science fiction

Remnant Population — Elizabeth Moon

Published on December 30, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Remnant Population

Remnant Population
Elizabeth Moon
360 pages
published in 1996

Elizabeth Moon is a writer I didn’t pay much attention to until a year or two ago. I’d read one or two of her books and they were competently written military science fiction, better written than those of a David Weber or John Ringo, but nowhere near as good as Lois McMaster Bujold’s. When I decided I needed to read more female science fiction writers, Moon was one of the writers I was giving a second chance. Since then I’ve read roughly half a dozen or so of her novels and my initial impression of her has remained roughly the same. She’s a better writer than she needs to be to sell the sort of stories she usually writes and there’s a bit of hidden depth in her mil-sf stories that’s missing from many of her colleagues, that hint at a greater potential. Yet she seems content to keep on writing the same sort of adventure science fiction and fantasy.

Not always though. On two occasions Moon has attempted to write something else than military science fiction, something more ambitious. The most well known of these two novels is of course her Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke winning 2002 novel, Speed of Dark. The other one is Remnant Population, which is a novel about First Contact, between the hitherto unknown indigenous population of an alien planet and the last remaining inhabitant of a failed human colony. As such, it’s a good case study of Moon’s strengths and weaknesses.

To start with the good bits: the protagonist Ofelia, a cantankerous widowed peasant woman not very enamoured of her youngest child and his wife she’s stuck living with. They’re controlling and bossy, always trying to get her to conform to their ideas of what a respectable widow should look and act like. Coming from a conservative society Ofelia has had more than enough of this her entire life. She resists this the way peasant women have forever, through passive resistance and going her own way as much as she can. It’s the same way in which she avoids being taken aboard the evacuation ship when the colony is abandoned, simply by not being there when the ship takes off.

Throughout the next part of the book, as Ofelia struggles to establish her new life alone and starts enjoying herself, we get to know more of her life before she came to this planet, on another colony world; Earth isn’t mentioned and it’s unclear how long humanity has been colonising other systems. It’s clear, both from what Ofelia tells about her life in the colony as on her homeworld that the society she grew up with, despite having star travelling technology is a conservative one, with a large base of only semi-educated peasants to which Ofelia and her parents belong, very much a “traditional” patriarchy, vaguely Latin American in flavour, though that may just be me. Besides this there’s also a much more technocratic, gender equal, westernised elite that works for the companies and the military. Ofelia doesn’t have much truck for them, as these tend to patronise her as much as her family attempted to control her. She’s glad to be finally alone and beyond the control of either of them.

Ofelia doesn’t stay alone for long; new colonists from a different company show up to reclaim the planet while pretty soon it’s also clear that there is actually indigenous intelligent life on the planet. When the new colonists land on a different continent they’re attacked and killed by these aliens, with Ofelia following everything on the radio. Ever since then she lives in fear the aliens will track her down and kill her too and indeed her worst fears seem to be confirmed when they do show up in her village.

It turns out that the aliens are a lot less hostile than their earlier actions suggested and Ofelia now has to learn to live with them and teach them, something she’s not that enthusiastic about, though gets to appreciate more once she gets used to them. For me it would’ve been perfect had the rest of the book explored the first contact and building up of trust and genuine friendship between Ofelia and the aborigines with their “stone age”, pre-literate oral culture, but Moon felt it necessary to complicate the story by having a human expedition return to Ofelia’s world.

This is probably Elizabeth Moon’s greatest weakness: she can’t write a story without overt conflict for which she needs a villain. In this case the villains are the members of the expedition back to Ofelia’s world, there to determine whether the aborigines are really intelligent and what to do about them. They’re smug, patronising to Ofelia and much much dumber than they themselves realise. While Ofelia manages to establish genuine contact with the aliens, learning to slowly speak their language, the expedition dissolves in petty squabbles, threatening the trust Ofelia had managed to build. In other words, the author’s thumb is very much on the scale at Ofelia’s side.

