science fiction

Dragonflight — Anne McCaffrey

Published on February 20, 20122 Comments

Cover of Dragonflight

Dragonflight
Anne McCaffrey
303 pages
published in 1968

Because I’ve been running my booklog since 2001 I know it’s at least a decade or more since I’d last cracked open an Anne McCaffrey novel, yet once upon a time her The Dragonriders of Pern series was very important to me. Like so much science fiction and fantasy I discovered the Pern books through the local library, first reading them in Dutch, then continuing in English after I discovered the later books were only available that way. Over the years I devoured everything of McCaffrey I could lay my hands on, but I got less and less enjoyment out of her later novels, until I stopped reading them all together. Which is why I hadn’t read her in more than a decade and why it took her death to get me to reread the Pern novels. Which is a shame, as rereading them now makes clear how good McCaffrey at her best really was.

And Dragonflight was the best story she ever wrote. The two novellas that form the first twothirds of it, “Weyr Search” and “Dragonflight were rewarded with a Hugo and a Nebula Award respectively and are worth it. I had remembered Dragonflight as a fairly light novel, but it actually starts out quite dark, with Lessa, its heroine being the sole survivor of a coup against her family, plotting revenge as a kitchen drudge against the evil lord Fax who had taken over her hold. She’s not a nice person at all at the start of the story, completely focused on getting her own back and on making the hold as miserable as possible. But she also has a secret, a bond with the watch wher, a telepathic reptile like animal used as a watchdog. Little does she know that this is a hint to a much greater destiny for her…

Meanwhile F’Lar, a wingleader at Benden Weyr, where the last remaining dragonriders of Pern live. Once upon a time there were six Weyrs, to defend Pern from the dangers of Threadfall, spores drifting in from Pern’s sister planet the Red Star, but the last threadfall was hundreds of Turns ago, five of the Weyrs have been abandoned and the Holds, where the bulk of population lives have forgotten their obligations to the Weyrs, while the Weyr itself has forgotten its duty to Pern and nobody longer believes in Thread. Nobody but F’lar that is, and his brother F’Nor, who still keep the old traditions in honour. And now F’lar is visiting Ruantha Hold, Lessa’s Hold, looking for candidates for Impression, for young girls to bond with newly born dragons as the next generation of dragonriders. Three guesses who becomes one of the candidates…

But this is just the start of Lessa’s and F’lar’s adventures. There’s still the menace of Threadfall to overcome, the resistance of the Holds to the Weyr and the continuing problem of how one small Weyr of dragonriders can protect the entire planet when it needed six much bigger Weyrs in the past, with much more experienced and better prepared riders… Both Lessa and F’lar have their roles to play in resolving this, but Dragonflight is largely Lessa’s story.

Dragonflight was written in 1968/69, long before the fantasy boom of the seventies, when fantasy was still very much an offshoot of science fiction. A lot of the tropes and cliches of epic fantasy can be seen in embryonic form here and I suspect Ann McCaffrey’s dragons have had just as much influence on the shaping of genre fantasy as Tolkien’s hobbits have, even if it’s less recognised. But Dragonflight isn’t quite fantasy, even if it has firebreathing flying dragons, a medievaloid society and a fight against unreasoning evil at the heart of its story.

Because the dragons are genetically engineered from the fire lizard indigenous to Pern, the unreasoning evil is just an alien lifeform doing what it must do to survive and spread itself, while the medievaloid society is the descendant of colonists from Earth who had to abandon most of their high technology because Pern wasn’t suited for it combined with the pressures of Threadfall, which explains why there are Holds but no cities: Thread can’t burn stone so people live in caves and other rocky places. What’s more, these explanations for the dragons et all aren’t there just as handwaving: scientific curiosity plays a huge part in the plot of Dragonflight and its sequels as the Pernians rediscover the world they’re living on. That’s part of the appeal of The Dragonriders of Pern for me, that process of discovery, though it would get a bit silly in the later novels.

Another part of what made Dragonflight and the other dragon novels so popular and important for so many people for such a long time is Anne McCaffrey’s ability as a writer to suck you into the story, what Jo Walton called readability when discussing John Wyndham: “the ability to write a sentence that makes you want to keep reading the next sentence and so on and on”. McCaffrey had that in spades, where no sooner have you finished the first novel, you want to start the next one.

