science fiction

Old Man’s War — John Scalzi

Published on September 11, 2011Leave a comment

Cover of Old Man's War

Old Man’s War
John Scalzi
311 pages
published in 2005

John Scalzi’s debts to Heinlein in Old Man’s War are indeed obvious as he says in his afterword. Even without what looks to be a shootout to the opening scenes of Starship Troopers halfway through the novel it’s pretty obvious where Scalzi got his inspiration from. In structure, plot and protagonist Old Man’s War could fit in neatly with any of Heinlein’s coming of age stories like Space Cadet or The Tunnel in the Sky in which a young man is forced to grow up quickly to confront a hostile universe. The only difference is that John Perry is not a young man, but a seventyfive years old widower when he signs up for his stint with the Colonial Defence Forces.

Apart from that, John fulfills the same role as Rico in Starship Troopers, that of the new recruit who we’ll follow through basis training and combat, somebody who needs to be educated in the true nature of the world he lives in and who can function as a stand in for the reader. Where the two differ is that John obviously is not a callow teenager, but somebody who lived a long and fulfilling life, who saw a chance to regain his youth and took it, without knowing or caring too much about what he’s getting himself into.

Which turns out to be getting his consciousness transferred into a completely new body, adapted for combat, faster, better, stronger, tougher than a regular human body. It’s obviously also much younger than his old one and is fully functional biologically too, without any unpleasant side effects — cue the orgy as hundreds of seventyfive year olds who’ve gotten their youth back get it on. That’s all part of the leisurely introduction of the first part of the book, with things getting kicked up a notch when John and his mates finally get to proper training. Which thanks to their new bodies and especially their integrated onboard computer or “brainpal” as the CDF has named it, is massively accelerated.

Through his training and first battles with various alien species, John Perry learns how the universe really works. Habitable planets are rare in the universe and most species want the same sort of planet, which means that often they have to be fought for. The CDF is there not just to protect humanity’s existing colonies, but also to take over planets from weaker races when possible, while avoiding as much as possible the attention of stronger peoples. It’s a dog eats alien dog eat universe and CDF soldiers can’t allow themselves any illusions about the situation they’re in: their ten year hitch will likely see most of them killed. So far it’s still very much like Starship Troopers but Scalzi lacks Heinlein’s conviction that this is for the best: there are some hints that the situation in Scalzi’s universe isn’t as black and white as all that.

In the third and final part of the book John Perry gets involved into the big battle for Coral, a human colony attacked by the Rraey, one of the alien races most antagonistic to humans, if only because they like the taste of human meat… Scalzi here sets up the conditions for eventual sequels, which indeed were not long in coming, with three so far having been published. Old Man’s War however is a complete story on its own and doesn’t need them to be enjoyed.

But that will probably not stop you from reading them anyway, as Scalzi is such a fun and engaging storyteller that if you have any interest in mil-sf, you’ll want to read these stories. Old Man’s War is a familiar story well told, an updated Starship Troopers without the pseudofascist ideology of Heinlein’s original. Ideologically the idea of humanity versus an universe filled with hostile alien races who can’t be argued with but have to be shot at is still suspect of course, considering the implications of that sort of idea in actually existing history, but you never get the feeling as you do with Heinlein that Scalzi actually believes this stuff other than for the story.

Well written, entertaining, fastpaced and with some depth to it, Old Man’s War is one of the best mil-sf novels I’ve ever read.

A Civil Campaign – Lois Mc Master Bujold

Published on August 28, 2011

Cover of A Civil Campaign

A Civil Campaign
Lois McMaster Bujold
534 pages
published in 1999

A Civil Campaign should have been the last novel in the Vorkosigan series. Starting with Brothers in Arms and continuing through Mirror Dance, Memory and Komarr Lois McMaster Bujold had constantly upped the ante for Miles, not just by giving him bigger challenges to overcome, but by forcing him to grow up and become mature, putting him in situations where his character strengths are useless or even counterproductive. A Civil Campaign is the culmination of that process, as Miles crashes hard against the realisation that his usual crisis management tactics are not suitable for trying to win the hand of the woman he fell in love with the first time he saw her. At the same time Bujold also ties up all the loose ends from the earlier novels, providing a proper ending for the series. It’s not a book for people new to the series.

