John Wyndham – The Seeds Of Time

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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

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Christopher Priest – The Adjacent

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Book Review, Christopher Priest, Dystopia, Sci-Fi, SF, The Adjacent

Dark Ravens, not White Doves, Emerge from the Magician’s Hat

Christopher Priest is adept at mangling the mind of an unwary (and even a wary!) reader; all his books tangle, darkly, with our perceptions of reality and identity. His new novel, The Adjacent, is no exception, weaving his lifelong themes of shifting realities, alternate and parallel realities of time and place, and the alternate and parallel life of individual identity itself.

Other Priest meta themes to be woven in are prestidigitation, illusion and magic, state control, dystopia, mankind’s heavy and bellicose footprint across the landscape of our history, and the lies and deceptions of our, public relations spin accounts of our time and culture, and the dark and shadowy underbelly of social control and our nightmare, `uncivil’ selves.

Vexaton.DeviantArt.com Commons

The Adjacent weaves a story through several settings, beginning with a post-apocalyptic world, some 40 or 50 years ahead of today. Physicists have found another way of manipulating matter, which, similarly to the splitting of the atom, can be (and will be) used in the service of destruction and control, however much the invention may have been designed as `pure science for the good’.

The effects of global terrorism, environmental damage and twenty-first century religious wars have changed our world forever.

Frighteningly, as so often with Priest, none of this really seems like science fiction – the only factor which isn’t clearly visible over the horizon – or already here – is `Adjacency’ (which I shan’t spell out, it is for the reader to discover)

Strep72 photostream. Flicr, Commons

There is a flipping back and forth between post-apocalytic twenty-first century, the First World War and the Second World War, and, to continue Priest’s other territory of islands, specifically post-apocalytic islands, we revisit some earlier landscapes from his previous novels The Islanders and The Dream Archipelago.

More, I will not say, there are love stories within here, and a surprising (but perfectly apposite) appearance of a pertinent author, but even to mention characters is to destroy the careful series of shocks and recognitions which it will be the reader’s pleasure to discover.

In effect, with his interest in stage magicians and their world, I always feel as if Priest’s readers ought to become, in effect, bound by the rules of the Magician’s Circle, and NOT reveal Priest’s tricks!

I did have a slight feeling of let-down with the ending of this one, and that is all I will say against this book.

An earlier criticism, which is that Priest cannot inhabit female sensibility well, and that there is always a certain coldness and detachment in his accounts of sexual encounters between men and women, something which feels like a flaw, an over-cerebral approach to the possibility of human warmth, did dissolve away, rather, late on the book.

Priest remains a deeply disturbing, sometimes a little chilly and cerebral, but ALWAYS challenging, unsettling and thought provoking, writer. Wallpaper, muzak, marshmallow writer he is NOT. Rather a pearl from the grit in the oyster kind!

I have been an uneasy, sometimes uncomfortable, admirer of Priest’s writing for nearly twenty years, since first encountering The Glamour which may well have been the first of his novels to escape from being sidelined by the often dismissive Sci-Fi label. Priest indeed being one of the authors (along with Doris Lessing, Ursula K.Le Guin, and John Wyndham, not to mention H.G. Wells) to sternly tell me not be so snobby, narrow minded and dismissive, and to realise its not the genre, it’s the WRITING I should look at.

The unease, by the way, is caused by the often scarily prescient quality of Priest’s vision. His is uncomfortable and challenging, not escapist, literature

The Dream Archipelago Amazon UK
The Dream Archipelago Amazon USA

 

John Wyndham – The Chrysalids

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Book Review, John Wyndham, Literary Fiction, Sci-Fi, SF, The Chrysalids

Examining society through science fiction

I first read this years ago, and though I have thought that as a genre science fiction is not something I’m particularly interested in, of course, in the hands of a fine writer (Wyndham was) it provides a brilliant way of taking a more reflective look at our own society.

Written in the 50s, where the grim realities of the devastation of war, the destructive power of nuclear weapons, and the use of propaganda and control were hugely in use – the Cold War creating bogeymen from both sides of the Iron Curtain – this dystopian view of a world destroyed by some long ago catastrophe (clearly the fall out from nuclear Armageddon) must have seemed particularly potent.

