down, It permeated my dreams two nights in succession, so much so that I woke and had to do some middle of the night further reading, driven by the page-turning (faster and faster, not just the world ending faster!) mind-mangling workout North was whipping up

5 star and then some! Hugely enjoyable, most entertaining, and with lots of really good stuff to chew on

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Amazon UK
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August Amazon USA

Emmi Itäranta – Memory of Water

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Book Review, Dystopia, Emmi Itäranta, Finnish Literature, Memory of Water

Poetry, melancholy, Nordic mists and Chinese tea, in a dry, dystopian landscape

Finnish author Emmi Itäranta astonishingly wrote her first novel, a delicate, dystopian Sci-Fi outing, simultaneously in Finnish and English. Born in Finland the author is resident in the UK. Memory of Water won one Finnish literary prize and was nominated for another.

We are beyond ‘The Twilight century’ (our own) Mankind’s wasteful, indifferent attitudes to its own species and to the planet we share with other species, has resulted in the climate changes from which there is no real return. There has been the melting of the icecaps, the warming of the planet, and most of the landlocked freshwater has gone. Much of the land is given over to huge landfill containing the unrecycleable wastes of this century and the one before – plastics, electronics, consumer junk, which there is no longer the power to use.

Potable water comes, strictly quota controlled, from desalination plants. Hoarding, iillegally tapping into this water supply, and possessing more water than the agreed quota is a capital offence.

China has become the dominant world power, ‘New Qian’. World culture is now Chinese culture, and the world is a Chinese empire

Set in ‘the Scandinavian Union’, Memory of Water’s narrator and protagonist is 17 year old Noria. She is the daughter of a tea master, himself part of a long lineage of tea-masters:

Tea-masters are the watchers of water, but first and foremost we are its servants

In some sense, Noria’s lineage makes her a traditionalist, and an observer and adherent to older duties and customs than those imposed by political decree. The tradition is one of interior discipline and reflection

Noria and her childhood friend Sanja, a skilful inventor and repairer of those long ago obsolete pieces of junk found in landfill from ‘The Twilight Century’ become in some sense, unwittingly, unwillingly, the guardians of human, peer, connection, set against the hierarchical connections of dictatorship and its apparatchiks.

I was fascinated by way this story was told, the creation of the world, and the often quiet, lyrical language. Characterisation was excellent, and Noria and Sanja, their friendship and its challenges, beautifully handled

Past-world tea masters knew stories that have mostly been forgotten………………….The story tells that water has a consciousness, that it carries in its memory everything that’s ever happened in this world, from the time before humans until this moment, which draws itself in its memory even as it passes. Water understands the movements of the world, it knows when it is sought and where it is needed…………Not everything in the world belongs to people. Tea and water do not belong to tea masters, but tea masters belong to tea and water

Itäranta’s interest in sci-fi and dystopian literature is impeccably on the side of reflective, imaginative thinking, and geopolitical awareness, rather than blazing light-sabres and intergalactic derring-do. Writers and books she recommends as her inspirers or books to inspire others include Ursula K Le Guin, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and George Orwell’s 1984.

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK

Memory of Water Amazon UK
Memory of Water Amazon USA

Michel Faber – The Book Of Strange New Things. It’s publication day!

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Book Review, Michel Faber, Publication Day, The Book Of Strange New Things

 

Here is a strange, challenging and enjoyable new thing of a book by Michel Faber, very different from his much loved The Crimson Petal and The White.

Here is my original review, written back in July after receiving it as an ARC from NetGalley in digital format

The Book Of Strange New Things Amazon UK
The Book Of Strange New Things Amazon USA

Michel Faber – The Book Of Strange New Things

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Book Review, Michel Faber, The Book Of Strange New Things

To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before

Michel Faber’s rich, opulent novel about power and sexuality in Victorian London, The Crimson Petal and The White, was, all those years ago an strange and immersive read.

Now, with The Book Of Strange New Things he has gone in an entirely different direction, producing something equally unusual, compelling, disturbing and memorable.

This is a genres-bending book – apocalyptic, spiritual, specifically Christian, SF, taking on board multinational corporate politics, what it means, after all, to be a human animal, a creature at all, and, what it means to be in relationship, specifically a sexual relationship. How do we connect with each other – and, how do we, how will we connect with other life forms, assuming we are not the only intelligent life forms in the universe, how will we manage to accept ‘extreme otherness’ when we can hardly manage each others’ otherness?

I found myself curiously distressed and disturbed, all shaken up, by this read. Rarely have I felt so strongly that in writing about ‘other life forms’ and our attitudes towards them, the author is not using this as a metaphor to make us think about racism, how we carry attitudes towards other groups and members of our own species – but instead, is really tapping in to some very primal potential disgusts about what ‘other’ looks like. Suppose, for example, intelligent alien life forms had an appearance close to something many of us felt an almost hardwired, visual disgust for – large maggots, bubbling goo with a rotting aroma or the like? How would that work if this were married with a progressive pan-religious idea that encompassed ‘made in the image of God’ as being something to do with soul quality rather than appearance. Faced with the challenge of recognising – let us not call it ‘humanity’ but some sort of ‘advanced and soulful creaturedom – created-dom’ – in a species which shares a lot with us, in many ways seems more emotionally, co-operatively ‘whole’ than we do – less aggressive, less egoic, wiser, more thoughtful, and yet, evokes that sense of disgust. How would we manage?