In the previous book, Komarr, Miles had met Ekaterin, a duty bound Vor woman trapped in a loveless marriage, and fallen hard for her from the first moment. With Ekaterin now a widow, Miles sets out to court her, but with the best of intentions decides to do so without her knowning or telling her that this is what he’s doing. Surely the same tactics of deception that worked so well in his career as a galactic man of mystery will be good enough to win him a wife? Of course there’s also the small matter of the imperial wedding to prepare for, the return of his clone brother Mark with his Escobarian business partner and their somewhat too biological startup they’ve set up in Vorkosigan House, the blossoming relationship of Mark with Kareen, the daughter of one of Miles’ father’s — count Vorkosigan — oldest friends and various other minor complications and side issues Miless will have to deal with, but how hard can it all be?

In typical Miles style, on small deception leads to another and it all blows up in spectacularl fashion when the small and intimate dinner Miles planned for him and Ekaterin and some carefully selected guests grows out of control and everything that shouldn’t have come out in the open just yet, does. It’s then that Miles finally learns you can plan to conquer a woman’s heart like you can plan the conquest of a star system. It’s a brutally crafted, darkly funny comedic scene, excruciating in the way the best comedy can be. It makes me wince everytime I read it. For Miles, once he gets out of his funk, it’s the chance to do what he does best: damage limitation.

What makes A Civil Campaign so good are the characters, as Bujold has developed them over the course of the series. Miles, though he should know better by now, is still the same cocky little manipulator he always was going into the book, only to come acropper because of it, but is able to learn from his mistakes and grow up. Ekaterin, though angry at Miles’ deception is also able in the end to set herself over it. Most of the people involved in the various plots and subplots, the viewpoint characters, are confused to what they want and how they can get it, struggling even to get to a place where they can find out what they need to do. In the end it’s all set to rights of course, but it takes effort for everybody. And it’s only once the disastrous dinner party has happened and everybody’s dreams seem shattered that rebuilding can take place, helped by one of the greatest supporting characters in science fiction, Cordelia.

Despite the lack of galactic intrigue and worldshattering conspiracies this is the most compelling novel in the whole Vorkosigan saga and also the most entertaining and witty. You could call A Civil Campaign a regency romance in space, Bujold keeping the tone light even when Miles’ dreams are shattered. This light mood is sustained by the callbacks and references to earlier stories, making it something of a box of chocolates for a Vorkosigan fan, with something for everyone. It all helps to set off the darker parts of the plot.

Speaking of regency romance, this is more Jane Austen than Georgette Heyer, as the reality from Ekaterin’s point of view is far more serious than it is for Miles, no matter how bad he feels when he thinks he may just have chased away the love of his life. Barrayar is a primitive, conservative society and the role of women in it is not at all equal to that of men. She has to deal with the expectations of Barrayar society and her own family in addition to everything Miles has to go through and at one point she might just lose her son, Nicky, if she does the wrong thing. After Komarr it’s another example of how Bujold manages to sneak in some light feminism…

Trading in Danger — Elizabeth Moon

Published on August 27, 2011Leave a comment

cover of Trading in Danger

Trading in Danger
Elizabeth Moon
506 pages
published in 2003

Reading Sheepfarmer’s Daughter gave me a taste for more Elizabeth Moon. Trading in Danger, the first book in the Vatta’s War series was what the local library had available. It’s science fiction rather than fantasy, but it’ll do. It’s still the same sort of adventure story even if the genre has changed. The other thing they have in common is familiarity, both are coming of age stories with few surprises, but sometimes familiarity is just what you want in a story.

