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Terminal World — Alastair Reynolds

Published on February 17, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Terminal World

Terminal World
Alastair Reynolds
487 pages
published in 2010

I find Alastair Reynolds hard to review. I like his work well enough to keep reading his novels, but I find it hard to say anything useful about them. As a writer, he has his feet planted firmly in the hard science fiction camp, where “hard” means no FTL ships or time travel and only the right sort of technobabble and jargon. He is however, unlike far too many American hard sf writers, not blind to literary virtues and not half bad at creating plausible, lived in futures either. All in all, most of his novels are solid, core science fiction, where if you like that sort of thing you’ll like them, but perhaps with not much to talk about other than the plot or the setting. They’re evolutionary, rather than revolutionary novels.

Terminal World is a case in point. This is a standalone adventure story set in the far future, where the world as we know it has changed considerably. It’s slowly dying, with what remains of humanity clustered on and around a gigantic artificial spire called Spearpoint, which from top to bottom is divided into zones of ever decreasing technology: Circuit City, Neon Heights, Steamtown, etc. Transfering from one zone to another is not easy: people who do it suffer from zone sickness, while higher technology stops working in a lower tech zone. Away from Spearpoint the world is largely wilderness, with the various zones becoming much larger as they spread out from the spire. What we have here in fact, is the planetary equivalent of Vernor Vinge’s Zones of Thoughts he divided the galaxy in, in A Fire Upon the Deep and sequels. It’s a great setting, with a never quite revealed secret at the heart of it observant readers might puzzle out for themselves.

And yet, the story that’s told in it is somewhat pedestrian. It starts with Quillon, an angel from Circuit City, the highest and most advanced part of Spearpoint, who’s a political refugee now living in Neon Heights. Where the first is roughly post-singular, the second is of a nineteenfifties technology level. When assassins from his former home turn up to hunt him down for the secrets in his head, secrets he himself is unaware of, he has to move down and out of Spearpoint, into the great unknown.

Once out of Spearpoint, Terminal World suffers from a common problem with fantasy novels, in that the story has to feature all the dangers and locations Quillon is told about before leaving town. For large parts of this Quillon is largely a passive observer, whom the plot happens to as it moves from set piece to set piece.

What saves the book are those set pieces. There is for example the Swarm, a steampunkish fleet of dirigibles, zeppelins and heavier than air aircraft forming their own, 24/7 airborne community, having evolved out of Spearpoint’s air force, long forgotten in the city itself. There are the self assembling, vampiric cyborgs which are the greatest threat in the wilderness and especially, there’s one scene at the end of the book that redeems it all by itself.

Because the zones are shifting, the Swarm and Quillon manage to move into a territory that for thousands of years was on a far too low a technological level for even normal humans to exist. Deep in the heart of it the Swarm comes across a huge graveyard of rockets and planes, of an increasingly primitive nature as they moved deeper into it, the end result of hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of failed escape attempts by the inhabitants of a now dead, twin city to Spearpoint. It’s a chilling, awe inspiring scene, but it’s only one scene and it has no further bearing on the plot.

It may perhaps be what Reynolds is doing, while the plot goes on its steady way, is play a game with the reader. A game in which the true nature of the world is never quite revealed, but hints are given. A dying desert world of which the atmosphere is slowly leaking into space as its inhabitants likewise are slowly losing their technology, their marvelous city dependent on the most basic of resources gathered from the countryside, resources also slowly drying up. It’s a world of barbarians taking over without understanding the high technology of their ancestors, a world indeed with two moons in the sky.

Now which world does that remind you of?

Ancillary Justice — Ann Leckie

Published on February 9, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Ancillary Justice

Ancillary Justice
Ann Leckie
385 pages
published in 2013

It’s funny how you don’t notice how ingrained gender is until you get your nose rubbed in it. In Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie makes it clear by the third page that when her protagonist Breq uses “she” and “her” she uses it as a neutral pronoun, yet unless I paid close attention or Leckie explicitly outed a character as male, I kept thinking of every character she meets as female. That’s I think a response more readers will have, as we’re just not used to thinking of the female form as universal; traditonally it has always been “he” or “him”, or something like singular “they” for those of us aware that the male isn’t actually universal. It may seem like a too clever writing trick, a clumpsy attempt at showing the reader the gender assumptions build into the very language we use, but I don’t think this is actually what Leckie had in mind. What it does instead is establishing the fundamental strangeness of Breq herself even before we learn she’s the last remaining component of a thousands years old warship’s AI.

