science fiction

From This Day Forward — John Brunner

Published on August 13, 2025Leave a comment

Cover of From This Day Forward

From This Day Forward
John Brunner
176 pages
published in 1972

Because I’m easily influenced, when I saw James Nicoll’s review of this, I went digging through my shelves of Yellow(ing) DAW paperbacks to see if I had it. Which indeed I did. As I had a two hour long commute the next day, I thought this slim, 176 page could be easily finished during it. Alas, I spent too long doom scrolling first so irritatingly the very last story had to be finished on the way back.

John Brunner is not a writer I’ve read many sort stories of and certainly not any I can remember of the top of my head. From me he’s always been a novelist first and foremost, mainly thanks to his quartet of dystopian novels he wrote in the late sixties to mid-seventies: Stand on Zanzibar (1968), The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972) and The Shockwave Rider (1975). Each of those tackled a different fashionable doom, from overpopulation and pollution to the threat of computer hackers. Before that, Brunner had been mostly writing decent but unremarable pulp sf, making the same sort of career change as Robert Silverberg did in the US when the New Wave struck.

It’s not just that Brunner tackled serious topics in a pessimistic manner, running counter to the strapping can-do attitude of Campbellian science fiction, but that he actually used literary techniques no self respecting Analog writer would wish to be associated with. Stand on Zanzibar especially benefited from Brunner adopting John Dos Passos’ fragmented story telling techniques Passos had developed for his U.S.A. trilogy, dragging science fiction kicking an screaming into the cutting edge of 1930s literature.

Not that any of this is noticeable from this particular collection, spanning stories published from 1955 to 1972. None of the literary sparkle of those four novels is present here. These are straight forwardly told tales, of a type that any science fiction writer of the period could’ve written. These are all classic O’Henry-esque twist stories, something an Asimov could’ve also written. The only difference perhaps being the faint pessimism most are infused with. It’s instructive to see where these stories were first published, from New Worlds< and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science fction to Analog and Galaxy, running the entire spectrum of sf magazines.

This is the sort of science fiction story I grew up on and reading these felt like coming home. If none of them were particularly memorable, at least they were entertaining. If you’re new to Brunner this isn’t the best book to pick up. You’re better off trying one of the Doomsday Quartet novels I mentioned above. From This Day Forward contains the following, as taken from the ISFDB:

[1] • A “From This Day Foreword”, As It Were • (1972) • essay by John Brunner
[2] • From This Day Forward (frontispiece) • interior artwork by Jack Gaughan
7 • The Biggest Game • (1956) • short story by John Brunner
18 • The Trouble I See • (1959) • short story by John Brunner
28 • An Elixir for the Emperor • (1964) • novelette by John Brunner
48 • Wasted on the Young • (1965) • short story by John Brunner
60 • Even Chance • (1965) • short story by John Brunner
72 • Planetfall • (1965) • short story by John Brunner
89 • Judas • (1967) • short story by John Brunner
96 • The Vitanuls • (1967) • short story by John Brunner
115 • Factsheet Six • (1968) • novelette by John Brunner
141 • Fifth Commandment • (1970) • short story by John Brunner
157 • Fairy Tale • (1970) • short story by John Brunner
169 • The Inception of the Epoch of Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid • (1971) • short story by John Brunner
175 • The Oldest Glass • (1972) • poem by John Brunner

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet — Becky Chambers

Published on May 11, 2025Leave a comment

Cover of The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
Becky Chambers
518 pages
published in 2014

Galactic civilisation depends on wormhole travel. But before anybody can travel wormholes, somebody needs to build them first. This is where a ship like the Wayfarer comes in. Equipped with tools to create and drag a wormhole to where it’s needed, it can travel independently, it just takes much longer to get there, months or even years instead of near-instantaneously. A ship like the Wayfarer therefore depends not just on a competent crew, but one that’s close knit and able to stand each other’s company on those long voyages. And into this multi-species crew comes Rosemary Harper, newly hired clerk for the ship on her first job straight out of university on Mars. Even under normal circumstances it would be a challenge for Rosemary to make a place for herself among a group of people who’ve been working and living together for years, but she also hides a secret: she isn’t who she seems to be. Worse, Rosemary joins at just the right time for the Wayfarer to undertake its most ambitious, dangerous job ever: doing a blind punch to a system near the Galactic Core, home to one clan of an alien species newly admitted to the Galactic Commons, a species still at war with itself…