Ky Vatta is a cadet at the naval Academy, an unusual career choice for a child of one of the great trading families. She’s an examplary cadet, but this doesn’t save her when an impulse to help a fellow cadet lands her in the shit. Expelled from the academy, she now has to face her family. Worse, because it’s a highly politicised mess she found herself in, she also has to leave Slotter Key, her home planet. Worst of all, the reputation she has in her family as a sucker for anybody with a sob story is once again confirmed, in the worst possible way. The solution to all her problems lies in an old Vatta family tradition, that sends any child wanting to join the family trade on a shakedown cruise first. She will captain the Glennys Jones, an old trading ship on its last voyage which will be sold as salvage at the end of it, as it’s too expensive to bring up to modern standards. This trading trip will take a couple of months and at the end of it Ky will be able to come home, having proven herself as a captain. As importantly, it will also get her away from her own humiliation.

Things don’t turn out to be quite that simple of course. At the first leg of her journey she runs into a trading opportunity that might just get her the money to save the ship, giving her a chance to prove herself to her family. When she explains this plan to her crew however it turns out that this is what everybody more or less expected her to do; apparantly it’s something most firstrun captains do…

So profiting from a rival firm’s failure to deliver agricultural equipment, she takes the Glennys Jones to Sabine, to buy the equipment again on spec, getting paid on delivery. It’s a bit risky, but the profit will be worth it. But when the FTL drive craps out completely when they reach Sabine and the machines they need to buy are much more expensive than Ky thought they would be, things cannot get any worse, or can they?

Course they can and Ky and the Glennys Jones find themselves in the middle of a warzone, with no way to get out of it. What’s more, the FTL communication station in the Sabine system is blown up by one of the parties in the conflict and nobody outside the system will know what happens inside. And then the ship is hailed by mercenaries, they board to inspect it and things go horribly wrong as Ky is almost killed when one young ship’s mate pulls a gun at the mercenaries.

Ky is cut from much of the same cloth as Paks in Sheepfarmer’s Daughter: young, somewhat naive, largely unaware of her own abilities, but with an iron will and potential that’s only fully realised under pressure. Like Paks, Ky’s shipmates see her worth much more clearly than she herself does; an old trick to make your main character not too concieted. She has her flaws though, a certain blind spot late in the book leaving her and her crew vulnerable to a betrayal I could see coming from a mile away. Again like Paks, Ky is also a bit more honourable than you’d expect most people to be.

As a novel, Trading in Danger feels a bit flabby. Elizabeth Moon takes her time getting the main plot going, taking well over fifty pages just to get Ky into space. The pacing in general is leisurely. There are a lot of side issues and little subplots not of direct relevance to the main plot that help up the page count; The minutia of trading life take up a large part of this. Moon also spends some time once the main enemy is defeated setting Ky up for the sequels, as well as having her deal with the aftermath of her adventure to see that her problems have not quite all disappeared. All this can be irritating to some readers. Myself I did not mind it this time, though it did annoy me sometimes. Moon has a knack for keeping me interested in the mundane, day to day details of her heroines’ lives even if they’re not directly contributing to the plot.

Trading in Danger is good, light entertainment, slightly better than it needed to be. Sometimes that’s just what you want.

Golden Witchbreed – Mary Gentle

Published on August 21, 2011Leave a comment

Cover of Golden Witchbreed

Golden Witchbreed
Mary Gentle
460 pages
published in 1983

It was the beautiful Rowena cover that got my attention, a long long time ago when I was browsing the English shelves at my hometown’s library. Showing a blonde woman in jeans and fur cape, armed with a stave and linking fingers with an obviously alien six fingered man, two swords at his side. That intriqued me, it promised both adventure and romance and it got me to pick up the book and that was how I got to know Mary Gentle. I’m not sure how old I was, but I must’ve been no older than sixteen-seventeen and Golden Witchbreed was arguably the best novel of hers I could’ve started with, much more easier to get into than most of her novels would turn out to be. But though I loved it when I read it and remember it fondly, I haven’t read it since. Which was why I put it on the list for my Year of Reading Women project. I wanted to know if the book I remember was still as good as I remember.