Which is just what I did.

Valor’s Choice — Tanya Huff

Published on February 13, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of Valor's Choice

Valor’s Choice
Tanya Huff
409 pages
published in 2000

Tanya Huff is one of those science fiction writers I vaguely knew about but never had read anything from, nor to be honest, had heard much about. One of those authors that steadily plods along, has a decent following and career but never quite had a breakthrough novel. I never really had a reason to take a closer look at her work, until I found myself in the English Bookstore last Friday looking for something light to read and Valor’s Choice caught my eye. I’m always on the lookout for good, enjoyable military science fiction and continuously disappointed by what I find on the shelves, when even a cursory glance is enough to show me that yet again my expectations are set too high.

And yet my standards for mil-sf are set so low already; all any story has to be to get me to read it, is to beat the Weber minimum. If the politics are less annoying and rightwing than David Weber‘s, the writing can be just as awkward, as long as there’s something interesting the writer is doing with their story. Literary qualities be damned, just as long as you tell a good story. Tanya Huff, from what I saw in the bookstore seemed capable of delivering at least that much, so I took a gamble on her. You may guess from the fact that I’m reviewing this already that she more than succeeded: I started reading this on the way home from the bookstore and had finished it on Saturday evening.

Valor’s Choice is not necessarily a good novel: Huff’s writing is servicable, slightly better than it needs to be to tell the story she wants to tell, while her characters for the most part are the usual stereotypes found in any military story, with the plot cleverly swiped from real life. For those who know their military history, the cover above gives a huge clue to which particular Victorian battle is re-imagined here, not for the first time in science fiction. None of this matters however, as the story that Huff creates out of these less than inspired ingredients was gripping enough that I had to keep reading to see how it all ended, even if I could guess the broad outlines of the story almost from the start and knew roughly what the payoff would be. That is in fact part of the payout of mil-sf for me, similar to the denouncement of the murderer in a classic detective story. What a good mil-sf story needs to do is give you a set of stock characters you can quickly bond with, follow them through the everyday routines of military life for a while with all its absurdities and annoyances, then give them a chance to win a victory against overwhelming odds, or at the very least a heroic death — craven betrayal by their civilian masters is optional though common.

What Tanya Huff gives us is staff sergeant Torin Kerr, a “battle-hardened professional”, who has just herded her mixed company of Human, Taykan — elf like aliens with an insatiable sex drive and few scrubles whom to share it with — and Kray — true omnivores who take a great pleasure in nausating their comrades in arms with what they eat, dead or alive, through a particularly nasty encounter when her and their well earned leave is cancelled for a sensitive, high profile engagement. They have been voluntered to serve as a honour guard for the Confederation diplomats visiting a newly discovered alien race, the lizardlike Silsviss, to get them to join the Confederation before the Others can do this. As the Silsviss are a typical warrior race, there needs to be an elite force of Confederation troops there to impress them and Torin and her people have been chosen for this role. Bad enough, but made worse for Torin when she discovers her new 2nd Lieutenant, the Taykan di’Ka Jarret, is the same Taykan she had just spent a very nice evening recuperating with…

The Confederation is a coalition of species that had amiably lived together in their corner of the Galaxy for a long time, long ago having become enlightened enough to realise space is big enough to share. That lasted until the Others came, who wanted it all for themselves. These elder species having long outgrown the need and ability to wage war, they needed more primitive species to fight for them, which is where first humans, then the other two warrior races came in, taken into the Confederation in return for their fighting skills. It’s a setting that’s been used both before and since, with the novelty here that for once these elder races do not seem to be corrupt and manipulative, at least so far.

