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Barrayar — Lois Mc Master Bujold

Published on July 15, 20121 Comment

Cover of Barrayar

Barrayar
Lois McMaster Bujold
386 pages
published in 1991

Barrayar was actually the first ever Bujold story I ever read and I hated it. That’s because it was the last part of its serialisation in Analog that I read and I had no idea of what was going. Coming back to it now, after having read all the Miles Vorkosigan books at least once, I enjoyed it much more. Like any prequel Barrayar depends for some of its impact on the reader’s knowledge of the main series. If you don’t know who Miles Vorkosigan is and why he is the incredibly determined little mutant runt that he is when we first met him in the Warrior’s Apprentice, the details of how he got to be that way won’t matter all that much.

Chronologically, Barrayar takes place almost immediately after Shards of Honor and is the second and so far last novel to star Cordelia Vorkosigan/Ransom. Cordelia and Aral are settling in to newly married live on Barrayar, with Cordelia pregnant with Miles. Then the old emperor dies and Aral becomes regent to his young grandson and he and Cordelia are soon plunged into the dangerous, still very medieval politics of the Barrayaran court and nobility. How dangerous Cordelia only realises when they’re the victims of an assasination attempt, with poison gas grenades thrown into their house.

They survive, but the antidote Cordelia has to take to counteract the poison gas has a very bad side effect, acting as a teratogenic agent on the fetus she is carrying, posing a real risk to its bone development. Normally there would be nothing for it but to abort the fetus or risk a stillbirth, but Cordelia is not the type of woman to just give up. On a more civilised planet, where medical science was more advanced, there would be chance for the baby, as it could be put into an uterine replicator and treated outside the womb. But Barrayar doesn’t have any of them, or does it?

There are after all still the uterine replicators which housed the children born of the rape of female prisoners of war taken in Barrayar’s last war, which had been forgotten about after they served their purposes. Cordelia manages to track them down, get Miles installed in one and get a bone strengthening programme going on. It takes all her strength but she gets her way and everything looks to be on the up and then the civil war breaks out.

And Miles is behind enemy lines, in the captial, trapped with the rebels. So Cordelia decides to go and get him to safety. Which is sort of where I came in the first time I read this, in the last third of the story. No wonder I was confused.

In retrospect, Barrayar is a turning point in the Vorkosigan series. The novels before it had been cleverly written, more intelligent than they need to be light science fiction adventure stories. With Barrayar the series took a leap in quality and became more serious and slightly darker, setting the tone for later entries like Mirror Dance and Memory.

Barrayar is also another reminder of how subtle Bujold can be in showing the effects of her science fictional technology. There isn’t any of the technogeekery or infodumping of some authors I could mention, but at the same time the plot is very much driven by a classic piece of science fiction kit, the artificial womb or uterine replicator. Here it is more of a macgufin of course, something for the protagonist to chase, but over the course of the series we slowly see the impact the introduction of uterine replicators has on Barrayaran society. And here is where it started.

Barrayar is not the best of the Vorkosigan series, but it is the best of the early part of the series. Don’t read it if you haven’t read the earlier published novels yet.

Slow River — Nicola Griffith

Published on July 8, 20121 Comment

Cover of Slow River

Slow River
Nicola Griffith
343 pages
published in 1991

Everybody knows about the Bechdel test now, don’t they? Introduced in Dykes to Watch out For, it’s a test to see if a given story meets a minimum feminist standard: a) does it have at least two women, who b) talk to each other about c) something else than a man? It’s a good way to think differently about the movies you see or the books you read, to see how common it is for a story to have only male characters, or only a token female character, sometimes as prize for the hero. Having a story with only male characters is normal, having one with all or majority female characters is the outlier, can get you shoved into a women only ghetto like romance or feminist literature.

This is true in science fiction as well as mainstream literature, which made reading Nicola Griffith’s Slow River so interesting. It’s her second novel, also the second of her’s I’ve read and like the first, the cast is almost exlusively female. But where that one was set on a planet where men had died off due to some handwaved plague, this one takes place in near-future English city that for once isn’t London. I’m not sure whether Nicola Griffith made this choice of cast deliberately, or it just happened naturally because of the story she wanted to tell, but it works.

The story Griffiths wants to tell in Slow River is that of Lore, younger daughter of a wealthy Dutch family, who’ve made their fortune with building conservation and waste treatment plants. Lore has led a privileged and sheltered upbringing, up until the moment she’s kidnapped. That was three years ago, three years since Lore escaped from her kidnappers and found herself naked by the river that runs through the middle of the city and met the woman who called herself Spanner. Lore isn’t keen to go back to her family — why this is so is explained over the course of the story — and she moved in with Spanner, but now, three years after, she feels it’s time to stand on her own two feet and leave Spanner and her self destructive ways behind her.