That consistent use of “she” and “her” foregrounds the difference of the Radchaai culture Breq comes from. It’s a bit of unexplained strangeness that tells a lot about their society, culture and history, most importantly that the Radchaai are inherently matriarchal in the same way most if not all actually existing human societies are patriarchal. But there’s more going on with Breq’s gender blindness, as other Radchaai seem to have far less trouble differiating between men and women, even if they use the same pronouns for both. Meanwhile Breq not only has pronoun troubles, she also has trouble remembering which secondary sexual characteristics are male and which are female. It’s this that singles her out as not quite human.

As it turns out, Breq is only the last remaining fragment of One Esk, which used to convince of some twenty ancillaries, these being the depersonalised bodies of Radchaai enemies converted to housing an AI submind. One Esk herself was just one part of the warship Justice of Toren, which has thousands of ancillaries — though most are deep frozen until needed — alongside its Radchaai crew. Breq’s memory, as One Esk, goes back thousands of years, most of which was spent conquering and “civilising” various non-Radchaai systems.

The Radchaai, it seems, are not very nice, an expansive interstellar empire busy assimiliating every other human system and have done so seemingly forever. In an offhand mention halfway through Ancillary Justice it’s explained that all this is done to protect the mother system, a giant Dyson Sphere at the heart of the Radchaai Empire, whose inhabitants are barely aware of the outside universe. It’s an interesting idea for a galactic empire, reminiscent of the popular imagination of what the Roman Empire was like. The Radchaai method of operation is to attack and conquer other human systems, subvert or kill its rulers, crush resistance, then offer the remaining, docile population membership in the empire.

Ancillaries like One Esk/Breq play a large role in this subjugation/pacification, unhesitantly obeying orders of their (human) officiers but without all the messy rape and abuse of human soldiers. To non-Radchaai meanwhile they’re objects of fear and loathing, being after all the converted bodies of previous victims of Radchaai expansion.

When we first meet Breq she’s on a quest of vengeance against those in the Radchaai empire who killed her, killed One Esq, having been a singleton for nineteen years when the story opens. In Ancillary Justice‘s second storyline we learn how this murder came to pass, as the story goes nineteen years back in time, to One Esq’s last posting in a backwater city on a newly pacified world. In essence then, this is a colonial murder/revenge story.

The colonial revenge story is one that’s somewhat old fashioned these days, now that western countries don’t really don’t have colonies anymore, just some protectorates and overseas departments it doesn’t do too much good to look too closely at. But they used to be a thing in the twentieth century, stories about murders that the colonial justice system couldn’t handle because they were perpetrated by those at the heart of it, to those who were the least protected by it, leaving no other option than to go outside it to get justice. It’s of course impossible to have true justice in a colonial situation, as colonism depends on declaring some peoples second class, non-citizes, slaves or sub alterns. One Esk is the latter, a willing tool of the oppressor because she literally cannot be anything but. What shook her so hard that her programming failed is what at the heart of Ancillary Justice‘s plot.

As a whole though, it’s so much more than that. Leckie is a brilliantly evokative writer and Ancillary Justice was one of those novels I couldn’t wait to finish yet didn’t want to end. She has a great eye for the telling detail; for example I loved the way she had One Esk sing to herself. If you have twenty bodies to sing with, why wouldn’t you? Yet she’s the only such ancillary to do so…

I’d only heard of Ancillary Justice or Ann Leckie when I read Ian Sales’ review. At the time she was new enough not to have a Wikipedia page. In his review he mentioned that Leckie had a lot of buzz behind her, similar to Kameron Hurley with her first book, but I was skeptical. If it was so good, why hadn’t I heard of it before? However, Sales’ review was enthusiastic enough to get me to try it for myself and now I know why Leckie deserved the buzz. She’s nominated for a Clarke Award; I hope she gets it.

