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Het Laatste Verhaal — Guido Eekhaut

Published on December 30, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Het Laatste Verhaal

Het Laatste Verhaal
Guido Eekhaut
332 pages
published in 2011

The problem with doing review projects, like getting myself back to speed with Dutch language science fiction and fantasy, is that it can lead you to read and finish books you’d normally put aside long before. Such is the case with Het Laatste Verhaal (The Last Story) which I thought was going to be some sort of cyberpunk story but turned out quite different. It also didn’t help that this turned out to be part of a loose series, something I only noticed once I started reading the novel.

Basically Het Laatste Verhaal is set in a world which had what’s assumed to be an alien visitation in the 1800s and those Bezoekers (Visitors) have been shaping human history ever since. Tall, pale and white haired the Visitors resemble nothing so much as vampires, but nobody calls them that to their face. In the near future Flemish Republic of 2019, they hold most of the power behind the screens, with democracy just a sham to placate those few still bothered by politics among the citizens, while the once strong unions also lead a kabuki existence, there because the all powerful companies sometimes need a trustworthy advisary. For those unable or unwilling to keep citizen status, there are the streets. Matthias is one of those, fled the safety and comfort of his father’s house to live a precarious existence outside the system.

Meanwhile, sometime in the future the entire world is ruled by what seems to be a new Japanese Empire, one that for all the splendour and decadence at court is destroying itself from the inside. Lady Kiyo, Imperial Storyteller was once part of a failed rebellion and now has infiltrated the court in an assassination attempt. At least that’s what her co-conspirators think, but she just wants to tell the emperor the real truth about his empire.

There’s another secret Kiyo’s hiding. During one of the last battles of the failed revolt against the empire, a Visitor was killed and Kiyo stole the sword he was carrying. This is a sword that can cut anything, doesn’t just slide through steel if it wasn’t there, but is so sharp it can cut holes between worlds.

Which is how Kiyo finds herself in Matthias’ Flanders, just in time to save him and his friend from a beatdown by a skinhead gang. It turns out quickly that her version of history and his don’t match up, but they don’t have much time to wonder about it, as the skinhead gang is still after them and worse, so are the Visitors, wanting their sword back…

Meanwhile there are a couple of other storythreads, one about one of the up and coming managers of one of the vistor owned companies plotting his way to the top, the other about probably the last union leader in Flanders still driven by ideology and concern for the workers, rather than his own career. These sort of weave in and out of the main plot, without contributing much to the story.

In general this is a very male book, with only two significant female characters, one of whom dies quickly to show the seriousness of the skinhead threat. Lady Kiyo is interesting, a peasant girl turned revolution leader turned storyteller, but Matthias is a bit dull, as is the neoliberal Republic of Flanders, which makes little sense especially since it’s set in 2019, too soon for all those changes, though there are hints that this too is an alternate history.

Guido Eekhaut certainly isn’t a bad writer, on a nuts and bolts level, but this novel was a disappointment nonetheless: confusing, meandering and without a real ending. It felt like the middle volume of an unfinished trilogy. A pity.

Future Gollancz SF Masterworks

Published on December 22, 20143 Comments

Now here’s an interesting idea Joachim Boaz came up with: take the Gollancz SF masterworks series and see what books you’d add to it if you had the chance. It’s such a neat idea that I want to play as well.

The Gollancz Masterworks series has always been a more appealing idea in theory than in practise, limited as it is by such mundane considerations like who owns the rights to a specific novel or how well it may or may sell, but that doesn’t need to stop me. What I’ll do is see which writers unjustifiably have been left out of the list so far, which of their books should be included and why, keeping strictly to books published before 2000.

Cover of Golden Witchbreed

The first candidate I’d nominate is Mary Gentle. It’s incomprehensible to me that she’s been left out so far, unless it’s because she’s mostly thought of as a fantasy rather than a science fiction writer. Even so, Golden Witchbreed (1983) should be a no brainer for inclusion. It fits perfectly in that tradition of planetary romance established by writers like Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, C. L. Moore and Ann McCaffrey, yet at the same time is a deconstruction of it and the colonial mindset that flows through much of the genre. It’s also perhaps the most straightforward, most accessible of Gentle’s novels, who usually has the reader working hard. If possible, the sequel, Ancient Light, which is more aggressive in its deconstruction, should also be included, perhaps with a foreword by somebody like Adam Roberts, in who I see a lot of Gentle influences.