The perfect setup for a classic space opera story, in which our ragtag band of tunnel borers somehow save the Galaxy from some menace or other, but this is not quite the story Becky Chambers wants to tell. what interests her instead are the crew dynamics and how Rosemary fits in with her new co-workers. Her boss, captain Ashby is a human in love with an Aeluon woman, the two repair and tunneling technicians, Jenks and Kizzy are human too as is algae specialist Corbin. Ont he alien side there’s Sissix, a reptilian Aandrisk, the pilot of the ship and Dr. Chef, a Grum, a species that choose to let itself die out. As you guess from his name, he’s the ship’s cook and doctor. That the Wayfarer can navigate the wormhole tunnels at all is due to Ohan, a symbiotic being. Finally there’s the ship AI, Lovely, whom Jenkins is in love with. Among these people Rosemary has to find a place to fit in, as she slowly learns to get to know them during the long mission to that small, angry planet of the title.

Originally self published in 2014, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet caused quite a stir in 2015 and 2016, being nominated that year for most of the UK’s most prestigious science fiction awards: The Clarke Award, The Kitchies and the British Fantasy Awards. Because so focused on exploring relationships, gender and emotions rather than alien civilisations and strange new planets it also drew a lot of ire from sf fandom’s resident troglodytes, the Sad/Rabid Puppies. Which in turn led to a lot of their opponents to start champion it both for its own merits and as the sort of science fiction that annoyed reactionary scum like that. In the long term this may have hurt it somewhat as its reputation got exaggerated.

I first read The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and reread it earlier this year. At the time I liked it well enough but never got around to write up how I felt about it. Rereading it, I still liked it, but I can see why some people are annoyed by it for reasons outside of its politics. At times it feels as if you’re following Rosemary doing side quests in Mas Effect to find out her new companions’ tragic pasts, just with a lot more talking and a lot less action. There’s also remarkably little friction between crew members: everybody gets along with everybody else, with the sole exception of Corbin, who is a bit of a pain in the neck by the book busybody and somewhat racist in his relationships with the non-human members of the crew. A bit like Blakey from On the Buses to use a reference older than me. The rest of the crew barely tolerates him and you wonder why he’s there. You feel the author’s thumb on the scale with him.

I can understand then why somebody like British science fiction critic Paul Kincaid, not a reactionary fellow by any means, loathes it:

But in Chambers you get no sense that meeting across the divide involves any real and continuing sense of discomfort, that you might choose awkwardness in order to engage with the other. Everything in Chambers struck me as too comfortable, too easy, every challenge was overcome with the minimum of bother and no genuine sense of threat.

Even if I disagree with it, I can understand where he’s coming from. In a way it reads like fanfiction. The emphasis on relationship and characters talking to each other, the lack of action, the vague feeling you’re already supposed to know these people. It certainly scratches the same itch fanfic does for me. If what you want from your science fiction is something that challenges you, either with ideas, plot or writing, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet will disappoint you. If you want something that’s humanist and uplifting in the broadest sense of the words, something comforting but not patronising, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is ideal. And I think this is what ironically made it such a polarising book at the time, as these qualities immediately repulsed Puppies as much as it attracted more progressive science fiction readers. Depending on your allegiance you had to either like or dislike it, which has made it difficult to judge on its own merits.

It also inevitably led to a backlash as fandom has moved away from that particular controversy and new readers and critics started to re-examine it, which is where we are now. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet kicked of a wave of similar “cozy” science fiction and fantasy books and not all of them were as good as Chambers’, which means that by now it has gotten in for an undeserved bit of kicking as the exemplar of unchallenging Tumblr generation “woke” fiction. On its own though it is an enjoyable read, novel for the emphasis it puts on emotions and relationships in a subgenre that’s usually more concerned with battles and existential crisises.

Inherit the Stars — James P. Hogan

Published on April 26, 2025Leave a comment

Cover of Inherit the Stars

Inherit the Stars
Thomas Waters
188 pages
published in 1977

While idly browsing a certain manga site, I discovered somebody had made a manga out of James Hogan Giants series. That got me interested enough to start reading it, having read the original novels and liking them. As I was reading though it didn’t feel quite right. While it had been a long time since I’ve read them (as I never reviewed any of them on here, it must’ve been twenty-five years ago at least), but it seemed more action orientated and conspiracy minded than I remembered. Which of course led me to reread the original novel that started off the series: Inherit the Stars.