Yellow mite Tydeidae:Lorryia formosa Wiki Commons

Set at some close future time where life is very similar, politically, geopolitically, to how it is now, with current climate and political flashpoints as they are, we have managed to jump space-time, and set up at least one community on a planet in another galaxy with an indigenous, intelligent, humanoid life-form

Peter Leigh is a British man with a damaged past, due to alcohol and drug abuse. All that is behind him though, having found sobriety, a loving and adult relationship with his wife Beatrice, a nurse, the two are evangelising Christians. Leigh is a pastor. The denizens of that other planet ‘Oasis’, named by us after a competition, are desperate for the words of Jesus (for reasons which become clear much later on) Leigh along with a small community of more obviously required professionals – thermo-engineers, experts in building, doctors, heating and air-conditioning engineers and the like, are building infrastrucutres and relationships with ‘the aliens’ on the new planet. Leigh is there to minister the word of the Lord to the aliens, at their request.

This is NOT a book about Christian evangelism. It is however a book about how we might keep a sense of faith, belief, integrity, humanity when all around us is heading for meltdown. Shortly after leaving for his tour of missionary duty, events back on Earth begin, rapidly, to head towards meltdown, both in terms of cosmic disasters, and the inevitable human response to apocalypse.

Leigh begins to build respectful connections with the aliens (though, in truth, as he realises, it is their planet, and it is ourselves who are aliens), with his fellow, far stranger, less humane human companions, even as his long distance relationship with Bea begins, steadily and painfully, on both sides, to fracture and crumble, as is evidenced by their ‘letters’ sent through space-time

This is a fascinating and absorbing read – one which can give rise to all sorts of challenging debates about ethics, philosophy and futurology ‘what-ifs’

I recommend it highly. I have some slight stylistic reservations about how things end for Bea and Peter, not quite convinced why one of them acts as they do, but this is a minor mark against what is an extremely thought provoking, well written addition to the modern SF canon.

I received this as a remarkably early ARC from the publishers, via NetGalley, as it is not due to see the general light of day till late autumn. Worth waiting for. Come October, I’ll start doing alerts and posts back to this. meanwhile, it is available to pre-order

The Book Of Strange New Things Amazon UK
The Book Of Strange New Things Amazon USA

John Wyndham – The Seeds Of Time

Tags

Book Review, John Wyndham, Sci-Fi, Short stories, The Seeds Of Time

The rich world of literary SciFi short stories

John Wyndham’s short story collection The Seeds of Time is a masterclass in how unformulaic any genre might be in the hands of someone who is a crafted, imaginative literary writer who happens to write in the Sci-Fi genre, as opposed to someone who is a Sci-Fi writer. Yes, I know my prejudices are showing, but I do believe it must be the writing, the craft itself which comes first, and the mastery (or not) of that, rather than the field in which someone chooses to write.

Here, Wyndham has laid out something of a smorgasbord of different genres of writing, with a theme which might loosely be described as SF – so, if you like, he is sewing together genres, so that we get SF Romance, SF Humour, SF philiosophy, an examination of racism through the lens or disguise of SF, etc.

The short story structure itself is something which demands precision and craft to be successful. Often, short story collections rather disappoint, because the reader may very quickly realise the writer’s particular tricks and tics, especially if the short story writer is basically writing in a very fixed groove – fairly recently I read an example of this, where had I just read one such story, perhaps, published as it was in a magazine, it would have been a superb example of the craft. Unfortunately gathering dozens and dozens of such stories, published over many years, individually, together, was just too much same old.

But that is definitely not the case here, because of Wyndham’s splendid variety.

Inevitably, there cannot but be variations in excellence, and I can only concur with a fellow reviewer, – Fiction Fan – see her review, with added jolly media enjoyment, in picking out the particularly stellar 3. It is not that the others are poor, only that these are superb

Perseid meteor shower 2007 Wiki Commons

Meteor is a short and telling story which shows what might happen when the inevitable supposition of what intelligent life from another planetary system might look like, remains viewed through the lens of human size as well as shape. This was horrid, poignant and funny, all at once

Survival is a shocking and absolutely plausible story which, written in the 50s, shows the danger of underestimating women. A proto-feminist SciFi fable

Pillar To Post is an extremely clever story involving a couple of protagonists fighting through time and space for possession of the same body.