Cover of Trouble and Her Friends

Cyberpunk has not been represented well in the Masterworks series, with not even Neuromancer included, just Lucias Shepard’s Life During Wartime. It’s a curious ommission to have such an important subgenre only represented by one book. You’d expect Neuromancer to be represented as for better or worse that’s the novel that shaped the genre the most, or perhaps Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix for the road cyberpunk didn’t take, but I’d like to break a lance for another book. And that’s Melissa Scott’s Trouble and her Friends (1994). Published a bit late to be a cyberpunk pioneer, at a time when the internet was already going mainstream, it featured the usual sort of impractical but cool computer technology, but where it shines is in its treatment of politics. It’s one of the few cyberpunk novels that realised that even cyberspace politics matter, one of the few to predict the taming of the internet by commercial interests and the state as actually happened in real life. What’s more, it’s the only cyberpunk novel I know that takes seriously intra-cyberpunk politics, to know that there would be an incrowd and outsiders and to realise that quite likely, those outsiders outside of cyberspace — people of colour, LGBT people, etc — would be outsiders inside as well. In short, Scott predicted things like GamersGate.

Cover of The Steerswoman

The Masterworks series has a good tradition of putting the spotlight on more obscure novels as well and one good candidate for this would be a novel I only this year discovered, Rosemary Kirstein’s The Steerswoman. This is a novel that’s at the heart of the science fiction genre yet almost unknown, one of the few stories that actually take seriously the idea of doing science, of finding out the shape of your world and discovering the scientific method in the process. It starts out looking as a fantasy novel, then slowly morphs into a novel of scientific discovery, one that never cheats and doesn’t depend on its audience knowing more than the protagonist. It’s also bloody well written, exciting and has three equally good sequels.

Cover of The Time Traders

Who else is underrepresented in the Masterworks series compared to the influence she has had, is Andre Norton, somebody who e.g. Ann Leckie has named as an influence. Incredibly prolific, she’s written a lot of novels, so the problem here is chosing which ones to use. I’d go for an omnibus edition of her Time Traders series, four short novels of early sixties Cold War time travel derring do. Granted, these aren’t the best sf novels ever written, but they are influential books that inspired whole generations of readers. They’re typical of a whole current of science fiction that’s underrepresented today, that needs to be rehabilitated.

Cover of Foreigner

Another massively important science fiction writer not yet represented in the Gollancz SF Masterworks series is C. J. Cherryh, somebody who has been writing since the seventies, won the Hugo Award three times and has a friggin asteroid named after her. She needs including and there are several candidates for which novel to include and I like to make the case for Foreigner because it’s such a good showcase of what Cherryh does best. And what she does best is getting her usually young heroes in over their heads, out of their depth, acting on too little information, too little sleep, stressed out and with the fate of worlds riding on their actions. It’s a formula you’ll find in many if not most of her stories and it’s nowhere else shown so clearly as in Foreigner.

So those are my five choices for new entries in the SF Masterworks series. For better suggestions, go visit:

Roadside Picnic — Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

Published on December 22, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Roadside Picnic

Roadside Picnic
Arkady & Boris Strugatsky
357 pages
published in 1971

An alien visit leaves the small town of Harmont littered with dangerous, enigmatic artifacts and the laws of physics strangely altered. Evacuated and isolated, the Zone around Harmont is studied by the Institute for Instellar Cultures and guarded by the army and police, but that doesn’t stop adventures or desperate men and women from sneaking into the Zone, to try and smuggle out some of the treasures littering the Zone. They call those people Stalkers and Redrick Shuhart is one of them, somebody who can make a quick three-four hundred bucks just bringing out one of the empties –two copper discs 18 inches apart held together by something — that can be found anywhere in the Zone.

