science fiction

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…

Rule 34 — Charlie Stross

Published on April 1, 20121 Comment

Cover of Rule 34

Rule 34
Charlie Stross
358 pages
published in 2011

It’s only thanks to Christopher Priest’s tirade about this year’s Clarke Award shortlist that you remember that you haven’t reviewed Charlie Stross latest novel, Rule 34 yet. You know that, like Halting State, which it is a sequel to, it’s written in the second person and you briefly toy with the idea to write your review the same way. But then you come to your senses and decide to write the rest of the review in a less irritating way.

Not that I minded the second person point of view in Rule 34, as Charlie Stross made it work and it fit the central metaphor of these books, reality as a massive multiplayer immersive game. At the same time I can see where Christopher Priest is coming from when he writes:

Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet.

It’s funny because it’s true, if mean spirited. As a writer Charlie Stross does bring a kind of geeky enthusiasm to his novels that can be wearing if you don’t share his interests. Stross’ writing style is snarky rather than witty, more interested in conveying information than in a mellifluous turn of phrase and he can be prone to a bit of infodumping. As with using second person point of view, it is not to everybody’s tastes. And if that’s the case for you, as it seems to have been for Priest, it would be a slog to get through Rule 34.

Yet neither his writing style nor his choice of the second person viewpoint is a flaw in Rule 34; instead they’re deliberate choices made to enable Charlie Stross to tell the story he wanted to tell with this novel. Like its predecessor Halting State this novel is an attempt to create a plausible near future Scotland by looking at various contemporary trends and extrapolating them a couple of decades into the future. As fitting an “internet puppy”, most of these changes are technological, extensions of current computing trends a few years down the road, but Stross looks beyond what might technologically be possible and embeds these developments in a political and sociological context.

The central idea at the heart of Rule 34 is that of the panopticon singulary, the way in which technological developments, commercial pressures and the law come together to kill privacy. The second person viewpoint in which it is written drives this home, because it makes the reader complicit in the panopticon: the characters become the reader’s avatars, as if this is a videogame rather than a novel. At the same time, Stross’ writing style, detached & snarky distances you from the characters as well which again reinforces that sense of complicity, of voyeurism.

For the people caught in Rule 34‘s plot, Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, banished to the Rule 34 Squad, the one dealing with all the pervy crimes, Anwar Hussein, a Scottish-Pakistani petty criminal turned honorary consul for a small, new Central-Asian state and “John Christie”, point man for The Organisation, having to negotiate their way through life with this sort of omnipresent surveillance is just part of their daily routines. So Liz spents her entire working life in CopSpace, through which she both has access to all data the Scottish police forces acquire and the system can keep taps on her. Hussein meanwhile is expected to keep his smartphone on and with him everyday so the polis can snitch on his location 24/7, while “Christie” has to take pains to avoid areas with too high a surveillance level, like airports.

Rule 34‘s story starts with Liz being called out to a crime scene, a suspicious death of an ex-criminal, who died while getting a colonic irrigation from an old Soviet machine that used to belong to Ceasescu… A true double wetsuit job, it at first just seems a regretable accident, but of course there’s more going on. Anwar Hussein meanwhile is beginning to wonder why exactly he has been made honorary consul for Issyk-Kulistan for. “John Christie” finally knows exactly what he’s in Edinburgh for, to recreate the Scottish branch of The Organisation. Each of these three protagonists thinks they’re at least somewhat in control of their own lifes, even if they’re now clearly been caught up into something bigger, but this turns out not to be the case.

Instead through the course of the novel it becomes clear that they are each being nudged in some way or another to perform certain actions, by somebody who knows how to do this for each of them individually and without their knowledge. Nudge theory is quite popular with the current British government, who see this as a cheap and easy way to get the hoi polloi to behave themselves and the more data you got on people the easier it becomes to find the right nudge. Current implementations are still primitive, in Rule 34 Stross imagines what it would be like if the people doing the nudging had perfect methods and all the data needed to use them, thanks to the panopticon. None of the protagonists ever quite catch up with the fact that they were being nudged or the overarching plot these nudges served, but the reader does get to know who is behind everything that happened and why.

As said Rule 34 sets out to create a plausible near future world which we could concievably get through from where we are now. Charlie Stross has done the most difficult job any sf writer can undertake, try and predict not just what new technology could do, but how it will be used and how the law, government and societies as a whole will handle it. As such then it is a worthy novel to be on the Clarke Awards shortlist.

The Better Part of Valor — Tanya Huff

Published on March 4, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of The Better Part of Valor

The Better Part of Valor
Tanya Huff
411 pages
published in 2002

Once I had finished Valor’s Choice, I knew I was going to have to go back to the bookstore I’d found it in and get the other two Tanya Huff books I’d saw there too. To be honest, I hadn’t even taken me as long as finishing the first two chapters to decide this. I’m always on the lookout for good, intelligent military science fiction and Valor’s Choice was just that, which meant I had to get the sequels too. What I especially liked was the absence of the sort of nasty rightwing politics souring me on so many other mil-sf writers.

The Better Part of Valor starts with staff sergeant Torin Kerr just back from her mission in Valor’s Choice. Having had words with general Morris, who was responsible for said mission, she is immediately sent out on another one by him, without her own platoon even. Whether this is punishment or reward she isn’t sure, but it turns out she will join a new marine platoon put together from scratch to protect a scientific expedition to an “unidentified alien vessel drifting dead in space”. She hopes it will be an uneventful recon mission, but after the last one she was sent on by general Morris, she isn’t hopeful.

And since we wouldn’t have a story if her pessimism was unjustified, she turns to be right. The reason why her new platoon was put together from individual specialists was to help avoid the media, but they turn up at the shipwreck anyway, the first of things that go wrong. Then, when Kerr, her platoon and the scientific specialists and journalists actually enter the alien ship, things go worse as an attempt to drill through part of a wall leads to an explosion, the loss of the airlock and attached shuttle, with the surviving members of the expedition having to find another way off the ship. The ship in the meanwhile isn’t as dead as it first seemed and starts to throw “tests” at Kerr and her people and turns out to be capable of influencing events outside itself as well, as it takes over the expedition’s own ship. Then, to top it all off, the enemy shows up, racing towards the same airlock Kerr and her people need to reach…

In the Valor series universe humans are one of three races that perform military services for the Confederacy, a loose gathering of intelligent species who never needed any military support until they ran into the Others, the first species that listen to reason but wanted to conquer the entire Confederacy. Which were humans and the two other “primitive” races, the Taykan and Krai, came in, offered membership in return for their military services. The way Huff writes these aliens there’s little difference between them and the human marines, all are more marine than alien. There are just a few stock traits each has: the Taykan are perpetually horny and their pheremones can inflame human passions too, while the Krai are true omnivores always talking about how good their teammates might taste, who are as flexible with their feet as with their arms, sometimes to the disgust of their team mates.

The news crew that shows up is more alien, being Katrien, small, furry, very cute, somewhat on the obnoxious side, either a racial trait or just a consequence of being a reporter. Unfortunately, Katrien being the Dutch name of Daisy Duck, I kept imagine them as just that, as aliens in pantless sailor outfits…

The plot reminded me of the those old Spacequest/Spacehulk boardgames, where you have to get a load of spacemarines out of a similar situation while coming up against various alien menaces. It’s not a novel story by any measure, but well told, even if it could’ve been a bit more claustrophobic for my liking. On the whole Tanya Huff turned out to be a writer who is very good at making you want to read on and on; I finished this in less than a day again.