Plague Ship — Andre Norton

Published on February 6, 20141 Comment

Cover of Plague Ship

Plague Ship
Andre Norton
192 pages
published in 1956

Hold on to your tail fins, space fans. This retro rocket boosted tale is sure to knock you out of your orbit. Oy, did this very fifties future slang get old fast in Plague Ship. This is another of Norton’s books at Project Gutenberg and mildly irritating as its language occasionally was, it was also the perfect kind of light adventure science fiction to be read in small snatches on my phone, while getting coffee at work.

Plague Ship is the second in Norton’s Solar Queen series, about the adventures of the crew of the ship the series is named after, free traders trying to eke out a living making the kind of trading deals the big companies can’t. The Solar Queen is literally a huge rocket ship, complete with humongous fifties tail fins to land on. Amongst its crew is Dane Thorson, Cargo-master-apprentice and our hero, prone to saying things like “rest easy on your fins” and “right up the rockets” and all other sorts of horrid expressions you have to read around.

Plague Ship starts with the Solar Queen visiting the planet Sargol, for which it now holds a trading license, due to the events of the previous novel. This planet is the source of a new sort of jewels which are very much in fashion back on Earth. Getting those jewels means dealing with the natives, which isn’t the easiest of tasks, as these have a very rigid concept of how negotiations should take place, which the Solar Queen’s crew has no choice but to adapt to. Worse, it turns out there are also representatives of one of the big trading firms present on Sargon, waiting to see if the Solar Queen slips up so they can take over their licence…

Luckily, through a series of misadventures, in which Dane plays a large role, they do manage to get the natives to trade as it turns out they’re very partial to catnip. However, as they blast off from Sargol their problems are only starting as most of the crew, save for Dane and three others fall ill to a mysterious sickness. It’s up to the four of them to get the Solar Queen back to Earth without being quarantined or giving the big trading company an excuse to take over.

I’m not sure if Plague Ship was originally published as a serial, but it sure reads like one. Dane is put from one dangerous situation into another, with no time to catch his breath. He and his friends not only have to deal with getting the Solar Queen back to Earth with all their fellow crew members helpless and sick, no, theh also have to evade the space patrol and land on Earth without their knowledge. Then they have to find a way out of the radioactive zone they hid in, a remnant of World War III (another very fifties sf obsession) and get their plight known to the people of Earth, to get out of the fix they’re in. It all moves along quickly, too quickly at times, with no time to really dig deep into anything.

For me personally, I would’ve been happy had Norton kept the focus on the Solar Queen’s adventures on Sargol and skipped the rest of the plot. She had a knack for introducing small, telling details to sketch a world, (also on display in The Time Traders) and what she put in about the tribes of Sargol made me interested in reading more about them. Once the Solar Queen left the planet it all became a lot less interesting.

Nevertheless, if you can get used to the very fifties feel of Plague Ship and are not too bothered with how lowtech the Solar Queen and future Earth are, this is actually a perfectly adequate adventure science fiction story. It’s something you could read in half a day and ideally suited to read in short snatches on your mobile when bored.

Ascension — Jacqueline Koyanagi

Published on January 31, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Ascension

Ascension: A Tangled Axon Novel
Jacqueline Koyanagi
331 pages
published in 2013

It was the woman on the cover which drew me to this novel and the subtitle which almost scared me off again. The woman attracted me because it’s not often you actually do see a woman of colour on the cover of a science fiction novel, sometimes not even when the heroine is indeed a black woman. Seeing that got me to pull Ascension off the shelves, but reading the subtitle A Tangled Axon Novel almost made me put it back because it made it sound as if this was a novel in an established series, rather than a first novel. Luckily the inside cover blurb mentioned that this was Jacqueline Koyanagi’s first novel, so I took a punt. Not having heard of her or her novel before, in the end the cover as well as reading the first few pages were enough to make me want to read this.