For once the cover on a seventies science fiction novel actually more or less accurately depicts a key scene from the story: the discovery of a dead astronaut clad in a red space suit on the Moon, though in the story he’s found in a cave rather than on the surface. It’s sometime in the twenty-first century and unlike with most Disco Era space exploration novels, we do not have an eternal Cold War going on. The world is a bit utopian even, compared to the actual 21st century so far. The world is rich and at peace, with military budgets slashed as nation states had matured. Profiting from that is the UN Solar System Exploration Program, which explains why there were people on the Moon in the first place able to find that dead astronaut. An astronaut that turns out to be 50,000 years old…

Unravelling the mystery of how there could be an astronaut ont he Moon at a time when the biggest leap in technology was the invention of fire is what drives the story. Key to this unravelling will be Dr Victor Hunt, a British polymath who has been hired by the people who found the astronaut to do just that. He doesn’t do this alone though; entire teams of scientists from multiple disciplines are working on this. Being the nominal protagonist however he will though be the one to find the missing piece of the puzzle. His antagonist is biologist Christian Danchekker. Where Hunt is able to think outside the box and make intuitive leaps, Danchekker is very methodological, plodding, only willing to accept things if they can be proven beyond doubt. You could see Inherit the Stars as an exercise in Hegelian logic: thesis followed by antithesis as Hunt and Danchekker spar, followed by synthesis as their duelling leads them closer to the truth.

To start with, their are two conflicting problems in explaining where “Charlie”, the astronaut corpse, came from. From examining the corpse, Charlie is clearly a modern human, so he has to have come from Earth, because as Danchekker puts, believing convergent evolution could’ve lead to the exact same people arising elsewhere is absurd. Yet clearly he cannot come from Earth as no evidence of a civilisation advanced enough to send people to the Moon existed before the twentieth century.

A new piece of evidence then comes in from further explorations out in the Asteroid Belt, establishing that it’s the remnants of a destroyed planet, one that was destroyed roughly 50,000 years ago… At the same time, further excavations on the Moon find more evidence of the civilisation Charlie was part of, confirming that this civilisation existed on Minerva, as the destroyed planet is christened. This evidence also suggest Minerva was in a state of war at the time of its destruction, between two superpowers armed to the teeth and not afraid to use nukes. Even the Moon was littered with armed camps, Charlie binging a survivor of one.

This of course explains where he came from, but not how he could be the same as a modern human. Convergent evolution is still ruled out even if it would’ve taken place on Minerva. Another mystery is how Charlie could get from Minerva all the way to Earth’s Moon, when his diary, once decoded, reveals it took him only three days. One suggestion is that the Minervians colonised Earth, but the Minervians didn’t seem to have spaceships capable of interplanetary travel and certainly not on such short time scales. Nor is there any evidence found on Earth itself that could be proof of said colonisation, leaving the debate at the same stalemate it was before.

the final clue comes from Ganymede, where an alien space ship is found that’s not 50,000 years old, but twenty-five million years, which was crewed by people that were clearly alien, but which did come from the same planet as Charlie did. At first this only confuses matters further, but when it turns out the ship had a cargo of Earth animals, it suggests that Charlie and the other Minervians were originally from Earth before having been transplanted to their new planet. Remains the question of how Charlie could’ve gotten to the Earth’s Moon from a planet that no longer had the technology to reach it but ah, what if it hadn’t been the Earth‘s moon when he did?

So that’s Inherit the Stars: a scientific puzzle story that slowly and methodologically establishes a ludicrous answer to its stated mystery, but it works. The science behind the fiction even at the time was complete bunkum. There never was a missing fourth planet, it was already known the Moon must’ve been around for billions of years, resulting from the collision of the Earth with another proto planet during the Solar System’s early history and Homo Sapiens definitely evolved on Earth, not elsewhere. But as a story it works. The science being wrong has never stopped science fiction after all.

It’s a pity that this science wasn’t just a neat tool for Hogan; he actually believed in Immanuel Velikovsky‘s theories about how the now existing Solar System was formed in historic times. Worse, he later became a Holocaust denier. None of this is fortunately present in Inherit the Stars and if you like a neat scientific puzzle story with little action but lots of conversations that bother on monologue, it’s still a good read.

Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion — Dan Simmons

Published on August 25, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Hyperion

Hyperion/The Fall of Hyperion
Dan Simmons
482, 517 pages
published in 1989 & 1990

No book, whether fiction or non-fiction is truly neutral or can truly stand on its own. Like it or not we always judge a book in the context of when you read it, what you know about it and its author, what others have told you about either. It’s rare that you get into a book truly knowing nothing about it or its writer; even then what you have read before will partially determine how you will respond to it. Especially in SFF we tend to pretend that context shouldn’t matter and we should evaluate a novel on its merits without taking in account its writer’s politics and opinions, but it doesn’t work that way in reality. Knowing that Roald Dahl was an antisemitic arsehole made me never want to read any of his books again even though I loved James and the Giant Peach as a child even if his antisemitism didn’t impact his novels. Not to say good art cannot be created by bad people, nor even that good art cannot be made in service to evil causes (Ezra Pound’s poetry springs to mind). Just that your enjoyment of such art can be indelibly tainted by this knowledge even when the creator’s awfulness has no impact on their art. Often though a creator’s bad opinions or politics do bleed through into their art and knowing about them can retroactively spoil their work.

All of which is to say that I reread Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion after realising how much of a raging islamophobe Dan Simmons really is and it completely ruined any enjoyment I had of these two novels. They were mind blowing when I first read them from my local library in the early nineties, the first modern space opera I had read. Dependent on said library as I was growing up, most of its science fiction was either Golden Age stuff by the usual subjects like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, or seventies New Wave and literary minded novels. In that context Hyperion was a revelation. Not just space opera, but aspiring to be literature at the same time, being deliberately structured like the The Canterbury Tales and with the resurrected Romantic poet John Keats as one of the main characters. For a teenager with little interest in proper literature this was heady stuff.

But that was before Dan Simmons wrote this:

“I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “Your future. Everyone’s.” He was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he stood, refilled his Scotch glass, and sat again. He said, “It was important to me to come back to this time early on in the struggle. Even if only to remind myself of how unspeakably blind you all were.”

“You mean the War on Terrorism,” I said.

“I mean the Long War with Islam,” he said. “The Century War. And it’s not over yet where I come from. Not close to being over.”

“You can’t have a war with Islam,” I said. “You can’t go to war against a religion. Radical Islam, maybe. Jihadism. Some extremists. But not a . . . the . . . religion itself. The vast majority of Muslims in the world are peaceloving people who wish us no harm. I mean . . . I mean . . . the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘Peace.’”

“So you kept telling yourselves,” said the Time Traveler. His voice was very low but there was a strange and almost frightening edge to it. “But the ‘peace’ in ‘Islam’ means ‘Submission.’ You’ll find that out soon enough”

Almost twentyfive years on it’s hard to understand how deeply 9/11 and the following War On Terror fried the brains of a lot of Americans, Simmons being one of them. The 9/11 attacks angered and upset America like nothing else had done since Pearl Harbour and it’s not hyperbole to say the nation lost its mind for a few years. In retrospect, Simmons already had an xenophobic streak in him, most noticable in his horror novels like Children of the Night (set in Romania) and Song of Kali (India), but 9/11 put it in overdrive. And once it was out in the open it became noticable in his Hyperion novels too.

I had originally wanting to reread Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion because reading Excession had put me the mood for a similar but different book, not necessarily another Banks one. Hyperion came closest to what I was looking for. Part of the the space opera revival of the late eighties I talked about in my review of Eternal Light to which you could see Excession as a capstone, it won the Hugo Award for best novel the year after it came out. Despite now knowing about Simmons politics I wasn’t sure it would impact my reading, but sadly it did. There were certain plot elements that looked a lot more sinister now in context: the background detail that Israel had been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust and the description of a Shite uprising on one of the colony worlds and how Fedmahn Kassad, a Palestinina soldier had put it down.

But even before I got to them Hyperon disappointed me with its opening chapter, in which the Consul, the nominal protagonist, sits in his spaceship on a primitive planet playing Rachmaninov on his Steinway piano while outside a thunderstorm rages and dinosaurs bellow. It’s such an overwrought, b-movie villain cliche it made me laugh rereading it. Completely destroyed any respect I had for Hyperion as a novel. Some of which had already been lost by the late nineties, much dumber sequels to the series, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, neither of which had been necessary nor good. Reading that silly prologue set the tone for me. Any goodwill I had for the series was definitely lost by it.

As said, the plot of Hyperion is structured like that of The Canterbury Tales. Seven pilgrims on their way to the so-called Time Tombs on the planet Hyperion, outside of civilised space, where the monstrous Shrike stands guard. During their journey each of the pilgrims in turn tells how they are connected to the Tombs and the Shrike. Meanwhile Hyperion is under threat of invasion by the Ousters, barbarian hordes from interstellar space who exists outside civilisation as represented by the Hegemony, who control the Farcaster teleportation network binding true civilisation together. While Hyperion tells the stories of each of the individual pilgrims as they journey to the Tombs, The Fall of Hyperion details what happens once they arrive. This is much more of a conventional space opera as all the various back stories and plot lines come together.