Making the newcomers more stupid than they should be, making these highly educated and smart specialists too dumb to find their backsides with a map, a compass and a flashlight, cheapens the story. It does fit the overall theme of the story though, which consistently puts Ofelia’s “uneducated” peasant wisdom against the book learning of her social superiors. It’s a deeply conservative message, which isn’t all that surprising coming from Elizabeth Moon, whose writing always has been a bit on the conservative side. The only problem with this here is that she basically has Ofelia defeat straw men, the plot didn’t need these cardboard villains.

Remnant Population then is a flawed but interesting attempt by Moon to write something deeper than the military adventure sf stories she usually writes. It’s unfortunate that she led her worst instincts to take over the last third of so of the story to introduce unnecessary conflict.

Crashcourse — Wilhelmina Baird

Published on December 27, 2013Leave a comment

Cover of Crashcourse

Crashcourse
Wilhelmina Baird
277 pages
published in 1993

Wilhelmina Baird is an interesting writer: wrote some short science fiction at the dawn of the New Wave (as Kathleen James), then returned in 1993 with this, a cyberpunk inspired novel with overtones of the sort of fifties satirical sf Pohl and Kornbluth wrote. She wrote three more novels, two sequels to this, then disappeared. She’s obscure enough not to even have a Wikipedia entry, so it’s unclear if she stopped writing or just couldn’t get published anymore. I vaguely remember that her second novel, Clipjoint, was hailed as a minor classic when it came out, but that’s all I knew of her writing when I first got this.

In the world of Crashcourse the population is divided in a small ruling class of Aris, slightly more Techs and Arts to serve and entertain them, with the vast mass of people being unemployed umps. Cass, Moke and Dosh are three of them, trying to earn enough (illicit) money to get off Earth, Cass as thief, Moke as artist and Dosh as whore. Caught up in a love triangle, with Cass loving Dosh who loves Moke who loves Cass, only wanting to leave if all three of them can leave together. That is, until Dosh is roughed up once too many by one of his clients and temptation comes calling in the form of an Aris with a film proposal.

As Cass is all too well aware, such a film is little more than a legalised snuff movie, where some hapless umps are enticed to sign their lives away in return for a shot at the kind of money that can get them off Earth and into the good life. Meanwhile the audience doesn’t just see them get killed, but actually feels the emotions of the leading actor or actress in a movie. It used to be that the film company didn’t inform their stars that they were on camera, but that had been outlawed — not that this made the films necessarily safer.

Cass — short for Cassandra, as what else could it be — warns against taking the contract, but Dosh is obsessed by becoming a proper actor and sees this as his real break, while Moke is happy enough to go along if only to stop all three of them from staying stuck in their old routines, with no real hope of making it off Earth. Once they have signed the contract, things move fast. Cass and Dosh are caught in a runaway funfair ride, while Moke gets an invitation from a serious art collector to talk about his sculptures and to top it all off, they rescue a young teenage girl from a gang rape.

To be honest, the plot flowed in a familiar pattern from there on out, where of course the “rescue” is all part of the film and the art collector, who the protagonists all dismiss as too obvious a put-on, turns out be genuine. Just as predictable, Cass and her friends, with a little bit of help from the local gangster in love with her, plot to turn the tables on the film company and succeed, but at the cost of the life of one of them.

The plot is therefore slightly pedestrian, while the background is, as said, clearly influenced by cyberpunk, but with a fifties sheen to it. It’s not quite over the top enough to rank with something like The Space Merchants, but it has some of the same elements. A world rigidly divided in haves and have nots, where the vast mass of people have nothing to do but engage in mindless entertainment and crime, while their rulers in turn amuse themselves with them. There’s some use of the usual computer hocus pocus you’d expect in cyberpunk, but it’s marginal; this story could’ve easily been told without it.