And I’m so glad I did, because this was a glorious, wonderful mess of a book. Reading it, especially in the first couple of chapters, you get the idea that the author is only showing you glimpses of a much larger universe she’s been carrying around in her head for a long time, therefore occasionally making oblique references to things she knows and which are completely clear to her, but doesn’t quite explain to the reader. That’s the messy part of the book. The glorious and wonderful parts are its characters, its protagonist especially. Alana Quick is a sky surgeon, a starship engineer in the midst of a depression when nobody needs starship engineers because starships are obsolete. Her ex-wife left her for a career with Transliminal Solutions, the company that made them obsolete, her sister Nova has a flourishing career as a spirit guide, relieving rich clients from their anxieties, while her own obsession with space, with the Big Quiet, makes her unsuitable for anything but repairing spaceships even if the hard physical labour does her chronic nerve disease no favours. Having to deal with a debilitating disease while barely making ends meet, is it any wonder she stows away when the Tangled Axon comes looking for her sister? Or that she falls in love with the ship’s glamorous captain Tev — “all blond hair, boots and confidence”?

A love that may seem hopelessly misguided at first, as neither crew nor captain take kindly to a stowaway, though they have no qualms in using her as a hostage to get through to her sister. As to why they’re so desparate to resort to such measures, it’s because the ship’s pilot, Marre is slowly disappearing, dying little by little and only Transliminal could cure her. But you need something to trade to get anything from Transliminal and luckily Birke, the mysterious woman who’s the — boss? CEO? Leader? — of Transliminal in this universe is obsessed with Nova, so they’re gambling that if they can get Nova to agree to work for Birke, her gratitude will give them a cure for Marre. There may even be a possibility of a real cure for the Mel’s disorder Alana suffers from.

As the external threats mount up for the Tangled Axon and crew, it’s the internal tensions that ratchet up. With her sister on board, Alana, who grew up in her shadow, has to deal with her feelings of inadequacy, jealousy and love towards her. At the same time her growning attraction to Tev is complicated by the fact that she’s in a relation with the ship’s doctor, Slip, also the first person in the crew to treat Alana half decently. Then there’s Marre, losing cohesion, with parts of her body dissappearing and reappearing at random, who fascinates Alana; she keeps hearing her in her head. Perhaps the least complicated person on board the ship is the other engineer, Ovie, who just looks like a big wolf occassionally but at least isn’t emotionally complicated like the rest of them. And of course there’s the ship itself, with which Alana from the first feels at home and talks to.

Ascension then is space opera, but one with a love story at the heart of it. It’s not just Alana falling in lust and then in love with Tev, moving beyond Alana’s initial attraction to her as a symbol of everything she ever wanted to wanting her as a person, but also Alana’s re-evaluation of her relationship with her sister, relationships with the other members of the crew, Slip, Marre and Ovie and as always, the ship itself.

And that brings us again to the messy part. Because we see everything through Alana’s eyes and Alana is confused, blinded by her emotions, occassionally lying to herself and like so many people, often worst at recognising her own blindspots, there’s a lot that she tells us that turns out not to be true, or not quite as she thinks it is. This is the core of the novel. Alana is not an unreliable narrator in the traditional sense, but like most of us, she’s build up stories about herself that colour her perceptions. This is most clear when we finally meet and get to know her sister, who isn’t quite the shallow airhead Alana makes her out to be and whose calling as a spirit guide can do more than just massage the egos of rich clients. Alana’s prejudices and assumptions make her (and by extention, us as readers) miss plot developments that might’ve been blindingly obvious with another narrator.

What stuck the most with me in reading Ascension was the underlying theme of disability and chronic illness. It’s not just Alana having to deal with her Mel’s Disorder or Marre very sfnal illness, slowly disappearing from the universe. Tev only becomes a real person, rather than somebody to admire or fuck, when it turns out she lost one of her legs in an industrial accident. She does have an artificial leg indistinguishable from a real one, but only when she’s clothed and she’s still paying it off. For both Alana and Tev their respective disabilities are things they have to live with, not things that define them, but they’re not a DND style kind of weakness either, something to offset their strengths. Alana has to keep her illness into account when working, to make sure she doesn’t make it worse and if she can’t take her mediciation, it will fuck her up; she’s learned how to minimise the impact her disease has on her life, but doesn’t always succeed or have that luxury. It’s a very mature, realistic portrayal of what being chronically ill means and for me personally it worked.