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar it’s because Roadside Picnic functioned as the inspiration for the brilliant Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, which in turn functioned as inspiration for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of videogames, which transfered the Zone to Chernobil (and in art inspiring real life, those people making a living from visiting the Chernobil exclusion zone, also call themselves stalkers). Reading this novel with that knowledge in the back of my head, it did read like a videogame at times, especially in the sections set in the Zone.

Roadside Picnic consists of four sections, after a short introduction in which the concept of the Zones is established, all dealing with Red’s continuing evolution as a Stalker. In the first section he’s still working for the International Institute, as well as moonlighting as a freelancer. When he goes on a sanctioned expedition as a favour for a friend, a chance encounter leads to the death of this friend after they’d already left the Zone, which Red blames himself for. Meanwhile he’s gotten his girlfriend Guta pregnant and although they fear the possible mutations that could result from Red’s visits to the Zone, they decide to keep the baby.

The next section sees Red as a full time Stalker, to provide for his family. One expedition results in a disaster as his companion, Buzzard Burbridge, steps in a trap of witch jelly, which dissolves his legs, needing amputation. Red gets Buzzard to a surgeon, but later on is arrested, escapes and tells the client for whom he undertook the expedition where to find a sample of the same witch jelly that almost killed his friend. He feels he has no choice but to do so, no matter the consequences, to be able to provide for his family, his wife and daughter.

His daughter turns out to have picked up a mutation from the Zone, being hairy all over and progressively living up more to her nickname, Monkey. All this is shown in the third section, which also sees Red’s dead father coming back to life and living with them, not an uncommon occurrence in Harmont. Meanwhile Red’s friend Richard Noonan is trying to discover who exactly is still smuggling out artifacts from the Zone, when all known Stalkers have been made harmless.

The climax comes in the fourth section, as Red goes for one last expedition into the Zone, together with the son of Buzzard, to find a legendary artifact, a Golden Globe supposedly able to grant wishes. Red knows the son is only there to spring the trap guarding the globe and once he’s dead there’s nothing standing between Red and his dearest wish, if he knew what that was. All through the story he’s been driven to increasingly worse behaviour to keep his wife and daughter safe, but now all he can think of as a wish is what his companion was shouting when killed by the meatgrinder trap: “HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND LET NO ONE GO AWAY UNSATISFIED”.

The nature of the alien visit and what they left behind in the Zones is never quite explained, except through the hypotheses of Dr. Valentine Pilman, who functions as the voice of authority in the novel. He first shows up in the introduction to discuss the Zones and where they came from:

“Imagine that you spin a huge globe and you start firing bullets into it. The bullet holes would lie on the surface in a smooth curve. The whole point (is that) all six Visitation Zones are situated on the surface of our planet as though someone had taken six shots at Earth from a pistol located somewhere along the Earth-Deneb line.”

Which is something he has gotten the credit for but which discovery wasn’t made by him, but by an unnamed schoolboy. Pilman shows up again in the third section, to explain why this alien visit wasn’t First Contact, but was just a picnic:

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around… Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind… And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.

All the gadgets, the miracle technology that came out of the Zones, appropriated through so much suffering, no more than garbage. But life changing garbage, that made a mockery of the attempts to quarantine and study the Zones as soon as the first useful gadget was smuggled out. The Strugatsky brothers take some pleasure in satirising the corruption and naked capitalism with which the Zones are soon riddled with, while also showing the effect it has on somebody like Red, who has no choice but to sell out to save his family. What comes out of the Zones is used for nothing much more uplifting than new consumer goods or better weapons of mass destruction, doesn’t change the realities of life under capitalism.

You could call Roadside Picnic something of an anti-science fiction novel therefore, going against the usual optimism in the genre with the idea that alien contact doesn’t have to be meaningful, could happen in terms we barely understand just as a roadside picnic is complete incomprehensible to the animals of the forest, an accident with no consequences to the aliens, but squabbled over out of greed and lust for power. It’s not a depressing novel though and the ambiguous ending leaves some hope that something better might come out of it.