So Torin, Jarret and the men and women of their company ship out to the Silsviss homeworld, to suffer through endless parades, visits and diplomatic gatherings, until one day, on their way to yet another city, their shuttle is shot down and they crashland into one of the nature reserves set out for the Silviss’ young adult males, who in the grip of their hormones, spent their years of puberty in huge gangs fighting each other, becoming the perfect warriors. Lost in the middle of the reserve, with no way out for the company and the civilians it has to protect and with several dead already and more wounded, Torin and co have to find shelther somewhere and wait for rescue from the Silsviss authorities, if they weren’t the ones that fired those missiles, that is. They find it in a small storage facility that’s normally used to feed the roaming hordes of hormone crazed, hyper aggressive teenage Silsviss males that has now surrounded the company, vastly outnumbered by the thousands of Silsviss coming for them…

And so the scene is set for a heroic defence, as this small band of marines is preparing to defend themselves against these vast hordes of Silsviss, their only consolation being their superiority in weaponry, if not numbers. Even so, if they can survive is anyone’s guess…

As I said, I’m a sucker for these sort of stories and Tanya Huff is as adept at tugging at the heartstrings, at bringing out the heroism of siege warfare as somebody like David Gemmell is. Valor’s Choice is a good entertainment, a story that in everything is slightly better, slightly smarter than it had needed to be to tell it’s story. As such it stands head and shoulders above the Weber Minimum, as well as the majority of mil-sf novels. I think I will read more of Huff.

City of the Chasch — Jack Vance

Published on February 11, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of City of the Chasch

City of the Chasch
Jack Vance
172 pages
published in 1968

When I first started to discover science fiction (longer ago than I care to recall) Jack Vance was one of the more popular writers to be translated into Dutch and the local library therefore had a shitload of his books. I therefore read quite a lot of his work, including the whole Planet of Adventure/Tschai, the Mad Planet (as it was called in Dutch) tetralogy, in one of those big omnibuses Meulenhof specialised in. There’s little I remember off it, to be honest, other than that it was a typical Vancean planetary romance.

Jack Vance is of course the master of this subgenre, effortlessly creating new worlds and societies for his stories, always exotic and strange yet believable and with their own logic. Sometimes the stories he sets in these worlds disappoint, as was the case for me when I reread Big Planet two years ago. For City of the Chasch I had less expectations, just because I remembered less about it, but I was still a bit disappointed with it. Like Big Planet, the worldbuilding here is more sketched in than fleshed out, not as rich and interesting as I had hoped it would be. I had planned to read the next books in the series immediately (I’m still missing the fourth) after I’d finished this one, but now I’ll think I’ll pass.

As said, City of the Chasch is a classic example of a planetary romance, the science fiction equivalent of one of those fantasy grail quests that visits every place on the map in the front of the book. It all starts when a spaceship finds radio signals coming from a star system no humans are supposed to be, goes to investigate and is blown up just as it had launched a scout ship to the surface. This crash lands, one of the pilots is killed by one of the tribesmen who were drawn to the crash site, but the other, Adam Reith is luckier, caught with his parachute in a tree and not yet discovered, yet helpless to get himself down as well. And then an airsled arrives and sets down and out come Blue Chasch and Chaschmen to examine the crashed ship, but before they can do anything another ship arrives filled with Dirdir and Dirdirmen, who are immediately ambushed by the Blue Chasch, who kill them all and then take the spaceship away. Reith meanwhile is taken prisoner by that first tribe of humans and is taken to their camp.

That human tribe is an excellent example of Vance’s ingenuity in creating new cultures. They call themselves the Emblemmen and each male member of the tribe wears an emblem on their hat that defines their personality and character, with each emblem having a long history, being passed down from man to man whenever an emblem wearer dies or has his emblem taken from him. The women on the other hand are little more than slaves, emblemless and worthless. Reith himself is also little more than a slave. If he wants any chance of getting back to Earth, he needs to find his scoutship; luckily he still has his scanner so he knows where it is, he just has to get there.

Easier set than done, but he does manage to escape the tribe, setting out together with one renegade tribesman, Traz Onmale. Onmale is a sombre, serious young man, worried about life outside the tribe, but willing to go along with Reith. Some days later sheltering in the ruins of a Phung city, the Phung being the native sentients of Tschai, Reith rescues a Dirdirman, Ankhe at afram Anacho, Anacho for short, who despite a renegade, is proud of his Dirdir heritage. Reith himself meanwhile is getting more and more annoyed with how subservient men are to the various alien races on Tschai, but still thinks of nothing but wanting to go back home. But first he’ll have to get his ship back.

