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God’s War — Kameron Hurley

Published on July 31, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of God's War

God’s War
Kameron Hurley
286 pages
published in 2011

The main problem with God’s War is its setting. Kameron Hurley’s debut novel is set in an unspecified far future, on the alien planet of Umayma, featuring an unending, religious war between Nasheen and Chenja, Umayma’s biggest nations. The war has warped both nations’ societies, with each country’s men either dead or at the front, leaving only the very young and very old at home. Despite both societies’ innate conservatism that has left women to take up the slack, having to take on traditional male roles, resulting in what’s best called a violent matriarchy in Nasheen, with women in all positions of power and the men constantly being sacrificed at the front. Nyx, its protagonist, is a brutalised, aggressive, scary woman, a deliberate attempt by Hurley to create the female equivalent of somebody like Conan while the background against which Nyx plays out her story was meant to show how a brutal, violent hierarchical society doesn’t magically become better because women are now in power, how easy it is for women to keep perpetuating the same violence and abuse as the men, just with different people in the victim and oppressor roles.

It’s an interesting concept, but the execution is troubling. Because while it is set on another planet far in the future and the politics and religion that’s being fought about is fictional, the images that Hurley creates are very familiar, because the religion she creates looks a lot like Islam, veiled women, multiple daily prayers, holy book and all, with the war and the societies it has left in its wake familiar from what we’ve seen on the news from Iraq or Lybia or even Chechnya. The landscapes are all desert landscapes, the cities are Middle Eastern, with mosques and minarets, often broken, often bombed out. As Tariqk put it, it’s as if Hurley “took every stereotypical Arab world depiction & TURNED IT TO 11”. It’s this orientalism that fails this novel, this inability to do more than use orientalist stereotypes, that reduces it to just another grim and gritty adventure story when it could’ve been so much more.

God’s War starts with one of those opening sentences you can only have in science fiction: “Nyx sold her womb somewhere between Punjai and Faleen, on the edge of the desert“. It sets the tone for the rest of the book, in the brutality and the matter of factness with which the protagonist, Nyx engages in, both against herself and others. It also hints at the gore, the sheer organic background of Nyx’s world, where the omnipresent all terrain pickups, bakkies, are run on bug cisterns, half or wholly organic power plants and blood and tissue are currency. It reminded me at first of China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, but that novel was far more baroque in the way it used biological constructs in its background.

The story that starts with that great sentence in itself only turns out to be prologue, an extended action series in which Nyx flees from at first undefined to us enemies, while following a note, a boy who had deserted from the front, who was possibly infected by a delayed action disease, who she needs to neutralise and kill. At that point Nyx still is a bel dame, a government sanctioned killer/bounty hunter, but by page 40 she has gotten her note, her enemies have caught up to her and she’s dumped into prison for a year. When she gets out she’s no longer a bel dame, but just a common mercenary, which is where God’s War‘s story really starts.

In between the first and second parts of God’s War several years have passed and Nyx has assembled a team of bounty hunters. Rhys, already met in the prologue, is one of them. A draft dodger from Chenja, he’s a failed magician with just about magical talent to be useful to Nyx, but in a peculiar way he’s also her conscience. Rhys is a deeply religious man and Chenja is slightly more conservative even than Nyx’s Nasheen. In the latter, of necessity women have taken over every role that traditionally would’ve been male, as all men are on the front until they’re forty, few surviving that long. In Chenja the same is also true, but hidden more behind a facade of normality. It makes Rhys deeply uncomfortable to be in the more “liberal” Nasheen, to see people not adhering to what he believes is right. He comes over as a bit of a prig, a bit stupid even where his religion is concerned, one plot point made possible only by his decision to go to prayer in the middle of enemy territory.

Yet while Rhys is in some ways the conservative foil for Nyx to put down, with Nyx’s views on religion as bunk more likely to be sympathetic to the reader than Rhys’s staunch beliefs, he’s not undeserving of our sympathy. He’s as much a victim of the war as she is, having been beated up a couple of times in the street, as well as sexually abused in encounters with the Nasheen security forces. He pays the price for being a man, a Chenjan man, safely away from the front, for being who he is, just like the rest of Nyx’s crew does. Like e.g Taite, homosexual in a world where most countries punish homosexuality with death (another thing taken from what we imagine Islamic countries are like). All of Nyx’s crew is damaged in one way or another, products of a relentless war, Nyx and Rhys the most. Their relationship is the heart of the story.