I also thought Dumb Martian, which examines racist and sexist attitudes under the guise of Sci Fi, was particularly fine, and Opposite Number, which looks at ‘alternate realities’ the intriguing idea of a kind of bifurcating universe where the choices an individual didn’t make, are playing out – and then what happens if a couple of these bifurcations collide. It’s the story of ‘What If………I had done this rather than that’

10 short stories – not one is poor

The Seeds Of Time Amazon UK
The Seeds Of Time Amazon UK

The Prescient View of Science Fiction writers

Tags

Book Review, Dystopia, Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, Science fiction, SF, Soapbox

Ray Bradbury –  Fahrenheit 451

Back whenever, Science Fiction was a genre I never thought about, convinced that such writers were (sorry, this is about my previous prejudices, and may not reflect reality about the genre, then or now AT ALL) geeky guys without social skills stuck in a 7 year old comic book fantasy of space-ships, ray-guns, stun-guns, giant robotic females with mammaries the size of whoopee cushions, who happened to be coloured green or red and had just dropped in from Venus or Mars.

It took me some time to realise that some writers whom I thought of as pretty thoughtful and thought provoking – H.G.Wells, George Orwell. (I liked their politics too) John Wyndham, even Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) were also writing in this genre. Science Fiction in the hands of these writers had far less to do with ray guns (or even Ray-Bans) and had everything to do with a device for looking at our society.

Then no less an admired writer (by me) than Doris Lessing began to write the stuff in the Canopus In Argos series, and moreover began banging the SF drum, saying that some of the most exciting writing was happening in the genre, as it was a perfect medium for Society to examine itself. Big ethical and philosophical ideas of now and the future could be teased out and examined, and moreover, of course, SF was a way of looking at what both a Utopia and a Dystopia might look like – or even whether Utopia itself was in fact really achievable, or just another Dystopia.

Added to my roster of other writers to admire (and I liked their politics!) were of course Lessing herself, Ursula K Le Guin and Sheri Tepper – not to mention Margaret Atwood and even Marge Piercy in Woman On The Edge Of Time. Suddenly it seemed as if there were a whole raft of feminist writers – fine writers, feminists, turning to this genre as a way of exploring gender politics, socialism – and I realised, hey, you know what, I LIKE SF!

Anyway, this preamble has brought me to re-reading some earlier SF classics, – most recently, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

Now Bradbury in this book may not be writing such well crafted complex characters as some of those writers I have mentioned, and the plot itself may even be a bit sparse or creaky, but my goodness, I am shocked and chilled and awed by how much of today’s culture he was predicting 60 years ago

Reality TV where we all become content not only to watch others living, rather than living ourselves, but, no doubt, the next step arriving very soon where our TV becomes interactive and we ourselves get inserted as bit players in the soaps we watch, or software that inserts our names into live TV, so that the TV talks directly to us, with announcers addressing us directly. Then we can live even less.

He seems to have mainlined into the fact that we have dumbed culture down, his description of the way people talk to each other so that actually they are not talking about anything at all seems unnervingly like the “and then he said, he was like, it was, you know, like, it was, yeah, no, know what I mean?” babble.  You hear these conversations all around, more and more being said without any meaning:

 People don’t talk about anything’…’They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else

He predicts also the worst excesses of PC speak, and puts his finger neatly on the button of our expectation of happiness as a right, our inability to come to terms with the fact that pain and suffering are a real part of embodiment, of living in a world of matter. The best, the justest, the fairest society will not be able to end our personal suffering

 Ask yourself, what do we want in this country, above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for, isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these

I was shaking my head in amazement at the accurate identification of our can’t be still, can’t reflect society which settles for circuses (never mind the bread) and drinks, drugs, medicates, and buys its way out of having to acknowledge that pain is an unavoidable part of life itself – we will grow old (if we are that lucky); we will have to manage the loss, at some point, of those we love, and we too will die.

There is more – a society which cannot deal with complexity, with the fact there may not always be an obvious right and an obvious wrong, and this too, we cannot bear. One of the great challenges are situations where whatever action is taken, it will not be without some great cost, and yet we have to take some action, as the not taking an action is of course itself an act. Events in Syria are so much illustrative of this. I am minded of W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming:

The best lack all conviction, whilst the worst
Are full of Passionate intensity

How do we live having let go of  the comfortable and childish security of a world which is black OR white, and let ourselves inhabit that more confusing  challenging world filled with ever more subtle complexities of paradoxes, conflicts and oppositions coexisting together into and and, rather than either or?

 If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none.

And, seeing ahead to the vapid game show, where factual knowledge gives us the illusion we have intelligence and wisdom

 Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so full of facts they feel stuffed, but absolutely brilliant with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving

He talks also about our inability to bear silence – everyone cushioned from the world by their own blare of noise wall to wall music piped into our heads, children plonked in front of the pabulum TV, learning early to be passive not interactive, – even the fashion for elective caesarians on non-medical grounds.

What makes this book so powerful still is the fact that so much of its dystopian vision is the way our lives actually are; not in fact so much ‘science fiction’ after all, rather a sociological analysis

We don’t need giant invaders from other galaxies with super powerful rare weapons to destroy us, and our world. We are ourselves those violent, aggressive, alien invaders

Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK
Fahrenheit 451 Amazon UK