Golden Witchbreed I remembered as a planetary romance, emphasis on romance. It starts with the cover with the two lovers holding hands. The woman on the left Lynne de Lisle Christie, envoy from Earth to the primitive, medievaloid world of Orthe, there to represent both Earth to the Ortheans and to judge Orthe on its fitness to trade and partner with. The Orthean she holds hands with therefore should be her alien lover, Falkyr. I remembered their romance as central to the plot, the circumstances in which it took place ultimately forcing Christie to go on the run and having to travel through most of the civilised lands of Orthe. Apart from that recollections were hazy.

And unfortunately, the part I did remember, though true in outline as far as it goes, was completely wrong. There was a romance between Christie and Falkyr, following the Orthean custom of becoming arykei, but it’s nowhere near as important as I thought it was. It happened relatively early in the book and at a crucial point in the plot, but that’s it. Instead Christie gets caught up in intra-Orthean politics, with the existence of otherworlders an intensely political question, with some not believing in them even when confronted with the evidence first hand, some wary of any contact with Earth, others looking for the potential in such trade. The romance is just a side issue, soon left behind; the real love story is between Christie and Orthe.

As such, on the surface at least it is a true planetary romance, eager to showcase and explore the world Mary Gentle has thought up, hitting all the highlights on the map in the back. What sets it apart from most other such explorations, both science fiction and fantasy, is the depth of the world Gentle has created. This is more than just a stage for the heroine to trek over. As such it reminded me both of Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite and C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner. With the Cherryh it shares the confusion of alien political intrigue, with the Griffith its sense of a fully realised world in which gender is radically different from Earth norms.

On Orthe like Earth there are two genders, male and female, but Orthean children are ungendered until puberty, when they go through a crisis and emerge male or female. Gender and gender roles therefore are nowhere near as ingrained as on Earth, with a lot of female characters in roles traditionally male. Gentle makes no fuzz about this, never explicitely setting out this connection as I stated it here. As is the case with all her stories, the reader has to pay attention and figure things out for themselves. As a small example, in a throwaway scene one important male character casually mentions having been arykei with another named male character. Blink and you’ll miss it.

Next to the gender, the political systems of Orthe are what sets Gentle’s creation apart. For what seems to be a medievaloid planet, Orthean society is relatively egalitarian, though of course nowhere near democratic. There is a supreme ruler, but they are elected every several years, there is a court, but the heart of Orthean civilisation is the telestre, a combination commute, family and estate; ideally every Orthean belongs to a telestre, as does all the land, though that is held in common — when Christie in an early conversation says she’s no landowner, her Orthean friend responds with shock to the very idea of owning land. Together the telestres form the Hundred Thousand, the Southlands, Orthe’s main civilisation/country.

Then there are the Golden Witchbreed of the title, whose empire was overthrown five thousand years ago, in which collapse the telestre system evolved. Throughout there are hints that the witchbreed had a much higher level of technology than Orthe now has, making the Southlands not so much a pre-industrial as a post-collapse society. In her journeys around Orthe Christie ultimately also comes to the one place where she could learn the truth of these claims. The central scene in which these revelations are unfolded is one I’ve seen dozens of times in books, movies and comics, the only time I found Gentle to be a bit pedestrian.

Golden Witchbreed was not quite the book I remembered, but it was the better for it. I’d still argue that for people new to Mary Gentle’s writing, this is the best, most conventional novel to start with. There are already hints of her more opaque writing style in here and it’s a good way to ease into it.