Spanner you see is a small time criminal, somebody who steals information, can provide you with a trusthworthy fake identity and hacks reprogrammable slates in the best cyberpunk tradition, at the fringes of organised crime but a small fish in a big pound. She may have rescued Lore and Lore will always be grateful for that, but she herself isn’t a nice or particularly sane person and Lore could see that sooner or later it would catch up with her.

Lore herself is not quite healthy in her own skin either, otherwise she would’ve gone back to her family. But she neither wants to nor dares too, as too much has happened for her to go back. Instead she tries to build up a new life as a manual worker at a waste treatment plant in Hedon Road and gets involved with the day to day problems of being on the night shift of the conservation plant. The details of which, while the least dramatic, are also amongst the most interesting in the novel; Griffith has clearly done her homework and is good at dropping in convincing sounding details of the work.

The plant is also where we meet the third woman, Magyar in the “love” triangle between Lore, Spanner and Magyar. If it’s Spanner whose shadow Lore wants to get out under, than Magyar is who Lore wants to win the approval off. Tough, no-nonsense, she’s the shift leader at the waste treatment plant and almost from the start suspicious of Lore.

In between this main story, there are also the stories of Lore’s three years with Spanner, trading in the depence on her family to a sort of independence, as well as the story of her youth up until the kidnap. What I only noticed about a quarter of the way in is that these three interwoven stories are actually written in three different viewpoints. There’s the first person point of view for the present, tight second person focus for the years with Spanner, while the chapters focusing on her family are in a much looser second person focus. The difference is that in the first form of second person focus we’re still inside Lore’s head most of the time, with the text refering her as “she”, while the second form, we see her from the outside, as “Lore”. It is of course symbolic for her growing up, maturing, going from what others see her as, to what she sees herself as. A coming of age story that is not nearly as obvious as most such are in science fiction.

In other words, Slow River is quite strange for a science fiction novel: a largely female cast with the plot driven by their individual concerns rather than outside concern driven, which is quite sophistically written with three different viewpoint styles and where the science on display is ecological, environment enginering. It’s no wonder it won a Nebula. A great, satisfying novel by a writer who should be much more well known than she is.

We Who Are About To… — Joanna Russ

Published on July 1, 20121 Comment

Cover of We Who Are About To...

We Who Are About To…
Joanna Russ
170 pages
published in 1975

We Who Are About To… is arguably Joanna Russ’ most famous and controversial novel after The Female Man. That novel became famous because of its outspoken feminism, still rare in science fiction at the time; if we’re honest, still somewhat rare today. We Who Are About To… comitted a greater sin however, by attacking the optimistic, can do attitude of classic science fiction, the belief that any adversity can be overcome by man’s unique fighting spirit. It’s not just that the protagonist doesn’t win in the end; even Asimov the arch-optimist had written “Founding Father” ten years earlier, a story in which four astronauts fight but fail to terraform a planet before it kills them. No, the real problem is that she rejects the choice out of hand and choses not to fight, not even to try.

That of course went against the grain, with plenty of science fiction fans being outraged about it, if I can believe the contemporary fan publications. But We Who Are About To… is about more than just rejecting science fiction’s traditional morality, it’s also a novel about how die. Slightly over half way through the story the central conflict of whether or not to fight has already been resolved, in favour of not to. The rest of the story is all about how you die. This part of the book has received less attention than the first half.

The plot is simple. A small, mixed group of interstellar travellers crashland on an unexplored planet barely liveable, far away from civilisation. Their hopes of being picked up are almost nil. They have shelter in form of the lifeboat that has set them down and enough supplies, water and tools for several months. They’ve no idea if there’s life on the planet and whether or not they can eat it, or it can eat them. The outlook is bleak, but they are all determined to make a go for it. All, but one, our protagonist, who is the only one to realise that rebuilding civilisation is not on the cards and wants nothing to do with it.

She argues as such, but is overruled. Civilisation is going to be restored, which means the women will need to start populating the world and make babies. Our hero obviously doesn’t agree with this and fight backs, eventually escaping the camp and moving away somewhere where she can die in peace. In the end she ends up killing everybody when they won’t leave her alone, then dies herself.