Meeting the Sculptor — Floris M. Kleijne

Published on December 14, 20141 Comment

Cover of Meeting the Sculptor

Meeting the Sculptor
Floris M. Kleijne
61 pages
published in 2004

Here is why it pays to follow SFF authors on Twitter; because otherwise I’d never had known about Meeting the Sculptor being free on Amazon, which is of course the perfect price to try out a new author with. Not that Floris M. Kleijne is exactly a new author: according to his autobiography he sold his first story, to legendary dutch anthology series Ganymedes backl in 1986, only to see the series fold before it could be published. After that false start it took a while for Kleijne to get back in the habit of writing, deciding in 2001 to start aiming at the English language market instead, in which he has been relatively successfull, though he’s still not a very prolific writer.

Meeting the Sculptor is his biggest success so far, as he won the 2004 edition of the Writers of the Future competition with it, the annual writing competition organised by the scientologists in honour of the pulp writer origins of L. Ron Hubbard. I can see why it won. You’d think that more than a century after H. G. Wells’ The Time Traveller it wouldn’t be possible to come up with new ideas for a time travel story but Kleijne has managed to do so.

The story starts with Mark. Mark isn’t a nice guy, a thirthysomething alcoholic who has wasted most his life chasing women. One morning, after a particularly bad evening with one of his few remaining friends had ended in disaster and he drowned his sorrows in his favourite bar, he wakes up in the flat of the woman went home with to find a strange man standing in her kitchen who wants to know if Mark knows the exact moment his life went to shit. When Mark gets angry and threatens to call the cops, he stops him with one simple sentence: “April 24th, twelve years back, at eight minutes after three, pm.”

That is a date that Mark knows, the day that he started to lose perhaps the one woman in his life he truly loved and it convinces him to hear the stranger — who introduces himself as “I’m Jolo. I sculpt.” — out. Who promptly shows Mark he’s a time traveller by taking him to a historic scene Mark knows very well, one that anybody with interest in the American Civil War would recognise, so familiar in fact that it’s not even spelled out for the reader if “four score” isn’t enough of a clue. But what has time travel to do with Mark’s life?

As Jolo explains, there are times in anybody’s life where with the right nudge, they can go one way or another. In Mark’s case, what happened twelve years ago could, with a slight interference by Jolo, be put right and Mark could’ve remained with the love of his life forever. It would mean altering only a small detail, but there would be a cost, a price to pay…

Who will pay that cost is obvious from the moment Jolo outlines his solution and the rest of the story elegantly sets up this denouncement, at which time you also realise that the flashbacks to that fatal date that interspaced the story weren’t Mark’s own, but those of his counterpart in the new timeline…

What impressed me the most about Meeting the Sculptor was just how tight and well constructed the central timeloop in the story is, how well done that moment of revelation where you realise that what you thought were flashbacks, was instead the second, changed part of the loop. What also struck me –and I’m not sure this was a thing already in 2004– is the irony of the sculptor’s name: Jolo, or YOLO?

Meeting the Sculptor can be bought via Floris M. Kleijne’s own website.

The Dark Colony — Richard Penn

Published on December 2, 20141 Comment

Cover of The Dark Colony

The Dark Colony
Richard Penn
327 pages
published in 2014

James Nicoll is a longtime science fan active on Usenet and Livejournal, who has been working as an internal reviewer for various publishers. As that work started to dry up earlier this year, he started doing sponsored reviews, where people (but not authors) can buy reviews of books they’re interested in, suspect James would like, or at least would have an enjoyable reaction to. I’ve known James for a long time and he’s one of the people I absolutely trust their taste in books of, so I pay attention when he says something he’s worth reading. Which is exactly what he did with Richard Penn’s The Dark Colony and since it was cheap on *m*z*n, I bought it.