Most of which, as said, is relentlessly grim, things starting out bad for Nyx and getting steadily worse and though she pulls some sort of victory out of the bag at the end, the cost is high. It makes for a hard read at times and I’ve found myself putting it down more often than I usually do. What also made it hard going was that orientalist, pseudo Middle Eastern setting. Kameron Hurley in one way made a good attempt at creating a fur future setting with no obviosu ties or references to 21st century Earth, yet then undermined it by using these stereotypes of Islamic religious fundamentalism, by the veils, the multiple daily prayers, the stonings for homosexuality, calls to prayers moving “in a slow wave from mosque muezzin to village mullah”, the sun bleached yellows and browns of the world and the war pocketed, partially destroyed towns and cities echoing the pictures we’ve been seeing on our tv screens coming in from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.

The setting for me is what in the end makes God’s War a failure, as shows a fictional, far future religion set on an alien world, yet in terms that are particular to the decade we’ve just lived through. It jars, it’s lazy and perhaps any attempt at creating a religious war would’ve had echoes of our recent history in it, but surely Kameron Hurley could’ve done better?

Adrift on the Sea of Rains — Ian Sales

Published on July 4, 20131 Comment

Cover of Adrift on the Sea of Rains

Adrift on the Sea of Rains
Ian Sales
75 pages
published in 2012

Ian Sales is a blogger and science fiction critic with strong options about what science fiction should and shouldn’t be and the conviction to put his opinions into practise. So for example, being dissatisfied with the lack of attention to women writers in science fiction and especially in the Gollancz science fiction Masterworks series, he launched the Sf Mistressworks blog to showcase overlooked classics by women writers. I don’t always agree with him, but he’s always interesting. Which is why I took a gamble on his fiction writing with Adrift on the Sea of Rains, a self published chapbook; normally something I wouldn’t bother with.

As he mentions in his biography page, Ian Sales was only three years old when Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, but it clearly left a deep impression nonetheless. It makes him about a decade older than myself, of the right age to be impressed by the seeming inevitability of nuclear war in the late seventies and early eighties, a Third World War that like the first seemed destined to be stumbled into rather than actively desired, all the more difficult to stop because of this. Somewhere in the mid-seventies we crossed the threshold where any nuclear war could still be survivable and reached the point where it just meant the end of the world. That was also the point at which the space race, the symbol of early Cold War machismo, ended, not in victory or defeat, but in a stalemate. The link between a better space programme and nuclear war is an old one in science fiction, as writers like Jerry Pournelle or Ben Bova, both in their fiction and outside it, arguing that space was vital for American national security, honest enough to understand that the space programme they wanted was only possible this way. Adrift on the Sea of Rains shows what could’ve happened had they been right, a story of nine astronauts in the US moonbase, left adrift after nuclear war destroyed the world.

Adrift on the Sea of Rains is told through the eyes of colonel Vance Peterson, USAF, who’s somewhat of a Right Stuff cliche, with “blonde wife and tow-headed son” back on Earth. How Peterson got on the Moon is told in a series of ever earlier flashbacks, which also hint at how the Cold War turned hot, while in the present he and his fellow astronauts are working on a way to escape the Moon by using the Bell, a piece of Nazi super science. It wouldn’t be enough just to get back to the dead and radioactive Earth they came from, instead they have to use the Bell to transport themselves into an alternate universe where the war didn’t happen. Which still of course leaves the problem of actually getting off the Moon…

Though Adrift on the Sea of Rains, especially the flashback sections, is written in the language of the technothriller, the mood it paints is that of seventies post-New Wave British science fiction, depressing and sombre. The combination works well though some of the more jargon heavy sections may be less accessible to those not that interested in obscure Cold War hypersonic fighter plane prototypes like the F-108 Rapier. To me though these casual mentions of these 1960ties wonder planes that in real life never went beyond the prototype stage strengthen the hubris that runs through the story. Planes like the Rapier, or the also mentioned Sukhoi T-4 and XB-70 are as much products of the sixties white heat of technology as the Apollo Project itself. In this timeline these sixties dreams of stronger, better, faster technology never ran out of steam but in the end turned out a nightmare.