Crashcourse, even if predictable, kept me entertained, in large part due to the way Wilhelmina Baird writes Cass, as a self aware, sometimes funny, tough but vulnerable woman, somebody who goes along with a harebrained scheme against her better instincts, out of love. The love triangle between Cass, Dosh and Moke is only sketched, but comes across as warm and real, a far cry from some of the more regretable cyberpunk cliches.

Vast — Linda Nagata

Published on December 1, 20134 Comments

Cover of Vast

Vast
Linda Nagata
403 pages
published in 1998

Space opera used to be terrible, reactionary stories of brawny male heroes with safe anglosaxon names making the galaxy safe for terran manifest destiny by cheerfully genociding any alien races looking at them funny. Long derided as the lowest of the low, though with the occasional saving grace in the form of that elusive “sense of wonder” all science fiction strives to achieve, it was sort of rehabilitated in the seventies by a generation of fans and writers who’d grown up reading the stuff. In the eighties and nineties this led to the socalled New Space Opera, which took that sense of wonder and removed the xenophobia and human supremacy from it. Though in this New Space Opera the universe was far more indifferent to human pretensions than the old stuff, it could still be upbeat, as in e.g. Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, where hundreds of various human races live happily ever after in an AI controlled utopia.

But not always. In Linda Nagata’s Vast the universe is not just indifferent, but actively hostile to human life. A millions years old alien war has left still active, automated warships behind, warships capable of blowing up suns. As humanity moved out of the Solar System and established colonies around other stars, these Chenzeme ships started to attack. One such attack has left only four survivors, fleeing the attack aboard the Null Boundary, a slower than light spaceship, who have decided to go look for the source of the Chenzeme coursers, somewhere in the swan direction of the Orion arm of the galaxy, all the while being chased by a Chenzeme courser themselves.

Vast is therefore one long chase scene, taking places over centuries of travel time as the Null Boundary moves further into the Orion Arm. It reminded me somewhat of Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space and sequels, which also partially took place onboard vast, ancient slower than light ships moving between star systems. There’s the same feeling of claustrophobia and isolation, though Nagata’s characters are much more strange than Reynolds’.

There’s Lot, infected by the alien Cult virus, which basically makes him want to infect everybody he meets to let them join in a brotherhood of cosmic love. Unfortunately for him, everybody on the ship is immune to him, which means he has no outlets for his urge to infect. It’s unclear where the virus came from, whether it’s related to the Chenzeme or, as some of the characters speculate, their hypothetical enemy.

Then there’s Nikko, the owner of the Null Boundary who most of the time remains within the ship’s systems, only occasionally downloading himself into a meat body and who, during the long centuries that nothing happens, tends to wipe his own memories every ninety seconds, living in minute and a half loops unless something interesting happens.

The two remaining passengers on the Null Boundary are Urban and Clemantine, the most normal and human looking, but like Nikko, each of them can upload and save their memories to the ship’s systems, redownloading in new bodies when needed. Thanks to the cult virus, Lot can’t and is therefore condemned to spending a lot of time in cold sleep. He and Clemantine used to be lovers, but when she was still vulnerable, he infected her with the virus, which put a bit of a strain on their relationship. Now she’s cured but none of the other three trust Lot all that much, suspicious of his virus induced pacifistic leanings.

Vast is a psychological drama, where the questions of where the Chenzeme came from or what their goals were, are never quite answered, but the focus is in how Lot and all deal with their long voyage towards an answer, change and evolve during their journey. It’s not entirely successful, as other than Lot, the characters remain largely two dimensional, not quite convincing. Nikko and Urban especially come across more as a collection of tics and responses than as real people.

Vast is an excellent example of the new hard space opera, playing “fair” with the laws of physics in limiting its space ships to slower than light, while still using miracle technology in the form of nanotech, computer uploads, semi-intelligent alien viruses, not to mention functioning robot warships millions of years old. It attempts to show something of the vastness of space by emphasising how long a journey even between relatively close star systems would be, again something that isn’t entirely succesful. In the end Vast provides a sort of monochrome sense of wonder, much more sober than the old, gaudy space opera of the pulps.

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.