A Point of Honor — Dorothy J. Heydt

Published on August 7, 20112 Comments

Cover of A Point of Honor

A Point of Honor
Dorothy J. Heydt
302 pages
published in 1998

A Point of Honor is the seventh book I’ve read in my Year of Reading Women challenge and the first I’ve read before. When I was setting up my reading list last year I wanted to include not just feminist sf classics or books to challenge myself, but also some old favourites that deserve a wider audience, of which this is one. I had read A Point of Honor when it was published back in 1998, after it had gotten some buzz on the old rec.arts.sf.written Usenet group, back in the day when that was still the number one science fiction hangout on the internet. The author herself was one of the group’s regulars, well respected and liked, one reason why I tried out her novel. This wasn’t the first nor the last time I did that: other writers I got to know through rec.arts.sf.written were Jo Walton, Brenda Clough and Matt Ruff, to name just three.

A Point of Honor is one of only two novels Dorothy Heydt wrote, the other being The Interior Life, a fantasy novel she wrote under the pseudonym of Katherine Blake. Apart from that she has only written short stories, some two dozen in total, the last ones a couple of years ago. None of her work is currently in print that I know off. A pity, but unfortunately an all too common fate for science fiction writers as their books for one reason or another fail to reach an audience. Which is another reason why I wanted to talk about this book, to bring some attention to an unfairly overlooked writer and do for A Point of Honor what Jo Walton did last year for The Interior Life.

Sir Mary de Courcy’s troubles all began the day she defeated the mysterious Grey Knight of the Sea in jousting and he paid off his ransom by deeding her his manor of St. Chad’s-on-Wye. First the plane from where the VR tournament had taken place is hit by a light aircraft and almost crashes as somebody had fiddled with air traffic control, then on the way home from the airport her little electric car is driven off the road by a truck and to top it all off when she finally is home her security system wakes her up to alert her to an intruder in the house… Once is happenstance, two times a coincidence, three times is enemy action, but is somebody really trying to kill Mary Craven for what her VR personality had done? And if so, why?

Sure, as Sir Mary de Courcy she is the reigning champion of the Winchester lists, one of the best players of Chivalry, good enough to make a living from it, but nobody special. She certainly hasn’t made anybody angry enough in the game to try and kill her outside surely, yet the very next day, while she’s teaching some newbies the ropes of VR and Chivalry, somebody not only puts a heart medication patch on her arm that could’ve killed her had she not noticed it immediately, but also stalks and mutilates her VR persona…

Luckily at this point she gets help, in the form of Brother Gregory, who in his mundane guise of Greg Hampton is one of the original hackers who build the world of Chivalry. Talking it through, Mary and Gregory decide that the best thing to do is for Mary to stay with Gregory in his secure flat, while the two of them go on a quest in Chivalry to her new manor of St. Chad’s-on-Wye to see if they can find something wrong. And they do of course, as it turns out the world of Chivalry is much bigger than it’s supposed to be and has some …interesting… links to other VR worlds. There is some sort of conspiracy going on in VR and Mary has stumbled right over it: the only thing for it to get her life back is to unravel it and bring it to light.

A Point of Honor was published in 1998, at a time when broadband internet was in its infancy, the web hadn’t become quite synonymous with the internet yet and porn was something you downloaded one fuzzy jpeg at a time. So it’s no wonder Heydt’s vision of what Virtual Reality would look like is a bit dated. People need surgical implants to engage with VR and data disks to keep their identities on. The way Chivalry is set up is quite different from how real life massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft are run, much more elitair and explicitly structured on the Society for Creative Anachronism. For me at least this datedness brought on a bit of nostalgia for the nineties internet, a simpler time…

A Point of Honor is an enjoyable, light adventure science fiction story that sadly did not get the readership it deserved, despite the support of rec.arts.sf.written. There was the possibility of a sequel hinted at in the story, but this never happened. A good novel to look out for secondhand and somebody could do worse than to bring this out as an ebook.