science fiction

Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan

Published on March 9, 2010

Cover of Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon
Richard Morgan
534 pages
published in 2002

Altered Carbon is Richard Morgan’s first novel. It made a strong impression, winning the Philip K. Dick Prize for best novel in 2003, as well as being optioned by Joel Silver, the sale of the movie rights enabling Morgan to become a fulltime writer. Since then Morgan has written several more novels, part of the same generation of British science fiction writers as Alastair Reynolds, Neal Asher and Jon Courtenay Grimwood. I knew of him, but had not read anything of his until last year, when I read Broken Angels and was sucked in from the first page. So not for the first time I started a series in the wrong way, as that was actually the sequel to this book — not that it mattered, as all they shared was the hero, Takeshi Kovacs.

Whereas Broken Angels was a Dirty Dozen type war romp with the cynicsm turned up to eleven, Altered Carbon is more of a Chandleresque film noir story. It starts with Takeshi as amercenary on Harlan’s World being caught and killed in a police dragnet, to wake up on Earth minus one partner and forced to solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft, which everybody but the murder victim in question thinks is suicide. If Takeshi refuses to cooperate or fails in his task he’ll go back in storage for the next couple of centuries or so.

Broken Angels – Richard Morgan

Published on March 7, 2010

Cover of Broken Angels

Broken Angels
Richard Morgan
490 pages
published in 2003

Richard Morgan is a British science fiction writer, who debuted in 2002 with Altered Carbon, to which Broken Angels is a sequel. It can however be easily read on its own, considering I just did that with no trouble at all. The only thing it has in common with the earlier novel is the protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs. I’d been aware of Morgan as a hot new writer, but hadn’t sampled him yet. Reviews of his work had been mixed and I hadn’t been interested enough to seek his books out. Which may have been a mistake, judging from Broken Angels.

From the reviews I’d read and the remarks made by friends who had read his novels I had gotten the impression that Morgan let his leftwing politics overwhelm his stories, while he was also accused of having a lot of unnecessary violence in his stories. I found neither of these allegations to be true in this case. There is a political undertone to Broken Angels, but certainly no dozen page rants; there’s violence, but it’s not at all reveled in the way John Barnes sometimes does. It reminded me in fact of Neal Asher, another author often accused of excessive use of violence, in that neither shy away from showing the consequences of violence, that being shot hurts and what it exactly does to a body. But where Asher’s descriptions are very organic, dripping with ichor and blood and bodily fluids, Morgan’s is very clean, sharp, bright and clinical but not at all detached. His characters feel their pain. And they get plenty of opportunities to feel this pain.

Buy Jupiter – Isaac Asimov

Published on November 14, 2009

Cover of Buy Jupiter

Buy Jupiter
Isaac Asimov
238 pages
published in 1975

It’s hard to know for sure at this late date, but Buy Jupiter, together with I, Robot, was probably the first science fiction book I’ve ever read. one of the. I must have been seven or eight years old or so and this and the few other adult science fiction books the local library had in its childrens section instilled a lifelong love of the genre. It was therefore with some sense of nostalgia that I reread this book for the first time in years — these stories were like old friends to me. Nostalgia can be a dangerous guide of course, as so many books can turn out to have been visited by the suck fairy since you last time you’ve read them, not to mention the racism or sexism fairy. Luckily none of them have been busy on Buy Jupiter, the stories were just as good as I remembered.

This despite the fact that Buy Jupiter is a bit of a strange collection, filled with twentyfive years of leftover stories. There isn’t any classic in this, no one story you would put in a Best of Asimov collection but this might actually its strength. Because it’s a filler collection, because most of the stories are short or very short, you get a huge variation of stories and subjects, a smorgasbord of Asimov’s fiction. A good introduction to science fiction as well, though even at the time I first read those stories they were already dated — you don’t pick up on that as a child anyway.

Old Twentieth – Joe Haldeman

Published on October 25, 2009

Cover of Old Twentieth

Old Twentieth
Joe Haldeman
272 pages
published in 2005

If there is such a thing as a baby boomer generation of science fiction writers, Joe Haldeman is the type specimen of them. Born in 1943 he was just old enough to be drafted at the height of the War on Vietnam after finishing college, got wounded in action and wrote his first book as a straight up retelling of his war experiences. His most famous novel is of course The Forever War (1975), which is often read as an allegory of the war and its impact on the people who fought it, a not completely unjustified view. Since then, the Vietnam war has cropped up again and again in his books as well as a more general grounding in sixties pop culture, often coupled with an encroaching sense of his own mortality as he has gotten older and obsession with the promise of evading death by becoming immortal (as e.g. The Long Habit of Living). This isn’t unique to the baby boomers of course, but this was the generation that promised themselved they’d stay young forever and then found out even they weren’t immune to entropy…

The Old Twentieth is a showcase for all these themes. It is not a good novel, if entertaining enough to finish. It’s not a good novel not just because the plot is dull, the resolution is trite, the characters are barely twodimensional and the setting is uninteresting, but because there just seems to be no point to this novel. It’s just 272 pages of not very interesting things happening, before they come to an unsatisfying conclusion and no clue as to why this story needed to be told. It reads reasonably enough on a sentence and paragraph level, but the overall story is so thin that Haldeman’s obsessions shine through it, bringing them to the foreground.

The Real-Time World – Christopher Priest

Published on September 20, 2009

Cover of Real-Time World

Real-Time World
Christopher Priest
158 pages
published in 1974

After finishing Camp Concentration I was in the mood for some New Wave science fiction and since I’d just bought this Christopher Priest collection of short stories this was as good a choice as any to read. Most of this I actually read while at the gym, on the treadmill — short stories being ideal, quickly enough read in a forty minute session and not requiring too much sustained concentration like a novel would. Some of the stories in Real-Time World I’d read before, in Dutch translation, some were new to me. All but one of the stories were published between 1970 and 1974, perhaps the height of the New Wave, and all are very much of their time. As a writer Christopher Priest has always seemed more comfortable to me at novel length than at shorter lengths, which is also notable here.

The reason why I wanted to read these stories was because I knew how seventies they were, but as often when confronted with the reality of what I was looking for, I was disappointed with it. None of the stories were entirely satisfactory and although each was competently written, they were written to formula. You could see they were written to achieve a specific effect and how Priest achieves that effect and as a result most of the effect is lost. The first story for example, “The Head and the Hand”, about automutilation as a form of performance art, with some graphic scenes including a final auto-guillotining which may have been shocking when first published, but certainly aren’t now and without this shock effect the story falls apart.