Now there was a risk with this. At times James’ fondness for exactly the kind of setting The Dark Colony provides — near future, the real Solar System, no magical rocket propulsion to let people pootle around it in hours or even days, no cheating — can blind him to some of the other qualities (or lack thereof) of a book. Fortunately however, in this case, the book’s appeal exists beyond its setting. Basically, this is a police procedural: it starts with the discovery of a body floating around in the the giant free fall hangar of Terpsichore Station. What’s remarkable is that it’s the body of a stranger to the Terpsichore colony, which only has a few hundred people living in the station and the asteroid itself. It’s up to constable Lisa Johansen to find out where the stranger comes from and in the process she finds herself unravelling a huge conspiracy in the heart of her community and beyond. Yes, this is not just a police procedural, it’s a gloomy Scandinavian one…

Well, not quite. While there is a conspiracy and it does cover awful crimes, the authorities are eager to stamp it out, not cover it up, they’re just hindered by the huge distances in the Asteroid Belt. Terpsichore is weeks or even months away from other colonies and while nominally part of a larger government, basically can only count on advice and moral support through video link. But despite these limitations, the support from the Belt Federations police on Phobos is invaluable if only available at the speed of light. They cannot provide immediate support, but they do have greater analytical resources available to look at and evaluate the evidence Lisa finds as she combs out the Hold after the corpse had been discovered.

And the most surprising piece of evidence is another stranger, a young girl who turns out to be Daisy, the sister of Tommy, the murder victim, who had died smuggling her to freedom. Her story reveals a dark colony, a hidden colony in reach of Terpsichore whose existence was completely unsuspected until the two refugees turned up. Of course, as we all know, hiding in space is difficult and stealth impossible but there are ways of making you less visible, especially if nobody is looking for you and you do know who you need to hide from. However, this hidden colony, especially since it got supplied through Terpsichore, still needs accomplishes. And it’s this where Phobos comes into its own, as they quite quickly unravel the conspiracy within Terpsichore Station to hide these contacts.

In the process it’s established that the hidden colony is more than just an unregistered colony, but one in which a group of criminals hold captive a group of women in sexual slavery; Daisy herself was getting old enough that she was bound to come to the attention of her masters sooner than later, which is why her brother smuggled her out. Their mother is still held captive.

Once the conspiracy inside Terpsichore itself is rolled up, Lisa, freshly promoted to sergeant, is charged to lead a rescue expedition to the hidden colony, with only a rough idea on which one of the three neighbouring asteroids of the “Local Group” they’re settled. The second half of the story is about making the preparations for this expedition and how Lisa and her crew manage to make the trip and rescue everybody, in the process setting up things for the sequel.

The Dark Colony is Richard Penn’s first, self published novel. As his autobiography makes clear, he’s a retired sofware engineer turned writer, not a “professional” writer. It’s somewhat noticable in his prose, which is a bit awkward, especially at first, not quite naturalistic dialogue, a slight tendency to as you know Bobism, which largely disappears by the end of the novel. Not bad or atrocious writing, but workmanlike.

What I like, apart from the interesting, realistic setting and the plot itself, is the politics of the story. James noted that the policing reminded him of 19th century Canada: not the free for all of the American west, but embedded in at least a nominal national police system. That in itself is somewhat novel compared to the usual more libertarian sympathies of authors likely to use such a setting, but what also struck me were the very recognisable sexual politics.

To put it bluntly, quite a lot of science fiction has fairly hideous sexual politics, with manly men and fridged women and no sense that the future is much different from a sixties frat house. Not so here. It’s not just Lisa and the other women who are revolted by the rape camps run by the dark colony, the men too are upset. In one scene, as they infiltrate the colony with remote controlled drones to find evidence of the crimes committed and Lisa basically hands out trigger warnings to her crew. It’s a breath of fresh air to see the matter of factness with which modern, sane notions of consent and the existence of queer people are promulgated into the future. The same also goes for the way in which Penn handles the rapes and other sexual harassment, all off screen without tittilation.

Really, the only thing that actually bothered me about this book was the awkward use of Dutch cursing in one scene, when Lisa made contact with the Dutch mother of Tommy and Daisy. Nobody but Dutch rappers use “neuken” as a curse; we say fuck or kut, shit instead of strong and it’s verdomde, not verdoemde klootzakken, etc. etc. But nothing is as hard as to do write realistic cursing in a foreign language so I’ll forgive this.

The Dark Colony and its sequels are available from the author’s website, less than four bucks on Amazon, so try it, you might like it.