Russ does load the dice a bit. The narrator herself is an elderly, slightly embittered, cynical, “difficult” no-nonsense woman, not dissimilar to some of Russ’ heroines from The Female Man. We see events only from her point of view and she has little sympathy for any of her fellow passengers, who all come across as nasty stereotypes one way or another. The succesfull business man and woman and their bratty daughter, the strong but dim ex-football player, the smug, status aware but intellectually stagnant professor, the blonde floozy, the bitter young woman who hates everybody. Almost from the start they are all hostile against her, the men all determined to play pioneer, the women, apart from her, content to go along with this. The others are more than happy to force the narrator into going along with their agenda, tying her to a tree and raping her if need be. It’s not subtly done, which somewhat lessens the impact, but sometimes you need a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

Once the narrator has escaped and killed her shipmates, not without some regrets, the story’s focus switches to how she deals with dying. She doesn’t commit suicide, just moves away from the lifeboat back to the cave where she hid before and stops eating. It takes time for her to die this way and she has long days to think about her life and to deal with any regrets she had about it, or about what she did to the other survivors. She hallucinates, but is never unaware that these are hallucinations, she gets weaker, slips away more and more and finally dies quietly: “well it’s time”.

This was the same way my wife died when she stopped treatment last year, well, without all the killing of course and how Russ described it was both familiar and emotional for me. She got the process right, the way in which it seems to drag out, then goes much more quickly than you expected, then suddenly the end is there. For me this was far more confrontational, far more powerful than the first half of the story.

I’m not sure in the end whether We Who Are About To… is actually a good novel, rather than a strident one. It was certainly a necessary one, a much needed kick in the pants to science fiction’s innate sense of human superiority.

Intrusion — Ken MacLeod

Published on June 6, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Intrusion

Intrusion
Ken MacLeod
387 pages
published in 2012

Over the past five years Ken Macleod has written a series of standalone novels that each in their own way have dealt with the post-9/11, post-War on Iraq 21st century and what it might evolve into. Intrusion is the latest in this series. Where MacLeod had always been a politically minded writer, his last few novels (The Execution Channel, The Night Sessions and The Restoration Game) were all directly rooted in current political realities, especially the socalled War on Terror. Intrusion continues this trend, but this time swapping the War on Terror with the nanny state.

And at first Intrusion feels like a novel from an alternate universe, one in which Labour didn’t lose the elections and had continued on its pre-9/11 social engineering course rather than by distracted by Blair’s foreign crusades. Britain’s nanny state has been turned up to eleven, driven by ubiquitous realtime surveillance and monitoring technology and increasingly finetuned social law. MacLeod has taken everything New Labour and the ConDem coalition have been guilty off in the past decade and a half regarding tackling socalled social problems: increasingly absurd health and safety laws, the liability adverse local bureaucracies, the enthusiasm to seek technofixes for ingrained social problems, the idea that you can force or nudge people into healthier lifestyles through banning or taxing their vices and extrapolated what it would look like a generation or so into the future. It’s a world in which most women wear monitor rings to make sure they’re not pregnant and if they are, are not smoking or drinking or going to places where toxins might be that could harm their unborn child, where ipso facto most women work at home as so many workplaces are not safe for their (potential) offspring due to e.g. trace remnants of cigarette smoke.

Such is the case for Hope Morrison, nee Abendorf, married with one child and one on its way, who for the most part accepts this as the way things are, neither bad nor good. What worries her far more is the Fix, a simple single dose pill that eradicates many common genetic defects and vulnerabilities. She doesn’t agree with it, hadn’t taken it for Nick, her first child nor does she wants to take it for this child. Worse however, she has decided against it not from any sort of religious dogma, but just because she’s uncomfortable with it. She had made this choice but doesn’t want to justify her choice to anybody, which is something the system has difficulties with. It is no wonder therefore that she’s increasingly pressured to either give in and take the Fix or to provide a proper, regulated reason for rejecting it.

Intrusion‘s plot is all about how Hope and her husband Hugh, a carpenter working with carbon fixing, self shaping New Tree wood, try and escape this pressure, trying to live their own lives within this system without either being grind up in it or compromise more than they have to. They’re not rebels set out to overthrow it, they’re just ordinary people who on one particular point want to make their own choice and want the freedom to make it without having to explain it in an approved, sanctified manner. But as an encounter with Hope’s local MP makes clear, when she tries to get him to help her, this is just what not only cannot be allowed to happen, but which the system as a whole is incapable of allowing: people cannot be free to make their own choices, as they might make the wrong choices:

“But it doesn’t feel very free,” Hope said, “having other people make your choices for you.”

“It feels a lot freer than making the wrong choices,” said Crow.

[And a few paragraphs later]

The government isn’t makeing choices for anyone. Like I said, it’s enabling people to make the choices they would make for themselves if they knew all the consequences of those choices.”

Which is something that could probably have been inserted in any Labiour manifesto of the past twenty years without raising too many eyebrows. On one level, as with the admonishment the MP bites off to Hope that if she’s that libertarian, why she doesn’t go and live in Russia, it’s incredibly funny; on another this image of the future is chilling as it’s so plausible, so clearly already starting to happen. The social free market ideology MacLeod has invented is something that could easily be reinvented by Labour (or perhaps the LibDems) for real.