Even though I was very hostile going in, I could still see what had first appealed to me in these two novels. He may have nasty politics and a tendency for the purple prose, but once he got going, he still sucked me into the story. The world he created in Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion has fascinated and inspired me ever since I first read them; at some level these are still what I judge any new space opera stories I read on.

Fun fact: I started writing this review in 2006, after I had finished rereading both Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion. For various reasons I never completed them, even though I tried again in 2014. It’s only thanks to Sean Eric Fagan’s Bluesky post about Simmons and the short discussion of Hyperion there that I got a handle on how to finally complete this post.

Hello America — J. G. Ballard

Published on March 21, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Hello America

Hello America
J. G. Ballard
224 pages
published in 1981

I must’ve last read this sometime in the late eighties, back when I was dependent on my local library for my science fiction and fantasy. Said library had a rule that adult fiction could only be borrowed if you were at least fourteen years old; it also had a rule that you could only borrow four fiction books at a time. I however had found a hack for both rules: foreign language novels didn’t count for either. Which meant that once I could read English, I started reading every English language sci-fi book the library had, including this one. Not sure I finished it at the time, but I was reminded of it through Phil’s review, where he characterises it as “a minor Ballard” and going “completely off the boil” halfway through. That picked my interest enough to want to reread it and you know, he wasn’t wrong. In fact, I would go further and argue it never really got going as a story. There’s little of Ballard’s normal inventiveness or imagery here and it feels tired from the start. It doesn’t help that it was dated even at the time of publication by having Jerry Brown as the last president of the United States…

The core idea of the book, that America was abandoned rather than destroyed, is interesting. The oil crisis of the seventies here continued unabated into the 1980s and 1990s, leading to a de-industrialisation of the USA, with people migrating back to Europe and Asia not long after. By the turn of the millennium America is all but abandoned, a few decades later even the pretense of an American government in exile is also given up. The energy crisis is handled better in the old world, where giantic environmental engineering projects damn the Bering Strait to provide farm land in the Arctic circle, but condemning the American east coast to becoming a desert while the west becomes a jungle. All this is explained in chapter seven of the novel rather than more organically, in one big infodump. It’s a very seventies sort of apocalypse but it also reminds me of some of the paranoid rightwing fantasies of the eighties were America is either betrayed or given up on, without ever being explicitly conquered or destroyed, the fear that the world could continue on even without it. Ballard’s version of course only works if you don’t look at it too hard, which I feel goes for most of Hello America.

The story itself starts roughly a century after America was abandoned, when an expedition from Europe onboard the steamship Apollo (of course) sets foot on American soil for the first time in decades. They’re there to determine the cuase of the radiation leaking out from the continent. Decades old nuclear reactors may be leaking, as may some nuclear weapon storages, but it also looks suspiciously like an actual nuclear detonation. The handpicked crew of teh Apollo needs to answer this question, but Wayne, our protagonist isn’t one of them, as he stowed away, keen to visit the country his ancestors came from and his father disappeared in. Wayne is not, to be honest, a very active protagonist, mostly moved by what’s happening around him, rather than initiating his own actions. Which is not a problem as long as the expedition is on the move, but does mean, as Phil noted, that the second half of the book is much weakened when they reach Las Vegas and just stay there as things happen all around him.

The image of the United States Ballard presents in Hello America is very much rooted in 1950s & 60s pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, the Kennedies, “Indian” tribes modeled after Chicago gangsters or stereotypical Divorcees, with the Executives tribe members all having brand names like Heinz or Xerox, etc. The villain of the piece is even called president Manson. Even for 1981 this seems a bit much. The first half of the book, with the expediotion trecking through an endless desert following the ancient highways, from motel oasis to motel oasis has almost an overdose of what you could call stereotypical Ballardian imagery: empty swimming pools, cracked concrete et all. The second half in Vegas, doubles down on the kitsch, with a musical performance by a small army of robot replicas of the various US presidents.

In the end, this was a failure. Entertaining enough on a chapter by chapter basis, it failed to form a coherent whole and its momentum completely disappeared in its second half, which indeed took me twice as long to read as the first. It just became a chore to finish, something you shouldn’t be able to say of any Ballard novel.