And that means trekking across an entire planet filled with almost half a dozen alien races and their human followers. Apart from the Dirdir and Chasch (Blue and Green) as well as the native Phung, there are also the Pnume and, most amusingly, the Wankh. So he and his companions set off to the city of the Chasch to go get his ship, with the usual sort of adventures on the way.

The story, though decent enough, never really held my attention; always a bad sign when I’d rather stare out of the train window than read a book on my commute to work. I’m not quite sure why this was, perhaps because it was all a bit formulaic or the characters were never more than cliches. There were some good bits; the Emblemmen, the various pieces of local colour, some of the setpieces later in the book, but it never gelled for me. A pity, because I would’ve liked to have liked this more.

Spirit — Gwyneth Jones

Published on December 11, 2011Leave a comment

Cover of Spirit

Spirit or The Princess of Bois Dormant
Gwyneth Jones
472 pages
published in 2008

So about halfway through Spirit, or The Princess of Bois Dormant, when the heroine is rotting away in prison on an alien world, forgotten by everybody, it looked like the novel was going to be a science fiction adaption of The Count of Monte Cristo. It wouldn’t have been the first; The Stars My Destination just being the most famous example of such an adaptation. But while the imprisonment of Bibi, Spirit‘s protagonist does consciously echo Dumas’ famous novel, including having an older mentor imprisoned with her who leaves her a fortune, it changes its mind almost instantly and doesn’t become a revenge story after all.

Which is for the best, as Bibi is no Edmond Dantès. Whereas the latter was unknowingly framed for a political crime for those he thought his friends, only discovering the truth years into his imprisonment, Bibi was just collatoral damage, not for the first time either. She had started live as Gwibiwr, the probable daughter of a (Welsh?) chieftan of the White Rock clans who’d long lived in rebellion against the one world government, a rebellion now crushed. Bibi herself is taken into the entourage of Lady Nef and becomes a minor servant, young enough to have lost most of her memories of before. She was therefore a victim of politics long before she was left ot rot in an alien prison for being part of a conspiracy against an emperor who hadn’t yet taken the throne when she had last been on Earth. And unlike Dantès, the people on which she could’ve had her revenge were mostly innocent bystanders as well.

I read my first Gwyneth Jones novel, Bold as Love back in February, as part of my Year of Reading Women project. It wasn’t a great success: the setting was dating, I had trouble getting used to Gwyneth Jones’ writing and I didn’t like the protagonists much. With Spirit I had much less trouble: less dated, better setting and a more likable if still somewhat passive heroine. Bibi mostly has no choice but to accept the circumstances she finds herself in and make the most of it, as she doesn’t have the power to do anything about it.

Once she escapes prison and finds the treasure her mentor set her up with and she re-emerges as the mysterious princess of Bois Dormant, she does have the power to change things should she want to, but by that time she’s content to remain in the background and manipulate events from the shadows. For the reader this means that it is sometimes unclear if she is responsible for some of the misfortune that happen to her enemies or whether these are just “coincidences”…

Like Bold as Love, Spirit starts slow, taking hundreds of pages to get Bibi into prison as we follow her from the time she was taken from the ruins of her clan’s cave fortresses in Wales, through her training as a servant to the Lady Nef and subsequent career as a civil servant, to the diplomatic mission she is part of which ends with her in prison. Until this point there doesn’t seem to be any plot going on, instead we just follow Bibi through her life and through her get a view of the society she lives in.

Which is somewhere in the far future with no obvious links to our time. Instead there are references to something called the Gender Wars, a first worldwide empire and a period in which the Earth was colonised by an alien race called the Aleutians, some hundreds of years previous and which has had the greatest impact in shaping contemporary society. What we see of it all seems vaguely Chinese though luckily not as orientalist as is the norm in science fiction. What impressed me as well was that Jones manages to make each of the major settings the story takes place in have their own distinguished cultures.

Spirit in the end is very much a book of two halves, the second half almost leaving Bibi behind in favour of other characters as she stays in the background manipulating events. As a whole it’s a bit unbalanced and as with Bold as Love I found it a bit meandering, but in the end I still enjoyed it.