Society is once again primitive and there is total control exercised by fundamentalist Christianity – its like going back to the seventeenth century and the fear of witchcraft – except the society being pictured is clearly both the America of McCarthyism and the Russia of Stalin. Here, birth defects (caused, the reader quickly realises, through the effects of widespread deviation) are feared, seen as evidence of God’s punishment and disfavour. Such deviation from the norm – whether in humans, other animals or vegetables, must be destroyed.

But what about deviation which may not be visible – a deviation of thought – here is where the parallels between the McCarthy witchhunts and their terror of reds under the bed, and those reds’ own terror of deviation from received thinking – become clear.

Wyndham wraps this all together in an exciting plot-line, with the central characters, and the hopes for a better future, residing in the young.

He is far more than a polemicist – the philosophical considerations arise perfectly from within the characters themselves. He is that wonderful mixture – a superb storyteller, a creator of interesting and layered characters, and a writer with something to say.

This is enough to make me want to revisit all the other post war, on-the-edge-of-a-nuclear-apocalypse territory writing Wyndham created. I never particularly think of Wyndham as a science fiction writer (which he is) but purely as a writer. And a very fine one, at that

The jacket shown here is of a version available in the States with a foreword by another wonderful, thought provoking SF writer, Christopher Priest
The Chrysalids Amazon UK
The Chrysalids Amazon USA

Christopher Priest – The Islanders

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Book Review, Christopher Priest, Dystopia, Literary Fiction, Sci-Fi, SF, The Islanders

The subtitle of Christopher Priest’s The Islanders `All men are islands’ cocks a snook at Donne’s `No Man is an Islande’ which points out interconnectedness. Priest’s supposed `gazetteer’ of the islands of The Dream Archipelago both reinforces Donne and his own subtitle, which hints at the also truth of isolation, inward looking, self-reflective nature of islands and island dwellers

This is a book to mangle minds. Told by several unreliable narrators – including the writer himself, who turns out to have dedicated his book to one of his mysterious characters, and thereby does that `up yours’ gesture to the reader who wonders how much the writer of the foreword, Chaster Kammeston, is, or is not, Priest himself – this book systematically pulls rugs out from under the readers’ feet, up-ending and wickedly landing them on the floor.

Those familiar with Priest’s writing will be no strangers to his ability to severely disorientate and deliberately unsettle the reader, turning his dream landscapes to nightmare, whisking what seemed safe ground away to reveal the yawning chasms of danger beneath. Echoes of his earlier works are scattered throughout the text. Indeed the islands themselves are part of The Dream Archipelago, the title of a previous work. One of the islands is the island where lottery winners achieve, through medical science, immortality, and some of the island names as well come from that previous work

Set in what is probably a post-apocalypse near or parallel future of this world, (environmentalists are already predicting this could be nearer than we think) global warming has flooded most of the landscape, leaving 2 war torn major land masses and the long, divided chain of islands of The Dream Archipelago. Presented as a travelogue or guide to some of the major islands, which, according to Kammeston are idyllic, peaceful areas of neutrality outside the still warring land mass areas, where the arts, education and scientific research which benefits all are held in high regard, we quickly learn that much of what Kammeston claims can be disregarded. The `no man is an island’ of Donne’s view and the `all men are islands’ of Priest’s subtitle clash and weave together – the oppositions proving and disproving each other just like 2 of the major installation artists of the book are shown to do.

Nothing is as it seems here, Priest reworking some of his major preoccupations with illusion, sleight of hand, the conscious attempt to deceive of theatrical magic – the major focus of his earlier The Prestige (GOLLANCZ S.F.).

To lay out more of the spells, the illusions, the darknesses and the oppositions Priest explores would be to spoil the new reader’s own journey of dislocation and necessary obfuscation.

If you are unfamiliar with Priest’s work, an excellent place to start is The Glamour (GOLLANCZ S.F.) (which is where I first encountered Priest) To describe him as an SF writer – as often happens – is not completely right. To my mind, he is a kind of English Borges, a philiosopher metaphysician with a scarily challenging mind and imagination. What I particularly appreciate in this book, is a sense of light touch and playfulness, leavening the darkness
The Islanders