This was the first story of Ian Sales I’ve read and it turned out to be as interesting as his non-fiction writing. I hope he’ll keep writing for a long time.

Scardown — Elizabeth Bear

Published on June 8, 20133 Comments

Cover of Scardown

Scardown
Elizabeth Bear
368 pages
published in 2005

Scardown is Elizabeth Bear’s second novel, sequel to Hammered, continuing the adventures of Jenny Casey. Where Hammered was straight up streetlevel cyberpunk, in Scardown the perspective opens up. That opening up actually started in the last pages of Hammered and Scardown continues seamlessly. Middle books in a trilogy, as this is can often sag, neither setting up plotlines nor resolving them, but Scardown avoids this fate. Each of the books in the Hammered/Scardown/Worldwired has its own story, but together they do add up to one coherent one.

Jenny Casey is a veteran who lost her left arm and eye in a war in South Africa decades ago, replaced by fairly primitive cyborg implants. Her ability to cope and survive for so long with these implants made her an unique candidate for starship pilot training, as these pilots would need to be plugged into their spaceships. This is why she was being pursued by the Canadian government in the previous novel, Canada and China being the world’s two superpowers in 2062. The world is dying, killed by climate change and humanity’s hope lies in the stars. Which is why both superpowers are building starships, starships made possible by alien technology found on Mars.

Hammered ended with Jenny Casey and her lover Gabe Castaign setting foot on board the Montreal, Canada’s first functional starship. Scardown begins with Jenny making preparations for her first trip as a pilot with the ship. She has made her peace with colonel Valens — the villain of the previous book — for the moment, even if she’s not reconcilled with what he did to her decades earlier. It’s just that she knows they all have bigger problems now. On a more optimistic note, at least she, Gabe and Elspeth Dunsany have come to an understanding regarding their relationships, starting to form a proper family together with Gabe’s two daughters, Leah and Genie.

Valens meanwhile is shown to be more than just a cardboard villain, or even the dedicated patriot trying to do the best for his country, no matter the cost that he was in Hammered. This is done not just because we get to see more of what motivates him, but also because of the introduction of his granddaughter Patty, who with Leah Castaign is one of the young volunteers for the starship programme. It’s just one example of how Bear opens up the story in this volume, following not just the characters from the first book — Jenny, Elspeth, Gabe, the Richard Feynman AI, Razorface et all– but also giving more screentime to secondary characters like Valens, as well as introducting new characters: Min-xue, a Chinese starship pilot, a young Canadian terrorist called Indigo Xu who has business with Jenny, the Canadian prime minister Constance Riel, various others.

This wider range of viewpoints compared to Hammered reinforces the opening up of the story. This is no longer about Jenny Casey and while it remains her story, what’s at stake is no longer the fate of one woman, but that of whole nations. Both the Chinese and the Canadian governments are convinced Earth’s climate is damaged to the point of unsustainability and the only solution is to get as many people off planet and to the stars as possible. Yet neither is willing to see the other side getting their first, with the Chinese in particular aggressive in sabotaging the Canadian process.

To be honest, the geopolitics (literally) is perhaps the most unconvincing aspect of the story. It was already established in the previous novel that the US had become a fundamentalist state for a while and therefore drifted out of superpower status, but to see Canada, at the head of the Commonwealth — the UK having frozen over when the Gulfstream shut down — as the dominant superpower together with China is a bit difficult to believe. India and Pakistan apparantly had a brief nuclear war sometime before 2062, while the European Union, Russia, Africa and South America are only mentioned in passing. It doesn’t quite convince me as a possible future, it feels more like a bog standard dystopian sf future with some of the furniture moved.

But that’s a minor quibble. Some of the background may bit a bit sketchy, the story Bear tells with it is worth it. There’s a steady ratching up of tension as the various plotlines come together, culminating in a climax about fourfifths through the book that’s literally world changing, the last fifth of the story dealing with the fallout of it.

What really impressed me about Scardown though — which in a better world wouldn’t be a reason to be impressed by a sf novel — is the wide variety of well rounded female characters in it. This is a book that passes the Bechdel test with flying colours. It’s not just Jenny Casey who’s important, all the named female characters are driving the plot as much as their male counterparts, if not more. Similarly, like Casey, most of the important characters are pushing middle age, with everything that entails. They carry the aches and pains and experiences of four-five decades of living. That too is somewhat unusual in science fiction.