If this isn’t chilling enough, Macleod doesn’t ignore the Labourite War on Terror and its security apparatus either. All through Intrusion there are hints that the powerful nudges the government can dish out often can turn into shoves, which is confirmed as one secondary character is picked up from the street, shoved in the back of a police van and chemically interrogated all without being arrested, but she is left with the number of a trauma helpline she could call. And all that because while she is Brazilian, she looks Indian and hence is suspicious in the climate of the Warm War, where the new Free World of America, Britain but also China and Iran confronts the new old villains of Russia and India as these refuse to confirm to post-Climate Change morals. This it seems is one of those things that are invisible to people who don’t fit a particular profile and ar therefore not hassled, but are common occurrences to those that do.

Intrusion is a bleak novel, a pessimistic novel, though not without a certain grim humour. It’s the most pessimistic I’ve seen MacLeod, even the sf macguffin driving much of the plot not offering much hope. It’s also a novel that calls back to his earliest novels, the Fall Revolution series and especially The Sky Road. You could read it as a dystopia, with the lazy comparisons being with 1984 or Brave New World, though it’s a much more realistic sort of dystopia than those two. In the end, unlike them, nobody is in charge but the system and the system has no consciousness, is unaware software rules and linked up databases driving surveillance and interference.

This is an awareness that slowly builds up through the novel, just as MacLeod only gradually reveals the world in which it is set and it makes a mockery of the grandiose speech one tertiary character gives to the woman who was assaulted by the police about how even the activists opposing the system actually serve it, how her assault was just a notification that it knew of her. It demands a consciousness of the system that it just doesn’t have.

Which is perhaps the most frightening idea in Intrusion.

Star Hunter — Andre Norton

Published on April 5, 20121 Comment

Star Hunter
Andre Norton
96 pages
published in 1961

For a lot of American science fiction fans my age or older, Andre Norton was the first “real” sf writer they ever read, largely because she was hugely prolific and specialised in what we’d now call young adult novels. For some reason however she was never all that popular in the Netherlands so I’ve read little of her work so far. But that’s changing, thanks to Project Gutenberg, who have a fair few of her books available, those on which the original US copyrights had not been renewed. Star Hunter is one of them, originally published as an Ace Double. I read it during a couple of lunch breaks at work.

Ras Hume is a pilot for the Out-Hunters Guild who on a trip to the newly discovered planet of Jumala has made a discovery that could make him incredibly rich, but to exploit it he needs to make a deal with Wass, the biggest crime boss on Nahuatl. What he found was the lifeboat from the Largo Drift, a space ship which disappeared six years ago, taking with it the heir to the Kogan estate. He also has a plausible candidate to play the part of Rynch Brodie, the teenage heir. What he needs Wazz for is to condition this boy to actually believe he is this heir, then he will be let lose on Jumala for Hume to discover him when he brings over the safari party he’s scheduled to pilot there. It’s an almost foolproof plan, surely nothing can go wrong.

But there wouldn’t have been a story if something didn’t go wrong. The patsy Hume has chosen, Vye Lansor, an orphan plucked from the foulest bar in Nahuatl’s spaceport, was conditioned and dropped on Jumala, but the condition wasn’t good enough and he remembers flashes from his true life. Worse, while Jumala was deemed fit for human visiting and free of intelligent alien life, something has been woken up by the safari party and Hume and Lansor/Brodie find themselves as grudging allies against this alien menace as this attempts to herd them towards imprisonment in the hills of Jumala.

Since Andre Norton has only ninetysix pages in which to tell her story, it obviously has to be tight. Which means that while we do get a resolution to the central plot line, the mystery of the aliens and why they attacked the safari party is never followed through. Hume and Lansor bond, fight their way out of the alien traps and survive and that’s it. A bit unsatisfactory, but not the end of the world.

In the same way, there’s little room to develop the settings, Nahuatl and Jumala, very much. Both are solid pulp sf settings, feel more like small towns than whole planets, but are deftly sketched in by Norton with a few neatly chosen details, especially Jumala. There are the watercats for example, dangerous aquatic ambush predators lurking in creeks and rivers, and the scavengers that come out of the water to finish off their kills — or the watercat, if it’s unlucky. Clearly some thought has gone into setting up the planet, even if it’s only a stage for a pulp adventure.

As science fiction Star Hunter is of course incredibly dated, of the rockets and blasters school of adventure sf. The scheme that drives its plot, to substitute some lookalike for the heir of a vast estate, has long ago been made impossible by the development of cheap DNA testing, while most of the technology on display that isn’t part of the standard sf furniture doesn’t really look all that advanced either. But these are just quibbles. Taken on its own terms, this is a tight, fun, enjoyable little story. Ideal for reading in some stolen moments at work…