science fiction

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.

You don’t terraform a thriving ecology.

Published on November 19, 2014Leave a comment

Vice’s Motherboard just launched its own short sf stories subsite and went a bit overboard in its enthusiasm:

There are tons of great publishers of science fiction online—but still, it’s strange that there isn’t more fiction commingling with the newsy posts and personality quizzes and status updates tumbling down our feeds. We encourage the dissemination of information and storytelling in every conceivable way, be it listicles, data visualizations, video collages, tweetstorms, whatever. But when was the last time you saw a link to a short story shared on Facebook? The internet, it seems, doesn’t know what to do with the stuff.

A strange claim to make in a world with Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Apex, Lightspeed, Uncanny etc. undsoweiter. We’re actually living in a new golden age of short science fiction, after decades of decline. Once again, we get new writers breaking through on the strength of their short fiction, rather than as novelists, something that had been rare in the past two decades. So why pretend that you’re the first ones doing it?

Especially as this project seems aimed at an audience not familiar with existing sf venues, lying about them is well dodgy. Be enthusiastic, big up your project by any means, but don’t diss the competition.

Ethan of Athos — Lois McMaster Bujold

Published on November 10, 20141 Comment

Cover of Ethan of Athos

Ethan of Athos
Lois McMaster Bujold
237 pages
published in 1986

Ethan of Athos is the third published book in Bujold’s Vorkosigan series and the third published in 1986. Whereas Shards of Honor told the story of how Miles Vorkosigan’s parents met and The Warrior’s Apprentice showed his first adventure, this is a spinoff not featuring any of the main characters in the series. In fact, at first it barely seems to take place in the same universe.

It all starts on the all male planet of Athos (named after the all-male Greek monastry on mount Athos, natch) where Ethan’s greatest worry is how to take his relationship a stage further and get his boyfriend to be more responsible. His dayjob is as a obstetrician. On a planet full of men natural child birth is of course impossible so uterine replicators using female gene cultures taken along by the original colonists are used instead. Recently these cultures have started to deteriorate however, showing their age and new cultures have been ordered from Jackson’s Whole. Unfortunately, once they show up, these turn out to be unusable thrash. Despite their desire to remain cut off from the rest of the Galaxy, the people of Athos have no choice but to send somebody out into the darkness, somebody pure who can handle the temptations of women, somebody like, well, Ethan.

Ethan is very much an innocent abroad, who course immediately stumbles into a conspiracy surrounding the lost cultures, as he’s kidnapped by Cetegandian agents, the dominant military power, who think he’s some sort of intelligence agent. They’re looking for a Terrance Cee, who turns out to be one of their escaped genetic experiments, a limited telepath who had used the shipment of tissue cultures to Athos to smuggle out the genes of his murdered female counterpart.

He’s in over his head, but luckily he stumbled into Elli Quinn, of the Dendarii Free Mercenary Fleet, taking a recuperative holiday after the events of The Warrior’s Apprentice. She’s actually in the employ of the Jackson’s Whole House responsible for the shipment of gene tissues to Athos, to keep an eye on the Cetegandians and find out what their interest in it is. Ethan, Terrance and Elli have to reluctantly team up to defeat their enemies, despite Ethan’s severe misgivings about women as the source of all evil.

As per usual with Bujold the plot and story is compelling enough that it’s hard to miss the serious world building underneath. Ethan’s consciousness raising with regards to the true nature of women is obvious enough, but the society of Athos itself deserves more attention. The planet without men is a hoary old sf cliche, but planets without women are rare if non-existent. Athos was founded as a refuge for what its founders thought were a persecuted minority, ridiculous as that sounds. It still has that siege mentality in its dealings with the wider galaxy and frex the access to galactic literature, but the society itself is refreshingly normal. Athos is a planet full of homosexual men, where heterosexuality is not just rare, but impossible. This is a single gender planet that’s not a monstrosity or missing something.

It also shows how early in her writing Bujold has been writing about what you might call traditional female concerns, dressed up in mil-sf adventure romps. The whole story is arguably driven by Ethan (and by extension, Athos) need to start a family. He starts in a traditionally female, nurturing role and doesn’t transform into an action hero but returns happily to his chosen career. Bujold presents all this matter of factly; she has that knack of slipping these sort of outrageous ideas if you think about them for a moment quietly past the reader.

It’s fun to see how different and yet recognisable by the same writer each of the three novels Bujold got published in 1986 were and how ambitious in retrospect she already was. Ethan of Athos, though usually seen as a minor novel in the Vorkosigan series, really is as ambitious and interesting as any of them.