The Heart of Valor — Tanya Huff

Published on May 19, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of The Heart of Valor

The Heart of Valor
Tanya Huff
411 pages
published in 2007

I’m beginning to see a pattern here. The first Valor novel was a replay of every mil-sf writer’s favourite Zulu War siege, while the second took on an equally venerable plot: the “let’s investigate a mysterious derelict alien space ship” one. And now, with The Heart of Valor, the third novel in the series, Tanya Huff once again takes on an old mil-sf standby, the march upcountry across a hostile planet, though she doesn’t go for the full Anabasis. In short, it looks like Tanya Huff is working her way through the Big Book of Stock Mil-SF Plots, but I’m not complaining. The general outlines might not be original, but as with everything, it’s all in the execution.

It helps if you have a strong character to hang your story on of course, and I like gunnery sergeant Torin Kerr. She’s a hardbitten, cynical career soldier keeping an eye out for her people, weary of her superiors and their inevitable fuckups. She also somebody we met in the first book waking up from a tryst with a di’Taykan, a somewhat randy alien species who never say no to a one-night stand, a di’Taykan that later turned out to be her commanding officer. Huff lets the reader spent a lot of time in sergeant Kerr’s skull and she comes across as smarter than she presents, conscientious and slightly paranoid. The latter is probably not surprising, considering her previous adventure on a very alien spaceship.

The Heart of Valor starts with Kerr recently promoted from staff to gunnery sergeant, being debriefed over her adventures on Big Yellow, the alien spaceship and bored out of her skull. So when major Svensson suggests she joins him as a temporary aide de camp on an expedition to the marine training planet Crucible, she jumps at the chance. The good major wents to check how his almost entirely rebuild body functions under combat circumstances, having only recently been detanked after almost having been killed. Gunny Kerr will be there to keep the major and his civilian doctor safe, while they join a group of recruits off for a twenty day survival course. By pure coincidence, the same di’Kaytan staff sergeant Beyhn who was there when Kerr through her tour, is also in charge of this batch of recruits.

On Crucible, the platoon of 120 day recruits is supposed to survive for twenty days while fighting various combat scenarios against combat drones and other AI directed threats, all overseen by a staff of instructors safe inside an orbital platform. Major Svensson, his doctor and gunny Kerr will tag along. It all sounds simple, but of course things go wrong quickly. First there’s staff sergeant Beyhn who carries a secret that could kill him and makes him fall ill at the worst possible moment. Then the Combat Processsing Node directing the “enemy” forces goes haywire and starts attacking with real life ammunition. Suddenly it’s up to Kerr and the major to sheepherd the rookie marines to safety…

Meanwhile, in a subplot carried over from The Better Part of Valor, gunny Kerr is still worrying about Big Yellow, the alien ship she encountered and some of the things that happened after they had gotten off the ship, things that don’t make sense, like a disappearing escape pod only she and Craig Ryder –the civilian salvage contractor she fell in love with — remember.

The marines in which Kerr serves are multispecies, with humans, Kaytan and Krai all serving, these three races having been brought into the Confederation especially because of their aggressive natures, to fight its wars against another multispecies alliance, the Others. Not that any of these warrior species is much respected for their nature by the supposedly more evolved and pacifistic Elder and Middle races. It’s a familiar setup we’ve seen in other sf novels. Both the Krai and the Kaytan are stereotypical alien races with one or two defining characteristics: the Krai are omnivores eating everything they can get their hands on, including fellow marines if need be, while the Kaytan are omnisexual and ready to hump anything that’s willing and stands still long enough. For the various Krai or di’Kaytan marines this is the main thing that distinguishes them from their human counterparts: they either eat everything or fuck everything. Apart from that, they’re marines.

I’ve got a fairly low standard for military science fiction: as long as the battles are good and all the military bits sounds plausible I’m not too worried about the writing or characterisation, which is why I can still enjoy David Weber’s novels. Tanya Huff is a much better writer however and hence The Heart of Valor is much better than it needed to be, as a lightweight mil-sf romp. It’s not world changing science fiction by a longshot, but it’s the kind of novel you inhale in one long sit, then run out to get the sequel.