Trouble and Her Friends — Melissa Scott

Published on November 21, 20111 Comment

Cover of Trouble and Her Friends

Trouble and Her Friends
Melissa Scott
379 pages
published in 1994

Trouble and Her Friends is the tenth book I’ve read in my Year of Reading Women project and the first and only cyberpunk novel in the bunch. It’s a book I’ve long wanted to read, having heard nothing but praise for it over the years and seeing it compared to e.g. Pat Cadigan’s cyberpunk novels. As I started reading it, there were two minor things that disappointed me: the first was the publication date, 1994, much later than I though, the second was the tendency of the covers to flake, something it has in common with other Tor books of that period. I’d always assumed Trouble and Her Friends had been published in the mid-eighties; certainly the setting is very eighties.

This matters because it means that not only is its future dated now, but it was already obsolete when it was first published. Trouble and Her Friends‘s vision of cyberspace is essentially an eighties one, where it’s important but largely unused by regular people, divided into discrete blocks owned by huge multinationals and hidden behind ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures (Electronic)) to ward off hackers, who seem to be the only people behind corporate drones to use cyberspace. It’s obviously inspired by the BBS scenes of the eighties and indeed the main hacker hangout is called the BBS. Yet 1994 was the year the internet fully broke into the public consciousness, when it should’ve become clear that it’s the openness of the internet and interaction with other people on it that are its greatest strengths, far removed from the lonely adventures of isolated hackers battling in virtual reality with faceless corporate ICE software that most cyberpunk, including Trouble and Her Friends, offers — it’s probably no coincidence that it largely died as a subgenre in the mid nineties. What saves Trouble and Her Friends from complete obsolescence can be summed up in one word: politics.

Most cyberpunk writers sort of took their politics from Neuromancer, which never was much concerned with plausible future politics (indeed, science fiction as a whole has always been a bit weak in this regard). So you got a lot of adolescent posturing of the heroic hacking underground versus the big bad megacorps out to rule the world. What Trouble and Her Friends does that few other cyberpunk novels do is to look at the internal politics of that hacking underground itself. And by doing so Melissa Scott is the only cyberpunk author that actually understood and anticipated the dynamics of online groups, of how even in groups that define themselves as outsiders there can be people who are outside the group as well, because for one reason or another they are different from the dominating members of a given group. Not a new dynamic of course, as any veteran of a socialist or anarchist splinter group can confirm. Even in progressive groups race, gender and sexuality play a role, but most cyberpunk authors assumed that in the bodiless worlds of cyberspace these things would no longer matter. Melissa Scott was clever enough to know that this is naive at best.

Her heroines — Trouble and Cerise — therefore because they are female, lesbian and use the brainworm implant disdained by the overwhelmingly male straight old programmable elite, are low on the totem pole in the semi-legal hacking scene and hence vulnerable once new US legislation outlaws hacking outright. Trouble flees and moves deeper underground, while Cerise goes legit but is still vulnerable because of her questionable past, which her immediate superior at the company she works for uses to manipulate her. Trouble herself is not safe either, hiding behind an alias that if it would come to the wrong people’s attention would not last long.

And then a new Trouble appears on the ‘net, who is not just doing all sorts of highly illegal things, but boasting about it as well. Which is enough to bring Trouble out of retirement and Cerise back to her old life to bring this newby to heel. The old gunslingers return to fight it out one more time with the cocky new bravo….

Despite Trouble and Her Friends‘s outdated even at time of publication view of what cyberspace would look like, what Melissa Scott was better in than even many respectable non-fiction authors writing about the internet at the time, in that she saw that cyberspace would not stay an unregulated jungle forever. The plot of the novel is largely driven by the introduction of harsh, bad law that made most of what Trouble and her friends did on the net illegal overnight, something a lot of Wired were convinced off would never happen in real life, despite warning signs like Operation Sundevil back in 1990.

This combination of realistic gender and sexual politics and being clueful enough to realise that yes virginia, governments can regulate cyberspace make Trouble and Her Friends worth reading. It helps that Scott can write well too, which keeps you reading though the plot is a bit thin.