What I also found realistic is how Alana’s health is part of her soured relationship with her sister Nova, who’s perfectly healthy but who as a spirit guide disdains her body. This is the first sf novel ever that I’ve read that could and did talk about health privilege. Science fiction over the years hasn’t done well in showing people with disabilities or chronic illnesses, other than providing a bit of extra glamour perhaps to dark and brooding antiheroes, so to see it handled so well here is appreciated.

In the end, Ascension is a love story as much as a space opera and it worked for me. The relationships between Alana, her sister Nova, Tev and Marre, Ovie and Slip were just a delight to see established and grow. If you like science fiction about strong, queer women of colour dealing with their disabilities, this is the book for you. If you don’t, what’s wrong with you?

Zoe’s Tale — John Scalzi

Published on January 26, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Zoe's Tale

Zoe’s Tale
John Scalzi
406 pages
published in 2008

John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War was popular enough to spawn four sequels so far, of which Zoe’s Tale is the third. Military science fiction set in a Heinleinian dog eat dog universe, with hundred of alien races competing for new colonies and humanity only a middling power, the first three novels in the series followed new recruit John Perry and Special Forces specialist Jane Sagan through increasingly high stakes adventures, in the process learning that the Colonial Defence Forces they’re fighting for might not be entirely trustworthy. Things came to a head in the third novel, The Last Colony in which John and Jane, as leaders of the latest colony founded by the CDF had to fight off the Conclave, a four hundred members strong alien alliance as well as the CDF’s own plans to turn the colonists into martyrs. Amongst those colonists? Their own, adopted, daughter Zoë.

As you may have guessed from the title, Zoe’s Tale retells and extends the story of The Last Colony from Zoë’s point of view. On its own it’s therefore slightly less than a whole novel and can only be properly understood if you’ve read the previous novel. Things happen for reasons that are only partially explained, with major plot developments happening off screen, “as you know bobbed” later; at the same time Zoe’s Tale was partially written to explain some of the plot holes from The Last Colony. For me, it had been more than two years since I’d read it, so some of its plot was a bit hazy while reading this; not entirely dissimilar to Zoë’s experiences.

Zoë is the seventeen year old daughter of a defeated adversary, not just adopted by John and Jane, but also the living symbol of Earth’s treaty with the Obin, an alien species with intelligence but no consciousness, until her natural father created a device to give them consciousness artificially. As a consequence Zoë is accompanied at all times by two Obin bodyguards and friends of the family, Hickory and Dickory. One of the main plot threads in the book is her continuing discovery of how much she means to the Obin and the consequences this has for her.

Zoe’s Tale is told entirely through her eyes, first person. Having a fortysomething male writer write from a teenage girl’s perspective is always tricky but fortunately for all his Heinleinian influences Scalzi is much better at writing female characters than he ever was. Not that Zoë is entirely believable: she’s far too reasonable, obedient and mature for her age, unless the plot demands otherwise. Granted, she’s of course not quite the average teenage girl, what with that whole Obin thing, but despite this it still felt a bit off to me.

The novel starts with Zoë and her family coming to their new colony homeworld, then discovering not everything is as it seems and that they’re going to function as bait, though it takes a while for that to become common knowledge. A large part of the story is taken up with Zoë’s adventures on the journey to the new colony and her experience in it, before the Conclave come. This feels somewhat jumbled and episodic and things seem to happen because they happened in The Last Colony rather than flowing organically from the plot. As said, Zoë remains unaware or is only told later about major developments, while in the previous novel you were right there.

Two of the plotlines however are exactly the opposite, showing the details of things only sketched in in The Last Colony, viz what happened with the “werewolf” like aborigines that turned out to live on the planet, as well as the story of how Zoë escaped from the colony to seek help amongst the Obin. These are the strongest sections of the story and the places where Zoë comes to the fore, an active participant rather than an observer.

In the end Zoe’s Tale was a decent enough read, but only because I’d already read the previous novels, if several years before. It’s somewhat weaker than them, largely due to the fact that this was partially intended to repair some of the plot holes in the previous novel.