Hammered — Elizabeth Bear

Published on May 10, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Hammered

Hammered
Elizabeth Bear
324 pages
published in 2005

Elizabeth Bear is a newish science fiction writer who I’ve been aware off, but hadn’t read anything off until now. Hammered is her first novel, published in 2005 along with its two sequels, Scardown and Worldwired. It was well recieved, with Bear winning both the 2005 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and the 2006 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Both are well deserved, as this is one of the better first novels I’ve ever read. Elizabeth Bear is in complete control throughout and it reads like the work of a much more experienced writer.

Hammered starts out in the most cyberpunk posssible way, with local gangster boss Razorface bringing a kid overdosing on an army combat drug called Hammer to Maker, Jenny Casey, a UN combat veteran of what wasn’t WWII, now left with a cyborg left arm and prosthetic left eye, to see if she can save him. Razorface has mouth full with “a triple row of stainless steel choppers”, hence his nickname, while Jenny has hers because she fixes things. Neither is fond of Hammer, a dangerous drug even when pure and the batch the kid o.d. on is anything but. Some corporation is leaking tainted drugs in their city (Hartford, Connecticut) and together they have to stop them. Meanwhile, an online multiplayer game in which the best players get a chance at piloting a virtual star ship is infiltrated by an AI, who suspects the game is more than just entertainment. It’s 2062, climate change and the wars resulting from it have wrecked the world, China and Canada are locked in a Cold War and somebody’s after Jenny Casey. It might even be her sister.

But while the setting might be cyberpunk, Jenny Casey’s life lacks the glamour a heroine in a Gibson story would’ve had. Her metal arm suffers from phantom pains, fucks up her shoulder and back where it attaches to the rest of her and while her artificial eye is an advantage in a low light situation, it’s a pain most of the rest of the time. She has had to live with her cybernetic implants, not just the arm and eye but also the enhanced nervous system that can make her reaction speed inhumanly fast when needed, for some twentyfive years and now that she’s pushing fifty, she’s suffering for it. She’s no Molly, cool cyberchick, but a woman who has had to learn to live with the limitations of her body.

She’s not the only great female character in this novel. There’s also Dr. Elspeth Dunsany, who spent the last twelve years in prison for violation of the Military Powers Act, released so she can do what she refused to do twelve years ago, built a tame AI for Unitek, the most powerful corporation in the world, brought back by colonel Valens, the villain of the piece, the spider in the web who is also an old ‘friend’ of Jenny and who is moving all the players together for his project. Elspeth allowed him to get her, both to get out of prison but also because her father is dying. Like Jenny, she’s not a young woman anymore and like her, she also has to live with what her history has brought her.

Not that Bear neglects her male characters. Apart from Valens, who isn’t quite the black and white villain you see him as in the first half of the book, there’s also Gabe Castaign, the man who actually saved Jenny from that burning APC in South Africa that cost her her arm, now also working for Valens. There’s Razorface of course, somebody else who has to struggle with his personal history and his status as number one gangster in Hartford with younger and more ruthless ones coming up to challenge him. But most of all there’s the AI, Richard Feynman, personality based on the American mathematician. There’s always a temptation for a cyberpunk writer to use an AI as deux ex machina, but Bear mostly avoids this.

One of the dirty little not so secrets of first wave cyberpunk was how much it shared the obsession with getting into space and off Earth as the salvation of humanity with classical science fiction, only slightly more realistic (ie with all the politics and crime it nicked from the hardboiled detective genre). This idea is at the heart of Hammered too, the one thing in which it followds older cyberpunk like Neuromancer unreservedly. In most other aspects, Hammered subverts or rejects the stereotypical cyberpunk tropes, as with Jenny’s cyborgisation above. These aren’t low punks with high techs, disaffected teens and twentysomethings looking cool, but real grownups dealing with real grownup problems, as well as the legacy of everything they fucked up in their lives when they were twentysomething themselves. It reminds me of Melissa Scott’s Trouble and her Friends, another book that took the easy cliches of the underground hacking elite and looked at them with an adult eye.

I read the first third or so of this book the way I normally read, in short bursts inbetween doing other stuff, but the last twothirds I read in one big gulp, everything else forgotten. And once I’d finished, I read the other two books in the same way. Higher praise than that I cannot give.